Have you ever thought that your B2B company can take advantage of social media marketing? In this post, I’ll let you know how to use one of the most popular social platforms to build your B2B marketing strategy.

Is social media marketing helpful to B2B companies?

First, you need to know if social media marketing is useful for your brand.

B2C companies are selling directly to people, including a whopping 3.5 billion social media users. Many social users search for new products/services using social platforms. On Instagram, for example, 200 million users see at least one business profile each day.

That’s why B2C companies are vastly using social networks for brand awareness and increasing sales. Many of them try to use sites like Social Tradia to acquire existing social media accounts with a huge following. In fact, this is the easiest and fastest way for B2C companies to reach out to their niche audiences and potential customers.

On the other hand, B2B companies deal with other businesses that seemingly don’t need social channels to find their favorite products/services. Many B2B companies believe that using social media is not beneficial. If you’re one of them, you’re wrong.

Let’s review several important advantages of social media marketing for B2B companies:

• Driving traffic
• Building community
• Reaching out to your partners’ customers
• Appearing like a niche thought leader
• Humanizing your brand
• Finding skillful employees

As you can see, social media can greatly help your B2B brand, so you have to include it in your strategies.

Why LinkedIn?

Social media marketing is all about finding relevant audiences. Every social network has its own features, and therefore, its users can be really different.

For example, more than 70% of Pinterest users are women, so it’s suitable for advertising feminine products/services. As another example, around 70% of TikTok users are between 13-24 years old. So you can’t get the same results with the same performance on two different platforms.

The question is which social platform is suitable for B2B companies.

LinkedIn is the most popular business-oriented social platform. It’s actually focused on professionals, jobs, and employee-employer relationships. Despite this targeted niche, it has been able to gain more than 500 million members across 200 countries.

Here are several useful features LinkedIn provide your brand with:

• Managing skills & endorsements
• LinkedIn Showcase Page
• Searching among jobs, niche communities, people, etc.
• Direct messaging
• Advertising jobs
• Posting, publishing articles, online polls, video marketing, etc.

As you can see, LinkedIn has many features useful to B2B marketing. Its products like LinkedIn Recruiter, LinkedIn Recruiter Lite, LinkedIn Jobs, LinkedIn Talent Hub, LinkedIn Talent Insights, Recruitment Marketing, and many others will greatly help you grow your business online.

How to build a LinkedIn B2B marketing strategy

Now, you have become familiar with the importance of social media marketing for your B2B company. It’s good to know that social media marketing is not as easy as posting some pictures and videos.

Without a concrete digital marketing strategy, you will face failure. So try to build a B2B marketing strategy for your brand on LinkedIn before embarking on this task.

Marketers usually define their strategies based on a typical procedure as follows:

• Define SMART goals

As a B2B marketing expert, you need to define specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound objectives for your brand.‎

Increasing brand awareness, building community, and generating leads are common goals many brands consider. Try to customize these goals according to your brand’s characteristics. It’s also good to set a certain budget for LinkedIn marketing at the beginning of your marketing journey.

• Define your target audience

Now, you need to know who you’re going to reach out to by LinkedIn. Gaining organic and niche relevant traffic is key to building your online brand identity.‎

The LinkedIn searching feature is a great tool to find relevant people, groups, and business profiles. More importantly, you have to sort your audiences in terms of age, gender, position, language, location, etc.

This helps you know which content you have to generate and how you have to engage with them.‎

• Create a Company Page on the platform

A Company Page on LinkedIn can be one of the most important factors in your brand awareness. It’s like your website’s home page and should be captivating.

Try to include key information about your mission, products, and services, employees, headquarters, logo, URL, company size, etc.

Try to optimize your Company Page in terms of SEO to be discovered easily. Choose your main keywords wisely and use them on your Company Page.

One of the most effective ways to create an optimized Company Page is by comparing competitors’ pages. You have to get ideas from them but avoid copying their content.

• Generate compelling content

Attracting a huge following on every social media is difficult, and LinkedIn is no exception. Remember that content is king, and generating compelling content is key to get more and more followers.

Here are several important tips when creating content for B2B marketing:

• Educate your followers to appear like a thought leader
• Choose trendy topics
• Visualize your content
• Share user-generated content
• Ask your employees to generate content
• Avoid being too promotional
• Use industry-specific and branded hashtags
• Schedule your content to optimize your presence
• Use polls to get ideas for your content
• Use social media A/B testing to optimize your content

You also can share your website’s articles with your LinkedIn connections as a technique of promotion.

• Engage with followers at a personal level

There are numerous students, job seekers, and professionals who might show interest in your content. You need to interact with all of them and encourage them to keep following your posts.

Remember that Building a community is much more important than getting numerous followers. So try to increase your engagement rates by friendly interactions.

• Collaborate with niche influencers

Influencer marketing is now a must for B2C companies. Although B2B companies are different, they can use endorsements to promote their business on social media.

Try to reach out to well-known content generators, professionals, and groups in your niche and get them to promote your content.

This can significantly help you increase your audience reach and strengthen your brand identity.

• Analyze your performance

Social media analytics tools are features that provide you with insightful data on your performance.

You can’t be sure about the results of your social media marketing unless you measure important metrics and compare them with your initial goals.

Here are several top analytics tools for LinkedIn:

• SocialPilot
• Unmetric
• Socialinsider
• Rank Ranger
• Klipfolio
• Whatagraph
• DrumUp

Try to measure your ROI constantly and optimize your performance accordingly.

Wrap up

LinkedIn is a unique platform for B2B marketing. You have to take advantage of it to build your brand identity and establish a long-lasting relationship with your niche communities. Try to become with its full potential to get higher ROI in your marketing.