LinkedIn Content Marketing Tactics for Those Who Struggle to Create Content

Posted by Ben Kniffen in Uncategorized

Let’s just face it. Some of us have trouble creating content.

That’s okay, it happens to the best of us.

If you’re a person that’s not able to whip up daily blogs posts, weekly case studies, white papers and any of the gobs of different types of content created today, don’t worry. There is still hope for you.

Although it does help to have that content, you can still get by with curated third party content. In some cases gathering third party content can be beneficial. Sharing content that you didn’t produce keeps you from seeming overly promotional, which is definitely a good thing.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can utilize your LinkedIn content marketing tactics.

Do not get promotional. Get involved.

It’s very common to see people post personally branded content into their groups. The problem is too much of it can turn people off. At that point it just seems like an advertisement. Not to mention, your prospects care about more than just that one subject.

Let’s say you are a manufacturing consultant. If all you ever do is promote content on the benefits of your consulting services, it will do more harm than good.

Think about what manufacturers care about. That’s the contoms1tent that you want to post to get their attention.

It’s okay that you are not an expert in plant safety. The key here is that you are demonstrating that you understand the needs of your prospects.

You can take this tactic one step further by turning your curated content into a discussion question. Combining the question with the content puts a call-to-action on the discussion thread. It not only gets people thinking about the topic, it asks them to share their thoughts and get involved.

Check out the example below:

plant safety 2Don’t stop there. Once you have a great piece of content, and an engaging discussion question that highlights the article, it’s time to get the community involved.

Sometimes posting into a group will spur conversation naturally. If that happens, great. But if not, there is nothing wrong with doing the spurring yourself.

Find other group me8-16-2014 9-41-34 AMmbers that will have an interest in the topic and send them a message inviting them to jump in on the conversation.

The conversation will only grow from there. The more people you invite, the better of a chance you have in getting a lot of comments on the discussion thread.

Those three tactics by themselves are nothing revolutionary. But when combined, they add up to an effective part of your overall content marketing strategy…and you didn’t have to write a thing.

At this point your job still isn’t done though. You should still keep tabs on the comments that are added to the thread and add some of your own thoughts when appropriate.

Don’t try and dominate the conversation, plugging your business with every comment you add.

Remember, it is about your prospects. It is not about your business.

Once you make it about your business then you kill the discussion. The more you stay on topic and help the discussion grow organically, the more people will begin to trust you.

From there repeat the tactic over and over again, choosing a variety of topics and resources to post into any given group. Every now and then you’ll be able to slip in a piece of content that more aligns with the type of product/service you provide, which will in turn spur people to open up about their needs in the area that you can help them with.

No matter how much good content you can curate, don’t over-post into your groups. This is NOT the sort of thing you want to do three times a day. Once or twice a week is what you’ll want to shoot for.

You can gather a lot of this content by setting up RSS feeds and Google alerts with tools like Feedly.

Where most go wrong in using this sort of tactic is that they just randomly post content into groups without trying to develop any real conversation around the topic. In some cases the content they post may not even be appropriate for the group. Because of this, no trust is developed, no one engages, and no one benefits.

Obviously there is nothing wrong with creating your own content. Creating branded content is one of the most powerful tools you can use in your content marketing strategy. It’s how you use it that can cause problems.

So whether or not you struggle to create content, don’t sleep on utilizing third party content for your LinkedIn content marketing, it might just be the key to starting new relationships for you.