Unlocking Sales Success with LinkedIn Content

If you’re looking to gain traction on LinkedIn, the ability to connect, engage, and deliver value to potential clients is no longer a nice to have, it’s essential.

Buyers react very positively to sellers that provide them with value with "74% of all buyers buy from the first seller that provides them with value and insights".

On LinkedIn, there are a number of content types that can help you showcase your expertise, identify potential clients, build relationships, and ultimately drive sales.

As a Sales Navigator consultant, I’ve witnessed how utilising LinkedIn’s content features in conjunction with Sales Navigator can significantly enhance the effectiveness of client acquisition.

In this article, I'll explore the benefits of the key content types on LinkedIn so you have a fuller picture of the content types you may want to adopt to help with your marketing and sales efforts on LinkedIn.

1. LinkedIn Posts

Posts are the most popular LinkedIn content type. They are versatile with many post types ranging from text-only posts to document posts, and video posts to celebrate an occasion. Posts topics are numerous and can be educational, stories of success, learnings, documentary posts, personal posts, industry insights, etc. The main goal is to create posts that resonate with your ideal audience. Let’s look at the benefits of posting.

Driving Engagement and Building Relationships

By regularly posting, you can grow a group of followers made up of your ideal audience, and you can create engagement by commenting, sharing, and liking. This two-way interaction deepens relationships and fosters a sense of community, which leads to warm conversations and sales. Even those who lurk can eventually reach out when the timing is right.

Positioning Yourself as an Expert

Sharing relevant and thoughtful posts that reflect your knowledge and experience helps establish you as a thought leader with your ideal audience. Whether you're discussing emerging trends in your industry, or providing tips for overcoming common challenges, posts that add real value and insights are a way to demonstrate your expertise, inspire trust and differentiate you from your competitors.

Helping Your Audience Take the Next Step

Adding value and insights is all very well, but you need to help your ideal audience to reach out. Including a call to action (CTA) in your posts is a powerful way to help your ideal audience find more of your content that can help them further understand the challenges they face. You can also direct them to your offers that will help them with their challenges. People get stuck and your job is to help them to take that next step and convert them into leads.

2. Polls

Polls are an interactive content feature on LinkedIn that invites your audience to share their opinions on various topics. Let’s look at the benefits of polls.

Engaging Your Audience and Gathering Insights

The simplicity of polls encourages participation. You create a question, with up to 4 responses, and participants click on the appropriate response for them. It is best to keep polls as simple as possible. Yes / No answers work best. Polls allow you to capture valuable feedback on industry trends and market preferences.

However, with strategic polls (i.e. a poll to gather information about potential issues your ideal clients face) also provide sales intelligence on where someone is with a problem you can help them solve. This data can be critical in shaping your sales approach and tailoring your offerings to meet the market’s needs but also, they can highlight who is out there that needs your help.

Stimulating Warm Conversations

After conducting a poll, you can follow this up by creating another post with the results along with your thoughts. This creates an opportunity for dialogue, leading to further discussions in the comments section. Engaging in these conversations helps you connect with potential clients on a deeper level and strengthens your relationships with them.

For strategic polls, you can follow up with the participants. A word of warning though, be selective of whom you follow up with, and the follow up should come from a place of helping and not selling. Offer them relevant content to help them with their problem, which could be an invite to an event, or send them a valuable resource that helps them with the problem they have. Be careful how you follow up on strategic polls. You don't want to be seen as a pest. ?

Increasing Visibility

Polls are often shared more widely than regular posts due to their interactive nature, which can lead to increased visibility for your profile. As more users engage with your polls, your reach expands to their networks, allowing you to be visible to potential leads who may not have previously interacted with your content.

3. Newsletter Articles

LinkedIn newsletters are a relatively hidden gem. They have been around for a number of years but were opened up to all a couple of years ago. Let’s look at the benefits of newsletters.

Fostering a Dedicated Audience

The best thing I love about LinkedIn newsletters is when you publish your first newsletter, all your first connections will receive an invite to subscribe to your newsletter. For future editions of your newsletter, subscribers will receive an email to their primary email account of their LinkedIn account, will see a notification in notifications, and can see the post for the newsletter in the feed. Subscribers have therefore 3 opportunities to see and read the newsletter.

By starting a newsletter on a specific topic, you create a dedicated audience for that topic. By providing thoughtful, consistent content, you can foster a dedicated following, leading to more engagement with your future posts and offers.

Establishing Authority with In-Depth Content

LinkedIn’s newsletters are a fantastic way for you to share longer, more comprehensive insights on specific topics. By creating well-crafted newsletter articles, you can delve deeply into industry trends, case studies, and best practices. Consistent quality content will build your authority, illustrate your credibility and trust, and reinforce your brand as a go-to resource for the topic.

Enhancing Your Networking Strategy

Newsletter articles because of their longer content type also help to create deeper connections and understanding through more detailed insights. This approach allows potential clients to see how you can add value to their businesses, increasing the likelihood of conversion from a subscriber of your content to a client.

4. LinkedIn Events

LinkedIn Events enables you to hold events which can be internal to LinkedIn (LinkedIn Live or LinkedIn Audio Events) or external (External Event Link). ?The Lives and Audio Events are where you broadcast a video or audio stream into the LinkedIn newsfeed, live, in real-time, whereas for external events as the name suggests, you invite them to register externally. These are open to anyone who has over 150 followers, has had an account for more than 30 days and passes LinkedIn’s “A history of abiding by our Professional Community Policies”.? Let’s look at the benefits of events.

Creating Real-Time Engagement Opportunities

LinkedIn Events enable you to broadcast content in real-time, which facilitates interaction. Hosting live sessions allows you to engage your audience more personally, answering questions and discussing topics in a direct manner. This content format humanises your brand, giving greater access to you, and building rapport with potential clients.

Showcasing Expertise and Thought Leadership

Live sessions provide an excellent opportunity to share your insights, conduct interviews, or demonstrate your solutions in action. The sky is the limit for what you can share. By offering valuable content in a dynamic format, you can enhance your authority and position your expertise prominently.

Building Community Through Interaction

The real-time nature of LinkedIn Live fosters a sense of community among participants. Encouraging viewers to ask questions and share their thoughts creates an interactive environment that strengthens relationships and makes participants feel invested in your content.

5. Creating Valuable Content Assets

Creating valuable resources helps you to become widely known as the person associated with being the go-to person to help them with a particular problem. These assets need to be truly valuable, insightful, and the more unique they are, the stronger the belief will be about your abilities to help. Let’s look at the benefits in more detail. Developing Informative Resources

Creating valuable content assets, such as ebooks, whitepapers, or instructional videos, allows you to provide concrete value and insights to your audience. These resources can address specific pain points or challenges that your target audience faces, positioning you as a knowledgeable consultant who understands their needs, but also as someone who can help them fix them.

Sharing Valuable Content Assets

Once you have created valuable content assets, you should share them widely, but only where this is relevant. These resources, for example, can be shared on your profile in the featured section to showcase the value you provide. You can share these assets via personalised direct messaging outreach to connections you know will benefit from them. By sending relevant resources to people you know will be welcomed, you are more likely to establish meaningful connections and engage potential clients.

Following Up for Continued Engagement

After sharing your content, follow up with those you engaged to gather feedback and continue the conversation. This approach not only demonstrates your commitment to providing value but also helps maintain relationships over time.

Conclusion

Embracing the different content types LinkedIn offers can significantly impact sales success. Each content type serves a different purpose, from building awareness, fostering engagement, and building relationships to establishing authority and expanding reach.

By strategically incorporating these content types into your marketing and sales strategy, you can drive meaningful conversations, generate leads, and ultimately facilitate your way to sales success. Remember “74% of all buyers buy from the first seller that provides them with value and insights”, so the topics you choose to write about will have an impact on the engagement you get. Write about what your buyer wants to read about and learn about.

Embrace the opportunities that these content features provide and with just over 1% of LinkedIn users creating content regularly, grab this opportunity to add value and start these warm conversations before others do.

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