With over 500 million members, LinkedIn is the largest professional networking platform. Here’s how you can unleash its potential for your business.
1. Write A Killer LinkedIn Profile
Before you write your LinkedIn profile, create a description of your desired customer – that’s your Avatar. Describe that person in terms of their occupation, industry, location and importantly, their needs and challenges. Even go so far, as giving them a fictitious name.
This will make it easier for you to write a LinkedIn profile targeted to your specific audience, showing your ideal prospects that you understand their problem and can help them to solve it.
Start your profile with a simple statement of what you do, expressed in terms of the value you offer prospective clients. Provide details of your experience in delivering your service. End your profile with a call to action which could be an email or website address via which they can contact you or the offer of a 30 minute free consultation.
2. Use the LinkedIn Feed to Position Yourself As An Expert
People want social proof that you can deliver on the service you’re offering. There’s no better way to demonstrate this on LinkedIn then regularly publishing via the LinkedIn feed.
Write articles on your business topic or provide a case study based on a project you’ve undertaken, showing how you assisted your customer to achieve their goals. Share valuable curated content about your industry, on topics that your service focuses on.
Regular publishing on LinkedIn gets you noticed and positions you as a helpful authority.
3. Turn Your Connections Into Customers
Once you start connecting on LinkedIn you want to build a relationship with your connections.
Many of us struggle with what to say when breaking the ice and striking up an initial online conversation. To assist, LinkedIn introduced a mobile app in December 2016 called Conversation Starters.
Put in the name of the person whom you want to message and the app provides potential starter scripts based on what you share in common with your connection, for example, qualifications, experiences and people or companies with whom you are both connected.
Use those script options as a guideline, making sure that you personalise them based on what you know about your connection.
Here’s a 40 second video describing how to access and use Conversation Starters:
4. Use LinkedIn’s Notifications To Market To Prospects
LinkedIn notifies you when any of your connections have a work anniversary or a birthday, achieve a promotion or change company. Just click on the Notifications tab located in the top right hand section of LinkedIn. You have the opportunity to congratulate your connection using a suggested message.
Personalise this LinkedIn message as it will make the recipient feel special – that’s how you begin to initiate that emotional connection with your prospect, so vital in forging a business relationship.
If possible, in that same message, offer your connection, a valuable resource, for example, an interesting article associated with your service.
5. Move Your Prospects Into Your Sales Funnel
Your goal is to move your connections into your sales funnel, ultimately persuading them to visit your website or meet with you in person. A means of achieving this is to prepare a series of message scripts which, over a period of time, fulfil your objective.
One of my business objectives on LinkedIn is to encourage my connections to download my book, The NEW Entrepreneur, and in turn to join my newsletter database, so that I can move them off LinkedIn and start communicating with them regularly. I’ve had success in this endeavour by individually messaging my connections with a link to my free book offer available on my website: www.marbreak.com.
In addition, whenever someone on LinkedIn invites me to connect with them, I immediately thank them for their invitation and offer them the gift of my book.
If you are using LinkedIn as part of your Marketing strategy, make sure that you are harnessing its capability to convert your LinkedIn connections into paying customers!
Wishing you LOADS of success in your business!
About the author: Shirley Anthony is an author, speaker and owner of Marketing Breakthroughs, a marketing consultancy operating for over twenty years. Having initially gained corporate experience in fast-moving consumer-goods branding, she has consulted in over twenty-five industries, including cellular, information technology, travel, engineering, food, cosmetics, architecture and banking.
