Top Tips: How B2B Brands Should Leverage LinkedIn in 2023
When it comes to building an engaged, loyal B2B community, the best piece of advice is an obvious one: go where your audience is. And as B2B marketers, we have the good fortune of knowing exactly where to find our audience — on LinkedIn.
Traditional social media lore would have us believe that the ultimate goal is to build a loyal following. But the problem with simply a following, is that the relationship is passive, not dynamic. And a passive audience, even a large one, isn’t nearly as valuable as a smaller, highly engaged community. So as B2B brands, how do we successfully leverage LinkedIn to build an active community and gain trust with our audience?
Let’s take a closer look at some of the overlooked, but highly important best practices for a modern LinkedIn strategy.
Tip: Go Back to Content Basics
LinkedIn can feel like a confusing place — it’s a professional platform, but it’s also built for building relationships, and most people never post anything except for job updates. This leaves most brands left wondering what they’re supposed to talk about. The good news is that you already have the answers in your content that are performing well off of LinkedIn.
Start with the content your ideal audience finds educational, entertaining, or thought-provoking, and then reformat it for LinkedIn. This, however, does not mean resharing a link to a well-performing blog and calling it a day.
For example, if you have a case study that lands well with your audience, why not create a post that talks about that customer and how well they’re becoming a leader in their industry (leveraging your solution). You can also use that same case study to create a carousel that makes the information more visually appealing and digestible. If you have a blog you want to share, create a post that talks about one point in depth — if there’s more than one point you want to talk about, that's a whole week of LinkedIn content!
Tip: Build a Strategy Beyond Self-Promotion
LinkedIn isn’t all that saturated yet from a B2B perspective because most brands aren’t leveraging LinkedIn for the exciting and accessible channel and community builder that it is. This is something you can use to your advantage because it doesn’t take a lot to stand out. Most brands, if they’re planning to post at all, are sticking to what feels comfortable: sharing links to existing blog posts, job openings, and congratulating themselves on the occasional award. These types of posts can all be valuable forms of content but should not make up the majority of your LinkedIn content. Instead, aim to post information that’s valuable for your audience at least twice as often as your post of something promotional.
Again, this is an opportunity to entertain, educate and engage, which is the lens through which you should always view your LinkedIn content.
So how does this look in application? Let’s say your team attends an industry event — a typical promotional post would be to share a picture or two from the event with a generic caption about what a nice time you had. It’s not bad content, but it’s something we all see frequently and doesn’t make an impact. Instead, what if the people on your team who attended the conference shared their top 5 takeaways from the program with inspiring quotes or helpful learnings — offering something valuable to your audience. And to take it one step further, what if instead of a written post, those same people recorded a phone video of themselves at the event talking about these takeaways? Now, that’s something that will stop your audience from scrolling. A 30-second video from a conference you’re already attending is a pretty light lift.
Tip: Find Your Voice
B2B doesn’t have to be boring, and LinkedIn doesn’t have to be stuffy and overly professional. In fact, it shouldn’t be. Yes, LinkedIn is a place for professional networking and thoughtful leadership, but it’s also true that your audience is made up of individual people and those people want to feel like they’re talking to a person, even when the information is coming from a brand.
If you haven’t yet done the work internally to identify your brand voice and personality, start by thinking of the people on your team who best represent your organization and easily connect with your customers. Then, lean into their personal voice and infuse it into your social media posts. A consistent voice helps to create trust with your audience — giving them something to expect and creating the foundation for a two-way relationship.
It’s Time to Level Up Your LinkedIn Presence
LinkedIn is a critical component of a complete B2B marketing strategy — don’t wait to connect with your audience where you already know they are — on LinkedIn! Get started today by downloading our free LinkedIn Best Practices Guide and get all the information you need about working with the LinkedIn algorithm and creating content that boosts engagement.
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