Kyle Lacy's Executive Brand Playbook
How to add 60,000 LinkedIn followers as C-suite of a publicly-traded company
Kyle has an insane resume. Over 10 years of marketing leadership in B2B SaaS. Director of Content Marketing at Salesforce. SVP Marketing at Seismic. CMO at Lessonly, Jellyfish, and now Docebo - a $200M ARR publicly-traded B2B software company.
There’s one thread throughout his career: Sharing his lessons and insights publicly, aka building his executive brand.
Last week, I sat down with him to interview him about his biggest lessons growing to 60,000 followers on LinkedIn.
What we cover:
- The one thing about personal branding that hasn’t changed since 2010
- How to create content as a busy exec
- Why reach doesn’t matter as much as people think
- Kyle’s biggest lessons growing from 0 to 60k followers
- The biggest mistakes execs make on LinkedIn
- The 3-comments-per-day rule
- How to use LinkedIn for internal communication
- When executive thought leadership becomes a marketing motion
- The best way to pick content topics
You can listen to it here:
Here are my own biggest takeaways:
Kyle published a book called “Branding Yourself” in 2010 (!!!!!). Here’s what changed about executive branding over those 15 years: AI, video, and micro moments. You gotta be well-versed with AI, which includes knowing its limits. You gotta find a way to let video find its way into your strategy. And you gotta think in micro moments - recording a podcast and finding the 1 minute clip that will do well on Linkedin, writing a newsletter and creating a stand-alone TLDR version of it for the promo post, etc.
Here’s what IS still the same: The only thing that makes you unique is your story. Kyle’s story at a high level (his words): “I’m a CMO at a publicly-traded software company and I talk about attribution, team health, and revenue – at that level, I sound like every other CMO.” But once you get deeper and include things like his day-to-day, publishing books, living in Indianapolis, father of two boys, owner of too many books on World War II, his journey of getting to CMO, that’s when his story becomes unique. You gotta incorporate & lean into some of those elements for yourself (applies to people AND companies).
Kyle never looks at his impression or engagement numbers. Is reach down on Linkedin? Yeah. Is that a reason for him not to publish or change who he is and how he talks? No. His main reason for publishing on Linkedin: To learn. By writing down his thoughts, he learns about himself. By reading and engaging with others, he learns what other marketers are up to. Besides learnings, it’s become a massively helpful recruiting tool for when he needs to hire.
His two “hacks” for coming up with content ideas:
Meeting Recordings: He records his 1-on-1s with Granola, and imports the transcripts into GPT with a simple prompt: “Review these conversations. Based on what you know about me and the topics we’ve discussed, pull out any themes that would make a strong LinkedIn post.” It surfaces the stuff he’s already talking about in real conversations every day.
Mid-day GPT Jam Sesh: When something hits him, after a call, in the car, mid-thought, he’ll immediately voice record the idea in GPT so he can come back to it later. When it’s time to write, he never starts from zero. AI helps with structure and a rough first draft, but 9/10 times, he rewrites it.
Besides those two tricks, what stood out to me is that Kyle mainly just focuses on the fundamentals: try to add value, engage with others, be yourself, and keep showing up. He tries to post every day and comment on at least 2-3 posts by others every day. He doesn’t use any tools besides Asana, ChatGPT and the Google Suite.
Kyle has published a newsletter on beehiiv every week for a year now. He wishes he had started sooner: to have an audience he owns (Linkedin can delete your account), and because writing long-form (1,800+ words) helps him evaluate what he’s doing.
When to invest into executive thought leadership. Kyle’s take: Always. Whether you’re a series A startup or a publicly-traded company, leveraging your internal leaders to create content in the places your ICP spends time is always something you should be thinking about.
P.S.
If you enjoyed this, I’m hosting a live webinar with Kacie Jenkins on Monday. We’ll talk about her biggest lessons leading marketing (3x VP Marketing) at Sendoso, Sourcegraph and Fastly, where she helped grow the company from series A to $200M ARR and an IPO.
Plus, why she’s been going hard on her Executive Brand recently, going from zero to 12,000 followers on LinkedIn in what feels like no time.
Join us here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/53UOqNm2S0ypgdmru6qqyA