The role LinkedIn has in building your credibility with prospective clients
Clients have been increasing their control when it comes to choosing which professional service firm they will work with through seeking information. It starts by doing their due diligence.
This needs to be considered when promoting your business and publishing thought leadership. That’s because this content is precisely what will sell your services to valuable clients without you being there yourself. By becoming a true thought leader in your industry, you’ll effectively showcase your expertise and differentiate yourself from the competitors. If you don’t focus on that, you’ll end up having to compete all the time on your price and every new client.
Naturally, it’s not easy to create thought leadership content. According to a recent study, decision-makers stated that only 18% of the content they consume is very good or excellent. So yes, only a small portion of the content found can be considered as thought leadership content.
However, you can still make it, and the best way to do that is through LinkedIn, not just by sharing your best content, but by testing what works best and finally reaching a point where all of your content is very good or even excellent.
How to use LinkedIn to build credibility
Sharing a lot of content on LinkedIn is easy and raises awareness about you and your expertise. However, it does help to be selective about the content you share. Continue sharing more of what truly works, and leave out the rest.Continue sharing what builds credibility in your expertise and creates the perception of your brand that you want in the minds of your clients. This will create a powerful digital footprint, and your prospective clients will have an easier time finding you and choosing you above the competitors.
However, it’s not all about following how many likes, comments, and shares you get. You also need to do research. By that, we mean research on what your prospects want to see. A true thought leader is an expert who forges a new path, and the best way to do that successfully is to see what your prospects want to see and work towards providing precisely that.
Join the right groups and the right pages, and try to see what your prospects have in common and what their interests are. All of that will become the best source of ideas for your future thought leadership content.
You needn’t do all of this on your own, by the way. Collaborative thought leadership marketing can be of use as well. That means that you can work with others to create engaging content. Find experts and feature them in your podcast or get them to be co-authors for an article. These two are just some of the ways you can collaborate with others to create value for clients.
And in the end, it’s vital to go beyond. Many of your clients are busy and are thus only visiting sites they know and like. You need to find these platforms and work on placing your content on them for your prospective clients to see. And yes, LinkedIn is just the place to gain the right contacts to get permission to post on these sites or work as a guest writer.
The bottom line
As LinkedIn is the place where many of your prospective clients search for content, it’s the best place to create meaningful and useful relationships, and to test your own content. It’s the best and fastest way of becoming a thought leader.