4 Steps to Generating Leads from LinkedIn

For businesses, LinkedIn can be a goldmine for those who know how to use it. Here are four ways your business might benefit from using LinkedIn for generating leads:

Participation.  Encourage your staff to participate with LinkedIn.  Your business will have more visibility when staff creates an account so more professionals will associate with  your business.

Presence within LinkedIn.   Make an effort to spread the word about your availability in LinkedIn.  Promote your profile on your blog and Twitter feeds.  Add a QR code to the back of your business card that drives traffic to your LinkedIn profile.  Include the LinkedIn link on your email signature.  Add clients as connections to see their contacts (aka, new potential prospects).

Group Think.  Contribute to active group discussions and position yourself as an expert in your field.  Don't waste time on groups that have low member counts and little or no participation.   Give thoughtful and expert responses to questions.   Don't pitch your services on LinkedIn, there will be other opportunities for that.

Follow Up.  Track who is viewing your company website and your profile.    These people may be potential leads researching your company.  Follow up leads with an email, LinkedIn's InMail or phone call.

Lead generation within LinkedIn does require some investment of your time.  But by engaging with professionals from relevant industries on social media sites, your list of prospects will grow.

Turn your Office Place into a Green Environment

We all have heard of “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”.   This may be easy to do at home but harder to accomplish in the workplace.   However, if you are able to make your marketing material green than there is a chance you might attract a variety of customers by advertising with the green approach.

Reduce -- If your habit includes sending emails, internet new articles, projects to the printer to have  a hard copy of then you may want to change your habits.  Although it is important to see how the product will actually look on paper, employees tend to print unnecessary documents.  Encourage employees to limit clicking the print button.

Reuse and Recycle  -- Do you have left over letterhead, flyers or other materials that are not used anymore?   Before tossing them, think of ways to reuse this paper.   Create a bin for paper that can be used again.  Put back in the printer to print on other side.   Use this paper as scrap note paper.  See if the staff can come up with creative ways to reuse paper.  

Many customers appreciate hearing about what your business is doing to help the environment.   Be honest of your recycling practices that you have established.  They may be no brainer practices, but is can be easy to embellish your recycling practice. 

Generating Leads on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a professional networking site businesses need to know how to use.  We came across a few ways businesses can use LinkedIn to generate leads.

Create a company page as we did for MarketMailPrint and fill out your profile as much as you can.  Have the staff participate by creating an account to help get more visibility to your company page and name.    Remind the staff to maintain a professional image of their profile.  LinkedIn should not be used to post party pictures or silly personal information.  

Once you have a company page created, do not let it go dominate.  Promote your company page profile on your blog or twitter accounts.  Do you have a blank side on your business cards?    Since you are handing out your business cards, have your business cards have a dual purpose.   On the blank side, print  a QR code that drives traffic to your LinkedIn profile.  Another idea is to include a link to your LinkedIn profile on your email signature.  

Be active with LinkedIn profile by joining groups and participate in some discussions. Select your groups wisely.   Look for groups that have a lot of participation.   Stay away from groups that have lots of members but little activity.  

Use Google analytics to track who is viewing your LinkedIn profile.  Track those people who have viewed your profile, these may be potential leads that are researching your company.   Follow up with an email or phone call to see if they may be a viable lead.

Generating leads from LinkedIn will need some investment of your time but it will help introduce potential customers.

Do you need a new Marketing Plan?

Has your company been doing the same marketing strategy for years?   If so, it may be time for you the change.  Social media  and QR Codes have introduced several  new marketing strategies.  See which ones may work best for you to help grow your business.

You will need to figure out  what marketing activity worked from your marketing plan last year.  There is a simple way to find out, just  ask how you are doing.  Publish an online survey, phone calls or ask customers in-person.    Feedback may be difficult to hear sometimes but listen to everything your customers are saying.  They will give you a different view of which promotions worked and which ones did not work as well as you had planned.  

When considering changing your marketing plan, remember to consider your Return on Investment.   Look at each marketing activity and evaluate if it was worth the Return of Investment instead of evaluating your marketing budget.   Make changes to marketing activities that were lacking.   Keep the marketing activities that had a good Return on Investment, you may want to think of ways to improve them.

How to Handle Charitable Donation Requests

Donating your services or products to a charitable organization is a good way to give back to the community and effective way to build your company's relationships.   As you would like to say yes to all request, it is just not possible.   Here are a some ways your company can handle these request:

Create a dedicated page on your website to handle charitable contribution request.   You can direct visitors to a specific page to submit a form request.  This form allows you to setup an automated response email for every submitted form request. 

This dedicated page can also contain your step-by-step procedures for handling charitable donation requests.   For example, once a form is submitted, it goes to a committee for review and then the organization will be notified whether or not their request can be fulfilled.

This page is a good place to highlight all the charitable organizations and events you have already sponsored.   Include testimonials from the organizations you have supported on this page.   Showcasing your contributions will show the community how supportive and involved you are which will strengthen your brand and reputation. 

Getting people to talk about your business offline

Social media is an essential way to get customers talking about your business.  Word of mouth is still an effective way to keep your business on customer’s minds.  Here are a few ideas to create buzz around your business:

Since MarketMailPrint offers free delivery and pickup, we try to engage with our customers when dropping off a business card order or customer brochures.  Customers have a busy schedule and appreciate staying at the office to handle their day-to-day operations instead of driving in busy traffic to pick up an order at MarketMailPrint.

Tell a story about one of your staff’s accomplishments, achievement or recent trip.   Feature this story  in your business window or front counter.  The story does not need to be very personal but make it interesting to spark conversation.  A table tent may help to make the display even interesting.

Put a guestbook on the front counter or by the receptionist desk.  The presence of a guestbook with help the staff focus on customer service.  Encourage customers to sign in and to write their thoughts about their experience with your business.  Leaving colorful markers or pens by the guestbook may get more customers to participate in signing the book.

Take some of these ideas and incorporate what works best with your business.

What is a Landing Page?

What is a Landing Page?

A landing page is a specific page on your website that is dedicated to a product or service.  Landing pages are created to help online users/customers to find what they are searching for without navigating through an entire website.

Create keywords for these landing pages for SEO so that when a user searches on those keywords in a search engine, the return result will be a link to that specific page on your website not your Home page.   This takes the user/customer to the product or service their searching for.

Landing pages have to be structured well to get the attention of your audience.  Make these pages visually interesting and not complicated.   Focus on one product or service per landing page.  Your content should be easy  for anyone to understand and relate to.   Try to keep your content to a computer monitor length.  Avoid too much text which causes the user to scroll. 

Add a clear call to action comment for the user to take.   Adding a simple statement  such as "call us" or "like us on Facebook" will get this user one step closer to becoming a potential customer.
Tracking these landing pages by analytics will help you see how many visitors came to that landing page and what they clicked on.   This gives you valuable information about your website and landing pages on which ones work well and which ones need improvements.

We, MarketMailPrint, created a landing page that list all our product categories.  This allowed us to create another landing page for one specific product so when clicked, the user is taken directly to the product page not the Home page.  See a sample landing page for MarketMailPrint business cards.

Scoring

     Scoring is creasing a paper for the purpose of making folding easier. If you were to take a sheet of card stock and try to fold it in half, it would look cracked and uneven, and pretty much not very attractive at all. But when you score a sheet of card stock, it indents the paper where it is intended to fold, giving a nice clean and even crease without the cracks.

     In the past, whenever a customer ordered a job that needed to be scored [cards, booklet covers, table tents, pocket folders, etc] we were setting up and scoring these jobs by hand. Even though it proved as a pretty decent arm workout, it was very time consuming. But, good news! We recently obtained a new Auto-Creaser that scores jobs over 10 times faster than before, and just in time for our yearly slew of Christmas and New Years card jobs. With this new machine, we can finish folding job faster and more efficiently.

     Another benefit of this machines is that it can even helps text weight papers look better. Text weights can be folded without scoring because they are light weight sheets. Unfortunately, for many small quantity jobs that are printed on digital copiers, there can still be cracking where the artwork meets the fold. As you may or may not know, copiers lay toner (a polymer/plastic) on top of the paper. Because it's not a real ink and hasn't soaked into the fibers of the paper, digital will crack when folded. Scoring these jobs — especially brochures — dramatically improves the look and quality. Once you see the difference you won't ever want to go back to the old way again.