LinkedIn is an awesome tool to acquire new leads. The tools it provides allow their users to easily establish important connections with relevant players in their industry. If you are not generating leads via LinkedIn marketing you should.
In this contribution we will be addressing how this can be done by contextualising this effort with a broad LinkedIn marketing strategy. Let’s start then.
Optimising Your Profile
Building a professional LinkedIn profile is key for success in this social media platform. A good profile will start building your credibility and, at the same time, identify you as someone who works in the industry.
You should, therefore, start by having a clear and professional picture of you and a nice cover image identifying whatever you want to establish. This is all up to you how you want to let yourself be perceived – but the picture and cover image need to create an identity and a bond with the person that is seeing you. First impressions count mainly because of these two factors.
After you dealt with this issue, next you need to write a professional intro statement. To be honest I prefer when they are short and straight to the point. I don’t enjoy reading endless profile description that go on and on and on. Why? Because you just don’t read them. Your mission intro statement needs to follow a certain formula. I will help you build this intro.
Next you need to identify your professional experience. To be honest I don’t recommend writing much on this section beyond the basics. LinkedIn is not the place where you are applying for a job, LinkedIn needs to function as a lead generation platform. Therefore, there’s no point in specifically describing your professional activities.
After this is done, we move on to give credibility to your profile. There’s nothing better than giving someone credibility that the education and endorsements section. It is not fundamental that you have a degree. What’s important is to fill in this section with something. Also, endorsements are important because they provide social proof of you as a professional. People love to ear that other people like you.
Finally, you need to insert contact info as well. This is important in LinkedIn profile optimisation mainly because people like to feel that you don’t mind sharing some personal information – either your e-mail or professional phone number. It shows openness – and the more open you are the better.
Developing a Content Plan
Right, once your profile is ready to go, it is time to start building your authority as an expert lead in your field. Hence the necessity for you to think about creating a content plan.
When developing this content plan, you need to be aware of what LinkedIn allows you to do. Basically you have two options, start a post or write an article. Therefore you need to be precise with your goals.
If you want to share something short and sweet about some technical issue you are thinking about then write a short paragraph about it and share it. Also included here could be something you read somewhere and you feel it could be shared. Write a comment about that article and share it.
Besides technical comments what works great in LinkedIn are comments about your products or services. If you just had a great review written you can share it as well. It is highly recommendable that you do.
Also if you have an event going on in your company or you just want to share the day-to-day life of your company, write a funny post about it. This creates bonds with your audience and makes them feel that they are part of
Finally, and if it fits your service, every now and then make a post promoting your service or product. This can be highly efficient as well. But what is absolutely key here is that you don’t do this often. A LinkedIn profile is mainly a platform to create engagement, relationships and prove that you are an expert – it is not a platform to regularly advertise your products or services.
Establishing Meaningful Connections
Once you have thought about and implemented a strategy for the previous two steps, should you start establishing business connections via LinkedIn. And here three steps are crucial.
Identify your Leads. Who do you want to start engaging with? Who are your potential clients on LinkedIn? From the research on your buyer persona, you need to come up with a list of potential industries that you want to interact with.
Building this list of potential leads and then start using Sales Navigator to start interacting.
Messaging: Generate Leads. Not all messages are the same. You need to interact with your potential leads through a specific interaction formula that I will recommend to you.
I constantly keep receiving on my LinkedIn page long sales messages from people trying to sell me something – and this is the main problem with LinkedIn ads as well btw.
You need to establish a relationship with your lead and your messaging should follow a particular logic. Don’t just try to sell your service.
Interact. Finally, once you start creating a reasonably good-sized list of connections you need to start interacting with them by commenting on posts or articles they publish. You can also start sharing some of this content. This is a great way to start making meaningful connections on LinkedIn.
Conclusion
Building a solid profile, creating relevant content and building meaningful connections should be part of any coherent LinkedIn lead generation strategy. The secret behind generating leads via LinkedIn is to show your credibility, knowledge and openness to meaningful connections. LinkedIn is not a platform where you just sell, sell, sell. Selling is the art of building relevant interactions and LinkedIn is certainly an awesome platform for you to start doing that.
Need help with your LinkedIn strategy? I can help …
