- Networking and Business: Face-to-Face and Online
- Social Media and Revenue
- The History of LinkedIn
- Why LinkedIn Is Relevant to Your Business
- Why LinkedIn Is More Than a Modern Rolodex
- How Your Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Teams Achieve Goals with LinkedIn
- LinkedIn Marketing Success Stories
- Joining LinkedIn Was Worth Nearly Half a Million Dollars
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
How Your Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Teams Achieve Goals with LinkedIn
There are a variety of different goals for LinkedIn users, such as the following:
- Increasing your number of leads
- Increasing your lead quality
- Branding and positioning your company
- Capturing your target audience in a group for marketing or market research purposes
All of these are valid goals, and although you might start with just one or two, you may pursue all of them with LinkedIn over time. Regardless of your goal, you need to define how you’ll measure your campaign’s success, what quantified target you want to hit, and what strategies and tactics you’ll use to get there.
For example, if you want to grow a LinkedIn Group for market research purposes, decide how many people you want in that Group. Have your LinkedIn advertising person do some research with the ad creation tool: How many people can you target on LinkedIn who might become your customers? Let’s say there are 50,000. You might aim for getting 5,000 or 10,000 in your Group initially. Your strategy for membership growth may be advertising. This gives you quantified goals and a strategy with which to begin this marketing project. On the other hand, if you’re going for a small group of extremely targeted folks—say, Fortune 100 CEOs—your Group may not be so large, but both quality (the right people) and quantity (because you won’t get them all as customers) are important.
As you’ll read later, most companies on LinkedIn use a combination of strategies and tactics to achieve their marketing goals, including contests, awards, polls, advertising, groups, content marketing, blogging, and integrating other social networking websites. And you’ll want to base all of this on the Internet marketing best practices we discuss in Chapter 2.
If you’re looking for leads, you’ll enjoy the conversation in Part III about how LinkedIn Advertising can empower your lead-collection process. You may also have a marketing automation service in place such as Eloqua, which can help qualify and score your leads before they go to the sales force (having that in place actually means you can go for a larger volume of leads without worrying as much about how qualified they are). You may already have a process for salespeople to give marketing and advertising feedback about how qualified the leads are or aren’t. They can give you specifics that might help you improve lead quality in your marketing and advertising. We’ll cover this sort of team interaction and feedback in Chapter 14.