LinkedIn Marketing for Plastic Businesses

Over the last ten years we all have heard the importance of social media and the trends associated with it, but most plastics companies are stuck in the strategy of only sending out twitter posts that get no engagement. Regardless of your hashtags, cool tradeshow pics of your booth, or distribution of your content, your posting on the platform with the most noise. Your posts are getting lost and most of the time when you audit your results, the lacking engagement should have your changing your focus immediately…and it’s not 2011 anymore.

It’s time to take a step back and rethink your strategy and the key aspect of social marketing is making sure that you are active on the social platform where your potential prospects are active. Your prospects may be on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, but it’s critical to identify where they are focusing their attention. Experience has proven LinkedIn to be the primary social media outlet that provides the most ROI to manufacturing and industrial companies, because it’s still the leader in the B2B arena.

LinkedIn has proven benefits, because approximately 75% of the company’s plastic businesses are trying to target are on LinkedIn in some way. Even if a company doesn’t have their own page completely built out, their employees will have LinkedIn profiles. As the platform evolves and improves, it’s estimated that two new LinkedIn users sign up every second. Currently, there are about 500 million users and about 250 million monthly users. What we see is that people are no longer using the platform strictly as a better job searching tool such as monster.com.

Many people who have profiles on LinkedIn also have profiles on Facebook, but the purpose for each is different. On LinkedIn, you’re going to get less personal stories and more focus on career and business, and you have total control over your privacy and settings. It’s made for business and excels with manufacturing and industrial companies.

This makes your company page and personal page of the utmost importance to prospecting. It is imperative to have an updated, accurate company and personal profile. From a sales/marketing standpoint, this means a compelling professional story in your summary that will resonate with your potential clients along with buttoning up everything from headline, headshot, profile content and engagement with your network. Your active sales/marketing team must be dedicated to time spent daily producing/sharing content that will add value to your network and engage with connections for sales/opportunities to follow.

Having good content is only part of the battle. You will need to continue to build your personal network daily by using the 80/20 rule. Keep 80% of your connections relevant to your industry and the goals looking to be achieved in terms of prospects and industry professionals. The other 20% should consist of influencers with 15k or more connections that can assist in pushing your content to a broader audience, gaining you notoriety as a knowledge source in the industry.

In addition to marketing your company, you should use LinkedIn to provide value to your network. This tends to get missed as, in marketing, companies often only promote their news and updates. You’ll find an abundant return if your company shares information to help the community (without self-promoting) and provide industry relevant information 75% of the time. Pushing company content has a place but focus on providing value first in your manufacturing marketing strategy.

If used strategically, LinkedIn can build your brand and drive sales. You could find thousands of articles telling you how to do this, but those tricks can often lead to mistakes and wasted time.

The Organic Approach

Here are the top five manufacturing marketing strategies you can implement today that over time will increase your brand awareness and sales.

1. Improve Your LinkedIn Profile

If all you’ve done with your LinkedIn profile is add work experience, your headline with your job title, and a profile photo—you’re missing opportunities. When you think of the marketing side of LinkedIn, a profile isn’t at the top of your list of things to put work into, but it should be. Users search the platform every day for your expertise and what you have to offer. Optimize your profile with a ton of relevant content under each section, starting with your headline. Having your current job title as your headline doesn’t express nearly enough of what you have to offer. Use a strategic sentence to tell future clients and network connections or partners what you can do for them and use vertical bars to break down each aspect of your expertise. Next, move down to your summary and use it to tell your professional story. Compel people to do business with you based on the value you can provide them and accomplishments you have achieved. Go into detail about each position under your work experience. What did you do? What were some accomplishments you made? How did you help the company? What are some skills you picked up working there? The more optimized content on your profile, the better.

2. Have Patience

You have to water your grass before it will grow. Not every message you send will get a prompt response, sometimes you may not get any response. This is what separates those who succeed in marketing on LinkedIn and those who don’t. It’s human nature to get frustrated but giving up is not an option when you want results. You might post something in the hopes that a specific person sees it and that person might not get on every day or every week. When they get on the next day, your post is lost in their feed unless it was passed around by other connections or had enough shares/likes/comments to show up again. Have patience with connections and messages you send, and with the content you post. Be persistent and consistent with your marketing efforts.

3. It’s Work, But Worth It

If you aren’t willing to spend the time and energy on LinkedIn, don’t expect sales to follow. I challenge you to put in a couple hours every day engaging, prospecting, and producing content on LinkedIn. This is not a sprint, you have to view it as a marathon and your behavior must reflect that to be successful. The more you engage with your network, the more you’ll get out of it in return. Use the time you spend on LinkedIn purposefully. Promote other people daily by liking, commenting, and sharing their posts. Put in the work with your content as well. Use your knowledge and experience to publish articles on LinkedIn that your network will benefit from with no expectation of an immediate benefit. Search for valuable blog posts and articles that you can link to and make yourself a resource. Follow up with connections and messages and keep yourself organized by using tags in the LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Break tags down into categories like interest level and prospect qualification. Then, attach those tags to people’s profiles to keep everything in order. Get out of the mindset that this is just a social network, it’s one of the most valuable marketing tools that is available right now for B2B.

4. Give First, Ask Later

 Nothing will put a prospect off more than pitching them without providing them with something useful first. Old school and one-sided marketing advises that you shouldn’t give anything away without getting something in return whether that’s an email address, subscription, or a sale. Instead of abiding by that philosophy, provide your network with value first and you will be astonished at the long-term results. The ROI on time you spend providing that value will come back exponentially. Remember, just be patient.

5. The 80/20 Rule

I’ve already discussed my thoughts on the 80/20 rule in the text above, however here is some additional information to consider. Keep 80% of your connections relevant to you and build the other 20% with influencers that have 15k+ connections and that are regularly engaging with their network. The 80% that are relevant to you will be an asset to your marketing strategy as you engage with people in positions and industries that you focus on serving. That 20% influencer base is just as important. They are both connections that can help pick up a post and blasting it to their thousands of connections, gaining you exposure. One way to really take advantage of this is to compose a post, not more than once a month, and tag one of your influencer connections. Mention them in the post, give them credit for something, and then push with your content. They will then like and share that post and you’ve extended your reach—that’s the 80/20 rule at work.

To put LinkedIn to work for your industrial marketing strategy first evaluate your profile and LinkedIn practices. Once you have corrected how you use LinkedIn you’ll start to see results, but remember this can take time, so don’t get discouraged. Instead, forge on and continue creating meaningful content that will draw people to your profile and see you as an authority in your field. If you aren’t using these strategies—implement them today and watch the results start to work for you.

The Paid Approach

Once you’ve completed the above organic growth approach and you’re firing on all cylinders, beginning a simple paid campaign is a great tactic to penetrate deeper into your target demographic and quickly increase brand awareness. Before you go reaching for that “start” button, there’s some basics that you need to understand first to avoid wasting money.

If you’re going to go at it alone, and not hire an agency like ours to manage if for you, here are the basics when running a self-service campaign.

1. Types of Advertising

There are basically four types of advertising on LinkedIn for self-service, which means that you can control the strategy, the copy, the style, and the frequency of your campaign. You can also stop, pause, or cancel a campaign at any point.

1. Text Ad- These are simple and are 30 to 100 characters of text at the top of a LinkedIn feed. As you refresh your feed a new text ad will come up. This is the least effective form of advertising on LinkedIn because it’s often overlooked by the viewer.
2. InMail- LinkedIn’s Sponsored InMail is their version of cold email marketing. There are a lot of pros to this type of advertising, it’s cost effective and you can still target your audience. Your return on investment will be lower and the effectiveness of the campaign is lower than the third and fourth options.
3. Sponsored Post- This shows up in your native newsfeed. It’s typically the second or third post in the center of your feed that most LinkedIn user will see as they go through their newsfeed. This will be some sort of graphic, white paper, article, or something below the company name, and it’s going to say “promoted” or “sponsored” in light gray, which indicates it’s a paid post.
4. Sponsored Video (new) – The same delivery and placement as a “sponsored post”, this shows up in your native newsfeed. By using a native upload (instead of YouTube) your video will auto play as the user scrolls through their feed, catching their attention immediately if the creative relevancy is done correctly.

Sponsored posts and Sponsored Videos are the most effective method of LinkedIn advertising for manufacturing companies, but it is also the most expensive cost-per-click or cost-per-impression. These sponsored posts are mainly the most expensive because of the fact that you can do hyper-targeting and strategic campaigns to a very specific and focused target demographic. Therefore, LinkedIn can charge you anywhere from $8-20 per click because they know that you have total control over who sees it. They know it’s worth it if your product or service has room for a higher client acquisition cost.

If the product or service that you sell is in the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars per client, like a lot of manufacturing companies, then it’s worth it to invest into sponsored posts and videos. In the long run, your cost per client acquisition is minimal compared to the contract and opportunities that you’ll see and profit you will make once a prospect becomes a customer.

      2. Optimize Your Graphics

When you’re running a LinkedIn sponsored post, you want to make sure that the graphics that you’re using for the post are customized and created fresh for your specific campaign. You don’t want to recycle graphics unless it’s applicable to the message that you’re trying to send. Graphics are something you’ll want to continuously update and refresh.

      3. Send Click Traffic to The Correct Page

Send the traffic to a page that has specifically been created or optimized for the campaign that you’re running. You always want to send paid advertising traffic to a specific page, and you don’t want to just send them to your homepage unless you’re running a campaign that is strictly for brand awareness. Sending traffic with a specific call-to-action means focusing on the relevancy of the text and the graphics that match the relevancy of the page. If people see your ad and have interest in your ad, they want to be brought immediately to a page that corresponds to that ad.

     4. Tighten Up Your Target Demographic

Once you’re setting up your campaign in LinkedIn’s campaign manager, you’ll have 100% control over who sees your ads and who your target demographic is based on the information that people provide on their profile. This information can be their title, their geographic location, the company they work for, the school they went to, their job function, the seniority that they have, and it can all be used as target triggers when setting up your campaign. The key is you want to be as specific and strategic as possible and determine the tightest target demographic while also making sure that the number of people that come up in your results is high enough. This information can be found at the top right-hand corner of the LinkedIn campaign manager, and it will help you to ensure that your ads are actually going to be seen on a daily basis by your demographic.

The best tactic for this is to focus on company names. Each campaign allows you to have 100 company names that you can input and find their company LinkedIn page to pair with. Then you’re going to look for employees in those specific companies based on their job function, whether it’s purchasing, engineering, operations, sales, marketing, administration, etc. The next filtering would be seniority if you want to only target managers and above, be careful not to over target because you could be missing people that don’t have their profiles properly updated.

      5. Monitor Performance

You can’t effectively know if your campaigns are working without monitoring the performance of those campaigns through the LinkedIn campaign platform and more importantly through Google Analytics website traffic.

• LinkedIn Campaign Monitor: Look at the click-through rate that you’re seeing on your campaigns within the LinkedIn campaign manager. LinkedIn produces content that says a good click-through rate is anywhere from .25% to .35%. In our experience, that percentage is extremely low unless you’re doing a brand awareness campaign either for your brand or a specific trade show you want people to attend. A standard LinkedIn campaign with a CPC, which is cost-per-click, set up shows the lower threshold should be around .5% to .6%, and you want to try and shoot for anywhere from .9% to 1.3% click-through rate if you can.
• Google Analytics: Check your bounce rate, average time on site and number of page views to get a rough idea if the campaign is effective.

    6. Ad Rotation

The most effective way to run a LinkedIn ad is for each campaign to have four ads with graphics in rotation. If your target demographic sees your ad in their LinkedIn feed and they don’t click that ad for whatever reason, either the graphic is not optimized for them or they don’t notice it, then the next time that they come to LinkedIn or refresh their feed you want to show them a different ad with a different graphic.

The way that the bid strategy works with LinkedIn is the same as Google AdWords or Facebook, which is you only pay a penny more than the next highest bidder. The issue that you’ll come across is people get gun-shy when placing a higher bid because they don’t want to spend the money or burn through their budget. You have to think about it like this, depending on the amount of time that your target demographic spends on LinkedIn, and how far down they scroll, how many minutes they spend per session, determines whether they’ll see your ad.

It’s much more effective to show up higher in the feed in either the first ad position, which is the second or third post that they’ll see, or the second ad position, which will be the 8^th to 12^th position in their feed. Focusing on the top two positions guarantees there will be a higher likelihood to see your ad once they’re fresh on the platform. People often get lost in scrolling or get distracted while their scrolling, so showing up in the first 1-3 ad positions is going to be the most advantageous and produce the best ROI.

Whether your only comfortable doing the organic approach or want to get into paid advertising, any attention and focus you put into a proper LinkedIn marketing strategy will be well worth your time. We have worked with 100’s of companies in the plastics space and produced amazing results, but if companies don’t put in the work at an employee engagement level then the results will be hindered.

Kyle Milan is a well accomplished B2B sales and marketing professional with over 18 years in the manufacturing & industrial industry and 10 of those years in custom injection molding, he is the CEO of 5 Fold Agency (https://mfgtribe.com) and a LinkedIn Marketing & Advertising expert. He has published several articles at major news media outlets on various topics of; Industrial Marketing, Manufacturing Marketing, LinkedIn Marketing & Advertising and Entrepreneurship. He also has a daily Vlog on YouTube when he shares all of his methods to get manufacturing companies better with sales and marketing.

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