Using LinkedIn To Grow Sales

Social Media is an increasingly popular way to communicate with a business’s audience, both clients and leads. LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social media and as such can be an invaluable resource in communicating and in lead generation.

For many users, LinkedIn can be used to vet a company before making contact. It can assist in assessing if they provide the products or services required, provide points of contact (i.e. office locations, website details), and give them an idea of the company’s ethos and community standing. It can also help existing clients to understand all the facets of your business, and potentially drive other purchases.

Having a strong presence on LinkedIn allows you to build brand awareness and reach the right audience, enabling you to engage with them and motivate them to take action (i.e. request a quote), attract top talent and create commercial opportunities. Through your page you can show the solutions you can offer other businesses to solve their problems and can validate what your business does. Sharing experiences with your audience is one way to demonstrate your ability to understand your clients’ challenges and offer relevant, effective products or strategies to address their needs.

So what’s the first step?

Build your collateral for your page and employee profiles:

• Produce rich media files such as videos and publications.
• Develop case studies and research papers.
• Have a business background image that you and your employees can use (make sure it’s high resolution)

Optimise personal Profiles:

• Get Professional Headshots
• Encourage your employees use the business background image
• Create a descriptive headline (what you do and who you work with)
• Craft a powerful summary, selling yourself on your experience and education, your cultural competencies (i.e. languages you speak, countries you’ve worked in). Include a call to action with your phone number and email.
• Use SEO keywords to promote search engine optimisation.
• Use the provided fields to list your education, experience, interests, skills and accomplishments.

When building your network and connecting with other users, remember to personalise your connection requests and to follow up after with a message that expresses the challenges you help customers overcome, demonstrating your expertise.

Create new content and gather content from work you are already doing and 3rd party resources such as:

• Company blog
• Company white papers
• Industry Publications
• Research Journals and Reviews (i.e. Harvard Business Review, Journal of Management)
• National and international newspaper articles (i.e. Australian Financial Review, Bloomberg)

Use your resources to share advice, give insight and communicate innovations happening in your area of expertise. Publish white papers, blogs or infographics on LinkedIn, to clearly demonstrate your prowess in your field and your commitment to industry development. Like, comment and share posts by the company page.

Using videos you can concisely explain your product or service’s unique selling points, share or expain current industry news and what it means for your customers, promote events, or talk about your role in the community (think about your Corporate Social Responsibility Policy, charity work, etc.)

As an overarching strategy the steps are:

• Optimise your teams LinkedIn Profiles
• Help your team to individually strategically grow their networks
• Leverage your content – case studies, innovations and insights, event launches
• Be consistent in marketing and posting on the company’s page – this will allow you to drive traffic to your website.
• Be holistic in your content – create and share quality content
• Review your analytics routinely.

LinkedIn Checklist

• Update your personal profile page
  • Add a company background image
  • Write a compelling summary
  • Coherently convey what you provide
  • Have a distinct call to action
• Add media files
• Seek recommendations
• Grow your network
• Engage regularly on the platform
• Start sharing expert content on your company page, or including tags and references to your company page.

This Factsheet has been compiled using footage from Ai Group’s webinar “How to grow your business on LinkedIn”, and information and slides provided by one of our BIG Hub consultants, Lucy Bingle.

View Lucy’s Profile or request a quote.