All digital marketers know that LinkedIn is the best social media platform for professional networking and showcasing expertise.
However, it’s likely that if you opened the platform right now and looked at your inbox and invitations to connect, you’d see a lot of spam. There are probably many people who are actively trying to sell you something.
This is not relationship marketing at play, and there’s a much better way to approach LinkedIn than being the salesy stranger.
That’s why we invited our friend, LinkedIn Expert, Viveka von Rosen, onto Magnet Marketers to discuss how you can magnetize your audience on LinkedIn and create real relationships.
Viveka von Rosen is the Cofounder of Vengreso, the largest provider of full-spectrum Modern Digital Sales transformation solutions, and FlyMSG, the world's coolest text expansion, and training software. Known as the @LinkedInExpert, she’s the author of the best-selling "LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day" AND "101 Ways to Rock LinkedIn” (and a few other books too.)
She's been named in Forbes (4 years running) as a top social media expert and is a regular contributor, and has been featured in Fast Company, Forbes, BuzzFeed, Inc, CNN, Entrepreneur, Selling Power, and the Social Media Examiner.
Her business mission is to help sales professionals and business owners create more quality and qualified conversations on LinkedIn.
Understanding PVC:
LinkedIn is just like any social media network in that it’s critical to show up authentically and take time to build relationships with others on the platform.
So often, individuals seem to forget that they need to earn the right to pitch or sell to someone. Trying to sell to a stranger will do nothing but harm your likelihood of making a connection, let alone a sale.
Viveka encourages marketers to remember PVC when on LinkedIn: personalized, value-based, and call to action.
Let’s break down PVC in-depth so that you can understand how to incorporate each of the principles into your marketing strategy.
Personalized:
The most effective content is personalized; it feels tailor-made to your target audience.
It’s important to keep your buyer persona in mind so that you can write in a tone of voice that resonates with them and their problems, interests, values, and pain points.
While it's commonplace for people to think “the bigger the audience, the better,” that definitely isn’t the case when it comes to effective messaging on social media. A larger audience is not better. In fact, the more focused you can get, the better your content will perform.
The more specific you are with your messaging, the better because that will be what people engage with and, therefore, what drives LinkedIn’s algorithm to amplify your content to an even larger audience of relevant people.
Action step: Add the name pronunciation AND a video to your LinkedIn profile.
While it might sound scary, we highly recommend leaning into the power of personalization by starting to create video content.
Not only can you create video content on LinkedIn, but you can send videos to people on messenger, which is another way to create closer relationships on the platform.
The people who are building deep relationships on social media are taking the time to look through people’s profiles to get to know them better so that they can craft personalized outreach and messaging.
This is the difference that makes the difference, and it’s what makes you more inviting.
We connect with people by being interested; when we’re interested in others, they become interested in return.
Not to mention, the law of reciprocity comes into play, and if you’re spending time engaging with others' content, they’re going to take the time to do the same with your content.
Value-Based:
Your content on social media should always aim to inspire, educate or entertain your audience.
By focusing on providing value, you don’t get lost in the weeds and ensure that your posts truly have a purpose. You want to work on content that draws people in and gets them to stick.
That’s why we strongly recommend creating buyer personas; they are what enable you to develop a deep understanding of your audience so that you know exactly what they’ll find valuable, funny, educational, and entertaining.
When you think of value, it’s not just about your social media content but how you approach relationship-building.
Once you’ve connected with someone online, you have permission to start truly showing up for them in a way that’s helpful and informative.
Action step: Enhance the connection you’ve created with someone by sending them over a free guide that you think they’d appreciate and find valuable.
This could be a guide that you created yourself (that’s ideal) OR one that you’ve found useful. The point is, you don’t want to try to sell someone something at first.
Your goal should be showing up consistently and authentically in a way that shows you care.
Call To Action:
Calls to action are so important in both our social media content and our personalized messages.
Being straightforward is a sign of respect, and it’s a much better way to get what you’re looking for.
It’s important that your calls to action aren’t all salesy.
In fact, the majority of your asks of your audience should be lighter lifts like asking someone to subscribe to your newsletter, follow you on Instagram, comment on your YouTube video or share your post with a friend.
That said, if you’ve been showing up online for months and providing a lot of value in your content, don’t be afraid to make a direct ask of your audience for them to visit your website and/or book you for a consultation.
Action Step: Use your intuition to determine when the right time is to make a call to action.
The most appropriate calls to action on LinkedIn are sending someone a link to your calendar to book a call. This shows that you’re truly interested in creating a connection.
Putting It All Together:
Whether you’re on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube or Twitter, it’s important to start showing up authentically with a goal of providing value.
Stop trying to sell yourself; instead, focus on creating and sharing magnetizing marketing content that helps your audience.
When you show up as someone with a goal of helping vs. selling, you build real relationships and end up driving long-term business success.
We recommend doing the following to start amplifying your approach to LinkedIn:
Make a plan for outreach:
Create a system for reaching out to and engaging with people on the platform in a way that is authentic, personalized, and genuine.
You probably aren’t going to be able to reach out to 5 new people a day, but maybe you can aim for 5 a week! Be realistic about the time you have to commit to the platform because the reality is that you do have to spend time nurturing relationships.
The great news is that you’ll find that you tend to send very similar messages based on your various offerings and buyer personas, so you can craft a few variations of a message and send it to the new contact.
Be intentional:
Don’t feel pressured to accept every single connection invitation that you get on LinkedIn. You want to make the platform work for you, which means being intentional about how you’re using it.
Use Viveka’s tool, FlyMSG.io:
It’s a chrome extension that has templates that allow you to expedite the messaging process without sacrificing the quality of the interaction. It has great categorization and internal training so that you can truly utilize the features of the tool.
The tool is the perfect mix between automation and manual; it’s not automated, but it saves a ton of time because it categorizes your messages and the formatting of your messages translates into the tool.
If you want to put everything that you’ve learned into action, we recommend connecting with Viveka on LinkedIn, but be sure to tell her that you watched Magnet Marketers so that she knows the *right* message to send to you in response!
What do you think? Are you going to transform your approach to using LinkedIn?
Have you checked out Viveka’s tool yet? We’d love to hear from you!
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