Organic vs Paid Growth in LinkedIn – What Works Best for Personal Brand Building?
Kavita Saxena
Founder and CEO of DigiSparsh, Cur8digital, and ROI-India | Seasoned Entrepreneur with Nearly 2 Decades of Experience Across Asia and the Middle East | Frontrunner in Digital Marketing | Design and Development Enthusiast
In the words of Jeff Bezos, the Founder and Executive Chairman of Amazon, “A brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room.” There is a lot of buzz when it comes to building a brand for a business, a product, or a service. However, Personal Branding, i.e. building a brand for a person or an individual, is often an overlooked and neglected topic.?
Interestingly, several studies suggest that business growth is immensely impacted by the Personal Brand of the leadership team. The two are, in fact, deeply intertwined.
For example, studies have shown that:
?82% of consumers are more inclined to trust a business whose CEO and leadership team engage with the community on social media. (Source: GO-Globe)
?77% of customers have a higher likelihood of purchasing from a business whose CEO and leadership team are active on social media. (Source: GO-Globe)
With more than 1 Billion users across the world (Source: Hootsuite), LinkedIn is now a gold mine for those keen to make their Personal Brand stand out! However, Personal Branding on LinkedIn is much more than uploading a great resume or getting glowing recommendations from seniors and clients.
What does this mean?
To leverage LinkedIn for Personal Branding, first and foremost, the unique voice of the individual needs to be captured. Just like no two people can have the same fingerprint, similarly, no two individuals can have the same tone or style of communication.?
This unique voice then needs to be channelled through attractive, time-sensitive, and intriguing content that resonates with the target audience in a meaningful way. Purely informative content, for example, may not be enough to captivate the attention of the masses. Visually appealing content that blends relevant information with insightful storytelling combined with a dash of personal touch is a time-tested recipe for successful Personal Branding on LinkedIn.
Having said that, there are two key ways to enhance and grow a Personal Brand on LinkedIn – organic promotion and paid promotion.?
Organic promotion relies on spreading the content through regular posting, sharing the content with key people in one’s network through direct messaging, engaging actively through comments, posting in groups, using the appropriate hashtags, tagging others in the post, and so on.?
On the other hand, paid promotion includes ads and sponsored content on LinkedIn. This requires an additional advertising budget to make sure that the content being promoted pops up in the LinkedIn feeds of the people who are being targeted through advertising.
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One question, however, remains: Which of the above is the best way to go for Personal Branding? ???
Well, as an entrepreneur in the Digital Marketing space who has executed many Personal Branding projects, I can say one thing for sure – there are no rules. It all depends on your unique scenario and the specific results you are seeking.
My advice? Take a stage-wise approach and have clear goals. Below, I have mapped my own approach to stage-wise LinkedIn Marketing for Personal Brands:
? Stage 1: If you are just getting started with the process of building a Personal Brand, then it is best to stick to organic promotion for the first 2-3 months. Why? Because you are still figuring out what your audience wants and how best you can deliver it. Use this time to test the waters and keep track of what kind of posts are working the best. Also, if you don’t have enough connections right now, don’t worry. Keep adding more people as and when you can, and try to see how best to engage them with your content.
? Stage 2: Once you have a clear idea of the content strategy for your Personal Brand and the tastes and preferences of your audience, it’s time to consider investing in LinkedIn advertising, i.e., paid promotion. At the outset, start small. For example, pick a post that performed well organically. Now promote it with LinkedIn advertising and see if it works! Remember, pumping more money into LinkedIn ads might not be enough, the key lies in targeting the right audience with the right content at the right time.
? Stage 3: By the time you reach this stage, you probably already have a well-knit circle of followers on LinkedIn who appreciate your content and engage with you regularly. The goal now is to expand this circle, and hence, your approach must be a strategic combination of organic and paid promotion.?
For this stage, I have found it useful and effective to boil down my LinkedIn strategy into a series of questions and then find answers to those questions. Some of these questions are listed below:
I hope that the above tips and ideas help you strike the right balance between organic and paid promotion for Personal Branding on LinkedIn. However, if you are looking for more detailed insights or need a professional team to manage your Personal Brand, then please reach out to me. Our team at Digisparsh can help you with anything related to Personal Branding, even beyond LinkedIn.
Have you tried any organic or paid approaches to promote your Personal Brand on LinkedIn? I am eager to hear your experiences! Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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2 个月Kavita Saxena depends on the support
Executive Director -India & Area, Horton International
2 个月Both strategies can yield best results, and the best approach often depends on your specific goals and resources. Organic growth is ideal for businesses with limited budgets, regular quality content can help build loyal audience and branding as an industry leader. Organic posting can help foster quick engagement and promote community building without the pressure of sales. Building audience over time will require consistency, reach of audience likely to be limited. Paid campaigns will enable increase visibility to targeted audience, with fair precision and can be scaled up as planned. Paid campaigns can be expensive in the long run and needs to be guarded against the likely emergence of ad fatigue, if users tend to get desensitized to ads over time.