🧪 Here's One LinkedIn Experiment to Try This Week
Get ready to see that engagement go Up like Carl Fredricksen
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🧪 Here's One LinkedIn Experiment to Try This Week
Good morning, my wonderful interweb friend. Ready for a shiny new week?
Most start-ups find themselves in the unenviable position of 1) needing to get their message in front of the most people and 2) having next-to-no budget to support it.
Run a multi-region, months-long LinkedIn ad campaign? With those premium fees? On whose dime exactly, sir?!
That’s why finding ways to expand your organic reach is critical to finding success in B2B social media. But posting across your own channels will only get you so far. You need to think bigger.
I want to share a supremely simple, highly actionable idea that can help you boost your engagement, get you started with some employee advocacy and impress your CEO in one fell swoop. Here we go.
Try this.
To start, you need a blog post. Something that has been ghost-written in the name of one of your colleagues, ideally on a subject they have a stake in having attached to their name.
I like to start with my willing sales colleagues. What are their customers looking to them to answer right now? If you worked in robotics, it could be how to avoid an I, Robot type scenario where our sentinent, metal friends go rogue and try to bring down mankind.
You know, something highly relevant.
Once you have your blog post, you’re going to have your colleague publish it as a LinkedIn article on their personal profile.
This has two main benefits.
It expands your organic reach. Research shows content shared by employees receives 8X more engagement than content shared by brand channels. That’s because they often have more people in their network than you do.
It raises their personal profile. I’ve written before about the benefits of employee advocacy - it leads to more conversions, attracts talent and ultimately building trust in your brand.
Watch the likes, shares and comments of your colleague’s adoring network start to roll in like a warm mist over a mountain prairie.
But it doesn’t stop here. This is when your repurposing journey begins.
First, re-share the article across your brand channels. Shine the light on their thought leadership with an organic post in your brand voice.
After two or three days, reformat the article as a Twitter thread or some other medium of choice with a link to the full article.
Finally, and I like to give it a week or two before doing this, write a short introduction, and post the article on your website’s blog with the proper accreditation.
That’s four bites from a single content apple!
When trying this in the past, I’ve seen upwards of 60% - 70% more engagement (likes, shares, comments) than when sharing a social post organically across my brand accounts that simply points to a blog post.
A few final notes worth considering.
If generating leads is the name of the game, I recommend peppering CTAs in your colleague’s article as if you were Salt Bae. At least three.
I like working with salespeople with this kind of idea as they have a vested interest in positioning themselves as a thought leader.
Make sure your colleague tags your brand account in both the article and their own social post promoting it. Let’s bask in that halo effect, baby.
I’ve heard of some brands that do this almost in lieu of having their own blog because the results are so high. Don’t limit yourself to just one crack of the whip.
🥡 Takeaway
Is this idea going to transform your social media into an overnight success? Not on its own, it’s not.
But I’m a believer that the future of social media will be organic, not paid. Every brand should be investing in building their thought leadership and authority across platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter and growing their audience of potential customers.
The experiment above is simply one tool to have in your arsenal on your journey to get there.
Michaela Mendes posted this incredible thread of 27 questions to ask when you build a content strategy.
Michaela Jefferson penned this interesting read on why customer acquisition is the only viable growth strategy in B2B.
(Michaela’s really bringing the heat this week, huh?)Shout out to my friend David Self for sharing this great infographic with me on why B2B doesn’t have to be boring - with examples.
And for you leaders out there, highly recommend signing up for this amazing new newsletter on empathetic management from Amalia Fowler.
🎙️ The Founder's Guide to B2B Content Marketing
In the latest episode of B2B Better, I sit down with Melanie Deziel, Director of Content at Foundation Marketing and Author of "The Content Fuel Framework.”
We talk about:
Why a Founder/CEO should invest in content marketing from the get-go
What an MVP content marketing strategy looks like
How to run an effective workshop to generate new content ideas
And how Founders can set up a content marketing programme that scales
Melanie also answers questions from Twitter, including my favourite - what do you say to B2B companies wanting their content to be totally professional?
Listen here or:
This is real advice for the everyday B2B marketer who wants to be better.
You can follow Melanie on Twitter here: @mdeziel
And her book - which is excellent - can be found here.
Previous episodes:
How to Use LinkedIn for More Than Just Lead-Gen w/ Charlie Whyman
What it Takes to Build a Successful B2B Community w/ Christina Pashialis
Tell Me Why… You Need Pop Culture in B2B Marketing w/ Brianne Fleming
Building a 10,000 Strong B2B Email List from Scratch w/ Sean Blanda
You can also find the B2B Better on Apple Podcasts and almost all other podcast directories.
And that's it! See you next week.