Improving on this subject is something we are constantly trying to do. Many times b2b clients reach out and want to build a solid presence on social. But here’s the harsh truth – building a community around a brand is almost impossible. However, positioning personas within the company, and leveraging their influence to grow the company page is way more feasible.
There are the rare examples of companies such as Gong and Zest who are knocking the ball out of the park with a killer company page, but they’re the exception to the rule (and they are also fueled by strong personas that have become authorities).
This post will focus on LinkedIn, however, there’s much to be said for Quora, Reddit and Twitter.
Here are experience-based tips on what works:
When posting make sure all posts are readable with white space out
Linkedin don’t appreciate linking out of the platform. Try to avoid it as much as possible. When you do, paste the link in the first comment (and mention “link in the first comment”)
The more people click on your posts the better – LinkedIn will get an indication of relevancy. So:
write texts that are long enough for people to need to click “see more”
for the same reason when posting images – aim for more than 5
Speaking about images – it’s always better to show people than scenery
Hashtags are important! – before using them check they have enough followers (hundreds and up)
Use emojis
Post in the morning when people get to work, noon when they’re on a break or afternoon as they head home
On top of the above: wadidigital published this fantastic breakdown on the types of posts the LinkedIn algorithm favors, keep it in mind.
Now let’s roll up our sleeves: Here’s a typical breakdown we try to stick to weekly for b2b c-levels who’s presence we manage.
Rule of thumb – we always try to strike emotions/ be controversial in the content, and to ADD VALUE:
1 Conversational type of post – ask a question “what music do you listen to when working”, “do you outsource tech or rely mostly on an inhouse team” etc
1 List type of post that end with a question “these are the top 5 books any tech pro should read, which would you add?”
1 Infographic with insights
(at least) 1 Share of a company blog post with a personal angle (we play around with these and sometimes also post entire blog posts as Linkedin articles, the jury is still out regarding the efficiency of this)
1 Viral type of post (the legendary Larry Kim does that so well we actually name those LK posts internally)
Daily Engage with peers, like comment and share
I hope this helps, if you have further tips to share, please let me know!
How well do you know your brand’s target audience?
Or, how well do you think you know your target audience?
We find that many brand managers in Europe assume they know their audience very well indeed. They might even have a very clear image in their head of the type of individual they are trying to target with all of their advertising and marketing strategies.
What is often the case, however, is this image in their heads isn’t always completely correct. When it comes to targeting your audience in Europe and motivating them into making a purchase, you need to ensure that your understanding of this group is bang on. Any slight differences between what’s in your head and your audience could result in some of your targeted work falling flat.
If you know that you have this problem in your business currently, here are steps to take to understand your target audience better. If you follow them through, you’ll know how to discover your target audience and start fine-tuning your aim for them in all your campaigns.
Brainstorm your target audience.
The first thing you should do is sit down and brainstorm what you already know about your target audience. Think about the characteristics that all of the individuals who are most likely to buy your products will share. Are they in the same age group? What is their job title; what kind of salary do they earn? You should also look at the common challenges, needs, and objections that this group of people might face in their life.
One great tip is to take a look at the audience that your competitors are targeting. How does that group differentiate from yours? Examine the data-driven insights using the right tools to understand the entire funnel, and how you can leverage this data to incorporate your USP to retarget.
Take advantage of brand trackers.
Use a brand tracker to get measurable and actionable data on your audience. This data can give you various, but specific insights. For instance, tracking brand awareness will tell whether or not your ideal target audience actually knows about you. As well as that, tracking brand consideration will show if they would consider using your brand. You can also track this data for your competitors and compare how your brand fares against them.
In addition, you might even discover that this isn’t actually the best audience for you to be targeting. By digging deep into all of this brand tracking data, you might see new audiences appear that you had never previously considered. Just make sure to choose a brand tracker that caters to niche audiences.
Develop a persona for your target audience.
Now it’s worth creating a persona of what the quintessential member of your target audience is like. There are so many benefits from audience personas, so why not use it?
For example, if you target the millennial generation, go beyond a generic idea of a millennial and think more closely about who you are selling to. If you find that millennial females who live in urban areas and work in the tech sector buy your product more than anyone else, then their defining features and characteristics should also be those of your audience persona.
Once you have made a persona, it’s important that you inform everyone on your team. To keep everyone on the same track with all their strategic work, you all need to be targeting the same persona.
Start targeting.
Now that you know who you are aiming at, it’s time to start trying to reach them. In order to target your audience, focus your efforts on the channels they use most often.
If you know that your target audience spends a lot of their online time using Twitter, then it’s worth starting a campaign on that social media platform. However, if you are targeting an older audience who might prefer to spend their evenings in front of their TVs than tweeting, think about running some TV adverts.
Researching the channels that your audience use really can help you immensely — not doing so could end with you shooting blindly and completely missing.
How does running marketing campaigns help find your target audience, you may ask. Well, how can you be positive that they are the audience for you unless you see if they work? And don’t forget…
Continue to monitor.
So you research your target audience well and then start to target them using suitable methods and channels. Job done, right? Not quite.
Sure, you’ve taken the right kind of steps so that the right kind of consumers will see your brand marketing. But how do you know whether that’s really happening once your adverts and promotions are out there in the wild? How do you know that they are helping your sales?
Keep your eye on the ball and monitor how your marketing efforts are doing. You can do this by tracking your brand guidelines and campaigns to make sure that they are hitting the spot.
It’s also worth noting that target audiences can change or shift over time, so monitoring them is a continuous task for every brand manager. As long as you do make monitoring a habit of a lifetime, then there’s no risk of you ever being left behind by competitors.
Those steps don’t sound too difficult, right? If you follow through with them, you should discover new things about your target audience that you might never have realized. And those nuggets of wisdom could help you polish up your marketing campaigns like never before.
Not only that, but you can now carry out all of your campaigns confidently, as your target audience shouldn’t be even easier to reach.
By: Steve Habazin Entrepreneur Leadership Network VIP
Market leaders have capitalized on digital marketing since the early 90s, but the current level of awareness toward the use of online tools for marketing has been unprecedented — here in Europe and elsewhere around the globe. The first half of 2020 has habituated many people to include online interactions and transactions in their business dealings as well as their consumer behavior. Many experts opine that the pandemic has reduced physical interactions and elevated online marketing to the role of a critical survival tool, i.e. protecting the business from uncertainties and risks of present and the future.
While many businesses and clients have been thrust into the online space, LinkedIn has emerged as trusted platform for networking, lead generation and sales. It can be an ideal place to get started, establish your lead generation funnel and future-proof your business. This is how I advise my clients to ensure that their business remains resilient:
1. Gain digital trust.
You may employ some of the same principles to gain digital trust for both your professional profile and company page. The objective of establishing a digitally trusted brand transcends all tips and tactics of LinkedIn marketing. It results in brand loyalty through participation in an online community, relevance, and shareability of content and the overall user experience of consuming information and interacting on your posts and articles.
2. Build the right network.
Like offline marketing, LinkedIn also depends on referrals and endorsements. Unlike offline activities, your interactions are in public view and have the potential to automatically imply a positive relationship with decision-makers, thought leaders and influencers.
3. Source strategic inputs.
A key input of future-proofing is to have the right strategy for the times ahead. Fortunately, LinkedIn is home to valuable content that is posted daily by credible industry experts and thought leaders.
Many influencers post the spontaneous versions of their articles on LinkedIn before they elaborate and repurpose it for journals. The timely and subscription-free access to such information could serve as valuable inputs to your business strategy as well as your content marketing.
4. Blend verifiable data with unique insights.
Verifiable data invites views and unique insights are instrumental in attracting engagement. If your content is visible to the right network of contributors — i.e. experts, influencers, and target audience — you not only gain their trust and insightful responses, but you also start to build a following that can help widen your distribution net exponentially.
Since LinkedIn is a content-driven social network, a lot of your data can be sourced from the content within LinkedIn and blended with your own insights to generate original content.
5. Optimize your content for searchability and utility.
There are simple ways to do search engine optimization (SEO) for any kind of content, such as profiles or company pages, text or video, data-driven or heartwarming or how-to posts. While anyone can acquire the traits to be SEO friendly, you must also create and optimise your content in such a way that it is refreshing, reliable, and useful.
In a few weeks, this can help refine the parameters of identifying your target audience and marketing your content to them. Assess where you fit in and how your brand can be more appealing. If you want to save the time and effort, you can opt for a paid membership plan like the Sales Navigator and also seek guidance from a LinkedIn consultant like myself.
Curate your feed by following and unfollowing people in order to “train” the LinkedIn algorithm to show you only posts you are interested in or from your “ideal client.”
6. Promote P2P content distribution.
LinkedIn Marketing isn’t just about creating a network of people who consume your content. It’s also about creating a community of users who distribute your content.
In other words, you have to foster a person-to-person (P2P) network by stimulating a quid-pro-quo relationship with active influencers and also encouraging the contribution of followers who enhance your visibility in their network. Even a like or comment can improve your visibility and if a follower sees engagement from their network, some of them may choose to re-share or distribute your content.
The inimitable “golden hour” in which you have one hour after a post is published to gain the most traction has just been abandoned by LinkedIn and posts are still shown to your network for up to a week after posting.
Remember: Future-proofing your business with social is all about committing to the long game. Develop your strategy now to help ensure your visability in and viability for the future.
By: Melanie Goodman Owner and Founder of Trevisan Social Media Marketing
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How To Use LinkedIn For Business In 2020 Subscribe to my YouTube Channel for more social media for business video tips https://www.youtube.com/c/MarkWarncke… LinkedIn’s popularity continues to rise and rise and in 2020 in guessing it will tick over 700 million user and profiles. So it’s not going away and is now a must to use for everyone involved in B2B sales So in this video I explain 5 simple and easy tips to get started with on with LinkedIn for business in 2020 Tip 1 – Complete your profile 100% Tip 2 – Start posting on a regular basis Tip 3 – Engage with your network Tip 4 – start recording and posting video content Tip 5 – Use the search function to find your ideal lead or opportunity to reach out to. These are the basic fundamentals of using LinkedIn but the vast majority still use it.
If your just follow these simple and easy tips LinkedIn will open more opportunities than you ever thought possible. Some of the video references I mentioned in this video are listed here 5 Tips For a WOW LinkedIn Summary Section https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EQcS… How To Setup a LinkedIn Company Page https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfmNq… How To Connect LinkedIn and Twitter and Post To Both At Same Time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXPyk… To stay up to date with everything social media for business subscribe to my channel Social Media for business expert Mark Warncken – I’m the guy that makes social media for business owners and brands easy using YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and a whole lot more.. Recommended Playlist for a full series of LinkedIn For Business Videos LinkedIn For Business Playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned platform that caters to the professional and business world has, since its inception, been focused on helping its users create networking opportunities and relationships through connections, communications, groups and forums. All of this, of course, being done online. But LinkedIn is now expanding its offerings…by going offline.
Last week the company announced that it is launching a new feature called Events. It’s targeted at people and companies who still like to do in-person affairs in the actual real, physical world.
“I think there is a massive whitespace for events today,” Ajay Datta, the head of product for LinkedIn India (where the app was developed) told TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden. “People don’t have a single place to organize [work-related] offline meetups specific to an industry or a neighborhood. People want to find other people.”
Why is a service that has traditionally focused on online networking now dipping its toes into the offline world? It’s because there’s overlap….and opportunity.
Despite all the ways we talk to each other online, the fact is that people still like to get together with other people at least once in a blue moon. It’s a human thing, you know? There are hundreds of conferences, conventions, business luncheons, networking groups, meetups and other local gatherings going on each day. Ask any professional and they’ll tell you that they attend one of these at least once or twice year. Why? Because face-to-face events create leads, solidify relationships and – according to reports like this one – provide a significant return on investment for most business, big and small.
Which is why, as the owner of a company that does in-person events for our clients monthly, I view LinkedIn’s new Events feature to be a no-brainer. In fact, it’s something they should’ve done a while ago.
The event management software business – which includes popular brands such as Meetup and Eventbrite, is growing at about a 15 percent rate every year and is expected to be as large as $11.4 billion by 2024. Should these companies be worried? In the short term, no. But in the long term? Absolutely.
That’s because currently LinkedIn’s service – while free – is very limited. It only allows its users to invite their first-person connections and doesn’t include the kinds of advanced marketing and management capabilities that the other big-name brands have like being able to find venues, integrate other services, accept payments and manage attendees. But, as Lunden points out, “if this starts to see traction – and I suspect that it will – you could imagine how LinkedIn might start to add on all of the above, and more.”
She’s absolutely right. Just because LinkedIn has traditionally been an online community doesn’t mean it can’t facilitate offline events. For now, I’ll use it to supplement both Meetup and Eventbrite, which my company also uses to attract attendees. But as LinkedIn inevitably adds features I’ll likely be using it much more.
51% OFF my LinkedIn Influencer Blueprint course on Udemy! https://www.udemy.com/linkedin-influe… In this lecture I talk about some nifty tricks that 95% of people don’t even consider when it comes to networking offline. When you have that “AHA” moment, go ahead and implement them. You won’t regret it!
Each week presents a new opportunity for you and your team to learn the skills necessary to take on the next big challenge. And, at LinkedIn Learning, we want to do everything we can to help make that happen. So, each week, we add to our 13,000+ course library. And this past week was no different, as we added 40 new courses covering everything from graphic design to CAD to having difficult conversations…..
Adam Erhart
Mark Warncken – Social Media Selling 123
