Episode 44: 5 Ways Non-Creators Can Leverage Content for LinkedIn

Bill McCormick 0:00

Welcome back to Making Sales Social Live! And on today’s episode, we are going to talk about five ways, five, Count them, 12345. Five ways that non-creators can leverage content to attract their ideal and target audience.

Intro (Bob Woods) 0:19

Welcome to Making Sales Social Live! As we share LinkedIn and social selling training, strategies, and tips, that will have an immediate impact on your business. Join Bill McCormick, Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, every week, Making Sales Social Live!

Bill McCormick 0:37

So Brynne, I’m going to throw it to you, we’re going to jump right into these five ways.

Brynne Tillman 0:42

I love that, I’m going to jump in. But first, I’m gonna stick my toe in with a quick little, why this is important first of all, and the pushback that we get from non-creators all the time. So people that are in sales that are in business development, that are using LinkedIn and social selling, to attract buyers, to have sales conversations, absolutely have to have content, whether they like it or not, content is a huge part of social, even if you’re just trying to start one-on-one conversations because remember, content is used in three ways. Content is used one-to-many, when we share this on our newsfeed and lots and lots of people get to see it, we use content for one-to-few. So let’s say I’m going after CPAs, and I find this wonderful piece of content that I can share with them, and now I can, kind of templatize my outreach to 20 or 30 of like people, right? That would be one-to-few, and then there’s one-to-one, how are we using content, to start real conversations with our prospects in the inbox, that I individually, I’m going after, someone to start a conversation, I’m approaching someone. So here’s the challenge, many sales people will say, “Content isn’t for me, I’m not a creator, I’m not a writer, it’s not for me,” and by the way, you’re wrong. Maybe you’re not a writer but you’re a content producer, sales people, you’re doing it every single day, you know, you are out there having conversations with prospects, and with clients, and talking about industry insights, and things that are happening, and the first goal to about the five things that we’re going to talk about, is you need to start “Capturing your genius.” Start writing down the brilliant things you’re saying on a daily basis. When you’re creating a lot of these “Aha” moments, you’re attracting these folks to you, right, and that may be right now only in conversation, but we want to create content at that. Does that sound good? (Bill: Sounds good, let’s do it.) The first one, which really is currently my favorite, that hasn’t always been my favorite, but it’s working so incredibly well, is to create a poll. So you guys talk a little bit about what you think goes into a good poll.

Bill McCormick 3:09

Let me just start by saying polls are now the hot thing. There are some people that are a little disenfranchised with them because there’s so many, because LinkedIn for some reason, LinkedIn has decided that this specific arena of content is something that they want to highly, highly push forward. So what we know is that polls will have a 4.5 times more reach, a 450% more reach than a normal, everyday post. So here’s the thing, what you want to do is just like with everything else in sales, we want to differentiate ourselves from everything that’s out there. So if you scroll through your polls, there your posts, like this morning, as I was on my newsfeed, probably almost every other post was a poll. Some of them were really, I’m just gonna say stupid, probably not a great thing to say. But they weren’t very thought provoking, they didn’t really have any meaning. (Brynne: Hamburger or Hotdogs?) Right, yeah, vanilla, chocolate or neopolitan, you know, who cares? I don’t care about that. So one of the first things is understand what’s your reason for creating the poll and make it about something substantive, substance. That means a lot,(Brynne: with substance.) with substance, yeah, however you say that, but make it–have some meat to it. So that’s my suggestion. Bob, what about you?

Bob Woods 4:32

Yeah, so I mean, I guess we’re gonna be talking about beefing up the meat a little bit more. But, so to get beyond those lame polls that are out there, you really need to–number one, create a poll that you think is going to be attractive for your audience to answer, and then number two, actually comes in the post part on top of the poll. You have to draw interest to your poll, whether that’s like a headline type of line or really “Attention grabbing” first paragraph, and this is something I learned back in broadcast journalism. It’s not about, it’s not about, you know, why should I care, it’s about make me care, make the people care about what it is you’re polling. So you do that through the poll, but the introduction also has to be just as strong. So make sure that you’re capturing interest from the very first paragraph, and then depending on what your poll is, it always helps to have some, maybe some supporting data or supporting opinion, so that people care even more about what you’re asking, and then you could say, you know, at that point, you say, you know, “Take this poll, and then let me know, any additional thoughts and comments.” And then that gets back to the actual poll itself, because you only have four choices. I see so many people putting out polls with two choices, yes or no, there’s no in between, and there’s no additional call to have people comment on something that may fall outside of those choices. Because let’s face it, someone’s gonna fall outside those choices, especially if it’s, you know, even if you do a poll that says yes, no, depends or you know, yes, no, you know, like that. (Brynne: Others sharing comments) (Bill: Right, yeah, right.) Yeah, others sharing comments is a good way to do it.

Brynne Tillman 6:31

That’s almost always my number four.

Bob Woods 6:35

Yeah, that should always be your number four, because you want to start conversations within the poll and comments. So, especially if you get a really interesting one, and you start driving with a person in messaging afterwards, guess what, you can invite them to a real conversation.

Brynne Tillman 6:55

And to piggyback on that for one second, and then we’ll get to, we have, you know, we’re running this live right now. So we have a question that we’re going to get to, but the last thing I’d say around polls is, just because you build it, doesn’t mean they come. You need to invite people to vote, and although we’re talking about content today, I just wanted to add that in. So we have a question from Niels Davis, who said, do you have a recommendation for how to capture what you say as it flows out of your mouth?

Bob Woods 7:24

So, two things here, one, if you’re having Zoom calls, record your Zoom calls, it’s that simple. Always ask for permission, obviously, and just let them know that it’s for your note taking, and you’re not going to use you know, you’re not going to broadcast them on your Linkedin, or your Twitter, or whatever, that’s probably the best way to do it. If you’re having regular phone calls, whether you’re piping them through, you know, Airpods, or whatever, or especially if you’re using the speakerphone function, buy yourself a cheap digital recorder, and take notes is obviously the other one too. Notes are obviously really good, I tend not to be able to actually read my notes when I take them. So what I’ll do is I may have a screen open on my computer, and I’ll take notes there or if I’m out somewhere, I always–I usually have a digital recorder with me, and I could just record it from there, and then go back.

Brynne Tillman 8:22

Can I add to that, in Notes on at least on the iPhone, I’m sure on Android too, you can talk-to-text. (Bob: Yep, you can talk-to-text, right) writing notes on your phone so if you have an idea, Bill, do you have any ideas?

Bill McCormick 8:35

So I do, because you know, there are some people that use the phone a lot, I’m not on that, I’m using Zoom. Bob talked about Zoom but a lot of my interaction with clients actually comes either on LinkedIn messenger or on email. So when a client asks me a question, and I answer an email, it’s already captured, it’s right there, I can just go back and look and say, “Oh, what was that question that they had?” Wow, so that’s a great topic for content in the future. So I’m going to capture my genius, so besides the notebook, you can’t see it, but I have a four foot by six foot, right over here, whiteboard that’s on my wall, and I have plenty of markers very close by, and so you know, I’ll just show you really quick. So there’s a lot of writing on it, right, so because as we’re on calls as a team, if I’m on a client call, I’ll just jot something down, and that and actually I erase it, but there are three or four titles of content that we talked about in the last couple of weeks, and that caught my mind, and so we want to do that. So capturing your genius is very important because that starts the wheels turning for you to create content, and you get to see, “Wow, I am a creator of content”. So yeah, hopefully that has helped you out.

Brynne Tillman 9:53

So let’s go to the second one, curate powerful articles.

Bill McCormick 9:56

So let’s start with, do people understand what the term curate means? And so we have a definition that we found, and then we kind of ramped it up for social, and curate is to select and present information or items such as blogs, articles, pictures, videos, things of that nature for people to consume and enjoy, and here’s the tagline, the important part, using your professional or expert knowledge. So curate means; to go find content, whether it’s a post that somebody else did, or it’s an article from Forbes or Entrepreneur Magazine, or something that you read, they’re like, “Wow, this is amazing”, my ideal buyers, this would really resonate with them. Just don’t copy the link post to LinkedIn and be done, what you want to make sure is you add in your professional or expert knowledge. So grab a quote from it, and then say, what really resonated with me was XYZ, and then ask a question, “What about you, when you read this, let me know your thoughts in comments” because that’s going to increase engagement. And just like that, you create a content using someone else’s content. Also, make sure you give credit where credit is due.ag the author, tag the magazine or site or company that you pulled that information from. That does two things, first of all, it shows that you’re well studied, and you give credit where credit’s due, but it also invites them to come into the conversation, and thank you, and their network will be seen, so that’s my part on curate.

Brynne Tillman 11:33

Yeah, I’m going to add really quickly, another curated place to go is to look at influencer’s content, people that are sharing content on LinkedIn, that are attracting your ideal buyers, right. So it’s a great opportunity to engage with the author, engage with all of the commenters, and then share it to your site, to your, as a curated piece of content. Did you want to add to that Bob?

Bob Woods 12:03

When you bring influencers in, it gives you added credibility because you’re mentioning someone else, and you’re expounding with your own thought leadership because part of content is building your thought leadership as well that in the minds of your audience, you become the go to person in your industry that if someone has a question, they know that you are the person who to go to for answers.

Brynne Tillman 12:31

Yeah, and you know, I’m gonna piggyback on that one more time, and then we’ll go to the next one. Because I think that’s awesome, and when we think about curating content. One of the challenges as salespeople that we face often is we find content we like, we can write, we’re out there, and in this particular case, if we’re finding content that other people are publishing, and they are attracting our ideal buyers, and our ideal buyers like that content, right, that’s a great point. So number three, livestream or Zoom.Record your thoughts, so one of the questions we had, that we talked about just a little while ago was how do we capture that genius in real time? Well, if you take some quick notes hopefully you can read some of them we can jump on a Zoom after the call and just then record, if you know, if you were on a phone call, or you didn’t record that Zoom, go in and record yourself.If you have any level of paid Zoom, you’ll get a transcription, you just click a little box in settings, or you can upload it for free to otter.ai and get it transcribed, and so you spend three minutes ranting on a topic that you just talked about, and that’s a great way to capture your genius.Talk about– we’re doing a live stream now. sharing our thoughts, right, talk about, you know, is this something that’s good for a lot of salespeople to do?

Bill McCormick 13:56

Absolutely, and it really helps in the curation of content because as Brynne said, you can then get the transcription. So what we do with this is, we use this for our podcast but then we also have a team that takes the raw transcription, and that goes on a blog to our website with just raw transcription, and they read it. And then, we take a look through the transcription and each of us pulls out a tip, and then we use that for content that’s created into a Canva image, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, and now we have little quotes that we can then use. So you have one piece of content, which is the video recording or the live recording that you can then use multiple ways for multiple pieces of content. You could probably, the average salesperson could probably get at least a week’s worth of content, if not, more out of one three minute video where they record just their thoughts around something.

Bob Woods 14:58

Yeah and your thoughts could be on absolutely anything. In fact, I came up with like one great idea, I hope it’s a great idea, I should say, you know, like instant reactions from a client call. You just hang up with the client, you take some notes, and then you fire up Zoom, you look into the camera. I just got off the phone with a client, this, this, and this came up, I talked to him about this, this, and this, and you know, just talk to the camera. Sometimes people find that intimidating. It’s not judging you’re just talking to other people, and I think that sometimes people do get kind of hung up a little bit with that when it comes to videoing, and just talking to a camera. Once you start doing it, it actually gets pretty easy.

Bill McCormick 15:46

And so I’m going to use that, because, so I just had a client call about a half hour ago that went super well. But listen, I don’t do– I do very few client calls on my phone. This is how I do client call, I do a client call in Zoom. When she got off, all I would have to do is hit record and give some notes.And so, I took notes on google, I have two screens up at a time, so I’m not looking down here to type and I take some notes, but how great would it be for me to do that. I say thanks to Bob. So this was for me today, that’s a great idea, and to Bob’s point about being comfortable, you have to get comfortable. Listen, videos are not going away, McKinsey’s report that came out just a few months ago says, about 75% of companies say that they want first interactions with a salesperson to be virtual. So get a hold of Julie Hansen’s book, “Look Me In The Eye,” take a look at that. She’s super great with that kind of stuff, and there it is, “Look Me In The Eye,” what’s the subtitles?

Brynne Tillman 16:54

How to build relationships with customers, partners, and teams.

Bill McCormick 

Yeah, so get that book, connect with her. She does some really great stuff about being more comfortable in front of the camera.

Brynne Tillman 17:05

The next one piggybacks on this.(Bob: Oh, yeah, absolutely)(Which is interviewing people on video.

Bob Woods 17:09

Interviewing is a great way to not only, obviously highlight their expertise but because you’re asking the questions, and you’re the one through your questions that are kind of guiding the conversation. Although conversations are just like any conversation, they can go in a wild multitude of directions. You can show through your interviewing that you are a thought leader, because you’re the one coming up with these questions in the first place. And the best times I think whenever I do interviews like this, is when somebody says, “That’s a great question” or something like that. So hopefully, as you start doing this more if you start hearing more and more people saying stuff like that, you’re actually validating yourself as a thought leader, as well as interviewing a thought leader in your industry. It becomes much more peer-to-peer rather than interviewer to interviewee.

Brynne Tillman 18:00

So I love that, and you know, this is also an opportunity. You can interview internal people that are subject matter experts in your company but you can also interview clients that have had some successes, or even prospects. So it’s a great opportunity to not just create content but really build relationships as well.

Bill McCormick 18:20

And what becomes really important in that is the getting–being comfortable on video. You know, when it’s just you talking to the camera, just with your thoughts and stuff that doesn’t really matter. But when you’re talking to someone else, you know, you don’t want to be down here, you want to make sure your camera’s in a place and that’s where Julie’s book will come in, where it will be super helpful. You know, have your questions in front of you, you sound like you know what you’re talking about, and you know, don’t do what I’m doing right now, like stammering but if you do, just keep going, it’s okay. You know, one of the things we say is treat the client that’s on the other side of the screen, the same way you would as if they’re on the other side of the table. Same here, treat it just like you’re sitting across a table from someone having a conversation. It gets easier, believe me, you know, we did Zoom before Zoom was cool like prior to the pandemic, we’re doing this and so we’ve had a lot of practice, practice makes perfect, you just have to keep going and keep doing it.

Brynne Tillman 19:21

And don’t expect a perfect way, so there’s never really perfect

Bill McCormick 19:26

Never, (Bob: not at all, not at all.)

Brynne Tillman 19:29

Practice makes it easier, is probably better, it just makes it simple, and now this is just the way that we’re having conversations right? So number five, last one. What can we do with those transcriptions Bill, once we have them? (Bill) So once we–(Brynne)you already talked about it.

Bill McCormick 19:44

Right, so yeah, so I said before, you know, once we have those transcriptions, you can use them as a blog. You can go through them and you can pull out quotes, and you can use a site such as Canva, or a site such as Word Art. We don’t talk about Word Art enough, in fact, I gotta get back to using it, because it’s a great place where you can go and put some keywords into an image, and it populates, and makes a picture for you that can be anything. It can be your logo, it can be a book cover that you’ve got a picture of something like that but what you can do is use that transcription to then make other images, and other content that you can use over and over and over again.

Brynne Tillman 20:24

Yeah, I mean, we have our quotes, you mentioned earlier, from our transcription, we have a quote that we pull out. All you have to do in Word Art is copy those words, stick it in there, they have stock images, or you can upload. You can actually use the noun project has a ton of really easy, simple images that you can download and upload, and they’re really clean and have some great word art images from there, there’s so many different ways you can do that, and Canva, another great way to just capture the quote, It makes such a big difference. So let’s just kind of recap the five. Number 1, polls, number 2, curate content from both periodical publications out in the world, as well as targeted influencers on LinkedIn. Number 3, livestream or Zoom record your thoughts, number 4, video interview people, and number 5, take the transcriptions from all of these videos, or all of your thoughts and make images out of them in Word Art or in Canva, how’d I do?

Bill McCormick 21:38

That was great, great wrap up and thanks everyone for spending some time with us, and if you’re listening to this on the recording, thank you once again for supporting our content. We love it if you would go and rate us, and then hit the subscribe button, and so we’ll catch you again here next week, on Making Sales Social Live! Bye-bye everyone.