John Nemo — March 8, 2017 Follow @JohnNemoPRLinkedIn recently revealed some eye-opening stats about the immense amount of B2B traffic and sales leads it’s generating online.
If you are marketing your business online and you’re not active on LinkedIn, chances are you are missing 80% of your leads.
LinkedIn recently shared some eye-opening statistics that should give you serious pause to consider the time and effort you spend (or don’t spend) on the platform.
“Studies show that 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn, and 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content,” LinkedIn shared in a recent blog. “On average, 46% percent of social media traffic coming to B2B company sites is from LinkedIn.”
These statistics give substantial legitimacy to the platform, which has moved beyond its well-worn reputation as a site for job seekers and hiring managers. LinkedIn now has nearly 500 million users in 200 countries, and 2 new members join the network every second.
Even more, LinkedIn indexes, sorts and organizes every piece of content created and shared on the platform. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants its users to use the site like a professional version of Google, finding answers to their questions in the form of blog posts, status updates, online courses, company pages, individual profiles and more.
The Key is Content Marketing
LinkedIn is the place where your ideal customers and clients in the B2B marketplace are hanging out, connecting and looking for news, training, vendors and resources. Your marketing strategy should be focused on creating valuable content that appeals to your target audience, and is easily “discoverable” on LinkedIn.
“Increasingly, B2B buyers are looking to LinkedIn for the content they need to move forward in their journey. More than half of them— 57%, to be exact — are on a mobile device. All told, there are 9 billion content impressions in LinkedIn feeds every week,” LinkedIn noted in its recent blog.
In today’s marketplace, content (meaning blog posts, podcasts, videos and so on) is the currency you must use to “buy” the time and attention of your prospects online.
More important, creating great content helps you demonstrate your authority and expertise instead of just claiming it.
The Riches are in the Niches
Realizing that there are 9 billion content impressions on LinkedIn every week means you must not try and be everything to everyone. Instead, be a big fish in a small pond by hyper-targeting some niche audiences with your content.
One of my favorite ways to do this on LinkedIn is to pick one target audience you want to sell to, then use that target audience’s name or job title in the headline of your blog post.
For example, say you want to get more coaching clients, and that you’ve already had some success helping entrepreneurs in recent months.
You could publish a blog post with this headline: “3 Daily Habits Every Successful Entrepreneur Adheres To.”
The content of the post could be three tips you share with your coaching clients on how to get the most out of their day, and you just tweak it to fit to Entrepreneurs.
Next, you use LinkedIn’s powerful search engine to identify all the entrepreneurs you’re already connected to, and you send them a 1-on-1 message that reads like this:
“Hi (Name) – hope this note finds you well!
Thought you might be interested in this, it’s a new post I just published here on LinkedIn called “3 Daily Habits Every Successful Entrepreneur Adheres To.”
Here’s a link if you’d like to read it: (link to post)
Hope you find it helpful, and can’t wait to hear what you think of it!”
See how simple this is?
You create free, valuable content for a target group of people, and (this is key!) you use their name or job title in your headline.
Turning Leads to Sales
Also, when people engage with your content on LinkedIn, it shows you who they are.
That means you can immediately, in real-time, connect and talk to the people who are liking, sharing and engaging with your content. This sparks personal, 1-on-1 conversations that can dive deeper into the topic you shared.
Plus, when someone comes into your sales funnel through your free content, they’re already warmed up. You’ve already proven to them that you know your stuff, and they’re already knowing, liking and trusting you as a result.
The best part of all is that there is no limit to the type of content you can create and share. So, the more quality content you create, and the more you hyper-focus that content on solving a problem for a niche audience, the more success you’ll have at winning new business.
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