Why LinkedIn is particularly suitable for B2B marketing & sales

One challenge faced by B2B companies in digital marketing & sales is the very specific target group, which focuses on decision-makers such as CEOs, CFOs or purchasing managers of companies. In practice, this means that 95% of a company's employees do not qualify as a target group for digital marketing or sales.

Traditional inbound marketing, which starts with large awareness campaigns and an equally large scatter loss, is therefore less suitable for most B2B companies. This is because it takes a lot of time and resources to filter out the right users from the large number of anonymous users.

Targeting of companies

The business-related details of LinkedIn members enable very precise targeting of different target groups. For example, campaigns can be targeted at specific companies (so-called account-based marketing). To do this, you can upload a company list with potential customers to LinkedIn and LinkedIn checks the information in the list against the existing company accounts on LinkedIn. In our experience, however, the company names on LinkedIn can differ slightly from the company names in the Excel list (e.g. "TOWA" or "TOWA GmbH"), which can result in a low hit rate. We therefore recommend trying out the upload of company lists first and using the search function when creating an audience in the Campaign Manager if the hit rate is low. Companies can be entered and added there "manually" (yes, this is a typical task for interns, but not pointless). You can then play ads such as traffic ads (with a link to a landing page) or lead ads (with contact forms directly in LinkedIn) to the created audience in order to de-anonymise users on your website or directly in LinkedIn and include them in your lead-nurturing campaigns.

Targeting of people

The LinkedIn Sales Navigator is also suitable for creating and targeting a target group. This can be used to search for specific people. For example, you can use the LinkedIn Sales Navigator to create a list of all users who work in the mechanical engineering industry in Bavaria, have "Managing Director" in their job title, have more than 10 years of professional experience and are interested in robotics. You can then create a contact request to all users in this target group, send InMails or export the contact list and import it into automation tools such as AI Bee to send messages automatically.

You can use the LinkedIn Sales Navigator to search not only for people, but also for companies and create a company list to which you can then display adverts in campaigns. This allows you to choose between company and contact targeting and, depending on the success of your campaigns, you can push them further.

Classic performance marketing meets B2B marketing

Of course, the same KPIs apply to B2B marketing & sales as to performance marketing. The performance of LinkedIn differs from Facebook and Instagram in 2 key points:

1. price

LinkedIn is relatively expensive compared to Facebook and Instagram when it comes to the visibility of adverts (impressions) and interactions (e.g. cost-per-click). While a price of between €5 and €10 is possible for 1000 views (of a well-designed advert) on Facebook, you pay around 10 times as much on LinkedIn, i.e. between €50 and €100. The difference in cost-per-click is similar: on Facebook, link clicks for good adverts are available for between €0.50 and €1. On LinkedIn, on the other hand, a click costs between €10 and €20.

2. generation of leads

Compared to Facebook in the B2B sector, LinkedIn is very well suited for generating leads via so-called lead ads. In these ads, users can download a piece of content directly from LinkedIn (such as a whitepaper) or register for an event. As adverts can be tailored very specifically to the professional interests of the target group, the lead ad can also be designed to generate relevant leads at a very good price. The price per lead for well-designed adverts is between €30 and €60. Automated campaigns with networking enquiries and messages can achieve similarly good results. Tools such as AI Bee accept an average of 30 % - 40 % of all networking requests and around 5 % of the users contacted respond to the networking request with a personal message. A personal conversation can then be started.

Further opportunities for B2B marketing & sales on LinkedIn

In addition to targeting people & companies, LinkedIn is also suitable for direct sales activities of your employees. With the help of various strategies and tricks, they can position themselves as topic leaders and continuously expand their network to make contacts, maintain relationships and close deals. This approach is also known as social selling.

LinkedIn is also a good platform for positioning managing directors or board members as corporate influencers who use their expertise to comment on strategically important topics and thus act as the face of the company to the outside world. After all, despite its professional focus, LinkedIn is still a social media channel that thrives on the social relationships of its members.