3 Effective LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategies for B2B Marketers

[ad_1]

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Whether you are a freelance content marketer, B2B founder, or marketing professional, you will agree with me that LinkedIn is a B2B goldmine, except you are one of those LinkedIn haters…

Do you know that 97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn?

Huge right? But a not-so-good news: most B2B marketers and companies are spinning their wheels on LinkedIn—scrapping templates that don’t work and following outdated gimmicks.

Here’s what I mean:

Copy and paste syndrome: marketers blindly copying the big dogs’ strategy— Hubspot, Gartner, e.t.c—without making tweaks to suit their unique goals
Inconsistency: Showing up today and going off for six months
Lack of systems and strategy: No process in place to back up marketing practices and spamming your connections with irrelevant content

In this article, I’ll explore different strategies you can use to unlock the great potential of LinkedIn. Not just that, you’ll get access to top LinkedIn marketing strategies with insights from leading experts.

Why use LinkedIn for B2B marketing

I can’t agree more with Victor Ijidola, a top content marketer and creator of Growthbaker. LinkedIn is clearly the biggest platform for B2B professionals to connect.

And the great thing is: It pays off. 40% of B2B marketers surveyed indicated LinkedIn as the most effective channel for driving high-quality leads.

4 in 5 LinkedIn users drive business decisions. So imagine building a vast network of 500+ professionals and target customers.

LinkedIn helps you make more sales. It’s the hub of social selling.

According to Foundationinc, Social selling for B2B brands means using social media channels to find and connect with prospects, build trust, strengthen relationships, and ultimately sell more. Employees can also do the same with their networks

Beyond marketing on social media, LinkedIn is also a great place to embrace social selling because it shortens the sales cycle.

How? You might ask.

Strong relationships. When you build your network and actively connect with them and help them with content, you increase trust. That makes it easy for sales to occur.

Here’s the graphical representation of Dreamdata’s Social selling scorecard on LinkedIn in just 91 days.

Source

So, more sales are possible on LinkedIn. The question is: Are you intentional about unlocking the potential LinkedIn has to offer?

“But my company or B2B agency is not on the same level as Dreamdata or Hubspot” do I have hope?

Yes, you do.

Here’s Victor Eduoh, founder of Vec studio, a Product-Led Storytelling B2B SaaS content studio.

He shares how his B2B Product-Led Storytelling brand maximized the power of consistency on LinkedIn:

Source

There are two things to learn from his story: consistency and striving to be different.

You don’t expect to do what everyone does and still stand out. Heck no! You have to be different, don’t be a copycat on LinkedIn.

Another case study worth mentioning: Tilled, a B2B payment facilitation company run by a 24-year-old founder, Caleb Avery, maximized LinkedIn lead generation potential to get 75% of Leads Inbound and a 59% Close Rate with Content Marketing.

These results are enough proof for you to understand the power of LinkedIn in B2B.

But remember, it takes time to achieve these results, and you must love the process.

Chris Walker, a top LinkedIn expert and founder of Refine labs, puts it this way:

“The people thinking about chasing LinkedIn strategy need to consider the ingredients necessary to make it work.”

If you don’t think about the ingredients necessary to make LinkedIn work for you, you’ll keep spinning the wheels—you struggle to attract your ideal customers and converts readers to buyers

For B2B marketing founders, marketing professionals, content marketers, and sales professionals looking to maximize LinkedIn, it’s time to dominate!

It’s not time to tell you how to create a page, what hashtags to use, how many times you should post a day, or templates to create posts. No!

It’s time to play beyond the status quo on LinkedIn and cut the fluff. Look at these no-B.S. strategies and ingredients to help you win on LinkedIn.

3 ways to Win on LinkedIn

Go from mundane content to sharing expertise.

If you check your LinkedIn timeline now, you’ll see some marketers sharing about ChatGPT only and neglecting their business social media content calendar. Sad, right?

It’s not bad to talk about the trend but..

Don’t spend the whole time talking about a trend when you should be selling your products and services to ideal customers.

When I spoke to Victor Ijidola about this heading, I was pumped to hear his view because I know he’s big on advocating for the expertise and opinionated content on social media.

Here’s what he told me:

“Sharing expertise (using storytelling) is the best method I’ve found to win on LinkedIn. Rather than sharing content on random topics, pick an industry you know about and share what you know. Do it consistently, and you’ll see results.”

Even when I spoke to Carlos Silva, senior content writer at Semrush and top LinkedIn voice on remote work, he had a very similar idea to Victor.

Here’s what he said:

B2B marketers must change the narrative in 2023. Enough of sharing mundane content and telling irrelevant stories to your ideal customers.

But how can you achieve this?

Practical examples: Ben Goodey and Chris Walker.

Ben Goodey, the founder of How the f*ck. He’s one of the top B2B SEO experts on LinkedIn. Indeed, he dominates the space with his original content filled with expertise and authenticity.

He uses excellent carousels and images to create posts that garner a lot of impressions and conversions.

How does he do it:

Ben Goodey speaks to his target audience directly through content. Who? Those who want to improve search rankings.
He uses case studies to show expertise.
He creatively puts up images to make a blissful content consumption experience for his audience

Who’s next? Chris Walker! His presence on LinkedIn is indispensable. He seems to be the go-to leader for all information—B2B marketing, attribution, and dark social insights.

In his words:

“Stop trying to hack the algorithm for likes and engagement.

“Start sharing radical, non-obvious thinking that challenges established, widely accepted norms that don’t make sense anymore.”

So, how does he do it:

He challenges common outdated beliefs that don’t work in the marketing industry
He engages his audience a lot on LinkedIn
He shares what others aren’t communicating, and he backs every content with a short-form video

Examples are uncountable.

But let’s end with this formula from Jake Ward, a top SEO and content marketing consultant who has reached 5.7M content views after posting 100 content, grew his audience base to 30,701 followers, and generated 109+ inbound leads in 5 months.

He says:

That’s not all. There’s one more idea to harness this strategy.

You must be intentional about engaging other content from top leaders in your industry. When you start engaging, you are open to trends and insights that help you create a better post.

I love Andrea Bosoni’s perspective about engagement; when I had a chat with him, he told me:

“Chinwoke, engaging more relevant posts can help B2B professionals build relationships and lead to more connections and opportunities.

He also told me that you could learn from their experiences and insights and stay informed about current events in your field.

Now you know how vital creating quality content is, let’s look at one more strategy that can redefine your path.

Take company pages seriously and embrace employee advocacy

Employee networks have 10x more connections than their company’s followers (LinkedIn )

Are you as confident as Amber of Usergems💎, who says employee advocacy is the marketing hill she will die on?

An employee influencer is someone working for a company vetted with authority to increase awareness of the company’s brand and products among a specific demographic.

And according to LinkedIn, sophisticated organizations know that by making it easy for employees to share content, they are naturally extending their content reach and engagement and connecting more authentically with their audiences.

Consistent employee advocacy helped 6 Dreamdata employees build a social selling engine that saves an average of $5.26 per click and $6.59 per 1000 impressions on LinkedIn.

Employee advocacy is powerful. So how do you do it?

Follow these steps.

Map out a plan and content strategy.
Set up a meeting with your team and discuss the strategy.
Enable the strategy and empower your team.
Find a way to play out the strategy consistently.
Ensure there’s an audience alignment across the different personal brand channels of your employees.q

Take your LinkedIn page seriously! Practical example: Chili Piper.

It was during my conversation with Victor Ijidola that I got to know about Chili Piper. I was surprised I hadn’t come in contact with their page despite my long presence on the platform.

Victor told me that companies like Chilli Piper are crushing it already; real-life brand stories, etc… They’re doing it well.

Undoubtedly, company pages are here to stay.

How Chili Piper does it:

Post consistently
Be engaging, and share real-life experiences.

In this post here; they share an opinion about demo calls from their experience. And they did it with a spice of humor using a GIF.

Share interviews with experts. In this post, they share a short interview clip and redirect their audience to the podcast—a great content distribution model.

Embrace employee advocacy! See practical examples: Nectarhr.

Here’s a post by Amanda Cross, an employee at Nectar. She posts about their recent blog post and how they achieved it.

That’s not all. Nathan Ojaokamo, a B2B writer at Nectar, reposted Amanda’s post. This shows employee advocacy in action!

What more can you ask for from your employees? This means more reach, more engagements, and more conversions.

But why get all these without giving your employees shout-outs regularly?

Nectar does it best. See what they do: They create team carousels regularly.

This little act motivates every team member. They know they are being cared for.

Embrace content repurposing native to LinkedIn

Many B2B marketing leaders are already embracing content repurposing

I mean, it comes naturally. Don’t you think so?

Well, I looked no further than Justin Simon, an expert in content distribution.

Here’s what he had to say:

“In 2023, B2B companies must focus on creating platform-native content for LinkedIn. It’s not enough to post a webinar link or announce that a new blog post has been posted. Companies need a playbook to take the information that is inside their webinars or blogs and deliver them natively within the LinkedIn feed”

A practical example from UserGems💎:

Images Source

The above images show how UserGems repurposed their blog and podcast content, respectively. Watch how they make it native to LinkedIn ( the use of short-form text captions) and send their audience to take a deep dive.

Content repurposing remains an effective practice for LinkedIn marketing. You can use it to drive more conversions for your software and products. All you need to do is ensure that every content you repurpose is compatible with LinkedIn’s features.

This approach is genius and will be welcomed by your targeted audience on Linkedin, increasing the organic traffic of your brand’s website.