My business development strategy using LinkedIn

In today's episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast, I am talking all about LinkedIn and specifically I share with you exactly what my Strategy is for LinkedIn and why. I think if you're in a B2B space, LinkedIn is the most important social media platform you can use. This is an action packed episode with some specific steps of what I do that you can replicate, so I know you're going to find it useful. And let's get on with today's show. Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob DaCosta. Today I want to talk to you all about one of the strategies that works really well for me when it comes to business development and that is using LinkedIn. Now, I'm no LinkedIn expert, in fact, we did have Tracy Burnett on the podcast episode number 37 who is an expert in LinkedIn, so it's worth having a listen to that episode. But, but if you were to ask me which social media platform works most effectively for me and which delivers the best return on investment in terms of investing time and money, then I would have to say LinkedIn hands down. However, there are a few do's and don'ts for using LinkedIn for business development and outreach. So I thought I would share with you what works for me and what I specifically do every week in the hope that you will get some inspiration from this and that you can start using some of these techniques in your agency as well. So first of all, you have to treat LinkedIn like any other kind of sales process or sales funnel. And that means building know, building like and building trust with your audience before you try to sell to them. And it also means ensuring that you're spending 80% of your time adding value to your audience and 20% of your time selling. It really amazes me how many generic connection requests I receive every day and on the rare occasion if I accept them, which I really don't do very often anymore, then they immediately send me a sales message and of course I just ignore it and then unconnect from them because they're, they're making absolutely no attempt for me to get to know them, to like them and trust them first before they try and sell. So this is a definite no, no strategy. And there's two nos about that. First of all, never send generic connection requests because it shows you're making absolutely no effort. And second of all, when someone does connect with you, don't start selling to them straight away. Now the thing I would say first of all, and I probably do this every six months, is that it's worth brushing up your LinkedIn profile page. And you need to think of your LinkedIn profile as an advert to engage with your target audience or rather than a cv. So that's definitely where I would start. Now, if you want to read more about how to get your profile right, then I'll include a link in the show notes to an article that LinkedIn published on 20 Steps to a Better LinkedIn Profile. So that's definitely worth a read. So that's where you should start by really brushing up your profile and making sure that it is a really good ad so that when someone looks at it, they get really good clarity on who you are, what you do and who you do it for. Okay, so once you've done that, let me tell you what I do on a weekly basis. And everything I'm going to tell you presupposes that you have a really clear niche and that you're able to identify exactly who your ideal target customer is. So firstly, I spend time every week using Sales Navigator to identify my ideal target customer. And then I send a small portion of that search results a tailored connection request. Now this will take some time, but it's definitely worth doing because you need to be looking at the person's profile and sending them something that makes sense to their profile as opposed to just sending that generic request which we've already said is a no, no. One of the things that I do is offer them a copy of my book, the Self Running Agency for free, because the message of the book will resonate with my target audience. Now, when I've got something of use to say to my audience that will obviously impart some value to them, I'll then send them a personalized message. So, for example, Recently I used LinkedIn to promote my free webinar on business development. And again, that got a good uptake because it was clear from the message of the value to the reader rather than me just looking like I was trying to sell them something. And that's really important if you want people to engage with you. So that's sort of my initial outreach. And the key about that is to do a few every day or every week. So you need to put time aside or have your VA do it or someone else in your organization do it. Remember, the point is here is to have quality connections, not quantity. No one's judging you on how many connections you have on LinkedIn. But what you really want to make sure is that you have quality connections and they're people that are in your target audience and they will engage with you. Now, once you start building up your tribe, you need to make sure you're posting regularly on LinkedIn. So I post at least three times a week. But I think a lot of people would say you need to post every day. And these can be posts of different things from you, adding value to you, asking questions to you, sharing stories and testimonials and putting placing videos on there, and so on and so on. So you want to make sure that you're really mixing it up. So you want to be posting at least three to five times per week, and you can use something like buffer to help schedule those posts so that you can sit down and create a week's worth of posts in one day, rather than having to schedule time every single day for that. Now, much of what I'm talking about today is you having time to do it. You know, when we do marketing, we have two options. We either have money to spend or we have time to invest. And what I'm talking about today is all about time to invest. So the next thing I would recommend is that you spend 15 minutes every day going through your dashboard and commenting on your first connection, who are your ideal target customers? Posts. And that will really help you increase your engagement with that audience. And it will also create more visitors coming back to your profile and the algorithm will like you. So every morning I spend 15 minutes just going through my dashboard and I put a timer on and I see how many of my first connections posts I can comment on, or at the very least, I can like. And that is a really good strategy. Now, one of the things you need to make sure you're doing is keeping all of your connections really clean. You think about LinkedIn as a mailing list, and with a mailing list, you'd want to keep that clean. And. And the same thing should be true for your connections on LinkedIn as well. So what I do is every quarter, I export my leads into a spreadsheet from LinkedIn, and I go through that list and I identify any people that are on there that are not my ideal contacts or not other contacts I want to keep on there. I mark them for deletion, and then I have my VA work through that and actually delete those contacts from my list. This is a really good way of keeping you focused and making sure that content you're putting onto LinkedIn has more chance of reaching your ideal target audience. So that is a good strategy. That you should be implementing. And that was one of the strategies that Tracy Burnett mentioned to me that I have been implementing since I learned it from her. A really important point in everything that I've spoken about today is to get this balance of 8020 right. So remember, you want to spend 80% of your time adding value to your audience and 20% of your selling in inverted quotes to your audience. So when I talk about selling, it could be offering something for free like I've offered my book or a webinar, or it could be trying to get people to sign up for something literally selling. But remember, you have to spend 80% of your time adding value to your audience, first of all, to get them to know, like and trust you before you ever start selling. And you know, that's true in everything I talk about in marketing. You'll often hear me talking about the 8020 rule. And it's definitely true in LinkedIn as well. So that's a summary of what I do every week on LinkedIn. And I would imagine that it takes me, well, 15 minutes a day to comment on everybody's posts, probably an hour a week to create the post that I'm going to promote, plus another hour a week searching for contacts and sending out connection requests. So it's definitely a good investment of what, two or three hours of your time. As I said at the beginning, if I had to pick just one social media channel that I could definitely measure ROI on than it would be LinkedIn. And that's why I invest more of my time in LinkedIn than other platforms. And this is particularly true if you are selling in the B2B space, then LinkedIn should be your preferred channel. And for me, if I'm honest, this organic outreach approach has proven to be more effective than using paid ads on LinkedIn, which can be very expensive. However, I wouldn't rule them out. They just haven't really worked for me or haven't invested a lot of money or time in them. So I would say if you were going to think about using paid ads, then get some expert help from someone because you can easily spend a lot of money getting nowhere fast. But these are the strategies I use from an organic outreach perspective and I think it is a really good investment of three hours of yours or someone else's time in your agency. And I think it's definitely one of the sort of two key business development strategies that I recommend all my clients use. It's something we talk about in our group coaching program quite a lot. And I would highly encourage you to adopt some of these strategies or research some others that will work for you. Okay, so that's a short and sweet episode this week. I thought it was worth sharing with you the specific steps and tasks that I do every week on LinkedIn because they're working for me. So I hope they will work for you as well. You know, people often say to me, rob, I need some business. What can I do? And the reality is that most business development strategies will deliver in the medium to long term. And if you start investing time in building your list and in LinkedIn outreach, then they are two strategies that are definitely going to pay dividends for you in the medium to long term. And so I'd encourage you to start both of those things today if you haven't already started them, and schedule time in your diary to do the things that I've outlined every week and you will start getting results. Okay, so as I say, a short and sweet episode this week, but hopefully really actionable steps for you. As ever, please make sure you've hit the subscribe button, share the podcast with your colleagues, and please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Other than that, I will see you next week for our next guest interview on the Agency Accelerator Podcast.