The Dialogues series spotlights marketing mavericks, adland disruptors, and cool creatives in The Daily Carnage community who have new tactics to share.
Meet Kimberly Bailey, Head of Marketing at Alpaca and OG subscriber (’16) of The Daily Carnage.
Kimberly started her career at Flywheel, a high-growth startup later acquired by WP Engine, where she advanced from marketing intern to in-house photographer and producer.
Today, she leads marketing efforts at Alpaca, an Omaha-based edtech startup on a mission to make school the happiest place to work.
Alpaca’s employee engagement platform provides pulse surveys to help school leaders understand school culture and teacher wellbeing on a monthly basis, provides actionable insights for school leaders and districts, and prompts thoughtful celebrations for teachers.
We caught up with Kimberly to hear more about the content strategy that grew her professional community to over 2,100 connections on LinkedIn. Here’s what we learned:
- Celebrate your little wins on LinkedIn. Relatability creates engagement and connection.
- Curate your personal LinkedIn feed to learn more about what excites your brand’s target audience—what they celebrate, what they find newsworthy, what troubles them.
- Find creative opportunities for your CEO to repurpose and generate insights for thought leadership content.
The Conversation
What is your personal content strategy on LinkedIn? What types of content perform best?
KB: LinkedIn, and much of social media these days, is used as an “announcement platform.” But, celebrating the little wins is really where the engagement happens. The smaller, seemingly mundane, but wildly relatable wins are where I’ve seen the most engagement.
These kinds of posts establish mile markers for sharing your own personal growth, allow connections to join the celebration, and invite feedback from those who have surpassed that little win already and have ideas on how you can reach the next level.
“When Alpaca changed its target audience, I took it upon myself to evolve and change my LinkedIn with it.”
What happens when a brand changes its target audience? How do you understand and connect with your new audience?
KB: When Alpaca changed its target audience from parents to school leaders and districts, I took it upon myself to evolve and change my LinkedIn with it. Not completely, and not by deleting and unfollowing those who I am already connected with, but more-so being strategic and intentional about who I brought into my newsfeed.
I’m not a former school leader and haven’t worked at a school district before, so I wanted to know what gets them excited, what they’re talking about, what gets their peers excited, what’s newsworthy and celebratory to them, and how Alpaca could work to amplify those aspects with our products and offerings over time.
Repositioning doesn’t happen overnight, and neither does holistically understanding your audience. So, I wanted to experiment with LinkedIn and my strategy with it to learn about our new core audience and what is happening in their world and be an active participant alongside them.
“Build content atomically. Keeping the repurpose in mind from the beginning is best.”
How can marketers empower busy organizational leaders to capture and publish thought leadership content on their personal accounts?
KB: Build content atomically. This is a big focus for Alpaca, and I imagine for all the marketers of the world who are endlessly pushing out content but know there’s 10 different ways to repurpose it if only they had the time to do so. Keeping the repurpose in mind from the beginning is best.
If your CEO or department leader sends a weekly update to the team with things that are on their mind, what they’re learning, or what they’re seeing, package that back up and shoot it back over to your leader with a gentle “make that a LinkedIn post” type of nudge. ChatGPT is great for this. Or, take your biggest problem/solution statements across your website and queue your leader up with one in a message and ask them to write about why they believe it’s important.
How should a marketer think about building a network outside of peers and industry-related content?
KB: As a photographer, one of the best pieces of advice I ever received was “show the work you want to shoot.” And I think that applies to countless aspects of our life, especially professionally, no matter your market.
What do you want to know that you don’t know? What subset of your audience do you need to learn more about? What industry are most of your LinkedIn connections from? Is it the same one your product serves?
Even if the interactions on my posts aren’t from Alpaca’s target audience, that’s fine! I don’t expect them to be. What matters to me is that when I open my newsfeed, I’m getting the news I want from the customers I’m building for. And learning a little bit more about them every day.
“Be less of a door-to-door (inbox-to-inbox) salesperson and more interested in an approach that exudes, ‘I’d love to get a coffee and know more about your role and your work.'”
How do you identify and connect with potential leads on LinkedIn?
KB: My biggest piece of advice is to take a little more time and make it personal. Most people enjoy being known. So, take time to know them before reaching out. Be less of a door-to-door (inbox-to-inbox) salesperson and more interested in an approach that exudes, “I’d love to get a coffee and know more about your role and your work.”
Subscribe to The Daily Carnage to join our community of over 23,000 marketers.
