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Eight tips for effective LinkedIn messaging. In this short video, I'm going to give you some tips for how to get your LinkedIn messaging right. Many people really mess this up. We've all seen those spammy unwanted messages that you literally just hit delete, or you ignore the connection request. We don't want that. We want to be adding value with our messaging- I'm going to show you how to do that and stay with me until the end as I've got a little bonus for you where you can actually download some messaging templates that can help you do this. Hi, I'm Paul Thompson consulting and let's get straight into the tips. One first thing is you've got to target your ideal audience. If you are trying to spread your message to everybody in the whole wide world, your message won't resonate with anybody. So you want to be become the big fish in the small pond. And what that means is you then becomes a go-to expert for that particular audience, your connection message, the actual message, where you look to connect with someone on LinkedIn. The key here is there's no pitch. It just has to be simple. And it has to be friendly. Anybody who pitches in a connection message that I receive gets ignored straight away. So it'd be friendly. Keep it nice and simple and look to add value to someone. Number three, be clear about who you are able to help. As I mentioned, be the big fish in the small pond. So have a specialism. Okay. So as a financial advisor, there's any number of ways you can specialize. You could work with professionals in a particular industry like pharmaceutical or oil and gas. You could work with other professionals like doctors or healthcare professionals. You could be specialized specifically with business owners of a particular size or people in a particular location. There's different ways you can do it. But the key thing is you have to be able to communicate with that. Audience is going to improve your messaging. And it's going to make your messaging resonate much more specifically with the audience, which is exactly what we want. Number four, have a tagline on your profile. And what I mean by this is under your name and photo on your profile, rather than just writing financial advisor or bank manager or whatever you write in there, have a tagline that actually tells people why they should connect with you and why you could be a personal of interest to them. We use a simple formula to do this. I help X with Y using Z where X is, who you help. Y is the benefit you bring to the table? And Z is how you go about it. Remember there's a restriction, how many words you can actually use in that space. So use the space wisely. I help X with Y using Z, be clear about who should pay attention to you. Number five, make sure your photo is clear and professional. I see so many photos, whether you're too far away from the camera, or maybe it's not professional. Maybe you've got your arm around somebody or you're not dressed professionally in the photo. So it needs to be clear. It needs to be welded. We need to be able to see your shirt and look professional. We should literally only see that part of use zoom the photo in, if you have to. Why? Because it's the very first thing that people see and people are visual. So they will make decisions on exactly what your photo looks like. Number six, have a series of follow-up messages that you drip out over a period of two or three weeks. The key to the follow up messages is you have to be looking to add value and build relationship. It's not about sales people. Don't like to be sold to. They like to feel like they're buying. So that's really the key with the messaging. It's got to be friendly and it's got to add that bit of value. Number seven, publish an article or other piece of content that is relevant to your target audience. I see an awful lot of advisors publishing very generic content. That's come from their network and has been very sanitized by the compliance department. But that's a problem because it doesn't resonate with anybody in your audience. So you could have a much more specific article that calls out specifically to your audience of your working with business owners. It might be four ways that business owners can optimize their financial future or their, their pensions for their retirement, for example. So you're being much more specific. It's talking about the type of business owner and what you can actually do for them. And don't pitch in that article. Just add value and just make sure that it's, it's, it's something that's gonna be helpful specifically for your target audience. One last tip on that, don't publish that as a SlideShare or as a PDF, just publish it as an article on LinkedIn itself. Number eight, remember that LinkedIn is a social network, so you actually need to be social. So respond to people, respond to people's comments and interact with other people's posts as well. Okay. Again, you're trying to add value. You're trying to position yourself as an expert and a great way to do that is interact with people and respond to other people's comments. The overall goal of your messaging campaign is to start a warm conversation with your ideal target audience. And if you follow some of the tips in this video, that's exactly what you're going to do. People don't like to be sold to. They like to feel like they're buying. So you want to build relationship and add value, and you'll be really successful on LinkedIn to help you with that. We're going to put a link down in the description, just click on that and you'll get access to our profile and messaging templates to help you get this set up really quickly. I'm Paul from Thompson consulting. Thanks for watching. Check out some of the other videos on our YouTube channel here as well.