LinkedIn, which was seen as a platform to connect with professionals across the world, has evolved into something even greater than that; your social media marketing and business’s sales navigator. You just need to know how to make the most of your expertise and the platform provided to you.
When it comes to LinkedIn, you need to play it smart, and that is exactly what this article will help you with; understanding and polishing your LinkedIn profile in a way that helps you to generate quality leads.
Kickstarting Quality Leads with a Polished Profile
First things first, let it be an SME or a large corporation, you need to make sure that not just your company’s but also your employees’ LinkedIn profile is optimized in a way it can act as a source of lead generation online.
A good recommendation here would be to not make your profile (company or personal) look like a resume. If you’re talking more about your past than your present, then you are simply just leaving potential quality leads on the table. You don’t want to do that.
Give more information about your current status; highly important for company employees to have this done. Have your employees focus more on what value they are providing to your company and their existing customers.
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Speaking of information, make use of keywords for your company bio. The same goes for your employee’s personal LinkedIn profile. Employee profiles are being emphasized because of the reason that they are representative of your business. They’re an indirect source of generating LinkedIn leads for your company.
For example, if your business offers digital marketing solutions, then you’d want both your employees and the company’s profile to show in the search results relevant to digital marketing solutions. This is why you need to make use of appropriate keywords that would help your company profile to get ranked.
Pro Tip: Make sure to highlight the keyword wherever you use it.
Some of the areas where it’s suggested to add keywords so that the profile can rank higher are:
- Headline
- Summary
- Current work experience
- Past work experience
- Specialties (listing your expertise in keyword form)
- Education
Adding Additional Sections
Don’t limit yourself to what is vividly visible to you. Explore the platform and the features that it offers to you. Additional sections can be added to your profile, and this is something that not everyone is aware of.
When you tap on the edit option on your profile, it prompts you to add more sections such as certifications, courses, honors & awards, organizations, projects, and other credentials.
The best part of adding these to your profile (if they are relevant to your field) is that you get to make use of more keywords, which means another way of having yourself ranked and generating LinkedIn leads.
LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator Tool
Another great way of generating quality leads is through LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tool. It is a paid tool costing like $80/mo or $780/yr. What this tool requires of you is to identify who your ideal target lead is and offers you with 22+ distinct filter categories (not your ordinary LinkedIn filters) to refine LinkedIn’s database as per your ideal target list.
Some of these categories that you can make use of to refine your target list are:
- Geography
- Keywords
- Relationship
- Industry
- Postal code
- Job function
- Job title
- Seniority
- Years in position
- Years at company
- Years of experience
- Company
- Company headcount and more
Pro tip: Only add those people to your list who are second connections to you. Here’s why:
- It gives you something in common (more in-depth insights, relation, and information than LinkedIn) with the person you’ll be targeting or would want to work with, which is very important psychologically.
- It helps to avoid mass spamming anyone who may not be interested in your offerings and you getting leads that may never even mature.
Also, you can maintain a list of 1500+ leads, set alerts on them, and share them with the team for future references. As it gives you extended network access so to communicate it bundles 20+ InMails to reach out to.
Call to Action for your Website
It is important to draw attention to your website in the right manner. LinkedIn offers you the option of adding three website links, categorized under My website, My company, My blog, and others.
But, having your lead generating website pages under such categories doesn’t necessarily give off the best impression. A suggestion here would be to make the website links that you are providing count. How can you do this? Simply by listing all three of these links as other. This way, you can customize the text that you provide for your links, increasing the chances of traffic being directed to not only the right pages but also quality lead generation online.
Make Use of LinkedIn Groups
There are two ways to go about this; creating your own LinkedIn group or joining other groups.
The later part – creating your own LinkedIn group, you not only get to demonstrate your expertise, connect with potential leads, and widen your network, but also get to email members of your group once a week.
To have such an option on hand means being able to provide valuable information for your members regularly via email, and also incorporating promotional emails for your business. But, these promotional emails and other forms of information need to be aligned with the goals of your group. Otherwise, it would negate the entire purpose of forming such a group in the first place.
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LinkedIn also provides the feature of creating an auto-responder email that welcomes new members to the group, which can be a mixture of an introduction of the group as well as an introduction to you, the company, or group administrator.
However, if you join existing groups in your industry, it would enable you to demonstrate your expertise, connect with potential leads, and eventually be able to broaden your network because of having the membership in common.
In either case, you are benefitting and increasing your chances of lead generation online too through LinkedIn; a platform not everyone is able to make use of to the best of their abilities. However, one thing is guaranteed that if you follow these simple steps, you will have another platform added to your list of not just creating awareness about your business but also generating quality leads.
