How to Build Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn in 12 months

So you want to build a LinkedIn personal brand that generates revenue?

Here's the 12 month process we use as a top personal brand agency.

First 3 months: STALK your customers, like you would an EX 

Seriously.

Go look at what they liked, commented on, what photo they posted & with who.

What event did they attend? 

Who are they hanging out with? 

What posts did they comment on? What did they say? 

Which channels are they active on? Which FB groups are they in? 

Watch them over a PERIOD. Not 1 week. 

OBSESS with it. 

Then see if you can get on calls with them (not in a traditional way). See if they would come on a podcast or be on a panel event.  

Revenue = 0 

3-6 months: Focus on building CUT THROUGH Content

Once you have finished stalking. 

You should be able to answer the below questions with confidence 👇

• Why do your customers need you?
• What can you do that they can’t do for themselves?
• What do they know about you?
• How do they feel and think about you? 
• How do your customers make buying decisions? Why do they buy? What makes them buy - think functional, experiential, emotional, social.
• Where is their attention? Which channels do they spend most of their time in? 
• What do they need to know to become problem aware, solution aware, brand aware?
• What content is popular amongst your ideal customer profile?

Hot Resource: This LinkedIn Audience assessment will help you identify how active your audience is on LinkedIn and the value of LinkedIn.

 And now start building cut through content which will help your buyers make a decision to spend $$$.

• Hype Videos
• Podcast
• Event snippets 
• Valuable resources
• Brand videos

Revenue = 0

6 - 9 months: Look for POSITIVE signals

For LinkedIn organic I look at:

• Content views
• Comments, which are deeper than a thumbs up 
• Profile visits
• New connection requests
• Messages, like below 

Hot Tip: If you want to measure how good your content did - if your content views > your LinkedIn connection count. You did very well. Viral well.

More people viewed your content than your number of connections.

We use LinkedIn ads to scale the reach of our personal brand content. Here's what we track:

Step 1: Track CPC & CTR

A low Cost Per Click tells us that it’s cheap to reach many people i.e. you’re ads are engaging.

A high Click Through Rate indicates your ad campaign is resonating with your target audience.

By improving CTR, you will also lower your CPC since they’re connected:

CPC = 0.1 * CPM / CTR

Step 2: Track conversions 

You may not be able to track this in the first 30 to 90 days because B2B buying decisions take far longer than a $100 impulse buy E-commerce product.

So give it time.

Hot tip: Instead track if in the first 30-90 days if they visited your ‘pricing page’ or ‘consultation page’ and attribute conversion, so you are getting early POSITIVE signals of intent. As you mature, and time goes on, only count conversions which went through to 'booking a call’.

Hot Tip 2: If you’re getting a lot of clicks to your website, but none are going to ‘book call’. Check if you have the ‘book call’ button on the landing page where you are landing your audience. 

Hot tip 3: One mistake I initially made was hoping someone identifies the book call button at the top menu bar of our page. Don’t Make the same mistake as us. Insert enough CTA's in your landing page.

Revenue = Likely 0

Now 6-9 months: Optimize 

You probably haven’t achieved a large ROI YET.

You have been BUSY building strong foundations

→ Learning the ins and outs of your customer

→ Getting your messaging on point

→ Optimizing Ads 

→ Rethinking Audiences

Should you persevere?

A marketer I really respect once told me - invest in a channel for 24 months, if you get positive signals early on. If you want to hear more - listen to our full conversation here.

Often 12 months is not sufficient time to assess your marketing.

So I was surprised to see the response to a poll I ran asking:

“What marketing ROI do you expect from spending $60k in your first year?”

Is it fair to expect a 5x return on your investment? 

Sure.

In your first year? 

No.

When digital marketing agencies promise you the world and say in 3 months you will start getting 15-20 leads - they're lying.

They are a burn and churn agency.

They usually have minimum 3-4 month terms, because they know in that time they will find their next victim to sting.

Instead of getting duped. I want you to CHANGE.

Now that you understand the process you can see why it doesn’t happen in the 1st year. 

I started these newsletters in January. 

For 4 months, I had DEAD silence. 

I asked people if they liked my content? NO RESPONSE.

But I kept going. I wanted to add value and show up every week.

In month 4/5, I had some people say they liked reading it. It was MY FIRST positive signal.

I kept going. Now I knew there was a silent tribe of people reading and getting value from my content.

Month 7, $60k deal closed. And $100k in pipeline. 

And BTW, I had done emails before, so had a good idea how to go about it!

Our expectations are part of what makes marketing (and life!) so challenging.

We’re afraid things aren’t working so we push our marketing teams. Who then change tactics before we can succeed. This is marketing from a place of fear.

We don’t give enough time and resources to own a channel.

For campaigns to iterate and improve. For our teams to grow and learn the intricacies of a channel. To talk to customers and our sales teams and feed that back into our marketing.

Just remember that anything worth doing takes time.

Want to have a chat about any of the above? 

Feel free to book in a 29 minute strategy call with me 👇

Great Things Take Time To Build,