How to Leverage LinkedIn for Your Export Business?

LinkedIn is one of the world’s largest social media websites and by far the largest professional networking website. It boasts 800 million users in 200 countries. With this pool of people all coalescing together and brought together by Linkedin, the possibilities are endless. You can use it for a myriad variety of purposes. One of those purposes is to utilise it by leveraging it for business purposes, more specifically, an export business purpose.?

For the uninitiated, exporting can be a risky proposition, resulting in trial and error methods that result in losses, leading to you shutting your business down before it even takes off. Here’s where Winning Mantra comes in.?

We can guide you through the process of international trade exports, helping you with export sales through export growth consulting, export training, and marketing consulting. Through Winning Mantra’s techniques and expertise, you too can build a profitable export business. One of Winning Mantra’s techniques is to leverage LinkedIn to increase sales and find potential clients, and we’ll be telling you about how you too can do the same. Here we go:?

1. Optimise your profile:? The very first thing you need to do when it comes to leveraging LinkedIn for exports is to optimise your profile. Not only is your profile the face of your digital footprint, but it is also the first impression you make on prospective clients. A great, optimised profile can be all the difference between getting and not getting clients.?

1. Use the Right keywords:? The second thing to note while optimising your profile is to keep LinkedIn’s algorithm in mind.? When a buyer types a keyword into LinkedIn's search bar, the network's algorithm considers the number of factors to determine whether your profile should rank higher or lower than those of other professionals on the network who offer a comparable service or product.

1. Connect with the Right: Although Connections in Common (shared), Connections by Degree (1st Degree, then 2nd, then 3rd), and Groups in Common (shared) have the largest impact on where you appear in a search, there are other strategies to boost your ranking, such as repeating target keywords across your profile and making sure your profile is 100% complete.

1. Create a Company Page: You can also use your LinkedIn page to drive brand awareness. Having a LinkedIn company page gives your export business a home base and allows buyers to discover and connect with you. They can learn more about your brand and the products that you offer. You can post behind-the-scenes information, share your designs to engage and foster a sense of community with your buyers. Understand your buyer’s thought process by always sharing a catalog with an engaged buyer and track which products they look at the most.?

That’s about optimizing your LinkedIn profile, now let’s understand how to leverage LinkedIn for your export business:?

1. Build your Target Community:?

To leverage LinkedIn for your export business, it is crucial that you connect with people into the same line of business or the ones directly associated with it. For eg: you could connect with Procurement Managers, Sales Managers, Manufacturers, etc. ? You could either connect with people company wise or even country wise, based on your target export countries.?

1. Exploit the Power of Personalised messages:?

When connecting with new people, always send a personalised message introducing yourself and why you want to connect with them. It helps build credibility and improves the chances of other people accepting your connection request.?

1. Engagement is the Key:

Once you have connected with new people don’t just have them as numbers in your list but ensure that you engage with their content too. It will not only help improve the recall value but will eventually help your business and network grow.

1. Build a Rapport:??

As time passes and you engage with people’s content, you may start building rapport with people via personal messages. Only once you feel confident about people and know what they exactly do, you may find a suitable opportunity to pitch your product/service.?

Note: However, Direct and Upfront Selling like sending your proposal or brochures in messages as soon as someone accepts your connection request is a BIG NO as it’s a deal breaker.

1. Maintain a Record:

Once you have a substantial number of people in your connection list, then maybe monthly or fortnightly, make a list of people you think can be your potential clients to be followed up on later for your business growth. Make sure your list includes details like their company name, designation, email address, etc.?

1. Use Tools:?

Having a data bank of customers is essential to expand your network and business too, however, all the important details of your connections might not be available on LinkedIn so you may use tools like Lusha, LinkedIn Premium, Import.io, Saivi, ParseHub, Diffbot, Scrapy, etc. to fetch contact information of your connections.?

1. Plan it well with patience:?

Building a business or even leveraging LinkedIn for sales is a game of patience. It takes time and gradually builds to the level you want it to. Therefore, even though it may sound uncanny, but leveraging LinkedIn for your business growth requires Planning and Patience. So hold on and keep working and we’re sure you will get there!

Important Tip: Spend at least an hour everyday on LinkedIn and engage, connect, post, share and build your network. It's tried and tested, take it from us- No one can do it for you. Only You Can!

For any other questions or queries related to exports or help with leveraging LinkedIn for exports, connect with our experts Mr. Sandeep Kaushik and Mr. Gagan Kapoor or visit our website at Winning Mantra.?