LinkedIn: Build Reach and Generate Revenue!

1. What potential lies behind LinkedIn?
2. Why is it important to increase the range on LinkedIn?
3. 5 measures to build more LinkedIn reach
4. Conclusion

When you think long term, the potential of the platform is huge. Whether it's about employee acquisition, customer acquisition, or your expert status in your industry. The reason for this is the high density of relevant individuals. Whether CEO, C-Level or investor. Everyone is on LinkedIn. Your goal must be to get into these individuals' feeds and ensure they know who you are and what you are doing!

What potential lies behind LinkedIn?

With 875 million registered users LinkedIn is the world’s largest B2B platform. Completely free and open 24/7, the influencers of the most important areas of our working world are here. In the DACH region alone, 18 million people have a profile on LinkedIn. This means that almost every third person in employment is active on this platform.

LinkedIn's range worldwide

Despite this, only a few entrepreneurs have discovered the incredible potential of this platform for themselves. Still, the majority of LinkedIn users are passive – but this will change rapidly in the coming years. With a younger generation, for whom their own online presence is a matter of course, the expansion of a digital reputation on LinkedIn will not only be essential to activate and increase the target group, but will also represent the only powerful way of economic influence and differentiation as a C-level personal brand.

Just because the market of active users on LinkedIn is not yet as oversaturated as on many other social networks, now is the perfect time to become active on LinkedIn and – relatively easily – build up a large range.

Why is it important to increase the range on LinkedIn?

When we talk about LinkedIn Personal Branding when it comes to reach, it is actually less about the number of followers, but rather about thought leadership within the industry. Individuals who have a leading opinion influence with their online presence, how tens of thousands of relevant recipients think about you and your company.

The broad mass is not the target. It is about the voice within your own industry and about guiding your existing and future team members via these channels.

Over the past three years, we have built over 350 C-level profiles on LinkedIn and collected some data and experience. Our process for maximum reach and ultimately also a return in the form of sales is based not only on good content, but on 5 phases, in which you will be guided in this article by our guest author Thomas Reck.

C-Level Branding Process

5 measures to build more LinkedIn reach

Step 1: Turn your LinkedIn profile into a landing page

The first step is about the basics: the setup. Here it is important that you focus on a few goals. These goals help you to perform an effective environment analysis, which gives you a feeling of what role models and competitors are doing both nationally and internationally on the platform and in your industry.

In the digital world, the attention span of consumers is severely limited. It is all the more important to determine: how present one's own industry is on LinkedIn, what is particularly popular with the target group, how often content is liked, commented on, and sometimes even shared.

It is important to build your profile so that your target group learns all important information such as references, concrete offers, etc. directly on your profile.

LinkedIn Profile

Step 2: Direct user attention with the right content formats

The second step revolves around contributions and therefore the right content strategy. A mix of personal content and informative articles, which position you as experts and thought leaders within your industry and thus offer added value for your target group, form the basic pillars. In principle, every topic has the potential to be a good post. What is important is that the content is relevant for your target group and that more suspense is created using diverse LinkedIn post formats. Switch between text posts, pictures and videos. Video content on LinkedIn is more complex, but creates a much deeper level of trust than purely text posts.

When selecting your topics, make sure that they are topics that are truly interesting to your target group. The topics do not have to appeal to you 100%, they have to appeal to the readers.

For planning and structuring our content, we use various project management tools and build our own content boards, as in Asana.

Content board Asana

The topic of the LinkedIn algorithm is one that is overrated for many. Of course, there are some hacks and tricks about the posting time, number of hashtags, and so on. These are, however, worthless if your content is not relevant. Therefore, you should invest 80% of your time in writing relevant content and not in researching the algorithm.

You can take all the technical details and tricks into account, but if your topic is not relevant for your target group it won't work. Conversely, however, a lot is possible. A super exciting topic will still work, even if you don't take every detail about the algorithm into account.

Step 3: Addressing the target group through messages

The outreach phase consists of actively approaching people from the target group. However, this should only happen after the basic work has been completed. Only once the profile has been transformed into a meaningful landing page can you be sure that profile visitors will take the right message from it. Outreach includes comments and direct messages.

With direct messages, you should make sure to strike the right tone. The classic sales messages no longer work on LinkedIn. With this as well, it is important to keep in mind that building trust is the highest priority.

Step 4: Getting into the media

Now it's about standing out from the competition and elaborating your own expert status towards your target group. To do this, you can use external trust factors such as established magazines, podcasts or blogs. First, you should find out where your target group's attention lies.

Next, it is about building contact with journalists and initiating the creation of articles. After the publication of your article, it should be used as efficiently as possible. This means that cross-postings are created on social media platforms, especially on LinkedIn. It is recommended to continue to make reference to the article in later postings in order to reap the maximum added value from it.

Step 5: Analysis of the Posts

The last step can actually become the first step again. In retrospect, using third-party tools, the reach achieved with your content and whether the intended target group was reached is analyzed. If this is not the case or if the target changes, it is back to square one for you and parts of the setup and the content formats are adjusted. For example, we use for the analysis of our LinkedIn posts Shield.

Conclusion

You have the greatest leverage if you publish for a longer time the content that is truly exciting to your target group and combine this with the Step Outreach. Analyze on a weekly basis your content engagers, that is, all people who interact with you and your content, and engage with them. It is important not to try to sell. Your ultimate goal should be to simply open a conversation to get in touch with your counterpart. Everything else comes almost automatically.