March 2019
We often get asked if LinkedIn Premium is worth paying for – here’s a short summary of the pros and cons to help with your decision making.
LinkedIn Premium is an extended version of your free LinkedIn account, which comes with a host of added benefits and features. There are four different premium accounts, and each one can cost between £19.99-£99.98 per month.
LinkedIn Premium accounts work best for those who are looking for a new career or are looking to hire, or for those who are looking to find leads and drive sales. That’s because LinkedIn Premium unlocks benefits such as InMail messaging, advanced search options and lead builders.
Sales navigator is great for business development managers and sales professionals. The service allows you to find leads in your target market, build trusted relationships and gather insights and data from your audience.
This plan includes features such as:
Cost: £49.99 - £69.98 per month
LinkedIn Premium for business is perhaps more suited to marketers as it allows you to promote and grow your business, learn new skills to enhance your professional brand and find and contact your ideal audience.
This plan includes features such as:
Cost: £39.99 - £49.99 per month
The best LinkedIn premium solution for job seekers. The platform allows you to stand out and get in touch with hiring managers, see how you directly compare with other applicants and learn news skills that will enable you to advance your career.
This plan includes features such as:
Cost: £19.99 - £24.98 per month
The best LinkedIn Premium accounts for recruiters. Recruiter Lite allows you to find great applicants quickly, contact the best talent directly and build relationships with those you are looking to hire. This plan includes many features, such as:
Cost: £79.99 - £99.98 per month
We’ve used the platform on behalf of a handful of our clients, and we’ve found the main LinkedIn Premium benefits to be:
LinkedIn Premium accounts give you the ability to search for prospects based on a combination of criteria including job title, industry, company size and years in the role. As a result, you are presented with a list of highly relevant prospects ready to be nurtured.
LinkedIn takes every person or account you have saved, and curates their activity into a timeline. This allows you to see what content each of your prospects are sharing and engaging with. This can then be used in one of two ways. The first as a conversation starter, when reaching out to these prospects and the second, as an aid to generate your own content which will appeal to your audience.
If you know the company you want to target, visit their business page via LinkedIn Premium and LinkedIn will suggest a handful of the most relevant people for you to reach out to within that organisation, based on your pre-set search criteria.
When saving a lead, you have access to a whole host of information about the prospect; including how long since they were last active on the platform. If they haven’t been active in the past 30 days, you can assume they might not be that responsive to you on this platform. On the other hand, if they are active regularly, you can work on nurturing this prospect more.
One of the best LinkedIn Premium benefits is the ability to use InMails. This allows you to send a long message before connecting; allowing you to really sell your business before connecting and therefore giving the prospect more information before deciding whether to connect or not.
While LinkedIn Premium offers a host of benefits and creates a wealth of opportunities, it will only work if you are motivated and willing to invest time into nurturing the platform. For what can be a hefty investment, it will only be worth your money if you’re willing to put in the time needed to generate a list of relevant prospects and put together a personalised strategy for each. For example, the aspects of your business that might appeal to one of your prospects might differ to another, and therefore it’s important to research this and create a different messaging technique for each lead.
Other cons of LinkedIn Premium include:
Sometimes, accounts that don’t align with your search criteria can sneak through into your results. It’s also the case sometimes where LinkedIn doesn’t use all of your specified criteria to find results which align with your ideal prospect type.
Once you’ve built up a good quality lead base, you, unfortunately, can’t export them from LinkedIn Premium. That means you have to continue paying the subscription fee or enter them into a spreadsheet manually to continue to nurture these leads.
The platform has lots of great features, but unless you know what you’re doing, it isn’t necessarily clear how to use them. There are so many things you can do on the platform that you have to be willing to invest time in exploring and learning how to use the system.
Yes. But only if you’re willing to invest your time into using it to its full potential. It’s one thing investing in the platform financially, but you also need to be committed with your time to make the most of what LinkedIn Premium has to offer.
If you want to give LinkedIn Premium a go, a good way to make sure you stay committed to using it is to include it as part of your marketing plan/strategy. Outlining how you will use it and how it will tie in with the rest of your marketing/sales strategy will keep you on track. If you want to know more about putting an effective marketing plan together, see our article here.
Our top tips for putting your marketing plan together
If you’re interested in how social media can influence and drive your marketing plan, check out our article on using social media for business. We discuss the benefits, the results and give a real-life example of how it can drive success.
