Business-to-business marketing, or B2B, refers to marketing products or services to other businesses and organizations. 

In the world of B2B, LinkedIn’s dominance does not go unnoticed. With over 774 million members worldwide, it’s no surprise that 66% of B2B marketers claim LinkedIn is the most valuable social media platform for their efforts.

LinkedIn Statistics for B2B Marketers

• 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing
• 89% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for lead generation
• LinkedIn is 277% more effective for lead gen compared to Twitter and Facebook
• LinkedIn Ads conversion rates are 3X higher than other major platforms
• LinkedIn users have twice the buying power compared to the average web audience
• 39% of users pay for LinkedIn Premium
• Over 90% of Fortune 500 companies use LinkedIn

So, Why Use LinkedIn for B2B Marketing?

As a B2B marketer, you can harness LinkedIn’s power in a variety of ways to achieve your marketing objectives. Helping you build brand awareness, establish relationships, generate qualified leads, and engage with your target audience, LinkedIn is much more than just a social networking site. 

Still not convinced? Here are the top four reasons why you should integrate LinkedIn into your B2B marketing strategy.

Thought Leadership

Thought leadership refers to becoming an authority on relevant topics by sharing insights and experience about a specific field or niche. An opportunity to become a trusted source among desired audiences and encourage them to purchase or connect with your brand, thought leaders have the ability to ignite new relationships and enhance existing ones. 

With LinkedIn, thought leaders are provided fertile ground to introduce and establish themselves as trusted figures in their field by gaining brand visibility, demonstrating credibility and expertise, and creating valuable discussions within an industry’s community. Thought leaders on LinkedIn are uniquely positioned to break through the noise, grab the attention of key decision-makers, and guide them through the purchase funnel.

Precise Audience Targeting

Effective targeting is make-or-break for B2B marketing. Costly setbacks can occur when ads are misaligned with the people they’re trying to reach. However, much of the ad targeting data used by LinkedIn comes straight from its members, leading to accurate and actionable first-person data that can put your organization in front of your most valued audiences. 

With LinkedIn, you have the ability to market to decision-makers and executives who act on new opportunities by combining targeting criteria to build your ideal persona. Using member-generated demographic data, reach the right audience through job title, company, industry, seniority, and more.

Raise Awareness and Improve Reputation

B2B marketers consistently see long-term benefits from connecting with their customers in a way that makes their brands memorable, as brand awareness, or the worth of a brand’s customer perception, grows over time. 

LinkedIn is an ideal medium for raising awareness of your brand. With more than two professionals joining LinkedIn every second, an organization can network with an ever-increasing number of connections. Helping companies gain visibility and recognition with their most valuable audiences through a full suite of targeting capabilities, LinkedIn aids marketers in achieving these objectives through both organic and paid content.

Make the Most of Your Data

If you already know who you want to target through a campaign on LinkedIn, you can input a list of email addresses to the platform, which will match those addresses to user profiles. If your list successfully matches 300 or more profiles, it will produce a Matched Audience that you can utilize in any LinkedIn campaign.

Account targeting is another beneficial approach, as customers with a list of accounts they’d like to engage with are able to cross-reference against the more than 8 million Company Pages in the LinkedIn database, which creates an account target segment based on this match. 

With LinkedIn Lookalike Audiences, upload your client data and establish a lookalike audience if you want to target individuals who are similar to your current consumers.

Generate More Leads

Whether you’re starting a new campaign, re-strategizing an old one, or simply searching for new methods to generate leads, LinkedIn is undoubtedly your best social bet for B2B marketing initiatives.