Earlier this year, a HubSpot study found that when it comes to generating leads, LinkedIn is 277% more effective than Twitter and Facebook. What people are having trouble grasping, though, is how. 

The tricky thing with LinkedIn is that there isn't just one single place to attract leads. There's LinkedIn Company Pages, LinkedIn Answers, LinkedIn Today, and so on. But the leader of the pack -- if done right, of course -- is LinkedIn Groups. In fact, HubSpot currently has three LinkedIn Groups for our different communities: Inbound Marketing University Alumni, Inbound Marketing Certified Professionals, and Inbound Marketing Professionals, which is open to the public to join and learn!

There are many benefits to building your own LinkedIn Group, but today we're focusing on the lead generation opportunity they offer -- and that stems from an awesome feature called LinkedIn Announcements. If you've never heard of LinkedIn Announcements, think of it kind of like a social media and email marketing mashup. Or, just read this post to learn more about it, and how to use it for lead generation!

What are LinkedIn Announcements?

LinkedIn Announcements are messages sent directly to the email inbox of the members of your LinkedIn Group -- in other words, it's email marketing through LinkedIn! Whichever email a LinkedIn user includes on their profile will receive the LinkedIn Announcement. Here's how to send one:

1) Go to "Manage" in the Group.

2) Click on "Send an Announcement." 

Easy! Right? But how does that translate to lead generation?

Why are LinkedIn Announcements Great for Lead Gen?

Let me illustrate this point with an image. The following graph shows the number of daily leads generated from LinkedIn for HubSpot in the past 30 days. The yellow bars, however, are the days that the social media lead gen team sent a LinkedIn Announcement to our Inbound Marketers Group.

See what I mean? Clearly, LinkedIn Announcements helped boost the number of leads generated -- not only for the day of the send, but also the days following. While the success of the LinkedIn Group is certainly a major portion of this, wouldn't any marketer want to amplify their already great results when possible?

How to Write a LinkedIn Announcement That Generates Leads

The rules for writing great email copy in your other campaigns also apply when writing LinkedIn Announcements. The Announcements feature will automatically create a subject line for you that reads "Announcement from XXX Group." Do not use this subject line. Instead, create a descriptive and eye-catching subject that shows members of the group that reading the message will benefit them. Here are some examples from recent HubSpot sends:

• Become a Data-Driven Marketer and Take Action with Metrics
• Build Inbound Links Through Social Media With These 10 Free Tips!
• Special News for Our Community: HubSpot's New Email Tool + Free Ebook!

Once the subject line is nailed down, you need to write some compelling copy. Let's dissect our most recent LinkedIn Announcement to highlight how.

1) Give them reason to keep reading. Open your email with something compelling enough to grab the reader's attention, and convince them it's worth their time to continue reading. It helps to include a mind blowing statistic here, if you have one. Use a clear but interesting transition to connect that first sentence to your main offer. The connection needs to be relevant and continue to keep the readers attention.

2) Have a call-to-action! Whether it's an ebook, a blog post, a coupon, or an event page, send your readers somewhere they can get more information that will benefit them. And to track the success of that offer, be sure to use a link shortening and tracking service like bitly. This will help you gauge the type of offers that work best for your LinkedIn Group. 

3) Make your call-to-action compelling. It's not enough to have a CTA -- you need to convince your reader to click through! Clearly tell recipients why they should download your content, attend your event, or use your product. Don't make them fill in the blanks -- be explicit with the value they will derive from redeeming your offer. Using bulleted lists or other formatting devices to call out these points will help you make your case.

4) Pose a question about the offer. The email you send will be linked in a featured discussion on the LinkedIn Group (more on this in a minute). That means you need to give them a reason to engage with the post that appears.

5) Monitor the announcement. People may start commenting on your announcement, so be sure you're looking out for notifications of new comments. That way you don't have to keep manually checking in with your LinkedIn Group, and can quickly respond to commenters.

6) Make your discussion a featured discussion.By making the discussion featured, it'll appear permanently whenever someone comes to your group, in the upper right corner. Users will automatically know the message came from a manager of the group, and therefore the content is likely important and helpful. 

7) Automatically tweet the announcement. You can do this by clicking the little blue Twitter bird. It tweets both the headline, and a link to the post.

8) Send yourself a test email! Sometimes reading the content in a different location -- like your inbox -- highlights small spelling or grammatical mistakes. If you have a friend or coworker who can review your email, it's a good idea to get another set of eyes on it, as well.

9) Send it!

Pretty easy, right? If you or your business owns a LinkedIn Group, start sending carefully crafted LinkedIn Announcements to supplement your lead generation efforts. And if you don't already have a LinkedIn Group, well, why not start one? Creating a LinkedIn Group has many benefits that will be proven not just in the short-term, but in the long-term. You can also try asking someone who owns a LinkedIn Group with an audience you want exposure to if you can send a LinkedIn Announcement to his/her group. Just be sure you have something valuable to give that person in return!

Have you used LinkedIn Announcements? Have you seen positive results? If not, do you plan on using them now?

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Posted by randfish

Starting up your own consulting agency can be quite a difficult process and often times the most challenging step to your endeavour will be finding new customers or clients.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday we will be covering some tips and tactics that you can use to get referrals and win customers. Don't forget to leave your own advice in the comments below.

Happy Friday Everyone! Enjoy!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Last week I got an email from a Moz fan who said, "Hey, Rand, I am trying to start up my SEO consulting business. My network is not that great yet. How am I going to find clients? Can you point me to a blog post?"

We've done several over the years, but I thought it was a great time to refresh and offer some practical tips and tactics for finding new business. I know there are a lot of folks out there who are seeking clients, who are considering going out on their own and starting their own consulting business, who've had success in-house, who've had success at other agencies. Let me give you some of the things that worked for us when we were in consulting and that work for a lot of the folks that we connect with in the field. Obviously, nearly 40% of SEOmoz's membership are folks who do consulting and agency work, the other 60% being in-house. Of course, we get to interact with a lot of these people and hear their stories of what works well for them. I thought I'd start with a few of those.

So number one, if you're just starting out and you have nothing else going on, I strongly recommend building a handful of case studies. What I mean by this is having a few sites and pages and projects that you can point to, even if you're very early stage. Even if you're saying, "You're my first professional customer," that's fine, that's okay. But have a few things that you've done in the past to show off your work.

So your brother has a hobby site, great. Maybe you've helped him to rank for a few keywords. Maybe you've helped him to build up a powerful Facebook fan page. Maybe you've helped him with some web marketing efforts on his Etsy store, whatever it is. Your friend's got a LinkedIn profile. Maybe she needs some help outranking some other people who are ranking for her name. She knows that she's going to be on the job market. You want to help her get position for that. You're going to help her create other profiles and write some guest pieces and all this kind of stuff that's going to help her show up highly in Google for her particular name. Maybe there's a personal blog, either one that you're running, one that someone else is running, a family member, a friend, and you can help optimize that site, get the right things installed in WordPress, get it moved over from Blogspot, get the post titles, doing some keyword research, having a few of the posts go hot. Great.

Now you can point to all of these case studies when clients talk to you and say, "Well, let me tell you about some of the things that worked well for this. Go to Google and search for this, you can see this page ranking, the reason that it's ranking so well are these different things that I did. I can help you with that kind of stuff." Having those case studies in your back pocket makes you very credible and believable, even if you are a very first-time consultant.

Of course, if you have a history of working with clients, one of the biggest problems that the SEO field has always had is that a lot of clients say, "Hey, I don't want you discussing my particular project. I'd prefer you didn't share and disclose which types of things you've worked on for me or what you've done." That's okay, and that's another great reason to have this handful of case studies that you can show off so you can say, "Hey, here's a few clients we've worked with" or "I can't tell you who they are, but if we sign an NDA, I'll be happy to disclose the names, and then they can serve as references, and then you can see the projects publicly that we've worked on, and those include some of these other ones."

A great follow-up to this is to actually offer some pro bono work, and there are two types of organizations that I strongly recommend this for. The first one is local charities or non-profits. It could be national non- profits and charities if you have a high profile and you want to do that. So here's Adorable Adoptions. It's an animal shelter. It's not actually an animal shelter. It's an animal shelter I just created in my mind. Lives here in Seattle on this whiteboard only. Fantastic, right? So you can do some SEO work to help them rank well for adopt a pet, or thinking about what to do with my pets, or those kind of things.

The other one that I think is a really good option is when you see small local startups kicking things off, so maybe it's somebody's personal project, something they're putting on Kickstarter, or something that they're launching for the first time and some friend of yours through a network or through Twitter or through Facebook, you've seen that they're launching this product through the TechPress. Great. Especially if they don't have a lot of venture backing and they're kind of on a tight bootstrap budget, maybe the founders still have day-to-day jobs, offer to kick in and help out. "Hey, do you need some help with your web marketing? I've done some things. I'm trying to build a portfolio, and I would love to show you guys how I can kick ass and then maybe build up some referrals in your network." They're going to be very, very grateful for that, especially those early stage folks who don't have time and energy to focus on the marketing components. So I really like those.

But I have a pro tip here. Make the offer very specific, and make your pens work too. Make the offer very specific. The reason being here is that if you offer to do some work, you can find yourself in these pro bono types of situations where there's just a lot of demands on your time, and as your business gets going or you have other projects you need to work on, those demands can become problematic. It can feel like a big conflict. So make sure that when you commit to something, you're committing to a very specific project that has a clear end date or that has a very clear end point. So once that project or that date has been reached, you can reach back out and say, "Hey, really loved working with you guys. I hope you'll recommend me in the future. I'd love to be able to use you as a reference for some future clients that I might get." Fantastic, but you've made that closure happen and sealed that deal. Of course, if they need more of your time, they can ask for it and those kinds of things, but you want to have that built in from the start. If you don't, you can get into a messy territory.

Number three, be a connector of people. Maybe you're an introvert or you have introverted tendencies and you don't love to go networking, that's okay. That's fine. But help people to find each other. Be on top of your local ecosystem in whatever world or niche you're in and whatever geographic region you're in. By being on top of what's happening in the field, you can say, "Hey, I noticed that you said you're looking for some software to help you with recruiting. I heard about The Resumator last week via TechCrunch or HackerNews or whatever. I'd be happy to make an introduction because I reached out to the founder there when I heard about it." Don Charlton, the guy from The Resumator probably doesn't need SEO help, but just as an example. And then help put those people together. If you have friends, if you have colleagues from former jobs, if you have people that you know through friends or family that have needs, putting them together and making those introductions can be fantastic. That becomes a referral source all on its own, and you will quickly see that other people who you've connected in the future will say, "Hey, you should meet so and so. She helped me connect with this person in the past, and she knows SEO stuff. So you should talk to her." Great way to get business.

Number four, choose a specialty. For goodness sake, especially right now it's critical because the field of web marketing is so crowded. There are so many people doing so many things that if you can choose a specialty and focus on it and then write about it and become known for it, this can really help your career.

I'll give you a great example. So this guy over here who I'm going to label AJ Kohn. So AJ, right, San Francisco-based SEO guy wrote what I consider the definitive guide to Google+ for marketing and SEO, and does a fantastic job of posting on there regularly. He's the only person I see in my stream who's really posting six, seven, eight, nine times a day, posting a bunch of interesting stuff, a bunch of fun stuff, personal stuff, whatever it is, great photography stuff that he always posts. He's made his topic area very unique. He started on Google+ in the very early days, was an early adopter of that. He wrote the definitive resource for it. By the way, he also wrote the definitive resource for Rel=Author and setting that up for sites, which I think is a great offshoot of that specialty. He contributes continuous updates to that and to other sites, like SearchEngineLand. He offers, obviously, to guest write for others, and he's showing off his skills by actually winning in that arena. When I do a lot of searches inside my Gmail account, which is the one that's connected to Google+, there's AJ, the stuff that he's Plus 1'd and shared and all these things, always ranking on page one for me because he shares so much content around the things that I consume. So he's done a great job of this.

There are tons of areas of specialty that still need or could use people in them. I would still say even old school kinds of things, like we need a new update to the old masters of curated research, guys like Dan Thies and Richard Baxter. We need someone who's getting into that world. We could definitely use someone to talk about the great advantages of Pinterest or LinkedIn. Chris from 97th Floor, Chris Bennett, does a phenomenal job with link-based still, infographics, interactive graphics. Once you get that association and are known for those specialties, people remember you, you have that branding, and then you're going to get recommended for these things. So find something you love and find the unique angle on it and the specialty. Phenomenal way to get content out there on the Web and get your name known.

Number five. This seems counter-intuitive, but when you're most desperate for business is when you make a lot of mistakes as an SEO consultant. I did this myself all the time, and I've talked to so many other people from the consulting and agency world who do this as well. They go, "Well, we have some people time free. I have some hours free. We really need the revenue coming in." So you expand to take on projects and customers that you normally wouldn't. The problem is that a lot of times, remember with accounts receivable, you're not getting paid with a credit card up front here. So you need to count on that trust factor and the likeability factor and the familiarity to make sure. It's actually a great idea when you're desperate to be able to say to someone, "Hey, I'm sorry. This is not in my wheelhouse. You're not the right kind of customer for me. I hope that you'll refer business my way, but let me point you over to this other person who does this work and who I think would be a fit." That interaction is oftentimes going to be much more positive than, "Yeah, let's start some client work. Well, I can't pay you that much, and besides I know you're desperate for business. So I'm going to offer you pennies on the dollar or 50% your normal rate. Then you're going to be locked into a contract with me, and by the way I'm unpleasant to work with." This makes for very frustrating stuff. So be cautious not to be accepting everything, to be cutting your rates, all that kind of stuff early on or when your business is struggling on the consulting side. A lot of the times, particularly in our field, you can take on some personal projects that are likely to either win you business over the long term or can actually be a channel for direct revenue, so anything from an affiliate project to a blog that sells advertising, this kind of thing.

Number six, my last recommendation and probably the best one I've got, this is via Wil Reynolds over at SEER Interactive. Help people. Help everyone you can and not just in the ways that are around marketing and SEO and social media and inbound. Help everyone you possibly can with anything that you can possibly do for them. So you see somebody who has a problem on Twitter, someone needs help moving something and you go, "Man, that guy's pretty cool. I'd really like to know him. You know what? I've got a van. I'm going to offer to pick up that chair that he needs at whatever furniture store. I'll reach out over Twitter or maybe I'll reach out over email." Fantastic, right? You have a friend who's out of work. I know you're struggling as well, right? You're trying to find clients. You obviously don't have a position for them, but it doesn't matter. As you're looking across clients, you're meeting with someone, maybe they don't take you up on it and you say, "Hey, I know that we didn't end up being your SEO agency. I didn't end up being your consultant, but I have a friend who's really good at project management and you said you were looking for a project manager position. I'd love to make the introduction." Fantastic, just by helping people in any way you can. There's a new local news site out there. There's a new neighborhood blog. Fantastic. Offer to contribute. Get to know all the people in the space. As you build up a network of people who know you and like you and who you've done nice things for in the past, you will have no problem winning clients and influencing referrals in the future.

All right everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to maybe seeing some tips from you down there in the comments, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

You're a rockstar inbound marketer. You spend your time figuring out how to increase your web traffic, generate more leads, and analyze your marketing analytics so you can keep your competitive edge on the web. Come on, what's more rockstar than that?

There's just one thing getting in between you and inbound marketing dominance -- your competitors. And what you don't know about your competitors may actually be doing more harm to all your hard work than you realize. But what's a marketer to do?

Luckily, in the immortal words of Apple, there's an app for that! It's called the Marketing Grader app, and with it, you only need about ten minutes every week to stay up to date on your competitors. This ensures you're doing the work you need to maintain your stellar online presence and slowly overtake that your competitors. Learn how you can monitor your competitors in just 10 minutes a week with this free marketing web app -- let's get started now by setting it up!

Set Up the App

Go to marketing.grader.com and run a free Marketing Grader report -- it'll be done in a flash!

Once you're in the report, click on the Sign Inlink on the top, right-hand corner of the application.

If you don't already have a HubSpot account, Register for a free Marketing Grader Account. If you already have a HubSpot account, sign in!

Enter your competitors' websitesso the tool can start tracking them. For the sake of this example, we'll pretend we're Dunkin' Donuts, and we want to track Starbucks.

Voila! You've just set up competitive tracking in the free Marketing Grader app! Now, let's learn what to do with the information.

Weekly Check-in (5 Minutes)

Now that you've set up your Marketing Grader app, set aside 5 minutes each week to log in at marketing.grader.comto see how you are faring against your competitors. When you first log in, you will see the Grade History tab. The Grade History tab lets you see how the Marketing Grade for your website and your competitor's website has changed over time. To get really specific feedback, click on the By Metric button, as indicated by the blue arrow in the screenshot below.

When you click on the By Metric button, you'll be able to explore the following metrics Marketing Grader is tracking to get specific ideas for ways to improve:

• Indexed Pages - We all know that Indexed Pages can increase your website visitors by up to 55%, so it's no surprise that this is a big metric to keep an eye on for your competitors. You don't want them stealing your traffic, do you?

• Linking Domains -Inbound links are the best way to increase your web authority, but the key is breadth of links rather than depth of links. Make sure your inbound links are evenly distributed across a number of domains to get the most impact!
  

• Facebook Fans & Twitter Followers- Sure, social media is a great way to build a community to evangelize your products and service. But the bigger your social media following, the more eyes on your oh-so-valuable content -- that's what we like to call "reach," and it's critical for getting traffic and leads.

All of this nitty gritty analysis is great, but the Marketing Grader report you know and love is still available to you, too. If you want to see that analysis broken down into the three sections that matter to you most -- Top of the Funnel, Middle of the Funnel, and Analytics -- you can always head back to the Reports tab. In case you forgot, the top of the funnel addresses how you bring in traffic, the middle of the funnel addresses how you convert that traffic into qualified leads, and analytics addresses which marketing activities work, and which do not.

Develop an Action Plan (5 Minutes)

So you've set up your Marketing Grader app, you've seen the competitive data -- now what? Now, it's time to craft your plan of attack! Start by asking yourself 2 questions:

1) Where did you underperform against your competitors?

2) What actions can you take to improve your performance in these areas?

Let's use Dunkin' Donuts as an example. Here in New England, there's a pretty big loyalty divide between Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks -- except on the web. Dunkin' Donuts has a lower overall Marketing Grade and is lagging behind Starbucks when it comes to indexed pages, linking domains, and Facebook fans.

So what would you do if you were Marketing Director of Dunkin' Donuts?

That's right! You would need to beef up your content strategy; I'd get started with more frequent blogging as the most efficient way to solve your problem with indexed pages and linking domains. Think about it -- every new blog post you publish is a brand new page for your website, a brand new opportunity to generate inbound links, and a brand new piece of content that you can feed to your social media followers. Talk about a powerful marketing opportunity! And you'll not only be able to identify this opportunity with the free Marketing Grader app, but track the impact of your efforts in just a few minutes every week.

See? You can handle this! Take your competitors by storm with this new weapon in your arsenal! Now, let's get started...

Have you started tracking your competitors' online performance yet?

Image credit: Gamma Man
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