Social Networks are not intended for selling. They are designed for building relationships. Anyone who tries to make a sales pitch without first having built a relationship with someone on any social media platform is likely to be met, not just with rejection, but hostility. And that is not the way to make a sale.
LinkedIn is designed as a business network, but it is still a social network. This means you are connecting with professionals and business owners instead of just friends. But that still doesn’t mean it is a sales platform. It is however a great way to prospect and market if you know how to do it.
The program I use (ProspectIn) is an extension to Chrome that is active while using LinkedIn. You need to install it for each LinkedIn account you want to prospect from. This program will do the following:
- Visit and follow profiles
- Email export and import as CSV
- Send personalized bulk messages
- Send automated connection requests
- 10 to 15 actions per day
   The important part is the “Send personalized bulk messages”. You start by doing a SEARCH using LinkedIn, such as “business owners”, United States, 1st degree connection.
You then export these results into the program and create a campaign. The program transfers those profiles into its CRM.
Then you create a message to send to these prospects, which you can personalize.
For example, I recently set up this campaign:
Hi {{firstname}}, I’m beta testing a service that checks for reviews you didn’t know you had. Looking to find a business that will let me experiment with this. I won’t charge you anything to run it and I’ll share the results with you. Comment below with your website and I’ll get you set up.
Regards, Greg
With the advanced versions of the program, you can set up scenarios where if someone doesn’t answer you after a few days, you can send them a different message. If they do answer you, then you can reply as normal through LinkedIn, and they are removed from the marketing scenario, as you are now having a sales conversation with them. The program will send out messages in a staggered fashion so as to emulate a human actually doing this.
Of course, the program is great for connecting with new people as well, but its real power comes from the marketing scenarios mentioned above. This allows you to build complex marketing funnels where you start by building a relationship with someone and then they end up asking you questions leading to sales. For example, the message above was sent to various LinkedIn connections and I ended up running reputation reports for a number of people, who then asked me to go over it detail. If you have read this far and are interested in seeing a reputation report for you company, send me a message and you can take advantage of this as well.
Greg Jameson has been writing blog articles on ecommerce and internet marketing for over 10 years. Learn more about Greg at https://webstoresltd.com/about/
Guest Posting
