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This may be an unpopular opinion amongst certain circles but hear me out.
I believe that your Executives and Salespeople represent a lucrative distribution channel you’d be crazy not to leverage.
Each Executive and Salesperson is sitting on thousands of LinkedIn connections; audiences being built but losing value quicker than the dollars sitting in your bank account (or the money you spend on the ads that you’re not sure whether they are properly hitting your target audience or not).
It’s an untapped marketing department hidden in plain sight.
Let’s unpack it.
LinkedIn is more than a recruitment tool – us marketers surely know this by now?
The companies winning on LinkedIn aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets, rather, they are the ones using it to share ideas and lead conversations through content creation (at scale). I began to understand the power of Executive branding on LinkedIn when I, among other leaders at a content marketing agency I founded, started doing it ourselves.
We understood John Dawes’ (Ehrenberg Bass) & Jon Lombardo’s (B2B Institute) 95:5 rule, which stipulates that of 100 people who would buy your product (your ideal customer profile), 95 aren’t yet ready to buy.
Therefore, posting once doesn’t “make it rain.”
So, what’s the best approach?
In a phrase: Think about marketing differently.
You first need to understand that if 95% of your ideal customer profile (ICP) aren’t ready to buy today, conversion messaging won’t be effective for most people you’re targeting. Awareness and consideration messaging however, will. And it will continue to create future demand.
Noting this isn’t to suggest 95% of your budget/focus goes on brand awareness efforts and the remainder to demand generation, no. This should remain at 50/50 (with a slight skew towards brand), but that’s a whole different article.
My point: You need to nurture the 95% and build mental availability until they fall into the 5% on their own terms.
To do that, your content needs to be consistent, authentic and relevant. This is best done through personal profiles.
LinkedIn company pages are imperative to have and be active from. However:
- They’re notorious for low reach (unless you pay for it)
- They’re less personal (people buy from people)
- There’s only one of them (unlike your team’s)
If you leverage the power of multiple people in your organisation – all strategically growing their networks and empowered with consistent, authentic and relevant content, you not only stand to reach more people (organically), you also get to see what content themes resonate with your ICP (at scale) before putting media spend behind content on the platform – which is a smarter use of budget too.
That’s not to say – don’t post content on your company page. The point is, don’t solely rely on it (or paid media).
We took this approach at my agency and two major things happened:
- Our clients noticed and asked if we’d do it for some of their Execs as a service
- Our personal notoriety rose as subject matter experts in our field, and prospects came and tapped me on the shoulder at events I would attend.
BINGO!
Knowing this is a great way to win business. Wayne and I have since built MySocial.ai to help scale your Exec’s and sales team’s social influence, enabling better quality conversations at scale; digitally and in the wild.
So, let’s help you tap into that today.
Discover a use case that works best for you.
Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash
