You may have asked yourself, should I pay for a LinkedIn Premium membership?
The main reason you should be using LinkedIn is to connect and build valuable relationships in an attempt to convert these into leads or prospects, recruiting the best talent or to make your brand more recognisable.
You may find that the standard version of LinkedIn can limit your efforts and whilst you may have already gotten off to a great start, it’s time to take this to the next level for even better results.
In this blog, we discuss the benefits of LinkedIn Premium to help you decide if it’s worth your investment.
What is LinkedIn Premium Business?
LinkedIn Premium Business is a monthly paid-for tier of LinkedIn (from £39.99 a month) targeted towards business professionals who want to get more out of LinkedIn.
Essentially, upgrading your account will give you a less restricted access to the business community and help you grow and nurture your network.
As opposed to a basic account, Business Premium comes with a few additional features.
Firstly, it allows for unlimited browsing up to the third degree: you can view any profile and all of their information if they’re within 3 degrees of your existing connections.
Secondly, premium users are able to set their profile to “open” whereby anyone can view your page regardless of if they have a premium membership or not.
A third great feature is users are able to take advantage of LinkedIn Learning to fuel their growth by gaining knowledge from the thousands of online courses available, written by industry experts.
Lastly, a premium subscription gives users better insights to data analytics which can help to identify industry trends and stay on top of the game, as well as more InMail credits to contact more people.
Now you know which extra features are included, let’s take a closer look at how these will benefit your business.
The Top 3 Benefits of a Premium Subscription
Who’s Viewed My Profile
Sometimes, your leads and prospects are sitting there right under your nose.
Where? You might ask. It’s the “Who’s Viewed My Profile” section!
With a premium subscription, you’ll be able to see everyone who has viewed your profile in the past 90 days, whereas a basic account will only show you the last 5 people.
In addition, you’ll be presented with a graph at the top of the page which can help to identify traffic to your account. On the days you see an increase, reflect back on what you may have posted that caused this spike and do more of that to regularly increase the number of people viewing your profile.
Plus, you’ll be able to add filters to the graph to see the companies the viewers are from, their job titles and how they found your profile. Understanding this will help you review leads and prospects: are your ideal clients/customers checking you out?
If they are, then you can view their profile back, check for commonalities and reach out by sending a personalised invitation.
InMail
If there’s someone you want to send a message to who you are not yet connected with or share a group with, you have to upgrade your account.
With a Premium Business subscription, you’ll be able to send and receive 15 InMail messages a month, plus receive credit every time you get a reply. If for some reason you’ve not used all 15, these will roll over to the next month, for a maximum of 3 months which means the most you can use at any time is 45 InMails.
Why is this beneficial? Well, this means you’ll be able to directly message anyone you perceive as valuable for your business in a more targeted way by making use of LinkedIn’s search features.
Moreover, InMail messages are 7 times more likely to be read over an email and are 2.6 times more effective than cold calling, which means you get better access to decision makers and leaders you don’t yet have a relationship with.
In addition, sending InMails are a great way to establish an initial connection without the other person feeling obligated to accept a random invitation. You have more room to explain why you are reaching out: 200 characters in the subject line and 1900 characters in the main body (invitations have a limit of 300 characters).
Extended Network Access
Arguably, the most useful feature of a business premium account is having an extended LinkedIn network access which removes search limitations of free accounts.
Unfortunately, with a basic account you may have found you’ve lost access to search results part way through the month, which isn’t great for lead generation at all.
However, with a premium subscription you’ll be able to fine tune your search, with 8 more additional filters, meaning you can reach the right people more effectively.
Not only that, but a business premium account means you can search for as many people as you want to reach across your network, save their profiles and review them later.
What’s even better, is that you’ll receive weekly emails from LinkedIn updating you with profiles that match your search criteria – in other words, LinkedIn will email leads and prospects directly to you.
Finally, you’ll gain better visibility in search results too. For instance, if users search for someone like you, your profile will include a few extra details in the results, giving users more information about you and making them more likely to want to connect.
Is it Worth the Investment?
In short, I’d argue yes.
However, whether you need or don’t need a premium subscription depends on your personal and financial circumstances. But if you haven’t made any valuable connections in a while, it may be worth investing in this platform to give you a competitive advantage amongst the 774 million+ active users.
At the same time, you cannot simply assume that by upgrading your account the leads will come flooding in. It will still require you to learn the new tools and use them well, but once you’ve mastered this, you’ll for sure see a difference in results.
All in all, LinkedIn Premium Business is perfect for established businesses who are looking to take their marketing efforts up to the next step but if you’re not yet convinced, I’d recommend taking advantage of the one month free trial and test the features for yourself.
Talking of leads, if you want to improve your conversion rate, please check our video below:
In the meantime, take a look at our LinkedIn Lead Generation Service.
