I have to tell you a little secret first, I’m no LinkedIn guru or expert level 9,000 with 10 million post views or anything like that. And if I’m totally honest I find it a little bit like chugging down those super green grass kale gross smoothies at times. We don’t always like what’s good for us but you have to eat your greens and network on LinkedIn which I encourage all my coaching clients to do. So if you’re bored or a little fed up with LinkedIn and you’ve not seen results then this is for you.
I want to talk about finding your audience, list building, what’s working on LinkedIn and some ideas for you to take away. Let’s talk about marketing for a second, it’s all about reaching your audience at the right time and connecting with a message that will resonate with your people most. If you just have a think about the LinkedIn platform for a moment, what is everyone there to do, why are they on the platform in the first place? Everyone is selling something right, it’s noisy and everyone is there to promote themselves in some way. If you have that in the back of your mind when you approach LinkedIn you might just uncover some gold.
The next thing to really take note of is that you want to connect with people, build relationships, be visible and in the moment that they’re ready to make a buying decision you’ll be the go to guy. This is where the value is by being on LinkedIn, your next client is on LinkedIn so what’s the opportunity cost of not being where they are? So what I’m saying is that it’s a long game building your know-like-trust factor. It’s not a short game and you’ve got to be in it and on it and active, showing up consistently.
Now marketing in general I really do hope that you are using video as part of your content strategy anyway and if you are brownie points. If you’re creating video for your YouTube channel, Facebook etc you should always upload it to LinkedIn. Now this is something that I’ve noticed and I’m not sure if technical LinkedIn junkie will agree with me but the platform wants people to stay on the platform so don’t link off to YouTube - you want to upload video as native content. I think you’ve got up to 10 minutes so wherever you create videos think about how you can edit or repurpose that for your LinkedIn profile. I learned recently that the human brain can’t differentiate between seeing a person in video or in the flesh, it’s why we all got upset when Sean Connery passed away, so the point is as a networking platform you want people to see you, hear you and get to know you and video is the fastest and most effective way to do that.
When you publish content on LinkedIn you can do a long form post or you can publish an Article. These have a bad rap, I have seen some people saying that articles don’t get engagement, they don’t get views and they’re pointless. Hmmm, again I think this comes back to the concept of opportunity cost. Say you’ve got a blog on your website, you could have a short version with a backlink to your blog and drive web traffic, your articles can be ‘featured’ on your profile so if anyone checks you out they’ll see your article so they have a longer shelf life than a post. And I think there’s still merit in articles because if someone is searching around your topic that could very well crop up on their search and who knows what opportunity might find it’s way to you. Maybe an invite to a podcast, asking for your comment by a journalist, who knows.
Your profile, your content and how you engage on LinkedIn is all about positioning yourself as the go to guy or girl for your area of expertise. It’s so important to make sure that everything is cohesive and coherent, well branded. If we call a spade a spade for a moment and take note that in life everyone is selling something we often miss an opportunity to use your profile to sell yourself. By selling I mean that you want to show that you really understand your audience, your get their pain points, their frustrations or their needs and it’s crystal clear how your product or solution solves that for them and how you do that. You want your summary section to address that, address your audience - not you or your gold medals and achievements, no one cares. Sorry.
Take a look at the flow of your LinkedIn profile from top to bottom and how that works as your best sales page. Your picture is so important, it needs to look like you to start with. Your background image is another opportunity to showcase your product or your solution. Your little headline is an opportunity for you to say who you help and how, you then scroll down to the about section which I’ve already mentioned you want to address your audience.
It may have started as on ‘online CV’ but you really want your profile to feel like a valuable resource, add value to your profile visitor and show them what you’ve got to offer. Make them want to get in touch, find out more, go to your website, watch your videos whatever the case maybe. Your experience and education section is the only place where you want to talk about yourself, the rest of it should be about your audience.
Like I said at the start, people are on LinkedIn to look for prospects. That’s fine, you’re doing it too. Above everything just remember that everyone is human, people. Get to know your audience, some people will come and go and some will become valuable connections that you can build a relationship with. In fact in my 5 Day LinkedIn Challenge we go into developing your ideal customer avatar or profile in depth, you really want to get to know this person, your ideal person, who would you want to share a smoothie with? Without going into this level of detail how will you product content, offers or really engage with them on the level of helping them to fix their problems, solve their pain points. If you add more value than anyone else you will build a positioning that will explode your competitive advantage to the next level. So like I said I might not have 10 million connections but the ones I do are quality, people I want to work with or pick up the phone to and have a conversation with.
When you get to know your audience you’ll know what your audience wants so you can share the right type of content. One thing, I see people complain all the time about certain posts not being for LinkedIn and they should be on Facebook or whatever, sure it’s a professional network but people buy from people so I might share something personal from time to time. And I love seeing that sort of content too. To give you an example, I am into riding motorbikes. I love bikes, not withstanding covid, I usually do a few track days in summer and go to Spain once a year too. By sharing that content I made deeper connections with a handful of people I’d known for a long time but didn’t know they were into bikes. If someone doesn’t like when you share something like that, who cares they can keep scrolling.
I don’t have a set in stone strategy for posting content, you know the time of day and how often and all that. What I do try to do is to show up consistently enough for my audience. On LinkedIn I post at least once a day, it might be an update, a picture a video. Once a week I totally recommend posting something significant, something that’s your opinion or sharing something valuable like some advice, a checklist, a blog and so on. If you have been talking to someone make sure you message them directly about your post, tag people in posts, share it in relevant groups that you participate in. All this helps with engagement because when you pop a post on LinkedIn only a small percentage of your audience is going to see it so do what you can to give it a bit more life and LinkedIn should reward you.
Now if you feel a bit argh about all this LinkedIn stuff and you want a bit of motivation to dust off your profile and turn it into a lean, green lead generating machine I have created a 5 Day LinkedIn Lead Challenge, it’s totally free to you just head on over to learnwithsian.co.uk.
I just want to say I created that challenge by accident - I had set myself a goal to up my own LinkedIn game and documented what I did over the five days. No joke I had 109% increase on profile views, made connections with 35 new leads and set up 2 meetings with prospect clients. That was all for free, ok except for the 20 - 30 minutes of effort per day but no complaints here. I took everything I did over those 5 days and popped it into the challenge so head on over there and sign up, let’s see if you can beat my results!
Before I go, I want to leave on this last thought. LinkedIn is a platform for you to share stories, your story or stories of success with your customers or clients. Be open, be yourself and get your personality across because you want to connect with your kind of people.
If you’re not going to sign up to the 5 day challenge then please block out some time in your calendar right now and plan some content and time to post regularly and consistently. Keep an eye on the type of content that gets engagement, make sure you are connecting with people and keeping on top of your inbox… I used to be super bad at this and missed out on opportunities, it’s a few minutes of your day. Oh and last but not least, if you connect with someone personalise your connection request and don’t hit them up straight away with a sales pitch… you want to take them out for smoothie before you ask them to marry you!
