A Deep Dive Into The LinkedIn™ Farming Strategy

Today’s Deep Dive is one of the four LinkedIn™ sales strategies: Hunting, Farming, Fishing and Mining. 

A Farming strategy on LinkedIn™ revolves around Content. 

You use can use Content for any of the following:

• Increase your reach by having new people discover your content
• Establish your credibility, by showing your deep knowledge of someone’s problems and demonstrating how you have helped similar people in the past
• Prompting these people to identify themselves by interacting with you and your content. 

There are two things you need to do in order to make the Content strategy work for you. 

1) Create content that you can use on LinkedIn™

There’s a lot you need to think of here:

1. Do you have a definition of your ideal customer, along with how you uniquely can help solve their problems? Showcasing that understanding and that solving capability is what your content will revolve around. 
2. Do you like creating content? With this strategy, you are going to create and publish content on an ongoing basis. Do you like creating enough to think you can keep this up? 
3. What format is comfortable for you and for your customers? For example, if you like making videos, make videos. If you like the less structured ad hoc nature of just posting, have at it. 

And you need to have a formal system to identify the people that have engaged with you and your content and to follow up with them. And then you need to work that system. 

1. You will need to regularly review the new people that have commented, liked, and reposted your content. Also your new followers, subscribers and people that have viewed your profile. 

In my opinion you have a legitimate reason to contact anyone who likes, comments or shares something you published, anyone who looks at your profile, or anyone that follows you. These are what I call “The Big 5” on LinkedIn™ – actually there are six now that we can have Subscribers. These are people who have taken an interest in you for one reason or another. They may be reacting to something you have written. They may be reacting to a comment you have made on someone else’s content. You may have done something or they have heard of you through someone else and they either want to follow you or view your profile to check you out 

All of these are legitimate reasons to contact someone. 

1. You need to have the framework in place for the outreach messages  you will send these people. These messages have to interest your prospects enough that they respond and want to talk with you. 

What skills you will need for a content based Farmer’s strategy:

Oddly the LinkedIn™ skills you need – putting together posts and such – are rudimentary

You do need to be able to write good messages and this is critical. If you send outreach messages to ten prospective customers every week, there will be a big difference in your income between a 10% response rate and a 50% response rate to your outreach messages. 

Although creativity is helpful, people who make farming work tend to have the following traits: 

• Discipline – especially to keep posting content on a regular basis and to follow up regularly with the people that the content discovers for you
• Organized – you can keep good records and lists of “what needs to be done with whom” to stay on top of things
• Patience – because this is not an overnight thing. 

A Farmer’s Checklist

Content

1) I have a good feel for my ideal customer, resulting in content that will be focused on showing deep understanding of their problems, and how I have a track record of helping people in similar situations. 

2) I know which content or types of content will work best for me

3) I know how much time I need to set aside in my schedule for content creation

Identifying prospects

4) I know which type of engagement will work for me 

5) I have a system for engaging with these people, and tracking the results of my engagement with them

Messages

6) I have the framework for my outreach messages set up that establish my credibility, is results oriented, and has an appropriate call to action

7) I have different messages designed for different types of engagement – a new follower versus a commenter versus a profile viewer for example. 

8) I have sufficient time set aside every week for both content creation and to engage with the people that engage with my content

Backstory: How I Set Up My LinkedIn™ Farming

Now, before we get into things here, let me say that Farming has been one of the pillars of my LinkedIn™ use. It works. So if you want to Farm, great, but like myself, you have to have a system and the metrics in place so you know if it is working or not. I have used Farming to great advantage for over ten years now, but aside from my content I put together a system. 

The first thing I found when I started my Farming on LinkedIn™ was that I found sharing other people’s content on LinkedIn™ provided marginal returns as most of the time someone discovering my shared content was more interested in the author (someone else) than the messenger (me). 

So I focused on writing my own content. It was a good fit for me as I enjoy writing, I am hopelessly analytical, and really stubborn. The system part of Farming on LinkedIn™ comes down to counting how much engagement results from your posting and the quality of those reactions. There are several parts as follows: 

• I started counting what I call the Big Five ways of engaging on LinkedIn™: how many Likes, Comments and Reshares I was getting, along with how many Profile Views and New Followers/Connection requests I received. 
• I would review the lists of these people every day – I would look for my new followers, profile viewers and people that engaged with my posts or articles on LinkedIn™. 
• I would contact the ones that looked like a good fit with my ideal customer profile. I invested in a Sales Navigator subscription in order to be able to reach out to these people. 
• When I contacted them it was to thank them for their engagement and I used the article they were interested in as the jumping off point in my approach. No sales pitch, just an open ended conversation about their interest in the topic I had covered. This resulted in a huge acceptance rate – typically 55% – in my outreach messages and InMails. 
• Despite my hilarious ineptitude with spreadsheets, I started one up that tracked my progress. I started to find patterns – for example, commenters and followers were much more responsive than shares or likes. Profile views fell in between. 

Over time as I started to acquire customers, I was able to go back to my spreadsheet and find out important information that was crucial to my business:

• I could see on average how long it took from someone first identifying themselves via engaging with my content until they became a customer.
• I could see which types of engagement generated more customers (in my case comments, then followers).
• And finally, which topics were the ones that generated the most comments and followers.

Was this a lot of work? Yes, and no. It sounds like a lot, but once I was up and running, my weekly commitment to LinkedIn™ was to write an article, publish it, and be available to respond to comments for the next three hours (though I could do other things while I was monitoring my post). Every morning I took around fifteen minutes looking for new engagees (is that a word?) and sent messages to interesting people I found; and every afternoon I took five minutes to look for replies to my messages. Total time invested in LinkedIn™ every week: around four hours, plus the time it took to write my weekly article.

And here’s the important part: I spent zero time wandering around LinkedIn™. And that’s a habit I still have today. These days I check every morning for the people who have engaged with my content, any connection requests, new messages and my notifications. Every week I review the people who looked at my profile and my new followers. I usually put a chunk of Friday afternoon into reading the LinkedIn™ newsletters that I subscribe to.

So Farming works on LinkedIn™. But if you are going to Farm, you need a plan, you need some patience and you need to stick to it.