Among the many impacts of COVID-19 is its effect on how companies reach out to prospects and close deals. Cold emails have a very low success rate, especially for complex products, people are bombarded with webinar invitations, advertising has limited possibilities, and nothing is happening in person for a long time.
The silver lining for savvy marketers is COVID-19 has forced them to take a new look at their online marketing program. Here, we focus on just a few LinkedIn tactics for B2B, in the future, we’ll look at email marketing, newsletter creation, marketing automation, and more.
The cornerstone for many clients’ online marketing programs is well-strategized LinkedIn campaigns designed to generate raw leads to feed the funnel and accelerate movement through the pipeline. We are very careful and focused with posts designed to intrigue, invite, and motivate prospects to learn more. We often complement these posts with a modest advertising program that pulls in additional prospects that our campaigns might not otherwise reach. Roughly half the posts include a call-to-action designed to drive prospects to the client’s website.
We will often execute LinkedIn campaigns for the client’s page as well as 1-2 of the founders or senior executives. Each page will have a slightly different focus and tone, designed to appeal to different decision-makers and prospects.
In addition, we work with our clients to create landing pages for each new LinkedIn campaign to both capture names, emails (and sometimes additional information), but to also measure campaign effectiveness — how many new prospects did we pull in, how far did these prospects go through the sales pipeline, what was their journey on the client’s website, how many became customers, what were the demographics and other attributes of these prospects?
Another facet of LinkedIn activity includes connecting our client page(s) with industry groups, technology and distribution partners and others with the goal of attracting their followers to the client. This includes sharing posts of these groups, endorsing their work and inviting them to do the same with our page(s).
But before we do any of this, we analyze the client’s website to look at attributes such as how long do people stay on the site, what pages are visited the most, what are peak days and times for site traffic, and more. We review the site to determine if it contains all the content necessary to communicate key messages as effectively as possible. Are there case studies and sometimes use cases, accurate content on products, solutions and markets, current bios of the c-level team, is the design easy to navigate, does the visitor reach a call to action in three or fewer clicks, what is the condition of SEO?
We worked with a client a few years ago eager to embark on a broad campaign including media relations, analyst relations, social media, and several other activities. However, one look at the website made us take a pause. There was no ability to build landing pages either through the website program the client used, nor would it integrate with other tools to build landing pages such as Unbounce. Luckily, the client allowed us to build a new website with many additional features, including landing pages, and we were able to execute our campaigns, which surpassed the KPIs in place by more than 30%.
LinkedIn is a powerful tool that many clients fail to exploit to its full potential, thinking that regular posts are enough to attract leads and business. The pandemic has provided an opportunity for many to rethink this position — ultimately to their benefit.
If you would like to discuss how your company can leverage LinkedIn to generate more leads, contact us!