10+ LinkedIn Marketing Trends To Acknowledge
Today whenever one talks about B2B marketing, LinkedIn is the leading social network that first comes to mind. With various features available, it’s more than a digital Rolodex.
Every new feature available in this marketing tool makes it a better platform for generating B2B traffic.
Whether you are a branding expert willing to do personal branding or trying to make your brand outshine, LinkedIn should be on the priority list as it holds 18 years of existence.
Also, with LinkedIn, you get global access and a chance to serve in 24 languages.
LinkedIn’s massive database gives great chances to gain business by connecting with other professionals in your industry.
It means reaching out to businesses and individuals for converting them into leads rather than just building a network.
If done correctly, then for sure, LinkedIn prospecting can be the best B2B marketing practice for your business to get more leads in a minor investment.
As per the prediction by eMarketer, more than half of the U.S. audience will get their hands on LinkedIn in 2021, which makes companies look at LinkedIn Marketing Trends to acknowledge this year.
To help you get started, below are the LinkedIn features introduced in 2021:
Advertising on LinkedIn is not as easy as it is on other marketing platforms, like Twitter. LinkedIn has proved why missing it out is a loss.
It helps you get an abundance of sales and traffic with increased brand awareness.
Improved Personalisation in Ads
With Dynamic Ads, LinkedIn makes personalisation take place on the next level.
You need to target a segmented audience accurately with a significant impact on them via content. Not only this, to help you grab the attention of your audience, you get to opt for separate campaigns scaling your database with an improved targeted audience dependent on your marketing objectives.
To help you be on the right track, easy tracking and monitoring of the campaigns within the campaign manager are available.
Whether you want to prioritise potential traffic, lead generation, or a word about your brand, LinkedIn makes considerable efforts to make you serve better to your target audience.
To offer a personalised experience, you get to control your spending by setting a budget. Availability of various payment options such as pay per impression, click, or message is another perk.
Through LinkedIn, making professional relationships is now feasible with more flexibility, control, and accuracy while not making a hole in your pocket.
Such a great personalisation helps you deliver your brand’s personalised experience, making them aware of what makes you set apart.
LinkedIn Stories
The most significant update this year, LinkedIn has made an accumulation of LinkedIn stories.
Like other social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram, the videos and images remain there for 24 hours.
The videos with a duration of 20 minutes get cut into smaller short videos of 30 seconds each.
The move made by LinkedIn with an introduction of stories shows footprints of creating interaction and engagement amongst users.
So, brands can now incorporate a human and personal touch with their stories giving a better introduction to their audience professionally.
This feature of LinkedIn stories is available only for mobile versions, which means businesses can expect 57% of the traffic from mobiles only.
Integration of Video Chat
A big jump from the old age primary text chat option. This trend shows LinkedIn’s efforts to be a communication hub instead of more than a recruiting platform.
With the integration of the video chat feature, LinkedIn is helping professionals practice social distancing and opt for remote communications by using this feature.
Also, every stage of the employee life cycle is easy to ride on while being safe at home.
As LinkedIn’s video calls will make communications natural between employers, employees, companies, and candidates looking for jobs, interviews will be easy to conduct.
This feature attracts more and more users, implying an opportunity for advertisers to advertise and reach the potential audience.
One can make use of this feature from mobile and desktop both. To make this feature take place in reality, LinkedIn has shaken hands with BlueJeans, Zoom, and Microsoft.
BlueJeans is a cloud-based service that will make it easy to connect with participants on different platforms and devices. With this platform, privacy and security are highly prioritised.
The integration of multiple devices and media into a single service makes this a great video conferencing tool.
Zoom, with its integration, makes users answer messages either via a video call, voice message, or standard text.
It is simple to set up a call. With just a link, a recipient can access the video call.
Microsoft Teams has got its tremendous growth due to the work from home culture during the pandemic.
Making accessible the sharing of files and collaborating makes it give more professional endeavour. Integrating it with LinkedIn makes users share documents, send messages, start video calls, and easily publish posts on LinkedIn directly.
Accessible to Edit Messages
Earlier, it was impossible to irreversible the messaging mistakes or typos. This feature of LinkedIn was not, in fact, available for InMail messages.
When accessing this feature, the receiver will not be aware if you’ve edited or deleted any message till the moment they’ve already read or seen the news.
The availability of this feature is for both versions desktop and mobile. This editing feature of LinkedIn is going to be helpful for more and more professionals in keeping their good side.
Send Message to Masses
Now, it’s easy to delete, mark a conversation as read, or even archive the message, which was earlier not possible.
Before 2021, sending messages to multiple users or a successive message group was available. In simpler terms, you can easily apply all the features of an individual chat to groups.
LinkedIn Marketing Trends For Both B2B & B2C Businesses
B2B economy is more optimistic in reviving its economy during this period by incorporating the latest marketing trends compared to B2C.
As a result, looking at the pandemic that has hit us all made B2B service and product companies raise their marketing budgets to generate profits.
According to LinkedIn statistics, in B2B sales, 80% of social media-related leads come from LinkedIn.
So whether you are owning a big business, a small company, or launching your SME during 2021, there are the top five LinkedIn marketing trends that you can use to make your impact in both B2B & B2C the market.
These strategies can be implemented by both B2B and B2C to promote their business, brand, and products.
Keeping in mind to make the best use of LinkedIn’s features, these are the marketing trends for B2B and B2C that should be incorporated in your marketing strategy:
Innovation
Marketing strategies are forced to change because of the behavioural transformation among customers, businesses, and societies and their expectations.
As per the pundits of the market, they are innovating along these lines to incorporate the changes that have become quite a challenge.
For this transformation, the marketing funnels and sales are eager to engage, convert and retain the customers by using technology to provide customers with digital-first engagement that can be differentiated and is unique from competitors. Hence innovation has become the primary priority for most marketers and businesses.
As part of the innovation process, the businesses are thus incorporating the following:
Rich Customer Experiences: Post pandemic, businesses see the extreme need to connect with customers; hence there has been a significant increase in providing better customer marketing service and customer experience.
In 2018, it was revealed that 80% of a company’s service and product are as important as the experience the business offers.
This figure was revealed by 84% of the customers. In the post-pandemic era, it is becoming even more critical. Hence the ephaptic, real-time engagement with customers is becoming the norm of the day.
Tracking Key Metrics: With the world getting in grip with the post-pandemic situation, the shift is now into recovery and adaptation instead of crisis management.
The marketing strategies have become even more important than before because they will help a company get a holistic picture of aspects of a business that are working or not.
The key metrics of tracking will enable the enterprises to transform lifetime valued customers into business values.
With the right KPIs and tracking knowledge in place, marketers will know the right place for investment, helping a business grow its revenue significantly.
Virtual Experience
As part of the B2C marketing trends of 2021, virtual experience for customers will become even more important since they could experience that during the pandemic period.
Three sectors will shape the marketing trends, providing the essential virtual experience to the customers.
- AI to personalise the engagement: Businesses now have to offer a personalised customer experience, i.e., the messages should resonate and meet the customers’ unique expectations. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will increase as time goes on to offer this personalised customer experience.
- ‘Do Good’ Factor: During the pandemic, brands became aware of their brand value to ‘do good for the society and customers. As part of the process, businesses are engaging in evaluating the brand and their brand strategy to understand what the customers think about them, Also where they stand in comparison to their competitors while providing the experience to the customers.
- Mobile Experience: Customers of various products have spent hours on mobile gadgets and social media platforms. This resulted in a renewed awareness to create a mobile-friendly website that can offer a better virtual experience to the customers. As per pundits, this will continue to grow for the next year, where developers will become more engaged in creating mobile-friendly UI and UX-friendly mobile applications.
- Growth from Partnerships: One of the marketing trends that will continue to evolve as time progresses, mainly for small businesses and companies, is building new partnerships. With a steady decline in the growth from internal resources continues, partnering up with others is becoming a long-term growth driver. The partnerships accelerating the growth can be categorised into:
- Influencers: It has been touted that the use of influencers will increase in professional services and the banking sector. Of-late company blogs and LinkedIn had become the focus of B2B influencer activities. In the next three years, the marketing teams will spend a significant about 12.7% of their marketing budget on influencers.
- Digital experience: The digital experience that the customers used to get during the pandemic will continue to rise and not return to the pre-pandemic level. Hence, businesses are now working tirelessly to fit into the digital platform for their customers, collaborate with different social media platforms, and create media that offer a better user experience.
- ABM Is New SOP: Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is becoming the new standard operating procedure (SOP) for many companies as it ensures better and higher ROI. ABM allows cross-selling and upselling; hence collaboration between the sales teams are established to deliver better and tailor-made customer service and meet their expectation.
Once there was a time when the business approach for B2B and B2C was to widen the pool to draw in as many customers as they can.
But in 2021, the trend is changing. The more-is-more approach is being replaced by creating an influential specific target audience and catering to them.
It has been estimated that most B2B online traffic does come from LinkedIn. Hence it is natural to get as many hits as possible on the site by over-summing up the business.
However, it is now seen as a gaffe to get the crowd in. Instead, it is better to get quality traffic by becoming specific with the products and business.
LinkedIn provides you with the perfect platform to share your business ideas and establish your brand irrespective of the business.
The function of the items you are selling and what the organisation or customers stand to benefit from your item can be easily conveyed with well-written and engaging content.
This can be in the form of a blog, video, an infographic that will communicate the instructive ideas of your business and items to give the market leaders the material they need to understand and support your business.
Hence it is worthwhile to create intriguing yet straightforward content on LinkedIn that will help you establish your business.
Continue To Measure And Take The Leadership
Both B2B and B2C marketers need to continuously keep measuring the features like Active Clicking Factor (CTR) or the number of times the videos were seen.
This informs and indicates whether the purpose of uploading the content has been successful or not.
In post-pandemic, when you are promoting your business on LinkedIn, you have to engage with additional measurements to ensure your business’ success.
Hence, it is time to dig deeper into the factors like Income Per-Lead and other data to push your business and mission ahead, with more customers becoming aware of what they want.
LinkedIn has a unique and embedded systems administration that can help you assemble different kinds of brand pictures and share them. This will allow you to engage the trust of the customers.
You can also start sharing relevant business news on the profile, linking it with other organisations, and urging employees to start posting about the business, products, and items.
It would be best if you didn’t restrict the advertising of your business to cater to leads only, instead engage with more.
Engage Across The Levels
Most often, B2B marketing engages with business leaders and C-suite chiefs, but this strategy is not entirely effective in the long run.
With LinkedIn marketing, you can develop an association with experts from lower levels who greatly influence several frameworks, items, and even administrations in different employments.
Engaging with everyone across the business line, irrespective of their portfolio/level, will allow you to uphold your item to many more from inside.
Wrapping It Up
It is time to engage with the latest LinkedIn marketing trends to impact your B2B or B2C business.
Keeping up-to-date with the site’s unique nature can help you get the leads you need to thrive in the post-pandemic time.
Author Bio: Saket Aggarwal is the Co-founder and CEO of Digital Gratified – a Digital Marketing & Web Development company helping international businesses grow their business.
This article is very informative, updated and transparent.
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