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Published January 14, 2020
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There are many things you might wish to achieve by spending time on LinkedIn. But is it working for you?
Sadly, I see a lot of time wasted by people on LinkedIn. They don’t seem to have a LinkedIn marketing strategy.
To me a strategy:
Unfortunately, I witness a lot of people publishing funny videos one day on LinkedIn. Commenting randomly another day. Accepting any and all Connection requests. The list goes on.
I find the best outcomes happen when you have a purpose. You know what you wish to achieve, and all activity is in support of that goal.
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there” – as the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland pointed out.
It may not include everything you’d like to achieve, but the video below might at least get you thinking about the different objectives LinkedIn can help you achieve.
Why not spare 8 seconds to re-think your LinkedIn marketing strategy?
As well as the goals outlined in the video:
there are other goals LinkedIn can help you achieve, such as job hunting and, as my Connection Richard Bradley, Commercial Manager at Alpine Fire Engineers Ltd, pointed out, keeping up to date with business and industry news and championing causes or other businesses you admire and value.
Whatever your purpose, find it and stick with it.
Once you have a purpose it’s much easier to make sure your activity on LinkedIn aligns with your LinkedIn marketing strategy aims.
The best way to achieve thought leadership is by committing to a long-term ongoing strategy of insightful and original content creation (sharing informative videos, handy podcasts and useful articles and documents on LinkedIn) and conveying your expertise by regularly commenting on other people’s content.
LinkedIn Live is also a great feature to use to interact and educate your audience.
Always think where you can add value.
If you demonstrate a depth of knowledge in your field on LinkedIn and have an up-to-date and complete LinkedIn Profile with a compelling Headline, detailed About section, and recommendations your work and skills almost sell themselves. Therefore, more people are likely to want to buy your product or invest in your services.
Another great way to achieve this aim is to utilise lead generation software such as Fastbase, Who is Visiting or Lead Forensics which can tell you which organisations have visited your website and thus shown interest in your business. With a bit of research, you can view the LinkedIn Profiles of key people within these companies who have been viewing your website. They will then receive a notification that you have been viewing their Profile, which will prompt them to return the favour. If they see that your Profile is complete and you are active and engaged on LinkedIn, they are more likely to make contact – all without you having to ‘cold call’!
Creating compelling content as outlined above is naturally a great way of raising your brand’s profile. Part of this content can include sharing case studies telling the story of how your product or service helped a client. Real-life examples are a brilliant lead generation tactic as others will want a slice of the cake too!
Proactively sending Connection requests to people in your target market with a personalised message outlining how you can help them (Note: NOT a sales pitch!) can contribute to increased lead generation.
Meanwhile, publishing content on a LinkedIn page that represents your business AND THEN sharing that post from your LinkedIn Profile, adding your own thoughts and comments to the post before publishing ensures your network of Connections also see the post and gives your brand a boost. People buy from people, not pages and you tend to have more Connections on your Profile than Followers on your company page so it pays to add your own angle and opinions on company page posts that you share.
For recruiters, it might be best to take advantage of LinkedIn Premium, a paid upgraded version of LinkedIn. Note: I always say this is only worth doing if you are already maximising the free version of LinkedIn by having a completed Profile and actively engaging on the platform and regularly publishing interesting content.
In particular, it might benefit you to utilise LinkedIn’s Recruiter or Recruiter Lite subscriptions, which, amongst other things, allow you to use advanced search filters to help you pinpoint the exact talent you’re looking for.
As well as Connecting with recruiters and messaging them directly, publishing your most recent work on LinkedIn (if you are able) is a great way to get noticed. For example, if you’re an out of work marketer, posting links to your blog that you write in your free time may help. Since you can publish photos and videos of almost anything on LinkedIn, an unemployed baker could publish pictures of their cakes just as an out of work IT professional could publish ‘how-to’ explainer videos on different aspects of computing. All are bound to catch the eyes of hiring companies sooner or later!
Having a completed Profile with recommendations and skills is a must.
The more you interact with content related to your industry or sector or interest the smarter LinkedIn’s algorithms get at serving you content related to the subjects you’re interested in within your homepage feed.
Following certain hashtags also helps personalise your LinkedIn feed. (Simply search a hashtag on LinkedIn such as #socialmedia and click the blue ‘Follow’ button).
Sharing their content and adding your own slant to it is a sure-fire way to promote causes your respect. Publishing your own original post and using the @ symbol to tag the person you admire and would like to endorse or tagging the LinkedIn company page name also creates a link to their Profile/Page and helps elevate them.
Sticking to goals is hard, even when you have a plan. Try focusing on what the rewards will be as an incentive to following through with the actions you’ve set yourself. Alternatively, just as it helps you maintain a get fit regime or diet if you do it with someone else, working to up your LinkedIn marketing strategy with a colleague or friend means someone else will hold you accountable!
Take small steps at first, in fact you can be a winner on LinkedIn spending only 20 minutes a day on the platform. The key is to be smarter with what you do on the platform rather than spending hours on it (hence why having a LinkedIn marketing strategy is important).
Whatever actions you choose to implement and however often, make sure you are consistent and always remain true to your LinkedIn marketing strategy goals!
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it! Asking yourself what is working and what isn’t, using your LinkedIn Dashboard figures to see how many Profile and Post views you’ve had and analysing your post’s engagement performance (number of comments, Reactions, and shares, etc) all help you learn and improve.
On how I can help you turn your Linkedin profile into multiple opportunities in a few hours.
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