By Aaron Agius
When you’re marketing a business, one of the most important decisions you’ll make is determining the best channels for communicating your message. Given that 80% of B2B social media leads come from LinkedIn, you absolutely must be using this platform if you’re selling to other businesses.
Most people use LinkedIn to network, stay in touch with people in their niche, and find new jobs, but LinkedIn is actually an incredibly powerful marketing tool. Here are some of my favorite tactics you can use on LinkedIn to market your business and generate new B2B leads:
Educate instead of sell
I know this sounds harsh, but people don’t care about your products or services. What they care about is finding solutions to their pain points.
However, most businesses use LinkedIn to post about how wonderful their products are, hoping that the right person will read it and convert for a sale. You can do a lot better than this approach by taking the focus away from yourself and onto your customers.
Instead of selling at every opportunity, provide value by contributing to discussions, publishing educational content, and using your expertise to help people solve their problems. And I know, you’d much rather reap the SEO benefits of publishing an article on your website compared to LinkedIn Pulse, but if your buyers are on LinkedIn, then it makes sense to use the platform for content marketing.
Likewise, aim to provide value in the groups that are relevant to your industry. Helping someone to solve their problems isn’t a guarantee that you’ll get them as a customer, but they’re not the only ones reading the discussions. Every time you help someone on LinkedIn, you’re promoting your brand to a far wider group of people.
Utilize tagging
Tagging is a great way to draw additional attention to a post. While you should never use tagging excessively, you should approach it strategically.
First, when publishing content on LinkedIn, type “@” and add connections that you want to tag in the post. When you’ve tagged someone, they will receive an email notification; your other connections will see it in their news feed.
Also, consider the influential LinkedIn users in your network, then research quotes from them that you can incorporate into your articles. When they receive a notification, they’ll be delighted to find that someone has mentioned them, as this helps to validate their position as a thought leader.
I know that whenever someone says something favorable about me in a post, I always try and share it to give it as much exposure as possible—not only as a sign of thanks to the author, but because it boosts my reputation too.
Consider sponsored updates
With sponsored updates, you have the ability to define the audience who will see your posts, so if you want to get your content in front of specific influencers, the cost of a sponsored update is more than worth it. LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager provides comprehensive metrics, so you can thoroughly examine whether you’re getting a good bang for your buck when you run a sponsored post.