Why Isn’t Your Entire Company On LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is best known as the place where professionals network with other professionals.  With over 400 million members, LinkedIn has built a very large network that you can take advantage of.  The concept is pretty simple.  I’m sure you’ve heard of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon.  The concept is that any two people are six people or fewer acquaintance links apart from each other.  By creating this large network of professionals, you have the opportunity to connect with any professional that you want to using LinkedIn.  This tool allows you to easily find contacts at other companies and discover who you are connected with that may be able to introduce you to those contacts.  Here are some suggestions on how you can benefit from having a LinkedIn presence for your company and how your employees can help your company grow using LinkedIn.

Create Your Own Company Profile   – If you haven’t done so already, create a company profile on LinkedIn.  It’s really easy to do and along with your other social media networks, you will have more visibility to more customers.  If you don’t know where to start, I recommend reviewing some very impressive LinkedIn business pages including Microsoft , Google, Salesforce, and Harvard Business Review.  According to LinkedIn, these companies have a few things in common that have made them very successful.

• 99% of the top global brands have employees sharing their content to their networks
• 97% of the top global brands have employee posts contributing to their content efforts
• 99% of top brands regularly share updates on their Company Page
• 73% of top brands are utilizing Sponsored Updates
• All of these top brands post an average of 12.6 updates per week

Although you don’t need to have your content machine in place on day one, these are great practices that should be emulated.

Sales – It is a very good idea that each of your sales staff has their own LinkedIn profile. Companies like to do business with people that they know.  Having a professional photograph and information about each sales person will help your company’s professionalism online and help them by having an “online business card”.  By the way, having a LinkedIn profile URL on your salespeople’s business cards is another way for your customers to learn more about them and you.

Sales should use LinkedIn to find key contact names of targeted prospects.  A word of caution –  many salespeople say they want to network and connect with professionals, when all they really want to do is turn that networking opportunity into a sales pitch.  Presenting your products and services to targeted prospects subtly is one thing, but don’t use LinkedIn as a tool to hound them for sales.  The better approach might be to see who you know on LinkedIn who might be able to introduce you to that contact.  Referrals are much more effective than cold calling on LinkedIn.  LinkedIn offers advertising opportunities to present your company’s products and services which is respectable way to get noticed.

Marketing – As mentioned above, there are some successful companies using LinkedIn very effectively.  Your marketing team should research these LinkedIn companies for best practices.  There is much to be learned about effective methods of leveraging LinkedIn and other social media networks.  The more updates that you can post on LinkedIn, the better.  Keeping your updates flowing, keeps your customers and prospects interested and updated on what is going on with your company.  I also recommend that your marketing team sign up for different LinkedIn Pulse channels.  There are millions of marketing professionals on LinkedIn and these groups love to share ideas that have worked for them.

Human Resources – Job seekers use LinkedIn as an online resume with the added value of providing recommendations from colleagues, skills, endorsements, volunteer information, blog posts, videos, photos, slide presentations, and documents. Your HR department should comb LinkedIn to find new talent.

Administration, IT and Production Staff – Having your administration, IT and production staff on LinkedIn can help build the company profile to your prospects and customers.  Not only is it important to have them create their own profiles, but also having them provide content for your corporate LinkedIn pages and sharing that information with their contacts spreads the word exponentially on social media.

Executive Team – The average number of connections that CEOs have on LinkedIn is 930.  Executives need to leverage LinkedIn for peer and new business relationships, partnerships and strategic alliances.

If you don’t have a corporate LinkedIn profile, build one.  Encourage your staff to create their own LinkedIn profiles and whenever you have a company update, make sure that you get your staff to share that information with their connections.  Leverage the power of LinkedIn to give your company more visibility and to expand your brand through networking.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

Photo credit: A Name Like Shields Can Make You Defensive via Foter.com / CC BY

Statistics: LinkedIn and DMR

Making the Leap from B2B to B2C

Can B2B companies make the leap to capture B2C customers?  It isn’t always as easy as it seems.  Here are a few things that I would recommend reviewing before making that leap from B2B to B2C.

Will Retail Customers Like Your Products? – This sounds like an obvious question, but you need to find this out before investing in a marketing strategy for retail.  Oftentimes, a product that sells very well in a B2B environment, doesn’t sell well in B2C.  I worked for an industrial supply distributor and we wanted to increase our sales for our best selling products.  When we posted 50,000 products on Amazon.com, something very interesting happened.  Our slow moving products in B2B were our best sellers in B2C.  We thought that we knew what the retail consumers wanted, but we were wrong.  Customers don’t always behave like businesses.

Are Your Products Priced Correctly? – You need to do some market research regarding the products that you want to sell in the retail market.  If your products are similar to others in the marketplace, then do some competitive pricing analysis.  If you have a unique product, you need to determine what your pricing strategy is.

Is Your Infrastructure Set Up For A Direct To Consumer Market? – When selling your products to the B2C market, are you set up to sell individual products instead of bulk shipments?  The B2B companies that I have worked for were already set up to handle large numbers of individual orders.  Not all companies can handle a huge influx of individual orders.  Make sure that your company can handle whatever the retail market throws at you.

Does The B2C Market Know That Your Company Exists? – Wanting to sell products that historically have been marketed directly to businesses may not be thought of or exposed to direct consumers.  You will need a B2C marketing plan.  How are you going to get the word out that you sell to end consumers?  You may need to invest in print and online advertising to let customers know what your company sells.  Press releases are also a good way to get the word out.  Google Adwords and Social Media are another way to get exposure online.

Know Your Target Audience – The best way to expand in new markets is to talk customers that you want to target.  Focus Groups and surveys are great places to collect information about your market.  Understand what motivates customers to purchase products.  Thanks to Amazon and other retailers, free shipping and discounts are some of the rules you need to understand in B2C markets.  End consumers don’t always behave the same way that businesses do.  Price sensitivity is a serious challenge especially with highly competitive products.

Understand How Your Existing Customers Will React To Your Company Going Direct to Consumers – It can get a little tricky when you move into a consumer market, especially if you have a distributor network.  I worked for several companies that sold directly to businesses and to distributors.  In that scenario, you need to make sure your distributor base isn’t threatened by your selling to businesses.  This issue can even get more convoluted when you add selling to retail.

Do your homework before making the leap to B2C.  If you make sure that you research whether the B2C market will buy your products and at what price point, ensure your company’s infrastructure can handle the potential influx of individual orders, build a solid B2C marketing plan and understand how your existing customers will react to you expanding into new markets, you should have the framework for expansion into that market.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

Photo credit: Nicholas Eckhart / Foter.com / CC BY

Marketing on a Tight Budget

I don’t know many marketing professionals who have an unlimited, endless budget.  With the economy as sluggish as it is, marketing budgets are monitored closely.  Branding and marketing effectively isn’t cheap, but there are some things that you can do on a tight budget that are still effective.  Here are a few suggestions…

Email Marketing  – Email can be a very effective way to keep your brand in front of your customers and to drive sales to your website.  Email is still a very effective and inexpensive way to communicate.

Search Engine Optimization – Make sure that your website has the correct title tags, long-tail keywords, and great content on each page.  Well indexed pages on Google can increase your visibility in searches, which will drive new customers to your site.

Social Media – Social Media has many benefits for marketers.  Customers talk about your company on Social Media.  Listen and more importantly, join the conversation.  You can do some effective marketing using social media without spending a fortune.

Google Adwords – You need to be very careful with Google Adwords budgeting.  If you aren’t careful, you can blow through your budget very quickly.  The good news is you can set your Google Adwords budget so you don’t overspend.  This is a very effective tool especially if your website isn’t optimized.  You will have the opportunity to appear on search pages that highlight your top selling products.

Oversized Postcards – Postage is often the budget-killer with direct mail marketing, however there are some effective direct mail programs that won’t destroy your budget.  Consider doing oversized postcards or tri-fold mailers.  There are also slim-jim catalogs that still fall into affordable pricing models.

Blogging – Blogging is a very effective way of branding your company and driving traffic back to your website by embedding deep links to your website within the articles that you write.  There are several free blog sites on the internet that are very easy to use.  LinkedIn also offers an excellent tool for your corporate LinkedIn site to post articles.

Press Releases – Send press releases on a regular basis announcing new products or other newsworthy activities for your company.  Press releases can have usually up to four deep links on your website driving traffic to your products.  Sites that offer press release services often give discounts for larger PR packages.  If you decide to do a series of press releases, you can save money.

The best way to take advantage of these recommendations is to put together a strategy that utilizes them together as a synchronized marketing campaign.  Blog posts should work with the other social media activities.  You can get your postcard and email marketing efforts in sync to cover your target markets.  Press releases can drive traffic to your SEO-friendly website and your Google Adwords campaigns can drive traffic to the products that your press release is highlighting.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

Photo credit: frankieleon / Foter / CC BY

Expand Your Network – Write LinkedIn Posts

I have always enjoyed writing and sharing stories of things that I have learned in business and on a personal level.  When I was younger if you wanted to get published, you had to submit manuscripts through snail mail.  Unless you knew somebody at the publisher, it was very difficult to get your manuscript published.  I know this process well.  I wrote several children’s books, but none of them got published.  Back then, there were so many manuscripts that budding new authors were sending to publishers, I was just one of tens of thousands. But today with blog posts, you “get published” whenever you want to.  It’s not the same as getting a novel published, but there is satisfaction for writers to get their points of view in front of the masses.  LinkedIn now allows you to use this awesome feature within your profile.

I started using this feature as soon as it was made available.  I have written over 30 posts on LinkedIn. Although most of my LinkedIn posts have had modest readership compared to the LinkedIn Influencers, I have been fortunate to have two of my posts featured on the Leadership and Management Pulse channel on LinkedIn.  Instead of having a few hundred people read my posts, when they were featured on LinkedIn Pulse, thousands have read them.

One of the key benefits to posting articles is the feedback you receive.  Some people love my articles and others don’t.  That’s OK.  The important thing is that these posts stimulate conversations with professionals all over the globe.  Many of my readers are interested in Marketing since that is often what I write about. They offer other points of view and valuable input that I haven’t thought of.

Another key benefit to writing posts on LinkedIn is expanding your network.  Since LinkedIn is the best professional networking site on the internet, it makes sense that new connections and followers are a benefit. Sometimes those connections are LinkedIn LIONS (LinkedIn Open Networkers) who have thousands of professionals in their network.  LIONS can help grow your network quickly.

If you don’t know where to start, check out the LinkedIn Pulse channels and read some of the posts that are popular topics and trending.  You will see what everyone is reading and it might give you some ideas on what you want to write about.  Or if you are like me, write whatever inspires you.  You’ll never know who you will inspire unless you try.  So what’s your story?

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

Photo credit: TheSeafarer / Foter / CC BY