Companies large and small are harnessing the power of LinkedIn’s network to market services, provide thought leadership, and make connections with people and companies they want to know. In my last blog, I detailed how to ensure your LinkedIn profile is complete, accurate, and impactful. Those steps provide the foundation you need before implementing any sort of LinkedIn outreach strategy.
The key word here is strategy. LinkedIn is a simple, yet powerful tool for filling your company’s sales funnel by broadening your reach and getting your business noticed. What are the best ways to leverage the power of LinkedIn to fill your sales funnel thoughtfully and consistently? First, a little background on this B2B social platform.
LinkedIn is More Than Networking
LinkedIn touts roughly 722 million individuals on their platform and its growth is not slowing down. In 2020 alone, LinkedIn saw a 55% upsurge in conversations, primarily associated with the increase in remote working situations across the country and the inability to network in-person. Prior to the pandemic, many of us relied on networking events to strike up interesting conversations with attendees, which held the potential to evolve into lasting relationships. Today, many rely heavily on our digital connections, in addition to nurturing contacts gained through past, in-person events. Beyond the connectivity aspect, millions of LinkedIn’s members use the platform to stay abreast of what’s happening in their industry, what the competition is doing, and what their customers want.
Top 3 Actions to Fill Your Funnel on LinkedIn
There is a wide variety of features and functionality to explore on LinkedIn. Here are the top three actions related to filling your funnel:
- Understand Your Audience
- Create Great Content
- Engage and Nurture
Put these three steps into action consistently and you’ll be on your way to building a recognized brand that sparks additional inquiries. Let’s take a deeper dive into each.
#1: Understand Your Audience
Before you begin to write your first sentence of content, you must understand your intended audience:
- What motivates them?
- How do the solutions you provide address their pain points?
- How do they make decisions?
- What kind of content is interesting to them?
If you’re unsure of the answers to these questions, ask some of your customers or conduct a poll on LinkedIn! Once you understand your target audience, you can tailor your messages accordingly.
Next, create a list of 10-20 keywords that resonate with your target audience. Keywords are terms that someone might enter into a search engine. Align the content in your LinkedIn posts to these keywords to increase the likelihood they’ll find you faster.
#2: Create Great Content
Now that the foundation has been laid, you’re ready to write! If you don’t consider yourself a writer or you’re suffering from writer’s block, don’t despair! Writing good LinkedIn content is about sharing your business knowledge and insights and putting yourself in your prospects’ shoes. Consider posts that:
- Answer a question your customers/prospects ask you often.
- Tell a story about a problem you’ve solved.
- Explain your process.
- Tie interesting facts about your business to a personal story.
- Summarize an already-published article about your field of expertise.
Use a minimum of two keywords in your content, drive people to your website, and engage them with interesting photos and graphics. You can also write longer-form content in a blog, post it on your website, then link to it from your LinkedIn post, along with a short lead-in to that content.
#3: Engage and Nurture
LinkedIn is a social platform – like anything else “social,” you must engage! Aside from posting regularly (a minimum of three posts per week for maximum exposure) on your LinkedIn profile and company pages, you must “like,” comment on, and share others’ posts. This is a strategy unto itself. You expand your reach on LinkedIn by responding to other people’s like-minded or synergistic posts, since your engagement appears on that person’s feed and to their connections. Additionally, when you post your content to LinkedIn Groups that are aligned with your company’s products or services, you’ll enable views from people who are not current connections.
Set aside at least 15 minutes a day on LinkedIn – posting, liking, sharing, commenting, and responding to messages. LinkedIn messaging can also be a great way to converse as you nurture your connections and build relationships.
LinkedIn is a great tool to help you fill your sales funnel. You can learn more about a prospect’s company, their interests (through their posts/engagement), and people in your network who might be able to make an introduction. The key is to be authentic, share information that is of value, and engage regularly to build your following and your brand. If you need help creating and executing your own LinkedIn strategy, we’re here to assist.