"Grow Your Business Through LinkedIn"

Do you struggle to generate quality leads consistently?

Are you finding it hard to stand out in the marketplace and get your message in front of key decision-makers?

Or perhaps you’ve tried several marketing strategies such as Google Adwords, Facebook ads or search engine optimization and haven’t yet achieved the return on investment you were hoping for?

These are the common challenges across many small business owners I speak with.
When I first started using LinkedIn back in 2011, I had just sold my previous business and moved back to Sydney to pursue my passion for starting a business advisory firm.

Like you I was on the lookout for a better, faster and more cost-effective method to win more business and increase sales.

After implementing a few marketing initiatives on other channels I quickly realized that the traditional methods of marketing were either too expensive or not effective in today’s social and digital world.

At the time I was very sceptical and maybe a little cynical about the return I could get for the time and money I would need to invest in social media.

With market globalization and so many social media tools out there, I found it easy to get caught up in the noise and hype of the next big thing.

I knew that if I we were going to generate any return through social I would need to choose the platform that offered the best potential for reaching our ideal audience.

As a small business, you simply can’t be amazing on every platform; that takes a huge amount of bandwidth and resources.

Instead of having a sub-par representation in a lot of places, I knew that the key was to be awesome in one.

So how do you decide which platform to choose?

Below are three reasons why I’ve chosen LinkedIn as my preferred social media platform and why I recommend others to the same.

1. Media

In today’s business world consumers buy more into people than they do in companies and products.

Sure having a good company reputation is important and you have to have a great product/service but all of this is irrelevant if they don’t like the people behind the company.

You may have the best product or service in the world but if nobody knows who you are or where to find you then what good is that?

This is why personal branding and online reputation is so important. And one great way to build your reputation and expertise in the marketplace is “Media Exposure.”

But getting noticed can be an expensive and time-consuming exercise. Hiring a traditional PR agency can cost you thousands, and whether or not their campaign will result in increased sales is another story.

For far too long the traditional methods of getting media coverage has either been too expensive, difficult or just too time consuming.

But thanks to LinkedIn you can now start connecting and building relationships with hundreds of journalists and editors from around the world.

According to a survey by Arketi media group, over 94.2 percent of journalists and editors are on LinkedIn and 62 percent rate it as their preferred professional networking tool!

2. Lead Generation

The second reason why I’ve chosen LinkedIn as our preferred social media site is because of its lead generation capabilities.

Regardless of what product you sell, where your company is located or what industry you’re in, ultimately we are all in the business of Marketing.

And the sole purpose of why we market our business is to get our message in front of key decision makers.

When it comes to marketing your business, I believe that it’s 10% what you say, 90% how you say it. Therefore, it’s hard to stand out if you’re marketing your business like every other competitor is in your industry.

With two new members joining every second in across 130 industries and 200 countries it’s never been easier to search, find and connect with thousands of potential clients without burning a hole in your marketing budget.

Think about it, where else would you have access to over 400 million decision-makers for free?
LinkedIn is the ONLY online platform that provides access to their database of decision makers, and they do this through their advanced search functionality.

So why spend thousands of dollars using traditional marketing methods to promote you’re businesses, when you can access a network of decision makers using LinkedIn.

Over the past few years, we’ve managed to use LinkedIn to fill events, secure 100’s of new clients and increase our database through online seminars.

3. Partnerships

And finally, the third reason why I’ve chosen LinkedIn is its ability to help you connect and secure partnerships.

Fostering strategic partnerships is a powerful way to grow a business.

With the right partner, you can refer clients to each other, leverage the power of offering complimentary products or services, and help grow each others email list.

Let’s face it, in today’s business world the customer sales cycle is a lot longer than it used to be 5-10 years ago.

Nowadays you need a minimum of 7-10 touch points to build up rapport and trust before you can pitch your product or business.

Why waste precious resources developing this trust when you can partner with someone else who has already established this trust.

And by doing so rather then getting your message in front of one potential client, you can broadcast your message in front of hundreds if not thousands of targeted contacts who have already built trust with the business or person you are partnering with.

However finding the right joint venture and alliance partners can be challenging. 
So where do you go to find joint venture partners, for instance, if you’re a social media consultant focused on helping chiropractors improve their marketing?

LinkedIn of course!

With 49% of LinkedIn members being key decision-makers, you will never have to cold call or run telemarketing campaigns to reach out and connect with key potential partners!

In the past 12 months, we’ve managed to secure over 50 partnerships through LinkedIn helping us grow our database from 50 subscribers to over 13,800.

share it with your network so they too can benefit.

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Lead Generation Secrets

Lead generation is the process of raising buyer interest and gathering inquiries from prospective purchasers, often in the form of names and contact information.

These leads are then qualified for their ability and desire to purchase your products and services.

While generally the focus of B2B marketing organizations, lead generation also applies to B2C companies, especially where high price, high consideration products are involved.

57% of a typical purchase decision is made before a prospect ever talks to a supplier based on a Corporate Executive Board study of over 1,400 B2B customers across industries.

For marketers, lead generation is a tradeoff between quality and quantity. Specifically without a sufficient number of leads, you can’t achieve your sales conversion goals.

By contrast, too many leads often translate to unqualified buyers who need lots of persuasions to convert or they’ll never buy.

1. Global Social Media

Ensure that the content is the right type of content for the community that it’s presented to and the right place in the customer journey. Be cognizant of the many steps in your customer’s journey. Make sure that awareness content is used in social channels. Consideration type content can be used for paid targeted audience buys.

2.  Find and Convert

Experiment with owned earned and paid campaigns. Try something you’ve never tried before. Be willing to fail small and fast.

3. B2B Marketing Insider

The most effective way for marketing to drive stellar leads for sales is to deliver the right content to the right prospect at the right time. Mapping content to the buyer journey and then delivering it to the right prospects is the best way to drive effective sales-ready leads without wasting your sales’ teams time and your company’s money.

5.Actionable Marketing Guide

Today’s customers are social media and content marketing savvy. Whether they’re making a purchase for themselves or their business, they’ve at least started their research before they ever contact you.

*Understand your potential customers including their influencers, end-users and social media community. To this end, create a marketing persona.

*Provide your market with the information they need to make an informed decision (i.e. the 5 basic content types). If you don’t offer it, your competitors and/or near substitutes might and you may lose a prospect.

*Incorporate a contextually relevant call-to-action. Don’t assume that potential customers will automatically contact you. Help them to buy from you.

*Ensure that your purchase process is easy-to-use. Keep your branding consistent as prospects move from your content on one site into your purchase funnel. Use tailored landing pages and ensure that your buying process is streamlined.

*Continually test each step of your lead generation and purchase process. Since your marketing is a dynamic process, test every step on a regular basis to ensure that your content and related marketing as performing as well as possible. This means that you must track your results!

6. Social Media B2B

You must include calls-to-action on blog posts to give visitors the opportunity to raise their hand and express interest in your company and its ideas. Too many blogs do nothing to try to convert their hard-earned blog visitors to leads.

7.  Social Marketology

Borrow a notion from Lean Manufacturing, and think about the world through the customers’ eyes. Each single one of us is inundated daily by marketing messages that are irrelevant. Those microseconds of attention are fundamentally without value; they’re waste. Eliminate waste, and create marketing that adds value to the lives of your audience.

8. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

Be smart about your content creation. The mantra for content marketers should be not to create more content but create more relevant content. Relevance is everything.

9.  Lead Generation for Dummies

Don’t forget about nurturing your leads once you have them in your database! Many marketers think that lead generation ends after the lead acquisition, however, what are you doing to move leads through your funnel?  Just because someone downloaded a whitepaper doesn’t mean they are ready to buy. Once they are in your system you have to use strategies like lead nurturing to educate them throughout their buying journey. That way, new leads become familiar with your company over time, and once they are ready to be sent to sales you will have much better luck closing the deal.

10.  Strategic Objectives

To generate leads, Strategic Objectives has created a cross-channel model: PESOF

P – Paid amplification of your content

E – Earned media through public relations

S – Shared content – that is both owned content that others share, and found content that you share with your audience

O – Owned content like websites, blogs, social connections, etc.

F – Found – use a Search Engine Optimization strategy to identify the keywords your audience is searching for, and then utilize these keywords in your content creation strategy and web copy.

Leads will be knocking down your door looking to hire your company if you properly align lead generation efforts across PESOF.

Lead generation, especially in a connected, content-rich world, is a multi-step process. While prospects may be 60% or more of the way through the process before they contact you, don’t expect them to buy from you immediately.

Be prepared to coax prospects through the purchase process by providing them with the 5 basic content types they need, giving them the ability to gather more information and to get their questions answered, and allowing them to purchase when, where and how they wish to do so.

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LinkedIn Tips for Lead Generation

LinkedIn has become "the most effective social network for prospecting by a wide margin"

In addition, almost 50% of the respondents said they were using LinkedIn more for research and prospecting that a year before. Here is a good visual of what this looks like when compared to Twitter and Facebook:

It’s Time to Get LinkedIn to LinkedIn – Here’s HowWhile anyone can setup a p

rofile on Twitter and add connections there are ways to set yourself and your company ahead of the pack and to become lead mean lead gen machines on LinkedIn. Here are my top 10 recommendations that are free and have proven to be effective:

1. Add the Twitter LinkedIn application- We can’t have a LinkedIn post where we don’t talk about Twitter. This is the power of social media — all the tools are very interrelated. In the LinkedIn application area (bottom right of the home page or in the nav bar), you can add the Twitter application, which at the outset doesn’t look that much different from the twitter feed in other Twitter tools like Tweetdeck, but there are two cool features:

• You can easily follow your LinkedIn connections in Twitter (if they’ve provided their twitter address). Click on “Connections” and then on “Not following” and start selecting the people in Twitter you want to follow.

• You can create a Twitter List from your LinkedIn contacts. This allows you to easily interact with your LinkedIn contacts on Twitter. In addition, the list is dynamic and LinkedIn will keep updating the list as your network grows.

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