LinkedIn, Wordpress and CANDDi Combined for Social Selling

This is a guest post by CANDDi Co-Founder, Tom Cheesewright (@Bookofthefuture)

I’ve just completed the first wave of a social sales campaign using CANDDi, Wordpress, Bit.ly and LinkedIn. So far the results have been encouraging. Here’s what I did.

My business is futurism. I help companies to get to grips with the changes that tomorrow might bring. The output of my work tends to be a lot of content. And as an ex-PR I know that good content is something that PR agencies often struggle with.

So I decided to create a new campaign specifically for PR agencies.

Step 1

The first thing I did was create a dedicated page on my website explaining the proposition. Note that it doesn’t have a form on it: it doesn’t need one.

Step 2

Next I did an advanced search of all my contacts on LinkedIn. I’ve been building up an extensive network for a few years, so searching for 1st tier contacts in the PR industry, in the UK, netted me 92 prospects. I saved this search.

Step 3

For each contact I grabbed the email address from their contact details and fed it into a CANDDi tracking link. You can do this with the CANDDi tracking link tool or you can do it manually as I did. I’m lazy so I only included the email address, not the full details. 

Step 4

I shortened the tracking link through Bitly to make it a little prettier. Otherwise it would take up a couple of lines and the appearance of the email address in the link would confuse people.

Step 5

I then inserted the link into a message to each prospect. I wrote a standard script for the message but edited it individually for each person. This was time consuming but these are contacts I’ve worked hard to build up. No point spoiling that hard work for the sake of a couple of hours personalising the message.

Step 6

I monitored the response through email, LinkedIn, and CANDDi. The most fascinating result so far has been the discrepancy between responses. Some people haven’t responded at all via email but spent minutes browsing the website and reading about different services. Others have responded in a fairly non-committal fashion but again spent quite some time browsing the website. Then of course there are a couple who have come back all enthusiastic but don’t appear to have even clicked on the link. You can’t win them all.

In the end the campaign went to about 85 of the 92 contacts listed on LinkedIn - a couple just weren’t right for this approach. The result has been overwhelmingly positive and just one day after sending I have four meetings lined up. I’m expecting more: people are often slow at responding to LinkedIn messages in my experience.