B2B Appointment Setting – Clear Through the LinkedIn Boot Camp [Infographic]

B2B Appointment Setting – Clear Through the LinkedIn Boot Camp [Infographic]:from Business 2 Community by Matt Ford

LinkedIn is a social networking site built for sales, marketing, and business professionals in general. The social networking site is widely used to connect with fellow businessmen and women to share views and gain assistance over a particular topic. It is also used for companies and organizations to search for suitable prospects for their b2b lead generation and appointment setting campaigns.

However, one does not simply gain quality business leads and sales appointments from LinkedIn (insert Boromir picture here for you Lord of the Rings fans). As such, Mindflash.com has supplied us with an infographic with regards to clearing through the basic training of the LinkedIn boot camp.

The first step is to condition the core of your LinkedIn account. In other words, you should complete your profile – straight up to 100%. Here’s one thing that you may or may not know, Google will rank your first and last name of your LinkedIn profile (SEO tactics still applies). You should know that first impressions will always last. Don’t let your prospects get a glimpse of a blank profile.

After finishing everything there is to place inside your profile, you should endure the endeavor of building your connections. You can’t get any business leads without having people to get to know about your company. Start by getting into groups and joining in on discussions. Once people see that you are active in the social networking site, they will add your profile to their connections list.

Once you have a good and growing number of connections, you need ammunition that will get your profile noticed by Google and your potential clients. Your guns and ammo will come in the form of customizing your LinkedIn profile URL and other websites (like your homepage) that you put in there. This will only take a few seconds to a couple of minutes to complete. Know that a customized URL has a higher chance of being clicked than a web address full of numbers.

The next thing is to ‘beef up’ your profile. Hence, put up a snazzy but still professional picture of yourself as your main display picture. Don’t stop there; you should also put stories about what you offer, the awards and recommendations you have received, videos about your business, and a bunch of other things that will entice your potential clients on purchasing your products and/or services.

When you have to fight for the success of your b2b lead generation and appointment setting campaign, then you have to fight a fair fight. Recommend connections to other people and they will most likely reciprocate by recommending you to their connections. This brings in a sort-of referral type of practice as you can get more inbound b2b leads without having to do much work (well, not really).

After all your personal stuff has been all well and done, time to build a profile about your company. Businesspeople rarely search for your name on Google or in LinkedIn. What they search are keywords like IT professionals or business call centers. Make sure that your company profile gets ranked with the keywords you have chosen by filling out the business’ about page, the products and services it offers, and its past clientèle.

Lastly, you can also add or link special applications to your profile as a form of special weaponry in targeting business leads. For example, you can link your WordPress blog or Slideshare account so that whenever there’s an update to these sites, your profile automatically updates itself.

Congratulations! You have just completed the LinkedIn Boot Camp.