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This 4-part formula used by a 20th-century master marketer will transform your business into the biggest selling brand in your industry…

Being the most recognizable brand in your industry is the holy grail of marketing. Many companies have achieved it by simply being the first to market. Even with a head start, competition eventually creeps up and threatens your position. 

[Read more…] about How to produce marketing that sells

#3 may seem EXTREME to you at first, but it’s actually easier than you think…

Authority marketing. You get it. People are more willing to take advice and do business with people they consider to be experts. If you’re a professional, LinkedIn is THE place to do that now. 

These 8 tips will paint you as an authority and at the same time, grow your network.

#1 – Post something, TODAY

If you haven’t posted anything or haven’t posted in a while, just do it, now.

#2 – What should I post? 

Be helpful. Think about your customers. What’s ONE problem they have (don’t overthink it)? Offer up 1 quick simple solution, based on your experience. Even if none of your customers see this, it shows your network that you’re knowledgeable about your job and that you’re a helping person.

#3 – How often should I post?

You’re a goal setter, right?  So set a goal to post once a week, CONSISTENTLY. Try to make your content more engaging with each new post. Once you get good at posting engaging content and have your templates set, you can increase the frequency.

#4 – What type of content should I post?

Share posts (like this one) and add your $2M cents. That’s super easy. Next, you can write your own posts, as mentioned in #3. Start with just text if you’re not comfortable with producing graphics or videos. You can always get help for that as you gain more traction. If graphics and video are your thing, then use your skills!! Visual content can get 6X the engagement.
Lists (like this post) work wonders for starters.

#5 – Tag People

Who are your biggest cheerleaders in real life? Call them out to help you increase engagement and then reciprocate. Try to avoid the clique pitfall. Your post comments section should be welcoming for all who are respectful and positive, even if you don’t know them. Join them in the comments conversation.

#7 – Hashtags

Use hashtags for your posts. They help you get traffic from LinkedIn’s search algorithm. Follow hashtags in your industry and in your clients’ industries to engage in comment sections, share posts, and get ideas for your own posts.

#8 – Create a swipe file

If you want to get really good at marketing, you’ve got to understand copywriting. “Copy” writing. Yep, you copy posts and ads that GRAB your attention and take special note of the first few lines of text (the hook) and the post format. Put it in a Google Doc, or in a folder on your computer. Use your swipe file to create your own posts, tailored to your audience.

#9 – The LinkedIn First content strategy

You might consider this RADICAL, but it really makes sense when you think about it for a bit. Most people post an article on their blog, and then link it to a LinkedIn post. Try posting all your blog post text as a native LinkedIn post. LinkedIn doesn’t want people clicking on links that take people away from it. You’ll still want to go ahead and post that content on your blog as well. Don’t worry, Google does not penalize duplicate content.

Transcript:
Hi, taking a look at journey, team.com. The first thing that I noticed that would be helpful would be including a top of funnel offer. Now, what is a top of funnel offer? If you know, the sales cycle top of funnel is somebody who’s coming in and say at the top of the funnel and they just getting information, just getting started with the research process of the purchase. I’m very familiar with the sales cycle for ERP up and helping, you know, sell ERP for the last 20 years for a Microsoft partner. And it takes a while usually.

And the beginning stage people just gathering information searching for maybe problems or solutions that they might have biggest issue is usually that they have disparate systems that are kind of tied together and they want to be able to put everything on just one system and have visibility for everyone and all the data flows into one system and everyone could see it. So they’re looking to find answers to their problems. They’re doing research and the call to actions that are here are for request an estimate and request a meeting, not going back to the funnel. Someone who is at the stage of requesting an estimate or a meeting is further down in the funnel. They’ve done a certain amount of research. They know more or less what solutions are available to solve their problem. They have done some shopping around or some comparisons of different solutions and they’re ready to get into the nitty-gritty of meetings and demos.

So I would say probably not even 10% of the people that visit your website or visit a website in general are going to be at that stage of the funnel. The vast majority are going to be in top of funnel and in the information gathering or, or Q and a part of the buyer’s journey. So that’s why I always suggest adding a top of funnel offer, which I don’t see right now on the website. So a simple top of funnel offer is something that’s gated, a gated piece of content that someone has to provide their information for in return. Just to give you an example of this and this isn’t the greatest example, but it’s a very simple one, a company <inaudible> you may or may not be familiar with. It’s also dynamics partner, and they do have a top of funnel offer, which is an e-book. So I would say that this is not the best execution. It’s kind of hard to find. I had to actually look for it and it doesn’t really do a good job of selling itself, but at least they have it.

So if I go into download the ebook, it gives a quick explanation of what is possibly going to be in that book and allow somebody to download the ebook. So by somebody providing their information well OCIO is already gathering a customer that may or may not have been ready for a demo or for a call or a meeting, and then not letting that customer slip away because the vast majority of people that visit a website don’t ever come back, either they get all the information that they need, or they don’t find what they’re looking for and they keep looking. So this is a great way to capture that information. And once you have that email information, you can market to them, you could send them emails you could push them down the sales funnel and you could actually start a conversation back and forth with them. So that would be my main suggestion for this site to any team, just adding a top of funnel Offer. If that’s something, you know, you need help with, I could definitely help with creating the content, having the strategy for what kind of content is going to be palatable and attractive for somebody and that top of funnel stage.

And then going beyond what this company did is making it more attractive. It, making them more palatable to increase the conversion rate of getting more and more people downloading the ebook and then keeping track of that. So you start to define a conversion rate. You start to see how many people visit this offer page or this landing page, and how many people actually go through with downloading it. You have a baseline conversion rate, and then you tweak the landing page and or the offer until you keep getting more and more conversions.