Episode 372: 5 Steps To Be Micro-Influencer

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

00:00:52:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome, everyone. It’s time for what we’re all waiting for Making Sales Social live. Coming to you live from the Social Sales Link. Virtual studios. And brought to you by Ask SSL.ai. I’m Bob Woods and I’m joined by Brynne Tillman and Stan Robinson Jr. How are you all doing today? 

00:01:14:43 – (Stan Robinson Jr): Howdie, fabulous people.

00:01:18:13 – (Bob Woods): Yeah they thought I was. Brynne is flying high but she did not, you know, climb up any poles or anything like that. 

00:01:24:24 – (Brynne Tillman): You can’t climb. 

00:01:26:18 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, they’re all great. So. Yeah, absolutely so. So with that let’s get into the day’s topic, which has to do with influencing. So when you hear the phrase social media influencer, we all have our visions of what that type of person is.

00:01:51:14 –  (Bob Woods): So I’m just going to leave that up to your imagination about what that means to you. A micro-influencer, however, is someone who is way different than that. We want you to become a micro-influencer, not a typical social media influencer, and we especially want to do that on LinkedIn. So before we get into things, I’m just curious, what is a micro influencer to you all in the way that we like to think of one?

00:02:22:24 – (Brynne Tillman): So it’s interesting because ultimately what you’re talking about is about finding your niche and having a, you know, a professional voice in that niche to be the go-to person. So ultimately so I actually believe, you know, when we’re looking at being a micro influencer, it’s very similar to a professional influencer. So I love to hear your perspective because we have different ones, which is great.

00:03:00:04 – (Brynne Tillman): I actually think it is about you being the go-to person on a topic, you being the subject matter expert and thought leader on a topic. So a micro influencer is finding kind of your ICP, your ideal customer profile and socially surrounding them with value and insights and influencing the way that they think about the way they’re doing business today.

00:03:34:07 – (Bob Woods): Stan.

00:03:02:07 – (Stan Robinson Jr): We’re in agreement on that. I think in terms of a very specific niche and ICP then you’re one of the resources, if not the first resource that they turn to for relevant, valuable information that serves their needs. So you’re not trying to be everything to everyone? Absolutely. You’re serving a very specific target. 

00:04:04:31: (Bob Woods): Absolutely. And I think that’s probably there are many differentiators between the typical social media influencer and the, you know, more business or professional-oriented micro-influencer that we’re talking about here.

00:04:17:11 – (Bob Woods): And I think that y’all really, really nailed all of those just in terms of, you know, the social media influencer they are going after a much bigger audience. One is probably more demographic driven, you know, like 18 to 24-year-old women or something along those lines, essentially. And they’re developing content to go after that audience, which is still a to-find audience.

00:04:43:29 – (Bob Woods): But our audience and micro influencing are much more professional, much more targeted in terms of who we’re trying to reach out to and in terms of, you know, actually trying to help them with our content, which what Brynne alluded to. So before we get into the five steps that you should take, it’s important that you go into this with two elements that we’ve kind of already talked about, but I just want to bring them to the forefront so that y’all know what to do ahead of time.

00:05:15:18 – (Bob Woods): So number one is to create a list of your ideal clients. So this is where the targeting really starts coming in. And then number two, listening. And this has to do with social listening. Listen to what your ideal clients care about so that you can put out the type of content that they want to hear. Not that the stuff that you want to talk about because I guarantee you those are two different things.

00:05:42:16 – (Bob Woods): So you really need to have the type of content out there, where they can learn about the problems and the situations that they face in their business. And then so that you can, you know, hopefully by the content that you start putting out to really get people thinking differently about what it is they’re doing so that they’ll want to ultimately have a call or establish some type of relationship with you.

00:06:08:28 – (Brynne Tillman): So do we want to start with number one and yeah, start with number one, Okay. Because I wasn’t sure if we were moving through. Great. 

00:06:15:29 – (Bob Woods): We are moving through. We are moving through. So the five steps are the first one. We talk about this all the time, about anything that you do on LinkedIn, it’s especially important here to optimize your LinkedIn profile to be value-centric.

00:06:32:29 – (Bob Woods): So in other words, we’re transforming it from a resumé to a resource. We’re not talking about you. We’re talking about the audience that you’re reaching and how you help them essentially Brynne.

00:06:46:45 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So I mean, this is obviously an area that is vital in ensuring that your thought leadership and your subject matter expertise are highlighted.

00:06:59:05 – (Brynne Tillman): And one of the things Bob says all the time is rather than telling them how you can help them, simply help them and the profile is a really good place to do this right.

00:07:09:19 – (Brynne Tillman): This is really an opportunity where you’re not just telling them there is a point where you do have to tell them what you do, but you want to earn the right to get to that point and you do that through content and value and insights. So when you start positioning your headline to resonate with your buyers and create enough curiosity that they want to keep reading when they start to read, this is when you start to become that micro-influencer, right?

00:07:41:25 – (Brynne Tillman): You’ve captured the right people, you’ve captured their interest, Now you are bringing value in a way that brings them closer and closer to seeing you as that subject matter expert, as that micro-influencer. So making sure that you’re positioning your profile in a way that isn’t all resume and isn’t all pitch, but actually as a resource will help you to earn that title of micro-influencer.

00:08:15:11 – (Stan Robinson Jr): Well said. And you can use your about section in your featured section too, as Bob always says, actually help people. So rather than talking about how we help people actually give people actionable advice that they can use as soon as they finish reading. 

00:08:32:91 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. So one example that I like to say, and this is where general influencers can be the same as us, is think about that person who does like makeup tutorials.

00:08:44:14 – (Bob Woods): They are showing you exactly what to do that is actually helping you. So if you can translate that to the actual content that you put out, that’s probably one way where general social media influencers can be the same or similar to what it is what we’re doing.

00:09:06:04 – (Bob Woods): So with that, let’s go on to number two. And number two is it’s almost like A and B, but it’s really not because it has the same goal.

00:09:15:18 – (Bob Woods): So both curating and then creating content, which are two kinds of separate things, but the goal is the same. You are doing this for your audience and not just any content, though, content that teaches us something new, something that they may not have known about their problems or situations before. So that again, you’re opening up their minds and they’re willing to learn something new from you and something that you are trying to help them with, essentially by actually helping them.

00:09:52:08 – (Stan Robinson Jr): Yeah. So when you do the research to find something new, it helps you stand out from everyone else. You find something that’s new that they can use that may get them ideally thinking differently about their situation.

00:10:06:29 – (Stan Robinson Jr): So when you can create an aha moment for them, that’s the ideal scenario.

00:10:12:24 – (Bob Woods): Yep. The aha moment. 

00:10:13:79 – (Stan Robinson Jr): Any thoughts you had.

00:10:16:23 – (Bob Woods): Yes.

00:10:17:27 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So I think content is critical when it comes to ultimately

00:10:25:04 – (Brynne Tillman): attracting and engaging your ICP, your ideal customer profile. I think curating content is great. We want to make sure that we’re curating content that our prospects care about, not just content that we want to share, right? That’s really important.

00:10:45:16 – (Brynne Tillman): What they engage on is the kind of content that we want to curate, including now our original content also cannot be pitching our products and services.

00:10:59:04 – (Brynne Tillman): We need to create content that will start conversations. The idea is not to sell them from our content, it’s to start trust-based conversations 100%, 100%. So the next thing that we’re going to talk about is, you know, you could be pumping out all this great content and everything, but if nobody’s listening or nobody’s watching, if nobody’s reading, it doesn’t matter.

00:11:22:17 – (Bob Woods): So you need to help people discover your content. And there are ways to do that that don’t necessarily depend on LinkedIn’s algorithm as well, which is becoming more and more of a thing on LinkedIn. So there are two ways to do it. Let you guys take the specifics on this. Number one is engaging with other people’s content.

00:11:42:18 – (Bob Woods): So you actually going out to other people’s content and commenting on what they are publishing. And number two, sending your own content to others in boxes without spamming them. Obviously. So, you know, sending the content that you think will be beneficial to truly beneficial to them in whatever it is that they’re trying to do in their business.

00:12:06:18 – (Brynne Tillman): I’m a big fan of polls for this.

00:12:08:18 – (Brynne Tillman): This is a great opportunity to put out an original post, a poll based on a topic, and then ask people to vote. It’s really a powerful way to get engagement without being spammy, right? So send love your one-click vote on a trending poll on a topic specific to your industry, I’m happy to share the insights.

00:12:32:01 – (Brynne Tillman): You know, once the poll closes and where you might have benchmarked to your peers. So, yeah, pretty cool. 

00:12:42:06 – (Bob Woods): Cool stuff. 

00:12:44:31 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): And if you’re a sales navigator user, you can search for activity in the past 30 days and identify people who may be who may have posts that you can engage on and tag them.

00:12:57:12 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So it just saves you some time if you have that tool. Otherwise, you can look on free LinkedIn. Just go to someone’s profile and see, check out their activity, see if there’s anything where you can add to the discussion. 

00:13:10:56 – (Bob Woods): Absolutely. And that is one of the there are many many things that I absolutely love about sales navigator Stan just hit one of the biggies that the past 30 days thing so yeah all of that is fantastic.

00:13:26:25 – (Bob Woods): So let’s talk about number four. So number four is where we go to other influencers, specifically macro influencers and leveraging them. And these are the macro-influencers who have voices in your industry, your vertical. However, you define that in whatever it is you do, and don’t ask me to do it for you because there are so many different ways in so many different things about that.

00:13:53:13 – (Bob Woods): But you know that basically involves finding influencers and then engaging with your ideal clients in the comments sections of those influencers. Sorry, I’ve got something in my throat, which is, huge because again, you want to draw these people to you and to your content. LinkedIn is all about networking. So you know, view this as Brynne likes to say and I’ll just let us take it from here kind of like a imagine the macro influencer is someone who is speaking at a conference and you are talking with someone in the audience about what the macro influencer is talking about on stage, except this time it’s actually in a LinkedIn post,

right? Yeah, that’s perfect. That’s exactly the way I like to look at it you macro influencer. So perfect example is if you look at these live the live streaming. So on Saturday mornings at 8 a.m. Eastern, Meredith Elliot Powell, and Mark Hunter run a live podcast. There’s an enormous amount of activity in the comments. I comment sometimes I’m mentioned in the live stream if the comment is relevant, but I have built a large network of people who watch that religiously.

00:15:21:28 – (Brynne Tillman): Well, those are the same people that I want to attract. To listen to our podcast and consume our content. So I leverage their audience in order to continue to grow my audience. And so and Thank you. Go everyone Go Sales Logic Podcast with Mark Hunter and Elliotb and Meredith Elliot Powell. Go subscribe because I want to give back and they’re awesome.

00:15:51:22 – (Brynne Tillman): But that’s a perfect example of macro influencers that are attracting the people that I would like to attract. So to Bob’s point, I love this idea. You know, go find these folks that they may not be and they shouldn’t really be your competitor because then it feels a little like you’re poaching, but it should be someone in a parallel vertical or that selling to the same client that you’re selling to, but they’re not competing with you.

00:16:23:21 – (Brynne Tillman): And those are absolutely phenomenal people to align with, both with their content and with their network.

00:16:32:06 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yep. And of course, you can always simply share the posts of the influencers that big influencers and of course tag them, but share the posts with their posts with your insights. 

00:16:46:69 – (Bob Woods): Yep. That’s another great thing to do that actually goes back to point number two, which I was thinking of, but I thought number four was coming up, we’ll just handle that with with number four.

00:16:55:14 – (Bob Woods): But you know, a lot of these can actually operate with one another and that’s one’s probably the biggest way that it can be done. So the last one, which is something that a lot of people don’t think about when it comes to, you know, just social in general and especially with LinkedIn, is setting metrics that matter.

00:17:17:20 – (Bob Woods): So, you know, you want to talk about KPIs and stuff like that and everybody’s always like, well, how do we do that? And everything else? You can set

00:17:26:06 – (Bob Woods): metrics that can be tracked so that you can see the performance of not only the posts but, you know, conversions and things like that as well. And this isn’t about views alone, because views on LinkedIn can be very misleading.

00:17:43:08 – (Bob Woods): This is about actual interactions. So you’re talking about, you know, hit likes and comments and replies to comments and things like that. So there is one important metric that I would like to bring out and that’s measuring your content value through the sales conversations started. So, you know, hey, I had a you know, hey, I comment on this person.

00:18:07:00 – (Bob Woods): We converse for a little while and now we’re going to have a sales conversation. You put one text or whatever in that column and then if it goes through to a close, you can actually get direct ROI from that as well. So you should definitely be tracking metrics off of everything that you’re doing, just like everything else that we do in sales that we’d love to track to see how we’re doing.

00:18:29:25 – (Bob Woods): It’s the same type of thing, except you can also do this when you become a micro-influencer because guess what? Now you’ve listened to all this stuff, you’re now micro-influencers.

00:18:41:87 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah the tools you need for sure. So let’s talk about those KPIs. I think it’s really important to measure the right things so lots of people can measure lots of there’s a ton of data, there’s no shortage of data, but we want to make sure that we’re looking at the right things and we can actually break this down.

00:19:04:06 – (Brynne Tillman): And I’m just going to throw out some ideas so it could be how many macro influencer pieces of content am I engaging every week? Maybe I have a goal and I want to engage one a day.

00:19:17:25 – (Brynne Tillman): So now I can say, am I engaging one a day? And then what do I want from that engagement? Have I connected with two new people a day?

00:19:28:01 – (Brynne Tillman): From the comments section that meets my ICP then have I converted those two new people a day to vote on a poll?

00:19:38:15 – (Brynne Tillman): And then I’ve converted the people that voted on a poll to download an e-book. And then if I converted that e-book into a conversation and lastly that conversation into a closed deal, those are productive. Bob mentioned if you’re doing views as a KPI that’s not really a productive KPI, it’s not actionable.

00:20:05:23 – (Brynne Tillman): The KPIs that I like to measure, although the final KPI is the amount of business that is a results goal. I really like to measure the activity goals in my meetings, my activity goals. If I don’t meet my final results goal, then I know that the activity was the wrong amount or the wrong things to do.

00:20:30:26 – (Brynne Tillman): So I’m going to just back up from this for a moment and kind of

the big picture is all of the KPIs that you should be measuring, you should be able to influence directly.

00:20:47:26 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, don’t spend too much time measuring what you can’t control.

00:20:55:15 – (Brynne Tillman): However you want to make sure that all the things that you’re measuring lead to your final results goal. Or if it doesn’t, we have to look at whether are we doing the right activity. And so all that. That is really where I feel like so many sales folks

00:21:17:05 – (Brynne Tillman): can miss the mark, because if you’re measuring things you can’t control, then you can’t.

00:21:26:24 – (Brynne Tillman): You don’t know what to tweak and what to do differently. And so you become a victim of your KPIs instead of your KPIs working for you, 100%, There are metrics that matter is what we’re calling that. And yeah, and that absolutely that absolutely hits the mark there. Anything to add to that, Stan? Because otherwise we’re gonna wrap up

00:21:51:25 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yeah just great nuggets there.

00:21:54:03 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Measure the things that you can control so that you don’t become a victim of KPIs that really don’t do anything for you. 

00:22:01:45 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, I mean, that can really put salespeople into a spin. 

00:22:06:30 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, that spiral almost. 

00:22:08:24 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. Spiral that’s the word not is spin a spiral? 

00:22:11:54 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, absolutely has a spiral Never mind. I can’t even say that I back everyone for joining us for this episode of Making Sales Social Live sponsored by Ask SSL dot AI. If you’re with us live on LinkedIn or YouTube right now, we do this every week.

00:22:27:25 – (Bob Woods): So keep an eye out for our live sessions by listening to us on our podcast. If you haven’t subscribed to follow already, we suggest that you do so so that you’ll be able to access all of our preview shows and be alerted when new ones drop. And, you know, like or comment as well. We like those as well. We do two shows weekly, this one and our Making Sales social interview series where we talk with leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business, and many other areas.

00:22:54:05 – (Bob Woods): If you’d like more info on our podcast, it’s at social sales link dot com slash podcast. So when you are out and about this week, in any week, and every week, be sure that you’re making your sales

00:23:06:18 – (Stan Robinson Jr. & Brynne Tillman): Social!

00:23:09:08 – (Bob Woods): We got it down. We better add doubt. Nailed it. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day. Great week,

00:23:14:27 – (Bob Woods): Great forever.

00:23:15:21 – (Bob Woods): Bye-bye.

00:23:16:05 – (Brynne Tillman): Bye, guys.

Outro:

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