Inbound marketing typically brings up the idea of a landing page on your website with a sign up form. Prospects that sign up are then engaged via an automated drip campaign. All said and done, it is a good system. However, there are other options that can be explored in tandem or instead of this. One very interesting option is to harness Linkedin.

Inbound marketing is a process to create initial value for the prospective customer typically with free content so that over time it generates demand for your business. (what is inbound marketing?)

How can we do this via Linkedin?

A simple Linkedin Inbound Marketing Campaign:

#1 Create a presentation deck or enticing update to promote your lead magnet. This presentation deck could also double up as the lead magnet itself and then you could ask them to connect with you for a consultation or next level lead engagement.

If using another lead magnet, it can be an online course or ebook or whitepaper or checklist or any of those usual ones. I have earlier compiled a list of 7 low effort lead magnets.

#2 Ask the people to comment with a specific term like ‘yes’ or ‘I want this’ or whatever and you will DM the lead magnet to them. Or you can also ask them to DM you directly, but I feel that will lose a few people, the process of going and DMing is a bit troublesome. Easier to simply comment ‘yes’. 😉

#3 Now you basically deliver the lead magnet to everyone who says ‘yes’. If you manage to accrue a much larger number of responses then you will be really taxed to revert to each one. But you could always ask a junior team member or even hire a virtual assistant at fairly low costs to do this bit.

This can be an ongoing activity, with multiple lead magnets (maybe a bunch of checklists for different target groups).

You could also do a series of updates around the same lead magnet but with slightly different targeting to generate more leads.

#4 Once you connect with the prospects via Linkedin DM, after that you need keep your further engagement plan ready. Except that it won’t go through as automated emails. Rather they can be sent to them on Linkedin as DM itself.

Voilà, you have your inbound marketing in place. Prospects have engaged with you for your content. And you have access to them, so you can provide more value as relevant and gauge if business synergies exist.

You can also devise a campaign to additionally connect with them on email. This also builds multi-channel engagement over time.

BTW I’m on Linkedin, happy to connect. Just drop me a message if you want to.

Example:

Inbound marketing on Linkedin can be much easier to implement compared to an email sign up

In the email sign up process, you would need at bare minimum,

• a website
• a lead magnet
• well made landing page
• a sign up form service that integrates with your email provider
• an engaging drip campaign
• automated email provider to send your drip

These are a lot of small tasks but which might accrue expense and also time for you.

Compared to that for the Linkedin inbound campaign described above you need,

• a lead magnet
• maybe a short presentation deck for your linkedin update (this can also double up as the lead magnet if you want to keep it even more minimal)
• a junior team member or VA to manually DM all the prospects (or put in this grunge work yourself)
• an engaging drip campaign

Depending on your business and team expertise it may be much easier for you to hire a VA than build a website, landing page and the set the email signup mechanism in place.

The only major difference is in scale,

Despite a hired VA, at the end of day the scale of a manual process can never match a mechanical one. Automated email campaigns could reach millions. While a manual Linkedin DM drip could only be sent to very few. But for smaller startups and early stage of inbound this would still be a very useful effort.

After engaging on Linkedin, you could later switch to email also, so the drip campaign remains automated. That way you can scale to millions too 🙂

Have you tried something similar on Linkedin? How did it go?

PS: I am working on a detailed Inbound Marketing guidebook. If you want to signup for it, get the free Branding Guidebook below 🙂