LinkedIn has established itself as the leader for B2B content marketing. LinkedIn officially states that nearly 97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn as their primary content marketing tool. This number is justified as nearly 50 million companies are registered in LinkedIn and a B2B marketer has to look no further than LinkedIn to market their product to businesses. But is LinkedIn all about B2B marketing? What about marketing directly to the consumers? After all, LinkedIn has nearly 690 million users which is nothing but 690 million prospective customers for your product.

One reason why B2C marketers refrain from using LinkedIn could be its association with businesses and enterprises, an inevitable association. What these marketers fail to understand is that the core of all these businesses is employees who can be your potential consumers. Thankfully, some B2C marketers have started using LinkedIn for their marketing efforts and they are killing it. And here are 6 reasons why these marketers and we think that LinkedIn is a great B2C marketing platform:

• Educated Target Audience

When you are selling a product through the power of words, the right target audience is a necessity. This audience should be educated and be able to understand your message clearly and in the way you intended. What better place to find such a target audience than LinkedIn which is the largest professional platform in the world where educated professionals are signing up at the rate of 2 members per second. We do not deny that you will find an educated audience on other platforms, but the proportion of such an audience will always be lower than LinkedIn.

• The Trust Factor

Unlike other social media channels such as Facebook or Instagram, LinkedIn garners a certain level of trust from the general audience owing to the type of members it has and also the various reasons why it is used. Also, the number of fake accounts is less as compared to platforms like Facebook. When a blanket of trust surrounds a brand, it becomes extremely easy for marketers to convince the buyers about the features of the product and make them purchase it.

• Early Mover Advantage

The notion that LinkedIn is a B2B marketer’s haven will not go away any time soon. Due to this, many B2C marketers are skeptical about the usefulness of LinkedIn as a B2C marketing tool. This poses a huge opportunity for brands to beat their competition and be the first to market their products on LinkedIn. Let us never forget that the early bird always catches the worm.

• The audience is less prone to ads

The audiences of LinkedIn are generally not bombarded with ads or promotions as in other platforms such as Facebook or Google. Sponsored ads are a regular feature on Facebook that keeps popping up as you scroll down through your feed in the Facebook app. Often, viewers are turned off by the sheer volume of ads which causes many members to ignore the ads even if some of them are relevant to them and they had an idea to purchase the product or service. On the other hand, LinkedIn with a lesser number of ads lowers the chances of users ignoring them which directly translates to better brand awareness and a higher chance of a conversion.

• Unique targeting capabilities

LinkedIn allows brands and marketers to target audiences in a way that is not possible in any other platform. Let us take the example of Mercedes Benz, the famous luxury automobile brand from Germany, that used LinkedIn to target those members of LinkedIn who had recently climbed up their career ladder. Mercedes Benz understood that such users would have a higher tendency to invest in a luxury car like theirs, the possibility to reward themselves for their success. These luxury brands can also use LinkedIn to target only those people based on their role and position which gives a direct idea of how financially sound they are and their propensity to buy their product.

• Possibility to market through other means

Unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn poses a plethora of opportunities to promote your brand in various ways. One such way is to post jobs on LinkedIn. Millions of employees search for jobs on LinkedIn every month and when they find jobs posted by your company, it arouses their curiosity and they tend to visit your website which indirectly improves the visibility of your brand. As a bonus, you can always post company values, information about the product, and customer stories in LinkedIn, all of which will have an impact on your sales.

To sum up, LinkedIn is one of the hottest selling real estates currently for marketers. Though the number of leads generated might be lower as compared to Google or other major social media platforms, LinkedIn wins them over in terms of the quality of leads produced due to the ability to hyper-target and due to the genuineness of the accounts.  LinkedIn also claims that its average cost per lead is nearly 28% lower than Google Adwords, which corresponds to a higher ROI. Though this predominantly includes B2B leads, there is no reason why such a high ROI cannot be replicated on B2C marketing. The type of audience, the purpose of their visits all makes LinkedIn an ideal playground for B2C marketers to experiment with their marketing activities and improve their brand awareness and the conversion.