Venture Accelerator Partners Š 2016 An Introduction to LinkedIn for Sales & Marketing
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Introduction to
LinkedIn For Sales & Marketing Venture Accelerator Partners MARKETING SALES
SOCIAL MEDIA Venture Accelerator Partners www.vapartners.ca Twitter: twitter.com/vapartners www.vapartners.ca LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/venture-accelerator-partners-inc.
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An Introduction to LinkedIn for Sales & Marketing
TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Why Use LinkedIn? ......................................................................3 1. Setting Up a Profile .......................................................................................5 2. Getting Familiar With LinkedIn ......................................................................6 3. How & When to Post Updates .......................................................................7 4. Publishing Articles .........................................................................................9 5. Creating a Company Page ..........................................................................11 6. Getting Followers on Your Company Page .................................................13 7. Measuring Results .......................................................................................15 8. Social Selling With LinkedIn ........................................................................ 17 Further Reading & Resources ......................................................................... 20 Tools for LinkedIn ........................................................................................... 20 About Venture Accelerator Partners ...............................................................21
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An Introduction to LinkedIn for Sales & Marketing
Introduction: Why Use LinkedIn? If you sell services or products to other businesses, LinkedIn is the social network you and your team should focus on because it is one of the best marketing channels for B2B businesses. Compared to the company blog, Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn drives the most leads for B2B businesses. With almost 400 million users in different industries, companies and job functions, there are plenty of potential leads to be found for just about any business.
Benefits of using LinkedIn include: 1.
2.
Building Awareness – 92% of all marketers indicate that social media efforts have generated more exposure for their businesses. Staying Top of Mind – Staying relevant includes being where your customers are. Interacting with your prospects on social media and on LinkedIn is an additional way to stay in touch and build a relationship.
DID YOU KNOW? LinkedIn generates the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74%, almost 3 times higher (277%) than Twitter (0.69%). Source: Hubspot.
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An Introduction to LinkedIn for Sales & Marketing
3.
Being Seen as a Subject Matter Expert – Become a source for industry news by sharing relevant articles and resources on your company page and on your personal profile.
Although there’s a range of social networks from Facebook to Pinterest, the best social network for B2B companies is LinkedIn. In this Introduction to LinkedIn for Sales and Marketing white paper, you will learn how to: • Set up a good profile on LinkedIn • Find and participate in relevant conversations in LinkedIn Groups • Share content to attract followers to your LinkedIn Company Page • Generate leads for your business
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An Introduction to LinkedIn for Sales & Marketing
1. Setting Up a Profile COMPANY VS. PERSONAL PROFILES Making the distinction between a company and personal profile on LinkedIn helps you implement the appropriate strategies to get the most out of your LinkedIn experience. This is especially important to consider for individuals who may be managing both their personal and company profiles.
DID YOU KNOW? 8 out of 10 SMBs use social media for their business to drive growth. Source: The Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2015, freely.net
The main aim of a company profile on LinkedIn is to represent a business. This encompasses the company’s team, culture, values, and overall brand identity. A LinkedIn profile is part of the overall marketing strategy to increase brand awareness, make connections and gain traction within an industry. A personal profile on LinkedIn is like a resume: an overview of your work history, education, projects and skills. A personal profile allows you to share updates and posts that aren’t necessarily related to your company’s service or products. PROFILE PHOTO Your profile picture is an important feature of your LinkedIn account. People are naturally attracted to images and will notice your photo before they notice the text that summarizes your experience. An idea profile photo should show your face clearly and you should have a neutral expression or a slight smile. LinkedIn suggests that the profile photo you upload should be at least 400 px by 400px and in a JPG, GIF or PNG format. HEADLINE, SUMMARY, WORK EXPERIENCE AND EDUCATION Your LinkedIn profile page is a summary of your skills and experience. However, you should also think about what you want to accomplish with your profile. For example, if you goal on LinkedIn is to connect with prospective clients, you should present your profile in terms of how your experience helps them or ways you’ve helped past clients. Consider what keywords a prospect would use if they were searching on LinkedIn for someone to help them solve their business problem.
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An Introduction to LinkedIn for Sales & Marketing
2. Getting Familiar With LinkedIn LIKING UPDATES AND POSTS “Liking” an update or post is one of the simplest ways to interact with someone’s content to show that you like their update or post. To Like an update or post, click the “Like” button under the update or post title. LINKEDIN GROUPS A LinkedIn Group is like a forum. Different LinkedIn Groups are dedicated to different topics or for different people, such as university alumni and professionals in a certain industry or interests. Joining a group, sharing updates, commenting and liking updates is a great way to start engaging with the LinkedIn community and peers. To find a LinkedIn Group, you can search for it in the search bar or browse LinkedIn’s directory of all groups at www.linkedin.com/directory/groups. Once you understand how Groups work, you can also create your own group by clicking “Create group” on the “My Groups” dashboard at www.linkedin.com/groups/ my-groups.
Example of a LinkedIn Group page.
LINKEDIN MESSAGES LinkedIn messages are private messages you can send to people you’re connected to. If you’re interested in sending a message to someone you’re not connected to, you can pay to upgrade your LinkedIn membership to send LinkedIn InMail.
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An Introduction to LinkedIn for Sales & Marketing
3. How & When to Post Updates Through the LinkedIn website or LinkedIn app, you can post updates instantly for your personal profile or company. If you want to schedule the update instead of posting it immediately, you can use a third party social media management tool such as Hootsuite (hootsuite.com) or Buffer (buffer.com). Scheduling your updates in advance is useful when those updates are related to future promotions/campaigns. Prescheduling updates for an upcoming week or month also saves time because you are creating a bulk amount of posts in one sitting. POSTING DIRECTLY FROM LINKEDIN To post updates to your personal profile directly from LinkedIn, you can use the LinkedIn website (https://www.linkedin.com) or the LinkedIn mobile app (mobile.linkedin.com) on your smartphone or tablet. When posting on your personal profile, you can share a short update/article, a photo or a long-form post/article.
To post an update for your LinkedIn Company Page, go to the dashboard for your company page. Similar to personal profiles, you can post a short update/ article and/or a photo. However, long-form posts/article are not available for company pages.
Update composer for Company Page updates.
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2. SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT TOOLS HootSuite Hootsuite (hootsuite.com) is a great social media management tool that lets you post and manage your Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Instagram accounts. Through Hootsuite, you can schedule updates to both personal LinkedIn accounts and LinkedIn company pages. In addition, you can also schedule updates to LinkedIn groups that you belong to.
Hootsuite social media management web dashboard.
Buffer Buffer (buffer.com), similar to Hootsuite, supports Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Buffer also includes an easy-to-use analytics feature, which helps you monitor the success of your posts to look for patterns in the headlines or content that get the most engagement. This is useful for planning future updates.
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4. Publishing Articles LinkedIn Pulse (www.linkedin.com/pulse) is LinkedIn’s publishing platform that lets you publish articles and read articles by people across the entire LinkedIn network. Publishing articles on LinkedIn Pulse is similar to writing a blog post. It’s also a great way to be seen as a subject matter expert on your industry by potential leads and peers. Links to articles you published are displayed or archived under your personal LinkedIn profile so people who visit your profile page will be able to see it. HOW TO PUBLISH A POST To publish your own article, click on the “Publish a post” button on the LinkedIn Pulse dashboard, or the “Publish a post” button on the dashboard of your personal profile.
LinkedIn Pulse newsfeed and article view.
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The LinkedIn publishing interface looks similar to a Word document; for example, you can format text, add bullets and embed links. You also upload a featured image and set a headline for your article. If you aren’t able to finish your post in one sitting, you can save it as a draft and continue editing later.
LinkedIn publishing interface for writing your post.
PROMOTING YOUR POST Promoting your post is just as important as writing your post. Although your published post will appear in your contacts’ news feeds when you publish it, there ways to extend its reach. Here are a few ways: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Share the post on your personal profile as an update Share the post on your other social media accounts, such as Twitter Post it on relevant LinkedIn Groups you belong to Summarize the article as a blog post on your company website with a link to the full article on LinkedIn
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An Introduction to LinkedIn for Sales & Marketing
5. Creating a Company Page HOW TO CREATE A COMPANY PAGE From the LinkedIn menu bar, go to Interests > Companies and click on the “Create” button under “Create a Company Page” or go directly to www.linkedin.com/company/add/show?trk=biz-module-create-company
Adding a company page on LinkedIn.
You will be taken through a sequence of questions for the setup, including the company name, company description, contact information and so on. To create the page, you will need to enter an email address with the company’s domain name; you will not be able to proceed if you use a Gmail or Hotmail address. MAKING YOUR COMPANY PAGE STAND OUT When your company page is first created, it will look pretty plain. Make your page a better reflection of your company’s brand by: • Adding a header image – such as an image from an event •
Getting employees to update their personal LinkedIn profiles – this ensures the company they work for is linked to your company page
•
Ensuring you post content on a regular basis – start sharing interesting news/articles or your company blog posts 1-5 times per week. Visitors are more likely to follow company pages with regular activity.
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An Introduction to LinkedIn for Sales & Marketing
Sample LinkedIn Company Page: Salesforce
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An Introduction to LinkedIn for Sales & Marketing
6. Getting Followers on Your Company Page Building an engaged audience on LinkedIn is one of the goals of your company social media activities. Having a good following can directly help with your sales and marketing activities because your business has more reach. It takes time to grow your following, but it’s possible with consistent effort. SHARE RELEVANT CONTENT One of the best ways to gain followers is by sharing third party articles or news about the industry. Your followers may “Like” the article, “Comment” on the article or “Share” it on their own personal profile or onto a LinkedIn group. People sharing your content will help amplify the reach of your updates. FOLLOW AND SHARE BUTTONS ON WEBSITES Similar to Twitter “Follow” and Facebook “Like” buttons, LinkedIn “Follow” buttons can be added to your website or blog to let your audience easily Follow you on LinkedIn. Once you have created a LinkedIn Company page, you can generate a LinkedIn Follow button by going to LinkedIn’s Follow Company Plugin Generator at developer.linkedin.com/plugins/follow-company and entering the company name you used when you created your company page. The page will then give you the code to insert on your website where you want the button to appear.
LinkedIn Company Follow button generator.
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BUSINESS CARDS AND EMAIL SIGNATURES Email signatures are often an overlooked piece of digital real estate since people spend an average of 19% of their time online reading and writing emails. Unlike social media updates, emails have a longer lifespan and are often reopened. It’s natural for people to want to know more about the person emailing them, which makes email signatures a great place to put links to your social media profiles, including your LinkedIn Company Page and personal LinkedIn profile.
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7. Measuring Results ANALYTICS DASHBOARD – PERSONAL PROFILE LinkedIn’s analytics dashboard for personal profiles is basic and straightforward. It shows how many times your profile has been viewed, by whom, the number of views on your published posts and how often your profile is viewed relative to your connections. Over time, you should aim to increase the number of your connections, and if you’re publishing posts, the number of posts and the number of views on those posts.
LinkedIn Analytics dashboard for personal profile.
ANALYTICS DASHBOARD – COMPANY PAGES LinkedIn provides an analytics dashboard for your company page, which you can access by clicking “Analytics” when you’re on your company page. The Analytics dashboard shows you a number of metrics including: • • • •
Impressions and clicks for each update you post The seniority level of your company page followers Graph of the number of followers for up to the last 12 months Graphs of page views and visitors to your company page for up to the last 12 months
As you use and update your LinkedIn Company Page, you should see an increase in the number of followers. The analytics showing the number of impressions and clicks for your updates can be used to refine the types of articles you post.
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An Introduction to LinkedIn for Sales & Marketing
LinkedIn Analytics dashboard for company pages.
REFERRALS TO YOUR WEBSITE LinkedIn can be a gateway to your company website; when you share your company’s blog posts on your personal or LinkedIn page, ideally your connections or followers will click through to your company website. Check your website’s traffic analytics (e.g. Google Analytics) to see if your LinkedIn activities, are increasing your website traffic. This should help you determine how effective your LinkedIn efforts are. INBOUND LEADS Analyze how and where your inbound leads are coming from. When you get an inbound lead ask them how they came to know about your services. If it originated from LinkedIn, you will know that your efforts are paying off. You should also track the number of inquiries you get directly from LinkedIn, such as through LinkedIn messages.
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8. Social Selling With LinkedIn LinkedIn is a great tool for a salesperson. It is helpful for prospecting and can also help close opportunities in the funnel. LinkedIn also allows for sales people to show subject matter expertise and stay top of mind in a nurturing way. Here are some of our favourite sales features within LinkedIn. ADVANCED SEARCH The advanced search is a very powerful tool within LinkedIn. You can set filters based on industry, title, location, and keywords. I would also recommend filtering on first and/or second connections. This could provide an excellent prospect list.
Search for LinkedIn users by company, title, location and more.
SEARCH CONNECTORS Finding connectors or leveraging first connections can be extremely helpful. One of the best ways to do that is to click on that connection. You will then see details like those below. You can add a term to the search bar, like a title or keyword, and all the connections that match will show up.
! Search for relevant personal connections.
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INMAIL Once contacts are identified then an inMail can be sent. First check to see if they are interested in receiving “business deals� messages. Referring to connections can also help to build credibility.
! LinkedIn InMail composer.
MEMBERS FROM GROUPS Groups can often be hit or miss for posting content and discussions. Some can be a ghost town and others can be very spammy. One of the biggest benefits in joining a group is the ability to message anyone in that group, even without inMail. Being in the group also adds to your credibility. Please note that LinkedIn has recently capped the number of messages within groups to 15 a month.
! Check for relevant contacts in LinkedIn Groups you belong to.
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SALES TRIGGER EVENTS An active company page featuring news updates and other shared information might be the key to getting your message heard. Looking for trigger events and relevant posts to discuss can help you quickly get your prospects’ attention and create warmer conversations. If you don’t see anything in their activity history, don’t worry. Simply click the “Follow” button located towards the top of the page to have their latest updates come right to your home stream. POSTS TO STAY TOP OF MIND Sales requires continuous effort and the need to follow up. Sharing content relevant to your offerings and industry is an easy way to stay top of mind with prospects that you’ve connected with but had not been ready to buy. Soon your updates will offer even more power as LinkedIn continues to roll out its new analytic “Who’s Viewed Your Updates?” allowing you to focus your attention to prospects interested in the information you are sharing.
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An Introduction to LinkedIn for Sales & Marketing
Further Reading & Resources GETTING STARTED WITH LINKEDIN •
Beginner’s Guide to Social Media - LinkedIn moz.com/beginners-guide-to-social-media/linkedin
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How to Use LinkedIn: 35 LinkedIn Tips for Professional Networking, Business & Marketing blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/23454/The-Ultimate-Cheat-Sheetfor-Mastering-LinkedIn.aspx
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5 Strategies for Building a Bigger Network on LinkedIn www.quicksprout.com/2016/01/06/5-strategies-for-building-a-biggernetwork-on-linkedin
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Master The LinkedIn Company Page: 12 New Data-Backed Tips blog.bufferapp.com/linkedin-company-pages
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17 Tools to Make LinkedIn Work For You thenextweb.com/insider/2015/10/23/17-tools-to-make-linkedin-work-foryou
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12 Sure-Fire Ways To Find New Prospects On LinkedIn www.salesforlife.com/blog/linkedin/12-ways-to-find-new-prospects-onlinkedin
Tools for LinkedIn SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT • •
Hootsuite - hootsuite.com Buffer - buffer.com
LINKEDIN ANALYTICS • •
Personal Profile - www.linkedin.com/wvmx/profile/rankings Company Page - Go to “Analytics” on the company page dashboard
CONTACT RESEARCH TOOLS • •
Discover.ly - discover.ly Rapportive - rapportive.com
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About Venture Accelerator Partners
Venture Accelerator Partners provides B2B sales, marketing and inbound lead generation services to startups and fast-growing organizations. Our clients range from mobile startups, large industrial companies, to major financial services companies. Since being in business in 2008, VA Partners has helped drive millions of website visitors, hundreds of qualified meetings, and millions of dollars in revenue for clients. Our team is passionately committed to growing revenue for growing companies. Some of our recent accomplishments include: • • • • •
Generated $500,000 in new revenue for an oil and gas provider in the first year of the engagement Helped create a $2 million annuity stream for a financial services company Closed $300,000 in incremental revenue working six days per month for a client Boosted website traffic and inbound leads by 300% over 6 months for a growing enterprise sales training company Secured partnership meetings with Fortune 500 companies like RIM, Microsoft, ADP and more
Companies work with us to establish sales processes, revamp marketing, build and optimize websites for lead generation, leverage social media, build a sales funnel of qualified leads, close deals faster, and save money with experienced resources. To learn more about our sales and marketing services for growing B2B businesses, contact us at info@vapartners.ca or (647) 401-7156.
VA Partners www.vapartners.ca 321 Carlaw Ave, Suite 202 Toronto, ON M4M 2S1 Twitter: twitter.com/vapartners LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/venture-accelerator-partners-inc.
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