Here at Wheelhouse, we’re big fans of SEO for creating long-term, sustainable traffic and interest in your business.
Without a big ad budget, it’s one of the best ways you can sustainably grow your leads without putting in a bunch of effort.
The only drawback is that with SEO, you’re playing the long game. Improvements might not materialize for months.
But sometimes, you need an increase in business right now.
Using LinkedIn when SEO takes too long
When you need results right now, paid ads are a great option (if you have the budget for it).
If you don’t, LinkedIn is a great alternative.
We conducted a six-month sprint for new business on LinkedIn. Over that time, LinkedIn became our #1 source of new leads and revenue and showed a 6x ROI on our effort.
Where’s my next lead coming from?
Service businesses often rely heavily on referrals.
To reduce reliance on referrals, we’ve experimented with a whole grab bag of lead generation tactics – writing guest articles, cold emailing, improving contact forms, creating new lead magnets, you name it. Some got us results, others just took up our time.
Our best results for getting leads right now (with no investment) came from direct outreach on LinkedIn. This is a tactic that works well for many B2B industries.
I’ll begin with a caveat: there are lots of people who do this poorly. We’ve all gotten these messages. They look something like this:
No offense to the guy who sent me this. He’s trying to drum up business, which I don’t blame him for.
But messages like these use a “spray and pray” approach, sending tons of identical messages a broad group of people. They’re also trying to sell me something right off the bat.There’s nothing personal or helpful to the recipient (me, in this case), and therefore doesn’t motivate me to reply.
That’s not what we do, and that’s not what we’re suggesting you try, either.
Starting conversations and building relationships
To that target audience, you’re sending non-spammy, non-salesy messages, with the simple goal of starting a conversation.
The rest of it, you already know how to do. It’s networking and business development like you’ve always done it – by building relationships.
Over six months, this approach helped us in a number of concrete ways (by bringing in 25% of our revenue) and less concrete ways (by helping us build our authority as experts in our field by introducing us to hundreds of people whose problems we’re good at solving).
Our Results, by the numbers:
Connections & Profile Views
- 250% Increase in LinkedIn Connections
- 15-30 Connection requests sent per workday
- 24% Connection Request Acceptance Rate
Profile Traffic during the second half of this effort:
- LinkedIn only shows you the last 90 days of profile views data. In my case, it was 825 between January and March (the second half of our campaign period).
- That’s an average of 275 unique individuals viewing my profile. Of course, just like traffic on your website, profile views are just a leading indicator – not directly tied to leads or revenue. But it’s still hundreds of people getting familiar with me and building awareness around my business.
- And if you take the time to really optimize your profile to connect with and engage the right people, a small percentage of those profile viewers will reach out to you and start a conversation. Otherwise (just like on a suboptimal website) they’ll move along and forget about you.
Key metrics
- 158 Conversations Started
- 19 Consultations Booked
- 68% Email list growth
- 8 Hours per week invested
- 25% of revenue attributed to efforts
- 6x Approx. Return on Investment
Start a conversation on LinkedIn today
LinkedIn is a place where it’s easy to be spammy, but the inverse is also true:
People are hungry for genuine connection and are open to start conversations if you treat them like a real person.
The list of decision makers you get access to on LinkedIn is massive:
So if you are concerned that your leads and other growth opportunities might start drying up, it could be worth giving this a shot.
Don’t expect instant results. It takes time and serious persistence, but it pays dividends.
Further learning about LinkedIn
Curious to learn more about this strategy?
We dive deep in this free 16-minute video:
