LinkedIn For SMEs

In this latest edition of Winning business on LinkedIn, I'll be sharing ideas from some of our guest experts on things SMEs can do on LinkedIn to ramp up their results.

My thanks to LinkedIn experts Judi Hays , Jen Corcoran and Luisa Reynolds for the ideas they've shared on our live Q&A calls, which form the basis of today's newsletter.

P.S. the next live Q&A call is with John Espirian on 25 April (details here)

Using Sales Navigator To Target Ideal Clients / Partners For Your SME

First up is a really helpful discussion with Judi Hays about using Sales Navigator. If you've not explored Sales Navigator fully, it has lots of features that help SMEs to target their ideal clients or business partners; to monitor what those people are doing on the site; and to connect and follow-up with them in a highly structured way.

There are loads of ways you might use this targeting to help you be more effective. For example, targeting:

• People who have just taken up new positions (ie. if you have success winning business from newly appointed CEOs, Finance Directors, etc.)
• People who work in businesses of a certain size (eg. if your business mostly wins work from large corporates or mostly from SMEs, being able to focus your efforts accordingly is powerful)
• People who've recently appeared in the news (can be a great conversation starter and / or a way of keeping tabs on major developments impacting companies in your sector)

Hope this helps you get a better understanding of whether Sales Navigator would be a useful low-cost upgrade for your SME:

How SMEs Can Partner With Other B2B Businesses Using LinkedIn

One way we've seen SMEs "punch above their weight" on social media is to use it as a means of forging partnerships with other businesses. This is one of the most easily achieved business wins from social media and in this conversation with Jen Corcoran, there are lots of actionable ideas on exactly how you could go about doing this:

Should I Add a Lead Generation Form To My Company Page?

Last, but not least, there's the relatively recent development that companies can now add a lead generation form to their company page on LinkedIn.

This means that, directly from your company page, someone can express an interest in having a call or getting further information from your business.

The degree to which this produces leads for your business will, in no small part, be determined by how well keyword-optimised your company page is and how much traffic it therefore generates each month. But it's simple to set up and I talked through this with Luisa Reynolds in this clip:

I hope this selection of ideas and expert input for SMEs really helps you to ramp up your effectiveness on LinkedIn. If there's a question you'd like us to answer on the next live Q&A call then do drop a comment below (or private message me, if preferred). Thanks - and see you on the next call!

P.S. you're welcome to book a call via the Social-Hire.com homepage if you'd like to talk to our team about your social media strategy for the coming year and how we could help make a success of this.