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Did you hear about the Tour de France rider who turned up without a bike?

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What happens when your LinkedIn and social media content doesn’t resonate with your audience or grab their attention, when your invitation to connect has little or no relevance or your blog does not stir the emotions of the very people you want to do business with? The answer is nothing – nothing happens at all.

Your job as a business owner, a marketer or a social media champion is to ensure that your message is not only seen by your target audience but that it makes them sit up, pay attention and take action.

 

Grab your reader's attention and aim for their heart

Grab your reader’s attention and aim for their heart

Last week I was asked by a client, ‘how do we create all this content?’ and I could see where she was coming from. The task of ensuring that your business has sufficient content to share, sometimes several times a day, can appear daunting even to the most competent PR and marketing specialist but there are 2 ways you can make your life a lot easier, when it comes to making sure you have sufficient content to maintain a regular and relevant brand presence online:

  1. Creating your own content.
  2. Curate content from the web that is relevant to your audience.

I will expand on these 2 points throughout the rest of this post. First though, let me explain why posting content online is so important to your social media success by sharing my own story and how such activity regularly brings new business to Linked2Success.

Why posting content online regularly is important

When I first began sharing newsfeed updates via LinkedIn, no matter how much attention I paid to ensuring my content was relevant and that it included an attention grabbing headline, I was lucky if I achieved a 1% engagement level (likes, comments, shares). I didn’t exactly lose sleep over this but I did begin to question whether this approach was a good use of my time. And then it happened!

After a period of not attending any physical networking events, I began to do so again and at these meetings, I would invariably meet someone I knew who would say ‘Hi Steve, good to see you again, by the way, I really enjoyed your blog this week, in fact I read them regularly’ or ‘I see you’ve been working in London this past week, do you have clients all around the UK?’. Ok, I’m paraphrasing slightly here but the point I need to make is that these business people were paying attention, they were not only aware of my content sharing on LinkedIn, they were reading it, even if they chose not to leave a comment!

So, what did this epiphany tell me? It showed me that I should get over myself. I shouldn’t worry about the 1-3% engagement from the posts I share on social media, it’s fine. You see, if your goal is to raise your brand profile with potential clients in your regional area or a specific sector and social media is one of your chosen marketing approaches, then content sharing is important – if it’s read then mission accomplished and consider it a bonus if your content is engaged with.

“You’re bloody everywhere!”

Let me share another example. A few weeks ago, I checked, as I do daily, who had been viewing my LinkedIn profile, one of which was a previous client of ours. A great opportunity, I thought, to say hi and ask how things were going with LinkedIn since the training I provided for their team some 2 years previously. I duly got in touch and asked my client that very question and our subsequent LinkedIn discussion led to a telephone conversation and then confirmation of further LinkedIn training.

During the training session, discussion ultimately came around to the posting of their marketing content via LinkedIn’s newsfeed updates. It was at this point that my client explained: ‘The reason why we’re here today is that I knew I required further LinkedIn support for our business but who should I contact? It was a no-brainer as every day I look at LinkedIn you’re there Steve. You’re sharing LinkedIn tips, videos, infographics, you’re posting in groups, in fact you’re bloody everywhere!! It was obvious who I was going to get in touch with’  – Please forgive the expletive, that is what he actually said.

Now that you understand the relevance of posting content online, how do you go about creating sufficient material to maintain your brand presence and keep it interesting?

1. Creating your own content

I believe that you have 3 objectives as far as creating new content is concerned; 1) Maintain your brand profile 2) Position your expertise via thought leadership 3) Build a relationship directly with those you want to do business with.

1.1 Maintaining your brand profile

This simply requires you to share content that is useful, helps solve problems, challenges thinking or promotes your services. This content can come in various forms; written blogs; video blogs; case studies; inspirational quotes; new product launches; company news; your daily activity, especially if it positions you in a strong light, such as ‘on my way to London to work with XYZ Company PLC’. As long as the content is interesting and relevant and positions your brand effectively, it almost doesn’t matter what the format is or the content. You should also be considering recycling your content throughout the week and at different times of day, don’t just share a content piece once because most will miss it first time around.

1.2 Position your expertise

This type of content can also take a number of different forms, such as a written blog or maybe a case study but in this case your content needs to be much more considered. The format in this case probably needs to be something like a more detailed written thought leadership piece or a case study, displaying your knowledge and skills; perhaps a demonstration video or you could enter into a group discussion forum and engage with others to put across your point of view.

1.3 Building personal relationships

Social media is not just about posting content, it’s also about building personal relationships with those you would like to be doing business with. Think about your own activity on LinkedIn for a moment – how do you respond when someone in your target sector connects with you? Do you have a series of prepared messages, designed to generate further engagement and are you even clear what your relationship building funnel looks like? Check out one of my previous blogs ‘How to turn warm LinkedIn prospects into clients‘ for some ideas on creating relationship building content.

2. Curating content from elsewhere could be the answer

It’s not all about creating your own content, much of the engagement I receive online is in response to content I have sourced from the web. There is so much information available online these days that all you have to do is type into Google a key word or phrase that relates to any topic that is relevant to your area of expertise or your client’s situation and there you’ll find blogs, videos and much more.

Curate content via Google (set up Google alerts), Twitter (follow industry experts), LinkedIn (follow experts and access Pulse News), share this content directly from its source, ensuring you credit the author of course or why not review the content and share your opinion of the article instead, which will further position you as a thought leader.

In the end your prospects and clients don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care. Keep these audiences in mind at all times, whenever you’re communicating content via social media and you can’t go far wrong.

Being on social media, without a content marketing strategy is a bit like turning up to the Tour de France without a bike or being at the start of a marathon run without your running shoes – you just wouldn’t do it, would you?

Have a great rest of your week and I look forward to hearing from you, if you need to increase sales and attract more new clients to your business.

If you liked this post, please would you share it using the social media buttons below.

 

Steve

PS – check out these client case studies to see what impact our training had on these businesses – click here

 

Steve Phillip is Managing Director and co founder of Linked2Success, specialising in measurable social media sales & marketing support for businesses.

Want more tips like this? Sign up to our weekly news-brief here or follow Steve on Twitter @linked2Steve

 


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