Speaker 1: In this episode, I'm going to give you a step-by-step guide to marketing your business on LinkedIn. Whether you own a business, work for a business or want to start a business, LinkedIn is one of the most powerful sources available to you today in order to generate more leads, more customers and more sales. So let me show you how it's done starting at the top with the first and single most important thing that you need to do and that's to identify and locate your target market. You see, one of the most important rules in marketing and especially when it comes to LinkedIn is making sure to properly categorize and identify your ideal target market so that you can find them and connect with them on the platform. Now, sometimes an ideal target market is also referred to as a customer avatar or a buyer persona but really what this is is some kind of representation either real or fictional of that perfect fit client or customer for your business. Now, this step is important because you really want to be specific, you really want to focus in on that kind of person that's going to get the best results from what it is that you have to offer and really figuring out the kind of person that you want to work with in the first place. You see, one of the biggest mistakes in all of marketing is trying to go too broad and trying to appeal to absolutely everybody. There's an expression that says when you try to appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to no one and there's a reason for this and that reason is when you try to appeal to everyone, when you go super broad with your messaging, you naturally have to water it down and make it a little more broad and a little more bland and a little more boring and generic. This means you don't get to highlight all of the pains and problems of your specific target market, you don't get to speak their language, you don't get to use the words and the messages and the calls to action that are actually going to attract them and so what ends up happening is you end up getting completely lost in the noise, just blending in rather than standing out. Not to mention, by failing to have a target market that you're going after, well, you're going to have to try to appeal to everyone and everyone, that's a whole lot of people. Man, that'd be exhausting. Fortunately for you and for me, LinkedIn has one of the most powerful business-specific search engines available today. In fact, even using the free version, you can run detailed searches for people, jobs, posts, companies, schools, groups, events and services and courses. Totally forgot courses. And each one of those has even more detailed selection criteria that you can further drill down in to really hone in on that exact perfect person or company or whatever it is that you're trying to connect with. For example, let's say that I was trying to do a search for a business in North America in the health and wellness industry with between 51 and 200 employees and let's say they also had active job listings. Well, that's fortunately as easy as just selecting a few different options and hitting search and voila, you've got pretty much everything you ever wanted. Now, here's a quick tip as well on choosing that employee number and why we would want to do this in the first place. Well, the reality is we can't choose, we can't select a business based on their revenue numbers, but we do have a pretty rough formula that we can apply in order to figure out the rough revenue associated with a company based on the number of employees that they have. So here it is. Annual revenue equals number of employees times $200,000. Or if that seems a little too high, you can multiply it by $150,000. But again, it's going to depend on business and market and industry. So I like 200k. So in this example, choosing a business between 51 and 200 different employees. Well, if we were to take the low end of that and say 51 employees, multiply that by $200,000. That gives us the company revenue at $10.2 million. Again, it's not perfect, but it works. And then once I have this information, well, I can further drill down into the different companies doing even more research into their employees and into their values and their mission and their goals. I can look at their website, I can look at all of their content and really start to get a feel for this business as well as the industry at large. Most importantly though, I can start to figure out what their problems are, what their pains are, as well as what their goals are and what they want to achieve so that I can position myself as a valuable resource that they can go to in order to help them solve the problems they have. And a powerful shift starts to happen for you and for your business when you provide value to people ahead of time, before money has ever changed hands or even before a conversation has ever taken place. So let's talk about that next with miracles and miseries. There are many wrong ways to make a connection request on LinkedIn and in life, but perhaps my least favorite of all and the one most likely to get ignored is this. Hey Adam, I was looking over your profile and I saw that you were in marketing. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help you. Now, at first glance this seems like a perfectly harmless introduction, maybe even a gesture of kindness and goodwill, but oh no my friend, this in fact is quite the opposite. Because what it's done is transfer the burden of responsibility for finding this person something they can do to help onto me. And I have no idea they can help or even if they could help because I know nothing about them or their experience or interests or goals. So if I were to take them up on their offer, I'd have to do a deep dive into them and start to come up with a list of ways that they may be able to help. Then present that to them and see if it lines up with what they were thinking. Obviously, this would take a ton of time and energy and therefore probably isn't gonna happen. So the message gets ignored or deleted. So what's the alternative? When it comes to standing out on LinkedIn or any other social media platform for that matter, well, the reality is you need to do a few certain things in order to position yourself as someone different, someone more valuable and someone that other people can rely on and go to when they need help. And the best way to do this is to start by addressing some of their concerns and some of their problems and some of the things that they want answers to through the use of miracles and miseries in your content. Their miseries are all of their fears and problems and pains and frustrations and all the things that they're trying to move away from either as people and as employees in the company or as the business or company itself. And their miracles are the complete opposite of that. That's their goals, their dreams, their wants, their desires, all the things that they're working towards, their desired end state that they hope to achieve. So the questions to ask yourself are what is your target market struggling with right now? What problems are they trying to solve? What goals do they have both short-term and long-term? And what do they really want to accomplish or achieve in let's say the next 30 to 90 days? Ideally something that you could help them with. For a very, very meta example, this episode right here on how to market yourself on LinkedIn is here to help you avoid the pains and the problems of not really knowing what the best practices are and what a good strategy is to better market yourself on LinkedIn. And ultimately, the miracles that it's trying to address is to help you grow your business, to get more clients or customers, to make more sales, and to increase your revenue. In fact, my entire content strategy is and has been for the past 10 years to do pretty much exactly what I'm telling you to do right now. First, identify your target market. Then, create content that addresses their miracles and their miseries. And then, get into the habit of showing up in front of them consistently over time. Day after day, week after week, month after month, and possibly even year after year. Of course, creating this kind of content is just one piece of the puzzle. It's a big piece but it's one piece nonetheless which is why the next step is making sure that all the rest of the pieces of the puzzle are in place so you can capitalize on all of the content and trust and goodwill that you've just built. And this means creating a LinkedIn marketing funnel. If you're not familiar with the term, a marketing funnel is really just a way of visually representing the customer journey. Basically, people start at the top of the funnel and then they work their way down or through your campaign and messaging until ultimately, a few come out the bottom as clients or customers. The top of the funnel is all about getting attention. The middle about increasing engagement and having someone raise their hand and self-select themselves as wanting to learn more. And then, the bottom is all about conversion and turning the lead into a client or customer. Now, here's the thing. Every business has a marketing funnel whether they're intentional about it or not. And the fastest and easiest way to identify what your current marketing funnel looks like is to reverse engineer your sales process. Starting at the end with a customer making a purchase and then stepping backwards, asking yourself what needs to happen before that. For example, if the end goal is a purchase, well, what needs to happen before that? Let's say a phone call. So then, what needs to happen before the call? And maybe it's to fill out an application form. And then, what needs to happen before that? And so on. The key for you is to make sure to be strategic and design your funnel to optimize the customer journey making it way more likely that your leads are actually going to arrive at the correct location by making a purchase rather than ending up lost or stuck somewhere. Like say, bouncing around and clicking all kinds of unrelated links on your website's homepage. Now, just like there are no two businesses exactly alike, there is no one-size-fits-all marketing funnel that's gonna work exactly the same for every business and every market and every industry with the exact same set of customers or profiles that they're going after. That said, there are a few things that are working exceptionally well right now and some best practices that I highly recommend you look into in order to increase your effectiveness with marketing on LinkedIn. The first of which is making sure that you have a dedicated lead magnet available for download right there on your personal profile. Adding one is as easy as entering it in the featured section of your profile and it'll allow you to easily collect email leads that you can follow up with later. A lead magnet like this would be considered gated content because it's content that hides behind a wall or a gate, I guess. And it requires someone to do something like enter their name and email address in order to receive that content. Ungated content, on the other hand, is the complete opposite and this would be all of the posts or articles or anything else that you just publish to social media without requiring someone to get access in order to see it. Both are important, gated and ungated. The gated content to capture leads in order to follow up with them later and the ungated content to provide value in advance and to capture someone's interest and attention. Now, with your gated content, with your lead magnet that you're going to be offering in exchange for someone's email address, well, once they enter their email address, the journey has really just begun because now it's your time to provide further value and to establish yourself as an authority in your field. And ultimately, all of these steps throughout your marketing funnel are going to lead to the next one and the next one and the next one, ultimately arriving at your conversion mechanism which is where you're going to transfer someone from a lead into a customer. Now, this could be done through a sales call, it could be done by talking in person, it could be done through a demo or a trial, whatever it is that works for you. But what's next? Well, at this point, we've talked about identifying and locating your ideal target market, we've talked about creating content on their miracles and miseries, and we've talked about creating a LinkedIn marketing funnel that drives people to your email list so you can follow up with them later and ultimately lead them to your conversion mechanism which is where you'll transfer them from a lead to a customer. But I've got something else pretty cool to share with you that's one of the most underused and least known about features in all of LinkedIn. In fact, I recently conducted the most unscientific experiment ever by simply asking a few of my friends and colleagues and peers if they'd ever heard of this thing and if they had if they were actually using it and most of them said no. And that thing is the LinkedIn marketing blog. Now, what I'm about to tell you next is obvious, painfully obvious, but there's an important point here. You see, the LinkedIn marketing blog is a blog about marketing owned and operated by LinkedIn. But why this is interesting and incredibly important is because this is LinkedIn's way of not just telling you but actually showing you what's important, what's valuable, and what's trending right now. This means with just a few minutes of reading and research you can see exactly what LinkedIn thinks you should be thinking about and creating content about right now. Plus, it also has some other pretty useful articles on everything from brand building to lead generation and social media marketing to LinkedIn ads to careers. But if you'd like to get even more of my absolute best secrets and strategies for marketing your business on LinkedIn then the next thing you're gonna want to do is check out the video that I've got linked up right here on how to get clients on LinkedIn. So, make sure to check it out now and I'll see you in the next video. The point is LinkedIn can be one of your business's highest quality lead and client generating sources, but you need to make sure that you're doing a few very simple but very important things...