#51: How To Use LinkedIn Newsletters To Drastically Reach More B2B Prospects On LinkedIn

The Business Growth Show

Learn More Earn More Business Growth Podcast

Host: Brian Webb

Episode 51: How To Use LinkedIn Newsletters To Drastically Reach More B2B Prospects On LinkedIn

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VALUE BOMBS

So you're a business owner or you're responsible for selling for your company. You're using LinkedIn and you want to get more out of it. What if you could reach a greater percentage of your followers? What if you could reach more people than even follow you on LinkedIn when you post? Today, I'm going to show you how. It has something to do with LinkedIn newsletters. Let's jump in.

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TRANSCRIPT

Brian Webb:

So you're a business owner or you're responsible for selling for your company. You're using LinkedIn and you want to get more out of it. What if you could reach a greater percentage of your followers? What if you could reach more people than even follow you on LinkedIn when you post? Today, I'm going to show you how. It has something to do with LinkedIn newsletters. Let's jump in.

This is the Learn More Earn More Business Growth podcast.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Brian Webb. This podcast is designed to be your number one premier place to learn the framework, secrets and growth hacks to grow and scale your business smarter and faster. While you're working on pursuing your dreams and growing your business, I'll be here to help you make better decisions and avoid costly pitfalls and expensive mistakes along the way. Let's go ahead and jump into today's episode.

Welcome back to the show, everybody. Today, we're going to talk about LinkedIn again. We've been a little heavy on LinkedIn lately, but if you're a B2B business owner or if you work in a B2B business, it's probably something we should be talking about. Today, if you're not familiar with it or if you're not aware, LinkedIn has a feature that you can use, Newsletters. I'm going to tell you why you should be thinking about using it. Once you've set it up, and by the way, I'll tell you how to do that in just a moment, once you have set up the newsletter function on your LinkedIn account, the following is going to happen.

One, LinkedIn is going to invite all of your current followers to subscribe automatically. Second, whenever you post new articles in the future, notifications will go out to your followers every time you post a new article. An email will go out from LinkedIn automatically to all of your newsletter subscribers anytime you post a new article. Basically, LinkedIn, once you have this setup, that's very important, once you've done this the first time is basically trying to help you get more organic reach. When they post to your audience or to your followers, it goes up in the news feed, it goes out in the notifications, it goes out as an email and it goes out to the invitation network.

We're always just trying to even reach the followers that we have because every time you post a small percentage, typically, depending on the type of content you're creating, typically a very small percentage of your audience will ever even know that you've posted. I've seen a case study where someone who had 30,000 followers got 100,000 views on their newsletter. That's enormous. That's amazing. Remember, organic, not paid traffic, free traffic. Let me take you through the steps on how to set this up on your account.

First, if you don't have it turned on, you need to turn on LinkedIn creator mode. There are two criteria that you must meet to start a LinkedIn newsletter. First, you have to have creator mode turned on, and second, you have to have created a post sometime within the last three months. If you want to take advantage of this, you have to have creator mode turned on on your LinkedIn account. Step two of three, you need to set up your LinkedIn newsletter. Once you've taken care of the first steps, basically, you log into your LinkedIn account, go to create a post, then click the option to create an article. Inside the publishing editor, if you have creator mode turned on, you'll see the option to click to create a newsletter. Once you do that, there are four steps you have to take to set up your newsletter.

First, you need to come up with a name for your newsletter. Now, while this is true with all marketing, it's certainly true here. Choose to be clear. Do not be clever. Don't choose a name or a title for your newsletter that was neat to you, it's interesting, but it tells the audience nothing as to what they're going to get out of it. The WIIFM principle, what's in it for me, what's in it for them. Let your title clearly articulate what value you're going to provide to anyone that chooses to follow your newsletter. Once you've chosen the name of your newsletter, you need to come up with a description. You'll have about I think it's 300 characters or so to work with. Focus on writing a clear description that outlines your value proposition. "Why should I care? Why should I subscribe?" Use your description words, and what you choose to say to entice me. Be as irresistible as possible.

The third step that you can take is to upload a logo. It needs to be 300 pixels by 300 pixels at 72 DPI. If you're not sure how to do that, just get a graphic designer to help you out. By the way, it might be your logo. Maybe it's your picture. Maybe it's your photo. Maybe it's your photo with your name on the photo. But you get a 300-pixel by 300-pixel square so that you can do something to brand your newsletter and let people instantly know that it's connected to you.

The last step you want to take is your anticipated posting schedule. Basically, how frequently do you plan to publish? Daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly? You need to set something to manage the expectations of those that might be thinking about subscribing. But don't worry. LinkedIn won't force you to stick to that schedule. If you say that you're going to do it monthly and you post twice a month, nothing is going to break. But if you say that you're going to post weekly and you're only posting every two months, you might be failing the expectations of your subscribers. Basically choose daily, weekly, biweekly, or monthly and this lets your subscribers know how frequently they should anticipate hearing from you.

We'll get back to the show in just a moment, but first, a quick word from our sponsor. Whatbox Digital.

Did you know that most marketing doesn't work at all? Did you know that most business owners and leaders are making the same mistakes over and over and over again? Like so many others, you are likely tired of relying on hope, which is a failed marketing system. This is when you're spending valuable time and money on marketing and then hoping it works. You've thrown tons of money towards marketing mistakes and failures and you wish you could get that money back. When you don't have a reliable system for generating leads and acquiring new customers, then you're doomed to exclusively rely on the loyalty of your existing customers and word of mouth. But it doesn't have to be that way.

I'm Brian Webb, the CEO and senior guide at Whatbox digital, and I've had the privilege of owning and leading a successful marketing agency in the greater Houston metroplex for over 18 years. Having worked in over 60 industry verticals, I've led my team and clients to achieve business growth time and time again, and I want to give you a resource for free. You heard me right. Free. I've put together the ultimate 97 point marketing audit checklist, which will allow you to assess and diagnose what is and is not working in your marketing. It'll only take you about 10 or 15 minutes to go through it. Think of it as an MRI for your marketing without the expensive medical bills to follow. To get this free marketing checklist delivered right to your inbox, simply go to getmymarketingchecklist.com, provide your info, and we'll get it out to you right away. Again, it's totally free.

I'd encourage you to walk through this checklist with your team and honestly discuss and evaluate every action item on the list. It will be the best 10 minutes you've invested into the growth engine of your business in a long, long time. Don't waste another day or another dollar on failed hope marketing strategies that do not work. If you want to grow and scale your business smarter and faster and with fewer mistakes, you're in the right place. Again, it's totally free. Simply go to getmymarketingchecklist.com right now. Let's fix what's broken in your marketing.

Now here's something else you might find interesting. Newsletters can have multiple articles that you've published in a single newsletter because you can attach articles to the newsletter. The newsletter is just the engine, letting your subscribers know that a new article went live. Check this out. If you didn't already know, LinkedIn articles are multimedia documents. You can literally upload GIFs, so animation GIFs. You can upload a code snippet, video links, and links to other articles in your newsletter. You can embed images, and videos. A newsletter going out on LinkedIn is almost like sending out a landing page so definitely take advantage of that. It doesn't have to just be text and images like an email newsletter typically is.

Then, of course, the third step of having a great newsletter on LinkedIn is publishing quality content. You do need to set up a cover photo for each article or we recommend it anyway. That's going to be I think 1280 pixels by 720 pixels. I almost forgot you can even include slide decks in your newsletters. If you have a slide deck that you've done now, that would have to be posted up onto Prezi or SlideShare, but you can embed that slide deck into your newsletter.

A couple of pro tips you probably want to be thinking about: One, at the end of each article that you post, include a screenshot and link that says continue reading to the next newsletter with a screenshot. Basically, be inviting people to other articles that you've done. Second, what seems to be working well is newsletters that take about two to four minutes to read. That seems to be getting the best engagement from what I'm seeing. By the way, even though you're just putting in copy and content into your newsletters, LinkedIn actually posts at the top the anticipated length of time it takes to consume that content so focus on two to four minutes.

Now, if you really want to elevate your game, whenever you're creating an article, always have calls to action in every newsletter. Share button on an article as a post as a message on Facebook on Twitter. Or if you have a lead generator for your business, include a link to download that at the end of every article. Okay, so now you know why you should be using LinkedIn newsletters. I've just walked you through the three steps on how to do it. Turning on LinkedIn creator mode, setting up the newsletter, the initial four steps, and now that you're posting content, let me give you some best practices. It bears mentioning again, choose a name for your newsletter that is clear that your audience will instantly understand. Don't be clever.

Next upload a cover photo for every individual article in your newsletter. LinkedIn is currently saying that 744 pixels by 400 pixels at 72 DPI, but upload art that's relevant to your brand. Do not upload clip art or generic stock images. That's not going to work. Images with faces and people tend to resonate more with your audiences. You'll probably also find that you'll get more engagement by adding a few lines of commentary or asking a question in a post when you share your newsletter. When you're posting about the newsletter, in your description, you could also ask members to subscribe. Now, share your newsletter articles or your newsletter page to your networks on other social media platforms, including your email list to increase engagement and awareness that you're even doing this. Once you have set the frequency that you're going to be publishing, maintain that cadence that you chose for your newsletter so that your subscribers can engage regularly with your content.

The last thing you may want to consider doing is changing the connect button on your profile to instead follow. Instead of connect being the button, the call to action that people see when they visit your profile. By the way, you can only do this when you have your LinkedIn account set to creator mode. Changing your connect button to follow can only happen when you have your account in creator mode. But this will enable people who view your profile to follow your activity, which means they're going to see when you post new articles to your newsletter.

If you publish content at all, especially if you're a B2B business or a B2B marketer, you have every reason in the world to be doing this. This is a phenomenal way to create brand awareness, to demonstrate thought leadership, to demonstrate authority and empathy with the pains that your customers are dealing with. While this may cost you a little bit of time, the reach that you get is free. You are not paying to get seen and noticed. Don't forget by the way. You might be thinking, "This is awesome. I don't have the time to do this or I don't want to do it. I don't know how to go about doing it." Reach out to me. Just text the word LinkedIn to 832-324-2432, and I'll get you hooked up with someone who can help. We are here to help you if you need some help with this. That's it for today. Let's keep going and growing together. I hope you got something out of this today. I will see you in the next episode.

Thanks for joining me today and listening to this episode of the Learn More Earn More Business Growth podcast. We can be found on all the major platforms like Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, and even Amazon Music. I genuinely hope you enjoyed today's episode and if you did, I'd be honored if you'd subscribe to the show and leave us a rating in an honest review. I'd love to connect with you on Instagram. You can find me at @BrianWebb and the show's sponsor Whatbox digital can be found at, as you might guess, @WhatboxDigital.

You can also find me in Whatbox Digital on Facebook and LinkedIn with the links in the show notes. This will allow you to stay up to date and never miss out on exciting new announcements, events, special offers, and opportunities, and you'll be in the know when we drop a new episode of the Learn More Earn More Business Growth podcast. If you'd like to send me a DM on Instagram to say hello or share your thoughts on how we can make this podcast even better for you, I'd love to hear from you. Again, thanks for listening. Let's go and grow together. I'll see you on the next episode.

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DESCRIPTION

The Learn More Earn More Business Growth Podcast is sponsored by Whatbox Digital, a marketing and consulting agency in the Greater Houston Metroplex. This podcast is your premier place to learn the frameworks, secrets, and growth hacks to grow and scale your business and revenue smarter and faster.