The professional networking site may not be as familiar to you as Facebook, but it has in fact been around for longer. If you are looking to promote your product or service to business professionals, then read on to discover how you can leverage the power of LinkedIn.
You may have read our recent blog on LinkedIn advertising about how to run a campaign; but in this blog we will focus on how you can build your own LinkedIn profile to identify and engage with new prospects.
Many of our clients have limited experience of using LinkedIn or have dabbled with limited success. They know they want to find leads and build their connections, but they don’t know how.
Our top recommendation would be to trial LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator. According to Diana Kucer, LinkedIn’s Director of Global Product Marketing: “Sales Navigator allows business professionals to tap into the power of LinkedIn efficiently. It improves social selling in support of powerful daily habits.”
So what does this mean exactly?
For just a small fee per month Sales Navigator gives you access to thousands of potential customers and locked profiles which you wouldn’t normally be able to see with a standard account. When you launch the tool it guides you through various set up options including choosing organisations you’re currently focusing on, sectors, job titles, country – the list is endless!
Once you’re in and set up, Sales Navigator will do the work for you by sending various suggestions of people and organisations giving you the opportunity to either connect or send them an inMail, some of which you may have not even thought about. You can also save various contacts within a list and go back to them at a later date.
Perhaps you already have a list of potential contacts, or you’ve been to a networking event and received a list of attendees – Sales Navigator is perfect for this too! If the person in mind has LinkedIn you can easily find them and contact them via the tool. Or, if you have a company in mind but no contact, you can search the company and view their list of employees on LinkedIn!
We recently used Sales Navigator for the Let’s Do Business Brighton exhibition which took place at The Amex Stadium in June. Our sales team found and connected with a wide variety of potential exhibitors making use of the built in search tool and also finding professionals on various attendee lists from the networking events they had been to. This generated a lot of interest around the exhibition which sold out ahead of the event. We even ended up securing one of our exciting exhibitors this way.
Other clients we have used this tool for include Goplasticpallets.com, the UK’s leading independent supplier of plastic pallets and boxes and Johnson Controls, a global manufacturer of HVAC equipment and industry-leading technology. Goplasticpallets.com were looking to target senior logistics professionals. We started by researching contacts at the industry associations they were members of including the UKWA, AMHSA and SMMT. Once we had identified their profiles, we sent them a message and connected in this way, which allowed us to start a conversation prior to our client setting up meetings or conference calls. The response to this surpassed our client’s expectations and we opened several new doors for them.
Johnson Controls were slightly different; they had their own list of potential companies and contacts so we searched for the contacts directly on LinkedIn rather than by job title. Having drafted a targeted message, we approached and connected with them in the same way. Within just one day we managed to identify two potential leads.
