It’s commonly accepted that if you use social media as a socially minded businessperson, your platform of choice should be LinkedIn. What is less well known is the potential LinkedIn has for B2B lead generation, giving SME owners access to targeted, qualified sales leads at a lower acquisition cost than many other social media lead generation strategies.
In this article, we explain why LinkedIn is the lead generation king among social media platforms.
1) Business decision-makers actively look for solutions on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a good lead generation platform because business decision-makers take it seriously as a good place to find solutions to their issues. If you can create a credible presence as a business owner and an authority in your field, you’ll find, in LinkedIn, a ready-made audience of potential customers willing to listen to you and ready to make a purchase. People on LinkedIn expect to be approached by other LinkedIn users with sales propositions (with greater or lesser degrees of subtlety!) and although there are rules of etiquette to follow when communicating with LinkedIn users you don’t know, members won’t immediately dismiss any promotional communication as spam without considering it first.
2) LinkedIn is the best specifically B2B social media network, with a huge potential audience
Statistics vary from industry to industry, but it’s probably safe to say that most senior decision-makers in the UK have some kind of LinkedIn presence, and many are extremely active. This gives you a very large potential audience – and specifically a B2B audience. Yes, Facebook may have more overall users than LinkedIn and there is a lot of crossover between the two platforms, but people primarily use Facebook on a personal basis. For B2B transactions, there is no better social media network than LinkedIn.
3) You can target specific companies on LinkedIn to fast-track targeted adverts to key decision makers
Inbound marketing rests on recognising the reality of business interactions – that your buyers are ultimately people, not companies. Nevertheless, these buyers all work for someone, and a good starting point with LinkedIn lead generation is to identify target companies on LinkedIn and then drill down to the relevant decision-makers within these businesses. Doing this is straightforward. First, prepare a list of target companies in CSV format, giving the company name, their website and country. Then, go to LinkedIn Campaign Manager and select the Create an audience feature. This will prompt you to upload the CSV file and select a “match based on a list of accounts” (you can also do the same with a list of email contacts). The result will be a list of all those businesses with a presence of LinkedIn, allowing you to create a personalised ad to make contact with your audience. This is an excellent starting point for lead generation for businesses that are new to LinkedIn marketing.
4) Lead generation on LinkedIn has a better conversion rate than Google Ads
If you’re new to lead generation, a fast way to get started is by paid adverts on Google Ads or LinkedIn. Both are excellent PPC platforms, and LinkedIn actually has a slightly higher average cost per click than Google. However, in terms of conversion rate, LinkedIn wins hands down, with almost double the conversion rate of Google Ads by using LinkedIn Sponsored Content – leading to significant overall savings by deploying your advertising budget on LinkedIn.
5) You can use LinkedIn lead generation forms to guide leads to your website or secure sales directly through LinkedIn
LinkedIn even makes lead generation easy for users by providing targeted lead gen forms that automatically populate with information drawn from the user’s LinkedIn profile. This saves your contact valuable time and increases the likelihood they’ll hit send on the form when they view your sponsored content. Lead gen forms can be easily configured within your campaign manager interface and can be tailored to a variety of CTAs, including directing traffic to your website, accessing gated content, and joining an email marketing mailing list.
Social media marketing support for small businesses
Social media provides an excellent channel for small business owners to build their lead network and is a good entry point into digital marketing for people with experience in traditional network building and B2B sales. To find out more about the benefits of using LinkedIn for social media lead generation, please call one of our inbound marketing team today on 01332 343281.
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