LinkedIn is already mandatory in Construction
In recent years, most of us have seen & missed markets bowing down to social media marketing, as other companies spent a little for unprecedented returns. Facebook was once the king of engagement and businesses were building high-volume and high-value brands in front of millions of people, but by the time the rest of us reached Facebook (for business), spending wasn't an advantage... it was and still is, a necessity. Organic reach is lucky to reach all of your followers but spending money will boost your reach and your insight... so who has the most money?... Or even better, who has LinkedIn?
Right now, you are in the middle of prime-time LinkedIn. If history has taught us anything, it is that LinkedIn will climax and they will begin to stabilise their value, prioritising the highest spenders, who reciprocate by rightly advocating the practice as an industry standard until not spending will deem your business irrelevant.
Right now, you are in the middle of prime-time LinkedIn
That does not mean that you need to start spending £2,000 per month on LinkedIn advertising today though... although it would probably be a better investment than some of the BD strategies that I have seen. It does mean that you should start dedicating 30-90 minutes each day, to understand which actions will encourage an audience to start looking at your brand, and what you have to offer. Hopefully, this will eventually lead to exploring a more targeted (paid) approach, but you will likely hear from me on this soon as well.
My prediction is that we are about to get a gift from the LinkedIn bosses, if we are paying attention to our 'Company Pages'. My two-pence is that they will increase the spend options for promoting your company page and for generating business leads, but in order for them to accumulate accurate data, they are going to reward you for demonstrating the pattern for a generous while in between.
Engagement means communicating indirectly and directly with decision-makers and influencers in your market
Did you know that you can affiliate three hashtags with your company page, and you can comment, like & share posts that have that hashtag, whilst acting as your page. That means that you can comment on posts from the biggest companies in the country and have your brand seen by all of their followers (with the option to visit or follow your page within one click). What is more, is that you can change the hashtags instantly and find an unlimited amount of relevant posts (and relevant people) to engage with.
More Followers = More People Paying Attention To Your Brand
Followers have been generous on our personal accounts for at least 18 months, and really still are. I have accumulated over 20,000 followers and I am fortunate to have an organic outreach of 4,000 - 13,000 with peaks of 100,000 from whatever LinkedIn have up their sleeve next... and in the meantime, I am predicting the same pattern for our company pages. We are not worried about putting loads of content out right now, but it is certainly the right time to be putting out quality content that is statistically engaging for the the right audience. By the way, when I use the term "right audience", you can literally define this by companies, job titles, locations & even names so you decide the right audience on LinkedIn.
Before you think about hiring a sixteen year-old apprentice to click the keys all day, I will note that one of the clear reasons that we get such quick results on such a low budget in this metric, is that we understand our clients, their markets and the terminology in between, allowing us to engage appropriately & bring value to the author's posts. You understand your market and your employees understand your culture so it would make more sense to haul someone in from site or to ask The Built World to test the waters with you (obvious plug).
Quality, Not Quantity = 100 Relevant Decision-Makers instead of 100,000 Anonymous Socialites
The conclusion of this article is to not overlook the opportunity in front of you, as more and more decision-makers join the platform and as more and more active users become decision-makers... and as LinkedIn continue to throw attention at us to prove their concept.
LinkedIn is already mandatory in Construction but there is still a huge vacancy for the winners.
