When it comes to B2B marketing, whom do you target? Do you go after the company or a particular individual? Whichever choice you make, there are, of course, solutions available to help you achieve your goal.
For those who seek to target companies, Lynkos, a B2B networking platform helps marketing professionals find leads among its company listings. According to Lynkos’ CEO Federico Cella, though “Lynkos is not a marketing tool per se,” he explained, it “empowers the marketing tools you already use.”
Lynkos currently lists over 2.2 million business from 953 industries in 228 countries around the world. By the time you read this, though, those numbers will likely have already changed, as it is growing at the rate of 20% per month.
Lynkos established profiles for companies filled in by the information found by hundreds of robots crawling the web to discover all relevant public data. Putting together the information in one place makes it easier for a business to find a B2B prospect in the market for their goods or services in their geographic location.
The lists derived from that search can be exported to a company’s marketing tools or integrated into its CRM. They also have the option of interacting with other businesses to bring new opportunities to light and obtain qualified leads. These “integrations add more value” for businesses that use the platform.
As LinkedIn does for individuals, company listings can be free or premium. Lynkos also derives revenue from transactional charges and third party ads. Businesses that want fuller control over their profiles can elect to set one up from scratch and delete the one put in from the automated tools.
LinkedIn itself can be also used for effective B2B marketing, as Kyle Milan, the founder of 5-Fold Agency, says. Among the things be recommends for clients is leveraging LinkedIn Match Audience. Based on the results seen with one of their own clients, they “have seen an increase in overall engagement, CTR,” as well as “a slight reduction in Bounce rate.
Milan explained that before LinkedIn introduced that feature this past May, “you could only upload a minimal amount of companies or select your target demographic by using their standard filtering criteria,” within set categories like industry, title, function, etc. “Now, you upload an existing list of either contacts or companies that you have on a spreadsheet that was converted to a ‘.csv’ file.”
Users put in at least 300 entries that LinkedIn applies to find those who fit the specified criteria. “This is an extremely powerful tool for companies that have been compiling prospecting list over an extended period of time, or companies that know the exact customers that they want to get the attention of,” Milan says. It opens up the possibility for far more directed ads and can inform “multiple micro-campaigns” based on the breakdown of the primary “lists into categories and sub-categories.”
As for the next step: getting access to the decision makers, Milan recommends using the Sponsored Post & Sponsored InMail options on LinkedIn. Both can be very effective in delivering your campaigns right to the people who make the purchasing decision with content that is designed to pique their interest.
However, you need to do some homework first: “You must first have some understanding of the position/industry/function of the decision makers so you can filter to them only, or upload the list through match audience.”
Just as it does for B2C, the strategy for B2B marketing starts with knowing who your target market is and reaching them with compelling content.
