Making the most of LinkedIn—A sharp weapon in your marketing armoury

You may not love it, with its clunky platform and wonky algorithms, but LinkedIn has steadily built its potential to be a key part of business sales strategy over the last few years.
In today’s post-GDPR, pre-PECR (you might want to check that out) environment, LinkedIn is assuming more significance as a sales platform for marketing executives around the world.
In a highly regulated environment, use of email to reach prospects—still effective and valuable if personalised and relevant—will slow down. With a predicted shift of focus towards inbound marketing, finding the most effective tools to support this is clearly imperative.
Ask any B2B CEO which social platforms matter, and it’s a safe bet they will mention LinkedIn. Good execs or sales people are well connected—and having a good set of connections is without doubt the best route to growing your business. And even without connections, LinkedIn is a highly effective platform for reaching your audience. Here are ten reasons why:
1/ There are 250 million active users on LinkedIn, and 40% of these use LinkedIn daily. The beauty of LinkedIn is that it’s likely that, as B2B organisation, most people you need to sell to are using it.
2/ It’s easy to be hyper targeted using LinkedIn’s segmentation tools. You can select audience by age, sector, job title, company size and location.
3/ LinkedIn lead gen forms can be used to support webinar registrations, events, content downloads, and have the ability to capture lots of demographic data. The data also directly integrate into your organisation’s MA platform, if you have one.
4/ That said, lead forms can be expensive, with a pay per view, rather than submission, model. In our experience of working with lead gen campaigns with our sister agency and MA consultancy CleverTouch, most success has been in using external landing pages, where it’s helped with brand engagement and is a lower cost (only pay for one click).
5/ Your campaign is more likely to stand out if you have a stand out and consistent imagery (see picture). Javascript will enable you to see which of the campaigns has worked, tracking the source of leads.
6/ Within the LinkedIn Sales Navigator function, there are a number of filters you can apply to narrow down to applicable companies, i.e. geographies, headcount, and a key one for some vendors, ‘technologies used’.
7/ Using the Sales Navigator search, you can also search leads from a selection of filters to find the key contacts. Alternatively, use your buyer title to search, i.e. Marketing Automation Specialist. More importantly, it also allows you to see the organisational lay out of a company and who is the best person to engage with.
8/ You can use LinkedIn InMail without being connected, and with InMails receiving a higher response rate compared to regular emails, this is worth considering. Bear in mind too, unlike regular emails, your reader also has a way to check your profile immediately providing greater transparency.
9/ Your profile has a massive impact on LinkedIn effectiveness and is crucial to supporting your organisation’s brand. 73% of prospects are actually likely to engage with a clear and complete profile. People trust endorsements and recommendations and this will help prospects in deciding whether to do business with you.
10/ The more you share, and like, the more you appear in your network (if the content is seen as relevant and valuable).
In today’s connected marketing environment, where the power is in the buyer’s hands more than ever, LinkedIn has a powerful role to play. It’s pretty simple to use, and can reach your unknown but relevant global or local audiences accurately. Not to mention promoting your company to employees, shareholders and customers, who can then share the message more widely.
Where other technologies may be fading out, LinkedIn is definitely in.