Connect Online, Close Offline

Nothing irks me more than a blatant sales pitch in a LinkedIn connection request or the first message I get from a new contact.

Whether it’s social media, email or any other medium, I’m sorry but I’m just not biting. You need to be a lot more patient and invest in building a reason for me to trust you enough to even consider buying your product or service.

The worst culprits are the seemingly endless parade of people popping up on almost every social media platform presenting themselves as the gurus whose training is going to save your business.

Sadly that aggressive, cold, often slightly sleazy approach is exactly the opposite of what works to generate solid leads and high sales conversion rates. Their behaviour is a poor advertisement for their offering.

OK, enough complaining. What should you be doing to leverage the power of the amazing, enormous and growing platform that LinkedIn has become.

It starts with patience, respect for your target audience and a deep underlying commitment to be genuinely helpful with no expectation of an immediate sale. Sounds counterintuitive but in online business you can’t expect people who’ve never met you to pop open their wallets straight away.

So, back to basics. The foundation is of course to create an awesome, authentic LinkedIn profile. That gives you the basis for building a content marketing strategy that, over time, will position you as something of an authority in your chosen niche.

Consistently creating and publishing relevant, genuinely valuable content that actually helps your audience improve their businesses will take them on a journey with you.

As they consume your high value content, they will steadily move from not knowing much about you, to liking or at least respecting you, and ultimately trusting you enough to buy a product or service or sign up for a program you run.

And when you do reach out to invite people to connect or start sending them emails, the same principles apply. Put in a bit of thought. Do some research. Identify topics and issues that would be relevant or identify some area of clear common ground.

And please, please avoid lines like “Your profile is awesome so I’d like to join your network”!

All that tells me is that you’ve put zero thought into it and may well have automated the whole process. I’m not against automation - it’s a very useful tool in the right hands - but it needs to be used appropriately, at the right time and with a little subtlety in the messaging.

You generally don’t propose marriage on the first date so it beats me why so many online marketers think they’re going to snag a sale with a cold pitch.

All of the work I’ve described happens online. When you’ve built up a solid level of trust and your prospect is starting to ask questions, that’s the time to move the conversation offline and into the real world.

That’s when you can suggest a Zoom call, a phone catchup or even a face to face meeting to talk things through in more detail.

And if this sounds like you may be ‘giving away’ slices of your carefully crafted IP long before a sale happens, you’re right.

That’s just how content marketing works. And believe me after nearly 10 years in a business devoted to content marketing on LinkedIn I can tell you it does work.

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