Using LinkedIn to Generate Leads
Every business owner knows that consumers are spending more time on social media than ever before. If you want to reach prospective clients, you must have a social media presence. Be where your prospects are.
Many fitness business owners assume this means they need to start posting more regularly on Instagram or Twitter or paying for ads on Facebook. While these options can yield a good return on investment, they are increasingly crowded with your competitors, making it harder and more expensive to gain consumer attention.
All the while, there’s an overlooked social media platform that is an absolute gold mine for connecting with high-target prospective clients: LinkedIn. Learn how to use LinkedIn to boost leads and increase potential sales.
Isn’t LinkedIn for Job Seekers?
There’s a misconception that LinkedIn is used only as a recruiting tool by employers and only as a networking tool by job seekers. That’s simply not true.
While it has defined its niche in the social media world by being career oriented, LinkedIn is far from just a job board. Content creators post articles on LinkedIn. Social networking groups are hosted on LinkedIn. Videos go viral on LinkedIn.
Your ideal audience is likely on LinkedIn, and a few key aspects of the platform’s functionality make it an extremely powerful tool for generating leads.
How to Get Leads for Free
The following 7 steps outline exactly how to begin using LinkedIn to generate leads and sales for your business, all without paying a cent for ads.
STEP #1: CHOOSE YOUR TARGET
Unlike Facebook and other social media platforms, LinkedIn makes it simple to connect with people by education, by profession or even by the company they work for. How can you take advantage of this?
As one example, you could target accountants, knowing that during the busy tax season they have little time for healthy eating or exercise. There is a pain point that you could solve by offering the right services tailored specifically for the needs of accountants.
Or imagine you once worked as a teacher. You know the struggles teachers face. You know the “teacher language” they speak. You could offer fitness programming aimed specifically at teachers.
As another example, think about the opportunity you’d have at your fingertips if a large company opened an office in your area. You could target, say, Amazon employees, with an offer exclusively for them.
Hopefully you get the picture. LinkedIn enables you to use career-related demographics to target an audience as broad or as narrow as you like.
STEP #2: SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE
For purposes of this article, let’s pretend you’re a former teacher who wants to recruit teachers as fitness clients. Your next step is to tweak your profile so that it speaks to them.
A neat feature of LinkedIn is the way it displays your profile when you reach out to someone or even when you simply view their profile. That person sees your image and your title. This is your chance to elevate your authority and build intrigue.
For example, if your title says “personal trainer” and nothing else, you’re not doing much to stand out from the crowd of other personal trainers. In contrast, if you tweak your title to read, “I help teachers get in amazing shape and stay in shape during the busy school year,” what do you think will happen when a teacher sees you?
At the very least, they’ll take notice.
Your title should explain who you work with and what value you offer to them. You may decide to call out a specific profession, as with the teacher example, or you could speak to the pain points that people of a certain profession or position might feel. For example, “Executives nicknamed me the ÔÇÿback doctor’ because I use corrective exercise to help fix their back pain.”
Once you have tweaked your title, update your bio to further explain why you help that particular target clientele and what makes your services unique.
STEP #3. START SEARCHING
Now that you’ve got an intriguing, value-focused title, it’s time to start getting noticed. Follow these steps:
- Click in the top search bar, then choose “People” from the revealed options.
- Click the “All Filters” box on the top.
- Check the boxes beside 2nd degree connections.
- Choose a geographic region.
- Scroll down until you see a fill-in box called Title (it’s below the First Name and Last Name boxes).
- Click the “Filter” button.
For example, if you are targeting teachers, you could type “teacher” in the “Title” field and type, say, “Buffalo, New York” as the geographic region. This simple search returns thousands of teachers who are now your prospective clients.
For steps number 4–7, see “Generating Leads With LinkedIn.” If you cannot access the full article and would like to, please contact the IDEA Inspired Service Team at 800-999-4332, ext. 7.