Unlocking LinkedIn: Influence, Leads, & Growth
Marketing Unfiltered #92 → How to Build a Personal Brand That Actually Converts with Alicia Teltz
Good morning leaders.
Thanks for your feedback on last week’s daily dose - if you missed it, here’s my run down of your free daily swipe file to inspire and entertain your team.
This week we have something a little different. An interview with Alicia, we go deep into how to make LinkedIn successful for your business.
Transitioning from a high-flying corporate career to the unpredictable world of entrepreneurship is a challenge few master, Alicia has taken it in her stride.
I sat down with friend of Marketing Unfiltered Alicia Teltz, if you are active on LinkedIn you will definitely recognise Alicia and her LinkedIn deep dives.
Alicia has navigated some of the world’s largest organisations, including working at LinkedIn and Gartner and is now running a successful mini media and training company The Hype Department.
Alicia is currently launching The Hype Challenge (starts on Monday), a 5-week LinkedIn Cohort & Posting Challenge aimed to help highly capable entrepreneurs and corporate professionals to finally get recognised for their brilliance and monetise their expertise through LinkedIn. Find out more ↙️
We explore the essential lessons learned along the way and dive deep into the mechanics of building a personal brand that truly resonates.
From mastering the LinkedIn algorithm to leveraging the exposure effect (exposure effect is a psychological quirk where we start to prefer a person, song, or product simply because we’ve encountered it repeatedly and it feels familiar) for trust to how she has translated onto her popular newsletter on Substack.
This conversation provides real actionable insights for any marketing leader looking to cut through the digital noise and drive meaningful business conversion (whether for you as a fractional leader or as a Marketing Leader).
» Connect with Alicia on LinkedIn and on her Substack
Corporate Background vs. Entrepreneurship
What key lessons from your corporate background at SAP, Mastercard, Gartner, Hootsuite, and LinkedIn have been most valuable in your journey as an entrepreneur?
The funny thing is that nothing really prepared me for entrepreneurship. When you work at a big organisation and all of the companies I’ve worked for were huge organisations; even Hootsuite had thousands of employees before they made cuts and made me redundant you get everything given to you. You get frameworks, existing clients, software, blueprints, inbound leads, absolutely everything.
When you’re an entrepreneur, you have to figure it all out yourself. You are reliant solely on yourself to land clients, market yourself, and show up. It is a whole different game. So basically, I have learned nothing from corporate life that prepared me for this! Even though I was in sales, I think it’s just the general sales skills that I developed being a B2B sales professional for 15 years understanding customer needs and their pain points, and then how I can help them overcome these rather than just feature-dumping.
For example, if you’re selling software, I’m not just telling them how this helps with a specific task; I help them understand how this helps them achieve their broader goals. The same applies when you sell to customers directly (end users). If they are corporate professionals, how does this help them succeed in their role and get that promotion? Because they don’t necessarily care that the company makes X amount more money when they use my software.
Ultimately, why do people show up on LinkedIn in the first place?
It’s because they want to achieve something.
Most likely, they want to use it as a channel to make more money, and they want more money because they want more freedom and want to chase their dreams. I always try to connect it back to the bigger picture.
Leverage The Exposure Effect
Often you will recommend your followers and subscribers to leverage the exposure effect with LinkedIn and content. What are tangible ways for marketing leaders to do this?
To quickly recap, the exposure effect (or mere-exposure effect) is an experiment that Robert Zajonc, a Polish psychologist, conducted in the 1960s. He found that the more often we hear or see someone, the more we rate those people as likeable, competent, and trustworthy. We also see actually from a Gartner study that trust is the number one factor when people make a buying decision. This is the same whether you sell B2C or B2B, because in the end, it’s still business-to-people.
There is always a human being making a buying decision, and every buying decision is first made emotionally and then justified logically afterwards with spreadsheets and data. What you really need to do as marketing leaders is understand how you can build trust with your potential customers.
The best way to establish that trust using the exposure effect is by being visible. LinkedIn is the perfect place because it allows sales representatives or executives to establish trust over time. They show up, showcase their skills and expertise by sharing content that displays how knowledgeable they are and how their products work (again, connecting back to how the product impacts people’s lives).
If you do that long enough by also showing your human, authentic, emotional side, it builds that trust.
Cut Through the Algorithm
When every update on LinkedIn could be seen as an ad, how do you cut through the algorithm and drive conversation and business conversion?
You need to show up as a human and not just as a robot promoting your company, your products, or your services. Share who you are:
What are your interests?
What are your hobbies?
Connect with people on a human, emotional level.
This is how you cut through the noise of the ads. Once you have built a bit more of an audience and shown up multiple times, you can then weave in bottom-funnel content.
If you think about content as a funnel, I always recommend:
Top-funnel content: ~70% - General industry insights, emotional/personal content geared towards the masses to grow visibility.
Middle-funnel content: ~25% - Designed to build trust; getting into the nitty-gritty of how you help customers achieve their dream goals using your products).
Bottom-funnel content: ~5% - The real call-to-action or hard sell.
Try to share as much top-funnel content as you can. Being overly “salesy” is only a fraction of the time.
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The Biggest Mistake on LinkedIn
What is the biggest mistake people make on LinkedIn right now?
Showing up too polished. Everyone is so transparent on LinkedIn; you show up with your real name, and everyone can see where you went to school, where you work, and who you are connected with (previous companies, current clients). Because of this, people are really scared to show up, so they stay in the “safe zone.”
Staying in the safe zone means content gets really, really boring overly polished, overly corporate. Everyone is terrified of saying the wrong thing, getting backlash, or being “cringe.” Because they put out boring content, it just doesn’t perform. Not in the world of AI we are currently in, where we are inundated with content.
Show up as your true, authentic self. Don’t worry if there is a typo in it. Don’t worry if you might get a bit of backlash you can always discuss it further in the comments or put out a follow-up post. If you are scared, simply frame it as, “This is my opinion, and I welcome a discussion around it; I want to learn.” That really helps you get over the fear of posting.
Mastering the Persona Bubble
You have made the point that you need to master the persona bubble. How would you recommend marketing leaders and CMOs align their profile and content to match their target audience bubble?
LinkedIn has confirmed (via Tim Jurka from the LinkedIn Engineering team, who designs the algorithm) that the platform decides whether your content will be distributed further based on:
How your profile is set up (your skills and experience).
The actual content you are sharing.
Who you are engaging with on LinkedIn.
If there is a mismatch between your profile setup, who you engage with, and what you talk about, the algorithm gets confused. You need to look at your profile and ensure your content matches it.
A QUICK TIP: Download your LinkedIn profile as a PDF (click the three dots on your profile), upload that generated CV into an AI tool, and ask, “What do you think this person is an expert in? Give me the top 5 themes.” See if those themes actually match what your content is about.
Everything, who you engage with, what you write about, and how your profile is set up should be geared towards your ideal customers.
This can be challenging if your ideal customers are in a different industry to yours (e.g., if you are an HR software company selling to accountants). You still need to state on your profile that you are a software developer, but it will be a bit trickier to be super clear to the algorithm.
Just try your best to stay out of the “tech bubble” and get into the “accountants bubble.”
Create A 3-Pillar Content Strategy
When you recommend using a balanced three-pillar content strategy, what are the three pillars to use, and what percentage breakdown would you recommend?
I recommend focusing on Business, Thought Leadership, and Personal content.
Business (Behind the Scenes): Team updates and what is currently happening. If you are a solopreneur like me, build in public. I publicly set a goal of hitting $100,000 for my launch, and I’m taking people on that journey. It’s like watching a Netflix show people are desperate to see the outcome! For larger companies, if you are raising funds (e.g., a £5 million round), take people on that journey. It creates hype, gets people talking, and opens up opportunities.
Thought Leadership: Showcasing your unique expertise and skills. If you are an HR software company, have your finance team talk about finance within the software industry, your legal team talk about legal issues, and your marketing team talk about marketing tech. Share your own unique lens and predictions for the future of your industry.
Personal: Establishing trust. Showcase who you are as a person. Do you have a dog? A family? What are your hobbies? Share lessons you’ve learned, vulnerable moments, or even if you recently got married.
The Split: Keep it evenly weighted at roughly 33% - 33% - 33%.
If you only share personal stuff, people might like you but won’t learn from you. If you only share thought leadership, they might learn from you but won’t remember or trust you.
High-Value Content Beats Likes
LinkedIn has recently moved away from surface-level likes. What are the best ways to craft high-value content to get out of your existing audience and network?
There are three crucial elements in today’s LinkedIn algorithm:
“Save-Worthy” Content: One of the key indicators for LinkedIn now is how many high-quality comments, saves, and sends (shares in the DMs) you are receiving. To trigger the “save” button, you need to include a step-by-step guide, a blueprint, or something highly actionable that people will want to reference later.
Authenticity: It needs to be unmistakably human. People must instantly see that a real person wrote it, not an AI.
Emotion: You need to trigger someone to feel something excitement, hopefulness, inspiration, motivation, or feeling seen and understood.
Become A News Distributor
One of your recent recommendations was to become a news distributor. How should someone in a senior position position themselves to stand out and add value?
LinkedIn wants to become a global news broadcaster. They want credible voices to talk about what is happening in the news because it is the best way to distribute information from various angles and expertise. If you write content about current events in your industry, it is typically heavily supported by the algorithm and might even be picked up by LinkedIn’s editorial team to be featured in their own news section.
Putting the phrase “The future of [Your Industry]” in front of your job title or content is incredibly powerful. It opens up discussions, shows you are thinking strategically outside the box, and proves you are in tune with where the industry is heading.
You Can Transfer Success to Substack
You have successfully transferred your LinkedIn success to your Substack. What are a few secrets you could share?
As a one-woman show, I don’t have time to completely create fresh content for both platforms from scratch.
My primary secret is recycling. I started on Substack by recycling my best-performing LinkedIn posts (the ones that performed incredibly well on LinkedIn naturally perform well on Substack too). I send out one comprehensive weekly newsletter, and then I write two to three short notes per day. These notes are largely motivational just giving people a quick check on my energy, a quick thought, or a brief lesson without going too in-depth.
I also started doing Substack Lives (webinars), which have performed really well.
Here is a recent deepdive from Alicia she ran on both Substack and LinkedIn:
Live video is incredibly important to connect with your audience and showcase what your product is all about.
The biggest mistake people make with live webinars is just demoing their product.
Instead, you want to deliver genuine value, thought leadership, and actionable insights. Leave the audience feeling like they learned something vital, which naturally leads them to your product or service. Work with a creator if your corporate lives are feeling a bit too boring; they know how to entertain and engage an audience!
Connect With Alicia or join her upcoming cohort starting in a couple of days
Have a great weekend and we will land in your inbox again next Friday!
Danny & Harry