I have always been skeptical of marketing tactics built for large companies translating into sales for my small business. So often, the recommended marketing strategies seem to be some version of “be everything everywhere all at once” (Great title for a film. Disastrous as a scrappy marketing strategy).
Marketing is a full-time job. And as a business owner, running your business is a full-time job (plus overtime), so unless you outsource your marketing, that math simply won’t math. You can’t be on every channel. And you won’t get happy results if you try to copy what works for companies with 10x the audience you have (and likely 10x the staff).
So what’s a business owner to do? I’ve long been an advocate for using LinkedIn as your main marketing channel and to scale your business. LinkedIn has been good to my business. It’s a platform where a solopreneur or a consultant could build a following, test their ideas, and start conversations. It feels like a 24/7, online networking event. And because I have built my business through referrals and in-person networking, fielding in-bound leads on LinkedIn has been a dream come true.
But over the past few years, I have watched LinkedIn go from being an easy place to build community—a place where consistency really paid off—to being an unreliable marketing tool. I’ve never cared all that much about playing the algorithm game. And now, with these statistics, it’s looking more and more like a game we’re never going to win.
Because of this, I no longer look to LinkedIn for inbound lead generation, nor do I teach clients to look at LinkedIn this way because I find it to be maddeningly unpredictable. Still, this is not me grabbing my pitch fork and calling for a boycott of LinkedIn. To the contrary, LinkedIn remains a social network I look forward to engaging with every day. So, let me tell you how I’m thinking about Linkedin for thought leadership.
Thought Leadership isn’t Influencer Marketing
The first distinction we need to make is between influencer marketing (which some call traffic marketing) and thought leadership. When I say I no longer look to LinkedIn for inbound lead generation, I’m referring to using the platform for influencer marketing.*
The difference between influencer marketing and thought leadership is in your goals and what you hope to gain from showing up on the platform.
Influencer marketing is characterized by:
- A one-pointed focus on sales
- Quantity over quality of content
- Surface-level content that’s meant to capture eyeballs, more than spread ideas
- A belief that going viral is the best case scenario for a piece of content
By contrast, thought leadership is characterized by:
- A one-pointed focus on building relationships
- Quality over quantity of content
- Experimental, authentic, and deep content that connects people with ideas
- A belief that starting conversations is the best case scenario for a piece of content
Now, there may be some crossover. You can absolutely post thought leadership that promotes a service you offer. Indeed, your thought leadership content should take your marketing strategy and goals into account. If you never talk about what you’re selling, how can you expect your audience to buy from you?
But if you are running a small, service-based business or consultancy where you have capacity for fewer than 100 clients per year and you’re delivering high-touch offers at a premium price, my recommendation is to focus on thought leadership. The good news is LinkedIn is a key component to cultivating your thought leadership ecosystem.
LinkedIn is a Great Platform for Testing Ideas
Thought leaders or what I refer to as big idea experts need a lot of feedback. Yes, we need time and space to take our brains for a walk. We need muse time. And we need high quality inputs of the right kind to stimulate new ideas. Then, we need to share those ideas and get other people to give us feedback on those ideas.
Where can we go to get feedback from other intelligent people who are excited to engage with us about our ideas?
- Conferences and events with other experts (which happen only a handful of times each year)
- Masterminds with other business owners (which happen quarterly or maybe monthly in various business networking groups)
- Colleagues (if you’re lucky enough to have a team or business BFFs to engage with)
- Family and friends (who may not be the best—or most patient—sounding board for all kinds of reasons)
That’s about it. In other words, good interlocutors are tough to come by. But I know where they are hanging out: LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is full of smart people, both experts in your area and non-experts who can think critically and who want to give you useful feedback. There have been so many times when I’ve floated a half-baked idea to my audience and received nearly immediate feedback that allowed me to take my idea to the next level.
For example, last year when I was thinking about doing a content repurposing workshop, I shared my idea and got a positive response, which led to my Digging for Content Gold event (a well-attended workshop that I’m repeating this year on December 7th).
But even beyond tactical benefits like this, sharing your intellectual property and your thought leadership content itself can show you how your ideas will land with a live audience. I especially encourage anyone who believes they have a business book idea to start putting those ideas out in bite-sized chunks on LinkedIn.
I recently finished a draft of my book about how to write a business book (it’s titled Unwritten and it’s coming to a bookseller near YOU in August of 2024!) and I have tested out many of those ideas on LinkedIn. Anyone who has been following me closely on LinkedIn will likely recognize some of the content in the book. And this is great for my own thought leadership.
LinkedIn is a great platform for testing ideas, doing informal market research, and identifying your thought leadership foundation.
LinkedIn is a Great Platform for Building Relationships
So if you’re not working a “be everything everywhere all at once” / influencer / traffic marketing strategy, what is your marketing strategy?
Thought leadership isn’t a marketing strategy or at least, it’s not a good marketing strategy all on its own. For one thing, cultivating your thought leadership ecosystem is a long game. It takes time to grow a following of super engaged people who hang on your every word. It takes time to identify your big ideas and build a strategy around sharing them. If you’re looking to get-rich-quick, thought leadership is not your jam.
Personally, I think thought leadership paired with a relationship marketing strategy (here’s the one I use) works the best for small, service-based businesses or consultancies like those I described above. Most businesses of this kind start with referrals and networking, so it’s not much of a shift to apply a strategy to what you’re already doing.
The big question here is how do you find and nurture a network of people who can reliably refer you to others, talk about your business, and act as your collective publicist? Again, they’re on LinkedIn. All you really have to do is figure out who you want to connect with to build your bench, start engaging with their content, and get some people on the phone to start a mutually beneficial conversation.
The strategy is simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It takes consistency, persistence, and perseverance. But you’re a business owner, which means you’re no stranger to these things.
Even though I don’t see LinkedIn as the reliable marketing tool I once did, I still use LinkedIn and I plan to continue using it as a key element of my thought leadership ecosystem. I still believe it’s the best social media platform for service-based businesses and consultants. It’s the place I go when I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea I think is brilliant. And it’s the place I go whenever I want to build my bench of referral partners.
Here at The Pocket PhD, we transform subject matter experts into big idea experts. We do this through a carefully curated blend of thought leadership strategy, short- and long-form content creation, and collaborative ideation. If you’re ready to cultivate your thought leadership ecosystem, get in touch. We’d love to support you!
* Of course, being an “influencer” on LinkedIn is very different from being an influencer on TikTok. The scale, content, and egos are not even in the same ballpark. But the characteristics of influencer marketing vs. thought leadership hold across different platforms.
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