4 Ways to Leverage LinkedIn to Get an ROI Organically

So many people are on LinkedIn, but how can you leverage it to make connections and grow your business? In this episode, Joe and Tami discuss how to increase your credibility, build relationships and increase your influence to get the best organic ROI on LinkedIn.

Episode 23 Transcript:

Tami: Welcome to High Energy Marketing, a podcast with us, the digital marketing agency Ajax Union, where we interview our CEO Joe Apfelbaum on key marketing topics, and we share everything you need to know to properly grow your business online. 

This is a Q&A podcast where I ask Joe questions about different topics and trends in marketing based on his book, High Energy Marketing. You can get the book at ajaxunion.com/book to follow along with us. 

This is the 23rd official episode of our podcast about High Energy Marketing. And today we’re going to discuss leveraging LinkedIn. But first, a quick inspiration minute. Joe, do you want to hit us with a quick minute of inspiration before we get started?

Joe: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Tami. Can you be grateful for the little things? Today I want to talk about all the little things that make life so great. We often reserve our gratitude for big moments, we appreciate when we see a huge miracle. I want you to know that you are a miracle. That flower is a miracle. 

Remember that everything you see is temporary, and when you have that in mind, you come to appreciate the little things in life. The wind in your face, the rustle of the leaves, the smell of fresh cut grass, or how you feel your own skin when you touch it. You have five senses, and those are constantly feeding you information, and when you discover your inner purpose, and you live it, it becomes easier to notice the little things in life.

Tami: Thank you so much, Joe. I know; I completely agree. Even something as simple as walking my dog in the morning in the warm sun and just hearing the peaceful sounds of the water around us is just— I’m so grateful for those moments. 

Let’s jump right into our topic of the day – Four Ways to Leverage LinkedIn to Get an ROI Organically. So first, what’s so special about LinkedIn?

Joe: LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social network. There are many other social networks, but those are unprofessional, or they’re more social. When it comes to using LinkedIn, we all know that LinkedIn is a professional social network. It’s a place where people come on a professional basis to talk about business, to talk about inspiration, and so the mindset of the people when they’re showing up to LinkedIn, they’re thinking business. 

So if you’re in business and you want to meet other business professionals, why not leverage the world’s largest professional social network? And people often write it off as oh, it’s LinkedIn it’s not social, no, it is a social network. People on LinkedIn come with the intention to create new opportunities, to get new clients, or to grow professionally. 

And, when I think about Instagram, I even polled my audience on Instagram, and 80% said they were on Instagram to have fun. Content is king, but context is also important. So you want to really think about, what is the context of the people on the social network that you are interacting with. 

Think about the mindset that somebody thinks about or has when they’re attending a business networking event, or a business trade show, or a conference, versus when they’re going to a family wedding or a social event in their community. When people are on LinkedIn, the mindset is business, networking, building relationships, so if you want more influence, you want more authority, you want to increase your credibility, you have to learn how to leverage LinkedIn, which has hundreds of millions of active professionals, and growing at a rate of two new members every second.

Tami: Wow, and then, so what’s the difference between the people on LinkedIn versus the other social media platforms? Aren’t they the same people?

Joe: Sometimes they can be the same people, but their mindset is different. When you’re at a barbecue, a family barbecue, you’re not there to network, you’re there to connect and build relationships with your family or your friends. You’re not there to talk about business. But when you’re at a trade show, or at a business networking event, it’s totally fine to talk about business. That’s why you’re there, you’re there for business. 

So LinkedIn — people go there, not just to have fun, they go there on a professional setting. And so when you’re approaching people there, you can be much more professional, you can be more business-like. And so, the opportunities are much more prevalent on LinkedIn to be able to grow your business.

Tami: Okay, the people on LinkedIn are more business-oriented, and you want, you’ve decided you want to be on LinkedIn to grow your business. How do I create a LinkedIn strategy to do that?

Joe: Well, the first step to creating a LinkedIn strategy is to ask yourself, what do I want to get out of this platform? It’s kind of just when you’re creating a business strategy about anything, what do you want to achieve? What does success look like for you? 

The right marketing strategy will save you a decade, and at our marketing agency, Ajax Union, we’ve created over a hundred different LinkedIn strategies for our clients over the years. And, we teach our clients exactly how to leverage LinkedIn using those particular strategies. Ask yourself, do you want more exposure? Do you want to build more credibility? Do you want more qualified conversations with your target market? 

Our process is called the LinkedIn Authority Blueprint, and it includes a strategy, a brainstorming workshop, around your business and personal brand. If you want to create a strategy, you’ve got to take the time to meet with a professional, or you can do it with AI these days but its not the same as doing it with a marketing expert as with AI, and you can review a little bit about your business, a little bit about your target market, a little bit about your competitive advantage, about you personally, and then you can go ahead and create a ninety day content calendar, you can create an asset library, you can optimize your profile. 

We do this for our clients and it gets them ten times more exposure on LinkedIn. We also give them a connections dashboard and direct messaging scripts. And it only takes a few weeks for us to deliver this LinkedIn strategy where they can start posting and engaging in messaging. But if you just start taking action on LinkedIn without a strategy, you’re going to be missing out. So, know what you want, know who your target market is, and then create the right messaging, and we can definitely help you guys with that as well. 

Tami: Okay, let’s say we have the right messaging, we know who we want to target, know what specifically do we do? What are the ways in which we leverage LinkedIn?

Joe: Well, there are four ways to leverage LinkedIn: information, research, access, and presence. When it comes to information specifically, think about the information that’s available on LinkedIn that maybe isn’t available on other platforms. First name and last name, title, headline, company name, where you work, how long you worked there, what were the different roles that you had at the company, where you worked before, what school you went to. Think about the vast amount of information that people have on their LinkedIn profile compared to Instagram, where they have a screen name, or compared to TikTok, where they have a handle. Or compared to twitter. People don’t put a lot of information on these other social media platforms, but on LinkedIn, because it’s a professional social platform, people put all their real information there. People also share who their mutual connections are. You can see who the mutual connections are on LinkedIn, and you can tap into that information. That information is often not available anywhere else, and so, learning to leverage that information is key.

The second way to leverage LinkedIn is to do research. You can do research on your competitors, you can do research on your industry, you can do research on what people are posting, on the activity of those particular people. You can do research by creating something called LinkedIn Polls, and doing surveys. There’s lots of different ways to do research on LinkedIn, to research your target market, your potential clients, your competition, even your own company, even your own employees. See what people are doing. See how they’re doing it. You can research hashtags, and go through and figure out what content is being put in for your industry, because Microsoft paid twenty six point two billion dollars for LinkedIn in twenty sixteen. They converted the platform to make it a content marketing platform. So there are a million pieces of content coming out on LinkedIn, and you can research by industry, by author, by type, by keyword, by hashtag and so you can do a tremendous amount of research. 

The third way is access. You can get access to literally connect with almost anybody on LinkedIn. All you’ve got to do is go to their profile, click on the connect button, and if you go to my profile, like Joe LinkedIn, you got to click on the more button next to the follow button, in order to be able to see the connect button. It’s kind of hidden there, because I turned my follow button on by turning on creator mode. So if you want to connect with someone, you can leave a connection note, and let them know why you want to connect with them, or you can just press the connect button. You can also follow people. You can also send people emails. I don’t know if you know this, but almost everybody’s emails are available on LinkedIn. When you connect with someone, you get their email, by clicking on the contact info button. Or, you can use other apps that we teach our students and our clients how to use, that basically overlay on top of LinkedIn, and give you their business email and their cell phone number of almost anybody on LinkedIn. So between being able to connect with anybody, being able to capture their contact information, or being able to message them through the platform, you now have access to people that you wouldn’t otherwise have access to. 

Recently, a woman told me that she doesn’t want to use LinkedIn, because her target market, which are registered dietitians, are not on LinkedIn. And there are millions of registered dietitians in the world, but she’s like no, they’re on Instagram. I said can we do a quick search and we did a quick search. Quickly, we realized that there are over a hundred and eighty thousand registered dietitians in the United States using LinkedIn. Her mind was blown. She’s like wow, wow I can’t believe there are so many people in my target market on LinkedIn. So, if you leverage information, if you leverage research, and if you leverage access, you will be able to learn how to leverage LinkedIn much better. 

There’s one final component, Tami, that I want to share with the audience, which is presence. Presence is key. Some people say it’s more important to have a presence on LinkedIn than it is to have a presence on your website. Because when someone’s searching for you, they’re not searching for your company necessarily, they’re searching for your name. And when they search your name on Google, your presence will show up, your profile will show up on Google. So, getting the right presence, making sure that you have the right presence, that you optimize your profile properly based on a strategy, or you get a company like Ajax Union to optimize your profile so that you start coming up better on LinkedIn. But you also can come up better on Google. You can SEO your profile and SEO your content so you start ranking on Google. And you can have a presence, and you can have authority, in your industry, and by posting consistently, you will start showing up and staying top of mind with your clients. So there you have it, information, research, access, and presence. And the acronym that I created is IRAP, I, R, A, P, because I like to rap.

Tami: Thank you, Joe, that was amazing information. We hope everyone listening got as much out of that as we did. In next week’s episode, we will be talking about why Facebook ads are different. Make sure to hit that subscribe button to catch the next episode. You can follow us on all socials at Ajax Union. Follow Joe on all socials at Joe Apfelbaum and follow him on LinkedIn at Joelinkedin.com. If you didn’t catch that, you can check our description for all our social media links. Ajaxunion.com/podcast also has this information. 

If you have any questions, you can shoot us an email at amazing@ajaxunion.com. Our music is by Michael Suarez. This podcast is produced by Sarah and Shannon and edited by Sami Mititelu. Thank you so much. See you next time.