Is This the Missing Piece in Your LinkedIn Strategy?

Welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching Podcast. I'm Ellie Scarfe, senior executive coach and business owner, as well as coach and mentor to executive coaches who want to grow their business with more corporate clients. I'm also committed to helping people grow businesses where three things are true. Firstly, they pursue businesses that are financially profitable. Secondly, that we do this work because we want to make a difference and we want to feel excited to get out of bed and make the impact that we know we can have. And thirdly, we're building businesses that support our lives and our priorities. Whether that is travel, family, health, something else, or all of the above. Our businesses are supporting those things and not necessarily the other way around. This podcast is all about practical tips, advice from someone who has walked this path, and stories from inspiring coaches about how they've grown their coaching businesses and what coaching means to them. Now, this podcast is about 18 months old now and since I started I've published at least one episode per week. That is 82 episodes all up. Actually maybe it's 84 now, but because I started from zero to build up to the very dedicated listener base that we have now, I've realized that I have a lot of excellent episodes tips recordings in the earlier episodes that you may not have heard. So over the coming month you might hear a few of these OG episodes sprinkled in with new content. Today I'm sharing an episode that covers a factor that might just be the missing element if you have been finding your LinkedIn efforts falling flat. So if you can't seem to connect with your ideal clients, or if you aren't finding leads, or if your feed seems to be full of the wrong people, this episode is for you. Hello and welcome to the business of executive coaching. Today is a very short and sharp and very practical episode with just one idea that could help your LinkedIn strategy and is likely a gap in your current LinkedIn strategy. Or at least as far as I've seen with executive coaching business owners, this is not something that many people are doing consistently. So firstly, let's just do a quick refresher on what should be in your LinkedIn strategy as an executive coaching business owner. So these are really the basics. The basics are that you need a great profile and when I say great profile, that means having a good profile picture, a banner image that is appealing and clear, having clear links and having a way for people to contact you clearly and see any more information about you. Like your website, having a really well thought out about section, and having strategically chosen featured posts so that's the first basic. The second basic is having a really good rhythm around the content that you create and post. And specifically, I mean good content, content aimed at the people that you want to speak to that is attention grabbing and that you are consistently putting out there. So you know, the rhythm is as important as the content. So building the habit of posting as well as posting the content itself. The third basic is outreach. And strategic outreach really means reaching out to your network and starting conversations with people who are in your network and who are possibly in your client base as well. Now, in my program, the Impact Coach Collective, my group coaching or mentoring program, we have masterclasses on this sort of thing. So a lot of these subjects we have done deep dives into. The fourth basic is engaging in other people's content, either in groups or on their posts. And when I say that, you know, I mean really adding value and commenting because you have something to say, not just being one of those people who regurgitates the post and just restates what the post has said. I don't know if anyone else has noticed that. I sure have. So. So those are the basics. But one other thing that I've noticed most coaches aren't doing is deliberately adding more people to their network. And specifically, what I mean by this is sending connection requests and personalized notes to the people who are your dream clients. Now, there are a few reasons why it's important to do this. The first is that if you have a look at your current network on LinkedIn, it's entirely possible and quite likely that it is largely people who are not your ideal clients. Now, particularly with coaches, and I know this for myself, is that your network might be mostly coaches. And that's great because it means you're exposed to, you know, networking amongst your peers. You're seeing, you know, ideas around coaching. You're, you know, really sort of expanding in that thought leadership space. But it means that your network is probably not the people who you want to be seeing your content. So those ideal clients, the other reason is that we need to be consistently increasing the pool of leads that we're talking to and that we have in our world. So there is an exponential effect by adding more of these, you know, prospective clients to our network because the more people that we have in our network, in those ideal audiences, the more their connections will see what you're posting, the more potential referral sources that they will have and the more outreach opportunities you'll have into that right market for you. It's also important because you will get exposed more to what those ideal clients are posting themselves. So you'll be learning about what is important to them, what is topical in their industry, what challenges the industry is experiencing. And all of those things help you to write better and more valuable content for those people. So we end up with that sort of virtuous cycle. So how should you do it? Like, if you want to add more of your target audience to your LinkedIn network, what should you do? The mechanics are actually pretty simple. So the first thing is to figure out actually what dream clients do you want to be targeting and adding more of in your LinkedIn network. So you need to decide, is it a geographical area, is it people in a certain role, is it an industry, is it a size of company, is it a particular profession, or is it a combination of those? So some people call this niching, you know, I think it's easier to think about, you know, what are the dream clients that you wish to have more of? And those are the people that you want to target your marketing towards. And one of the aspects is adding more of them to your network. So once you've figured out who those people are from a demographic perspective, then you actually have to find them. And you can do that using the search functions within LinkedIn, or you can do it by getting lists anywhere, really. So you might have industry groups that publish lists of people, or you might attend a conference and see a list of people. All of those are viable ways. But in LinkedIn, you can use the search function. So if you have Sales Navigator, you will have more advanced filtering and you can save lists, which is very helpful. But there's still a lot that you can do with regular LinkedIn or with LinkedIn Premium. So you need to use the search function. Then you need to build a rhythm around reaching out to them. So a habit, a habit of saying, I'm going to consistently and predictably add more people to my network, particularly people who are in this ideal client bracket, if you like. And so the way to build a rhythm, I think, that works best, is to set yourself daily or weekly targets of how many people you're going to connect with. Now, there are actually limits on how many people you can connect with. I think it is around 400 per month. But I would suggest doing some research and checking because you don't want to go over that. But I think they do prefer that you gradually ramp it up. So what I would suggest is start with five per day, start with something like that, and then grow it from there. So don't do Too much too soon. But equally, you want to build that muscle early. So it's pretty simple. Then you can apply all of your outreach strategies because they'll be in your network, but they'll also be seeing your content. So it should go pretty smoothly. But in terms of, you know, a few FYIs, one of them is don't accept them all to accept. So. And 100% acceptance rate is unrealistic. So if this is largely a cold outreach, you are not going to have 100% of people say, oh yes, sure, let me be in your network. So with my cold outreach, I get about 70, 65% acceptance and then I have about 30% of those people who respond to the message that I've attached to the invite. And I'd say this is fairly standard. So you know, have just pay attention to your own numbers. I would also say in terms of the notes that you attach to your connection request, keep it simple but keep it personal. So you might have a standard template of one and then you just adapt it to putting something personal to that person. So for example, you might want to include something about something you have in common that you notice through your review of their profile. Or maybe you have connections in common, maybe you've been in the same industry or did you read something interesting in their post? Is there something that you would like to discuss further or you wanted to ask them a question about? Your goal is to have them join your network and ideally to start a conversation. Because that's what we're really here to do. We're here to build connections, we're here to learn. And you know, there's. I don't think of this as a salesy process. This is really actually about connecting with people and so, you know, build your connection with them on that basis. So if reaching out to people and adding new connections is something that you don't already do, I think it's a really valuable way to invest a few minutes every day. You might even include it in your hour of power. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, then check out episode 20. I hope that this idea was helpful for you and I'll be back next week. See you later.