The lifeblood of every thriving business is the high-quality leads they get from marketing campaigns.
Online marketing has made it simple and cost effective to drive paid visitor traffic to a website.
The amount of visitors you can direct to your website is only limited by your budget.
But they have to be the right type of visitors.
Your website visitors have to be ready and willing to buy what you are selling.
Only visitors who buy will generate the regular cashflow your business needs.
Social Media posts have also become a proven method of attracting people who are interested in your business.
You can then direct your social media followers toward your website and sales page.
When your products are for sale to consumers, any social media platform will work.
For business to business sales; you need to use a business network.
The world’s largest business to business social media network is currently LinkedIn.
LinkedIn currently has over 760 million businesspeople as members.
So, how can you take advantage of this massive audience and find your potential customers?
Here are four simple methods to generate leads for your business from LinkedIn.
1. Lay the Foundations
LinkedIn’s capabilities are only open to you once you have the basics in place.
The LinkedIn platform offers many netowking capabilities but you must the get the fundamentals right first.
Your personal and business profiles should make optimial use of keywords. These are the words and phrases that your
customers would use to describe you.
As with all good marketing, your profile should describe your business and products from the perspective of the customer.
Humans are selfish creatures, potential customers even more so.
When they read your profile, your prospects will be asking themselves “What’s In It for Me?”
Use your profile description to answer that question.
Getting your LinkedIn profile right is vital to your success.
In fact it is so important. we have put together a guide called: How to Create a Killer LinkedIn Profile.
You can get your free copy of it here.
2. Write for your Specific Audience
Publishing content on LinkedIn should be as specific and narrow as possible.
Don’t share generic information about your niche.
Someone looking for a solution to an urgent problem is not going to want to read general information.
Get super-concentrated about a specific issue or problem your customers may have.
If your expertise is to help your customers reduce outstanding debt, write about that.
A business with crippling debt doesn’t need general information about invoicing.
They want to read about methods of collecting from their debtors.
When your content is hyper-targeted your specific niche audience will find you.
3. Keep Posting Great Value Content
As I mentioned above, LinkedIn is a vast network.
It is also very noisy.
It is very easy for your content to get lost in all that noise.
Be sure to make regular posts.
Decide a schedule and stick to it.
Your readers will learn to look-out for your content posts.
Don’t forget to repost your content to relevant LinkedIn Groups.
Groups are where you will find new followers.
4. Publish Long-Form Writing
LinkedIn offers a valuable way to share your thoughts with a vast audience of members.
LinkedIn Articles (aka LinkedIn Pulse) is the place to post long-form writing.
The articles you publish here can go deep into an issue, and describe your solution.
Any article you publish appears under your by-line. There is a direct link to your profile.
Prove your credibility and authority in your niche by publishing your personal insights.
5. Gather Prospect Information
Members on LinkedIn share valuable information about themselves and their companies.
If you are researching prospective clients, there are few better places to look.
Company pages share information about headquarters locations, web addresses, business size, and more.
Collecting this information provides a clear picture of the best organisations to target.
Resist all suggestions that you should automate this collection process.
There are two reasons for this:
- Robotic data mining goes against LinkedIn’s terms of service.
- You will learn much more about your market and prospects when you do the research yourself.
These are just five ways to use LinkedIn as part of your marketing strategy
LinkedIn is a valuable resource for business to business marketing.
I believe in LinkedIn so much I’ve put together a no-holes-barred training course to help you get the most from it.
The course is called LinkedIn Success and you can read all about it here: LinkedIn Success.
