In our last two blogs on How to Use LinkedIn to Attract New Business Leads, we discussed ensuring your LinkedIn profile is set up correctly – and by that we mean professionally – and how to “Work The Room”.
Once you’ve worked the room and made connections, what do you do next? Here are 3 ways to build relationships with your LinkedIn connections.
Keep in contact
Set aside regular time each week to reach out to the new connections you’ve made. It’s no good working the room if you never make contact with those people ever again. But making contact needs to be done professionally. Badly written messages all about yourself are not what’s called for here. This is not the time or the place to be pitching anything. Why? Because people are on social media for themselves, not for you. So talk about them, do the research and discover what they do and then give them something that will show you understand their business goals and needs.
Be generous and give the reader the content for free. Nothing will annoy a potential client more than getting to the end of your message to discover it’s nothing more than a sales gimmick. That’s not what relationships are based on.
Here are some ideas:
- Articles/Blog Posts
- Case studies
- Checklists
- eBooks
- Reports
- Videos
LinkedIn’s Relationship Tab is a useful tool that enables you to keep both your prospects and your Relationship Building messages organised.
Join a group, get engaged
It’s been said that if you want to marry a doctor, hang around with doctors. The same applies here, if you want clients, hang around with potential clients. It can’t hurt to be in a LinkedIn group based on your industry, but you’re unlikely to find clients there. House painters won’t find clients in a house painting group. They’ll just find other house painters. When you set up your profile you decided who would be your perfect clients. Find out which groups they’ve joined and join them as well. If used wisely, LinkedIn, which allows you to join up to fifty groups, will become a great pool in which to fish.
The one thing you need to remember is, to get people to notice and remember you, you have to engage with the group. There’s no sympathy for wall-flowers here. Consistent, professional engagement that demonstrates your expertise and credibility is what’s needed. Build your reputation as an authority in your industry and your pro-active efforts will pay-off as you begin to attract your ideal clients.
Take It outside
There will come a time when you need to get offline with your potential client. Here is where you will close the deal. But don’t launch into a sales pitch straight away. Remember, you’ve spent time building your credibility and demonstrating your expertise and your ability to provide value in your LinkedIn blogs and articles and engagement with the groups. Now is where you get to know your client on a more individual level. You need to discover what problems your potential client is currently facing so that you can suggest a solution that’s appropriate.
Now that you’re getting a handle on how to use LinkedIn more professionally, download our e-book today and discover even more Master Tips on using this powerful social media tool to generate new leads and convert them into clients!
