LINKEDIN FOR AEROSPACE AND DEFENSE – an overlooked resource

Okay – I don’t think I have to state this, but making sales in our industry isn’t easy. We face multiple challenges such as long sales cycles, selling high-value products, and a large amount of competition. As an industry, we don’t tend to value marketing the same way that others appear to – our focus is much more heavily on the engineering side. Yet the sales and marketing teams are still expected to fill the funnel with endless leads.

This is where LinkedIn comes in. An often-overlooked resource, LinkedIn can be perfect for our industry. Here is why:

• With a very quick search, there are over 103 active companies on LinkedIn that fit into “aviation & aerospace”, “Defense & Space”, and “Airlines/Aviation” categories.
• Even more, there are 198,000 people that show up when searching just “Aerospace & Defense” representing far more than the original 103 companies. Better yet, LinkedIn allows you to filter those people down to exactly who you are wanting to target – be it a specific company, region, or job title (or all three!).
• LinkedIn is all about connecting and building relationships (a well-appreciated staple in this industry)
• And the best part, LinkedIn can be a totally free tool

How to be successful on LinkedIn (without spending money)

Learn Hub posted a great article on “How to Leverage LinkedIn as a Powerful Sales Tool”. I am going to summarize it below and make a few tweaks to apply it a bit more to the Aerospace & Defense Industry. Let’s get started.

Make your profile sales-friendly

Unlike other social media outlets – LinkedIn reflects your professional brand. It may be both you and your companys’ first impression on sales prospects, so you want to come across as approachable, authentic, and credible. To make a great first impression, we recommend you optimize your profile. This includes:

• Uploading a professional picture of yourself
• Including a descriptive headline
• Write an authentic summary
• Add your skills and endorsements

Similarly, if you are using a LinkedIn Business Page, we recommend you optimize that page as well. This includes:

• Using high-quality images for both your profile and cover photos
• Including a compelling “About Us” section and include relevant keywords
• Building a career page
• Building a product page

Follow the companies your prospects work for

Like other social platforms, your newsfeed will be filled with updates based on who you follow. We suggest that you follow those companies that you are wanting to target so that you can stay up to date with any news shared – which may also provide you a good “in” to reach out to them.

Create and share original content

This one is huge, especially in our industry.

• By creating and sharing valuable and helpful content, you are establishing both yourself and your company as a leader in the space and building your credibility.
• You are also staying top of mind. The more you share content, the more that your followers will see and think of you and your company, in hopes that when a need arises you are first in mind. This is extremely important in industries with high value products and long sales cycles.
• You can be creative & strategic with your content. For example, if you are following your prospective customers and you see them posting about specific challenges, write about your experience on that topic.
• In addition to creating and sharing content, also be sure to engage with others posting content as well. A great practice would be to start by setting aside 2-3 days a week, 15 minutes a day, to just scroll and engage. This can easily be done while sipping your morning coffee or jotting down your to do list for the day.

Join and be active in LinkedIn groups

With a quick search using only “Aerospace and Defense” there are over 432 groups in LinkedIn with the top groups having well over 200k members. This is a great resource for getting more involved in the industry, sharing expertise, and connecting with potential buyers.

As mentioned above there are a TON of groups to join so it may feel overwhelming at first. Our advice, prioritize the groups by putting yourself in your buyers’ shoes – what is it they care about? Where would you find them?

Utilize common connections

Our industry is surprisingly small, and people tend to move around a lot. Odds are you have a mutual connection in the industry and if you do leverage that! LinkedIn allows you the unique opportunity to view your prospects profile and see mutual connections. Maybe this can be the ‘in’ you were looking for to build that relationship.

It’s about the buyer, not you

As with any cold outreach, structure your sales message in a way that puts the prospect at the center of your narrative. Use LinkedIn as an opportunity to provide value and be helpful. Make the message about how you can help solve your buyer’s problem and not why they should buy from you.

LinkedIn Marketing Tools

In addition to all the tactics above, LinkedIn also provides some very cool marketing tools (for a price) that have been proven successful in our industry.  A few quick facts:

• InMail has on average a 52% open rate as opposed to the 21% average standard we follow for email campaigns
• The cost per lead on LinkedIn is 28% lower as compared to Google AdWords
• LinkedIn has 90 million senior-level influencers, 63 million decisions-makers and 17 millions opinion leaders – meaning odds are more in your favor to reach the right person

What LINKEDIN marketing tactics are available

LinkedIn provides a self-service ad platform that includes, Sponsored Content, Message ads (InMail) Dynamic Ads and Text Ads. You can read more about each one here. 

If you are interested in trying a LinkedIn Campaign but still not sure where to start – reach out. We would be more than happy to help! Contact us

Why does AERPOWER recommend LinkedIN

Year over year, email marketing tops the charts as one the top marketing tactics utilized and one of the most successful in terms of ROI. While AERPOWER agrees that email marketing is a great tactic and we do see success with it in our industry we also deal with the following challenges the most:

• Obtaining a list – most that want to leverage email marketing haven’t put the resources into building or maintaining a great list. This poses a huge challenge. While we have various tactics that have proven successful in building strong lists, effective list building takes time which is counter to the usual current, more urgent need to get a message out or fill your prospect funnel. We also strongly advise against purchased lists as they violate email marketing rules and can cause repercussions.
• List quality – If you do choose to purchase a list, you may not be aware of its quality. And if your list isn’t good, your campaign won’t be successful regardless of how great your message is.

LinkedIn provides a unique opportunity to find and connect with your prospects. It’s a great channel to share and engage in content, build relationships, and stay top of mind. It also offers you the ability to send out emails, via their messaging capabilities, to a very targeted list without having to curate a list or violate any email marketing rules. And as stated above, LinkedIn does have high success rate metrics when executed well.

Wrapping Up

If you’ve been on the fence about the effectiveness of LinkedIn, give it a try. It can be a great marketing resource and also proves to be an extremely valuable tool for your sales and business development teams.

And as always – if you have questions or need help, reach out. We’d love to help. Contact us