The ultimate purpose of LinkedIn content is to surface new business opportunities by connecting a company’s executives or business development team (whoever’s posting the content) with prospects in the company’s target audience. 

The way to foster customer relationships via LinkedIn is to post content consistently that will be helpful to your target audience. By helping your prospects before you even directly speak to them, you can train them to expect value from you, recognize you as an authority on their needs, and ultimately signal their interest, leading to a conversation. 

But LinkedIn content only works as a biz dev program if the people posting it follow a few steps to turn their content into a biz dev system, as opposed to merely content.

Here are the steps I recommend to turn LinkedIn content into a revenue-generating system.

LinkedIn content systematization in six steps

1. Post at least four days per week. The majority of these posts should be focused on helping the audience understand the industry and better perform their jobs. If we are helpful to our audience and approach LinkedIn content from a giving perspective (we want to help you as much as possible before we even speak), we will build an audience and earn their trust, which is what leads to sales opportunities.

2. Be social. Respond to every comment on your posts. Also, comment on at least five other people’s posts every day — and ideally not “cool!” or “agreed!” but rather something substantive. For example, share your perspective on the problem they’re having. If someone shares a win, don’t just say, “Congrats!” Share a story of a similar situation you’ve experienced or seen other clients experience. Genuine conversations build genuine connections, which lead to business opportunities.

3. Consistently build your network with ideal customers who are active on LinkedIn. Go to the search bar on LinkedIn. Search one of the titles of your ideal customers. Hit the filter “people.” Play around with the other filters to find people in your target audience, possibly by adding a specific company or choosing 2nd- or 3rd-degree connections.

When you click on someone’s profile, you should be able to see how active they've been. If they haven’t commented or posted in, say, a month, they’re probably not going to see your content. So, the ideal scenario would be that you find, say, five people a day who are actually active on LinkedIn. This will become easier as you get in the habit of doing it, and, over time, these active users in your target audience will come to you. (Notice that the person below is not super active — her activity is all from a month ago.)

When you add connections, it helps to note something about their profile (again, treat it like socializing in real life). The key is not to make people feel like you’re just going to sell them something as soon as they accept your invitation — and, indeed, you shouldn’t sell immediately. Take a genuine interest in getting to know the people to whom you reach out. If you consistently provide value to multiple ideal prospects per week, you won’t need to sell cold. Warm leads will pour in.

4. Reach out to people in your ideal target audience who engage with your posts. Here’s an example of a message I recently sent that successfully yielded a chat with someone in my target audience who had commented on my post, “Hey, John! Thanks for commenting on my post today. As a fellow journalist turned content marketer, I'd love to chat with you sometime and hear about your journey, share current challenges and tools of the trade, etc. Let me know if you'd be open to that! Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons are usually open on my end.” Maintain a record of all the people to whom you’ve reached out.

5. Got a chat with someone in your ideal target audience scheduled? Congrats! You’re building relationships with the help of LinkedIn content. This is how it’s done, and now, it’s more about biz dev and sales than content marketing. (For what it’s worth, I generally send someone a one-pager after we’ve had an initial introductory chat. If they express interest in a deeper conversation, we have that conversation so that I can learn more about their marketing objectives, messaging, resources, and ideal content mix. Then, I create a pitch deck.)

6. Repeat. If you consistently create content, add connections in your ideal target audience, and reach out to ideal prospects who engage with your content without immediately selling them, you are highly likely to get high-quality leads from your LinkedIn content. If you don’t, it is likely that the content is poor in quality, you didn’t post or engage enough with prospects, you’re not adding active ideal customers, you gave up too early, or your outreach process is flawed. Track results monthly and analyze them quarterly to identify optimization opportunities.

Procedure for content creation

When Sharp Pen first offered LinkedIn posts, we created content by repurposing the insights of long-form content into four weekly posts for our clients’ whole staff. Understandably, this process, while designed for efficiency and cost-effectiveness, often left the individuals posting the content we created feeling like the content was not necessarily reflective of each individual's ideas, concerns, and voice.

So, I prefer a more intensive approach. Instead of merely repurposing long-form content, I like to have two one-on-one 45-minute interviews with each client-side thought leader each month. Each interview will inform content for the following 2-3 weeks. This way, we learn a lot more not only about each person’s individual responsibilities and ideas but also about their voice and personal career journey. This informs a more comprehensive, individualized, and organic LinkedIn presence for each professional using content to build a presence and create relationships on LinkedIn. 

The business case for LinkedIn content

Ideally, a LinkedIn content marketing program should just about pay for itself by generating enough pipeline / sales opportunities that the ROI is a no-brainer. Bear in mind that LinkedIn audiences, like all content marketing investments, grow over time, and success should snowball. 

But even in the short term, let’s say you spend $6k/month, or $18k/quarter, on LinkedIn content. And let’s say across two individual accounts, you’re able to generate 12 networking calls per month, or 36 new business opportunities per quarter. 

To achieve 5x ROI per quarter, you’d need to generate opportunities likely to lead to about $360k in annual revenue. Is that a feasible goal based on predicted conversion rate and average order value across 36 quarterly opportunities? (You’ll notice that this math works much better for businesses with a high average order value than, say, SaaS businesses charging users hundreds of dollars a month or less.)

This is just the napkin math I’d do to assess whether a LinkedIn content program is worthwhile. My suggestion if you implement this program would be to record engagement, audience growth, and calls scheduled to see if you make progress throughout a quarter, and then you can reassess whether the program is working as well as how to improve it.