Leveraging LinkedIn: A growth marketer’s secret weapon

“LinkedIn is a growth marketer’s best kept secret.”
– Sergey Ross, growth strategist

With over 104 million active users, it’s hard not to look at LinkedIn as a powerful acquisition channel for growth marketers. But beyond being an acquisition channel for lead generation, think of LinkedIn as part of your product and customer success engage and delight tactical plans.

Listen to Sergey Ross’ Mastering Growth live session on the topic:

According to Sergey Ross, a Toronto-based growth strategist, speaker and author, the opportunity to create in-depth human connections on LinkedIn is incredible. However, to utilize the channel effectively, careful thought and attention must be paid to create highly targeted and meaningful connections.

If done authentically, growth leaders can connect their brands in a deeper way with customers. With over 8,000 B2B marketing technologies live, authenticity is increasingly important as many decision makers simply now mark as spam most sales messages that are not highly relevant and personal.

So how do you leverage LinkedIn to build your presence? Check out these eight tips from Sergey.

Sergey’s eight tips for LinkedIn

1. Build authentic content with targeted headlines. Use “I” statements and do your research on your audience before blasting it out into the ether.
2. Show your vulnerability. Tell stories that reveal your shortcomings, what you learned and how you overcame the problem. Recount quirky incidents that share a lesson learned. The key is to show your vulnerability to build trust and credibility.
3. Do your research. To deliver high-value and targeted messaging, make sure your message has value by doing your research beforehand on your target customer. A simple Twitter bio search can help you better target your content. Use tools like Followerwonk to determine who in this audience group is the most influential.
4. Don’t recreate the wheel. Republish relevant existing content with a fresh spin and use your SEO keyword strategy to target it further.
5. Don’t randomly add people to a list without doing your research on them first. The content has to add value. Usually, Sergey connects with someone by referring to a piece of content they’ve written and then offering to add to it.
6. Optimize your LinkedIn profile. Use your customers’ words in your profile, not your company words and never sound promotional. People want to connect with authenticity.
7. Use tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator to build lists and target by industry, company groups, and so on. Remember, though, that LinkedIn is a social platform and not a database. Stay highly targeted in your list building to ensure you’re sending relevant InMails.
8. Use automation software like Linked Helper to help you automate your audience-building capabilities. Ensure the tool is live and credible before you use it. LinkedIn has a habit of shutting these tools down.