In this episode of Marketing Spark, we dive deep into the world of LinkedIn with Florian Decludt, a renowned strategist who's been guiding entrepreneurs on leveraging this powerful platform.
Florian's insights are gold whether you're looking to build your brand, network effectively, or supercharge your content engagement.
Discover the dos and don'ts of posting, tactical advice to maximize engagement, and the secrets behind a standout LinkedIn profile.
If LinkedIn is on your radar (and it should be!), this is an episode you won't want to miss.
Auto-generated transcript. Speaker names, spelling, and punctuation may be slightly off.
Mark Evans: Hi. It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to another episode of Marketing Spark, where we dive into the latest trends and strategies in the world of b to b and SaaS marketing. Joining us today is Florian DeKlut, a digital marketing expert who turns founders into thought leaders and helps clients leverage LinkedIn to attract, engage, and win customers. In today's episode, we'll be exploring Florian's approach to LinkedIn strategically and tactically and how he guides clients who wanna drive brand awareness, leads, and sales from the platform. Florian, it's great to have you on the podcast.
Guest: Well, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.
Mark Evans: Why don't we start with a very, very high level question about which I'm sure you get asked a lot. What is thought leadership? Yes. It's a loaded question, but I'm interested in how you define it. And what do people most misunderstand about what it is, why it's important, and how it happens?
Guest: So that's a great question. And like you said, people get it wrong a lot because the way I see thought leadership is being known as the go to person to solve one specific problem for one specific kind of people in one specific way. And people usually think, like, oh, in order to be a thought leader, I need to be Bill Gates or Gary Varnuchuk or Richard Branson and have these millions of followers. I need to have all these business success. I need to get all these likes on my post. And and the truth is it it's not because you can be a micro thought leader in your niche, like, being the number one expert to market, for example, financial software in The United States. That could be a a small niche that you can be a thought leader in because you are the best in the world at doing that, you're actually sharing your thoughts online, and that's just providing value for your audience.
Mark Evans: On LinkedIn, I see a lot of people talk about thought leadership. And my point of view, at least how I see it, is a lot of people overthink thought leadership. They believe that if you put together a strategic plan to become a thought leader and you follow these steps, then that will make you a thought leader. And maybe my approach is a little more amateurish, if I can use that word. I believe that a thought leader share is generous with their time, shares their insight, is open to conversation, and willing to talk to people about what they think, why it matters, and as important, listen. Maybe it's a simplistic approach to thought leadership, but I think people try too hard. I think they believe that some thought leadership is a is a marketing campaign that they can execute on, and I don't see that at all. What are your thoughts?
Guest: That people overthink it, definitely. I I think LinkedIn experts, put experts, quote, unquote, are kinda responsible for it because this is what they sell pretty much. They sell frameworks. This is they sell programs. So it's about building the value of it, and so you got to make it look very complicated and very strategic. Mhmm. Now, of course, there's ways that you can make it very subtle and very strategic, and you look at some of the best people on LinkedIn, some of the highest performing creators, people like Justin Welsh, like Richard Vanderbloom. They are very strategic and very deliberate in their strategy. Now does that mean that you need to be extremely deliberate and extremely complex in your approach, especially when you get started? Absolutely not. I mean, you look at all the quiz creators out there, the one thing they had in common is when they started, they had no idea what they were doing. And all they did was was share what they knew, share one piece of information today that would be helpful for their audience based on the experience that they had. It's just about the generosities, kind of waking up every day and thinking, what could be one small piece of insight that I can share to my audience that will help them achieve their goals? And and then as a secondary goal, like, position myself as someone who produces valuable content to solve a specific problem and therefore position myself as a thought leader. Thought leadership is a result of helping people consistently and being recognized as someone who provides value every single day. You don't just show up and say, oh, I'm a thought leader. Listen to me. It's you kind of earn that thought leadership by showing up every day, be like you said, being generous with your time, interacting with the audience, and just being helpful.
Mark Evans: I wanna connect the dots between thought leadership and LinkedIn. But before I do that, I'd like to ask you about why you've embraced LinkedIn as the platform that you want to help people succeed. A lot of people, like you and I, spend probably too much time on LinkedIn. But for people who are looking at the platform and understanding that it has changed and it's not just a place where you look for jobs or get recruited, but it's a place for sharing information, what is it about LinkedIn LinkedIn that that has attracted you, and and why do you see it as as the platform or one of the platforms for business professionals?
Guest: What I like about LinkedIn is two things. So, overall, if you're in b to b, you can boil down to the platforms. So you have LinkedIn on one side, and then you have Twitter / x on the other side. The reason I went on LinkedIn is at first is just because the atmosphere, the the overall vibe of the platform is a little more positive. And one of the biggest thing that I think is stopping people from posting regularly and becoming fraud fraud leaders is having the confidence and the safety to put their thoughts out there and not being drooled for. I chose LinkedIn kind of by default because I'm kinda like my probability of being insulted and being mocked for what I'm saying is a lot lower than on Twitter. So so I I chose LinkedIn. Then it was kind of a happy happenstance because one thing that LinkedIn provides is because of all these premium features, like Sales Navigator, and Sales Navigator is a wonderful tool if you want to build thought leadership. You can target people extremely specifically. So when you start combining an outreach strategy with your thought leadership, then you can target the right people very effectively by connecting with them, and you can send them messages or you can send them cold messages very precisely. It's a lot easier to target the right kind of people on LinkedIn than it is on Twitter just because of all of the premium tools that come with it.
Mark Evans: Let's connect the thread of thought leadership to LinkedIn. Are there characteristics that make someone an effective thought leader on LinkedIn? And you probably answered this question already, but what are the steps that one would take if you're looking at LinkedIn and you're saying to yourself, I do wanna be a thought leader. I do wanna be known as the expert in my specific field, and I do wanna leverage LinkedIn. So sort of a two sided question here. How do what are some of the key characteristics, and how do you make that happen?
Guest: I think the key characteristic is they're very focused. I think the best thought leaders are not the ones who have massive audiences. The the best thought leaders have actually very small audiences and but they focus on one very specific problem and one very very specific kind of people. They don't try to solve the biggest problems of the world. They try to solve small painful problems that a very small set of people is are experiencing, and they become the go to person for it. So for example, one of the most effective thought leaders that I've trained, he has he he had 6,000 followers when he started back in November. Now he has 8,000 followers. His post get on average, I think, 30 to 40 likes. Not a successful influencer by by any means in terms of metrics, but he gets about one lead a day, and each lead is worth a $100,000.
Mark Evans: That's great, and it's amazing that somebody has taken that approach to LinkedIn. But it also talks to one of the realities of LinkedIn is that people get thrown by engagement, by views and likes and comments. And at the end of the day, your success in many respects is based on the financial success of your clients. Do you think that people get distracted by vanity metrics on LinkedIn? And there's a lot of talk about, hey. My posts are really popular, but they never talk about the correlation between popularity and business. Do you think that people see engagement views, etcetera, as vanity metrics?
Guest: Oh, yeah. It's a difficult question because what happens is, ultimately, you're right. If you should define success on LinkedIn by how much money it's making for you. I mean, that's why we should be spending time on LinkedIn, ultimately. I mean, it's great to spend time to share people and everything, ultimately, we're building we're business people. We're building a business, but we gotta make a living somehow. But most people still approach LinkedIn by how do I get views? How do I go viral? How do I make carousels that sell that sell? How do I create the right cheat sheet? Like, all all these very tactical things about how to get more views. It's kind of like a race to the top of the bottom depending how how you how you look at it where we have all these influencers trying to get as many views as possible, and they get four likes, 500 likes. They get, like, 80,000 followers, 90,000 followers, 100,000 followers, and it's great. But then if you look at the at the business numbers, I was talking to to a creator yesterday. Think he has 38,000 followers, pretty successful guys. They're getting lots of lots of engagements on his post, a lot more than me. But then I was asking him about his rates, and he's was telling me, yeah. Oh, yeah. For what I do, it's, like, $1,500. And I'm like, wait. You do all these things, and if you most you can extract out of a single prospect is $1,500, that's that's ridiculous. Chunk change. You know? But then at the same time, I have I have my client who is a micro influencer, not successful by any means in terms of metrics, in terms of likes and engagement or something like this. He's he's making 7 figures off LinkedIn because he's focusing on the right metrics, which is, okay. Getting likes is great. Am I getting likes from the right people? Am I getting DMs? That's great. Am I getting DMs from the right people? Am I getting comments? Great. Am I getting comments from the right people? And it's that's all that matters. And but the thing is it's also very human to go around and say, like, oh, this guy is getting a 100 likes. I'm going to get 200 just because I wanna show this person that I'm better than them. So it's it's a very dangerous game, and that's that's how the platform is designed. That that's how the platform is designed. But back to your to your question, it's really easy to get caught up in in vanity metrics. And and I think in in the business of LinkedIn coaching, unfortunately, you have to kind of play that game if you want to get to get customers because, ultimately, that's what customers are are looking for. If they wanna get views, wanna go viral, they want because they associate thought leadership with being massive. So it's takes a lot of education to to make them realize, yeah, I mean, that that's great for your ego, but your wallet probably wants you to be more focused and focus more on talking to the right people.
Mark Evans: There's a lot of, I would say, generic go through the motions content on LinkedIn. People have jumped on the bandwagon simply because they wanna be there. I'm curious about your take on how you help creators and entrepreneurs identify their unique voice and perspective because the ability to differentiate yourself and stand out and offer an interesting perspective matters when you're trying to attract the right customers and and business. So how do you help clients to find their personal brand on LinkedIn? And as important, how do they discover and nurture the people that matter to them?
Guest: Mhmm. We have a couple ways to go about it. The first question they need to ask themselves is, do they want to be creator centric, or do they wanna be, audience centric? So creator centric being, do they want to talk about themselves and their company and their journey? So that's very effective. For example, if you're launching a start up and you're starting from scratch and you're kind of, like, making a reality show out of out of your start up. So I know a couple creators who did that, and they they did that very successfully. Or do they wanna be audience centric, meaning that they have an audience in mind? Like, let's say, for example, they are an agency and they are targeting fintech startups to help them with their LinkedIn ads, for example. So or are they going to focus on the startup on these people and say, like, okay. I'm going to list out all the problems that it may that they might have, and I'm going to solve one of the problems every single day for content. So that's the first thing that they need to figure out. It's like, what kind of angle am I going to take? Because then depending on the angle, it's going to be very different strategies, very different formats as well. Because when you are a creator centric creator, a lot more videos, a lot more selfies, a lot more pictures, things like this. When you're talking about audience centric, you're going to use a lot more text, carousels, infographics in order to provide as much value as quickly as possible to your audience. That's the first thing to to go about it. Now in terms of helping them finding their voice, the the thing is people already have a sense of what they wanna talk about. It's just if they they have ideas, but it's about getting them to express articulate those ideas and put them into post. So my goal is to help them figure out what kind of value that they can provide to their to their audience and then, through conversation, extract the value out of it. Okay. So you can make a post about this. You can make a post about this. You can make a post about this. Because oftentimes, what happens is they're so busy founders is so busy with their with their company and managing HR, managing product development, marketing, all these things that they don't realize that all if they have a ton of post ideas in their head, they just they they don't know they don't know their their rights. So for my job is to help them extract it extract all those post ideas and then group them into different themes so that way you don't end up talking about the same thing over and over again. And in terms of finding your voice, it's it's about going through the motions. It's about posting regularly and then finding out what works, like what generates what generates interest, what doesn't generate interest, and generating interest from the right people. So what how do you define the right person? That really depends on what stage you are at. So let's say you're an established business and you're trying to diversify your acquisition channels and you want to incorporate some more needed inbound, then you wanna look at your current customer portfolio and look, okay. Who are my top five customers in terms of who do I love working with and they pay me well, this is just great. What do they have in common? And then how can I target these people in order to get more of them from LinkedIn?
Mark Evans: And you can use so you can use tools like Sales Navigator to Right. Make that happen.
Guest: For example, you can use, Sales Navigator. So let's say you find out that your best customers are all using HubSpot for some reason, then you're going to put in the filters. I want all the other people I only want to filter companies that are working with HubSpot because this is something that you identified as a common denominator between all the all the best companies. And so that way and, ideally, you want to have a list of a 100 to 200 companies that you want to work with and that are ideal, and then you start adding the leadership to your to your network. And so that way, they will start seeing your content regularly. And even if they don't necessarily engage with it, that they there will be a strong probability that they see it. And then at one point, when they face a problem that you're solving, you'll be the first person that they reach out to.
Mark Evans: You've worked with creators from various industries. Can you share some case studies or examples of content strategies that have yielded particularly strong results on LinkedIn? I love real world stories about entrepreneurs and creators who are who are being successful on LinkedIn. It would be great to hear a example of one of your clients who's really kicked it.
Guest: I can I can actually think of two clients? So the first client was actually my my employer, Red Hat Advertising. So it's a growth marketing agency. I used to work with them. Now I work with them on a freelance basis. And so the strategy was it was a brand new company, and the goal was to generate some inbound leads for content. So I worked with the cofounders in order to to put together a content strategy so that they could attract the ideal customers. And so it was back in January 2022 that I sat down with one of the cofounders, Pierre. And so back then, I think he had about 500 followers, like, not active on LinkedIn. Just LinkedIn equals CV, like typical typical profile. I started posting. And so for him, the first thing that we we figured out was getting used to posting. For him, his biggest fear, he still had that block against posting and sharing his ideas. So for him, it was about getting him comfortable. So the first strategy was not to have any strategy. Just, like, get used to to the process of posting. And then once you're used to it, then you can start being more deliberate and and focusing a little more. And so we did that for about a month. And then for him, it was about then what we did is that we identified the needs that we yeah. We identify what problems the people we were working with had, what did they have in common. And so then we started addressing it in our content. So, for example, we found out they had strategic problems. Like, they had a product, they didn't know how to grow it. If they had a problem finding their target audience, they had problems building sales funnels. They had problems choosing between different acquisition channels. And so then we started creating all those content themes about different topics of worth marketing, and then we started declining it into, like, strategic and tactical levels. So for example, if you take the topic of LinkedIn ads, okay. So why should you use LinkedIn ads? What's a good LinkedIn ad strategy? So that would be more strategic topic. But then you can have we can go more tactical and say, like, how to create LinkedIn ads for for b to b fintech company. And then you can go into a case study. It's okay. You have a $3,000 budget. This is how you should set up your LinkedIn ads. So then you have different levels of content. And so in terms of metrics, so it's generated about, yes, multiple seven figures in pipeline. It's a 7 figure, 7 figure agency now. And in terms of his personal brand, he went from 500 connections slash followers to about 45,000 and high quality marketing leaders in his in his niche, and he's getting about two to three inbound leads every single week.
Mark Evans: One of the realities of LinkedIn and the way that the algorithm works, and we can talk about the algorithm later and and how you play with it or adjust to it, is the idea that you have to or the the platform encourages you to create content consistently. And I see a lot of creators, high profile creators, publish content that ranges in quality, and this is my perspective. Some of it's really good and some of it not so much. So how do you produce content consistently without sacrificing quality?
Guest: The first thing is about clarity. It's about knowing exactly what you're going to talk about. Because if you see a post that's just a piece of content that you throw out there, then the quality is going to vary a lot because sometimes it's really gonna hit, sometimes it really is going to miss. However, if you see a piece of content as an answer to a specific question, then your hit rate is going to be a lot higher. So you might not go viral, but you're not going to bomb either because that is going to hit that standard, and it's going to provide a certain standard of value to your to your ideal audience. So by having that system and knowing exactly what problem are you solving for your content, then it helps you focus a lot more specifically and be able to create high quality content at scale. And then the second part is about knowing how to create a good post. What are the the best practices for creating a good post, creating good carousels, creating hooks? We have lots of advice on it on on LinkedIn. And then just put it into a prompt on chat GPT and then help you generate a base for it. So instead of having to write every single post from scratch, you can always generate a a a draft and then work from that. Work from there. I have a specific prompt for hooks. I have a specific prompt for carousels. I have a specific prompt for text posts that just allows me to save a ton of time and be and be able to scale my content creation because, yeah, the truth is when you're a founder, you don't have two hours to spend Mhmm. Creating the perfect post. You have better things to do. So either you've you have a strategic strategy combined with tools to help you scale that more quickly, or you just hire a ghostwriter.
Mark Evans: One of the realities for LinkedIn creators is understanding the algorithm, which constantly changes, and it often happens without any warning from LinkedIn. They just announce that or sometimes they don't even announce that the algorithm has changed. People see engagement drop and views drop, and then there's a state of panic in the industry. And among the creator community, how do you stay current with best practices? What resources or people do you leverage to make sure that you understand how the algorithm works and how it's changed?
Guest: That's a great question. And the way I look at it is who does the algorithm work for? Because a lot of people get it get this all wrong. People think that the algorithm's job is to serve creators. The algorithm doesn't work for creators. The algorithm works for LinkedIn. So in order to understand how the algorithm works, you have to understand how LinkedIn works, how they make money. If they're here to make money, and they're they're very, in business, and the algorithm is the the number one employee. So the way they make money, they make money through subscriptions, like sales navigator, recruitment, and things like this. And then they make money through selling ads. So pretty much, the more time you spend on LinkedIn, more valuable you become because they can show you more ads and you have a higher probability of clicking and that brands spend more money more money on it. So, ultimately, the way you got to look at the algorithm is how can LinkedIn get more people to spend more time on the platform. So the algorithm is not going to do anything that goes against that interest. So how does it impact content? So with that in mind, what kind of behavior does LinkedIn want to see from creators? So they probably want creators that create every day because that way people show up at a specific time and they'll it's 9AM. Mark's going to post. It's gonna be a good piece of content. I'm I gotta check it out. And so that becomes part of people's habits, and so, therefore, they show up on the platform more. And then it's about creating quality content because with every single post you see as terrible and it's not useful, are you gonna be aware what LinkedIn is? Yeah. I mean, it's it's great, but I'd rather spend time on TikTok. I'm having more fun doing it. So the next question is, okay. So how does LinkedIn measure the quality of the content? K. What what's the formula? So there's lots of theories. The way I see it if the way I see it is they look at how many people engage with a post. So they're going to look at how many people click see more. They're going to click look at how many people stop to check out the post. They're going to look at how many people click on the carousels. They're going to look at how many people save the post, and then they're going to look at how many people like and comment on a post. So they're going to look at all these metrics, and then based on that, they're going to assign a score to a post and then give it more or less visibility. So for example, I I don't know if you remember last year, there was a time where polls were super popular. Mhmm. Right? Because while people click, and that's an engagement on the that's a piece of engagement. Well, this post is doing well. People are engaging, so we're we're going to push it. And so everybody started creating polls. And then LinkedIn probably found out. I think we went a bit too far with polls. Or keep well, people are not too happy about it. Let's kill the polls. Instead, let's put some some carousels in there. And, oh, it's been going on for a while, so I guess it's working pretty well for them. So, again, every single time there's an algorithm change and you see your engagement dropping, it's about, okay. What can I do to get more people to pay attention to my content so they can come back to LinkedIn more consistently? Because, ultimately, this is what they want.
Mark Evans: You did a post recently on it was interesting to me because I create content on a consistent basis, but you did a post recently on how to boost engagement without creating content. What are the ways that people can make that happen? Because a lot of us in the creator community is all about content, content, content, but you're saying, nuh-uh. You can do something different. You can take a different approach. So what are the secrets to that strategic approach to LinkedIn?
Guest: So, again, it's about engagement, but it's about not just any kind of engagement. It's about engaging with the right people. So the way it works is you got to find some creators in your niche. So, for example, let's say you're targeting b to b SaaS SaaS founders. So you gotta find people who are also targeting b to b SaaS founders, creating content, and you gotta figure out what time they post. So that way, you can put in more an alert and, okay, I got to go on LinkedIn. I got to go on this profile and be one of the first people to comment. What for and you wanna do that for two reasons. Number one, there's going to be more people looking at it. So, therefore, your comment's gonna have more visibility. And then if it's a thoughtful comment and that's very important that it's thoughtful. If it's if a comment is great post, no one's gonna is gonna find you valuable. But if it's a thoughtful comment and it adds up to conversation, then people are what? Mark is a pretty insightful person. He seems to know a thing or two about b to b SaaS marketing. I should probably follow him. If you follow him this way, you can all so you gain followers this way. You also able to start conversations because people might react to your comment, and then you're able to start conversations with your comment. And then most importantly, you're able to attract the attention of a of a post creator.
Mark Evans: Mhmm.
Guest: And they will have there will be a higher probability that they answer your comment, and therefore, you're able to start an interaction. And why is it so important that it's about the right people and not just commenting on any post? Again, you don't want to have any kind of audience. You don't want to have a 100,000 people in your audience that are not qualified. You want to have a thousand to 2,000 to 3,000 people who are who match your ideal customer profile perfectly. And so if you target the creators who share that ideal customer profile with you, then you're going to create a much more valuable audience for yourself, and you'd be able to grow organically without having to post.
Mark Evans: Over the course of the conversation, you've mentioned a couple of tools, Sales Navigator, ChatGPT, that help you create content for LinkedIn without giving away your trade secrets. What are the tools in your LinkedIn marketing stack to create content, distribute content, that kind of thing?
Guest: So it's actually very simple. I use Canva to create carousels. I use ChatGPT to to help me to help me scale with ideation, creating the post, creating the hooks, and things like this. I use Notion to create my content calendar, and I use Sales Navigator to find the right people. And that's it in terms of I do schedule my post, but I use LinkedIn to schedule my post. I use LinkedIn Analytics to analyze my my post because, again, what I'm most interested in is business. I'm I don't really care about what post gets most views or whatever. I'm more interested into other over more meaningful business metrics. And but that's it. It's it's about simplicity, ultimately. I think one one thing also is it's it's it's becoming a technician's word. It's like, who gets the best tech stack and who gets the best the the latest tool to do x, y, and z? Ultimately, it's it's it's a writer's game. Right? So you want to you wanna keep it simple as simple as possible. Don't get too bogged down into the specifics or how to do it perfectly. Ultimately, you wanna get started. And then when you hit a problem, when you find something that you can't optimize, you can always find a tool for that.
Mark Evans: That's really great advice. Yeah. My tools are are in the same realm. The one tool that I do use is AuthoredUp, which is a tool to write content, for LinkedIn. I was using Shield as an analytics platform, but I I wasn't really terribly interested in my analytics. I'm more interested in engagements and conversations. Mhmm. So I I backed off of that one. But thank you for all the great insight about LinkedIn. I hope we provided people with some tips and tools and and direction on how to make the platform work better for them. Where can people learn more about who you are and what you do?
Guest: So the best the best way is just to hop on my LinkedIn profile and then shoot me a DM. I check them about once or twice a day, so I'm more than happy to continue the conversation there.
Mark Evans: Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. And if you're a b to b or SaaS company looking for more sales and leads but struggling to do marketing that makes an impact, we should talk. You can reach me at Mark@MarkEvans.ca or DM me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon. Alright.