4 LinkedIn Content Marketing Tips for B2B Brands

Businesses in every industry are reevaluating their messaging to align with recent changes in consumer behavior. It’s clear that consumers are less interested in the “hard sell,” and more interested in receiving content that provides value and helps them navigate these challenging times. 

For B2B brands in particular, what’s the best way to share that message with customers?

With roughly 90 million senior-level influencers and 63 million decision-makers on the platform, LinkedIn is the holy grail for B2B marketers. 

A hub of growth, thought leadership, and industry expertise, LinkedIn’s users are actively looking for ways to improve their careers and organizations, making them terrific targets for your company’s content marketing initiatives.

White papers, infographics, ebooks, case studies, email subscriptions, etc. — all of these are great ways to connect with the ambitious and hungry user base of LinkedIn and create qualified leads for your organization. But just posting those great assets as part of your feed isn’t exactly going to let you reach your conversion goals. To do that, you need to think a little bigger.

Top 4 Tips For LinkedIn Content Marketing

1) Utilize LinkedIn Groups

Anyone who spends a decent amount of time on LinkedIn is there because they want to better themselves, their careers, or their companies. But as B2B marketers, we don’t just want the people who want to be better — we want the people who are willing to really do something about it. 

That’s where LinkedIn groups come in handy. Without spending a single extra penny on promotion, simply by sharing your brand’s thought leadership, advice, and content in a relevant group, you’re already getting in front of people who are more engaged, more active, and more likely to check out your profile than if you just published your content in your brand’s feed. 

To get involved with groups, just do a search on LinkedIn for the topics, industries, or movements in which your brand has experience, request to join, and start participating. Answering questions, posing your own, and just being a part of the conversation gets your brand’s name and voice in front of people who are already highly engaged and involved with your industry. And if for some reason you can’t find a group to join, or if you just want to, you can create your own group and start your own conversations by inviting people to join.  

2) Put Your Money Where Your Mouth is

As great as groups are, if you really want to see results from your LinkedIn content marketing efforts, you need to start pumping some money into the platform. Just like every other social platform out there, organic is more or less dead, and paid social is where you want to be if you want to really see positive results. 

When you just promote content organically, you’re essentially hoping that the people who need to see it will just happen across it — not the most efficient way of doing things. By putting dollars behind your content, you get to target exactly who you want to see it at the time when you think they most need to see it, meaning your conversion rates have a much better chance of going up. 

To do this well, it’s important to make sure you utilize all the different ad types that LinkedIn offers in order to maximize your paid social spend. 

• Sponsored Content
• Sponsored InMail
• Text Ads
• Dynamic Ads
• Lead Gen Forms (more on those in a minute)

Each of these ad types has its best use cases and should be leveraged in a strategic way to highlight its strengths. Sponsored content, for example, is an in-feed placement of content, like a regular post. While it’s not the top converter on its own, it’s great at supporting concurrent text ad and InMail campaigns as well as raising general awareness. InMail, on the other hand, is perfect for direct, personalized messages to people who fit your targeting criteria. 

Keeping up your organic presence is still necessary though, don’t get me wrong. Company updates, thought leadership, and industry insights are great ways to 1) promote your content, 2) reach new audiences through shares, and 3) keep your followers informed, all while reminding them of your subject matter expertise.  

3) Use Lead Gen Forms

Once you’re ready to start putting some paid dollars behind your LinkedIn content marketing campaigns, make sure you’re not overlooking the golden goose of lead generation on the platform: lead gen forms.

First launched in 2017, LinkedIn lead gen forms have been steadily improving ever since, and have certainly become one of the best ad types to use on the platform if your primary goal is quick and fast lead generation for B2B. 

When it comes to LinkedIn content marketing, lead gen forms work great for promoting white papers, schedules for upcoming events, ebooks, or any kind of premium asset that you have gated on your site. Once a lead’s email and information are gathered, putting them in an email lead nurture campaign allows them to continue receiving relevant content, keeping them engaged as they work their way to becoming a qualified lead.

Lead gen forms seamlessly allow customers to convert in-app from sponsored content or inMail ads. A form will pop up on their phone screen, often with some basic information already filled in from their LinkedIn profile, which reduces the amount of fields they have to fill in. This minimizes the risk of turning them off with too many asks and creates very little friction between the ask and the conversion. The odds that your prospect will convert increases, since the conversion just became that much easier.

For example, during one campaign, one of our ed tech clients had a sponsored content CPL that ranged from $100-125, while their sponsored content with a lead gen form CPL was drastically lower at $22-$30. By utilizing lead gen forms, they were able to see a significant increase in their ROI and gain way more leads than using just sponsored content alone. 

4) Keep in Mind What the Platform is For

LinkedIn’s mission statement says that its goal is to, “create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.” While a noble goal, in recent years, many users and advertisers on the platform haven’t been sharing in that same vision.  

Recently, there has been a growing amount of concern over whether or not LinkedIn is losing its way and becoming more like Facebook — that is, too casual and unprofessional. 

As a content marketer trying to not only cut through the other noise on LinkedIn but also fight up against people’s growing disillusion with the platform, it’s important to keep in mind what LinkedIn is primarily used for — growth. 

Do your best to honor LinkedIn’s vision in helping people better themselves or better their companies. That means sticking to content that focuses on self or professional improvement — how-tos on industry or career-related topics, general thought leadership about the goings-on in the industry, or topics related to your company and how it can help prospects solve problems in their professional lives. 

By keeping LinkedIn’s purpose at the core of all the content you share on the platform, you’ll be providing prospects and leads with content that is helpful, insightful, relevant, and applicable — attributes that are always desirable in content marketing, be it on LinkedIn or elsewhere. 

Ready to Start Your LinkedIn Content Marketing Campaign?

Talk to the paid media and content marketing experts at Silverback to learn how you can take advantage of the B2B potential waiting for you on LinkedIn. From white paper creation to full-funnel paid social strategies, we can help get your LinkedIn lead gen engine firing. 

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation.