My step-by-step guide to leveraging LinkedIn
How Great Contractors are using LinkedIn for cheap marketing, easy business development, and closing deals.
LinkedIn is an extremely cheap marketing and business development tool, but most Contractors don’t leverage it to its full potential.
Contractors who DO fully leverage LinkedIn are doing things like:
Getting their name and brand out there daily
Establishing authority as expert builders with their ideal clients
Creating awareness about their business to potential employees
Getting meetings, building relationships, and winning work because of the platform
It’s a recipe for more work, better profits, and a more valuable business.
So, today, I want to share with you my step-by-step guide for leveraging LinkedIn as a marketing and business development tool.
It’s exactly the process I’ve used to grow my profile to over 9,000+ followers, get my company’s name—Well Built Construction Consulting—out there nationally, make hundreds of real relationships, and close multiple 5 and 6-figure deals.
You can do it too. Let’s jump in.
Step 1: Be a human
In today’s world, having a company LinkedIn page is important, but people want to work with and learn from real people.
So, if you want to get the most out of LinkedIn, start by getting PEOPLE—yourself included—in your organization to be active. Encourage them to follow the rest of the steps below to get started.
This simple mindset shift from a company account to an individual account will pay off for you quickly.
Step 2: Marketing
Marketing yourself and your brand on LinkedIn is free and extremely high leverage: You hit “post” once, and thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of people see it!
Compare that to offline marketing, where you need to repeat yourself thousands of times to get the same message out, and you can see why it’s beneficial to leverage LinkedIn.
So, whether you are marketing to future employees or prospective clients, here are a few ideas to get started:
A) Comment and Like: Don’t know how to use LinkedIn? Scared to create content? Don’t know what to do? Keep it simple to start. 1) Like posts from potential clients or future employees. 2) Comment on engaging posts in your target market.
B) Post jobsite pictures: If you’re not sure what to post about, take pretty pictures of your jobs! It’s that simple, and it allows thousands of people to see the type of work you perform.
C) Be consistent: Marketing on LinkedIn is a numbers game. So, make sure you are playing it as much as possible. My advice would be to post at least 2 to 4 times per month. More is better, but that’s enough to keep you top of mind.
Step 3: Business Development
As you spend more time liking, commenting, and posting, you’ll start to recognize the other people active on the platform. Identify which ones could be a great person to have a relationship with—based on their values, business, or skills—and connect with them!
Some best practices for doing this effectively are:
A) Personalize your connection (and don’t sell): When you especially love a post or connect with someone in your target market, —whether a prospective client or future employee— start building a real relationship with them by sending an awesome, personalized direct message. Don’t try to sell them something. Instead, say hi, mention something you found on their profile or website, and mention you look forward to getting to know them on here. Try this:
Hi Carol,
I loved your post talking about the recent ABC event! It makes me happy to see a group of Contractors together helping to make the industry better.
I look forward to being connected and hope we can meet more personally some day!
Best wishes,
Matt
B) Pay attention: Now, pay attention to that person’s future posts, comments, and likes. Decide whether you have similar values. Engage in more conversations through the platform so they know you genuinely care about what they have to say.
C) Ask to meet: After you go back and forth a few times on LinkedIn, it’s totally appropriate to ask to meet via video or phone call. Again, go to your DMs, and try something like this:
Hey Carol!
It’s been awesome getting to know you on here and I’d love to meet via video or phone call sometime! It seems like we have similar values and I’d love to learn more about your business and potentially share about ours.
Either way, would love to meet you and wishing you the best.
Matt
Once you meet, show genuine interest in them as a person. If it leads to talking about business, then great! You can move into a “sales mindset”. If not, then that’s okay too. Your objective is to leverage LinkedIn and build real relationships, not make sales.
The trick is, once you make enough real relationships, the sales start showing up organically.
This is a secret sauce of LinkedIn.
Spark Notes:
Most Contractors are not leveraging LinkedIn to its full capability and it’s holding them back from free opportunities to market themselves and develop relationships.
If you want to get started today, then start practicing the step-by-step guide that I use to build relationships, get meetings, and make more sales:
Be a human
Post, comment, like
Be consistent
Personalize your connection
Pay attention
Ask to meet
It works, I promise.
