When it comes to B2C marketing, social media is by far one of your greatest assets. I myself have fallen victim to many an Instagram fashion advert, (you know, the ones where you know they have no returns policy and were almost definitely made in someone’s living room). Massive retailers like ASOS regularly post outfit inspiration, competitions and hauls. Popular restaurants show you what’s new on their menus and how they’re standing out amongst the rest. However, when it comes to B2B marketing it’s a little harder to utilise these networks. People tend to go onto Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for light hearted, fast reads they’ll generally forget about rather quickly. In B2B, we want to generate loyal clients, ergo we need a platform where people come to read and explore agencies like us. Here’s a (simplified) rundown of LinkedIn in B2B marketing, and why it’s such a great idea.
Enter the glorious world of LinkedIn. Sorry PrettyLittleThing, this is our playground now. LinkedIn is without a doubt one of the best social media platforms for B2B marketing. First and foremost, it’s for professionals. Now whilst this word can be used for essentially anyone with a job, LinkedIn is for connecting with professionals within your sector, or a sector you are interested in. It presents an excellent, formal way to network within a space that you want to be in.
Context is another reason why LinkedIn in B2B marketing is a good way to go. If you’re scrolling through Facebook and you see a B2B Technology advert asking you to click through and read up on their case studies, chances are you’ll scroll right past it. Why? Because you’re on there to see photos of your niece’s first birthday party and tag your friends in what kind of potato are you memes. If you’re on LinkedIn, you’re there for a purpose and are actively seeking something out. Tying into this, LinkedIn generally operates like a 9-5 job. During the work day, people check LinkedIn for posts, new connections, InMails etc. When they go home, they simply want to kick their feet up with a cold beverage and mindlessly trawl through other social media platforms.
LinkedIn was built specifically for business networking. This means that it has a tonne of built in tools to help you achieve this purpose, something that other social media platforms lack. Their targeting tool allows you to make your search for connections or companies as niche as you would like it to be. They have almost limitless filters, so you can look for CEOs of companies involved in the AI sector, based in the UK, with more than 1000 employees, just as an example. You barely have to do any of the search work yourself, which saves a hell of a lot of time and energy filtering out the leads that don’t apply to your personal parameters. These filter options are also excellent for A/B testing, as you can easily expose the same campaign/ad to two separate filtered lead choices, finding out what works best for who. This tool also gives you the freedom to constantly change your audience (if you wanted to)
LinkedIn has an excellent feature called Sales Navigator, which is a tool to help you tap into their large network more easily. Within it, you can create and send InMails (a targeted message which can be personalised and sent to a large number of contacts simultaneously), get alerts for responses & opens and create custom lists of leads/companies. With this, you can design adverts/messages to send to whatever list you have created and it will send it to all of the people you have placed in that list. Whilst you do have to pay for Sales Nav, it gives you the crucial ability to contact potential leads, whereas in the free version, you can only message those already in your network of connections.
Another tool that LinkedIn possesses which makes it the ideal network for B2B marketing is Campaign Manager. This essentially walks you through every step of the process of building a campaign. It let’s you pick the demographic, budget, objectives and ad format (e.g. video ad, carousel ads etc.). Building a campaign can be a very stressful job, so having this tool guide you takes a lot of the strain off of you. Additionally, it then tracks the performance of said campaign for you, giving you a live report of the impressions, clicks, actions and income generated by it, minute by minute. Using the data received from this tracking, you can then alter your campaign to make it as productive and efficient as possible. LinkedIn in B2B marketing is the thing you never knew you needed, and trust me, you won’t be able to let go when you have it.
