For entrepreneurs and sales professionals, LinkedIn has proven to be an excellent lead generation resource. It allows people to share their knowledge from their respective fields; it makes it easy to share and track industry trends with peers. Most importantly, LinkedIn is a resource that can help you develop a professional network.
If you feel that your network is small and disconnected, you are not alone. One of the most common challenges faced by entrepreneurs and sales professionals on LinkedIn is to build a valuable network that can help them achieve their business goals. Why is that? Because they treat everyone on the platform as potential customers.
What they should do is to narrow down a small part of the LinkedIn crowd representing value-added relationships-potential sales or knowledge sharing exchanges, to name just two examples. This is a five-step process to find your target audience and introduce only the most relevant professionals (from a sales perspective) to your network.
Market Research
Suppose you are the CEO of an application development website company. You know what can be done inside the company (creative product design, Linux-based software development, PhoneGap, React.js, etc.), but you may not know the market on LinkedIn. To build a high-quality network of contacts, you need to understand who to sell products to and their needs. Please do some research and pay attention to the terminology used by potential customers-it will come in handy.
Optimize Your Profile
Your profile is the most important indicator of who you talk to and the services you provide. However, so many people still make mistakes when defining their professional identity. In this regard, the short description under the profile image is key because it allows you to learn about your service very specifically. Let’s return to the application building software example. Who is your target audience? And how to attract them with words within 300 words? Based on your market research, you should understand the terminology used by your customer base. Use the same terminology in the title and description to resonate with customers and speak directly about their needs.
Strategic Outreach
After optimizing your profile to match your target audience’s keywords and terms, it’s time to start strategic communications. Joining a professional groups is a good starting point because it can provide you with:
- Exclusive contact with industry leaders
- Opportunities to learn and share knowledge with peers
- Recommended resources and great resources for establishing social sharing for your published content
In addition to the group, follow up on your industry research and establish contacts in key areas that are meaningful to your company. Back to the app-building company again: It makes sense for the CEO to keep in touch with the marketing department of a medium-sized company in the mobile app market. First of all, this is a relatively large market segment, which can be subdivided into subsections based on potential customers’ prospects.
Conclusion
Attracting your target audience on LinkedIn is one of the 13 social selling strategies we recommend; you can read more about it here. The value of perfecting your LinkedIn profile is self-evident-after all; this is one of the best lead generation strategies in B2B marketing! If you need help with your online market strategies, remember that we are here for you.