LinkedIn B2B Marketing for Industrial and Manufacturing Companies

LinkedIn B2B marketing is the use of LinkedIn company pages, employee profiles, content and social selling to build relationships with business buyers. For industrial and manufacturing companies, research shows three things matter most. Being present and responsive on social platforms strengthens B2B customer relationships. B2B marketers see influence as rooted in expertise and long-term relationships, so engineers, experts and salespeople should be part of the plan. And social selling works when management backs it with a strategy, tools and content, rather than leaving each salesperson to figure it out.

Why LinkedIn matters for industrial companies

Some manufacturers use LinkedIn mainly for recruiting. The research suggests it can do more.

Karampela, Lacka and McLean (2020) surveyed 200 customers of UK-based B2B firms. A supplier's presence on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook had a positive effect on four measures of relationship strength: commitment, intimacy, satisfaction and perceived partner quality. Interactivity improved perceived partner quality, and responsiveness improved commitment. The authors' practical advice was to focus first on simply being present, then to answer customers' questions and interact with them.

B2B firms have been slower to use social media than consumer brands. In an early survey of UK B2B SMEs, over a quarter were using social networking sites for brand objectives, most often to attract new customers. The biggest barrier was a sense that social media was not relevant to their sector, and most users did not measure effectiveness at all (Michaelidou, Siamagka & Christodoulides, 2011). A later comparison of 449 organizations found that B2B firms rated social media as less effective and less important for relationships than B2C and mixed firms did (Iankova et al., 2019).

That gap is an opportunity. If your competitors still see LinkedIn as irrelevant, a consistent presence stands out.

My own doctoral research gives another reason to show up. I built my brand equity framework around interaction: relationships form from many small exchanges between a customer and a company over time. In my meta-analysis of 71 brand equity studies, the customer–brand relationship, made up of those interactions at different touchpoints, had a strong association with brand equity (ρ = 0.61; ρ is a correlation on a scale from −1 to 1), and trust was stronger still (ρ = 0.69; Farrokhi, 2020). A comment answered on LinkedIn is a small interaction, but relationships are built from small interactions.

One question I raised in the dissertation is still open: whether online interactions build brand equity as well as in-person ones do. Until there is better evidence, treat LinkedIn as a complement to site visits, trade shows and sales calls rather than a replacement for them.

Treat LinkedIn as a strategy

Cartwright, Liu and Raddats (2021) reviewed research on social media in B2B marketing and found that most of it treated social media as short-term tactics. They identified three relationship-oriented uses that a strategy should combine:

1. Sales facilitation: helping salespeople find, understand and engage buyers.
2. Integrated communication: making social media part of how the brand communicates across channels.
3. Employee engagement: involving staff as voices for the company.

Leadership matters. In a study of B2B firms, top management participation strongly influenced how far social media was built into marketing functions. The payoff was uneven: using social media in channel management improved both sales performance and relationship development, using it in product development improved relationship development only, and using it for pricing and promotion showed no significant effect on either (Maduku, 2024).

What to post on an industrial company page

Research on B2B posts gives some guidance on content and style.

• Use both reasons and feelings. In an analysis of more than 7,000 Fortune 500 tweets, B2B marketers used more emotional than functional appeals, and neither B2B nor B2C marketers used "hard sell" messages (Swani, Brown & Milne, 2014). On Facebook, corporate brand names, functional and emotional appeals and information search cues increased the popularity of B2B posts compared with B2C posts (Swani et al., 2017).
• Make posts easy to process. A study of 229,272 tweets from 156 B2B brands found that linguistic features which help readers process a post tended to raise engagement, and features that hinder processing tended to lower it (Deng et al., 2021).
• Show the work. Equipment running, installations, test results, factory floor problems solved. These are the posts competitors without real capability cannot copy.
• Point to your own site. Use posts to send readers to articles, case studies and guides on your website, so the attention builds your search presence too. Our guide to B2B content marketing explains how to build that library.

The emotional side of B2B messaging is covered in more depth in emotions in B2B buying.

Your engineers and experts are your best channel

Cartwright, Liu and Davies (2022) interviewed 22 senior marketing professionals about influencer marketing in B2B. They found that B2B marketers prefer the idea of "influential marketing": influence based on trustworthiness, expertise, professionalism and the exchange of know-how, rooted in long-term, industry-specific relationships. That describes a respected applications engineer far better than a paid influencer.

Manufacturing research points the same way. Chirumalla, Oghazi and Parida (2018) studied two manufacturing companies and how social media could improve the working relationship between marketing and R&D. They described adoption in three phases: coordination, cooperation and coproduction. Getting engineers involved in social media is a process that takes time and structure.

In practice, that means:

• Help two to four technical experts build credible LinkedIn profiles that state what they know.
• Give them a simple routine: share one field observation, answer one question or comment on one industry development each week.
• Have marketing do the editing and scheduling, so the expert only supplies the substance.
• Reshare their posts from the company page.

This is thought leadership at its most practical.

Social selling on LinkedIn

Social selling is the salesperson-level version of this work. Ancillai, Terho, Cardinali and Pascucci (2019) defined it as using social and digital channels to understand, connect with and engage influencers, prospects and customers at relevant points in their buying journey, in order to build valuable business relationships.

The evidence on results is encouraging:

• Three activities. Terho, Giovannetti and Cardinali (2022) developed measures for social selling and confirmed three dimensions: insight generation, connecting and engagement. Social selling worked through salesperson thought leadership and acquisition performance to raise sales performance.
• Management makes it happen. The same study found that management drives social selling through a social media strategy, social media sales tools and content support from the firm.
• Service, not just prospecting. In a study of 171 B2B salespeople, social media use was linked to value-oriented prospecting and proactive servicing of customers, and all three sales activities studied were linked to performance. These links were stronger when the salesperson's peers also used social media (Bowen et al., 2021).
• Social capital. Salespeople's social media use built market knowledge and reputation, and indirectly networking. These drove value co-creation with customers, which improved cross-selling and up-selling (Itani, Badrinarayanan & Rangarajan, 2023).

A qualitative study of 32 B2B sales professionals adds a caution about how to roll it out. Social selling practices emerged from the bottom up, through three kinds of work salespeople did, which the authors call promotion, reconciliation and disruption. That work could spread new practices or stall them. The authors encourage firms to support salespeople's own initiatives rather than control them (Schmitt, Casenave & Pallud, 2021).

A LinkedIn plan for an industrial company

1. Fix the basics. A complete company page that states who you serve, what you make and where you operate, with a link to your website. Make sure key staff list the company correctly.
2. Choose two or three themes. Tie them to your positioning and your buyers' problems, such as uptime, energy cost or compliance.
3. Name your experts. Pick the engineers and specialists who will post, and set up an editing routine.
4. Equip sales. Give salespeople content they can share, a short guide to social selling and the tools to track it, following Terho et al. (2022).
5. Respond fast. Answer comments and messages promptly. Responsiveness was linked to commitment (Karampela et al., 2020).
6. Link everything back to your website. Your site is where buyers check specifications, case studies and contact details. See what makes a B2B website work for industrial buyers.
7. Use LinkedIn around events. Before a show, post what you will exhibit and book meetings. After it, follow up with the people you met. Our guide to trade show marketing covers the full sequence.
8. Measure what matters. Track engagement from target accounts, connections with buying center members, conversations started, meetings booked and opportunities influenced. Follower counts on their own say little.

Frequently asked questions

Is LinkedIn worth it for manufacturers?

Research on B2B customers found that a supplier's social media presence, including LinkedIn, strengthened commitment, satisfaction and perceived partner quality (Karampela et al., 2020). Judge it by the conversations it starts with your target accounts.

Should an industrial company post from the company page or from employees?

Both. The company page gives you a home base. Employees and experts give you credibility and reach. B2B marketers describe effective influence as rooted in expertise and long-term relationships (Cartwright et al., 2022).

How often should a B2B company post on LinkedIn?

No study we reviewed gives a reliable posting frequency for industrial companies. Choose a pace your experts can keep for months, such as one useful post a week, and judge it by the conversations it starts.

What is social selling?

Salespeople using social and digital channels to understand, connect with and engage buyers at relevant points in their journey, to build business relationships (Ancillai et al., 2019).

How do you measure LinkedIn B2B marketing?

Measure engagement from target accounts, new connections in buying centers, conversations and meetings started, and opportunities influenced, rather than likes and followers alone.

The bottom line

Pick one engineer whose knowledge your customers respect, and help them publish one useful post a week for three months, with marketing doing the editing. Track how many customer conversations it starts. AXXEN's Demand Generation work builds content and distribution systems like this for industrial companies. For where LinkedIn fits in the wider plan, see the B2B marketing strategy playbook.

About the author

Mo Farrokhi, PhD, is the founder of AXXEN in Calgary, Alberta. His path runs from electrical engineering through an MBA and a PhD in marketing to industry roles, including VP Marketing & Product at a TSX-listed clean-tech company. AXXEN builds marketing systems for technology, manufacturing and industrial companies that have outgrown ad-hoc marketing.

Sources

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