Crafting Standout LinkedIn Content: Tactics for Amplifying Influence

Are you looking to amplify your professional influence and connections on LinkedIn?

In this episode, we sit down with the Disruptor himself as he shares his wealth of knowledge on becoming a thought leader in your industry.

Gain practical insights and actionable strategies for leveraging LinkedIn to drive sales success.

Key Takeaways:

1. Improved credibility and thought leadership: A complete, optimized profile demonstrates your expertise and establishes you as a credible thought leader.

2. More engagement and discussions: Tactics like using compelling headlines, inserting calls to action, responding to comments quickly, and using rich media boost engagement on your posts. This sparks more discussions with your network.

3. Expanded opportunities: With greater visibility, credibility, and connections, you're more likely to attract exciting opportunities, leads, and valuable relationships.

4. Enhanced personal brand and professional image: These various optimization tips let you craft a cohesive personal brand across your profile and content. T

Dive Deeper:

Connect with John on LinkedIn to continue the discussion.

Check out John's 3-part series on optimizing your LinkedIn presence:

Part 1: Revamp Your LinkedIn Profile
Part 2: Crafting Impactful LinkedIn Content
Part 3: Amplify Your Influence

Don’t forget to check out your Social Selling Index: See how successful you are at using your LinkedIn account and engaging with others.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Shalini Manjunath: The title of today's show is Crafting Standout LinkedIn Content: Tactics for Amplifying Influence. My name is Shalini Manjunath, and welcome to this special edition of the Cloud Collective Podcast. Today, we will be talking with social selling expert John Kundtz as he shares valuable advice for those embarking on a social selling journey, especially some of the pitfalls and mistakes many B2B enterprise sales executives can make before they even get started.

Welcome to the show, John. How are you doing today?

[00:00:36] John Kundtz: Hey, Shalini. It's great to be here. Normally, I'm the podcast interviewer, but today, I get to switch roles, and you're interviewing me—lots written about crafting standout LinkedIn content. You and I spent some time trying to develop guidelines for some of the social sellers we work with. I thought it would be a good opportunity to share some of our thoughts and insights. 

[00:00:57] Shalini Manjunath: We are excited to have you, John, and we would love to talk more on all the tips and techniques you have to give to all our listeners. Before we get started, could you please talk to our listeners and the audience about your background, education, and experiences so they can know personally who John is?

[00:01:17] John Kundtz: I'll try to keep it brief. In a nutshell, I have spent most of my career working for a single company, IBM, and about a year and a half ago because of the spinoff of the services division. I've retired from IBM after a 37-year career, mainly focusing on sales management, running practices, and things of that nature.

Today, I do some podcasting on the side. I do some blogging, mentor startups, and do a lot of not-for-profit board work. I'm pretty busy, but it's exciting and fun to share some of the war stories I've experienced over the last few decades.

[00:01:55] Shalini Manjunath: That's fantastic, John, and I'm sure we will have a lot of audiences who will be interested to know you more. We will be doing other topics, and in other episodes, everybody can get to know you and us as a team more. 

Now, the next thing I'd like to ask is, what are some significant benefits for the companies that successfully leverage LinkedIn content into their overall sales strategy? 

[00:02:21] John Kundtz: Sure. This is an interesting area. It's a topic of debate, especially for those of us in the B2B enterprise sales marketplace, but selling and buying has changed over the last 25 years. I think the real benefit is that the buyer tends to look for subject matter experts. They no longer call up salespeople to educate themselves on products or services. If you can establish yourself and your personal brand as a thought leader, then you're going to connect and resonate with potential buyers and even your current customers.

So, I think the strategy is helping each person become a personal brand that, in turn, helps the company's brand and, ultimately, gets you into the door to sell more products and services.

[00:03:15] Shalini Manjunath: Thanks, John. That's a good tip because Most of us are very focused on having the content and just sticking to the branding part, but we all forget to brand ourselves and being more relevant and resonating to the products we are talking about. So this is really great.

 What are the most common mistakes companies make when attempting to optimize their LinkedIn presence based on your experience? 

[00:03:44] John Kundtz: Spent a lot of time researching this over the last few years. Much of it comes from the work I did with startups and even some of the not-for-profit board work I've been doing. And. Again, it goes back to, in today's world, the buyer's journey. So, if we're trying to target a specific buyer persona, we want to connect with that buyer early in their journey, not when they're still in their Discovery Phase and even in the Consideration Phase. If we get to them too late in their Buying Phase, which is the traditional point in the sales process when most enterprise salespeople try to talk to a prospective buyer or prospective customer, we're probably too late.

Some of the things you can do as a social seller on LinkedIn are simple. There are people that make a career of trying to sell you consulting services on how to leverage or game the LinkedIn algorithm. But I think if you think about it, like all social platforms. We're focusing on LinkedIn primarily because it's the B2B platform versus some of the other social platforms, which are more suited for a Business-to-Consumer market, but those of us who are spending our time selling enterprise solutions, complex, longer sales cycle solutions.

You can do some of these things pretty quickly. I think the first mistake is people ignore their LinkedIn profile. A lot of people set it and forget it, as we like to say. 

I think the first thing you should consider doing is revamping your profile and do it periodically. There's a couple of key things that people don't do, and I think they should do. One is, If you haven't activated your LinkedIn profile to be in creator mode, that's a two-second thing.

 The reason you want to do that is it signals the LinkedIn community that you're actively sharing and engaging and, you're a creator and you're a thought leader. Assuming you're using the platform to be more of a seller and less of an online resume, getting your profile to reflect that is important.

The other thing I would say is continue to add connections strategically, figure out who your ideal persona is or your avatar that you're trying to sell to, and increase that network by adding connections. I think LinkedIn will allow you to make up to 100 connections a week, but don't spam them; engage them, connect with them, and then begin to try to build a relationship just like you would if it was face-to-face. 

So those are probably the two most important things you could do to your profile. There are a couple of others that we've highlighted in some of the blog posts we've written, but I think if you did just those two things, you would probably show the platform and the people on the platform that you're serious about being a thought leader.

I think the other thing is next is when you're creating content. A lot of people don't create impactful content. The biggest mistake I think people make when writing and posting content on LinkedIn is they don't insert a call to action. You want to continue the discussion, right? You want to build a back-and-forth discussion with your audience. It's not about being a social influencer and going viral. That's good and fine if you're in the entertainment business, but if you're in the enterprise business-to-business selling business, it's more about finding quality prospects and buyers and enhancing your relationship with your existing customers.

Having a call to action at the end of your article or post is important because you're inviting the customer to continue the discussion. The second thing is understanding the algorithms; we'll get into that in a second. You want to conclude your posts with relevant hashtags, that makes sense, but, at the end of the day, I think the biggest piece of advice on crafting content is just be authentic, engaging, and consistent. That will build strong relationships with your connections and your audience. 

The last piece of this is just the actual algorithm itself. you could spend a career trying to understand the algorithm I'm by no means an expert in this, but there are some really simple mistakes people make. I think the biggest mistake people make is they post and ghost. They put up a nice piece of work, but then they just go away. And so the key is to engage your audience. Make sure you are commenting on their comments. You are sharing other links and things like that. 

The second piece is I think people overdo the formatting. In other words, they either don't tag anybody, or they tag too many people, or they don't use hashtags, or they use too many hashtags.

 What I've read and my research suggests to be selective in your tagging and maybe three people or so. If you have too many people you tag in your posts, the algorithm is going to flag it as spam. The second is limit your hashtags to maybe four to six. They recommend a mix of what you would call niche hashtags and then broader hashtags.

 Again, you're not looking for hundreds of thousands of views. You're looking for quality views and trying to connect with the prospective buyer. 

We talked about consistency. This is more of a marathon than a sprint. If you do it once a week, post once a week. If you do it once every other week, do it every other week. The algorithm will benefit you for being consistent. It will degrade your views if you are inconsistent.

Timing matters; the algorithm looks at the first day or two are the most critical. So, if you can engage your audience in the first couple of days, you'll have greater reach and range. 

Then the last thing, which is an interesting one, and I don't totally understand it, but a lot of people put external links into their posts. And if you think about it that's what LinkedIn doesn't want you to do. All social platforms don't want you to leave the platform. They want you to continue to be there. So, the recommendations I'm hearing are like a call to action. If a call to action is to go, Download a white paper or sign up for a consult or something like that, which would require an external link.

Don't put it in the post itself. Put it in the comments sections. It also shows the LinkedIn algorithm that you are trying to engage your audience. 

That's a couple of the mistakes people make and some of our ideas on improving it.

[00:10:21] Shalini Manjunath: Thanks a lot, John. That's a lot of tips, and some are very easy to achieve, like getting the creator mode on. The consistency part sounds easy, but yes, we all have to strategize on building our pipeline and then going about managing the consistency in whatever manner, weekly monthly. Quarterly, not quarterly, maybe weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly. 

So I've taken away a lot of good tips, and I'm sure for our listeners in the audience here, we will be sharing all the blog posts you've written regarding these tips and techniques, which could come in very handy for them. Yeah, we are looking forward to following you on the blogs as well, John.

Thank you. Now, the next question I have is, what advice would you give to someone considering embarking on a social eminence journey? I'm sure, like, there are a lot of people who just want to get started, and they don't know where. Can you just talk to us a little more about it?

[00:11:18] John Kundtz: We highlighted some of this already. The key here is to focus on your profile, write quality content, and try to do some simple things to maximize or amplify your influence on the platform, just little simple things like a solid call to action being authentic. Like anything else, it's just getting out there and doing it consistently. Most of us are not journalists; we're certainly not professional broadcasters, but here we are on a podcast, trying to share some of our insights and tips. 

One thing you can do, and we'll it in the show notes. There's the ability to check your social media eminence on LinkedIn. I would check that and, after trying a few things, see how it improves. It will tell you where you stand within your group, and it's an interesting statistic that would be my call to action for you folks to check your social selling index.

[00:12:09] Shalini Manjunath: Thank you so much. That was a great interview, John. There were some very important tips I have taken away personally for myself, too, and so would our audience. And just before we let you go, if you were to summarize this entire thing, how can people learn more and get started with crafting standout LinkedIn content?

Anything else that you'd like to add?

[00:12:33] John Kundtz: I've hit most of it In the show notes. There'll be a link to my LinkedIn profile, and I'm certainly encourage you to reach out and connect. I'm pretty much of an open networker. 

I'm happy to share links with you, and we'll put them in the show notes to the three-part series we just talked about, crafting stand-out LinkedIn content. So those two things, I would say, are the easiest way to continue this conversation after listening to this podcast.

[00:13:01] Shalini Manjunath: Thank you so much again for sharing with us everything that you could talk about building social eminence for people representing big companies or like an individual who want to just get started on their social eminence journey. Thank you to all the B2B sales executives in our audience for joining us for this fantastic presentation about the mistakes surrounding optimizing LinkedIn profiles content, and the real truth about how to avoid those mistakes and get better results instead.

So again, I'm Shalini Manjunath, and thanks for joining us on the Cloud Collective Podcast.