Social Selling and Lead Generation
LinkedIn is the Largest Professional Network on social media and is intended to directly lead to business and enables users to find and share opportunities everyday. It is one of the most trust worthy sources and is an extremely effective platform and tool for lead generation. Statistically, 80% of social media, business to business leads, originate from LinkedIn. In result of this, more users are inclined to engage with content on the platform. Social Selling on LinkedIn is one of the best ways for sales representatives to generate leads. LinkedIn is directly focused on businesses by using the application to find, connect and build relationships with potential clients, prospects and businesses. This marketing strategy is a newer approach in sales that makes it possible for salespeople to target, engage and relate to their potential leads.
“The idea of social selling is like modern relationship building.”
HootSuite
Social selling is about having meaningful interactions with target markets that are personable and engaging. It is more than just your average form of sale, it’s all of the marketing that goes behind it shown by the content that you post. If your an active social seller, you will be noticed more by people and businesses. These meaningful social interactions will present your brand as a trusted source to solve a problem. This will result in brand recognition, customer loyalty and will overall help generate leads in sales. Content can be made up of multiple things on a platform like LinkedIn.
According to LinkedIn Sales Solution
What is the best kind of Content to post on LinkedIn?
There are three different powerful content strategy categories that sales representatives using social selling on LinkedIn, can use to post content. The first one is industry insights, for example, post relevant news about something in your industry and add in a glimpse of your own opinion as a company or brand. You can tell a story to your audience; create posts that can show your experiences and personal journey with the business. The last of the content strategy category is relatability, this could be used in the form of humor or relatable interests like mentioning your favorite books, portfolios or podcasts in your posts. Altogether, each one of these elements presents the idea of adding a human element to your online selling content through LinkedIn as a professional media platform.
This LinkedIn Expert has a ton of beneficial ideas of how to post and what kind content will generate leads. Some of the ideas she mentions is when you start posting on LinkedIn, the best formula to use is divided into 3 simple steps. The first part of the post should include a hook; use a few key words or phrases to grab the attention of your potential lead. Following the hook, supply a short amount of information that will intrigue them. This will lead them to find the call to action you suggested, whether that be engaging with the post, clicking a link, following, commenting and/or much more.
LinkedIn Content Strategy: Post Ideas for Growth
What Content can be…
- Commenting – When your posting comments, it is important to reply on other peoples as well as your own. This could be posts you were tagged in or posts featuring your specific hashtags where your company is trending at that time.
- Sharing – When it comes to your opinion, clients like to engage and see what you have to say about your own and other brands and companies. Sharing other team members or associates posts is impactful when generating content.
- Text Only Posts on a personal or business account’s page. Longest text limit available.
- Image With Text – Tip: always show real images and not that are generated photos. Using those kind of images takes away the authenticity you need when posting organic content.
- External Links – these are able to be shared on LinkedIn and make people want to engage with your content because they have to click on it to see what the information might be.
- Document Feature – going along with adding links to your content, the document feature has similar benefits with being a swipeable visual file. This encourages the client to think about what they see and make them curious to continue to read.
- Creating a Video – video features on all applications are continue to rise within each platform. It is important to keep videos on LinkedIn short and to always feature people. This gives the audience that sense of the human touch of who’s representing or working with a business.
- Going on LinkedIn Live – Connects your audience. This feature is able to be scheduled and set for certain days and times, it is also able to appear on your the top LinkedIn profile banner behind your profile picture. It is good for engagement, it will be one of the first things others will see when they click on your profile.
- Survey with a LikedIn Poll – keep these simple, find your ideal length time to have it available to others and beneficially it is overall ideal for audience reach.
- Post Articles – they have the potential to go VIRAL! Make sure to add a cover image and a link to the article. Share on other platforms (easily sharable content!)
- Create Stories – available for image and short video.
- Post LinkedIn Events – remind people and create with intentions for them to engage.
Since there is a multitude of content that you can post on LinkedIn, there are a lot of opportunities available to build up your LinkedIn community and make connections. Coming up with a content strategy is very beneficial for a sales representative looking to generate leads when social selling on LinkedIn. Here’s how:
After making the decisions that adhere to your specific brand or company, this plan should assist you in moving prospects through your sales funnel and you will turn out with more potential leads. It is good to know your target audience and continue to add the human element to all of your posts.
The Best Tips and Tricks from LinkedIn
In an ebook called “The Secret Sauce: How LinkedIn uses LinkedIn for Marketing” LinkedIn shares a few tips and tricks of what kinds of content to add to posts that will cause more people to want to engage with your company on LinkedIn.
- Content = Currency, LinkedIn suggests that creating blogs or adding them to other posts is one of the best ways to engage and build business relationships with your target audiences, there is an estimation of about 9 billion content impressions per WEEK on the network’s news feed.
- “The Numbers Don’t Lie”, According to LinkedIn, data shows that posts with statistics when linking back to a piece of content, had many more clicks and overall impressions. People will be more interested and want to keep reading.
- Shorter = Better, Keep short, sweet and to the point and then ‘link to more’. LinkedIn shared that status updates with 150 characters or less resulted in an over 18% boost in engagement rate.
- Words Matter, the key words you use in posts are extremely important to pay close attention to, when aiming towards lead magnets. Example: using the word ‘guide’ rather than ‘ebook’ resulted in 100% more increase in click-through rate. Through your words, target niche audiences and use LinkedIn’s advanced features to find the exact people you want to reach.
You’re all set!
Now it’s time to come up with a social selling plan, applying some of the most useful content to your posts. Find your community, make those connections, build those relationships and find your way to lead generation!
Teaching Social Media 