Is Your Business using LinkedIn to Market Effectively?

We are back, guys. LinkedIn, here we go. It's the big one today. I am excited for this, guys. I love the LinkedIn network. It is one of my favorite social media networks. It gets very little hype compared to some of the newer networks that are out there. Everybody's talking about Instagram and Snapchat, and it's like LinkedIn is tucked over here because people don't really know how to use it. They think it's an old-timer network. Maybe it's a B2B exclusive network, and we're going to trash those myths. Today we're gonna go through what is LinkedIn, how can you use it effectively B2C and B2B, and here we go. So what is it? What is LinkedIn? For those of you that don't know, most people out there would go, oh, it's a job site. It's like Monster or Indeed or Workopolis or wherever you go to put out your resumes for jobs. Incorrect, it's not right. LinkedIn is an extremely powerful network that is built of Millions of professionals across the world, globally, internationally. Everybody in every niche, in every industry has their decision makers on LinkedIn. So what is LinkedIn? LinkedIn is a powerful resource for you to be able to engage in community with powerful decision makers in companies, whether that's executives, directors, presidents, vice presidents, owners, even entrepreneurs are all over the thing. It's an amazing opportunity for you to connect as a professional with other like-minded professionals either in your industry or in industries you want to migrate your business to. So what is LinkedIn? Is it a job site? It's a small portion of it. We're talking like 5-10% of the site. The reality is it's a powerful networking tool that you could— people love going to these business conferences and connecting and trading business cards. This is the world's largest business conference. Business cards are free, and you can try to connect with anybody you want. Biggest names out there. You want to go tap on Mark Zuckerberg's shoulder? Give it a shot. Go for it. It's an amazing network, powerful tool. Consider it the world's largest business conference. That's LinkedIn. Now, how do we use it? So how do we use it? How do we use it for business? B2C must be irrelevant on this network if it's just business people talking with other business people. You're dead wrong. LinkedIn can be an extremely powerful B2C network for this reason. You know this many people. It doesn't matter who you are, even if you're the biggest person in the world, you still only have your influence. And you could be Mark Zuckerberg and your influence is bigger than other people, but you're still not reaching everybody. You're not relevant to everybody. And the beauty of LinkedIn is it allows companies with a product that is meant for the customer base, not the businesses, to connect with distributors. And why is that important? Why is that of value to you as somebody who creates a product for a direct customer base? It's important because the decision makers in distributors for your niche are all on LinkedIn. So I can say it again, the people that sell things to the people you want to sell things to are on LinkedIn. And I'm not talking about direct competition. I'm not talking like, well, Nike knows Adidas is out there. I'm talking Nike knows Walmart's out there. Nike knows Amazon's on there. You get what I'm saying? So the opportunity is there for you guys, and how it works is you simply go onto LinkedIn. I'm gonna assume you've already done that. I shouldn't make that assumption. You should go on there, create an amazing profile, showcase your product if you're B2C. How do you serve people? What's your passion? What's your community? Who else says that you've done it? What have you created? How does it work? Great. Now that that's out there, engage with the community. It's as simple as a search bar, guys. Type in your industry, type in similar keywords to the things that are involved in your industry, and you're going to see 3 kinds of things pop up. You're going to see other companies, you're going to see decision makers in that field or industry, and you're going to see groups that you can plug into. Engage. Go, go. It sounds always like Star Trek. Engage. But really, that's the reality of it. As a B2C company, what you do is you take your product, you engage with like-minded professionals in that industry, either in groups, on their company pages, or or directly through connection, if you're able to connect to them through your network, okay? It's that simple, it's not that difficult, but imagine the power of taking your network and going, okay, so here's the people that I can reach currently, it may be a lot, it may be a little, great, but I know there are distributors out there like Walmart that would love my product, so how do I go about connecting to a relevant decision maker inside Walmart? What groups are they in? What business pages are they involved in? What's their direct profile? Can I find their name? Do I know their role? Great. Now connect, engage with them and say, eventually knock on doors, just pop it out, 10, 15 connections a day. Great. Hi, who are you? This is what I do, this is what I love. I'd love for you to distribute this in your store. Even people as small as mom-and-pop shops are on there. So if you look local at people specifically in your city that have a shop that you know would kill it with your product, great, connect to them. Their decision maker is on there. It's a great B2C opportunity, guys. Don't shirk it. Because it's not Twitter or Instagram or Facebook. It's a powerful tool for your B2C company. B2B. Oh, if you're not using this for B2B, you're gonna wreck yourself after you start using it. The first 5 years of my business, every contract, not a couple of them, every single contract came from a connection on LinkedIn, every single one. And the beauty of this was, as that grew, as those contracts grew, these were people already using the network. So guess where the referrals came? Guess where the recommendations and endorsements came from my profile? All of those contracts that I worked on from LinkedIn. It just fed itself. It grew like a monster, and my ability now—there's not—I would safely say there's not a person in the world that I cannot connect to via LinkedIn. All of the connections that I've that have grown out just over five years, I am able to connect to a decision maker at any major company just by reaching out. I remember a couple years back I was able to connect to Mark Zuckerberg. I was like, this is awesome, that a small digital marketing firm in Canada can connect to Mark Zuckerberg via LinkedIn, killer. It's absolutely amazing what can be accomplished. So again, same process as B2C for the most part. What you want to do is get out there, get in your industry, get involved in the groups and pages, get involved with companies and decision makers that are relevant to the service or product that you provide B2B. But the added benefit to this is you want to reach out to people that you've worked with in the past and get their professional referrals and endorsements on your profile. What this does, guys, is it steamrolls your own profile for you. You allow customers and past clients to skyrocket your own profile for you, to give you the authority that you have to build up on the other networks. I— you just— you start up on Instagram and you have to build an authority in the community before where you can start speaking to things. Otherwise, people aren't gonna listen, they'll just move past it. Here, the network itself builds the authority into your profile. That's super powerful. This would be like you need a resume to land a gig and somebody else writes it for you. And not only do they write it for you, they write the best things about you onto that resume. They blow other people away and say, that's the guy. But it's millions of people on this thing that have the potential to do that for you. So if you're B2B and you are not connecting using LinkedIn, you're stressing out on Facebook, you're stressing out on ads and Twitter and Instagram and all that, if you haven't touched LinkedIn, you are missing out on a massive opportunity, massive. You wanna talk low-hanging fruit? It's like Instagram and Twitter are up here and Facebook is up here and LinkedIn's on the ground. It's the fruit that falls Fell onto the ground. All you gotta do is pick it up and go. That's it for today, guys. Thank you so much for all the ideas you guys have been throwing out. As you can see, I'm loving this daily process of creating these videos. So Monday through Saturday, we're gonna pump out a video every day for the next year. See how it goes. See how it grows. You can help me to grow it by click that subscribe button. Love it. Click it. And any comments that you have below, any other questions you have about LinkedIn or any other networks you'd like to see. Me rip apart and give you guys some ideas and thought process on, I'd love to do that. We will catch you guys tomorrow for the next video. No clue what it's going to be yet, but we will see when we get there. Take it easy, guys, and have an amazing Friday.