3 Reasons Why Service-Based Entrepreneurs should Focus on LinkedIn

Generating leads and sales opportunities using social media seems like the promised land. Everyone talks about it. Where is the gold?

Many professionals and entrepreneurs are scrambling to find time to market their business on a multitude of social media networks with little or no results to show for their time and effort. While networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest each offer a unique set of benefits, engaging your audience across multiple platforms won’t necessarily drive results for your business.

LinkedIn is the hub for consultative selling

Most professionals that we help, get confused when we classify them as B2B. When we explain the concept of consultative selling, it’s typically the biggest “aha moment”.

So what is consultative selling?

This approach focuses on using strategic questioning skills to engage in a sales dialogue with a customer about their most pressing business issues. A consultative approach to sales requires the salesperson to consistency elicit feedback and use that information to ask the right questions at the right times. This ensures both parties are communicating and understanding each-other effectively.

Modern buyers are more informed and more prepared; they face an overabundance of information and options, come to the table with increased skepticism. As a result, the sales cycle has elongated, or in some cases stopped.

For professionals and entrepreneurs who offer a service, a consultative selling approach results better than the product-oriented approach.

How do you market professional services in the information-overload economy?

Entrepreneurs focus too much on how great their product or service is. They assume that we will be engaged, just because they are in front of us. The truth is, you must earn our attention.  I think most Sharks will agree with me on this one.

Robert Herjavec 

Fish where fish are

Your marketing plan should include social media marketing. You want to select the platform that takes you closer to your ideal buyer. Let’s take a look at the platform’s usage for B2B.

LinkedIn is great for SEO

If you haven’t already done so, apply some time-honored SEO principles to your LinkedIn profile so that you’re more likely to get noticed. Content optimization is one super simple way to land on the newsfeeds.

SEO or search engine optimization is a complex science among all other dominant Google algorithm’s 200 or more factors. SEO is mainly the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to a website. It’s a practice of optimizing web content for better ranking. By following the SEO best practices, an online marketer can place content on top of other similar topics.

According to this approach, people who are actively searching for particular information will be able to view your web content the moment they enter a query.

But it’s to keep in mind that search engines are continuously refining their algorithms. Each year, Google changes its search algorithm for several times. Although, many changes are minor, yet there are specific algorithmic updates that might affect the search results in significant ways.

Nowadays, SERP or a search engine results page takes in consideration images, social media information, videos links, article listings, ads and several widgets. Although keyword and critical phrase optimization are still relevant, yet according to the present Google algorithm change, now a digital marketer has to give importance to several other off-site elements also.

If you’re not taking advantage of LinkedIn Articles, it’s time to start!

LinkedIn Algorithm is unique

Content is reviewed by human editors

Part of the LinkedIn algorithm’s uniqueness is that it uses real humans to filter through user-generated content, and to learn more about what makes a post noteworthy (or not).

This is the stage where those humans determine whether your post is valuable enough to continue displaying in the LinkedIn feed. If your post continues to get engagement, the cycle continues, and it keeps getting shown.

There’s a lot of speculation that, at this stage, if your content is amazing, it may get a boost and reach more people.

Closing thoughts

LinkedIn is a trend that you don’t want to miss. Our flagship course, LinkedIn Ninja, will take your business to the next level. Learn more.