Reaching new customers and prospective employees is a priority for most businesses. Speaking at a recent NationaLease meeting, Dan Golden, president and chief artist at Be Found Online, a performance marketing agency, discussed how to launch a successful LinkedIn outreach campaign to attract both employees and customers and employees.
Step 1: Goals and stakeholders
According to Golden, LinkedIn outreach can help build your brand and bring in new employee prospects as well as new customers. He says that LinkedIn is 99% about the newsfeed — so make sure that you have a team approach to posting on LinkedIn.
Use consistent branding for your team’s posts and interactions. Have employees use a cover photo on their LinkedIn profiles that is a variation of your company profile cover photo to create brand recognition. But remember, LinkedIn is not just about your brand, it is about connecting people.
“LinkedIn creates a platform to empower our teams to engage as people — we connect as humans instead of just brands,” said David Fisher, president of RockStar Consulting and LinkedIn blogger, in his book, Networking in the 21st Century…on LinkedIn.
Unify your team for the best result. Include all levels — executives, sales, marketing, employees — and encourage them to execute a clear company strategy by sharing and connecting on LinkedIn. Content shared by employees has twice the engagement versus when shared by the company, and salespeople who regularly share company content are 45% more likely to exceed their quotas.
Step 2: Use the data
Your company can use data tools available on LinkedIn to zero in on your audience.
- Use the LinkedIn Insights Marketing Hub to gain insights on people, advertising and industry.
- Use LinkedIn data for targeting within Microsoft ads.
- Use Microsoft and Bing Intent data for LinkedIn ads targeting.
- Use LinkedIn data to extend your reach on Facebook Ads and Google Ads.
- Combine LinkedIn Prospecting work to connect the dots with Marketing Automation Platforms.
- Combine SEO and content marketing to build a content strategy to address each audience segment.
- Install the Insight Tag on LinkedIn: https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/insight-tag
Step 3: Unified campaigns
Be careful not to spam your prospects and audiences. Don’t send a message to prospects asking them to read a bunch of material about your company and then invite them to a 10-minute phone conversation. Rather, engage them with a brief personalized message that outlines why your product or service would be a good fit for them, and invite them to learn more.
Use a combination of the following types of outreach campaigns to deliver your message. Different campaigns can reach different customers.
- Traditional engagement — Get your content and message in front of your audience.
- The conference campaign — Reach out and connect pre – and post – conference with prospects who are most likely to be attending.
- The coffee campaign — New in town? New Industry? Connect with potential prospects in your new market.
- The feedback campaign — Combine this with any other campaign to gather valuable market and business intelligence.
- The mini campaign — Target podcast guests, companies in the news, etc.
- Custom campaign — If you can dream it, you can make it a campaign.
With a little research, you can use LinkedIn as a powerful networking tool to extend your company’s reach.
