Track your leads: Use LinkedIn Tools like sales navigators to track individuals from your target accounts. Whenever you log in each day you can see what your target accounts have been up to. Make sure you are always commenting, liking and or sharing their posts which will increase your visibility with them greatly over time. So if you were trying to land Vodafone as a client for your HR software you would identify all the HR heads across the territories you serve and save them as leads within sales navigator. By doing this you will create a personalized feed of all their LinkedIn interactions
As part of my series of interviews about “How to Use LinkedIn To Dramatically Improve Your Business”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Larry Kotch. Larry is a Lead Generation expert based in London. He marketing agency The Brains and is also host of the YouTube Channel Brainy Marketing. He’s a LinkedIn addict and regularly tops the B2B marketing and LinkedIn marketing rankings on YouTube.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I used to work in Corporate Finance as an analyst but felt my creativity was being stifled so I began getting interested in the Tech Startup space which felt was full of creativity. I started a business on the side trying to raise money for clients. Really it was trying to make that business grow which caused me to discover how difficult that was and the need for an automated lead generation system. Since I was attending startup events each week I began to get slowly introduced to Digital Advertising and Marketing Automation and basically became progressively obsessed. After a few years I had quietly become very proficient in generating leads for my business and decided to start adding marketing services to my capital raising clients. The rest as they say is history and the Brains was born!
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started this career?
I was brought in to help one of the largest political parties in the world (in terms of members) win an election through targeted Ads. This took me on a whirlwind trip around the world and I started to understand the incredibly fine line between persuasion and manipulation online as well as the very real internal politics of huge organizations. At one point I was mediating between the campaign manager of the party and the communications strategist because they refused to talk anymore. Call it a crash course in organizational psychology — not something I ever thought I would have to contend with to that scale!
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I remember pitching for work with a big Tech company for a big SEO project before The Brains had an SEO department. Because I was keen to get the account and we had proposed other services, I brought in a contractor who I had only had a 30-minute vetting conversation with a week before. I met the contractor outside the potential client’s office, and he turned up in jeans and a hoodie. In the meeting he was so talkative and awkward that the client started repeatedly shushing him every time he started talking. We lost the entire pitch. I learned sometimes when the resources are not on your side just pass on the opportunity or refer it to someone else, hastily assembled teams always end up letting you down and potentially losing a client if you aren’t careful and that’s no way to build a sustainable business.
Which social media platform have you found to be most effective to use to increase business revenues? Can you share a story from your experience?
For B2B companies I think LinkedIn is the most criminally underused advertising platform yet is incredibly powerful. Your ability to target business executives and target accounts is laser specific. Obviously Facebook and Instagram are superior when it comes to B2C products and if you have a large customer or marketing database you can always use custom audiences on Facebook for B2B which has a lower CPA than a custom audience on LinkedIn. We worked with the largest satellite imagery company in Europe who were looking for senior execs in the forestry and infrastructure sectors. While they were convinced it would be difficult to find this audience anywhere online, within 4 weeks they were gob smacked at the number of Leads and the CPL coming from LinkedIn. You would be incredibly surprised how many seemingly obscure and niche industries can be zoned in on through LinkedIn’s Ad manager. With a strong Lead magnet and email automation strategy you can hoover up the top of funnel audience on LinkedIn very fast.
Let’s talk about LinkedIn specifically, now. Can you share 5 ways to leverage LinkedIn to dramatically improve your business? Please share a story or example for each.
LinkedIn Ads: LinkedIn’s Ad manager can help you target at an exceptionally fine level of detail. I think my story above probably serves as a great example of how niche you can get.
Use a LinkedIn bot: I helped a media company acquire Siemens Europe and a Large Charity as a client through a LinkedIn message. Technology exits now that can help you totally automate your connecting with and messaging of ideal prospects on LinkedIn — while you sleep. Just type Linkedin bot into YouTube and you will see my videos about it at the top of the list It is an immensely powerful outbound channel.
Rank your site content: If you are creating loads of content for SEO across your site then bear in mind that social links are considered in Google’s ranking algorithms.
Track your leads: Use LinkedIn Tools like sales navigators to track individuals from your target accounts. Whenever you log in each day you can see what your target accounts have been up to. Make sure you are always commenting, liking and or sharing their posts which will increase your visibility with them greatly over time. So if you were trying to land Vodafone as a client for your HR software you would identify all the HR heads across the territories you serve and save them as leads within sales navigator. By doing this you will create a personalized feed of all their LinkedIn interactions. The aim is to interject yourself in these conversations as and when to keep you top of mind before or during outreach efforts. If you are following an Account Based Marketing strategy this will be a great tool for you.
Get maximum free views on your posts: If you use a marketing automation tool like HubSpot you can schedule LinkedIn posts to go out using their tool. You can set up email notifications to all your staff asking them to share and like and comment on the post to massively boost its reach. At the end of the month the person with the most shares will get a prize. You can increase the average post vies by 100x doing this depending on the size of your company.
Because of the position that you are in, you are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Given my time in political advertising and interest in politics and philosophy I would urge people to consider the movement already outlined by Brett Weinstein called Unity 2020. I think the political climate has become very divisive. My movement would try bring people to the center ground like Unity 2020.
Some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
I’d love to sit down with Russell Brunson. I think he is one of the only people that really gets modern persuasive advertising. Almost every online business guru follows his science and theory behind online persuasion. I have studied his work and others to develop a theory of content marketing for B2B brands that is far more effective than what I see 99% of B2B brands doing. I would love to know his thoughts and pick his brains on how to improve it.
Thank you so much for these great insights. This was very enlightening!
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Larry Kotch: How to Use LinkedIn To Dramatically Improve Your Business was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.