B2B Marketing and LinkedIn: Top Strategies and Best Practices to Adopt

It is no secret that LinkedIn is a hub for professionals in general, and especially for B2B marketing: networking, recruitment, business and partnership opportunities, brand image promotion, lead generation, and much more.

A heavily trafficked digital space, it’s a social network where competition for attention is fierce. To stand out and reach your targets in this pool, it’s best to know and master the top marketing best practices.

What to say to those wondering why use LinkedIn in B2B?

LinkedIn has become an indispensable tool in the B2B marketing toolkit. Its ability to generate prospects and increase visibility makes it an essential platform for any corporate content and communication strategy.

Right from the start, know that you can use LinkedIn to its full potential by deploying your strategy on two levels simultaneously. In addition to your company page, you can also leverage your employees’ personal LinkedIn profiles, especially your sales team. With, for example, a brand ambassador program, you benefit from their participation to increase the reach of your content and amplify your company.

What is the foundation of a good B2B strategy on LinkedIn?

Before taking action, you need to sharpen your pencils and make a stop at strategic planning. Here are the ingredients that can set your company up for success on LinkedIn.

• Well‑defined objectives: what do you want to achieve on this platform—launch a new product line, enhance your employer branding, gain qualified leads?
• An optimized company page, with a profile photo and banner that capture attention while showing your colours, accompanied by a description that presents your brand clearly and appealingly.
• Mastery of your target audience, including their browsing and content consumption habits or what keeps them awake at night.
• A clear starting point: by noting key performance indicators (KPIs), you can track their evolution later.
• Brand ambassadors to lend you a hand, whose personal LinkedIn profiles are ready to take the spotlight alongside your company.

The 10 best practices to make your company shine on LinkedIn

To maximize your impact on this social network, adopt the following best practices.

1. Share quality content regularly—and at the right times!
2. Leverage your team’s support
3. Focus on relationships
4. Experiment with formats
5. Exploit LinkedIn’s native interface features
6. Encourage engagement from your audience across your entire brand ecosystem
7. Use hashtags—but don’t overdo it!
8. Take advantage of advanced features—LinkedIn Ads and Sales Navigator
9. Monitor your performance
10. Stay alert

Let’s dive into the details!

1. Share quality content regularly—and at the right times!

To maximize your effectiveness on LinkedIn, post content regularly as part of a diverse, engaging marketing strategy. To maintain your followers’ engagement and remain a consistent presence in their feed, consistently share your own articles or those from other experts, industry news, case studies, and customer testimonials.

It’s also crucial to publish at the right times. On one hand, to reach your target audience when they are on the social network, and on the other, to reduce the chances that your post gets lost in a sea of other content.

A tip to keep the momentum? Set up an editorial calendar, schedule your posts in advance and automate their distribution!

2. Leverage your team’s support

As noted above, by equipping your employees or colleagues to become brand ambassadors, you can benefit from many advantages. Every volunteer should have a quality photo, a catchy title and updated skills. If your team is full of goodwill but short on time, consider offering them a full ambassador kit to give them a good boost.

(Throughout the following tips, discover in ambassador form concrete ways to get the most from this strategy on LinkedIn!)

3. Focus on relationships

Easier said than done? Concretely, engage actively with your audience by responding to comments and tagging people and companies mentioned in your posts.

Putting your team in the spotlight is also a good example of this practice, as it highlights ongoing projects, challenges overcome, and daily life at the office or remote work, all aligned with your company values. Remember that, on social media, your staff will be more inclined to share content that highlights them or that they participated in. You can kill two birds with one stone by humanizing both your corporate and employer brand.

“LinkedIn is first and foremost a social network: weave relationships there! It’s an opportunity to build a trust-based relationship with your followers and your prospects.”

Ambassador tip: Joining different LinkedIn groups and interacting with their members is a way to expand your network while strengthening your expertise and, indirectly, your company’s reputation among partners, potential clients, or candidates.

4. Experiment with formats

Be creative and original—within the limits of your brand image! More or less long posts, with or without emojis, illustrated, photo or video, etc. In addition to energizing your profile, diversifying your content can increase the chances of catching your followers’ interest.

Ambassador tip: take advantage of LinkedIn “native” articles (published directly on the platform), which are tied to the profile of the person who shares them. Companies do not have access to this feature, so you need to designate an employee to share it. On the company page, this person appears with the shared article.

5. Exploit LinkedIn’s native interface features

Among the key tactics of an advanced marketing strategy on LinkedIn, creating a showcase page helps diversify ways to reach your prospects. Appearing in the right margin of your company profile, this showcase page can highlight particular aspects such as your product or service offer and recruitment (a bit like the “Careers” tab of your website).

Moreover, your company profile can include several tabs, including “About,” “Posts,” and “My organization.“ Also, consider updating the “Jobs“ tab, which is meant to… post your job openings!

6. Encourage engagement from your audience across your entire brand ecosystem

Go from links to leads! By creating content that captures and retains your audience’s attention, you can boost engagement with your posts—clicks, reactions, comments, shares, etc.

Above all, make your platforms work in synergy. Including links between LinkedIn and your website is a powerful tactic to strengthen your online presence and improve your SEO.

Include clear, compelling calls to action in your posts: whether it’s to read an article, register for a webinar, or download a white paper, guide your audience! Depending on your goals, also consider more interactive options like polls and live videos, which are particularly effective in sparking engagement.

7. Use hashtags—but don’t overdo it!

The expression “Too much is as good as cake“ aptly summarizes our point. Often, two or three hashtags do just fine. Also, note that their absence can become a missed opportunity to improve content visibility. Again, it’s all about the target audience and business sectors!

8. Take advantage of advanced features—LinkedIn Ads and Sales Navigator

Take advantage of the tools offered by LinkedIn, such as Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Ads, to target and attract qualified prospects.

LinkedIn Ads

With this platform, you can run ads that specifically target your audience and market to extend the reach of your posts (the number of people who see your content). These ads can be highly effective at generating qualified leads.

You can choose from many ad formats: text or dynamic ads, sponsored content or message ads—there are countless options depending on your objectives!

Sales Navigator

A paid tool for sales prospecting or recruitment, Sales Navigator is like an extension of your LinkedIn account that acts as a prospect-centric database tailored to your business reality. It’s not for everyone, but it offers useful options, including:

• Advanced, precise filters for searching professionals and companies
• Saving your searches as well as automatic follow‑ups
• Setting alerts related to the activity of followed accounts
• CRM integration and real‑time update of contacts—for example, change of position.

9. Monitor your performance

Part of what makes a campaign successful on LinkedIn is tracking and adjusting your marketing efforts: based on the KPIs established at the start of your strategy, you can evaluate your posts’ performance and adjust accordingly.

LinkedIn offers its own analytics interface and automation tools to monitor campaign performance. For example, head to the Update, Followers and Visitors tabs, which allow you to see which posts resonate with your target audience, how you measure up to competitor pages and who visits you without being a follower.

10. Stay alert

Any good marketing strategy is rarely a finished product: it is continuous work that evolves over time based on your prospects’ needs, as well as marketing trends and industry practices. What’s another key element to keep an eye on to stay competitive? Changes in LinkedIn features reflect the platform’s evolution to adapt to web realities and its users.

Also, note your competitors’ LinkedIn strategies and take note of what they’re doing well, but mainly what could be improved: each of these is an opportunity for your company to seize!

LinkedIn strategy for companies: relevant content, regular communication and support from your employees

To achieve your marketing objectives, relying solely on your website’s SEO presence is not always sufficient. That is why you could transform your company page on LinkedIn, supported by brand ambassadors, into a key element of your sales funnel.

And if your LinkedIn use is not bearing fruit, maybe you need to spice up your profile, call on willing team members for reinforcement, or diversify your posts? To plan your next move, our digital and content marketing specialists are ready for you: let’s work on your strategy.