If you’re a business professional, you likely have a LinkedIn profile to interact and connect with like-minded
individuals in attempts to improve your business.
While you may have plenty of connections, you may be stuck in the conversion of those connections to prospective clients. Below are three simple tips to help you in your conversion efforts.
BE INTENTIONAL
Whether you are meeting someone for a first time or reconnecting with an old connection, the first question most people will ask is “what do you do?” The same holds true with connections on LinkedIn. In order to get to the point with prospective clients, it’s a good idea to prepare a written version of a 30-second commercial in your profile summary. The important thing to remember about LinkedIn is that it is a huge, never-ending network. Adding connections from the “people you may know” button broadens your network with people found in your email contacts. Remember, everyone you talk to about business or meet during the course of a typical business day is a potential LinkedIn connection.
CAREFULLY CRAFT YOUR MESSAGE
You never get a second chance to make a first impression, so you need to be sure you are not losing business because of your messaging. After you identify people you want to connect with, you will want to carefully tailor your communication with them. You should approach these prospects naturally and cordially. Greet them by name and give them a reason to accept your request to connect. A personalized connection request is always more welcomed than the standard LinkedIn request. It will also help keep you from being flagged as spam. If you have purchased InMail, this can be a great resource to connect with people because these messages have a very high open and response rate.
USE TAGS TO SEGMENT AND TARGET PROSPECTS
LinkedIn allows users to create custom tags to more easily identify connections to maximize messaging within the network. Doing this is a matter of going through your contacts and adding a tag such as “prospect”, “current client”, or any other identifier that makes it easy for you to target your messaging. Once you’ve created these tags you can then begin to target your connections with your segmented business messages. Using tags lets you target specific prospects when sending out information about specific campaigns.
By being transparent and specific about your intentions, LinkedIn can make it easy for you to target prospects quickly and easily. Once you get going with this process, you’ll be on your way to growing your business.
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