How to generate engagement through LinkedIn among B2B audiences
Does your LinkedIn page look like a photo album instead of showcasing content reflecting the true essence of your business?
Do most LinkedIn posts look like calendar events, notifications, or Holiday wishes?
Today, consumers yearn to connect with the brands they buy from. According to a recent study by Sprout Social, 64% of people expect brands to communicate with their consumers and rank social media as the number one channel to achieve that. While for some strange reasons, we in B2B marketing sometimes forget that our buyers are just as influenced by brand affinity, storytelling and emotions as they are while choosing products for their consumption.
Thus, to create that edge, one could employ some tricks as B2B marketers can to enrichen the engagement of your visitors on your LinkedIn Pages.
1. Deploy the 4-1-1 Rule
One of the best strategies for you to be successful as an online B2B presence is to employ the trick of “sell without selling.” In other words, your content should have a healthy mixture of education and entertainment for the target audience, along with specific product or service information. This is where the 4-1-1 rule can be your best guide. It gives you a perfect balance between different aspects of social media posts.
Let us look at how to implement this rule while posting:
Out of every six posts on your LinkedIn page,
- Four (4) should be of new content curated by you which is educational and entertaining.
- One (1) should be of “soft sell” or promotional, e.g., an event or shared content from another/external source.
- And One (1) should be about a focussed “hard Sell” with a call to action, like a self-serving post with a sense of urgency. E.g., It may include phrases such as “Hurry,” “Visit our website today,” “Limited Period Offer,” etc.
The deployment of this rule would go a long way in preventing your LinkedIn page from becoming a place wherein one would talk of one’s organization rather than enabling your feed to truly anchor deep into your audience’s needs.
2. Take Advantage of the Content Suggestions Tool
The Content Suggestions tool developed by LinkedIn empowers you to bring to light topics swiftly and articles your audience currently cares about. The tool works these suggestions based on generic factors like location, industry, job function, and seniority.
The Content Suggestions tool is handy when planning content while weighing in conversation threads, you would prefer to initiate or contribute to. While perusing the suggestions, consider queries you could create to build a conversation around a specific premise. You can watch the following video to understand better how to use the free-to-use Content Suggestion tool available in the “Admin View” section of all your LinkedIn pages.
3. Boost Your Page’s Best Posts
Boost posts from your LinkedIn Page to enable wider dissemination of your content, especially to those beyond your listed followers. In 2021, LinkedIn introduced “boosting” content, which essentially allows you to convert some of the organic posts on your page into paid advertisements for a specific period to reach a wider audience.
The posts you can significantly boost could include industry thought leadership, stories or insights from your customer, and new product launches or upcoming events to derive the mileage you always relished.
A simple strategy is to identify posts that have already garnered significant engagement among your followers or the posts you believe need to be seen by a larger audience. Be assured not only of the expeditious success of your content in catching the eye of your community but also being able to engage LinkedIn’s targeting features to enlarge the reach of your content to an audience that is significantly more diverse than the set of your active followers on the platform.
4. Show the Faces behind the Business
Every business is as good as the people running it behind the scenes. However, time and again, these people must step into the foreground and be visible to their existing and prospective customers. Thus, reminding oneself that the people behind a business are as important as the idea, the data, or the processes, will allow the customers to connect emotionally with your brand. Neither you nor we would ever want your potential customers to feel that they are engaging with an organization run by robots. Moreover, posting only rich pictures of products and services will not enrichen engagement for your content. Even simple sharing of true faces that run your business via a selfie or a video will exponentially accentuate the human element in your interaction. Bring the most accurate image of the back of your office to the front of your page, displaying in full glare the authentic passion involved in your brand, and all will follow suit.
The following example illustrates precisely how the warmth of human touch can be communicated distinctly through a small and crisp video with the employees.
5. Test and experiment to learn what your audience likes
One of the most daunting tasks for any social marketer would entail precise identification and a deep-seated understanding of one’s target audiences. If your objective is engagement, it would undoubtedly help to experiment and reveal what resonates best with your target audience, for experimentation beats perfection here.
Not every effort will be a hit, and that is completely fine—you’ll learn just as much from what flops as you will from what succeeds.
6. A Little Humor Goes a Long Way
Yes, LinkedIn is a business platform for interacting with professionals, entrepreneurs, companies, and corporates. However, a tiny element of fun helps smoothen the high-octane conversations which are the staple of this networking platform. Also, humor is a great tool to communicate your point assertively and confidently without sounding too aggressive. It also helps engage with the audience, build a rapport, and simplify complex concepts in an easy-to-understand manner.
At the same time, ensure that you are using an element of humor, such as memes, stories, and jokes, to convey your point instead of merely for the sake of being funny. Following is an example of integrating your content with memes, which have grown to be an effective marketing tool in recent years.
In conclusion, understand that the number of views, likes, and shares you get on LinkedIn is not nearly as significant as the connections, business propositions, meetings held with clients and closed sales deals. Use your LinkedIn page as a doorway to your website, where your business lives and thrives. You need your customer to spend more time on your business website than your LinkedIn profile; design their journey keeping this in mind.
