Marketing your b2b business on LinkedIn is one of the most effective ways to reach your target audience. With LinkedIn's good organic reach, it's a no-brainer for businesses to start promoting their products or services on this platform. The downside of building an organic acquisition channel is the time until you build momentum and a large enough audience that is engaged before you can monetize. Also you will have to build an efficient sales funnel and a great content strategy for this. I will write about that in another article. But the reason I am writing this today is that there is a much more efficient way to reach your dream clients. And I am going to break it down for you:
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If I would have to choose between doing organic or paid, and if could allocate a good amount of advertising budget, for b2b businesses my advice is to do paid ads for growth and acquisition of new clients.
Step 1: Identify Your Target Clients
To get the most out of LinkedIn, you need to take a more targeted approach. Pick a target client – these are companies that would like to do business with you. This could be for example a 100 million pharmaceutical manufacturer in Basel, Switzerland. Hire someone to research the data or you can use LinkedIn Sales Naviagator which requires a subscription. But you can apply a trial subscription first. Then create a list of companies in Switzerland that fit your criteria. Sort out the ones that don't match your target group and keep the ones that have enough employees to target. Do this for all your potential segments you want to target. But to start with I suggest to choose one of them and complete the following steps.
Step 2: Create Targeted Content based on USPs
To help you getting started with this, think about what you would talk about with one of your target clients at a business lunch. Find the pain points or challenges they are facing and how your product or service can solve them. These will be your unique selling points (USPs).
Choose the 6 most important USPs. Then, to maximize your chances of success, create the same content in six different formats, such as written word, graphics, and videos and in different angles. You never know which one will convert best, so it's important to cover all your bases.
This gives you 36 pieces of content to target against the employees of one company with the hope that one of them will forward it to their decision maker.
This creatives approach will also serve you on other advertising channels. But always keep in mind that the creatives you are using should match the platforms' tone of voice.
Step 3: Launch an Influence the Influencer Campaign
With your content ready, the amazing targeting features for LinkedIn campaigns come into play. This strategy is all about reaching the right people who will influence the decision makers. LinkedIn's targeting features also allows you to upload a csv file of your company target list. You can target as granular as CEO, CFO, Marketing Manager, Procurement ect. of the exact company you wish to target. These people you should have in mind you are addressing directly in your ads. If you don't know where to start with crafting you ads check out my article on Crafting Effective Ad Copy.
Step 4: Dial Up Your Media Budget
To achieve success, you need to dedicate a budget for LinkedIn, either internally or through an external production team. One question that I know is burning in your head right now: But how much budget should I allocate to this? To have a substantial reach and to test enough creatives I suggest that a minimum advertising budget should be at CHF 36'000 per year. This monthly budget you can split into acquisition campaigns and retargeting campaigns. How you split it up is up to you but naturally you will need more reach first and second retargeting. So ⅔ acquisition and ⅓ retargeting as a start. As usual a close monitoring of the campaigns is needed and better ad spend can be allocated after a while when you can see the statistics.
Step 5: Avoid Sponsored Content
Sponsored content is not the way to go on LinkedIn. It may produce vanity metrics like views or likes, but it will target the wrong people who won't buy.
Step 6: Retarget Visitors to Your Website
A great way to retarget is to target those who have visited your website. Build for these potential customers your retargeting campaigns. Retargeting campaigns are friendlier to your budget than pure acquisition campaigns. And go heavy in on these.
In summary, LinkedIn is an ideal platform for B2B marketing with its paid ads offering a more efficient way to reach target clients. The key steps to success on the platform include identifying target clients, creating targeted content, launching an influence campaign, allocating a budget, avoiding sponsored content, and retargeting website visitors.
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