LinkedIn is a professional social media platform that has been able to attract more than 600 million users across the world.

This post will highlight some of the best LinkedIn marketing strategies for the benefit of small business owners.

LinkedIn is not only considered as a platform for the community of job-seeking persons and potential employers, but also one of the most useful business marketing tool.

As per the LinkedIn sales report, over 80% of all business leads generated by social media came from LinkedIn, 90% of business marketers use LinkedIn as a content distribution channel.

7 Effective LinkedIn Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Set Realistic Linkedin Marketing Goals:

business owners must set specific marketing goals that need to be achieved using the LinkedIn marketing channel.

Here are some common LinkedIn marketing goals that you can set for your business:

  • Increase brand awareness of your company
  • Generate marketing qualified leads
  • Built trust and reputation for your products and services
  • Increase the overall engagement rate
  • Sell your product or services through LinkedIn

Audience Research on LinkedIn:

Define your target audience and build a person.

HubSpot has a great personal builder that will help you create an ideal persona for your business

Use the company page analytics section to understand about your followers and page visitors.

Conduct a short survey on your LinkedIn company page to find what type of content your followers like.

Create a LinkedIn Showcase Page:

7 Effective LinkedIn Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Linkedin Showcase Pages are niche pages to promote a specific category, sub-brand, product, or category within your company.

Showcase pages will help you share content that is specific to a buyer persona.

If you know the importance of audience segmentation, then the showcase page will be the right tool for you to build an engaging audience.

LinkedIn will provide detailed analytics for each of the showcase pages that you have created, and that will allow you to refine your content and keep it personal and interesting.

LinkedIn Group Marketing:

7 Effective LinkedIn Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

If you want to build an audience that is focused on having quality discussions and feedback, then LinkedIn Groups is the right choice.

Major social networking platforms are tweaking their algorithms to favor brands that create engaging content, spark conversation, and builds a highly relevant audience.

This makes it critical for businesses to create groups that share meaningful content rather than broadcast marketing messages.

LinkedIn provides powerful community management features such as dailu or weekly digest of all activities in the group to keep your members updated.

Here are few quick tips to create a LinkedIn Group

  • Choose a specific topic that your audience will like
  • Fill out all the details such as group title, logo, description i.e. purpose of the group, group rules and group membership info.
  • Create a message template that will be used to send custom messages automatically to people interested in joining the group.
  • Share group info with your network and invite people to join the group.
  • Share engaging content by starting a discussion and be active by responding and commenting.

LinkedIn Company Page Optimization:

Optimize your LinkedIn company page so that people can find you through the search bar, increase visibility in search results, and get discovered when searched on Google and other search engines.

Use the right keywords that are relevant in your industry, use search terms that your target audience will likely use and update your company page information accordingly.

Take a look at your competitors company pages to analyze the number of followers, follower growth and content engagement they are having.

You may even go through their timeline to find best performing posts and find why they perform best.

Regular Updates and Content Calendar

You need to have daily updates over your company page so that you engage with your audience and build a fanbase.

Try to post content during the time that gets maximum traction and when most of your followers are active.

You can analyze the click-through rate of your previous LinkedIn posts and find the best performing posts to decide on which time works best for your audience.

Use images and videos to increase click-through rate, engagement rate, and start a conversation.

The LinkedIn algorithm prioritizes native videos over links from other platforms such as YouTube.

Advertise on LinkedIn

What better way to scale your reach on LinkedIn than to advertise your products and services using LinkedIn paid ads.

LinkedIn advertising will enable you to increase your visibility in your industry, deliver targeted ads, acquired new leads, customers and increase your revenue.

You can target an audience based on their employer, job title, skills, interests, and many other professional attributes.

Here is a full video tutorial on LinkedIn advertising:

So, is linkedin good for b2b marketing?

Yes, Yes and Yes – The advanced professional targeting options that LinkedIn provides is much better than Facebook and Google.

How do you create a b2b LinkedIn marketing strategy?

Create a buyer persona, understand b2b purchase journey, shortlist the audiences, their preferences and professional attributes and then target them using LinkedIn ads.

How do you generate b2b leads on LinkedIn?

Research your prospects, run B2B lead generation ads, target professional, industry groups and companies.