Can I Find My Customers on LinkedIn?

Can I Find My Customers on LinkedIn?

Are your customers active and reachable on LinkedIn? 🧐 Too many people waste time on other social media channels when their ideal clients and customers are actually on LinkedIn!

Learning how algorithms work, figuring out if you need to run ads, trying to build an audience, knowing what sparks engagement, the language to use, and the hashtags that work...

...it’s different on every platform.

So, how do you choose which ONE platform you need to do well?

HINT: Where does your target audience mingle online WHILE ALSO being in the mindset to do business?

In this Mondays with Mindi episode, we're talked about the simple steps you need to take to get LinkedIn up-and-running so that you can start finding and connecting with your ideal clients and customers.

The Key to Finding Your Customers is Your Profile

One of the questions that recently came in from a number of listeners over the past month was around finding customers on LinkedIn.

Many of them had either recently pivoted their business (or side hustle) and had a renewed focus on a target market. Questions centered around how to use their LinkedIn profile to “do the heavy lifting” when it came to attracting inbound prospects.

Thing is that no matter HOW GOOD your outbound prospecting may be on LinkedIn, if your LinkedIn profile is not in alignment or optimized, EVERYTHING you do will fall short of its potential.

Every activity on LinkedIn is somehow linked to your personal profile. It makes absolutely no sense to invest a lot of time in publishing content, writing posts, building your network, and trying to get into conversations with your prospects until your profile is as good as it can be! 

If it’s been a while since you’ve really taken a HARD look at your LinkedIn profile, you may not realize the importance of keeping this up-to-date and compelling.

Maybe you’ve tried to figure out how to update it and model after someone else you admire or follow online, but you’re not sure if you’ve done it right?

Or, you’re trying to figure out how LinkedIn fits into the big picture of your entire personal brand and online presence.

Many experts I know who come to me for help on their profile, their presence, or their personal brand, and they are a bit embarrassed when they say they feel like they are “the industry’s best kept secret.” 

It’s not uncommon for them to have spent far too much time on building a website (or thinking about it) or putting together their portfolio, but they have no idea that if they channeled all of that energy into JUST their LinkedIn profile as the starting point, that they’d be lightyears ahead.

Did you know that LinkedIn has 830M+ members and ALL of them are focused on business, professional growth, their career, and networking with like-minded professionals. 

If your presence is subpar here, you’re missing out on a HUGE opportunity to reach your customers.

If you’ve been wondering a few simple ways to improve your profile TODAY to help you start finding and attracting your customers, it’s not as hard as people make it out to be.

Too many people think they can dabble on LinkedIn and get the results of a power user. 

That’s not how it works. You cannot just “pay $ to play” on LinkedIn. For your LinkedIn efforts to generate ROI, you need to actually BELIEVE LinkedIn is your most valuable lead generating asset and ACT as if using LinkedIn effectively will generate business revenue.

When you use LinkedIn as a true expert and build the right professional relationships here, you only need to connect a few dots to make it work for you without wasting your time, money and energy. 

Are my customers actually ON LinkedIn?

A number of business leaders, subject matter experts and career professionals interested in getting new customers are confused with where to invest their time and resources because they’re told they need to “be everywhere” and “just cross-post to LinkedIn through an automation tool” or “just hire a VA to do your social.”

The problem is, trying to be on just ONE platform effectively can be tricky enough.

Learning how algorithms work, figuring out if you need to have paid ads, trying to build an audience, knowing what sparks engagement, the language to use, the hashtags that work.

It’s different on every platform.

So, how do you choose which ONE platform you need to do well?

Where does your target audience mingle online WHILE ALSO being in the mindset to do business? 

Think about that for a moment.

We go to Instagram to be entertained or inspired. 

We go to Facebook to keep up with friends, family, and our favorite groups. 

We go to YouTube when we have a question.

NONE of these places are geared specifically towards BUSINESS or PROFESSIONAL GROWTH.

If you have an audience filled with consumers, you do have more platforms to choose from when it comes to social media options.

If you’re in the B2B space or a career professional… you’ve got ONE. It’s called LinkedIn.

Love it. Hate it. Not sure what you think about it.

If you’re avoiding LinkedIn because you’re unsure, you’re overwhelmed, or you’ve tried it before and it didn’t work like you hoped… you’re not alone.

But, you do need to realize it’s a simple matter of connecting the dots - that could take your business from “doing okay” to a sales pipeline bursting with people who WANT what you have to sell and actually LIKE you as a person. Go figure.

For example, a podcast production agency owner focused on business owners and leaders who want a podcast came with the problem of having an AWESOME service where he could easily help his clients create their podcast, produce episodes, and get great guests for the show. 

The problem was that nobody knew him on LinkedIn, he had a LinkedIn profile that looked borderline spammy with a pitchy headline and poor headshot, and he was not convinced that LinkedIn would actually work for him because he heard it had gotten so spammy.

We dialed in his target audience (discovering that they were VERY active on LinkedIn), fixed up that profile, did a test of sending out some tailored LinkedIn messages to see if his audience wanted to chat.

BOOM! His message immediately resonated, and he ended up booking out his calendar nearly two months in advance from reaching out to only 10 people per week. 

More than a year later, he still doesn’t need to go outside LinkedIn to fill his sales pipeline. He has as many prospects as he can handle - with no end in sight to the prospect pool.

So what really happened here?

Belief happened first. Testing happened next. Results spoke for themselves.

Finding Clients on LinkedIn Can Be Simple

When you CHOOSE to prioritize LinkedIn by learning how to connect the dots, that’s when the magic happens.

It’s not about spending hours a day trying to scrounge up LinkedIn posts to comment on, rather it’s about providing value and showing up consistently over weeks and months.

Every week, I do coaching calls with clients who tell me they learn more about how they can use LinkedIn during a single 60-minute session together than they have been able to figure out going through multiple courses or following a number of LinkedIn experts.

Why is that? When you get crystal clear about your intention for LinkedIn, the resources you have available, and define what would make LinkedIn a success for you, it’s really simple from that point to create an effective LinkedIn approach.

Too many of my peers make LinkedIn feel so complicated that you need the equivalent of a Masters degree in Social Selling to make it effective, but you can hire them for a few thousand dollars a month to do it for you, of course.

Using LinkedIn for your company, your business, or your career means that you are here with a very clear objective in mind. 

Think about it like this - it’s EXACTLY how we go about building a successful business or a standout career. We create offers and services, build a clientele or customer base, and overdeliver on expectations - we do this over and over again - until we get a process that works, with margins we love.

Everything you do on LinkedIn should lead you closer to doing more good business with more good people.

It’s not spamming. 

It’s not about clever automation.

It’s not about pitch-slapping people via LinkedIn messages.

It IS about using a proven system and processes that ACTUALLY work on LinkedIn right now.

Now I want to go back to the story I told earlier, what I didn’t tell you about that podcast agency owner, he doesn’t spend more than 10-15 minutes per day on LinkedIn. Why? Because we NAILED his processes and systems.

Now, how do you figure out how to connect the dots for yourself on LinkedIn?

3 Questions to Identify & Reach Your Customers on LinkedIn

If you’re not already convinced, I want to share with you three questions that can help you determine how to determine whether or not your customers are actually on LinkedIn AND how best to reach them.

#1 - Is your target audience consumers or professionals?

As I mentioned before, if they are other professionals, leaders, CEOs, and executives - LinkedIn is most likely the ONE channel where they actually have a profile, are somewhat active, and can be reached.

Trying to target a CEO on Facebook with an ad? Good luck.

Reaching out to that same CEO with a personalized InMail and a great connection invitation? 

Your chances of getting through are MUCH higher, even if they do have an executive assistant checking their LinkedIn messages for them. 

...that’s the thing, they DO have a gatekeeper paying attention on LinkedIn, but do you think they’d let their VA into their personal Facebook account?

That is a rhetorical question. 

#2 - Do you need to build professional relationships?

Short Answer: Yes. No matter whether or not your audience is primarily consumers or professionals, you are going to be doing business or collaborating with other business owners, leaders, vendors, or clients.

We all have heard about the “know, like, and trust” factor in getting people to either purchase what we’re offering (if we’re in sales or business) or choose to hire us over another candidate (if we’re in a job seeking scenario.)

If you are in the B2B space, it’s essential for your potential customers to talk to a real-life human during the sales process, which means they are not going to buy without connecting to YOU along with any other related people on your team.

If you tend to push people towards a “free discovery call” or default to “let’s hop on for a quick chat” - LinkedIn is a great fit because when you have genuine conversations in LinkedIn DMs, calendar links are quite often exchanged.

On that note, I would not recommend handing out your calendar link too freely, as that can be perceived as desperate or that you’re struggling. If you do hand out your calendar link, be sure that the call is about doing business together. 

On the other hand, if you are accustomed to pushing people towards a landing page or video to learn more about you, and it’s a lower-priced product (less than a few hundred dollars) that they can easily purchase without thinking twice… then LinkedIn might not be the best fit for THESE customers. 

BUT, if you’re like many other entrepreneurs and business owners I know, you likely have a premium offering or upsell where your high-ticket clients want to work with YOU directly. These clients are the types of people you’d want to reach out to directly on LinkedIn.

If you’re a sales person trying to get through to decision makers, you probably already are using LinkedIn, but I’ve come across very few who do it well. It’s a tricky balance and tough when you have any type of “sales-related” word in your title. You’ve got to get clever.

Think about your sales process and how you sell. How much of YOU is part of that sale? The more of YOU that’s necessary, the more valuable LinkedIn as a lead generation source will be.

And not to gloss over those of you looking for your next opportunity or job on LinkedIn, relationships with the right people are critically important even if you are not actively job seeking. When the time comes that you want to leapfrog into a new position, you’re going to need to have established all the right relationships months (if not years) in advance.

#3 - Which activities will best connect you with your customers?

To be clear, I’m NOT trying to sell you on ANY of my services here. 

This is a question that you need to answer for yourself because getting into LinkedIn trying to put together a mix-match of tactics is going to result in you wasting your time.

You need to decide if LinkedIn is the right channel for you, and then realize it’s going to take some education, some time to learn the ropes, some processes, and some resources (like a good VA) to help you manage some of the moving parts.

Many of my clients manage their end-to-end LinkedIn program themselves because we design a good checklist, while others prefer to delegate parts to a virtual assistant or team member when they finalize their LinkedIn process and feel confident it’s working.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I always recommend to my coaching clients and students that they do a simple 90-day experiment where they define what “going all in” on LinkedIn looks like for them. Then, they set up a simple “going all in” LinkedIn plan or checklist to test their hypothesis.

The beauty of this approach is that once you get your LinkedIn process up-and-going (usually takes only a few weeks), you can make an educated decision on how you are going to invest in LinkedIn moving forward.

Worst case, you decide LinkedIn is not for you. Then, you’ve spent 90 days getting your LinkedIn profile looking amazing, creating content you can use other places, and learning exactly how to do cold outreach in a way that doesn’t feel spammy. 

Best case, you figure out a LinkedIn system that actually leads to business revenue, a “social” channel that you can point to next year and say “LinkedIn opportunities made me X dollars for Y investment.” Good return?

Connect the dots first, and then commit to taking action for a specific time frame.

Such a fun topic today! Finding your clients on LinkedIn can actually be an empowering exercise, and it’s usually the first place I start with people when they come to me for coaching.

If you have a hunch that your clients and customers are on LinkedIn, run a 30-60-90 day experiment to find out!

If you’re looking for that extra edge to get your started on the right path, get on the waitlist for the next cohort of The LinkedIn Accelerator kicking off at the beginning of 2023, which is tailored to take you through ALL of these seven sections I covered today (and the rest of them!) in just five days flat - - one week, and you’re off to the LinkedIn races.