If you had access to an audience of 675 million actively engaged business professionals you wouldn’t turn it down - right?
The thing is, business after business is missing out on the great marketing opportunities that LinkedIn presents — including its 675 million users.
For B2B marketers, LinkedIn can offer the perfect platform for reaching decision-makers within the businesses you’re targeting.
Here are some of the reasons LinkedIn is such a good lead generation tool:
- Engagement is increasing on LinkedIn by 50% year on year
- 30 million companies are on LinkedIn and it’s growing all the time
- 4 out of 5 people on LinkedIn drive business decisions
- 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing
- Cost per lead is 28% lower on LinkedIn than Google
So, how can you make the most of the opportunities LinkedIn presents and start to create quality B2B leads from this platform?
Start doing LinkedIn SEO.
Here are 3 tips to get started:
1. Your Profile is Prime Real Estate - Optimize It
All too often, businesses set up their LinkedIn profile without making the most of the space that’s available to them though.
LinkedIn themselves say that profiles that are 100% complete get 40 times more opportunities, so take the extra time and complete your profile.
Think of LinkedIn as another search engine where your business has the opportunity to reach hundreds of millions of business professionals. If you’re showing up at the top of LinkedIn’s search function and delivering value to potential clients, then you’re going to get leads, just as you would from Google.
The LinkedIn algorithm works in a similar way to Google, so using keywords, whilst balancing SEO with user experience is vital. Make sure you’re including your important short-tail and long-tail keywords in your profile, in a natural manner.
It’s important to have a clear focus on what you want to achieve with your LinkedIn profile and tailor your page towards those goals. In many ways, your profile is like a funnel that’s designed to get people to take your desired action (visit your website, inbox you) and your text is the copy you use to achieve this.
Deloitte is a great example of a business profile that does this well. They take advantage of every piece of real estate by filling out their profile and using it to get people to take action.
Use your LinkedIn profile to get people to take the actions you want them to take by updating your profile with your audience in mind and making sure you’re offering value.
Quick Tips:
- Do your keyword research
- Optimize page for keywords, but don’t keyword stuff - keep it natural
- Remember user experience is important for SEO, so keep it clean and engaging
- Understand what you want to achieve with your LinkedIn profile
- Use your profile as a funnel to get people to take the actions you want them to take
- Make sure your profile is complete
2. Build Your Audience
LinkedIn prioritizes 1st and 2nd-degree connections, so building your connection base is important. The more connections you have, the more likely your profile is to appear in relevant search results within the platform.
Start by connecting with people you’re connected with on other platforms such as Facebook, and then find opportunities for new connections within those people’s networks.
You can also perform manual searches and join industry groups to find your ideal customers and build your audience around them.
Another great way to boost your audience is by encouraging your employees onto the platform. Studies show that 30% of a company’s engagement comes from employees, and they are 14 times more likely to share content from their own employers as opposed to other content forms, greatly expanding the reach of your business.
Quick Tips:
- Connect with contacts from other platforms
- Use search functions and industry groups to find your ideal clients
- Encourage employees to use LinkedIn
3. Engage Your Audience with Quality Content
Once you’ve built an audience you can focus on giving your connections what they want. Remember why people are on LinkedIn in the first place - to build meaningful business relationships. Tailor your content to meet this goal and offer people value from your relationship.
You can see this idea of building a relationship in this profile from Gong (who we were honored to have as a client).
Gong mixes in easy to consume videos and snippets that allow you to get to know the people behind Gong with highly informational content that addresses their target audience’s pain points.
This allows people to see Gong as a partner, rather than just a business that is trying to sell a product.
When you’re creating content for your audience, keep following your basic SEO principles of providing high-quality, focused content that addresses the questions your audience has, using intriguing headlines that get clicks and fitting in keywords naturally.
Just like with content marketing, you’re building a relationship with your potential clients through your page, and that relationship should be mutually beneficial. If you go the extra mile on LinkedIn and provide real value, then you will be rewarded.
Quick Tips:
- Remember why people are on LinkedIn and fulfill that need
- Offer people value from your connection
- Post high-quality, shareable content that answers your audience’s questions
- Write articles, use multimedia, and post useful links
- Remember your regular website and content SEO basics (e.g. click-worthy headlines, keywords, etc.)
- Give people a reason to take the next step with your business
View Your Profile as a Second Company Website
A good LinkedIn profile has the ability to serve as a kind of second company website. The great thing with LinkedIn though, is you’ve got a ready-made audience of business professionals, you’ve just got to figure out how best to reach them.
If you check out another great LinkedIn profile - Teleperformance - you can see that it’s so in depth and well presented that it’s as good as a company website and there’s no reason why your profile can’t be the same.
In many ways, reaching the right people involves the same principles as it does with your traditional SEO - it’s all about that key idea of offering value.
When you establish your expertise through high-quality content, that’s where you start to generate leads and make sales. LinkedIn is an ideal platform for this because of its professional reputation and the audience it has.
Remember though, that people want to build legitimate business relationships. They don’t mind if you use the tools available to reach them if you offer them value, but they do mind it if you’re only interested in a one-way relationship where your only goal is to convert them as a customer.
If you’re overly "salesy" and focus on your sales rather than what your customer wants, then you will quickly discredit yourself and your SEO will suffer as a consequence.
As always, when you’re looking to give your connections value, it starts with understanding your audience and putting in the time to research useful information.
The better you can do this, the more quality B2B leads you’re going to generate.
Takeaways
LinkedIn offers B2B marketers a great audience for lead generation. It allows you to reach a targeted audience with high-quality content and engage the decision-makers within your target businesses.
To do this, you’ve got to start looking at LinkedIn for what it is, and that’s a search engine as well as a social media platform. When you want to get to the top of the search engine rankings pages, you’ve got to engage in SEO, and it’s the same with LinkedIn.
First off, you’ve got to optimize your page to suit your audience, using the keywords that are going to attract your ideal customers and create content that appeals to them. You want them to take a certain action (become a lead), so give them an incentive to do so by offering value.
Continue building quality connections in your industry and expanding your audience, and you will find your LinkedIn can become like an auxiliary website, that’s tailor-made for a vast audience of engaged business professionals.
Want help incorporating LinkedIn into your overall SEO strategy?
Contact us at KeyScouts, today. We will be happy to help.
