SOCIAL MEDIA
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Business Success Through the Smart Use of Social Media
"Clearly Creative showed me how to target and reach out to over 700 new leads, literally within minutes, using LinkedIn.
The result was three customer deals closed within 90 days, totaling over $250K in new business. My investment was the cost of a two-hour workshop. You don't get much better ROI than that." -Todd Cieplinski, President, Universal Mind
The Backdrop
Headquartered in Westfield, MA, Universal Mind, Inc. helps clients achieve their business objectives by creating custom connected software applications for the Web, desktop, kiosks and mobile devices. The company excels at solving difficult business challenges for its customers by fusing experience-driven design, advanced technology and industry insight.
The Universal Challenge
Universal Mind has set as one of its major goals the creation of a unified social media strategy usingtools like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and others to expand and enhance lead generation activities, assist with recruitment efforts and increase company awareness and perception on the Web.
In the past, LinkedIn usage at Universal Mind has been scattered and unfocused –a common problem among companies that use social media. Their approach has been largely reactive (e.g. responding to LinkedIn invitation requests) rather than proactive (e.g. actively generating sales leads), and they have struggled to uncover concrete benefits from using the product. With no consistent, overarching strategy defined for how to use LinkedIn productively, social media in general as a legitimate business enabler was in danger of being seen as a waste of time.
Clearly Creative Solution
In response to their need, Clearly Creative held one of its two-hour LinkedIn training sessions in October, 2009 at a Universal Mind company sales meeting. The focus of the session was on identifying LinkedIn features and capabilities that directly support key business goals and processes. Clearly Creative demonstrated many highly effective uses of LinkedIn for recruitment, lead generation, web-based marketing and community building – capabilities that even the most active users are typically unaware of.
Tangible Results
The benefits from the session were dramatic and almost immediate. Todd Cieplinski, President of Universal Mind, used what he learned in the training to quickly and easily reach out to 700 new contacts with the following results:
- Within 90 days, 70% responded by accepting LinkedIn invitations
- Three expressed interest in discussing projects
- All three signed deals (100% close rate!)
- More than $250K in business was generated for Universal Mind
Energized by this success, Cieplinski plans to expand LinkedIn usage across the company in a variety of ways, starting with training all company managers on how to use the product most effectively.
Gaining Insights
At Universal Mind, LinkedIn is coming to be seen as a powerful, flexible adjunct to existing marketing tools and programs that can dramatically expand lead generation results, enrich customer information stores, and even assist in corporate recruitment activities.
Looking to the future the company plans to expand its use of LinkedIn in the following ways:
- Explore opportunities to integrate LinkedIn with its existing CRM system
- Extend LinkedIn training to all managers and ultimately to all employees
- Identify and embed standard company keywords in all company LinkedIn profiles to enrich Search Engine Optimization (SEO) results
- Use LinkedIn as a way to build community within Universal Mind by helping to better connect a distributed workforce
For more information, please contact us at (617) 401-3345 or linkedin@clearlycreative.net.
