Social Selling and Corporate Influencer on Linkedin

If you want to get started on LinkedIn organically and without a big budget, you should definitely focus on social selling. Social selling is the complete opposite of annoying spam emails, cold calls, or salespeople knocking on your door! Basically, it's about using LinkedIn to build genuine relationships with your potential clients and then convincing them of your expertise and your product.

It's not about simply working through a list of potential clients and writing to everyone. Instead, the focus is on social interactions and exchanges with your target group. This strengthens trust in you and your brand and also gives you valuable insights through exchanges with your target group. Once you have established a trusting relationship, you will see that lead generation is much more successful and, with good support, customer loyalty is also significantly stronger.

What are the benefits of social selling?

The figures prove that it works:

• Those who engage in successful social selling generate 45% more sales opportunities on LinkedIn than salespeople without a high social selling index.
• Companies that rely on social selling are 51% more likely to achieve their sales targets on LinkedIn.
• 78% of companies that use social selling achieve better results than competitors who do not.

In addition, you can expect more valuable client relationships and, accordingly, a higher customer lifetime value, as your new clients are not only convinced by your product/service, but also by your company as a provider and, in particular, by you as a contact person. Social selling is already part of everyday life and the sales strategy of many large and small companies. These include brands such as Microsoft, PTC, and OMR itself.

First, you need to optimize your own profile on LinkedIn. Ideally, you should do this for your company page, your personal profile, and—if you have someone on your team who is open to it—for a few team members. Profiles are like websites, only on LinkedIn: when done well, they convey professionalism and credibility for what you say. If your target audience is still very uncertain at the beginning, they will visit your profile to check you out.

Building the right network for social selling

The next step is to network and maintain this network. Here you can join groups that may be relevant to your target audience. LinkedIn also offers a very good search function that allows you to find specific users (e.g., potential clients or existing contacts) and connect with them.

Here's a tip: It's best to write a short message with each networking request explaining why you want to connect and how it makes sense for the customer to connect with you. But be careful: Avoid sales clichés at all costs and keep in touch after connecting. This is not cold calling! With this approach, you would achieve exactly the opposite on LinkedIn. So focus on social interactions, networking, and demonstrating expertise—in other words, post, comment, like, and write messages.

The right content is essential

Now it's time to find the right content to become more visible and relevant to your topic and to draw your target audience's attention to you. In principle, you can read what we have already written on the topic of organic content on LinkedIn. If you follow these tips, you should quickly gain reach on LinkedIn and familiarize your target group and contacts with you and your company. It is essential that you continue to build and maintain the relationships you have gained in this way. If you succeed, you will soon notice the positive effects of social selling and generate a large number of new leads.

In addition to yourself, your employees can also engage in highly effective social selling on LinkedIn by networking, exchanging ideas, and drawing attention to you and your company as experts for your products, services, and the platform in general. In doing so, they take on the role of a corporate influencer—someone who works for your company and writes about it on LinkedIn, for example.

Such corporate influencers create a lot of reach and authenticity. People prefer to follow people rather than brands. And they are also more likely to trust other people. This can be used to authentically convince potential applicants of the great team, the good benefits, etc. At the same time, it can of course also be used with a view to sales to generate more leads via social selling. The approach is the same as for social selling in general: profile, network, content, maintenance. Consider how you can best support your corporate influencers. This could be by producing images for posts or simply by giving them the time they need. Yes, it's their profile. But they are posting for you and your company!

There is hardly any other way to build a large reach and many loyal leads on a small budget than with social selling. If you analyze your target group well in advance and create an appropriate strategy for content and other aspects, you will soon reap the benefits and generate leads via the platform on a consistent basis, even without expensive ads. These leads are significantly more sustainable and loyal than those generated via ads. And we haven't even mentioned the possibilities of LinkedIn Sales Navigator yet.

However, it is generally advisable to take a holistic view of LinkedIn. Especially in the beginning, there are many useful functions, strategies, and features that you can use to optimally position your company, recruit employees, or generate leads. Newcomers to the platform are often overwhelmed by the sheer number of options and need some time or support to find their way around. At Drive, we support many of our clients, such as Heise Business Services and Invest in Lower Saxony, with their LinkedIn presence. As certified marketing experts for LinkedIn, we know the platform and its possibilities. So if you need support or a sparring partner for your ideas, simply write to us at pole-position(at)drive.eu and we will get back to you for a free initial consultation.

Here you can find more blog posts on the topic of LinkedIn marketing:

• LinkedIn marketing for your B2B
• Reach your target audience with organic content
• Reach new target groups with LinkedIn Ads
• Using LinkedIn company pages correctly