A few months back, a question bugged me. I kept going in circles, intellectually trying to solve it, with no progress. The question is simple—almost too simple—but as I explored it further, I realized that there is a ton of depth here.
The question – Why do Founders and CEOs create their personal brands on LinkedIn?
Why should they even bother?
My quest eventually led me to discover a very important insight. It’s something that I wish I had been told earlier. But here I am, back from the quest, ready to share my findings.
The best part? A personal brand can be optimized for multiple goals. And you can pick the goals that resonate with you.
Let’s begin.
- The “Functional Benefits” of building a personal LinkedIn brand
The functional benefits are those we can touch and feel, not the abstract ones. These are the tangible benefits you and your business get – stuff you can put on an excel sheet.
An effective LinkedIn brand facilitates more, deeper conversations with your ICP (Ideal Customer Persona). LinkedIn’s search filters are quite awesome at helping you find your ICP and connect with them.
More conversations -> More leads -> More clients.
Deep relationships with your ICP also reduce long B-to-B sales cycles. If you know the decision maker in the organization (or even the influencer), you are ahead of your competition who is trying to work with the same prospect. Yes, B-to-B selling is driven by human connection.
Magnetically pulling employees
The last functional benefit (but probably the most important of all) is that a LinkedIn personal brand magnetically pulls potential employees to your brand—not just another average Joe, but employees who deeply connect with your organization’s mission and the change you are trying to make.
Better employees -> More revenue.
So the question is – Are you building a brand for functional benefits?
- The “Emotional Benefits” of building a personal LinkedIn brand
But it’s not just about Excel sheets, is it?
Having an effective Linkedin brand gets you predictability of leads. Instead of wondering where your next lead will come from, a personal brand pulls leads toward your brand.
But again, the emotional benefits are beyond the predictability of leads.
There is a certain, umm, I don’t know how to put it….
Sharing ideas online brings a certain satisfaction. It refines your thinking. Making sense of the mess in your head and putting out your thoughts for feedback brings joy.
As you put your content out there, you become better thinkers, and your expertise deepens.
For me, personally, the emotional benefits are much more attractive than the functional ones. Sure, all the leads that I have attracted have come from LinkedIn. But even if LinkedIn does not bring me any leads, I would continue publishing there.
The happiness of sipping coffee as I play with my thoughts and create something meaningful… it’s priceless.
The question is, “Are you building a brand for these emotional benefits?”
- Social benefits
There is a feeling that we all crave…
The feeling of being ‘seen and understood.’
Imagine someone comes to you and says, “Hey, your LinkedIn post helped me a lot!”.
I don’t know the science, but I am sure it does something in our brains. A chemical is released that makes us feel good. It’s like being hit by a cool breeze on a rather warm, sunny afternoon.
My hypothesis is that there is some assurance that the brain gets.
“You are not an idiot after all. Screw all the others who thought that you were an idiot!”
Sure, this craving also has a dark side. We do not want to be fashion influencers who attach their self-esteem to the number of followers they have. But we can always use this feeling to build genuine, deep trust with our audience.
But which goals should I choose?
My therapist tells me that I am a very binary thinker. The world exists in black and white. When we choose to build our brands, however, it’s never this or that.
It’s not either/or. It’s and.
You don’t need to pick. You can do all 3. Think of it as three dials that you can turn to the degree you like.
Some might want to create this personal brand purely for business reasons (functional goals), while others find greater joy in creating it for emotional reasons. Someone could also be doing it for social reasons.
To summarise:
We can build a personal brand for functional, emotional, and social reasons. Fortunately, we don’t have to pick one. We pick all three and then adjust them to whatever degree we are comfortable with.
Work with me:
If you want to work with me as a LinkedIn ghost-writer, write to me at pranav@pranavkale.com or pranavkale120@gmail.com