0LinkedIn is estimated to be so valuable that the Microsoft purchased the entire network for $26.2 billion. LinkedIn is used for networking, sales, job posting and headhunting, as well as marketing campaigns and sharing valuable business knowledge with 70 million of monthly active users on their SlideShare platform.
LinkedIn Stats For B2B Sales And Marketers
Latest LinkedIn stats show that this network has about 500 million users, that means you have a direct contact with half a billion (!) professionals all around the world. But LinkedIn representatives stated that they aim to reach a user base of 3 billion. About 40% of that number use this network daily and a new profile is opened every two seconds. More than 70% of a total number is outside of United States, with the majority of users from India, Brazil, Great Britain and Canada.
When it comes to decision makers, 44% of LinkedIn members earn more than $75,000 per year. About 41% of all millionaires in the world have a LinkedIn profile and an average CEO has 930 connections. LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions Blog stated that 61 million users on LinkedIn are senior level influencers and 40 million are in decision making position.
LinkedIn is also the most used platform amongst Fortune 500 companies and LinkedIn makes 50% of all social traffic to B2B websites and blogs. https://foundationinc.co/lab/b2b-marketing-linkedin-stats/
Total of 79% of B2B marketers see LinkedIn as a good source for generating leads and 59% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn generates leads for their business and 38% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn is generating revenue for them. https://foundationinc.co/lab/b2b-marketing-linkedin-stats/
Even though businesses get 80% of B2B leads from LinkedIn and the rest 20% from Twitter and Facebook, it would be a good idea to do the reverse ie. use your lead list to add decision makers on LinkedIn.
How to add decision makers on LinkedIn?
Let’s presume you already have an Ideal Customer Profile built and you need companies that would buy your service or a product. To save your time you might have outsourced your lead generation to a freelancer or a lead gen agency and you acquired a list of decision makers within those companies.
For some business these contact lists can have hundreds and thousands of contacts and adding them manually on LinkedIn would be a complete and utter waste of your time.
The trick or the hack how it’s popularly called is to upload those lists to your Contact section on LinkedIn and let the network do its job.
According to LinkedIn Help section all you have to do is go to My Network Icon on top of your LinkedIn page, click See All below Your connections on the left, then find Manage synced and imported contacts on the top right and click More options below. Here you will find an option Upload a file, but keep in mind that the file format must be in .csv, .txt, or .vcf. Now you can upload your list of decision makers’ contacts et voila! All your decision makers with LinkedIn profiles will be added to your Connections.
Of course, now is the time real magic begins but you are the one who must create it.
Maybe you would like to contact your decision makers with a sales pitch, maybe only introduce yourself or if you’re a shy salesperson or a marketer, you can only post your best content and let your connections know that you are really an expert in your field.
However, we still recommend contacting your decision makers via InMail since the stats show that SaaS company, Replicon, for example, has seen 11x better response rates on their sponsored InMail comparing to their email.
It’s nothing new knowing that to sell you must follow your decision makers on social media, especially LinkedIn, and comment on their content to make yourself more visible to your potential buyers. Besides, introducing yourself to your prospects via LinkedIn profile is much more personal and human than just sending an email blast.
Of course, you don’t have to write off your email campaign just yet, but having a nice face to go with your blast is always a plus.
Use LinkedIn To Build And Maintain Business Relationships
You don’t have the time to rummage through the LinkedIn yourself looking for companies that fit your Ideal Buying Persona and decision makers within those companies. Let the professionals in lead list building find your contacts for you and you can just upload them to your LinkedIn profile and start building relationships.
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