Wayne Breitbarth to Translate His Success to Your Company

It’s hard to dispute the lessons of LinkedIn guru Wayne Breitbarth. The man has more than 18,000 connections, after all! From those connections, Wayne has built an amazing LinkedIn following and an enormous email contact list. But can his personal success be applied to your company’s efforts?

In many ways, it can—and he’ll tell you how in his March 13 presentation for AMA Madison titled “LinkedIn for Business: What’s New for Corporate Marketing in 2018.” Wayne will share updates that apply to business pages, as well as tactics for individuals.

This isn’t Wayne’s first visit to AMA Madison, and it certainly won’t be his last. In a recent interview, he shared his thoughts on:

  • Best practices for standardizing your company’s profiles
  • The struggle with company pages (and the real way to succeed)
  • His own methods for success

Q: You’re going to talk about what’s new for LinkedIn in 2018. One of your points of emphasis will be about how companies need to standardize their employees’ profiles. Why?

I’m going to talk about the seven things you need to standardize among your employees with their company profiles. This includes photos, company description and relevant keywords.  

It’s essential that these things be consistent, especially those keywords, so you can appear in searches. Too often employees are left to their own devices, and that’s a huge opportunity missed.

I will talk about keyword research, and educating everyone on the LinkedIn search engine. When you optimize the outward business development, you optimize searches. It’s really about more than people landing on company pages.

You and I have talked about how important individual profiles are compared to company pages. Are people too fixated on company pages?

What tends to happen is that a marketer is put in charge of a company page, and so it’s their job to make it work. But the true power of the company brand is to get into those individual profiles as best you can. Get the outward facing people to realize the strategy and importance of connecting and sharing with prospects.  

There is a bit of a disconnect here. The marketer will think “I’m not in charge of all the sales team’s pages.” But someone has to try and do some training and educate the sales team.  

Does the company page have a role?

It does, and I will definitely be talking about new developments on LinkedIn, including the LinkedIn pixel and landing pages. But I’m finding that company pages are really based more and more on paid advertising.

Have you noticed that companies you follow don’t show up in your feed as often? It seems the preference on what’s being shared in feeds is going to the paid customers. The only companies I see are the huge international corporations with big budgets. And that’s fine. But what if you don’t have that kind of budget and you want your content to show up?

That’s when I get back to using individual profiles, especially publishing posts on behalf of members in your company. We will talk about that during the presentation.

How do you use LinkedIn personally to build your business?

I have more than 18,000 connections, and over 1,000 followers. I always publish my full articles on LinkedIn. I also have a couple of additional tactics I’ve been using lately that are time-intensive, but successful.

When I have an upcoming seminar that I want to promote, for example, I will cut and paste a message into individual mailboxes. It’s time consuming, but I get a great response. People tend to pay attention to individual messages on LinkedIn, not like email.

I also don’t simply hit “Accept” when someone reaches out to connect with me. I’ll spend some time to reply to them personally, and ask them if I can add them to my mailing list. Then I take those emails and add them to the list.

Wayne will be discussing these and other tactics during his presentation on March 13. Register now!

This post was written by Greg Mischio, the Owner and Strategic Director of Winbound. Winbound provides an all-in-one content marketing and conversion optimization package specifically designed for small marketing departments. Twitter: @gregmischio

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