Front-Foot Marketing: The Art Of Getting In Front Of Your Top Prospects On LinkedIn

In case you’re interested...

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Let’s dive in….

Do you respond only to those who contact you on LinkedIn? Occupying your small corner and only sticking your head out when asked?

That will get you nowhere. You’re wasting your time.

Either delete your LinkedIn profile or come out from that pile of rocks and get on the front foot with your marketing…

All smart chipmunks know that, in order to get the best nuts, you need to find the best nut trees. That means getting out there and being active!

Chipmunks are not known for their intelligence - but they do know that. So it always surprises us to hear this question from established professionals:

“How do I actually get in front of the top prospects in my network? I have a great network but the people I really want to get in front of never appear in my news feed…”

Guess what? Yep - think nuts!

Get on the front foot with your marketing

The reason why you’ve not yet got a conversation going with your top prospects on LinkedIn is because you’re invisible to them. You’ve been hiding in the rocks and the best nuts sure as heck don’t come to you.

If your top prospects don’t appear in your news feed, it’s difficult to start a conversation. But it’s even harder if you don’t appear in theirs…and don’t make any attempts to track them down when they are active (which might not be very often).

Get on the front foot with something we call ‘inception marketing’. This is where your activity makes you visible and you can then thrust yourself in the spotlight.

Inception marketing

Firstly, bear in mind that the LinkedIn ‘algorithm’ is different to Facebook: news feeds are dominated by those who are most active and most followed: they are the ones you see on your news feed.

That’s precisely why the Influencer Project strategy is based around supercharging activity,

Many of your top prospects may be like typical professionals on LinkedIn, who logon once a week for 30 minutes and respond to messages or connection requests.

To get in front of them, follow three basic steps:

1. Identify the top 10 prospects in your network
2. Aim to start a conversation with each of them
3. Get on the front foot: take the initiative by liking their comments…

How do you get top prospects more active?

To get your top 10 prospects seeing you more often and to entice them into taking more activity, start by opening their profiles.

Scroll down and you will see a section called ACTIVITY, which includes a summary of the content published and all their news feed activity, such as comments, replies, likes etc.

Your leading prospects (unlike Rana above) may have very little activity to show. After all, they are not appearing regularly in your news feed, so they may be largely inactive.

However, any activity they take opens the door for you to get on the front foot.

Click on SEE ALL ACTIVITY and wherever you see that they’ve made a comment that you agree with, ‘like it’. They will see this in their news feed and appreciate that someone has ‘liked’ a comment they made. It’s human nature.

Simply ‘liking’ one of their posts is good (if there are any) but ‘liking’ a comment potentially goes a layer deeper and shows them you are listening to what they say. Your ‘like’ acts as a validation for their comment and, let’s face it, everyone likes someone who agrees with them.

But don’t stop there. Add your own comment to theirs: something like “Totally agree, Rana”. Then tag their name to make doubly sure they are notified.

Don’t forget that the person who posted is seeing your comment as well as the prospect of yours who commented: a double ‘reach out’.

Create more conversations with prospects…

The effect of taking this simple front-foot approach? You enter a prospect’s awareness and make it more likely to create a conversation with them.

People are more likely to give the time of day to you when you are already familiar to them - rather than a ‘cold’ contact approaching them out of the blue. Again - that’s just human nature.

By getting proactive in engaging with them on LinkedIn, you take the important first step of forcing them to familiarise themselves with who you are.

This simple but unique strategy to get in front of your prospects is one that most people aren’t doing. It is true ‘outside the box’ thinking and can accelerate the process of getting more of the leads you really want on LinkedIn.

Try front-foot marketing and see how you start to get ahead…

P.s. Whenever you’re ready… here are 3 ways I can help you grow your business with LinkedIn

1. Join the Influencer Boardroom and connect with other advisors and consultants who are scaling too: It’s our new Facebook community where smart advisors and consultants learn to generate more purpose, profit and power. - Click Here

2. Join Our Implementation Program and be a Case Study: I’m putting together a new consulting case study group inside The Influencer Project this month… stay tuned for details. If you’d like to work with me on your client-getting and business growth plans using LinkedIn… just send me a message and put “Case Study” in it and I’ll get you more info.

3. Work with me and my team privately: If you’d like to work directly with me and my team to take you from 6 to 7 figures and level things up… just send me a message and put “Private” in the first line… tell me a little about your business and what you’d like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details.