Show up and stand out: How LinkedIn presence builds trust and drives growth
How do you build trust with your audience? By consistently showing up and adding value. Jared Robin, CEO of RevGenius, is a LinkedIn regular with a unique style, a compelling story, and a clear point of view. This has helped him build a strong personal brand and connect with over 45,000 followers.
For leaders, managers, solopreneurs, and individual contributors, building a powerful presence on LinkedIn is a game-changer.
A HardNumbers study shows a strong link between social media presence and financial success for unicorn companies with active founders.
“Our report reveals that unicorn companies whose founders have the most LinkedIn followers secured over £763 million in total investment on average. This is over 20% more than the average total raised – £632 million – across the UK’s entire unicorn cohort.
“This shows that investors want to align with leaders who have a clear, compelling story. When the story resonates, investor buy-in is more likely.” [Source]
The compelling story needs to be told. We know building your personal brand is needed, and we know it works. What’s next?
Balancing act: How to start and stay consistent?
We’ve all been there struggling with:
- Finding time for consistent content creation
- Generating fresh, cool, and engaging content regularly
- Balancing personal authenticity with professional branding
- Engaging in a meaningful way
- Using AI in more elaborate ways than simply chatting with Chat GPT 🙂
Whether that’s a busy CEO, founder, manager, or IC, building a consistent and powerful personal brand is a full-time job.
Strategies to build your personal brand
That’s why we talked to four experts who shared their strategies for building a personal brand and engaging with their audience, all while using AI as a tool. Check out our session with Justin Simon, The Founder of the Distribution First podcast, Brianna Doe, the Founder and CEO of Verbatim, Chelsea Castle, The Head of Content and Brand at Close, and Blaine Bolus, the Co-Founder for Castmagic, or read the recap below.
Start with a strong point of view
“Be willing to take a stand and repeat it until it becomes a recognizable theme.” – Justin Simon
Having a clear and recognizable POV is the starting point in building your personal brand. The consistency in messaging and defining your unique value proposition will guide all your efforts. As Justin explains, the more you talk about the topic, the more it becomes ingrained in your audience’s minds. This clarity helps in establishing your voice and makes your content memorable.
How can AI help?
AI-powered tools like sentiment analysis and market research platforms can provide insights into what your audience cares about. This data helps you craft messages that resonate and differentiate you from the competition.This not only sets you apart but also gives your brand a solid foundation. Use AI tools to analyze market trends and audience preferences to refine your value proposition.
Castmagic has an iOS app that turns your thoughts into content — you can share your thoughts, and let the app transform them into multiple posts. You can also use the Content Sample feature to style your content like the influencers you follow on social media.
Having a clear “why” and an established POV helps in setting a clear direction and reducing content fatigue.
Be authentic. Always.
Authentic content is what truly resonates with your audience and builds trust. “Be clear on your ‘why’ and set boundaries to approach personal branding from a healthy perspective,” Chelsea Castle explains. Genuine engagement is key.
Balancing professional and personal brands helps with authenticity concerns.
Define the one word you want to be known for and focus on evoking the desired reaction from your audience.
How can AI help?
Personalization at scale: AI can help personalize your interactions at scale. Use it to analyze your audience’s behavior and preferences, allowing you to tailor your messages. This personalization helps build stronger connections and fosters trust. As Justin Simon points out, it’s about integrating your brand into everyday interactions without losing the personal touch.
Meaningful Engagement Avoid using AI for generic responses, especially in comments and direct interactions. Brianna Doe, the CEO and Founder of Verbatim stresses, “Creating content online and building a personal brand online doesn’t mean you can’t have boundaries.” Focus on meaningful, thoughtful engagements that reflect your genuine interest and expertise.
Store, Revisit, and Refine Your Ideas
Coming up with consistent content ideas can be challenging. Brianna Doe shares her approach:
“I use Notion to store and organize content ideas, categorizing them based on my content pillars.” Having a system in place ensures that you always have a pool of ideas to draw from.
Blaine, co-founder of Castmagic, recommends creating a library of high-performing content from other creators. “Building a swipe file can serve as inspiration for what to post and when,” he explains. This file can serve as a valuable resource for generating new ideas and understanding trends in your niche.
Capture and document first, and then fit those into ideas later
How can AI help?
Repurposing: Tools like Castmagic can help repurpose content from various formats, ensuring you get the most out of every piece of content you create. This means transforming webinars, podcasts, and articles into bite-sized social media posts, blog entries, and more. Imagine taking your raw thoughts from sales calls, meetings, or recordings and transform them into a variety of content types: social posts, newsletters, blogs, etc. You can turn any conversation into insightful leadership content.
Writing assistance: While there is a debate about using AI for direct content creation, it can be incredibly useful as a writing assistant. Chelsea Castle mentions using AI to “synthesize and analyze content” and improve the clarity and conciseness of your writing. Tools like ChatGPT can help refine your content, making it more engaging and easier to digest.
Automate to focus on connections
Automate to focus on connections. Identify where collaboration happens in your content workflow to optimize for both speed and authenticity.
Part of your job as a creator is being a curator of your own content
There’s no other way, we need to minimize manual effort but without losing the personal touch. Transcriptions, summarizing, scheduling, and content distribution can all be handled by tools but curation is key:
Curate and evaluate content before automating to avoid appearing inauthentic.
And by content we mean not only podcasts you were a guest at, your articles, the company’s webinars, and interviews but also: your calls, conversations with customers, community chats with your friends AND your own thoughts.
“Recording thoughts and conversations can create a multimedia library that can be repurposed into different content types.” [Justin Simon]
TL: DR Best Practices Cheatsheet
- Tap into your media library for evergreen ideas. Turn context into content.
- Keep it simple. Know what you want to be known for, how often you want to show up, your point of view, and who you want to connect with. Building a personal brand is all about showing up authentically.
- Record your thoughts and repurpose them as much as possible.
- Embrace authenticity and use AI as your assistant and sparring partner.
- Consider moving your audience from rented platforms to your own (like newsletters) and use AI for deep personalization.
How can Castmagic help in content creation?
RevGenius webinar session was powered by our partner Castmagic. It’s an AI-powered tool that makes it easy to create content from your audio and video conversations. It transcribes and summarizes key points from webinars, podcasts, and meetings, allowing you to quickly turn them into blog posts, social media updates, and newsletters.
Imagine a CEO who regularly speaks at industry panels and webinars. With Castmagic, these sessions can be transcribed and key insights extracted to create LinkedIn posts, a blog, and content for a company newsletter.
To give you an actionable plan and help with building your personal brand with AI we sat down with the Castmagic team to share the multiple ways you can use it — dive into the use cases here or check out our breakdown:
- Pages — Combine multiple recordings to extract and repurpose content into a 2000+ word article, newsletter, social post, and more.
- Customer Discovery — Record your sales calls and push them through the Customer Discovery Profile. Learn more about companies to come up with authentic write-ups.
- Courses — You can take the webinars and run them through the Courses Profile, get worksheets and quizzes, summaries, and cheat sheets, and even build out a course program.
- Podcast — make sure to repurpose your podcast once recorded into various formats: articles, interviews, courses, and social posts.
- Meetings — Record your meeting and get quotes, key points, and ideas listed. Let the AI organize the agenda and action items. Use the shared link to send the recap to the team. Perfect for inspiration, content posts, and more.
- iOS App — Start recording your thoughts. A 2-minute recording on your walk can turn into an endless supply of social content to build out your brand on Linkedin.
Remember that you can create your own prompts to repurpose any audio or video recording in your writing style and brand voice.
Sign up for a free trial and experience the magic of Castmagic!
Your personal brand is a reflection of your professional journey
As Jared Robin highlights:
“I get into dozens of conversations daily with community members, many of which are automatically recorded on Zoom. What comes out are so many thought-provoking ideas and concepts. Castmagic allows me to create content from that easily and repurpose it so the gems get captured and don’t die when the call ends. These conversations contribute to the brand I’m building.”
Your personal brand reflects your professional journey – make it impactful, authentic, and memorable. Don’t miss our upcoming webinars on marketing, sales, and GTM trends!