Episode Summary
The past seven months have been a whirlwind for Nick Bennett. In March, he began building his personal brand on LinkedIn by commenting on others’ posts and sharing his own content. Within six months, he grew his network to 10,000 followers.
What got Nick started on crafting his personal brand in the first place? A simple LinkedIn challenge from a former colleague.
“I was really the only one that kind of stuck with it,” Nick says. Along the way, he learned that consistency was critical: “If you’re going to do it, you have to do it consistently. You have to invest time into it if you want it to be successful.”
On this episode of Tech Qualified, Nick, the Director of Field Marketing in North America at Logz.io, shares about his experience in all things personal branding.
For Nick, the most significant thing to come out of this initiative is the community of like-minded people he now feels connected to.
“I just want more people to join my community, to engage in the content that I put out there. … Going forward, my only goal is to continue to put out content that adds value and to grow the number of people that follow this journey,” he says.
Guest Profile
- Name: Nick Bennett
- What he does: As the Director of Field Marketing in North America at Logz.io, a company that provides log management and log analysis services to engineering teams, Nick develops and executes field and cross-channel marketing strategies.
- Company: Logz.io
- Noteworthy: “I am still learning every single day from a lot of other people that do it [their work] really, really well — but I think that I've learned a good amount along the way. ... The more people that we can kind of get to tell their stories, the better, I think.”
Key Insights
- Nick explains that to build a personal brand, you have to be consistent. You cannot be afraid to post regularly, even daily, and put yourself out there with content. This, however, requires an extra time commitment on top of your work because you cannot post something and then disappear. Consistency is also important for engagement. If people are interacting with your content and you aren’t responding, they’re not going to want to invest their time in you anymore.
- Engagement is the best way to grow your network. For Nick, this was clear before he even began posting his own content. He spent a lot of time commenting on posts from people in marketing and sales that he wanted to interact with and that he felt could be a valuable part of his network. “That was helpful, too, because then we would connect, and it would just add another person to my network who was like-minded,” he says.
- Having a community is essential for Nick. In fact, he recently created his own, bringing together industry professionals of different backgrounds to foster a network for growth and mutual sharing. Within the community, there are various ways to interact with other members and learn from them or start conversations. Nick shares, “It's a great way to connect with other people. I’ve learned so much about other people just through this, but it has also allowed me to build my network, too, because those are exactly the people I want to be connected to.”
Episode Highlights
- Finding what resonates with your audience
“The first thing I wanted to do was figure out what I even was going to talk about. When I first started, I started talking about field marketing because that’s what I do, that’s what I knew. When I started off, for the first couple of months, I was only getting five likes, I was getting few comments. The engagement wasn’t there, but I knew that you had to have the patience to go through that. … Once I figured out what I wanted to talk about, it was just coming up with ideas and figuring out what’s the message that I want to get out there now.”
- Personalize messaging even if customers have the same end goal
“I post about once a day. Occasionally, I’ll throw a second one on there, but I never prewrite anything that I post. I will come across an idea and I’ll just keep it in my head and try to keep all of the content that I do write to about five minutes because if I start to think about it and start to overanalyze everything, I think, ‘Am I using the wrong words here?’ ‘Am I actually getting my message across?’ What I’ve learned is if I just put it up, there is always an edit button.”
- Reevaluate your success metrics
“If I could have a post that has maybe 10 reactions on it but a hundred comments, I would take that any day of the week because at least people are putting the time into actually reading it and adding value. And it’s a great place to crowdsource ideas and answers for things that maybe you have questions about.”
- Great content gets straight to the point
“I always try to end any post that I do with some type of question. I realized that has helped drum up the most engagement. If you’re putting something at the bottom, like ‘Do you agree?’ or ‘What would you do differently?’ — basically posing some type of question in that format, it gets people thinking. They see that piece at the very end and they say, ‘I want to leave something.’”
- Great content gets straight to the point
“I’m interested to see how marketers and other people are going to be using this. For me, I’m going to keep it real. I’m not going to try to hide behind some fancy thing and say, ‘Everything is great.’ I’m going to show you my real life. I’m trying to keep it real, maybe it’s tips and tricks about personal branding or marketing, maybe it’s showing me running around with my two-year-old. We’ll see. I hope it doesn’t become another Facebook where things just get flooded. So far, people have done a pretty good job, but I’m interested to see where marketers take this from a creative aspect to the next level.”
- Marketing as the central hub of your organization
“I try to connect with a lot of these younger people, whether they’re in high school or college, to be able to give them feedback and advice on what to do to build their personal brand so that this next generation of the workforce is just that much more armed.”
