Episode 132: 5 Steps to Become a Micro-Influencer on LinkedIn

Bob Woods  00:00

Hello fellow humans and welcome to Making Sales Social Live! Brought to you by Social Sales Link. I’m Bob Woods and I’m joined by co-host and fellow LinkedIn Connoisseur, re-contour, and whatever “tour” words we can think of, Brynne Tillman. How are you doing, Brynne?

Brynne Tillman  00:19

Thank you Bob, I’m good. How are you today?

Bob Woods  00:22

Doing great. Thank you very much. 

Intro 00:25

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 Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, every week. Making Sales Social Live.

Bob Woods  00:42

You know, when some people hear or read the phrase “social media influencer,” they think of people who make social media their entire lives like it’s their job title and their full-time gig. Well as salespeople and business development pros, we ain’t got time for that. Instead, what we need to become are micro-influencers and of course, because it’s us we’re talking about mainly on LinkedIn.

In our minds, a micro-influencer is someone looking to attract a very specific audience. So in other words, you’re not looking for everyone, as your audience. You want people with whom you can start sales conversations, in other words, your audience of prospects. 

So by definition, you’re looking for a target audience as a micro-influencer. So let’s get things started off with identifying your audience and learning what matters to them, Brynne?

Brynne Tillman  01:40

Yeah, so one of the things we tend to do is jump right in without really doing this pre-work. And the pre-work, you know, it’s interesting, we want to really hunker down and take a look at who are our ideal clients, who are people that we’ve served that we love serving, it may not be our biggest client, but it’s our favorite client. The one where you get the most reward and get paid at the same time a lot of that can start outside of LinkedIn but once you’ve identified them, you want to think about the characteristics from a filter perspective.

How do we find more people like them? Two quick things. One, if you’re looking at companies, it’ll show you on their company page, other companies like them. If you’re looking at people, on their page that may have other people similar to them. That’s a good way to gauge the right types of folks but once you’ve built that list, right, when we’ve identified who it is that we most love to work with, we then have to listen to what they care about because, Bob, this is something that we deal with all the time where people are sharing content they want to share, not necessarily the content their prospects want to consume. So by looking at what they are engaging on and sharing, we start to identify what matters to them. Bob, do you want to add to that?  

Bob Woods  03:17

Yeah, so I mean, this all goes back to the one story that both of us loved to tell. We had a financial type, financial expert, financial advisor, whatever you want to call them. This person was publishing content but we noticed that the only reactions that he was getting with this content was from other financial professionals, in other words, not the audience that he wanted to reach and that’s because the types of content that he was publishing wasn’t really appropriate for the audience of people that he wants to start sales conversations with. 

So if you’re getting into that type of situation where you’re only hearing from your own kind, for lack of a better term, you know, you’re not micro influencing at that point, because you’re not reaching the people who you want to start those sales conversations with. 

Brynne Tillman  04:12

100% agree on that. What’s the next thing that these folks need to do to show up as micro-influencer? 

Bob Woods  04:21

 Yes, so now you’ve identified your audience and especially learning what matters to them and the types of content that they want to consume. The very first thing you do is something that we teach everyone to do, no matter what their goal is, and that’s to position their profile to be value-centric, taking it from a resume to a resource, which is another one of our T-shirt, printable quality quotes, but it’s really true here because if they go to your profile, and they don’t learn what it is you do, not only what it is you do, but how you can help them like immediately, you’re gonna lose them. 

So that’s where the “micro influencing” kind of style comes in a little bit, just in that you really need to provide value,  you need to provide education, you really need to influence what it is that these people want to consume and want to learn from you. So it’s ultimately all about learning from you and that’s having a value-centric profile that teaches them what it is you do and help them rather than just talking about how you help them. It’s another one of our phrases, stop talking about how you help people and just help people. Do that in your profile.

Brynne Tillman  05:40

Yeah, I mean, I absolutely love the concept of a value-centric profile. We are so tired of being either pitched or reading these resumes. If you want to be a micro-influencer, your job is to create curiosity to resonate with your particular buyer to get that to teach them new things that get them thinking differently about their current situation and create a compelling moment, a moment where they accept your connection request, they asked you to connect, they like your comment. 

Ultimate goal in being a micro-influencer is to influence your identified group of people and influencing those folks, really, it comes down to every time they experience you starting with your profile, you’re bringing value and when you do that, you start to build that following.

Bob Woods  06:39

Yep. So now we’re gonna go from the profile and do exactly what Brynne just said. So this is all about curating and creating content that teaches your audience something and not only it teaches something, but hopefully, it teaches them something new at the same time. So when you teach somebody something new, it gets them thinking about their situation differently and in my experience, it also kind of broadens their mind to where they’re more willing to accept new ideas than if they were, you know, like in a cold call or something like that. I mean, you know, something where there’s already breaks and walls up and people don’t want to learn. When they’re consuming content and when they’re learning what it is that you’re teaching them,  they’re starting to think and that’s their micro-influencer, who is in sales and “business dev” really wants to do. 

Brynne Tillman  07:34

Yeah, so it’s interesting because I mean, we both talked about those steps of resonating with your buyer, creating curiosity, teaching them something new that gets them thinking differently that creates a compelling moment for the profile and for the content. There’s a consistency there, that is vital, right? And the reason is, what does an influencer do? they get you thinking differently, learning something new. 

Think about like let’s go macro influencer, a Kardashian, content about makeup. They’re an influencer because of all the people that know who they are and follow them but the reason they follow them is they learn how to do eye makeup differently or they learn like it is still teaching them something even if ultimately it’s selling them, the people keep coming back because they’ve gotten value from the content. 

So you could go big picture influencer, the Tony Robbins, the Brené Brown, but if you watch what they’re sharing, it’s education, it’s thought leadership that keeps people coming back. And that’s the goal as a micro-influencer, ultimately, is that you keep attracting the same folks and then new folks in your industry where they keep coming back and engaging on your stuff, in your niche.

Bob Woods  08:57

In your niche, which is where we go from the macro to the micros, you know, in my mind, it really is kind of like those makeup tutorials, except you’re doing it about your niche, and you’re talking to people within your niche. That’s probably the biggest way that it becomes micro because again, you’re not going after everybody you’re going after a very select group of people just like you doing all of your sales activities every day, whatever you’re selling, you’re not selling to everyone you’re selling to a specific group of people. It’s that same idea, except you’re just bringing it down to actual content sharing and things like that. The next thing I want to do is to go even more micro. So this involves sharing content of your targeted audience directly into their messaging inbox on LinkedIn and then asking for their perspective. Talk about micro, that’s one-to-one. You don’t get more micro than that.

Brynne Tillman  10:04

Right! You know, it’s interesting. When you are a micro-influencer and you’re growing as a micro-influencer, the more personal you are, the more one on one you are, the more loyal connected these folks are to you. Like it’s amazing to me when I’m watching you know a lot about this, by the way, a lot of this is we’re watching what other micro-influencers are doing to build their following. So it’s not just our experience, it’s what we are learning from other people. And I recognize that there are tons of shout-outs, there are, you know, when that influencer mentions your name, you’re like, “ooh, they know who I am. I’m on their radar.” 

As you come up in the micro-influencer world, when you are engaging in that one-on-one, you’re building real human connection, that inbox asking for their thought or saying, “Hey, I thought this might be a value to you personally because…” and I’m pulling something from your profile that it doesn’t feel like it was a spam message that it was specific for them really creates a connection with these people. And they’re like, “Man, he’s really like, engaged with me, she really took the time, look at her and her audience, and she really took the time to engage with me.” And you may only have two or three people right now that’s your consistent audience, it doesn’t matter, maybe you don’t have any yet, and you’re looking to build it, this is a great way and their next tip will help as well but getting content into the inbox of folks is a great way to help them discover you.

Bob Woods  11:43

Yeah, and then the other big way to help people discover as well as doing, you know, all the other things that micro-influencers do but it also helps push conversations is engaging on other people’s content. So that could be influencers, that could be just other people in your network, but definitely people in your space. So not only engage with their content of the original publisher, but with their commenters as well. So the commenters on their content, you can engage with them as well and that’s a fantastic way to really build your influence there.

Brynne Tillman  12:22

Yes, and sometimes we look at this a little bit like you know, that author, that big influencer, right in your industry, you want to be a micro-influencer in this industry, but we’ve got this big one, right? And they are already attracting all the people that like that topic, they’re already attracting people that are sharing content that helps to lead to your solution, right? So they’re attracting the right people. So to exactly what Bob says, you want to engage with the author, but you also want to engage with all of those commenters and potentially connect and start a conversation and ask them if they’re interested in content around topics you share on and ask permission to share some of that content with them and you start to find the right people that are being attracted to a macro influencer in your industry that will like your content as well. And that can be a big deal. 

The other piece in here that I think is really, really important, is to start the conversation around that influencer. I know I just said, hey, eventually, you can send them your content but start with “Hey, did you hear the podcasts that Brené Brown was on last week on this…?  right that Brené Brown is the author of the content and they’re engaging, talk about them first and slowly moving into a conversation where you can ask permission to send your stuff. Sidenote, have polls running often, because when you got polls running, you can ask them for their vote as well. And people love to share their opinions.

 Bob Woods  13:57

Absolutely. So before we wrap this up, I just want to talk really quickly about metrics. So when people are sharing, it’s kind of like a human thing to want to have a lot of people see their stuff. You know, whether it comes from you know, and mainly that’s views of your content that you put out. For micro-influencer purposes, I really see those as vanity metrics. I mean, yeah, it’s nice to have a lot of people see your stuff but I think that you should replace that metric with another metric and that’s how many relationships did you begin, how many relationships did you strengthen because of your content and ultimately how many sales conversations you got started because of that.

And that may take a step or two before you get into that conversation, but still, as a micro-influencer, you want to start sales conversations. So if you got like 80,000 views on a post, but you got nothing out of it in terms of really what you’re looking for from business and to make money. That post wasn’t really successful in my opinion. (Brynne: Very good point) Yeah, so I’m just gonna wrap this up now. Thanks again for joining us on Making Sales Social LIVE! If you’re with us live on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Tiktok, oh my god, or Twitter right now we do this every week, so keep an eye out for our live sessions. 

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