With an active network of over 630 million professional users, it’s no surprise that LinkedIn tops the charts as B2B marketers’ favorite social platform. In the last year alone, LinkedIn has reported an 60% increase in content creation across its network. What’s clear is that LinkedIn as a B2B marketing channel is here to stay.
What may not always be clear is how to stay on top of new B2B marketing trends, and effectively using these techniques within the healthcare industry. At Activate Health, our passion lies in leveraging a deep knowledge of this space and new marketing approaches to develop strategies that meet our clients’ unique goals.
We’re sharing three of our best practices that help you employ LinkedIn’s advanced audience targeting and robust features for marketing to healthcare executives.
Don’t underestimate the power of personal pages
For some, a LinkedIn personal page can be a great tool for reconnecting with old colleagues or searching for a new role, but in reality, personal pages can play a powerful role in your B2B marketing strategy.
During a time when growing company pages organically is at its most difficult, personal pages can be essential to driving new audiences to your company page in order to reach target audiences and build your following. When working with a new organization, we make it a point to identify influencers and key players within the organization that can contribute to the company’s broader social strategy. These internal influencers, who have often spent decades building connections within the healthcare space, can make a significant impact on your marketing results by simply sharing and engaging with your company page content.
If you’re working with an agency or a larger team, you’ll likely want to build out a strategy for each of your influencers to ensure that you’re taking advantage of every opportunity to cross-promote content while helping to build out their thought leadership profile. While it’s important to remember that your company doesn’t “own” its employees’ LinkedIn pages, most executives are willing and able to use their own pages to help bolster their employer’s presence. So don’t underestimate the power of personal pages in accomplishing your B2B goals!
Find your niche in LinkedIn Groups
With over 2 million groups, your target audience is just a search away. Much like other social networks, LinkedIn offers online communities that center around specific interests, fields of study and professional affiliations. Their group tab invites members to request to join groups that connect them with an audience of individuals that share the same interest. This can be especially valuable when marketing to healthcare executives in specific industries or professional societies, including the American Healthcare Executives & Hospital Administration Forum, to name one example.
While often an overlooked strategy, LinkedIn groups can be key to bolstering your awareness and thought leadership efforts by giving you a hyper-targeted channel for distributing content. Too good to be true? LinkedIn groups do need to be approached with a well-planned strategy that doesn’t result in your account being banned for breaking group rules around promotional content.
At Activate Health, we carefully research groups to make sure that our clients’ content not only is a good fit, but also provides value to each audience member. Resources such as white papers, articles or case studies are ideal types of content that your audience may find helpful and won’t put you at risk of coming off as overly promotional.
Don’t be afraid to explore paid
Once you’ve updated your profile, optimized your content and posted in your first group, it may be time to explore best practices beyond organic tactics. LinkedIn’s native advertising platform offers a treasure-trove of unique ways for those marketing to healthcare executives to reach their precise target audience without going over budget. This strategy is ideally used to complement your organic efforts to build even more momentum over time.
With endless targeting parameters that let you narrow down your audience by factors like company size, job title and even exact company name, it’s no wonder that 80% of social B2B leads come from LinkedIn. You can also drill down deeply into all types of broad categories. For example, starting at the “healthcare organization” level, you can find population health executives employed for more than 10 years at health insurers of a certain size, and serving specific geographies. Not only does LinkedIn deliver your target audience, but the platform also allows you to capture them during a moment when business is top-of-mind.
Before developing a targeted LinkedIn advertising campaign, we recommend drafting a clear and compelling call-to-action. If you have a recent webinar, a white paper, or even a blog post that your organization wants to amplify, LinkedIn’s many ad formats give you a variety of ways to reach healthcare executives to drive engagement and even lead generation. You can also set up separate campaigns for multiple variables—trying out different creative content, multimedia formats (video versus images, for example) and audiences. And you can pause these campaigns at any time if they aren’t performing at your desired level.
If you’re not sure where to get started, LinkedIn’s recently published Ads Guide can help you determine the best format to accomplish your goals.
When it comes to marketing to healthcare executives, LinkedIn is undoubtedly near the top of the list for most B2B marketers. Its advanced feature set and a bit of creativity can help you reach your ideal healthcare audience and develop compelling, value-added connections. While these are just a few of the many best practices you can leverage, these tips will help you get started on the path toward more effective, highly targeted marketing. If you want to learn more about these tips, and additional strategies for marketing to healthcare executives, contact our team today.