Fix your LinkedIn Strategy | B2B Podcast - Content Wars EP7

Video is going to be the best starting point because of how versatile it can be in its use and reuse. You know, we talk about blogs and white papers, right? If you sit down with a subject matter expert and they're able to brain dump on camera and you're recording it, you now have something that you could go back in reference and probably pull two, three, five blog articles out of one conversation if you wanted to. Whereas right now, just on your blog, you're probably struggling to get them to give you enough information for one. So you just got back from a conference where you had the opportunity to be a speaker and I know that after we had some conversations about some of the different things that came up and some of the key points that you felt either resonated with the audience, but as well as some of the things that were maybe a surprise to them. Talk to me a little bit about how that went. Sure. So the conference itself was for B2B marketers primarily. Some agencies were there, a lot of in-house marketers were there. The particular presentation that I was giving was really about the underutilization of video primarily from B2B companies. So sure, I had an entire presentation of, hey, what's causing the underutilization? How do we solve that? Some processes, some tools to use to start to break down, start to break down what's preventing businesses from harnessing the power of video. In there, one of the pieces we talked about was distribution. Anytime you have content, it matters very little if you're not distributing it correctly to your audience. If nobody sees it, it doesn't matter. So one of the pieces was distribution and one of the topics within distribution, I was a little bit surprised in how much interest there was when I started talking about it. It seemed as if almost the majority of the audience hadn't known about it or at least hadn't understood the magnitude or potentially how it works. And that particular aspect was LinkedIn thought leadership ads. Yeah, so the thought leadership ads are a new-ish feature. So it doesn't surprise me that people aren't really using it to its full potential now, but I do think that there is a distinct difference between thought leadership ads and then the generic kind of brand awareness ads that you would run as a company. Should companies be approaching that from the same direction? Should they be taking kind of all the content that they have and putting it on both the company's paid ads and the paid thought leadership ads? So the answer is it depends on the content. It It on the company. It depends on the audience. It depends on a lot of things. But before we get into all of that, I think we need to like take a step back. You You going back to the presentation, my assumption based on some of the the reactions in the audience when I started talking about thought leadership ads in general is that there was a either a lack of awareness or lack of understanding of what it is even. So so so the easy way to think about a thought leadership ad is really a boosted post from a person, right? You have a professional. They put a piece of content out there. It goes to a percentage of the audience that they've built. The thought leadership ad gives the opportunity to boost that post to a selected audience. And when I say selected audience, it could be certain companies, certain job titles, certain skill sets, certain regions. You basically are selecting the target audience that you would want to hear that message and you can boost it or pay to display it to a certain audience. So that's what thought leadership ads are. Now if you really look at the context of content in general, some content is going to be more company oriented and some is going to be more individual oriented. So you have to find a balance and a mix of what makes sense where, for example, if you and I were doing a podcast like this and it all got chopped up into social content. It's It's It's good idea. Yeah, we should think about that. We'll put it into our review process for next quarter. But it would be really awkward if somebody else on the team were just posting all of my comments from their account, right? The company could do it, but it's going to be probably best primarily coming from me. Sure. So the answer to the question, should the company be posting or should the person be posting or how does this work? The answer is you need a healthy mix of all of it. I think most companies, especially B2B companies that are on LinkedIn are really focused on company content and social and it's somewhat shocking. Social is still undeveloped in most B2B companies. So your organic social is kind of treated like an afterthought. You can just go to any companies in LinkedIn and scroll through it and it's pretty sparsely populated in most cases. If it is populated, there's a lot of self-serving aspects on there, a a of sales related things, a lot of product related things, not a lot of actual content that isn't related to what I'm just going to call related to commerce. There's going to be, oh, look at our blog post or download our ebook. Potentially, if it's in a marketing realm of things, there's also a lot of what I would consider pointless content, bring your dog to work day or it's Susan's birthday or whatever it is. That's fine and that's cool for internal, but your audience doesn't care that it's Susan's birthday and they definitely don't care that you brought your dog to work. So there's a lack of development in most B2B companies as far as the organic content they're putting out there and then when they move into paid content specifically on LinkedIn, they're really only thinking about one thing, which is lead generation. How do we get lead generation? We're going to pump money in and somehow we're going to get leads out and I mean, you can look at study after study. LinkedIn doesn't perform that well as a paid lead generator, but it is an excellent platform for getting ideas to the right people for having conversations at high levels, for for relationships, for building trust, for engaging in industry conversation. That's what it's great at. So as long as you're using the tool in that way, then you can start to say, cool, what content will we create that allows us to be part of those conversations, allows us to build trust, allows us to build authority and if we're going to create content in those ways, then what's the best way to distribute that? I think some of that content would fare very well on a company channel, whether organic or paid, and some's going to fare better coming directly from a leader or a subject matter expert or someone else representing the company because it's actually their voice on camera or maybe in a written form. It's their content that's actually being promoted. So when we're talking about pushing out content through either the organization itself or through individuals, why do you think it's more impactful to push it out through individuals as kind of a distribution option? So I think there's a number of reasons. Companies habitually focus on the company account and there's nothing wrong with the company account. Your company account should be active. You should have updates on there and things happening and it should be a channel that is also pushing out valuable content for your audience. But when it comes to your subject matter experts or your leadership's accounts that are starting to be active on LinkedIn, you gain some advantages. One, that person has built a network, their entire career and a lot of those connections are connected to them on LinkedIn. So automatically you've expanded your audience in a major way. Secondarily, on LinkedIn, primarily people are wanting to have conversations with people. They may follow a page, but if you really dissect the audience that follows any brand page, it's not going to be the same quality or caliber or even relevancy to the ones that are actually following your leadership team or definitely your subject matter experts. These are people that have spent their entire lives, entire careers building up this network of people. That audience is solid gold. If you analyze it, it probably literally is your market. Whereas the company might have vendors following and people who want to work there and people who have worked there and people who do work there and then a couple customers and a couple of other people, they're different audiences. They also have different intent. The intent of following a person is that you want to see their content. You want to have dialogue with them. You want to follow their career. You want to know what's happening with them. You want to refer them business. You want them to refer you business. There's some sort of business idea here. Whereas when you follow a company, that's not necessarily the case. And I think it'd be very hard for someone to make the case that, oh yeah, I follow that company because I intend to buy from them at some point in time on LinkedIn. Because most B2B companies are not putting out the type of content that would even facilitate that type of idea happening. So the easy version, LinkedIn is a great platform. You should have company content. You should have individual content. You get some advantages because of the way the audience expects to interact with a human being and when you can amplify your message into a larger footprint, a larger reach, a larger organic audience, even before you get to pay by just including your people rather than just the company. It's a no-brainer that I think too many companies are really, really missing the opportunity on currently and I think that's about the change. Yeah, and I mean, I think if you even just look across kind of even the accounts you follow, the people that you follow or people that have unique perspectives about what they do or who they serve or how they approach the work. And I think that that's something that has more authenticity and comes across as less salesy. So when things are pushed out through the company page, usually like you mentioned, it does have a sales focus. It does have kind of this goal in mind of, you know, getting somebody to take the next step versus when it's more native content that seems like it fits on the platform and its conversations, its experiences, it's things that that person has gone through or has knowledge on, people can relate to that. And so when you create relatability, you create rapport. And when there's rapport there, there's trust. And the more content you can put out that builds trust over the long run when somebody's ready to buy, they're gonna be able to think of you instead of maybe a company page because they remember this person believes this, said this, experienced this, has gone through, you know, this situation before. And so there's a lot more power there to be able to help move somebody from whatever stage you're at or whatever problem or challenge they're in, having a person-to-person connection and having person-to-person authority helps establish that organization even without it going out through the company page. Absolutely. And you know, having it on the company page, again, there's nothing wrong with that, but when you have somebody on camera and that person is taking the content and then putting it on LinkedIn, there is a direct connection of, this person is saying this thing, I know that person, I will listen to that message from that person and over time the ideas that are being spoken about, the conversations that are being had, the elements of proof that have been laced into it, all of those are being absorbed over time. And it does, it builds two things, it builds familiarity and also it builds trust. So when you start to show up as a person, start to show up in people's feeds and you start to put your opinions out there and your ideas out there and share right or wrong, people start listening and they start saying, oh well, this isn't a good idea and they're not gonna agree with everything and that's fine, but they're at least gonna start viewing you as a voice in the market and by extension, you're a a representing a certain company. So the trust that you're building as an individual, whether you're the CEO or a subject matter expert, it really doesn't matter. The trust that you're building, some of that transfers into the company because if you're, you know, being put into a category of someone with ideas, someone that has something to say, someone that is unique, those things are gonna be transferred over into, oh, where are they? They're at this company. Oh, they must be unique. They must have something valuable to say. They must be different than the other guy across the street. So a lot of it's just visibility and, you know, at the end of the day, you take a CEO or subject matter expert, they're gonna have ideas, they're gonna have... I hope so. You would hope. They're gonna have points of value that should be shared with an audience or with someone that could potentially spend money with them. These things should be happening. They're just not in most cases. So when it starts happening at a particular company, the ideas are shared, whether on the company or whether the individuals are getting involved in sharing personally, that trust is gonna start to build, that that of the message, whatever it is, is going to happen. So, you know, it's gonna happen over time and as it happens, that credibility transfers into the company, that familiarity transfers into the company, the just mindshare that you're able to occupy in your market's mind is going to increase and going to grow. And And ultimately that's what good marketing looks like. Good marketing looks like occupying a space in an individual's mind so that when they think of the problem that you solve, the product that you offer, the results that you achieve, they think of you first. So when there is an opportunity to do business, they're not going, oh gee, I wonder who I could possibly, they're going, oh, I need to call these people because that's what they do. All right, so we talked about thought leadership ads, we talked about the value they have when compared to just the company putting out content. Talk to me about what do we need to be able to create a team of experts and then how do we go about approaching them to create content? Sure, so that's probably one of the biggest hurdles the marketing team faces. Historically, when B2B thinks of content, they think of blog articles, they think of white papers, things of that nature where maybe you got to sit down with a subject matter expert and ask some questions and get some information out of them. And then the marketing team was tasked with go write that blog or maybe even a total outside partner tasked with hey just write our content for us. It's a handoff process. Oh, there's content that happens but our executive team, our subject matter experts, they aren't hands on with it. So that's the biggest hurdle when marketing goes to the leadership team or subject matter experts and says hey, we want some of your time to do this thing. There's some pushback, right? There's always pushback, yeah, because that's one of the biggest things that we hear all the time is I don't have enough time. I don't have time. I'm not the right person because I don't have the ideas. I don't want to be on camera. There's just these hurdles that feel internally very challenging. So I think before you ever talk to anyone, step one, you need to clarify your use case, right? The business has business goals. If you can tie your use case to the business goals that leadership cares about and by extension the subject matter experts care about, now you have a case. So business goals aligned to the ask of what you're asking. Hey guys, we're going to do X, Y, and Z to create content because it ties back to our awareness that we're trying to solve for that new product offering that we have. It ties back to the lack of trust that we had from that event that happened last quarter. It ties to whatever it is that leadership is up to. So if if if need to say, hey, these are the business goals, can we make our content aligned to those business goals and if we can, you're going to have a much stronger case with them. Next, you have to have a realistic ask. So it's all fine and good if they say, oh, I see what you're up to. I like the idea. But if you're walking in there saying, hey, I need, you know, five hours a week, that's that isn't going to work. So you have to have a realistic ask on a per person basis to where they could actually do it. If you can align your content ask with the business goals and the time ask with their scheduling, you're going to be in a much better position. The other thing to really consider is where you start. I think a lot of people in the marketing departments don't start high enough. If someone that's a subject matter expert just says, oh yeah, I'll do it, that's cool. And that's not a bad place to start. But a much better place to start is if the CEO has buy in of, oh, that type of content for this purpose and it only takes this amount of time. Oh, yes, I have time for that. But I'm also going to tell you that our other leadership team has time for that. And so do our subject matter experts. Now there's no question about whether we are or aren't doing it. We are doing it. Now it's just a matter of how we're doing it. So whether the CEO is going to be on camera or not, and I would. And I would I would CEOs to do so and marketing leaders to encourage CEOs to do so. Whether they're going to be on camera or not, getting their buy-in and blessing for what should happen and why it should happen and how it should happen is going to be a great way to break down the barriers that marketing teams face so often when bringing up starting any kind of content that directly involves the busy people in the company and they are busy and should be busy. But this is an important initiative for the company and they'll see that if it's explained correctly and the ask is realistic. So I know that you talked about different formats of content. You talked about white papers and blogs and different things like that, but it sounds like you're recommending starting with video. Is that kind of the core starting place that companies should be considering when picking a medium or prioritizing a medium? So if we're talking about any kind of B2B content, my personal opinion, and not just because I have a video agency, but video is going to be the best starting point because of how versatile it can be in its use and reuse. You know, we talk about blogs and white papers, right? If you sit down with a subject matter expert and they're able to brain dump on camera and you're recording it, you now have something that you could go back in reference and probably pull two, three, five blog articles out of one conversation if you wanted to. Whereas right now, just on your blog, you're probably struggling to get them to give you enough information for one. So if your goal is blogs, guess what? I still recommend starting with video. It's going to be your best point. You would also get the audio from that that maybe you're going to have a podcast. You would also get the video from that for long form videos if that's what you're into or a vast amount of short form content that can go into whatever social channel you're into, whether it be obviously in a B2B play, you're going to be prioritizing LinkedIn, potentially YouTube. There's other use cases on TikTok and Instagram and some other platforms, but primarily in the social environment where we're talking about video content is raining supreme. And if you're not already thinking about that, it's time to start thinking about that. So when we talk about the marketing team approaching the executive team or subject matter experts, you mentioned about starting from the top or getting some people bought in. Like how many people are we talking about here? We're talking about one or 10 or 20. What is the ideal ask to start with that will realistically one, give you content and two, that will actually fuel an initiative? So it's going to depend on a company by company basis. For instance, we have one company that literally has 12 different departments. Hypothetically, marketing could go into that and say, we're going to start 12 different content initiatives in each different department. We're going to have one leader that kind of leads the charge in each one. And that's fine. And a lot of companies will say that's where they're going to start. What I would urge people to consider is to start smaller and really focus on somebody that we think is going to actively participate. That's going to be able to deliver well, that will participate in not just the ideation of the content, not just the creation of the content, but also in the distribution of the content and even the communication that happens after that, the discussions, the comments, the whatever else happens after that. Who do we think is really going to get involved in this? There are plenty of companies, founder led companies that have one person who is the spokesperson. They're the guy, the girl, the person with the microphone, and they do at least the heavy lifting of the content, the distribution, those pieces. So it can be very powerful with just a single person. So before we go in list 10 or 12, maybe consider one to prove success. If you need two, great. If you're having a podcast, yes, you might need two, you might need three. I wouldn't go beyond three to start with. Choose three people that can be involved that are knowledgeable, that will actually participate in the process and won't cause a problem in doing so. And are willing to experiment and willing to be vulnerable and willing to try new things. Those are the people that you want because it's not going to go perfect in the beginning. You're going to have things to iron out. You're going to have things to improve upon. But when you do and you have a system of, guys, let's get together and forgot what we need to talk about this next quarter. What are the issues with our customers? What are the issues with our industry? What are the legislative issues? What are the economic issues? What are the product issues or the competitive landscape looking like? What do we need to be talking about? And then they'll actually sit down on a scheduled basis once a week, once a month, hell even once a quarter and produce the content with you. And then they'll actually engage in distributing the content once you've broken it down and make it into postable assets. Those are the people that you want because at the end of the day when that's happening and you see Mark and Susan and Larry. Out there and their colleagues see it, their colleagues are going to see them on LinkedIn. They're going to see you creating content. They're initially going to say, well, I'm glad I didn't get to be the person that's on camera. But then when they see that small team out there and they see their colleagues commenting on it and sharing it and they see their personal brand or their personal status and trust level start to elevate. Some of them are going to start to realize I'm missing out on a professional opportunity here. Some will and that's fine and not everybody needs to be on camera. But more people will be more willing to participate when they see the fruit of what's happening and not just maybe the vulnerability or the work that might have to go into producing that fruit. Yeah, and you hit on an interesting point because you mentioned about people that are willing to engage and people that are willing to put in the work. And I think that's so important because if you are sharing this either organic or paid and you get comments, you get some level of engagement, you get these signals back, whether it's in a green for you or not. You need people that are going to be willing to engage with the comments and they're going to be willing to put in the work. And I think that's something that often gets overlooked is it's like, oh, well, I'll just get it and post it or I'll get it and promote it. And we often forget that the comments that are coming in are from real people and it's your opportunity to either double down on what you believe and end your position or say, you know what, I hadn't considered that. Tell me more about your perspective. Tell me more about why you believe that. Tell me more about your experiences that led to that. And it's a way to have this real authentic engagement that will fuel either building vulnerability or building trust. And that's another reason why it's important to start small, right? So naturally, usually, the content team that you're going to create isn't used to being as active as you're about to ask them to be on LinkedIn. So one, you're going to have to train them. This is how we use LinkedIn. These are the times that we post. This is how we post. This is the type of commentary we're going to put in here. Are we using hashtags? No, not necessarily. And here's why. Like just there's things that they need to understand about the new environment that they're going to play in. Some of that involves the comment thing. Oh, someone commented on my post. What do I do? The natural inclination is going to be do nothing or just like it, right? But we know that the LinkedIn algorithm is going to prefer that we comment back because it starts to increase the engagement on the post. It starts to have other people reading the comments, which improves the dwell time that happens within that post, which tells LinkedIn, let's send this post to other people, right? So there's things that you need to train your team on when you're going through this process. And it's very hard to do to a larger scale team. You got 10, 20, 30 people. That's going to be very hard to train that many people. It also be very hard to monitor that many people. If you've got three people, pretty easy to check a few times a day or whatever your schedule is going to be. Hey, have we gotten more comments on Larry or Susan or whomever's thing and reach out to Larry and say, hey, Larry, you have a comment you ever responded to. Can you do that? It's important that we stay on top of this stuff. The smaller team will enable that to happen much easier. Because let's be honest, the marketing team is usually already stretched pretty thin. When they're taking on an initiative like this, it's not no work. There's work involved here. It's good work. There's there's a purpose to it. But the more we can streamline the process to reduce the burden for the marketing team and to still see success out of it, the better it's going to be for everybody. So again, that small team to start with allows that to happen until there's a process and everybody can get up to speed and everybody knows what's happening. I would recommend doing that or it's possible to basically have the marketing team run the personal accounts of the executives or subject matter experts. And there's softwares out there that would allow you to do that. I think it's always better if your actual team is doing it. It's going to have their voice. It's going to have their knowledge. It's going to be them. It's going to be more authentic if it's actually them. The smaller that team is, the more manageable it's going to be to really make sure that the right things are happening so that everyone can be successful. Yeah. So I think that that's the easy part is when you have kind of some of the other things set up and now you're creating content and you actually have content to put in. You essentially have two choices. Like you mentioned earlier, you can post it from the company organic. You can post it from the individual organic. You can post it from the company paid or you now in a better way, you can post it from the individual paid through thought leadership ads. And I think that we joked about it being basically a boosted post, but I think that it has so much more power than that because you're able to take that content and target exactly who you want. You can limit it by job seniority, job function, company size, company revenue. Whoever your target is for that content. And the cool thing is, let's say that Jim is in engineering, you could target just people that would relate to Jim in engineering or if Susan is in HR. And if Carl is in operations, like you can create these different segments that allow you to run these ads to the companies and the functions or the seniorities or whatever industries apply to that person. So it has a lot of power in being able to get that message beyond just the network that they've built, but also the network that you want to build. Absolutely. At the end of the day, you're creating content to transfer a message from your leadership or experts into someone else's brain. The only reason to create content is to transfer information. That information is never transferred if it's never consumed. So really, what we're talking about is a consumption game. How do we make the right people see the right message that we're creating? And how do we maximize that? Because obviously we're going to get the maximum return on our investment in creating content if we get a maximum return on our investment of consuming content. So again, organic distribution is great. And if we involve our team, we're going to get a lot more bang for our buck on the organic side. But when we start to include in a paid aspect, the company channel is cool and there's still some paid things that should happen there. And I'm not saying don't do any lead generation or any of that type of stuff. If it's working for you, please do so. But getting into a idea distribution mindset on the company channel is fine. But you're going to find a lot more success when you get into your individual leadership and expert accounts and start distributing that content for them. And the cool thing is they're going to talk about different things. As you mentioned, you can target different profiles, different accounts. You can do that on a per person basis. You can do it on a per topic basis. If one person is talking about, you know, a drilling technology one day and then a hydrogen technology the next day, you know what? The audience for those could be completely separate and you might want one message going to one and one going to the other. Or they might have a multi-layered message where some of it is maybe meant for leadership. Some of it might be meant for purchasing. Some of it might be meant for engineering. And that all might be covered in one set of content creation where like we're doing right now, we hit a bunch of different things. Different pieces of information might need to go to different places. The CEO might need to hear, oh, I need to be open to being involved in content. The marketing person might need to hear, hey, this is how you get your team involved in the content. The subject matter expert might need to hear, hey, you can build your personal brand and authority. So being able to segment your message down and say, hey, these individual messages could go directly to those different people at the exact organizations, at the exact locations, with the exact job titles that I want. And there's a lot more variables than that. But when you start to realize the power of how you could direct your message, really the wheels start turning, light bulbs start going off. And you go, OK, we're in a whole new ballgame of how we can reach our audience. We don't necessarily need to deal with them on a one-to-one basis. We don't necessarily need to wait for that trade show. We don't necessarily need to host something where they have to come to it. We don't necessarily have to be in front of them for them to hear the exact message they would need to hear to know us like us, trust us, eventually, buy from us. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things that is often overlooked from even a tactical level is when you are creating these ads and distributing them, you can look at your top performers and you can look at the percentage that people have watched. And you can narrow it down to 75, 50, 25, whatever you feel is good, depending on the length of the video. If you take the people that have watched at least 75% of your video and then you retarget them with a case study, and now you've said this thing and they're engaged and now you've retargeted them and put something in front of them. That's a case study that builds trust or reinforces the things that you said, but it's coming from a customer. That is so much more power to be able to build trust over the long run because it's not just you saying it anymore. Now your customer is reinforcing it and we know you've watched at least 75%. So you know you're interested, you're engaged. So there's a lot of power in these ads without it feeling salesy. There's also a lot of insight that you can gain from the ads themselves. So if you're running your content program, whether it be video or something else, correctly for this type of approach, you're not talking about making one video or five videos. You're talking about making probably hundreds of videos that you're pumping into the audience. When you start to see the topics, the people, the audiences, whatever it is that you're having success in, and the ones that you're not, you start to be able to have a roadmap for improvement. How do we become more interesting, more relevant, more successful at delivering the message into these audiences? What am I doing well? What am I doing not well? How do I stop doing what I'm not doing well and do more of what I'm doing well? It's a literal game of how do we transfer the information to our audience in the most effective and interesting way defined by are they giving us their attention? Are they consuming the content that we're putting out? And are they responding well to it? And I think the more information we have about how it's happening on the distribution side, the better we can get on the ideation side and on the content creation side. Simply said, if we know it's working, and we will, because we're approaching an audience at scale and we have data, we'll be able to use that to improve over time. And that's something that B2B marketers have had in a lot of different areas of their life. Everybody has metrics and KPIs. We're trying to do this and that and the other, but they really haven't had that on an individual basis. On a, oh, the leadership team is doing this or a subject matter experts doing that. They've had no way to track what is the activity they're doing in communicating to our audience and how is that resonating? And now they do. So I think the important thing here is just giving companies the knowledge that there is a new-ish tool. It's not brand new, but I believe a lot of companies don't know about it. And I know for sure a lot are not utilizing it. There's a new tool that you can reach your audience in a different way. There is now a reason to do what many marketing teams have wanted their team to do for a while, which is get involved in the content, get involved in the messaging. Help me present this message to our audience. And I think a lot of marketing teams have presented this and kind of been shut down. There's now there's a reason to represent it. And just the opportunity that exists and the business justification, I think, has increased. And hopefully it just gives B2B marketers another way to increase their game, to increase their ability to reach their market with a meaningful message, well-building credibility and trust, which obviously is exactly what they're up to.