It’s all too easy for B2B marketers to forget that their customers are people too. And nowhere is this more important to remember than on social media.
Most B2B brands on Linkedin have adopted a broad approach, using it for occasional campaigns or general content. And they’re missing a massive opportunity.
The businesses that are flourishing on Linkedin are using it differently. Here we take a look at how four B2B brands are using Linkedin to fill their pipelines with opportunities, so you can replicate their success.
Why Use Linkedin for B2B Marketing?
The answer to this is simple: it works. Linkedin is currently the most effective platform for delivering content and securing audience engagement.
Where other platforms fall short, Linkedin has a track record of delivering good quality leads for a wide range of businesses; more than one in three B2B marketers say it generates revenue for them.
4 B2B Brands That Are Winning on Linkedin
The B2B brands that are seeing success on Linkedin have taken advantage of its powerful algorithms to really dig deep into their target audience.
With that info, they’re creating premium content, designed for real people, and—this is key—promoting it to well-defined audiences.
By targeting their audience so well they often create a rare and powerful phenomenon amongst their target customers: the sense that everyone in your professional life is talking about the same brand.
This is the kind of buzz that can quickly establish a brand in a niche and fill its pipeline for months.
Hubspot
Hubspot is a content master, so it’s always worthwhile taking a look at their approach.
As we can see from their page, text-posts still work well on Linkedin, and Hubspot does a great job of using them to initiate a conversation with their audience in the comments.
To maintain an ‘always-on’ presence, they mix up their premium content with quotes from recent reports tied with questions to initiate conversation.
One trick they use to drive engagement is using carousels of images to create a story/slideshow effect. These are used to post abridged versions of their guides, or to answer a relevant question like, “Are dating apps the newest marketing channel?”
By promoting an ‘ecosphere’ of content across Linkedin, Hubspot gathers campaign engagement data, including early audience engagement metrics, which it uses to target those early leads who view their content with more traditional ads.
Hubspot uses LinkedIn’s early audience targeting technique to help radically reduce the CPL (cost per lead) from Linkedin ads, as well as providing a wealth of data about the content consumption of their target audience.
Templafy
Helping to prove that text-posts still work well on Linkedin, Templafy has taken a similar approach to Hubspot, but typically with much longer posts.
They dole out tips, facts, and questions to engage their audience in a friendly, emoji-filled voice. This even includes mini-courses in productivity, or epic videos promoting their latest whitepapers.
Content like this appeals to their target audience—business and marketing managers—it’s actually useful and engaging, but most importantly, they’ve hit the sweet spot by remembering to remain human.
They continue this human-touch in their follow up process, leveraging the data they receive from Linkedin lead-gen forms to personalize their follow-up messages.
Using Linkedin data to target the right prospects with content from the start and then to maintain a human, personal touch during the sales process has helped Templafy reduce cost per sales opportunity by as much as 43%.
Matmatch
Matmatch is a platform for bringing together suppliers and buyers of materials for various uses. As a new networking platform with no audience and few members, Matmatch needed rapid growth.
To do this, they used Linkedin data to explore the interests of their target audience; engineers, technicians, scientists, etc. and then created content specifically for them.
In a similar way to Templafy and Hubspot, Matmatch has gone for a friendly, relatable tone in their content, on topics that will really appeal to their audience.
Who else would appreciate a joke about a helium atom walking into a bar, interesting facts about gold, or the real reason Tesla’s cyber-truck looks so weird.
This is the kind of content that colleagues and customers talk about, share on Slack, and remember to come back to.
Matmatch then uses the data collected from their content engagements to target potential new users with InMail and traditional Linkedin adverts, coupled with personal outreach to influencers within target accounts who had been engaging with their content.
This mix of sponsored premium content to drive targeted ads and informed Sales Navigator outreach helped Matmatch to build an active user base of 150,000 in less than a year, grow their supplier opportunity pipeline 10x, and reduce CPL by more than half.
Comarch
Comarch is a large IT solutions provider with a tiny audience — until they started using Linkedin.
As a pan-European cross-industry IT provider, they had to produce content for a range of niches, in different languages.
They used Linkedin audience data to prioritize content production by identifying key audience segments.
This informed the premium content they produced to establish themselves as a thought-leader, which included commissioning professional research papers.
They tested their content’s appeal rigorously to help drive subscriptions and engagement, building their audience and significantly increasing brand awareness within their key industries.
Comarch then used Sales Navigator data to identify key influencers within their target accounts, track their engagement with the content and follow up and start building relationships with them.
This has resulted in at least five major deals for Comarch and a significant uptick in brand awareness and perceptions in their key industries.
Final Tips for Getting More B2B Leads on Linkedin
From the four case studies above, we can tell that there are 3 steps you should take as a B2B marketer to drive more leads from Linkedin:
1. Use the data you have
Pair Linkedin’s data with your existing buyer personas to inform you of which types of content you should be producing and who is interested in it.
2. Create and promote premium content
Create useful, engaging content for your target audience(s) and then promote it so they see it. Gather data on engagement with your content, test, repeat.
3. Use engagement data to drive outreach
Use the data on your content’s engagement to identify influencers within target accounts and follow up with a relevant ad or personal InMail message through Navigator.
Related Articles:
How to use Linkedin for B2B lead generation
What Type of Content Should You Be Posting On Each Social Channel?
How B2B Brands Are Seeing Success With Instagram Stories
About the Author:
Daniela Puzzo, VP Marketing, Fonolo
Daniela is the Vice President of Marketing at Fonolo. She is an experienced, metrics-driven marketer with a knack for content strategy. When she isn’t concocting Fonolo’s next marketing strategy, or selling dreamhouses, she’s a busy supermom to her young twins.