By Paul Taylor, founder and CEO of Webmarketing123
With its vast store of employee contact information, LinkedIn continues to be the leading social media platform for B2B businesses. Given that more than 71 percent of users have a household income of $50,000 or higher and 64 percent use LinkedIn for business growth, it’s vital to leverage this platform for your marketing efforts.
Establish Personal Connections
Does your lead-generation team struggle to make personal connections with prospects? How valuable would it be if they could refer to a mutual acquaintance or could refer about the great restaurant they visited in the contact’s hometown? LinkedIn provides a highly efficient way to access information about a prospect before that introductory call, and dramatically boost the likelihood that a sales call will be returned. How dramatic? studies have shown a 243 percent increase in sales productivity. With this extra ammo, your sales team can begin establishing personal ties earlier in the sales process, paying huge dividends as you move leads through your pipeline.
Establish Credibility With LinkedIn Answers
Another way to enhance the authority of your sales team is to use LinkedIn Answers to reinforce your position as a thought leader in your industry. There are questions being asked every day on LinkedIn about your industry, and having your profile highlighted as an “Expert” will aid in establishing personal authority and brand recognition.
Grow Your Pipeline
For many sales teams, it’s difficult to keep up with the continual churn at their prospects’ organizations. Contacts are promoted, relocated and change companies all the time, making it difficult to keep your pipeline database up to date. On LinkedIn, it’s easy to search for employees of companies and their titles, ensuring that you are contacting the right decision makers.
Engage Your Employees
Undoubtedly many of your co-workers are on LinkedIn but aren’t using it proactively. Encouraging your employees to share posts from your company page can help them leverage their own personal networks and increase the amplification of your company’s social media efforts. Our clients have seen large opportunities manifest simply because an employee interacted with the company’s page.
Promote Your Microsites
Search engine optimization continues to be the most important source of lead generation for B2B companies, and though those three outbound links LinkedIn provides are designated “no-follow” (they won’t improve your search rankings), they can add to the diversity of your overall link portfolio (Google favors this) and raise the visibility of your microsites or specific sections of your website.
Paul founded Webmarketing123 in 2004 and continues to direct the company’s overall strategy and manage its operations. An Inc. 500 company, Webmarketing123 helps clients improve SEO, PPC and social media marketing performance, and delivers measurable results. In demand as a speaker, Paul brings his 20 years of marketing and strategic consulting experience and enthusiasm for education to his many speaking engagements and webinars. Prior to founding Webmarketing123, Paul was a vice president and general manager at AT&T Wireless, and a management consultant with Bain & Company. He earned a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in business administration from the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.
