LinkedIn as an Inbound Lead Generation Machine

You are looking for people that are looking for YOU!

And therein lies the problem!

Do you know your customer?

Seriously, I mean it, do you know your customer?

The problem is this, unless you have a very detailed, clear understanding of who your customer is how will you recognise him or her?

Over the years I have found this being the number one reason why business professionals do not achieve their marketing, sales, or business goals.

Think about it in terms of a fairy tale.

Cinderella – the hero of the story.

In the story she went through 4 distinct stages.

1.     She lived an ordinary life

2.     Then she had a problem -she was not allowed to go to the Prince’s ball.

3.     Next, she found a sage – the Fairy Godmother

4.     Now her problem was solved, and a transformation took place in her life; she lived happily ever after.

Let’s get back to your customer.

Your customer is the hero in your story.

You are the sage in his or her life.

What you need to aim for is finding your customers that need you as the sage they were looking for.

Simply put, you are looking for people that are looking for YOU!

To achieve this, you need to apply Inbound Marketing, also known as Attraction Marketing – on LinkedIn.

Inbound Marketing

With the LinkedIn changes since 2020 it has become clear that LinkedIn wants us to change our approach.

Gone are the days of pushing our content and messaging to all our connections often.

Even connecting with as many as we could find now has been restricted.

It is therefore important to focus on setting up our LinkedIn accounts in such a way that our customers, ideal clients, leads and prospects will find us.

It has caused a shift from outbound to inbound marketing.

Outbound Marketing is the traditional method of marketing seeking to push messages out to potential customers, known as causing a disruption and interrupting others.

While Inbound marketing on the other hand is a method for growing a business by helping potential customers reach their goals focusing on building relationships.

Inbound marketing, using the HubSpot Flywheel identifies 3 main steps in the customer’s journey:

1.     Attract

2.     Engage

3.     Delight

So where does LinkedIn fit into this?

LinkedIn Inbound Marketing Setup

Applying inbound marketing as the foundation, the initial setup, of your LinkedIn account just make sense.

Use the 3 steps in the customer journey in LinkedIn as follow:

Attract – Your profile will earn people’s attention and generate more traffic and leads.

Engage – The LinkedIn page and content strategy will focus on building relationships and convert more leads and prospects (but not closing deals). Ultimately lowering client acquisition costs, saving you time, effort, and money.

Delight – Finally the LinkedIn group will be used to create brand awareness for your prospects and leads, as well as improving customer retention, lifetime value and referrals.

Marketing Systems vs LinkedIn Marketing

Marketing technologies assist marketers to execute elements of marketing campaigns, from lead generation to email marketing, and from social media management to search engine optimization.

In setting up and preparing LinkedIn for inbound marketing you could even save cost as LinkedIn caters for it all.

·       Sales Navigator can easily be configured as a type of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) managing the relationship building process in LinkedIn

·       Blog’s have always been a great way to inform and educate potential buyers, but it is difficult (and costly) to drive traffic to these and ensure that your message is heard. A well-defined LinkedIn content strategy is highly effective as the traffic is already available and the potential buyers know you.

·       Website SEO (Search Engine Optimization) requires a skilled website developer and SEO specialist to ensure that your website investment yields measurable conversion results by adding monetary value to your business. LinkedIn, with reduced cost and skill, can be used to become visible, on and off LinkedIn, as the structures for SEO purposes, are available. For SEO configurations and setups use the LinkedIn:

o  Profile

o  Page

o  Group

o  Recommendations

o  Skills

o  Endorsements

o  Keywords

o  Hashtags

o  Funnels

o  Engagements (Give and Get)

o  Content

·       Most marketers will use Social Media Marketing management tools like Hootsuite to gain insights as well as manage daily social media activity such as listening, posting content, and engagement. Using LinkedIn notifications, post engagement, messaging will take care of all these in no time. LinkedIn is a great source for buyer behavior research as the data is available.

·       Marketing and sales budget reduction is the biggest advantage of LinkedIn inbound marketing as all this can easily be achieved organically without any adspend.

If you want to transform your LinkedIn Account into attracting laser focused ideal clients while using targeted keywords and hashtags, the MarketingCX team are experts in LinkedIn SEO. We can assist! Learn more: https://marketingcx.news/limakeoverdfy

Final Word

The recent LinkedIn changes will result in attracting your ideal clients saving you time, effort, and money.

Disruptive and intrusive outbound campaigns are going to become highly ineffective, time consuming and could even label you as a spammer, damaging your brand.

The time is now to focus on utilizing LinkedIn as a business tool to reduce client acquisition cost without using LinkedIn as a lead generation database.

Going forward focus on LinkedIn inbound (attraction) marketing as part of your business growth strategy.