So your company is on LinkedIn. You have a page and you might even have a product page, but you aren’t seeing the results that you want. Let’s talk about the one thing you can do right now to stand out on LinkedIn.
1. A Mindset Shift
People do business with people, not logos, and consumers are expecting more. We’re challenging you to change your mindset on how you were looking at your overall marketing strategy, but especially as it relates to LinkedIn. You need a content strategy that is centred around people. So stop cranking out boring, branded content and start leveraging your people!
2. Identifying Employee Brand Representatives
So who are these people? Well, it really depends on your company size. If you are a small company, typically it is the owner or another individual in leadership. If you are a bigger company, this could be an entire team of sales representatives, C suite executives. It really could be anyone that has subject matter expertise. Regardless of who it is, they have to be willing to be a face for your brands. It has multiple benefits, not just for them individually, but the company as well. So you’re boosting up their thought leadership, their personal brand, which makes them more invested in your company. And then your company is humanising its brand by sharing this individual’s expertise. Doing so will create more empowered and invested employees as well as cultivate brand affinity.
In addition to being a subject matter expert, this individual must be upbeat, articulate, especially on camera, positive, energetic, likeable. All of these traits are incredibly important because at the end of the day, you want someone who is going to resonate with your community. They must be willing to put in the time and effort that is required to become a thought leader. It’s easier when they see the value in building their personal brand and thought leadership. You can also help them by empowering them with the right tools and resources, starting with a content plan.
3. Know Your Customer
So what does this content strategy actually look like? First of all, you need to know your customer and your customer’s pain points. You need to know the gap of where your customers are now and where they wanna go. So you’ll want to pull from your existing client avatars and the more you know about your customer, the easier this process is going to be.
For example, talk to your sales team, figure out what questions they are getting when they are talking to prospects. Look at your emails. Look at what questions prospects and customers have asked you. Also look at your analytics. What keywords are people typing in to find your site? What blog topics are the most popular? What pages on your website or getting the most traffic?
You should also be looking at your competition. What are they doing with their content? Are they leveraging their employees, their people? What are some topics that may have not performed the greatest based on their engagement? Ultimately, you need to know your customer’s pain points inside and out. You never wanna lead with your solutions. You wanna provide value that addresses your customer’s pain points, and then your content will lead them to your solutions.
4. Leverage Existing Content
So how do you actually do this and make it a success? What does this content actually look like? A great place to start is by leveraging content that you already have.
So more than likely your company is posting blogs, social media posts, and white papers. So you have a repository that you can pull from. What you wanna do is start with that long form content and figure out what is going to resonate with your customers the most and what is gonna be the easiest to take and put into shorter form thought leadership content.
To demonstrate my point, let’s take a look at blog posts and how you can repurpose those into thought leadership content on LinkedIn. So what you wanna do is you want to create a hook in the beginning, which can be your blog title. Then you wanna have some sort of short introduction. Then you wanna have a few key points, and then you wanna wrap it up with the conclusion and then leading to your solutions. So you don’t wanna simply copy and paste a long blog post into a post. You wanna make it a condensed version and get straight to the point.
Another quick tip to maximise the engagement with your LinkedIn post is to pay attention to the formatting. You wanna make sure you have plenty of spaces and you’re utilising bullets and emojis to break up the content.
5. Utilise All Types of LinkedIn Posts
Now, there are all different types of posts that you should be taking advantage of on LinkedIn. This includes polls, videos, carousel posts, images and text only posts. And you really need to diversify your content and utilise all of these.
6. Establish a LinkedIn Post Schedule
The next key step is determining your posting schedule. Start with two posts a week to keep it easy. Weekday mornings perform best. If you have a team posting thought leadership content, you need to coordinate so that they are not posting everything at the same time.
7. Encourage Engagement
If you want this thought leadership content to get incredible results and maximum views, then you need to encourage engagements. And it’s especially important that this engagement comes in within the first hour of the post being live. And one way you can do that is by notifying employees every time a new post is live and then getting them to engage with the post. You might not wanna do this for every single piece of content (obviously that can get annoying.) Focus on the thought leadership pieces that are the most important. Share the URL of that post and encourage them to comment, like and share it.
8. Organising Your Plan
All can be a lot of work, especially when done right. You wanna make sure that you have an individual that is responsible for overseeing this process and managing it. One way to keep everything organised and everyone on the same page is by creating a shared content calendar. So everyone is aware of what is being posted and when it is being posted. For the most basic content calendar, you’ll want to include the topic, the person posting it and the post format. We briefly mentioned a few different post types today, but we go over them in a lot more detail over here in this post!
