Top LinkedIn Marketing Strategies for Lead Generation and Thought Leadership

Judi Fox Top LinkedIn Marketing Strategies for Lead Generation and Thought Leadership

Top LinkedIn Marketing Strategies for Lead Generation and Thought Leadership Episode Transcript

Rich: My next guest is a LinkedIn top voice for marketing strategy. Plus, she is listed as a top 10 LinkedIn coach in Yahoo Finance and featured speaker at VidSummit, Social Media Marketing World, Social Media Examiner, Video Marketing World, People of Video, and on several top 100 marketing podcasts – you know, like this one. This isn’t even her first time on this podcast.

With over 18 years’ experience in business development and sales, she developed the LinkedIn Business Accelerator Method. Clients are implementing this LinkedIn method to achieve more business and over 1 million content views in just 90 days.

Today, we’re going to be looking at LinkedIn. Where it is today, how artificial intelligence fits into it, what you should be doing right now to help you win more business and grow with none other than Judi Fox. Judy, how are you doing today? I got so excited about this.

You got, for the people who aren’t watching the video, you’ve got your fox ears on, as you often do. You were born with a very cool name. I’ve got all my Spiderman stuff behind me.

And because you put on your ears, I put on my Spider Man hat, given to me by my good friend, Atiba de Souza. And it’s first time I’ve ever worn it. It’s just always sat on my shelf looking handsome. Now it’s actually on my head and I’m enjoying it. So welcome to the show, and what’s going on?

Judi: We are a fully branded show. So if you need to, you got to see the visual. Everyone listening, take a second, go look at our visual content that comes out from this episode because we got a lot going on and it is memorable. I remember how you lean into, just with knowing Agents of Change and having the Spider Man, it’s all connected.

Rich: I’ve always had that kind of thing for superheroes. I never really grew out of it. Got my Agents of Change mug here. I got to see you again speak at Jessika Phillips event, Social Media Week Lima. We’ve spoken there a couple of times now. I’ve spoken there a couple times, you’ve spoken each time I’m there. And you had a great presentation about LinkedIn.

But here’s the thing with you and LinkedIn that always boggles my mind, you almost never post. So how can you be such a superstar on LinkedIn if you’re not posting anything? You post occasionally, but talk to us a little bit about that strategy of how infrequently you post, but people are still turning to you as the LinkedIn expert.

Judi: I’m going to start with my mindset comes from a place of I studied chemical engineering. So just to give you the background, I have a very technical, logical process flow oriented mind. And on top of that, I got a master’s degree in business sustainability. So not just thinking about the environment when people hear the word ‘sustainability’, but also economics, societal sustainability, human sustainability. How do you last as a person? And I’ve translated that to, how do you last as a person online? Because the idea that every person on this planet wants to consume tons of your content, and that the only solution is volume – I need to post, post. That’s the language we’ve heard for a ton of years.

I’ve heard it from Gary Vaynerchuk a ton. Post three or more, more, more. And to me, it will always come back to a few quotes. We shared a couple of quotes that are powerful. One, which is if you make everything important, then nothing’s important. That quote always resonates with me.

And then when I think about LinkedIn, you’re asking your audience to like and comment and support you all the time. Especially if you post every day or multiple times a day. I dial people back to hit that million views in 90 days. I tell people once or twice a week post. Because your audience cares about their digital footprint online. They’re on LinkedIn to also get work, get a job, get business. They cannot look like they have all the time in the world to like and comment on every single post you create.

So if you slow it down and just even ramp up the quality of each post and think about a little bit more in the call to action and you spend a little more time on it, you’re better off doing two or three posts a week and only pulling on your ideal client and your audience to comment two or three times a week.

Rich: I will admit that I feel the pull to post more often. And I’ve moved away from almost every social media platform out there, with the exception of LinkedIn right now. There’s some platforms that are maybe considered to be social media, but of the big ones, I feel that pull.

So if you are saying I should post less. And now I probably post, I actually am posting right now one, two times a week because I’m so busy. But I have known to be known to post three to four times a week, maybe more on a very busy week.

Instead of posting more, what are the kinds of things that you’re recommending to your clients so that they can take the quality of their post or the engageability of their post to the next level?

Judi: Two things. You’re going to spend your time smart networking to the right people. Which means that can look like not just trying to get in front of the ideal client, but also get connected to parallel connections to your client. Maybe somebody that you know that might never hire you, but they will support you. They’ll send clients your way. They will recommend you for a podcast behind the scenes. When Rich and I can talk and then we have these side conversations, he might say to me, “Hey, do you know anyone that is in this space, in this world, that knows this expertise?” That is the power of that behind-the-scenes networking.

And to do that on LinkedIn really well is to map out. I’m at about 10 to 20 people that I want to stay connected, I want to stay well connected with for the next five to 10 plus years beyond. It’s sustainable, and many people can wrap their heads around the idea that you’re going to stay connected to people versus I just need to scroll this newsfeed that LinkedIn just randomly gives you that you have no control over.

I always say, take your power back. You can create your own custom news feed on LinkedIn now and build out with the filters a news feed that you can scroll of those 10 to 20 people and that’s it. So when you open up LinkedIn, your experience can truly just be those 10 to 20 people. And you make sure you’re liking, you’re commenting in a peer-to-peer way that is supportive but thinking long term.

Rich: So if I’m hearing you correctly, you’re really looking at this platform, and there’s no one way to look at LinkedIn or any social media platform. But what’s working for you is you’re not looking at this as a necessarily a thought leadership platform or a place to build up a giant audience. What you’re looking to do is to get business out of it by finding the right people to build your network that’s going to be much more powerful and will ultimately pay dividends down the road. Am I correct? Am I close?

Judi: So I love what you just said about not necessarily thought leadership. And I’ll say your comments, if you do them strategically, they are thought leadership. Your comments, if done well, and if you do narrow in on those 10 to 20 people, what ends up happening to me, it’s the equivalent of being your posts are you as a keynote speaker from the stage and your audience is in the audience listening or asking questions. They come up to the mic and they ask you a question. You are creating your own panel of experts to be on the stage next to you. So when you actually go out and comment, think that way. Think that I’m still a thought leader.

I love the panel discussions I’ve been on from the stage. Those still get me thought leadership exposure and business, and the way that you talk with your panel of experts you create can reflect really well into getting you more clients.

So I think it does both. I think it still grows your thought leadership as long as you’re not publicly chasing, commenting on everyone. That’s where you dilute your voice and your power of what you have to say. But if you know that somebody is a great person to look like you’re next to them on a public stage, that’s the people you want to create your virtual stage on LinkedIn with.

Rich: Interesting. All right. That’s some good stuff. I want to shift gears a little bit right now, because when I saw you present, the presentation spent a lot of time talking about the tools, the AI tools that are on LinkedIn and how people can use AI. So I’m curious how you’re using AI on LinkedIn right now, as well as what you’re recommending to your clients who may have different needs or desires on LinkedIn than you would.

Judi: The number one thing I’ll say is, I think of AI as a way to amplify your voice, not to take over your voice. So my favorite prompt or a phrase to add into a prompt, especially with every piece of advice I’m about to give you for how I use it for LinkedIn is, “Use my exact words, AI. Don’t overwrite what I’ve written and phrase it your way. Phrase it the exact way that it came out of my mouth.” And of course you can edit it from that, but if you’ve written it a certain way, it is ideal to stay as close to your voice as possible. So we can’t tell AI, “Help to write it.”

The power I’ve seen in supporting people with AI on LinkedIn is two ways. Number one, the AI can take that long form content, the content we’re doing right now, the words coming out of my mouth right now, can make a post. We’ve we have five or ten posts already just from the conversation we’ve had back and forth. That text from the transcript of our talk is the written part of the post. And we shouldn’t use AI to pull new words into it, but just to organize it so it flows. And then you can ask AI to either clean it up or tighten it, or you can ask it and prompt it to, “Can you make sure in this text of this post for LinkedIn, I don’t say the same thing twice.” I’m just saying a mic drop moment here and you can help me tighten up the messaging so it doesn’t ramble or it doesn’t go on and on about the same thing. So I just said the same thing twice, two different ways.

Rich: So when you’re talking about this specifically, are we talking about, I get to LinkedIn, I want to create some content on the site. And usually like I’ll write out a post and immediately LinkedIn is like, “Would you like AI to rewrite it?” And I’m always like, no, I just wrote it. I don’t need your help to rewrite it. I feel pretty good about my writing skills and my voice.

But what you’re saying is, this is what we’re talking about. Somebody creates content right within the LinkedIn platform, and then they have an option for AI to fix it or to rewrite it. And you’re giving it a prompt to do it. Or are you doing that outside with something like ChatGPT?

Judi: I do it outside with ChatGPT. I’ve tested LinkedIn’s tools, I have seen better results from outside tools like ChatGPT. I’ve tried other ones, I just ended up building out my own private ChatGPT, my custom one. And that one has more of my voice, and I was able to lean into that, which is helpful.

Rich: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I struggle with the LinkedIn AI. Only because I find that AI is incredible when you are weak in a skill. So before you and I started recording, I was talking about how much I love Fathom. And part of the reason is because I’m a terrible note taker and I can’t remember anything, but Fathom does that work for me. It makes me much better at it. But just using LinkedIn’s AI to rewrite something that I just already created, and think is pretty damn good. I’ve tried it a few times. It’s never been better.

Also, I’ve never met an AI that does good hashtags. Like it always just randomly crams three words together and puts a hashtag in front of it. So that’s not how I would use it. However, if I was a terrible writer and I could never start something or never really clean it up, I think that being able to use that as a crutch on LinkedIn is helpful.

But again, if you use it every time, you’re going to sound like everybody else who uses it as a crutch, too. And as we’re talking about Spider Man and the fox ears on top of your head, I think that branding is critically important. And it actually seems like it’s bubbling up again as importance for SEO and importance for social media. And you’re obviously leaning heavily into everything that’s fox as well.

Judi: Yeah. And people can over time sense when your account has become more AI supported or driven, especially if you really are leveraging it to create the original writing. That’s why I say amplify your voice with AI. If you’re stuck with a call to action, get AI to help you out. Give it the post you wrote and say, “give me 10 options for what you think I could ask the audience.” That way you get to brainstorm with AI, collaborate with AI. But it is not ideal to let it take over, because you’re messaging in your leadership on LinkedIn.

So yes, from thought leadership or even to close business, you have to have it be as close to you as possible. Because if we get on a call with you and you sounded amazing on your posts and then you cannot communicate in a clear way when we talk with you on the phone, that is a huge gap that you’re not going to make up. And people talk, especially if you are getting traction on LinkedIn and your posts are going viral enough, people behind the scenes will start saying, “Yeah, I did a call with them, and it wasn’t matching.” And people will say, do you vouch for that person? Did you work with them? It’s just not good for your reputation to let AI take over too much. It’s the amplifier.

The second thing AI can do behind the scenes, that’s really cool, is you can download your data from LinkedIn. So if you go into your account settings, account details, you can download all your direct messages, your connections, your posts. You can download your digital footprint on LinkedIn, and you can upload it into ChatGPT as a file and ask it to talk with that file.

For example, I’ve done it myself and I’ve said, “Can you identify 10 hot leads for me that maybe I didn’t catch along the way from my direct messages that you identify are the right ideal client from both the inbound and outbound of lead conversation and business generating?” You can create entire conversations with AI that you can start dialing in closer and closer to who you should be connecting with, who have you had the best success closing, and you can have these conversations if you have the data.

Rich: Interesting. I have downloaded my content before, and I used it to train AI in speaking like me. But I hadn’t done it in the way that you’re considering it or you’re using it, which is absolutely clever. So we can use AI to amplify our voice by helping us create content. Again, not starting from scratch, but really improving it. And then keep making sure that it still has our voice in it.

And to your point about if there’s too much of a disconnect between your AI content and your real-world content, I feel the same way about headshots. I’m seeing a lot of people use AI enhanced headshots these days. I’m afraid to, because I think people will be like, oh my God, he is one handsome, young looking fellow. And then they meet me in real life, what a disappointment. For me, I think there’s an interesting thing where you might post something with your AI enhanced headshot on it. But if you’re using that, it’s almost like you’re catfishing somebody. That’s my opinion. I know other people might disagree, but that’s one of my concerns too, is a lack of authenticity when we’re leaning too heavily into AI.

Judi: Everything, whether it’s thought leadership, whether it’s business, whether it’s getting a job and getting an opportunity, climbing the ladder in your company, it sends a signal of distrust when you have a gap like that. So I’ve experienced the same thing.

Maybe somebody has a headshot from too long ago, even if it wasn’t AI or filters. Because filters, I even mentioned, I was like, I’m double checking I don’t have filters on. So the power of filters makes us feel better mentally to create content, but it can hurt you when we just want the realness. We didn’t, we did not need the smoothed out, perfect filter, no issues on your face. Because that’s not reality. And when we meet you in person, which hopefully we do, we feel like we’re meeting the same person.

Rich: Yeah. I recently read some research that showed that when people used AI to help them with a specific task, AI did help them become more creative, like a creative task, individually. But when they looked at it over a large group, the amount of ideas were actually diminished.

Because AI is great. Again, helping that bottom half get to the top half. But if you’re already somebody who has an opinion, has a voice, I’m just concerned that leveraging AI too much or using AI in the wrong ways is going to dull your edge. And suddenly you’re not the most interesting person in the room and you don’t have new ideas. You’re just basically saying the same thing that everybody else who’s leaning too heavily on AI is doing as well. So I think that there’s got to be that balance in there. There’s got to be that brand. There’s got to be that personality if you want to succeed.

Judi: Yeah. I also really like what you said about the edge. Because I do sometimes wonder, I think we all wonder, is there something happening out in the world in my niche, in my industry, that I need to be paying attention to. Or there’s advice that maybe something has changed out there or somebody’s figured something out.

So there’s a few people, just like I told you, I create a list of 10 to 20 people. I’ve tapped a few people who I think do try to stay ahead and are my peers in a sense of I want to hear what they’re saying. What are they saying on a podcast? I found AI to help me summarize where I think they’ve been on a podcast. I grab the transcript and I put it in ChatGPT, and I chat with it and I say, hey, is there anything happening in here around hosting strategy? What advice did they have around direct messaging? Maybe something’s changed there. Do you think there is advice in here that your experience being in my private, my custom ChatGPT that I haven’t told you that you think is interesting? You can just ask it a ton of curious questions, and I love that part.

Rich: Absolutely. And I’m not obviously dissing AI. I use it multiple times throughout the day. I find it to be critically important. I think the more you use it, you start to see where it can help you. And as we were talking about, maybe taking away some of your edge, and I mean edge in a good way.

Judi: Yeah.

Rich: So I don’t know if there’s anything more on AI specifically that you’re using on LinkedIn. I also know that you were talking about some of the things that are starting to emerge, and maybe where LinkedIn is putting more of its focus, so you would recommend we pay more attention to that. What are some of those things?

Judi: I will say one more thing with AI before we wrap it up. But the way you do one thing in business is the way we think you’re going to do everything. So too many people have leaned into creating these AI images. And we know it’s AI images, they’re not trying to pass them off as if they’re not AI. But be careful with that.

Because then if we think your AI images are your posts and your content, we could assume you are leaning too heavily into AI. So I would be very careful not to do it a ton, not to make all your newsletter images, cover images to be AI generated, because that will send the wrong signal. We won’t click in and we won’t like that content, because we don’t want to risk liking too much AI driven content. So be careful with that.

The other thing happening on LinkedIn is I always will say LinkedIn’s a cargo ship, other platforms are speedboats. The speedboats are out there zooming and zipping and doing all different things. And LinkedIn’s over here going, we’re still loading the data and cargo ships on our big freighter here. And what’s happening is if you see something happening on Instagram, we’ve got now short form video reels is trying to compete with TikTok. The short form video world is just now hitting LinkedIn in a big way.

So the advice going forward is things you see going popular will happen on LinkedIn at least a year, maybe six months to a year later. So you’re going to be well ahead of the curve on LinkedIn, because it just hit LinkedIn that short form video, it’s still in beta but they’re creating their own scrollable video, short form newsfeed on LinkedIn. And the thing that’s happening in the newsfeed is they’re featuring videos.

It reminds me of when I go over to Facebook and it’ll have a scrollable to the right, not a scrollable up and down, but they’ll give videos like Reels basically that you want to watch, or short video. Not YouTube shorts, but short videos that you want to watch. Do you know what I mean? In the Facebook newsfeed. That’s what LinkedIn’s doing. And that’s resulting in people getting millions of impressions within one week. So uploading a short video right now.

Rich: How do we do that? Is there anything that I need to do different, is there a ratio that I need to do? Or is it just a regular post that I go into LinkedIn and I’ve got a video, I assume that I can pre-record it and do any editing I might want to do, and then I just upload it? Is there anything else I need to do to say, this should be in your real section, or your short form video, or your vertical video section?

Judi: Right now, because it is in beta, I would just tell people to go make sure their app on their phone for LinkedIn is the most up to date version. So that way you do have the beta version. I don’t know if they’ve rolled it out to everyone. Almost everyone I’m talking to has access right now, and it is showing up in that part of the newsfeed.

I think the bar is so low or available that almost every video, if you’ve got a following of even a couple hundred to a thousand people, they’re pushing those videos out. They want those to get visibility.

I would say the best thing for you is that make the video interesting right at the beginning. We all know the first seven to even three seconds matter. So start it out not branding it with a logo or having a blank screen, start with humans on the screen, real people having a real conversation. Cut right into the conversation, no context, just give it to us because that will catch people’s attention on LinkedIn.

Then the text that goes with it, I would make the text pretty light, not a super heavy text post. Because the text of that post is not going as far. It’s showing up just like on TikTok, it’s at the bottom. It’s a little bit readable, but it’s not the highlight. The highlight is the video. People are being encouraged to watch the video. And if you can have transcripts of what you’re saying transcribed on and you have the words on there, that can also help to just send it over a little bit more over the edge of visibility.

Rich: And so this is something, do you know, does this show on the desktop too, or is this primarily being shown on the mobile devices?

Judi: I saw it first on the mobile device. I have not seen it on my desktop rollout yet. The beta version of the scrollable newsfeed is only on my cell phone. So that’s why I tell people you want to make sure your own app on your cell phone is up to date. Even if you upload the video on your computer, on your desktop, it still would show up on your cell phone.

Rich: Awesome. I’m definitely going to make sure I have the most… I was looking on my phone. I didn’t see any videos, but I didn’t scroll very far. So I’ll have to check that out after we finish up today.

What else, what other tips right now would you give to people who are really looking to leverage LinkedIn in 2024?

Judi: I will always say the power of LinkedIn is to engage and comment. If you want more comments, go out and give more comments. That’s just the normal advice I’m going to tell everybody. And the comments on LinkedIn are very visible. Like way more visible than any other platform.

I would say maybe Tik TOK comments, if you go viral with the TikTok, your comment is visible, but LinkedIn is really powerful with commenting. So that is still a really smart strategy.

And then the next one, 2024 the power of LinkedIn newsletters and podcasting or YouTube with your LinkedIn newsletter. I would say podcasting and YouTube with your LinkedIn newsletter is a powerful combination. Because if you want to engage more than what you could say in a short post, for example, you can leverage those newsletters. And I have been running a LinkedIn newsletter group. And out of my most recent clients, I have six people with the top blue badge, that top voice, blue top voice, if you know what I mean. That’s where the bigger names have that, like a Sarah Blakely or Gary Vaynerchuk, any bigger name has that. And six of my clients recently got those, and it hinged on having a newsletter. And specifically a newsletter that connected to podcasting or YouTube.

Rich: All right. I’ve been saying since the last time we talked several years ago that I really am going to get going on this LinkedIn newsletter, but this time I promise I will get it started by the end of this year for sure.

Judi, always just so many great ideas and I love seeing what you’re doing. If people want to follow you, if people want to check you out, if people want to learn from you, where can we send them?

Judi: The best place is on LinkedIn, just go to J U D I F O X. And I always appreciate a follow on my hashtag, #FoxRocks.

Rich: Awesome. And we’ll have those links, of course, in the show notes. Judi, thank you so much today.

Judi: Thank you. It was wonderful.

Show Notes:

Judi Fox knows the secret sauce when it comes to helping her clients position themselves as thought leaders and authorities in their niche on LinkedIn through her LinkedIn Business Accelerator Method. Be sure to follow her on LinkedIn for all of her tips and expertise.

Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.

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Top LinkedIn Marketing Strategies for Lead Generation and Thought Leadership Summary

Key Takeaways

How to Maximize LinkedIn for Business Growth Using Smart Strategies and AI

1. Post Less, But Post Smarter

2. Focus on Smart Networking, Not Just Followers

3. Thought Leadership on LinkedIn: Quality Over Quantity

4. Using AI to Amplify, Not Replace, Your LinkedIn Marketing

5. Best Practices for LinkedIn Posting

Final Thoughts

Top LinkedIn Marketing Strategies for Lead Generation and Thought Leadership Episode Transcript

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