Posted by LinkedSelling in Uncategorized
I recently sat down to review my company’s sales and marketing goals and metrics, and was struck with a startling reminder of the challenge nearly all small business owners face.
How can I possibly get in front of as many prospects as I need to, while still running my business?
Based on our historical sales metrics, we need to make 3,000 touches per month to prospects who fit our target profile. Yep, if we want to meet our goals, we have to make some sort of contact with at least 3,000 qualified prospects every month.
(Note: If you’re not paying attention to your sales and marketing metrics, how do you know what success looks like?)
It’s a big challenge for a small company. Luckily, we have a plan.
A major part of the solution for us is LinkedIn, and I think it can be for you too.
But before we get into the “how” let’s look at the old way of marketing.
The Old Way of Making 3,000 Touches Per Month
My sales goals require me to make 3,000 business contacts each month.
I’m certain that can’t be achieved the old fashioned way.
By my calculations, a salesperson who does nothing but work the room at networking events could only shake hands with about 2,580 people in a month.
But we all know that’s an absurd scenario which includes no time for prospecting, follow-up, building real relationships, closing, proposal development, and administration, not to mention real work!
One solution would be to hire a small army of salespeople. That might work for some, but it’s not for me.
How I’m Making Over 30,000 Touches Per Month
One of the LinkedIn groups we run, Small Biz Forum, has over 1,400 members and is a truly valuable resource for small business owners. The conversations happening in the group are literally providing guidance to business owners that is saving or making them thousands of dollars. It’s no joke.
Every day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, I post two articles, case studies, or other online resources to the group.
Usually they are fantastic pieces of content written by other people, that I believe the group members will find extremely valuable. We try to limit our own content to no more than 5% of our discussion posts.
As a result of this approach, and to a larger extent the fantastic community of group members, Small Biz Forum is considered by many to be one of the best small business groups on LinkedIn.
Each day, a digest of the group activity is emailed to about 90% of the member’s email inboxes. This is something LinkedIn does automatically, on my behalf. Pretty nice of them to provide this free email marketing service!
Do the math. 1,400 members x 90% daily digest x 30 days per month = 37,800 opportunities to position my name in front of a prospect each month.
Every day, they see my name and my LinkedIn headline. Take a look for yourself at this recent screen shot of one of these emails. This is the exact type of email that is hitting 90% of the group member’s inboxes every day.
Getting into people’s inboxes is the holy grail of internet marketing. Yet even with an email marketing campaign, it is difficult to find a way to stay in front of people EVERY DAY.
With LinkedIn groups it is very possible to achieve.
As long as you are promoting content that is extremely valuable to your prospects, they’ll quickly view you as a trusted authority and leader.
They won’t tune you out, and you’ll be positioned to make thousands of touches every month just from your group.
LinkedIn Groups Are Just 1 Component of a Holistic Campaign
The group strategy is just one component. To round out your LinkedIn marketing campaign, consider these additional LinkedIn tactics:
- Select engagement and content promotion in other relevant groups.
- A consistent effort to continually grow our database of connections.
- Profile optimization strategies to attract prospects.
- Regular status updates to stay in front of connections.
- Messaging campaigns to stay top-of-mind with our most high-value prospects.
- LinkedIn ads to attract new prospects outside of our network.
- And more.
And of course, it all exists within an ecosystem that includes great content, webinars, free training videos, and more. None of this stuff can operate in a silo.
The strategy works for our business, it works for our clients, and it can probably work for you.
The goal is to generate real leads and business opportunities on a daily basis. This strategy gets it done.
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Since there are a lot of limitations and restrictions on Linkedin, Linkedin group is very important feature to send message, add connection and build relationship.
This is how I keep building relationship with its co-founder Mr Konstantin.