K atie c ouric

CHAPTER 11
SUBSTANTIAL BUSINESS GROWTH
WITH LINKEDIN
inkedIn is a powerful platform that can help you target and reach specific
people that can lead to significant growth for your business. At first glance,
some people just see it as a job-searching and position-filling platform, but
if leveraged properly, it can be tremendous for advertising to sell products,
strike big deals, and forge career-changing connections. If you have a
product, for example, that’s beneficial to chief marketing officers (CMOs)
of companies with at least a thousand employees, LinkedIn is by far the
best and perhaps the only tool that allows you to find those people at scale.
AJ Wilcox, a LinkedIn ad consultant, founded 
B2Linked.com
 in 2014,
which has managed more than a hundred LinkedIn ad accounts, has spent a
cumulative of more than $100 million on the platform (more than any other
individual or company worldwide), and has managed three of LinkedIn’s
top five customers. He believes that LinkedIn is the easiest place to gain
access to people who have the job titles, skills, or business-related profile
traits you’re looking for to build and grow your brand or company.
Biz Development and Forging Strong
Partnerships
Wilcox says that LinkedIn is great for searching for jobs because you can
connect with anyone you want. Your level of access to people is only

---

limited by your ability to reach out. You can use the search features to find
the head of marketing for the company you’d love to work with. If you have
a great service for them, nothing stops you from writing a custom
connection request saying, “Hey, I’ve followed you for years and I really
love your work. I would love to connect with you.” And once you’re
connected to someone on LinkedIn, you have access to his or her email
address or any other profile information they display. You can send emails
back and forth for free in an unlimited manner.
If you know someone with whom you’d like to connect—your ideal
customer or partner—you can foster a line of communication. The key is to
be smart in how you reach out. You don’t want to send a request saying,
“Hey, I want to get you on the phone and try and sell you something.” It’s
about finding ways to provide value. Start with an initial compliment or
something that builds a relationship first without trying to sell anything.
Wilcox points out that everyone hates to be sold to, but everyone loves
to buy. So when you first reach out, don’t come off like you’re there to sell
something or it will be the last time you hear from them. You’ll be
categorized as spam. I have personally found tremendous success by taking
the approach of reaching out with the intent of providing true value to help
an individual grow a business or be more successful at work; that can
significantly increase the chance of getting a response and can eventually
lead to a sale. Don’t sell them your service or product; instead offer unique
value to them through your product or service. I know this may sound a bit
similar, so let me give you an example.
When I was advising a company that was selling social paid
optimization (i.e., managing and optimizing social media paid campaigns)
for Fortune 100 and 500 companies, I didn’t reach out to people and say,
“Hi, I would love to talk to you about managing your paid social
campaigns. Are you available for a quick call this week?” That is way too
salesy and would never get a response. Instead, I would send something
along the following lines:
Hi {person’s name}, I first want to say congrats on all of your
success at {company name}. What you were able to achieve with
{cite a specific project, product, or campaign} is truly remarkable.

---

Because you are an expert in the digital field, I wanted to let you
know about a new tech platform we launched that provides exact
data on how all of your competitors are spending on social channels,
along with insights on their past performance. It also provides deep
data on which videos visitors view before and after watching a
competitor’s video, as well as on which social platforms they
viewed the video.
The intriguing part of the platform is all of this data can then be
mined and used to increase the quality score of your own videos,
which in return drops the cost per view of your own campaigns and
increases the organic virality of the video. The best part of the
platform is that it is 100 percent transparent and can save you up to
{insert impressive statistic} on your paid media campaigns, while
also increasing your performance by {insert impressive statistic}.
We are currently working with {list client names} with this new
technology. Because you’re always on the cutting edge of digital, I
wanted to forward the info along as I thought it might be helpful. I
would be happy to make an intro to the company if you’re interested
in learning more.
Best,
Brendan Kane
This message is positioned from the standpoint of providing value to the
person to increase the success of their his or her social efforts, not about
wanting to sell something. Essentially, you apply the same rules that work
for in-person networking. You never walk up to people at a networking
event, shove your card in their hand, and say, “Hey, you’re from that
company. We should do business.” That’s just going to lead to a lot of
people avoiding you on the way to the punch table. Always start with a soft
introduction and find out how you can provide value to the other person as
quickly as possible.

---