So, why is this the case?

B2B companies tend to occupy niches very comfortably. Over time, they specialise in what they do best, and are known within the industry as a specific service provider in that area. And as long as the business leads keep coming in, they generally don’t feel the need to communicate externally much, if at all.

There are two problems with this.

• If the market is somehow disrupted (e.g. new competitor, new product, supply chain issue, economic collapse, global pandemic), then this company can suddenly find that its usual supply of leads has dried up, and has no alternatives.
• Unless the individuals in the company responsible for business development (usually the CEO or founder) is solely focused on creating business, then the supply of leads can be irregular, and is dependent on a single individual, which is inherently risky.

Using LinkedIn for B2B: An exchange of value

This is where a LinkedIn B2B strategy can help.

Most social media communication, be it from brands or otherwise, is a form of value exchange. The source of the content provides value through what they post, and the audience provides attention and engagement in return. If the value being provided by the content isn’t up to the audience’s expectations or needs, then attention and engagement will reflect that.

This absolutely applies for B2B companies on LinkedIn. Brands provide good content, and in return they will receive consideration of their service and hopefully a boost in reputation with their audience. 

However, a piece of content that basically says ‘We are great at this! You should trust your business’s needs to us!’ isn’t of much value to the audience. 

So what does great LinkedIn B2B content look like?

It addresses pain points

A piece of content that provides actionable insight or information that addresses a key pain point that your target audience experiences is of immense value. It may sound simple enough, but understanding exactly who your audience is and what their specific pain-points are is an exercise that may prove more extensive than you may initially think.

The more relatable content you can provide to your audience, the more likely your business will be considered the next time a member of your target market is looking to change suppliers.

It’s consistent 

Building a strong reputation takes time and patience. After starting to post for the first time, leads won’t start pouring in immediately. 

But don’t be discouraged.

In our experience it can take over 6 months to begin seeing the fruits of your labour in the form of business leads, as long as the effort is consistent. The upside is that the source of these leads is sustainable in the long run, and doesn’t rely on personal connections. 

It leads and participates in market conversation

You must be able to show that your team is innovating and actively thinking about the present and future of the market it operates in. By showing thought leadership in your field, any potential future clients would feel at ease knowing that you have all the bases covered, and that you’re already preparing for market changes. 

It’s self-improving

Through the engagement and results received from previous content, you must be able to adapt communication based on what your audience actively responds to and finds valuable. Remember, just because you think something is great doesn’t mean your audience shares your feelings. Don’t communicate to yourself.

Where do I start my LinkedIn journey?

First, you need to revisit your business. Analyse exactly what you do, why you do it, and who you do it for. Only with those elements clear in your mind can you develop a narrative that you can outwardly communicate with value and consistency. If you’ve never considered your business purpose and audiences in any sort of depth, now is the time to do so. 

If you’re not sure where to start, get in touch with us for a no-strings-attached chat with our CEO, Richard, by clicking here.

The post LinkedIn for B2B: How to Use Regular Posts to Boost Reputation & Trust appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

You use social media. Not as a selling tool, but to build your reputation. 

Social media is a communication tool at its heart. By creating and posting content regularly, it can turn a brand into a trustworthy reference point and a thought leader in its industry rather than yet another service provider. 

But it’s not just about posting. 

You also need to look into what you’re posting. 

Content Matters

It’s not just about posting as often as you can. Your content is the key to building trust between your brand and your audience: the more high quality the content is, the greater the value you’re giving your consumers, and the better the relationship will become. It’s true for B2C communication, where the customer might not necessarily need to get to know the brand on a deep level. And it’s especially true for B2B communication where your audience is going to be significantly more wary about trusting their company to your services. 

Posting great content helps with that. Great content shows that your brand is an authority in its field, and that you’re not really just in it for the bottom line. That you’re providing the valuable content for free also sets the tone for the kind of customer relationship and brand you want to have – and it’s often the very first step to take in every kind of industry if you’re going to leverage your social media to build relationships with your audience. 

And at the end of the day, even if you don’t have frequent social media posts, having strong content can make up for the shortfall. Establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry will be essential: your brand will then become an authority, someone that other brands look at to see how things are done. 

All of that happens from social media and social media posting. 

How to Be Social on Social Media

Here are some quick tips for building trust at scale using social media: 

• When you post, don’t just push your product: talk to your followers in ways that offer a lot of value for free. Share insider knowledge.
• Interact with others on your social media. Like, engage, and respond to questions: talk! The more you interact successfully, the more the algorithm of your selected social media will push your content. 
• If you’re personally on LinkedIn, post frequently as an individual. Any positive light you shed on yourself will reflect on your company
• React to news and content within your industry, and provide your 2c based on your own experience. Be genuine.
• Be patient. Just because you don’t see business leads rolling in after a few weeks or months of posting, it doesn’t mean you’re not having an effect. It takes time to build a reputation. Keep at it.

The bottom line is this: your social media is an invaluable asset. Use it like one, and it can serve you well.                                                  

The post How B2B Companies Can Build Trust at Scale with Social Media appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

I’m a fan of LinkedIn – a couple of years ago, when Covid hit, LinkedIn was one of the tools we used to save our business, and over the years we’ve learnt that there are a few things that we can all apply on LinkedIn that will help us grow and improve our business. I’ll cover them today.

I had a couple of networking events recently. In one I met around 25 people who are my loose peers. At least half of them commented on how strong my LinkedIn content is. Some of those comments lead to conversations that landed me business.

In the other, I met someone (last October), who came up to me and told me that a LinkedIn post from February changed the way he was viewing his small business and he’s changed his business model completely.

I post so much on LinkedIn that most people ask me about it when I meet them. They also ask me so many questions that I have built a series of FAQs that people ask me about whenever I’m at networking events.

But first I want to tell you what we won’t be covering today.

• We won’t be covering any short-cuts that involve buying lists or scraping names etc
• We won’t have a silver bullet, or a quick win that will save your business.
• We won’t cover outbound sales methods, LinkedIn can be used for that, but I’m not an expert in the field

The way I use LinkedIn, and the way we help our clients use LinkedIn, is to help you grow your network organically, growing your reputation in the process.

Since starting this process we’ve increased our business dramatically, both locally and internationally – and interestingly enough one of our strongest sellers is helping businesses (literally from across the world, from the US to Australia) with their leaders’ LinkedIn profiles.

The brightest minds realise that growing your reputation and network has many benefits, some of which include

• Being referred to as top of mind
• Having people realise (or think) you’re an expert in a field
• Landing you new business opportunities
• Landing you new connections
• Having you appear as an expert (or be interviewed) in publications, on TV, on webinars or being invited to speak

All of these contribute to a much better chance of you growing your business.

It also helps you become a better employer, because people want to work with people that they respect and admire – and LinkedIn helps you do that at scale.

Before starting I want to get a few quickfire points out of the way. These all deserve to be a topic in and of themselves, but you can find so much about them online that I’d be wasting your time if I went over them today:

1. For heaven’s sake: Complete your profile. Include a professional headshot and accurate information about your professional experience. Have a great write-up that makes me want to talk to you. This is not your first CV.
2. Connect with people. Reach out to your colleagues, industry contacts, and other professionals you know.
3. Join groups. Join groups in your industry that are relevant to your interests and your career.
4. Follow companies and influencers in your area. Follow companies that you are interested in, to stay up-to-date on news and job openings, but also to get ideas for what posts work.
5. Ask for recommendations. Ask your colleagues and supervisors to write recommendations for you. It always helps to have social proof from real people.

So without further ado, here are some of our top tips for using LinkedIn effectively to grow your business:

Why LinkedIn? Why should I focus on LinkedIn?

• The obvious answer is that it’s a more professional network
• Just by choosing to focus on it you will start winning. Seriously.
• Out of all the people you follow, how many actually post?
  • I have 5000 connections. I’m sure that not more than 50 of them post regularly. Can you spot the opportunity?
• LinkedIn is a great channel to communicate. A great place to stand out.
• It’s a great place for various reasons, but one main one is because it help bridge the gap between the two kinds of social media types – networks for people you know, and networks for people who are in the same field or interested in the same things
• Think of this paradox: We all have something to say, but we think that the people who say them are the only ones who have something to say
• We see this consistently with clients, once we start posting for them, their profile starts rising automatically because people notice they have something to say

How often should I post?

• As often as you have something to say, but be careful – this might lead you to thinking that you never have anything to say.

• I know people who post once a month, I know others who post multiple times a day. I’d say at the very least I’d prefer to keep my page alive with one post a week, even though on a good week I could post daily.

• Under once a month people would consider your profile dormant, and so would LinkedIn – so it is harder to reactivate it and to get engagement.

What should go in a post?

• A strong opening line, critical if you’re writing beyond 2 lines. It should be engaging enough to make me press “read more”
• A good number of hashtags, ideally at the bottom of the post. #DON’T #HASHTAG #RANDOM #WORDS half way through the text.
• Don’t CAPITALISE RANDOM words
• Each post should have a beginning, a body and an end, it should tell a story
• If you can include anecdotes, always do, they make for much better stories.
• Photos work wonders
• So do videos if you have the capacity and the capability to create them.

How should I build a content calendar?

Think of things that you’re passionate about:

• Things you do around work (events you go to, places you visit, conferences etc)
• Things you learn, or things you learn that you were wrong about. LinkedIn loves a redemption arc.
• Things you love about your industry
• Little details that stand out in your industry
• Behind the scenes of your industry
• Your business philosophy
• Hot takes on news in the world (as long as it’s somewhat relevant to you or to your industry
• Teardowns and in-depth explanations of something you’re good at, maybe by giving examples of something in the wild.

Everything can be an idea, and expecting it to take ages to become something you can go out with

I personally first write out a title, then start the post, then I’ll write out bits and pieces until it makes sense, and only post it when I feel it can make an impact.

Posts can tank

And many posts do tank, but there’s no shame, if it tanked nobody saw it anyway

Post engagement is not always a good indicator.

I remember meeting someone at a party last year and he mentioned that he loved what we were doing in a specific area.

I had only posted about that in one spot. On LinkedIn. And I remember that the post. It was one of my worst-ever performing posts on LinkedIn. It only had 4 likes, and this guy wasn’t one of them. Trust me, when a post has 4 likes you know who those 4 people are. But here he was, three months later, bringing up the post as something that had stuck with him.

Brand pages vs Personal Pages

Build a brand page to have a good repository for people looking up your brand, but we’ve found that personal pages always work better. People are on LinkedIn to follow other professionals, not to engage with brands, so we put much more effort on the humans we want to push within a brand.

Brand pages are still extremely important, but you usually have to build a paid strategy for these, as organic doesn’t cut it, so I won’t go over them today as it’s a completely different subject.

We also make it a point to have multiple people from a business post – from the leadership but also from outside the leadership, the more people can communicate, the better – but don’t force it!

Network, Network, Network. This is the place to network.

Reach out to people and talk to them whenever you have something in common.

I make it a point to follow up some of my more interesting conversations with a chat – eventually asking them for a call.

I try to schedule at least one a week, even though I don’t always make it, but that’s OK.

This is one of the best ways to grow your business internationally as it breaks the big barrier of trust.

By hopping on a call with someone when you don’t have anything to sell them you can have a frank conversation that will let them see you in your best light – not one where the power balance is completely in their favour because you’re trying to sell to them.

But it’s easy, why the hell do people use you guys to manage their profiles?

That’s an excellent question, and it’s one that deserves an answer. Posting on LinkedIn is a relatively easy endeavour. At the end of the day we’re good at what we do, so we should find it easy to talk about it.

We (as an external agency) never know as much as our clients do about their subject – if we did we’d probably be working in their field instead!

But we bring value in three areas:

• Consistency – by working with someone external who “owns” your calendar it will never fall by the wayside. Your LinkedIn profile will always be alive, even when you’re drowning in “real” work.

• Articulation – We’re not experts in your field, but we’re experts at helping our clients communicate complicated concepts in ways that are easy for all to understand.

• Expertise – Since we manage the profiles of a vast number of clients, we learn a lot about the platform so that our clients don’t have to. We learn what LinkedIn values and what gets the most engagement and interaction and we apply those learnings across all of our clients. We’re your secret weapon.

Secret cheats, Reminders (and some new ones):

• People love personal stories, so do your best to post as many as you’re comfortable with. Always try to link them to a business angle, though. This is not a space for personal complaints.

• People especially love personal stories of vulnerability, so if you have the courage to spill the beans about your hardest moments, people will love you for it. One such post helped me reconnect with someone I hadn’t spoken to since I was 4 years old. It was fantastic, and we learned so much about each other when we met.

• Build a scratchpad for posts – I use Notion, keep going back to it and build a post over days, weeks or months if needed.

• Post as often as you feel makes sense for you, no more, no less.

• Faces always do better, don’t be afraid to include photos of you and your team whenever you can.

• First lines change everything – especially since LinkedIn tends to hide most of what comes after them behind a “Read More” – so make sure to have a first line that can work well alone, otherwise no one will click through.

• Engagement on other posts is an excellent way to get noticed by that person’s network. They’re also a great “cheat” to getting noticed by your network if you don’t have the energy or the time to post today.

• Pictures of text work well too if you don’t have photos. And if you can afford some basic design (or if you can use Canva) then multiple slides in a PDF become a little slider that looks sexy on desktop and on mobile.

• If you’re going to link to an external post I would experiment with link posts and with linking externally in the first comment. LinkedIn seems to penalise content that’s off the platform (the same applies for Youtube videos as opposed to native video).

There’s so much more to say about the subject, but we will have to tackle those in future events, or in future posts. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, and reach out if you want to meet up for a conversation.

The post Using personal LinkedIn profiles effectively to grow your business appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

As a social network, it’s behind some of the others: in the same period of time, Instagram registered over 1,074 million users, Facebook claimed 2.91 billion, and TikTok increased by 45% to 1 billion users. 

Per month. 

LinkedIn can’t compete on a reach front with other social networks. It’s also one of the more complicated social networks to get right: a fully professional, some-holds-barred social media platform where the rules of getting any kind of traction rely on using LinkedIn in a certain way and making a conscious effort to use it often. 

For businesses, this could be too much time to invest in a social media network with no apparent return on investment. 

It isn’t. 

Your business leaders should be on LinkedIn. As a social network for professionals, it does what Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok can’t really claim to do: create a space where you can talk business. 

How to make LinkedIn work for you

One of the biggest reasons people avoid LinkedIn is because they’re happy in the job that they have. 

That’s great. 

But it shouldn’t keep you from using LinkedIn. 

LinkedIn is more than just somewhere to put your CV and scroll through job-listings when your day at work makes you question why you stay with your company. If you’re in a key position at your organisation – CEO, CFO, business manager, marketing manager, director of sales; any management position – having a well-put-together LinkedIn profile is the best thing you can do for your organisation. 

Here’s why. 

LinkedIn for Business

LinkedIn has one of the best buyer-marketer relationships for social media networks. 

• Over 65 million users on LinkedIn can make business decisions. 
• LinkedIn has been ranked first as the most trusted social media platform for five years running. 
• Brands have seen a 33% increase in purchase intent after using ads on LinkedIn. 
• 40% of B2B marketers consider LinkedIn as the most effective channel for high-quality leads. 

The audience you want to talk to is on LinkedIn. 

And the only way to communicate with that audience is by using LinkedIn as a key leader in your organisation. 

Lead(ership) by Example

If anyone is looking you up on LinkedIn, something you’ve said or done has made an impact.

Keep that in mind when you’re building your profile. People in leadership positions are going to be the first profiles potential customers and clients look up, so making sure that your profile is up to date, active, and shows the best side of your company is the first step you need to undertake. 

There’s more. 

Curate what you talk about. 

We say this for every social media, but on LinkedIn, having even a basic idea of what conversations you’re going to reply to, what you’re going to post, and how you’re going to have those conversations needs to be laid out before a profile is made. 

Potential clients are on LinkedIn. They’re looking for companies to do business with; companies that align with their values and opinions on what’s going on in any given industry. 

They’re looking for thought leaders. 

Building your profile on LinkedIn isn’t the same as building your profile on any social media. 

The people who are on LinkedIn want to know about what you stand for, what your business is, how your company handles a crisis, what your employees think of the way you do business. 

It’s vital that you give them that information. 

Executives who use LinkedIn have an unmitigated control over the sort of message they can put out about their company, while simultaneously allowing people a deeper look and a better understanding of what their company is and what it stands for. 

LinkedIn Leadership: Case Studies

Richard-Muscat Azzopardi, CEO at Switch Digital 

Our CEO, Rik, made a lockdown mission to try and understand how to lead effectively on LinkedIn. 

This is what he discovered.

“I went into lockdown being a relatively sporadic user of LinkedIn. I gave it more time because it enabled me to forge new connections when we were locked in, and I discovered a whole new aspect to the platform. 

Beneath all the vacuous boasting and silly posts about simple sums there is a wealth of information and a hell of a lot of interesting people who are there to actively network in meaningful ways. 

I also learned another extremely important lesson. 

People browse the platform but don’t interact. I learned this when I started meeting people in person again and they’d bring up my LinkedIn posts in conversations, even though I’d have remembered if they had interacted with them.”

Follow Richard on LinkedIn

Satya Nadella, Chairman of Microsoft

From the one-liner ‘About’ section to the updated articles tab, Satya Nadella’s feed is an excellent example of when your feed reflects who you are. As CEO and Chairman of Microsoft, Nadella doesn’t need an updated LinkedIn to make connections, but Nadella still makes it easy for people unfamiliar with Microsoft to understand his perspective by posting frequently about the real-life applications of Microsoft’s products and services.

Follow Satya Nadella on LinkedIn

Cindy Hook, CEO of Deloitte Asia Pacific

Hook’s profile is a mix of personal and professional: not only does she highlight interesting business news from all around the Asia Pacific, she leverages her formidable profile to post about topics that interest her on a personal level, such as environmental awareness and business opportunities in her home-country, Singapore. 

Follow Cindy Hook on LinkedIn

LinkedIn Leadership: Takeaways

Using LinkedIn the right way has a definitive return on investment. Put in time, and you grow your following, expand your business reach, and connect with people who can make the decision to work with you. 

Ignore it, and wait a few years: sooner or later, marketing on LinkedIn is going to be necessary. As one of the only social media on the internet where what matters most is results and how you do business, LinkedIn is important for business. 

How important it is for your business is up to you. 

Here are a few tips to help you: 

1. Make connections with people who can provide value. This doesn’t mean that you should go connecting with everyone in your industry; the opposite, in fact. Connect with the people in your industry who you might have things in common with, who might be able to help you and who you might be able to help.
2. Set a time and pace for posting. LinkedIn isn’t about volume: it’s about the quality of what you have to say, and the people who are listening when you say it. Keeping an eye on what kind of response you get when you post is how you figure out how to tailor your message. 
3. Stay authentic. It’s tempting to hop on the bandwagon and talk about the latest big industry news, but unless you have an insight on it that hasn’t been said, it’s not going to net you the kind of following you’d need to make an impression on LinkedIn. 
4. Your employees are going to be your biggest asset and your best way of amplifying your message. If they’re on LinkedIn, connect with them too – and give them good things to say about you. 

LinkedIn is a powerful way of getting your message across to people who can make a change in the way you do business, but to use it the way it’s intended, you need to put in the time. 

If you need help getting started, drop us a line – we’re always happy to help you tell a better story.

The post Leading From LinkedIn: CEOs on Social Media appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.