Nothing irks people more than a blatant sales pitch in a LinkedIn connection request or the first message you get from a new contact.
Whether it’s social media, email, or any other medium, it’s something that just won’t entice many people to open. Make sure you are being patient and invest in building a reason for people to trust you enough to consider buying your product or service.
The worst culprits are the seemingly endless parade of people popping up on almost every social media platform presenting themselves as the gurus whose training is going to save your business.
Sadly that aggressive, cold, often slightly sleazy approach is exactly the opposite of what works to generate solid leads and high sales conversion rates. That kind of behaviour is a poor advertisement for their offering.
Try working towards leveraging the power of the amazing, enormous and growing platform that LinkedIn has become.
It starts with patience, respect for your target audience and a deep underlying commitment to be genuinely helpful with no expectation of an immediate sale. Sounds counterintuitive but in online business, you can’t expect people who’ve never met you to pop open their wallets straight away.
Let’s move back to basics. The foundation for any successful strategy is to create an awesome, authentic LinkedIn profile. This will provide you with the basis for building a content marketing strategy that, over time, will position you as something of an authority in your chosen niche.
Consistently creating and publishing relevant, genuinely valuable content that actually helps your audience improve their businesses will take them on a journey with you.
As they consume your high-value content, they will steadily move from not knowing much about you, to liking or at least respecting you, and ultimately trusting you enough to buy a product or service or sign up for a program you run.
And when you do reach out to invite people to connect or start sending them emails, the same principles apply. Put in a bit of thought. Do some research. Identify topics and issues that would be relevant or identify some are of clear common ground.
Make sure you’re not using obvious lines like “Your profile is awesome so I’d like to join your network”!
All that will show people is that you’ve put zero thought into it and may well have automated the whole process. We’re not against automation – it’s a very useful tool in the right hands – but it needs to be used appropriately, at the right time and with a little subtlety in the messaging.
All of the work that needs to be done happens online. When you’ve built up a solid level of trust and your prospect is starting to ask questions, that’s the time to move the conversation offline and into the real world.
That’s when you can suggest a Zoom call, a phone catchup or even a face to face meeting to talk things through in more detail.
And if this sounds like you may be ‘giving away’ slices of your carefully crafted IP long before a sale happens, you’re right.
That’s just how content marketing works. As a business we have worked out that after nearly 10 years in a business devoted to content marketing on LinkedIn we can tell you it does work.
Here are some ways you can start more conversations on Linkedin:
Engage & Invite
The first step is simply engaging with your target market and then inviting them to connect. The best way to do this effectively is to make sure you are using LinkedIn’s sales navigator. For those of you who are not familiar with sales navigator, it’s a tool that allows you to drill down from millions of members on the platform right down to the specific people you are looking to get in front of and connect with. You can do this by using the advanced search feature. Once you have completed your search you can save those people as leads. From there LinkedIn will then create a secondary news feed of all of your leads who have shared content in the past 30 days. From that point, the key is to start engaging with those leads, liking and commenting on their posts before reaching out to connect and start building a relationship with them.
Follow up
The second strategy you can use is to follow up on the invites you have been sending out. Some of the invites will be accepted and become part of your network but will not respond or engage with you. A follow-up with these people is a great idea, just make sure you keep it personable. Asking about their business and for more information on what they do is a great way to start that conversation.
Develop and post quality content
The last piece of the puzzle is ensuring you are creating and distributing quality, engaging, and target content in your newsfeed. Once someone accepts your invite they will now be in your network. This means they will now be able to see your content pop up in their newsfeed. Providing quality, engaging content is going to help build your brand, your influence and help you become trusted in your community. Your content strategy needs to be consistent and targeted, this will start to build a strong community and once someone is ready, has a need, or is interested in what you do then you have built that trust with them and they will think of you and reach out.
P.S. Here are 5 ways we can help you accelerate your Lead Generation results:
1. Grab our free 4-Week LinkedIn Profile Optimisation Course
It’s the road map to positioning your profile in the top 5% of the 800+ million LinkedIn members – Click Here
2. Join our FREE LinkedIn Group and connect with entrepreneurs who are scaling too
It’s our Facebook community where smart entrepreneurs learn to get more leads and smart ways to scale using LinkedIn — Click Here
3. Take our FREE LinkedIn Productivity Assessment
Score your current presence and activity on LinkedIn against industry best practice benchmarks. Receive customised results instantly and as a BONUS you’ll get a FREE PDF download of Amazon’s Best-selling book F“Influencer” Click Here
4. Join our LinkedIn Inner Circle Solo Program Click Here for more details
5. Learn more about the four most effective conversion strategies for LinkedIn success
When we analysed the most successful conversion campaigns amongst these, we found there are four very specific strategies that deliver the most consistent results year after year. We call them ‘The Magic Four’. Take the Questionnaire now to assess your suitability Click Here
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