LinkedIn for B2B lead generation

Is the juice worth the squeeze?

Why many Australian B2B businesses have yet to have measurable benefits from their activity on LinkedIn can often boil down to two facts; firstly, LinkedIn strategies require time and resources. While the people using LinkedIn are precisely the right connections your business wants to make, it takes more time to create these connections than on other social channels. Why? Those using LinkedIn care about their professional profiles and networks. They think more carefully about with whom they connect and communicate. That's why they are more protective than on other social channels. 

The second most common reason B2B companies fail to achieve their goals on LinkedIn is consistency. LinkedIn rewards those who post more consistently with increased reach and longevity of post-life. The LinkedIn algorithm can separate those who see the channel as transactional and those serious about providing users with valuable content and connections.

Rather than view LinkedIn as 'just another social channel', think of it as a networking opportunity that demands adherence to the rules and shows respect for users. If your company acts in this way, it will reap the benefits.

The foundations

It's important to understand that LinkedIn favours the needs of individuals over companies. That's why you must establish a personal profile before creating a company profile. We recommend using one of LinkedIn's personal paid profile solutions to increase your reach and search features. 

Once you have established a personal profile, you must build your following. You can use many techniques to enhance results, which we won't cover in this article. 

Creating your personal profile is essential, as it is only from the company page's administrator's followers that you can send invites to follow your company profile. 'Yes,' people can organically find your company page and follow it; however, that process is only effective if you're a high-profile company. Mid-sized companies will need a more proactive approach to building their company profile. There's also the issue that in the beginning, only some people want to follow a company page with a limited following.

LinkedIn Groups

As an individual, you can connect to as many as 100 LinkedIn groups. You can choose any groups to follow; however, we recommend focusing on the groups where your potential prospects seek their information. 

The benefit of groups is that you can post relevant articles and information directly into specific groups, customising your posts to make them more relevant and compelling to that target audience. Responses in a group create opportunities to engage directly with your audience and boost the reach and longevity of posts.

Content strategies

LinkedIn is a hungrier beast to feed than many businesspeople understand. Posting once a week or monthly will deliver little to no results. We recommend more regular posting. Sometimes, posting may be a daily proposition (including at weekends). In other cases, it may only be twice a week, with posting frequency increasing when your sector is in the news (e.g., cyber security, 'just in case' manufacturing).

Destinations for your LinkedIn posts

LinkedIn's algorithms favour content that doesn't have links outside their network; however, that's not necessarily beneficial to your business development needs. We recommend a strategy where you create links in your posts to pages on your website. These links allow better management of the lead qualification process and ROI tracking on insights, product and service info, and call-to-action pages. These links also help boost your website's organic profile, driving increasingly more qualified web traffic.

The other benefit of this approach to posting is that it allows you to repeatedly promote the same web content on LinkedIn, with new intros to content with every post.

The X factors

A great post on LinkedIn has around 2,000 impressions and low engagement; however, Digital Storytelling Collective frequently have impressions on posts more than ten times that rate and, in some cases, as much as 30 times the LinkedIn average. 

Achieving these elevated numbers of impressions and engagement level requires the 'X factor'. The X factor for LinkedIn posts boils down to either tapping into an existing trending topic or creating a new topic that personally impacts your target audience. 

There's another element to this, and it's the ability to 'read the room'. Great copywriters hone these skills over a lifetime, making it second nature to understand the emotional motivation of a target audience.

Why your B2B company needs to build and maintain a LinkedIn profile

Only some B2B companies treat LinkedIn as more than just an item on a checklist. Like a website, a LinkedIn profile is not a checklist. It's the public face of your business. It's how you refresh and grow your prospect and client list. It's how you build partnerships and distribution networks. It's how you attract the best talent. It also shows how you attract investors and the attention of those who may one day acquire your business.

If you wish to create a more robust, sustainable, and profitable business model, treat your LinkedIn profiles (and your other marketing touchpoints) with the same respect and resources you allocate to other areas of your business.