Ep 289 | Power of Creating a Personal Brand on LinkedIn with Alex Thoric

Let's dive deep into the power of LinkedIn for nonprofits with the help of Alex Thoric, a digital marketing expert. Alex shares his insights on building a personal brand on LinkedIn, engaging with your audience, and leveraging the platform to connect with key prospects and partners. Whether you're a LinkedIn pro or just getting started, this episode is packed with practical tips and strategies to help you maximize your nonprofit's presence on the platform.

What you'll learn:

→ Why LinkedIn is a must-have for nonprofits with a B2B focus
→ How to build a personal brand on LinkedIn and use it to your advantage
→ Strategies for creating and repurposing content to engage your audience
→ Effective ways to use direct messaging and multiple touchpoints to build relationships
→ The benefits of using LinkedIn Sales Navigator and the “Dream 100” approach

Want to skip ahead? Here are key takeaways:

03:15 Should you even be on LinkedIn? YES! LinkedIn is a powerful platform for nonprofits, with 80% of B2B sales happening through the platform.
07:02 Understand the power of a personal brand. Building a personal brand on LinkedIn is about being relatable and connecting with people on a deeper level, not just selling yourself. It also happens through your personal page.
14:29 Creating content for your page doesn't have to be overwhelming. Batch content creation and repurposing existing content can be a game-changer for your LinkedIn strategy.
19:59 You don't even have to create posts to make an impact on LinkedIn. Using direct messaging and multiple touchpoints, like email, is crucial for building authentic relationships on LinkedIn.
26:59 There is a lot of power in the filtering opportunities to find the right people. Investing in LinkedIn Sales Navigator can provide a significant ROI for your nonprofit, allowing you to connect with key decision-makers.

Resources:

The Ultimate Sales Machine Book by Chet Holmes
LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Full Transcript

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
If you have a social media strategy for 2025 that doesn't include LinkedIn, what are you waiting for? LinkedIn is one of my favorite platforms for social media, especially for nonprofits with the B to B element, and so I'm super excited about today's conversation with Alex Thoric. We're talking all about the personal brand on LinkedIn. Now, when we initially talked about this as a conversation topic, I was a little bit, you know, hesitant, because when I think of personal brands, I think of people that are selling themselves, people like, you know, like Oprah or Ellen or, you know, you don't have to be big to be a personal brand, but it's about selling myself as a brand. Well, Alex has some great thoughts and ideas and insights on how we can use our individual LinkedIn pages in conjunction with our nonprofit organizational pages to really build better relationships, have better conversations, and get in front of new people. And so I really think you're going to enjoy this episode. If you are using LinkedIn, you're going to get some great strategies on how to do it. Even better, you're if you're new to LinkedIn, you're going to get some ideas for how you might want to kind of build things up and get things started. Alex thorough is the founder of a marketing agency and co founder of a marketing consulting company building income on demand. A digital marketer who has great experience working with different industries such as spas, gyms, coaches, consultants, real estate and restaurants. He loves working out and playing soccer and guitar. I think you're going to love this conversation. It's going to give you some great ways to think about your LinkedIn, personal page. How to not be nervous about having your employees go out on their own on a social media platform and just different ways to think about your brand overall. But before we get into it, this episode is brought to you by our free resources. The first click provides amazing free Downloadables and videos for you to take advantage of to raise more money online, everything from your website to email to fundraising, ideas, social media and even some mindset tips and self care. You can grab these resources at thefirstclick.net/resources, and we're adding more all the time. I really hope that you'll check them out. There are dozens of them there, and you can pick one or download them all, whatever makes the most for you, and what you need to tackle today with regards to your online fundraising. So again, that's thefirstclick.net/resources, let's get into the episode.

Intro
You're listening to the digital marketing therapy podcast. I'm your host, Sami Bedell-Mulhern. Each month we dive deep into a digital marketing or fundraising strategy that you can implement in your organization. Each week, you'll hear from guest experts, nonprofits, and myself on best practices, tips and resources to help you raise more money online and reach your organizational goals.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
Hey, friends, please join me in welcoming Alex Thoric to the podcast. Alex, thanks for being here.

Alex Thoric
Yeah, thanks a lot for having me.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
Yes, we're talking all things LinkedIn today. So before we kind of jump into our topic, I would just kind of love to hear why LinkedIn? Why is that a platform that you particularly love?

Alex Thoric
Well, in my case, I do work with B to B, so it's definitely the platform to be had. Maybe you've heard of the stats that 80% of BGP sales are done through LinkedIn. So for someone who is working with other businesses, or they need other businesses to promote theirs, LinkedIn should definitely be the platform for you. And a lot of people that I talk to, actually, even these days, they still look at LinkedIn as a CV platform, which is not necessarily true anymore. It's more of a social media it's more of a business related social media platform.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
Yeah, I've never heard that 80% stat, but I it's pretty active, so I'm not surprised to hear that that's great.

Alex Thoric
Yeah, you can Google. I mean, maybe, maybe it changed. But based on what I've seen last time, that's the those were the numbers, pretty much. And of course, like you, because LinkedIn works on a lower scale as well as on the higher scale. And with all the large companies, let's say the Inc 500 all the salespeople, all the yeah, basically, all the salespeople that work within those companies as well. They they all use LinkedIn. And in their case, the one deal for them could be, I don't know, one, 510, 30, million, yeah, yeah.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
Well, the, I think the thing that's really unique about LinkedIn is the personal pages versus the business pages, and I think that's also what can be scary for nonprofits. And we did do an episode about this earlier, which we can link up about personal pages and business pages. But today what we're talking about is kind of personal brand and how you can kind of show up. So. So could you kind of just talk maybe a little bit about what a personal brand is and how that kind of plays into the context of somebody working for a nonprofit organization, as opposed to, like, running their own business.

Alex Thoric
Yeah. So the way I see personal brand is like you, whenever you go to a networking event, you always have, or most of the times you have a business card, whether it's physical or digital, business card, LinkedIn or having a personal brand online, is pretty much your business card online, because that's where people can come and see who you are and what you're doing and get more information basically about you, but at the same time, the reason why it's personal, you do share some personal things. Of course, you don't necessarily need to share your family, like some like influencers, are doing it those days, like you don't. You don't need to become an influencer to have a personal brand. Having a personal brand is basically showing people who can basically being relatable to people. That's that's what it's all about, and whether it's sharing with different some of the hobbies that you might have, or maybe even some of the interest, let's say like you like reading books. And I'm sure there are a ton of people that like reading the books and maybe the specific type of books. So having a personal brand does give you an option to connect with people on a deeper level. And the difference between a personal page on LinkedIn as well as a business again on business page, they're not as not as active, and you can't really make it active again, because it's business like you, you would, most of times, you'd post, yes, certain updates, certain news about the company, maybe team members, what's going on. Maybe you go to an event, maybe sponsor something, or somebody sponsoring your events, stuff like that, right? And then the case with a personal page, that's where you you can, you pretty much connect, because in LinkedIn, have connections, right? You have second for first, second and third level of connections.

Alex Thoric
So that's where you connect with people on a personal level, and that's why it's important for you to, I would say, start building a personal brand using LinkedIn. And the way you could do it, of course, through content. That's the main way. And when I say content, though, that could be a short form video content LinkedIn started pushing that more and more. I keep getting more messages from LinkedIn. Specifically, that video content is getting more is bringing more awareness, even though I'm personally not seeing that, because most of the content that I see on my news feed is written content, so it's literally an image and the text and carousel posts, the ones that you can swipe through like a document style. So that's those are the two type of contents that I see that they're working. Another thing that you could do in order to promote your nonprofit is make sure that you are active on LinkedIn, within the comment section. And when I say within the comment section, what I'm referring to is say the people that maybe you want to you want to maybe sponsor some of your events on your or you want them to be part of your nonprofit, whether those are people or the companies, of course, or heads of companies, go ahead and connect with them first, first of all, and then make sure that you engage with their posts, with their content in the comment section. Because what that is doing is, whenever you comment, you know how it is, you have your name and then you have your tagline right under so other people will see your comments, and you will you, you might actually get more awareness by commenting on other people's posts than just posting on LinkedIn. Because it's a, I would say it's a, it's kind of a dance of putting out the content, but also engaging, because at the end of the day, social media is designed to be social, and that's the end goal, and it's not just to get likes. So yeah, I would say that those are the things that you should definitely consider.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
I love that, and it's also like just a good way to naturally start a conversation. But I think, you know, comments not being like, Oh, great post. Like being thoughtful, oh yeah, and I, and having information in there that maybe it encourages that person to then want to comment back on yours, so that you can actually start that conversation and maybe take it somewhere else, right? Like being thoughtful about how you're engaging with people.

Alex Thoric
Yeah, yeah. 100% so it's basically like LinkedIn. You can, you can look at LinkedIn as again when you go to an in person networking event, or, let's say you have your event, and whenever you talk to people, you have a genuine conversation, it's exactly the same thing just online.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
Yep, it's beautiful, and you can use it for sponsorships or board recruitment or, I mean, all sorts of different things. I love that. Yeah. So one of the things that I think people get nervous about as nonprofit organizations. Is okay. So Alex, you work for my work company. You're out there networking and talking to people. How do I ensure that you're going to represent the company in a way that we feel good about? Or if you leave and you have all these connections and they're not connected with our company page, do we lose all of that engagement? I think it comes from a fear of, what's the word? Well, just comes from a fear of, you know, we're nonprofits. Are always like, well, we have to maintain these connections. We have to maintain these connections, otherwise they're going to go somewhere else or they're going to go with the person. So how can we maybe, as a company, create a culture of LinkedIn encouraging people to engage also understanding that it is their personal page, and they might be sharing things that aren't related to our business, like, how do we start to navigate that conversation?

Alex Thoric
Well, first things first, I would say the person who started the nonprofit, or who is in charge of nonprofit, that person should definitely start building a personal brand, because I don't think that person will either leave, or even if they leave. I mean, at the end of the day, they're the ones who started, they're the founders of the nonprofit, so you kind of become the face of your company. If, for the people that, let's say, work at nonprofit, I don't think there will be an issue of them. Let's say, even if they leave, they still, they still build the relationships, and people still have that bridge of whenever they think of that person, they'll think of the nonprofit, because that's how well, when you start building the personal brand, right, you position yourself that way, specifically in this case, and that's what other people will remember you as. So it doesn't necessarily mean that people will lose the connections, or even the relationships of those other connections, that this specific person had, connections with connections with connections. That's funny, but, yeah, but there's these people still remember. Will remember the name of the nonprofits, and in order, so, as you mentioned, like, how can we bridge them together as well, whenever? So whoever is doing the business development for nonprofit, they should also have either access to the business page on LinkedIn, because that way they can also invite people. I mean, the either way, they can invite people to follow the business page on LinkedIn, but when you're a connection, you get an official invitation. I would say, so it's not just like sharing the page and it's like, hey, follow our page, but people would get notification to follow the page, and because the person knows that, oh yeah, I'm connected with this person, it's easier for them to just pretty much click follow and follow the page itself.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
Yeah, because the goal is to start the conversation on LinkedIn, but always to take it off LinkedIn as fast as possible, to have a more genuine conversation, right? So if you put some of those things in place, then again, you should be capturing their information in your CRM or in your other notes, notes and whatnot. So I love that, and I think just having a social media policy for your organization in general can help provide some guidance on what's appropriate and what's not when you're posting. I mean, you know it's like this day and age, you wouldn't think we would need to have those conversations, but you do

Alex Thoric
for some people, right? Yeah, yeah.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
We always say, if you wouldn't want your what was the rule of one other company? If you wouldn't want your mom to see what you posted, then it's definitely not appropriate for you to post on a company page. Yeah, I might change. I love it. Okay, so when we think about, kind of our building our personal brand and kind of creating the content that we want, because I agree with you, I know LinkedIn is pushing video, and it seems like more on the app than on the desktop version. So maybe if you're on the app, more you are seeing more video. But how can we kind of support our teams in that content creation? So, like, I'm not alone. Be like, Okay, well, yes, I am here trying to promote LinkedIn. I also have my, you know, brand that I'm trying to really build myself as a subject matter expert, or really, you know, build that trust with people. How can we kind of work together to create that content, or should it come from one place? Or should we feel like we can kind of create on our own, if we feel comfortable doing so?

Alex Thoric
Well? In this case, we have two options. One of them is to maybe actually start a podcast like that's something that that we are doing currently. That's one of the best ways to do it, because we get to have a genuine conversation. And then we can take this clips and then take this video and then chop it down to short clips and promote it this way. Another option that we have is do batch content creation, where you could, let's say, take one day out of the month, prepare the content, prepare different outs. The topics. If it's easier for you to read a script from a teleprompter, you could do that. You could use something like big Vu. It's big Vu as a teleprompter. You add your script and pretty much take your phone and you start reading the script. As for the batch content creation, I would suggest preparing as much as possible. And you could like these days, there's chatgpt, there's cloud.ai like cloud.ai is more of a marketing type of an AI platform, very similar to chatgpt, but some people like it more for the marketing purposes. So you could put in the right prompt in and get the end result that you want. Just make sure that you do put in a good quality prompt, because the quality of the prompt will give you the quality of the answer. And then you could take all of that, and I would say again, take one day out of the month, prepare all the content, and maybe take an entire day to pre, to post, produce all the content, and you can schedule it for the entire month in advance. So that would literally take you maybe two days. But this way you pretty much have content for the next 30 days. I love that. And I think what I like about LinkedIn,

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
too, is it's such a great place to repurpose everything you're already creating. So like we so you, you brought up this podcast, right from this podcast, we record or we create short, little video clips. We also, um, put it in our newsletter. Our newsletter gets repurposed as a LinkedIn newsletter. Our blog content gets repurposed as blog content as articles on LinkedIn. So I think what you find is you already have a lot of the stuff you just need to. You're just not putting it there and chucking, yeah. So I love that, yeah,

Alex Thoric
yeah. Definitely. Repurposing is, I think, one of the best way to it, because you could, you could go even further than that. You could take. So as I mentioned, let's say you do the articles. You could take the entire article with the topic and then create a LinkedIn carousel, or basically upload it as a document. So you would upload it as a PDF file or PowerPoint, both of them work. Yeah. And those would be the survival posts, because that's what people engage with, and the goal of those is for people to either share comment and like Pretty much,

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
yeah. Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about engaging, because I think that's the beauty of the personal brand, is we're not unique in what we do, but the way that we do it and the way that we connect with people is unique, right? Like, that's why people choose to work with us or give to our organization, or what have you. So I think content generation is a piece of LinkedIn, but it doesn't have to be the whole piece you already talked about, the commenting on on the business pages or the people that you want to build future relationships. But I think we would be remiss if we don't talk about a DM strategy and how we kind of connect with people in that way. And I know we could do a whole podcast episode on just that strategy alone, but if we're kind of listening to this, we're like, Well, I'm not ready to pump out a bunch of content. Maybe I'm not going to be on LinkedIn. Maybe kind of what would be a big overview, or how might we want to think about DMing and building relationships in an authentic and genuine way on LinkedIn that I think is unique. So

Alex Thoric
in case with the outrage we DMS on LinkedIn, I would say you have two options. You could either do it manually and have a sequence of actions that you would do most of the time. Well, these days, what we are currently doing is, when we send a connection request, we send it without a note, unless we know that. Let's say we engage with a person's post, or maybe within the comments with with another person. In that case, definitely makes sense to add a note to kind of remind that person. But let's say, if you're reaching out to someone who you didn't really interact with, you didn't engage with, just send it as an empty note. Because sometimes, most of the times, like, I'm sure you've had those connection requests with a note where you where people write an entire sales page, yeah, yeah. So I've been there myself, done my fair share of mistakes earlier, like, say, five, six years ago. But yeah, it's important. So this, what really works these days, is send, send out a connection request without a node. Then when the person accepts the connection request, you can send a message saying, Hey, thanks for connecting. Would love to and it really depends on what exactly you want them to do, right? Because one school of thought is you can go in and try to book an appointment right away with people, because it's numbers game.

Alex Thoric
But. Again, it really depends, but in this case, specifically, the goal is to build relationships. And I would say most of the times the goal is to build relationships, I would say you could just introduce yourself with a short, like really brief introduction, and maybe a little bit about the company itself or the nonprofit itself. So you could either do it manually, or you could automate the entire process and use the tool called drupify. That's what we use. And you can automate this entire process, sending out the connection, request, viewing the page, sending the messages, liking people's content, sending them an email, because it's important also for you to have multiple touch points, because these days, people have very short attention span, and maybe they're not necessarily on LinkedIn all the time. So let's say if they connect with you now you when you go to the people's page and you click on More info or contact info, you will get to see their email. So now you can also email them and tell them something like, Hey, John, we just connected on LinkedIn. Just wanted to reach out to you through email. Not sure how active you are on LinkedIn as an example, right? So this way you have multiple touch points, because, again, most people are not I think I was 85 I was 85 I think it was 85 or 90% of LinkedIn users are not necessarily that active. So, and it's all, it's only really 10% that's create content. The rest either just watch content on or they just come to the platform a couple of times a week, but they're not really doing much. Yeah, I heard

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
that too, that most are not content creators on the platform, and so, like, that's also the beauty of the beauty of the direct messages, because you can search, targeted, search for people and interact with them in that way. But I love kind of that, even if you, if you're just getting started, and you don't want to use an automated platform, even just having that checklist, right of, okay, what when we make a connection request, this is the process that happens so you don't miss all that, all that stuff, because, like, that top of mind piece. Well, if I, oh, I'm recognizing that name now, because I saw they commented on my post, they sent me a message, they I got a notification that they viewed my profile. And it's making all of that kind of resonate in your brain. So I think that's really smart. Yeah,

Alex Thoric
it's having the multiple touch points. I'm not sure if you heard of the study that Google did. They called it 711, four, or at least that's what people call it. Now, Google wanted to see how much time it takes a person to become a client of company, whether it's offline or online, and these days, takes for people to consume seven hours of content. Have 11 touch points across four different platforms, and that's why I'm saying having multiple touch points. And as you mentioned, engaging with the person's content, reaching out to them, connecting right sending an email. So having those touch points and making sure that you're showing up multiple times, because everyone is trying to get our attention these days. Yeah.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
And I think even because of that, resisting the urge to, like, word vomit everything about who you are and what you do, and I would say also, like taking the time I get pitched all the time for my podcast, and most of them I just delete. And especially because I'll get pitches from like these companies that are like, Hey, we help businesses get to like, six figures, and we're gonna, we would love to come on your podcast and talk about how we can really ramp up your sales strategy. Blah, blah, blah, okay, that's great, and you might be really good at that, but you clearly have not actually looked at what I do at all, because you're not mentioning any like that is not even close to who my audience is. So a lot of times, even just taking a few moments to look at their profile and be able to customize that message can kind of go a long way, because not a lot of people are doing that. And for small organizations, you don't need to be reaching out to 1000s of people, right? You could do wouldn't it serve you more to like really target 10 to 20 that you know are really the right fit for you? Yeah? Well,

Alex Thoric
yeah, 100% there is a, I don't know if you've heard of the dream 100 strategy, no. So it was created initially by Chad Holmes. He wrote the book called The sales. The Sales Machine. The sales sell something. Look it up and make sure it's in show notes, yeah. But then Russell Branson also mentioned so he started using that himself as well. Sure. I'm sure you know who Russell Brunson is, yep. And he mentioned that in his book as well, the way he's using it. But in case, with Chet Holmes, he was selling advertising to companies, or actually he wanted to get advertisers and his case like he wouldn't. He didn't necessarily had 1000s of people to reach out to or like connect with. He literally had about 100 something companies. So he came up with a plan to he wanted to know everything about those companies, so he tried to connect with. Them in each and every way possible. And then at the end of the day, he became the top salesperson in that company for the for the magazine. And that's pretty much what you can do to create a dream 100 for your company, of companies or people that you want to connect with, you want to build relationships with, so they can be either your sponsors, or they can represent you somehow, and then the day, so they can partner up with you in one way or another. Yeah,

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
I love that, yeah, because we need to come at it from an abundant mindset, not a scarcity mindset. We don't need to talk to everybody. And in fact, we're going to raise more money if we talk to a smaller amount of the right people than everybody. So I think that that's fantastic. That's fantastic. Well, so many great tips and things happening. Resources. We'll have them all in the show notes at thefirstclick.net/289, but Alex, you know, if there's one thing that you're most excited about for LinkedIn in 2025 kind of what are you guys focusing on? What are you excited about? What trends are you seeing that we might want to maybe pay attention?

Alex Thoric
Well, the pin focus right now on LinkedIn would be short form content, because that's what the platform said that they will start pushing. So it makes sense to listen to them and do what they what they're mentioning, because that's what they want users to do. So they will be pushing more and more of that type of content, and I guess it's going to be even between simple posts and video content. But that's definitely something that you should use, and then also start using, I would say, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, if you're not using it yet, because that's a gold mine. And you can reach people like, I like to call LinkedIn Sales Navigator, the database of LinkedIn, because they pretty much give you the entire back end all all the accounts that they have access to. And you can literally connect with presidents of companies if you really need to.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
Yeah, I love that, and that's not a free option, yeah? But again, to your point earlier, if you get one donation off of it, it's gonna,

Alex Thoric
oh, it's so worth it, yeah, it's, I think it's at $79 a month, yeah? So it's definitely worth it compared to, let's say, if you advertise it on other platforms, whether it's Well, Google is usually free for nonprofits, but let's say, if it's meta, Facebook and Instagram, even if you decide to advertise on LinkedIn, LinkedIn ads are pretty expensive, yeah, but using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, that's something that you could definitely that's where you can get the most ROI. I would say, Yeah,

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
I love that so good. Well, Alex, there's so many more things we could talk about with LinkedIn. It's definitely a topic and an area of focus for us in our business, next or this year, as we kind of work through connections and building relationships. If people want to learn more about how you support organizations and companies with LinkedIn and all the other amazing things that you do, how do they connect with you.

Alex Thoric
They can reach out to me on social media. It's Alex Thoric, pretty much on their platform, they can also visit our website. It's building income on demand.com. We have a lot of free resources that they can go through and download them start using for their businesses.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
Love it. Well, again, we'll have all of this stuff linked up at the show notes thefirstclick.net/289, all of the resources Alex mentioned, as well as ways that you can connect with him. So thank you so much for being here today. This was really fantastic. Yeah,

Alex Thoric
thank you a lot for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
Thank you again to Alex for joining me today. You will be able to grab all of the goodies in the show notes. At thefirstclick.net/289, and I hope that you will really jump into LinkedIn and come up with a strategy that works for you. Again. I love that you can get on LinkedIn and start having conversations. It's not all about content creation and posting, but there's a way that you can really make LinkedIn work for you. So let me know if this is a strategy you are implementing in 2025 for now, please make sure you hit that subscribe button so that you get notified whenever new episodes launch. And thank you so much for being here with me in 2025 as we kind of get close to crossing 300 episodes, which I think is crazy, but so so fun. So again, thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.