As you probably know, I often define marketing’s job as creating ART, Awareness, Revenue, and Trust, and I’m forming a couple of thoughts on this in terms of LinkedIn.
Aside from the fact that we seem to be staking our personal brand, career aspirations, and new business development on an algorithm that is currently filling my feed with 3-week-old posts that I have already liked from a narrow subsection of the people I am connected with.
Shhheeeez.
That aside…
It’s not an earth-shattering insight to suggest that LinkedIn is about building the trust to hire you, consult with you, or recommend you.
The same goes for using LinkedIn as part of your paid media or organic social strategy as a marketer; it’s predominantly content marketing.
You are staying in your target market’s consciousness and building trust for the moment that they are in the market for either you or the thing your company does.
So, we’ve had some fun; we’ve done a thing, like using ChatGPT to turn ourselves into action figures (guilty) or made some snarky, witty comment about AI using emdashes(also me), or made some observation about the politics bollocks (definitely not me, but you do you).
We get the dopamine hits of likes, comments, and all that.
LinkedIn tells us that it got a little tickle of reach, with impressions and members reached.
Awareness right?
Good, right?
The temptation is to lean into this, to do more of that.
Especially as (probably) the longer form thing you spent all afternoon writing barely featured on the dopo-meter.
However, the thing that should be riding on the back of awareness is trust, and that’s often a trade we are making.
Like any vanity metric, these reach indicators are unreliable indicators of the content being relevant.
Is it relevant to the thing the person you want to trust will buy or hire you for? (The reason why you are here).
Relevance is what builds trust.
In the olden days, when the marketing zeitgeist was all about our websites, I had a talk I would give that included a claim that I had a guaranteed method to increase website traffic: Just train a cat to play the piano and put that video on your homepage.
It was pre-AI, so you had to train real cats.
Yep, more awareness, more reach, more hits, but not relevant and only trustworthy to the niche of your buyers who also have a side hustle training cats.
I’m not down on awareness, having fun on LinkedIn, or more broadly in our marketing, grabbing a quick sugar rush of reach – it’s about balance.
I’ve used LinkedIn posts as an example here, but this applies to any marketing thing I am doing – I feel like trust is sitting on my shoulder like Jiminy Cricket whispering:
But will this create trust?
Fancy more of this?
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I’m a 3xCMO, now a marketing strategy advisor and podcast host at Rockstar CMO. Although, I’m not a rock star, but a marketing leader, strategist, content marketer, columnist, speaker, industry watcher, and creator of ART (Awareness, Revenue, and Trust) for the companies I work with. But most of all, I am an enthusiastic tea drinker.
You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or now Threads! – or listen to my weekly podcast at Rockstarcmo.com
The half-baked thoughts shared on this blog may not reflect those of my employer or clients, and if the topic of this article is interesting or you just want to say hello please get in touch.