Guest post by Brooklin Nash.

Marketing and sales are more connected (or at least, they should be aligned) than ever. How are you closing the gap between the two?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help.

Yes, it’s typically thought of as a sales tool (it’s in the name, after all). But Sales Nav is powerful for B2B marketing, too.

The platform helps you find your target audience, get to know those people and companies, and know when the sales team should act.

What Is Linkedin Sales Navigator?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a premium account that lets you generate leads, keep track of their job changes, and contact them directly. Even though it’s geared toward salespeople, it has tools perfect for marketing.

The best feature it offers is Advanced Search, which allows you to find fellow business owners by:

• Location
• Industry
• Company Headcount
• Keywords

Imagine how useful this could be for your next B2B marketing campaign.

Here are some ways you can use Sales Navigator for your account-based and outbound marketing efforts.

Finding The Right Leads

LinkedIn has a huge user base, and you can focus in on the right audience using Sales Navigator.

With Sales Nav, you can categorize pages and profiles based on the rich user data data LinkedIn offers. Plus, you can get alerts when those businesses get funding or miss their targets so you can strategize how to market to them.

How do you find leads with Sales Navigator?

Using the Advanced Search is where the targeting comes into play. It lets you search for people and companies with several filters. You can get very specific about what or whom you want to find.

Here are some things you can do to find the right people and companies.

Create a leads list

In order to create a list of companies to reach out to, you need to create a leads list within LinkedIn. This is an organized list where you bookmark profiles and pages and even get notifications when there are changes with them.

To create your first list, go to Lists ? Lead Lists, then click the “Create Lead List” button in the middle of the page. Title your list and then you’ll be ready to start finding the right companies.

Utilize keywords

One of the most useful filters is keywords. You can add any keyword, just as you would on a Google search, and the search results will include any profile or company page with those words.

This way, you can find similar companies or those who need what you offer.

Take advantage of the filters

There are so many search filters within Sales Navigator that you can use to your benefit. These filters help you find LinkedIn members who have a high probability of wanting what you’re offering, rather than using a shotgun approach.

The filters you can use include:

• Location
• Industry
• Company size
• Function and title
• Keywords
• Changed jobs in the past 90 days
• People who were mentioned in the news in the past 30 days
• If they posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days
• Shared experiences with you
• People who follow your company on LinkedIn
• Changes in senior leadership

Filters are really the flagship feature of Sales Nav, so it’s best to use it to its full potential.

Exclude factors

To refine your search even further, you can use exclusions. You can add parameters like “and,” “or,” and “without.” This keeps certain pages and profiles from appearing, meaning you get the most relevant leads possible.

Get To Know Your Leads

Profiling is an investment of your time, but it’s worth it. Doing your research before outreach is like building a foundation before building a house. And having that foundation is necessary for effective marketing.

So how do you profile LinkedIn accounts with Sales Navigator?

There’s a feature called “The Buyer Circle” that’s a great place to start. This is where you can see “all key stakeholders involved in the decision-making process for a particular deal,” according to LinkedIn.

Customize Your Content

After you’ve found relevant leads and made sure they are definitely in your target audience, you can now deliver customized content. If the previous steps were the foundation, this is when you start constructing the house—building trust and your reputation.

This means the people and businesses are seeing content from you that they want and need to see. You’re delivering value for free, which is the best kind of marketing.

With LinkedIn’s account targeting, you can share content and show it exclusively to the accounts of your choosing.

Track Your Score And Get Alerts

You know you need detailed tracking when running a marketing campaign. This tells you the perfect time frame for the sales team to do some outreach.

With Sales Navigator, you can get alerts for when employees at one of your target accounts look at your content. This way, you know what type of content resonates with your audience and you can create more of it.

Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can scale and personalize outbound marketing efforts in a way almost no other B2B tool allows. What’s stopping you?

Brooklin Nash is Head of Content at Wiza.co. A content marketer with 7 years of experience, Brooklin joined Wiza to create insightful content on lead generation, LinkedIn and cold email. He continues to run his own content marketing business on the side. 

The post LinkedIn Sales Navigator Isn’t Just For Sales appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog | Webbiquity.