Mastering LinkedIn Marketing in 2025 (for creatives & brands)

0:00 Today we are going to talk about the cursed opportunity of LinkedIn, the business network. In this video, we're going to talk about do you really need to become LinkedIn famous? What does it actually take to do so and does it actually matter for a brand? We'll hit the state of LinkedIn, the AI slop, the never- ending outreach, the massive video uptick that happened on the platform last year, people that stand out and how brands build something that stand out on the platform, which there's a absolute ton of value in. We'll get there. We'll talk about LinkedIn for creators because some of the results on there have made me kind of think twice about my strategy. We'll talk about a bit of how the actual network works when you're creating on there and then how you develop a cadence that works and a lens that works if you want to post on the platform. Let's lock in. So let's start with LinkedIn on the surface. When you log into there, you get this immediate level of cringe that none of the other social networks will ever give you. While at the same time posting on there has a higher level of angst than anywhere else you can post because it is professional, because bosses are on there, because co-workers are on there because there's expectation. And so what you do see is a lot of dril. You'll see posts someone can you know announcing a or making some note or news about their industry and then you'll have these AI responses which has grown increasingly popular on there where people will just hit a button and we'll have some generic response that recaps it to you. It's truly a bad experience to engage in.

1:11 When you combine that with the relentless outreach in your inbox from sales reps at wherever who are trying to get on a call to sell their software that does whatever that just makes it so a lot of people just don't want to log in. That is the negative. And that negative means a lot of people look at that social network as one that should not be a part of their strategy. But I'm here to say that it is quite the opposite. But it is completely different than how you engage in any other of these networks. If you want to lock in, actually make money on the network and advance your career on the network, you have to think of it in its own vacuum.

1:38 So when we talk about opportunity, the first thing that comes up is what's happened with video on LinkedIn. So there's now a dedicated videos tab. Also, when you play videos, it pops into a dedicated videos feed you can scroll through. You'll notice when you view videos on mobile on there is a whole little designed interface which is very attractive. It makes you want to watch these. And if you do post videos on there, you've probably noticed that a lot of them get absolutely massive impressions. I want to clear up this impression statistic because a lot of people will la it and be like, "Hey, I'm getting hundreds of thousands of impressions, millions of impressions on LinkedIn." But what does that actually mean? So on certain social networks, impressions are measured differently.

2:10 LinkedIn introduced their video module. You'll see this on desktop especially be a carousel of about three or videos that are going across and it is natural when you scroll through there's a constant flow of those multiple carousels. If your video is seen on one of those carousels whether it plays or not it is an impression for that video and because those are now constantly throughout everyone's feed. If you do post video and it happens to be then featured inside those carousels, you get an absolute ton of impressions. But very few people click through in videos on that feed. And if they do they click one, there's multiple videos and so it leads to a much higher number than the actual number of people looking at it.

2:42 So plays as always is a much better metric to actually measure. Now plays are no joke on LinkedIn and you actually can get a lot of interesting and quality traffic on that, but it operates in a different universe than it does on Instagram etc. It's not as inherently sharable. People aren't sharing LinkedIn videos back and forth with each other the way that you see that on Instagram or Tik Tok. People are viewing it. People are consuming it oftentimes at work. People will feel like they're doing work when they browse LinkedIn as opposed to when they're browsing other networks. So you get this consumption that fits a little bit differently, but it's still an excellent tool for awareness and for personality building, just in a different way. I'm going to talk about LinkedIn first as a creator and then as a brand. So I was not super active on LinkedIn and posting videos on LinkedIn, even though I make business content, right? All my short form video is about marketing, about branding, about trends, about consumer products.

3:28 Actually fits very well on LinkedIn. And at one point, I began cross-osting on there. That's gone pretty well, but it hasn't like brought in major brand deals. It hasn't gotten me a bunch of work. People don't buy a lot of anything that I'm selling particularly on there. I'll get some like add-ons to existing brand deals to also post on LinkedIn for like a low amount like whatever. It's not like a hugely incremental. What has happened is the tying in of the dots where people that are in professional settings have seen my content on Instagram or Tik Tok aren't comfortable DMing me about work on there. Just straight up. I there just if you and if it does honestly my DMs I can barely respond to like a fraction of them.

4:00 There's so many requests in the different inboxes whatever it is if you don't follow you. But on LinkedIn, I've noticed significantly more of the actual people that will sponsor my videos, who want to work with me on consults, who want to join whatever program are more than comfortable reaching out on LinkedIn and also they can reach out in the connection request and send that note. And so you basically get this bottom of funnel traffic of people that have seen you on these other social platforms, but who then finish the deal inside LinkedIn or who find that other connection or get brought up again and again say, "Hey, I'm going to send this, but it's coming from my work account versus like my personal Instagram."

4:31 There's actually a huge needle mover that I cannot recommend enough that if you are a creator operating in that world, posting your content and growing on there sheerely to just take advantage of some of these closing aspects that come from that is something to hugely be aware of. Let's talk about LinkedIn from a brand perspective and how that works. And I'm going to use two examples for this, both friends of mine who have used LinkedIn for one for the brand he works for, one for a brand other guy founded to actual like great success and in two very different strategies. So, first I want to talk about my friend Matt from a brand called Chlorophyll Water.

5:01 Chlorophyll Water is a brand that I worked with him when it launched. We built out SEO for it, some of the strategies, some initial web stuff. Matt is someone I used to work for back in the day before we started this water brand. And he has now gone on to like great success. Sprouts and Whole Foods and the the water has carried everywhere. It's a wonderful product. But since the beginning on LinkedIn and with all social strategy to be honest, he has been pretty savvy in some unique ways. But he has cheerleaded on LinkedIn from the beginning. And cheerleading is an important word where Matt posts all the time. He posts every time they're into a new store. Every time he does a store visit, he is posting that product.

5:32 Hey, Corell Water is now in this yoga studio. It's now in Awan. Hey, I stopped by and dropped off five at this charity event today. And his posting of those milestones, you look at his LinkedIn from the outside perspective, especially at the start, it got like a couple likes. It was not like getting massive traction or anything like that. Uh, now I think it does significantly better, but him just sharing those stories and the ripple effects of that and then tagging the buyers he saw or tagging the places he went has been a massive like B2B positive. I remember I was at the natural natural expo West or Expo West that's out here. It's like a natural foods expo. We were there together a year or two ago and we're walking through and there are so many people that see him who know him from LinkedIn but also know the accounts he's in. He will meet with this buyer, this person and be like, "Oh, I saw that you're in blank and blank. Oh, I saw that you got this account." the B2B effects that don't matter. Doesn't matter how many likes you get, you can get zero likes.

6:17 If you are building your network and you're connecting with people on there, if you're tagging with people that work in legitimate roles, like buying at whatever store, you're tagging in on these chains, the way that LinkedIn works and shows content means that other people in that industry are going to be aware and are going to find out. And him just relentlessly posting multiple times a week, every single business goal and telling that story has probably led to an exponential increase in the retail success of his brand. And I've got to tout him for having that strategy and sticking to it. And I also wanted to say like that is a blueprint for especially if you are in retail or you're building B2B connections to share that brand story as a founder. And again, this isn't video content. This isn't high produced content. It's just him writing updates and sharing a few photos and doing it absolutely constantly over the course of years. And this is an important strategy to note because branded content on there, posting from a brand like doesn't do particularly well.

7:02 You post from the brand account, it doesn't really go anywhere. There are a couple exceptions to that. We'll talk about that strategy in a second. But before that, I want to talk about my friend Steve. When I was running marketing at Gailb Blaster, Steve had run marketing prior and then moved over to launch the new product that gel blaster product called Nexus. It's like an experience center and he is a relentless LinkedIn poster likes which I've never seen before in my life. But I also got to see the huge benefits that come with that because what Steve does is particularly interesting. I think applies to almost all brand categories is he's not the founder. He's not posting founder content. He's a representative of the brand. He works for the brand and he is telling the brand story on LinkedIn and he's doing it in multiple ways. Any cool piece of content related to the brand, Steve is posting it on his LinkedIn. If we post a cool video on Instagram, he's ripping it and it's on there. He would be putting stuff out before we'd even cross post it at places. Like he was on it. Anything cool influencer deals, influencer kind, hey, we just did blank and blank with blank and blank here. It's on here. This YouTube video just went live or someone talks about blank. This review is here.

7:54 Anything that the brand does, new location, new store, photos, the street team posted on their personal Instagram. This guy had it curated as putting out on LinkedIn. The power of this was huge because he was also a relentless networker on there. anyone in the toy industry, which is his background, he had sent that request to, right? And then he had been trying to meet up with them at trade shows. He remembers people's names. He is constantly adding to that network. But when we would go to shows with Steve, people knew Steve before they even knew the brand. They knew about the stories that Steve told and about brand lore in a way that if even if you were on our email list or follow our social media, you probably wouldn't keep up with. And he had been able to maintain an industry reputation around the brand by sharing consumer content, not just business content, of just telling, "Hey, here's what we're doing. I'm proud of it. and I'm going to relentlessly tell that story as an advocate of it while connecting with people in my industry. And if you are a brand owner or work in marketing at a brand, no matter what, you need a person who is doing the Steve role there who is saying because it's not just about business content on LinkedIn, right? I feel it's about consumer content. If you have a kids brand, you say, "Hey, my customer isn't on LinkedIn." Yeah, they are. Parents are on there. And guess what? If you constantly post your cool consumer content, your influencer brand deals, your collabs, your new email strategy, whatever it is, people are going to notice it in your industry and the buyers and the B2B relationships you want. And there's a lot of casual consumers who again they may not click through and purchase but the awareness is there as well. All right. So I'm going to walk through some new features that Art List has put inside their platform that I think every marketing person and content creator should be thinking about as they begin to understand the landscape of what's changing around us. They now have these AI image and video generation tools where you're able to generate images and then generate video from images. So you'll see here they have a bunch of styles listed out from more realistic stuff to things that are very good information. But these are excellent tools to be able to fill in B-roll and create interesting story. Of course, I used just this prompt, drift cars racing in the desert. It generated this image. Now, I'm able to animate from there. So, I click animate button. When I click the animate button, it gives me a video prompt that's already written out that I can then edit to actually tell it what shots we want it to do, how we actually want the video to go. And you'll see in the video here, it's kind of panning around as this car moves, generated from the image that I made.

9:58 You can see much the experiments I have inside my account with different things happening. This is another one where we generated a fume bottle and actually created the video of it spinning around it with a really kind of simple video prompt. And so you can see this is everything from scenic like I generated the shot of Hawaii and then generated kind of a drone video that probably on top of it animating drawings like you see here with this cityscape cartoon.

10:18 There's just a ton of options you're able to do inside the platform. Now just fill in any footage you might need to help tell a compelling story. And this is, I think, a really important time to be talking about this kind of stuff for creatives because you're beginning to notice that the limitations of production budgets just continue to decrease. We're just in this very shifting world where it really is the creativity of the ideas and then the distribution and organization of the team that are like really going to be what separates interesting, creative, and creative that works kind of from what doesn't and less and less like, oh, we can't afford to hire this tool or that. And you're like watching this kind of change under our feet like as we create, right? So anyway, you can check this out inside Artlist at artlist.io.

10:55 Uh, and I'm stoked to see anything you might create. A final example I'll bring up on this is the Portland Leather team. The Portland Leather CEO does an excellent job of founder content that actually performs at a high level, gets a ton of likes, gets a ton of engagement, telling that story, walking through the business anecdotes, and sharing the cool things that they do along the way. And I think that versus trying to emphasize your brand page, build anything is just saying, "Hey, we have all this content, things that we are doing. We should be sharing that, building personalities around it and combining the sharing of that story and all those things with the networking that comes natural to LinkedIn. And that brings us to actually a bit of what success looks like on the network and what you can actually do with brand account because LinkedIn is a social network and a very social network. The more you are connecting with people, the more you have an actual conversation, the more you comment and engage, the better you do, the better your content does and the better you get real life benefit from it. And LinkedIn tells you this. They have expectations for how much you interact on the platform. So before you even start posting any content, be that person who is making three to five genuine comments every week on people's stuff that's on there, who's actually weighing in with non AI responses on things, who's connecting with people and then going into their content and looking at it and who's having actual conversations on there.

11:59 And then when you begin posting content along with that and engaging with it, you will notice there's a much better effect. But how social you are on LinkedIn in terms of how many people you're connecting with that are actually relevant that want to connect with you and how many real conversations you're having on there is a big variable to how successful your content can become. This ties into how brand accounts work because it's actually interesting. If you post on your account and you tag a brand and you are one of the admins, you have the option to notify people at your company that you posted. And also, if people at your company like an update that you mentioned that tags their company and you listed as working at their company, the algorithm likes that, too. Which means that a cohesive strategy of people from the company posting about the company and sharing updates, tagging it, and other people interacting with it actually can push you pretty far in the algorithm. And you'll notice whether it's planned or unplanned. A lot of the companies that do well on there is because there's a high engagement level between their team members and the actual content that they're producing as a brand. And this is a important thing to note and incorporate into your strategy. If you have a brand account, you want to succeed on there. But if you want to start contributing there and you make content already or you don't, there's two things I think are particularly important. The first is developing a cadence. Most people are inhibited by posting content. They don't want to do it. They're afraid to start out. If they do start out, they post once and they stop. This is the thing that you absolutely must not do. And I'll break down some ideas to make this easy for you, too. The first thing you do is get a cadence. I recommend that especially for creatives and marketing people. Post once a month is a great start or once a week even is a great start, but get this lower cadence. It doesn't have to be daily. Everyone always has these like high expectations. That's great. You want to become a creator and influencer, you kind of have to do that. But if you are just trying to set up your basis on the platform, let's start with monthly.

13:27 Say, hey, once a month I'm going to post about my work and what I do on LinkedIn. And if I miss a month, then you know I'm putting some major penalty together. But if that every month you go, I'm going to share one project that I worked on at work that I had a contribution to. Or if that project is posted by the brand, I'm then going to share and be like, hey, it was a pleasure to work on blank and blank. I did X and Y. Here's what I learned. Here's where I took inspiration. Where you are big upping things that happened at the brand. So it's not like you're building some separate identity. You're sharing what you worked on specifically and showing off your role for others to see. And you're providing some experience for people to look into and be like, "Oh, that's what a junior art director at Amazon does or whatever your role is."

14:01 But establishing that cadence and sticking to it at the end of a year, you've now posted 12 things that show what you do. Whenever a potential employer goes there, it's there. You begin to see some resonance. You have a contribution. Now, if you can do that weekly, even better. But how you do it weekly is you have your contribution item. Maybe that's once a month. And then you begin to have what else you can share, right? And so a big thing there is what's happening in the world, right?

14:19 Can you what is happening in your industry, in your niche? If you are again, if you're in art direction, what's happening in current art direction or cool campaigns that happen? If you're in the cosmetics industry, like what new releases or anything happen? being able to talk about those. And to do that, you need a lens. This is a really important concept for posting on LinkedIn, really anywhere. A lens is just a way with which you look at things that happen in your industry. And to give you some examples, if you have an art direction lens, so anytime anyone releases a campaign, you're just going to talk about the art direction. I love the composition of this, the way they use these this color pattern. Oh, they use this lighting structure. Whatever it is, same thing. a photographers's lens, a copywriter's lens, a salesperson's lens, a meta ads lens, whatever it is, you're gonna say from my perspective, I'm going to analyze this thing and I'm going to talk about my expertise in relation to that thing. So, Road launches a new campaign. Hey, this new road campaign launched. I looked at their two meta ads and this is the ones I think are the best and this is why they did it well. Right? That is a lens that you get to apply and every person has a lens. Accountants have lenses.

15:11 Analysts have lenses. Videographers have a lens. You all have to have your perspective of how something happens. So, if you want to then say, "Okay, I have my projects I'm working on. I talk about those. There's some cheerleading you can do, just promoting your brand, whatever. And then, hey, I'm going to take my lens on things that are happening in the world, and I post that like once a week. You are then developing a rapport for things that are happening. You're not making it purely about you, and you're expanding things that are in your industry. And if anyone's like, oh, you're posting on LinkedIn now, which is what everyone's worried about. You're like, yeah, I'm sharing the things I'm learning in my industry. I'm trying to connect with more people so I can better be better at my job and better promote the brand that I work for. And very few people are going to have any problem with that. But if you are looking for that initial cadence of like, hey, where do I start?

15:47 do that exact thing we just mentioned. What was my contribution? How can I share something with my lens? And do that while being social on it and you're beginning your LinkedIn journey. To recap, if you're a creator, I feel like you have to get on there for bottom of funnel and be crossosting your content and just have people be aware they're there because you're going to get more business inquiries that way. If you're a brand, you need to find those cheerleaders and if there's no one around to do it, then it's probably you and be posting your consumer content on there on your personal page like as much as possible, too, because that storytelling of all the things you're doing is important and reaches consumers. And if you are just an employee looking to better use that platform and connect, then I would be sharing within those two frameworks I provided. If you want to take it more seriously and learn how to make video and stuff for it, the cut 30 info as always is below, which is the 30-day kind of boot camp I do for short form video and carousels and whatnot where we do cover a lot of LinkedIn, but this isn't like a long sales letter for that.

16:32 But it is a network where I say there's no need to go to say I'm become LinkedIn famous. But it is a key part of personal marketing and of brand marketing. Especially if you end up selling B2B or especially if you are trying to rise from a junior to more senior position or you in a senior position and want to make sure you know what your options are for the future. You should,000% being taken advantage of. Thank you so much for watching. If you have any questions about LinkedIn below or you want to just drop your URL to connect, [Music]