Networking On LinkedIn For Your Business
You probably know already that networking is the best way to search for key people that you could recruit for your business or promote your company. Doing it all online is the easiest and most efficient way to do that.
But online networking has its own set of challenges and difficulties. While most people know how to use social media networks like LinkedIn, many don’t know the best way to network online while seeing tangible results for their business. Here are some principles to consider as you get the most out of online networking.
Start With The People You Actually Know
This company, Zen WP, started with a soft launch because we wanted to be able to quickly make changes to our service while collecting feedback from a small but growing group of customers. This allowed us plenty of time to scale without messing up our operations or quality guarantees. As a result, weren’t concerned about heavily investing in marketing. In fact, we didn’t spend a dime on marketing while acquiring our first 20 customers. So how did we acquire these customers? We did it on LinkedIn.
I see a lot of companies trying to promote themselves or their new product on LinkedIn by connecting and sending messages to every profile they see. Not only is this annoying, but it’s a waste of time. Call it “marketing” if you want but most people refer to it as spam.
Online networking is best done by first reaching out to the people you know very well and then branching out from there. That’s because those people are the ones who will most likely help you. When we launched our service at Zen WP, the first thing we did was tap into our inner circle and first ask if they would be interested in our product. Then, we asked for relevant introductions to people who would be interested.
For example, Zen WP essentially provides an IT outsourcing service to businesses with WordPress websites. When reaching out to people in our inner circle, we asked them if they knew of any business owners who would be a good fit for our service. If they did, we asked them to make an introduction for us through LinkedIn’s introduction feature.
Set Goals And A Schedule
You’re not going to be able to build a list of prospects for your new product overnight. Networking is an enduring process.
You obviously want to reach as many people as possible. However, don’t forget to maintain ties with the people with whom you’ve made meaningful contacts. This leads us to our last point.
A Two-Way Street
Even if you make contact with someone and it doesn’t work out or you don’t get anything out of it, leave the door open for future communication. One good way to do that is by taking a couple of minutes to look at the other person’s profile and see if you can actually help them in any way.
If you can and do end up helping them, it will go a long way. People are more inclined to help those who have helped them. And you never know how that one person you helped a while back could prove to be an amazing resource for your business in the future.
However, if you don’t help them for one reason or another, be sure to thank them. Appreciation never goes unnoticed. Just be sure to stay in touch because you never know when they might send prospective customers to you. Although most of our marketing is done through social media advertisements at the moment, we still get a steady stream of new customers who have been referred to us by our LinkedIn connections.
