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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 gives you the opportunity to convert these prospects and generate leads.
About LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the world’s number one B2B social networking platform. B2B marketers use LinkedIn as there are over 500 million potential decision-makers in their target audiences. 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 am going to share my top ten tips for using LinkedIn for business.
LinkedIn marketing tips
1 Optimise your personal Linkedin profile
Your personal profile, 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 a great recent post, how to create a top LinkedIn profile.
2 Optimise your company Linkedin page
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 that your customers or personas might be facing.
For a deeper understanding of Linkedin company pages check out this post we wrote recently, Effective LinkedIn company pages.
3 Opt for premium Linkedin: LinkedIn Sales Navigator
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 sales reps as they need a better handle on their working prospects. Sales navigator gives you the ability to save leads in lists, save your searches for your ideal buyer persona and keep up with their updates. This allows you to ump in and seem attentive to their every post and update.
Read our great post, How to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for a deeper dive into the subject.
4 Define your buyer personas
Savvy b2b sales reps understand the value of buyer personas but they are often woefully under-informed. With over 500 million users available to you 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 marketing 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 simply click here to read our guide to effective customer acquisition. Our two most-read articles are 15 amazing buyer persona facts and how to plan a marketing funnel.
5 Write and publish persona-driven content
As mentioned in our previous point, buyer personas are intrinsic to the success of your marketing and sales results. By understanding the problems that your product or service solves for key decision-makers, you can craft a content marketing strategy to suit.
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 are solving the problems they face. By doing this, you can utilise this content to introduce yourself to prospective customers.
Ensure your blog posts are optimised for your audience and for 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.
6 Prepare your sales tools
Quite often as you start to build relationships with prospects on LinkedIn, they will ask you for things like case studies, company decks, ebooks. These are all things that you must have prepared for when asked or the situation arises.
Be prepared to go beyond the norm though. USE VIDEO wherever possible. Even if you are outreaching 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.
7 Linkedin saved Links
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 GIF, Image and Smileys but you do get attachments and links. The links are really important. You can save assets you use on a regular basis 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.
8 Join Linkedin groups
In order to build more kudos and brand on LinkedIn, you HAVE to join groups where your prospects likely hang out. Not only MUST you post your BEST and most INFORMATIVE content into the group feed. You must also engage with your prospects and like and comment and HELP them out before you try and sell them.
But in order 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 engagement in groups.
9 Create offers uniquely for LinkedIn
This might seem obvious or it may cause you to say, hey, this is a marketing post? Whatever thought process this tip kicks off, marketers can ask for the buy.
Think about this, you spend all your time creating thought leadership and educative content to share amongst your target audience but you’re not going to ask for the buy? You may as well become an encyclopaedia on your subject matter and be done.
A great way to test the response of your audience is to start with small buy-in calls. Go for e-books and webinars to gain trust in the beginning. But post that, ask for people to buy your products, especially those highly engaged with your content. Send them a direct message and offer them a unique opportunity.
To wrap it up
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 reach out to us if you have any questions or need any help with your Linkedin marketing strategy.
