Using LinkedIn as an inbound Marketing rather than an outbound Marketing tool
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There is a shift in the world of marketing based in outbound vs. inbound types.
Have you ever tried cold calling to generate business? It’s an excruciating task! Calling businesses and asking to talk to the owner, sometimes without knowing their name, and always trying to get past the “gatekeeper.” It’s a failure rate that makes even the most seasoned sales professionals cry themselves to sleep. And yet, salespeople continue to pound the phones!
Fortunately, there is a better way!
Businesses can leverage Social Media and Inbound Marketing to connect with other business owners and generate leads in a much more organic and stress-free way.
Below is a list of how to properly use LinkedIn and ways that some are improperly using LinkedIn. .
1. Introduce Yourself - don’t just connect to people to increase your connection count, introduce yourself and maybe tell them why you are connecting with them.
2. Don’t Focus on Selling - Ever seen that person at a group event who is always selling, leads to some awkward conversations. Don’t be that guy. It isn’t all about you and what you want. Find about about them and their goals and needs.
3. Offer Endorsements - ever notice that the authors with the most and best endorsements blurbs on their books also just happen to be the authors who get around to writing endorsement blurbs for other authors. Might be some causation in there somewhere.
4. Provide Recommendations - see above
5. Share Great Content - If you want to be seen as an expert who is worth listening to on some topic then this is your chance to prove it. It is amazing the residual value of this activity. don’t expect this to pay dividends in the short term but it works in the long term.
It's a simple list-- really is all about relationships and bringing value into the equation. The problem is that we are all so self-centered that we find it hard to do these things.
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How are you using LinkedIn to leverage your business?
For more information, visit my page Who & Why or send me an email at sethgetz@gmail.com.
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Do you think endorsements are valuable? I ignore them because people endorse each other (and me) all the time for skills and experience that the recipients don't have, or the endorser isn't qualified to endorse anyway.
ReplyDeleteI agree that you should tell a person you are connecting with them. The default invitation may be enough when you know a person well, but when it's a stranger, you increase your chances of acceptance by including a personal note. And, it's just polite.
Good questions Chad, on LinkedIn - Recommendations >>>>>> Endorsements, but I don't think that endorsements are worthless. They are part of the "SEO" and search ranking system within LinkedIn. People are searching for skill-sets and using the endorsements system means more then what skills I put on my profile. A lot of endorsements don't mean anything because of how easy they are but when someone has 99+ it can tell you something about them.
DeleteA comparable might be the like on Facebook. It's easy and doesn't mean much but a lot of them will effect the edge-rank system.
What are your thoughts?
Those are valid points. Although each individual endorsement may be practically worthless, in aggregate they may be informative. I wish there was a way to qualify them. For example, an endorsement from a client should count far more than one from a near-stranger who's just endorsing to earn favor.
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