Before you can develop your LinkedIn strategy, you need to understand the difference between three key terms that are used throughout this book:
• Strategy Your LinkedIn strategy is an implied or implicit statement of how you will achieve your objectives. Your strategy provides the direction and the decisions, related to your personal or business brand, that your LinkedIn presence and activities will communicate. This includes your brand promise, brand positioning, target audience, and the LinkedIn features available to you as well as your time, resource, and monetary investments. In other words, your LinkedIn strategy provides broad direction to all other functions related to your business, brand, or career development.
• Tactics The short-term actions you perform in an effort to execute your LinkedIn strategy.
• Plan Your LinkedIn plan is a written document that analyzes where you are currently in terms of meeting your LinkedIn goals, what your competitors are doing, where your target audience is, and what are your resources and budget. Based on your LinkedIn strategy, your LinkedIn plan outlines a long-term roadmap filled with short-term tactics and strategic steps to achieve your goals.
 |
INSIDER SECRET |
In order to develop a comprehensive LinkedIn strategy, you need to first define your goals as discussed in Chapter 1. Next, take the time to fully evaluate where you are today (personally or in terms of your business), what your competitors are doing on LinkedIn, and what your audience is doing on LinkedIn. You need to look for potential opportunities and threats, and you need to determine what are your strengths and weaknesses.
In marketing practice, this process is referred to as creating a SWOT Analysis. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. The key is to look for gaps and fill them. Those gaps could be new opportunities that you can fill or gaps that you must fill to defend yourself against competitive threats. You cannot create an effective LinkedIn strategy for the future if you don’t take time to understand the environment where you’ll be spending time (i.e., LinkedIn) and where you can fit into that environment.
B2B or B2C
What type of audience do you want to connect with? Are you trying to build a business that offers services to another business or government agencies? Do you want to build a consumer product brand to sell more products to people? These are some of the first questions to ask yourself as you develop your LinkedIn strategy.
LinkedIn is often referred to as the social site for business-to-business (B2B) sales, marketing, networking, and career development because the majority of members are professionals working either directly or indirectly in the world of business. However, the LinkedIn user base offers a lot more than B2B conversations, wants, and needs. Business-to-consumer (B2C) initiatives have a place on LinkedIn, too.
 |
DEFINITION |
The LinkedIn audience comes from the worlds of finance, marketing, self-employment, government, nonprofit, legal, and more. They’re executives, professors, middle management, students, entrepreneurs, and so on. In other words, they’re a diverse group of people, but they typically share a common focus on personal or business professional growth. That is why LinkedIn has gained a reputation as a B2B social media and content marketing tool, while Facebook—which has a much broader audience of users—has gained a reputation as a place for B2C marketing. However, every LinkedIn user is a consumer. They purchase products to live their lives each day, so excluding B2C marketing and brand-building activities from your LinkedIn strategy would mean missed opportunities. Bottom line: Even B2C has a place on LinkedIn.
Your LinkedIn strategy should appropriately reflect your efforts B2B or B2C. Even if you’re solely using LinkedIn as a tool to find your next job, your LinkedIn strategy should reflect your efforts B2B. While your efforts will focus on connecting with other people within your industry for career networking, your goal is to market yourself and your services as an employee to those businesses.
Networking Strategy
The concept of networking to build a career, business, or brand isn’t a new one. For as long as one can remember, people have been informally and formally networking to gather business and career leads, get on important people’s radar screens, and open doors to new opportunities. Whether it’s an informal cocktail hour after work with colleagues or a planned conference or event that brings larger numbers of people together for a common purpose, socializing with people at in-person networking events is common around the world.
With the debut of social networking sites in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the concept of networking for business, brand, and career growth evolved. No longer was it necessary to meet in-person to network with other people. By the mid-2000s, social networking moved from being an ancillary tactic for career and business development into an essential strategic priority. Today, if you’re not participating in social networking through a site like LinkedIn, you’re limiting your chances for success in whatever field or endeavor you choose.
Therefore to reach your goals on LinkedIn, you must define your networking strategy. LinkedIn should not replace your in-person networking efforts, but it should enhance those efforts. It’s simply not feasible to travel around the world and attend every conference, seminar, and trade show related to your career or business. Fortunately, LinkedIn offers tools such as groups, questions and answers, and messaging that enable you to converse with other people, schedule and promote online and offline events, and share and learn.
Determine the type of networking you want to do on LinkedIn to enhance your offline efforts and your other online efforts, then integrate those networking needs into your LinkedIn strategy. For example, if you want to connect with experts in a specific field to learn and to open doors for future business partnerships or sales, search for a LinkedIn group that is targeted to that audience and join it. (You can learn more about LinkedIn Groups in Chapter 7.) Alternatively, if you want to build relationships with people who work at a specific company to open doors to work with that company in the future, search for employee profiles (discussed in Chapter 5) or visit that company’s LinkedIn page and browse through employee profiles directly from that page (discussed in Chapter 14).
Again, you need to know why you want to network with people on LinkedIn before you can develop a strategy and plan to network effectively with them.
Content Strategy
Every word, image, video, presentation, and so on, that you publish on LinkedIn is a form of content, and all of that content can be considered part of your overall LinkedIn content marketing strategy. In simplest terms, content marketing is a method of indirectly promoting a company using words, images, and video that are published online or offline. There are three primary forms of content to consider when you’re talking about content marketing strategy:
• Long-form content Content that takes more than a couple of minutes to create and consume is considered long-form content. For example, most blog posts, articles, videos, white papers, e-books, and presentations would be considered long-form content. When you share a link to one of your sales presentations through your LinkedIn profile, you’re promoting your useful long-form content and indirectly marketing yourself, your business, and your brand.
• Short-form content Content that takes fewer than a couple of minutes to create and consume is considered short-form content. For example, Twitter posts, shared links on social bookmarking sites like Digg.com or StumbleUpon.com, and pictures or animated GIFs would be considered short-form content. When you share your Twitter posts feed via your LinkedIn profile updates, you’re promoting your short-form content and indirectly marketing yourself, your business, and your brand.
• Conversational content Content that is published to start or be part of an online conversation or two-way dialogue is considered conversational content. For example, a blog post comment, a forum post, a LinkedIn or Facebook update to another user or in a group, a comment on a video or image, or a Twitter update in reply to another user are all types of conversational content. When you publish a comment in response to another comment in a LinkedIn group that you belong to, you’re indirectly promoting yourself, your business, and your brand through useful conversational content.
As a member of LinkedIn, you can publish short-form and conversational content on the site, and you can also share and promote short-form, conversational, and long-form content that is published off of LinkedIn. For example, you can (and should) publish a link to your most recent blog post related to your business, brand, or career in your LinkedIn profile feed (discussed in Chapter 5). As you create (and inevitably modify) your LinkedIn strategy and plan, you must determine the type of content you are comfortable creating and understand where and how to create and publish that content both on LinkedIn and off of LinkedIn. Tips and suggestions for content creation are included throughout this book, so help is always at your fingertips.
Keep in mind, for content marketing to work your content should be useful and meaningful to your target audience, not self-promotional. While it’s perfectly acceptable to share links to your useful content on your blog or other site, and it’s also acceptable to publish an occasional promotional piece of content (for example, if you’re holding a special sale), it’s not acceptable to use LinkedIn as a place to continually promote yourself. LinkedIn is not your marketing brochure.
Marketing Strategy
Review your ultimate goals that made you consider using LinkedIn in the first place. What do you want to get out of your time on LinkedIn? Your marketing strategy depends on those goals. As mentioned in the preceding section, LinkedIn is not your marketing brochure, but it is a powerful social media and content-marketing tool. Through your social interactions and the content you publish on LinkedIn, you can effectively market yourself, your brand, and your business to large targeted audiences. It’s time to put your strategy for marketing yourself or your business on LinkedIn into writing.
As discussed in the definition of strategy (provided earlier in this chapter), your marketing strategy for LinkedIn must include both information and direction related to your macro- and microenvironments wherever you do business or represent yourself for career purposes. It needs to include directions related to your brand promise and position, as well as directions related to your competitor and customer analyses. Finally, it must include information about your budget and resources, and all of these parts must tie into your goals.
Put together a 12-month marketing strategy for how you plan to use LinkedIn to build your business, brand, or career; then turn that strategy into an actionable LinkedIn marketing plan that addresses the following strategy definitions and tactics to reach your strategic goals.
• Objectives: What do you want to do in the next 12 months?
• Target audience: Who do you want to talk to in the next 12 months and where can you find them? (Demographic and behavioral segmentation are discussed in the next section.)
• Influencers: Who can help you spread your messages and where can you find them (i.e., who they are, where they are, how they can help you, how you can build relationships with them)?
• Content: What kind of content do you and your competitors publish? What content does your target audience want? What content do influencers share with their own audiences?
• Content forms: What types of long-form, short-form, and conversational content will you publish?
• Marketing integration: How will your LinkedIn efforts tie in with your overall marketing strategy and build your business, brand, and career? How will you cross-promote to boost your results?
• Results tracking: How will you gather metrics to track your performance?
Don’t let the process of defining your LinkedIn strategy and plan become overwhelming. Remember, the social web is a constantly evolving environment with new tools and features debuting every day. Your LinkedIn strategy and plan should not be etched in stone. Instead, both should be working documents that change as you learn—and grow along with—your target audience, competitors, and the tools available to you. What works today might not work tomorrow in the fast-moving world of social media. You need to be prepared to adapt your efforts if you want to attain the best results.