Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 0 80% of B2B social media leads come from LinkedIn. (Source) Isn’t that a promising stat for a B2B company looking to generate leads? It sure is. Here’s one more: LinkedIn outdoes Facebook, blogging, and twitter for individual lead generation (Source) Having said that, let’s dive into how to use LinkedIn for sales: 1. Create A Compelling Company Page Believe us or not, your LinkedIn profile page can be the most powerful business assets – if only you learn how to use it efficiently. In this section, we’ll go cover how you can optimize your company page to attract the right audience and generate leads. As a professional, you should keep in mind that your prospects can come across your profile page anytime – and when they land on your page, it should leave a good professional impression on them. Want the answer to how to use LinkedIn for sales? You’ve to make sure that your page is 100% complete and optimized. Here’s how you can do it: Update Profile Picture & Profile Banner: Company pages with complete profiles get 6X more visitors as compared to those without. Your goal should be to stand out from your competitors. So, creating attractive visuals that highlights something that makes you different from other products, celebrating recent accomplishments, and promoting exciting events. Add A Compelling ‘About Us’ Content: Make sure that your company page’s about us content is well-optimized. An ideal bio would’ve tightly worded paragraphs to tell visitors everything that should know. You can include the following information: Who are you? What do you offer? What is your brand voice? Where are you based? How can people contact you? What are your values? Fill Out Key Fields: Another important step would be filling out key fields such as URL, Industry, company size, office address, website, HQ Country, and more information about your business. Having all these details will make your page more discoverable to target users. Add Showcase Pages: The highly customizable showcase pages are the mail tailored news feeds on specific aspects of organization. Based on the interest, different users come across such pages for content about a brand’s product ranges, meetups, events, and sponsorships. We’ll wrap this section with more tips: Turn it into a lead generation page. Keep content unique. Use catchy images. Incorporate engaging content. Make content readable Ensure page is presentable Separate images for header and landing page. 2. Join LinkedIn Groups in Your Niche You can make great connections and reach out to prospective leads through niche groups So, start joining your respective industry groups from today and get insights about your prospects. You can also leverage these groups for discovering the prospects interests, pain areas, search intent, and then address those challenges with authentic and valuable answers. Let me break down this process to you in few simple steps: Join relevant groups on your industry Be more active in groups where customers are also active Contribute to group discussions Establish yourself as a thought leader Add conversation-focused posts to get noticed by your targets Approach targets at the right time 3. Conversion-Focused Page If you’re thinking about using LinkedIn for sales, you should start by optimizing your LinkedIn profile for conversion. The best way to get a conversion is by first looking at your LinkedIn profile. Apart from adding visual appeal, make sure that your LinkedIn profile is active. In other words, keep the page active by adding fresh content so you get organic traffic that boosts your success rate naturally. LinkedIn marketing is done by ensuring that the leads get converted into customers. In other words, this platform is all about converting the browsers into buyers. One of the best ways of getting is done is building a conversion-focused page that has regular updates where people are usually engaged in discussions. You can follow the following tips to draw people’s attention and to encourage them to become a customer: Post regular updates Make sure your posts are about trending topics Write catchy and unique content that attracts responses Engage your viewers with interaction posts Develop a communicative bond with your potential targets Be present to cater to your customer’s attention 4. Make Use of Advanced Search One of the things people love about LinkedIn is its powerful search capabilities. This platform has data about millions of people in a structured format. This means that you can find right people through specific query terms. For example, if I want to look for people working at ‘ParamInfo,’ I can just type the name of the company, and LinkedIn will retrieve all people working in this company. Similarly, with advanced search, you can narrow the search down by specific positions in the filters. When you choose a particular position at a specific company, LinkedIn will do a tight search and retrieve information you need. Furthermore, you can do much more with Boolean search. For example: OR: This search will find people in your network who have one of two terms in their profile. AND: It allows you to find people who have both terms in their profile NOT: This one will filter out unnecessary profile from your search 5. Encourage Your Employees to be Active Another way of using LinkedIn effectively is getting employees to speak for your brand. In other words, turning them into influencers. According to LinkedIn, the articles or content shared by company employees get 2X higher engagement as compared to posts shared when salespeople or from company handle. This shows that engaging employees and seeking their help as an influencer can be beneficial for branding, marketing, and overall business growth. Let’s say you’ve a team of 10 members, imagine these ten people talking about your brand frequently – about your businesses’ technology, customer success stories, accomplishments, awards, and services. In other words, you should look for influencers within your organization. Start with your executives, founders, and other interested employees who are generally active on LinkedIn. 6. Use Hashtags and Tag Companies Yes, hashtags originated on Twitter first. But they’ve paved their way to LinkedIn too. And now, these hashtags have become a great tool for inbound marketers since they help them categories specific keywords to reach potential clients. In other words, a post or article with specific keywords will surface with other posts having the same hashtag and reach people with similar interest. You can also tag people in posts and discussions by simply typing @ followed by the username whose attention you want to gain. 7. Rich Media: Images, Videos, and SlideShare Focus on using all three formats and experiment with the content. See which type of post gets you the maximum leads and which format helps boost reach. We recommend sharing short videos about your product, services, customer success, and other sections of your profiles. These can be used to acquire more views and engage more people, and you’ll stop thinking how to use LinkedIn for sales. 8. Foster Relationships This has got to be the most important LinkedIn marketing strategy ever! As a marketer you must remember that LinkedIn is a perfect place to engage with buyers. Don’t think of it as a platform to bombard requests to everyone or send unnecessary messages. Instead, work on building valuable relationships with customers, companies, and experts. Whether it’s the entry-level marketer or CMO, you can build a supportive and diverse community to share your own advice and learn from others. In short, you can build genuine connections that will help you gain authority for nurturing leads and turn prospects into customers. 9. LinkedIn Ads If you’re serious about LinkedIn marketing, you shouldn’t miss LinkedIn ads. The best part about ads on this platform is that it enables you to target the right audience based on their professional attributes such as job roles, company name, skills, function, and industry. However, don’t run ads unless you have built some organic traffic – Ads won’t make much of a difference unless you’ve built an organic reach. We’re saying that because you should understand that LinkedIn audiences are the decision-makers of your target customers. So, if you want to gain their trust, start by building your credibility. And to build credibility, you must focus on implementing all strategies efficiently. Once you’ve good quality content, regular posts, and engagement on your page, then only you should focus on reaching out to the target audience. Follow this and you’ll never ask how to use LinkedIn for sales. Bottom Line LinkedIn is indeed a breeding ground for marketers, especially if they want to build awareness. If you want to make the most of this platform, start thinking beyond the basics and focus on how you can turn leads into customers. Where some people believe in aggressive marketing, LinkedIn doesn’t work that way. You’ve to focus on ‘connections’ and apply the entire funnel to your LinkedIn strategies. We encourage you to take advantage of all the tools LinkedIn has to offer, seek relationship-building opportunities, publish the right content daily, and turn your business profile upside down! Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article was written for Business 2 Community by Chanakya Kyatham.Learn how to publish your content on B2C Author: Chanakya Kyatham Follow @chanakyakyatham Chanakya Kyatham is a Senior Digital Marketing Manager at ParamInfo Computer Services Pvt Ltd and piLOBI. He is passionate about topics such as SaaS, productivity, Android and iOS, general technology, and business. … View full profile ›More by this author:Why Product Reviews Are Important For B2B SaaSTop 7 Customer Feedback Tools for 2022Top 9 SEO Marketing Tools for 2022