Having an effective LinkedIn Marketing Strategy is critical, especially if you want to generate more leads, clients and sales and your business is selling B2B (to other businesses) or getting referrals from other businesses.. In this article we have pulled together some key strategies and tips from our recent Marketing Strategy Show podcast with Adam Houlahan who is an International Keynote Speaker specialising in Social Media for business.

Basics of LinkedIn

• The real power of LinkedIn is the ability to have a one on one conversation
• This is the reason you need to focus 99% of your energy into your personal profile as this is where you will be contacted the most
• One of the good features of LinkedIn is the Sales Navigator platform. The sales navigator is not free, it is a subscription base here in Australia
• Sales navigator is a premium paid feature within LinkedIn  that allows users to access all the power of LinkedIn , based on the contacts you have selected, Sales Navigator suggests potential organisations that fit a similar profile. You can also define your territory so that suggestions are based on limited by your area.
• Another key feature of Sales Navigator is that is shows you a list of people who have been active in the last 30 days, this  is a critical part of the feature as you may find that you are sending out a lot of requests and none are getting accepted and it isn’t because the person doesn’t want to connect, it’s just because that person’s not highly active
• You do have a limit of 3,000 connection requests that you can send, that sounds like a lot but it’s not 3,000 that accept it’s 3000 sends
• The only thing you have full control of is your email database and your website. So, everything should always be about getting people back to your website or ideally even subscribe to your updates and newsletters

Personal Profile

• Before you start anything spend your time on getting your profile right.
• You should have a company profile but you should put all your energy into your personal profile.
• With a lot of small clients, if they don’t have one it really isn’t critical to set one up as all the focus should be on the personal profile
• The thing is if someone clicks through to your LinkedIn  Profile and in this case, there’s no profile image, or the content isn’t updated regularly it doesn’t represent you in a highly positive way
• The profile image is a very important part of making your profile look good, investing a few hundred dollars on having a professional headshot done is money well spent as you can use it on all your social channels
• Make sure your profile is up to date. if you use an old picture or look completely different to your display picture it decreases your credibility
• The second part of getting your profile right is the position description and keywords
• When you view someone’s LinkedIn account you can see a skills section with sometimes as many as 50 skills listed, and you think to yourself how could this person really have all those skills but you need to look at those skills as keywords
• Think about what keywords you would want to be found for in searches and use those words. You should also be using them in your headline
• The banner image on your profile should also be used, its free advertising so why not use it
• The key thing is if you are going to be on 2-3 or even more platforms, consistency is key. Make sure the images (especially the background) are the same across all platforms

Content Distribution / Lead Generation

• Lead generation wise, LinkedIn tends to work best probably more for people in the B2B space first? It’s not to say it doesn’t work for other businesses but B2B is where it works best
• Even if you aren’t in the B2B space, the key or the most powerful way to use it is to position yourself as an industry expert in whatever it is that you do.
• The best way to do this is through curating content. So, for example, you might read an article on a website and think it’s a good read, so you put a short description of why you think it’s a good read.
• If this is hard for you to do think about what content would be interesting to your ideal clients and customers instead of what interests you
• If you are writing a blog for your website, take the same blog and publish it to LinkedIn.
• You can then also take snippets of that in the form of a status update or tweets. The point of content these days is to create one piece of content and use it a hundred times
• Pro-tips are a great example of short-form content, they are a very short snippet of information and they are just a little tip out of each blog article, so every blog article can probably create 5 or 6 pro tips
• It is recommended that you find an automation service to help with that process because obviously manually posting 6 snippets in an article regularly is quite involved
• Programs like Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprinklr and Meet Edgar all provide automation services for your social publishing
• What sets Meet Edgar apart from the rest is that you basically put all your content into libraries and if you can’t create content to release in your regular schedule Meet Edgar will just repurpose something you’ve used before
• When creating video content you need to think about the fact that roughly 80% of all videos viewed are viewed without sound
• By outsourcing aspects of the video production to cheap low cost services like fiverr you can spend more on other things like subtitles to make your video go the extra mile.

Connecting on LinkedIn

• Another aspect you need to recognise is that you want to personalize the messages in as to why you want to connect rather than the generic template that LinkedIn  provides
• If you are sending a generic response the onus is on the person you are sending it to see what you are about, whereas if you just put that quick message there with why you want to connect and why you think it could be beneficial, nine times out of ten they will connect
• There is no set formula for sending out messages, it could be as simple as saying “Hey, I’d like to connect because I’ve been reading some of your content and I’m interested in that.” It might be “hey we are in the same industry, I can see some great value in us collaborating on things”.
• But don’t start selling as soon as you are connected!!
• In the LinkedIn  Playbook by Adam  talks about following people’s content and commenting and engaging in that way to start off building connections
• The key thing that you need to realise with LinkedIn  is that it is there to create a conversation
• Realistically it is probably better to spend 10 minutes per day as opposed to 30 minutes once a week responding to people and connecting to new people as it is much more valuable to be a regular user than one who is only online for short bursts of activity

LinkedIn  v other social media

• In regard to other social media profiles (like Facebook), people think they must be on this platform and that platform so they set up all these different profiles where they’ve got maybe ten followers or two lines or no photos. In LinkedIns case, these look awful and it detracts from what you are trying to do
• The thing with personal branding is you are far better off to just be on two or three platforms and do them well
• When trying to connect to your ideal clients on social media, don’t just join a platform for the sake of joining, be on it because the people you want to reach are on it.
• Publishing content on LinkedIn  or any social channel – I’ve always had the belief you can’t be good all the time but you need to be taking people back to your own website, your own real estate not just have all content sitting on your social media page
• The difference between posting content to Facebook and LinkedIn  is that you should only be posting content that would be high value to your followers or ideal clients, whereas on Facebook its more about regular updates.

Need some LinkedIn Marketing inspiration?

If so we have a simple Linkedin Marketing Strategy roadmap you can follow that details 8 key strategies step-by-step to help you use LinkedIn more effectively. That means building better relationships and more leads, clients and sales. You can download a copy here.

If you would like any one-on-one advice on how to use LinkedIn more effectively in your Marketing,  need assistance to get a Marketing project or a Marketing Plan done  we would love to help. Just call 1300 676 448 or contact us for an obligation-free discussion.