How B2C Professionals, Like Financial Advisors, Should Do LinkedIn Lead Generation Now
Reading Time: 11 minutes
While LinkedIn lead generation is not typically good for businesses that sell to regular people or consumers (B2C), there is an exception.We’ll explore the best way to reach the B2C market with LinkedIn lead generation.
Let’s talk about it:
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What is ABM (account-based marketing)?
Account-based marketing may sound like a fancy marketing term but all it means is that you choose your potential customers based on the business they are affiliated with. So, that means instead of going the traditional route of trying to get individual people interested in your services and products, you look for places where your target customer is gathered.
An example would be if you have a very good customer and what makes them good for you is their level of income and job-related benefits. It stands to reason that other people at their company of similar rank may also be good customers for you as well.
By connecting this idea of your target customer and the business where your target customer works, you get the idea behind ABM for the B2C (business-to-consumer) market.
Why would you do ABM for B2C?
One of the reasons to do ABM for the consumer market is that it can save you a lot of time. Think of your traditional marketing campaigns for business-to-consumer marketing and how you are overwhelmed with a variety of marketing channels and choices.
- You can choose to do advertising on television.
- You can choose radio advertisements.
- You can choose billboards.
- You can choose Instagram.
- You can choose to do mailers
- You can choose to do mass texts.
- You could choose to send cold emails.
You ultimately have way too many marketing choices when it comes to business-to-consumer marketing. And the biggest potential problem, that we B2B (business-to-business) marketers can more easily see, is that you will end up spreading yourself and your resources too thin.
We all have limitations on our time, on the amount of attention we can give to a specific customer, or to a specific endeavor. And because of these limitations we have to dwindle down our potential campaigns to a solid few. The Bullseye Method championed by the Traction Channel folks explains this idea in detail
The quicker we can dwindle down our marketing options, the better chance we have of finding and creating campaigns that reliably and consistently generate high quality leads for our businesses.
Am I suggesting LinkedIn is good for all B2C (business-to-consumer) products?
Not all. I would not suggest that LinkedIn is appropriate for all B2C products and services. But if you do ABM for B2C services, that is, you target specific people that work at specific types of businesses, then LinkedIn can be a very effective tool for B2C marketing.
An example of consultants that I’ve seen rock LinkedIn are people in the financial services industry.
How B2C Professionals, Like Financial Advisors, Can Do LinkedIn Lead Generation
There are three main tips I’d ask that you use if you are going to do ABM for the B2C space via LinkedIn.
- Use past and current customers as references.
- Stay local, if possible.
- Keep your exchanges conversational.
I will be explaining each of these in greater detail.
Use past and current customers as references
If you’re doing ABM for the B2C markets as an individual service professional, then it helps if you have a recognized track record with a certain type of person that works at a certain type of company. It will help you to get through a lot of the resistance that people have when engaging with a new, potential salesperson.
Note: Make no mistake, if you are in business, you are in sales and when you begin to approach people about using your products or services, they will see you as a sales person and they are not wrong.
Our goal is to avoid the basic responses to stress that you get from prospects, namely the fight, flight and freeze responses.
- Flight: this is the person that does not respond to your messages.
- Fight: this is the person who automatically responds to your inquiries with anger, frustration. ‘How dare you try to reach out to them and try to sell them something in an economy ever?’
- Freeze: this is the person that may send you one message and then ghosts you or they may send a response that’s very vague, like a smiley face or “thanks”–and just never get back.
These are perfectly average responses to any kind of stranger. But we’re trying for better than average here 🙂
If you are able to get the right person at Company X to recommend you to other people at Company X, please do so. Referrals are still going to be the most valuable way to get leads, even in our digital age and with our digital economy.
Referrals from friends still rank highest out of all other ways that people can learn about our services. In a number of industries, referrals are pretty much the only way anyone gets business.
Now I know you may be thinking of using digital marketing strategies in order to get around this referral thing (and feel free to do so, if you find something that works) but if there’s any way you can use a referral within a company to meet other people, I would highly recommend it.
No customers at Company X? Another way to approach this, say if you do not have any customers at Company X, is leveraging LinkedIn connections who work there.
An easy way to do this is to send a pitch message directed at current connections that I recommend here. I’d recommend sending it to someone at Company X, getting them on the phone and seeing if they can refer people to you.
While it may not immediately feel comfortable, It’s a lot easier to ask for a referral then to ask for a sale because the unspoken is you can be easily denied without concern. People are not necessarily afraid that you are going to stalk them if you deny a referral. Use these tips in order to get past and current customers to refer business your way.
Stay local, if possible
When I look at ABM strategies being used for B2C marketing, I find that the professionals who are best at it take a local approach. They’ve already taken the first step of using past and current customers at specific companies in order to get referrals. Then what they do is try to stay local.
Why is this important? Because a lot of the professional services are so common and require such a high level of trust that using a local professional is often a forgone conclusion.
By staying local, you also have a better chance of establishing some familiarity. For example, talking about local landmarks, you might say something like,
“Hey, we’ve helped Joe or Jane Doe at your company, Company X. Looks like you guys are on our side of town. We’re just off of county road 55, you know, by the old saw mill. Are you familiar?”
Any familiarity that you can help build with your potential prospect, even if you haven’t even met them, even if they’re just meeting you secondhand, will help you to speed up your sales. There’ll be much less selling the more familiar you feel to them — and it’s not going to cost you anything extra.
Keep it conversational
This is a big tip I gathered from financial professionals who’ve been successful with social selling. The biggest surprise I found, looking at their chat histories is how they’re messaging potential leads, they’re not going in for the kill.
It is very clear that their top goal is to be conversational and to be seen as a resource. So, I want you to take on this mindset if you’re going to be doing ABM for B2C marketing, stick to a conversational tone.
How might you do that? Well let me include a few example messages below so you can check them out your for yourself:
Message #1
Thanks for connecting! How’s it going today?
Message #2
[Your Response] I wanted to know if you had a little time to talk? I see you’ve worked at [Target Company] for years and some other places before that!
Message #3
I have a few clients that work at [Target Company]. I know they have a good [Relevant Fact That Makes Them A Target]. I help them with [Your Main Offer].
Message #4
Do you have a good time in the next few days to set-up a phone call? After that, I can actually prepare something for us to meet and go over.
Now you can see from the messages that some of these responses don’t necessarily ask a question. They’re made to feel just like a typical human conversation.
Going back to the idea of trust that we’ve talked about before. Trust is going to allow us to eventually make the sale but trust cannot happen if your primary goal is to get people’s money. Instead, you’ll want to show a little bit of restraint here.
It will pay you back in the long run.
Even if things do not go as planned, at the very least, you have someone who has learned a great deal about your products and services and could refer business in the future, other people at their company who might be interested in what you have to offer.
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