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How to Jump Hard into LinkedIn With Both Feet: Camille Trent
60 Plays4 years ago
2020 has been a big year for LinkedIn. The social media platform now has more than 720 million users globally.
It has transformed into a platform dominated by content and connections rather than a place where HR professionals troll for talent and people look for new opportunities.
In short order, many people have decided to embrace LinkedIn as the social platform to drive their personal profiles and careers.
From doubling-down on the platform over the past seven months, I've seen first-hand the power of LinkedIn to drive my fractional CMO business.
I've made new connections with people around the world and had dozens of conversations, including Camille Trent, a brand and digital marketing specialist with Texas Citizens Bank.
I reached out to Camille because she has established an engaged following since jumping hard into LinkedIn in August. I want to learn first-hand about how someone leverages LinkedIn effectively.
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Transcript
Introduction to Marketing Spark Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
You're listening to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight, tools and tips from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in 20 minutes, more or less. If you're active on LinkedIn, one of the biggest benefits is the ability to connect with people around the world.
Guest Introduction: Camille Trent
00:00:17
Speaker
A case in point is Camille Trent, a brand and digital marketing strategist with Texas Citizens Bank. So how does a marketer in Toronto, me, connect with a marketer in Colorado? Well, it's about LinkedIn.
00:00:30
Speaker
Camille has been writing some great content. So I reached out to her, see if she wanted to appear on the podcast and here we are. Welcome to marketing spark Camille.
Camille's LinkedIn Strategy
00:00:39
Speaker
Thank you. It's good. Uh, it's good to finally chat. I know we've been exchanging comments here and there on LinkedIn, like you mentioned. So I'm glad we were able to do this.
00:00:48
Speaker
So let me start by asking you about your LinkedIn experience. Like a lot of people, I suspect that you jumped harder on the platform recently. Maybe give some background on why you decided to use LinkedIn and what you're getting out of it. Probably a few years ago is when I realized that you could post on there.
00:01:05
Speaker
I didn't actually do that at the time. I shared a few posts here and there once every few months. And then this year, I was like, there's something here. This LinkedIn thing is a real deal. I started posting a little bit more, a little bit more, starting probably in January.
00:01:22
Speaker
so that I was going from three or four posts a month to 12 posts a month. Then in August, August 5th, I did write down the date. I'm just going to jump all in on this. I'm just going to post once every day. Once I set that, it's hard for me to go back on it. It's a goal that I had for myself. So I did that and I started posting every day. So now it's been almost three months, not quite, of posting consistently.
Content Creation Tips and Tools
00:01:49
Speaker
I've gotten some, some really good insights from that. And I've also gotten to meet some really great people. So as far as creating content on a consistent basis, I know as a writer, it's a challenge. And this is what I've trained you professionally. How do you keep writing content consistently? Do you have any tricks? How do you capture your ideas? How do you tell whether the content you're writing resonates? So you should write more of that and less of others. What's your approach?
00:02:14
Speaker
I can just go through my whole strategy, which I don't know if you can even call it a strategy, but this is what I do. Throughout the day, I think the number one thing is being open to everything being content or everything being copy. If you have that open mindset of anything that you come across, the way that you see it, the way that you interpret it in the world, that is your content because someone else actually sees that differently.
00:02:42
Speaker
When I have an insight or something I consider to be an insight, I write it down in Google Keep. So basically just a notes app. What I like about Google Keep is if I do want to write something more long form or if I need to kind of have it's an idea but it's not hammered out, then it actually shows up on the side of
00:03:00
Speaker
of Google Docs. And so on Google Docs, you'll see like Google actually have it up right now. So you'll have you'll have the little Google Keep app right there, you actually have your tasks right below that and you have your calendar. So it's all kind of like in one central place. So then if you prefer to kind of use a word, word documenting, word processing kind of thing like a whole word doc,
00:03:20
Speaker
then you can actually just pull in your notes from there. So that's kind of what I do to keep a running tab of my ideas and my thoughts. And usually what it ends up being is a headline. A headline or maybe four lines. If I have four lines right off the bat, then it's a pretty good indicator that
00:03:35
Speaker
its content, that there's something there because it has legs. Then from there, every night is actually when I do it, I started writing in the mornings around like nine, but I have a 21-month-old and I have a husband and so we have actually just been carpooling, so I take him to work every day and we do some daycare.
00:03:56
Speaker
it was just a little too hectic to do in the morning and so I decided okay I'm just gonna post at night and whatever happens happens if it kills my reach that's fine it didn't it actually ended up being about the same if not better when I started posting at night and yeah and so my process is just I look back through my notes I kind of
00:04:13
Speaker
see which one i'm feeling for the day and and then i kind of go with that as a prompt really i think if you think about it let me back up if you think if you think about it as being open to everything being content and i have a whole back story on that but basically i watched a documentary it was called everything is copy and it kind of just changed change my world a little bit on how i saw a copy and how i thought about content marketing so so i do that and then i i pop open my my notes slash google docs and i see kinda what i want to
00:04:43
Speaker
riff on essentially what topic I want to pick out and sort of riff on and then I'll write something and I'll post it usually around like 10 p.m. My time so that's kind of my process
00:04:55
Speaker
Now as a writer, one of the things that you're looking for is flow.
Impact of LinkedIn Activities on Employer
00:04:59
Speaker
You're looking for inspiration. You're looking for your content to essentially be easy. You don't want it to be hard. One of the things I'm curious about is given the fact that you're producing content on a consistently producing content on a daily basis, how do you stop it from being an obligation?
00:05:14
Speaker
You look on LinkedIn and there's a lot of people you got to write every day and I can see people struggling. The post gets shorter. The insight gets less interesting and it's almost like they're going through the motion. So how do you avoid that kind of situation?
00:05:28
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really good question because I feel like I was getting close to burnout because it does take some time away from family or just fun things. I mean, you're already having your work day and then this is just essentially more work. The key for me is to not think about it that way. So when I very first started it, my plan wasn't to get leads or to generate business. My plan was just to experiment with it and to learn the platform because I knew that once I did that,
00:05:54
Speaker
That one, that's fun for me anyways as a marketer. But two, I could share those insights with members of our bank. It would help me with the company page that I was working on. And on top of that, I could share it with clients because I do do some freelancing on the side.
The Role of Copywriting in Modern Marketing
00:06:10
Speaker
I knew that there was a big enough why that I needed to figure that out. And then as I went, I realized kind of how much I missed
00:06:18
Speaker
Copy writing specifically so i do some copy writing for for my job but i also do a little bit of everything in terms of marketing and branding so so what's nice to kind of have my own writing time if i just thought about it is journaling essentially and i've said before that a lot of my posts are actually just notes to myself like things that things that i know but
00:06:39
Speaker
I needed to reposition it to myself to get the motivation to really do it, hard talk to myself. There are tenants, things that we know about marketing, but that I need to position or pitch to myself or maybe pitch to marketers in general that this is a good idea to keep with it because it is really hard with marketing, both with LinkedIn, like you mentioned, and then just marketing in general.
00:07:06
Speaker
It's a consistency game, so it's momentum and it's consistency. You can get really down if you don't see those results right away. You have to love it. I just decided I was only going to write about things that I wanted to write about, and so I did pick some core tenets of branding, copywriting, marketing in general, but marketing from a customer experience standpoint,
00:07:30
Speaker
And I think that that has kind of like separated some of my content because I really try and look at it, look at things and look at the world and look at marketing from a consumer perspective, like not from not from a marketing perspective. And so are we making it easier to buy from us or are we making it easier to like.
00:07:47
Speaker
us as marketers. So when I picked those topics, and then when I thought about it as a copywriting exercise, like this is a way for me to get better at copywriting, and also to get better at consistency, those are two huge things in marketing. So I really just thought about it as as a way for me to grow.
00:08:03
Speaker
as you focused on leveraging LinkedIn and using LinkedIn and providing insight, have you got any feedback for your employer? Do they look at what you're doing in a positive light? Did, do they think that it may be distracting you? I'm curious about what that's been like over the last few months. Yeah. I mean, so I don't take up any of, of my actual work time to do my own personal posts. And so, um, so there hasn't been any,
00:08:28
Speaker
any commentary on that specifically. Although I've gotten some positive feedback in that, so I work for a community bank and we were in the PPP loans, and that was a big deal for small businesses. Being able to share that message on LinkedIn and on Facebook that had a lot of shareability power just to know how hard that these bankers were working and all the extra hours they were doing to try and
00:08:54
Speaker
get more small businesses funded and be able to kind of stay alive and also thrive during that time. I published a lot of that stuff through our LinkedIn page and that got some pretty good exposure in the area. So people were excited about that. I think kind of once you see it working or once you see the potential with it, that's pretty cool. Another part of that is the SBA office themselves. I think I tagged the SBA district office in a post that we did that was about the do's and don'ts of using your PPP loans.
00:09:24
Speaker
That generated some good engagement, but most importantly, the district office reached out to our CEO and asked if they could actually use the slider that we put together on LinkedIn for the webinars that they were holding for small business owners. I think once you see it in that light, because obviously, our team was pretty excited about that and being able to get that extra exposure to our bank and having it be from a piece that
00:09:49
Speaker
was really just meant to be helpful that we originally created for our own customers. Seeing those kind of results, I think definitely got them excited about it. As far as my own personal brand, I've been lucky enough to have some really good bosses and mentors. They were excited for me to just do my own thing, especially since it was on my own time. But honestly, a side note is the fact that because I've grown a few followers, not a ton,
00:10:16
Speaker
But because I've grown my personal brand a little bit, it actually does give some extra exposure to the bank because when I go and I like those posts, then it shows it to more people. So there's those things. And then the last thing I'll mention is when we've gotten a few more employees, especially some of the younger employees.
00:10:32
Speaker
they had already seen our LinkedIn content and seen our Facebook content. I think that warmed them up to us being slightly more modern than maybe than some of the other banks out there. One of our other employees had started posting every day or every other day. That gives me an opportunity to interact with those posts and like those to give them a little bit extra exposure. It's an algorithm and it all feeds itself.
00:10:59
Speaker
LinkedIn is very smart about how they've done things about getting people to use the platform that way because it all feeds into each other. But but yeah, no, they they're happy about about LinkedIn in general. And I think happy about the exposure, the tiny bit of exposure that like my extra personal brand is able to bring to it.
00:11:17
Speaker
So it's been win-win all around. One of the things I want to talk to you about, aside from how to leverage LinkedIn in your experience on LinkedIn is your thoughts on copywriting. Cause a lot of your content, a lot of your posts are focused on how to be a better copywriter. And you've alluded to the fact that you're talking the talk and walking the walk. Why is copywriting get getting more attention these days? I mean, there's a lot of high profile marketers that are what I believe are giving a lot of copywriting one-on-one advice. Why is that happening? And do you think that copywriting is underrated or undervalued?
00:11:48
Speaker
It's funny that you should mention that because I did just post a few days ago that the copywriting is overrated and it was a little bit of a hook headline because it ended a little bit differently than that. But my thoughts are basically that when I went to school, actually graduated in advertising and then copywriting specifically. So there was a copywriting program that I took in school and it was geared toward the big agency life. So I did read all of those books and talk to the marketers at big companies or the
00:12:16
Speaker
the creatives rather at big agencies. So I kind of had that background. So it was really funny to see now that marketing has kind of jumped on it. Obviously, copywriting is part of marketing, but historically, it's been kind of within the creative department within agencies.
00:12:32
Speaker
But when I was graduating and there were recruiters over, one of the more interesting things is that it seemed like everyone in my class wanted to go to agency. That was what we're set up to do and what we're excited to do. But right around that time, there was a shift where there were a lot of companies bringing creative in-house.
00:12:50
Speaker
So bringing copywriting in-house and bringing designers in-house. And so I remember there being an Apple recruiter there, and that's what she was saying, was that they're moving everything in-house. Historically, they'd been with Shai at Day. That's almost famously so that they'd been with them. They'd started taking more of that work in-house. And I think because of that, that shift toward in-house creative, more in-house marketing.
00:13:13
Speaker
that more marketers have had to learn or at least understand copywriting. So that's, I think, kind of the background.
00:13:22
Speaker
on it and why it's become almost overrated, like I mentioned. What I meant by that is that marketers have been talking how they wish that they had learned copywriting early on and this and that, but it's almost become this weight on copywriter's shoulders of like, okay, we know that copywriting does a lot of the heavy lifting, so we're expecting you to do a lot of the heavy lifting when really it's a team effort because I really, really admire the designers that I've worked with in agency and then freelancing.
00:13:50
Speaker
and then also in-house when I work with agencies. So design is really important as well. And I think that that's been underrated at this point. It was almost like design was overrated, copyright was underrated, and now it's kind of shifted. And so I think design is still really important. I think just having an overall strategy, like having your positioning
Advice for Aspiring Copywriters
00:14:09
Speaker
figured out, working with a lot of small and medium businesses, they don't always have their positioning
00:14:14
Speaker
figured out and they kind of just want sometimes they want what clever one liners or you know just clever copywriting like they kind of just want you to fill in the blanks when really like you you need it to be you need to have you need to have figured out the strategy ahead of time and have a good product and have some other support like with design and with distribution I haven't even gotten started on distribution but it's not like you can just
00:14:39
Speaker
make good content and that's it. There's a few other things that go into it. Honestly, I would say that copywriting is a little bit overrated at this point. I think that it makes a huge, huge difference, but I don't think that you can just hire a great copywriter and that's it. You got to have the systems in place first. One final question. If you are a marketer and you want to improve your copywriting skills, can you give me some basic advice? I think that the main thing that
00:15:08
Speaker
companies miss out on is there's an opportunity to differentiate and a lot of times they decide to play it safe. I think that any time that you have an opinion or something that you believe strongly in that you should lean into that. I think in general that that is great for brands because it's more, it's more relatable. It's more believable. I think when people try and be on the fence and not offend anyone, then they don't get any fans that way either. They can't have both. You have to be willing to
00:15:38
Speaker
not upset people, but you have to be willing to not please everyone because that's the way that you are going to please the people that matter most, the people in your ICP that are actually going to buy from you ultimately. I think not chasing vanity metrics and really just chasing good content. Personally, I don't think that I am the... I don't think copywriters are the only ones that know good content. I think
00:16:01
Speaker
This is something I've been trying to preach a lot to is that most people know what good content looks like based on the things that they like and the things that they share and really the media that they consume when they're not at work, the TV, the movies.
00:16:15
Speaker
That's good content and good copywriting. So a couple of tips that I can give is the headlines obviously super important. I'll talk a little bit about, about LinkedIn specifically, but, but the, with LinkedIn, you need a good starting line. A lot of times it seems to be better when it's short, but it doesn't have to be the next two lines really need to get you to keep reading the next lines. So I know everyone's heard that.
00:16:36
Speaker
A lot is that the first line needs to get you to read the next line. But that's that's a big part of it. I kind of also started thinking about the headline as the thesis. So if I think about posts or whatever I'm creating as a an essay, almost as a almost as a persuasive essay, then then the
00:16:54
Speaker
First part needs to be kind of your thesis or your abstract. I've been thinking about this a lot because my husband is in immunology. He's a research scientist, so he does grants. It's kind of similar, right? Like you should have the most important stuff up at the top. That's how it is in newspaper. That's how it is in science. That's how it is in copywriting. You should have your most important statement up at the top. It should build
00:17:15
Speaker
build into something. It should give you a reason to keep reading, but also have enough structure in the middle where it's not pure text. It's nice to break it up with bullet points or at least short sentences. Short sentences are better in general. But to back up, I think it's just have something to say. Have something that you believe in strongly and that you know that your target audience will care about, and you can find that out based on what they're talking about, what they're talking about on other social
00:17:42
Speaker
networks, what their interests are. I mean, those things will tell you what they're interested in. So being able to relate to them, committing, like committing to the niche that you have, committing to a human voice, not a corporate voice, like committing to the style that your customer wants to see. I think Gong does a really good job of this on their LinkedIn company page and just in their copywriting in general. They sound like you can tell it's written by a human.
00:18:09
Speaker
I'm saying the same thing from Lemonade, I think is what it's called. I think it helps you buy homes, but you can tell that it's written by human. I just stumbled across their page and I immediately liked the brand. I knew nothing about it. I didn't know if their product was any good, but I knew that I felt an affinity for it because I could feel the copywriter on the other end of it. I could feel a connection to that person. That's what's about is connection with copywriting.
Connecting with Camille and Podcast Resources
00:18:35
Speaker
Camille, where can people find you to learn more about you and consume your content? I mean, obviously, LinkedIn, if you send me a DM, then I'll try and respond as fast as I can. That's probably the best place. I'll stop there. I have some emails and things, but I think you can find that on LinkedIn as well. Well, thanks, Camille, and thanks everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you like what you heard, please rate it.
00:19:04
Speaker
For show notes of today's conversation and information about Camille, visit marketingspark.co slash blog. If you have questions, feedback, would like to suggest a guest or want to learn more about how I help B2B companies as a fractional CMO, consultant and advisor, send an email to mark at marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you next time.