How to Use LinkedIn Analytics for a B2B Audience
LinkedIn has developed into a career-building network (it will be 20 years old in 2023) that enables users to construct a personal brand and present their professional portfolios online to peers, companies, and recruiters. LinkedIn will celebrate its 20th anniversary in the year 2023.
LinkedIn is an excellent platform for business-to-business marketing and networking, making it a valuable resource for professionals interested in expanding their professional connections.
The network, which has more than 850 million members and is present in more than 200 countries, provides enormous prospects for B2B enterprises in all sectors.
The beauty of LinkedIn is that its analytics are well-matched to the requirements of a B2B company, making it possible for these businesses to make sound decisions regarding their marketing strategies and to make investments that are effective. If you want to be successful with LinkedIn, just like with any other social media network, you need to have a solid strategy in place.
Continue reading this article if you are a B2B marketer or organization to learn some of the ways that LinkedIn and its analytics can be of use to you and to find out how they can help you.
How to Get LinkedIn Analytics Up and Running
Creating a LinkedIn account is simple, and once you do so, you will immediately have access to the platform that it uses for its analytics. The only thing you need to do is go to LinkedIn Pages and click the button that says “Create Page.” This will take you to a screen where you can select the kind of page you want to create for your LinkedIn profile.
After selecting “Corporate,” you will be taken to a page where you can fill out a form that requires you to upload a company logo or other picture to represent you.
When that is finished, all you have to do is click the “Create Page” button, and you will be ready to go!
Logging onto your LinkedIn profile and opening your company page are the two steps you need to take in order to access the LinkedIn analytics tools and dashboard. Keep in mind that you can assign certain users the role of admin or “analyst,” and that these users are the only ones who will have access to the analytics.
You will be able to monitor your LinkedIn analytics as soon as you have the appropriate rights and access in place.
Different Categories of LinkedIn Analytics
You can choose from six different kinds of tools and analytics offered by LinkedIn. These are intended to measure particular metrics on your company page and provide you with easy access to data as well as insights that can be used to increase engagement and improve overall performance.
1) Analysis of Site Traffic
The visitor analytics provide you with information on the total number of people who have visited your company page. It really is that easy!
This section displays the total number of page views, unique visitors, and clicks on custom buttons that have occurred over the course of the past 30 days, as well as the % change that has occurred between each month.
Visitor analytics will tell you who is visiting your website, enabling you to recognize patterns that will assist you in creating material that is more relevant to the individuals who are viewing it. The objective would be to not only get people interested in your brand so that they learn more about it, but also to get them to follow you on LinkedIn and raise your overall engagement there.
Therefore, if you want to increase your visibility and determine how many people are visiting your site to check out your material, you should begin here. You are able to filter your data through visitor analytics by time periods, page sections, page views, and unique visitors. Additionally, you are able to split down your data into particular criteria such as job function, seniority, firm size, and industry.
2) Analyses of the Followers
When it comes to marketing in the “long game,” the number of followers that you are able to recruit is one of the most significant KPIs to track.
You may see information about the demographics and origins of your followers through the Follower Analytics function on LinkedIn. The goal is to inform you of who is following the page associated with your organization as well as the most effective ways to interact with them.
You have successfully acquired the equivalent of a “repeat customer” if you are successful in persuading visitors to your LinkedIn page that they should appreciate your company or the material on the page enough to “subscribe” and agree to receive your regular marketing emails.
The variety of followers that you have can be an extremely important factor in determining the success of your business plans. This is true regardless of whether you are attempting to attract new business partners or investors, experienced experts, or simply make new contacts.
You may divide the characteristics of your followers into a variety of categories, such as their location, profession, industry, and the size of their firm, using the Follower Demographics feature.
3) Keep Your Analytics Up to Date
You are able to monitor how well your LinkedIn postings are performing thanks to the function known as Update Analytics. You will be able to evaluate the performance of each based on the quality, format, and topic published on your company’s website. This will be of use to you.
This function meter is a veritable treasure trove of long-term data that can be put to useful action because it monitors the level of engagement with all of the content you produce, whether it be videos, articles, photographs, or any mix of these components.
When you have a good understanding of your most recent statistics, you will be able to distinguish between the content that resonates with your audience and the messaging or content that does not. Check read our post titled “7 Popular Content Types and How to Use Them” on our site if you are interested in experimenting with a new type of content style.
The Update Highlights function provides you with information regarding the type of response you receive on a monthly basis. You may monitor the performance of your material over your timeline by looking at the comments, likes, and shares that are represented in this section.
4) Analytical Tools for Employee Advocacy
The content quality and level of engagement of the posts that your employees share on LinkedIn can be analyzed with the help of a tool called Employee Advocacy Analytics.
The number of recommendations made for employees who are connected to your LinkedIn page, the number of reshares, and the number of comments made by LinkedIn members on the postings are the metrics that are featured here.
This feature is an excellent tool for determining the level of engagement that your employees have with your material and, as a result, with other people’s posts on LinkedIn. When all is said and done, your employees should be your best advocates; therefore, encouraging them to share information that is relevant to the brand is an excellent method to increase brand awareness and establish an employer brand that attracts and keeps talent.
5) Analytical Tools for the Talent Brand
These metrics are connected to the Career Pages on LinkedIn, and they provide guidance on how to enhance your engagement with the target demographic that you have identified. Companies who are interested in engaging new talent and attracting new talent to the organization should take this into consideration.
It will assist you in showcasing your brand as an employer, promoting open positions, engaging and connecting with applicants, and communicating the story of your organization.
6) Analysis of the Competition
This feature, which will be implemented at the end of 2021 to take the place of the one called “Companies to Track,” is an excellent tool for keeping tabs on what your rivals are up to and evaluating how you stack up against them.
This tool can compare follower metrics and organic content analytics, and it can be found under the tab labeled “Analytics.” At the moment, access to this function is restricted to a certain amount of users. You may view a breakdown of the number of reactions, comments, and shares by clicking the value that is displayed in the Total engagement column.
You will be able to acquire valuable insight into the followers of your competitors and learn more about the types of material that are successful for them by doing this.
Which Metrics Should You Be Tracking on LinkedIn?
To create an effective plan with analytics at the center for any social media platform, the first step is to establish your company’s goals and to set key performance indicators (KPIs). Once you have those, you will be able to select the appropriate metrics for your company.
Some essential metrics from LinkedIn’s six available analytics will matter to your business and help you assess performance so that you can improve both organic and paid posts. These metrics can be found here.
Traffic
You’ll be able to monitor the evolution of your traffic over time with the help of LinkedIn analytics. You will be able to notice peaks and troughs in activity as a result of this (or, if you’re lucky, a steady ascending line).
You will also be able to monitor whether the majority of your traffic is coming from mobile or desktop devices. You will gain a better understanding of the goals and preferences of your audience as a result of this. If a significant number of your LinkedIn followers access the platform via mobile devices, taking advantage of this feature can make it easier to create content that is optimized for mobile users.
Impressions
The number of times that your post has been viewed is the number of impressions it has received. This statistic is essential since it not only informs you of the frequency with which your content is viewed but also enhances the likelihood that users will engage with it.
You should also track unique impressions. This is different from the number of impressions, which can count for the same individual viewing the post many times. This counts the number of unique LinkedIn users who saw your post.
You can also better comprehend reach with the assistance of one-of-a-kind impressions, which will allow you to better track brand awareness. If you have a greater reach, it indicates that you have the ability to attract prospects and customers, which is a fantastic indicator for any B2B marketer.
Engagement
The engagement rate on LinkedIn is computed by taking the total number of interactions, clicks, and new followers obtained and dividing that figure by the total number of post impressions. It would be beneficial to include this in your research because it provides an overarching perspective on how well material is performing on your LinkedIn channel.
It is important to highlight the findings of a 2022 B2B study conducted by Socialinsider, which indicated that small to medium-sized accounts have a larger probability of being engaged with video content on LinkedIn because it receives more impressions. Images create the best levels of engagement for middle accounts, whereas native documents (those generated using a third-party application like Word) generate the highest levels of engagement for large accounts (more than 100k followers).
Clicks, also referred to as CTR
Clicks are a marketer’s best friend, and for good reason: they indicate that someone found the content you posted on LinkedIn to be interesting enough to take some sort of action.
Your clickthrough rate (also known as CTR) is expressed as a percentage and is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks on your posts by the total number of impressions. This will provide you with a decent indication of the interaction per post, as well as assist you identify what content is successful, which will allow you to plan for future LinkedIn efforts.
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Using these analytics, you will be able to determine the level of interaction that your LinkedIn posts are receiving and observe how people are responding.
These metrics have the potential to be considered vanity metrics; therefore, you should carefully consider why you want to include them in your overall LinkedIn strategy. If increasing brand recognition is a key objective of the activities you want to pursue on LinkedIn, then these indicators, especially the number of shares, can assist demonstrate engagement with your brand profile and its growth.
Demographics
While LinkedIn allows you to connect with individuals across the world, if you are targeting a certain region or territory in your B2B activities, it can be very valuable to identify where users are coming from.
It might assist you to make modifications in your material to cater to a specific audience. For example, if you want to target users in the United States, make sure you are utilizing U.S spelling and language.
Other areas to think about include video views and following growth as they can give you valuable insights.
Your LinkedIn: Wrap-up
As you can see, the activities you carry out on LinkedIn can provide you with a variety of information on the people who consume your material as well as the content itself. The key is to have a thorough understanding of your company’s goals, to establish KPIs that are both relevant and attainable, and to evaluate analytics on a regular basis in order to adjust and improve your content.
First and foremost, you need to establish a social media plan that includes LinkedIn if you want to be successful in converting B2B prospects into customers.
