Mastering LinkedIn: Building Your Personal Brand as a Startup Founder

Hello everybody, welcome to our event today on how to build your personal LinkedIn brand as a startup founder. Today my name is Emilia and I am a content manager at FI and Founder Institute. For those who are joining for the first time, it's the largest, the world's largest pre-seed accelerator. Today we have invited very interesting marketing experts But before we invite him on stage, I just want to know more about you and where are you joining. We usually have a very global audience and it's really fun and curious to know where are you today at this moment. You can put your answer in the chat. So we have people from Vancouver, Switzerland, Germany, Morocco, Colorado. That's great. And at this moment we have a few hundred. And more about the platform, you found the chat and you're using it already, but we also have this Q&A session which is very important. Please post your, your questions for our speakers Speaker today there, so we can find him easily and bring them on stage and he can answer. You also have the emoji reactions under the screen down, and they're very useful while he's speaking. He will know your feedback and your emotions and your opinion about what he's saying, what is interesting for you. So please don't hesitate to use them as well. Also, to get to know you even better, we have created a poll related to our topic today, and I'm gonna bring that on stage right now. Our question for you today is: what is holding you back from building your personal brand on LinkedIn? Is that time, or you don't know what to talk about, or you don't know where and how to start? You can vote until the end of the webinar. For now, I don't know if you can see the results. I don't know how to start has the most votes, almost half. I'm gonna hide this from the stage for now and we can see these results later again. It's about equal actually. I don't know what to talk about and I have time. Okay, about the agenda today. Our speaker is gonna present for about 20-30 minutes. Then we're gonna engage in a Q&A session with your questions, and after that you can join our networking lounge on Airmeet. You will see tables that you can join, and we'll be there, our guest will be there, maybe if he has time to join us, and you can give us your feedback and you can connect to each other. And the lunch. And now we can bring on stage Timothy, our guest speaker today. Timothy Davidson, he's the marketing director at Directiv. He can talk more about what he's doing and introduce himself. He's already on stage, actually. Hi, Timothy, welcome. Hey.

Hi, thanks for having me. Hi all. Yeah, like mentioned, I'm the director of marketing at a company called Directive. It's a performance marketing agency for software companies. I actually grew up in, so it's mostly B2B. I started off on the client side, which gave me a lot of, I worked with a lot of founders, a lot of marketing heads specifically. And one thing I did find, especially with LinkedIn for B2B, it was a huge driver for revenue. And when they paired, if the CEO or someone had a personal brand, it really helped out a lot more there too. And then even just in the last 3.5 years, I've also built my own personal brand on LinkedIn, which has helped drive a lot of revenue for the company Directive, but also just opportunities for myself that I just didn't even know were possible. I'm very excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Thanks a lot, Timothy, for introducing yourself. I'm gonna be off stage now and the floor is yours. See you in a bit.

Awesome. Thank you. Yeah, so I'm gonna start right here. Let's go. Now, can you see my screen? Make sure that's right. All right, perfect. Yes, like we mentioned, talking about growing your personal brand on LinkedIn, I think it's So, so, so important, especially for founders, executives, pretty much anyone that outside of very specific use cases where your buyers or the people you want, like your investors aren't, but for the most part, investors, your buyers are on LinkedIn. It's just, it can vary, industry to industry and who you're talking to. And growing your personal brand is just going to be a huge, huge benefit on LinkedIn for you. I know I already mentioned a little bit here, but just who am I? You can, if you, you know, your computer, you wanna look at my LinkedIn, you could scan the QR code there, but it'll give you kind of insight, more insights on the content I create, the, you know, my profile, things like that. It will kind of go through on some optimizations and things that I've learned across along the way. But I've been in marketing for most of my life. It's just to me, the most interesting thing has been how building my own personal brand has been a big benefit for the company, but also myself being on both sides of sponsorships, being on both sides of just having sales calls because someone is talking about me or because they saw me on LinkedIn and they come to our company. So it's such a big benefit. And outside of time, it is free in the sense of LinkedIn's a free platform to create content, engage with the community, things like that. I see the QR is disabled.

Oops.

I'll actually put the the link in the chat here. All right. Yeah. So why build a personal brand and why should you build it on LinkedIn? Personal brand, I mean, as founders, you all know how it's your reputation and that opens up so much doors and that helps retain clients, but also just bring in new customers, word of mouth. It really extends word of mouth. But having a strong personal brand really just gives you credibility, social proof, and just opens doors that you didn't know were possible. The cool thing is nowadays you can do that at scale. Everyone's always had a personal brand. It's just now you're doing it at scale because of social media. Now, why LinkedIn? Because LinkedIn is the only, pretty much the only B2B social network, but also you're For the most part, your buyers are there. As a startup founder, an executive, LinkedIn is going to be the big place there. It's going to have where your customers are, your investors, future employees. But even more importantly, there's still a big opportunity there. And you can't say that for every other platform. All the other ones, yeah, there is still obviously some opportunities, but LinkedIn has a lot of opportunity. You can start today and really start to see that kind of traction pretty early on, which is going to help you keep going. Now, before we kind of go into like, what, how do you create content on it? How do you engage with the community? There's some foundations you should set first. On the poll, it was like, I don't know how to start. And I know the other one was, you don't know what to say. The thing about building a personal brand, as you know, as a founder, is for your company, you need to create a unique point of view. I've been doing this long enough, worked with a bunch of companies. My company Directive have worked with hundreds of software companies and I've been on both sides of it where I've worked with them a lot. And one thing I've definitely noticed is people buy different, not best. And that's because best is, you know, it's a subjective kind of term, but also it's hard to explain you're the best. Everyone says they're number one rated and things like that, but people will buy different or verticalized, or they want something that's going to stick out. Because if you're not different, you're going to be commodity, and then it just ends up being a, you know, a price war, which is not good. And that this is very important for your personal brand as well. With your personal brand you need to, you need something to say, you need something that people actually give a crap about. You need something that's going to help you be known for something. We've seen examples of this with companies and personal brands. And a lot of these companies here, Gong, Sixth Sense, Drift, they all have actually people that had big personal brands from there and it kind of goes hand in hand. Kong started revenue intelligence, Sixth Sense created the dark funnel, Drift started conversational marketing. All things that they were known for and the people behind it, like so for Drift, Dave Gerhardt was, and he's still very big right now, but he was kind of the face of Drift and he helped create conversational marketing. He has a different point of view now 'cause he's no longer at Drift, but these kind of point of views, these things that make people care about you and your company are very important and it's definitely something to create first. And it doesn't have to be groundbreaking, doesn't have to be, you know, completely against the grain, but if you are just going with the grain, if you're just saying the same thing everyone else is, it's just you're not gonna stick out. The other thing, especially early on when I was doing that, creating this or creating my personal brand, one thing you're going to want to do is follow leaders in your space. And so I'm just going to stop sharing for a second. I want to show you something. So what I actually ended up doing early on was creating a folder on, of links of people in my space, of profile, LinkedIn profiles in my space that I would check every other day, every day. And so like I mentioned Dave Gerhardt from Drift, like he was one of those people I would go to his profile every day or every other day and just look at what content he's putting out. So on one hand, I was looking at it for ideas. Or just to see what kind of content was working. But on the other hand, you can also engage with in the comments because these influencers in your space, whoever the people your buyers look up to, these people you want to one, build relationships with because you can do, you know, you create content with them, you can do things with them. There might be partnership opportunities. But you can also— it's also that those comment sections are gonna be gold because that's where your buyers are gonna be. And so engaging with these kind of influencers is going to help get you in front of them and your buyers. And the other side benefit here is, as you can see right here with this, this comment, if you comment on someone's post and you'll actually end up getting a lot of views from that, which is gonna come back to your profile, which is going to help you get, you know, innovate on ideas, test new ideas, kind of point of views. As you can see here, this one got like 18 engagements, and that's just engagement, it's not views. There's gonna be a lot more than that. But those comment sections of your buyers are gonna be very critical to start building those relationships, to start, Start building those relationships. You can engage and find content ideas as well because you'll also see in here, look at all these comments that were not responded to, and there'll be questions in there. And that's going to give you ideas of maybe content to create, things to answer in videos or picture or content. But it's just going to give you more market research than just trying to do it on your own. So, you know, early on especially, I would definitely look to see, find these influencers, uh, in your space, and then daily or every other day, every other week, and try to learn from them but also engage with them early on. It's gonna be a big benefit to you and, you know, just to your buyers as well. The other— there's one more foundational thing here, which is your profile. So I'm going to share my— I'm actually going to walk you through my profile real quick, and we'll just talk about some of the things here. So you'll end up seeing when you're creating a bunch of content and you're building a personal brand on LinkedIn, people will come back to your profile. They're gonna click on your profile and they're gonna come to it. It's a snapshot in time, right? Someone clicks on it, this is the snapshot they're gonna see. All these things matter. Your profile picture, at least just have a profile picture. You don't really need to go crazy there. But the background image here, I'm not saying mine's perfect at all. Mine has a lot of flaws, but it does portray the kind of point of view I have, the things I want to talk about, the things I'm talking about. And it gives kind of, you know, things that they can go from as well. Like, as you can see, like they have the link here, you can go to the website, the contact info, all that stuff matters. Having all this filled out, the right company, the, you know, what you're talking about, this can, you can actually change these hashtags. Your title that people are going to see within the feed, the background image here, even doing like the featured stuff. You can put content there, you can put like, you can do some certain pieces of work you've done. All that stuff matters. The about section, because creating content and all that is great and people are going to see that, but they're also going to click on your profile and see what you're about. And that's going to help convert those people from the personal brand to your, your business. So now that we have the kind of foundation set here, we're gonna dive a little deeper into, you know, what is that next step here. All right, so back to the presentation. So there's two sides when you're on LinkedIn of creating content and engaging. There's two sides of building your personal brand, which is creating content and engaging, and then the engagement part. Most people would just think of it, oh yeah, I'm just going to create content and just post, post, post. You need to do that, but you also need to engage with your buyers. You need to engage in the community. Like I mentioned, those influencers, comment on those posts because that's going to get you more views. It's going to also train the LinkedIn algorithm. People, what we call it is like warming it up. So a lot of times actually people will like comment on other posts, other people's posts for 15 times before posting something because I don't really have good data on this, but it does feel like you get a lot more reach because LinkedIn's making it. LinkedIn likes that you're engaging with the community, but it's also just going to give you those insights that we talked about. It's going to give you more ideas and just community engagement. You're talking to your buyers every day on LinkedIn by doing this. You need to do both sides. And later in this presentation, I'll walk you through kind of like a 3-month kind of roadmap and you'll see where the engagement really does come into it. But commenting, liking and post, mapping out those influencers so you can engage those and you could build those relationships that way. Those things are all very important. And so once you start doing something like that, Engaging, creating content. We now need to understand what type of content to create. As a founder, there's probably 3 big buckets that you can, you should do, and I think you should do all of them, but you want to find your kind of cornerstone one first and then, you know, layer in the other ones as well. But you should do all of them because your buyers consume content, want to find different things based on the type of content. So you should have all of them, but obviously you should just start with one when you're starting off. But we have personal stories. This is probably one of the staples for a founder, in my opinion. Again, I work at Directive. We run a lot of ads for companies. And one of the biggest driving, one of those, the best ads I've seen that works just time and time again is the, it's called the founder story. And it's literally the founder's story because they're usually in the shoes of the buyer as they're buying. And it just, it speaks to your buyer and it works wonders on LinkedIn as well because people can resonate with that, especially if you were your buyer and that's why you started your company. If that's why you're the founder, that's why you're doing these, what you're doing now. These personal stories not only could drive business and things like that, but they also just connect with the audience and the people you're trying to talk to. And then so that's more of like, if you think about it, it's more of like an emotional kind of connection. That's more of, and it also just gives you more content because a lot of times like documenting, it's kind of like the story. It's the here's where we were and then we went, And here's the trials and tribulations, then you kind of how you won and that type of thing. And there's informational, so maybe it's like stats, insights, content that can make your audience better. So I've seen, you see this all the time with different ways of doing it. Actually, let me show you some examples here. So one example here is this company called Lavender. It's an email AI tool, and something I really like what they do is they have this mix, and we're talking about the informational stuff here, but they have content that's very informational, that stuff that you can basically use right away. So here's like an email framework that they have here. This is content that is very just informational, great for their buyers and their founders and all that. They and their people, their company post all this too. So they're also building their personal brands. Then obviously they have a mix of, you know, entertainment and stuff like that. But like data, stats, things that make your buyers better. Is going to be very helpful to give that information insight. But you don't need to do that every single time. You can layer that in because then you also have maybe something like an edutainment. And again, I think having all of these is important because your buyers need a mix. And your audience needs a mix. But just an example from my standpoint here, just for me, I do a lot of videos and a lot of times I'll do edutainment in the sense of it's education with entertainment. So this is just like one series I've been creating, but it's kind of like How— I mean, the arts and crafts— this is actually a bad example, but there is like a— it's like a skit. But we're also entertaining at the same time. That's where the edutainment part comes in. The people I see that have the biggest personal brands, they usually have a mix because you need that. It also shows off your personality as well. [No speech]And then within that, there's a type of content. So there's video, text posts, images, and then you can even do like polls and things like that. Again, I do think you need a mix, but I would look at one for your— the, the content you're gonna do the most of, uh, because it's easiest for you or the best return on investment for you. Me, I found it to be video, and I actually think most founders should look at video. You can just use your phone, doesn't need to be crazy, because what it does is it lets people connect with you better because they can actually understand your mannerism. They can understand, you know, your tone of voice. And like when you meet them in person, they'll actually like feel like they'll know who you are because you are on video. And in LinkedIn, there's not a lot of that, not a lot of video. So you can actually stick out as well. Then there's text posts. Again, I think you should sprinkle it in. Text posts are usually the easiest and you can obviously just write it out that way. Most people do that and that's great, but it is very common, which means it's not going to stick out as much, but they also do perform very well. So obviously it has to depend on your personality, your time, all those factors. But what I would say is you should sprinkle in all of them. And there's images. Again, it's literally just gonna be a text post but with an image, and the image can stick out, especially if it's like a data point stat. It definitely can help stick out in the feed. Now, I mentioned a 3-month kind of roadmap. I know one of the hardest parts is going to be just starting. Everyone kind of struggles here. Myself included. I took years and years of on and off until I started building my personal brand. So I do kind of go back and forth sometimes because I do think it's very important just to start. But I also think you do need to lay the groundwork. You talked about the profile optimization and things like that. But in the first month, start as soon as possible. Optimize your profile to make sure it's set up right and make sure so when someone comes to it, they can understand your point of view, understand who you are, what your company is, or why they should care about you. Follow those influencers I talked about, the people in your space. Create a folder with like maybe 5 to 10 of those links and just Follow them so that you can look for inspiration, ideas, but also engage, engage, engage, engage. I think it's very important you start building those relationships and you'll start engaging those buyers as well. And I would, just because when you're starting, I don't want you to get overwhelmed, I would start posting maybe once to twice a week. And then the rest of it engaging, because the engagement, commenting, all those things like that, that'll also help you get ideas of things to post or create content for. And then the second month, I want you to continue all the other things, the engagement, the community stuff, but then start posting a little bit more, 3 to 4 times a week. You want to ramp that up a little bit. By that time, you should have more ideas and things to talk about. You should have more ideas of, uh, because you, you should have more ideas, things to talk about, because you're looking at those influencers, you're looking at the other people that are creating their personal brand, and you're kind of getting ideas that way. And then the third month, you want to evaluate a little bit. You want to keep going, keep creating that content, keep engaging, but you want to take a step back and understand what content, what kind of comments, what things that you're looking at, just like you do with your product, with your company, just understand what is working, what's not. So you can do more of what's actually working and stop doing what's not. So whether that is video versus text and you're seeing a lot more text posts do well, maybe you shouldn't do video. And video's not for everyone. I know I mentioned like, I think it is important, but maybe it's not for you. And obviously vice versa. But I know people, a lot of people have a hard time starting or don't know what to talk about, or they just don't know. They're kind of scared because they're kind of scared of the feedback. The truth is, if you don't start, you're never going to do it. Because like me, like every single other person, the first 10 pieces of content you create, they're going to suck. Are you going to suck? And, but that's how you get better, uh, cuz you'll get the feedback or you won't get the feedback, which means it didn't do well. Um, and then you can iterate from there. Um, and if people, and if it's something that's really that bad, no one's gonna see it. So there's no reason not to just start and, and start creating content. And like I mentioned, just get started today and you'll see what happens. I mean, you'll innovate, you're a founder, right? You're ahead of something. You know, for the most of us are startup founders, just like everything, you will innovate on it. But building a personal brand on LinkedIn is going to be very, very helpful for whatever your endeavor, whether it's the current one or even later. It's very, very helpful. So I'm just gonna scroll through. That's actually the end of the presentation, but I'm just gonna scroll through some of the comments, see if there's any questions I can answer.

All right.

I believe there's gonna be recording this session. I know there's a couple questions there. If not, whatever I can do, I can send this slide. I'll, yeah, I can definitely download the slide deck and get it to everyone if that's possible. Oh, okay. There's a question working with complex vertical industries and domains. Enterprises, enterprise decision makers are looking for deep value and impact and content. How do I factor that in? Yeah, I think that's why you have all those different kinds of content. You have the informational, you have the edutainment, and then you have the founder story there or the personal story. I think that's why you have all those people. I think one of the things that people think too much about is, yes, they are enterprise decision makers, maybe they're a little bit more technical, still people. That's where the edutainment comes in, right? Everyone still likes dogs and cats and has kids and/or doesn't, or they are personal. So I think having all those factors into it so they can peek to their technical side with the informational side of it, but also just the personable side with the edutainment. Or you can actually teach someone, but also keep them engaged in that way as well.

Thank you, Timothy, for these amazing, valuable tips with examples and very actionable advice. We're gonna— I'm gonna help with the questions now.

Okay.

Or first, if you want, we can look again at that poll because it's interesting to see people's barriers. Do you see the results on stage? Can you see them?

I can't see them now.

No. Uh, well, the main barrier is that our startup founders don't know how to start, then they don't know what to talk about, and third one is time. Well, just interesting information to know, and we can jump into the Q&A session. We have a lot of Very interesting, practical questions, and I like all of them, but let's see the ones that are voted, that have the most votes. I will show this on the screen. So this is a question from Laia Barcelona: Is it good to have different pages under the same unique profile? For instance, a page My Business, a page Me, As an artist, all under my main profile, or better to have different profiles for different targets?

Yeah, I would say so from the business side, I would just keep it all under one business page. You can actually in LinkedIn, you can have it. So if the one way you could do, like, you still have one business page, but you could actually do products. They have products now. Where you can actually do like different products. So in theory, if you have different targets, so like an example would be like, you know, software for, you know, this industry or software for this industry, you could technically make it different products in there. But I actually think you shouldn't spread it out. I'd rather you have it all under one business page. For the personal side of it, your personal profile, I think is going to be your best bet. I wouldn't create like an artist main profile. There's not much for LinkedIn, at least there's not many benefits to it. I'd rather, I think it's much better because of the reach, just have it under your personal profile.

So there are different options. Thanks, Laya, hope that helps. Next question. It's hard to post twice a week information about your product. Or you get exhausted and don't want to be repetitive. How to handle challenge like this?

Yeah, I think that's actually completely right. They can get exhausted. That's why I think where I mentioned the founder kind of story, the personal stories, I think, you know, as a CEO, I think there's a lot of things you can talk about on, you know, how you got to where your company is now, or how you got to the point of what your product is now, or even like the failures. I think something very underrated actually is the failures of a company because people are people, they understand not everything's good. I think there's a story to be had about what failed or what things you innovated on or just how you got to where you are now or Did you have problems with hiring? There's a lot of stories to be had that are similar to your business or they kind of go hand in hand, but they're not specifically about your product. And I think people, buyers want to know more about your product and I think, or not, sorry, yes, about your product, but more about your business. And I think that helps them buy your product.

Nice. Storytelling is always great advice. We have many more, so we can just briefly go through them. Is it better to have followers or connections?

That's a great question. I would say connections. So actually, if you connect with someone on LinkedIn, it automatically makes it a follower. So you actually get a connection and a follower. The only way to unfollow is like someone would actually have to go in and say unfollow, but still stay connected. I think they— I actually don't see a big difference. The only thing I would say that is different is when you are building your personal brand, it ends up being easier to follow someone. So if you're scrolling through the feed and you see someone's content and and you like, like it, like you just, like, you're just, you actually like read it and you're like, you really like it, not like actually click like, but then there's a follow button on the, on the top. So as you start growing your personal brand, you'll get more followers because of that. And I think then there's also, so actually the answer is probably followers because there's also a connection limit. LinkedIn cuts you off at a certain point.

And you can just not get the connection, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You can have unlimited followers, but you do get limited on the connections.

Okay, next question. How should you post for your company as opposed to you, the founder, when you're maintaining both? That's similar to previous, a little bit.

So I've actually found it better to post from your personal than your company page, just because— so I would prioritize your personal rather than your company page, just because LinkedIn limits the reach for company pages compared to your personal by a lot. I've tested like the same exact content and you can get 10x in the same. So Directive's personal page our company page has more followers than me. I think it's like 18,000. I have about 14,000. I can create the same exact content, post at the same time, and my page would get like 10x, 20x the reach than the company page. So I would do that first. I would prioritize the personal because you see it time and time again. Company pages end up getting a lot of followers from the personal from the founders or from, or sorry, company pages get a lot of followers even if they don't post on the company page just because of the personal profiles that are driving all the, the people to those pages.

All right. Okay, how about reposting? Is it better to repost with those equivalent to brands? Brand new post.

Oh, brand new thoughts. I've only done this a little bit of time, a couple of times, but yeah, just reposting someone's— I think I understand what you're saying. If I understand this correctly, you're reposting someone's content you see in the feed. If you do that, you don't get much reach. I think it's like From what I understand, it's like 10% of what you could if you actually take that content or even just screenshot it with your phone and tag the person or the company, whoever posted it, and then put your own thoughts on it. You'll get a lot more reach that way. So I would do it that way more.

Is this an equivalent to your own post with your thoughts? That is not a repost.

Yeah, because it would actually technically be a new post. So if you took— if you're like putting your thoughts on a post instead of just like reposting it and just saying like, oh nice, but actually like, um, taking that, that whatever that was and putting your own thoughts on it, your own unique point of view on it, that ends up being a brand new post. It's kind of like a reaction or, or something like that. And you can actually— those things actually work pretty well.

Okay, so it's worth making the effort. Let's have one or two more. We talk about the COVID image. Okay, this one. Should technical and non-technical— technical and non-technical founders employ the same personal branding strategies? April.

Yeah, I think you'll have different— I mean, everyone's approach is going to be a little different based on your personality. I would still— I think the same concepts still work and then you'll have to adjust based on, you know, what you are more comfortable or what you like to talk about. That's where I think it would adjust the most. I think the same approach with pretty much all of it, you know, the profile optimization, following the people, creating the content, maybe, you know, maybe you don't like to do video and that's great. We just do more text posts and it's more, or images with more, content like that. So I think most of the concepts still apply. It's just where your personality lies. And obviously technical and non-technical founders have different personalities. So I think that's where the adjustment would be. But I think the concepts should still apply to both.

Thanks. And another Similar question. Does it make sense to post in two languages? I want to start selling in Switzerland and then in other countries. English would be the best one to post, but not all Swiss people understand English, so I thought to post in German and English.

Yeah, this is a good, good question. I would, at the start, I would probably stick with one. Because if you do scroll through LinkedIn, it will give you an option to like say see translation. I know those aren't the best. So, but I would, I don't, I think it would dilute. I don't really know the answer, the exact answer on this because I think, but I do think if LinkedIn, if you post the same thing on LinkedIn at the same time, just one, you know, one's in different language, I think LinkedIn would hamper the reach you get, unfortunately.

Yes, it's a bit tricky. Well, thanks. We're going to wrap it up now with the Q&A session because our attendees keep on posting new questions. But please follow Timothy, connect to him, talk to him. You have also the slides and video recording from today in your inbox in 48 hours. You will have all his contacts. So follow, connect to him, and also follow FI, our events. Sign up for the newsletter and have a good day or good night. Wherever in the world you are in the moment. And see you soon. See you at our next event. Thanks a lot, Timothy. If you want to say last words before you go.

This was great. Yeah, but yeah, if you have any other questions, just DM me on LinkedIn. This was awesome. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Thanks a lot. See you soon.

Bye!

And see you guys in the networking lounge.