LinkedIn has gradually been taking over from other social media platforms when it comes to making a presence online using the social media phenomenon. While Facebook and Twitter have empowered businesses to enjoy a technology-fueled transformation of their brand advertisement, LinkedIn has proved to be a platform that lets them reach their niche audience with a great degree of precision.

There is a huge cluster of LinkedIn groups on various verticals – be it travel, technology, sports, etc. – and promotion through these groups means you are making noise at all the right places. Then there are options to display banner ads and some more. It would rather require a lot much to write on how one can leverage the power of LinkedIn to make a greater marketing impact. At the same time, one can get indulged in writing hell of a lot of literature on how it is being misused – rather, inefficiently used – by the online marketers.

The common slipups in marketing through LinkedIn are becoming all the more common as the doers aren’t resorting to creative ways to promoting the brand, and going back to the approaches applied by marketers in stone-age:

Extracting Email Addresses form LinkedIn Profiles to Send Emails in Bulk

The inefficient and incoherent email marketing is back, and how. So, while few wise souls realized the email marketing isn’t bringing them the results they so crave for, others won’t budge. While they have taken the route to LinkedIn Marketing, the wagon seems unchanged. The marketing professions use applications to extract the emails of their prospective customers and place the list on the tables of their sales teams. And this is where going-back-to-the-ineffective-basics happens. The sales team starts sending random emails to random people (which apparently fit their definition of “target audience”. This strategy does not prove to be useful and rather stacks up the bottlenecks in their marketing campaign to the point it is rendered completely futile.

Too Eager to Make a Sales Pitch

Turning clicks into sales is the decisive goal of any marketer. But if you think “bang, I have got my customer” approach is going to take you places, you are likely to not go anywhere with your modus operandi. So, once you manage to make a connection with a prospective customer who is willing to hear you out, the only way you are going to hold his or her attention is by educating them.

Tell them how your services can help them overcome the challenges they face and how affordable your products are, especially considering the worth they bring to the customer. Surveys have shown that the attention span of the customers when they receive a call from a sales person is extremely thin. And if you straightaway start with the line, “Sir, I am calling from XYZ and our company is offering you discount on our….” The poor soul is going to put down the phone faster than you could muster up the offer details. And if you are lucky, you may be the first to hang up the phone.

Not Leveraging LinkedIn Groups with the Right Approach

Strictly restricting your brand marketing to posting promotions, offers and product launches won’t get you traffic. What rather would serve you well is if you can build discussions around the products you are selling. This is where the groups on LinkedIn come to the party. Don’t barge your audience with the content that holds no bars in sending out a sales pitch. Creating conversations is what it all comes down to in the end.

There is a possibility that your website has a separate blog section intended to drive some more traffic to the site. As a part of its promotion, you post the links to different articles on the relevant groups. However, even posting the links to your blog will hardly grab eyeballs. There are too many blogs of big and small brands already out there, making some noise. Unless you are doing that, your posts are only going to find themselves adding to the pile.

LinkedIn is an exceptionally valuable platform that can bolster your sales metrics by a fair degree, but only with an application of an ensemble of resourceful stratagem.