Grow your B2B business faster by establishing your personal brand (and leveraging LinkedIn)
For people to buy from you, they need to trust you. So the question is: How can you establish that trust quickly and start making some money?
I’m the founder and CEO of lempire, a French B2B SaaS company that I grew from $1,000 to $150,000,000 in valuation in less than four years, with zero funding.
A huge contributor to the success of my company and the rapidity of its growth was my personal brand.
In this article, I’ll share my 5-step process that you can use to build your own personal brand and accelerate your business’ growth.
Invest time in building your personal brand
When I first started my business in 2018, I was sending tons of emails to prospects, but I kept receiving the same (harsh!) rejections. 🥲
A few years later, I was the one receiving hundreds of messages from people each month, wanting to purchase my software products, collaborate and even invest tens of millions of dollars into my company.
All of that thanks to my personal brand.
Before diving deeper into the advantages of personal branding, let’s take a step back. When you do sales, you believe you can help your prospect solve a specific problem they have.
But for them to allow you to help them, they need to trust you.
Building trust between your prospect and yourself involves targeting, credibility, and messaging:
- Targeting involves having a deep understanding of your customers' needs and the problem you’re solving for them.
- Having credibility will help convince your prospects that you’re an expert in the field they need help in.
- Messaging is how you make them understand that you are their best option to help them solve their problem; not your competitors
As you might have guessed, personal branding is all about establishing your credibility as an expert in a specific field.
Follow this 5-step process to set up and build your own personal brand
Here are 5 steps you can follow to get your personal brand going and set your business up for faster growth:
- Identify the framework of your personal brand
- Build a LinkedIn profile that stands out (for B2B)
- Write compelling posts
- Engage with relevant content creators
- Stay consistent
Step 1: Identify the framework of your personal brand
The first step is to identify the framework of your personal brand that will guide everything else. It consists of the following:
- The mission you’re trying to accomplish by building your brand
- The audience you want to reach
- The topic you want to talk about
- Your personal backstory
You need to be as specific as possible on those elements since they define the foundations of your brand.
Also, don’t forget that you’ll never achieve complete expertise in any field, so don’t wait for the “perfect time” to launch your personal brand, because that simply doesn’t exist.
Even if you’re still learning, you are one step ahead of someone who needs to discover what you learned yesterday.
Take my example for the framework of my personal brand:
My mission is to help people and businesses grow.
Therefore, my target audience is entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs who want to start or grow their own companies more efficiently.
To help them reach their goal, the topics I talk about are:
- Entrepreneurship
- Finding your passion and purpose
- Building your business from scratch
- Leveling up as a CEO through time management & self-development
On a deeper level, my goals are also to level up myself as an expert in my field and as a human being, and to create awareness for my company.
Now let’s talk about creating your personal backstory.
The best tip I can give you to help you create your backstory is to find a way for your audience to relate to you. Of course, everyone is different, but there is one thing that’s very relatable to anyone: overcoming an obstacle.
A good backstory consists of:
- Where you started
- What people thought about it
- What changed
- Your struggles
- Your plan
- Your achievement and change
Your backstory will help you stay consistent in your posts regarding storytelling and writing style, and you’ll be able to find inspiration for future content.
Step 2: Build a LinkedIn profile that stands out
If you’re trying to build a B2B company, I recommend you build your personal brand on LinkedIn.
Here’s why:
- LinkedIn is a business-oriented social media platform
- The audience on it is huge, with many different interests such as copywriting, sales, growth, product, and so on. Whatever your domain of expertise is, you can find your target audience.
- The LinkedIn algorithm allows you to reach a lot of people outside of your connection network very easily.
- Finally, 99% of LinkedIn users do not create any content. This means that you could be part of the 1% of creators on the platform. Hence, you’d have a vast potential to grow an influential audience.
At lempire, working on our personal brands on LinkedIn helped us reach 20M people monthly, significantly contributing to growing the company from $1,000 to a $150,000,000 valuation in less than four years.
It is essential that you make sure it is clear, well-organized and eye-catching.
The three most important components of your LinkedIn profile are your profile picture, your cover photo, and your headline.
Let’s start with your profile picture: Choose a professional and recent profile picture that showcases your personality.
You should use a bright background to catch more attention and stick with the photo you choose to make it easy for your audience to recognize you when they’re scrolling through their feed.
⚙️ Tool tip: Use Profile Picture Maker to turn any photo into a catchy profile picture.
As for your LinkedIn cover, here are the three most important things to keep in mind:
- Keep it simple (don’t add too much text)
- Showcase your work/company
- Add a clear CTA
This will help your audience understand exactly who you are and what you can do for them, without having to scroll at all.
Check out these two examples for inspiration:
LinkedIn Cover photo example #1: Brandshift
[CTA] - [company name]- [value proposition]
LinkedIn Cover photo example #2: lempire’s Head of Marketing, Roxana
[company logo] - [social proof] - [CTA]
⚙️ Tool tip: use Canva to build your own LinkedIn cover with 100+ ready-to-use templates.
Lastly, you need to create a catchy headline for your LinkedIn profile. Think of it like a "mini sales pitch" to your readers:
- "This is who I am"
- "This is what I do"
- "And this is what you can expect to hear about from me"
It is very important that your headline is clear and not self-centered, but instead answers the question: “wWhat’s in it for my audience?”
Check out these three examples, you can use the structure below each example to create your own headline 🙌
The [differentiation + what you do] for [audience]. [what you’ll get by following]
I help [target audience] achieve [specific goal] in [timeframe] while [secondary goal] | [position]
I help [audience] do [thing] | [position] at [company]
Step 3: Write compelling posts
You can follow many different copywriting structures, but I recommend you train with simpler ones at first.
For example, Justin Welsh uses the AIDA structure, which consists of 4 parts:
- Attention
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
Let’s take an example of one of his posts to illustrate how you can use that structure:
Attention: Catch your reader’s attention in the first sentences of your post.
Interest: Make your reader interested in what you say.
Desire: Build desire by sharing your content’s value proposition.
Action: Make the reader take action.
Step 4: Engage with relevant content creators
A big part of personal branding is to engage with content creators as it significantly boosts your visibility.
You can find existing content creators who post about your subject of choice, follow them and engage with their content on a regular basis.
It’s important to remember here that quality > quantity. Sharing comments like “I agree!” or “Great post!” are quick and easy to write, but they won’t help you position yourself as an expert.
Instead, focus on adding value to the posts you engage with. For example, add something to the post that you think was missing or politely disagree with the publisher to spark a friendly debate.
Spend 30 minutes per day engaging with 3-5 posts relevant to your audience and I assure you that you will steadily grow your audience.
⚙️ Tool Tip: use Taplio’s “engage” feature to engage with relevant posts 10x faster
Step 5: Stay consistent
Make building your personal brand a habit and stick with it for at least six months.
💡Tip: Add a one-hour slot to your calendar that repeats every day at the same time. Make it a habit to use that time every single day to write your own content and engage with relevant content of the creators you’re following.
If you focus on building your personal brand about something you’re passionate about, I can promise you that you will boost your growth.
Be patient, stay consistent, and don’t give up. Very soon, your results will speak for themselves 🔥
I’ve created a free course to help you build your personal brand. It contains a personal Notion workspace and a database with hundreds of post templates as well as ready-to-use hooks and CTAs. You can sign up for free here.
Cheers,
G.
Thanks a lot for your sharing. Can you share some content ideas that can help newbies build their personal brand and establish trust with their audience? What are some useful sources of ideas we should read to always be presence on social media?
I have the same question
I still remember how LinkedIn was a nightmare for me when I was struggling to get a job. People used to say that major hiring is done through LinkedIn and not through recruitment processes. But for some unknown reason, LinkedIn was not responsive to me at all. Since then, I have been away from LinkedIn but recently when I started focusing on personal branding, I realised how much of an impact LinkedIn can create in me achieving my personal branding goals.
The way you have explained is on point and aligned with my own research. I am glad to be validated through this article.
@HassanMunj 🙏❤️
Spot on Guillaume!
I'd like to add
Commenting on relevant posts can actually get you better reach than posts
Having a system to reach out to people who sent you a request greatly helps in generating meetings
Joining whatsapp / discord / slack groups of your ICP makes a huge difference in the engagement
Real life events matter more than indiehackers think they do! One free event / webinar can help you connect with 150-200 people on Linkedin who stay part of your loyal audience
1 good post per week is enough! But try to add 200+ connections every week who are either content leaders / competitors / ICP.
Bonus: Never change your profile picture periodically. People no longer remember the names of everybody or brands. (For example I remember your name starts with G but I can remember Lemlist more easily, and more on how your face looks from YouTube.)
I got yellow.ai, Google and Decathlon to try my tool using the exact same steps and now I run a successful agency (inboxpirates.net) doing the same so I can assure everyone that this strategy works but it pays off over time
If you're consistent for 5+ months, it pays off massively!
Thanks for sharing @goforbg! Totally agree on the physical events part, we're currently organizing two events per week in our HQ in Paris to help people & businesses meet, learn from each other and grow together and it adds so much value to everything that's happening online 🚀
I never really think to use Linkedin for growth, but totally makes sense for B2B. I appreciate the profile rundowns!
@fleur_inthecity 🙏❤️
Great post. Thanks a lot!
Is a cliché when we heard "you need to know your niche..."
Until we don't dive into what those group of people could want, we won't see it.
I thing we must stop thinking about niche, groups, buyer shities and hermetic schemes.
They and we are persons. We need stuff for a time all the time.
So my advise is get the balance point between you know to do very well and the chance into people who need it.
Thank you for sharing your experience. I'm a solopreneur just started the sponsorship management tool for B2B influencers.
https://www.loopconnect.xyz/
I always have thought to build my own personal brand,,, and your post is inspiring me a lot!
Start to change my LinkedIn profile lol
LinkedIn used to be my worst nightmare when I was job hunting. Despite its reputation for being the go-to platform for major hiring, I couldn't seem to get any traction. I gave up and walked away from it entirely. But recently, when I decided to focus on my personal branding, I rediscovered LinkedIn's immense potential. It's amazing how a change in mindset can reveal a completely new perspective. Now, I can confidently say that LinkedIn has become a game-changer in helping me achieve my career goals.
Thanks for sharing this @guillaume_lemlist , it's absolutely gold!
I have been following your journey and have done the Personal Branding Course as well and it has been working really well for me. Have also tried Lemlist for my startup's cold outreach. I am just curious or rather stuck with a constant thought that how can we generate ideas and content that is of true value add to the audience. How do you and folks at Lemlist do it? Thanks
Actually I really want it but having hardship to start it. It is due to not being sure on what the "compelling" post actually is. I hesitate on it.
Your personal brand is the fuel that can ignite your B2B growth engine 1,000%.
thanks for the information
Awesome Id never seen this AI picture profile tool. I just used it free and have lots of cool shots to change up my profile picture thanks mate
This is amazing! I had to idea I should have build myself as a brand on linkedin
Awww. thanks! I will follow that pattern!
You can do more than target a B2B audience. You are building your brand for any endeavor, and it will follow you from project to project and job to job.
When considering your main topical focus, don't choose a niche -- choose an obsession. Something you will be highly motivated to think about and post about all the time, whether you are getting results or not.
Great list of steps for building a personal brand! Here are some additional tips to consider:
Identifying the framework of your personal brand is key to building a strong foundation for your brand. This includes understanding your unique value proposition, target audience, and messaging. By defining these elements early on, you'll be able to create content and messaging that resonates with your audience and helps you stand out in a crowded market.
LinkedIn is a great platform for building a personal brand, especially if you are targeting a B2B audience. A strong LinkedIn profile can help you establish yourself as an expert in your field and attract new business opportunities. In addition to having a complete and up-to-date profile, consider regularly sharing industry news, insights, and original content to showcase your expertise and thought leadership.
Writing compelling posts is a key part of building your personal brand. This involves creating content that is informative, engaging, and relevant to your target audience. Consider using a mix of formats, such as blog posts, videos, and social media updates, to keep your content fresh and interesting.
Engaging with relevant content creators is a great way to build relationships and expand your reach. This involves commenting on other people's posts, sharing their content, and collaborating on projects or events. By engaging with other thought leaders in your industry, you can expand your network and establish yourself as a trusted authority.
Finally, staying consistent is crucial for building a strong personal brand. This means regularly creating and sharing content, engaging with your audience, and staying up-to-date with industry trends and news. By consistently showing up and delivering value to your audience, you'll build trust and credibility over time, which can lead to more business opportunities and growth for your brand.
I really enjoyed reading this. I am a software engineer and I recently launched a subscription based design service company https://flatfeedesign.com . I plan to use this methods you have shared to create my personal brand but my interests are both in entrepreneurship and software engineering. Like I did like to talk about cloud native applications and software engineering practices and also talk about my business. So I am thinking how do I combine both interests and still be able to build a personal brand that can help me scale my business and build trust with my audience rather than confusion. Any advice I did really appreciate?
Great question @PorH! What I suggest is that you document your journey of launching your company, with some posts being focused on the technical part of engineering your software. This way you can integrate both and it's relevant for an audience who's in the same domain / who wants to launch in that same domain. What do you think? 😊
Thanks a lot for the advice. I think it’s great because I did be talking about Business and engineering altogether. It’s going to be a tough one but I will pull through.
I regret not making a personal brand on LinkedIn. I often think about making videos and posts and content but I often procrastinate. also, I want to make youtube content.
Anyways great post. will try it for sure
You can start now. Just start where you're at.
It's definitely not easy @aaricevans but it sure pays off if you stay consistent 🙌
LinkedIn (as cringe as it can) is a SLEEPER platforms👇
· 675+ million users worldwide.
· 303 million monthly active users
. Additionally, 44% of LinkedIn users take home more than $75,000 per year, which is above the national median in the US.
Source Kinsta & Hubspot (can't post links here)
But point being LinkedIn is a MASSIVE opportunity for growth marketing if done right.
Definitely @ByteSizedGTM! Only 1% of people on LinkedIn are actually creators and only few do it "right" in the sense where they provide value to a relevant audience, it's a HUGE opportunity 😊🚀
Absolutely! Most people still use it as a job board versus a massive B2B social network.
Establishing a personal brand can be a powerful way to grow your B2B business faster. By building a strong personal brand, you can establish yourself as an authority in your industry and attract new clients and customers to your business.
@sultan7786 100% 🚀🚀🚀
Great, is very helpful!
@andresceballosm 🙏❤️
I'd not heard of the AIDA structure, nice!
@michael_sydney_moore 🔥🔥🔥
Thanks for the information!
@rosa767 🙌
Exactly the post I needed! Packed with great actionable advice - Thank you!
Do you have any advice for someone who is permanently employed while starting a business on the side and whose LinkedIn profile serves two purpose:
Are there any ways to keep a LinkedIn profile clear for both purposes or would I have to make a more radical choice to focus my profile on one of them?
@LuSyo great question! I think it depends on how similar your current job and your business concept are - if they are very different, I'd suggest you prioritise one of them and focus on that for your personal brand, otherwise you can find a common ground for both of them and concentrate on that 😊🚀
I agree, i can confirm that these worked in my case
@jobfetcher 🙌
This idea really worked
@PriceMIT 🚀🚀🚀
Great Read! The 5-step process you outlined for building a personal brand and accelerating business growth is very informative and practical. Your personal example of growing your own company from $1,000 to $150,000,000 in valuation in less than four years with the help of your personal brand is very inspiring. Thank you for sharing your insights and tips; they will be very helpful for anyone looking to establish their personal brand and grow their B2B business.
Thanks so much @ritiksingh 🙏❤️
That's very true. For B2B businesses, LinkedIn would be the ideal place.
Also thanks I got to know about this tool - Taplio. I am a user of TweetHunter & I didn't know there is a similar tool by the same creator - Tabo for LinkedIn.
Thanks @worldofprasanna! Yes TweetHunter and Taplio are awesome! 🙌
Great tips, thank you!
@joerter ❤️🙏
In B2B especially, organic outreach and branding can be huge. If it means going from 2-3 customers to 10-15, it can make a big difference for lead acquisition and retention over time. Love these insights!
100% @startuprabbithole and thank you so much for your kind words 🙏❤️
Thank you for sharing such useful insights. I've been trying to use LinkedIn and got answers to what I've been missing.
I have a question, do these tips fit in for a company page on LinkedIn?
Am aware it's difficult to build an enterprise page and gain traction on it as compared to the personal pages, but there must be some way for that as well.
And lastly will surely check out your course!
Glad it could help @SaaSAnalyser! As for company pages, I do think that personal profiles tend to work "better" because it's much easier to identify with a person than with a brand, so your followers get more attached to you. However, if you have a well-defined brand identity and clearly define the objective of your LinkedIn presence & engagement, it can totally work as well. Hope this helps!
Noted, thanks for getting back! :)
Great post @guillaume_lemlist !
It resonates a lot with what I am trying to do right now, to build an audience and some sort of relationship to make it easier to market my future projects.
I understand that being trusted to be knowledgeable in a particular field is extremely important but what if someone is trying to lay the ground for future, not well defined projects? Do you have any best practices for cases like these?
Great question @fpsd! What I recommend in your case is to document everything you do and learn as you go, because even if you're not an expert yet, there will always be someone who is one step behind you and who'll benefit from what you've learned. It also allows you to organize your thoughts and learnings and grow into an expert in the field of your choice 😊
Thanks for getting back to me @guillaume_lemlist!
That's a great advice, I am more or less doing the same but I have to get better at making it public. Now I am between to main topics: product updates/launch and tech posts, with the latter easily winning. I think the lesson here is to try to find more product related content that can be helpful in a more general sense. I'll let you how it will evolve ;)
You're right. Thanks for sharing this. I really love the idea of reserving a 1-hour time slot for a task that will repeat every day.
Most of us need to follow this kind of strategy where we create and share content on one platform and forget about it for the next 3 to 5 days. Now, I have decided to make a time slot for this purpose.
I really appreciate it. Thank you for sharing this amazing roadmap.
Really happy it could help @buckyjames! I feel like making a habit out of repetitive tasks is really the best way to stay consistent - and consistency is key for success 🙌 Thanks for your kind words! 🙏❤️
It's a nice one to hook up with, thanks to the publisher.
@Debarbs 🙏❤️
Fantastic suggestions!
I have a relatively large following on LinkedIn which I'm struggling to make 'work for me,' so implementing these strategies and we'll see what transpires!
Super cool @willjh! Rooting for you 🔥
This is the best growth tip I've received as an early-stage founder. I've been trying cold messaging for the past few weeks and have not seen any conversion. And I was just starting to use LinkedIn more strategically. Thank you for sharing!
What would you say is the optimal length for Linkedin posts?
Awesome, glad it could help @smorean 🙌 For the length, it really depends! In general I try to keep things as short and sharp as possible - remember that people usually don't have a lot of time and tend to skim posts, so it's best to avoid long and complex formulations. That doesn't mean that you can't go into detail though - just make sure that every sentence brings a maximum of value and is necessary to get your point across 😊
I've used AIDA extensively and can say that it is a really really solid framework.
The problem for me is consistency and I like the idea of blocking out some time for brand building... but I find that if I just engage with content once a day, I miss a lot of it and I'm often late to the party so my comments get buried. But if I'm constantly checking my socials and engaging, I never get any work done.
Is one 1-hr block per day enough for you to really engage, or how do you handle it @guillaume_lemlist?
Hey @Toni_notTony! Great point!
For engagement: most creators post at the same time every day. If you have a number of favorite creators that you follow, try to figure out at what time they usually post, so you can set yourself reminders everyday to be one of the first ones to comment, without losing much time scrolling around your feed.
For content creation: it really helps to get into a writing routine and it becomes a habit, especially when you do it at the same time every single day. 1h is usually enough but may be a bit short if you're just starting out, so you can also block 1.5h every day. The time of day depends on when you're personally the most creative and focused to write. Also, it really helps to use tools like Taplio to get inspiration and schedule your posts so you can plan ahead 🙌
Isn't this what got you banned on LinkedIn?
😂 good one @HahahaNope