Marketing is shifting at a dizzying speed these days. Two competing ideas are coming into focus for folks responsible for generating demand for their professional services firms:

• For many firms, connections with prospects and, more generally, audiences, are happening outside their websites on platforms like LinkedIn.
• “Dark social,” which is all the ways you and your audience might share content that’s untraceable through web analytics, is becoming increasingly popular.

These two ideas can throw a serious wrench into how you market to your audience and how you measure success. Here’s how to deal with it. 

The Importance of Connecting and Selling on LinkedIn

Search has become less effective at offering results that actually help people find answers. SERPs are dominated by AI and keyword-jammed listicles that are there just for clicks, not to actually help you—and buyers have noticed.

For years, B2C buyers have been turning to social first for answers; professional services and other B2B buyers aren’t far behind, turning to Reddit and LinkedIn. Social and professional networks should feature prominently in your distribution strategy going forward. 

But it’s not enough to post on LinkedIn a couple times a month—consistency and timing are everything. 

Only about 5% of your audience is “in market” and on the verge of buying at any given time. Professional services marketers have to cast a wide net to help potential clients discover their service offering so that when they are ready to buy, they think of your firm. 

Your website content should be updated regularly, but LinkedIn is increasingly important for marketing and sales. Social selling creates 45% more opportunities, and nearly 80% of people who engage in social selling outsell their peers. 

The Rise of Dark Social

The term “dark social” was coined in 2012, but if you work in professional services, you’re probably hearing it a lot now. It’s been around since we started DMing and emailing links, posting in Slack or Discord, sharing in closed social media groups, texting and generally sharing content in any way that’s not traceable by web analytics. (Though, if you want to get an idea of it, check out your “Direct” traffic in Google Analytics.)

There’s always been an incalculable side to distribution, brand awareness and attribution that gives marketers agita. It’s difficult to prove that a brand awareness campaign works, for example, when you’ve received modest engagement. 

So, What Should We Do About It?

How should marketers market in the age where activity outside a website is equally as important (if not more important) and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to measure? Here are some tips.

Build Personal Brands For You and Your SMEs

Connection on LinkedIn and social selling takes place between individuals, not necessarily brands. Build up your own personal brand by updating your LinkedIn profile, as well as the profiles of your top SMEs. Profiles need to be accurate and make SMEs look trustworthy.

Try Executive Activation

Your SMEs, thought leaders and top salespeople need to be active on LinkedIn and other networks where your audience hangs out. Executive activation is a program in which your SMEs create and post thought leadership to LinkedIn (often with a lot of hands-on guidance from the marketing team) to demonstrate their expertise, spark conversations and build trust. 

Engage in Conversations

Actively participate in relevant LinkedIn groups, comment on posts and reply to people who engage with your content to demonstrate your expertise. This will help you build actual relationships with prospects, and also improve your engagement metrics across LinkedIn. 

Share Valuable Content

Create a Venn diagram (in your head or on paper) of what your expertise is in and what your audience is interested in. Post content where those two topics overlap. 

Pick out blog posts or other content your team has developed and post all or part of them to get the conversation started. In my experience, it feels more natural to write part of a blog post into a more concise (and sometimes conversational) post just for LinkedIn. You can break up one blog into several posts that are a couple paragraphs long. Our report found that, even on social media, 51 percent of buyers preferred long-form content over short-form content (yes, you can use AI to help you create these posts). Finally, put full thoughts into your post without including a link to your website; LinkedIn penalizes users for linking to outside sites. 

Identify Subject Matter Unicrons (SMUs) at Your Firm

Your firm can take executive activation to the next level with Subject Matter Unicorns. These are thought leaders who find sharing their POV on LinkedIn comes pretty naturally. They are bursting with ideas, have strong opinions, drive conversations and become go-tos in your industry by publishing consistent, authentic and helpful content. Sometimes they need help expressing themselves at scale, but don’t worry: We wrote a whole eBook on this; get it here. 

Use Sales Navigator

If it aligns with your strategy, consider using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to identify and connect with potential leads more effectively. Sales Navigator provides advanced search and targeting options to find prospects based on specific criteria.

Use Analytics To Track What You Can

While dark social interactions may not be easily traceable, you can still use LinkedIn analytics to track impressions and engagement. Tracking website traffic with Google Analytics and email performance through your platform is also still important. 

Whether you’re just tracking performance within your marketing team or you report to other leaders at your firm, it’s important to understand that it’s not as easy to figure out attribution or draw a straight line from an eBook to a new client anymore. This is a new reality, and we have to change the way we track and report on the work we do.