B2B LinkedIn Content Ideas: Content Pillars to Drive your Online Marketing Forward
Creating great content for LinkedIn is one of the most impactful ways to stand out from the crowd on the #1 B2B social channel. With 97% of B2B Marketers using this channel for their content marketing, they are competing for the scrutiny of time poor users with a low attention span. This means your B2B content needs to punch.
It is worth the effort to create compelling content. It builds credibility, establishes rapport and helps keep you top of mind with your most important audience. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to your posts, but every piece of content should add value to your community.
Don’t allow LinkedIn to be a wasted opportunity for your business. For B2B Marketers, 40% see LinkedIn as their most effective channel for driving high-quality leads. This leaves us wondering why the remaining 60% don't see the same impact. Taking the time to create great content and successfully delivering this across LinkedIn will drive demand in your business.
One of our current clients has notably said; “Our industry is waiting for our next post” - can you imagine being in this position with your business? To have industry experts waiting for what’s to come from you as their trustworthy source?
An active, online presence featuring insightful posts will promote company page optimisation, encourage community conversations and increase page visibility in searches. Become a master of LinkedIn by understanding the customer journey and crafting engaging B2B LinkedIn content that drives intent.
B2B Customer Journey
Each prospect will undertake a ‘customer journey’ or journey of discovery on your business. It could take 5 minutes or 5 months, but ensuring your B2B LinkedIn content provides all the right information at the correct touch-points is key to guide prospects along their path.
The customer relationship journey is essential for your marketing strategy. You should aim to:
Create content that helps you get discovered
Enlighten your audience with content that engages, educates and inspires
Use content to drive the prospects’ intent to convert
Deliver content that adds value to current customers - increasing retention
Finally, use content to champion loyal customers
Keep in mind online audiences have short time spans. Deliver content with value and purpose, but with uncomplicated measure.
B2B LinkedIn Content Pillars
Here are B2B LinkedIn content ideas that are tried and trusted within our agency and regularly used across our client accounts.
Native Company Insights - Generate interest and earn expertise points
LinkedIn generates more ‘clicks’ and impression rates for native documents on social posts, improving visibility and organic reach. This engaging content can be in the form of video, PDF, infographic, LinkedIn poll or carousel that provides high-authority resources or insights for your audience - and it’s helpful to know that using all formats of content increases reach by 10%.
Website content - Posting & sharing
From blogs to newsletter sign-up links and links to 'discovery call' bookings, this content pillar will provide a direct link between LinkedIn and your website. Leveraging this content and utilising a clear CTA will drive traffic to a key web page and build multi-channel engagement. If you’re wondering about your CTA on LinkedIn, lead generation forms using the CTA option ‘Get Started’ performs x5 better than ‘Contact sales’ or ‘request free demo’.
Industry insights, trends and data - Share your expertise and expand on your B2B sector Champion new trends and forecasts. This content pillar should identify potential challenges and key information around your industry - including insights, trends, data, anecdotes or peer statements… Your audience may be in a similar industry which will heighten engagement, build intrigue and help to enter people within your marketing ecosystem.
Levers of Influence - Influence intent
In B2B marketing, we have a number of influence levers we can turn to drive intent by building actionable LinkedIn content. This should cover topics such as the contrast principle, reciprocation, social proof, future social proof, unity, authority and scarcity to help us create intrigue and turn the wheel of engagement.
B2B X-Factor - Add the wow factor
What content and insights can you deliver that no one else can? Think about industry reports, research, insights, or the way you can create the content. What information or view of the market do you have that sets you apart from everyone else and is repeatable?
Employee Advocacy - The human touch Showing small insights into the business, from founder thoughts to team accolades, new hires, events you're attending to celebrating client wins. Company insights and news help to build relatability, trust and authority. And it doesn’t stop at your page; commenting as a company page on employees, suppliers or clients' posts will significantly increase your reach.
Challenge, solution, result
- Showcase your product/service
Product-based posts cleverly convey how your product or service is solving the challenge your customers might be experiencing. The transformation from the problem, to the solution and finally, the result, is a framework which signals to your customers what’s at stake and what they can achieve. Use models, methodologies or customer experience to elevate this to your audience.
Current affairs
- Share news with your network
Show that you have a finger on the pulse when it comes to relative industry news and trends both your niche product/service and as a whole. Share the right information as it comes out. If you do the same you’ll soon turn into a trustworthy source for the news, even if it’s from another source. This appeals to a lot of people to follow a certain social influencer, channel or company.
Final thoughts
Approaching B2B marketing on LinkedIn without a plan leads to inconsistent efforts, posts that take too long to create and mixed messages that don’t align with the brand. Delivering a consistent and cohesive approach, allows a brand to track, analyse and adjust appropriately to optimise results.
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