As with so much in life, marketing within LinkedIn is a matter of balance. As you may know, Yin and Yang represent equal but opposite forces working in a flowing natural harmony. Light and dark, hot and cold, straight and round, all are examples of Yin and Yang.
For LinkedIn, Yin and Yang are your inbound and outbound marketing techniques. Concentrating on just one can push your LinkedIn marketing program out of balance. Your best results come from using both promotional approaches in tandem.
Your LinkedIn inbound marketing efforts include:
- Your LinkedIn profile page – make sure your headline and summary inform readers what problems you solve for your customers; explain why people look to you for solutions; include projects, videos, and other content that will give viewers a sense of what you accomplish for clients
- Updates you post – share content and information that adds value to those who read it; don’t blatantly self-promote or people may start to un-connect from you
- Comments you make on others’ updates –same caveat; be helpful, not promotional
- Groups you participate in – choose groups where your target audience resides; listen and learn; offer information and insight in response to posts; offer ideas or ask questions that aid the audience, not your own interests.
As you can see, our Yin, or inbound marketing, focuses on putting out good content that allows people we’d like to attract to us to find us. Hopefully, they will then click to our profile or website to learn more about what we do and how we can help them. The onus is on the viewer to come to us. In this respect, we’re “passive” in our promotion. We place content and wait for others to come to us.
Your LinkedIn outbound marketing efforts include:
- Researching your connections to identify companies you’d like to meet, and asking those connections to introduce you
- Emails to select connections, individually or with a single group message
- Forming and hosting a LinkedIn Group
- Advertising on LinkedIn
In contrast, our Yang, or outbound marketing, focuses on pushing something out to our target audience. We deliver our message to the audience rather than let them find us. In this respect, we’re “active” in our promotion.
Note that the rules of good content still apply to outbound efforts. You’ll get better results if your message gives value to the recipient. It’s just that you’re pushing out the message rather than pulling them in with inbound marketing efforts.
When building your LinkedIn marketing plan, understand first what you’re trying to accomplish. Once you’ve set your goal(s), be sure to try a combination of inbound and outbound techniques. Find what works for you. Certainly read what others are doing. But remember that each of us has to find our own Yin-Yang balance.