B2B marketers can utilize LinkedIn to generate leads and establish brand recognition with business audiences. A properly optimized profile and company page increase discoverability via searches with relevant keywords.
LinkedIn makes it easy and efficient to reach your target audience without them leaving the site, with native documents (such as original reports or trend forecasts ) typically garnering higher engagement rates than other forms of content postings.
1. Create a Company Page
LinkedIn provides the ideal venue for hospitality companies to showcase their services. Unlike social networks like Facebook or Instagram that reach a broader audience, B2B-centric platforms such as LinkedIn allow you to target specific industries, job titles or individuals with your content.
An optimized LinkedIn company page can set your business on the path towards success and enhance its credibility, by providing an opportunity to demonstrate industry expertise and establish direct contact with potential clients.
To create a company page on LinkedIn, click on the Work icon from your homepage and choose between “Company” or “Showcase Page.” Once selected, LinkedIn will request information on you and your headquarters address as well as industry choices from which your company operates – either from their list or by typing your own.
Your next steps include providing your company’s website, logo and tagline – the latter should emphasize what value your hospitality services can bring other businesses – plus up to 20 specialties that describe your hospitality company – these words can then be searched through within the platform and beyond! Adding these keywords can help your company page appear during relevant searches within it or beyond it.
Maintain your company page regularly by posting updates, following LinkedIn’s 3-2-1 rule for content creation: For every six posts you publish on LinkedIn, three should cover industry-wide trends and predictions; two can focus more on organizational or thought leadership pieces–allowing your team to showcase its skillset as well as community involvement efforts; while one directly related to hospitality services like events, marketing campaigns or alternative uses of hotel meeting spaces.
2. Optimize Your Profile
LinkedIn is a professional social networking website designed for business to business (B2B) hospitality services looking to elevate their brand, connect with key contacts, and remain updated on industry insights and trends. As such, LinkedIn makes an excellent tool for expanding their services on an international scale.
Success on LinkedIn depends upon creating an optimized profile that presents your business in its best light, including having a professional headshot, adding relevant keywords, and offering relevant content that highlights your expertise and experience.
Use LinkedIn to your advantage by optimizing your title with keywords that describe your services or niche market, such as “hospitality,” “events,” or “corporate travel.” Furthermore, take advantage of LinkedIn’s Specialties field to showcase areas of expertise. By taking these steps, potential customers will easily be able to locate you when searching LinkedIn for products or services you provide.
Make sure your profile includes your website address and a contact form to entice visitors to take the next step in connecting with you, and ensure all contact details such as email and phone numbers remain current.
LinkedIn’s Profile Video feature is often underused. This tool allows you to record an introductory video up to 30 seconds long that serves as an introduction for visitors who come to your profile, showing off properties or team members authentically and engagingly. Furthermore, adding logos or brand colors into this video further elevates it!
3. Share Your Own Content
To maximize LinkedIn as an effective marketing platform for B2B hospitality services, it’s crucial that your hotel create original content that resonates with its target audience. This may involve blog posts, case studies, videos, infographics and any other form of media that highlight its expertise or sets it apart from competitors.
Posting original content provides direct communication with potential clients and helps build the know, like and trust factor. LinkedIn allows users to leave comments below any post, providing another avenue for engagement while drawing more eyes onto your material.
LinkedIn research indicates that publishing multiple types of content – photos, video, infographics or otherwise – leads to higher levels of engagement on its platform. Therefore, sharing photos, video or infographics in addition to updates about your company will lead to greater levels of success on LinkedIn.
Utilizing social media distribution tools and calendars can streamline this process and ensure your updates reach their target audiences at the most optimal times. According to research by LinkedIn, sharing during business hours (typically 10am-12pm on Tuesday through Thursday) has shown to be most successful as this is when most LinkedIn users are online and active on the platform.
Submitting content through LinkedIn groups can also be an excellent way of disseminating it and reaching new audiences that may otherwise not have known about you or its offerings – especially hotels and hospitality-related companies! Joining groups focused on travel and tourism professionals or group business planners could open doors that might not otherwise have existed for your hotel or its offerings.
4. Encourage Employee Advocacy
As a B2B platform, LinkedIn offers hospitality services unique opportunities to market their offerings. However, it can be challenging to distinguish yourself among a sea of competitors; an effective content marketing strategy requires setting clear goals. By identifying key metrics aligning with these goals and monitoring progress against them using Databox or similar analytics tools on LinkedIn, tracking success becomes much simpler and understandable.
To expand the reach of your marketing campaign, consider tapping into employees’ networks through LinkedIn employee advocacy. Employee advocacy involves sharing company-related posts on personal profiles in order to drive organic social media traffic, build brand recognition and gain new leads – an incredibly efficient marketing tactic when implemented properly.
Step one in getting employees involved with your LinkedIn marketing strategy should be to inform them about its goals. This could involve explaining what you hope to achieve through the program – such as increased visibility, more traffic, and better SEO rankings – or providing them with company-related content so messaging remains consistent.
Enhancing employee advocacy on LinkedIn is a powerful way for hospitality companies to boost overall visibility and attract qualified leads. Employee advocacy on the platform also shortens sales cycles and increases chances of closing deals faster, providing employees with increased opportunities for networking. Step one should be to educate employees on what benefits come with employing LinkedIn marketing strategy; such as shorter sales cycles, enhanced credibility, and greater networking potential.
When developing a LinkedIn community-based marketing strategy, it’s crucial that you select an audience that will be interested in what you offer. This ensures your messages reach potential customers most likely to convert. For instance, Sephora’s community includes beauty and cosmetics enthusiasts who are highly engaged with its products and services, creating super users for its brand who enhance customer loyalty while helping the company meet its business goals.
5. Create a Showcase Page
As B2B hospitality marketers, you simply cannot ignore one of the world’s leading professional social networks: LinkedIn offers many opportunities for businesses looking to market and attract new clients. While many hotels and tourism businesses choose Facebook Pages over optimized LinkedIn Company Pages in terms of visibility and reach; LinkedIn may offer even greater targeted visibility and access.
Showcase Pages are extensions of Company Pages that allow businesses and organizations to highlight specific products, services and locations with larger hero images and newspaper-style layout for content posts. Showcase pages may be found under Affiliated Pages on a Company Page or may even link directly to personal LinkedIn profiles – for instance Microsoft maintains both an initial profile as well as showcase pages dedicated to each of its different products.
LinkedIn recently unveiled an option that allows businesses to add showcase sub-pages to their main profile, providing businesses an effective way to segment their audiences by offering visitors the ability to follow pages focused on specific interests that match up better with what’s relevant for them and reduce time wasted reading irrelevant material.
Log into LinkedIn, navigate to Pages tab and click “Create a Showcase Page.” Select from available options and provide information about your product or service – such as photos, videos and a link back to where visitors can learn more on website or landing page – this showcase page. Creating special events to promote showcase page on company pages or groups you belong can also help spread awareness, as can resharing posts between Showcase Page and personal update stream for maximum reach.