Why You Should Market with LinkedIn

While it seems as if the whole world has embraced social media, businesses are still working to figure out how to best utilize it in order to effectively convey their brand messaging. For the B2B world, LinkedIn stands head-and-shoulders above the rest in terms of generating leads and business prospects.

It makes sense. The LinkedIn audience is focused on business. When the same person who checked his friend’s vacation on Instagram, talked to his relatives on Facebook, and spent his lunch break tweeting about last night’s basketball game logs onto LinkedIn – he is looking for a unique experience. He is still looking to connect with people, but this time he is looking for new employees and new ways to grow his business.

As with any medium, targeting is half the battle. You want to get your message in front of the right people. With LinkedIn, the members do the heavy lifting for you. They are incentivized to keep their profiles accurate and up-to-date for networking, personal branding, and job opportunities. When members complete their LinkedIn profile, they provide information on their job experiences, company, skills, and more. This means you can target members using profile-based demographic information, re-target visitors from your website, or upload lists of contacts or companies for your account-based marketing efforts.

Before you begin, there are a few key steps you should take to ensure your advertising efforts will pay off. Make sure you have a professional LinkedIn page for your company and consider creating a group page where you can make frequent updates with relevant content. Participation in other LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your business will help drive traffic to your group as well. Encourage employees within your company to actively participate on LinkedIn to help keep your company front and center with prospects. Once you’re sure your company is presented in the best possible light on LinkedIn, you’re ready to move on to the next step.

The next question is HOW. For that, turn to Campaign Manager, LinkedIn’s ad platform for creating and managing your marketing message. It not only helps you create content, but it also helps you segment your audience and combine different targeting facets to reach people that are most relevant for your content goals and your business. Just by answering a few key questions, Campaign Manager will walk you through:

1. Estimating the size of your audience
2. Using different targeting facets to reach your audience
3. Using audience expansion to reach similar audiences
4. Saving your audience as a template for other campaigns
5. Creating Matched Audience targeting segments

In addition to creating sponsored content and text ads, you might want to consider utilizing Sponsored InMail through LinkedIn. Sponsored InMail lets you reach your target audience directly with personalized messages delivered to their LinkedIn messaging inboxes. Since Sponsored InMail can be accessed through both desktop and mobile, you’ll want to make sure that content is optimized for viewing on both platforms. This list of best practices for creating InMail messages will help.

So, now you can see the benefits of marketing through LinkedIn and how easy it easy it is to target your potential customers. The only thing left, is to craft the message. And if you’d like help with that, turn to the marketing experts at ScanSource Services. Our marketing services are customized and scalable, meaning we can connect with your marketing strategy for a full campaign or a single project, like a LinkedIn approach, for example. We’ve got the knowledge, experience, and expertise to help you attract new, qualified leads.

To sum up. If you’re looking to grow your social media presence, start with LinkedIn and lean on ScanSource’s Marketing Services for help.