LinkedIn wants you to generate leads – Talk Marketing 043 – Jason Osborn

Jason is a plane crash survivor, a Texan and a LinkedIn lea generation expert. He produced the best LinkedIn Profile that I have ever seen and that’s how come we ended up talking. It was a really interesting chat. If you are interested to be better at generating leads on LinkedIn you should definitely give it a listen. 00:00 Introductions 07:42 How are you qualified to talk to us about LinkedIn marketing? 14:53 Tony’s is the best LinkedIn profile I have ever seen, is he just a standout customer or are you achieving this more broadly? 33:47 Is it a British thing to be more reserved about your business and what we have to offer? 40:46 LinkedIn is essentially a recruitment too so how do you bridge the gap between recruitment and providing other solutions? 45:35 Is there a content component to your method for achieving leads on LinkedIn? 57:30 Who your customers? How do you actually add value in their lives? 1:01:38 How do you feel about automation in LinkedIn lead generation? 1:25:00 What do you recommend people read? 1:27:33 Who can you introduce me to that might agree to be part of the Talk Marketing series. Martin Henley 7:42 So the first question, how are you qualified to talk to us about LinkedIn marketing? Is that how you frame yourself as LinkedIn marketing? Jason Osborn 7:53 I do. Yeah. So I frame myself as a LinkedIn marketing expert, just because that’s what captures people’s attention and stuff. But it goes back further than that. So as I said earlier I’m from Texas I owned my first business when I was 20. So I’ve owned businesses kind of off and on for most of my kind of working life. When I moved to Ireland, obviously, it was a completely new country. So I just got a job there. But straightaway, I was looking for something to do business wise. 16 years ago, the whole online business world was really, really new. I mean, as an industry, it’s still new but particularly then, like it was an infancy stage, just kind of the wild, wild west days. I was really intrigued on starting up an online business and as I said, I’ve always been really big on impact. So I thought, well, how can I combine those two things? I said, well let me train up as a life coach, I did that as well, and started marketing myself online as a life coach. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing online, it was just like, how do I connect people? How do I get people to join my list? How do I do anything? Back then it was very different than it is now but within 18 months, I built up an email list of 9000 people, I was coaching people in 13 countries. A lot of people were starting to ask me like, well, how are you doing this? How are you actually, you know, building your business online? My mentor at the time suggested that I transition my business coaching and mentoring people with their online marketing. I remember saying to him, I was like, I don’t know how to do that. I don’t. I don’t know how to do, and he’s like, yes, you do, you know, way more than you do. So, as a good kind of mentoree I said, all right, I’ll trust you on that and I transitioned my business into that. In terms of online marketing, I’ve been doing this for around 16 years. About four years ago, I started hearing a lot of things around, just chatter in different places around how LinkedIn was really good to generate leads and people talking about LinkedIn is a great way to generate leads. I was like most of everyone else, even though I’ve been in, you know, helping with online marketing for a long time, I wasn’t using LinkedIn as a platform. I just thought LinkedIn was just a CV or resume website, like most people think it is, which if you’re looking for job, it is good for that, right. I was like, really? LinkedIn? Gosh, okay, well, let me start looking into this. I started on LinkedIn and I struggled with it. Unknown Speaker 10:32 Like, I didn’t get it, I couldn’t figure it out. I realised that what I was doing is what a lot of people struggle with, when they start using LinkedIn to try to generate leads, and actually gave up after about two months. I was like, Man, this is, I don’t, I can’t figure this thing out and just stopped. But I kept hearing people that can generate leads on LinkedIn. So it became kind of personal to me. I was like, Okay, I’ve been in this for a while now, I’m not a novice, I can figure out this LinkedIn stuff so I’m going to do this. So I re-looked at the the way all this, how LinkedIn set up their platform, how they work, the way they want you to work. What I realised is this, LinkedIn, you cannot use it like you do Facebook and Instagram. This is probably the number one challenge that people have. Because we’re so used to LinkedIn, sorry, Facebook and Instagram, we think, Okay, I’m going to do the same on LinkedIn. It just does not work that way. What I also realised is LinkedIn wants you to generate leads, they’ve actually built the platform for you to generate leads.

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