by admin | Oct 7, 2014 | Blog, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Training
If you are the owner or founder of an SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) or are the person responsible for sales or business development in any size organization then your reputation – your personal brand is paramount in your personal success and the success of your organization.
‘Brands are like people’ is an analogy often used to describe the companies they represent.
Virgin is the brand built by Richard Branson and the two are hard to separate. Consumers buy into the personality of the founder and what it represents and promises.
In many cases however ‘brands are people’ – every celebrity is a brand, from Oprah to Dr.Phil, to rock stars and actors to sports people like Beckham.
Business brands take on or communicate the values of their founders. This is especially true for start-ups and new businesses, professional services firms where the names of the founding partners make up the brand names. Although this is not the best way to brand your services business this is still the dominant reality for many.
So the brands are designed and communicated by people. People, especially in services industry is who we all buy from! So it makes sense that ‘these people’ have an optimal representation of who they are and what makes them special in the place where it matters most, the place where positive perceptions are formed – online!
Your online identity and representation is made of your online assets:
- LinkedIn
- Twitter
- Facebook
- Blog / Website
- YouTube Channel, etc
The most important of these in the SME (B2B & Professional Services) is LinkedIn, and we’ll cover this next.
For a Free and No Obligation Discussion about your specific needs contact us today.
by admin | Sep 22, 2014 | Blog, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Training
LinkedIn, is the most exciting of all social media and one that is not being used to anywhere near its potential by 95% of users.
In fact it is the greatest Personal Branding, PR and Business Development Tool for B2B and Professional Services since…EVER!
With LinkedIn you can:
- Take control and promote your personal and company brand
- Promote all of your online marketing assets from one central location
- Be proactive in the way you network
- Headhunt, recruit and be headhunted
- Develop new business and maintain / improve existing relationships, generate leads and accelerate sales
- Advertise – reach an exclusive, well educated and highest income demographic online, with laser sharp accuracy
- Ask for advice, the ultimate in ‘crowdsourcing’ from those best qualified professionals
- Find experts and partners
- Increase your personal productivity
- Conduct extensive research on industry trends, consumer opinions, companies and individuals
- Conduct reference checks
and much more!
For a Free and No Obligation Discussion about your specific needs contact us today.
by admin | Feb 20, 2012 | Blog, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Training, Promotion, Strategy
There are not many certainties in the world today, but here are 3 we can examine and show you how LinkedIn can assist you in benefitting from each:
1. The world has changed and the change of pace will keep accelerating.
Whether there will be another financial crisis or not and how big it will be is not something any of us can predict or control, but jobs will keep being lost; outsourcing, offshoring, resources will keep flowing to where the return on investment is the greatest. Whether it is job vacancies or business opportunities you will have to work harder and smarter to stand out and differentiate yourself from a greater number of competitors all trying to get a smaller share of the pie.
So, who can you rely on when times get tough?
You! And the equity in you; your personal brand. LinkedIn is the perfect personal branding and publicity tool.
LinkedIn, is a way that you can communicate to the world
- What you know, your experience and expertise, knowledge and the benefits you can deliver to your clients and manage and leverage
- Who you know, your trusted network, the people that think you are good
There’s no point debating which of the two is more important, you need a good dose of both for success.
2. Online Marketing in general and Social Media Marketing specifically, together with the irreversible swing towards inbound marketing means that if your online marketing assets are not optimised and helping you and your business ‘get found’ then you will rapidly be left behind.
When it comes to B2B and professional services, LinkedIn provides the ultimate platform to combine all of your marketing assets, once they have been optimised – no point driving visitors to a leaky boat:
- Your LinkedIn Profile itself is a great way to be found by prospects and stay top of mind in front of your customers
- Your Website
- Your Blog
- Your YouTube Channel
- Your Slideshare
3. Everybody in business relies on it, everybody wants it, everybody knows it is the most effective way of attracting customers, yet when it comes to the holy grail of generating referrals very few businesses / salespeople have a have a plan and a process to turn their connections into contracts!
LinkedIn is the perfect Sales Tool for B2B and professional services marketers that allows you to leverage your networks. LinkedIn provides the perfect and simple platform for every step of a typical Referral Process:
- Identifying Referrers / Influencers in your Network
- Providing customers with a WOW experience (LinkedIn won’t help you there – you need to be great at what you do or deliver exceptional value through your products and services!)
- Stay Top of Mind through regular communication that adds value to your customers and prospects
- Educate your network how to refer to you
- Ask for targeted Referrals and Introductions, rather than ‘asking for referrals blindly’
- Recognise and Reward those that refer to you!
Don’t get left out, get LinkedIn.
To learn about our LinkedIn courses check this out.
For a Free and No Obligation Discussion about your specific needs contact us today.
by admin | Feb 9, 2012 | Blog, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Training
There are 3 types of people in business:
- Entrepreneurs
- Intrapreneurs
- Un-enterprising and all of them can benefit from LinkedIn, even the un-enterprising!
It’s the often overlooked social media channel of LinkedIn! Whilst it is Facebook and Twitter that get all the media attention, it is LinkedIn that leads with results.
Hubspot research shows LinkedIn being the equal leading Customer Acquisition Channel together with Company Blogs and the definitive leader in the B2B segment.
“LinkedIn is the largest professional social network online today with an astounding 135 million users and a targeted audience of business professionals. If you are a business professional and you do not have a powerful presence on LinkedIn, you are undoubtedly missing valuable opportunities to connect and grow your business.”
– Rebecca Corliss is marketing manager and leader of the social media marketing team at Hubspot.
“There is no other social networking site in which you have a greater chance of being able to interact with an influential decision maker due to the business- focused nature of the community. LinkedIn remains one of the best social networking sites to market your business-to-business (b2b) products and services because of this special demographic. even for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, LinkedIn is important: not only because consumers are members of LinkedIn, but also because the network offers a great platform for finding distributors, agents, and strategic alliances.”
– Neal Schaffer, author of Windmill Networking
I used to refer to LinkedIn as “Facebook for Business”, but how wrong I was!
The first 2 points provide a major difference between LinkedIn and Facebook and hence give business people an amazing opportunity not available in any other media channel:
1. LinkedIn provides a meeting place where people expect to “do business”
2. LinkedIn leverages relationships by making connections visible
3. LinkedIn helps maintain personal relationships and build new ones.
4. LinkedIn provides a platform for the most effective form of Marketing – Word of Mouth
5. It can link all your Online Marketing Assets and essential Social Media Tools, e.g: Website, Blog, Slideshare (now incorporating Video), Twitter and Facebook.
With all of the new developments in LinkedIn, today it can assist you with:
- Promoting your personal brand
- Proactive Networking
- Checking References and Backgrounds
- Look for a Job, Seek and Hire Candidates and be better prepared for interviews
- Generate Leads and Accelerate Sales
- Ask for Advice from your own network as well as “Crowdsource”
- Find Experts and Partners
- Improve your Personal Productivity with all of the different LinkedIn tools, Widgets, and Apps.
- Research trends and industries, gather opinions by running pols as well as track company news.
Finally and most importantly, LinkedIn can provide you with the perfect and simple platform for a Referral System! Referrals are critical to success in business.
FACT
– 98% of Businesses rely on referrals to gain new business*
FACT
– 3% of businesses have a strategy for referrals*
REFERENCE:
*BNI – Business Network International
Benefits of a Referral System:
- Lower Marketing Costs
- Higher Revenues
- Prospects convert to Customers
- Better customer ‘behaviour’
- You can concentrate on your business
Please note that there is a large and important difference between Word of Mouth Advertising and a Referral System. Word of Mouth or ‘going viral’, usually happens by chance. We as marketers try as we might do not have control over a video or a game going viral, and more fail than succeed!
A Referral System, on the other hand is:
- Predictable
- Consistent and
- Repeatable!
LinkedIn can assist you in most of the critical steps of a typical Referral Process:
- Identifying Referrers / Influencers in your Network by listening and studying where opinions are being shared
- Providing them with a WOW experience (LinkedIn won’t help you there – you need to be great at what you do or deliver exceptional value through your products and services!)
- Stay Top of Mind
- Help them Help You – you need to educate your network how to refer to you
- You need to ask for Referrals and Introductions
- And you need to Recognise and Reward those that place their trust in you and refer to you!
LinkedIn or any other technology or media channel for that matter will not help you Stand Out and Be Noticed!
You need to give people a reason to talk about your products and services, and make it easier for that conversation to take place. You’ll need to be creative and wow prospects and not just with your message. Remember the old adage – “great advertising kills bad products faster”
As with all social media or marketing activities in general, the more you put into them the more you will get back in return. The more you care and share the more likely you are to benefit. Check out this latest Infographic http://mashable.com/2012/02/08/new-content-marketing-tactics/
To learn about our LinkedIn courses check out http://www.qubepartners.com/promotion-media/social-media/linkedin.
Get LinkedIn or become LockedOut!
For a Free and No Obligation Discussion about your specific needs contact us today.
by admin | Dec 13, 2010 | Blog, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Training
A fascinating debate recently took place on the pages of Anthill, the summary of which can be described as follows:
- Should you aim to get as many connections as possible?
- Is Linked In suitable for B2C Marketing or only B2B?
You can find the article and readers responses here:
http://anthillonline.com/so-you-have-300-contacts-on-linkedin-well-im-not-impressed/
Doesn’t the question of how you should connect and with whom all depend on your product or service offering?
Although I see merit in both arguments, I am partial to side with Jen Bishop. Obviously by definition, Linked In is more suitable to B2B, however “all of us” are consumers and now there are 80+ million on there who are a marketer’s dream demographic! Which raises the question of reward v effort and ROI of targeted ads in this medium versus building your personal network…but that’s a whole other debate.
To support Tom’s point, I know of a Marketing Consultant (Self Proclaimed Linked In Guru) who has 17,000+ connections. Although he is undoubtedly a very smart guy who seems to be very successful and have his heart in the right place providing a lot of free education, I do not agree with some of his tactics and “teachings”, in fact I have reported one of his tactics to Linked In as I see them akin to “black hat SEO” …
I digress…the point being he is selling “educational product”, CD’s, Pod/Video Casts, PDF’s etc…The more connections he has the better for his business! In that respect he is doing a great job – satisfying customer demand and making a profit without doing anything wrong!
SO LET”S ALL BE CLEAR ABOUT OBJECTIVES – HORSES FOR COURSES! We should not make sweeping statements but instead spend a little time working on our strategy, value proposition and then worry about evaluating the media channel, it’s advantages and limitations and the process with which you will maintain DIALOGUE in your chosen channel.
Success on Linked In and in fact in all Social Media channels, to be specific VIA NETWORKING & WORD OF MOUTH, NOT ADVERTISING, relies on the principle of leveraging and building your reputation with your existing professional (and personal) connections as well as building new connections that will also hold you in high regard. Now how you will do that is the big challenge and not one of technology but strategy! What will you offer them to make their lives/jobs easy and what do you need to do to attract people to your profile in the first pace?
Many Linked In users damage their reputations because they forget the simple rules of engagement when it comes to interacting with their existing and prospective audience online.
I received two Linked In invitations in as many weeks, from individuals that indicated they were friends and gave no specific reason as to why they wanted to connect with me and used standard “templated” invites. In fact, having searched my electronic databases as well as my “super computer” called the human brain; I could not remember how or where I MAY have met these two people. These two invites were great examples of what not to do on Linked In. This doesn’t mean that these individuals can’t add value to my network or I to theirs. It does mean that I will wait to accept their invitation until such time that they can illustrate the value in connecting with them, and either choose to be more honest or learn how to better use the technology!
My Linked In connection policy is based around either one or both parties being able to POTENTIALLY add value to another. It’s a decision process that most PROFESSIONAL Linked In members should be able to answer in a matter of 30 seconds (in this case deciding whether to connect or not):
- Has the person inviting me illustrated a clear reason for doing so?
- Is this reason of value to me?
- If there was no clear reason stated, they have one last chance. I look at their profile for 20 seconds and decide for myself, read between the lines how connecting with them may benefit either me or them:
– Are they a potential prospect or referrer for my business?
– Am I a potential prospect for theirs? Is what they sell so unique (are they a real expert in their field) so as to interest me, even though they may not have given me an initially strong reason to connect.
– Am I a potential referrer for their business?
- Finally, if the answers to most of those are negative, I will not connect with them, as they are likely to fill my inbox and those of my network with useless junk and be a time sucking vampire!
Your CONNECTION policy maybe vastly different, BASED ON YOUR SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES, but the bottom line is you NEED to have one, and the only way to do so is to have a well thought through strategy.
For a Free and No Obligation Discussion about your specific needs contact us today.
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