Bonus Tip for LinkedIn Marketing

LinkedIn’s Social Selling Dashboard

Our recent 4-part series was all about optimizing LinkedIn for marketing your business. Ever wish you had a quick snapshot of exactly how effectively you are using LinkedIn for marketing your business? To see how effective the strategies you are implementing may be?

It exists – for your personal profile (different insights are already available for your company pages). And it’s as easy as clicking: https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi

Here’s an example of one piece of my current dashboard (which is updated daily, so it may be different tomorrow!)

You’ll see four components on the right, each with a scale based upon LinkedIn’s own algorithm.

I recommend that you FIRST focus on any area that you’re already doing well, but has extra room for improvement. So if your bar is at about 2/3 of the way, say at least a score of 20, work on boosting that strategy first.

That may seem counterintuitive. After all, look at that score up there of a 4.19 – a green line just begging for attention! But that’s not where I will be able to move the needle as easily and see a return for my efforts.

One of my favorite books – I’ll see if I can find the passage so that I can update this post and tell you exactly which book (it may have been Good to Great? but several books and articles discuss this same thing) – talked about how Tiger Woods became great at golf not by focusing on his weaknesses, but by focusing on his strengths.

It’s easier to move the bar to see real results from 7 to 10 than it is to try to move the bar from 2 to 10. Focusing on the weak areas first would result in you moving the bar to a 3 or a 4 – which isn’t where the impact will happen.

That’s why Tiger Woods focused on his putting rather than his driving. He knew by honing a skill that was already good, and making it great, would see the biggest impact.

So what you want to do, if your highest bar is still not at least 85-90%, then start there first.

If your best bar is already pretty high but not all the way (because let’s face it, I’m not sure you can ever get it all the way to 100% since algorithms change frequently), then you would want to look at your 2nd highest strategy, and work at moving that bar up, one a number at a time.

When I first started really focusing on marketing on LinkedIn – because let’s face it, I’ve been a solo entrepreneur just like you and had to carefully focus on which platforms and strategies I used – all of those numbers were at around 50% of the bar or less. You see I’ve done a pretty good job at focusing on the red (top) and blue (bottom) bars. Now that I’m ready to add a strategy, I can continue with what I’m already doing that helped me reach that level, and add a new strategy.

If you look at my example above, I would see the most impact at this point likely by focusing on “find the right people” and can use some of the strategies from my four-part series on Optimizing LinkedIn for Your Marketing, specifically in Part 3 where we discuss finding new connections. It also makes sense to me that this strategy is lower on my dashboard, since I have put a lot of focus into moving the needle first on those other two.

Proof that my strategies work? At the bottom of the report, you’ll see how your score compares with other people in your industry (based upon what industry you have noted on your profile).

I am in the Marketing & Advertising industry. Based upon the industry alone, you would expect that it’s comparing me to others who know how to market on LinkedIn. Yet my scores are higher, I rank in the top 10% of people in my industry. That’s when being compared to the “big” names that you would recognize immediately as being part of my industry.

Have you ever used this LinkedIn Social Selling Dashboard?

What do you think of it? Where are your numbers ranked currently?

Using LinkedIn for Marketing Your Business

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Vicky Wu

Vicky is the CEO and Chief Creative Strategist of Vicky Wu Marketing. She draws from 30 years of experience at the CMO level, the CEO level, marketing for Fortune 500 companies and multi-million and multi-billion-dollar organizations, PLUS strategies learned helping startups and nonprofits with limited budgets … now focusing on providing SMBs with effective and efficient marketing strategies – giving them access to the same level of expertise as the really big guys with deep pockets, that they may not otherwise be able to access.