Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Made in the UK for HR consultants worldwide. You're listening to the HR Marketing Guys podcast.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Hello, James here and welcome to this week's podcast episode. In this week's main event, I'm going to talk you through the different LinkedIn accounts, what features you need, and what account is best to help you grow your consultancy. And in today's Thought of the Week, I've got a lovely story about a rubber duck I want to tell you about and why It's a timely reminder to give yourself a break. So let's jump straight.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: In this week's main event, what kind.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: Of LinkedIn account should you have? Should you just stick with the free version? Do you need Premium Business or is Sales Navigator worth the price? So I get asked these questions all the time by confused HR consultants. And that's why in today's main event, I'm going to break down the different types of LinkedIn accounts and plans, what features you get within each plan, and most importantly, what's actually useful if you're an independent HR consultant using LinkedIn to grow your business. Okay, so you probably know me by now. Before I dive into anything, I like to do a big step back and look at the bigger picture. So to that end, let's get started by looking at how, as an independent HR consultant, you actually need to use LinkedIn to grow your business. And I've broken this down into six tasks for you. Task one is that you need to set up and optimize your LinkedIn profile. Task two is you'll need to post content on a regular basis. Task three is that you need to engage with your connections. Task four is that you need to search for leads. Task five is that you need to connect with leads. And task six is that you need to contact leads. So these tasks are your use cases and we can now look at what features are available in each LinkedIn plan as to determine what plan is best for each use case. Okay, so now let's look at the different LinkedIn account options and deep dive into each one to see what features are available. So there are three main LinkedIn account options for you to choose from. You have the free account, obviously. You then have Premium Business Account, which is roughly $59 a month. And then you have Sales Navigator Core, which I pay £79amonth for. If you try to Google LinkedIn's pricing, it can all get a bit mysterious. So I think it's better to just check out what they're quoting you for within your own profile. You also have annual plans which provide you with a saving, but again this requires an upfront decision and investment which might not be the right decision for you. With the free account you can fully build out your profile. You can post content without restrictions. You can engage with people's posts without restrictions. You get basic people search. You can send about 100 connection requests per week. You then hit a commercial search limit after a while and you can only see the last few people that have viewed your profile. Now, on top of all of this, you can upgrade to the Premium account, which allows you to personalize your profile further by adding a call to Action button to your profile and service pages. You get unlimited people search with no monthly cap. You can view all profiles including third degree connections. You get 15 InMail credits per month to message people you're not connected with. You also get access to business insights on company pages and you can also see who's viewed your profile over the last 90 days. And on top of that, if you upgrade to Sales Navigator, you also get 50 plus advanced search filters to really pinpoint your ideal clients. You can save leads and create different lists. You get 50 InMail credits per month and you can also get alerts when your saved leads post content, change jobs, or appear in the news. Okay, so now you've had an overview of each LinkedIn account, let's deep dive into each use case to see what features and plans is best for each one, starting with task one, and that's profile setup and optimization. So with the free account you can basically do everything you need. The only benefit of the Premium account is that you can add a call to Action button to your profile, which is very useful. And you can add service pages to your profile too, which is meant to be good for search, although I'm not sure how that really translates. Task two is posting content, which you can do the free account, and there aren't any additional features or benefits available if you upgrade to either Premium or Sales Navigator. Task three is to engage with your connection posts, so you can do this with your free account by just scrolling the news feed. There aren't any benefits to the Premium account here, but with Sales Navigator there is a feed of your connections most recent posts which you can work through on a daily basis. However, I have noticed that this feed doesn't include everyone's posts, which kind of defeats the whole point of having one centralized feed, which is very annoying. Task four is to search for leads. Now with a free account you can use your filters and search for leads easy enough, but they limit the amount of searches that you can make. So if you're able to find your target market using the filters available, but you just need to make more searches, then it would probably be a good idea to upgrade to Premium. However, if you need more filters to find your target market, then this is when Sales Navigator might be helpful. However, I will say this, the success of finding leads on LinkedIn boils down to your strategy and how clear your target market is to begin with. Task 5 is to connect with leads, so technically you're capped to connecting with 100 people a week anyway, regardless of what LinkedIn account you're on. And task six is to contact leads. So with your free account you can happily DM your connections. With Premium and Sales Navigator you get InMail credits. So this is when you can send someone a DM without being connected with them. But I'm not really a big fan of these. My philosophy on this is if they don't accept your connection request, they're probably unlikely to reply to an InMail. If you do have a Sales Navigator account, you can message people using your Sales Navigator account or your personal profile. But annoyingly, these conversations don't merge into one thread, which makes keeping track of conversations, especially if you're having them in two different places, incredibly difficult to manage. That's the one feature I really wish that LinkedIn would fix because it just doesn't make sense to me. Okay, so if you said to me, hey James, what LinkedIn account should I have? Here's what I'd say. If you're just getting started and mostly posting content and growing your network slowly, slowly, the free plan is fine. If you want to be more proactive, as in see who's checking out your profile and have more searches available, then go for Premium business. And if you're really serious about using LinkedIn to find your ideal client profile, which may require advanced filters, then Sales Navigator is right for you. Just be mindful of how you're having conversations with people if you are using Sales Navigator as to keep a record of those conversations in one place. And remember, you can usually get a month free trial of Premium or Sales Navigator. So if you do want to test out the different features that are available in those different plans, you can do. And if it's not right for you, then you can just cancel without getting charged. Okay, so that brings us to the end of this week's main event and I hope that I've clarified how you should be using LinkedIn's Grow youw consultancy, the different features that are available and what plan is right for you. If you do need any other help and advice using LinkedIn to generate leads for your consultancy, then I'm here to help. Just get in touch and let's book in a call.
[00:07:30] Speaker A: James's thought of the week.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: You may hear my voice that I'm not 100% right this week and I feel a bit run down. And you know why that is? Because I've been a very naughty boy and not followed my own advice. I've been working super hard, putting loads of pressure on myself. I've not been prioritizing balance or rest. I've not been sleeping great and now I've crashed, which has provided me with the opportunity to reevaluate my life. Realized that I didn't have any balance, which is mental because I'm living here in Bali, so you'd think that I'd be living at the beach. I went to the beach for the first time in a month yesterday actually, to watch Sunset. I'm trying to launch way too many things at once and I just need to take a minute, slow down and pace myself. Otherwise I'm going to stay stuck on this treadmill of stress. And that's not how I want to live life or how I want my experience here in Bali to go down. So you may relate to this in some way as a busy consultancy owner, constantly feeling like you're on that delivery treadmill and not giving yourself the time or freedom to love life and enjoy life. So thinking about this reminded me of a talk I went to last year. It was a typical business type conference thing and they had various speakers throughout the day. A guy walked on stage and it was like he had walked out of a London gangster film. Thick Cockney accent, geezer personality and Del Boy type vibe. The type of charisma that is typical. Typically likable, yet incredibly grating at the same time. His talk wasn't that great, to be fair. It's just a collection of inspiring business quotes, really. But he did something at the end that has always stuck with me. He handed out a little rubber duck to everyone. And he said that as business owners, we're a bit like a duck. Okay, I know random, but just stay with me here. Above water, we try to appear calm and collected, but below water we're frantically flapping away and we're scared to stop in case we sink. But like a duck, if you stop flapping for a while, you won't sink, you'll just float. And I was amazed. What a brilliant way to end a mediocre talk. And what a brilliant analogy to put things into perspective when you've been flapping away like mad for ages and made yourself crash out as a result. So when I realized I burnt the wick at both ends, I reminded myself of my little rubber duck story. And hopefully this story has given you the same relief it did me at the time. If you've been working super hard recently, give yourself a break. You won't sink. You'll just float for a few days until you've got the energy to start flapping away again at hopefully more of a sustainable speed.
[00:09:55] Speaker A: You've been listening to the HR Marketing Guys podcast, helping you to get new clients and create a life you love.
