When it comes to B2B marketing, LinkedIn is absolutely vital to your online marketing strategy. In fact, no other social media platform comes close to the benefits that LinkedIn can provide to your business. According to recent data, it’s estimated that around 80 percent of all social media B2B leads are generated via LinkedIn. That statistic alone should be enough to make you seriously consider using LinkedIn, but if you’re still on the fence, then consider the following six benefits:
1. Improve Brand Exposure and Create Awareness
Companies have to know who you are if you want to be able to establish and foster business relationships. Fortunately, LinkedIn is an excellent platform for improving the exposure of your brand and creating awareness for what it is your company does. The following are just a few methods that you can use in order to go about accomplishing this goal on LinkedIn:
- Connect with who you know – Begin by connecting with current business partners and clients. You can then look through their connections in order to find other businesses that are relevant to your brand and whom you may be interested in working with, whether you’re looking for partners or clients.
- Find the influencers – Know who is important within your industry and connect with them. Share content that they have posted and add comments that are relevant and valuable to their posts. This will help them to become aware of your brand – not to mention help expose your company to their audience as well.
- Join LinkedIn Groups – LinkedIn has groups that people can join in order to discuss specific topics. Look for groups that are relevant to your business. Join the conversation by posting comments that you think will be helpful or informative in the context of the discussion. If people in these groups find your contribution to the conversation to be valuable, they’ll be more likely to check out your business page.
2. Establish Your Company as an Authority
LinkedIn can be a really effective platform for improving your company’s reputation as an authority within your industry. Your reputation could get to the point where your brand name itself generates trust, leading to businesses seeking you out, instead of you having to go looking for them. How can you do this? Besides actively engaging with your connections and in LinkedIn Groups, you can use LinkedIn to post valuable blog content. Great content can go a long way in establishing your company as an authority within your industry.
3. Boost Web Traffic
As you increase your company’s exposure on LinkedIn, your chances of driving more traffic to your website increase as well – especially as you build your reputation. Posting links to your blog is a great way to drive connections to your site. LinkedIn users can also share your posts with their own group of connections, thereby driving even more web traffic. How effective is LinkedIn at actually driving web traffic? No other social media network drives as much traffic to corporate websites or blogs as LinkedIn does.
4. Increase Leads and Boost Sales
There are 380 million registered users on LinkedIn, not to mention that more than three million businesses have company pages on LinkedIn. That’s a huge audience for you to tap into. If you use LinkedIn effectively, you should be able to increase both your leads and your sales. In fact, 51 percent of all companies that use LinkedIn have acquired at least one B2B customer, and 50 percent of all LinkedIn users are more likely to make a purchase from a company if they engage with them on LinkedIn.
5. Maintain Business Relationships
Once you’ve established a relationship with another business, you’ll want to maintain that relationship to give yourself the chance at future business opportunities. If you have a strong relationship with someone, they may even refer you to other clients. LinkedIn is an excellent way to maintain contact with current and past clients and partners since you can drop them a message every once in a while, comment and share their posts, and even post content that you think that they might find helpful.
6. Get Feedback
Simply observing what others have to say about your business is a great way to get feedback about products or services as well as other aspects of your business. You can even post questions to your connections to get a better idea of where you stand and how you can improve the way you do things.
There are hundreds of different social media platforms that you can use as a B2B business, and we highly recommend that you take advantage of LinkedIn. There simply is no other social media platform that is as effective for B2B marketing – no matter what type of business you might have.