Let me be real with you.
There is such a thing as a rags to riches story.
And, in our industry, we’ve seen it happen time and time again to many of our clients.
But, this isn’t a “get rich quick” story, this a detailed guide on how LinkedIn has helped many people gain sales momentum and take their organizations to the next level.
My name is Houston Golden, and I’m the owner and founder of BAMF Media, a growth hacking firm and LinkedIn optimization agency. I’ve worked with Fortune 500 companies and a lot of struggling startups.
The goal that my team and I share is simple: we wanted the little guys to make it big.
But, enough about me.
Why LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is the largest professional social network platform in the world. It has about a quarter of a billion active users.
A lot of people flock to LinkedIn to find jobs, while other people are on the platform to connect professionally.
However, not everyone has been taking advantage of the medium for another underappreciated function that it can do: it can help you sell.
Here’s the thing.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and almost all social networking sites, regardless of their core function and niche, are all battling for the control of your eyeballs.
The longer that they keep you on the platform, the more they make in terms of ad revenue. However, this has also opened the doors to many struggling startups and mom-and-pop businesses to take advantage of its power.
And, we’re not even talking about using it for ads here.
Our clients were once the little guys on the platform, trying to scramble for leads or looking for a quick sale. But, what we found after years of research and trial-and-error was the fact that it’s also a great source of passive inbound leads.
You can use it organically to generate not only traffic but revenue.
Prospecting on LinkedIn
Generating new prospects during the height of the pandemic was difficult, but a lot of our clients have found a lot of success on LinkedIn.
What we like the most about LinkedIn is the ability to narrow down searches and build client lists that fit into specific customer profiles.
Given the state of how everything is so competitive right now and how budgets are all restrained, targeted prospecting has become critical to the success of many campaigns.
You can take this a notch higher by using their LinkedIn Sales Navigator tools or through the use of third-party apps.
We’ve ran campaigns for our clients that targeted clients using a particular tech stack, this is useful if you an ultra-niche service or app that’s suited to a very select group of people.
We’ve found that the best way to start the prospecting process is to create an ideal customer profile, by:
- Identifying markets that you have or penetrated before
- Zeroing in on people that are connected to the decision-maker you are trying to reach
- Finding correlations not only between their demographics but also with their attitudes
- Listing down common pain points, objectives and goals
- Researching messaging the resonates with them
We take it a step further with our clients and assign names and photos to our idea customer profiles. This helps with streamlining your objectives and vision.
Once you have your ideal customer profiles ready, you can now start to prospect.
LinkedIn Outreach
On LinkedIn, connecting and messaging with people to ask for their help is already given.
This means that people are already expecting you message them.
Although we will never recommend that you pitch a client on the very first time, that you connect with them.
There are plenty of ways to do outreach with lead nurturing.
One of these ways is through triangulation, where you attempt to supplement your outreach towards a certain decision-maker by targeting the other people in their inner circle first with passive lead devices disguised as content and later real messages.
LinkedIn gives lead generation specialists a sandbox where they can experiment with different techniques and strategies. This allows you a lot of elbow room, especially now that we’re headed into the new normal.
This is what we found when prospecting with our smaller clients:
- They can compete with larger organizations in terms of lead generation, but it has to be organic and they have to double down on their efforts.
- The general message blast won’t work with prospects that they try to connect with, each message has to be personalized.
- Opting to post regularly using content that resonates with prospects that they’re already connect with has helped them generate a generous amount of inbound leads.
- You don’t have to be direct when you use LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Profile Optimization
That’s not all.
A lot of the little guys have found a lot of success on LinkedIn by optimizing their profiles to turn them into landing pages for their products and services.
This turns profiles into passive lead generation machines.
You see, when you pitch to someone or put out good content, there is a high possibility that those people will end up curious and clicking on your page.
Here’s how you can turn your profile into a landing page:
- Profile Picture – a professional photo can do wonders, make sure you’re wearing what you’ll usually have on in a real world or Zoom meeting.
- Header Image – turn it into an ad banner! You can combine several elements and even CTAs into your header image. Who said header images should only contain photos of you or the product?
- Headline – this is highly tied-in with LinkedIn SEO. This should tell people what you do in a flash, while containing the keywords that will help you rank higher on LinkedIn search.
- Summary – did you know that by putting in your email address first in your summary, you can increase the likelihood of people hiring you?
And, it doesn’t just stop there.
We’ve found that other parts of your profile such as your experiences can also be turned into little link pods that showcase what you do.
I’ve written books on LinkedIn optimization, techniques that I’ve used and my clients have used to turn their businesses into multimillion-dollar machines.
These things don’t only work. They’ve driven a lot of real organizational growth.
Takeaways
If you’re a struggling business owner with no money to spend on ad campaigns online, we feel you.
This is where a lot of our clients were during 2020.
However, utilizing platforms like LinkedIn have allowed them to have a lot of success.
LinkedIn still remains to be a place where you can generate leads for free, post content that boosts your brand awareness, and create passive lead generation through your profile.
If you’re willing to make the jump this 2021, you should consider using LinkedIn for lead generation and nurturing.
We’ve seen a lot of our clients start with no staffers and quickly scale up to medium enterprises worthy of angel investment.
In fact, BAMF Media started from zero and we’re now at $4 million in revenue.
How did we do it?
LinkedIn.
