As of 2024, LinkedIn has far surpassed its original trademark: “the social media of the business world.” With record numbers of engagement, an elevated user base, and growing sophistication, LinkedIn has become the ideal platform for B2B marketing. By utilising top digital strategies like non-automated outreach, targeted advertising, and highly engaging content, LinkedIn is the most effective way to propel your business and brand in the competitive marketplace and be part of an exclusive community of decision-makers and thought leaders.
LinkedIn’s Growing Engagement
Each quarter, Microsoft, who bought LinkedIn in 2016, releases LinkedIn’s record levels of engagement statistics, and each quarter since October 2018, that number has continued to increase exponentially globally. On July 31st, 2024, Microsoft released its latest performance numbers, showing LinkedIn’s record level of engagement increased an additional 13% from the previous quarter. As of 2024, LinkedIn reported 1 billion active users, with 40% of monthly active users visiting daily. The majority of these active users are decision-makers who consistently outperform and boost LinkedIn’s record levels of engagement each quarter. This engagement surge is attributed to 3 main factors:
Quality, Engaging, and Thought-provoking Content and Community: LinkedIn has become a thriving hub for top leadership and thought leaders who share their expertise, business goals, and achievements, as well as engage in meaningful conversations. High-quality content and a sophisticated user base sharing relevant, growth experiences attracts a higher calibre of users.
Authentic Conversations and Non-Automated Outreach: LinkedIn promotes authentic, professional interactions on the platform. LinkedIn user agreement specifically states the use of bots and automation is a breach of their agreement, highlighting the platform’s goal to build genuine relationships so users can learn, share, and connect on relevant topics.
Enhanced Prospecting Features – Sales Navigator and Ads: The advanced targeting features of Sales Navigator and LinkedIn’s advertising platform outperform any competing social media or advertising platform on the market. These provide additional options for business reach, strategy, and access to a B2B business’s target market.
What Does This Mean for Your Business
With these record levels of engagement, LinkedIn has become the number one platform for driving lead-generation initiatives, building brand awareness, and developing real business success and outcomes. The top 3 ways to take advantage of the increasing level of engagement and utilise the platform is by leveraging non-automated outreach, LinkedIn Ads, and thought leadership or business page content. Here’s why:
Non-Automated Targeted Outreach to Decision-Makers
LinkedIn’s advanced targeting, search, and filter capabilities make it the most effective platform for reaching your B2B business’s ideal clients and target audience directly and immediately. By using Sales Navigator, you can filter by job title, company size, industry, and location to identify key decision-makers with the highest buyer intent.
If this seems overwhelming, hiring a specialised agency to handle this advanced targeting is recommended for you. Agencies like StraightIn can guarantee a higher level of engagement and output for your business while providing an intricate level of expertise to amplify your efforts. Building a highly personalised, non-automated outreach campaign is crucial, and to maintain your reputation, you want to ensure that your message and approach are perfect, relevant, and resonate with your target audience. Since LinkedIn is a professional platform, users are more receptive to well-crafted, human-centred, personal messages directly addressing their pain points. Outsourcing your lead generation gives you time to focus on what you do best and only have to worry about taking your new, qualified sales calls added to your calendar and pipeline while your dedicated campaign manager and LinkedIn expert do the daily prospecting.
PRO TIP: Beyond leveraging LinkedIn Sales Navigator for its advanced search capabilities and insights, take the time to optimise, customise, and build a strong LinkedIn profile. The first thing a new prospect will look at after your engaging message is your credibility and involvement on LinkedIn. The more active you are, and the more information you have on your profile, the higher your conversion rate on LinkedIn will be.
Effective and Highly Targeted LinkedIn Advertising Opportunities
LinkedIn’s advertising platform is the secret weapon for marketers and B2B businesses looking to expand their network and reach a professional audience on LinkedIn. With the advanced targeting capabilities on the ads platform, each company can tailor their perfect target audience and ads campaigns to specific business objectives. Whether it be lead generation, brand awareness, or driving traffic to a website, it can be done in a more passive yet highly effective way directly on the prospects LinkedIn feed.
How LinkedIn Ads Work Best for Your Business
- Precise Targeting: LinkedIn ads’ targeting features outperform all competitors, as you can filter to an even more tailored audience than Sales Navigator allows. When engaging with StraightIn, we have the expertise to filter your ideal customer profile while optimising your ad budget to create a highly effective and powerful campaign.
- Trust and Credibility: The ad provides trust-building content to help frame your business’s credibility and advertise direct results that easily convert LinkedIn users to warm leads. Displaying direct results, case studies, or pain points in your target audience feed builds a sense of trust before they even have the opportunity to speak with you.
- High-Quality Leads: Using StraightIn’s tested, results-driven, and fool-proof ad process, we deliver high-quality and high-intent leads directly to your pipeline. With strong top-of-funnel, engagement campaigns, and strategic retargeting campaigns, the ads process is a seamless, easy, and efficient way to get higher-quality leads.
PRO TIP: Combine LinkedIn Ads with your non-automated direct outreach to maximise your visibility, conversion rate, and overall success. You’re guaranteed to double your lead generation results by introducing retargeting campaigns in outreach and advertising. Most importantly, don’t skip the engagement campaigns!
Content Marketing that Drives Thought Leadership, Conversions, and SEO
Posting content on LinkedIn is an effective tool for building industry credibility, meaningful conversations with potential prospects and decision-makers, and improving SEO. Publishing SEO-optimised articles, relevant, creative posts, and industry-related news helps build brand authority and thought leadership, and positions you as the expert in your field. LinkedIn’s algorithm promotes and favours content with high levels of engagement, so it’s essential to create content that resonates with your target audience.
Content that Performs Best for B2B Businesses on LinkedIn
Articles and Blog Posts: Long-form articles and blogs allow you to display your expertise in a specific subject matter. They also allow you to dive deeper into a topic and create quality SEO-optimised content.
Consistent Company Page Posts: Posting at least 3x per week on your company page builds credibility and a consistent client following. It also provides content for your employees to repost and simultaneously builds their brand authority on LinkedIn.
Thought Leadership Personal Anecdotes: Becoming a LinkedIn thought leader takes time, dedication, and a clear vision and tone of voice for how you want to represent yourself, your business, and your employees. Your thought-leadership content should be longer and more personalised than any other content to build brand authority and subject-matter expertise.
PRO TIP: Create a mix of content types to keep your audience engaged. Switching between short-form posts, rotating image content, and polls can lead to higher engagement rates and conversions. Additionally, by leveraging insights from LinkedIn Analytics, you can better understand your audience and their interest levels in your business, topics, and content.
As LinkedIn continues to reach record levels of engagement and attract top talent and thought leaders worldwide, the platform remains the best digital marketing strategy for any B2B company. By adopting a powerful, personalised, and non-automated outreach, with ads and content strategy, your business can outshine any competitor globally.
If you’re looking for additional help delivering value, building authentic relationships, and effectively leveraging LinkedIn’s advanced tools, reach out to StraightIn to find out how we can grow your business quickly and achieve maximum ROI.
