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Do you, as a coach or consultant, use LinkedIn to promote your business? If you haven’t, you are missing out on a huge opportunity because LinkedIn can benefit your coaching and consulting businesses by getting you high-paying clients.
LinkedIn is powerful in helping coaches and consultants reach more audiences and generate high-quality leads for your business. I made this particular article to answer two popular questions about LinkedIn. The first is why you should use LinkedIn for lead generation, and the second is how you generate leads on LinkedIn.
Why use LinkedIn for lead generation
Your biggest question can be, ‘Is LinkedIn good for lead generation?’ Recent research by Hubspot found that LinkedIn is 277% more effective at generating leads than any other social media platform, including Facebook and Twitter.
So if you are still spending most of your efforts on other social media but struggling to book high-paying clients, switch your focus to LinkedIn.
As a business strategist for coaches and consultants, I strongly recommend you invest your time and energy in optimizing LinkedIn’s features—especially when you want to grow your 7-figure business by offering high-ticket coaching programs or consulting.
LinkedIn is a powerful lead generator. I built a 7-figure coaching business from LinkedIn alone. Then, I formulated my LinkedIn strategies and used them to help other coaches and consultants to generate multiple five and even six figure deals from LinkedIn.
Some of the reasons why LinkedIn is a gold mine are:
1. People and businesses joined LinkedIn for professional networking. Business owners, C-level leaders, middle-top managers, and other decision-makers utilize LinkedIn for business purposes. Therefore, LinkedIn is already making it easier for you to do lead generation marketing for B2B sales and coaches.
2. You can effortlessly reach your target market because Linkedin makes it easy to find information on your connections’ industries, location, positions, and other important details. Therefore, you can always find your matched audiences to help you generate high-quality leads.
3. LinkedIn has a Newsletter feature to draw your potential clients, so they are primed to book a call for your high-ticket coaching programs or consulting programs. You can post articles in your newsletter and ask your audience to subscribe and opt-in to your lead magnet. You can read my previous article to learn more about optimizing your LinkedIn Newsletter to attract high-paying clients.
How to use LinkedIn for lead generation
Many people give up too quickly on utilizing LinkedIn as lead gen. It is often because they do not know how to optimize their LinkedIn account as an effective lead generation tool. I will make it simple for you. Here are the top four principles of using LinkedIn to reach your high-paying clients so they will buy your high-end coaching programs.
1. Create a fantastic LinkedIn Profile
Treat your LinkedIn profile as your landing page because it is the first impression your potential clients will have with you. An incredible LinkedIn profile will encourage people to look, read more, and finally take the next step to join your email list, book a call, or even buy your high-ticket coaching programs. On the other hand, a lousy profile will do just the opposite—they will click away from your page.
To make your profile irresistible, you must optimize everything, including your profile picture, background image, feature section, recommendations, and SEO.
High-resolution images for your profile picture and background image are important. You can use your professional and branded photos with keyword-friendly texts and logos embedded in them.
You must also include a compelling, persuasive copy in your Linkedin ‘about’ section. Mind the SEO so that your profile will be searchable for every term you want to be found. Don’t forget to update your work experiences and ask your clients to leave recommendations so that you can showcase your client results.
I have created an easy-to-follow practical guideline for building your LinkedIn profile professionally. The article shows you exactly what to do to optimize your LinkedIn profile so you can target high-paying coaching clients.
2. Build up your audience
Your LinkedIn profile is crafted persuasively to attract a pool of clients. You strive to engage with your audience through what you write and post on LinkedIn. Once your audience is drawn in, they will pay more attention to you—and your content in their LinkedIn feed. You are building trust with this strategy.
Along with gaining your audience’s trust, they will see you as the expert in the field. It will create a strong bond through engagement. This situation will naturally make them want to take the next step and book a call with you. It gets them thinking, ‘I want this person to help my business grow and solve my problems.”.
So far, I see two significant obstacles to building up a LinkedIn audience: a low number of connections in their network or a low-quality network. A low number of connections means you have 500 or one thousand connections on LinkedIn. It will be tough to attract a consistent flow of high ticket leads to your coaching business with a low number of connections. Meanwhile, if your focus is solely on growing a high number of followers (aka vanity numbers), it will also be hard to convert those to high paying coaching clients since not all of them are your ideal clients.
Make sure to do the following things for your LinkedIn lead generation strategy:
- Know your audience. Make sure you drill deep into the data to attract decision-makers—business owners, VPs, C-level leaders, and top-class managers. Be familiar with their industries and the scale of their businesses. You will need this background information to give insights into your future clients’ needs.
- Target the location. Location targeting is a powerful LinkedIn marketing lead generation tactic for B2B sales and coaches and consultants. Instead of targeting a global market, you can narrow your target location to focus on specific areas or states.
- Find the most active users. Some entrepreneurs and decision-makers create their LinkedIn accounts and then forget about it, whereas others use the platform significantly for business purposes. Since active users on LinkedIn post or interact more than passive users, you can use their activity information to know what they are up to.
- Decide on your outreach strategy. Your audience will not appreciate spam posts or aggressive marketing strategies in your outreach efforts. Remember that you are targeting top-level decision-makers, so posting an ad to watch your live webinar with the caption “It is live, NOW!” when it is not even live is not a good idea. You lose the element of trust instantly. These kinds of messages will turn your audience away immediately.
Do your outreach efforts with integrity. You can lead with value and optimize your various outreach strategies. For example, posting informative newsletters, asking your audience to comment and writing about the main challenges they face in their businesses, or distributing a free PDF that will trigger their curiosity to know more about your coaching or consulting services. Using those techniques, you can create an audience who trust and ultimately buy from you.
There are many things to do to optimize LinkedIn for business lead generation. If you want to discover the strategies I teach my clients, be sure to check out my LinkedIn lead generation masterclass.
3. Have an expert positioning
Another surprising fact shows that 90% of coaches and consultants struggle to onboard ultra-high-ticket clients from LinkedIn because they have a weak positioning. Positioning is how you are perceived online—for example, if someone from your audience views you as an expert or just as a peer.
It is crucial because if you position yourself to your client at a peer-to-peer level, no one will hand you five to six-figures to solve an urgent or complex problem. No one will pay for high ticket coaching programs if you are perceived as someone with little value.
If you position yourself as an expert, who is incredible as a strategist, a pro problem solver, an expert in _____ (field), others will see you as a viable mentor. They will see you as someone who will take them straight to the top with your expertise and experience. They will be more likely to buy your high-ticket coaching program, believing you are the best person to help them reach their goals.
Three strategies of expert positioning can be done through the following efforts: clear messaging, great branding, and proven credibility.
4. Have compelling copy and expert building content
The last LinkedIn lead generation best practice is to pay attention to your LinkedIn content. The data shows that LinkedIn drives 46% of social traffic to B2B sites. This platform also scores as the most professionally credible social media content platform. Therefore, building your expert authority in the form of content is essential to generating clients.
Do not just focus on growing your audience without putting out content and don’t just create content without growing your audience as no one will see it.
To know what kind of content you should create, you need to do some research. Avoid creating boring content. Instead, create compelling content that can capture your clients’ pain and struggles. Then, give them practical and comprehensive steps to solve their needs and talent them to their goals.
Understand your audience, solve their problems, motivate them, and inspire them. Above all, you should trigger them.
Do not be afraid of triggering your audience. Although triggering may not always get the most significant engagement, it often gets the most booked calls because when you trigger your audience, you speak to their innermost thoughts. You make them feel uncomfortable by sharing their reality. It is like handing a mirror and asking your audience to reflect on their own issues and struggles.
Use triggers in your content to motivate them to take action. They may not comment on your post, however, they may send you a private message or an email or even just book a call with you.
Lastly, you must be congruent with your content on all platforms you use. Your audience will find it helpful when the content they see on LinkedIn has the same branding and voice as your YouTube videos or Instagram reels. Sharing an on-brand message is crucial so your audience can easily recognize and trust you.
Define where you sit on the spectrum of influence, how polarizing you will be. Build your persona as an influencer on LinkedIn.
You must know yourself well and define yourself professionally through your LinkedIn profile. Understand your audience so you can create the right content where you showcase your values and expertise that match their needs. When you do this the right way, you will get ultra-high paying clients on LinkedIn.
Those four LinkedIn lead generation best practices can elevate your performance as a coach and consultant. However, those are just the beginning. You must also build a supportive system to scale your growth, otherwise, you may be stuck in the low six figures for years.
Do not fall into the trap of the generalist when you ascend up to expert to grow a 7 figure coaching business. To know more about this, check out my 30-page guide on the Ladder of Influence. Growing your income through LinkedIn means you must increase your influence. This guide will help you prepare for this process—assessing where you are, understanding challenges at each stage, and successfully moving up your rank as you grow your authority and expertise to build a 7 figure coaching business.
I want to hear from you! Comment below and share what you are struggling with on your LinkedIn profile. Until next week!