0:00 Dan 

Hi, Dan here. LinkedIn is arguably the most powerful social platform to drive b2b leads and sales. A place where you’re either decision makers hang out ready to do business. In today’s episode, I’ll show you some of the less well-known LinkedIn strategies, including an insight into the power of Linkedin’s hidden newsletter feature.

It takes about 10 minutes to repurpose it just to make sure it fits and everything. We’re now reaching a much larger audience of people on my LinkedIn that we weren’t reaching before through doing it via email. So, get ready to maximise your potential on LinkedIn and start generating high-value leads for your business. This is episode 99 of the business anchors podcast.

0:39 Lloyd

Dan, what underrated LinkedIn strategies can b2b businesses use to drive new business?

0:58 Dan    

Very well read Lloyd?

1:00 Lloyd 

Oh, no, no, no. I was just wondering, are we recording the podcast?

1:06 Dan    

Should we just talk through it and discuss it.

1:09 Lloyd

I thought it was weird. The mics and the lights and everything. Yeah, we might as well then as this could be a good episode as well. Please, please tell me about the rated LinkedIn strategies.

1:21 Dan   

So just to give context for this episode, I spend most of my life on LinkedIn.

1:27 Lloyd 

Yeah, it’s sad.

1:28 Dan   

And for our marketing agency, we’re probably generating 60 to 70% of our revenue through LinkedIn.

1:36 Lloyd 

Which isn’t sad.

1:37  Dan 

Which isn’t sad. And after doing this for six or seven years now, there are some clever approaches we’ve learned to generate b2b business leads that turn into lots of revenue. So, I thought, I want to talk about some of the more like, underrated, underrated, or like, less known ones, because there’s some really, there’s lots of LinkedIn trainers and people that talk about the site, you know, create great content. But that’s not that interesting to you business anchors.

2:08 Lloyd 

So less of the obvious stuff that if you just Googled how to use LinkedIn, well, more of the things that we’ve found out over the years.

2:15 Dan 

And also recently, there’s been some quite cool updates to LinkedIn, and new features and stuff that we’ve been testing and have found work well. So, I want to share some of those things.

2:27 Lloyd

Last week we talk about TikTok this week, a LinkedIn bit of a different vibe.

2:30 Dan    

Yeah. I mean, we should have probably worn suits and stuff to be a bit more formal Lloyd shouldn’t we.

2:36 Lloyd 

That’s what you have to do on LinkedIn. Okay, let’s get changed.

2:39 Dan    

So shall I go in? Do you wanna do the radio voice because I’ve got five, five different things. Do you want to for each one?

2:47 Lloyd 

So now we’re going to listen to the five underrated b2b business & LinkedIn strategies to drive new business and in at number five he’s up to two and it is.

2:57 Dan    

Create a newsletter on LinkedIn.

3:00 Lloyd 

Great, who sings that one?

3:03 Dan    

So no one sings it. But this sounds boring. But this isn’t boring. This is good. So a LinkedIn newsletter is a LinkedIn article with the added benefit of notifying everyone who’s subscribed every time it goes live.

3:22 Lloyd 

Do you do this from a business page on LinkedIn?

3:25 Dan    

Good question.

3:26 Lloyd

Thank you.

3:27 Dan    

It used to be that you could only do this from your profile on LinkedIn, but they recently added this feature to business profiles. I’ve been testing it through my personal LinkedIn profile because that’s where we have our largest audience. But in terms of your listeners, if you want to test this, I’d recommend starting using this feature either on your business or personal profile, but wherever you have the largest audience.

And the reason for that is that when you create your first LinkedIn newsletter, every single one of your connections or people that follow your business page, gets a notification asking if they want to subscribe to your newsletter. Like, it’s quite rare to have the ability to notify every single person that you’re connected with or that follows your business page.

4:16  Lloyd

It’s almost as if that is kind of like overpowered within the platform. There’s, I can’t think of another way that you can get everyone connected to the profile to get a notification basically, to remind them of you. Go sign up for this thing where we want to communicate with you.

4:31 Dan    

But you need to be careful because if you start making a newsletter every day, and posting every day, then well somebody would do this but you need to think about your subscribers and your connections and not annoyed them basically because I know us marketers as Gary Vee says ruin everything. So you don’t want to just end up notifying them constantly like oh, a new one.

4:52 Lloyd

But it’s a similar thing, isn’t it to when we say when people say how long should our videos be on social we say as long as they are going to be good It’s like, How often should I do a newsletter letter on LinkedIn, it’s like, do one an hour, if every hour, they’re going to be brilliant, and everyone’s going to want to read it. The likelihood of that isn’t going to be great. So if you do a daily one or every couple of days, it’s got to be really good quality and stuff that people want to be reading.

5:17 Dan    

Exactly. And if you currently send an email newsletter, because this is what we’ve done, for that kind of loyal anchors, listeners, you’ll know that we’ve got something called the Friday club.

And the Friday club is where every Friday I write and send an email to all our subscribers, that shares the best content that we’ve created and discovered the news and apps and tools and new feature updates every single Friday. So what I started testing about a month ago, is using LinkedIn as a newsletter feature to copy that content over to the LinkedIn platform. And it takes about 10 minutes to repurpose it just to make sure it fits in everything, and then send that and we’re now reaching a much larger audience of people on my LinkedIn that we weren’t reaching before through doing it via email.

Now, one thing that some people have said is, Oh, aren’t you cannibalising your email subscribers by sharing on LinkedIn as well? Like I thought the objective was to share it through email. But I found that our open rates and click-through rates haven’t dropped via email since doing on LinkedIn. And I’m gonna I’m keeping reviewing this. I’m not just like that could happen, but currently, it hasn’t.

6:33 Lloyd

That’s good to know because that’s something I would have been one of those probably did say to you. Oh, well, isn’t that cannibalising. But it’s good to hear from someone that has done it and hasn’t, I think it’s really good to get that insight for someone who’s thinking of starting.

6:45 Dan    

But it could happen. So I’m not saying it might. So if you’re gonna use the LinkedIn newsletter feature, just keep monitoring.

6:51 Lloyd

For legal reasons. This is not a recommendation.

6:53 Dan    

Exactly. And the final thing on this is, there’s a guy called John Experian, who talks a lot about LinkedIn. And he’s got a really good, great newsletter. He writes lots of great blogs. And he’s written a very detailed blog about LinkedIn newsletters, so go to his website, Espirian.co.uk and he’s got a blog specifically on there, talking way more detail than we want to share in this podcast. But go and look at that if you want more info. Nice. So, Lloyd, that was number in at number five.

7:27 Lloyd 

A new entry in at number four.

7:30 Dan    

We have proactive engagement.

7:32 Lloyd 

Sounds like a punk ban.

7:34 Dan    

This feels like this is so boring when you’ve got your exciting radio voice and I say proactive engagement.

7:39 Lloyd

Well, you don’t need to tell the listeners each time it’s boring dan.

7:42 Dan    

This is exciting for me so good. One of the most. Shut up, Lloyd. One of the most common. I’m joking.

7:50  Lloyd

Kind of.

7:54 Dan    

Sorry, Lloyd. One of the most common questions I get when people are like starting to write content on social media and trying to drive business through social media is how do I get engagement on my content, we all know that we want to convince someone to have become a customer, you first need to get their attention. You then need to convince them that you’re good at what they do.

And then you also need to try and engage them in some way so that you can start to build a relationship and build trust with them to buy your product or service. And my answer when anyone says how can I drive engagement on social media, especially LinkedIn, is to proactively engage myself.

So you start finding the people who you want to work with on LinkedIn and adding meaningful comments to their content, so that you’re starting to pop up in their feed, and they start to think Oh, Lloyd keeps adding some interesting points to my posts. Who’s Lloyd Let me click on his profile. Oh, Lloyds, the CEO at Knowlton.

He’s got a well-optimised profile that’s showing all the great work he does. Oh, let’s click on their website, they’ve got some amazing case studies. They’ve recently done a project with Peaky Blinders and Wahl and they’ve done lots of great stuff. So that’s the kind of journey that people go on.

9:11  Lloyd

It is interesting saying that journey? Because then you think, yeah, this makes perfect sense. Yeah. And interestingly, I know, people may or may not know, I’m quite considering we run an agency that’s so linked with social media. I don’t post much on social media or engage much, unlike Dan and the rest of our team.

But there was one post by the CMO of Pepsi, and I recently found it interesting. So I commented, and this sounds simple, but he liked my comment, or the person running his page liked my comment, and I did kind of have that light bulb moment. You speak about this all the time. I was like That was so simple to potentially get the attention, or get in front of a massive decision maker that could potentially sign off millions and millions of pounds of budget to spend with you.

And I know it takes much more. I’m not like, oh, he likes my comment. He’s probably they’re just telling his wife about Lloyd Knowlton, to work with them, will take much more than that, especially with someone in a massive brand like that. But it just gave me a little sign of oh, yeah, that completely makes sense. Practically engaging the first time you get on their radar and keep building that. Yeah, that could work.

10:33  Dan   

Another funny thing that I’ve noticed happening, because lots of well, not lots of people, but some people know this strategy well, and really kind of overdo it. Sometimes you have to be careful. There are several people and I look at the description on LinkedIn or like, marketing agency owner coaches, like obviously, we’re the ideal target market for that. And they always comment on my stuff.

10:59 Lloyd 

You also kind of I think you can see sometimes that they’re commenting for the sake of commenting. Yeah, there’s not much substance to it. It’s just oh, really enjoyed this looks like you’re having a great time. Yeah, good. Remember me.

11:12 Dan   

This is a really good point when you’re adding these productive comments, you need to make sure they’re meaningful, and they add something to the conversation. Don’t just do what Lloyd said, like, this is good. I like this. Because you can see that that’s just someone doing it to get your attention.

11:30 Lloyd 

Down one at number three.

11:33 Dan 

Make content that doesn’t look like it’s made for LinkedIn. So who knows This isn’t Facebook brigade. Have you had you? Yes.

11:43 Lloyd 

Yeah, I think it’s dying down slightly. But yeah, the classic LinkedIn is that if you put anything that isn’t . ‘I made a great spreadsheet today’ Then they’re like, ‘this isn’t Facebook you know.

11:55 Dan 

This is because people don’t like change in general. And if you look at the history of LinkedIn, LinkedIn started, basically as a place where you have an online CV. So if you’re, if you’re trying to get a job, you upload your CV, or your profiles, your CV, and it’s quite passive, and people just find you.

12:14  Lloyd

People that don’t like change, no one can see my online CV because you’re getting all the attention. It is hiding stuff out there showing personality and creativity, horrible person.

12:25 Dan    

So the next stage from it just being a place when where you upload your CV, it then became a place where you can post content and there was a feed like Facebook that shows that content to people on LinkedIn and had an algorithm to show certain people depending on how well the post was engaged with. And when that first came out, people were treating it like a very formal platform. Because it was a very formal, here’s my CV, people would be you know, here’s an educational post that’s going to teach you something not necessarily somewhere where you’d upload entertaining, funny content.

The next stage from that was people posting funny entertaining content that looks like the kind of content on Facebook. Now, from our experience, content that doesn’t look like your traditional boring, LinkedIn content works much better than traditional boring, LinkedIn content generates and attracts new business because that’s literally how we’ve grown our agency through doing that. And there’s a saying, I can’t remember who said this, but when others Zig you should zag. Have you heard that?

13:38 Lloyd 

History leaves clues. Oh, no, that was from last week. Sorry. Yes, cheesy, but it makes sense. And just to say as well, about this different-looking content on LinkedIn, we’ve recently worked with a b2b client, selling safety equipment. So it’s, so yeah, this sounds boring. They’re lovely people lovely business.

But it’s not exactly the most exciting thing. And we kind of pitch them the type of content we wanted to create to get the sales of their safety equipment. And they were kind of a bit unsure because we were saying to do this stuff that’s out there, this weird entertaining stuff that doesn’t look like your typical LinkedIn. So you should bother by safety content because of this.

And we’ve done it and we’re running a campaign now. And it is performing better than the kind of informative content that we created. And within 24 hours of the content going live to kind of convert customers through the funnel. We were getting leads from multinational corporations that could be worth 1000s and 1000s for those businesses through this type of content.

So just wanted to let you know that this isn’t us just saying this fluffy stuff. You should do this like we see the pounds coming into our clients from doing this stuff, and how it’s so effective. So we’ve got, you know, the data and the proof to back up this rather than just like we think it’s what you should do.

15:08 Dan    

And if you’re a b2b business, and you’re looking to drive new leads that convert into sales, I want to hear more about that case study, let me know because I can set up a call and we can have a chat, and I can show you the numbers that show it’s a really good investment.

15:19  Lloyd

And by the way, Dan didn’t tell me to say that, but it has worked out quite well. Same position as last week in at number two.

15:27 Dan    

Add a link to the top of your profile. It sounds really basic. But recently, there’s been an update on LinkedIn where on your profile, you can add a link that’s directly at the top of your profile. And also, you can choose the text that people click on to click on that link, like the anchor text. So for example, the way we use this, for my profile is at the top of my profile, there’s a clickable link that says something like, see our award-winning work, okay. And since doing this, we’ve noticed a real uplift in the traffic from LinkedIn going to the case studies on our website, right now. It’s not like 1000s and 1000s of people.

But the value of someone looking at the work we’ve delivered is powerful compared to maybe watching an entertaining video that we’ve created as not to do with our work is hugely valuable for us for key decision-makers who we could potentially work with to see the great work we’ve done and the results it’s achieved. And it’s such a simple thing that you can do.

16:32 Lloyd 

It previously mentioned that journey that people go through, oh, you might proactively engage with someone’s content. And then they might look at your profile or your page, and then and then they might go to your website, like anywhere where you can make it easier for them to go through this process of getting to the end of that journey. And working with you is such a great tool.

So it might be that before having that link on your profile, there might have been 20% of people that aren’t going to bother to Google your name or Google your business. And that’s the end of their journey. And then they’ll forget about you in the next week.

Whereas if at that point, they click that link, they’re on your website, looking at case studies, and then they go, Oh, hang on, like, that’s exactly what my boss was asking me to find someone to do. And this company is good at, then they’re getting contact, then they’re a customer, I think if you can, you can stop any of those points when that journey where they might not have taken the next step. And this is one of those.

17:28 Dan    

And you’ve reminded me of a really good point that you shared in a previous podcast, I can’t remember exactly how you may…

17:35 Lloyd

The eco-system.

17:35 Dan    

Yes, Lloyd.

17:36 Lloyd

It’s the system around your content, this is what you need, you need that link and you need to show the brilliant work, it can’t just be one good video that you do. And then you think everyone’s gonna work with you.

17:47 Dan    

So Lloyd’s point in that episode was that, like, there’s no one silver bullet strategy to post this thing and you’ll get loads of business, you need to build an ecosystem around that. That’s giving that potential customer all the information, they need to know that you’re the best solution to their problem. An example of that is having the case studies on your website and the link that they can easily click to that. So yeah, that’s a good point.

18:06 Lloyd

So in case you’re thinking I don’t add any value to these episodes, sometimes I do. Right. And at number one.

18:16 Dan   

Use Knowlton’s LinkedIn. What?

18:20  Lloyd

So I just, this seems very jarring that we’re talking normally and I just shout about the position of these. But anyway, sorry, number one.

18:28 Dan    

Just going off-topic a little bit. It seems like people enjoy your weird, like, input to some of these episodes. Some of the feedback I get on comments and stuff because I’m looking at all your witnesses.

18:41 Lloyd 

I attract like-minded weird people.

18:44 Dan 

I mean, there are loads of people that hate you, but I don’t say.

18:47 Lloyd 

Yeah, and I apologise for that. I’m sorry, you can just skip these five seconds from now. Just five seconds forward. Dan, I’ll be saying something good.

18:57 Dan    

1,2,3,4,5.

I’ve so in a number one is the LinkedIn video outreach strategy that we’ve spoken about before. So this is a really big action that you should all take if you haven’t listened to it already, Episode 85 of business anchors was called the LinkedIn outreach video that made 50k This week, go and listen to that episode because we talk in detail about the LinkedIn outreach strategy we’re currently using to drive shitloads of business.

And it involves each week looking at people who are in your target market on LinkedIn that are showing signs that they’re interested in working with you, and then sending them a personalised video to set up a call to then talk to them about how you can help them. There’s lots more detail around that and we unpack that in episode 85.

19:45 Lloyd

We go through it step by step, don’t we? So, if you are wanting to take positive steps on LinkedIn, listen to that and you can make notes of every step in that journey and then oh, sorry, I’ve realised we got to number one, there’s nothing passed that. My brain just said, and then, which is a strange way to try and continue the conversation.

20:08 Dan

Have you enjoyed this episode, Lloyd?

20:10 Lloyd

And then I have Yes. Yeah, I’ve had a really good time Dan and I, actually I was a bit concerned this one might be a bit try about LinkedIn and stuff, but I think I’ve learned quite a lot there as well. And I think our anchors will enjoy it. Excellent. Even if they have to skip past the bits where I talk. Good. They won’t be listening now.

20:31 Dan    

If you’re listening to anyone still, if you enjoy these episodes, please do tell other people that business anchors and post about it and stuff so that we can reach more people and more people can hear listen to Lloyds weirdness.

20:47 Lloyd 

Yep. And we can I mean, if you’re watching a video, that means we can invest more in things like the suit of armour that’s behind Dan on set at the moment. So that’d be real money well spent. If we get more listeners,

20:59 Dan    

That will be real money well spent.

21:01 Lloyd

And then, see you in your ears next week.

Hopefully, these LinkedIn strategies have been useful and helped you generate lots of B2B business. If you have any more questions about LinkedIn strategies or want to know how Knowlton can support you Start A Conversation with us. 😊