One of today’s best kept marketing secrets

I want to share with you today one of the “tricks” I always show my clients for finding very specific people to market their services to. You need to promise me you’ll read this to the end as I promise you it is well worth it.

I’m going to show you some functionality in LinkedIn which most people are not aware of. And, it’s totally free so you don’t have to pay for any of the upgrade options. I suggest you log into your LinkedIn account and walk through this with me. Keep reading as this is such a great way to grow your marketing list with prospects who match your ideal client criteria.

Right then, when you log in and go to your profile or any of your pages you should see this advanced search box along the top of the page. Click on “Advanced”.

This will then open a larger search box as shown below.

For this to work you need to think of the job title your ideal prospects will have. Some that my clients often use are HR Manager, IT Manager, Marketing Manager, Managing Director, CEO and so on. You need to type the job title you want to search for in the “Title” field which is about half way down on the left hand side. LinkedIn gives you the choice of whether you want to find people who are currently in a role with your chosen title or ones that have previously had that role. It’s totally up to you which you go for. I would suggest you use “current” just to limit the number of people that come up in the search so you create a more targeted pool.

The next thing to think about is where you want these people to be based. LinkedIn allows you to pick a post code and then choose a 10 to 100 mile radius of that post code to search within. The number of people that LinkedIn will find that match your search criteria will depend on what you are searching for. Realistically you’ll probably find more people than you can cope with so focusing on a particular geographic region will help you extract more data from LinkedIn as the free membership entitles you to see the 1^st 10 pages of people for each search. All you need to do is to re-run the search with tighter geographic criteria and then move the post code by 20 miles (or whatever makes sense for you) and repeat the search. You can even do the search in different countries so the world really is accessible using LinkedIn.

Once you have entered your search criteria you simply hit the “search” button at the bottom of the screen. LinkedIn then displays the results. It will tell you whether you are a 1^st, 2^nd, or Group connections. How you are connected to them will change how you can message them, but the bottom line is you could message them all!