LinkedIn is an extremely powerful tool when it comes to generating leads. Businesses of all sizes use it to their advantage. As a business owner, you need to ensure a sustainable inflow of clients in to generate revenue and if used correctly, LinkedIn can help you to do exactly that.
The core of LinkedIn marketing is building connections. For businesses, LinkedIn is a Goldmine. The most important thing when it comes to connecting with people on LinkedIn is ‘know your target audience well’. Half of your work is done if you know who you are targeting and where to look out for them. If you do that, then you’ll be able to shortlist them easily and invite them to connect with you.
Who is your target audience?
I’ll put forward a few questions, answer them to narrow down your search funnel and be as targeted as possible.
- What is your targeted industry?
In the advanced search tab, you’ll find a number of industries to choose from. Go through the entire list carefully and list down the ones to wish to target.
- What is the designation of your targeted profile?
As a seller, you do know who do you want to approach i.e. reach out to in order to pitch your product. Is it the owner, director, manager or purchasing agent? Search for the profiles with that particular title.
- What is your targeted geographical location?
Is your network limited to Karachi or can you supply to a client in Quetta? Based on your operations, you can search for potential business clients within a certain geographic region.
- What is the targeted company size?
Based on company size, you can have a good idea of its status. If you are looking to target small firms & startups, then you might want to go with 1-10 employees. A mid-size firm can have around 50 employees and so on.
If you check the advanced search setup of LinkedIn, you’ll find a number of search options that you can use to get specific and desired search results.
For example:
- My target industry is: Construction, Building Materials
- Ideal prospect’s designation is: Sales Manager
- Geographical Location: Pakistan (more specifically Karachi)
- Company Size: Over 50 employees
These are some of the search options that we’ve discussed. If you want to dig deeper you can also use:
Group Search: Show prospects within a particular group. Use this search if you know that this group contains your ideal prospects.
Keyword search: Show prospects who have included the provided keywords in their profile. Use of Boolean string is always helpful in this case. A simple example of that would be to add your keyword in the parenthesis: “fertilizer distributor”
Relationship search: Show prospects that are 1st/ 2nd/ 3rd degree connections. You should exclude 1st degree connections because they are already in your network and you do not want them to show up in the search results.
Similarly you could also do a company search using keywords and then connect with your target profiles who work within that company.
Use these basic search parameters to connect with your prospects on LinkedIn. It has helped me in generate leads and I am sure, you’ll be able to do so as well. Do share your feedback.
image credit: shutterstock
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
