Introduction: A real-life story
Building a strong professional network is essential for any business owner or entrepreneur. One particularly effective strategy is to connect with others in your industry who may be potential partners, clients, or mentors. For one user, a business coach herself, she was specifically interested in connecting with other women business owners, coaches, and consultants. As always - we're here to help!
Here's what we recommended she did.
The Search Strategy
The first step was defining the right search parameters on LinkedIn to surface the women coaches and consultants Sophie wanted to connect with. Some of the main filters she used included:
- Location = United States
- Industry = Coaching/Consulting services
- Title keywords = Coach, Consultant
- Gender = Female
The first 3 are really easy.
How would you do the 4. Gender = Female though? There's no easy way to do it!
That's where our recommendation came in - with the power of the boolean searches (more on this on our article Become an expert at LinkedIn searches)
What we recommended: combine various first names common for women (a quick Google Search for "Most common female names in the US" gave us this list) and narrow down the results even further. For example:
firstName=Mary OR Patricia OR Jennifer OR Linda OR Elizabeth
With this multi-pronged search approach, I was able to generate a remarkably focused list of ideal targets all in one place.
Automation for Efficiency
While having the right search dialed in was crucial, the next challenge was how to actually connect with this audience at scale. Attempting to manually send customized connection requests to thousands of profiles would be incredibly time-consuming.
That's where Botdog's LinkedIn automation came into play. With Botdog, our user was able to:
- Import her targeted search results directly into Botdog
- Send a connection request message (remember: don't include a note to get up to 80% more replies!)
- Set Botdog to automatically send out a daily batch of connection requests to stay within LinkedIn's limits
- Track which requests were accepted over time
- Automatically send a casual message 3 days after the invite to engage the conversation (still using Botdog)
By combining this advanced search strategy with intelligent automation, she was able to consistently grow her network with her ideal connections on autopilot. No more tedious manual outreach!
Eventually, she even might want to take advantage of Botdog's analytics to test out different invitation message variations. This would allow her to identify which approach resonate best and maximize her connection acceptance rates.
The Results Within just a few months of implementing this LinkedIn networking strategy, Sophie was able to add over 1,500 new connections to her network - all of whom were part of her ideal target audience of women business coaches and consultants.
The takeaway? Learn how to use LinkedIn, leverage intelligent automation, and beat your competitors!
