Steps to Use LinkedIn to Generate Clients for Your Small Business
Tags: Small Business, Entrepreneurship, LinkedIn, Marketing, Social Media

Steps to Use LinkedIn to Generate Clients for Your Small Business Lets.teach.business Jul 2·8 min read

LinkedIn is not a great social media platform, but one of the most powerful marketing tools in this modern social media era. Since it was launched more than two decades ago, LinkedIn has an estimated 780 million users and 30 million company pages. Out of the 780 million users, LinkedIn has an estimated 17 million opinion leaders with another 10 million executive leaders, the majority from the blue-chip companies and the fortune 500 companies. Thus, as a small business, LinkedIn gives you a powerful platform to engage with decision-makers, and this is the right target clientele for your small business.

So, how do you package your message to reach the right target market?

1. Start with a killer profile

Your profile is the pathway to your LinkedIn marketing. A LinkedIn profile is not a carbon copy of your resume but an outline of your personality, skills, talents, experience, vision, mission, weakness, strengths, and everything that makes you a living, breathing person. While the resume has this information, your LinkedIn profile should add a personal touch to your profile, talk about parenting, your love for music, love for nature, family life, and every aspect of life that makes you great. However, stick to your professional life and add a few aspects of your social life in a few words.

Here are the steps for a killer profile:

- Start with a comprehensive profile

Your personal LinkedIn profile acts as a landing page that connections, potential clients, professionals, recruitment agencies, and potential employees see when they click on your name. The LinkedIn profile is a snapshot of your resume, your photo, and links to your work, references, and other critical details about your personal life. Ensure your profile is comprehensive, detailed, complete, accurate, and genuine. Don’t hype with accomplishments or skills that your lack since this amounts to professional dishonesty, which is not only unethical but can damage your reputation.

Also, ensure the profile is a highlight of your professional life, not your social life. It is okay to mention that you are a mother and a wife but don’t use your profile to proclaim your undying love for your significant other. Further, ensure that you use a recent professional photo compliant with LinkedIn profile picture rules.

- Use the about section to outline your skills

Remember, your skills should be a value proposition to potential clients. Unlike in a traditional resume where you can list your skills, you must outline how your skills will benefit a potential client on LinkedIn. If you are a great accountant, detailed and good with numbers, your about section should explain how this skill will benefit your potential clients. The best way to draft this section is to think about your potential clients’ skills and outline these skills on your profile. Ensure that you outline genuine skills and those in which you are competent.

- Outline your experience and how you enabled a client or an employer to overcome a challenge

The experience section is not an opportunity to talk about how many years you worked at XYZ Company. In this section, explain how you helped your past employer overcome a challenge. For instance, talk about how you used your digital marketing skills to open a new area or bring onboard new clients. Ensure that your experience outlines those skills that your potential clients are looking for. Thus, if you worked at a dog walker in your teen years and now you own a software development company, is that a skill that can improve your odds of landing a client? Probably not, but if you worked as an intern at Microsoft in your teen years, that is a skill that should be included in your experience.

- Request endorsement and recommendations

According to a study by Expert Voice, a leading consumer survey company, 83% of customers trust recommendations from friends and family more than celebrity endorsements. Getting recommendations from LinkedIn is a great way to build your credibility and enhance trust among your potential clients. You can request a recommendation from past employers, clients, colleagues, college mates, or any acquaintances in your professional life. The best way to get a recommendation is to give recommendations.

Further, give recommendations to people you know, have worked with, and trust. Your word carries a lot of weight, and the last thing you need is to recommend an accountant who ends up being a fraudster. Similarly, only ask for recommendations from people who know you, and have worked with you, and can put their neck on the line by recommending your services.

2. Establish yourself as an authority in your field

After investing in a great profile, you need to put meaning and life to every word on your profile. You can achieve this by choosing to engage, interact, post, comment, start conversations, and put life to your LinkedIn profile. If you are a forensic auditor and are looking to help organizations prevent and identify fraud, you need to portray yourself as an expert in a forensic audit. Thus, have a plan to post, share, create, and engage in fraud prevention and investigation conversations. One way to achieve this is to create an engagement plan for your LinkedIn profile. You can start your day by sharing a quote, meme, fun fact, or tip on fraud investigation. As the day progresses, write and post an article or video about forensic audit to keep your audience engaged. Later in the evening, share a tip or two about preventing fraud and how an organization can adapt your techniques.

Further, volunteer to offer resourceful information relating to your field. You can host a zoom meeting to train executives on identifying the red flags in their organization and how to initiate and implement measures to prevent fraud. If you can afford, host a small conference and invite your target clients to discuss emerging issues in fraud investigation and prevention. By offering free tools, you instill a culture of trust and reputation among your potential clients, and this will make them turn to you for all issues relating to your area of specialization.

3. Connect with the right prospects

Having a killer profile and establishing yourself as an authority will not amount to anything if you have not connected with the right prospects. The following factors define the right prospect on LinkedIn:

* Demand for your goods or services

* Ability to pay

* Decision maker

Demand for your goods or services means that they have a problem that your services can solve. In the example of a fraud examiner above, who might demand the services of fraud examiners? Banks, Sacco’s, microfinance institutions, manufacturing companies dealing with cash, and most industries where employees directly link with the company’s financial assets.

In terms of ability to pay, think about the estimated turnover of the company. If the prospect owns a small shop in their local neighborhood, they might not afford a fraud examiner’s services, which rules them out as a target prospect.

In terms of the decision-maker, think about the key decision-makers in an organization. In most organizations, the senior executives, the head of departments, and the business owner are the right decision-makers in the business. Thus, while an intern might acknowledge the existence of fraud and understand the importance of fraud investigators, they are not the decision-makers; hence engaging them might not be the best use of your time.

How do you connect with the right prospects?

Type the appropriate keywords on your LinkedIn search icon, and browse through the results to get the right prospects. For instance, you can type the words’ owner’ on your search icon and send connection requests to all the individuals that show up on your results. Filter through the results, and only connect to prospects within your target area. If you are a fraud examiner based in Texas, connecting with a prospect from Asia might not be the best use of your time. It would be best to connect with prospects that you can visit and examine the systems, processes, employees, documentation, and all the relevant evidence required to build a strong case.

4. Conduct competitor analysis

Remember, unless your nature of business is building a spaceship like SpaceX, you are likely operating in a perfectly competitive market with many players. Competitor analysis will help you to outline where you are winning, losing, strength, weakness, need improvement, or the strategies to drop. Your competitor analysis should not follow the complex analysis like SWOT, Pearson analysis, or competitive analysis, but simply watching what your competitors are doing and following suit. Watch what they post, share, comment, articles, videos, networks, connections, and all their activities on LinkedIn.

Your competitor analysis aims to improve your strategy, not necessarily to mimic what your competitors are doing.

While conducting your competitor analysis, don’t limit yourself to other small businesses, and instead, follow the market leaders in your industry. For instance, if you own an accounting firm, you must follow companies like Deloitte and PWC to check the trending topics in your field. Use their ideas to start a conversation in your network and keep the network engaged.

5. Stay up-to-date with the trends in your industry

The business world is dynamic, and everyday businesses are confronted by something new, thus ensure you are updated in your industry. Understand the new techniques, technology, methods, regulations, trends, ideas, and policies governing operations in your industry. In the case of an accounting firm in the above example, understanding the changes in taxes in your area of specialization is a great way to stay competitive and give your clients value for money.

Some of the tips to enable you to stay up-to-date in your field include:

* Follow opinion leaders: whether it is the senior executives of big firms, company CEO, political leaders, media leaders, and head of government in your field of operation. For an accounting firm, ensure that you follow the minister for finance, the minister for trade, and the head of the chamber of commerce. These leaders will likely have insights into the new developments in the business world.

* Ensure that you read the news feed: The news feed is the homepage on your LinkedIn profile where your network post all recent development. Using the filter icon on your LinkedIn, you can sort the news by the most recent, popular, or relevant, to ensure that you receive news relating to your industry.

* Ensure that you follow trending hashtags; these are conversations shaping the world of businesses in your area of operation. LinkedIn algorithms use your profile information to display trending hashtags relevant to your industry.

* Ensure that you follow leading companies and organization pages. Even if you own an accounting firm, following the Microsoft LinkedIn page will help you stay updated in the world of businesses. If the trending conversation on the Microsoft company page is artificial intelligence, understanding how the concept works might help you know how it can be applied in your field.

With these tips, you can use LinkedIn to get clients for your small businesses. Remember, LinkedIn is a social network designed to help professionals interact. Thus, use your page or profile to engage with your prospects. Don’t spam their inbox or news feed with promotional content about your company. Instead, focus on giving value, and your network will find a reason to do business with you.

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