B2B with LinkedIn: The Basics

A person using a laptop with LinkedIn pulled up on their browser  LinkedIn holds a unique place in the social media world. While other platforms focus on the general public, LinkedIn targets businesses and the employees in them. While advertising your business on Facebook is through avenues of friends and family, doing it through LinkedIn focuses on owners and administrators. LinkedIn is a powerful business tool (as seen by the recent acquisition of them by Microsoft) because it allows your company and its component employees to directly target and communicate with businesses and their staff. However, there are some tricks for using B2B with LinkedIn.

Figuring Out Your Goals with LinkedIn

When you’re looking at leveraging LinkedIn to build your own business, it’s important to decide on the goals you’re looking to accomplish: this will dictate how your best approach. The following are several questions you should ask yourself:

  • Are you looking to build your presence on LinkedIn and gain followers?
  • Are you looking to engage other businesses and users on LinkedIn?
  • Are you looking to highlight your company’s achievements?
  • Are you looking to use existing connections to make sales?

Each of the following sections looks at the key component in these questions and focuses on answering them. Your strategy may focus on some or all of these parts of LinkedIn.

Your Company Page

Your first stop should be your company’s LinkedIn page. If you don’t have one, this is the vital first step. LinkedIn provides some simple tutorials for getting this started. Once you’ve set up the page, make sure your employees follow it (see more tips below in the “Involving Your Employees” section. You’ll also want to make sure your business partners follow you as well. Just like with personal accounts, getting people to connect with your business page opens up its reach.

Involving Your Content

Once your page is up and established, it’s time to start producing content you can share in updates. Not only should you look at updating the info on your page, but also sharing blogs, press releases, and insights on your company page. You can also create Showcase Pages to share subsets of your company.

Involving Your Employees

The LinkedIn company page account can be used to post content to the page and make changes to the company’s status on LinkedIn, but it cannot directly act on behalf of the company. It cannot join LinkedIn groups, directly communicate with users (outside of ads), or do other forms of outreach. Employees of your company, from owner to sales, can really help by producing and sharing their own content on LinkedIn Pulse. Make sure all new employees update (or make LinkedIn profiles and connect with your company).

Involving Your Sales Team

Your sales team should be using LinkedIn to generate leads, and they have several options to do so. They can perform outreach on relevant LinkedIn Groups, start a dialogue with individual companies, and make use of built-in B2B services such as LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator (for a nominal fee, of course). It’s vital to get your sales team on track with this platform if you’re looking to leverage B2B with LinkedIn.

Advertising with LinkedIn

Like with other social media platforms, you have the option to spend money to advertise on LinkedIn. Before you do, it’s important to know who in the network you want to target, and how much you are willing to spend. If you’re familiar with advertising on other social media (such as Facebook), it’s important to remember that with targeting businesses and their employees, acquisition numbers will be significantly lower.

We hope this has provided a basic overview of how LinkedIn works in a business-to-business footing, as well as a few tips to get you started. If you’re interested in getting assistance in building and engaging followers on LinkedIn, it’s a good time to contact Vision Advertising. We can help you improve your business’s online presence, from social media to a new website.

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About the author : Alex Geyer

Alex wears many hats, and not just because he’s bald. A writer by his background, Alex writes “social media content” for Vision – anything from social media statuses to blogs to whitepapers and beyond. In addition, he builds and maintains all search engine advertising for Vision’s clients, along with social media advertising for others. In his free time, he starts and stops writing novels, compiles tabletop roleplaying system conversions, and cooks a mean Chicken and Dumplings avec Peas. A videogame enthusiast, he is also developing his first video game with the startup game studio, Pretty Weird. He is terrible with plants*.