We’re in the midst of a digital revolution which has forever changed the way we buy, sell and market ourselves. Social selling is big business, and it’s becoming clear that getting to grips with this method of marketing is essential to our success in the modern landscape, no matter what our niche.

In the world of B2B marketing, LinkedIn is king, queen, prince, and princess. While Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook are all valuable tools for learning about prospects and reaching out to them, LinkedIn is by far the most profitable in terms of actual selling potential. Once not much more than a directory of business professionals, the modern LinkedIn landscape is much more of a business network, free from the chatter and playground politics of other platforms.

According to LinkedIn themselves, social selling via this channel can:

• Increase sales opportunities by 45 percent
• Help you outsell your competition who aren’t using social selling by 78 percent
• Make you 51 percent more likely to hit your quota

Using LinkedIn for social selling lets you create a professional brand, focus in on the best prospects and build trusted relationships that can ultimately lead to sales. Here’s what you need to know about social selling via LinkedIn.

Getting started with social selling on LinkedIn

Being heard among all the noise and clutter is key to social selling success, so how can you do it? One of the first things you’ll need to take care of is to optimize your profile for selling. Here’s how to do it:

1. Make sure you can be found

Getting found on LinkedIn is no different to getting found on Google: It’s all about the keywords. Searchers will be suggested your page if you have the right keywords to be flagged up when they search for a service like yours, so do your research and design your page to pick out the best keywords for your niche.

2. Why you?

What makes you different from the other thousands of businesses offering your type of product or service? What’s your story? Why should people work with you? Lay this out in plain English so that potential buyers can immediately see the benefits of picking you over the next company on their list.

3. Build credibility

Consumers are trusting advertisements less and less these days. Instead, research has shown 92 percent of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase decision, and 80 percent trust reviews of products as much as they would a personal recommendation. We call this social proof and building it into your LinkedIn profile is crucial to cementing credibility with your potential buyers.

4. Solve problems

Hopefully, you’ve already built some sort of profile of your ideal clients and the problems that your product solves for them. Your LinkedIn profile should speak to them in their language, about the things they care about in a way they can truly connect with. It should spell out your understanding of their issues and lay bare the ways in which your product or service solves those problems.

5. Make a strong call to action (CTA)

All too many businesses miss out this fundamental step in the sales funnel when they’re using LinkedIn, but unless you’re going to tell your customer what they should do next, they’re simply going to think ‘well, that’s interesting’ and move on. Make a strong, clear CTA that leaves them in no doubt of what the next step should be.

6. Demonstrate your authority

Being an authority in your niche will help to build confidence with your customers, so make sure your LinkedIn profile reflects your knowledge and ability well. Include links to LinkedIn Publisher posts, videos of you speaking about your topic, links to published whitepapers or any other content you are particularly proud of.

7. Be better than the next person

Do your research. What do your competitors LinkedIn pages look like? Have they used rich media, professional images, captivating headlines? Whatever they are doing to drag the spotlight in their direction, you need to go one step better. Invest in pro designers to help you create a unique and engaging page so that you truly stand out from the competition.

Marketing yourself via LinkedIn doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does require some planning. Having a truly kick-butt profile from the outset is crucial, so take the time to develop something really special.

Next steps

Once you’ve optimized your profile, the next steps are all about building your network. Seek out active potential clients, and connect with them in a professional, non-salesy manner. Don’t just spam them with information about your business; take the time to treat them as real human beings and build new relationships with them.

Once you’ve made connections, take things off LinkedIn to progress your business. Get them into your sales funnel via email, telephone, and real-life meetings, otherwise, you leave yourself at the mercy of any future changes to LinkedIn’s data ownership policies.

There are a whole wealth of automation tools and extensions that allow you to present a more professional image on LinkedIn, so use them. Auto replies to messages, tools for curating your content, methods of finding prospects… all of this can help to reduce the amount of time you spend on the platform actively managing your campaign. However, be wary of over use of automation, as keeping things real and human is key to your success

How are you doing?

If you’re starting to see some results from your efforts at social selling, how can you ensure you are constantly improving if you don’t track your results? Establish some key performance indicators (KPIs) which are important to you, and track how you are doing against these metrics to drive constant improvement and the ability to capitalize on successes.

To do this, you need to think about the outcomes you really want from social selling. Perhaps you want more visitors to your website, or maybe it’s more important to make actual sales. Whatever statistic makes a measure of your success, you need to ensure you have access to the data to see how you are doing against this measure.

Some of the things you could track include:

• Leads generated
• Connections made
• Offline conversations generated
• Value of sales
• Traffic to website
• Revenue from social selling
• Return on investment

LinkedIn has its own indicator which can help track some of these metrics, known as the Sales Navigator which tracks your results on a Social Selling Index (SSI). It’s a paid for service which some swear by whereas others have found better and cheaper ways to do it. There’s a free trial, so it’s worth a look, but we’ve found it somewhat limited in terms of the feedback gained from its use.

Here at MSTech, we can help you create a powerful social selling campaign on LinkedIn with all the tracking and feedback you need built in. By developing a tailored solution just for your business, you can ensure you are reaching the right people in the right way and getting the best results from every cent you invest. Why not have a chat with our team of social marketing experts today about how you can monetize LinkedIn and let us take your business to the next level.