Monday, November 3, 2008

Turning LinkedIn into a Small Business Contact and Lead Management System

LinkedIn is full of tens of millions of affluent, well-connected, decision makers. No small business marketing database you could create would have a better base to harvest for sales. So stop working so hard to generate sales from your social marketing plan--building your campaign on one of the top social sites on the Web.

LinkedIn Marketing is an Internet marketing dream. LinkedIn is full of people ready and willing to connect and transact on the Web. But, how do you get them to transact with you? The first step to success is stop looking at LinkedIn as a social networking site and start thinking of it as a marketing database or contact management system. Selling with LinkedIn is like using a super-charged CRM.

Contact Management
LinkedIn is already constructed much like the top small business marketing software. You can import contacts from all of the popular electronic address books (i.e., Outlook, Apple Mail, Gmail, Yahoo!, etc.). LinkedIn helps you segment connections and prospects into affinity groups (i.e., industries, schools, jobs, positions, and even interests).

However, one of the key advantages of LinkedIn being your contact database--prospects segment themselves. With LinkedIn, you have access to search your potential customers' own descriptions and profiles. These same prospects ask questions, answer questions, join groups, and participate in this social network.

No better contact database can put you in the cat-bird seat to observe your customers expressing their wants and needs.

Social Marketing
A social marketing plan is simply the extension of your contact management strategy when managed from LinkedIn. As you assemble connections into your LinkedIn lead management strategy you automatically begin social marketing. Typical contact or marketing management solutions require you to continually push incentives, offers, and teasers. LinkedIn shifts this paradigm, allowing prospects to pull your marketing feed and cause attractions.

Here are some clever strategies to optimize your Internet marketing strategy on LinkedIn:
• Use keywords in your personal profile and descriptions
• Post questions and answers to LinkedIN Answers
• Join an participate in relative LinkedIn Groups
• Create a LinkedIN Group of customer advocates for your business
• Search, visit, and learn from competitors, prospects, and experts in your industry
• Request connections and referrals from your customers and vendors

Connections naturally build trust, credibility, and loyalty for you. Center your marketing with LinkedIn on this strategy.

Lead Nurturing
Although we want every lead to convert that is simply not the real world. This is where Selling with LinkedIn again shows power of LinkedIn being your prospect database. Most contact databases often make non-active prospect difficult to track and activate.

LinkedIn makes a great platform for internet marketing and lead nurturing. These inactive leads still see you, see your activities, are still exposed to your LinkedIn questions and answers. Social marketing is always on with LinkedIn.

LinkedIn becomes a hands-off small business marketing and lead nurturing campaign to your connections, whether they are ready to buy or not.

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