Over the past 10 years, LinkedIn has grown into a very powerful networking tool. With over 360 million professionals, LinkedIn is by far one of the best marketing tools to build a business or grow an existing business at a reasonable budget. With unlimited access to professionals from all over the country and around the globe, LinkedIn is one of the best place to find your potential clients or referrals partners.
So how do you leverage these connections? What can you do with them?
To answer that question, I want you to imagine having about 200-300 connections and out of that network, you have a small core group of 20-30 referral partners who are consistently referring you business every month. What would that do for your business? How will that help your revenue? This is where planning is extremely important.
So how do you do that on LinkedIn?
The first step in this process is Planning. It is extremely important for you to put together a LinkedIn Marketing Plan. That plan should be a road map with the end goal in mind of having 20-30 referral partners in your network.
The second step is enhancing your Profile. Your LinkedIn Profile is one of the most powerful marketing tool that you have in your arsenal. Your profile represent you when you are not there. Someone will check your profile before replying to you.
Thus, your profile should have the following:
- Attention grabbing headline
- A professional headshot
- A compelling summary highlighting what makes you different? How you are able to help your clients?
- Recommendations from past clients to demonstrate credibility
The third and final step is segmenting your connections. LinkedIn has some amazing features. One of these tools is the tag feature. This feature allows you to segment your connections. This is where you can go thru all your LinkedIn connections and sort them out. Once you are able to identify whom within your connections may be great referral partners, now is the time to start building relationship with them and find out how can you be a resource to them.
With LinkedIn, it’s all about being a resource. It’s not about you, it’s about what you can do for them. Once you figure that out and you able to bring value to your core group, you will have a lead generation machine.
If you want to learn how to put an effective plan together or you want to outsource your LinkedIn marketing efforts to a team of experts, please schedule a time for a consultation session: jabraham@abraham-global-marketing.websitepro.hosting
This post was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.
By: Julbert Abraham
