4 Key Tactics to Get ROI from LinkedIn

LinkedIn can be a great marketing tool for brand maintenance, but more importantly, for measurable, thought leadership objectives and sales-supporting lead generation. Brand maintenance activities on LinkedIn include steadily adding connections, making regular status updates to both company pages and personal profiles, commenting on discussions and auto-posting blog articles in groups. While you need to do this, it is vital to want more than just increased shares, connections, and followers. If used wisely, getting ROI from LinkedIn can be a piece of cake. Here are 4 key tactics for acquiring ROI from LinkedIn and assist in lead nurturing, demand generation, and opportunity development.  

1. Be specific

In order to achieve your goal of getting ROI from LinkedIn, you need to start by setting measurable objectives such as how many visitors do you want to drive to your landing page or how many influencers do you want to establish a connection with and so on. Next, you need to specify your target audience. LinkedIn has 238+ million users today. Obviously, not all of them is your target audience. Identifying your target audience helps you be more specific about the kind of content to offer them, know more about what grabs their attention, and what topics of interest do they have.

2. 2-way interaction is better than 1-way interaction

LinkedIn is not a platform to blast out all your marketing messages. If you have been regularly posting blog articles in status updates and groups, you have been treating LinkedIn like a distribution service for your news releases, and this is not quite its purpose. It is wise to think of LinkedIn as an online version of all your offline networking events such as conferences, group meetings etc. while you're there to make a presentation, people get real value from the conversations you have and the one-on-one knowledge-sharing you provide. This helps you get increased ROI from LinkedIn. 

Engaging and interacting with users personally can be done by joining as many relevant groups as possible, starting new discussions and participating in ongoing ones. Another effective way is to create a custom group to attract users and build a community.

3. Keep in touch

Statistics show that 75%-80% of customers and partners won’t be interested in making an association with your business or brand, the first time they make your acquaintance on LinkedIn. And if you don’t bother to keep in touch, they will lose interest rather quickly. When you participate in groups actively, it keeps you on top of your users’ minds. Add value by responding to comments or questions quickly. When you're part of a group, you can send an email-like message once a week to stay current in the minds of your group members.  

4. Be attentive

In order to get ROI from LinkedIn and achieve sales-related objectives, one needs to monitor the scene actively. Just being part of a group doesn’t ensure that your posts are seen by all the members. If they aren’t, then you may need to change your approach.