Building your thought-leadership and brand presence on LinkedIn is quite straightforward but often overlooked.
Imagine inbound inquiries from key people inside multi-million dollar companies who reach out because they recognise you as a leading influencer in your sector?!
This is entirely possible with a few simple strategies in place.
Forget BNI, meetup.com, and even regular business events and conferences. LinkedIn is your networking and brand-building platform 24/ 7.
The following these steps can help you boost your brand presence and authority on LinkedIn and facilitate more business conversations with the right people.
First, add the right people to your network.
If you go to an event or conference at which all the attendees' names, roles, and companies are published in advance you probably spend quite a while analyzing the attendee list and prioritizing people to engage over break-time coffee, lunch, or after-drinks.
You can make sure you’re in the right break-out sessions with the right people and you can message delegates ahead of time to suggest a meeting.
LinkedIn is like this but it never switches off.
You can find pretty much endless lists of people in your niche by role title, company, geography, revenue, industry, and many more variables.
You can reach out and directly engage them, add them as connections, ask them questions, and suggest short meetings.
Second, engage meaningfully with your network’s posts and content.
Each day, spend a portion of time [30 mins or more] liking, commenting on, and otherwise engaging with the content of your target demographic.
When at a conference you will attend sessions, keynotes, break-outs, and display stands of businesses in your sector, take some time to browse and engage with your network.
The more important leads or connections are to you, the more you want to pay attention to what they are posting, commenting on, or how they are behaving on LinkedIn.
By knowing more about them and the challenges they are facing you can present yourself in a manner that is relevant to them and show you are positioned to help.
Moreover, by simply interacting with their posts and content, they are more likely to see and engage with your content and are more likely to be open to warm conversation and connection when the time is right.
Third, post meaningful content regularly.
By regularly I don’t mean several times a day. Once per week is enough.
By using LinkedIn articles, you can write long-form content that both educates and inspires your network to think differently about their challenges and potential solutions.
Videos and short-form content are very powerful as well.
Most importantly focus on topics related to challenges your ideal client is facing and give insights based on your own expertise, as to how they can solve these problems and move forward.
By sharing high-value content, educating, and inspiring your network, you effectively advance your presence as a thought leader in your sector and become and focus point for inbound inquiries.
Fourth, make direct invitations to talk to you.
This does not mean spam or pitch your network until someone says yes.
It does mean don’t hold back inviting people directly to a chat, in which you can explore their challenges and in which you can offer them relevant advice, tips and strategies that help them immediately.
By engaging one to one and in direct conversation, you manage to create warm relationships with leads who now can see that you can help them solve some of the prickly problems they face in their business or life.
If you are able to maintain these four steps with regularity you will be assured of a strengthened brand presence, authority and profile in your sector and both inbound and outbound leads will be more plentiful !!
How do you build your brand on LinkedIn?
