In my years like a professional interested to provide value to my company and my contacts network, I’ve learned that LinkedIn is a must-have for every person in the world interested to be part of what Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO calls “Economic Graph”, where every professional who has a profile can create a better economic opportunity for the others who is connected.
We all need to understand deeply in our heart and soul, because we could apply the same thing thinking like a business. LinkedIn provides a unique chance to promote your business and services like nobody could do it, and that’s why I want to present the tactics that Socialbakers.com could apply today at to convert the company page in a huge lead generation machine.
Tactic # 1: Encourage to every person of the company to be at LinkedIn
Many professionals don’t see yet the importance to have a fresh and updated LinkedIn profile, but my friends, just hear the advice of Kristina Jaramillo, founder of GetLinkedInHelp and a well-known LinkedIn marketing expert with many years of experience in this social network working with clients who go from small businesses to Fortune 1000 companies:
“I use LinkedIn to directly connect with and build relationships with key decision makers (my prospects), key professionals that influence business marketing decisions, and potential referral sources/white label partners”
Kristina has done this for years and she encourage to each of her clients to keep a marked importance in their profiles, because this is the place where you could communicate the value that you could provide to current and prospective customers. To see this aspect in better shape, I invite you to read the post that Kristina wrote for Salesforce.com about this topic called “How to Communicate Your Value On Your LinkedIn Profile”.
To learn how to improve your own LinkedIn’s profile, there are several resources that you could use today:
- How to Use LinkedIn for Business: A Beginners’s Guide (particularly Chapter 1: 8 Steps to create your LinkedIn profile) from HubSpot
- LinkedIn’s Checklist
Or if you want to learn from excellent examples, you use these profiles like references:
- Jason Miller, Sr. Manager, Content Marketing, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
- Jay Baer, founder of Convince and Convert, author of YoUtility
- Viveka Von Rosen, LinkedIn expert and Author
- Lana Khavinson, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn
Tactic # 2: Create an engaging company page
Then, when you have to everyone in the company with their LinkedIn’s profile well written and updated, you will create a serious company page in the platform with all the benefits that includes the new Company Pages design:
- The possibility to have a larger cover image highlighting the culture and pros of the company, encouraging to prospective employees to fall in love with what are you doing. There are many great examples, but my favorite are Adobe, Dell, LinkedIn, and HubSpot
- The chance to put your products and services is another critical thing that you should know and use. The benefits are many, but one which is key is the power of recommendations for your products, where your current clients have the possibility to talk about them and why other clients should use them. This tactic could grow exponentially your sales if you use it wisely. One of the best examples which have done an incredible job with their products is Rocket Fuel, where they put all the products at LinkedIn and many of their clients have given great recommendations, causing a very good number of leads for the company.
To know more about this tactic, you should read “A Step-By-Step Guide to LinkedIn’s New Company Pages” from HubSpot.
Tactic # 3: Make a better use of LinkedIn Sponsored Updates
If you want to grow exponentially, Sponsored Updates is an amazing way to do it, calculating precisely the right audience for your promotion using its Advanced Targeting features.
For example, if Socialbakers.com wants to make a promotion directly from the company page at LinkedIn, focused in marketing executives with base in Singapore and with more than 5 years on their respective companies (decision makers), or if you want to make the promotion of a new blog of the company in Spanish, focused in LATAM region (it would be nice to help on it), you can do it.
It’s important to be always seeing the performance of your campaign, to measure what kind of posts and updates give you more impressions. You can measure everything with the powerful LinkedIn Campaign Manager. To know more about this, you must read “The Sophisticated Marketers Guide to LinkedIn” or you can see the post from HubSpot about why LinkedIn is more effective than Facebook and Twitter for lead generation.
Tactic # 4: Use the powerful combination of Slideshare and LinkedIn for lead generation
There is one trend which are making sound in every marketing teams: Visual Marketing, and Slideshare is the perfect place to do this using the power of images in slides. One great way to use it, is to translate webinars to slides and put it there, or for example, make a report of the global stats of Social Media Marketing by region or by country backed by Socialbakers.com data, using targeted slides for it. If you need examples, see how We Are Social made these two presentations:
- We Are Social: European Digital Landscape 2014
- Social, Digital and Mobile Around the World (January 2014)
And then, make another sponsored update with the slides at LinkedIn to give the message to company followers and more.
To know more about this topic, you should read “10 Tips for Using Slideshare for Lead Generation” by Marketo.
Tactic # 5: Obtain the best benefits of LinkedIn Groups
“100,000 members join new groups at LinkedIn”
said HubSpot in a recent study, so you can see the level of engagement that users have in the platform. For example, I use several LinkedIn groups focused in Social Media, but I will put here my favorite list:
- Social Media Marketing Networking Club, created by Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner
- Inbound Marketers — For Marketing Professionals, created by HubSpot where the team share great posts, articles, statistics, webinars, etc related to the world of Inbound Marketing
- The Social CMO, is full of great discussions about how Social Media is transforming the current role of the Chief Marketing Officer
I think that every member of the Product Marketing at Socialbakers.com should become in member of these groups to analyze trends, participate in the discussions and give smart opinions about the topics which are being discussed. This could pay off huge dividends in the long term for Socialbakers.com, because all this could reaffirm you like leaders in the Social Media space, showing your expertise there.
I´m well known in all these groups because every response that I give there is always thinking in the best answer, because in that way you become in a Group Influencer if your discussion or comment is OK for the members of the group, and all this have given a lot of clients for my consulting business in Social Media Marketing Strategy, and all Socialbakers.com team could learn from it.
Tactic # 6: Jan Rezab and Neil Morgan as INfluencers in Social Media Marketing Analytics
This is one of my favorite things right now at LinkedIn, because they invited to business owners, CEOs, Presidents, Non-profits leaders to write in the platform about their experiences and this have paid huge dividends for them, because the growth of LinkedIn is being increased with time.
Jan (CEO) and Neil (CMO), with their great expertise in the field of Social Media Marketing and Analytics, could become in two of the most followed leaders in the platform, writing posts about Social Media Trends by regions, promotions of the company, and stories about solved problems to clients with any product of Socialbakers.com, or for example Neil’s impressions about the past Engage London 2014.
Tactic # 7: Obtain constant advice and feedback from LinkedIn experts
The advice here is simple: just read the Sophisticated Marketers Guide to LinkedIn.
Conclusions
So, my friends at Socialbakers: You should work today with Kristina and Jason to revamp your business at LinkedIn, and if you want to thank me, just do it with a Tweet or share it at LinkedIn. Thanks again for reading.