How to use LinkedIn to find customers in western countries
LinkedIn – is the most popular social network in the world, designed to find new contacts, communicate on business topics and find new business partners.
Despite this business-oriented concept, today you can more often find here all the “classics” from other social networks, such as Tik-Tok (for example cat pictures, viral videos, etc.). Nevertheless, in general, the network content is mostly related to business and the overwhelming majority of registered users are entrepreneurs from Western countries.
The process of finding customers is called lead generation, where potential customers are called “leads”.
There are several main approaches to conduct lead generation on LinkedIn:
1 With the help of content. Managing your content by placing posts with information relevant to your potential business partners from Western countries and constantly expanding your audience, you have the opportunity to get new customers for your business. After all, if the information is of interest to your contacts, the Linkedin algorithm, analyzing activity (“likes” and views), will show your information to an increasing number of Linkedin users. This way you can get an inbound lead from LinkedIn.
2 Communicating directly with Western customers (the so-called “cold outreach”) through the LinkedIn network. It is the most effective way, but for this, you need to meet some requirements:
- You have a conventional “portrait” of your potential Western customer (country, age, gender, an industry in which one works, problems that you will help to solve, and much more). That is, you understand who you are writing to and for what purpose. The presence of this information will allow you not to spam everyone in a row, but to communicate with your potential customers.
- You have a perfectly designed profile on this social network. We’ll be writing a whole article about it soon, but the main things to look out for are: professional photo, description of all your services, uploaded presentations about the company you work for, and so on.
- You are creative enough. Since this social network private messages are flooded with spam, you must find a way to “reach out” to the person you need. There are a lot of such methods, and one of the most effective is not to sell immediately, but to use the tactics of so-called “nurturing leads” to gradually increase communication with a person, at first (1-3 months) staying in contact with him, congratulating him on his birthday, or other significant personal life events without trying to sell anything.
- You have feedback from previous customers. If you are looking for ways to find customers through Linkedin IT services in western countries, most likely you already have a fairly “promoted” account on UpWork, or you have done several projects for Western customers. You should ask your ex or current customers to give you feedback on the Clutch platform. Thanks to positive customer reviews, Clutch has named BizZzdev a Top Agency in B2B Consulting for 2021. For example, here is our profile, where you can read the full versions of the reviews.
- You have a lot of time, or you know how to use automation for LinkedIn since the conversion rate is quite low: when sending 100 people an offer to join your contacts, you need to understand that only about 30 will accept your offer, about 5 will answer you and 1-2 want to chat with you about potential projects.
- You have materials that you can send in addition to your messages (presentations, case studies). After all, it is always better to support words with visual information.
- The texts of the messages themselves are the foundation on which the entire potential success of this event is built. If you write interesting (or better, exciting), then you have a good chance of finding Western customers through the Linkedin network. If you think that it is enough just to copy-paste ready-made generic mailings (like “Hi {name} I came across your profile …”) for you to succeed – don’t even think about starting. With this approach, you can only cause anger and aggression, they may complain about you and there is a risk of even getting your LinkedIn profile blocked if there are a lot of such complaints.
- You are ready to analyze all the subtleties of working with Western clients on Linkedin since even the time of sending messages is important. For example, understanding the time difference with your potential customers will help you to send your messages right at the beginning of the working day. The day of sending messages is also important: if you send something on Monday morning (client time) there is a 90% probability that you will simply drown in the sea of spam inundating the mailboxes and linked profiles of your western customers.
- Understanding the mentality of Western customers. Probably the most important point of all previously listed. If the Americans are quite open people and the deal can get closed within a month, then, for example, it is quite difficult to find an approach to the Scandinavians and the “closure” of the deal should not be expected in the next few months for sure. In this case, it is best to go to personal meetings, having previously agreed on them on Linkedin. It is crucial to earn trust and break the ice first since many countries with their cultural specificity oblige you to use individual approaches. Thus we consider the choice of a focus country as one of the most important points when elaborating a marketing strategy for IT company.
- Using other channels to increase the effectiveness of mailings, such as email newsletters, will be a big plus for achieving results.
! It is best, of course, to use both strategies – cold outreach, “pre-warming up” a potential customer of your IT services with the help of content.
Additionally, we recommend that you also read our article on SEO (SEO-Search Engine Optimization) – a tool that we consider to be the most inexpensive and effective for getting entry requests from potential western countries’ customers.
To summarize the above said we come to the following conclusions:
- It is possible to find Western customers through the Linkedin network, but the path is not that short and you need to have a profound knowledge base to get a result.
- You can independently find and “sort through” all the information about Linkedin lead generation presented on the web, but it will take you about a year to get the first sale starting from the time of reading this article (also read the article about how to create a sales department). You can reduce this time by applying to a company that provides consulting services for finding clients through the Linkedin network, but be careful when choosing a contractor: see their profiles, ask for examples of messages, screenshots of correspondence with clients, etc.
- Working with LinkedIn and email newsletters can be fully automated using modern automation tools and you can organize it by yourself, although the best choice is to use the services of professionals. It is better to give such things as creating a “client portrait” and writing mailings to people with experience in Linkedin because even sending 1000 messages a day without understanding your addressee and the purpose of writing, what services your potential customer from western countries may need, why should he choose you, etc. – you just “scream into the void”, hoping that you will be heard.
We hope that the information provided in this article is enough to take the first steps in the Linkedin social network and find customers from western countries for your IT company.
