LinkedIn is the best social media network for generating leads, particularly for financial brands. There, we said it. Perhaps you intuitively agree with us; if not, consider the facts: 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%).
For those of you who've contemplated LinkedIn for financial brands, these findings won't come as a surprise. After all, most LinkedIn users are professionals, and oftentimes, relatively affluent ones. They're on LinkedIn for networking purposes; as a result, they are tremendously open about their career, education, goals, interests, and so on — in other words, they happily provide valuable lead generation intelligence. To this point, LinkedIn users are striving to advance their careers, learn new things, and understand emerging business and technology trends: a perfect opportunity for financial brands to deliver useful inbound content.
All of this begets the question: how can financial brands generate high-quality leads on LinkedIn? Here are some tips.
Make sure your brand's profile is optimized. Should you generate prospect interest, you'll want to make sure your profile page is top-notch. Click here for more guidance.
Do your homework. Your brand can only market towards a finite amount of leads, so identify the low-hanging fruit. Most often, these individuals will map to a buyer persona. Let's say you're particularly interested in leads who are looking to take out loans. More often than not, these individuals are over 30, college educated and with steady employment; they also live within 30 miles of your bank. Naturally, you can discover all of these important details on their LinkedIn profile or by using LinkedIn's People Search Tool.
Deliver compelling content. As previously noted, LinkedIn users are an inquisitive bunch, and fortunately, there's no shortage of financial content that will be of interest to them. Taking the aforementioned buyer persona as an example, you can roll out blog posts or FAQs like "7 Things You Need to Know Before Taking Out an Auto Loan" or "Is Now the Time to Refinance? Click to Find Out."
Go with what works. Monitor comments, likes, shares, and clicks to see what types of content resonate most with LinkedIn users. Calibrate your approach accordingly.
Simplify communication. The beauty of inbound marketing is that more often than not, prospects will reach out to you before you reach out to them. So as you roll out content make sure readers know how to contact you for more information.
Participate in LinkedIn Answers and Groups. LinkedIn Answers is a section on the site where people can ask industry-specific questions and get advice; Groups consist of, well, groups of like-minded individuals. Join the financial-related sections and exude expertise; it's another great way to attract the attention of would-be leads.
Set up a Showcase Page. In November 2013, LinkedIn announced the rollout of LinkedIn Showcase Pages, a specific kind of page that's part of your Company Page that allows you to highlight specific brands of products. Click here for more information. (To that end, you may also want to consider paid ads on the platform.)
What do you think? Is LinkedIn for financial brands something that interests you? Has your firm experimented with lead generation on the platform? What social media network has proven to be the most successful in terms of generating leads?
