LinkedIn is a great platform to create connections with decision-makers. You probably know that, right? However, as a leading social media agency UK, we often see that people send pitch messages straight away.
And if you use LinkedIn, you probably know what we are talking about as you might get tons of messages from people who just tell you why you should use their products or services.
All without knowing you or what you need.
And as such, this strategy has a very low success rate.
Funny thing is that most people who feel overwhelmed by similar messages use the very same strategy for themselves with the same poor results.
So, how could you successfully use LinkedIn to create valuable connections and land more sales and high-ticket clients?
Hi there, and welcome back to Serendipity Marketing. We're a digital marketing agency with a mission to help small businesses grow by applying psychology to their marketing strategies.
Before we get started, please go ahead and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram.
LinkedIn is one of the best places to find powerful people. You can find so many executives, so many millionaires, and billionaires all on LinkedIn.
It's a great place to go for connections. And the reason being is that it allows you to create strategic alliances versus a lot of other social networks out there which aren't that great for strategic alliances.
If you're not familiar with strategic alliances and how they work, don't worry about that. We are going to go quite a bit in-depth on that.
A quick thing for you to know is that 90% of corporate executives surveyed, they felt that strategic alliances or joint ventures with another company are essential to maintaining their competitive advantage.
This allows them to grow faster because if one business has a lot of customers and another business has a lot of customers, they're in similar fields and there's not a lot of overlap in customers, they can each promote each other's products, services, to their customer base and generate more revenue, which benefits both companies.
What is a strategic alliance?
A strategic alliance is nothing more than just people saying they're partnering together. It means that they want to expand their markets, their business, their customers, their profitability, and pretty much a way to grow faster.
And the reason people like partnerships is because partnerships allow you to scale quickly, versus if you had to go out there run marketing campaigns, get them up, do all the testing.
It takes much longer than someone saying "Hey, we have £5 million in revenue. We have all these customers. Let us just shoot an email out to all our paying customers to see if any of them want to use your product or service as well."
And with these strategic alliances, if you look at a lot of the industry leaders like Google and Disney or Apple or Microsoft, they all do them.
It allowed their businesses to grow fast, to scale, and that's why many of these companies are worth billions and billions of dollars.
As Michael Dell says "We work extensively with our partners across the ecosystem and it's a big part of how we evolve rapidly, reach new customers, gain access to the latest ingredient technologies. So, the partnerships and alliances are an incredibly important part of how we grow."
If Dell uses them, IBM uses them, a lot of the old school companies use them, and don't take them for granted as this archaic way of growing doesn't work anymore.
Instead, you should look at it as if the big guys are using it to grow, why can't use it for growth as well?
The number of alliances has grown by 20% a year with 10,000 new alliances being reported in the last 12 months alone.
More than 20% of revenue generated from the top 2000 US and European companies comes from alliances.
Now enterprise.com did a survey about alliances and what they ended up finding is when people are leveraging them, 49% of business reports more worth because of them, 21% higher revenues, and 38% increased productivity.
It's worth it.
You should consider it because it's proven it works and if it works for the big guys, it'll work really well for you too.
What we love about them is that if you combine those efforts with some of your other efforts, you can also improve your margins as well.
A good example of this is that if you do an alliance with someone and they can help move double the amount of inventory, well, if you're now producing more inventory in quantity, you can probably get better rates, and not only are you making more sales, but you can also increase your profitability per unit as well.
And this works well in both B2C products and B2B.
It doesn't matter if you're selling products, services, physical, or digital, alliances work.
And there are a lot of different ones that you can use such as joint ventures, affiliate marketing, cobranding, hosting, equality partnerships, endorsements, acquiring leads, licensing, doing cross-sells between your sales team, and new products, new markets.
One of our favourites is affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing
And the reason we love it is that if someone drives you a sale, you pay them. If they don't? Well, they eat the cost of marketing, and they take on the risks, which is great.
And there are a lot of different advantages.
Some of our favourite ones are you share infrastructure costs, share resources, allow you to scale faster, and allow you to reach new regions like international regions.
This is also how we expanded to regions like Spain and Italy really quickly. We did it by doing alliances with people on the ground, almost taking the franchising model like McDonald's but a little bit differently where it's owned and controlled by us in majority, but more so got people on the ground, give them some skin in the game and it allows them to push hard and allows you to grow quickly too.
Some other major benefits are that this allows you to get a leg up on your competition.
And in many cases, you can actually create a bigger company than your competition with alliances.
A great example of this is when Bill Gates partnered up with IBM when Microsoft was building out MS-DOS. And Windows and look at them now, they're huge, they're way bigger than IBM.
IBM hasn't had that growth rate that it once used to, but Microsoft is still booming.
And as mentioned, you can also use this to reduce your costs and increase your profits. As you scale up, you should get more efficient and so should your margins. You should see that in your profitability.
Low-cost scalable strategy
As a leading social media agency UK, what we also recommend that you do is, as your businesses grow from these alliances and as you're continuing to expand, not just into territories, but new product lines, new services, you can use these alliances to test out these products and services to see if they're working or not, so then that way you're not putting in too many resources into them.
And we've also found that it creates a lower barrier of entry to go into new products, new regions, you take less risk from all of this, and you can also share knowledge between the companies that have the alliances, which works out really well.
And last but not least, when we come to major benefits.
Alright, now before we move on with the next social media agency UK strategies for LinkedIn success, have you ever thought about how much you should invest in marketing to generate constant business growth? Click the button below to calculate the ideal marketing budget you should allocate for higher visibility, engagement, and profit.
How much should you invest in Digital Marketing?
Social Proof
It's great for social proof. If you're partnering up with some of these big brands, it makes you look better and it also gives confidence to your customers and to your own employees.
And it's a great way for you to also recruit more talent as well.
So now that you see the benefits of a strategic alliance, you need to now look at your strategic objectives.
You need to start with the big picture.
What are the key components that are necessary to make sure that it does well organizationally or with your partnerships?
Where are your partners going to come from?
What options do they have?
What do you want them to focus on?
Do you want them to focus on expanding one region to another or is it something else like helping you get a certain product out to a specific customer base?
Partnership Objectives
And as you figure out your objectives, then you can figure out how to partner with people and find the correct partner.
Because the last thing you want to do is find someone who can't fit your objectives.
You want someone who has strengths where you have weaknesses. You want someone who can help you explode into areas that you haven't tested before.
And the best partner will have done this many, many times for other people.
So, look out for someone's track record as well when you're partnering with them. And we want you to take everything that you've learned to find the best partner on LinkedIn.
Is their business scalable? What is their customer base? Is it similar to yours? Do they have a big sales organization? Can you create a win-win relationship between you and them?
Is a person that you're talking to on LinkedIn, the right fit and the decision-maker, or do you have to get to another person and go through this gatekeeper?
And you can find all these people on LinkedIn to really help you with these partnerships. And the benefit is not just for you guys, but it's also for your customer base as well.
If you can provide the customers with better solutions, more things that they're looking for, even if you don't provide them, it creates a win-win where they're going to be more loyal to you and they're going to be happier with you as well.
Use LinkedIn Groups
As a top social media agency UK, we recommend you check out groups on LinkedIn.
There are groups for everything. And within these groups, you can strike up conversations with people.
Let's say marketers, business development people, salespeople, executives, whoever it may be. So that way, you can strike up a conversation and potentially create this new partnership.
And you can nurture these relationships because, once you nurture them and you get to know them, then the partnerships will happen over time.
It's not quick, it takes a while.
But once you get them going, you can build a massive business just through partnerships.
And when you reach out, come prepared. Talk about what you can do for them.
Have the benefits, talk about how what you're doing can benefit them and vice versa, so that it becomes a win-win situation. And be open-minded, let them do a lot of the talking and find out their goals, their objectives, what they're looking for.
This way, you can make sure you fit in there and you can adapt what you're proposing, so that way it is truly a win-win situation, not just for you, but also for their customers and your customers as well.
And when you're doing all of this, keep in mind, that you got to execute.
And execution is the most important part.
If you don't execute on everything, well, nothing is really going to happen.
You want to monitor the results; you want to measure them. See what's happening. What's working, what's not working.
Because even though something sounds perfect, just because it sounds perfect, doesn't mean it always pencils out and it works the way you want right away.
Conclusion
LinkedIn is a great platform that can generate massive business growth. Don’t do like most people do which is pitching people in the first message.
If you want to land high-ticket clients, it’s all about connections, not straight sales.
And LinkedIn is by far the best platform where you can build relationships with high profiles in business that will help you grow and scale quicker.
So, if you follow the strategy our social media agency UK shares in this article, you’ll find yourself really taking advantage of LinkedIn and sharing common projects with high-level brands.
If you need help with your social media marketing to grow your business in terms of visibility, engagement, and profit, contact our social media agency UK today and speak with one of our digital marketing experts to see how we can build the bridge between the point you’re standing at right now and your goals.
