Top 5 Industrial Marketing Strategy Tips for LinkedIn Marketing

It’s no secret that LinkedIn is an effective marketing tool that, if used strategically, can build your brand and drive sales. There currently is an over-abundance of articles and blogs telling you how to superficially do so. So, what’s the problem? Surface level tips and tricks lead to mistakes, and mistakes lead to wasted time and lost opportunities.

Here are 5 industrial 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 with 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 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

There are two schools of thought on LinkedIn connections. One, build your network and connect with and accept everyone so you can acquire a large connection base. Two, only connect with people that are relevant to you and your industry and no one outside of that demographic.Unfortunately, they’re both wrong.Instead, use the 80/20 rule. 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.

LinkedIn Marketing Success

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.

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