THE ULTIMATE LINKEDIN GUIDE

BUILD YOUR BRAND

GENERATE LEADS

BUILD YOUR OWN ENGAGED EXECUTIVE AUDIENCE

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In This Guide:

Introduction

Stand Out with a Brand Enhancing Client Profile

Articles and Posting

Searching Linkedin for your Perfect Prospects

How to Connect and Start Messaging

The Real Fortune is in the Follow Up!

“We now have access to a bigger database than the biggest companies in the world just a mere 15 years ago!”

Linkedin is here and it’s here to stay!

Long gone are the days of cold calling with just a number and no details of who to speak to. Buying cold data is expensive, time consuming for your employees and on the whole a stressful experience with regard to successful results.

Linguistically wrestling with gatekeepers to try and find the information you need.

We now have access to a bigger database than the biggest companies in the world had just a mere 15 years ago!

Why is Linkedin Important?

It is the largest B2B networking platform worldwide. Giving you access to professionals globally. If you work in or own a B2B company, you should be on Linkedin…no ifs… no buts.

Who is Linkedin Good for?

It is good for anyone with a B2B business that wants to find more ways to drive growth and generate warm INCOMING leads.

If you want to become a thought leader in your industry, Linkedin is an important tool. It will drive excellent ROI and increase brand awareness.

What is the best strategy on Linkedin?

There are many different strategies you can adopt, this depends on your company, the industry and what your goals are.

Understanding your business for online promotion.

Clear description of your company
USP
Target Audience/Target Personas
Competitors
Goals online

Stand Out with a Brand Enhancing Profile

When you are active on Linkedin a lot of traffic will go through to your profile. You want to make sure you capitilise on this by making sure you adhere to the following guidelines. This will make it easy for your prospects to discover the value you are able to provide them with.

Profile Picture

This should be a professional image of yourself, smartly dressed with a clear photo image will help increase your professional connections and engagement.

Banner

This appears behind your profile picture and is a branding exercise. This Includes your company logo, tagline, your company’s key benefits and features plus of course your contact details. This can be done quite easily on canva.com as they are free to use, already have templates, and the correct dimensions to get you started.

Headline

This is what people will see next to your name, so make sure it stands out and answers how you help businesses with your products and services. This will give a clear message advising of the solutions you provide to increase your connections.

Summary

Many proles on Linkedin use this space similar to an introduction piece on a CV. This will not help new prospects understand how you can help them. Instead use a client facing approach, where you speak directly to your target persona. This will include speaking about the benets and features of your product and service. Again, including contact details.

The 3 Most Important Questions you want to Answer

Answering these 3 questions will help provide you with a message that can be used all throughout your marketing (and included in your profile summary) to introduce yourself and company

What is the main problem you solve for your prospect?
How do you solve this problem?
What are the benefits of this problem being solved?

Reach Further with Articles and Posts

Articles and posts appear on your profile feed. Keeping in mind that the people you connect with will look at your prole, having a few articles that provide value and talk about your service will boost the chances of securing that prospect as a lead further down the line. Articles are thought pieces so are generally longer, and when produced an alert goes out to many contacts of yours, prompting them to take a look. A few ideas on articles you can produce:

Problem vs Solution – outline a problem you faced and what solution you found.
Guides – How to demonstrate your expertise.
Research and Analysis.
Exploring a Point of View.

Posts tend to be shorter and can include images, videos, links. We have a guide on how to post here: 5 Categories of Posting

Tip – Engagement Groups – Have your team and any partners join a messaging group where you actively like, comment and share the content you post.

This will make your content stand out and also encourage more conversation.

Searching Linkedin for your Perfect Prospects

Why Sales Navigator?

It allows a lot more functionality when it comes to searching and identifying your target audience.

Added features that are useful:

* and keep up to date with alerts about new potential

Ability to save searches prospects: and keep up to date with alerts about new potential prospects:

Extended Search Functionality. This includes seniority level, exclusive marketplaces and viewed prospects. This helps to speed up the process of finding new prospects and limits any repetition of reach out.

Company updates If you are about to contact someone it can be extremely helpful to know if any big news has happened in their company or sector. This can help with the way you approach them and can show your prospect you are knowledgeable about their industry.

Crafting your search terms

Linkedin is great because all users have entered their job titles, making it very easy for you to and the right people you need. However one problem Linkedin has is its search accuracy. For example if you were to type in: marketing director

You will get results from anyone who has marketing or director in their job title. This is not very accurate at all, and can make finding the right people a tedious job in itself. Luckily there isa solution and this solution is called Boolean Search.

Basically this is a range of search commands that can help narrow down your search result and make it more accurate to your your search.

How to Boolean Search commands:

Boolean Search is fairly simple and comprises of 4 commands:

* “” – quotation marks should be your go to when searching for a prospect on Linkedin. This makes sure that it is specic to what you type in. For example if you type in the same job title as mentioned previously using the quotation marks “marketing director” you will get results of people who have the word Marketing immediately followed by the word Director in their title.

* AND – If you are looking for people with more than one job title for example a beauty professional that owns a clinic. This may help you out. For a search like this you would enter: “beauty professional” AND “clinic owner”

* OR – Potentially you want to open up your search to more than just one job title. This command allows you to do that Search for multiple prospects.

* NOT – This is another important command as whilst using quotation marks can help narrow the search, you may still nd people that are not relevant to you. So in the example for “Marketing Director” you may and that there are some Marketing executives that show up. These people may not have the decision making capabilities you are looking for so you might want to exclude them. You can do this by using the NOT command. So the search term would look like this: “Marketing Director” NOT “Marketing Executive” There is no limit to search commands so you do not have to limit yourself to one.

*One tip to take note of is that not everyone gives themselves the same job title, so taking the time to use Linkedin to search for different titles and taking note of the results will help when you are looking to reach as many people as possible.

If you have sales navigator you will be able to save these searches you have made so that you can keep track of them and do not have to note them down. If you do not have Sales Navigator I would suggest making an excel spreadsheet of all the searches and commands you have made, so you don’t have to remember or redo a lot of the work as you will have a good list to come back to when needed.

Connecting and Messaging

Now you have the people you want to make connections with you may be thinking, what is the best way to reach out?

This really translates into should you use a personal connection message or not. This depends a lot on your strategy and method of approach. If your business requires a more targeted approach to individuals who get contacted regularly, then having a connection message will help you stand out to them and explain why they should connect with you. On the other hand if you are in a volume based business it may be best to not include a connection message. Personally we have found that including a connection message doesn’t always have positive eects. So depending on which option you feel most comfortable with make sure you track to see who connects with you and who doesn’t.

Once you are connected.

This is great news! You have connected with a relevant member of your target audience so from now on you know they will be able to see your prole updates, whether that be status updates, new articles, and any new movements made by yourself in the industry. However this is not enough for most people. As just connecting with someone does not leave much of an impression so unless you have content that is something to shout about, your best move is to contact them through a direct message. This is an individual message that gets sent by you to the person of choice who will receive in their inbox, similar to email or messaging.

Direct messaging is an art form in itself, make sure you spend time on getting this right for your business. The last thing you want to do is burn important relationships!

The more personal you can make the message to the person you reach out to, the more likely that they will respond.

“Simplicity is the greatest form of sophistication”

Fortune is in the Follow Up

Once people start responding to your message it is important to not take your foot o the gas. This is just the rst part of the sales process so depending on your product you will want to book a meeting, jump on a call, or send an email.

You have identified interest; it is now up to you to follow up and bring the client to a point where they are ready to buy. Most of the time the sale will not be closed by a Linkedin message alone, so keep this in mind when interest does start to come through.