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If you’re like many small business owners, you likely wear many hats, tackling sales, content marketing, bookkeeping, and customer service, among others. Trying to accomplish all these tasks can be challenging – but thankfully, with small, achievable goals, a step-by-step action plan, and the right tools, you can make your vision a reality.
Step-By-Step Action Plan
1. Build your professional and personal brand
Establishing a professional brand is vital to relationship building on LinkedIn. Building relationships with your prospects and clients is crucial, because people are more likely to buy from those they know, like, and trust. This is more difficult to achieve in today’s digital world, where we have to rely on our digital brands to get our prospects to the “know, like, and trust” stage. As a social media platform for business professionals, LinkedIn is most effectively used by small business owners who create both a LinkedIn personal profile and a company page.
2. Establish your authority on your topic
When you curate content, ensure the articles you share look professional, and solve a problem or challenge your ideal clients to face. Further, provide your own opinion or perspective on the material. Your ideal clients can find this content elsewhere – what will make it unique is your perspective on it.
If you have the skills and resources, you should also create and share your own original content. You can post it is as status updates or long-form articles via LinkedIn Publisher. The content you create should be 100% client-focused and of interest to your ideal clients.
3. Generate new prospects and clients
If you’re like most small businesses, getting more business and making more sales are always your top priorities. If you’ve successfully established your brand and authority on LinkedIn, you will have set yourself up for success with this third strategy – generating new prospects and customers.
Start your LinkedIn lead generation process by searching for the job titles (keywords) of your ideal clients (i.e., Marketing Manager, VP Marketing, VP Sales, Director of Customer Experience, etc.)
4. Build your network of partners and vendors
One of the LinkedIn strategies most people miss is the opportunity to build relationships with other businesses with similar audiences, and/or complementary products or services.
What better place to build a network of strategic partners than on a platform full of professionals?
Start by reaching out to people who know and trust you within your existing network, then continue to expand your reach by asking your trusted network to make further introductions for you.
5. Stay up-to-date on your industry
It can be tough to keep up with the latest news and trends affecting your business and your clients, but LinkedIn is also an excellent tool to stay up-to-date on recent, and relevant, developments within your industry.
Here are some of the ways in which you can keep current using LinkedIn
- Read your news feed
- Follow thought leaders and influencers
- Follow companies and organizations
- Follow your competitors
- Follow hashtags
