LinkedIn is a pretty bizarre channel.
On one end, it’s the perfect platform for finding your target audience and building up conversations with them, which is undoubtedly hugely valuable. However, on the other end of the spectrum, it’s a totally saturated pool of everyone trying to sell to each other with the same copy-paste templated messages.
So, how do you take the pros of the platform and all the value LinkedIn has to offer and leverage the positives?
That’s exactly what I’ll cover below, as well as provide a quick step-by-step daily process so you can start leveraging LinkedIn for the better.
What LinkedIn often feels like…
Step One: Research
Use LinkedIn as a tool to find and research your future customers… not pester them. How? Firstly, know your customers and what makes up their DNA. Define what industry your clients are in, the size of their organisation, their location and other aspects make them similar and worth targeting as a potential customer for you. Once you know this, you can use LinkedIn to find out who all the similar companies are, and most importantly, who the decision-makers are within these companies.
Let’s say for example J2 Group was a potential customer of yours. A simple search and seek would find me as the key decision maker.
Pro Tip:
Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to speed up this process. It’s a pretty handy tool and worth the minor price tag, however, there is also a free one month trial you can sign up for to save some coin.
Step Two: Start with Building Your Connections
The goal here is not a sale, it’s purely to build up your network with your future customers.
Don’t think of the sale right now, think of the connection as purely organising your future customer onto your channel and a streamlined place where it will be easier in the future to identify them and perhaps look at approaching them.
How to ensure your connection request is accepted?
As with everything we preach at J2 Group, it’s all about personalisation. This is key to standing out and actually being accepted.
Pro Tip:
How to personalise? Compliment them on something genuine and personalised you noticed about them. Also, be sure to measure your connection requests of what is/ isn’t working. Is a certain message and strategy having more success than your others? Then scale this one.
Step Three: Consistency is Key
Be consistent –start to connect with 20-30 prospects a day with the singular goal of building your target market onto your channel.
Step Four: How to Nurture your new connections?
Alright, so now you’ve built a community of your network on LinkedIn, what are the next steps? How do you start establishing a conversation with these new connections? How do you get them genuinely interested in your brand and solutions?
The goal is to think of all these new LinkedIn connections as the equivalent of people who’ve signed up to your email list on your website. Connections are now a community of people with whom you can begin to nurture and build a relationship. The leads will come as you establish yourself as an authority and provide value to your new connections.
Learn Our Sales Methodology
It’s time to nurture.
Ways to nurture and provide value to your new connections?
Firstly, begin to share content regularly (organic reach is high on LinkedIn so now your actual target market will begin seeing your content)
Provide content and value directly to your connections via a LinkedIn message (This is a key way to nurture and build a one-to-one relationship. See a quality example below)
Each time you have something to say, an event, a webinar, a new podcast, let the new connections of your target market know in an individualised way.
Nurturing via LinkedIn Message Example…
So to conclude… Build Community
Begin to think of LinkedIn as a research and a community engagement tool with your target market, rather than annoyingly asking people to buy your product in a 33 character restricted connection request ad nauseam.
LinkedIn is the perfect way to create one-to-one conversational marketing with your prospects in a personalised way that can scale. Something that every business owner should really be doing, but realistically, don’t have the time.
So, if you’re keen to discuss automating this process and beginning to engage with your LinkedIn Community & Network at scale, we’ve recently just launched an exciting product development to take this off our clients’ hands.
Get in contact with us and we can set up a chat.
