Leveraging LinkedIn to Grow Your B2B Business Through Social Networking

I love teaching. I love teaching people about leveraging LinkedIn. One of my favorite, and humbly, one of the best courses I’ve ever created and teach on a regular basis is my latest LinkedIn class. I call it TRIBE. The reason I call it TRIBE is because it’s built around a concept of only focusing on 150 contacts, and optimizing those to help spread your messages. I have broken it into 4 key parts and I will share them with you here in a bit.

Companies tend to lump social media into a marketing category while I look at it differently. I look at Linkedin as a relationship marketing tool.

What confuses most people is how others use it. They look at it as a giant cold calling list. We all have been connected to and pitched. That is not what it was designed for. That spray and pray or wish marketing will have the same results on social media that it would if you just sent a postcard in the mail.

In order to get different results, you have to start to approach leveraging LinkedIn differently

You Already Have What You Need

The concepts that I teach are mostly based around B2B companies with sales teams. That assumes that you have multiple employees. Let’s estimate that you have 10 people you can get them all to utilize LinkedIn the same way. If each of them has 150 contacts that pay attention to what they do, now you have over 1,500 people that will see your messages.

Let’s examine some of the concepts so you understand the basics of how all of this works. One of the most important things you have to realize is that you probably already have everything that you need.

You have customers, and hopefully, you can find them on LinkedIn. You should have a business page with all of your employees linked to it or associated with it. Those two, when used as a system, help you to amplify your reach within the LinkedIn platform.

Then, you most likely have existing content. I am guessing you probably have a mix of blogs, videos, podcasts, or something that can be shared. Although creating new content is important, utilizing old content is important, too. That gives everything that you’ve already invested in more shelf life.

One of the keys to your business’s success with this system is helping your sales team better manage the relationships they already have with your current customers, your past customers, and helping them to attract the right prospects for your business.

From experience with my own and my clients, businesses, this system just works, and the results can be amazing.

Next, let me go over the three core principles.

Optimizing Your Team

The first part of this is getting everybody in your organization to have unified profiles. That means everybody has a quality headshot. All of their header images represent your business. And they have something known as a headline as opposed to just a job description. A headline describes who you serve, the problem that they have, and how this person solves it. A job description is just VP of sales at My-co.com.

Next, you can help them by using the new creator mode on LinkedIn to show off your content to your perfect audience. Getting everybody aligned in that way creates a unified message to everybody who is looking at or working with your company.

Optimizing Connections

The next thing you want to do is get everybody in your organization to connect with the right people. You don’t want to connect with everybody, first, you want to connect with people who are already associated with your business, then focus on prospects second.

You want to start by having each salesperson or each customer service person connect with the people they serve. In other words, connect with your customers first. Next, you want to make sure that everybody is connecting up with past customers. You never know if they’ve moved on to other companies or have taken new jobs where your company can reconnect with them and increase your sales base.

And then finally, if you’re working with prospects, you want to make sure you connect with them on LinkedIn as well. All of your content needs to be served up to your perfect audience. Prospecting is important but connecting with the people you already serve is one of the best ways of leveraging LinkedIn as a tool that gets your messages across to the right people at the right time.

Optimizing Your Content

The third and final piece to this puzzle is pulling together and sharing high-quality content. What does that mean? There are three different kinds of content. There’s awareness content, educational content, and sales content. Awareness content is usually targeted towards prospects. It just is a quick, scroll-stopping graphic or video that says, “We are here, and we do this for you!” Educational content is targeted towards your current and past customers. And finally, sales content is geared towards people who have already or are ready to make a purchase.

After you have created your content, you can share it in various different places on LinkedIn. You can share on your staff’s profiles, you can create articles, you can share it on your business page, and then share it into groups. Again, the key thing here is that everybody across your organization is sharing your content. That way, people who are following your company, get a unified message, and you get to control that message by the sequencing and timely sharing of your content.

One other thing that I mentioned before is old content is great. It can be reused and put up as lead generation and educational material that can help people better understand your products and services, your unique selling proposition, and what makes you better for them as a solution provider.

Optimizing The SYSTEM

All three things, having great profiles, making sure that you’re connecting with the right people, and putting out quality content, work together as a system. When everybody in your organization is on the same page and understands that they are responsible for monitoring and responding to any comments or engagements on their own personal profiles, then they begin to amplify your messages and engage with your customers in a cohesive and profitable way. This system works best when everybody understands the end game; to get people off of social media and have a conversation via email, a phone call, or in person.

Final Thoughts

LinkedIn is the perfect B2B solution because that’s where people spend time engaging and learning about business. They are not messing around with cat videos or anything political. It should be used as a soft promotion tool that is less about sales and more informational. And leveraging LinkedIn is the perfect way to amplify those messages.

The final piece of this puzzle is making sure that you are creating fresh content on your own website and having your sales team and customer service team share it on LinkedIn. When people click on it, they end up back at your website and that becomes measurable traffic that you can build upon.

LinkedIn is much more than just a social network. It is a tool that’s going to help you, your sales team, and your business engage with the right customers at the right time.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas, or questions about what great advice you would share about leveraging LinkedIn. How does your business ensure people are interacting with people? Have you been working to amplify your marketing message? What worked and what did not live up to your expectations? Do you have any ideas or other advice you could share?

  This article originally appeared on B2B Interactive Marketing Inc. and has been republished with permission.
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Author: Brian Basilico

Follow @bbasilico

Brian Basilico is a nationally recognized author and speaker.  He’s the founder and president of B2b Interactive Marketing Inc., an award winning marketing consulting and production company in Aurora Illinois. B2b helps companies and non-profits, market their products and services through the effective use of on-line tools including; websites, blogs,

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