what_is_b2b_marketing
Demand Generation Digital Strategy 

B2B Social Media: Companies leveraging LinkedIn ‘professional network’

rukmani , , , , ,

Especially for B2B companies, if approached with a well thought strategy. Although, LinkedIn offers many features that are used by B2B marketers. One of the most interesting feature is the sponsored InMail. InMail campaigns have proven to be successful for some major B2B companies in the past.

Let’s discuss how to create an effective LinkedIn InMail strategy:

    1. Define the objective: Like any other campaign, it is important to have a specific goal in mind before running a campaign. InMail campaign is an interesting medium for Lead Generation, Brand Awareness and Engagement.
    1. Target your audience to send sponsored InMails: With LinkedIn you can micro target the audience on LinkedIn database. You can select your audience based on location, Interest, persona or accounts. For instance; Consider for targeting to sell an IT infrastructure software.Location based and Account based targeting: Companies in the US region with employees more than 500. Persona based targeting: CIO, CFO, IT Heads, IT Leads etc.
    1. Content Strategy: Think through the content. For a successful InMail campaigns, make your content highly relevant and interesting for the target audience to engage with. Therefore, add a personal touch or humanise the message to increase the chances of the end user to read and engage with the message. Furthermore, you can also add a custom salutation using %FIRSTNAME%, %LASTNAME%
    1. Landing Page strategy: Best practice, InMail should have a CTA to visit a dedicated Landing Page. A good landing page must be relevant to the content in the InMail and contain detailed overview of the message in the InMail. For B2B best practices, a landing page with other documents such as Whitepaper, Case Study, Ebook has a better potential to hold the interest of the prospective customer.
    1. InMail series:LinkedIn restricts the number of sponsored messages a person can receive. Therefore, create a well planned InMail series and nurturing campaign for better impact and ROI.
      Docusign (an interesting case study) created a successful InMail series campaign. They used third party validation from customers in their content to build a community and create pipeline opportunities.
    1. Measure your results: Track key metrics of your InMail campaign. With Linkedin dashboard, you can track the opens, clicks etc.

LinkedIn InMail is just one way for companies to reach out to potential customers through social media.

With B2B marketing becoming more personalized these days, the marketers would have to include personalized campaigns and messaging in their strategies. Marketers are moving beyond the monthly newsletter to a more specific offerings. They are moving towards a more sophisticated lead nurturing systems that ties their content marketing. Therefore, emails are being segmented by personas and behavior. Emails are a fundamental part of B2B marketing and they don’t seem to go anywhere in the future. However, for most B2B markets, it’s the email and LinkedIn, to get leads on their website. (Carter, 2013)

By: Rukmani Mohindra

References:
Carter B. (2013) Linkedin for Business: How Advertisers, Marketers and Salespeople Get Leads, Sales, and Profits from LinkedIn. Pearson Education