Behind the profiles of LinkedIn’s nearly 500 million users are real professionals, including your ideal clients. And when it comes to selling on LinkedIn, or anywhere online for that matter, your ability to scale up warm, inbound leads is one reason social media marketing is so powerful.
On the former desktop design, “notifications” used to be the “flag” with updates in a drop-down menu that was somewhat hidden on the site.
LinkedIn recently announced that this important feature is now more visible and more powerful, which is great news for your marketing efforts!
Creating Relationships Through Content
In today’s online marketplace, content is currency. Creating great content and then sharing it online is how you “purchase” the time, attention and interest of potential customers.
When you help others to solve a pressing problem or reach a specific goal via your status updates, long-form posts, and other content, it allows you demonstrate your expertise in your field, and opens the door to 1-on-1, personalized conversations with people who like and engage with your content.
This marketing strategy removes the “cold call,” and instead gives you a “warm” approach to interacting with prospects on LinkedIn.
In fact, people on the platform are excited to hear from you because they’ve already been “warmed up” by your helpful content.
(Related: The New Reality on Online Sales and Marketing)
Growing Relationships Using Notifications
Notifications on LinkedIn allow you to immediately see what content of yours other professionals are liking, sharing and commenting on.
LinkedIn has also added “ice breakers” that will help you with the right words to spark conversations when messaging your connections, and the platform’s new desktop design can also sync with your calendar to help you better manage your business relationships and set up meetings.
Here’s a video from LinkedIn that shows the top tips for the new Desktop redesign, including where to find the Notifications feature.
VIDEO:
Taking the Next Step
Using this data gives you the context to take the next step and begin those 1-on-1 conversations that will build business relationships that lead to sales.
For example, when you see a notification that someone liked your blog post, you can spark a personal, 1-on-1 conversation via a personalized LinkedIn invite or LinkedIn message with them around the content they engaged with (there’s your context) — and you can do it in real time.
(Related: How to Write Irresistible LinkedIn Messages)
As long as you remain personalized and not overly-spammy or sales-y, your conversations will begin to open more opportunities to move them further into your sales funnel.
