The importance of networking

http://www.livegroup.com.au/live-capital/importance-of-networking

Networking is essential when it comes to launching a small business, but getting out there and meeting new people will often be easier for some than others.

If the idea of ‘selling’ your business feels awkward and uncomfortable, it’s important to remember that most networking is about mutual benefit so you have nothing to be shy about. Over time, effective networking can become a powerful source of new business.

What are the benefits of networking?

Networking allows you to promote and increase exposure of your business. It’s low cost and can help you find investors, customers, staff, suppliers or even business partners.

There are plenty of other advantages including:

• Shared knowledge: Take learnings from other business owners in similar positions. They’ll often have useful tips from their own experiences which will be even more relevant if they work in the same industry
• Connections: Meeting new people helps to make yourself known and increase referral opportunities
• Confidence: Putting yourself outside of your comfort zone and regularly talking to people you don’t know will help build your confidence for selling your business
• Profile raising: Networking helps you and your business become visible. Put yourself on the radar and begin to create a reputation. If you do this well, you’ll be first to mind for your vertical
• Surprise opportunities: You never know what will come along from meeting new people. Some of them might be potential new customers

What are the different types of networking?

• Face to face meetings: Meeting potential customers 1-1 to explain your business and value proposition
• Networking events: Connect, learn and share with like-minded professionals at organised events
• Forums: Raise your profile online by participating in relevant conversations
• Social media: Break down geographical barriers and connect with like-minded business owners nationally or internationally
• Anytime: Be unconventional, use any engagement as an opportunity to sell your business if appropriate

How can I prepare?

• Adopt the right mindset: Don’t be shy when promoting your business
• Hone your elevator pitch: Develop a succinct and persuasive sales pitch of the value you offer customers
• Business cards: make sure they contain all your essential contact information and ensure you are memorable. Good business cards help reinforce your brand
• Questions: prepare a few so that you get the most out of any networking situation

It’s also vital to remember to follow up. Practise a 24-hour turnaround so that you are fresh in the mind of the people you met and are also able to clearly remember the contacts you made.

The earlier you get started, the greater the number of connections you’ll make, which in time will help you grow and build your business.

Karma works

 

Bob Pritchard identifies 12 core things you need to do to stand out from the crowd

In the 1920s, mass media largely consisted of newspapers, although radio began to become important during the decade. 

A new style of advertising was born where instead of listing a products specifications and qualities they stressed the benefits in terms of lifestyle improvement.

Consumers made decisions emotionally, companies emphasized USP’s, customer service was important in terms of benefits and ease of doing business. 

The corporate manager of the 1920s developed, for the first time, a concept of social responsibility  because they were faced with a greater challenge of legitimizing their positions in society than their entrepreneurial predecessors.

Advance to 2017, while we kid ourselves that we are somehow much more sophisticated and enlightened, absolutely nothing has really changed, today we are just bigger wankers.

Certainly newspapers are dead, radio has changed dramatically and the most effective marketing medium is social and digital media, the structure of the effective marketing message to incentivize people to buy is the same as it has been for 100 years.

I was recently amazed when I gave a presentation to a room full of technology CEO’s and CMO’s and began speaking about the critical keys in any marketing or sales message, and that no one buys the product, they buy the personal benefit of the product, they were dumbfounded.  I was bombarded with questions during the presentation and when I left the stage about the use of emotion, CPB’s, Wow touch points etc in their marketing message.  The view of a majority of attendees was that they promote the product in a well integrated campaign across all social and digital media and hope it will take off. This is the same misguided logic that said 20 years ago that if you bombard consumers with a million ads, your product will sell.

Well, guess what folks, the annals of marketing history is littered with well promoted corporate corpses.

There are 12 elements that should be included in any marketing or sales strategy irrespective of the communication vehicles utilized;

1. Know what business you are in.  The majority of businesses think what they do is the business they are in.  If you don’t know what business you are in you cannot clearly communicate with potential customers.  For example, Hardware stores are in the problem solving business, not the hardware business, a totally different message.
2. Fully understand your customer… geographic, demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and product related.
3. Clearly differentiate from competitors.  This difference can be real or perceived, but it must present a clear choice to the potential customer.
4. Consumer Purchasing Benefit.  Your differential converted into an emotional trigger.
5. Turn all product features into emotional benefits.
6. All marketing/ message focus must be on the customer NOT on the product.
7. Product features do not sell, only benefits sell.
8. Give positively outrageous service at every consumer/ company/product touch point whether online or offline.
9. Your message must be inline- whether online or offline.
10. Be a good society, employee and community citizen… give back.
11. Adding value to every transaction dramatically increases sales results.
12. Reversing the risk can double sales potential.

There are more considerations but these are the basics.   If you are running a business and your results are not what you would like them to be, you should send me an email now.  Too many people who call themselves marketers, not only in startups and early stage businesses, do not understand the critical fundamentals, to their own peril.

How to Cultuvate a powerful network in LinkedIn

 

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Once you have a complete and up-to-date profile that is authentic, relevant, and compelling, it’s time to start using LinkedIn for networking. 

Hopefully, you avoided reaching out to new contacts and accepting connection requests until your profile was in tip-top shape. You need to assume that people will check out your profile when you are connecting. And with many connections, that’s your first impression. Remember the advice from the 1980s Head and Shoulders commercial: You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

When it comes to networking in LinkedIn, there are two primary functions – just like in real-world networking: Building your network and nurturing relationships. I’ll cover both in this post.

Build your network

In growing your network, you want it to be both diverse and concentrated. On one hand, you need to benefit from the power of diversity in networking (here’s a great post that explains why this is important) – yet you must also make sure you have a concentration of connections to people in your sphere of expertise. LinkedIn lets you meet both needs at once.

Before we go further, I want to explain an important part of LinkedIn that will impact your thoughts on networking. Many people I speak to only want to connect with people they know. That strategy appears to play it safe, but it will work against you because of how LinkedIn is programmed. If you want to show up frequently in searches and you want to see the maximum number of full profiles, you need to be promiscuous in your connections strategy . Ignore LinkedIn’s advice to only accept connection requests from people you know. That may help them sell Premium subscriptions, but it won’t get you found.

If you’re still feeling a little queasy about being an open networker – accepting most connection requests – it should allay your fears to know that LinkedIn makes it really easy to remove, block, or report a connection. So any connection request you accept can be disconnected.

With that in mind, it’s time to build your network. There are four primary ways to do it:

1. Reach out
2. Accept connection requests
3. Connect to people who are suggested by LinkedIn
4. Use groupsPreview

Start by adding everyone in your professional life as a connection. You can link your email account and your iPhone contacts to make this easier.

If you’re just starting out with LinkedIn or you haven’t focused on it, you may have fewer than 500 connections. That will work against you. Once you reach 500, LinkedIn no longer displays the actual number you have. There is a psychological phenomenon where we believe people with 500+ in their profile are somehow more accomplished. So strive for five (hundred)!

1. Reach out.

When you’re reaching out, remember to customize the request instead of using the unimaginative “I’d like to add you to my network.” You can even customize requests when using the LinkedIn mobile app. Here’s how:

• While you’re at your invitee’s profile, click on the three dots in the upper right (don’t use the connect button).
• Choose “Personalize Invite.”
• Write a custom message, and then click send.

2. Accept connection requests.

Know your criteria for accepting requests (and remember what you lose if you are a closed networker). LinkedIn alerts you when you have requests. Get in the habit of accepting them soon after receiving them.

3. Connect to people who are suggested by LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has an algorithm that helps identify “people you may know,” who might be valuable to add to your network. Review the suggestions regularly and connect as appropriate. Your network will grow significantly over time. 

4. Use groups.

Groups are the most powerful networking feature in LinkedIn . Why? Because they give you access to huge numbers of people who are all interested in the same topics you are. And LinkedIn allows you to join up to 100 groups. Research a variety of groups and join the ones that are populated by your target audience members. You can join groups related to your area of thought-leadership, social causes, alumni, etc. Look for groups that have lots of members and lots of activity.

Once you join a group:

• Spend a little time getting to know how the group works, who’s most vocal, what content gets the most buzz, etc.
• Introduce yourself. Let other members know you are new to the group and share a little bit about why you are there.

Nurture Your Network

Adding people to your network won’t help you build a relationship with them. You need to engage with them regularly. Here’s how:

Interact

• Provide status updates on a regular basis. It keeps you visible to the people in your brand community.
• Like and comment on LinkedIn posts that you think are valuable, and share the posts with your connections and other groups you belong to.
• Share content you find at other sites – like Fast Company or Forbes or Huffington Post – that you think would be valuable. When sharing, remember to add content saying why you think it is valuable and expressing your point of view.

Acknowledge

LinkedIn does the heavy lifting when it comes to staying on top of people in your network. They provide notifications when someone you know has a birthday, work anniversary, or new job. You have the option of “liking” the notification or sending a message. I suggest choosing “send a message” and writing a personal note. Determine a time of day you will check in and get in the habit of doing it daily so you don’t miss any of your connections’ important dates.

Now you have the keys for unlocking the power of networking on LinkedIn. In all of these interactions, remember that successful personal branding is the result of being authentic and being consistent. In the next post in this series, I’ll share with advanced features you can use to truly differentiate your profile from your peers’.

William Arruda is the cofounder of CareerBlast and author of 13 Things All Successful Professionals Do To Fuel Their Careers.

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Niched Content events are the go

Karolin Geike

Point 9 Capital's Karolin Geike

2017 prediction 

https://medium.com/point-nine-news/point-nine-capital-2017-team-predictions-837d1c7f80f7#.yf1yugk5m

Bigger is not better!

Start-up & Tech events will shift to be way smaller (exclusive), niched and content driven.

While the conferences outgrowing cities with tens of thousands of attendees, dozens of stages, evolving to festival like happenings with trillions of side events will leave attendees looking for insightful and actionable take aways overwhelmed and disappointed we will see an increasing number of specialized meetups.

Attendees will strongly focus on value add, interactive knowledge sharing, qualified networking and an awesome experience before, while and after attending instead of business card bazaars, confusing and overloaded programs with shallow and repetitive content, nonspecific crowds in overrun and hence expensive locations.

Event organisers know their audience and will tie together tailored experiences to meet the growing expectations of an authentic and engaged community.

I also firmly believe in the rise of live streaming and AR/VR as this emphasizes the conscious spending of time and money and will be picture changing in the long run!