Just because someone accepted your LinkedIn connection doesn’t mean that five minutes later they want to receive a message offering a demo of your product or service. If this sounds familiar read on to find out how you should use LinkedIn and make it a valuable part of your Account Based Marketing strategy.
The current economic environment means that sales teams are having to become more proactive than ever before to generate leads and LinkedIn is the channel of choice but this has led to a rapid increase of pitching products and services through messages and InMail when there is no clear requirement or desire from the recipient.
Our latest article looks at how by following a simple set of rules you can use LinkedIn effectively to use account based marketing to generate quality sales leads and will no longer just be connecting and messaging as many people as possible in the hope that one of them might be interested in your services.
Ensure your profile is up to date
There is nothing more annoying that receiving a connection request from someone who’s profile is incomplete or empty. It’s an immediate no from me as it is with many other LinkedIn users.
Take your time to fill in your experience, add interests and skills, join relevant industry groups, as well as try to get a recommendation or two. A completed profile means that your target prospect can find out more about you and decide if it is worth accepting the connection request. As part of your ABM strategy you want to be able to connect with target prospects so give them a reason to accept your connection request.
Create your list of target connections
Before you start randomly trying to connect to everyone you should consider who will be buying your product or service in the future. Whether you’re marketing to a very small group or a few hundred making sure that you’re thorough in identifying your prospects is a crucial first step in account based marketing.
There are a number of things that will help you identify the people you want to connect to including looking at your existing customers, sign up for relevant industry groups, see who your competitors are connected to, as well as examining your own sales and finding “look alike” organisations.
Once you have built up your target list you can then start trying to connect to them and if they are not easily identifiable can use this information for paid activity within LinkedIn.
Once you have the connection
Stop …… don’t message them. This week alone I have had two people message me as soon as we connected trying to sell something ….. needless to say they are no longer a connection.
Take a bit of time to understand your target. Who are they? What groups are they a member of? What do they comment on?
This will help you create the right approach in the future and push them towards the right content. By listening to them across all their social media channels you can start to understand what they are looking for and identify the right type of content that may be of interest to them and the right time to get them to engage with you
Although you want them to notice you straight away now is not the time to go through all their posts and comment “that’s interesting”. In developing an effective ABM campaign taking time to consider your target prospect requirements is very important.
Create the right content
The key to a successful ABM programme is to develop content that is specifically created for the audience. It must:
Reflect what they are interested in
Provide a solution to a specific problem
Help them achieve their objectives
Give information or knowledge that educates them
It is important to remember that these new connections are at the bottom of your sales funnel. While you may have content ready to go for those who are already at the decision-making stage, turning connections into leads isn’t the right time to be provide those offers.
Get content into the hands of decision-makers
Great content is useless if it fails to reach the audience and accounts you are targeting. You can organically promote content through posts and comments in your own feed, carefully post to interested user groups and, if you have some direct engagement with your prospects, tag them in a post to attract attention.
In addition by using sponsored content you can boost engagement with content to reach your target lists as well as get them to complete lead generation forms to fill the bottom of your sales funnel.
If you would like to talk to the team at Volpes Marketing about developing an Account Based Marketing Strategy and generating more sales leads contact us on 01625 403199 or fill in the form on the contact us page and we will call you straight back.
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