How do you use content effectively on LinkedIn?

Grant Leboff: Danny, one of the things that we are always talking about is content marketing, and I am wondering how can you use content effectively on LinkedIn?

Danny Bermant: When you connect to a new prospect on LinkedIn, that’s the first step – not the last. Often businesses give themselves a pat on the back, they say; ‘I’ve done it, I’ve connected to them, they are going to become a customer of mine’ and obviously that’s not going to happen.

The content is really what changes them from being a prospect to a buyer. There are three steps of building a relationship. 1) A prospect needs to like you, 2) They need to know you, 3) They need to trust you. That happens with content because, when they connect with you initially, they are thinking; well, you look interesting, I am intrigued, I would like to know more about you.

So what you then have to do is, you need to be using LinkedIn to regularly share the right sort of content. People often think that content is just putting out a status update. They may or may not see that, because they have to be on LinkedIn at the time that you post the update. So it’s actually thinking; what is the content that is going to get them to a stage where they are interested in working with you?

There is a well-known statistic that is used in sales whereby, for a prospect to buy from you, there are a minimum of five touch points with most prospect – it can be far more than that – but that’s what’s needed and very often, people on LinkedIn give up. They’ve sent a couple of bits of information… why hasn’t the person responded to me yet? So with those touch points you need to think about what sort of content is going to help people buy from you.

There are a variety of things that you can be doing, none of which take up a huge amount of time. It can be things like simple video guides – a little bit like what we are doing now – speaking to each other. You can basically put together a simple interview, where you are interviewing people in your industry. That works very well. You can be putting out PowerPoint presentations with a voice over where you are explaining an idea. That is something very easy to do in Camtasia or Screenflow if you are a Mac user. You can be putting out things like ‘cheat sheets’.

So, for example, if I am an accountant, I could put out a cheat sheet which is, say: ‘Here are 10 steps to understanding the budget’. These are great because these things that can be digested in a few minutes.

They are really helpful and at the same time they establish your credibility as knowing your business, knowing your subject.

In addition, a lot of content can be, what I call, ‘repurposed’. There is a lot of content that is evergreen so, for example, if you’ve written some great blog articles, you could actually take some of those articles and put them together into a simple e-book. So if you are an accountant, where you publish a weekly blog on accounting tips, you could turn that into a great book; ‘10 accounting tips to help your business’. You could be sharing that with your contacts. You will be surprised at the number of people who will, after receiving regular content from you, respond to that and say; Look, I love what you sent me, let’s have a chat.

But you’ve got to have perseverance and, as we see again and again, very often sales teams or commercial directors, who are using LinkedIn to push their business, give up too quickly because they’ve not been doing it for long enough and they’ve not got to that step where people are ready to buy.

Grant Leboff: So you’re putting out good content. How do you make sure that it’s being seen on LinkedIn? What are the techniques you can use to make sure that the right people are seeing this content, instead of just being filed into the ether?

Danny Bermant: You do need to be measuring what’s happening with content and one thing you need to be doing is setting up your analytics correctly. So if you are sharing ‘video’ guides which you want prospects to look at, you need to be linking it to a page on your website where your Google analytics will tell you we can see clearly that this content is being looked at regularly.

Grant Leboff: And of course coming from LinkedIn.

Danny Bermant: Yes, because your Google analytics will tell you the source from where traffic is coming. The other thing that is crucial is that you need to have a CRM system when you are using LinkedIn. You need to have some kind of customer database so you can actually measure how people are responding. If you think about, say, Facebook and Twitter, very often you will be pushing out updates that will take people to a place on the website where they might buy or sign up to something. So you can see your website stats and say; ‘Oh look! We have 400 visitors from Facebook, what we are doing on Facebook is working’.

LinkedIn is a little bit more complicated because, very often, it is an off-line relationship as well. When the person actually decides to buy from you, you have a face to face meeting, you have a phone call, or you are drawing up a contract… How do you measure that using traditional analytics? So you also need a customer database, CRM system, so you can effectively measure that.

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