The summer is winding down and my fall season of teaching is heating up. I’ll be teaching digital marketing at Harbour.Space University in Bangkok in September, and Barcelona in October. If you’re interested in an amazing one-year digital marketing master’s degree, let me know and I’d be happy to introduce you to the admissions team, as well as tell you about available partial scholarships.

This week, meet Alana Sparrow, a LinkedIn creator like no other I know. Her unique posts are both eye-catching and cleverly written; that’s no surprise since she’s the founder of a creative branding firm. My interview with her this week talks about why she’s passionate about personal branding, and how she brings her creativity to the table on LinkedIn. Let’s start with news and then on to the interview, I know you’ll enjoy hearing from Alana.

What’s new related to LinkedIn? Here’s what caught my eye this week.

• The latest LinkedIn-er? Kamala Harris (well, the White House to be specific, but I’ll bet it’s the VP’s team behind it). One post and counting as of today. (Marketing Brew)

• Can’t get enough of LinkedIn names set to lyrics? Here’s a whole TikTok account of them. (TikTok)

• Have you seen in-feed video carousels yet? They’re rolling out now, but I haven’t encountered them. Hit reply and let me know if you have! (Social Media Today)

Welcome, Alana. Please tell us about yourself.

I am the founder and chief branding officer of the Foundry for Art, Design and Culture, which is a brand strategy and creative services agency for business, personal, and employer brands.

What’s your industry?

Brand strategy and creative services.

What does LinkedIn do for you?

It's very much a sales channel for us, for brand awareness, particularly around our personal and employer branding services. And those services have turned into feeders for the business branding aspect of what we do.

I turned to LinkedIn in early 2023 to fill a loss of contracts we’d had because of Covid. No one was making an investment in video for two years, and that had been 60% of our revenue.

I decided to use my LinkedIn as social proof, thinking, if this can work to grow other people’s businesses, it certainly can work to help me. I put everything I know about brand strategy into LinkedIn to build my personal brand. And it turned our business around in three months. And I haven’t looked back. I only wish I’d started it sooner.

What are your main goals for using LinkedIn?

Our goal is mainly lead generation. Through LinkedIn, we get clients for our personal and employer branding services, and those then feed in to our business branding services.

Alana’s content strategy

Who’s your target audience on LinkedIn?

We have two buyer personas. We have CEOs or executives, and then we have high performing founders or solopreneurs. Our target right now are people who have at least six figures, going for seven figures, [in annual revenue].

We have a lot of coaches in the mix. But the demographic really that seems to resonate a lot with me, because of my lifestyle and the fact that I have kind of had a remote first business for a number of years, are people that are looking to transition out of corporate.

How do you decide what content to create and share on LinkedIn?

We're still very much in an education of the market in terms of how beneficial a personal brand can be. So my content is a mix of creating awareness, as well as nurturing.

To me, everything is bottom of funnel. The reason why I say that is that If I'm nurturing people through and I'm educating, they might not be my client now or my target now, but they will be at some point. And when they wake up [to it], I want to be top of mind.

With each post, I may have one single person in mind, so I'll speak to their very specific pain points that I've identified through having conversations. Some assumptions too, based on my being in their shoes in many ways; I can speak to those pain points a little bit more directly.

How do you differentiate your content from others on LinkedIn?

[Stephanie’s note: Alana’s content - which you really should check out! - is both visually compelling and beautifully written, and different from anyone else I’ve seen on LinkedIn.]

Where a lot of this starts is that I'm a creative. I was formally trained as a designer, as a painter. But I'm also a strategist.

Finding that very unique expression and tapping into some of my own personal art practices and things that I do for my own personal passions is reflected in my positioning and visual identity, because I want it to stand out.

Then how can I stretch the limits of this and still grab people's attention? It's been a little bit of experimentation and sometimes it's wildly successful. And then there's been times where I pushed the boundary too far, but that's totally okay.

The uniqueness of the visual aspect of my content catches attention, but I feel like what's kept their attention and what makes them want to stick around is that I embody every ounce of what I'm doing. I believe it. I live it. I breathe it. My goal is for it to come through the screen and to get right inside of my audience's head or their heart.

What are the processes you use to create content? 

• Schedule in advance ❌

• Batch create content ✅

• Optimize for SEO/keywords ✅

• Follow an editorial calendar ❌

• Have specific content pillars/themes ✅

• Repurpose content to/from LinkedIn or reuse on LinkedIn ✅

• Use AI in any part of the content writing process ✅

• Have team/human support for any part of your LI process ✅

• Keep a list of potential topics somewhere (Notes, Notion, etc.) ✅

• Design or source visuals including infographics and carousels and video ✅

What types of content do you post to LinkedIn?

• Text only ❌

• Polls ❌

• Audio ❌

• Video ✅

• Carousels ✅

• Photos of yourself (selfies) ✅

• Photos of other people or things ❌

• AI generated images ✅

• Infographics (single image) ✅

• Other people’s graphics ❌ 

• Links to your company content ✅

• Links to other content ❌

• Reposts of others’ content (repost only) ❌

• Reposts of others’ content (with your thoughts) ✅

• LinkedIn newsletters ❌

• Responses to community articles ✅

• LinkedIn Live events ✅

How much time does it take?

How much time do you spend each weekday on LinkedIn on comments or Direct Messages (DMs), outside of content creation?

A minimum of 2 ½ - 3 hours, because I engage with other people, and because my content is so highly engaged. For example, this morning I spent 45 minutes replying to comments on my post.

Are you active on LinkedIn on the weekends, either posting or commenting or both?

I'm active on the weekends as well. Saturday is one day that's probably my lightest day, a day that I'll say I'm not even going on to LinkedIn, but usually I do. It’s still 2 ½ - 3 hours on Sundays when I post.

How do you use DMs (direct messages) in the service of your goals?

My DM routine does vary. If I have a high volume of clients that I'm working with or onboarding new people, then I just physically just don't have the time to get into the DMs. I am probably sending about five DMs a day on average, but some days, you know, I'll sit down and it's like, nope.

I tend to nurture inbound leads, they’re my priority, and prospect outbound if somebody seems perfect for my ICP (ideal client profile).

Alana’s biggest growth levers

What has contributed most to your growth?

I would say my relentlessness to it. I adopted [LinkedIn] and drank the Kool -Aid. I didn’t have time to mess around; my window was closing on me because of my [business] situation.

I went into a LinkedIn course cohort with top creators Lara Acosta and Luke Matthews, and just dug in and did it. I took everything they said and put it on steroids. Because that I did that, it happened.

I think in all fairness, I also came to the table with a huge advantage: I'm a brand strategist. I understand the strategy part. I also understood very clearly how to speak to people.

What I didn't really know was like, how do you work this platform? Like what are those formulas that do work, and then how can I bring what I bring to the table?

How do you track what’s working and know what to change?

I do study my back end data; I'm like a scientist because I know that there is so much gold in that information. I've built different AI prompts to be able to analyze that data.

I pay attention to like how many likes, how many impressions I have in the first 10 minutes. I check it again in the first 30. And so I know within an hour exactly where a post is going to go. I know the number of impressions it's going to get, the number of total engagements. It's kind of down to a science now. So I can tell if it's not going to resonate really quickly at this point.

There's a lot of things that go into consideration before I will entirely dismiss a post. What constitutes success for each individual post is different; a pure sales post is not going to perform at the same level of engagement or impressions the way that something that might fall under top of funnel type of content.

How Alana makes money

How do you generate revenue in your business?

We have multiple revenue streams. Individual personal branding, executive personal brands, and business branding. And all the strategic creative that comes from that. That includes videography and photography, design, and strategy work. Most of our clients are retainer clients.

We also have our private client white glove service, where you come in for three days, we work out all of your brand strategy and content strategy, build a visual identity, photo, video; it’s very intensive, in person.

How do you quantify your success on LinkedIn?

Our revenue through LinkedIn, from when I started to the first of the year, tripled our monthly revenue at that time. We’re set right now to further double everything by the end of next year. It's really amazing and it’s transformed our business. It's wild.

Alana’s top tips

Have you faced any challenges on LinkedIn along the way? what's, have you ever wanted to quit? And what got you back on track?

I've wanted to quit many times because it feels there were points, especially the first three, four months, it felt like I'm building something that's not sustainable. This doesn't feel good, this is just crazy. I hadn't been that exhausted since grad school.

There are times when I don't like the negativity that can come with having a high profile. I struggle with that. I'm not like some big creators that just blow it off, I feel it a bit more. The bigger I get, the more I expose myself, I don't love that. I have thought about quitting, but then where would all my clients come from?

What advice would you give other Networkers who want to build and leverage their LinkedIn presence?

I believe this to my core: If you're going to put the energy and the effort into building out a personal brand, have it have purpose. It takes so much work and so much effort to do it, that it's worth making it meaningful. Not only meaningful for you, but for the world, for your other people, because otherwise to me, it's just a squandered opportunity.

If you approach it that way, and if you look at it as part of your larger strategy for your business and for yourself personally, you'll get so much more out of it. And it'll be a thing that feeds you and you get really excited about. That'll be the thing that sustains you and keeps you going.

Is there anything else you want to tell me that I haven’t asked you?

Because I'm a world traveler, I love making the planet feel smaller and smaller. And that's been one of the most surprising things about LinkedIn. I love that I'm seeing the world in a very different way than the way that I've been able to experience it when traveling, because I'm being exposed to people and cultures that I've not gone to physically yet. And to me that's a gift.

Alana’s best post

Stephanie’s note: I’ve asked each Networker to give me one “best post,” based on their own criteria.

Read this post on LinkedIn

Why Alana considers this her best post.

I acquired 450 followers in 18 hours from this post, and 40% of them fit my ideal client profile. It’s not my highest performing post in terms of impressions or engagements, but it’s the highest for qualified leads, followers, email signups, and connect requests.

How to network with Alana

• Follow Alana Sparrow on LinkedIn

• Visit her business, The Foundry for Art, Design + Culture

• Visit Alana’s personal branding website

• Follow her on Instagram, too

Have you noticed that I usually pick tips that help solve MY problems? That’s because I assume if I’m having a problem, others probably are too. Hit reply and let me know if I’m right about this!

This week’s tip is a great analogy and video from Naim Ahmed on why and how to use warm outreach DMs to actually book meetings. This is something I’m actively working to improve so I really appreciate this breakdown. I hope it helps you, too!

Read this post on LinkedIn

I’m always on the lookout for something that changes the way I use LinkedIn. It could be an idea, a tool, a process, or something strategic.

Have a tip I should consider? Hit reply to this email and let me know!

That’s all for now—I look forward to seeing you again next week for another Networker interview.