Zenologue

When times are tough, it pays to explore creative, low-cost marketing solutions. One such strategy is using the professional social networking site LinkedIn to build your prospect database, turn cold calls into warm leads, and establish yourself as a subject-matter expert.

Just create a professional profile, send invitations to people you know to connect, request introductions to prospects your friends or colleagues know, and you’re off! And the best part is that you don’t have to spend a dime!

Here’s the low-down on what you need to know:

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a social networking site that’s specifically targeted for business or professional purposes. You can use it to connect with colleagues, meet new prospects, find vendors that deliver the services you need, and even establish yourself as a subject-matter expert. There are an astounding 30+ million people using LinkedIn today. This number has roughly tripled over the last year.

How can it benefit my business?

LinkedIn is best used to reach specific individuals. It’s not really intended for mass marketing purposes. This is why companies who sell B2B (business to business) find it more useful than those who sell B2C (business to consumer).

Specific benefits of LinkedIn:

• Pursue direct sales. See who your friends, colleagues, customers and vendors know that you need to know to reach your goals. If you sell IT services, you can identify IT decision makers within companies that you’re targeting. Then just ask your friend or colleague who knows him or her for a virtual introduction.
• Increase the visibility of your business or brand by using LinkedIn’s tools to demonstrate your subject matter expertise.
• Generate traffic to your website.
• Improve your search engine optimization (SEO) – your search engine ranking in other words.

How do I build my network?

Start by building your profile in LinkedIn. Then invite your contacts to “connect” with you. Once they do, their connections, and their connections’ connections are visible to you. Think “six-degrees” philosophy, only it’s just three-degrees deep. If only 25 of your contacts accept your connection invitation, each having 25 connections of their own, who also have 25 connections each, you have an instant network of 15,000 people in your network.



How should I incorporate LinkedIn into my marketing strategy?

• Generate sales leads by:
  • Searching inside or outside your network for prospects that you need to be doing business with.
  • Responding to service requests, such as when a member of the LinkedIn community publishes a request for an expert in your field.
  • Connecting with potential clients and gaining credibility before you ever call on them by conversing with them through the Answers tool on LinkedIn.
• Increase your brand’s visibility by:
  • Indirectly announcing your services to others via the LinkedIn Answers tool by responding to a question related to your service or asking a question that indirectly points to what you do. Be careful, though. Full-on self-promotion is a no-no in the LinkedIn community. It must be a soft sell.
  • Driving interested readers to your blog posting by answering a question and providing a URL to your blog for additional detail.
  • Getting your product or service recommended by another member of the LinkedIn community.
• Improve your search engine ranking by:
  • Driving additional traffic to your site through LinkedIn.
  • Creating additional links to your site which helps the search engines find you and can improve your ranking. For example, if your organization has 50 employees and 25 of them have LinkedIn accounts, why not send out a company-wide email through LinkedIn to those 25 employees requesting a link back to the company website? These additional links to your site could help improve your search engine ranking.

What LinkedIn tools should I be leveraging?

Wanting to get more advanced with LinkedIn? Consider these tools:

• Answers
• Services
• Search
• Groups

Answers: The Answers tool on LinkedIn allows any LinkedIn user to ask a question or answer one. You can interact with people both inside and outside your network with the Answers tool, which helps you meet new people online with similar interests and continue growing your network of connections.

After you ask a question, when the timeframe for the question comes to an end, you are asked to choose the best answer and flag it accordingly. The person attributed with the best answer gets an “expertise point” that is displayed on their LinkedIn profile.

Providing answers to questions posed in your industry and earning expertise points allows you to gain credibility as a subject matter expert which can often be a foot in the door with a prospect. To stay up to date on questions being asked on your topics of interest, just subscribe to the LinkedIn RSS feed.

Services: The Services tools on LinkedIn allow you to recommend others that you’ve worked with – past colleagues, vendors you’ve hired, etc. These tools also allow you to request recommendations from those you’ve done work with or for. The more recommendations you have, the better you look to a prospect viewing your profile.

Search: LinkedIn’s Search function allows you to search for people outside your network (e.g., by company name, type of company, or geographic location). LinkedIn will then tell you if someone in your network knows them, where you can in turn ask that person to make a virtual introduction. If not, you have the option of purchasing a paid account from LinkedIn, called InMail, to contact them directly. There are different packages available starting at $19.95 per month.

Groups: If you join a Group on LinkedIn, everyone in that group becomes your connection, thus growing your network. You can also start a group of your own to attract people with similar interests or backgrounds.

For support in developing your customized LinkedIn strategy and incorporating it into your overall sales and marketing plan, contact RedRover Company at lori@redrovercompany.com.

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