With over 310 million active monthly users on LinkedIn, there are a wealth of opportunities to get your name out there and make meaningful connections, which could generate truly life-changing business for your brand. If you haven’t been using the professional platform to generate leads or don’t know where to start, now is the time to understand the lead gen opportunities that LinkedIn offers.
Here are 5 simple ways you can generate leads on LinkedIn:
Maintain a strong profile
If information Is sparse and your homepage is looking rather empty, potential connections aren’t going to stick around your profile too long. They will simply see a tumbleweed float past and think that you’re either completely inactive or not organised enough to get your profile into tip-top shape.
To generate leads on LinkedIn, you need to think about what your audience wants to see and the solutions that you provide for their problems. For a nudge in the right direction when optimising your profile, ask yourself:
- What services do you provide and what information would be helpful for your audience to read?
- Are there any keywords or phrases that your audience will be looking out for?
- How can you make yourself stand out as an industry leader? Can you reflect your brand’s values and ethos through the correct tone of voice?
These simple questions can help shape your profile, from adding attention catching headlines to descriptions that tick all the right boxes.
Don’t forget to add relevant visuals that keep your audience engaged. This could be showcasing your brand’s colours, logo, or sharing a personal photo that lets your audience get to know who you are.
Locate potential leads
With millions of business leaders present on LinkedIn, it’s hard to know where to start when it comes to locating potential customers. The best way to start is to start looking through your recommendations of people you may know and reach out to individuals you recognise.
It’s important that you don’t randomly send out lots of connection requests to random people, as this will only harm your progress and make it difficult to make meaningful connections in the future. Be sure to focus on people that you do know and send personalised messages explaining how you know each other.
Another fantastic way to prospect leads is to join groups that your target audience are likely to be involved in. This could those relevant to your industry or groups focused on small businesses – anything surrounding your bubble will help you identify potential customers.
Spend some time everyday exploring your connection recommendations and forming a list of suggested connections that you would like to meet up with for a chat. Whilst daunting at first, it allows you to step outside your comfort zone and form relationships, which in turn could transform into reliable customers!
Content
Standing out as an industry leader or trusted connection amongst your community and audience is an incredibly important factor that can be determined on the content that you share to LinkedIn.
Of course, what you post depends on your target audience, but you need to think of engaging ways to capture their attention and showcase the best of your brand. For example, consider exploring behind the scenes insights, industry trends, and honest content that includes the best and worst of the working day. Your connections want to see a human side that includes successes, failures, and how you’ve grown over time.
Create content that focuses on quality over quantity, encourages engagement, and sparks conversations that guarantee opportunities.
Engage
Engaging content will in turn lead to engagement from your audience, which is incredibly important as it allows you to understand your content and improve it. Likes, reactions, and comments all help your posts show up in more news feed as the algorithm adores poplar content and will seek to promote it.
You can encourage engagement by asking questions, sharing people’s posts, and leaving comments, which in turn will lead to building relationships. It’s a simple way to get your foot in the door and even learn from others, helping to shape a successful future for your business.
Be consistent, check daily, and stay active to get noticed and form a community.
Build Relationships
After prospecting potential leads, you can’t expect them all to be receptive to a sales pitch; some leads need to be nurtured first.
Once you’ve sent a connection request, the best way to build a relationship is to strike up a conversation. Now, there’s no magic secret when it comes to conversation starters, but try to focus on something that you both have in common (this is where research comes in handy):
- Have you met at a networking event before?
- Do you have connections in common?
- Did you grow up in the same town or city?
- Are you working in the same industry?
Getting over the conversation hurdle is the tricky part and all you need to do from here is keep them engaged, either through discussing business trends, celebrating their success, or exploring potential for growth.
These insights will help shape your pitch, which you can further form through asking questions such as:
- What are their short and long-term priorities?
- What challenges are they currently facing?
- What is the process for their business when it comes to acquiring new products or services?
If you’ve asked all the right questions and built some trust, it’s time to let them find out more about what you have to offer and how you can help them. From there, you can finally pitch your business and transform the connection into a valuable customer.