Do you want to acquire more traffic and leads from LinkedIn?
According to Experian Marketing Services, LinkedIn received 94M total U.S. visits in December 2012, an increase of 40% in traffic compared to December 2011.
So, whether you’re a B2B and/or B2C company, now is a great time to start leveraging LinkedIn to find and attract your target market.
Here are 8 ways to attract high-quality leads with LinkedIn.
Did you know you can add custom banners to your company page for free? And did you know each of these banners can link back to your site?
You can add up to three different linkable product banners (646 pixels x 222 pixels) to the Products & Services section of your company profile. This is a great way to funnel LinkedIn traffic to a webinar, case study or other type of targeted landing page.
HubSpot product banner with Request Demo button driving traffic to a landing page.
Many businesses are missing this opportunity. If prospective clients make an effort to visit your Products & Services section, you should provide a simple way for them to contact you by linking to your site or targeted landing page with your banner.
Here are some ways to use these product banners:
LinkedIn has been making it easier for companies to reach their target audience. Last year, they started allowing companies to tailor status updates to specific LinkedIn connections (based on industry, seniority, job function, etc.).
Companies can target connections with specific status updates based on job function, seniority level, industry, company size and geography.
And now, companies can attach files or pictures (along with links) to their status updates. This helps company status updates “pop” out of the stream, which increases visibility and click-throughs with each post.
Experian promoted a new email marketing case study with a large picture and two links.
To do this, first attach your image. This is an important first step because if you type in your status update and add a link, you will no longer be able to add an image.
Click on the paperclip icon to attach your image.
After attaching your image, you’ll have an opportunity to edit the title of the image and description, which can serve as a teaser to get people to click.
Second, choose your targeted audience for your offer. You must have at least 200 connections in the audience list in order to target them with your update.
For example, you may only want to target non-employees with offers.
Click on the Targeted Audience drop-down to choose your target.
Last, type in your status update and append your URL. By following this sequence, you’ll ensure that both an image and URL will appear twice in your status update.
Add your status update and link last so that both an image and URL will appear.
Think about all of the different ways you can leverage these expanded status updates that include an image and two links. You can feature an image of a webinar. You could show off a white paper. You could give a preview image of a YouTube video you want people to watch.
Most companies are not utilizing this new feature, so take advantage of this opportunity to get expanded status updates and more relevant traffic to your website.
Here are some tips to help you provide engaging status updates on LinkedIn:
If you decide to test an ad campaign budget on LinkedIn, you owe it to yourself to add the Lead Collection widget to your landing page.
This little box sits at the top of your website and allows people to easily submit their email address to you with one simple click.
UCI can easily accept email leads with one click of a button.
The Lead Collection widget allows you to acquire leads faster, especially for the increasing number of mobile device LinkedIn visitors who don’t want to bother typing into your website’s contact form.
LinkedIn Products & Services pages can serve up different content based on the profile of the user.
Not only does this allow you to use the right language (based on geography), but also feature only the products and services that might interest certain types of people (based on their job function, company size, industry and seniority). It then allows you to provide the right messaging and links.
Dashboard for creating multiple versions of LinkedIn company product pages based on audience types.
Creating custom content for specific LinkedIn members helps you drive them to appropriate landing pages and/or specific phone numbers to reach specific departments in your organization. Creating unique pages only takes minutes, so the time investment to test this out is minimal.
Aside from posting company status updates during high-conversion periods on your own website, you should also post updates during the times of day you get the most impressions on LinkedIn.
Lana Khavinson, senior product marketing manager at LinkedIn, says, “We find that companies get the greatest engagement from morning posts. That said, we are seeing engagement rates increasing in the evening as our mobile and iPad apps keep gaining massive traction. We encourage companies to test posting at different times of day so that they can find what works for them and their target audience.”
The way you’ll find the best times to post is by watching the post impression numbers in your posts.
Engagement metrics on posts can be seen by admins of company pages. The above illustration is an example of how data appears, but does not show real results.
These LinkedIn post engagement numbers (impressions, clicks and shares) can be seen by anyone who manages your company page, and should be analyzed to figure out what types of posts are driving the most relevant traffic and/or leads to your site.
Also pay attention to what type of content gets the most shares, since number of shares means even more visibility for your business in other people’s LinkedIn streams.
Sure you can link to your landing page, but why not also allow LinkedIn members a quick way to ask a question or message you without leaving LinkedIn? This is a killer way to make it easy for customers to contact you for a product or service they are interested in.
Jay Baer allows you to message him directly from each of his LinkedIn product pages.
Jay Baer has made it easy for prospects to learn more about his services by linking to his website and allowing people to message him directly from LinkedIn. This is a smart way to pull in prospects and lead information (without people needing to visit your website and complete a form).
Besides, getting a message through LinkedIn and connecting gives you access to prospects’ email addresses. This means they’ll start seeing updates from you, which can help nurture relationships and increase the likelihood of turning prospects into clients.
You can add up to three different people in your organization to receive messages from product pages. To do this, simply go to the Products & Services tab and click on Edit.
As a company page admin, you can edit any page by clicking on the blue Edit button.
Next, you’ll find a Contact Us section on the right-hand side of the page. This is where you can add the people in your organization who are equipped to handle questions from prospects.
Add the names of up to three different employees to be contacts for a particular product or service.
You might feature someone on your sales team, products team and/or a senior manager (depending the product or service offered). Just make sure the person you assign will be frequently checking LinkedIn for any messages.
And make sure he or she regularly posts about your company to keep any potential leads aware of upcoming webinars, case studies or new products/services.
LinkedIn Sponsored Inmail is like email marketing on steroids. You don’t need your own list because you just work directly with LinkedIn to identify exactly whom you want to email. Craft your message, add your URLs and then let LinkedIn do the rest.
It’s a great way to build your leads and targeted traffic to your website. Yes, this costs money, but the ability to target specific people in organizations can be worth it.
When you launch a Sponsored Inmail campaign (formerly referred to as Partner Messages), the person you’re trying to reach gets a notification about an important message in their inbox. The alert is also visible on certain pages of your LinkedIn account.
Google Wildfire sent messages to social media managers about one of their products. This is how it appeared in the inbox.
In these Sponsored Inmails, businesses can share their message and link to their website with buttons and images. In the message below, the yellow buttons and Wildfire logo are linked and tracked.
Google Wildfire sent messages to social media managers about one of their products. This is how the message appeared when clicked.
A Sponsored Inmail campaign can be just what your organization needs to get eyeballs on a new product or service you want to promote.
If you want to grow your network and leads, you need to provide your insights and thought leadership in relevant LinkedIn Groups where your target market is talking. This doesn’t mean bombarding groups with redundant content and links back to your website. That just makes you look like a spammer (and desperate for attention).
Instead, use these groups as opportunities to learn more about your target market and share insights. Strive to become a valuable resource and contributor to the community.
Companies can showcase favorite groups on their LinkedIn profile, and it’s a great opportunity to guide your target market into a community you’ll be participating in.
Dell promotes their Business Solutions Exchange group to help build a community around services they provide, which is a great avenue for them to show thought leadership, build relationships and earn new business. And this a perfect example of what more companies should be doing.
Dell promotes their Business Solutions Exchange group to help build community.
As always, never use groups to spam or share irrelevant, self-promotional blog posts. Be useful and provide insights that will help others. This is how you build relationships, and over time you will earn credibility, new business and more referrals.
So what are you doing on LinkedIn? How are you building relationships, creating new business opportunities and earning referrals? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Are you looking for content marketing ideas?
Need some actionable tips you can put to use today?
We asked 10 content marketing experts for their best content marketing tips.
Here they are:
Without a doubt, one of my hottest content marketing tips is to do interviews… especially video interviews. In fact, it isn’t just hot… it’s downright freakin’ sexy.
David Siteman Garland
Here is why you should add interviews to your content repertoire (big word!) in a fun numerical order:
David being seen interviewing Tim Ferriss.
Good luck and go get ‘em!
David Siteman Garland, author of Smarter, Faster, Cheaper and creator of the web show and resource The Rise To The Top.
Ileane Smith
I’m seeing some real excitement starting to build around content curation platforms right now, and by far my favorite content curation tool is Scoop.it.
I love using Scoop.it because not only does it allow you to curate content and connect with other content marketers, you can also share what you find to an endless number of social media sites and accounts because of the integration with Buffer and HootSuite.
The presentation below is from Scoop.it co-founder and CEO, Guillaume Decugis, which sums up the benefits of human content curation over machine algorithms.
You can leverage a site like Scoop.it to spread your message to a brand-new audience. At the same time, you’re building authority and demonstrating your expertise on important topics related to your niche.
Track the popularity and activity of your Scoop.it topic pages with the summary emails they send out. In the image below, notice the growing number of followers and visits to my topic pages for Podcasts and YouTube Tips and Tutorials—not to mention Basic Blog Tips!
Track the popularity and activity of your Scoop.it topic pages with the summary emails they send out.
Of course you can’t completely leave search engines out of the content marketing equation.
For example, when I check Google Webmaster Tools, I find thousands of links coming from Scoop.it pointing back to my home base, which is my blog.
Use Google Webmaster Tools to track where your links are coming from.
Below, the screenshot from Google Analytics shows that during the second quarter of this year, Scoop.it was in the top 10 referrers of traffic to my blog, actually beating sites like LinkedIn and Famous Bloggers. It’s important to add that the average number of pages visited was 3.4 and the bounce rate was only 12%, so we’re talking high-quality, targeted traffic here.
Google Analytics shows that Scoop.it was in the top 10 referrers of traffic.
The added benefit of using a site like Scoop.it is the community aspect. Users get to know each others’ interests and content is “rescooped” and reshared across every social networking platform.
You might be using a different curation service like Storify or newcomer Spundge, and that’s great. Just be sure that you network and make connections with influencers just as you would on any other social site.
Ileane Smith, founder of Basic Blog Tips.
Heidi Cohen
Use a contextually relevant call to action to nudge your target audience to take the next step.
By its nature, content marketing—whether it’s integrated into your social media or not—is non-promotional, enabling it to get through the clutter. As a result, to get participants to do something without screaming “Buy, Buy, Buy!”, you must make it obvious and easy so they do it without thinking.
Actionable Marketing Tip: Don’t limit your calls to action only to sales. Include calls to action to get prospects to take steps all along the purchase process.
How calls to action are used on a blog post to get readers to take different actions to read deeper into the blog, share socially and enter the purchase process.
Heidi Cohen, president of Riverside Marketing Strategies.
Michael Stelzner
I recently had a crazy idea I call verbal tweets. It’s a way to make it effortless for people to tweet. It’s especially valuable to podcasters or anybody who is recording a video or audio.
If you want someone to tweet something about your show—for example, at the end of your podcast—give a shout out to say something like, “Hey, if you love this podcast, do me a favor and visit socialmediaexaminer.com/love”. This link repopulates a tweet directly into the Twitter feed.
Here is an example below. When you go to socialmediaexaminer.com/love, this will show up on your screen:
Social Media Marketing podcast’s verbal tweet.
To create a verbal tweet, go to clicktotweet, type in your tweet exactly as you want it to be, with the URL already shortened the way you want and then hit Generate Link. This link will get generated for you and then you can embed it into a blog post, for example.
Use clicktotweet to help generate a custom link.
But if you want to take it one step further and not make someone have to find it, you can use a cool WordPress plug-in called Pretty Link, which allows you to create a custom URL. Then paste in your pretty link.
Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner, host of the Social Media Marketing podcast and author of Launch and Writing White Papers.
Pam Hendrickson
It’s not what you know, it’s how you say it. We’ve all heard that on Web 2.0, content is king. But face it: we’re drowning in content. Every minute, more than 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube and 270,000 words are written on Blogger.com. A Google search on even the most obscure topic pulls up hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of results.
You can use SEO, keywords and other strategies to improve your rankings and get people to find your stuff online—but how effective are you once you get their eyes and ears? How good is your content?
The amount of information available to us as human beings is almost incomprehensible. As a species, we make, store and increase our capacity for information by the second. With the creation and rapid growth of the Internet, almost any information we need or want is available at the click of a single button.
It’s not information by itself that people are coming to you for—or ultimately, that they’re paying you for. There are three things that will make your content and products desired by your customers:
Pam Hendrickson, producing, launching and marketing highly profitable products for many of the top names in the personal and professional development industry for over 20 years.
Steve Sheinkopf
Although our business is primarily known for blogging and keyword capture, email may be the best part of our marketing.
Now most people blast away at a list once a week or month (or an astounding 14 times during Black Friday/CyberMonday), but they are missing the point.
If you are emailing to a general list, you will have seen diminishing returns over the last few years. It has nothing to do with the message of your email.
Email is about relevance. If you are relevant, people will open your email. Now slicing and dicing a list is good.
There is, however, a better way, which should be incorporated into your blogs and all of your social media. Create buying guides/white papers along different lines of your business. They only have to be four or five pages, but these buying guides will aid your lead generation and sales.
Lets take our induction example below.
Check out the click-through rates on these email campaigns.
About a year ago, I created the induction guide and placed it on all of our induction blog articles. If someone downloads an induction guide, common sense dictates they are interested in induction.
Now guess what I email to the people who downloaded the induction guide? Induction articles, induction promotions, induction cooking demos, etc. This increased click-through rates to over 45% on the best campaigns.
Blog, guides and email: Think about aligning the three.
Steve Sheinkopf, third-generation owner of Yale Appliance and Lighting, one of the most unique appliance stores in the country.
Gini Dietrich
My hottest content marketing tip for business is, without a doubt, blogging. That said, it’s also the most difficult and most time-consuming.
Here’s how I want you to think about it: How much time do you spend making cold calls that amount to nothing? What about meeting people for breakfast, coffee, lunch, drinks or dinner to no avail?
What if I told you blogging can be one of your top three drivers of new leads, and help nurture and convert them as well, but it will take 10-15 hours of your time each week?
Would you be willing to replace cold calls and meeting time with blogging for a better return?
In the past two weeks, we’ve generated three new clients from Spin Sucks. How do I know that? Easy! Each of them said when they called for the first time that they read the blog.
But sometimes it’s not that easy. Sometimes you have to dig into Google Analytics and other data to figure out where people are coming from and whether they’re converting to a customer.
Of course, it’s easier when you sell something online. We’re a professional services firm, so in the beginning, to monetize the time we spent on the blog, we created products out of content. Things such as ebooks, webinars and white papers. These things allowed us to track who was clicking on the links we provided in blog posts and on the sidebar of the blog and who bought the products.
Track the performance of your content in Google Analytics.
We used in-page analytics and our ecommerce platform to give us those numbers. For instance, in a blog post last summer, we linked to a webinar we sell for $50. You can see by our in-page analytics 2% of the visitors—or 47 people—clicked on the link. When we compared that to our ecommerce, we saw 43 people bought the webinar.
Measure engagement with in-page analytics.
A pretty good ROI for one blog post, which took less than an hour to write, optimize and distribute.
If you don’t sell online, you have to track a little bit differently. The easiest way, of course, is to ask how people found you. Do surveys, hire someone who understands analytics and data, and pay attention to the content on your blog that is most popular. That’s how you’ll determine how well it works for your business.
Gini Dietrich, co-author of Marketing In the Round and the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich.
Krista Kotrla
Imagine the impact if you started to utilize every person in your company to create content. Why not have an army of people helping build your digital brand? Want a hot content marketing tip? Make content marketing part of your business culture.
Here’s the deal: Your employees are already content machines… They answer customer questions all day long.
They talk about price/cost. They compare products. They solve problems. They have an opinion about current industry topics. Imagine all of the content trapped in hundreds of thousands of emails, phone calls and conversations over the years that get a one-time shot at return on time invested.
Utilize every person in your company to create content.
Now imagine putting all of that collective knowledge and information to work for you online, helping you get found by more people and building buyer trust 24/7 for years to come!
While every other company is dipping their toes into “going social,” now is the time for you to go all in and utilize the strengths of your entire team. Get ahead of the competition. Give your team a better platform that brings about better long-term results.
Make content marketing part of your culture and you’ll benefit by having an army of great listeners developing strategic content with a more effective platform bringing about significant results for years to come. Unleash the brilliance of an inspired team accomplishing something that matters.
Krista Kotrla, vice president of marketing for Block Imaging International.
Stan Smith
Content marketing is a giant killer.
In 2013, your challenge will be to combine content publishing with smart planning and marketing automation.
Here are three steps on how to create a powerful integrated content marketing program for your business.
1. Create a Content Editorial Calendar
Usually editorial calendars are simple blog planning tools. The problem is that your business story needs to be told on multiple platforms through a variety of content types.
Instead I suggest creating a Content Editorial Calendar. This calendar’s objective is to surround your visitors with an immersive multi-content experience. This calendar lets you align content to customer needs and schedule a steady drumbeat of diverse content that will give your customers something to see, hear, watch and experience.
A Content Editorial Calendar helps you surround visitors with an immersive multi-content experience.
2. Use Content to Segment Your Prospects
Integrated content marketing forces you to design content based on what your customers need versus talking points. Customer-focused content allows you to segment your readers and uncover insights about how to engage and accelerate them through the sales process.
For example, a productivity app developer can create a video series around daily goal-setting and offer a special report on the same topic. Opt-in subscribers for the report can be put on a “goal-setting” contact sublist that gets content focused on their interest.
3. Ramp Up Content-Focused Relationship-Building
Email is still a powerful relationship-building tool. Smart companies use email marketing to engage customers and accelerate their decision-making process.
In 2013, actively tie each piece of content to a robust email campaign. Make Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest work harder by offering high-quality opt-in content that puts subscribers into custom email campaigns. Track these email campaigns to gain customer behavior insights based on platform and content.
These steps create an effective 1-2-3 punch that will leverage your business story, target customer needs and convert reader interest into revenue—a powerful way to market in 2013 and beyond.
Stan Smith, founder of Pushing Social and co-author of the forthcoming book Born to Blog.
Joe Pulizzi
According to the Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs research, over 90% of all marketers use content marketing in some way. Yes, almost none of those marketers have a documented content marketing plan or strategy.
This is a major problem. Without a clear content marketing plan, we are planning to fail.
According to the Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs research, over 90% of all marketers use content marketing in some way.
A good start is to develop a content marketing mission statement.
For example, Inc. magazine has its mission statement in the first line of its About Us page.
“Welcome to Inc.com, the place where entrepreneurs and business owners can find useful information, advice, insights, resources and inspiration for running and growing their businesses.”
Let’s dissect this a bit. Inc.’s mission statement includes:
Remember, content marketing is not about “what you sell,” it’s about “what you stand for.” The informational needs of your customers and prospects come first. Although there must be clear marketing objectives behind the mission statement, those should not be outlined here.
The Inc. mission statement doesn’t say anything about selling more advertising or paid events. To work, your mission statement has to be all about the pain points of your readers and followers or it simply won’t work.
Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and co-author of Managing Content Marketing and Get Content, Get Customers.
The content marketing pros who contributed to this article are all speaking at Content Success Summit 2013.
It’s a live, virtual conference that starts February 5, 2013 (spread over four weeks to improve learning and accommodate your schedule). Plus you’ll get recordings and transcripts of all live sessions.
Social Media Examiner recruited the biggest and best names in the world of content marketing for this conference. Only the best for you!
All of the experts you’ve come to respect and admire will be in one place. Be sure to check it out.
This conference will reveal everything from strategy to content creation techniques you can put to use immediately.
You’ll discover all of the newest strategies, practical tips and real-world examples for using blogs, podcasts, video, webinars, email and online courses to establish marketplace credibility, build a loyal following and explode your growth.
Twenty-two experts will reveal all of the latest business-building tactics you need to know to benefit from content marketing.
Consider this: more than 16,000 people have attended our online summits and on average, 95% of attendees say they’d recommend our events to friends and attend again. This year we have an all-new professional development summit fully focused on content marketing.
Want to save some money? Reserve your spot now, before prices go up! Click here for details.
What do you think? What’s your favorite content marketing tip? Please share it in the comment section below.
Are you happy with the traffic coming to your blog or website?
Have you kept up with the changes in search engine optimization (SEO)?
This is essential for most businesses today.
Keep reading to learn how Google changes are making social media more important and what you can do about it.
On April 24, 2012, webmasters around the world were dinged by the Google “Penguin” update—one of the latest in a series of algorithm modifications designed to weed out low-value results from the natural search engine results page (SERPs).
Google's Penguin algorithm update was a recent search engine change designed to eliminate spam from the natural search results.
Whether or not your website’s traffic flow was affected by this update, it’s important to understand what this change entails, why it came about and how you can compensate for it using social media marketing—as Google’s heightened focus on web spam is likely to result in similar updates in the future.
The Google Penguin update had three primary objectives to minimize the SEO impact of the following web marketing elements:
Of primary interest to webmasters who use social networking platforms to promote their websites is the first item on this list—the presence of artificially created backlinks. In a post-Penguin environment, building natural backlinks should be a primary objective for webmasters.
Adapt your social media marketing with the following techniques to improve the SEO of your website.
Digital marketing today needs to be “natural.” Ideally, instead of building manufactured backlinks (as was a primary focus of past SEO best practices), your site should acquire links in a natural way—as it would if you did absolutely no promotional work whatsoever.
The key to building natural backlinks is to publish high-quality content that people will be inclined to share naturally on social media networks. After all, if you produce mediocre content, there’s no incentive for readers to link back to or share your website, making it even harder to get the backlinks needed to rank well in the new natural search results.
Social networking websites are a great place to find ideas for future content marketing pieces. Charlene Kingston outlines a great process for uncovering content ideas in your retweets in her “8 Ways to Discover Content Ideas From Your Readers” post, but you can also enter a series of prompts into Twitter’s search bar to uncover the topics your community has demonstrated an interest in.
Results for a search "How do I SEO?"
As an example, the above image shows a few of the results displayed for the search query “How do I SEO?” which highlights several possible topics for future website articles.
Further ideas could be generated by entering any of the following prompts into Twitter search:
Pay special attention to search results that don’t include outbound links, as these are often—but not always—self-promotional in nature. In addition, look for results that have been retweeted by others, as these demonstrate audience appeal.
Once you’ve identified a few potential article topics, produce quality content on the subject and promote your posts using the technique described in Step #2.
Social networking websites are a great place to build natural backlinks to your website, as both Google and Bing confirmed that they track publicly shared links on Facebook and Twitter.
To encourage the creation of these valuable links, you’ll want to take the following actions:
In addition, take the time to set up your Google+ page. There’s some indication that the number of “+1″ votes your articles receive is a factor that’s weighted in the natural search ranking algorithms. Boosting your presence here may help to ensure stronger SEO for your website.
Google+ pages can be created for different types of businesses.
One final thing to consider when using social media websites to protect yourself from future Penguin-like Google updates is the potential for social networking traffic to minimize your reliance on visitors from Google and the other search engines.
To see just how important this can be, take a look at the following list of some of the biggest post-Penguin losers (in terms of natural search visibility), as compiled by web data firm Searchmetrics:
Losers in Google's Penguin update experienced significant drops in search visibility.
In particular, take a look at the impact on great-quotes.com, which experienced a 94% decline in SEO visibility. If natural search traffic from Google was the site’s primary source of visitors, this single algorithm update could have dramatically decreased the company’s revenue.
To diversify your traffic base and increase the number of website visitors you receive from social media platforms, take the following actions:
A blog article includes both a call to action and social sharing buttons.
This final recommendation serves two purposes. In the article referenced earlier on how Google and Bing weight social signals in their ranking algorithms, both search engines assert that they attempt to quantify the relative “authority” of a user as a part of their measurement of social signals.
However, being recognized as one of the “go-to” resources in your industry offers potent benefits from a traffic generation standpoint as well. When you’re recognized as a niche thought leader, your site will naturally attract repeat visitors and referrals—both of which can be great sources of traffic that aren’t subject to Google’s changing whims.
What do you think? What social media marketing actions are you taking to minimize the impact of search engine updates? Share them in the comments section below!
Let me just cut to the chase here: When it comes to business blogging, there is content, and then there is content that sells.
Ask any business owner or marketer which they’d prefer and the obvious answer would be the latter.
The fact is, all the business blogging in the world doesn’t help a bit if it’s not increasing sales. Make no mistake—a business is a business and it needs to make money.
In this article I’ll discuss 4 ways companies can create blog content to bring in more sales. Adapt the principles here to your industry or niche to get more business with your company’s blog.
Here goes…
Of all the things I’m going to discuss in this article, teaching with story and selling with subtleness is really the most important. It’s incredibly underutilized by businesses around the world.
Here’s how this works. When businesses share their success stories, they usually don’t adopt a “teach first” mentality. They explain what they did for the client, but they don’t give the lesson behind the experience.
But first, customers want an answer to “What’s in it for me?” If our content only talks about how great a job we did on a project but doesn’t teach, we’re not likely to get the best results.
Here’s an example of how to first teach with story and then sell with subtleness. I recently wrote an article, “What Does the Face of the Blogger of Tomorrow Truly Look Like?”
The teaching message was: Companies need to embrace the idea that the majority of their employees, especially those in sales, can be content producers and blog writers.
And I shared the story of a company doing just this. US Waterproofing, a Chicago basement waterproofing company, turned their sales guys into content producers, which led to a significant increase in traffic, leads and sales from their company website.
By showing your client success stories with a "teach first, sell second" mentality, you're likely to garner many more leads and sales.
That was the “teaching” segment of the article.
The “subtle selling” portion came into play when I mentioned, in a very subtle manner, that I had gone to this company and spoken to their staff. I gave them the initial vision, and after they bought in, they got the desired results.
In other words, there were two messages in that article, in their proper order:
See how this works? Although I spent very little time in that article talking about myself or the fact that US Waterproofing was a client of mine, I’ve received many inquiries since then from other companies looking to achieve the same success with their employees.
But remember, it all starts when you teach a principle first, and sell later.
Let’s look at a completely different example in another field I’m in—swimming pools. As some of you know, I own a swimming pool company that installs in-ground swimming pools throughout Virginia and Maryland.
One of the biggest issues my swimming pool sales department deals with from consumers is their concern that pools are too much work, too hard to clean and aren’t worth the hassle. With respect to the cleaning issue, for years customers kept telling me they heard it was very hard to vacuum an in-ground pool, and that it could only be done with two people.
Knowing this train of thought was completely wrong, I decided to do a video dispelling the myth, showing customers and viewers just how easy it was to vacuum a pool. This alone would not have been a very unique nor personal video, but I did it with a catch—my 6-year-old son was the star of the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok0Hv75AMMs
If you watch the video above, you’ll clearly see just how easy it is to vacuum an in-ground swimming pool. But beyond that, one other thing will happen—you’ll get to know my son, which means you’ll get to know me a little better as well.
When people know you and start to trust you, your chance of doing business with them is much, much greater.
Video is an amazing tool for this. It allows businesses to integrate the social power of YouTube with the personal power of real people, and the teaching power behind the content.
And because we send this video out to all of the leads who come into our system, they immediately get a different perspective—not only on swimming pool ownership, but also on the owner of the company they might be buying from.
In many ways, this is what creating personal content that sells is all about.
Are you starting to pick up on a theme yet? Yep, everything always involves teaching first, then comes the selling.
In some cases, the services or products in your field may be time-sensitive, at which point you can take advantage of urgency and allow time, or the lack thereof, to be on your side.
Take for example the recent Facebook Timeline change for business. Because thousands and thousands of businesses were affected by this change, and because the timing of it made action urgent, it was the perfect opportunity for Facebook/social media consultants to create sales through content.
One perfect example of this was Social Media Examiner guest writer and Facebook guru extraordinaire Amy Porterfield, who wrote the following blog post:
This is a perfect example of teaching with urgency and then using a call to action from Amy Porterfield's blog.
As you can see from the screenshot, Amy informed her audience of Facebook’s impending changes, she discussed when and what those changes would be, and then finished off the article with a perfect call to action for a webinar.
When it comes to producing content that sells, this was a great example of how to do it the right way with the right progressions.
In previous articles here on Social Media Examiner, I’ve discussed the “power of comparison” as a sales tool with content marketing.
As consumers, we love to compare. We love to line products and services up against each other and choose the one we feel is the best.
For example, let’s imagine you want to buy a sports car and your top two choices are the Ford Mustang and the Chevy Camaro. Once you narrow your choice down to these two vehicles, what are you likely going to do next? If you guessed “go to the Internet and compare the two models,” you’re right. In fact, you’d likely go to a search engine like Google and type something like:
A good content marketer selling one of these vehicles would certainly create an article addressing these very questions.
For another real-life example of how comparative content works so well, I’ll refer you to Block Imaging‘s incredibly successful blog.
To give you a quick background on Block, they sell refurbished medical imaging equipment all over the world, with a focus on MRI machines. Because they offer so many different types and models, and because their clients are constantly comparing products, Block Imaging consistently writes these comparative articles like the one below to help clients choose the product that best suits their needs.
Not only do their readers love this, but the search engines are rewarding Block for addressing subjects that so few in their industry have ever discussed online.
By comparing some of the most common products in their industry, companies like Block Imaging are not only garnering trust from their customers, but great search engine results as well.
Now it’s Your Turn
So there you have it, friends—4 ways your company can produce content that sells. But the truth is, there are many other ways by which you can sell more with your content.
What do you think? Please share the effective strategies you’ve used with your business. What else would you add to the list? Jump in, folks. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Leave your questions and comments in the box below.
