The answer is No. LinkedIn is not just for boring old corporate people, it’s an absolute goldmine if you know how to use it. 

Alright, in this article, we are going to talk about LinkedIn, why it’s such a goldmine and how to use it – three specific ways to get clients fast for your business. 

Number one is you want to optimize your LinkedIn profile for your ideal client. A lot of people treat it like a resume or like a showcase or a place to just show off, show of about their awards and what they’ve done, maybe they’ve written a book or whatever. You don’t want to do that, you want to treat your LinkedIn profile if you want to use it to get clients, you want to treat it kind of like a mini sales page or mini landing page, and the goal of your LinkedIn profile is to attract and convert your ideal clients. To do that, you need to optimize your LinkedIn profile to do that to get your ideal client to come to your profile see what you do and say, “oh that sounds like that guy can help me?” 

There are three main areas on the profile that you want to optimize, number one is just your image, your file image and your cover photo. Don’t overcomplicate this – your profile photo should just be something simple if you like looking professional, smiling, not like you just rolled out of bed or came out of a bar it should be a clear picture to make sure it’s not like pixelated or you can’t see your face. Just make sure It’s a picture of you that’s clear and looks somewhat professional. Your cover photo is same thing. You can use something that shows your authority or you can link with a call to action to your website or whatever you want people to do. Make sure these two areas it’s not like the default, make sure that you optimize it to make you look good and position you as an authority.

The second place you want to optimize is your headline. Most people what they do here is they just put their job title right, they might say ‘oh I’m CEO whose company this is what I do’, well you want to make sure that when your prospect reads your headline, they can answer the question, what’s in it for me, right? And does this person help me? For example, in our case, ProspectMe.io is a B2B lead generation company where we provide LinkedIn and cold email lead generation for B2B technology startup SaaS companies and agencies. I want to make sure, if my company and who I target are B2B startups and agencies, my top headline on LinkedIn speaks to that.  The lesson here is make sure that you can answer who do you help, how do you help them and what result do you get.

Number two is your headline. Area number three that you want to optimize is your about or your summary section. And this is where people go so wrong like they’ll just put like for example they’ll speak about themselves in third person, so they might say something like “John has worn won three awards”, “he started five companies”, “he’s made like ten million dollars”, “John is a TEDx speaker”, “he has this book and that book” and “he’s done this” etc. Just talking about themselves in third person which first of all is just it’s kind of strange and it’s kind of creepy. Who actually talks about themselves in third person, and second of all, you look like a narcissist when you do that. So make sure that your profile summary talks about your prospect and how you can help them. Let’s take a look at my example.

The very first line I don’t say anything about me or like my background or anything. I talk exactly to the value proposition. “We help technology startups and digital agencies, fill their pipeline with high-value leads that turn into customer. You get an expert team dedicated to prospecting and customer acquisition for half the cost of an in-house team.” Now by reading that very first sentence, you know exactly who I helped, exactly the result I get and how like why it’s relevant to them. “Half the cost of an in-house team” SaaS companies, SaaS founders, they’re so used to hiring like three to four sales reps at like four to five thousand dollars a month each and they still have to train them and buy them tools and all that stuff. We’ll cut that cost in more than half and we’ll get we have a proven system that already works and we can get them exactly what they want, which is more customers.

The first sentence should be a value proposition about you and what you do and how you help them market. Then I kind of dive deep into the problems and pain points. You are going to have to do some research into this. You want to make sure that you’re speaking in the language of your niche. So for our niche for B2B technology companies when we are talking to founders, they’re always like “I don’t know where my next deals coming from”, like “we don’t know which source is coming from”, “we don’t know if it’s from a webinar or LinkedIn or cold email or Facebook advertising”, “we don’t know where our next deal is going to come from.

We tie that into the pain point here –

Is your team wasting hours of valuable selling time when researching and instead of closing deals?

Do you wish you have a proven system?

These are specific pain points that come up when we talk to our market. Your profile summary should speak directly to your ideal client and your ideal prospect and talk about how you can help them solve a problem that they want to solve, in our case it’s lead generation and getting more customers for their SaaS business. You should not be talking about yourself in third person or your awards or anything like that. Nobody cares.

Number two is you want to connect and engage with your ideal clients. You can use sales navigator options. Let’s just say that we’re going to use it to find B2B, SaaS founders because that’s who we target for ProspectMe.io. If I want to find SaaS founders in New York, all I got to do is type in ”Founder” and “New York” in the filters, and it gives me a list of 3,990 founders in New York of software companies. With sales navigator you can get even more granular with like the size of the companies, how many employees they have, more specific industries, more specific titles and seniority levels, but I’m just showing you a quick example here and this shows me two thousand plus founders, people who fit my ideal client profile.

What do I want to do, I want to connect with these people. Let’s just say Yana here, I might connect with Yana, I’ll send him a connection request, “Hey Yana saw that you’re a co-founder of a SaaS company in New York would love to connect and share insights with you”, something super simple like that. Once they connect, you can send them a message and just see if they’re interested in having a quick conversation with you to learn more about what you do as what you deliver at your service right and how you can help them to provide value to their lives.

LinkedIn outreach works, you know you have to just make sure you’re connecting with the right people, with your ideal client, you’re providing value up front, you’re showing them that you care about them and that you can help them get a result that they actually want. And that’s what we’ve done here and this is exactly what we do for our LinkedIn service, what we’re doing we’re connecting with people, we optimize your profile and then we start connecting with people and engaging with them to get you more appointments, so that you can get more customers, more clients.

That’s number two is connecting and engaging with your ideal clients and trying to get them. So number three, the third way to grow your business and get more clients from LinkedIn is content. There’s two types of content. This is the way that I break it down, type one content is content that shows who you are as a person right. So talk you’re going to be telling stories about yourself, your business, your personal life, things that happen, things that are good, things that are bad, it shows people that you are human and who you are as a person. I mean of course, you are human, but it shows your personality a bit. 

Type 1 content is showing who you are as person and letting people know that you are human and you’re not just some robot on LinkedIn trying to just spam and get business all the time right.

Type 2 content is content that position you as the authority, it answers the question why should I work with you to solve X problem. This gets people interested in what you have to offer and they’ll see your posts, they’ll reach out to you through your messaging here and they’ll want to set up a time with you to chat. So content is a very powerful way, if you combine it with an outreach strategy.

So those are the three things, number one optimize your profile for your ideal client, your profile photo, your cover photo, your headline and your profile summary. Your profile should all be geared towards your ideal prospect, your ideal client. It shouldn’t be talking or bragging about yourself. Number two is getting connected, engaged. You want to connect with your ideal client and you want to provide some value, maybe you found an article that’s useful to them that’s relevant to your service that you provide. And also number three is to post content. Type 1 and type 2 content. Personality content and authority content. You want to people interested in what you have to offer and stay top of mind so that when they are ready to move forward with whatever you provide, you are going to be the first person they think about.