How to Use LinkedIn to Generate Business Leads?
With over 500 million members, LinkedIn is popular and recommended professional social network. Social media is a strong platform for generating business leads, and LinkedIn is the top contender. The professional network can be utilised to create business contacts, which can turn into business sales in the long run. Creating a profile is the basic step. Let’s see how you can use LinkedIn to generate business leads.
#1 Add Current Clients
If your business has clients already, prospect them on LinkedIn and send a connection request. Why? Once connected, you can request them to leave a ‘recommendation’ on the LinkedIn personal profile. These recommendations and publicly viewable; therefore, new business prospects are likely to browse your profile in detail and viewing those recommendations will leave a favourable impression.
In fact, the recommendation feature is a viable opportunity. Don’t wait for others to give recommendations. Take the initiative and recommend others. It will serve the impression to your network that you’re a team player, and this prompts the recommended to return the favour.
#2 Daily Updates
Spending 5 minutes daily on LinkedIn sounds far sensible than wasting time browsing updates on other social sites. The LinkedIn Pulse feed publishes valuable content to read and share. Spend few seconds to think and publish an update on your profile. You can auto-publish unique content on Pulse and reach out to new viewers. If writing is an issue, hire a skilled and experienced freelance writer to help with new content creation. These can be exclusively published on LinkedIn Pulse. Sharing articles, videos and status updates help to keep the LinkedIn account active and relevant to new prospects.
#3 Add Connections
There is a LinkedIn world beyond referral network additions. The social site automatically pulls your contact list, matches with their database, and prompts you to add them. Do that BUT go beyond and search for new people to connect with. If you’re offering a B2B service, search for industries that would benefit from the service, find people from those industries and add send them a connection request.
Remember that if you mass send a connection request, LinkedIn is likely to ban the profile. Instead, nurture each connection. As you begin the networking process, you will come across the mutual connection. Ask them to introduce you to a new prospect.
Lastly, as the connections begin to increase, spend some time daily in analysing the connections. Analyse their profile and judge how you can help their business through your product/service. A lot of research and due diligence is required here. Once analysed, begin a conversation but don’t make the communication solely business sales oriented. Remember that you’re prospecting a lead, not making a sale. The selling process can be done off LinkedIn.
#4 Complement Text and Video
Usually, the LinkedIn profile contains a textual introduction. Complement the text with a 30-second video introduction that encapsulates the essence of your professional experience. LinkedIn allows users to embed images and videos. Use the feature. Get a video done through freelancing sites like upwork.com and fiverr.com, or if you have the budget, hire a professional videographer. Any prospective lead visiting your LinkedIn profile will be more interested in watching the video.
From a textual perspective, the text copy should be on-point. Don’t digress into meaningless information. If your business is about selling CRM’s to the fashion industry, the introduction could be something like:
“We specialise in creating turnkey CRM solutions for the fashion industry. In the past, we have been associated with A, B, C companies and helped them reduce their inventory and fulfilment costs by 33%. Our CRM software helps clients to create a cost-effective in-house operational system”.
Notice how these three sentences offer a succinct company introduction and put forth the value point easily.
#5 Join Groups
LinkedIn has active groups for various industries and business niches. Join few of these groups and become an active participant. Don’t spam these groups with cold outreach messages. Try to become an authority contributor in your business field, and slowly group members will begin to recognise the authority. You will effectively build a personal brand, and such brand creation activities enjoy a high recall factor than the rest.
#6 Create a Group
A powerful way to generate new leads and create a brand authority is to create a group on LinkedIn. The professional network allows anyone to create a group but maintaining it is damn tough. Get a logo created on Fiverr.com and create a group with it. The group should be ideally in your targeted business niche. The next step is to get members to join it. Hover to the “interests” menu on the LinkedIn navigation bar and search for your target business profiles. If your group is on “inventory management”, find people from the same field and invite them over to join the group. Obviously, it will take time for the group to become active and create some traction. Until that time, use your content curation skills and some content writing rules to share informative content with the group. Put some defining guidelines so that others don’t start spamming within the group.
#7 Professional Contact
A novice mistake many LinkedIn account users do is either not adding any contact details or adding personal contact details. Getting a professional email Id like abc@yourdomain.com costs less than $5 a month. A professional contact email creates a good impression than a something like seoexpert@gmail.com – sounds very spammy! Use Google for Work cloud services to create a professional email. Of course, you need a domain first, which can be availed from GoDaddy at less than $10 per year. Don’t forget to add other professional communication options like Skype or phone number on the LinkedIn profile.
Endnote: You don’t need to spend hours and hours cultivating a LinkedIn business profile. Devote 15-20 minutes daily, and you’re good to go. Begin by soliciting outbound leads, but your ultimate goal would be to receive inbound leads. You have to spend some months before the transition from outbound leads to inbound leads happen.