Guest post by Eduard Klein.

There is no shortage of LinkedIn tips online, offering guidance about posting content and generating leads. Although it’s the ideal platform for reaching your target audience, the problem is that 96% of B2B content marketers are already using LinkedIn for organic social marketing.

How can you cut through the clutter and find qualified leads? How can you most effectively reach out to prospects, strike up a conversation that triggers their interest in your business, and keep them engaged to turn them into customers?

Fortunately, there are some advanced ways of using LinkedIn as a powerful B2B marketing tool. If done correctly, you can open up the floodgates of leads and strengthen relationships with your prospects.

This post takes a deep dive into eight tactics you can integrate with your LinkedIn marketing strategy and set yourself up for success to post content and generate leads.

1. Optimize Your Company Page

With over 55 million businesses competing for the attention of 720+ million users on LinkedIn, it’s vital to design a captivating LinkedIn company page that cuts through the clutter and connects with your ideal customers.

Your company page is the best place to tell your brand’s story and showcase your products and services to your target audience. For B2B companies, it’s the most powerful social media platform for people to reach you, follow you, and learn more about your company.

A well-optimized page increases you brand exposure on LinkedIn, increasing purchase intent by 33%.

Here are some pro tips to optimize your company page for maximum engagement and lead generation capabilities:

• Upload an attention-grabbing, easy-to-understand profile image and banner, as these are the first things people notice when they land on your page. For the profile image, use a clean-and-simple company logo. And for banner images, you can be creative with brand-relevant icons and quotes like Amazon.
• Write a compelling “About Us” section under 2000 characters or less. You can tell visitors about your business goals and a brand story, helping them understand the value of your products or services. Remember, the About Us section must answer six basic questions, including:
  • Who are you?
  • Where are you based?
  • What do you offer?
  • What kinds of companies do you serve?
  • What are your vision, mission, and values?
  • How can visitors contact you to learn more?
• Illustrate your brand with a headline and call to action (CTA). You have a 120-character limit within the headline to explain what you do and how you can help potential customers. For call-to-action, you can choose from five CTA buttons: Visit the website, Learn more, Register, Sign up, and Contact us. The SoundCloud headline in the image below says it all about the brand before prompting visitors to click the CTA “Visit website.”
• Keep pace with new features and algorithms. LinkedIn constantly tweaks its algorithms and adds new features to help businesses connect with their target audience in different ways. For instance, LinkedIn introduced a feature allowing admins to invite first-degree connections to follow their LinkedIn company page. Hence, it’s worth keeping an eye out for new updates as the platform always searches for ways to support company-level engagement.

2. Create a Showcase Page

Showcase pages are niche pages of your key LinkedIn company page. They allow you to feature your company’s specific products and market to a specific buyer persona. For instance, McDonald’s has multiple showcase pages for its branches in different countries.

Showcase Pages allow you to build personalized content for multiple buyer personas and reach out to prospects in a more targeted way. For instance, if you sell pet food, you can create Showcase Pages, in-depth updates, and posts for specific animal food like dog food, cat food, etc. Dog owners can follow your respective dog food showcase page without following your main company page.

Creating a showcase page is similar to creating a regular LinkedIn company page. Here are the steps to follow:

• Open your LinkedIn company page.
• Click on the drop-down of the “Admin Tools Menu” at the right corner and click “Create Showcase Page.”

• Choose the showcase page name and LinkedIn public URL. It should be different from the main company page.

• Click on “Create Page.”
• Add the information as you would for the main page, including logo, tagline, website links, images, and industry.

• Click “Publish.”

Your showcase page will display under the Affiliated Pages section of your main company page.

Note: You can create up to ten free Showcase Pages.

3. Start Your Own Group on Specific Topic

There are over two million LinkedIn groups, some of them with more than a million members.

The last thing you want is to create a generic group and compete against thousands of other similar groups. For instance, if you offer SEO services, you’re competing against 12,000 related groups.

Besides, your customers are more interested in focusing on a common industry issue or topic than talking about your products. Let’s say you have built an opt-in email marketing tool. Your prospects would be far more interested in building an email list than chatting about how to use your tool.

That’s why it’s essential to create a group on a particular topic to start conversations with prospects sharing similar interests. It also keeps your content focused on your brand-relevant subject and positions you as an expert within your niche.

You can narrow your products or services down to a specific topic by asking a few questions:

• What are your goals for the LinkedIn group? Is it brand awareness or lead generation?
• Who is your targeted audience? Are they beginners in the ecommerce business or growth marketing professionals?
• What type of content is helpful to your members?
• What are your customers’ common questions and pain points?
• What are the common topics you can relate your brand with?
• What specific benefit can you give your audience that other groups can’t?

Once you get the answer to these questions, it’s time to plan your group’s name. To pick a unique name, you can combine your topic + your audience. For instance, HubSpot’s LinkedIn group name is “Inbound Marketers – For Marketing Professionals.”

After creating your LinkedIn group, start posting content to attract people interested in your topic. As your group expands, you can start sending personalized emails to your group members to convert them into leads.

A personalized email is a standard message with personalized images or animated gifs you can send to your target audience. Let’s say you want to invite a LinkedIn group member over a virtual coffee and chat. You can write an email reminding the member that they are part of your group and telling them you’d like to help them get some specific results (e.g., a 200% increase in outreach engagement).

Along with this email, you can add your and your LinkedIn member’s image. Like this:

The final email will look like this:

A personalized email humanizes your outreach request and delivers your business information in a memorable way. You can use a tool like Hyperise to auto-personalize your LinkedIn outreach email.

After establishing this connection, you can then send a follow-up email. Writing an effective follow-up email can be tricky, though. You have to show what you can do for your prospects and convince them to take an action you want, like collaborating on a project.

Here’s a follow up email template you can use:

At this stage, your outreach campaign turns into a guide dropping educational breadcrumbs for prospects to follow along. With each crumb, the prospects learn more about how you can solve their problems and help them accomplish their goals. Next, you’ll need a lead nurturing strategy.

Lead nurturing is about building relationships with your prospects and guiding them towards purchase. The best way to nurture leads is to book a call and have one-on-one conversations with prospects. They can ask clarifying questions to ensure your products or services are a good fit, and you will know what exactly they need to make a purchase. You can automate the entire appointment-booking process with tools like Appointlet.

4. Host a Live Event

LinkedIn Live videos generate 7X more reactions and 24X more comments than regular videos. Additional benefits of hosting a virtual event on LinkedIn include:

• Meet your audience where they are (i.e., LinkedIn);
• Keep your event open to LinkedIn Company Page followers;
• Send direct invitations to your profile connections;
• Build buzz for your event by posting updates to your company page; and
• Save the live broadcasts in your Page’s video tab for later viewing.

To host a live event on LinkedIn, first, you have to apply for LinkedIn Live, an exclusive platform enabling you to host live events through your company page. Once you get the access, click “Create an Event” from your company page’s admin tools. Give a name to your event, set time and date, write a description, and tag speakers and attendees if required.

If you are not using LinkedIn Live, you can also host a live event using a third-party tool and promote it on your LinkedIn company page. Let’s say you are hosting a webinar through a third-party tool. Simply “Create an Event” on LinkedIn, fill in the information, and share your webinar link. It will look like this:

You can share it with your connections and group members. Attendees will be notified as soon as your live stream begins.

Once you announce your live event, practice self introduction. People take only 30 seconds to form a first impression. Here, your goal is to convince the audience why you’re qualified to talk about the topic. You can start with some fun facts to break the ice or choose a professional approach to explain how you can help solve their problem.

5. Map Out a LinkedIn Content Strategy

There are multiple types of content on LinkedIn, including Feed posts, articles, videos, images, live events, podcasts, etc. Creating them all can be overwhelming and may lead to a waste of time and effort. For instance, you may create content that doesn’t match the information your targeted audience wants. That’s why you need a content strategy to define your goals, set priorities, plan your work, and ensure your content is goal-driven.

Here are four steps to creating a LinkedIn content strategy:

• Identify your objective. Whether it is getting more people to sign up for trials or demos, building a community of loyal customers, or boosting conversion, your goal helps determine which type of content you should create. For instance, if you want people to subscribe to your newsletter, gated content like an ebook will help you achieve that objective.
• Pick five key topics within your industry segment. Find ten questions people ask about each topic. This gives you 50 pieces of content (5 topics x 10 questions = 50). Later, turn each question into content like a long-form article or host an event to answer the question. You can use the free tool com to find out questions people are asking about your topics.

• Create a content calendar. Add your topics and questions to the calendar along with the date when you will finish them. It will help you stay consistent with your content creation process. Also, you can create a separate list of ideas you compile during your research or light-bulb moments. You can use Trello to create an understand-at-a-glance content calendar.

• Repurpose your content. The idea is to create one long-form content each week and turn it into other forms of content. For instance, you can turn your live event into a long-form post, short videos and images highlighting insights, Q&As for your LinkedIn feed, etc. This way, you don’t need to create content from scratch each time.

6. Run an Advanced Search

The five tips above are focused on generating leads and content creation. The next three explain how to find prospects instead of waiting for them to find you.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a social selling platform offering features to help you find the right prospects and build trusted relationships.

One of the most useful features of LinkedIn Sales Navigator is its search filters that enable you to narrow your search, find your ideal customer profile, build a list of highly-relevant leads, and increase your odds of conversion.

Let’s say you are looking for people working in the marketing and advertising industry and living in France. You can filter your search with these details and generate a list instantly.

You may think you get similar filters in the regular version of LinkedIn. But it limits your monthly searches and has only 11 filters. Sales Navigator has 40+ filters to help you narrow down millions of searches to the most relevant leads, saving you time and effort wasted on irrelevant leads.

7. Hyper-Personalize Connection Requests

When was the last time you received a cold message like “I’d like to join your network” or something involving your first name and a generic reason they wanted to connect with you?

While sending generic connection requests is easy and tempting, it lacks a human touch and results in 83% lower response rates. Unless the person already knows you, it’s essential to tell them why you want to connect. This is where hyper-personalization comes to the rescue.

Hyper-personalization fetches real-time data, going beyond first and last names to deliver personalized content or product and service information to the users. For instance, it automatically detects someone’s profile image and adds it to your connection request message.

Let’s say you want to connect with Elon Musk on LinkedIn and tell him about your top three LinkedIn outreach strategies. Considering he receives thousands of requests each day, you’ll need to show what makes you unique. What better way than to use his LinkedIn profile image and send a message like this?

And if you want to take your LinkedIn message personalization to the next level, you can use GIFs instead of images.

You can use a tool like Expandi.io to automate your LinkedIn connection request with hyper-personalized images or GIFs.

8. Initiate Meaningful Conversations with Prospects

According to a recent survey, here’s what buyers expect from sales reps:

• Listen to their needs: 69%
• Don’t be pushy: 61%
• Offer helpful, relevant information: 61%
• Respond in a timely manner: 51%

When you first connect with prospects on LinkedIn, it’s a bad idea to go in for sale right away. But you still want to stay in touch to remain on their radar. The most effective way to do this is to begin a one-on-one dialogue.

71% of consumers expect businesses to communicate with them in real-time. As you talk, you will establish a relationship beforehand and later can introduce your products or services naturally.

Here are a few ways to start meaningful conversations with your prospects:

• Engage with your prospects’ posts. Like, comment, and reshare their posts. Send them a LinkedIn message complimenting what they say and how it helped you.
• Ask questions. Do your research on your prospect and ask questions that position you as an expert in your niche and help you build credibility. For instance, you can say, “I see X, Y, and Z going on your business. How is it affecting you?”
• Send them a personalized video. It’s a tailor-made video addressed to a particular person or a company, and can result in an 8x increase in click-through rates. You can introduce your team, offer product or service demonstrations, or client testimonials.

The key here is to pre-record a video and use it as a template that auto-customizes itself as per the prospect’s name, logo, or website screenshot. You can use a tool like Hyperise to create personalized videos.

• Schedule a Zoom meeting with prospects. Let your inside sales team have face-to-face communication with clients online. 99% of survey respondents said video calls helped them improve communication and collaboration. Perform a killer zoom presentation and discuss prospects’ pain points and ask questions relevant to their needs and goals.
• Pitch your product or service. Prepare a solid pitch addressing how your product or service can relieve the pain points you discussed earlier in the meeting. Add the benefits your prospects could experience if they move forward with your product. For instance, if you sell digital products like courses, you can highlight the positive changes prospects experience after finishing the course.
• And last but not least use advanced sales closing techniques like the scarcity close or the “Columbo” close. These classic methods can easily be used in a LinkedIn conversation to ultimately close the deal.

Closing Thoughts

Summing up what successful B2B LinkedIn strategies have in common, all of them revolve around quality content, personalized prospecting, and meaningful communication. Treat people like people (not just potential sales prospects), understand their needs, and provide value before you jump to your sales pitch.

Thoughts? Feedback? Leave a comment below to share what’s worked for you.

Eduard Klein is an International Digital Growth Marketer, Blogger (eduardklein.com), and entrepreneur with a global mindset. He guides through the process of starting and growing a digital business, and riding the wave of digital technology and marketing without getting swept away.

The post Eight Advanced LinkedIn Strategies for B2B Marketing appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog | Webbiquity.