Wondering if you should use platforms like LinkedIn in your network marketing business? The fact is EVERYBODY's using social media to sell their stuff these days. Even the biggest brands like Coca-Cola, Nike, Lego, American Express, General Electric, Lowe’s, Taco Bell, and NASA are flexing their social muscles and building huge fan bases online.
According to Infusionsoft, more than 70% of small businesses are planning to include social media marketing in their business strategy. But while Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram get most of the buzz, many entrepreneurs are neglecting a hidden goldmine of hot, receptive prospects.
After all, when you’re trying to get your business noticed, wouldn’t it make more sense to go where the business action's really at? Hint: LinkedIn is where it's at!
LinkedIn is Not a “Social” Channel – It’s a “Business” Channel
LinkedIn was created as a place to talk business. Since the early 2000s, it’s where professionals hang out and network with other professionals. It’s got such credibility as a business networking site that two professionals join LinkedIn every single second.
According to their own research, LinkedIn reports:
- 51% of companies acquired a B2C (business to consumer) customer through LinkedIn.
- 93% of B2B (business to business) marketers consider LinkedIn to be the most effective site for lead generation.
- 50% of LinkedIn members say they are more likely to buy from someone they’ve engaged with on LinkedIn.
- 80% of LinkedIn members want to connect with companies to enhance their decision making.
- 92% of B2B marketers include LinkedIn in their digital marketing mix.
And if that’s not enough to convince you, check this out...
- Inside View reports that LinkedIn generates more leads for B2B companies than Facebook, Twitter, or Blogging individually.
- Econsultancy reports that LinkedIn is responsible for 64% of all visits to corporate websites from social media channels.
So how do you use LinkedIn to attract the kind of high-quality prospects who'll build your network marketing team fast?
7 Steps to Use LinkedIn for Network Marketing
Whether you’re a brand new marketer or an experienced pro, you can use LinkedIn to generate leads, build brand awareness, and establish strategic partnerships with serious businesspeople. Here’s how you get started:
1. Define Your Goals and Target Audience
Start your LinkedIn strategy by determining exactly what you want to accomplish.
- Do you want to generate leads and sell products?
- Build your brand awareness?
- Recruit team members?
Once you know exactly what you want, it’s easier to define and hone in on a specific audience. Let’s say your goal is to sell a training program to network marketers. LinkedIn has over 700 groups specifically for network marketing professionals.
Or imagine you’re part of a health and wellness company and you want to target network marketers in that field. There are more than 1,500 groups on LinkedIn dealing with health and wellness. Additionally, the site has 38 groups focused only on health and wellness marketing.
Depending on your goals, your LinkedIn job is to attract the audience who shares your goals and invite them to connect with you. From there, you can build your network marketing team with the prospects you want.
2. Create Your Personal LinkedIn Profile
Once your goals and target audience are clear, you can start to make your LinkedIn profile shine. You'll need to make sure it is professional and appropriate for your target audience. The goal of your personal profile is to portray yourself as a professional. Not as a goofy skateboarder or karaoke singer or kid’s soccer coach like you might on Facebook.
Why? Because people do business with people they know, like, and trust. Your profile has to create the kind of first impression that makes people feel comfortable trusting you and answer for themselves, “Can I see myself working with this person?”
Complete your profile as close to 100% as you can to establish your credibility and add to it as your accomplishments grow. Oh, and use a professional headshot for your profile picture. LinkedIn’s own research indicates that profiles with professional portraits drive profile views up 14 times than those with non-professional portraits. Putting your best face forward shows your target audience you believe enough in what you’re doing to put a professional face on it.
3. Start Connecting and Building Relationships
Starting from your own contact list, invite current and former colleagues, clients, customers, and others you’ve done business with in the past who fit your target audience profile. Focus on who you are and who you want to reach with your messages.
Join groups and invite people who fit your target audience to connect. As soon as someone accepts your invitation to connect, or reaches out to connect with you, send them a message and a gift.
Remember, the goal is to “give without want” – to provide value FIRST before you ask for anything. Thank people for reaching out, offer a brief statement about yourself and your purpose, and give them something of value. This can be a link to a lead magnet, your website, or an offer you think might be valuable to them.
You might say something like, “Thanks for connecting. I’m passionate about the home-based business industry and how it can help generate substantial income for people. Here’s something that I think might help you move forward toward accomplishing your own business goals.”
Then, stay in touch to build likeability and trust. When you get LinkedIn notifications of birthdays, job anniversaries, or job changes, send a brief message to stay connected. Make sure to always include something of value in your messages like a link to an offer or to an article you’ve written. Or, you can send an invitation to subscribe to your mailing list or to follow your Company Page.
4. Build Your LinkedIn Company Page
Your LinkedIn Company Page is your business’s profile. It should help prospective leads, prospects, and customers using LinkedIn learn more about your network marketing business.
Your Company Page is where you’ll publish relevant content to your target audience; articles, blog posts, business tips. It’s important to optimize your Company Page for search – whether the search comes from within LinkedIn or not.
Make sure you incorporate keywords that speak directly to your audience: what words or phrases would your target audience use when they search for your product or service?
Another way to get noticed and boost your search rankings is to link your Company Page to any other places you have an online presence. These could be your company's website, blog, or other marketing sites.
5. Actively Attract Followers to Your Company Page
Whenever someone follows your Company Page, updates to it appear directly in their LinkedIn feeds. Moreover, the more followers you have, the greater reach your updates will have. Start by asking your current customers or team members to follow your Company Page and share it with their networks.
Promote your company page in your blog posts, emails, newsletters, and website, and directly and unapologetically ask people to follow it. Use a “Follow” button or link on your website to allow your visitors to follow your LinkedIn Company Page with just one click.
6. Publish Rich, Engaging Content to Your Company Page
What kind of rich content should you post? While it might be tempting to focus on your own products or services, “pitchy” or aggressive sales content doesn’t work very well on LinkedIn. Remember, LinkedIn people are business professionals first. That means you need to provide content that your target audience finds useful. This means content that addresses a pain point, solves business problems, answers questions, or helps people do their jobs better.
The good news? You don’t have to write all that content yourself. You can share other people’s engaging and insightful content with your followers. This can position yourself as an authority and “thought leader” in your industry.
Offer your perspective on industry news and trends. Share the vision and ethos of your company. Showcase how your product or service can offer the best solution for your customers.
And don’t forget to include images. Research shows that posts with images attract 6 times more engagement. So, use pictures, YouTube videos, and SlideShare presentations to enrich your content and engage your followers.
Perhaps the most exciting opportunity of publishing rich, engaging content on LinkedIn is this: out of 560 million users worldwide, only about 1 million users have ever published any content! That means less than 1 tenth of 1% (.001%) of LinkedIn users are providing content!
Combine that with the fact that 91% of marketing executives say that LinkedIn is their top source for quality content and the opening should be blindingly obvious.
7. Take Advantage of LinkedIn’s Unique Advertising Features
There are three ways to leverage LinkedIn to grow your follower base through advertising:
- Sponsored Content - Sponsored Content is LinkedIn’s version of native advertising. It allows you to promote your most engaging content directly to the feeds of the people in your target audience (no matter what device they’re using), test variations of your message, and track how many leads you’re getting and where they’re coming from.
- Self Service Ads - LinkedIn has a very cool Campaign Manager dashboard that you can use to set up text ads and sponsored InMail campaigns in minutes. From there, you target your audience, set your budget, bid on your advertising rates, and track your results using LinkedIn’s analytics.
- Managed Campaigns - LinkedIn also offers Managed Campaigns for people with bigger budgets. These include dynamic ads and account-based marketing services.
If you’re just getting started, you can go a long way by just using Sponsored Content and Self-Serve ads – all you have to get comfortable with is targeting your audience, bidding on your rates, and working with measurement, tracking, and optimization.
Your mission as a business owner using LinkedIn is to attract high-quality prospects who are serious about network marketing.
LinkedIn is Where Serious Business Professionals Hang Out
They’re comfortable talking about business there. They’re actively looking for ways to grow their incomes and advance personally and professionally. It’s what LinkedIn is for.
So, when you use LinkedIn in your network marketing efforts, you need to do whatever it takes to make yourself, your business, and everything you communicate attractive to the kinds of people you want to reach.
- That means polishing and perfecting your professional image and posture online.
- It means being clear about how you can serve your target audience by providing something that has real, tangible business value.
- It means positioning yourself as a thought leader who attracts serious business professionals who want to do business with you: Who doesn't chase after them with aggressive pitches.
In short, LinkedIn is the best platform for attracting serious prospects. So, if you're looking to attract the very best prospects to your business on LinkedIn and every other social media platform, then check out the strategies taught in the FREE 10 Day Online Recruiting Bootcamp.
You'll see exactly what to do and how to position yourself, so you’ll never have to chase, annoy, pester, or beg anybody, ever, to take a look at your products, services, and business. These methods allow you to build your business automatically—where prospects reach out to you (instead of you having to reach out to them).
The bottom line is that, in today’s age, you don’t need to be pushy, obnoxious, or overly-aggressive to build a successful business!
So if you’re ready to get started, just click this link to get immediate access to the FREE 10 Day Online Recruiting Bootcamp and start generating leads this week!