How to Find Clients on LinkedIn (5 Minutes Per Day)

LinkedIn is a treasure trove of new leads and clients, as long as you know how to use it to your advantage.

For a majority of business owners, attracting clients on LinkedIn often feels like a serious struggle. Understanding the ins and outs of the platform often seems a bit difficult for most entrepreneurs.

However, it doesn’t have to be. By sparing just five to ten minutes out of your day and dedicating your attention to LinkedIn, you could potentially turn it into a prime hunting ground for your company.

There are several simple things that you could be doing right now to bring about a serious change in your strategy. If you have decided to take the plunge into the LinkedIn ocean and start fishing for clients, here are just a few tips to help you land your first catch quickly and find clients on Linkedin!

Target the Right Keywords (Use Boolean Search)

Boolean searches use symbolic logic in order to find what you are looking for without having to run multiple searches. It allows the use of common operators, such as AND, NOT, and OR. It allows you to limit, broaden, or more accurately define your search parameters.

If you aren’t using the Boolean search on LinkedIn, you are missing out. It works exactly as intended, and allows you to better conduct your searches. Here are some of the options available with LinkedIn Boolean Search:

• Quoted searches:?if you run a search and add the keywords within quotation marks, LinkedIn will run an exact search for the keywords. However, you should know that stop words like “with,” “by,” and “in” are not registered.
• AND searches:?If you write AND (capitalized) and then run a search, it’ll show you all of the results from a list. For instance, if you are looking for clients in a specific niche, you could write something like “SaaS AND finance” for more accurate results.
• NOT searches:?If you want to exclude a particular search term from the results, you can use the NOT (capitalized) in your search. This will allow you to further narrow down your results. For instance, you could search for a “developer NOT designer.”
• OR searches:?If you want to see results that include one or more items, you can use the OR (capitalized) operator. This is great for getting more results from a specific niche. For instance, you could search for “eCommerce OR agency.”
• Parentheses:?You can also run a search using parentheses. For instance, if you want to find potential leads who are decision-makers in their organizations, but don’t want assistants, you can run a search such as “product managers NOT (assistant OR deputy).

As you can see, Boolean search is incredibly effective if you do it right. As long as you are able to narrow down your search results, you can eventually find relevant clients or leads that you can eventually reach out to.

Optimize Your Profile

Your profile is the first thing that a potential client is going to see when they log on to LinkedIn. It is imperative that you optimize your LinkedIn profile if you want to leave a strong impression on your clients.

If you don’t leave a good impression on your clients, your outreaches will fall on deaf ears. There are several things that you can do to improve your profile and make a better impression on visitors. Let’s run through them one by one.

Use Professional Picture

One of the best ways to create a strong impression on potential profile visitors is to use a good profile photo. It always pays to hire a professional to take a few headshots that you can use for your LinkedIn profile.

Using the same photo that you are using on Instagram or Facebook is absolutely not recommended. A professional profile photo shows that you are willing to make the extra effort to impress prospective clients. Here are some good practices to follow when selecting a LinkedIn profile photo:

• Always choose a clear, high-res image.
• Choose a photo in which your face takes up 60% of the full-frame.
• Never choose group photos. You should be the only person in the picture.
• Always use a smiling photo. The right expressions can make all the difference.
• Always choose a photo with a clear background.

Spending some money on hiring a professional photographer to take a few pictures of you in the studio can actually have a good ROI!

Curate Your Best Content

Daymond John, the man behind FUBU and one of the mainstays on Shark Tank, regularly updates the “Featured” section on his profile. He’s a millionaire, but he always curates and presents his best content on the platform.

If such a successful person does it, you should too. By curating your best content on your profile, you will improve your authority and your reputation on different topics. If you are approaching clients in a relevant niche, this could work wonders for you.

Add a Professional Heading

A professional, relevant headline goes a long way in improving your profile and the impression it leaves on visitors. When creating a headline for your LinkedIn profile, don’t just go with another common one like “Product Manager” or “Marketing Executive.”

Instead, your headline should focus on your target audience, what you can do for them, and how your contributions can solve their problems. For instance, if you are a content marketer working with digital agencies, your headline could be something like:

Helping digital agencies improve content reach and defining user journeys to improve brand awareness.

Add Keyword-Optimized Summary

A properly optimized LinkedIn summary with the right keywords can go a long way in leaving the right impression on potential clients. You already know that keywords play an important role in how LinkedIn categorizes profiles.

Using industry lingo and experience-based vernacular can go a long way in leaving the right impression on your audience. Don’t just restrict keyword usage to the Summary section – sprinkle them throughout your profile!

Add a Bullet Summary Job Description Under Each Experience

Instead of writing overly long paragraphs detailing your job experience, try to make it short and relevant by adding bullet points. This is an excellent way to make your profile more scannable and to ensure that relevant information is highlighted at a glance.?

By adding a bulleted list, you make it easy for profile visitors to get all the details they need about your accomplishments and successes in seconds.

Regularly Post in Groups and Engage with Others

To further enhance your authority and credibility within a specific niche, it’s imperative that you start using LinkedIn on a regular basis. By regularly posting in groups, engaging with others’ posts, and initiating discussions on relevant topics, you can easily gain more connections.

Equation is simple:

Engaging with others = better reach = more connections = more leads

Unlike other social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn is used primarily for business purposes, so when you post something, expect a relevant, serious response. Groups on LinkedIn are a great way to engage with new prospects and to share insights into your own work.?

If you are active in different groups on the platform, it’s also going to help improve your SSI (which we’ll get to a bit later).

Build Your Ideal Client Persona

Before you start targeting clients on LinkedIn, it’s important for you to build an ideal client persona. Think of the persona as an archetype that you can create to determine the ideal customer for your company.

Adding psychographic details to the persona is very important, as it helps you identify clients who would be the best fit for your services. For instance, if you are offering services within a specific region, your ideal client persona would be people within that region along with other attributes your business model requires.

There are several questions to ask yourself when building an ideal client persona. Here are a few:

• What are your audience’s main demographics?
• Where does your audience do its research before shopping online?
• What are the main pain points that your audience faces?
• How does your ideal client wish to interact?
• What are their daily workflows like?
• What would be the ideal time to engage with them?
• How much are they willing to spend on services like yours?
• Are they seeking long term collaboration or project-based work?

All these questions will help you build a perfect client persona which will furthermore help you optimize your advertising strategies and the hunt for new clients as you’ll know exactly what you’re looking for.

The downside of not building an ideal client persona is that you might end up becoming a universal Yes-Man which often ends up in you investing all your resources for a very small to none benefit. So make sure to build your ideal client persona!

Work on Improving Your LinkedIn SSI

As a platform, LinkedIn was designed primarily for social sellers. It’s an excellent place to find new clients if you are great at conversations and are really good at what you do. If you are using Sales Navigator (as you should be!), you might already have an idea about the LinkedIn SSI.?

For those who don’t, the LinkedIn SSI is simply a metric to track just how good you are at social selling and execution. It’s known as the Social Selling Index, and it’s calculated based on four factors:

1. Your professional brand –?is your profile completed with your ideal client persona in mind??
2. Find the right people –?have you connected with the right people who are relevant to your industry?
3. Engage –?are you sharing updates that are worthy of discussions to build new relationships on the platform??
4. Relationships –?are you actively looking to build new relationships with decision-makers in your industry??

As shown above, social selling goes a long way in helping you increase your sales. You can?check your LinkedIn SSI?and get tips from the platform on how to improve it. The more you engage and participate on the platform, the better your score will get.?

Outreach

Now that you optimized your profile fully, increased your engagement and SSI score, it’s time to actually take steps to find clients.

Sure with all the steps previously completed you will have a much bigger chance of clients finding you but bear in mind that others are also hustling and reaching out to potential clients even they already have optimized profiles like you. Knowing that it’s a logical assumption that you’re missing out on finding new clients if you’re not doing the outreach!

Outreach can be a super boring and monotonous process, but the key is actually making personalized messages to potential clients.

If you send something like:

“Hey [NAME],

I’m John Doe and I have a marketing agency and I can help you grow your business, let me know if you’re interested”

…you won’t be getting much response from people you reached out to.

So if you find a person you think your services may improve their business personalize the message to them. Some things you should include in your message:

• Their actual name
• What are they missing out on that you noticed
• How you and your service can resolve that
• How much you can help them grow
• CTA

Here’s an example of a good-converting outreach message:

Hey [NAME],

Thanks for accepting my connect request!

I wanted to reach out to let you know that I dug a bit around your website as your service/software seemed very interesting (might be actually useful for my XYZ reasons!).

As I’m an SEO expert with 5 years of experience, I couldn’t help but notice that your blog posts aren’t reaching their full potential – you have good topic ideas that may get you a ton of traffic, but there’s a lot I see that you’re actually missing out!

Here’s a friendly tip: When covering a topic and writing a blog post, try to think like the reader — what questions would they actually have about your topic? Also, make sure that the structure is actually getting the reader step-by-step through the story and not skipping any steps!

I know this may seem like a lot of work, but I’m sure your readers and your business will be thankful!

Also, if you’re not sure how to get the most out of your blog feel free to reach out — my agency has some incredible solutions that I’m sure would be out of great benefit to you and your business! We can schedule a call or simply consult here!

Let me know!

Thank you,

[SIGNATURE]

With this method, we’re pretty certain that potential clients you reach out to will convert much better, and if not, at least they will know who you are and that you dedicated time to give them a friendly tip!

So in summary, here’s the formula:

1. Express gratitude for connecting with them
2. Let them know that you’re familiar with their business
3. Let them know about a few issues they currently have
4. Give them a friendly tip on how to solve the problem
5. Plug in your services?
6. CTA

We admit, this isn’t really a 5 minute per day thing, but sending one of these per day will cost you no more than 20 minutes. Another good thing is to consider hiring an outreach manager to do the heavy lifting for you.

Now that you know how to contact potential customers, happy outreach!

Advertise

Linkedin offers advertising as an option as well, and you can actually find a lot of clients if you’d rather invest the money instead of time spent on outreach.

They have multiple advertising options and you can get more information on their?Linkedin advertising landing page.

Linkedin Ads are far less complicated than Facebook/Instagram ads and Google Ads, yet they can actually convert far better, especially when it comes to the B2B industry.

The best thing about Linkedin Ads: they actually are 5 minutes per day!

Wrapping Up

If you do it right, LinkedIn can be a fantastic place for you to get new clients from. Since its acquisition, LinkedIn has become an excellent platform for sales professionals and entrepreneurs looking to promote their services.?

By spending just five minutes of your time each day working to improve your LinkedIn presence, you will notice a considerable uptick in the number of leads you generate through the platform.