Nowadays social media can help b2b marketer a lot in generating leads and supporting sales of their products or services. LinkedIn works much better than other social media in the majority of areas and business-oriented industries.

When salespeople and marketers work on B2B markets they usually deal with a Buying Center. Such decision-making unit brings together all members of an organization who become involved in the buying process for a particular product or service. This is why b2b sales are always harder (and much more interesting) than b2c sales. The Buying Center is made up of deciders, purchasers, gatekeepers, influencers, initiators and users.

Moreover, before signing a contract and a pay-check every buyer pass through 3 main stages of the buying process which are Awareness, Consideration and Decision (for some cases, there are much more than 3 stages, but I prefer to keep it simple). Marketers need to leverage the right content (message), IMC methods and media channels for each of these stages.

Thus, to support B2B sales successfully sales team and marketers should engage most important members of the buying center with the right message via effective channels on every stage of the buying process. Plenty of engaging content has to be created.

LinkedIn can help any organization to boost their B2B sales because it allows contacting every member of the buying center of XYZ company (mostly) via multiple ad formats and tools.

To start using that marketing approach and increase your B2B sales:

1) Identify the accounts you would like to acquire. Ask your sales team to come up with a list of companies who might be extremely interested in your product or service;

2) Do a research on a social media to identify the most important members of the buying center. In case if your business is SaaS you need to identify Senior Software Engineer (as a User), a head of Software Engineering or IT department (as an Influencer), COO (as a Deciders) and a head of Procurement department (as a Purchaser);

3) Think about how can you effectively enter the buying center of this organization. Who should you contact first? What sales strategy do you need to use (Bottom-up or top-down)?

4) Come up with a list of needs and problems of every member of account’s buying center which are relevant to Awareness, Consideration and Decision stage respectively. That is the hardest part of this approach;

5) Create a message extremely relevant to each of those needs and problems. That is the most important part of this approach, take your time, double check it all;

6) Finally, set-up LinkedIn ad campaign to engage every important member of the buying center with a message that is well-targeted and relevant to their main needs, a message that gives a solution to their problem. Start approach those people (every sales persona) with banner ads and then use sponsored content. Make sure that your landing page gives a meaningful and comprehensive solution, double check that the page has a clear CTA.

Ad campaigns on LinkedIn work same way as on adWords: you can set daily or total budget and will be charge performance-based (per click, thousand impressions or message send), but unlike adWords, LinkedIn provides excellent business targeting options: to get more traffic or leads you can target the message to a specific company, department and people with a specific job role.

I repeat, the most important part is to create a credible message (banner, text ad + landing page on a site to get lead).

Do not forget to combine this approach with other marketing methods such as personal selling (phone calls), cause marketing (like special events participation, meaningful charity), etc.

What to know more and learn all the details of this approach? Contact me to make an appointment, so we can boost the performance of your business together.