The Best Ways to Nurture Leads and Drive Sales on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great platform for generating B2B leads. As a marketing channel, it allows you to find new customers and create new contacts. Here are some stats that prove its effectiveness:

• LinkedIn sees 106 million unique visits every month.

• Over 500 million users have LinkedIn accounts.

• 40% of these check LinkedIn every single day.

• LinkedIn’s user base spans across 200 countries and territories, with 70% of them outside USA.

• Q1 2016 recorded 45 billion page views from LinkedIn members.

If you've got a business that's marketable, LinkedIn is the platform where you can generate qualified leads, establish highly relevant industry connections, and crack heavy-duty deals. Now if this doesn’t motivate you to market your business on LinkedIn, tell me what will!

Long story short – LinkedIn is the number one place for business marketing on the web. And we’re here to tell you some of the best ways to do so.

1. Invest Time, Thought, Content, and Effort in your LinkedIn Group

Want a sales funnel that feeds close to 100 fresh leads every day? Businesses would kill for such a supply of qualified leads! LinkedIn Groups is your tool to set your golden funnel up.

Here’s how to do it.

• Identify an interesting niche relevant to your business, and something that the audience is interested in.

• Create a LinkedIn group.

• Use these tactics to generate buzz around your group, and get more members and leads every day.

1. Add relevant keywords in the group description so that it shows up in search results in LinkedIn.
2. Add the most relevant keyword in the group title; this helps it with visibility on Google search.
3. Add your company’s blog or website to the group to divert traffic that way.
4. Add your blog’s RSS feed to the group; this auto-publishes your new content on the home page of all group members.
5. Connect people in the group by making introductions among people who can help each other.
6. Add value-adding content in the group to keep the members interests.

2. Use LinkedIn Answers Regularly to Market your Business to Highly Targeted Audiences

LinkedIn Answers is a great platform using which you can engage in meaningful conversations with other users, and contextualize it to convert the engagement into leads.

Go to the LinkedIn Answers app and specify the areas you have fair bit of knowledge on.

Once you see a question pop up, here’s how you can approach it best.

1. Do 10 minutes of research on the person who’s asked it, so that you can personalize your answer for more appeal.
2. Give external website links and other resource links in your answer to make it highly valuable for the reader.
3. Leave the answer open; ask the reader to contact you privately for getting better insight.

Here are some more tips to help you as you leverage LinkedIn Answers for targeted marketing of your business.

• We’d recommend you make LinkedIn Answers a regular part of your weekly marketing efforts. Find out 3 hours at least, to answer at least 5 questions every week.

• When your first-degree contacts ask a question, you are updated automatically. Make it a point to leave a note to the asker, even if you don’t have the answer.

• When readers rate your answer to a publicly asked question as best, you get Expert points.

• To be an Expert, you’ve got to answer like experts. To know more, go to Answers tab, click the Experts option. Glance over some Experts This Week to get a hang of what kind of answers are doing well.

3. Integrate Your Website’s Analytics with LinkedIn

An estimated 98% of your business website visitors don’t register as leads. But just the fact that they’ve been on your site means that they’re far more likely to be qualified leads than people who have never even seen your content.

Obviously you shouldn’t think of anonymous site visitors as having the same value as opt-in leads, but if you can identify them and follow up with them on LinkedIn, offering free advice, you’re likely to find relationship building to be far easier than cold calls.

That’s the power of this integration. Leadfeeder is a super easy and highly effective tool for this. This web app for social sellers uses reverse IP lookup technology to identify the companies that are visiting your content, and it generates easily segment-able logs of every page loaded, along with dates and dwell times. Leadfeeder can even push all of this sales data to your CRM, so you can easily track the engagement and specific interests of your most important leads.

The app also displays each visitor’s LinkedIn Company Page, and from there, it’s easy to see how many first and second degree contacts you have, and quickly reach the right person to pitch your idea, product, or service.

4. Use LinkedIn Sponsored Updates to Market Your Content to Specific Audiences

LinkedIn Sponsored Updates is a paid option you can use to push your business posts into specific LinkedIn audience members' personal feeds.

Once you post an update to your Company page wait for a few minutes, hit Refresh, and you’ll see a Sponsored Update button.

Give a name to your campaign. This is a great feature, because you can use the same campaign for subsequent posts you want to promote through Sponsored Updates, using same target criteria.

Next, choose your target criteria. Apart from demographic level controls (location, gender, age), you can target a highly relevant audience by specifying criteria such as job functions, job title, skills, company name, school, and groups. Because of the highly targeted nature of the advertising, the conversion rates are bound to be higher than any PPC or pay per 1000 impression methods.

Next, choose between the cost per click or cost per 1000 impressions option, and make the payment. There’s no post authorization delay from LinkedIn, so it’ll start being promoted almost immediately.

Use Campaign Manager option to preview and monitor your campaign.

5. Other LinkedIn tools to use for your business’ marketing

Check out LinkedIn Events. Promote your next marketing event using this option. When anyone RSVPs, your Event shows on their home profile, thus attracting more users.

Use Advanced Search, and create a database of highly relevant individuals you want to reach out to.

Send personalized messages to influencers that you identify using Advanced Search.

Invest time in these methods, and you will soon see more marketing outcome from LinkedIn than any other platform.

Bonus infographic:

Courtesy of: Salesforce.