Troy Sandidge
As the state of social media is getting more complex, the stakes for having a strong brand presence are higher, and trying to reach the decision-maker is even more challenging.
How do B2B and agency-centric brands—and the social media managers behind them—create content that breaks through within the LinkedIn platform ecosystem that also converts into tangible ROI?
Compelling content that converts consistently into tangible ROI requires:
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Speaking the right language to the ideal audience
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Reaching the decisions makers and earning trust
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A solid content engine for effective distribution
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Standing out in a niche industry to gain “top of mind” real estate
Regardless of what industry you are in, what product or service you sell, or whom you serve, all brands are now de facto media publishers. It’s not enough to simply “target specific titles, company sizes, revenue, and geo-locations” and create and schedule content to just run and think that basic Linkedin strategy alone will drive new inquiries, mentions, comments, and conversations that matter.
The Four Main Reasons Your Social Media Marketing Isn’t Working For LinkedIn
How do we turn LinkedIn content and connections into referrals and business deals?
Unless you’re among those that want “thought leadership” or LinkedIn Top Voice status, I think it’s safe to say we all want our social media marketing, content marketing, and overall marketing efforts to contribute to making our business more profitable and our brand more successful. Most people turn to LinkedIn because of the specific users on the platform, the type of aurora and energy there, and for most executives, it’s the main platform they understand best.
Maybe you’ve been creating content on LinkedIn already but just getting the results you want from the efforts.
This could be because of four possible reasons I expressed here but summarized below:
1. You’re making a lot of noise, but no one is listening
You could be speaking to the wrong people, not talking to the actual decision-makers. You aren’t showing proof of concept with your content. Or maybe your content, to be frank, just isn’t as good as you think it is, and you need to do better.
2. Your copy isn’t clear and doesn’t position you to be in high demand
How well do you know the needs of the people you want to attract, and is what you are doing aligned with them? Are you talking in only acronyms and business jargon or actual simple-speak? Does your content convey what you do and who you do it for clearly? You could be technically saying all the right things, but it’s all in a foreign language to them.
3. You simply aren’t posting and engaging enough
You posted, congratulations, you want a standing ovation? The world moves at lightspeed, where we scroll thousands of times a day on these screens. We have to get the word out there consistently because there will never be a time when everyone will see your posts.
4. You are not using LinkedIn properly for the goals you want to achieve
LinkedIn is a bridge, not a destination. If it stops at following, liking, and commenting, but never leads to off-platform conversations, then you aren’t approaching LinkedIn properly. But it’s a process. You can’t drive people to have a meeting if they don’t know who you are, what you stand for, and how you help. Build awareness. Establish identity. Prove expertise. Share knowledge. Nurture engagement. Spotlight others. Cultivate community. Ask intentionally.
Why Use LinkedIn In The First Place?
According to research by Sprout Social, LinkedIn content marketing generates 277% more leads vs Facebook marketing alone. In addition, when it comes to particularly B2B marketers, LinkedIn was responsible for 80% of their social media leads and conversions. And even though monthly active users (MAU) isn’t the biggest (about 320 million) in comparison to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube (though the endless debate of is YouTube technically a “social media channel” is still ongoing), the audience is a very focused group that if done correctly, can serve as a surplus for increasing network, community, connections, and of course the bottom line.
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Research by Econsultancy stated that LinkedIn is now responsible for a staggering 64% of all visits from social media channels to corporate websites, and rest assured that number has increased for today.
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According to HubSpot, LinkedIn lead generation is 227%, almost 3x higher than Twitter and Facebook.
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SourceOn research shows that 41% of all millionaires use LinkedIn.
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Oberlo compiled survey results reveals 70% of B2B marketers are increasing their organic social media efforts
If you want to see an additional breakdown of all the essential LinkedIn stats regarding demographics, users, audience breakdown, and more, you can see this 2022 LinkedIn Report by Data Reportal.
Why should any of this matter to you? Let these stats prove and debunk the myth that LinkedIn is just a professional network and instead accept that it is a potential gold mine for businesses and brands looking to expand their authority, increase their influence and community, boost their searchability, prove their insights and pov within their industry, and ultimately drive new business.
Now the question becomes, how can we use social media to harness LinkedIn as a utility to do this?
The LinkedIn Effect: How & Why You Need To Approach Social Media Differently On The Platform
All content, strategies, and marketing tactics aren’t created equal. Some are better than others. Some are more aligned with the ideal audience and platform. And from that same vein, to make social media marketing as effective as possible on LinkedIn, you must create an entirely separate (but in alignment with your overarching marketing) social media strategy for it.
Let’s cut right to the chase, you must be more tactical with your content creation and social distribution when it comes to LinkedIn. This isn’t a QVC commercial type of platform where you can “set it and forget it” and think that will drive the social media engagement activity and results you need to become a viable platform for your business. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Many marketing campaigns that have worked exceptionally well on other platforms were completely ineffective on LinkedIn.
The problems most executives (and the social media managers that write for them) face are:
- What do I write about?
- When do I post it?
- Who should I be talking to?
- Where should I point them to?
- How do I measure and quantify success?
- How do I replicate and maintain success?
A big part of the reason most marketing strategies fail with LinkedIn is that the platform is a personal user-focused first platform. Meaning that personal accounts get more reach, impact, and engagement than business accounts. While social media managers usually get all access to business accounts, it can be harder to get the trust and buy-in of your executive and leadership team to allow you access to post on their behalf. But this can create a great challenge for social media managers, forcing a longer-than-normal approval process to actually get content posted since they may want to be more involved with the creation, tone, presentation, timing, and overall management of the content. Then multiply that by multiple individuals, and it can get very time-consuming incredibly fast.
Revenue expectations from content are increasing astronomically, with pressure rising for marketers to create content in higher quantities that achieves the big audacious goals. Getting that buy-in is absolutely critical to successfully building and launching a content marketing plan that will increase the authority of the executive leader and help improve trust currency.
“I don’t mind if it’s a long-term strategy as long as you’re honest about it so that we don’t set short-term expectations.” – Liz Beechinor, Coefficient Marketing
A blog from Writer.com shared some good insights on how to get buy-in for your content strategy according to CEOs and mentioned as a marketer, it’s normal that you care about the details of the content strategy. But when you’re trying to get approval from decision-makers, focus on the business value of your content. Don’t just post titles and concepts, share ideas and walk them through to process to the desired outcome. Jay Acunso’s solution to the “green smoothie” problem, as he refers to it, is to answer the following questions:
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What do they want? (What are the goals of the CEO/Executive Leadership Team?)
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What do they believe about what they want? (What do they believe about content marketing?)
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What is your reasoning? (What are the steps you’re taking to reach their goals?)
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What is the unfair advantage? (What skills, tools, and expertise will help us reach our goals?)
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What will success require? (What resources, help, or commitment do you need from them?)
The better you’re able to pitch your copy, the better you’ll be.
Unlike other social media platforms, to get bigger, more concrete and quantifiable results from LinkedIn requires and demands more work than you may not be accustomed to, for this very reason of managing a sub-series of personal LinkedIn profiles building your very own “MCU” for your brand that ties back to the company LinkedIn page and driving folk to your website and other owned media sites accordingly.
Some examples of companies that have successfully done this very well:
I’ve even watched firsthand how the founder and CEO of Gravy, Casey Graham, used this tactic of empowering the personal brand development growth of their team members on LinkedIn in conjunction with their company business page to become a juggernaut in their space – raising more than $100M and is now worth more than $1B simply by developing an umbrella LinkedIn content marketing strategy.
TLDR: LinkedIn social media marketing effectiveness depends not just on how consistently your content is shared, the types of content created, and how you interweave your CTAs, but on the full delivery, which requires a solid system to achieve all of these things. This is where lessons learned from the LinkedIn Authority Writing System™ can come in handy.
What Is The LinkedIn Authority Writing System?
The LinkedIn Authority Writing System™ is an assembly of proprietary systems, messaging and positioning concepts, psychological techniques, marketing frameworks, distribution best practices, and copywriting methodologies tested and proven among c-suite and executives, B2B and Tech organizations, and industry leaders who desire to elevate their content marketing and ultimately their brand that breaks through the LinkedIn algorithm to connect with ideal customer profile for effective results.
I created this system for No Middle – a content marketing firm that approaches content from a psychological pov to build content engines helping multi-million and multi-billion Tech and B2B firms go to market fast – and over the past 18 months, we have learned a lot that can be very effective for social media marketing managers to implement.
Here’s what typically happens in the content creation process for LinkedIn:
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CEO – Smart, lots of things to say, technical, frantic. Tasks marketing with writing.
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Marketing Team – On an island by itself.
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Content Writers – On an entirely different planet by themself.
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Four weeks, countless interviews, meetings, drafts, and 25 edits later – nothing gets done.
Here’s what the final results were using that outdated, time-consuming process for LinkedIn:
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Inauthentic content that looks like a corporate robot wrote it.
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No personality.
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No emotion.
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No engagement.
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No ROI.
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No brand presence.
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And no one thought for a split second that it was actually written by the author.
Sounds familiar? I’m sure we’ve all been caught “in the middle” at times trying to get content ideation, marketing, and distribution going, but the final results didn’t achieve the intended goals – if you were even able to get content created in the first place.
Here’s How To Write For LinkedIn (That Actually Works):
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Post content that actually sounds like you.
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Start with one post a day, three times a week and increase from there.
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Text content should be 80% of the time, with the remaining 20% being visual.
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Schedule content on the weekends. (Many executive decision-makers engage on Sundays.)
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Long-form content has always proven to work best. (It’s not about length… it’s about interest.)
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Reshare content adding your own spin and including folk to the conversation. (Just don’t spam.)
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Set up notifications or use social listening tools to keep tabs on those creating content to engage.
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Focus less on hashtags and more on substance, storytelling, and visual groupings with your posts.
Additional Strategies To Incorporate:
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Engagement on your current and past posts, as well as aligned content creators, increase all of your metrics from engagements to mentions to profile views and connection with ICP.
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Regardless of medium (video, graphic, carousel, etc), long-form consistently performs best.
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Proper white space, bullets, or other symbols used to show lists, and short bursts do very well.
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Though long-form should be the priority, mix it up with short-form, polls, videos, and carousels.
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25% of your content should be mentioning or resharing with value-add someone else for reach.
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Participating in LinkedIn groups, events, audio events, and livestreams can help find new audiences.
The whole point is to avoid sounding like everyone else (a robot set to broadcast-only) and create an infrastructure where authenticity with an emphasis on achieving trust is the focus, all while pulling content to distribute consistently playing the long-term game. You’ll start seeing success in a boost of your engagements, mentions, profile views, connection requests, and LinkedIn SSI in no time.
Now That You Know The System, Here’s How To Reach The Mind Of Your Audience To Win Their Hearts
The longest form of communication among us humans is through stories. Storytelling is the backbone to making all of what we talked about even possible, and the numbers don’t lie. A consumer research report by Cone and Porter Novelli found:
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67% of people feel companies with a purpose care more about them and their families.
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79% said they’re more loyal to purpose brands.
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73% said they would defend them.
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67% said they are more willing to forgive such a company for a mistake.
Here are some questions you need to ask to activate your storytelling:
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Who are you? – What’s your identity or uniqueness? How are you different from others?
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Why are you here? – What’s your purpose? Studies show consumers care about your mission
statement. 63% of consumers prefer to purchase from a purpose-driven brand. -
What can you do? – What’s your potential? Know your strengths so you can maximize them.
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Where are you going? – What’s your destination? Start with your desired end in mind. It’s your blueprint and vision.
Your story identifies your passions and serves as the foundation for future content. It also evokes emotion, ignites curiosity, grabs attention, and locks people in. Once you have your story down, you’ll be able to move forward in creating content that will serve your brand in all areas.
In my book, Strategize Up, I shared two great formulas/frameworks to apply when writing for your audience.
The 4 Cs To Creating Impactful Stories
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Consideration. What are your followers’ pain points? What keeps them up at night? Ask your community questions about themselves, and encourage them to share their opinions.
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Communication. Be transparent about the what’s, why’s, and how’s of your story while adding the who’s, where’s, and when’s as background copy.
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Connection. Use emotion and reveal personal things about yourself to get your audience to open up to you and like you; the more touchpoints, the more powerful your influence.
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Consistency. Make it a point to market and share daily. Inconsistency confuses your audience and could also erode your bottom line. Exposing your vulnerability helps people trust you and convinces them you’re sincere!
The P.A.S.S. Formula
LinkedIn is all about community, brand loyalty, networking, and establishing strong relationships. You must create a social media marketing plan, tell stories, and write convincing copy in a way to touch all of these points. And the P.A.S.S. formula will help you activate profitable relationships on LinkedIn.
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Present a touchpoint. Present information and facts which allow your community to come to their own conclusions.
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Ask questions. Ask questions to spark conversations, especially when you are not equipped to give thoughts. Your audience can help through dialogue.
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Share often. Share what others are saying to amplify their voices.
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Sway frequently. Sway with content that makes the most sense and isn’t tone-deaf to what’s going on around you.
As Christopher Collins says, “great copy isn’t written, it’s assembled.”
Final Thoughts To Improve The Effectiveness Of Your Social Media Content On LinkedIn
To be clever, it’s not that LinkedIn of itself will give you business. It’s understanding how to use the utility that is LinkedIn with copywriting and effective social media marketing to compel your ideal audience to take action and have a conversation that could lead to the business opportunities you want.
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Create good content.
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Good content leads to conversations.
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Great conversations lead to building community.
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Community establishes brand authority and nurtures brand advocates.
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Brand advocates validate your content has value and generate the demand to create more of such.
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Repeat the process.
When it no longer creates conversations and maintains community interest, it is no longer good content, no matter how long it took you to make or how much money you spent to make it.
Good content is only determined by the actions taken by those who consume it.
Adjust the content to match the actions you need your consumer to take and if they are actually taking actions. Overlay your OKRs and OKIs as milestones and indicators accordingly to the actions you want to measure to lead you to the goals you want to achieve through the content that you produce.
Perception is reality to your consumer. Most focus on the creation but 75% is in proper distribution, tone, and timing among your community than the content production in itself. Please do not confuse the level of quality with the amount of effort, time, or money spent in creating it, as that doesn’t necessarily have a correlation to the quality dubbed by the audience. The quality is from the perception of the receiver, listener, watcher, reader, etc. If no one knows your content even exists, the question of whether the content is of high quality or not is irrelevant! Sometimes people use “quality” as a crutch or justification for perfectionism. Too many folk are missing out because their missing their window for content consumption and aren’t going harder on content distribution. Focus on creating quality content while simultaneously maximizing the quantity of distribution.
At the core of any social media marketing strategy and adjacent system that works for LinkedIn or any social media platform for that matter, requires an inside-out/top-down approach. You must activate, empower, and connect with your audience in a way that works consistently. And to do that the best way possible comes down to applying S.O.A.P. — Simplification, Omnichannel-communication, Automation, and Personalization. Master integrating S.O.A.P. into your content marketing and watch how well your content will perform to reach your goals and achieve the results you want.
When you fully utilize effective social media marketing, content marketing, and brand efforts on LinkedIn, it can visibly boost your authority, reach, discoverability, content distribution, audience, and sales. And despite the best LinkedIn marketing tactics being multifaceted with various nuances, finding the right ones that work well for you can make all the difference in your brand now and in the years to come!
Troy Sandidge @FindTroy
Strategy Hacker® • Executive Growth Advisor Giving Brands The Blueprint To Growing Faster • Author of Strategize Up • Top 100 Marketing Podcast Host • Keynote Speaker • Founder of Strategy Hackers
Hey, amazing humans! I’m Troy Sandidge, an award-winning growth strategist helping brands grow and scale faster, generating over $175 Million in sales and launching over 35 brands for clients worldwide.
I simplify the process to maximize businesses’ growth potential by creating custom strategies, systems, SOPs, and solutions to increase sustainable profitability and scalable revenue.
A 3x agency builder, 2x CMO, serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and executive growth advisor, I am the Founder of Strategy Hackers, a growth consultancy that increases the growth, authority, and profitability of growth-driven brands.
I am also the COO at No Middle, a content marketing firm that approaches content from a psychological pov to build content engines helping multi-million and multi-billion Tech and B2B firms go to market fast.
Author of Strategize Up, I’m known as the Strategy Hacker® because of my proficiency in go-to-market, demand gen, sales enablement, inbound, and digital marketing strategies infusing sociology, psychology, cultural anthropology, business ethnography, and behavior science.
Recognized as a Top 100 Marketing Leader and part of Los Angeles Wire’s 30 Under 30 Class of 2020, my insights and companies have been featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Fast Company, WSJ, Inc Magazine, Yahoo News, ABC, NBC, and CNN.
As an internationally-acclaimed speaker known for my captivating storytelling and energetic delivery, I’ve spoken at over 600 events on five continents, speaking at INBOUND, Digital Summit, Podcast Movement, Northwestern, United States-Korea Conference, Internet Summit, Social Media Week Lima, and several others. I’ve shared stages featuring Oprah Winfrey, President Barack Obama, Viola Davis, Daymond John, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Russel Brunson.
I am the host of the Webby-nominated, Top 100 Marketing Business Podcast iDigress — an unapologetically candid podcast praised for its business-talk simplicity and cultural infusion that is disrupting the pathways to achieving growth by empowering businesses to integrate easy-to-understand strategies, marketing frameworks, sales tactics, business insights, and proven methodologies to drive business success. iDigress is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network and among the Top 0.5% of all podcasts!
Follow me for all things growth, strategy, marketing, sales, copywriting, sustainability, and scalability.
• Podcast: iDigress.fm
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And I’m so happy this brought so much value for you. And yes would be honored to be a guest on your podcast in the not too distant future. Let’s get it locked in and an additional conversation! Getting notified of this comment brought me so much joy today! Thanks again.
I am excited to get my hands on it. I am excited to read and then host you! I’ll send you a link to book a slot for my podcast via LinkedIn message.