Recently, I made a showstopping decision to stop blogging. NOT all together but on my personal business blog at RSVPselling.com. Let me explain why this could be a major home run (or hit for 6 if you're a cricket follower) for every business to business sales leader looking to get extremely focused on content marketing to build their brand and drive new business in 2015.
Social Selling 3.0 is upon us and LinkedIn is the most powerful publishing platform in the world for B2B sellers. Why is this 3.0? Because it buzzes a smartphone in someone's pocket, it's always on mobile responsive, because it's global and geo-targeted and holistically referral driven. Can your static old blog do that? Only if someone goes out of their way to share it. Let me elaborate...
LinkedIn provides connection in context with unparalleled reach that is impossible to achieve on your own blog or website. So why make people come to you when you can leverage Social Proximity?
Based on Metcalfe's law, the value of your post on LinkedIn Publisher increases with the total number of posters in the network. Therefore, exponential value accrues daily to your network. If a traditional blogger with a following of 100,000 people gets a 3% read rate on an email blast, only 3,000 people see it. Readers may or may not share it. Contrast this with an engaging post to LinkedIn Publisher that is shared 200 times and reaches 10,000+ viewers in 72 hours (getting featured in a Pulse Channel like Leadership & Management with 10M+ viewers), many who can interact and opine about it in their feeds fostering even more quality conversation.
Your blog took 10 years to build. Your LinkedIn Publisher post took 10 seconds to post and reached a massively bigger audience. Content is king and audience is kingdom. Al Ries said, "The power of a brand is inversely proportionate to its scope." So why not leverage LinkedIn Publisher as the hub of your professional brand and all the other networks as secondary and tertiary accretive spokes?
In the emergent Web of Context, Web 3.0, I would posit LinkedIn Publisher itself supersedes the traditional construct of a "blog." You can mix and mash your SlideShare, YouTube footage and other multimedia elements to further amplify. LinkedIn Publisher posts are the proverbial flapping of butterfly wings that create flurries that can morph into viral content hurricanes on the other side of the world.
It's better to be where readers are, and everyone who matters in the B2B world is on LinkedIn: 75% of professionals in North America and more than 90% in Australia. LinkedIn is in more than 200 countries and has more than 330 million members. Two people join per second and they have approximately 190 million unique visitors every month.
This post is about a "think bigger" idea that harmonizes sales and marketing, it's about how heavy hitters think. I realize that jettisoning your personal blog represents a tremendous leap of faith and I know some will gripe, 'What if I relinquish control of my precious content?' LinkedIn has a stunning vision for the future, endeavoring to map the economic graph of the planet toward 2020 and so rest assured, it's in their DNA to respect our I.P., our brand, and the authentic quality material that we add to the system everyday to showcase our domain expertise.
I'm writing another blog shortly about the need for sales people to become micro-marketers and this will be an important part of the mix. Large enterprises are notoriously slow to move so sales people will need to push and drive this with management if it's to happen in 2015. The biggest execution risk in this strategy is that so few sales people can actually write coherently... an indictment on our education system here in Australia and to a lesser degree in the USA. Marketing will clearly need to help resource the effort with sales people, not for sales people. Otherwise it won't be authentic and seamless when the interaction moves from digital interaction to real-world conversation.
*************
Tony Hughes is ranked as the #1 influencer on professional selling in Asia-Pacific and is a keynote speaker and best selling author. This article was originally published in LinkedIn where you can also follow Tony's award winning blog. Also visit Tony's keynote speaker website at www.TonyHughes.com.au or his sales methodology website at http://www.rsvpselling.com/.
Main image photo by Flickr: John Levanen
*************
Please Share: If you valued this article, please share via your Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook social media platforms. We encourage you to join the conversation or ask questions. So feel free to add a comment on this post below.
Your Invitation: We invite you to subscribe to this blog. Subscription is free and it allows you to get access to all our subscriber only content and our periodic newsletter.