Questions to ask before starting promoting your business on Linkedin

Questions to ask before starting promoting your business on Linkedin
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Social Media Marketing January 9, 2021

Lifesaving questions to ask before starting promoting your business on Linkedin: What-why-how-when

Introduction:

What is this report all about? I can simply tell you what it is NOT about. It is not another report that merely focuses on “marketing your business on LinkedIn”. Marketing is a part of the whole picture and not all of it.

I believe that asking questions is the clue to solving any problem. Just think: every invention started with a question. Every diagnosis of an illness starts with asking the patient some questions.

The question may be to discover a “cause” of a problem or a “solution” for it. Questions to find the cause of a problem are eventually followed by questions to solve it.

What: is business and what are its components?

According to Wikipedia, “Business is the activity of making one’s living or making money by producing or buying and selling products. Simply put, it is “any activity or enterprise entered into for profit.” However, business in its core is all around the art and science of creating a value (a product or a service), delivering it, and achieving an income from this process. 

 

Why: do we choose LinkedIn over other social channels or platforms for business?

These stats will clearly show you why we selected LinkedIn. Focusing on one channel at a time is preferred by many, and once you start to get some results you can add other channels.

  • As of April 2020, LinkedIn’s number of users in the U.S. reached 160 million, making it the country with the most users in the world. (Statista, 2020) (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)
  • In 2019, LinkedIn InMail was the third most-used candidate outreach channel globally, behind email and phone/ text. (Statista, 2020) 
  • In 2019, over 87% of video marketers on LinkedIn described the platform as an effective video marketing channel. (Wyzowl, 2020) (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)
  • LinkedIn is the second-most popular social media platform used by B2B marketers, ranking only behind Facebook. (Statista, 2019) (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)
  • Top-performing salespeople believe they receive better leads from marketing. Almost all (94%) of the top performers surveyed in the LinkedIn study called the marketing leads they receive either “excellent” or “good”. (LinkedIn, 2020) (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)
  • 36% of buyers “strongly agree” that an informative LinkedIn profile is important for salespeople to have. (LinkedIn, 2020) (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)
How and When: to utilize LinkedIn for each business component? 

LinkedIn tasks (in brief): 

  1. Creating an impressive personal profile and optimizing your company page are the keys to LinkedIn success, regardless of the strategy you follow. The secret recipe for selling yourself is in three words: State what most of your client’s pain points are, what are their desired targets, and how YOU can solve them. Not to forget, a company website that has a strong home page and storytelling about us page is the second most important factor. Never start active promotion on LinkedIn before completing this step.
  2. From day one, start inviting people for connecting with you. Make it your daily homework to send 50 to 60 invitations. Don’t start inviting your target audience right away. For example, if your business is a real estate digital company, don’t send invitations to real estate investors. They will ignore your invitations if you have zero connects. Alternatively, invite those who are LIKELY to accept. Freelancers and job seekers are the best option now. They will happily like to connect. 
  3. When you have around 5000 connects, you can start to think bigger. Now you can invite some of your target audience. For example, 10 out of 60 invitations per day. You can increase this portion later on.
  4. Engage… Engage … Engage. I cannot stress it more. Like, share and answer questions for at least 10 people per day. Preferably, mix your engagement with some of the reputable influencers and those who are a LinkedIn beginner.
  5.  Do you want a free program to schedule 2000 posts??. Semrush has a free plan for one project only. Many don’t know about this and this is a great tool. The content strategy and the use of SemRush in social media posting can be discussed in detail in further blogs.
  6. A hidden gem in LinkedIn. Invite your connects to follow your page. At first, you have a limited daily credit to use, later you will get hundreds of credits daily. Seriously. Use it daily. And every day. This is a BIG HIDDEN TREASURE.
  7. Utilize the power of LinkedIn groups. Follow the same principles of connecting to individuals. When you are in several relevant groups, start to select some of your nice posts to share on these groups. Again, avoid direct selling of your product. You are always trying to provide true and free value. 
  8. Follow up and monitorall your activities. Again I recommend SemRush.  
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Now to the big deal; we will dissect business into its components and goals, and show how and when LinkedIn can be used to achieve them.

1.  Partnership: getting business partners/funding.

Have you ever thought about this benefit? You can get new partners and shareholders from LinkedIn. It’s a HUGE business community. Good relationships are always fruitful. Of course, don’t expect (or try) to get new partners right away. You need to build authority and trust on LinkedIn first. 

In my experience, you may start to get messages from other companies to make a partnership with you as early as three or four months from your starting point. A small piece of advice here: you must control your inclination to accept every invitation. You must discriminate well. After all, all of us on LinkedIn have the same goal: making money. Handle all “salesy” messages wisely. You may get some real benefit to you.

Asking about “Funding:?: yes, use LinkedIn for funding your campaigns. In another blog, we will explain how to promote affiliate programs on LinkedIn. Of course, this will not be a significant source of income at least at the earliest phases, but this revenue can be later used to fuel paid LinkedIn campaigns

2.  Research and development: gathering more data.

Have you heard of “social listening“? It can simply be defined as ” analyzing the conversations and trends happening not just around your brand, but around your industry as a whole, and using those insights to make better marketing decisions. ” https://sproutsocial.com/social-listening. This can further help you in:

  1. Selecting the values that worth it. You can directly know what your clients are searching for, what are their expectations and needs.  
  2. What are your competitors doing? What are the tactics that work best for them?
  3. What are your clients say about you and your products/services? What are your weak points and your strength areas? 
  4. How is the market right now? What are the best geographic areas to target? 
  5. Value creation: building operation teams.
3.  Operation: more production

Building your future operation team is a hard mission. Whether you intend to depend on outsourcing or in-house employing, you should seriously consider LinkedIn. The following stats are clear enough to help you make your decision:  

“…The other primary reason LinkedIn users are active on the platforms is for job recruitment efforts. With more than 20 million companies listed on the site and 20 million open jobs, it’s no surprise to find out that 87% of recruiters regularly use LinkedIn.

A study found that 122 million people received an interview through LinkedIn, with 35.5 million having been hired by a person they connected with on the site.

One good LinkedIn stat for recruiters is that employees sourced through the site are 40% less likely to leave the company within the first 6 months.” 

In LinkedIn, you can go the free but hard way by simply browsing talents or the easier but paid way by posting a job. Many of our current and top-performing employees were recruited via LinkedIn; the free technique. 

4.  Marketing:  gain more attention 

From 100% passive methods to reaching 100% active methods, you should gradually build your strategy. After you fulfill these requirements you can launch your marketing campaign:

  • Your website, your LinkedIn profile, and your LinkedIn business page are all ready and optimized.
  • You have at least 5000 connections, 4000 followers, and 1000 page views over the last 90 days on LinkedIn.
  • Your business page has at least the same number of followers as your average competitor. Semrush is an invaluable tool for monitoring your LinkedIn stats and still, you can use the free subscription for that.

Then and only then, you can start LinkedIn marketing and using these recommended steps:

  1. The 100% passive tactic: simply depending on your strong LinkedIn profile can get you potential leads. When you have more presence on LinkedIn, with many posts, doubled your connections and followers, you can go to the next steps (all together, not one by one). At this level, you should be and look like an authority on LinkedIn. 
  2. The 25% active tactic: now we reverse the roles. You should start to search for projects (if you are providing a service). For example, a digital marketing agency can get SEO or web development projects easily on LinkedIn. Consider it as a combination between a freelancing site like upwork.com and a social channel; a very professional one, in which you can select trustworthy agencies or even freelancers more reliably. 
  3. The 50% active tactic: active messaging of your target audience, connects, group members, and followers. Sending them valuable advice that is related to their pain points, however not selling them your services directly.
  4. The 100% active tactic: for the selected target audience, you are going to send them coupons, offers, free trials, etc… You should consider this if they approve to call them or voice chats. You have to build rapport first. This type of active selling should be the smallest portion of all of the other tactics mentioned before. People generally don’t like to be sold to.

Another peculiar technique I used and succeeded in. I am not looking for clients all the time. I am mostly looking for people who will do this job instead of me. I am looking for affiliates who can bring me more clients and get a DECENT commission for that. There is no upfront cost for that and over 2019, 50% of our sales were through affiliates like these. 

5.  Value delivery:close more deals.

 As discussed earlier, your business page, personal profile, and your websites are your main sales assets. 

Another often neglected feature of LinkedIn is LinkedIn Showcase. According to LinkedIn, “Showcase Pages are extensions of your LinkedIn Page, designed to spotlight individual brands, business units, and initiatives. Once created, they’ll be listed under ‘Affiliated Pages’ on your main LinkedIn Page.” “LinkedIn Showcase Pages are a smart place to highlight a special side of your brand—especially if it’s business-related”. For example, IKEA has a Showcase Page just for its Italian audience“. Ref: hootsuite.com. Other great examples include HP Software Showcase Page, Office Showcase Page, and  Salesforce. 

6.  After-sales (support center,..): Help your clients easier and faster.

Using social media platforms as support centers is not new. However, Twitter and LinkedIn are the main platforms used for professionals and B2B models for this purpose. Allowing your clients who visit your website to reach the LinkedIn page is not only important to gain more visitors to it but also gives them a way to follow all your company updates that were not added to your website What do you get from this? More support and credibility

Conclusion:

No matter what your business is, there are clients for it. The problem is Where to find them and How to pitch them. If you find a single platform that helps you in both that is the perfect solution. 

LinkedIn is not simply a “social media platform”. It combines the power of social media with a freelancer site, an eCommerce site, a bog, a website, a CRM, and an advertising platform. No wonder its popularity is growing and the revenue you can generate by properly utilizing its power points will grow as well.