Unlock Your Small Biz Customer Growth with Authentic LinkedIn Marketing

In this episode of the Talk About Digital Podcast, host Mark A Preston dives into how small business owners can harness the full potential of LinkedIn to grow their customer base. If you're a small business looking to secure more leads, make impactful connections, and build lasting relationships with potential clients, this episode is packed with actionable advice on how to use LinkedIn as a customer growth tool.

Why LinkedIn is a Must for Small Businesses:

Mark breaks down why LinkedIn is one of the most powerful, yet underutilised platforms for small businesses. Unlike traditional advertising, LinkedIn is not just about selling; it’s about starting meaningful conversations, building trust, and opening doors to opportunities you wouldn’t normally have access to.

Key Insights for Small Business Owners:

• Building Relationships, Not Just Selling: Learn how to use LinkedIn to initiate genuine conversations that can lead to long-term customer relationships. Mark emphasises the importance of avoiding automated sales pitches and instead focusing on mutual benefit in every interaction.
• Mastering LinkedIn Profiles and Engagement: Mark provides tips on how to optimise your personal profile to showcase your expertise and how to use valuable content to position yourself as a go-to expert in your field. This helps potential clients recognise you as a solution to their problems.
• The Power of Personalisation: One of the most important takeaways is how to personalise your connection requests and messages on LinkedIn. By taking the time to research and understand your prospects, you can stand out from the crowd and start genuine, value-driven conversations.
• Taking the Conversation Offline: Mark shares his personal strategy for taking LinkedIn connections to the next level—by moving conversations off LinkedIn to phone calls, Zoom meetings, or in-person interactions, where relationships can truly grow.

What Will You Gain by Listening?

By tuning in to this episode, you’ll gain practical knowledge on how to leverage LinkedIn as a lead generation tool without being overly salesy. Mark’s step-by-step guidance on finding the right prospects, building rapport, and driving conversations towards business growth will help you unlock LinkedIn’s potential for your small business.

TAD Takeaway: The episode ends with a golden piece of advice: Use LinkedIn’s search feature to find your ideal customers, send personalised connection requests, and focus on the mutual benefit of the conversation. This approach will not only generate leads but help you build valuable, long-term relationships that drive customer growth.

If you’re ready to grow your small business through LinkedIn customer growth strategies, this episode is a must-listen.

This podcast is produced by Voice It Podcast Agency
https://voiceitpodcastagency.co.uk

Transcript

[00:00:00] Mark A Preston: Welcome to Talk About Digital, the podcast for small and medium sized businesses looking to grow new customers through impactful, low cost digital marketing strategies. Have you invested in digital marketing with zero positive impact? If this sounds like you, then this is the place for you. Each week, we provide actionable steps to move your business forward with our TAD takeaway, helping you to harness your biggest asset, yourself, to achieve big impact with minimal investment.

[00:00:36] Stay tuned as we dive into the world of digital marketing, offering insights and advice that will transform your business. Let's get started. Welcome to the talk about digital podcast. And this week, I'd love to talk to you about LinkedIn and how you as a small business can use the power and the vast network of LinkedIn to help grow your customer base now, for one, if you are not on LinkedIn.

[00:01:08] Get yourself on LinkedIn, but if you listen to this podcast, chances are you've already got some sort of profile on LinkedIn. Now there's a profile for your business on LinkedIn, a company page, and you have your own individual profile as a person. Now as a small business owner, it's your own profile that really matters.

[00:01:37] Just to give you a bit of context about the value of LinkedIn over the years, I've run my own businesses and agencies and everything. And I must've generated somewhere in the region of eight figures of new business using LinkedIn. Now. Over them years, I've tried and tested lots of things on LinkedIn and tried automation and it were just dire.

[00:02:09] It wasn't me. It wasn't my voice. It wasn't what I was trying to say. I mean, automation has its place in the world. But for me personally, I hate nothing more than receiving messages on LinkedIn that are just basically, I want to sell you this. And they haven't looked at my profile. They haven't gone to the effort of going through my profile, understanding who I am and what I provide.

[00:02:40] Like I say, over the years, I've used LinkedIn, To generate lots of business and one of the most powerful pieces of advice I could give is think about LinkedIn as your way as a small business to start a conversation with somebody that has the potential to buy what you provide. Think about it in that way.

[00:03:12] Think about LinkedIn being the conversation starter. Think about LinkedIn being the ability to open doors. That you wouldn't normally be able to open outside of LinkedIn. Now, once you've opened that door and you've started that conversation, my personal advice is take it off LinkedIn as soon as you can arrange a zoom call with them, go and meet them in person, pick up the telephone and carry on that conversation.

[00:03:48] LinkedIn is, is such a powerful tool. Powerful tool in the small business market that why not use it? Why not take advantage of what's already there? Why not take advantage of the massive network? As long as you understand your audience and who you want to do business with. It's about nurturing that relationship.

[00:04:16] It's about, you know, what can you post on your profile to give value to those people who will read it and think, ah, this person really knows what they're talking about. I have this problem and they can potentially solve it. It's about presenting yourself as an expert in a certain subject and topic. You know, it's portraying yourself.

[00:04:48] It's giving yourself a voice. It's giving yourself a personality and it's a way for you to get out there. And if it's done properly, There is no reason on earth that you cannot generate a solid flow of quality leads for your business using LinkedIn, as long as you think about things in the right way.

[00:05:16] Now, my TAD takeaway when it comes to LinkedIn, and for you, is Step back, understand who you want to do business with. Use LinkedIn search to find those people, send a personalized connection request to those people and try and look for, now this is the golden thing. Try and look for the mutual benefit in the conversation.

[00:05:52] If you go in saying, Oh, I am Mark and I sell training and come and do business with me. That's no good. You want to look for the mutual benefit. What benefit is there? To them and you create yourself a spreadsheet and go through that process and literally there's no right or wrong about how you communicate because each answer you provide will be determined on the message you receive.

[00:06:28] So. Go on, give it a try. Are you communicating with the right people on LinkedIn? Are you providing mutual benefit to them? Or are you keeping the conversation going on LinkedIn itself far too long? Honestly, pick up the phone, get that conversation off LinkedIn, and you will be surprised the benefit to your customer growth it makes.

[00:06:59] Until the next time, where I will be sitting down talking to a real life LinkedIn expert who has not only been advising businesses about LinkedIn for many years, he's actually got an inside view on LinkedIn and the features and everything that's coming up. So really. Just can't wait for that. I'm literally buzzing, as you can tell, because LinkedIn has been a pure goldmine for me, and it will be for you.

[00:07:36] Now, don't forget to tune in next week to listen to another episode of the Talk About Digital Podcast. Thank you for tuning into the talk about digital podcast. Remember, every small step you take brings you closer to your business goals. If you found today's episode helpful, subscribe to our podcast and sign up to your free 12 week TAD customer growth course at the link below.

[00:08:01] To www.talkaboutdigital.co uk to receive even more customer generating tips and in size. Until next time, keep harnessing your strengths and making actionable, impactful moves in your digital marketing journey. See you soon.