LinkedIn Course Dry Run

Hey guys. So I wanted to talk to you today about getting started with LinkedIn. This is specifically for MSP owners, but it can be good for salespeople, marketers, anybody in the org who wants to become kind of a thought leader and grow the company's brand presence through LinkedIn. So if you have like a service delivery business, delivery manager who's open to engaging on LinkedIn, this can be good for them too. So the first thing is to just get started. We're going to go over a lot of strategy and different tactics you can use, but the most important thing is to create a baseline. And the only way you can create a baseline is by doing something. So post something, anything. A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. So you do want to create some type of objective for what you want to do. This is an example. Um, I want to create massive engagement with one post. Um, and there is a framework for this that you can use, but what's like your big picture. So define your objective and your big picture under your goal, right? Create a goal and decide what that is. Write a post. You can craft a compelling offer. Um, you can create some design functionality, or you can just post anything. Grab a video clip of you ranting about something that gets you fired up. My top performing LinkedIn content has always been just me talking about things that make me upset. Craft the post, right? You're going to need some assets. Then you're going to need to actually post it. The biggest thing on LinkedIn is engagement and follow-up. You need to respond to comments. You need to send direct messages. You need to personalize. You need to engage with other people's content to get people paying attention to you on LinkedIn. And then analyze and adapt. You need to monitor your results, track the number of new contacts that you get, track your engagement rates. Again, this part is all about creating a baseline. Your goal is to just get started, initiate some conversations and follow up. Okay. Then you're just going to continuously improve and iterate. On what you've done before, moving into the next bit, right? You want to develop a content strategy. The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. I talk to a lot of MSPs, and very frequently you guys will tell me our target market is just anybody that has more than five computers or more than ten computers, and we probably couldn't hand anybody that's more than like five hundred or two hundred or whatever that number is for you. That's a very, very broad audience. And if you were to try to capture that entire audience, it's going to be insurmountable. And when you market to everyone, you market to no one. So define your objectives a little bit more deeply, identify some goals, identify your target audience. And at this point, definitely one of your goals should be to build your audience, cap out the 200 connection requests you can send each week and create content that's going to draw more followers. So when we talk about content, there's 2 very different kinds. There is content that creates a lot of engagement, that gets a lot of interaction, and that is highly viral. That's usually like funny, emotionally charged content, but it isn't always the type of content that's going to convert into dollars for you. In order to get that content converting, you first need to have followers. So the So the initial strategy can be around memes and jokes. And then later you're going to start implementing more of that thought leadership content, that value-add, that high-converting content where you're going to get responses. You want to audit your current state. Remember before when we talked about just getting started, just do something? Auditing your current state is all about reviewing what you've done and what's worked. What topics have you covered? What's resonated? Do maybe a competitor analysis and look at your peers and the leaders in your field. What kind of content are they sharing? Identify your gaps and opportunities here. Okay, then we're going to build content pillars and themes. Don't worry, at the bottom of this segment I have a tool for this as an example of how I built it. Um, you're gonna, based on your objectives and your audience, you're gonna define 3 to 5 content pillars that represent the key areas of your focus. So like for me, Um, I'm focused on DEI, MSP sales, MSP marketing, uh, B2B technology sales, and then like kind of like family content. Kind of captures who I am. Develop your unique voice and your style. Decide how you want to sound to your audience, um, and consider formatting your posts in ways that are going to resonate, like stories, how-tos, lists, What's that mix going to be and what kind of tone are you going to use? Remember guys that authenticity is the best way to go. So you're not trying to develop a new voice, you're trying to capture your unique voice and style. Build out a content calendar and plan content. This is pretty basic. Hootsuite is free. Schedule out your content. You don't have to use a scheduling tool, you can just time block to do your posting, but for busy people it can be helpful. Full to just schedule that content instead of constantly having to log into LinkedIn and post. Crafting your content. Um, an engaging hook is the most important part on LinkedIn. Those top 2 lines, 2 to 3 lines in a LinkedIn post are what shows in the preview text. And after that, somebody has to click read more. The first thing that you need to do for the algorithm to like you is get people clicking that show more, read more, see more so that they get to see the whole post. Then the algorithm is checking to see how much time are they spending on that post? Is it actually engaging? Are they reading it? Then it's looking for likes, comments. And the big thing too is depth of comments. So the algorithm is going to present you to more people if there's lively commentary happening in the comment section. So not just someone commenting and you not responding, but them commenting, you responding with another point of view or a takeaway and getting them to reengage or others to reengage and come and comment in that comment section. So the deeper the thread goes, the more the algo says this is hot content, more people need to see. Engagement and community building. You need to respond to comments on your own posts, but you also need to use LinkedIn to grow your network strategically and comment on other people's posts. I have a whole like little file of people that I regularly check on their LinkedIn and engage in their content because I consider them to be thought leaders who help my network. Measuring and optimizing. You need to track your performance and iterate based on what works. I highly recommend Shield app. For this if you're not using it already. And here's an example of my content strategy. I listed out my interests, then I turned that into teachable topics. I dropped that down and created like a list of things that I wish I had known a year or 2 ago. And then I choose— chose my 3 primary content buckets and I picked topics for each bucket. I defined my voice. I analyzed my past content. I planned and wrote my content, and I have notes for myself on how to do that. And then I have this sort of like just at the bottom, it's just all these different files and stuff that are good, important links that I can use for things. Create a file like this for yourself. Growing your audience. This is the next piece. Marketing to everyone is noisy and ineffectual. Providing value To a niche is how you scale. So you got to choose your primary LinkedIn account. Who are you going to be posting as? If you're like, is it the company? Is it yourself? Just FYI, personal profiles do about ten times the reach on average of a business profile. So keep that in mind. Are you going to post as yourself, or is it going to be like a lower level employee? You're going to post as the owner. Are you ghostwriting for someone? Pick the account. Identify your target audience. Who are you talking to? Is it IT directors? Is it owners? Is it office managers? What industries are they in? What are their top pain points? What do they talk about? What do they care about? What resonates with them? Utilize the connections of well-connected individuals. Find those super connectors to connect with so that others will be their second connections. Just a fun thing to know about LinkedIn. Let's say that like Kyle or Alex were to comment on my post. You're more likely to see my post if you're connected with them and they like or comment on it than you are to see it just because you're connected with me and I posted it. So people see more content of their connections' engagement than they do their actual— the people that they follow. Go ahead and broaden your search and don't over-filter in the beginning. It's okay to have a wide audience as you get started. It's later on that you're going to want to niche down. A/B test your connect— personalized connection requests. So you can say something simple like, hi, I noticed that we share common interests. I'd love to connect, but also send them blank and see which performs better. For me and most of the people I coach, blank connections perform much better. Set a daily connection goal. You get 200 a week. Break that down into the time blocks you have to do this type of activity, or you can automate it with a tool. Track your progress. So monitor your acceptance rates and see what's working and then establish a routine. Um, you can drive engagement with some of my top-performing LinkedIn plays. Take a look at this. My favorite play is to connect with my ideal client, which would be MSPs and MSP owners, MSP salespeople, MSP marketing. Um, I create a poll that's specific to them. There's an example here, which is me asking, you know, what brings the most leads to your company? Is it the owner, referrals, inbound marketing, or outbound sales? Then I send the poll and I say something like, I really respect your industry expertise and I was hoping that you'd vote in my poll. I share the link and then I follow up when the poll closes and write a custom message. I just did this yesterday and I've booked 6 meetings just from sending the poll and the engagement that came from like the conversation we had before I even waited for the poll to close and do follow-up. So 6 meetings set just at the very beginning. There are a couple other plays here you can look at that could work well for you, both in building your network and turning that network into revenue, which is the end goal, right? Followers are dollars. Okay. If you approach a negotiation thinking the other guy likes you, you're wrong. That's not empathy. That's a projection. Okay. You need to prepare. You need to craft your compelling offer. You need to post, do some engagement, follow up, convert it into sales, and continuously improve. Then you want to just continue your engagement maintenance. This is a really short section. I'm sorry, whoever's editing this. I can do another take and make this better. This is my first time presenting this. It took me some time to put it together. Level up your story. Those who tell the stories rule the world. First and foremost, you need to identify the hero. So there's 2 ways to come around building a story and a story brand. One is creating a story where you're the hero of your own story, and you're gonna use your story as sort of the personal brand that connects to the brand of your business or what you sell. The other option is to make your client or prospect the hero, and you are merely the tool that they use in their quest. So you're Excalibur, but they're Arthur. You need to outline those heroes' issues— internal, external, philosophical. Introduce the guide. So maybe you're the guide, maybe you're not the tool, maybe you're the person that tells them how to use the tool. Present the plan and a call to action. Describe what success looks like and warn of failure. And implement your backstory. You need to kind of play around with this, but there is a spreadsheet here that I use to dig into my own backstory. Which you can play around with. Uh, you can build your niche here. You can also fill out a backstory, and there's content matrixes. So all these tools are available to you, and if you have questions about how to do this kind of stuff, I'd love to book a consult with you and just kind of dive into it personalized for you.