As you all know, I run NSE. It’s a marketing advisory company. Under NSE, there is a division called NSE Social Media. Here, we helped customers to manage their LinkedIn activities. Brands and individuals who outsource their LinkedIn personal and LinkedIn Page activities are usually professionals who are busy yet they need to be the authority or the thought leader in their respective industry.
To attract clients to sign up for NSE Social Media and outsource their LinkedIn activities to us, I am consistently accessing and engaging the right decision makers. For your information, since 2014, 90 percent of all leads for NSE are generated from LinkedIn. The rest is from the word-of-mouth.
I studied extensively on how on earth did I manage to secure paid customers through LinkedIn without having to own a website. I didn’t realise that the journey that I made them go through was pretty systematic. And smooth too. Let me share with you how the journey looks like.
The goal here is to make the person go through a 4-stage journey once they see my content on LinkedIn.
First, the attention. They need to notice the content and read it. I need to make them like what they see in that particular content. If I manage to make them understand, resonate with it and eventually like it, they will go to the next stage – the profile visit. At this stage, they will quietly check out my profile. They will take a peek at the price at NSE Social Media too. I purposely create a LinkedIn Showcase Page just for that and park the pricing there. An impression of me is now created in their head. If they see me as a trustworthy guy with good authority in Marketing, they will then go to the next stage – more verification. Here, they will play a wait-and-see game, to further verify my capabilities further. They will quietly observe me too. They will observe my content, how I respond to comments, how I comment on other people’s posts and how I would react to negative and positive comments. In other words, they will find out reasons not to hire me if they require a LinkedIn management service from NSE. At this stage, a trust is being built. The next stage is the Need. Once the need arises and they couldn’t find any good reason not to hire me, they will text me up first before anyone else gets the chance. This process, however, will take time.
I don’t do hardsell, I don’t like it. That’d be the last thing I would do to get a long-term business. Inbound marketing through engaging content works best for me so far. It worked for me before and I believe it will work for me in the future as well.
Yes this will take time but I don’t mind waiting.
