LinkedIn’s 1 billion members and 67 million company pages provide a goldmine of insights for B2B marketing. But tapping into LinkedIn’s potential requires monitoring capabilities reaching across these dispersed audiences and assets.
This guide explores how continuous LinkedIn tracking elevates your marketing strategies. You’ll discover use cases, tactics, and tools to unlock value through:
- Brand management
- Competitor analysis
- Account-based marketing
- Lead generation
- Market research
Let’s dive into the world of strategic LinkedIn monitoring and intelligence gathering. With the right approach, LinkedIn’s breadth and depth of professional data will transform your marketing.
The Marketing Power Within LinkedIn
As the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn offers unique advantages for B2B marketing including:
- Access to decision-makers – LinkedIn profiles provide employee roles, responsibilities, and contact details to enable direct engagement.
- Lead generation – Member demographics and interests allow highly targeted advertising and messaging.
- Thought leadership – Company Pages and Showcase Pages distribute high-value content to relevant audiences.
- Credibility and trust – LinkedIn’s professional nature provides a level of credibility beyond other social networks.
- Community and conversations – Users actively engage in industry discussions across groups, posts, and newsfeeds.
- Competitive intelligence – Track target accounts, prospects, and competitors in one platform.
Tapping into these opportunities requires dedicated monitoring across the ecosystem of LinkedIn pages, groups, posts, ads, and member profiles.
LinkedIn Brand Management
Active brand management is crucial on LinkedIn to understand how your company and products are perceived across stakeholders:
Brand Mention and Sentiment Monitoring
Regularly search brand name variations, products, and executives to find:
- Mentions in company/member posts
- Comments on LinkedIn articles referencing your brand
- Your brand added to member profiles
Analyze associated sentiment and topics to identify:
- Potential brand promoters and detractors
- Positive and negative perceptions or experiences
- Misconceptions to address in messaging
- Impact of PR or external events on brand perception
Trend Identification
Track spikes in brand mentions, shifts in sentiment, and trending topics:
- Monitor hashtag volume and brand association with key trends
- Stay on pulse of industry news, events, and issues
Influencer Engagement
Discover influential evangelists or critics:
- Build relationships with brand advocates through outreach and content sharing
- Address concerns voiced by critics constructively
Proactive brand tracking provides early warning signs of opportunities or threats. Ongoing monitoring protects and enhances your brand’s reputation.
Competitive Benchmarking
Gain powerful competitive intelligence by monitoring key LinkedIn competitor profiles:
Content Performance
Compare content marketing success:
- Engagement and reactions on competitor posts
- Blog and Showcase Page follower counts
- Employee thought leadership content reach
Track performance over time and identify winning topics, formats, and styles.
Followers and Community Growth
Benchmark community size and growth:
- Company Page followers
- Employee connections and content audience
- Group membership and activity
These reflect business interest and audience reach. Prioritize growing underperforming areas.
Products and Positioning
Monitor competitor product launches and messaging:
- New products added to Pages
- Shifts in positioning statements
- Expanded target customer profiles
Evaluate potential competitive threats and identify new market opportunities.
Continuous competitor tracking provides measurable benchmarks to surpass and guides your content roadmap and community building.
Target Key Accounts with Account-Based Marketing
LinkedIn monitoring supercharges account-based marketing (ABM) efforts by revealing deep insights on key accounts:
Ideal Customer Profiling
Create detailed profile summaries of target accounts including:
- Company size, industry, tech stack
- Leadership changes and org structure
- Current providers used
- Publicly stated pain points and needs
These inform personalized messaging and positioning.
Decision-Maker Identification
Pinpoint the exact individuals involved in purchase decisions:
- Research roles and responsibilities
- Connect on LinkedIn for warm outbound
Getting into the right hands boosts conversion rates.
Buyer Journey Tracking
Follow target account activity across LinkedIn:
- Pages followed, content interactions
- Group discussions and questions
- Job postings, new hires, events
Their digital body language indicates current priorities and challenges.
ABM powered by LinkedIn monitoring transforms scattershot outreach into highly targeted, relevant communication driving measurable pipeline growth.
Social Selling to Generate Leads
Beyond accounts, focus on tracking and engaging potential individual buyers through social selling:
Lead Identification
Leverage advanced search filters to identify prospects based on:
- Job title, industry, location
- Company size and technologies used
- Skills, experience, and interests
Saved searches automatically alert you to new prospects matching ideal customer criteria.
Lead Mapping
Visualize connections and relationships to your company:
- 2nd and 3rd degree connections
- Coworker connections and referrals
- Prospect activity on your Company Page
Assess the strength of existing touchpoints for warmer outreach.
Lead Nurturing
Monitor prospect engagement over time:
- Page follows, content likes, and shares
- Comments and discussions
- Job changes and expanded responsibilities
Create lead nurturing sequences based on digital body language.
Social selling depends on vigilantly monitoring prospects across the LinkedIn network. The right tools automate tracking and surface hot leads in real-time.
Market Research Made Easy
While monitoring focuses on existing targets, you can also leverage LinkedIn for broad exploratory research:
Audience Insight Mining
Search across member profiles to uncover trends like:
- Most mentioned skills and needs
- Largest industries and regions
- Common challenges and pain points
- Relevant technologies used
Pivot targeting and messaging based on audience priorities.
Competitive Intelligence
Broaden searches beyond current competitors to identify:
- Who competitors follow and mention
- Discussions referencing competitors
Detect blind spots and new competitive threats.
Price Benchmarks
Search for buyers referencing product prices:
- Pricing mentioned on profiles
- Budgets and quotes in group posts
Price appropriately based on buyer willingness to pay.
Treat LinkedIn’s millions of members like a giant focus group. Their collective commentary reveals product opportunities, messaging insights, and untapped markets.
Streamline Tracking with Specialized Tools
While manual searching provides basic monitoring, specialized tools like Mention automate the process for vastly higher efficiency:
Custom Alerts
Get real-time desktop and email alerts when:
- Your brand is mentioned
- Competitors are referenced
- Prospects hit trigger criteria
Alerts link directly back to the LinkedIn content.
Auto Monitoring and Reporting
Automatically track brands, keywords, companies, members, and groups with summary stats and reports.
Competitive Benchmarking
Compare volume and engagement for any brand pages and posts. Exportable rankings and charts visualize trends.
Insights Identification
AI instantly surfaces relevant news, opportunities, and threats based on monitoring.
CRM Integration
Push discovered leads automatically into CRM and sales workflows.
Tools like Mention transform manual searching into automated intelligence distribution – your marketing team’s greatest asset.
Ignite Growth through LinkedIn’s Hidden Potential
As this guide demonstrates, immense marketing value hides within LinkedIn’s ocean of companies, pages, groups, and members – if you know how to access it.
Regular monitoring provides a treasure trove of insights to:
- Defend and enhance your brand reputation
- Keep a pulse on competitors
- Engage prospects on their buyer journey
- Fine-tune targeting, messaging and content
But don’t rely on manual searches alone. SaaS automation accelerates monitoring, analysis, and integration with your MarTech stack.
Turn noise into intelligence. Let today be the day you begin harnessing the full breadth of LinkedIn to take your B2B marketing to new heights. The hidden potential waiting within the world’s professional network is ready to be unlocked.
Key LinkedIn Monitoring Takeaways:
- Tracking brand mentions identifies new influencers, promoters, and threats
- Competitor intelligence guides content planning and community growth
- Monitoring target accounts informs highly personalized ABM strategies
- Lead identification and nurturing boosts sales prospect pipelines
- Broad audience research reveals customer needs and market opportunities
- Automated tools like Mention scale LinkedIn tracking and analysis
What LinkedIn monitoring tactics resonated most with you? Let me know how I can help implement a deeper LinkedIn marketing strategy.
This study was based on the eBook: Leveraging LinkedIn Monitoring for smarter marketing
