Building your personal brand on LinkedIn to amplify your company's brand

Building brand awareness in the market can take many forms – and it doesn’t always have to come with a big price tag. As an employee, you can help amplify your company’s brand to drive bigger brand awareness in the market.

One way to become a brand ambassador for your company is to use your personal brand on LinkedIn to bolster your company's profile. It’s a way to consistently stay in front of potential prospects and clients – without feeling intrusive – which can build credibility and trust over time. So take the leap, invest time in your personal brand and turn it into an impactful marketing channel for your company.

In this episode, Logan Mallory, Vice President of Marketing, joins us to talk about his experience driving greater brand awareness for his company, Motivosity. 

00:21 Becoming a brand ambassador on LinkedIn
08:36   Defining your content strategy
10:20   Driving business and customer interactions
13:09   Becoming an example for other employees on building a personal brand
15:21   Building brand ambassadors across the company to amplify the company brand
17:33   Engaging with customers through social selling and creating a presence
18:37   Convincing executives to build their personal brands
22:24   Creating meaningful interactions
26:12   Being intentional about building your audience
33:32   Consistency is key 
36:46   Focusing on engagement over impressions
37:15   Building credibility and trust 

The Demand Gen Fix is hosted by Deanna Shimota, CEO of GrowthMode Marketing. Listen to our team of marketing experts and featured guests drop knowledge on how HR tech companies can maximize the success of their marketing for today’s B2B prospects. Learn more at www.growthmodemarketing.com.

Transcript

(00:00:01) - Hey, everybody, it's Jenni from GrowthMode Marketing. You're listening to The Demand Gen Fix. The podcast where our team of GrowthModers and our guests discuss the ins and outs of demand generation, and why we believe it's the key to long term sustainable growth, especially in the HR tech industry

(00:00:21) - Hello everyone! We are back for another episode of The Demand Gen Fix Podcast. Today we're talking about how building brand awareness in the market can take many forms, but it doesn't always have to come with a big price tag. As an employee, you can actually help amplify your company's brand to drive bigger brand awareness, credibility, and trust in the market. And one way to do that is to become a brand ambassador for your company, to use your personal brand on LinkedIn to bolster your company's profile. So, I'm really excited today to have Logan Mallory, the Vice President of Marketing at HR tech company Motivosity, join me on this episode today because I have had the opportunity to follow Logan on LinkedIn, and he is one of those individuals that has really shown how to make LinkedIn work as a brand ambassador.

(00:01:12) - So, welcome to the show, Logan.

(00:01:14) - Thanks for having me. I appreciate that. I think being an ambassador is a big never ending project, but I'm glad that I'm getting at least the first parts right.

(00:01:24) - I know from my own experience, it's a lot of work sometimes to keep up with LinkedIn, and build out that profile in that audience. So, let's start with your experience on this front. You've obviously spent quite a bit of time, and built up your audience ,and are frequently in my feed, and I imagine frequently in other people's feeds, as well, posting lots of great content. How did you build out your personal brand?

(00:01:52) - Building out my personal brand on LinkedIn has taken some time, but it's been a really great investment. I think that part of it was that I started early. Like, LinkedIn was where people had uploaded a picture, and they might have put in their jobs, but people weren't really being as proactive on LinkedIn. And I can remember, it's probably been eight or nine years ago, that I wrote an article.

(00:02:16) - I just had this idea, and I had been interviewing some people, and I was like, I'm going to share some ideas about interviewing and hiring. And I wrote this article, and it probably got like 500 impressions, which back then felt massive. That wouldn't be anything worth celebrating, but it was enough of a gateway drug that I just realized that I could talk to people and share what I was learning in real time. The reality is, I just got started. I've thought about LinkedIn differently than just a place to post about work, and I think that attitude has made a really big difference in my approach and in my presence.

(00:02:52) - I envy the fact that you started doing it eight, nine years ago because I can imagine you're far ahead. So, you said it took a long time, but those that start now, my experience, I started maybe a year, year and a half ago, really engaging on LinkedIn and posting stuff, and it does take a long time to build up that audience, and to get the engagement levels.

(00:03:14) - So, if I could go back and do it all over again, I would, a few years back, have started posting regularly because I definitely see those individuals that are, what I call Micro-influencers, right, on LinkedIn have big audiences, and they could post anything and get lots of engagement. And it's like, wow, that wasn't even very median. You've got 200 people making comments and liking it, and so on.

(00:03:41) - There are a lot of people, and I talk about how long I've been on LinkedIn, and there are a lot of people who have surpassed me really fast. You'll see some people that just have one really great or viral piece of content, and suddenly they have tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of followers. And, I think, every once in a while people get really lucky. I don't know what does that, but I wouldn't hear me say eight or nine years, and then feel hesitant. I think that LinkedIn is a really powerful tool, and won't be going away. Microsoft bought it, I don't know, it's probably been twelve or thirteen years ago, maybe even longer, and they bought it for some billions of dollars price tag. 

(00:04:23) - LinkedIn isn't going away anytime soon. And so, I would say to people, regardless of where you're at today, just start getting involved. Now, getting involved, to me, doesn't mean just posting. I think that's the mistake a lot of people make is they say, I'm going to go post once a day, or post twice a day, and that's actually not, necessarily, the best way to use LinkedIn, but, and we can talk more about that, but don't let how long others have been on the platform stop you from getting involved because there's still visibility to be had right now.

(00:04:55) - Yeah, I think that's a really good point, and I agree with you. Don't just go and post. I've seen more growth in my own followers when I'm commenting on other people's content out there, and I think you have to have meaty content. It's not just going and posting a comment that's like, I agree, this is great. Things like that. It's like having a perspective and no opinion is what makes you interesting enough for people to look at your profile, decide to follow you, to engage with you and continue to see your content and find value in it.

(00:05:33) - I think that's exactly it, and different people on LinkedIn have different personas, and I'll just share my example. There was a while, a few years or a time a few years back, and I was trying to say, what do I want to be on LinkedIn? What do I want people to know me for? How do I want to be recognized? I was basically defining my personal brand on LinkedIn, and this thought came to me, and it was this idea of, I want people to know that I'm like a hopeful, energetic, positive person. If that's the only thing that I do is bring some, like, happiness and energy to people, then that's a win for me. And so, I just gave myself this title. I have it on LinkedIn still, and it's just called, a force for good. And maybe that's a little pretentious. Maybe that's a presumptuous about myself, but what it's done is it gave me this lens to look through, and so, when I'm commenting, when I'm posting, when I'm messaging people, that is the attitude that I tried to take.

(00:06:32) - And it's given me a lot of focus, and I think that's an important perspective that people should have when they start engaging. And again, engaging doesn't mean posting. You're exactly right. It means commenting and liking, and what content are you expanding on, but knowing the place that you're working from; the foundation that you're approaching your engagement from, I think it's really important.

(00:06:53) - I agree with you. I think you've got to have a content or engagement strategy. It doesn't have to be this big blown up plan that you create. Like, this is all the types of content I'm going to do, and this is my personality, and this is how I'm going to do it. Be authentic with it and be yourself, but have intention behind the content that you create, right? Know, okay, If I'm going to post regularly on LinkedIn, and I want to not only build my personal brand, but be a brand ambassador for my company, what do I want to say? What do I want to be known for? What do I want people to take away from that? And I think that's important because you do see people out there on LinkedIn that are trying to be ever present, and show up in your feed a lot, who, it's clear, they don't really, actually have intention.

(00:07:40) - They're just, the thought of the day that pops in their head. Maybe that's an intentional strategy on their part, I don't know, but it doesn't come across that way, and I think those are the people that, from my perspective, I'm less likely to follow someone unless I know them personally If their thoughts are all over the place.

(00:07:59) - People will often come and they'll say, Logan, I want to post on LinkedIn. I want to be more engaged there, but I don't know what to say, and, I think, there's lots of philosophies people can work from. And what I've done is I've created three buckets; three like mental wells that I'll go get water from. The problem is, is that I found that if I was talking about the same thing every day, I ran out of ideas. So, for example, my background of my career is marketing, right? And if I just talked about marketing all day, every day, I felt like I ran out of stuff to be original about.

(00:08:34) - I felt like I ran out of, it was the content became forced. And so, at some point I decided, all right, I'm going to have multiple buckets. And so of course, my career is marketing, and every once in a while I'm going to talk about marketing topics, and what's working, and what's not, or the cool new technologies. The other bucket that I pull from is the bucket for my employer, right, that brand ambassador, and I'll admit, at a place like Motivosity, where we have this, like, fun, engaging, and user focused product, that's a lot easier than it has been in other roles, but that's a place where I can pull content, or thoughts from. And then my third bucket is this leadership force for good attitude, which allows me to pull in some of the things that are happening in my personal life, right? Whether that's like mental health, or seeing someone make it make a positive impact in their community, I can talk about that. And so, if I'm not feeling inspired in one of those three buckets, then I can go to the other type of content to pull out posts and ideas.

(00:09:39) - And so, that's been a helpful framework for me, is to say, here's the three themes that I can pull from, and if I'm not feeling inspired in one, I've got two other places to go be inspired for the content I'm creating.

(00:09:51) - I like that approach, and pulling a little bit of the personal into it, I feel like seeing your content all the time. You get a glimpse into Logan's life beyond Motivosity, and that's interesting because you start to feel a little more connected to people, right? Like, they feel like they know you, and they're more likely to pay attention to what you're putting out there. So, how has your personal brand impacted Motivosity?

(00:10:15) - It's been a really interesting journey. I've been at Motivosity for three and a half years now, and there is a pretty tight correlation. Maybe one of the easiest ways to share this is, and this will be good for the marketing audience, not too long ago we changed our forms on our website. We had a pretty standard form: first, last, email, phone, company, and then we would let the attribution happen on the back end.

(00:10:40) - So, we'd use UTMs, or whatever it might be to track where those leads were coming from. One of our team members, a couple of months ago, said we should add an open text field that says, where did you hear about us? And my gut instinct is always, we don't want to add friction; we don't want “random letters” in our data, but we did that, and it's been really cool to see where our hand raisers are actually coming from. And it's often not what the attribution says, right? We'll see lots that say they came from social, or they came from AdWords, but then when they fill out the form, and they have the open text field that says, I've seen Logan on LinkedIn; I saw Logan on a webinar. It's a double edged sword to have that personal brand be driving business for Motivosity. It's a really positive thing. It also means that my brand matters, and if I screw it up, I hurt the business. And for sure that's not the only self input data that we're seeing.

(00:11:36) - We have a lot of customers that come from referrals. We had one the other day that said, my spouse works for this company and they use Motivosity. That open field has been pretty cool, but it's also given me a place to see some of my own impact. The other thing that will happen, often, on LinkedIn is people will reach out directly to me in my messages, so I have lots of people that will say, Hey Logan, I'm ready for a tour of LinkedIn, can I get a demo? I've had people who haven't been totally satisfied, or something hasn't worked the way they wanted it to, and they'll reach out to me and say, hey, Logan, can you help get me to the right spot? So, they're coming to the vice president of marketing. I don't want to say triage, but to get help, and it's because to them, my personal brand is what they associate Motivosity with. And again, there's pros and cons to that. I'm with Motivosity for the long haul, so I think that's a pretty good marriage.

(00:12:29) - It's amazing that there's people out there that are associating your personal brand with the company brand, and now they know you well enough to reach out and say, hey, I need some customer service help, but like you said, there's pros and cons, right? On the flip side, it's like, oh man, now, on top of wearing my vice president of marketing hat, I need to wear the customer service hat to, like, not the right channel for them to go through, but it shows the power of being able to build that brand. If you could do it differently and you were starting all over with your LinkedIn brand, what would you do?

(00:13:02) - What would I do differently? I don't know that I would do a ton differently because my goal on LinkedIn isn't really to be a sponsor. I'm not trying to be a paid influencer, right? Like, I'm not trying to get money, although I do wear a lot of Travis Matthews clothes, and Travis Matthews hats, and polos, and so someday if Travis Matthews wants to sponsor me, I'd take that, but otherwise that's not my goal.

(00:13:25) - One of my big goals has to been, insulate my career. I'm a little bit risk averse, and very focused on self-reliance, and being stable in my career. LinkedIn has protected that. Meaning, if for some reason Motivosity fired me, or I was unemployed, or my career ended, I feel like I could get a new job pretty quickly, and that's a pretty selfish perspective. That's been one of my goals, and that's been, I think that has become a reality on LinkedIn. If I was there, and in need of a role, I think I've built that network big enough to make that happen. If I were to do something different, I would change my internal perception. Sometimes there are days where I'm like, oh my gosh, I have to post on LinkedIn; I haven't thought of anything yet, and I would get rid of that pressure. It just is what it is, and if you post some days, great.

(00:14:15) - If you're not in the mental place to do that, then you should let that go, and if you're forcing it too hard, people will feel that and you will enjoy it less. And that's one thing that I would probably shift. 

(00:14:25) - That makes sense. I think turning LinkedIn into a meaningful marketing channel for your company is a real possibility. Let's talk through things that listeners should think about as they're looking at LinkedIn, and how do we make this work even more for our organization? So, I think, first thing is, like, increasing the reach, and building brand ambassadors across your company. So yes, it's awesome that Logan is a brand ambassador for Motivosity. The dream is, how do we get the CEO to do this? How do we get other leaders, and sales reps, and everybody in the company to become a brand ambassador because all of those voices just amplifies everything, right? I don't know if that is the case at Motivosity. I think a lot of organizations that is not the case, where it's a lot of people doing that, but I have seen some companies on LinkedIn, where you can see that this is something in their company that they're wholly embracing, and you see comments, and posts, and things coming from across the organization, and it feels like they're all over the place, as far as like, I open my feed and I see, every day, at least one, or two, or three of them, right?

(00:15:39) - I think that's something that we at Motivosity can do better of, but there are seeds of it. For example, one of our sales managers, Sam, manages our SMB team. I think Sam caught the vision, and saw what was possible, and saw that this was a way that he could help contribute to his sales team members pipeline. And so, Sam and I have really similar paths and methods. He covers sales more and I cover marketing more, but he is on LinkedIn, consistently sharing what he's learning. And yes, it absolutely helps our revenue numbers in driving new revenue. It also helps our employer brand. People want to come work for us because they see that we're having a good time.

(00:16:22) - So, Sam and I actually have this really funny banter. He'll comment on my post, and I'll comment on his, and we pick on each other in this really playful way, and we have people, all the time, that say, you guys seem really fun, I want to come work there. And so, it gives us more talent to choose from, which is a meaningful thing. When it comes to involving your team members and involving the company, it is really hard because it can sometimes feel like a part time job. A couple of different thoughts. One, there are some tools that you can use. One that I've used, and have been pretty happy with is GaggleAMP, right, and GaggleAMP is basically a way to incentivize social engagement across the company. If your social media manager can go into GaggleAMP and say, hey, here's this post, you'll get X points if you like it, or if you comment on it, right? And then there's a leaderboard within GaggleAMP that shows who's the most engaged. At some companies I've worked for, we've had a pretty formal program around that.

(00:17:22) - If you were the most engaged employee, socially, through GaggleAMP, then there was a custom piece of swag for you, or you went to lunch with the CEO that quarter. We incentivized it, so that any individual contributor could have an impact and amplify that voice. So, I think that is one way to do it. I'm doing a training for our sales team. We have a sales kickoff this week, and the training I'm doing for them is about social selling, and this isn't how to find people and send them a DM about get a demo of Modivosity, right? This is how do you think about who you want to sell to, and then engage with them so that when they are in the market for our product, we're top of mind. I don't want my reps to go DM 50 people a day. I want my reps to go engage and create a presence so that their target customer knows them, and recognizes them, and thinks, oh yeah, that Andy guy, he sells this. I should go talk to him first.

(00:18:27) - So, I think that's another step that you could take is thinking about social selling. And then the executive part is very hard. Not all executives want to spend their time on LinkedIn. I'd say that's an area that I can do better in getting that buy in from my team, and so you've given me something to aspire to today. I'm going to go add that to my to do list.

(00:18:47) - I think in a lot of companies, the marketing leader, they wish the CEO would do it, but let's face it, the CEO is pretty busy and unless they believe like this is the way to success, it's going to be pretty hard to convince them to do it. Now, there are some HR tech companies out there where I can say the CEO is actually like their number one brand ambassador and doing a really great job with it. So, it's really just a mindset from their perspective, but one of the things, so years ago I worked at a company, I was the head of marketing, and we decided we wanted to do the brand ambassador thing.

(00:19:24) - And this was before everybody was doing it on LinkedIn. As a marketer, I was like, this just makes sense to me. Let's go out there and start getting in front of this audience if it's a captive audience, but the real driving force was I had minimal marketing budget, and I had to figure out how we were going to grow rapidly, right? You get really creative when that happens. So, I went to the CEO. I said, I want you to be a brand ambassador for this company. I know you are really busy. I'm going to do it too, because I want to set an example for you on how to do it, how to do it well, and I will help you with it. Meaning I will work on building up your audience. I will sometimes ghost post for you to get it out there. And then I want you to see this, and I want you to pop in, and I want you to post some thoughts of your own from time to time.

(00:20:18) - So, that's how we worked. I look back on it at the time, one of the areas we focused was Twitter, actually now known as X.

(00:20:33) - I was just thinking yesterday when I was reading an article and it was like they post on X, formerly known as Twitter. I'm like, the name is now X, formerly known as Twitter. It's not X, right? Yeah, just publishing X, but in a year, I built up my following, and it was other marketers that I was trying to build my following, up to over 12,000 followers in a year. If I could go back and do something differently, I wouldn't have let that kind of go when I moved on to the next job because little did I know, fast forward years ahead, I'd be at a marketing agency. But it is what it is. Learn from me, guys. When you switch jobs, keep it up because you never know when you're going to be like, I built a really good audience, why didn't I keep engaging them? But I was able to build up the CEO's Twitter following to probably about 5,000 people, and I was slowly getting him more active into it and stuff.

(00:21:32) - And looking back on it, this was probably ten plus years ago that we were doing this, but I'm like, man, if all of that had been stuck with, imagine the big audience that they would have today because we had built up quite an audience, and it wasn't just any audience. We were very specific about who we were trying to target, and in my case, as a marketer, I was trying to build an audience of marketers because I worked at a translation company. And guess what? Global companies, marketing often has to translate all of the content that they're creating.

(00:22:11) - Yeah, I love that, and good for you for stepping in and taking on some of that burden. A couple of thoughts. One, like, whether we like it or not, people are more likely to follow and engage with people with a higher title. Their conversion rate will, just naturally, be higher because of that title. The other thing that I would say is, as you're building that brand, it's probably not very often that you are selling, right? You're building by giving, and inspiring, and like, providing insights, and answers, and learnings.

(00:22:44) - And that's how you build the brand. No one wants to follow a brand that they're getting pitched by once a week. They want to follow a brand that inspires them, and teaches them, and encourages them to be more than they are. And that's a really important mindset to work from. So, in my content you won't actually see me sell Motivosity very often. In fact, I don't know that I've ever said get a demo of Motivosity, or click here. What I often say is, gosh, I'm really excited to go to work today because I work at some place where I'm recognized and celebrated for my efforts, and I'm glad to work for a company like Motivosity, or I'll say things like, we just surveyed 2,000 people, and 75% of them said their mental health would improve if they were recognized at work more often. For me, I'm never saying click here, I'm always saying, here's what happens when you recognize your people and tell them they're doing a good job.

(00:23:44) - Yeah, absolutely. You know, it goes back to the: know your audience. Make it meaningful, right?

(00:23:51) -  Exactly.

(00:23:52) - There are ways to really, like, subtly put those messages out there to build that, like, brand awareness, credibility, and trust without it feeling like it's a sales pitch. And even for those who are building their personal brand up on behalf of their company who are in sales, I think you can still do it. In fact, I think again, don't go down the path of sales like, hey, book a demo. No one's going to pay attention to those type of posts, but if you post thought leadership type of content, opinions, and thoughts, and points of view on topics that are relevant to that, what happens, I've found in my experience, is they'll be like, that's really interesting. They'll click on your profile, you can put all that information about who you are, and what you do, and what your company does in your profile, so it's not in their face. It's them coming to it and looking at it and being like, oh, that makes sense. Logan works at Motivosity. It looks like Motivosity works in this space. Now I get why he's talking about all these things. I should check out Motivosity, right?

(00:24:58) - Yeah, exactly. I've been listening to a lot of Ted talks lately while I'm exercising in the morning, and I realized what I'm getting from those Ted talks is new ideas, perspectives that I didn't have. And I think that's what people are looking for on LinkedIn. There's a lot of times where we could just be an echo chamber, or repost the same thing as somebody else, but you have unique perspectives. Your company has content and thought leadership. That is a unique perspective, and when you share that, it goes a long way in bringing people in.

(00:25:30) - I think as you think about your LinkedIn presence, and how to build that personal brand, going back to the know your audience, anyone who's been on LinkedIn a long time probably has quite a few connections already. So, you're starting at this base and you're saying, okay, I've got 500 connections, or 2,000 connections, whatever it is, before you're working on your personal brand it was probably, like, anybody I've worked with, people I meet along the way. That isn't necessarily the audience you're trying to reach when you're building a personal brand on behalf of your company. Logan, if you've ever done anything around this, but I know to build up my own personal profile, I certainly have, and I have maybe 6,000 followers now where I'm like, I want to connect with people in the HR technology space, specifically marketers, CEOs, people that have the power to make a decision to work with GrowthMode Marketing. I work not only to put content out that would be relevant to those individuals in those roles at those companies, but also on the back end, like my connection strategy. I go out, and I connect with people that are in the industry, and I have a formal strategy around how do I build up my network because the bigger my network is of followers who fit that ideal customer profile for me, the more likely it is that they're going to see the stuff; that they're going to start engaging on the stuff.

(00:26:59) - There are tools out there. You've got Sales Navigator, InMail, things like that, but there's AI tools out there now, where you can set up a cadence of emails that help you make that initial outreach. And honestly, I've used that to promote this podcast to say, hey, I'd love to connect with you, and share the Demand Gen Fix Podcast, because you're in HR tech marketing and that's who we talk to, or I'd love to connect with you and invite you on as a guest to feature your technology on the HR Tech Spotlight Podcast because your technology is innovative in the industry. So, that's how I've built up my audience and my following, and then a lot of it is also organic, like, they see you're connected to someone they know in the industry. They're seeing your content, and they just come and they follow you. They don't even have to connect with you. If you've got creator mode turned on, they can just follow you and then they see all your content.

(00:27:58) - I think there's so many ways to do that, and I love that you're being intentional there.

(00:28:02) - I have a similar, but probably more manual approach. Who are the people that I want to be talking to? And at different points in my career, it's been different people. Sometimes, for a long time, I wanted it to be marketers because I want people to know me as a powerful marketer, and to think, oh, Logan's a good leader in that space. There was a time where it was recruiters. I wanted recruiters to be seeing my content, so that it was easier to get my next job. Right now, it's HR people. At some point it will be, for me, it will be people who are running events, right? I speak a lot, and I want people who are planning events to see me as a speaker, and think I should bring Logan in as a keynote, and I just go engage with those people. I'll search for them, and if they look interesting, or look like they're active, then I'll go comment on some of their posts. If you're following someone, or have connected with someone, you can set a notification so you get notified every time they post, and then you go make comments or engage when they've shared something.

(00:29:00) - There’s really simple things that you can do, and sometimes you'll just see me say, hey, I'm commenting on this job opening you posted to help spread the word to my network, and then, if nothing else, they'll recognize me a little bit later on. And so, I think one of the problems that people make is they look at this as a short term play, and it's about relationships. It's about people feeling confident in you. It's about people recognizing you, and that, again, will be a different audience at different times in your life or career. And it's okay to, go proactively, say you know what, today I'm going to search for HR leaders, and I'm going to build out my network of HR leaders, so that they're seeing this message, but again, that message had better be the right thing, or else you're hurting yourself rather than helping yourself.

(00:29:50) - Right, I think going back to the make it meaningful, like, you can get creative with how you're engaging with people and reaching out to them and getting your thoughts out there because there's lots of tools within LinkedIn.

(00:30:03) - It's not just posting comments and potentially liking someone else's. There's articles, there's newsletters, there's sponsored content. So, if you had a post that really got a lot of momentum, and you could actually go in and instead of doing LinkedIn ads, your sponsored content shows up like it's a post, but it's targeting specific audiences. I've never done that. I've seen companies do that pretty effectively, though, from a demand generation program standpoint, and of course, you got direct messaging, and InMail, and also groups. So, there's lots of different ways, I think, you can go in, put your stamp on LinkedIn, show up where the people that you want to engage with are showing up and really interact with them. And there's a lot of people, I think, that have a LinkedIn profile, but never go on LinkedIn. But there are also an awful lot of people that spend an awful lot of time looking at LinkedIn. You and I are two of those people. It surprises me how active a lot of people actually are on LinkedIn on a very regular basis.

(00:31:11) - The stat they always say is that something like 1% of people actually post, and there's a lot of people that post, so there's a lot of people lurking out there, and I actually don't have a problem with that. In fact, there are some people from an SDR perspective or people reaching out to me. Alot of times I might not know them, but in their outreach, when they email me, they'll say, I saw this post that you made about the Utah Jazz, or I loved this thought you had about marketing technology, or thanks for inspiring me with your comment about your neighbor, right? Whatever it is. But I can tell that they've at least, instead of just sending an automated email that came from a sequence or a nurture, they've at least seen me, or taken a moment, and I will almost always read those emails. I might not take the meeting. I might not respond, but I pay more attention when I can see that they have seen me, rather than just I'm in your sequence.

(00:32:09) - Yeah, totally. Thinking about the last thing that I think is important in building up that personal brand on LinkedIn. It's really about consistency. So, if you're popping on and you're posting once a month, that's probably not going to get a whole lot of traction, and there's actually quite a few people out there that I see that sporadically post. I am someone, who in a past life, I was a sporadic poster. If I had something like an article or something, or I happen to pop in and see something, I'd make a comment, but I wasn't very regularly about it. And what I've learned is if you're trying to build up an audience and you want to show up often on people's feeds, you've got to post often, you've got a comment often, and even if you're like, nobody's engaging with this, don't assume that it's not working for you because I can't tell you how many people I haven't seen in forever; talked in forever, and they're like, I see you all the time on LinkedIn.

(00:33:09) - And I'm like, how come you've never liked my post or commented? And they're like, I'm just a watcher.

(00:33:16) - People, people are so stingy with those. They're so stingy with those likes.

(00:33:21) - I think consistency is a really big part of it, and what most people do is they get excited, they post for two days, they get zero engagement, and then they bail. And so just steady yourself for that. If you're going to become a brand ambassador, just steady yourself, and decide that it's okay that it takes some time. I'm writing some content, right now, about the idea of failure. We're really afraid to fail, and we think people are watching us, and the idea is, that I hope people will work from, is that failure is just progress as long as you're learning. If you're doing the same thing over and over, then yes, that failure is really painful, but if you're learning and trying something new, and thinking about it differently, and using each failure as a way to add to your experience, then you're on a good path and you'll get there eventually. So, be patient with yourself. Give yourself a lot of grace because, of course, it's not all going to work, and it's not going to work fast.

(00:34:21) - For most of us, it doesn't work fast, right? 

(00:34:26) - Some people, they just post the right thing on the right day, I don't know, but I have seen more than one person on LinkedIn who has big followings and lots of engagement post about how the experience went, and they've said it took a solid year of posting two times every single day, and they were like, is this worth it? And then they said they just started getting like leads and opportunities coming in the door, or people reaching out to them and asking them to have conversations. And so, it wasn't a quick silver bullet. It did take them time to do it, but they stuck with it, and eventually they built up enough audience where their posts, they're seeing a million, 2 million impressions per year.

(00:35:17) - That's a lot of low cost marketing impact, right? As long as you're hitting the right audience, and I see it with my own posts when I take a break from it. Of course, the impressions and the engagement go down, but over time, if you're consistent and you're posting a lot, it builds up, so the post you did six months ago is still showing up in some people's feeds, and the post you did yesterday, maybe out the door, it only got 500 impressions, but give it time. Before you know it, it's like wow, thousands of people have seen that one post.

(00:35:53) - It's absolutely true. I have a couple of those and they feel evergreen. One was from a concert like a year and a half ago or so, and it still gets a like or a comment on it. You're not going to have all winners. Not every post is going to be that big, and sometimes they'll really surprise you, but if you are consistent, you will occasionally come across one that feels like a really huge success, and that's great. The small ones in between can also be winners.

(00:36:20) - Yeah, and I don't think that engagement and number of oppressions is the absolute, and I'll be all right. It's great to see your post get a lot of views, but sometimes it just takes one of the right person to see it to make that difference. That one person saw it, and they called you and they said, I want to work with your company. That's a win, right?

(00:36:45) - Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

(00:36:47) - All right, so let's wrap up this conversation. I would say the key takeaway is that a personal brand on LinkedIn is not just an asset. It can also play a pivotal role in reinforcing and expanding your company's brand. It's a way to consistently stay in front of potential prospects and clients without feeling intrusive, which can ultimately build the credibility and trust over time. So, take the leap, invest in your personal brand, and turn it into an impactful marketing channel for your company. Logan, thanks so much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate your insights and perspective.

(00:37:24) - It's been great to be with you and your audience. I hope that if there's anyone I can help, or be a resource for, not surprisingly, you can find me on LinkedIn.

(00:37:32) - Yeah, right. We’ll post his LinkedIn link in the show notes, so be sure to follow Logan and see what he's all about.

(00:37:42) - Thanks for joining us on The Demand Gen Fix, a podcast for HR tech marketers brought to you by GrowthMode Marketing. I sure hope you enjoyed it. Don't forget to subscribe for more perspectives on demand generation and B2B marketing strategies. Plus, give us a like. Tell your friends. We'll see you next time.