Linkedin is a business social network for businesses. Each account on the site is a user profile with professional skills, achievements, and potential offers for other people. Many HR companies decide to join Linkedin to find highly specialized specialists for their projects who will help solve a specific problem. Small and medium-sized businesses, top managers, company executives, freelancers are the primary audience of this platform. Users actively advertise their products and services and get acquainted with the offers of others.
When launching an advertising campaign, you have every opportunity to show your offer to people interested in a complex product. Linkedin is where you’ll find warm leads from small and medium-sized business leaders looking to improve the efficiency of their departments. And for this efficiency, which will bring them profit in the future, they are ready to pay large sums.
On Linkedin, the audience is actively making contact since the platform’s main goal is to exchange experiences, promote oneself, search for “useful” acquaintances, and then advertise their products. Any offer is read from start to finish with an assessment of the possible benefits to increase your profit.
We will point out four main advantages of Linkedin as a place for social selling activities:
- Possibility to search in Linkedin. LinkedIn has a robust search function on the platform where you can enter key terms that will lead you to the contacts you want. For example, to find one person in a company, you should first contact them by typing the company’s name. From there, you can narrow your results by location or function of work. This specificity is crucial because instead of going straight to the executive level (whose names you can probably find on the company’s website), you can use LinkedIn’s search capabilities to find mid to senior professionals who could directly use your product or service and possibly be more receptive to new connections than the boss.
- You can join Relevant Groups. LinkedIn has thousands of groups based on industry and location, and you can enter 50 groups. Join these groups to expand your local presence by searching for your city and joining related groups, then do the same at the industry level by searching for a term related to your sector. Within groups, you can post content that showcases your experience and provide helpful information by participating in discussions within the groups. However, keep in mind that you don’t have to be group salespeople, as people want to chat about group-related topics rather than read ads. However, the main reason you should join groups – and how you can use them to sell more ultimately – is the direct access you need to send an InMail or request to connect to any member of the group.
- You can find content related to the target company. People are still on LinkedIn to be social – they want to communicate professionally and communicate about work-related issues. So, just like you shouldn’t be overly commercial in groups, you shouldn’t be commercial when you make connection requests or send InMail messages. Instead, good advice is to talk to the prospect about what’s going on in their company. The easiest way to do this is to set up a Google alert to receive an email anytime this company is mentioned in the news. When you see an article or press release saying their company, contact them on LinkedIn to congratulate them or confirm the information. You can then start a dialogue about what the article is about and ask if they have time to talk about how their business is doing. It doesn’t look like a direct sales pitch at all, and it tends to be effective.
- Possibility for personalizing your sales. Along with the idea of being social on LinkedIn, you also need to personalize your sales. This means that instead of sending an InMail that you have a product that you would like to show, find out more about the person you are trying to sell to. Study his profile and read his posts to understand what worries him. Then see if he is writing about the conference you are going to and ask if you can schedule a time to talk there, or ask him for coffee if you are in the same city. Please find a way to spend time face-to-face and then try to understand his goals, which may not align with his company’s. From there, you can see how your suggestions can help him achieve his specific goals. By being personalized, you can create a message that matches individual perspectives.
LinkedIn can be a potent tool for your social selling activities and getting more deals, an opportunity of reaching your commercial goals and make a good profit.