With less competition than the biggest social networks and lots of business opportunities, LinkedIn can be one of the best ways to generate leads, sales, and vital promotion for your products and services. But where do you start and how do you build on your success?

This article will help you:

• Work out what you want to achieve on LinkedIn
• Create a successful strategy for getting more leads and sales
• Organise your time and commitments so you can maintain your approach

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1. Create your goals

The first step is working out what you want to get out of LinkedIn by setting goals; start with what you want to achieve and work backwards. Ideally you want to begin with a general aim such as ‘Increase sales from LinkedIn,’ and then add more specific ‘satellite’ goals around it. For example, ‘Generate £XXXX from LinkedIn sales by the end of the year’, ‘Boost LinkedIn sales by 10%’, ‘Increase hits from LinkedIn to an average of XXX per month’ and so on. Create a mix of easy, do-able and difficult goals to ensure you stay motivated but don’t limit your potential.

Consider your goals an ongoing project rather than a finite list. Remember to revisit them regularly and change, add more, or cross off and rewrite them. As time goes on, you’ll build a much better picture of what’s achievable and how you can improve your aims and results, as well as making sure you’re staying on track.

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2. Develop your strategy

Despite it being a relatively simple social network in terms of functionality, when it comes to generating leads and sales there are a lot of different strategies you can adopt.

To create your own custom approach, answer the following questions:

• How much will your strategy be based on paid advertising, and how much on organic reach? (It’s fine if you don’t intend to spend any money at all, but it may be worth doing a small advertising test if you have the budget and a strong target audience).
• How much time are you planning to spend per week/month on building sales via LinkedIn?
• Will you be selling to businesses, individuals, or both?
• Do you want to promote yourself (personal branding), your business, or both? If it’s either/or, how will you separate yourself from your business? If it’s both, how will the two parts complement each other?
• What kind of content will you be sharing (and why)?

Once you’ve made some notes on the answers, it’s time to get started. 

Essential tasks

1. Create a company page [https://www.heartinternet.uk/blog/the-importance-of-having-a-linkedin-company-page]; even if you just use it as the bare minimum listing page for your business, it will give potential customers confidence.

2. Tighten up your imagery. Make sure all your photos, particularly cover images and profile pictures, are high-quality (professional if possible) images. Avoid distracting backgrounds and photos where someone else has obviously been cropped out!

3. Develop a consistent tone of voice for both your company page and your personal profile. Think about how you want to come across (and how you already come across on your website, over the phone, and in person). Are you laid-back and open, or serious and formal? This will often be linked to the types of products and services you offer (e.g. children’s toys vs. funeral arrangements), and whether you sell to businesses or individuals.

4. Start seeding content (to your company page, personal profile, or both) on a regular basis. Ideally you want a mix of your own links and third party ones. Sharing other people’s links cuts down on the amount of content you have to create yourself and also helps build positive relationships with the content author. For extra value, share content created by customers, potential customers, desirable contacts, etc., and tag them in your share where possible.

5. Promote your presence and activity using your other social networks, website, and email lists/signatures. You could even run a contest for likes or shares on your company page.

6. Find relevant, quality groups and actively engage with people in them to develop relationships and your authority. Avoid the hard sell and spend a few minutes offering advice and answering questions.

Optional tasks

If you have time, it will also help your efforts to do the following:

1. Publish your own posts on LinkedIn. Your contacts will automatically be notified when you’ve created an article so it’s a great way to make them aware of your posts. Include a link to your website or contact details to make your approach more direct, and don’t be afraid of posting something controversial or unique in some respect; those are the posts that get more attention!

2. Create a group. This is by far the most time-consuming commitment you can make, but it can also have the biggest benefits. LinkedIn members are encouraged to subscribe to emails from groups and so it’s a great way to build a mailing list. Base your group on something you’re interested in and post regularly until your membership grows. Encourage questions and promote the value of your group wherever possible.

3. Repurpose and update your content. That old blog post or infographic can be turned into a slide deck perfect for LinkedIn. You could even use your phone to turn a post into a podcast (iPhone, Android). These are perfect for LinkedIn and also allow you to tap into content areas that have less competition. Repurposing content is actually a time-saving exercise in the long run, because you can work with your own proven, successful content to give it a new lease of life and skip all the ‘planning and creating from scratch’ stages whilst taking the guesswork out of whether it will be popular or not.

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Keep the momentum going

The easiest thing in the world is to start with the best intentions, but before you know it months have passed and you’ve not given your strategy a second thought because you’ve been so busy elsewhere.

To avoid this happening, create a calendar and schedule tasks with reminders. These might be as general as ‘Check LinkedIn’ or as specific as ‘Share article on XYZ’, ‘Post on ABC group’ and so on. It’s also worth adding in reminders to update your company page, images, and so on. Every week, fortnight or month, make a list of things you’ve done recently on LinkedIn. If the list is short (or non-existent!), turn it into a to do list.

Make a habit of checking LinkedIn regularly; turn on email notifications if you haven’t already, install the app, and have a tab open on your computer. If you tend to detour towards another site to fill a few minutes, such as Twitter, Facebook or the news, replace it with LinkedIn.

Even if you’re not posting anything new, it’s still beneficial to comment on statuses and publicly interact with your contacts on a regular basis. It increases your visibility, reach and ensures more profile views; particularly if you’re commenting on statuses where the business or company has a large number of followers. Well-constructed debates or different perspectives can help you rack up the profile views and kickstart relationship building very quickly. If you’re professional and active in your approach, you can take advantage of LinkedIn’s lower competition and better contact networks, increasing leads and sales for your business.

What are your tips for getting more out of LinkedIn? Let us know in the comments.