Chuck Hester is a sought-after LinkedIn expert for media relations and professional branding with over 16,000 direct connections. He has addressed conferences in Canada, Australia, and throughout the U.S. He also offers corporate boot camps that help businesses maximize their use of LinkedIn, find and retain customers, as well as enhance their social media footprints.
The LinkedIn platform has a reputation for being the place for business and professionals, and remains to be an ideal channel for corporate storytelling unlike other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
B2B Marketing Strategy Tips on LinkedIn
Here are Chuck’s tips on how to create an effective LinkedIn strategy for B2B marketing:
1. Join Groups with the Right Audience
Search for LinkedIn groups in your industry that fit your interests and actively participate in them. More importantly, look for groups with potential clients – people who will eventually buy from you. This is a great way to foster business relationships.
Being a member of a group with your fellow marketers is great. However, they won’t buy your services. They’ll only be complaining about how difficult clients are.
2. Don’t Overuse Marketing Automation
When people are browsing through LinkedIn pages, groups, and profile, most of them are looking to establish a real business relationship with a company. That is why it’s important, as a marketer, to initiate a personal interaction with your potential clients and show them your expertise throughout the buying process.
InMail does not allow you to connect with somebody directly. Often, you’ll find marketers using it to send out sales messages which many people don’t like. Always establish a relationship before selling to a client.
3. Creating an Attractive Business Page and Profile
Create engaging copy and use attractive visuals for your posts. Also, establish your company’s thought leadership status by constantly sharing and distributing relevant content. Ensure that your feed is updated with useful content to show your prospects that you are more than just an attractive profile page.
Apart from your status, you can also use the LinkedIn publishing feature to distribute content. Remember to share your content to relevant LinkedIn groups as well as other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
4. Mention Your Key Clients in Your Posts
If you are using the LinkedIn publishing platform to publish your content, then you may want to mention one or two key connections in your posts/articles.
This will mean that you have to read through their blog posts. Look for ideas and quotes that you can incorporate into your article, and link to their posts if you used some of their ideas. Your connections will definitely love this.
You can reach out to them via direct message or tagging and notify them that you’ve used ideas from their posts. You can also request them to share your post to other platforms, but subtly.
Further sharing of your content will improve your brand recognition and visibility, and this will easily get you more sales and leads. Therefore, you have the task of constantly producing top-notch content for your audience.
All in all, don’t mention people for the sake of using this strategy. Ensure the ideas and quotes are relevant to your posts and helpful to all your prospective clients.
5. Utilize the Sales Navigator Search
Sometimes prospects come to you. Other times, you have to take the initiative and see what you can dig up. LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator allows you to search and find profiles of prospective clients who you can connect and eventually do business with.
You can also find prospects by using the Advanced Search feature on LinkedIn. Even without an upgraded account, you can still filter and narrow down your search. The most powerful aspect of this feature is probably the center column which allows you to filter your client search by industry, location, school, current company, past company, as well as non-profit interests.
LinkedIn is the Ultimate Platform for B2B Marketing
For many marketers, LinkedIn has provided a conducive breeding ground for brand awareness. B2B marketing on LinkedIn goes beyond turning leads into customers – you should also learn how buyers engage on the platform and establish a relationship with them.
Take advantage of the numerous tools LinkedIn has to offer, publish engaging content on a regular basis, seek relationship-building opportunities, and you’ll finally start to see measurable results. Start you B2B marketing journey on LinkedIn with these five Chuck Hester strategies. B2B marketing has never been this easy!
About Chuck Hester
Chuck Hester is a LinkedIn power connector with more than 16,000 direct connections. He is a sought-after expert on the subject of using LinkedIn for media relations, personal and professional branding, and how to use social media to build business contacts. He’s addressed conferences in Canada, Australia and throughout the United States.
Chuck serves as the B2B Marketing Communications Consultant for North State Communications, helping the company market their business communications, network security and co-location services to businesses in the Southeastern United States.
He also offers LinkedIn Corporate Boot Camps that help businesses maximize their use of LinkedIn, find and retain customers and enhance their social media footprints.
