I was talking with an Accountant earlier this week. He told me that his team only used LinkedIn for research.
I shared with him that business2community.com recently reported that:
" LinkedIn generates more leads for service based businesses than Facebook, Twitter, or blogs." It then went on to say that: "80% of B2B marketing leads from social media come through LinkedIn."
Here are the top 3 ways I shared with him that teams can tap into the power of LinkedIn to help grow their business.
1) Build Your Personal Brand
Most people’s LinkedIn profiles look like an online resume. They contain a list of their past jobs, the tasks they performed at each of these jobs and a few recommendations from connections in their industry.
Instead of being a professional online Resume, your teams LinkedIn profiles can offer you the opportunity to position yourself as the answer to your clients’ problems.
ACTION STEP: Review your profile. Is it an obituary of past roles? Or does it provide your potential clients the answers they are looking for?
2) Engage In Conversation
The first step is to develop the profile to harness the brand-building aspect of LinkedIn.
But to utilise LinkedIn to actually grow your business, this is achieved by developing relationships.
When connecting with people, instead of using the default message target your communication.
ACTION STEP: Review your current communications. Are they creating engagement and conversation?
3. Watch And Learn
What people often don’t know, is that LinkedIn can be such a powerful tool in promoting B2B sales due to its fantastic research capabilities.
One of the options to tap into is using the research capabilities to tailor your reach. Search for your ideal prospects using job titles, industry types, and physical locations. These kinds of keywords explain what your prospects pay attention to, and how you can be found by them.
ACTION STEP: Apply the new-found keywords to further optimise your own profile and make it even more compelling to your target audience.
Another fantastic way you can tap into the power of LinkedIn to grow your business is to publish articles. Publishing content on LinkedIn allows companies and individuals to grow their brand, expand their reach, build trust, and engage with their network of followers and clients.
Here is how content can help you:
1. When you publish something on LinkedIn, your first-degree network connections will see it in their feed.
2. First-degree connections can engage (like, comment or share) with one of your posts. This means your content becomes visible to a second-degree network through that connection.
3. Another huge benefit of using LinkedIn as a publishing podium is the analytics that are available. This allows you to become familiar with the type of content that is popular, the people who are reading and engaging with it and then adapt what you are posting accordingly.
By taking advantage of the capabilities offered by LinkedIn, this Accountant is now in a position to use it to best benefit your business.