In our previous article Five Mental Brakes That Keep You From Standing Out On LinkedIn, I explained to you how important it is to have a presence on LinkedIn for your brand and for your business and the mental brakes that often make us doubt it.
Once this aspect has been clarified, we go to the next level: once we have decided that our business needs to be on LinkedIn to establish relationships with users and other companies and work so that they become sales at a given moment, the big question comes:
How to do it? What is this LinkedIn presence based on? Having a presence on LinkedIn is not opening a profile and that's it. LinkedIn is the platform to generate conversation; a conversation that leads to the sale. In a natural way.
But how do you get it? Thanks to the strategy.
In this article, I will explain why and how to create an effective strategy on LinkedIn.
The strategy is a series of thoughtful actions, directed towards a determined end.
Let's see how to define this action path for LinkedIn.
Why a strategy is necessary to have an effective presence on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is a powerful tool to generate conversation with your prospects to look for a sale to occur. But it is not about opening a profile and waiting for the contacts to rain, nor to attack all related profiles.
Not much less.
I want you to ALWAYS remember the following 4 words: LINKEDIN IS A SEARCH ENGINE
If you agree with me, THEN you will only be able to do two types of strategy on LinkedIn:
- SEARCH = Prospecting Strategy: develop search actions for potential clients
- BE FOUND = Attraction Strategy: develop actions so that potential clients find you.
The strategy to be developed on LinkedIn is based on THESE poles that complement each other.
Each of these two strategies will involve certain actions, which we will see little by little.
In the beginning, the normal thing is to start prospecting, being proactive, looking for our ideal client ... but there will come a point in our presence on LinkedIn, that we will need less and less prospecting and we will establish more attraction strategies.
So, at this moment, the perfect combo is to do a combination of the two.
But what do you think will be the goal of these two strategies?
Well you establish strategies to be found on LinkedIn and to search for your client on LinkedIn, the final objective will be only ONE:
Talk to YOUR potential client VIA MESSAGE.
The platform offers us four resources for this:
- The LinkedIn Search Engine
- Messaging through the Inbox
- Your Profile and that of your company's employees (we cannot prospect with COMPANY PAGES)
- Content that you share from your profile and other employee and company profiles.
Therefore, the key lies in activating those four axes to get a conversation with your market.
How can you do it?
To achieve the objectives set with your presence on the platform, you have to define and clarify several issues very well:
- Who you are and how you want to be perceived
- What do you offer
- To who
Markets are just conversations and from those conversations, the sales will come, naturally. Therefore, the sale is a process, the consequence, the culmination.
How to develop this process by taking advantage of these resources and tools that LinkedIn offers us?
I have a method for it just for you.
A method that is already proven in hundreds of businesses, which seeks precisely that this process of starting a conversation, developing a relationship and that it culminates in the sale occurs naturally and it works for all types of B2B businesses, of any sector, activity, type and size.
What do I want to express with this method?
That any strategy to develop on LinkedIn to generate conversations that manage to close sales naturally are articulated around these following four concepts.
- Be Known First: LinkedIn is made up of people. People who through their profiles establish relationships on the platform and make themselves known.
To meet your goals on LinkedIn, you will have to make yourself known to the people in your circle of interest.
If you want to sell you have to make yourself known. Nobody buys something they don't know.
You can't pretend to sell to a prospect if they don't know you at all. If you are doing it like this up to now, you can change your tactic, because this is not going to work for you.
So your first strategy to develop on LinkedIn is to get visibility.
- Then you will have to be Recognized: we move forward in the process. Your contacts already know you, you have already established a relationship with them.
Natural progress is based on that knowledge turning into recognition, into positioning. Get value in your niche as a specialist in what you do, that your contacts know what you help, what are the products or services you offer.
This process will occur thanks to the value you bring to your prospects.
- Admired - Desired: when your market knows you, recognizes you as a person of reference in your area of specialization and you are valued, you have to ensure that what you are offering (your product or service) is desired.
Let them fall in love with you or your brand or your products and services.
That they wish to have what you are offering them. That they buy you and appreciate that you exist in the market
And, of course, that they value you for your transforming power regarding what they seek and need; not for your price. What's more, the price factor should not even be taken into account. Because they will gladly pay more to buy from the brand that has earned their TRUST.
- Purchased: being purchased will be the natural consequence of this whole process.
When you work on LinkedIn and execute these steps correctly, you will not even have to develop commercial actions, because your clients will come to you.
The types of a user profiles on LinkedIn
If we decontextualize the characteristics of the profiles of people present on LinkedIn to their type according to this paradigm, we can define at least nine different types.
We are going to articulate them based on just two cores:
- The recognition you (and your team) have on LinkedIn. Its control variable is participation.
- The knowledge that your niche, your ideal client, has about you (and your team). In this aspect, the network of contacts, the number of contacts you have on the platform will be the variable.
The types of profiles present on the platform are located around these two. How does a profile go from being present on LinkedIn without visibility to being known, to being recognized, to being admired and thus being bought?
All part of the Content that we share on this social network. Look at the difference between the 3 types of profiles that you can find:
- The one who does not share content
- The one who shares a certain type of content
- The one who shares your OPINION and criteria
- Number One = I do not share content
They are profiles that, even with a user profile on LinkedIn, do nothing to interact, relate and enter into conversation with other people.
- Number Two: they share content from others, they do use social selling.
These types of users are creating valuable connections, sharing content and contributing to the rest of the people present on LinkedIn.
The content that these people share is that created by their companies or other media or sources of information.
- And number Three: these are profiles that create content following their own strategy on LinkedIn and share it.
They differ from the previous ones because they also share their opinions and that positions them in your market.
They reflect and create opinions. In short, they contribute.
Interesting, right?
In my next article, I'll show you three elements that fit together and work in sync to start building relationships.
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