If you are looking into marketing your business’ products or services directly to other businesses, then LinkedIn is definitely an excellent online marketing channel. However, knowing how to do it effectively can be the determining factor between success and failure.
LinkedIn works great for marketing towards businesses simply due to the fact that you can target your ads specifically towards your niche in great refinement. Below are some major considerations you will want to consider before you start marketing other businesses through LinkedIn so that you can increase your chances of generating more revenue, and ultimately a higher bottom line.
Developing a Persona of Your Ideal Customer
The first thing you need to consider doing before even setting up any advertisement is developing a persona of exactly who you will be targeting. A persona is an ideal person that you would be selling your products or services to. For this, you will not only need to determine which business industry the person would be in, but you also want to consider the position role the person will hold, as you are wanting to target the job title holder that will likely be making the buying decision towards your business’ products or services.
To provide an example, let’s say that you are selling project management software for the construction industry. In this circumstance, you would not only want to target someone from this industry, but would want to consider the person that would be making the purchasing consideration of this software. This could include the project manager himself, or even someone in charge of the I.T. department (as they often will make recommendations as well). You probably wouldn’t want to consider the CEO or CFO to market towards, as they are most likely unaware of what type of project management software is needed.
Choosing your Target Market
One of the greatest features for targeting B2B advertising on LinkedIn is the wide methods of being able to choose EXACTLY who you want to target. Some of the segments you can segregate include the business industry, job tittle, years of experience, type of groups they join, number of employees they have, schools they have attended, as well as their gender and age. All of these functionalities allows you to target specifically towards you targeted persona you create that you want to market towards.
Creating Ad Copy
When creating your ad copy, you want to make sure you speak specifically towards your audience that will deliver the best results. Some of the items you can add into your ad copy includes a small image, a headline to draw their attention, as well as a description that provides more information. To do this effectively, you will want to really consider every word you use, and make sure you are testing different ads to determine which ones are driving the best results.
Landing Page
The next consideration you want to consider is the landing page, or where the link on the advertisement will take the targeted visitor to next. The landing page is also very important, as it helps convert the user towards making a purchase of your product or service. You can either take them to a specific web page, or directly to your business’ LinkedIn page. It is highly recommended that you create a specific landing page over using your general LinkedIn page, as you have better flexibility over making your landing page appear exactly as needed with the ad copy that helps persuade the targeted visitor towards making a purchase for the business.
Also, in order to help convert higher, you will want to consider using analytics to help determine which ads are converting higher. You can use a free analytics tool like Google Analytics to accomplish this.
Branding vs. Acquires Leads and Sales
The next consideration you need to make is whether you simply want to brand your business name towards potential businesses, or whether you want to use LinkedIn ads to drive in leads and sales. If you are wanting to simply increase your brand awareness, then you should probably consider purchasing cost per impression (CPM) over pay per click (PPC). With pay per impression, you will be paying for each time your add appears towards your target visitor on LinkedIn. However, when it comes to getting traffic to your website in attempt to getting them to make a purchase, then Pay per Click is the better consideration.
If you are considering to use LinkedIn for branding, then you can target more broadly, targeting more individuals within a specific business industry. However, when it comes to PPC, you really want to nail the specific buying decision maker to help increase conversions.Â
Making it all Work TogetherÂ
There are many considerations you need to make with LinkedIn in order to help increase the success rate of marketing towards other businesses on the social network. Here are 3 major considerations you must always make in order to increase its rate of success:
- Make sure your goals are set clear, can be measured, and you are able to continuously work on improving them through testing the many aspects LinkedIn offers.
- Make sure your target business and business decision maker is precisely segmented in order to help improve conversions.
- Always work hard on delivering the best ad copy. You are limited in the number of words and characters you are able to use, so take every word on your advertisement into high consideration. Always test other ads and see which one does better. Get rid of the less performing ones, and then test other ad copy against the best ad on a consistent basis.
