Even LinkedIn marketers could use some help.
Do you know how I know?
I can’t count the number of times I’ve asked someone to give me a hand.
This is why I love the story of Sharon.
She is one of the most outstanding LinkedIn marketers I’ve met.
So, when she said she needed a little more boost in her growth hacking efforts. We didn’t hesitate.
This is how we got her 174 sales calls in 4 months.
Who is Sharon?
Sharon van Donkelaar is the CMO of Expandi.
Now if you don’t know who Expandi is, you’re missing out.
They’re one of the industry leaders when it comes to LinkedIn marketing software and we’ve worked with them in the past.
If there are people who know about growth.
They’re those people.
Sharon, isn’t just a CMO, she’s also one of the best LinkedIn strategists out there.
(She’s also the person on the homepage up there.)
What Was the Challenge?
Sharon was good at what she did.
But, here’s the thing.
Sometimes even marketers need their own marketers.
It’s normal.
Doctors have their own doctors, lawyers have their own lawyers, etc. you get the drift.
She already had leads coming in, but she knew two fundamental truths:
- She couldn’t just focus on lead generation for herself.
- She knew that there was untapped potential.
From the get-go, we knew it was going to be a fun ride.
What Needed to be Done
It was time to turn Sharon from a regular LinkedIn marketer to a thought leader.
We had a simple plan for her:
- Take her to thought leader or LinkedIn influencer status
- Make sure she had an active outbound campaign
- Keep the phone ringing
What BAMF Did
Profile Optimization
Sharon’s profile already looked dope, to begin with.
I mean she is a LinkedIn growth strategist.
But, we wanted her to be a thought leader, so that’s exactly what we did.
Her cover photo was alright, but it didn’t really push people to convert.
We switched it out immediately giving her targeted marketing copy, a couple of logos to push for trust by association, and made sure the design theme was hard-hitting.
We also organized her LinkedIn headline, making sure that she had all her credentials neatly listed at a glance, and got rid of all her emojis (she had a lot – sorry, Sharon).
Next, we got ahold of her profile photo and zoomed in on it, and we added some of those branding elements in the header.
But, that’s not all.
We also made sure she had an about summary that would convert.
Apart from that, we went through the visual elements of her profile and updated the marketing copy on it.
At this point, we knew that half the battle was already won.
By doing this we were able to position Sharon as a thought leader on LinkedIn.
This essentially turned her profile into a passive lead generation tool.
It was now time for us to get cracking with active campaigns.
Content Release
Sharon was already releasing content.
But it was time to add the BAMF treatment to it.
We conducted a round of interviews with Sharon.
We needed her real voice and her stories to come out.
After that we looked at everything she released in the past and took stock of it. Her previous content was already good, so we reworked it, and used it to create a distinctive, catch voice that would resonate with her followers.
We added the BAMF treatment and made sure everything was mobile optimized.
We had a post that hit 18,000+ views and a couple that were over 10,000 views.
This meant that the strategy was working.
Outbound Campaigns
Her outbound campaigns needed a little freshening up.
She needed her message to resonate with the people that she was reaching out to.
So, we put her on a new outbound campaign.
We looked at her target customer profiles, we created specific messages that would appeal to them, and we started the campaign.
After some testing, the phone calls started to come in.
And, we’re talking about a lot of calls.
Results
Sharon is no stranger to outbound outreach campaigns being the CMO of Expandi, but we wanted to take what she was doing further.
It wasn’t enough that she was growing her connections steadily, we took what she was doing and applied the BAMF outreach treatment.
We made sure that more than a third of the people she connected with accepted her request.
However, that’s not the only cause for celebration here.
The LinkedIn marketing tools industry is highly competitive, and in order to get more leads in, she needed that message reply rate to go up.
We went ahead and ensured that the reply rate to her messages was almost a quarter of all messages sent.
Here’s the real kicker.
The number of qualified sales calls booked.
You can see that before we started her customized outreach, she was already getting sales calls.
But, the moment our campaign kicked in, that number shot up.
It was crazy.
174 calls were booked in the period.
And, Sharon was averaging 43.5 calls a month.
If you do that math that’s more than 1 call a day, regardless if you count the weekends.
But, we didn’t stop there.
The content optimization that we did got her 4,346 percent lift in four months.
That’s an average of 60,000 views per month.
We took what she was doing well and took it to the next level.
These results are just a glimpse into what a little personalization and strategy can do for a campaign.
Sharon van Donkelaar
Takeaways
The main takeaway here is that Sharon isn’t just an ordinary marketer.
She leads one of the top LinkedIn automation firms in the world.
But, that doesn’t mean she can’t do away with a little help.
Imagine this.
All she needed was a little optimization and another set of eyes on her current campaigns, and she started bringing in so many calls.
Plus, all of this was DFY.
So, there was no extra effort required.
It’s okay to ask for help.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a pro or not.
