Explosive marketing success, ninja tricks and more from the world’s leading LinkedIn Expert

Teaser Q&A with the Tech Marketers Group Conference’s opening act, Viveka von Rosen

With the inaugural Tech Marketers Group Conference a mere matter of weeks away, we thought we’d take the opportunity to ask a few key questions of our international keynote speaker, Viveka von Rosen. What advice has she got for marketers to make sure we hit the ground running in 2019? And, most importantly, what insights can she give us about the day’s opening session, Creating Explosive Success with Marketing on LinkedIn?

Here’s what she told us…

1. Tell us about your session – Creating explosive success with marketing on LinkedIn. Why should people attend? What are they going to come away with from the session? What are some of the key takeaways? 

LinkedIn has introduced so many cool new marketing features, many of which are content marketing features. I’ll be addressing the two that I’ve seen have the most impact for both personal profiles and company pages.

Additionally, LinkedIn doesn’t do a very good job of showing you how to use the new features – so I’m excited to be able to showcase their use. Also, there are some ninja tricks on how to strategically use them to get even more visibility and amplification.

So that’s really what I’ll be covering: How to use these new content marketing features that LinkedIn has offered up and how to use them in a way that amplifies your visibility and drives traffic to wherever you want to drive traffic to. And I’ll be showcasing some case studies. It’s all about optimising your effort.

LinkedIn is a really powerful tool. The last update I shared got over 100,000 views – that was mainly the result of taking advantage of a new feature. And that’s what I’m going to talk about – when LinkedIn offers a new feature, jump on it.
And then there’s the amplification part of it.

How do you get your community to amplify your content – whether it’s your colleagues or influencers in your industry?

2. When you think about marketing success, what specific trends are you seeing for 2019? Where do marketers need to be focusing their efforts, and why?

Two key focuses come to mind.

Number 1: Focus on sales and marketing alignment.

One thing that I’m noticing, and marketers might not like hearing it, is that there is a huge lack of alignment between marketing and sales. Content marketing is great, but then we have to go the extra step and create content for sales enablement. I’m seeing a huge gap between what marketers are creating to build awareness and visibility for the company, (which is great, but that’s only step one in the buyer’s journey) and what sales folks need to actually sell their products and services.

There needs to be a way for marketers to start engaging with modern sellers to uncover and reveal what the sales team needs at each step of the buyer’s journey. This lack of alignment between sales and marketing is costing companies a lot of money. You have marketing departments that are so knowledgeable in creating content, but they’re not getting it into the hands of the sales people and they’re maybe not always creating the exact right content for a specific part of the buyer’s journey. Along with that is a need to find ways for sales people to get the marketing content into the hands of buyers.

Number 2: Personalisation

I think we can all agree that most email marketing is pretty meh and we all delete it. Unless it’s something that we want right that second (like a Tori Burch purse on sale in my case). So, if you can find a way to personalise the content and the marketing message so that people engage with it more, I think that’s a huge area for marketers to focus on. The buyer needs to feel like you are thinking of them, creating content for them and speaking directly to them. They need to be able to identify themselves in your messaging.

3. Finally, tell us a little bit about you. How did you get to become known internationally as the “LinkedIn Expert”?

It’s all come down to a little luck, a little skill, a little synchronicity – and taking advantage of opportunities.

Quite honestly, I really lucked into LinkedIn. It was 2005 and I had a different business then. I ran a co-share space. I’m really bad at managing people but I was really good at networking. In fact, one of the things I did every week was run a networking event for my members.

I clearly remember the day that changed my life (and that’s not hyperbole). I had invited a local marketing expert to talk about Web 2.0 (which tells you how long ago it was). In 2005, the whole idea that websites were becoming interactive was a really big deal. At the end of the presentation she mentioned this thing called LinkedIn. And because I had managed to double our business in a year doing face-to-face networking, and there was a huge virtual aspect to our business, I thought, Oh, this is cool, there are seven million members on LinkedIn! (Now isn’t it ridiculous to think there were just seven million members?! But it was a big number back then.) So I thought: What can I do with this LinkedIn thing?

And then one of the international associations we were aligned with, the American Business Centers Network (ABCN), heard I was doing teaching and training on LinkedIn and so they said, Do you want to come and do a webinar for us? And I said, Of course. (I can never say no to a stage!) They liked the webinar I presented and so invited me to speak at their event at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, which was awesome. Fortunately, after that I was able to quit my day job, (because I really didn’t like it,) and teach and train full time on LinkedIn.

Shortly after that, I took a twitter training and believe it or not, the Twitter handle @LinkedInExpert was still available! And the SEO from that alone further launched me on my path. Finding out about LinkedIn, getting the Twitter and then LinkedIn handle were both just lucky, coincidental events – right place, right time. But I took advantage of them – thank goodness!

Because of that good SEO juice, I started showing up online. Which led to more speaking gigs, which led to more training, which led to Wiley reaching out and saying, Hey, do you want to write a book?

From there – and again this was synchronicity, luck, whatever you want to call it – but my editor from Wiley went to work at Lynda.com. He asked me if I wanted to do a course at Lynda.com and I said yes. And then Lynda.com got purchased by LinkedIn and fortunately LinkedIn Learning continued to use me as one of their resources. So, I have a few courses on LinkedIn Learning as well.