6 Reasons LinkedIn is Great for B2B Marketing

Did you know LinkedIn is the oldest social network, having started in 2003? And it’s still going strong. LinkedIn is one of the world’s top 10 fastest growing brands. And with good reason. As the most trusted social media platform in the world for over 5 years now, LinkedIn is the place to be for B2B Marketing. Below, we expand on why…

First, here are some statistics to chew on:

Although LinkedIn originally started as an online place for people to find career opportunities, most companies have embraced it and at the very least have a company profile that appears on the site, regardless of whether their audience is B2B or B2C. LinkedIn has expanded from its original purpose, and now members view content approximately 15x more than job listings.

LinkedIn is seen as so trustworthy because people find employees (not the C-suite) to be more trustworthy. People like people who are like them. As social creatures, we know that it’s much harder to lie or treat people poorly when you see them as being within your group (or tribe). We also tend to give more credibility to people we know (advertisers capitalize on this when they use celebrities to pitch products and services). Without LinkedIn, most employees would have been nameless and faceless, so LinkedIn lets potential customers see and connect to regular employees. And in turn, this connection to these employees and their behaviour makes your company more trustworthy.

Here are 6 reasons why LinkedIn is great for B2B marketing.

#1. LinkedIn Helps B2B Companies Create Awareness and Great Reputations

The perfect place for thought leadership and influencer marketing, LinkedIn is built to showcase your employees, and your company. B2B buying cycles tend to be longer, involve many stakeholders, and are surprisingly emotionally driven (more than people think). When careers can hang in the balance, emotions can play a profound part in decision-making. As mentioned above, social media is seen as more trustworthy than advertising, especially LinkedIn, mainly because of the access you gain. The more active your employees are on LinkedIn, the more awareness you can create and the greater reputation your company can have. At the end of the day, your company is only as good as your employees, and in B2B, with business relationships often lasting years, this can make a huge difference in the success of your company.

#2. LinkedIn Helps B2B Marketers Distribute Content

It important to repeat that B2B customers are consumers too. In fact, they often have more riding on their decisions than with an average consumer purchase, so they spend more time investigating and researching before making a purchase. 33% of B2B decision makers research a product or service on LinkedIn before making a purchase.

There are over nine billion content impressions available on LinkedIn, with roughly 3 million users sharing content on a weekly basis. LinkedIn is a great way to distribute your content via advertising or organically. Ideally, if you can have your employees help distribute that content, it’s even better. Of course, quality content that informs and educates will be more successful than content that just promotes your product or service. We’ve successfully leveraged LinkedIn to promote content for B2B clients for years, and campaigns succeed because LinkedIn lets us zoom in on our target audience members, placing content they value right in front of them.

#3. LinkedIn Lets B2B Marketers Target, Target and Target Some More

Another advantage of LinkedIn is that people usually keep their profile information accurate because it’s in their best interests to do so. All that accuracy makes it easier to target relevant LinkedIn advertising. Although people may misrepresent themselves, there’s a natural disincentive to do so when you’re part of a network and company that may read your profile. There are so many variables with which you can build your target audience that you can get quite granular on LinkedIn as long as your ultimate target group is at least 300 people strong. So, if your B2B product or service is niche, you may be able to target your audience there more cost effectively than other platforms.

#4. LinkedIn Groups Are Ready-Made B2B Marketing Audiences

LinkedIn Groups lets your employees be a part of a ready-made and relevant network, and if your employees are active, you can build awareness and engagement for your company, without being overly promotional of your products or services. Employees can distribute content, ask questions and provide answers, increasing the authority and credibility of your company. We’ve also found LinkedIn Groups to be an effective way to advertise to our target audience. In general, people join groups because their interests are aligned, and they want to see the content that is distributed by group members. Often, we’ve had group members like and share content that we advertised to them, which helps to expand our reach and credibility.

#5. LinkedIn Advertising Lets You Target On Partner Websites

Although we couldn’t find a statistic on how many partner websites LinkedIn has, even if it’s a quarter of the size of Google’s, we’d still have access to half a million websites. In general, people don’t spend hours on LinkedIn reading their feeds. Although 40% of members access LinkedIn daily, they generally only stay a few minutes, which is why targeting the same audience off of LinkedIn is so important for successful B2B advertising. With the LinkedIn partner websites, you can still advertise to your chosen target audience off of LinkedIn when they are going about the rest of their day. That’s doubly true in remarketing context: if your original list is built with high quality LinkedIn audience members, then all your remarketing to them, on whichever channel – will be higher quality too.

#6. LinkedIn Delivers Higher Lead Quality for B2B Marketers

There’s a reason why 94% of B2B marketers choose LinkedIn to distribute their content; LinkedIn delivers high quality on average, whether through traditional methods, such as registering for a webcast or downloading a whitepaper, or less traditional methods such as answering questions or being part of a LinkedIn Group. We’re so confident in lead quality there that if you’re not capturing good leads on LinkedIn, it’s a signal to revisit your targeting, messaging, or both as something is likely askew.

If this blog intrigued you, here’s some more articles we think you’d enjoy:

3 Tips to Make Your LinkedIn Company Profile SEO-Friendly

3 Big Reasons to Advertise on LinkedIn

Why LinkedIn? Because Professionals are Consumers too

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