Investing in LinkedIn training is vital to your business growth. LinkedIn’s ability to help B2B growth is phenomenal, so here are some facts from LinkedIn’s Marketing Blog.
LinkedIn has:
- Over 500 million users
- 61 million senior-level influencers
- 40 million decision-makers
Why wouldn’t you want to present your business in front of this professional audience?
With 40% of active monthly users on the platform daily, you could be marketing your company on the fastest growing network for professionals as Omnicore Agency states.
LinkedIn creates four crucial ways to build your business. It gets your content seen by a wider audience, generates sales, and builds your brand. You’ll have the ability to make yourself visible and grow your network.
We are not sponsored by LinkedIn. However, we have seen the benefits of using the platform for building businesses. Whether you are in marketing, sales or business management, here are the reasons why businesses need to invest in LinkedIn.
Understand how to unlock the revenue that is available through LinkedIn training.
Content Marketing
The marketing area is changing. Traditional marketing methods, such as TV adverts, direct mail and subscribing lists have nothing on content marketing. The Content Marketing Infographic states that 70% of people prefer to learn about a brand through an article over an advert. It also costs 62% less than traditional methods of marketing.
Content is the key to getting attention for your business. LinkedIn provides you with a wider audience than your website or your online blog.
As an idea of how crucial content is to your business, 90% of organisations market their business with content. B2B and B2C are the biggest content creators. 91% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers use it in their marketing strategy.
On the receiving side of this content, 68% of people spend their time reading about the brands that interest them.
Whilst 78% perceive a relationship is formed between them and the company through custom content.
Think about how many leads you could get from your engaging content. Use the built-in LinkedIn publisher tool to post articles or write posts that grab your audience. Clients are looking for authoritative voices that they can trust and do business with. Content improves your brand loyalty. 70% of consumers who felt closer to a business as a result of the company’s marketing content.
If you have a regular marketing strategy when you are posting your content, you are able to market your company by building your business’s reputation, generating leads and increasing your direct sales.
So why aren’t you using this in your LinkedIn strategy?
The foundation of getting results from using content on LinkedIn is that you can become a voice of authority in your industry. Think about how you can alleviate the pain your clients feel and, by producing regular content, you can get seen by a massive network of potential clients. By posting relevant content, you will be able to encourage leads to trust and connect with you.
Sales Process
We’ve studied a lot of people and a lot of strategies, and LinkedIn is our go-to strategy for any marketing or sales activity. The sales process works on connecting with others through content and engagement. As we discussed earlier, creating content can generate sales and leads. It is the conversion of content to customers that makes up the sales process, but what about engagement?
If you have connected to the right people, you will be able to sell your product over to a network of connections. You can build engagement through a variety of ways. Selling is a necessity, so having a marketing process makes it really easy. This is why gaining a knowledge of using LinkedIn is vital to business development. Too many people send direct mails over LinkedIn or, as soon as you connect, they hit you with a sales pitch. This is not what we mean by selling over LinkedIn. Leads are converted into sales on the basis of trust. The sales process should be gentle and it should warm up your lead. Think about strategically commenting on people’s content or endorsing someone for their skills. This shows you are not a soul-less brand.
The ultimate goal of the sales process then is to show people the human behind the brand and eventually get them to buy from you. We have all received those pushy sales pitches over social media or email, so don’t be that person. LinkedIn is not the place for cold calling. Using LinkedIn well is the solution to converting leads to customers and stop ‘selling’ full stop.
You can manage this sales process through the free version of LinkedIn, but we would suggest buying into Sales Navigator. This tool makes it easier to track your leads but only invest in it if you have a LinkedIn strategy in place. You don’t want to waste time on the platform when you could be generating revenue from it. LinkedIn training is crucial in helping businesses grow their client base and get sales.
Building a Company Page
As a business owner, you need to make sure your business is portrayed in the most professional way possible. It’s great if people are engaging with your personal profile. You can use this in your personal branding, but what about your business?
Think about it, when leads view your profile, the next thing they are going to look for is your company. There are over 610 million members on LinkedIn. So, why wouldn’t you credit your business’s reputation by having growing your company page?
A LinkedIn company page gives you the ability to showcase your company’s products and story. The page will funnel people to your company website too, which will help your search engine ranking. As it is on a social media network, your employees will become your company’s ambassadors because it will appear on their profile. Having a company page will also allow you to share updates, events and job vacancies. The company page also gives you the opportunity to measure the effectiveness of the posts and updates you share as well as find out when someone else mentions your company name on the platform. LinkedIn pages are basically an opportunity to know what’s happening in your industry and target your audience better with LinkedIn advertising. Why wouldn’t you want to invest in LinkedIn training to learn how to do it right?
Thought Leadership
Thought leadership is beneficial to your business as you can make yourself a voice of authority who has the answers to your customers’ questions. It’s the step up from personal branding because your content has a larger following and it is not just a brand. Thought leadership is a way in which you can build yourself and your business to be trusted. As before, trust is crucial to your content marketing, sales and reputation.
As investigated by the Marketing Insider Group, 81% of C-Suite executives stated that they had a trust increase after looking at thought leadership content.
(Source from the Marketing Insider Group)
But, who is thought leadership for? B2B companies and consumer companies have driven their businesses forward through thought leadership. Thought leadership is simply based on knowledge. Everyone has a different point of view and experience and by sharing this with your network, you can build your reputation. The most important thing to remember is the reason why you are sharing your content on social media. You need to have a substantial amount of knowledge before you can portray yourself through thought leadership.
This is achieved through research and knowing a strategy for delivering content. The foundation of thought leadership is to encourage your followers to act as a result of your content. Whether it is encouraging them to engage with your posts or follow you, the ultimate goal is to portray a professional and influential person. LinkedIn makes thought leadership easier. You are able to put yourself in a light which will decrease the length of the sales process and build a credible brand.
You Need to Invest in a LinkedIn Strategy
So, LinkedIn has the ability to develop your business drastically through your profile and company page. If you produce regular content, navigate the sales process well, build a great company page and invest time into thought leadership, you can push your company forward.
But, what if you don’t know how to become a leader through thought leadership or get your content marketing seen?
This is why investing in the short term for LinkedIn training is crucial to your business. It is great that you may be on LinkedIn, but if you randomly post when you feel like it or drop engagement for a while you cannot reap the benefits of the platform. You don’t want to miss out on the 80% of B2B marketing leads from social networking platforms via LinkedIn. Using LinkedIn involves time and strategy. If you don’t think logically about how you are going to implement LinkedIn into your marketing strategy and what you need to achieve through it, you will waste money. You will not only waste the time and money you could be making elsewhere, but you are missing the money that LinkedIn can generate for your company.
Why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of this?
62% of B2B marketers are not forming any revenue from LinkedIn, but there are 38% that are. How do they do it? Why are so many people asking for advice on building a business with LinkedIn? Too many people get LinkedIn’s potential but are not getting the results that are boasted about.
Here are Two important questions:
- Have you put the time in and got nothing out?
- Have you seen others getting results and you’re getting nothing?
Well, the bad news is, this means that you are one of the 62% who isn’t generating revenue from LinkedIn. The good news is if you would like to join the 38%, you can.
As a company, we offer no-nonsense training for businesses who want to generate sales and create a reputation on LinkedIn. We offer events, corporate training and consultancy for all kinds of businesses.
You can easily learn how to transform your LinkedIn from wasting time to making money.
Investing in LinkedIn training works, we prove this in our workshops and Masterclasses. We show business owners and sales professionals how to use it to their advantage.
Think about it…
If you had an opportunity to put your business in front of 40 million decision-makers, would you prepare for it or just wing it?
What about the opportunity to meet 10 new prospects, would you prepare for it?
If you had a meeting with your dream client would you know how to pitch?
Do you know how to create a compelling reason to buy?
The sad part is most people don’t spend any time trying to understand how to make LinkedIn work for them and so they give up. They quit on a platform that can get you business without leaving the office.
In our LinkedIn training programmes show people:
- How to gain an understanding of how to promote yourself and your business.
- Learn to generate leads and enquiries through LinkedIn.
- Methods of producing great content that gets you noticed.
- What will and won’t work.
- How to build your own growth roadmap.
