B2B Marketing is yet to completely explore and utilize the power of social media, especially LinkedIn to get potential leads by building brand awareness and driving traffic to the website. Amongst all the social media platforms, LinkedIn is fast becoming the most powerful lead generation tool for B2B marketers. To substantiate this further with numbers, LinkedIn is responsible for more than 80% of a business’s social media leads, while all the rest of the social media platforms put together amount to only 19.67% of leads!
Here are 10 tips to help you make the most of your LinkedIn page to generate genuine leads
Handle with care: Your LinkedIn page is your online profile, so treat everything you say and do with utmost care. Your aim should be to add value to everything you publish, but ensure that that you avoid cheap promotional tricks and spammy comments. Too much of self-promotion will put off your followers and you might lose a lot of social media coverage that you’ve gathered so far.
Optimize your profile: The description of your blog and website are the most important areas of consideration. Make sure that you customize them in accordance with your company’s blog and specific pages of your website. Keep it as eloquent as possible. Ensure that you’ve used all the keywords in your description to make them upfront and focused to your point of communication. Also, using keywords will help you capture a space in the search results when prospect consumers are searching for expert help and will go through your capabilities and achievements at a glance.
LinkedIn internal apps are an advantage: Using the applications that LinkedIn provides can help you win potential leads by adding relevant content to your profile. For example: Use SlideShare to exhibit a webinar that was acclaimed or a PowerPoint deck of how your company serves to solve problems and challenges of clients. However, ensure that it is not a sales presentation or a gimmicky product pitch.
Utilize the power of LinkedIn groups: These groups are a perfect place to develop leads. If you are a member of a group that has your prospective clients, you can avoid the need of a good connection to message them since group members are enabled to see profiles of fellow members without being connected. Therefore, take some quality time to search and research about the groups that have your target audience and that you can join. The good part is that you can be a member of up to 50 groups. But being a silent member won’t really help. You’ll have to be a part of conversations where you answer questions, be helpful and share links of assets on your website that help the members of the group (without being overtly promotional). While, sharing links of assets on your website, make sure you embed it with a short form to capture the details of your LinkedIn visitors. And Congratulations! You’ve got a new lead.
People You May Know is useful: You can make connections using LinkedIn’s ‘People you may know’ feature, which is a quick way to connect with your level 2 connections. If you think there’s someone who is useful to be connected to, you can seek help of your level 1 connections for an introduction or use a common group to get self-introduction and association.
Use LinkedIn Answers: It is always helpful to search for questions that fall in the area of your expertise and then answering them with profound knowledge and skills. This can make it easy for you to connect with the person who asked that question, and if the person agrees to connect, you know you’ve a lead in your kitty. To make the most while answering the question, click on ‘Share This’ below the question on the questions page. This will give you the option of to share the question via LinkedIn message with up to 200 connections that you have.
Use advanced search options to your advantage: The Advanced Search option of LinkedIn is known for its richer search experience. For example, if you want to make a company specific search about the connections that you have, all you have to do is type the name of the company in the Advance Search field and then sort the results by ‘Relationship’. You can then find out any level 1 or level 2 connections with the employees of that company.
‘Companies’ field is an important resource: If you are targeting a specific firm to get connections, use the ‘Companies’ field to search for relevant LinkedIn members. You have to ‘Follow’ the company to get regular updates. This will not only help you see your first and second degree connections on LinkedIn but also all the other employees of that company. You can then find out your relevant link and see how you can connect with them using your connections and groups.
Don’t miss to update your LinkedIn Status: All your new blogs, white papers, case studies, new pieces of thought leadership, press releases, features, and articles that can help your prospective client should be updated in your status on LinkedIn. To make this easy, you can link your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts together to spread a message like a wildfire. Don’t forget to add shortened URLs to generate inbound traffic and leads.
Advertising On LinkedIn: Yes, there are paid options to engage your audience on LinkedIn. You can host text, video, and video with text ads on LinkedIn. You can also have ‘sponsored updates’ just like ‘boosted posts’ on Facebook. But to make the most of your LinkedIn ‘sponsored updates’ you’ll have to ensure right messaging and right targeting. If you haven’t yet earned a large following on LinkedIn, these options are a great way to drive traffic and gain traction.
With this expansive strategy, you have great scope to trace out precise, result oriented strategies to make the most out of your LinkedIn profile. However, without the right knowledge you will not be able to maximize your B2B marketing goals. So, next time when you login to your LinkedIn account, spend some quality time to do some advanced or group search to come up with at least 2 potential leads. And remember, it’s the first step to convert your 1st LinkedIn sale.
