There are more than 277 people with a LinkedIn account today: that is over one-third of the total estimated number of 600 million business professionals worldwide. According to LinkedIn, this represents the largest group anywhere of influential, affluent and educated people.
At the same time, if you are like many other business professionals, you have probably built your profile on LinkedIn, connected with associates and friends, perhaps even posted some job ads on LinkedIn, but you have likely not fully leveraged LinkedIn’s sales and marketing potential yet. If so, keep reading, and discover the three tools that may work well for your business!
Start at http://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions to get an idea of a range of LinkedIn solutions for your marketing, such as Display Advertising, Sponsored InMail, and PPC advertising. In addition, go to your account, click on Upgrade to learn about the additional benefits of different levels of memberships for sales professionals, such as Business Plus, Sales Executive, and Sales Pro membership level.
There are many ways to market on LinkedIn, but here are the three techniques that we are finding the most effective, yet very simple to follow:
1. Get Introduced!
This is a powerful marketing feature on LinkedIn. The first step is to use LinkedIn’s advanced search in order to find companies or executives that meet your criteria (in order to do a good job at search, you might need to upgrade your account). If you already have several hundred connections on LinkedIn, you will soon realize that quite a few of your targeted companies i.e. potential clients are 2nd or 3rd degree connections, and you will be able to discover how you are connected with those prospective clients.
This is where you can use the LinkedIn feature “GET INTRODUCED” to get in touch with your prospects. Alternatively, instead of sending a message via LinkedIn, you can just use the “old-fashioned” phone and personally call your 1st degree connections requesting that they personally introduce you to your 2nd degree connections.
- Targeted Advertising
Similar to advertising on Google, LinkedIn has a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program (https://www.linkedin.com/ads/) used by advertisers to raise brand awareness, build relationships and get new leads. However, LinkedIn’s PPC program is unique as it allows you to advertise to selected types of individuals or businesses only, based on various criteria such as company size, industry, job title, function or seniority level.
For example, you can target HR directors of companies with 200-500 employees located in Canada, or you can advertise to marketing directors of companies with more than 500 employees in agricultural sector in US. You can set your own daily budget, and pay by click or by impression. This is an amazing targeted and trackable marketing tool that in our opinion has a great untapped marketing potential.
- InMailAccording to a recent Gigaom Research study, most digital marketers in the US consider e-mail as the most effective digital marketing tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion and customer retention (http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/online/email-rated-most-effective-digital-marketing-tactic-44110/?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=mc&utm_medium=textlink). E-mail marketing, however, has its limitations and downsides.
The key is to do it properly without compromising your credibility. This is where LinkedIn’s InMail can help. Now you can send an e-mail to any executive that meets your search criteria on LinkedIn. But first, you will need to upgrade your service and get a certain number of InMail credits.
At the Sales Executive membership level, for example, you will get 25 credits (at $79.99 a month) which will give you the right to send 25 messages. However, the nice thing about InMail is that if your prospects do not respond to you within seven days, you will get refunded for your credits so you can send another message at no extra cost.
Written by Dr. Ivan Surjanovic and Cyri Jones,
adapted from BizTech101 column in Business in Vancouver
Photo by Hello I’m Nik 🍌 on Unsplash