How to generate leads in Linkedin to get new customers
In the eyes of a large majority of users, this professional social network is only seen as a great board to hang our curricula, but it offers enormous networking possibilities to generate leads that we can later convert into sales.
The main basic error of many Linkedin users is that they do not define clear professional objectives. And if you don’t have a professional goal you don’t have actions. If you are not active in social networks, nobody sees you. You don’t exist Looking for a job or business, 5 views of your profile, which is the average number of visits in many users, will not generate any opportunity, ”said Pedro de Vicente , an expert in this network and author of Squeezing Linkedin ”.
YOUR TARGET MARKET
“The first thing to do is define objectives: what do you want to achieve in Linkedin. Then, define the target market (employer or buyer) and create highly segmented communities in relation to those objectives. Many Linkedin users – this expert affirms – do not have a defined invitation policy. There are users who mistakenly accept all the invitations that come to them because they are ashamed to say no. There is a lack of judgment. When you define objectives, you have niche companies to go to, you have set some functions and some managers to focus on, and you must know who you are interested in accepting and who is not. ”
According to De Vicente, both those seeking employment and those who want to evolve in their jobs or those seeking business, “must be clear about which companies can buy their services, that is, where am I more competitive? Linkedin gives us segmentation criteria to reach only those professionals and companies. ”
INFORMATION AND SEGMENTATION
This expert highlights two great strengths of Linkedin: “On the one hand, you have a lot of information about a professional’s profile. When you locate it you can know a lot about it. And secondly, the very high segmentation capacity it has. The strategic key, in the medium and long term, is to create large highly segmented professional communities to generate (if it does not exist) or support and care for the brand, define positioning, generate and contribute value to those communities through content. And also, at the same time, overlap the strategy with the tactic developing and implementing concrete actions: advertising, internal email marketing on Linkedin, or very personalized message campaigns. It is a mixture that allows to take advantage of that great capacity of location and segmentation of the target that interests to build communities with them.
FOCUS, FOCUS AND FOCUS
When you have that ability to locate the professionals you are interested in, “what they cannot do are general and massive actions, which, in many cases, do not adapt to the profile of a professional,” warns De Vicente. “If you are interested in contacting, for example, with purchasing directors in France, first do a search and location of how many there, and then try to ‘bring them’ closer to your business environment, either as a company follower, or to the user profiles of managers who will then implement full actions. And, from there, design an action as personalized as possible. If it’s internal email campaigns, for example, personalize with the name and what you are offering. And that, which seems logical, is often done badly many times. For example,
FOR SMALL BUSINESSES
Linkedin allows to develop actions aimed at brand and branding and communication and others, to business generation. “We,” says this expert, “have client companies, with an annual budget of around 20,000 euros, and we are generating, in certain campaigns we do quarterly, between 50 and 70 leads monthly. These leads in Linkedin are decision makers in their respective companies. It is adaptable to all types of companies. ”
PREMIUM ACCOUNT
If you are going to use Linkedin professionally it is very advisable to hire a premium account. “For example, the professional looking for sales works with special accounts, such as Sales Navigator, which is an addition to your base account. This account allows you to organize the information in professional leads and in target companies. These accounts allow you to eliminate all the noise from the home page and exclusively present you with the social participation, the updates, the shares they make, the target companies or those managers that you have defined as leads ”.
FIRST AND SECOND LEVEL OF CONTACTS
Direct contacts – first level – are important, but they only represent between 0.01% and 0.03% of the total range of your network of contacts, ”says Pedro de Vicente. “Imagine,” he says, “a network with 8,000 direct contacts, with a range close to 30 million. The opportunities are not at the first level, but outside the first level. If your first level represents 0.01%, the opportunities (whatever is outside) represents 99.99%. And that’s where they are. You have to reach managers who are in your second level, who do not know, but who are key in your business process or job search through common contacts. The key is to rely on those common contacts. ”
