[LinkedIn Success Guide] UNIT 13: HOW TO USE A PREMIUM LINKEDIN ACCOUNT TO GET EVEN MORE LEADS

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[LinkedIn Success Guide] UNIT 13: HOW TO USE A PREMIUM LINKEDIN ACCOUNT TO GET EVEN MORE LEADS

Note: You can read the full guide and resources in the carousel above ☝️

Like all networking platforms, LinkedIn is free for the basic accounts. The basic account has features that offer a good start to marketing your company. With the free account, you get things like building your professional footprint online, network with people you know and people that you should know, and search for companies or people and receive alerts about them.

When first starting out with LinkedIn, you will probably do well with the free account, but as a business and interest in what you do grows, you may find that you can get your business to the next level by upgrading your account. Deciding to pay for an account on LinkedIn is recommended when you have maxed out the features you get on the free account.

There are different kinds of premium accounts and they all have costs associated with them, however, you can try one for free for 30 days, and you can cancel your premium account at any time. Job seekers will want to try Premium Career, which gives them access to career coaches, the ability to see who views their profile, the ability to send messages to recruiters, see how they measure up to other applicants for the types of jobs they are searching for, and the ability to become a “featured applicant.” Recruiters can sign up for a Recruiter Lite account that is feared toward hiring managers and recruiters.

LinkedIn Learning is an account that offers learning resources to learn skills, improve your skills, train employees, and gives you the ability to upload your own video content that is specifically made for your company. You can add tags to your content to make it searchable, and you can filter training based on things like job function, skills, and across all fields and levels, from beginner to expert.

While all three of these accounts have marketing aspects, they are not tailored to marketing, sales, or growing a business. However, the other premium accounts are primed for marketing with them, and they encourage certain marketing elements.

Premium Business

LinkedIn premium business accounts are created for growing your company. This includes expanding your network, searching out potential leads, and offering information about your competitors, industry trends, and measuring your own company growth.

This type of account provides access to LinkedIn Learning, the ability to see who has looked at your profile and how they got there, unlimited browsing of member profiles, and 15 InMail messages per month so you can message anyone you would like to connect with even if they aren’t in your network.

If you receive an InMail response from a member you have sent one to, you will get a credit for that message.

The “who’s viewed my profile?” feature is useful in creating personal connections with potential leads that find you instead of you having to go out and find them. Following up on leads that come to you generally means someone has been referred to your company or has heard good things about your company and wanted to find out more. These members who have viewed your profile or company page typically lead to a pretty easy sale since the initial work of bringing them to you have already been done. The prospects who view your profile and connect with will bring along their network of potential leads.

The Premium Business account offers a filter for seeing where your views come from so that you can tailor your marketing materials. Or, if you see that your profile is being viewed by people who are unrelated to your planned marketing audience, you can use that information to update your keywords and materials to reach the right customers. LinkedIn Business allows you to see how you rank against the competition and others that are using LinkedIn.

Another helpful marketing and lead generation feature with LinkedIn Premium Business is the advanced search tool that offers more specific fields of search, like company size and member years of experience.

This can help you target your messages and saving the search lets you keep the results so you don’t have to run the same keywords more than once.

With Premium Business you get 500 search results at a time and up to 5,000 saved results, along with the ability to view the full profile of the results found, even if they aren’t in your network. An added bonus is that you can get alerts when something changes on anyone who was found in the search your saved, which can increase the possibility for you to gain even more new leads.

You also have access to analytical data on your page when you upgrade to a Premium Business account, including who visits your page and who follows your page. Each category can be broken down into various demographic categories like industry, job function, level of seniority and others. Graphs are created to show you the metrics regarding the engagement on your page. With LinkedIn Premium Business, you get “Business Insights,” which tells you a variety of useful pieces of information, both within your own company and with others.

To see any connection to your search results, you can click the “How You’re Connected” button. This will allow you to invite second-degree contacts to connect. You can see industry and company news and updates, which departments are increasing their budgets or cutting back, open jobs, and employee count. All of this information shows a company’s stability.

Upgrading your account to Premium Business is beneficial if you have a small business that you want to grow and network or if you are not necessarily a sales company. However, if you have a large company or a sales team, then you should consider upgrading to Sales Navigator.

Sales Navigator

The premium Sales Navigator account is suited for businesses for many reasons. It is a useful tool for lead generation and advanced search filters to see where your target audience lies. The average sales navigator member sees an increase in their opportunities for leads and sales, more goals being met, and a more productive sales team. The Sales Navigator is also helpful for marketing as well as sales because it helps you to pinpoint your target audience and understand what you audience is interested in.

There are three plans available in the Sales Navigator Account:

+Professional

+Team

+Enterprise

While Sales Navigator is geared toward sales teams, it can also be extremely helpful for marketing. The advanced search options allow detailed search fields with a wide range of keywords, beyond job function and geographical location. This can allow your marketing team the ability to compare their traffic against the size of the target audience.

Your sales and marketing teams can work together to increase the company profitability using LinkedIn tools. Having the two departments working together results in a more comprehensive picture of the client and increased profitability. When you have potential customers that have viewed your ads and been on the receiving end of one of your marketing strategies, your sales team will usually see an increase of opened and answered Sponsored InMail messages sent by your salespeople.

Personal relationships between potential customers and your sales team also help to boost the sharing of content media by the potential client. This makes it beneficial to share the marketing content with the sales team and showing them how to use it.

LinkedIn’s basic profile is a good place to start when you are just starting out on LinkedIn, but as your business gains more connections and a larger network, upgrading to one of the premium accounts can justify the expense by making it up in new revenue. 

Read more: You can read the full guide and resources in the carousel above ☝️