Getting hooked on LinkedIn to promote B2B marketing is worth the jog. After all, LinkedIn is the best social platform to build strong business relationships and generate qualified leads.
So picture this – LinkedIn is a digital B2B business fare. If your business aims at having a popular stand, you’ll need to flex some intellectual muscle to attract the right attention.
Well, the same goes for B2B fintech and cybersecurity startups. Many prospects will connect via LinkedIn first before putting trust into a service, which is particularly true in the finance and business intelligence industries. As such, building a loyal LinkedIn community is imperative.
Once you’ve established a strong following on LinkedIn, your next goal is to become a community manager. This means translating your visibility into a lead-generating machine, which for startups newbies as much as industry veterans can be a daunting task.
With that in mind, we’ve outlined what it takes to be a successful LinkedIn community manager for fintech and cybersecurity startups alike.
1. Transform your connections into a LinkedIn community
The key to a successful B2B social media marketing strategy is building connections with your target audience.
Generally speaking, a personal and transparent DM followed by a clear call to action proves is better than generic email templates stuffing people’s inboxes.
Likewise, encouraging colleagues to connect their personal LinkedIn accounts with your company’s one is a great way to multiply your page’s reach and content visibility.
By expanding your reach, you can draw attention to clients. This can be as simple as connecting with like-minded entrepreneurs in your industry and see with whom they are connected. Check out Ingenico, who are successfully networking with the biggest fish in the financial industry.
After you have successfully grown the number of your connections, it is time to strengthen them in quality.
2. Take care of your LinkedIn community and build trust
Prompt responses to prospects’ questions and open dialogue are the best tools for fostering consumer trust.
Imagine asking for more information on a cybersecurity company’s regulatory compliance via email and not receiving a response until weeks later. Would it strike you as a reliable company to do business with? Would you trust them managing sensitive data and private information?
What counts for inquiries via emails, holds true for LinkedIn business communication: Impression is everything. And the key strategy is reacting, sooner than later!
Whenever a LinkedIn user engages with your content, it’s vital to answer in a timely manner. This principle holds true for any kind of engagement, including direct message inquiries, comments on posts, or mentions of your company. Knowing and understanding the concerns of your customers is a terrific way to generate qualified leads.
Let’s face it: You care that much about your clients that it makes you interested in following them as well!
3. The golden rule: Follow proactive community management
Congratulations, you’ve responded to your audiences’ comments underneath your posts and your direct messages are well handled. Let’s take it a step further.
One of your clients or customers post great content with relevance to your industry or lies within your business expertise? Get involved and share their content and stories on your page. Don’t forget to mention them with an “@” so they can recognize your acknowledgment!
One cybersecurity company to be inspired by is AttackForge. Looking out for the LinkedIn activity of their industry-related members and influences, they join their conversations and create a buzz!
You have successfully grown your community? Now focus on giving value to your community.
4. Lead your community with LinkedIn Groups
Joining a LinkedIn group and putting your thoughts on topics you have expert knowledge in help
you drive traffic to your LinkedIn page in no time.
Alternatively, set up your own group, connecting like-minded professionals in a space that doubles up as a vessel for your own thought leadership.
In the fintech and cybersecurity industry, your biggest goal is creating trustworthiness among customers and proving reliability. LinkedIn groups provide a hub for demonstrating your credibility and are vital to building a loyal customer base.
5. Establish your thought leadership with LinkedIn Events
LinkedIn events and webinars are some of the top services LinkedIn provides. Long-form video content is particularly effective for B2B marketing strategies, and 66% of B2B buyers prefer to watch a webinar before buying a product.
Wondering what’s the best strategy to approach LinkedIn events? Simply participate in events, live discussions, and interactive sessions. Once in the webinar, you can join or host conversations with other attendees.
Always reach out to find industry-related events. For example, if you’re a cybersecurity startup, the Cybersecurity World Congress pops up in March!
If you have the time and the budget, create your own LinkedIn event. As with any online content, webinars can be focused on educating audiences, showcasing new services or products, discussing industry advances, or brainstorming ideas with potential clients.
All of our tips, in summary, are pulling in the same direction: Towards generating high-quality content with interactive marketing strategies.
6. Take the win-win content strategy with interactive marketing
Good quality LinkedIn content is mostly about business tips, recruiting ideas, industry news, and how your product or service speaks to the pinpoint of your potential clients.
Having this said, only high-quality content encourages user-generated content and inspires your community to interact with your business or service.
However, you can also trigger interaction. For examples of great interactive LinkedIn content in the fintech industry check out Klarna. Its interactive marketing strategy starts with live Q&A sessions for retailers, LinkedIn surveys, radio featuring clients, and it frequently asks its community for feedback to improve its customer-orientation.
Interactive marketing is basically making your company page into a social space for customers and clients to interact, allowing them to take part in your company’s development.
If you’re looking for more ideas on how to generate engagement you can listen to Rene Cheng’s insights on The Loudspeaker.
Final Thought:
Fintech PR and cybersecurity PR require fully-fledged communications with your customers and partners. On the one hand, you need to demonstrate what effective solutions you have to your clients’ problems. On the other hand, your business clients are also people. They’re looking for the human touch in business relationships.
If you communicate your products and services and simultaneously foster social communities via LinkedIn, your clients will go from adopters to brand advocators, the best piece of earned media going.
