Why LinkedIn Isn’t Always The Answer For B2B Marketing

LinkedIn is a powerful tool, with great targeting abilities it gives you access to premium audiences in a professional environment where business, professional development and networking are top of mind.

As with any niche audience targeting, advertising on LinkedIn can come at a premium price with a fairly small audience pool available to target.

While LinkedIn advertising can certainly deliver great results it’s important to properly consider the audience you wish to target before diving right in.

A client of ours, SalesIn, an app that helps wholesale businesses manage their stock and orders remotely i.e when wholesalers/distributors are on the road visiting stockists, was looking to reach more B2B customers.

The challenge for them was how to identify who was in the wholesale industry and how to advertise to them in a meaningful way.

We had been posting organic content on Facebook and promoting key posts as well as running Facebook Ads with a stronger sales messages. The natural progression from there was to consider LinkedIn, with it’s B2B focus this seemed like the best path to take.

SalesIn didn’t have a presence on the platform so we started to consider what would be needed to get a LinkedIn strategy off the ground. Before jumping in, we took the very important step of researching our potential audience size, to really commit to another platform we had to know it was going to be worth our while.

We set up hypothetical target audiences in both Facebook and Linkedin to determine the size of our audience on each platform. In Facebook Ads Manager, we ran the numbers on people that were interested in wholesale, people that like wholesale companies, people that were reading wholesale-related content, and we came up with close to a million people. This was a much larger audience than we were expecting given the fairly niche nature of wholesale, this added some creed to the success we had been seeing from our existing activity.

Next up was LinkedIn, where the targeting is a little more limited than on Facebook, but you have the ability to target by job industry, which was where we saw an opportunity. We were pleased to find that it was possible to target people in the wholesale industry specifically, though this audience was fairly limited, with only about 45,000 people. When compared to the Facebook audience of close to a million people, it didn’t really make sense to invest all our time into creating organic content, building up engagement, and advertising to this limited audience.

When you’re dealing with a smaller marketing budget and it comes to choosing between one platform or another, this kind of research allows you to make a more informed decision. For SalesIn, this process told them that they were in the best place to reach the largest possible audience with their current budget.

If you're not sure which platforms are right for your business to be investing in, we can help you identify the best opportunities to reach your audience wherever they may be. At Promote Social | Media we always say, it’s better to do one thing well, than a lot of things poorly, so pick your channel and go hard!