3 Keys to Generating Leads with LinkedIn

What do you get when you combine a smart and successful business owner with marketing on social media? Headaches and frustration. And most of the time, you don’t get enough money back to make the time invested in social media marketing worth the effort.

It’s not because you aren’t good at running your business. And it’s not because social media marketing doesn’t work.

One of our clients is a very successful business coach. She has expert knowledge and is capable of delivering huge benefits to her clients. But her LinkedIn doesn’t get much traction. She’s tried a bunch of different things without gaining any ground.

Here are a few of the things we helped her change.

Social Media is About Relationships

When businesses go into social media, they expect to gain followers and develop an audience that will, in some unknown way, turn into paying clients. But marketing isn’t magic. People don’t buy if they don’t trust. Trust is one of the most challenging things to build with your audience, but it’s the foundation of a good relationship.

Building trust requires knowledge, consistency, and time. You have to share a portion of what you know with your audience so they know you are an authority on the subject. You have to express your thoughts in a consistent manner so your audience doesn’t get confused. And you have to be consistent in getting in front of your audience over a period of time so they are reminded of you. That’s how you build a relationship with potential clients.

Content Has to Be Engaging

Many of the clients we help are active on LinkedIn. Their pages are full of posts about their passions and things they find interesting. And that seems great, but the most important rule in social media marketing is to make content for your audience and not just for yourself.

It’s okay to make content you enjoy as long as someone in the audience is interested in it as well. The content you make has to appeal to them or you are only serving yourself. That means you have to know roughly who you are talking to when you make your content.

Continuing the Conversation

In order for your social media marketing to be effective, you have to take the conversation you start on social media off the platform and into real life. Accomplishing that can be a little tricky, but it doesn’t have to be. With LinkedIn, we routinely help our clients build the systems and processes they need to manage the whole conversation, with a focus on how to get the potential client into a phone or zoom conversation. The main thing it requires is consistency.

In Conclusion

Making the changes to your LinkedIn is a lot of work. Getting the messaging just right, coming up with content ideas, and creating content that your audience will connect with means hours of effort and on top of that there’s a lot of work that has to be performed on the rest of the profile.

You don’t have to be perfect when you start. And that’s good news. But you do need to start. If you need help figuring out where to start, we are more than happy to help you. We’ve included our Social Media Training for LinkedIn download for you below, so you get started. Additionally, we help our clients with the creation of strategies for LinkedIn that cover what you need to know and what you need to do.

Whatever you decide to do, just make sure that your social media marketing is working for you and not against you.