LinkedIn Follows Google’s Lead. You Should Do the Same.

I recently shared the following post and Entrepreneur article, relaying how LinkedIn’s algorithm update will be a game-changer for content creators and publishers on the platform. What made this post generate 100 times my typical impression account? In a word, it was “helpful.”

People Are People

The upshot? Big Tech knows where its bread is buttered. The observation that “If the service you’re using is free, you are the product” is apt here. LinkedIn, Google and others understand that the product they are selling to brands and advertisers is humans — their attention, their eyeballs, and their interest. Both are working dutifully to forestall the day in which their platforms are just a bunch of robots shooting AI-generated content back and forth to one another. If the people leave, the business model evaporates.

The takeaway:

If Big Tech is working to sniff out and suppress AI-generated content, you should do the same. Algorithms are being designed and deployed to spot algorithms, and if you are relying on them to be your voice and represent your expertise, you’re risking visibility, exposure and engagement. Without those, you might as well not even be in the content game to begin with.

B2B Prospects Move Themselves Into Market. Here’s Why That’s Important…

If you are in the business of selling expertise, a professional service, or consulting engagements, one of the best ways to earn the confidence of a prospective client is to consistently and convincingly demonstrate domain authority and subject matter expertise.

But the goal is almost never to move a prospect into market. Typically speaking, no amount of marketing can, as the purchases are significant, well-thought-out, thoroughly discussed, and of significant scope and dollar value.

So, if we can’t convince someone to buy from us with marketing, why should we bother? Because of the natural lifecycle of a purchase of professional services.

How Things Work. And How Your Content Will Work for You.

Buyers of sophisticated professional services do not make impulse purchases, as the stakes are often high and the commitment to getting it right rigorous.

As opposed to the lifecycle of commodity purchases, much of your prospect’s “customer journey” is taking place long before that person ever has such a pressing need that he or she is actively shopping for a service provider and vetting candidates.

In fact, it’s often a matter of those shoppers looking for assurances and confidence that they are making the right selection, and this happens one of two primary ways:

1 – Through a referral from a trusted resource (someone who may also be in your marketing plan’s target market)

2 – Banked trust and respect earned over the long-term through the service provider’s (that’s you!) public demonstration of expertise and the ability to get results.

In either case, your best opportunity to earn that referral or respect is to generously share your ideas and insights with the world, so that you earn the reputation of a proven, reliable and expert problem solver.

To my mind, there is no better way to do that consistently than to create and publish content in the form of thought leadership, be that writing, podcasting, public speaking, or even video production.

For today, let’s focus on the former. I will share with you my formula for structuring written content that will earn the interest of your clients, referral sources and prospects, and ultimately, establish you as the preferred candidate for anyone looking to hire a service provide in your particular domain of expertise…

Keep Reading:

How to Structure An Effective Thought Leadership Article to (Someday) Influence a Purchasing Decision (not Today)

Your Content Has a Half-Life. Plan Accordingly.

In science, half-life is the time required for a quantity to reduce to half of its initial value.

The content you create and publish has a half-life, too. And it seems as though that half-life gets shorter and shorter with each passing day. We keep increasing the pace at which we consume—or ignore—content, to the point nowadays that your content’s half-life can be fleeting.

So what’s the use in spending two weeks to plan, several hours to write, and maybe days to produce and publish a 1,500-world article that may spend only seconds in a busy scroller’s social media feed, or seconds on screen before a declutterer deletes your marketing email that links to your blog?

We are being bombarded with more and more content, at an increasing pace, that as consumers, we are being faced with split-second decisions whether to click a link, commit to a read, or afford minutes to a well-produced video.

Is it worth the time we put into perfecting this polished content? No. And Yes.

Don’t Bother with Perfect. Get to Published.

If the intended audience isn’t willing to spend more than a few seconds with your content, why take hours, days and weeks creating it for them? In the modern media environment, people are looking for quick hits: byte-sized content in the form of short posts, quick videos and instant gratification. Multiple rewrites and reviews of academic articles, expensive post-production and editing of two-minute sizzle-reel videos, and splashy immersive multimedia productions…most of that time and expense is wasted, if the user’s thumb simply scrolls right past it, onto the next post in the feed.

“Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good [enough],” is the common expression. More and more, I’m advising clients to shorten their time-to-market horizons to match the short game that content consumers are playing. If people are craving for quick hits, give them to them. 

Instead of a perfectly polished 1,500-word article, start with a 700-character LinkedIn post. Instead of expecting browsers to click a link to consume your content, give them the chief takeaways right in that post itself. The article might take hours to create; the post should take fewer than 30 minutes. The former is expected to be perfect; the latter might even have a typo in it! [Gasp!] That’s okay. It’s a different kind of medium, and perfection is not expected.

The name of the (short) game nowadays is to be visible, be ubiquitous, and be relevant. In the time it might take you to plan, write, produce and publish a full-length article, you will have missed as many as 100 micro-moments—opportunities for you to get a kernel of expertise in front of the audience you’re hoping to influence. Don’t waste those opportunities and leave them to your competitors to claim.

Instead of the polished production video, shoot a quick selfie video capturing an idea that comes to mind. Instead of a pre-planned Webinar, hop on a Zoom call with a client or colleague and record a short discussion about a hot topic of interest to your audience.

Not only does this absolve you of the burden of perfection, it allows you to produce more content, more quickly, and to meet your constituents in the moment…literally. Consider the timeline it might take for you to get the “perfect” piece of content produced. How often can you commit to the time, work and attention to get something like that completed? Maybe monthly? At best?

Here’s how I would spend that month instead:

• Start with a weekly post on LinkedIn.

• Once comfortable, accelerate that pace to three posts per week.

• The ultimate goal is one LinkedIn post per day.

In time, you will increase your content “at-bats” from one per month to 30. You don’t have to be a math major to understand the inherent value in that increase in odds.

Don’t Forget the Long Game!

But remember: That fleeting moment in which your content expended its half-life was only one half of the story. Indeed, once the initial moment has passed, your content has only expended half of its initial value! The remaining value looks more like a dinosaur tale, and in most cases, lasts in perpetuity.

Despite everything I advocated above, you cannot only play the short game if you want your thought-leadership content strategy to be fully effective. You must understand the long game as well.

All of those micro-moments are, indeed, fleeting. There is very little permanence to them. What does live forever, however, is that fully produced content published on your owned media platforms: your website, chief among them.

Consider the other two applications in which your content does some business-development heavy lifting for you:

• matching people’s search criteria

• validating your expertise for website browsers who are approaching a purchasing decision

If you only play the short game, and all of your content lives only in posts, it will be invisible to anyone searching for your expertise online or visiting your website to vet you as a service provider. These are the moments that validate your prior commitment to “the perfect.” Here, prospects will be looking to understand your value, learn your differentiators, and glean your expertise. It’s either a first impression you’re making, or a last-ditch pitch to make the prospect’s short list. Better make it count.

Posts, selfie videos and impromptu Zoom conversations won’t cut it here. 

So you have to do both if you want to be truly effective—the short game AND the long game. The nice thing is, one overlays against the other. 

This is how that long-game content calendar might shake out:

• monthly blog

• monthly newsletter

• quarterly video

• two webinars per year

• one conference, event or symposium per year

Both, Not Either/Or

In tandem, your most effective content calendar will both meet prospects in their micro-moments and maximize the entire lifespan—not just the half-life—of your content’s value…even in perpetuity:

• daily posts on LinkedIn

• weekly impromptu videos, Zoom conversations or podcasts

• monthly blog

• monthly, semi-monthly or weekly email newsletter

• quarterly “sizzle” video

• two webinars per year

• one conference, event or symposium per year

In my experience, most would-be content creators get stuck on the enormity of the task at hand, thinking they need to become prolific content creators of perfectly polished prose. That’s only half of the formula, and it’s not the one I would start with today—especially if I needed to get off of the sidelines and into the game. The long game is the traditional paradigm, and it’s still paramount.

But the short game is happening right now…with or without you. The quicker you check in, the sooner your at-bats will start resulting in singles, doubles, runs scored, and games won. Batter up!

Is LinkedIn a business-development platform?I think it should be.

But I don’t think it should be used as a glorified version of Salesforce. By that, I mean that I don’t think it’s wise to approach LinkedIn as prospecting “CRM” software, wherein you go trawling for leads, playing the spray-and-pray numbers game. 

Instead, I think there’s a more genuine, human approach you can take to the world’s largest business-to-business social network in a way that will almost assuredly result in business-development wins, but will not have you pounding the proverbial pavement, cold calling and knocking on doors.

Don’t Do This

We’ve all been on the receiving end of the blind poke—the LinkedIn version of the cold call. You receive a LinkedIn invitation from someone you’ve never met in the real world, who appears to be a service provider to your industry, rather than a colleague, peer or associate. Sometimes, you ignore the inner voice warning you to ignore the invitation, and you connect with this prospector.

Within minutes, you receive a three-paragraph pitch, offering a “proven system” to generate leads, optimize your website, or a thinly veiled plea to “explore synergies.” Likely, an automated, anonymous pitch triggered by the connection you just agreed to.

How do you respond to such an unsolicited overture from a stranger? Or do you even reply at all? For me, I take no joy in conversing with a robot. Ignore. Or, worse, I immediately undo the connection.

Yes, LinkedIn (Premium) allows you to send unsolicited InMails to people who might want to hire you, but should you? I’d rather you take another, more authentic, and much more effective approach.

Do This Instead

If you’re the type of person who walks into a networking event handing out business cards to strangers and peddling your wares to anyone who gives you a moment of their time, I guess using an online social networking venue to do the same will suit you just fine.

But if you’re like most people, and you prefer to be asked for opinions and opportunities, rather than foist them upon strangers just looking to join a casual conversation, you’ll be able to convert and transfer your typical behaviors and tactics from the real world into the digital realm.

There are better ways to generate conversation, foster engagement and convert connections into relationships…and relationships into opportunities. Consider these alternate, authentic approaches:

• Connect with people you know in real life as a starting point. And send each connection request with a short note contextualizing how you know the invitee and why you’d like to connect with him or her.

• Participate in conversations already happening on other people’s posts—either professionals you know personally or the more popular “influencers” in your industry. As you’re replying, commenting and engaging with real people on the other end of the conversation, extend a connection request with these erstwhile strangers. Now there’s a reason for the invite!

• Spend some time in your timeline, as opposed to only going to LinkedIn to post an article or status update. A few likes, comments and shares on other people’s posts in your feed go a long way toward generating authentic discussion and camaraderie, but they also send signals to the algorithms baked into LinkedIn that make suggestions as to whom you should connect with, what types of content will appear in your feed, but most importantly, who’s streams LinkedIn will serve your content into!

• Be generous with your content-sharing strategy. Offer help, solutions and expertise—with no expectation of return or benefit. Just like in “the real world,” people will notice. They will bank the impressions you’re consistently making as a resource, an expert, and a thought leader. At some future (appropriate) point, they come looking to make a withdrawal!

• Be yourself. And not an automaton. 

Yes, technology like LinkedIn does make it much easier to prospect at scale, using automation and other shortcuts to make mass-market prospecting seem easier. But just because you can doesn’t always mean you should.

I’m of the belief that real people like connecting with real people. And that by offering value, rather than asking for business, you will genuinely attract people who want to engage with you, as opposed to ignoring your solicitations or deleting you from their connections. 

Without ever having to “sell,” opportunities will find you…as if, by magic.

A Proven Formula for Writers of Thought Leadership Marketing Content

If you are in the business of selling expertise, a professional service, or consulting engagements, one of the best ways to earn the confidence of a prospective client is to consistently and convincingly demonstrate domain authority and subject matter expertise. Buyers of sophisticated professional services do not make impulse purchases, as the stakes are often high and the commitment to getting it right rigorous.

As opposed to the lifecycle of commodity purchases, much of your prospect’s “customer journey” is taking place long before that person ever has such a pressing need that he or she is actively shopping for a service provider and vetting candidates. In fact, it’s often a matter of those shoppers looking for assurances and confidence that they are making the right selection, and this happens one of two primary ways:

1. Through a referral from a trusted resource (someone who may also be in your marketing plan’s target market)

2. Banked trust and respect earned over the long-term through the service provider’s (that’s you!) public demonstration of expertise and the ability to get results.

In either case, your best opportunity to earn that referral or respect is to generously share your ideas and insights with the world, so that you earn the reputation of a proven, reliable and expert problem solver. To my mind, there is no better way to do that consistently than to create and publish content in the form of thought leadership, be that writing, podcasting, public speaking, or even video production.

For today, let’s focus on the former. I will share with you my formula for structuring written content that will earn the interest of your clients, referral sources and prospects, and ultimately, establish you as the preferred candidate for anyone looking to hire a service provide in your particular domain of expertise.

First, Let’s Get Physical

I’m going to only speak briefly here about the importance of having a captivating and inviting headline, as for me, that often comes after I’ve written the article. Until I know exactly what the piece provides the reader, I’m unsure what to promise in the form of a headline that can be paid off through the delivery of the full piece of content.

But I do want to emphasize the importance of the physical structure of the article, specifically in terms of appearance. Be sure to make your content scannable, even though your actual intent and preference is for the reader to consume your each and every word. That’s not how content is consumed anymore. What you want to do is to generate enough interest in that first scan so that your reader will go back and start to dig deeper into every section, until they’ve actually read 80-100% of the article. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but them’s the breaks nowadays, when people’s attention spans have been rewired to even gloss over a long tweet.

But see the subhead I used above? Maybe that caught your eye and told you where to skip ahead to next. Those visual landmarks make longer-form content more perusable, and they keep your scanning reader engaged, at least to a point. And you’ll notice that I chose to get a little pithy with my headline, summoning the Olivia Newton John classic for a little fun with wordplay. That may or may not fit into your particular personality or voice, but if it does, have at it.

OK, Really First: Solve for “WHY”

I typically structure my blog posts and thought leadership articles as three-act plays in the following hierarchy: WHY—>HOW—>WHAT.

The first act is designed to pull the reader in and convince him or her that you have a genuine understanding of people’s pain points, aspirations, challenges or goals, based on your considerable expertise in a given area. If you can show, not tell, the reader why your topic is important, relevant, timely and worthy of attention, you will have achieved the critical first step: reader engagement and a degree (perhaps to a great degree) of trust. This may come in the form of an anecdote, a statistic, a news item or prevalent industry trend, or simply (but not only and always) a position you’re staking out — perhaps even counterintuitively.

Next, Show Me How

Again using the show me don’t tell me approach, my second “act” or article section is typically devoted to how you approach the relevant issue…how you’ve solved this problem or overcome this challenge in the past…how you think differently and insightfully about the pain point or aspiration. You might take a case-study approach here, or actually reveal a bit of your secret formula (just enough so that the reader will want to know more), or provide a guiding philosophy that informs your overall approach. The latter is typically something that seems rather routine for the expert that you are but, for the novice reader, seems innovative and insightful.

Lastly, Give Me the What

I typically conclude each piece with some specific, prescriptive action items that the reader can consider and even begin to implement right away, so that you’re not just leaving the reader hanging. Remember, you are going to have to pay off the promise of your alluring headline and opening. Simply providing an articulation of a problem without offering a solution is not a service to the reader — it’s simply a complaint, and a tease.

This final section may come under the header of something like “Three Steps You Can Take Immediately to Overcome Your Recruiting and Retention Challenges in a Tight Labor Market.” Then you might bullet-point this list out, again for easy consumption and to give the reader another visual landmark as to where to direct his or her attention. Don’t be overly concerned about giving your best ideas away “for free.” In almost every scenario, your target market doesn’t want to handle this problem, in an area of expertise largely foreign to them, by themselves. They are going to hire it out to an expert. What you want is to be that expert — not your competition.

Closing Time

When executed over the long term, each deposit of thought leadership that you invest will be “banked” by your clients, prospects and referral sources. At some naturally occurring future moment in time, when a matter arises that you are strong candidate to address, you will have made enough incremental investments that will pay off to genuinely earn you the position of the natural and obvious solution or service provider.

In many cases, when your prospect is at the point of need and ready to hire someone, there will be no short list of candidates to vet and for you to compete with. That short list will be you.

And last but not least, if you can come up with some clever way to conclude the piece to leave a memorable last impression on your reader and future client prospect, go for it.

And if not…

If you want to design a successful marketing program, watch the movie “Memento.”

Here’s how that would work…

(If you’ve never seen the Christopher Nolan classic, Memento is a story that is told in reverse chronology. The first scene of the movie is actually the final event in the story. The second scene depicts the events that immediately preceded the first scene, or final chapter. The third scene depicts the events that immediately preceded that. And so on it goes, all the way to the final scene, which depicts the first event in the storyline — the one that kicked off the chain of events, told backwards, from back to front.)

Here’s how and why you should apply that same reverse chronology approach to reverse-engineer a successful, data-driven marketing strategy of your own:

What happens immediately prior to a sale, sign-up or conversion?

• Typically, you’ve presented a quote, proposal, bid or budget estimate for a prospect’s consideration.

What happens immediately prior to that presentment of quote or contract?

• Typically, a prospect has asked for, or agreed to, your submission of the proposal.

What happens immediately before that?

• Typically, you present your capabilities, differentiation and value proposition to the prospect for consideration.

What happens immediately before that?

• Likely, you’ve taken a series of meetings or phone calls with the prospect to assess need, discover the problem, and determine whether there is a match between what you offer and what the prospect needs solved or accomplished.

What happens immediately before that?

• The prospect discovers you and expresses some level of interest or intent to see if you can help them.

This is where things get important, and how it can shape your strategy, for better or for worse…

How did this prospect discover you?

Did they find you on Google? Then your marketing strategy should focus on search engine marketing and SEO.

Did they respond to your outbound overture in, say, an email or newsletter? Focus your efforts on email marketing.

Were they influenced by some form of advertising? Where and how? Apply your budget and resources to more of the same.

Were they referred to you, by an existing client or trusted colleague? Or have they long been part of your network and ecosystem, and only reached out when they had a problem that required your services?

If the latter is true, as it is for most of my clients, then you need to engage in more of the kinds of activities that foster referrals and earn trust and authority over time and ongoing.

In the B2B space, generally speaking this means sharing your ideas and expertise with the world so that you can demonstrate capability and influence future referrals and inbound requests for your services.

Specifically, I’m referring to thought-leadership content and storytelling. For these types of buyers, you need to take a show-me-don’t-tell-me approach to demonstrating expertise and earning trust. It simply can’t be bought on the cheap or in the moment.

Whatever the customer journey looks like for you, map it from forward to back, and pick your ideal client as the hero in the journey. 

For once you get to the beginning of the story, and can say with confidence what the first chapter is that sets the rest of the story in motion, you can confidently replicate that story arch and start to tell it over and over again…from the front to back.

You’ll engage in more of the sorts of activities that set the story’s wheels in motion, thereby making sure you get more final scenes that end the way you want the movie to end.

So map the story backward, so you can force the story forward with greater frequency and to greater effect.

That’s how Memento so brilliantly works, and that’s how effective marketing programs are designed.

You Can’t Convince Someone to Buy from You

If the above is true, why market at all? Perhaps I should explain…

By the above assertion, I mean the goal of content marketing in the business-to-business world is not to convince someone who is not in the market for your product or service to buy from you when they’re not in need. B2B decision-making doesn’t happen that way.

Yet too many B2B marketers put too much pressure on themselves to identify success metrics in a way that consumer marketers and advertisers might. If I put out a piece of content, I should expect a lead. Nope. Doesn’t work that way. At least not for B2B professional services providers.

The mistake they’re making is applying consumer marketing methodology to an ecosystem with a much longer buying cycle, a much more sophisticated buyer, and likely, a much higher price point than a typical consumer product.

Do the Opposite of What You Think You Should Do

In fact, you aren’t really marketing to shoppers at all, in the B2B space. You’re marketing to latent or dormant shoppers. Some of the marketing you do won’t even be directed at potential customers or clients at all, but rather referral sources and centers of influence, because that’s where buyers of B2B professional services to go to shop for service providers. They ask friends, colleagues or other trusted confidants.

I was fascinated by this recent article entitled, “The 95:5 rule is the new 60:40 rule.” An excerpt:

Many B2B marketers seem to think that marketing works through persuasion, ‘pushing’ buyers down a funnel by explaining the product benefits. According to our surveys, 95% of B2B marketers expect to see significant sales within the first two weeks of a campaign. And that’s a reasonable expectation, if you believe that ads convince buyers to purchase products.

How marketing actually works: The 95:5 rule

So how does marketing actually work, you ask?

The exact opposite way.

Such is the conclusion of our new research with Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. According to Dawes, only 5% of B2B buyers are in-market to buy right now. That means 95% of the buyers that you reach are out-of-market and won’t buy for months or even years. And, contrary to popular belief, you cannot persuade the buyer to go in-market because they already have what you’re selling and won’t need a newer version any time soon.

Marketers don’t move buyers in-market – buyers move themselves in-market based on their needs. For example, if an IT manager just purchased a brand new cloud computing solution yesterday, then that need is gone, and there’s nothing a B2B marketer can do to generate an immediate sale.

So what can we do?

Give up? Focus on the 5% who are in-market? Ignore the 95% who aren’t?

No. Marketers should focus on the 95% – the out-of-market buyers.

Effective marketing increases future sales in future buying situations. How? By increasing the probability that the brand comes to mind when the buyer goes in-market. Simply put, the brand that gets remembered is the brand that gets bought. You can’t push buyers down a funnel, but you can, to quote Professor Jenni Romaniuk, “catch buyers as they fall”.

If you stay focused on generating thought leadership content that purchases trust, gains influence, establishes authority, and consistently reinforces the problems you solve and the value you provide, you will be making an impact where it matters most. But because your someday-shoppers are lurking, latent and listless, you won’t have the immediate, tangible results to demonstrate that you’re making progress.

But you will be.

B2B marketing does not work like a gum ball machine. No coin in, candy out dynamic at work here. But when that 95% becomes the 5% who are in the market for your product or service, you will have already won the customer over, either directly or through the referral source who has been paying attention, and can recall your name and justify your bona fides with confidence.

That’s how business-to-business marketing works. And there’s nothing you can do to change that.

Joe objected, “But I’m NOT a thought leader. Why would anyone listen to what I have to offer?”

Just because you don’t regard yourself as the preeminent voice in your space doesn’t mean you can’t offer insights. You don’t need to be a certified “Thought Leader” to have observations, experiences, theories, command of basic principles, inquiries and perspectives.

In the aggregate, all of those potential offerings position you as an active participant in a given domain or congregation. Over time, you become recognized as a credentialed member, and even an authority. Eventually, people come to recognize you as an expert. That expertise becomes regarded as thought leadership. Maybe not today, but at some point in the future.

It doesn’t start with the proclamation, “I am a thought leader; here are my views.” It begins by making consistent offerings and deposits into the bank of ideas and conversation.

Thought Leadership is not a base to be stolen. It is a goal to consistently drive toward. It starts small, with commitment, confidence and consistency. To complete the baseball metaphor, aim for base hits, and don’t swing for the fences!

Yes, Joe. You’re a thought leader in the making—regardless of experience, title, age or demonstrable track record.

Step to the plate.