Small Business Success Using LinkedIn

Expert Insight from Louisville Web Designers

All around us we see evidence that the world is becoming more transparent. People are sharing information about themselves, their knowledge, their businesses at a wondrous rate. As transparency proliferates, success becomes a little less about just access to information and resources, and a little more about how you use those resources and what you're using them to do.

Part of my goal in writing this column is to help along this information equalization - who knows how far it will go, but for now the shift is great for small business.
In this article in my I'm sharing the case studies of individual small businesses who took nothing but their time, their creativity and (mostly) free tools and turned them into successful marketing strategies on LinkedIn.

Each of these business owners has gracefully shared their knowledge, experience and prowess not just for a few moments in the spotlight, but because they know the transparency is coming, and they have much more to offer the world than just the ideas I'm sharing with you.

The most persistent theme in the LinkedIn strategies that I've used and encountered is that people are seeing success when using LinkedIn as a very targeted, high-touch marketing tool. Not as a spam blaster. When people spend the time to craft targeted messages to targeted groups of people, they see fantastic results. But this isn't a big shocker -- this is marketing 101. The more specific your audience and the more targeted your message, the better your results. So if this is marketing 101 why doesn't this kind of targeting happen all the time?

Often the reason business don't target (outside of not knowing who to target!) is that typically targeting is hard or expensive or both. How do you find all those small businesses owners in Kentucky in the trucking industry? In the past you had to buy a list, spend $$ for an ad that was mostly wasted or do a lot of cold calling. Now? Do a search on LinkedIn. LinkedIn makes it much FASTER, CHEAPER and EASIER to find and communicate with exactly the right people.

And we can all understand the value of fast, cheap and easy when it comes to marketing.

While a lot of marketing can be just a numbers game, that's not really the point on LinkedIn. I mean, it still gets down to numbers, but not in the anonymous, send-a-million-spam-messages-because-at-least-one-of-them-will-get-suckered-in kind of way. In fact that same search that allows you to find exactly the people you know you want, can even help you figure out who you want by simply looking for the commonalities and/or the points of difference in your search results.

The "killer app" for LinkedIn, is its particularly effectiveness for maintaining your weak ties with a purpose. That purpose is what I called "building your team" and what Seth Godin calls building your "tribe".

Building Your Tribe on LinkedIn

Building a tribe is good advice for any business. Who is that group of 1,000 people who will be ecstatic about what you're doing? For a lot of industries, I'll bet you can find a good number of them on LinkedIn.

Once you have an understanding of:

• the reason you want to use LinkedIn (I'm trying to build a community, I'm trying to support product sales, I'm trying to find consulting work) the tools available to you — search, groups, email blasts, Q&A your resources — i.e. I have 2 hours per week so either I can't do this on my own or it's going to take me much longer
And the most important question:

• who are you looking for
You can build a tribe that even your networking-iest friend would be envious of.
The List of LinkedIn Strategies for Small Business.

While we cannot possibly cover every LinkedIn strategy in a single article, and I unfortunately could not include every example I received, I've chosen some of the most widely used strategic goals and provided great examples of what small businesses have done to make LinkedIn work for them. They include:

• building a live community
• doing business development
• promoting a blog/branding/building traffic
• getting work as a freelancer or consultant
• promoting a product
• strategies for everyone

Building a Face-to-Face Community

LinkedIn can be an excellent tool for pulling people offline to congregate in the real world. Anyone looking to build a very targeted community of people who share a common and specific interest can use LinkedIn extremely successfully to find and build that community. Whether building a community that congregates online or in person, there are tools that can put your group on the map quickly:

Create a LinkedIn Group - Ours is Linking Louisville

Groups offer an easy way to enable your community members to congregate, an easy way for you to invite people to participate and an easy way for you to communicate with those who are already participating through group emails. This is a great option if you have a specific topic or idea around which people can freely congregate. Not such a great idea if you just want them to be "fans" of your business.

Use LinkedIn Events within a Group to build Offline Community

It's debatable whether the free LinkedIn Events are effective for promoting an event outside of an existing LinkedIn group. There is a paid option that allows you to promote your event to the top of the events list. But using them to promote an event within an existing group can be very successful.