All branding is a conversation between the marketer and the target audience. “Business” social media has facilitated conversing with your customers by virtually eliminating the waste and morphing into a seamless toolbox of elements to shorten the sales funnel. LinkedIn revolutionized business networking with the basics of connecting. It is critical to an executive and to a company to reinforce your personal and corporate brand by honing your profile, photo, summary, experience and accomplishments. Attaining meaningful related endorsements and recommendations that drive people to the skills you offer and that the market is demanding increases the effectiveness. But that’s LinkedIn 101.

LinkedIn is now a solution to many areas of sales marketing that need to tie into a brand’s strategic positioning and claim a legitimate place in the overall marketing mix.

Staying abreast of how this platform is evolving as well as other sales tools can be a key competitive advantage enterprise-wide. Here are examples of the latest capabilities of these services that facilitate branding conversations with your current clients and start conversations with new revenue stream targets:

LinkedIn recently announced updates to its platform for 2018. Here are some new ways the service will help you be more efficient and targeted with your sales prospecting conversations:

• Lookalike Targeting
  • This feature scheduled to appear in the second half of 2018 will allow you to find high-value audiences to target based on your Matched Audiences data.

• Lead Gen Forms for Sponsored InMail
  • Already released, Lead Gen Forms let you efficiently collect quality leads from your sponsored InMail with seamless pre-filled forms.

• Sales Navigator Account & Contact Targeting
  • Forthcoming in Q3 2018, Account and Contact Targeting through Sales Navigator helps you nurture your sales organization’s high-value accounts and leads.

HubSpot Sales Hub offers a variety of tools to help make your prospect conversations more timely:

• Know When to Follow Up
  • HubSpot’s tracking features allow you to know when a prospect opens your email, clicks a link or downloads an attachment, helping you to more efficiently and effectively follow up with your prospects.

• Set Meetings More Easily
  • Customized meeting scheduling links can be sent to your prospects to quickly select a time that works with both your schedules to efficiently schedule meetings.

• Document Tracking
  • HubSpot document tracking allows you to make your sales pitch personal by understanding when prospects view your sales document and which pages they spend the most time on.

SageCRM offers a variety of tools to help improve your customer relationships:

• Customer Service Tracking
  • As part of its CRM software, the “Service” tool allows you to quickly access reports on customer service metrics, store customer service information in a central database and automate and manage customer service cases. These features help create improved customer relationships and conversations.

As a classically trained marketer, I know we are beyond a tipping point and have been at a clicking point for a few years now. Marketers need to stay updated and embrace and test the technological capabilities that replace other out-of-pocket traditional means of managing the sales funnel.

For a digital strategy agency that will effectively and efficiently integrate a meaningful tech-focused enterprise approach and methodical digital marketing services to boost your brand awareness and sales, contact Lisa Samara, CEO/President of Domus, Inc., a full-service advertising agency that builds brands and sales.

Lisa M. Samara
President/COO
Phone: (215) 772-2182
Email: lsamara@domusinc.com