Building Sales Through Social Media Part III – LinkedIn Power

Generating Leads and Networking via LinkedIn

Welcome back to our ongoing series with Ken Schmitt, LinkedIn Coach.

In Part 1, we discussed why social media space for your brand is important. So very important.  From reaching customers, to building reputation don’t miss out on this chance to increase the “shelf space” of your brand.  And in Part 2 we identified the value of LinkedIn for sales reps and marketers and then found some quick ways to find your audience and generate leads using LinkedIn.

Great you found them! Now what?

The key to all of this, of course, is building your personal network in LinkedIn to allow for more connections and “links.”

Building Sales through Social Media Part II – Why LinkedIn

Generating Leads via LinkedIn

Part 2 of our sessions with Ken Schmitt, LinkedIn Coach. If you missed part 1, start there.

As a small business or individual sales rep, how much value do you place on customer loyalty?
If you could engage your customers (scientists) by providing true value, offering real-time data and introducing them to your connections, do you think they’ll buy from you when the time is right? You’d better believe it.

In Part I of this series, we talked about the importance of securing “social media shelf space” – leveraging multiple social media tools – Facebook, Twitter, corporate websites, blogs and LinkedIn – to build a broad-based web presence that speaks to multiple audiences across a variety of demographics. Failing to incorporate these channels into your sales & marketing campaign will allow your competition to connect with your customers. A recent study of 2,100 businesses by the Harvard Business Review revealed that 79% are using social media.

Which social media channel is right for sales reps and marketers?

While there are a number of reasons to consider Facebook with 500m users, a $50b valuation and one of the most recognized brands in the world, it is not necessarily the best platform for your business. Likewise, while Twitter now boasts 110m tweets per day, star power including everyone from Anderson Cooper to Ashton Kutcher and a $10b valuation, there is a great deal of noise in this particular channel – Sysomos claims that 71% of tweets are ignored, 23% garner a reply and only 6% secure a retweet.

The key to this question – “which channel is right for me” – is determining where your customers and prospects hang out online!

My guess is that a quick analysis of your top 20 prospects will reveal that the greatest presence, and easiest access, is on LinkedIn. After launching in 2002, LinkedIn now boasts over 90m worldwide users, representation from every Fortune 500 Company, a total of 1,000,000 company profiles and over 600,000 specialized groups – oh yeah, and a valuation of $2b with only $100m in revenues! LinkedIn has become so prominent, that a new user joins every second…. That means approximately 8 users joined while you were reading the last sentence!

So how do you know if your customers have a presence on LinkedIn? And more importantly, how can you determine whether or not the specific person who will buy your services has a presence on LinkedIn?

Luckily, LinkedIn makes it very easy to find companies, people, titles, events, jobs , and of course, connections. That sound like good old fashioned lead prospecting?

LinkedIn Magic

LinkedIn has done an amazing job of integrating an easy-to-use interface with in-depth and relevant content. Are you interested in building a list of prospects in the pharmaceutical industry? Click on the “companies” tab at the top of the page, go to “browse industries”, click on the “Pharmaceuticals” link, and peruse the 9,586 different businesses in this category.

Here’s an example of how you might find a scientist on LinkedIn who currently works at Novartis, doing immunology research:

1. Set the search at the top of the page to “People” then click on the Advanced link
2. Enter “immunology” in the Title field, and “Novartis” in the company field, and select “Current” in the dropdown box
3. Get leads

Give it a try! We bet you find all kinds of new leads.

More great LinkedIn tips will be in Part 3 of this series coming soon!

About Ken Schmitt:

Ken C. Schmitt is an Executive Recruiter, Career Coach, Expert Resume-Writer, Master networker and LinkedIn trainer. He has been training, coaching and placing mid-senior level professionals for 13 years with a particular focus on leveraging social media for career management. Having presented to nearly 1000 professionals and written more than 50 career-related articles, Ken is well positioned to provide valuable information about social media, recruiting and career management. For more career management advice visit- Turning Point Search

Web Tactics That Propel Antibody Suppliers to the Top, a study by Red Funnel

Web Tactics of the Top Antibody Suppliers

by Rusty Bishop

A few weeks back, I wrote an article about the “Top Antibody Supplier” study that was released by BioInformatics, LLC.  I got some great comments from readers Jack and Mark about Abcam, one of the top suppliers. Everyone seemed to be in awe of Abcam’s web presence. It was noted that they do an excellent job of appearing in the top Google Search Results.

We decided to use our knowledge and tool set to determine whether there was a correlation between the Top Companies in the Bioinformatics survey and those that appeared most often in Google Search Results (SERP) when scientists searched.

Correlation

After just a few searches for common gene-specific antibodies like actin, p53, and caspases, we began to see a trend that certain companies (Abcam, Santa Cruz, Cell Signaling) were almost always on the first page.  The very same companies that were on top of the Bioinformatics survey.

So we decided to put the Red Funnel research team into action to dig deeper and determine what separates these few companies consistently from the rest from a search/optimization perspective.

Results

The result is our first white paper – Web Tactics That Propel Antibody Vendors to the Top. Which is available for free to our subscribers.

Here’s some examples of the results in the report

• 385,000 annual searches for the top 44 gene specific antibodies entered into Google last year.
• 19 suppliers appeared on the first page of Google results in total for the top 44 antibodies.
• 4 important site code optimizations of the top ranking suppliers were uncovered.
• 100% correlation to page one ranking for one of the factors we examined.

Although the results are directed to marketers for antibodies, we believe they are applicable to those marketing any life science products online to scientists. These principles hold true whether you are selling kits, antibodies, or microscopes.

How the study was conducted

Red Funnel used tools freely available to the public online and…

1. Determined the most searched specific antibodies by scientists in Google.
2. Determined the “best phrase” used by scientists most often in their Google Search bars. For example – “actin antibody” vs “anti-actin”.  For more on this see ‘Learning to Speak Scientist.‘.
3. Determined which companies rank on the first page of Google for the top antibodies.
4. Examined 30 different suppliers to determine whether they sold the top 44 antibodies.
5. Ranked suppliers by percentage of products appearing on page 1 based solely on the products they sold.
6. Compared the web tactics of the companies that appeared often to those that rarely or never appeared to determine why.

How to Get a Copy

The article is available to our subscribers for free download.  Just follow a few simple steps to confirm your email address so our email provider knows that you requested it and it’s not spam. Once you confirm, you will receive an email with a link to download your free copy.

If you are already a subscriber, check your inbox for the download link in our latest newsletter or fill in your name and email and you will automatically be redirected to the download page.

How to discover sentiment in millions of science posts and blogs

A Needle in a Haystack

Finding scientists discussing your products online can be a difficult proposition with thousands
of blogs, tweets, forum posts, and wikis to scour over. In the new world it clear these conversations can
be extremely damaging to your brand and your bottom line.
 
The question is what are you doing about it?
 
On the other hand, positive discussion can be a powerful marketing tool to be linked from your
website and pushed in company newsletters.

A Simple Tool

Towards the goal of finding these conversations, we have built a very simple Scientist Sentiment Search Engine.
 
It searches sites where scientists are actually discussing experiments…. experiments using your products.

How You Might Use It

Lets say you work for Cell Signaling, Inc and want to see what scientists are saying about your antibodies
 
I simply, type “Cell Signaling Antibodies” into the search box (try it now!)
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 You will see results below that look like this….
 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Now skim through the results in classic Google style and click through on a few.
For example the second link down points to Mock IgG versus No Antibody – Negative Control – BioForum. BioForum is a huge scientist discussion board hosted on Protocol-online.org
This will take you to the discussion that looks like this
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Within this discussion are sentences like …

(Rabbit IgG from Cell Signaling) and am getting very high background

and

I changed my IgG for Cell Signalling IgG (very low background)

Pretty cool huh? Just like that you found one problem with your antibodies and one praise of your antibodies.
 
If you have any questions about how to use the tool please don’t hesitate to drop us a line.