Using LinkedIn to Generate Leads: What MSPs Must Know
With a global audience of 500 million members, it's one of the most powerful tools you have.
August 21, 2019
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The reason your personal LinkedIn profile is an investment worth protecting can be summed up in a single word: networking.
In the old days, “networking” meant that you had to stay in work mode until 10:00 p.m. at a local wine and dine event, only to turn around and get up at 6:00 a.m. so you could make it to your local chamber breakfast.
Now, you can see the same results 24/7/365, without ever leaving the comfort of your computer chair. But you can’t do it with your company LinkedIn page.
The problem is that on LinkedIn, business pages can’t connect with and strike up a conversation with people actively using the network — that can only be done using your personal profile. If you’re only relying on your company page, you have no way of getting into someone’s inbox and making that intimate connection you’re both after. If you want to get visibility, you essentially have only one option: You pay for an ad.
Not that there’s anything wrong with ads, but why would you limit your own potential on LinkedIn for no good reason?
With your personal page, you can send a connection request to someone to introduce yourself. You can send a message to someone to answer a question they have or address a concern. You can set up a time to get coffee and chat about what your business can do for theirs. You can show them that there’s a living, breathing, hardworking person behind that company logo.
You can’t necessarily do that — at least as easily and as organically — if you’re only focusing on your business page, which is why your personal page on LinkedIn is of paramount importance.
Now that we can agree that your LinkedIn personal profile is where your lead generation activities are going to take place, here’s what you must know in order to perform those activities most effectively.
Probably the most important thing that you can do to start generating more leads on LinkedIn involves showing your potential customers how you’ll be able to provide value to their business.
Absolutely nothing on LinkedIn should happen at random. Everything — from your headline to the structure of your summary and beyond — needs to be a decision made with your ultimate end-goal in mind.
Take an element as seemingly innocent as your headline, for example. You don’t just want someone who lands on your profile to learn that you’re a managed services provider. The chances are high that they already know that. So while a headline to the effect of “An MSP with 5 Years of Experience” may be adequate, “adequate” isn’t actually the target you’re trying to hit.
Now, consider a headline like “In five years, we’ve helped clients in Minnesota save 75% on their technology through our unique managed services offerings.”
Suddenly, you’re cooking with gas.
In the span of the few seconds that it takes someone to read that headline, they know:
That you’re a managed services provider
Where you operate
How long you’ve been in business
What you’ve already done for customers like them — in this case, you’ve generated savings of 75% over a traditional in-house environment
People don’t just begin to get a sense of what you can do — they instantly start to understand what you’ll be able to do for them.
This idea can absolutely bleed into your summary, too. You have about 2,000 characters to play with, here, so you need to make excellent use of every last one of them.
Sit down and come up with a concise, tightly written summary that is no longer than three paragraphs. Any more than that and you run the risk of people skimming your content. If they start skimming that early on in the page, they’re probably going to do so for the rest of it, too — and at that point, the best designed LinkedIn page in the world won’t be able to help you.
Use the first paragraph of your summary to kind of expand on what you just wrote in the headline. Take what you already wrote and make it more specific. Instead of just saying “we’ve helped people save 75%,” convert that into an actual hard dollar figure. Go into more detail about the specific industries you serve.
Use the second paragraph as an opportunity to expand not on what you do, but how you do it. Talk about your thoughts on important topics like cybersecurity and if any of your clients will allow you to use their name (always ask first), include that information here.
Devote your third paragraph to a well-written call to action. Again, play into the information that you’ve already provided to someone. So instead of just “call us today so we can chat!”, even something as simple as “call us today so that you can save 75% on your IT expenses, too!” will make a world of difference.
That’s what I mean when I say you need to build value. Every element on your page — from that headline to any photos to your description on down — needs to be laser focused on your ultimate goal of using LinkedIn to generate as many leads as possible.
Just how important is authenticity in the modern era, you ask? In a word: very.
According to one recent study conducted by the Boston Consulting Group, the majority of customers said that authenticity was one of the top qualities that would attract them to a company to begin with. Another study showed that about 63% of customers said that they would buy from a business that they deemed to be “authentic.”
People don’t need you to be the objectively highest quality managed services provider in the world. You don’t need to have the widest array of services or the largest team or the longest list of credentials.
But they do need you to be as authentic as humanly possible. If you can clear that bar, there’s really no limit to what you’ll be able to accomplish.
In a broad sense, this means that when people view your LinkedIn profile, they need to feel like it was created for the right reasons — and absolutely none of them should have anything to do with your bottom line. If your page feels like little more than a cold and calculated LinkedIn-shaped advertisement, guess what — people are going to start to think about your business that way, too.
In a more precise sense, nearly everything you do and say on LinkedIn can absolutely contribute to that larger sense of authenticity that is critical to generating new leads. ExampYou les of this include but are not limited to:
The content you share. Are you only sharing content about your business that makes you look good, or are you sharing blogs, videos and other helpful bits of content that actually bring some sense of value to your prospects’ lives?
The interactions you have. When you reach out to someone on LinkedIn, are you doing so only for the purposes of selling? Or did you notice that someone had a question, thus inspiring you to reach out and provide the answer? Did you begin that interaction because you thought there was something in it for you, or was it because you wanted to address a concern or solve a problem without expecting anything in return?
Are you operating with truthfulness and integrity? If you make a mistake, do you try to hide it or own up to it? Are you honest about situations that may not make you look good, or do you try to pretend like they never happened?
All of these little things add up to something very, very powerful.