When it comes to B2B marketing there are fewer tools better than LinkedIn.

In fact, LinkedIn state that 97% of B2B users use LinkedIn for their content marketing efforts and that 78% of B2B marketers state that it’s the most successful social media platform when it comes to achieving their goals.

It’s particularly helpful if you own, or work, for a SaaS company. LinkedIn allows you to connect with the decision makers at the businesses you want to target.

What is SaaS marketing?

SaaS marketing is the process of promoting a service that your company can provide. The key to ensuring success is understanding that it’s not just an app that you are selling but a service that the customer is happy to pay for on a monthly or yearly basis.

Unlike other traditional marketing, with saas, you are selling something that is intangible. It’s worth remembering that your customer has an issue and you have the solution to that problem.

SaaS marketers need patience and have a keen eye on what is known as “lifestyle marketing”.

As customers are paying you monthly, your concern isn’t about bringing them back but instead ensuring that they love the product and buy into your company to prevent churn.

SaaS marketing has become incredibly effective as companies are moving away from inhouse network and IT teams and are favouring products with a cloud infrastructure.

As a SaaS company, it’s important that you focus on growth. Establishing a good customer base and having companies trust in your product is difficult.

What is Enterprise marketing?

Enterprise marketing is the process of marketing your saas product to large enterprises.

Sales cycles are generally long averaging 4.5 months, though some sales cycles may be as short as 3 days.

As Christoph Janz put it, when it comes to enterprise marketing, you are hunting “big game” therefore the key is to focus.

Focus on the target buyer persona and the marketing channels which has the potential to deliver the most ROI.

Click here for our Saas Marketing Buyer Persona template.

In general, enterprise marketing channels include Events Marketing (Conferences, Dinners, Seminars, Trade Shows etc), Partner Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Organic and Search.

Once you are a 100% clear on who you are targeting, the next question you should ask is: how do I target these customers?

Enter LinkedIn

Over the years, Linkedin has become much more sophisticated as a marketing channel for the B2B Saas companies.

First off you need to create a LinkedIn company page, if you don’t already have one.

The biggest thing to consider when setting up your LinkedIn company page is which featured groups you want to display.

Leveraging the use of groups is a fantastic way to get some traction on LinkedIn.

This is a great way to communicate with your potential customer base. Also, it has come a long way in recent years and is much easier to navigate.

Highlights of the group are curated and you can also contact the admin of each group. This is a particularly good idea because for a small fee they can pin your article/product to the top of the page.

LinkedIn will also look at the groups you are joining and give you recommendations based on your activity.

If you are thinking of becoming a thought leader or influencer in your industry you definitely need to consider creating a group of your own.

You have the option to create rules and also whether you want the group to be visible or not in search results.

If your group is unlisted it can add a bit of inclusivity to it and make people feel they are part of a community.

The important point to remember with groups though is to not be overly salesy and becoming an authoritative voice offering sound advice is a much better approach.

Finding the right people on LinkedIn

As we mentioned earlier LinkedIn is fantastic in reaching out to the decision makers within companies.

LinkedIn allows you to target people by their connections, location and also what company they work for.

Do you have leads from certain companies? If so, reach out to the decision makers within them by using the search below.

Once you find the people you would like to contact you can use the paid InMail option.

This allows you to promote your product or a piece of content right in their inbox. All the designs from LinkedIn are mobile responsive and messages are only delivered to people who are currently active on LinkedIn.

How LinkedIn can help you with your account-based marketing

Firstly it may be helpful to explain what we mean by account-based marketing.

ABM is a type of marketing that is mostly executed by enterprise organisations in the B2B sector.

It targets an individual within a company as well as the company itself, which is why it goes hand in hand with LinkedIn’s people search.

If you haven’t decided already it’s best to figure out who you believe the decision-makers or purchasers are within the companies of your target market. This information may already exist within your company so it’s worth asking.

How to target specific companies on Linkedin

LinkedIn allows you to match your companies list against the 13+ million LinkedIn pages they have on their system.

Via a CSV file, LinkedIn allows you to upload a list of 300,000 companies. The next time you are in your campaign manager screen you just have to choose Match based on a list of accounts to target your audience.

Be aware that if you are looking to target straight away that it may take up to 48 hours for your list to populated in LinkedIn.

There are a few elements to bear in mind when uploading your account list for targeting:

• Use LinkedIn’s template to ensure proper formatting
• Remove all formatting from your spreadsheet such as quotations before uploading
• The larger the list, the better chance of matching. Therefore ensure you have a minimum of 1,000 contacts
• Avoid adding too many filters to your campaigns as this can limit your scope

If you need help with B2B, Enterprise Saas marketing or Account Based Marketing, let’s have a chat.

How to target specific people on Linkedin

As we mentioned above you also have the option to target individual people based on your email list. This is fantastic for turning leads into sales.

It’s worth separating your lists into three categories in order to delivered tailored messaging for your SaaS product. These lists could be:

• Leads to convert
• Customer retention
• Winning back churned customers

You are also able to integrate LinkedIn with your content management platform. This ensures that your list will automatically upload in LinkedIn when you’ve generated a lead.

Similar to account targeting there are a few elements worth considering:

• Remove all formatting and use the LinkedIn template to ensure proper formatting
• Consider uploading a list of at least 10,000 contacts to achieve the best results
• Similar to account ads, avoid hyper-targeting and using too many templates

Using Hubspot to notify your sales team when a lead has been generated

Tailoring your messaging to your contact lists will help lead them down the funnel. But what happens when they are hot and are close to becoming a customer?

Once leads are submitted on Linkedin, using a tool such as Hubspot allows you to sync the leads automatically to your sales team for a quick follow up and potentially close.

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Hubspot also allows you to see additional contact information about a person once they have completed a form on your site. This includes their job title as well as their social profiles.

You also be able to see how they were referred to the website and what they do on your website even after they have completed a form.

All this information is completed in a nice timeline which is great ammunition for your sales team. From this they will be able to see what features they like most about your SaaS product before contacting them.

Hubspot also offer in built analytics which can give you insights in to which pages, offerings and referral sources are driving the most conversions for you.

Seeing how users navigate your site and which pages have the most value is vital to spot trends and drive more people to convert.

How your sales team can use the Hubspot Sales Extension

Hubspot has a Google Chrome sales extension that you can add to your browser.

One of the main benefits of it is that it allows you to track and log emails with your leads. This allows you to receive pop-up notifications when your recipient opens or clicks a link in the email.

The emails will also log within the customers profile so that you can see what communications have taken place and identify where they are in the sales process.

Hubspot also gives you the opportunity to schedule emails within the system. Hubspot looks at the time and days that have been most successful in regards to the emails and schedules them at an appropriate time.

There are an array of Hubspot tools that you can access directly through Gmail which is very beneficial for your sales team. This helps you speed up the process and reduces the admin time.

For example you can add commonly used snippets which appear underneath the subject line.

You can also save whole templates as well as track what documents or attachments are the most popular with your leads.

Your sales team can also save meeting or webinar links. This is very handy for the person in your sales team responsible for product demos.

Conclusion

If you are an enterprise company looking to promote your SaaS company then LinkedIn is the most powerful tool you can use.

If integrated with Hubspot this can transform your sales funnel to the next level. It’s vitally important however that you have an idea of buyer personas and which teams will be involved beforehand.

LinkedIn advertising should take place as part of a multi-channel marketing strategy that strives to raise brand awareness. Reviewing your analytics and basing your marketing efforts based on solid results throughout is a great way of ensuring a positive ROI.

If you need help with B2B, Enterprise Saas marketing or Account Based Marketing, let’s have a chat.

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