This article is for sales and marketing professionals looking to develop a LinkedIn marketing strategy and drive traffic to their LinkedIn company pages and profiles. I’m giving my 9 top tips to know about LinkedIn marketing to help grow your sales funnels. In addition to driving traffic to your LinkedIn profiles, you will also want to drive traffic to your company websites. It’s this website traffic that allows you to convert these prospects and generate leads.
LinkedIn is the world’s number one B2B social networking platform. B2B marketers use LinkedIn as their target audience and have over 500 million potential decision-makers. By combining LinkedIn ads with content posted in your LinkedIn feed, you will certainly create an opportunity to do business.
In addition to the ads and the feeds, you can post to your LinkedIn company page keeping prospects in your best channel. The best B2B marketers know that talking to decision-makers where they expect to be contacted makes LinkedIn a much better bet than Facebook and Twitter.
Seasoned LinkedIn users understand that a well-optimised profile is a key asset to driving traffic and website visitors as part of a broader marketing strategy. As such, I will share my top ten tips for using LinkedIn for business.
Your personal profile is the key to showing your LinkedIn prospects and connections who you are and what you do. However, do not make the mistake that most people do. Do not post your CV - unless you are looking for a new role. Your contacts are looking for how you help, not what you do, and there is a distinct difference.
We covered this in an excellent recent post on how to create a top LinkedIn profile.
A LinkedIn company profile is a sure-fire way to let your prospects know how good your products or services are. But only if it’s well constructed. The LinkedIn company page is a key asset in your LinkedIn strategy as it is a place where your marketing team can share content.
This content should demonstrate your ability to solve problems your customers or personas might face.
For a deeper understanding of LinkedIn company pages, check out our post we wrote recently, on effective LinkedIn company pages.
A standard LinkedIn profile allows you to do so much, but it limits you to a number of searches, and you can’t save any data. Not unless you find a very manual workaround.
We advocate opting for a premium LinkedIn account, especially for sales reps, as they need a better handle on their working prospects. Sales navigator allows you to save leads in lists, save your searches for your ideal buyer persona and keep up with their updates. This lets you jump in and seem attentive to their posts and updates.
Read our great post, How to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, for a deeper dive into the subject.
Savvy B2B sales reps understand the value of buyer personas, but they are often woefully under-informed. With over 500 million users on the platform, now is the time for highly defined personas, not broad, high-level demographics in target companies.
Marketing professionals can also capitalise on the closed captive audience on LinkedIn by developing their content strategies to target the decision-makers. This makes it easy for companies to be targeted through inbound and account-based marketing.
For those not used to personas, we have written lots of content on the subject, but to make this easier for you, click here to read our guide to driving effective customer acquisition. Our two most-read articles are 3 ways not using personas harms your growth opportunities and how to plan a marketing funnel.
As mentioned in our previous point, buyer personas are intrinsic to the success of your marketing and sales results. You can craft a content marketing strategy by understanding the problems your product or service solves for key decision-makers.
Remember, even though people expect to do business on LinkedIn, they don’t want to be interrupted or sold to. They want to see other business professionals who can demonstrate the ability to problem-solve. Your written and video content should demonstrate how you solve their problems. By doing this, you can utilise this content to introduce yourself to prospective customers.
Ensure your blog posts are optimised for your audience and SEO. LinkedIn members are looking for thought leaders to solve their problems. The more problems you solve, the better you position your business for brand awareness.
Quite often, as you build relationships with prospects on LinkedIn, they will ask you for things like case studies, company decks, and ebooks. You must have prepared for these things, or the situation arises.
Be prepared to go beyond the norm, though. USE VIDEO wherever possible. Even if you are reaching out, you should use video to connect. You have to be memorable and stand out from the crowd.
Try tools like Drift or Vidyard to get going.
LinkedIn has some great tools once you have a sales navigator account!
As you can see, when you have a sales navigator account, you don’t have the GIFs, Images and Smileys, but you do get attachments and links. The links are really important. You can save assets you use regularly and share and track them via LinkedIn. This means that when you send things to prospects, you can see data about those assets.
For more information on smart links, click here.
To build more kudos and brand reach on LinkedIn, you must join groups where your prospects likely hang out. You must post your best and most informative content into the group feed. You must also engage with your prospects and like, comment and help them out before you try and sell them.
But to be truly successful, you have to start instigating conversations. Use your content or content from reliable sources to drive home a message. Often, people will engage in a subject that ails them if it’s not directed at them. Use this to your advantage and test different approaches to driving group engagement.
This might seem obvious or cause you to say, hey, this is a marketing post. Marketers can ask for the buy-in whatever thought process this tip kicks off.
Think about this: you spend all your time creating thought leadership and educative content to share amongst your target audience, but you won’t ask for the buy. You may as well become an encyclopaedia on your subject matter and be done.
A great way to test your audience's response is to start with small buy-in calls. Go for e-books and webinars to gain trust in the beginning. But post that, ask people to buy your products, especially those highly engaged with your content. Send them a direct message and offer them a unique opportunity.
Hopefully, I have given you food for thought with this post. Maybe I have reinforced some ideas that you were already fostering? Potentially, I have informed you of strategy ideas you didn’t previously consider.
This article is supposed to help, so please let me know if you don’t feel like I gave you enough information, and I’ll do my best to correct it.
For those of you who need to tighten up your LinkedIn marketing strategy, this is one of a series of LinkedIn marketing-focused posts. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or need any help with your LinkedIn marketing strategy.