Brainstorm Design Blog

This guest blog has been written by Tim Watson

In the last quarter LinkedIn earned $33.3 million from Premium membership subscriptions. That’s 20% of LinkedIn revenues and its grown 87% in the last year.

Persuading more of the 90% of free members to upgrade is a major revenue opportunity for LinkedIn.

LinkedIn are using email to convert members, sending a free one month trial offer. I am a LinkedIn member and after many years still on the free package. As an early adopter of LinkedIn this makes me a target for Premium membership upgrade.

Just as I was putting the finishing touches to a new email copy & creative training deck of 87 slides a LinkedIn upgrade offer dropped into my inbox. It demonstrates several of the principles I’d just covered in the slide deck.

LinkedIn have optimised

What happened next was even better. I found a copy of the same offer from last November in one of my email folders (LinkedIn have tried a few times to convert me).

The difference between the email now and from last November is an excellent case study in email optimisation, so let me share the key elements of what changed and why.

In a recent study of over 5,000 businesses, HubSpot found that traffic from LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74%, almost 3 times higher (277%) than both Twitter (.69%) and Facebook (.77%).  

Which social media platform generates the most business for you? Why not take part in our poll!

On Wednesday 25th April, I will be at Regus Borehamwood discussing the various ways that LinkedIn can be used to sell to other businesses. I will be demonstrating why LinkedIn is 277% more successful than Facebook and Twitter at lead generation. The briefing will cover...

• How to promote your business on your LinkedIn profile
• Using LinkedIn company pages
• LinkedIn Events
• Promoting your business on LinkedIn groups
• LinkedIn advertising

The session will end with a Q&A session.

With the recession continuing and bank loans ever harder to come by, even firms lacking a marketing or sales budget can attract new clients.

Straightened economic times may seem to constrain business opportunities – yet there are solutions around, and one is to get on LinkedIn. Not only is it (mostly) free but it enables you to make direct contact with your target audience. Described as the “Facebook for business people”, LinkedIn has over 100 million users in more than 200 countries, and it enables you to get introduced to new clients without having to make cold calls or advertise.  

For several years, I was a BNI member. I was given a business card folder with the business cards of all the people in my chapter. If I had a meeting with a client, I would present the client with my folder and ask them if they needed the services of anyone listed there.

Now I do the same thing, but using my iPhone. Typically, I will have one to one meeting with a client and they will list a particular problem e.g. they are unhappy with their accountant, they are looking for a courier, they need legal advice. All I need to do is get my iPhone out, switch on my LinkedIn app and look up the details of trusted suppliers who can help them.

Dear Danny,

I would like to promote my business on LinkedIn. I am a member of a number of LinkedIn groups that include people I would like to do business with. Is it ok to promote my services on LinkedIn group discussions?

Best regards,

Brian

How can LinkedIn work for my business? How do I use LinkedIn to attract new clients? How can LinkedIn help us find the top candidates?

If you would like these and other questions, I will be online Thursday 30th November between 2.00 and 4.00pm and waiting to answer your questions.You can either tweet me (@brainstormdsgn) or post your questions to our Facebook page.

You can also post questions on our LinkedIn group "Brainstorm Design". I look froward to hearing from you!

Do you find that a lot of the discussions on LinkedIn are pointless? Or little more than excuses to attract attention?

I've recently noticed that many of the articles that pose as "discussions" are just links to people's blogs or advertisements for business. Many LinkedIn group members are suffering from "discussion fatigue" and most of these discussions are ignored. 

The whole point of a discussion is to attract feedback to what you are saying, so think carefully about what you can say that will get a reaction.

Do you have a duplicate LinkedIn account? We recommend you delete one of them to avoid confusing your customers.