8 Tips to Use LinkedIn as a B2B Marketing Tool

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional social network has been gaining immense popularity in the recent times. According to the latest stats and figures, it hit a staggering 590 million users in over 200 countries and territories – massive growth when we consider this social network just had 22 million users five years ago. In fact, LinkedIn is one of the oldest social networks that has stood the test of times and emerged as a winner. Staying abreast of the technology trends and tacking all the challenges along the way, this social network has managed to grow stronger and popular. In this blog, I’m going to share a few tips to improve your marketing through the world’s largest professional network.

As you may probably know, LinkedIn is a powerful tool to build and nurture professional relationships. Whether it is about finding a job or a new business opportunity, LinkedIn can help you connect with the right set of audience. Communicating your ideas, sharing latest industry news and exploring the new trends is all possible with your LinkedIn profile. Regardless of your business niche and size, it is important to identify and focus on your target audience. Below listed are a few tips for marketers.

Your profile leaves the first impression and you need to make sure it is appealing. If you are a marketer, business development professional, CEO or anybody who is in search for a powerful platform to showcase and develop your business in an effective manner, then a LinkedIn platform is the perfect way to present yourself. Your skill sets, achievements, interests, awards, scholastics and all other professional details can be added to profile so that it impresses and informs your target audience. Maintaining your company profiles and updating the pages with all relevant information and updates will help you in connecting with more professionals and gaining more followers.

In order to devise an effective marketing plan, it is essential to connect with the right set of audience. Make use of Advanced Search functionality to explore and connect with your targeted audience. However, you need to have a better understanding about the relevant keywords and search terms in order to retrieve perfect results. Once you have narrowed down to your expected outcomes, make sure to save the search.

After you obtain your leads, you should draft a customized message for your connection request. If your account is new, it would be better to start by sending just a few connection requests to begin with. In the initial phase, you can start adding your colleagues as your first connections. Instead of going with a template message, it is recommended to draft a personalized message while sending connection request to your peers.

When you have established a connection, then you may start sending out pitch messages. While preparing a pitch, make sure to keep the language clear and simple. Keep yourself in the shoes of your clients and think how you would like to be pitched to. People can always spot hype and fake messages, so keep it real. And most importantly, answer the key questions regarding your business through the pitch.

Perhaps this topic is new to you. This is a testing process to determine the best way to attract more people towards your business. You can draft different connection messages and pitch messages. Then you can send different messages to different people and find out which message is more reachable. You can use that specific message for your business purposes in future.

It’s very easy to reach out to more people on a single platform. You can easily search for groups according to your business. You can join 100 groups at one time and you should ensure that the groups you choose are very active and informative. Select the groups with higher number of participants and make sure the people in them are your targeted audience. Once you join a group, you can communicate your ideas and comment your suggestions. After 15 days of joining, you can send a private message to group members. Thus without much effort you can reach out to people with whom you are not connected.

You can analyze your own performance in LinkedIn. This is a sample page that displays a user’s performance graph, profile viewers, number of likes he has received for his shares, his rank among his connections etc. This would give you a better idea regarding your profile status and performance over a course of time.

Once you establish your business and connections through LinkedIn, you can easily upload your LinkedIn contacts to your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or any data management software with CSV file. You can easily synchronize your LinkedIn profile with your contacts and accounts. In this manner, you can easily maintain a good clientele. Export your LinkedIn contacts in a CSV file for data management purpose.

LinkedIn opens up unlimited opportunities for the business, provided you use it in the most systematic way. LinkedIn even offers premium subscription services in different price tiers and is available for one month free trial. This professional network also offer some valuable resources for its users which include online classes, Slideshare, Pulse and more. Start exploring LinkedIn to discover what works best for you.

Happy connecting!