According to Arthur Goldstuck’s recent SA social media landscape report, LinkedIn’s growth in SA is on par with the way it’s been growing internationally. 6.8 million users, in terms of userbase, brings LinkedIn very close to the Twitter and YouTube user bases in South Africa.
In order to get leads from LinkedIn, you have to be intentional. Leads don’t just fall into your lap. You work for them.
The best way is to turn your business or company page into a lead generation page. This is a course reversal from the typical company page, which shows basic ‘About us’ information and facts about the company. Who reads that stuff anyway?
A Page is also a place to showcase life inside your firm, whether for recruiting purposes or to give prospective customers a sense of what it’s like doing business with you. If you treat the page as a dynamic marketing tool, you can establish thought leadership, build brand awareness, and move your audience to take action, i.e. clickthrough to your website.
I would like to share my experience to use LinkedIn to catch the eyes of prospective customers. Also read my previous blog posts on lead generation for more tips: PR agencies – become demand generation heroes and The role of PR in lead generation:
Ronelle Bester 28 Apr 2017
Use an image that gets attention or creates interest. The header image is the first way to attract user’s interest. The header image should make the user eager to find out more and keep reading.
Create a clear and compelling pitch in your company description. The company description should not be a dry explanation of how much you grew, and how many offices you’ve opened. That’s not the stuff of lead generation. The most important part of your company description is the first two-ish lines, because that’s all that LinkedIn displays.
Make your Updates section clickable and conversion-focused. Just in case prospects don’t click through your company website on the company information section, you want to get them in the Updates. As long as you’re regularly posting updates, you’ll have an active and engaging feed. The best way to gain leads from this section is to post updates that are directly aimed at your target audience.
Here a few tips to write compelling updates:
Create a Showcase Page, a purpose-built page designed to promote specific business lines, products, brands or initiatives within your company. Showcase Pages were basically custom-made for B2Bs to better generate leads. A showcase page should target one customer segment, and provide information that is relevant to them.
Here are some tips to make your Showcase Page powerful:
Start a group. LinkedIn groups offer a lot of great networking opportunities. one of the ways to get even more from the power of groups is to create your own. When you become the owner and moderator of your group, you can form a place where your target audience can gather and interact.
Page analytics is crucial to track your success and provides you with metrics and trends about your Page. By gaining deeper insights into your Page performance, you can:
This is a broad-level strategy, but without the right knowledge, LinkedIn becomes just another time-sucking social network.
