Winning More Business on LinkedIn

Editor's Note: We announced yesterday that there are over 15 million small business professionals on LinkedIn. Canada made it to the list of top 5 LinkedIn locations for small business professionals, so we invited Sourov De from Kitchener, Canada to share his small business story with us. Do you have a success story to tell? We want to hear from you too!

Can LinkedIn help a new business win more clients? We asked ourselves this question four years ago when we started our marketing firm Stryve Group. Back in 2008 when Stryve Group was in start-up mode we didn’t have a big fancy marketing budget. Much like any other business starting out, we had to figure out how to market ourselves to win more clients in the most efficient way.

So we turned to a couple of marketing tools in our toolbox to get our name out there. First, we created a list of people in our network that we thought could benefit from our services and called or emailed them to tell them how Stryve Group could help solve their marketing dilemmas. This was a slow and manual process. We thought to ourselves what a dream it would be if our ideal clients would just call us instead. The other tool in our marketing toolbox was (at the time) a “new hip” way of marketing using social media to connect with ideal clients. Our target clients are Marketing and Sales VPs or Managers and we knew that we were most likely to connect with these professionals over LinkedIn. So we focused on building our visibility on LinkedIn before any other social network in our social media marketing efforts. Here are the three steps we took:

1. Empower your employees on LinkedIn
We made sure each Stryve Group team member had LinkedIn profiles that would stand out and get noticed. We thought about the information our target clients would like to see on our employees' LinkedIn profiles and built content that aimed to answer typical questions such as, “What does Stryve Group do?” and “How is Stryve Group different than other marketing firms?”. We even put a SlideShare presentation on our LinkedIn profile that explained what a client engagement with Stryve Group looked like. When clients came through our LinkedIn profile, I didn’t have to spend time convincing them we were a company that could help them.

2. Participate in LinkedIn Groups
We joined groups where other Marketing and Sales Managers or VPs congregated like