Beyond Social

Turning LinkedIn Into Your Personal Brand Powerhouse

• Vista Social • Season 1 • Episode 28

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Think your personal brand is enough to stand out? Think again.

In this episode of Beyond Social, host Reggie Azevedo and Vitaly Veksler, sit down with Morgan Cox, CEO of MAC Marketing, to explore the undeniable power of personal branding. Morgan shares her journey of growing from 1,000 to 14,000 LinkedIn followers in just six months, and how that growth didn’t just elevate her personal presence, but also brought new opportunities to her agency.

This episode dives deep into:

  • Why authenticity is your strongest currency on LinkedIn.
  • The intersection of personal branding and agency success.
  • How brands can leverage their teams to amplify their reach.

Morgan’s insights go beyond theory, offering actionable advice for anyone, from CEOs to coordinators, looking to create a genuine connection online.

Can your personal brand outshine your company’s? Tune in to discover why investing in yourself might just be the best marketing move you’ve ever made.



When you have someone who's just authentically themselves, who shows up online consistently and really just, they put out their thoughts. It really can be a great asset to anyone's business. Hey everybody, Reggie here with Beyond Social Podcast. Welcome back. This is the show where we go behind the scenes on how marketers are building amazing things on social and how we're creating tools to help support them there. Today, we've got a very special episode. We're here with Morgan Cox. She's He is the owner, the CEO, the founder of MAC Marketing and welcome. Thank you so much for being here with us today. Thank you guys for having me. I'm going to tease a little bit for our guests or listening, our audience members, 14, 000, that's going to be the number, from 1000 to 14, 000 followers on LinkedIn in. Six months. Yeah. Wow. That is huge. I What an accomplishment. Thank you. Congratulations. First of all. Thank you. We're gonna dive into that. I want to hear .Yeah. Batal and I are, we're building tools to support marketers. But when we hear a story like this, how within six months. You're able to find an audience. Like a community. I'd love to hear how you started. Yeah. so LinkedIn is always a platform that I've gravitated to because of how I feel like authentic it is and how much you can learn. so at the beginning of this year, I was Instagram is cool, TikTok is cool, but I feel like growing a presence on LinkedIn is something that can be very valuable to you as a CEO, entrepreneur, anything. So I started posting consistently. I started posting four days a week, just things that I was going through in my everyday life as a social media marketer, as a CEO of a marketing agency, and a lot of social media managers, directors, professionals really resonated with what I had to say. So over time, I just really started sharing my authentic experience with them about struggles that we face on a day to day, how, In the marketing world, people may not really value social media managers because they may feel like the job is easy, even though in reality it's just marketing online. And so I really just got on there and spoke my truth. And now 14, 000 followers later, people resonate with it. And it's really awesome. Wow. Did you have a specific inspiration that kind of led you to let me, go on LinkedIn and try this out. I think the drive for me to start posting on LinkedIn was just me seeing other, social media managers really doing their thing on there. So there's a lot of great creatives that were really positioning themselves and I was like, I think I can really do this and make it special and have my little, I put memes to it. people like to always jump in my DMs and be like, Morgan, you're like, the social media professional that keeps it real, which I do. I don't sugar coat anything. I get on there and I say what I need to say. And I think that's why people love my content so much because it's thought provoking, it's real and I provide value. So I think that's really what my secret sauce has been to growing LinkedIn. Over the past six months. And I guess what's interesting about this is that you have an agency, right? Which probably has a LinkedIn page of its own. And then Morgan, you yourself have a LinkedIn profile. So, here we are talking about you building your personal brand, right? And most likely at the same time building your agency brand as well, right? But I guess it's a distinction worth pointing out that This, nature, this sort of the way you're describing this being real, right? And being telling, divulging, the struggles or, the fun parts, right? About being like the CEO of the company or the social media manager more broadly. So that resonates. Do you think? It's, so it's gotta be different between managing or building a personal brand and building a brand for your agency. Did you find more success with one versus the other or even ease of doing so? On my personal page, I get way more inquiries about my, business. then I do my business page. people are always asking if I can share think pieces with them or what my services are. And I think the biggest difference between brand and personal social is there's a, you're humanizing your brand. So I'm not necessarily selling you anything. I'm not necessarily saying, Oh, go check out my website just by you resonating with what I say, or maybe you're relating to me in some way, you're naturally going to want to go do that. so I feel like that's been the biggest success for me is that I just show up as myself online and people really want to dive into more of what it is that I do as a social media professional. So you're basically, Morgan is being Morgan, right? On the personal profile, like you're not being a CEO of the company, necessarily, right? So do you feel like people even know that you are a CEO of the company when they look at Morgan on LinkedIn? Is that maybe the recipe here? there's so little add to it or so little promotional? Yeah. Like even on my LinkedIn page, I don't even put CEO. I just put social media manager and content creator. So maybe a lot of people don't even know that is my brand. But once, we get to talking, they're like, Oh, Mac is my initials. So they put two and two together. but people always are like, do you offer services? Like, where do you work? I say that you work at Mac marketing, public relations. And I'm like, yeah, that's my brand. So when I show up on my personal LinkedIn, it's really just authentically as myself, because even though I am a CEO and a founder, at the end of the day, I do social media marketing and, we all face the same struggles in terms of being in the industry. So that's just. Awesome. I know that you have, customers that your agency manages. do you talk to them about the value of the personal brands also? Or is, I know, that you're probably getting hired to manage like the brands, social media. Yeah. Do you talk to them about the personal brand? Do you, are you participating in helping them build it? Is it more inspirational? Are you actually doing it for them? it's interesting to know what brands out there think out of personal brands. Yeah, so anyone who knows me knows that I'm the personal brand enthusiast. Even my friends and family are like, Morgan is, if you are a business owner to me, you need to be having a personal brand. no matter if it's a big company that I'm working for, a small company, I think positioning yourself online in some capacity is very important. It goes a long way. So C Suite executives, your experience is very different. then someone who may be a manager or a coordinator at a company. And you're doing different things. You are connecting with a different audience than somebody else, but also you're seeing the brand in a different light. So I feel like when you go to a brand social page, it's very structured, but people like to see the behind the scenes. They like to see who you're interacting with. but also just being a human, like I tell people, just be yourself, be a human. Take a photo with someone. what struggles are you facing? What exciting projects are you working on? Those things are what people connect with because people remember emotion. So that's always what I preach is if you are someone who is working at a company or if you have a business, your personal brand should be your number one priority. So as an agency, when you are discussing, the services that you are providing or when you're being approached, do you see customers, inquiring about both or do you see yourself explaining to them the need for both? definitely the need for both. I think people, when they first come, they're like, I need help with my brand socials, we need cohesiveness, we need copyright, we need content creation. And then I'm like, are you on LinkedIn yourself? Are reposting your employees posts? what's going on? And a lot of them are like, I just don't have the time or I don't even know what to, that's me. Yeah. Or I don't even know what to post on LinkedIn. And then it just segues into that conversation of the importance of positioning yourself online personally and how it can really benefit the a brand in the bigger scale of things. And what's their response? Do you see them like, how, obviously, everybody understands the need to build the brand's presence right on social media. Do you feel like you are being successful in, in, in that, in the, because obviously that will probably lead to higher budgets and more expenditure on their behalf. Do you see them being convinced enough to procure these services from you? I think so. Especially with the success that I've had personally, people love to see success stories. And with other clients, they see the importance of it because yes, you are, I like to tell people, you are positioning your brand in a different way, but you're also positioning yourself. So think of it as like your brand can get opportunities, but so can you. so Sometimes it takes a little bit of pull, but not too much. Just because I think people really want to position themselves online. They just really don't know where to start. Cause a lot of people don't think they can provide value or they don't think that they're doing cool things. I'm like, you were just at a grand opening and a ribbon cutting. That's pretty cool. So why not post those things and leverage what you're doing? Wow. So that's super interesting. do you see, for example, obviously as you're building your brand, you can be authentic. Because you are you, right? Can you accomplish the same on behalf of somebody else effectively? So what I tell people is when I do my personal brand coaching and consulting is like, Hey, take a photo, give me what the experience is. But like I tell them, we can curate the copyright based on your personality. So I'm like, yes, it's LinkedIn, but you don't have to sit there. I'll cookie cutter and whatever, talk to them. Like you're talking to your best friend, talk to them. Like you're talking to. whoever, but I think I'm able to really with my clients. I really like to get to know who they are. So it's I know how they speak. I know like where they hang around, like everything like that. So I'm like, okay, let's get on a call. How did this experience make you feel? Why do you want to share it with your audience? Like really getting to know the why of why you want to share this with your audience and why you want to push this content out and how would you describe it to me? That's really how I like to position it. Cause Like you said, my tone is my tone and my personality is my personality. So really getting to know my clients and how they want to position themselves is very important. So when you, work with these, brands, are you working with kind of C suite Middle management. what's the range? Yeah. So it's a lot of C suite executives because very busy. So they don't always have time to take photos or videos. there's someone doing that for them, but they're like, I want to post what I'm doing, but I simply just don't have the time. Nor do I really know how, cause a lot of C suite executives might be older. So I've done a lot of C suite communications in my previous roles or even in my agency. And really just positioning them online. So people know Hey, we're out here. This is what we're doing. because even the last brand that I work for, we did so many amazing things in the community, but nobody knew about them. And so like we were working with companies that were huge in South Florida, going to ribbon cutting, sitting down in meetings with government officials and nobody knew about those things. So I was like, okay, we need to start telling people about these things because Not only will it draw attention to you as a thought leader, but in return people were wondering who or what the brand that I was working for at the time was. And it really helped grow our personal, his personal brand, but as well as the brand social as well. Do you see the need for the personal brands, be less of a priority for certain members in companies? Do you see this maybe being a broad need And is the fact that you perhaps only offer that to, say, C suite executives, just purely a function of just the time consumption and you maybe not being able to do more? So just, maybe it's a complex question, but I guess, To simplify it, how many people within an organization, in your opinion, and that would, benefit from themselves, but also maybe benefit the, or the, brand, right? By being present on social. It definitely doesn't need to be just C suite. it could be anyone sharing their experience. So basically there's coordinators on LinkedIn, there's managers on LinkedIn, there's directors on LinkedIn. So your audience is on LinkedIn. So if you're a coordinator that is just starting out at a big company and you want to talk about how you got started in your field or the steps that I took to start it to start working at a big company as a coordinator, position yourself to do that online. And then it really does show, "Okay, this company is attracting great talent who is able to really cultivate a community online." It humanizes the brand that you're working for, but also it's a win. You're winning and the brand is winning as long as you're positioning yourself authentically and appropriately online, of course. So it really doesn't have to just be C suite. It could be at any level because like I said earlier, everyone's experience is different. Everyone's personality is different and cultivating an audience online, there's a hundred and one ways to do it. So it's, it sounds like from the C Suite level, C Suite, like it's the time thing, right? I don't got the time, but obviously it's, important for everybody across the board. I've heard a lot, I've talked to, brand owners who, listen, we want to be able to, get our 500 employees, 200 employees to be active and we want to help them to build their personal brands. But it's a lot of work. You need a dedicated person, dedicated team in an organization in order to get something like this going. If you're going the traditional route, so obviously like advocacy is something that comes up a lot. How do you feel about an organization like that trying to, maybe not necessarily offload that work, but try to partner with someone like yourself to say, Hey, listen, instead of just, Handful of C suites. Can you help my entire organization to uplift our employees personal brands? And essentially, can you, Morgan, right? As good as you are, right? And as amazing as your team is, right? If somebody walks through your door today and says, we are an organization of, I don't know, a hundred people or 50 people, right? Can you take them on in terms of building their personal brands and what would you need, right? What tools may be right to get that going? definitely would be able to take them on. It would start with a lot of strategy and intention, like, why do you want, your employees to be positioning themselves online, in their personal brands. But I think when it comes to a company of that size, obviously using platforms that have employee advocacy features on them, so that way you can plan out content that's already, been approved by executives. There's constant, there's consistent branding in it, making sure that you're distributing that content to your employees for them to post and then they can write their own thoughts or kind of just making sure that they're engaging with everyone. To me, I think that's very important just because everybody's audience has different eyes, but really creating the content for the brand or those specific employees for them to push out themselves and maybe you even writing your own copy, but what does the post look like? What does it feel like? Like being able to really stream that it streamline that in one place and kind of seeing the effects of that. I use a tool right now that really helps me do that with the employee advocacy. So I think when brands come to me and it's at a larger scale, it's very important for them to leverage that because like I said, I don't think. Anyone has ever gone wrong with positioning themselves as a thought leader online. How do you balance the level of personalization that you can get with working individually with the executives versus having to work at scale to build out content, monthly content for 200 people? 300 people. Yeah, there's obviously a big difference there. if it's more on a one on one scale, definitely be more personalized, but I always do encourage people. If there is something that's being created on a larger scale, going in and engaging with your audience, that's all you, know what I'm saying? Like you replying to comments, you connecting with other people who are in your industry, really leveraging what you can bring, and then making other posts outside of the ones that are being streamlined as well, is very important to me as well. And I guess also the, within the organizations, I can envision that the employees that are at being asked to participate or, may need a bit of an explainer or may need quite a bit of maybe even convincing that it is something that they need. Do you see this as a sort of like almost like an in employee benefit? of them benefiting by being employed and as part of their employment, their personal brands are getting built no matter which level you're in, are you a developer, are you in marketing, are you in operations, right? Or do you see this more of a, hey, it's your duty as an employee to do this for our brand? Have you found, more success, with one versus the other or maybe it's a combination of both? I think that a lot of people would post on social media if they had the tools to do so. I think In terms of it being authentic, I think people really just want to show up, but they may not have the tools to do so in the ways that they want. So that's never really been a problem. I don't think it's ever felt like a duty for someone, especially if they're not really out there creating the content or it's something that they have to think hard about. But also, I think people have really seen the benefits of positioning yourself online, of it being... Yes, it's drawing attention to you, but people want to know more about what it is that you're doing and LinkedIn is a great place where it's "Wow, Morgan's doing this really great thing. I want to collaborate with her," and maybe that collaboration could be personal or it can be brand or whatever. But there's a lot of benefits, I think, come out of really prioritizing what it is that you do. For instance, like maybe you're getting interviewed for a podcast like I am right now, or maybe it's a magazine. Like you really can never go wrong with wanting to push yourself online. And I guess are we only talking about LinkedIn or? No, TikTok and Instagram are great. Don't get me wrong. Like a lot of things can come from that. I just feel the engagement on LinkedIn is very different. I feel like even if there's people that I've never met, never have even heard of before, who they'll write paragraphs under my post or they'll message me and be like, Morgan, I've been watching your content. I've been seeing your content for months now and It's changed the way that I look at social media management. It's changed everything. So I just personally think the engagement on LinkedIn is very more thoughtful. It's very more, people really want to hear what you have to say. They want to connect with you. They want to engage with you. Not saying TikTok and Instagram is not the same, but I feel like people really care about think pieces and thought leaders more on LinkedIn. I guess it's also for TikTok specifically, it's heavier lift, right? Because it's video content and it's, taking photos and posting photos, sharing that stuff is probably a lot easier. Fantastic. Do you see if we were to focus a little bit more maybe on economics as other maybe agencies are looking at this and hearing this and thinking of how to maybe inject this into their service offering. And obviously you may not be able to go like into specific numbers, but, what is your thought process? So here's this service offering that includes social media management for a brand, right? How does the personal brand building changed the economics of for you as a business, basically, when you begin to offer these services. Yeah. So I have a couple of different packages that include personal branding, so it could be just consulting. So a lot of people come to me and they're like,"I just need a strategy of how I can position myself. So what do I need to post?" Because sometimes when you work in the social media space, it may be easier for you to speak about your experience, but if you're a real estate agent, or if you're a doctor, it's like, "Wow, what do I post?" So a lot of it is consulting. So I have a package for that. And then if it is on a larger scale in terms of, I'm streamlining content for two, 300 people, then obviously that is something that is more in depth with, us really doing strategy, creating the content, meeting with different people to make sure it really meets company standards and all of those things. But, I do think it's something that a lot of agencies should start adding into their services because I think It's something that is needed. It helps not only the person, but it helps the brand side in terms of organic reach and really helping people humanize your brand on social media. So that's something, honestly, this year that I started implementing into my agency and a lot of people have been so interested in wanting to learn more about what it is that they can, gain from personal branding. And even agency owners, like you said, they're like, you're killing the personal branding game. How can I implement this into my agency to really help my clients? So I think really just talking to them about the importance of it, whether it's consulting or having an actual package, it's really a win either way. You have a sense of, there's clearly a before and after moment, right? So before you were, you began to offer this and after anything, maybe again, without going into like specific numbers, have you seen, I don't know, budgets on average double or triple or have you seen maybe even much higher wins? Again, I'm asking this question. More from the perspective of another agency looking at this and trying to understand the economics of it and, is it, because clearly it's a lot more work. Yeah. Even though we talked about the tools to automate that. Yeah. But what's the win? Is it again, doubling the revenue. Is it tripling the revenue? Is it just. Maybe creating pretty much an unlimited, stream of revenue because of, just depends on how many employees they have. Yeah. So I think that depending on what the brand is, there's definitely been an increase of revenue, but like I have T suite executives come to me and they're like, I really just want brand awareness. So if it's like a smaller brand, they really just want people to be talking about their brand and what it is that they're doing. And then if it's a bigger brand, it could be not even, it could be centered around a specific thing. So if there's like a new product coming out and they want their employees to talk about it, or if they just want their employees to position themselves online to be like, Hey, we want our brand to be seen as something that's more human or whatever. It really just depends, on what the goal is. So I've seen an increase in revenue. I've seen CEOs come to be like, Hey, nobody at our company posts about what we're doing. It's in, so in turn, nobody knows what we're doing. So for instance, at my last, job or my last client, we, they started off on LinkedIn with about a thousand followers. And by time, I was completed with that project. 8,000 followers on LinkedIn. And a big part of my strategy was like, Hey, I'm posting on the brand side, but you are out here with CEOs of big companies like JetBlue and Spirit Airlines, and nobody knows what you're doing. So I think it really is great for revenue, but also brand awareness and helping people know, wow, like I want to connect with this person because there's, they're doing great things. Yeah, I think so. We always as we build Vista and we think about solutions. Often times we come across ideas that almost feel like nobody should ever say no to. Yeah. whereas if you are a brand competing and you are promoting your brand. Is it really a survivable tactic to avoid or not do personal branding? is that even like realistic? Can you really compete with others? Because so essentially if there are two brands that are alike, all it's going to take for one brand is to begin doing personal branding and they will just outpace you. Yeah. There's a brand that I have in mind right now where their social media manager is killing it on their brand social, but she has over, I want to say 200,000 followers on LinkedIn. And there's so many companies like this company, but because of who she is, her personality, her thought leadership, people gravitate towards this company. So I really think that when you have someone who's just authentically themselves, who shows up online consistently and really just, they put out their thoughts, it really can be a great asset to anyone's business. Awesome. We see this a lot online, right? there's this push on social now to authenticity, like you're talking about, I'm tired of receiving polished advertisement from brand accounts on my feed all the time. I want to cut through that noise. And I think that's really where the authenticity of that personal brand is resonating so well with the audience right now. Yeah. it's crazy you said it, but it's true. It's like a company that doesn't have a personal brand versus a company that does. That's it. It's going to come to a point in time where there's so much noise on social that if you're not doing it, no one's looking at your stuff. You're driving the result. I'm sure budgets matter. Maybe people do it out of just the fact that they, don't have, because it feels like to me that if you do sea level branding for each executive, each of those is probably worth probably about a full brand worth of your time, right? Because it's going to take, you can't have each, C level exec posting the same thing. So the budgets do have propensity to increase substantially. But at the same time, maybe there's, there are different perspectives on this. You do have this very customized, individualized sort of solution that could get expensive. But at the same time, through the use of advocacy tools, right? You could arrive at something very comparable where personal brand, personal sort of profiles get the updates without necessarily going all in creating a very special, it's great if, if, the owner of a, I don't know, a local laundromat, would become a massive influencer on LinkedIn, right? That would be fantastic. But maybe the fact that they'll begin posting, four times a week or whatever, maybe that is also a significantly, you know, that's a significant improvement over what they would have otherwise do. And, by the way, so the advocacy, I feel like may not be that significant of a budget ad to teams, right? Versus very sort of custom pursuit of let's turn you, the business owner, into an influencer. That's both. It's doable, but it's obviously more expensive. It's more expensive. For sure. And honestly, like there are people on LinkedIn who are doing it just because they want to. So brands should hone in on that. So if you have an important, like me, I'm, if I ever work for somebody ever again, they're going to love me because I'm going to position myself to always be a thought leader. So I feel like a lot of brands also miss that. Sweet Nugget is you have employees on LinkedIn who are positioning themselves to be thought leaders and are sharing things about your company, but are you using that to your advantage? So that's another thing is making sure that you have a social media team that's aware that you have employees who are really doing great things online and really using that to make sure that it's incorporated in your brand strategy. Metrics would probably be different too, right? You've worked with both brands and personal brands. I assume when an agency approaches you or when someone approaches your agency and they're saying, Hey, my brand, I want to be able to do this, and this, the KPIs, the results, the business outcomes that they want are very different. You mind pointing out what maybe the, some of the top, two or three KPIs that usually people come to you with when they say, I want to develop personal branding within our organization. So engagement is the top one. Like people really want to have an engagement. Followers is another. a lot of people are like, I want to be a LinkedIn influencer. They say that a lot. when you, when they come, they're like, I want to 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 because at those marks opportunities come. So I would say those are the main two people really want to have the engagement. People really want to have the follower growth, because on LinkedIn, people are growing so exponentially, it's crazy. I don't know if it's because it's happening to me, I'm really watching what's going on, but those I would say are the main two. On average, if you're averaging anywhere between 2 to 3% engagement on LinkedIn, you're doing a pretty good job. I want to ask you one more question because I'm very, curious without sharing the secret sauce because I'm sure you've got the blueprint behind the scenes there. So let's say a hybrid approach, right? We've got the custom, the boutique, the very one to one personalized approach to this. We've got the more generalized, not necessarily generic approach, which is going to be content created at scale to lots of employees using advocacy tool. First, is there a world where we can do both where it's like an organization with lots of employees, but maybe we would break out content by department. And I guess what would your suggestion be to create that hybrid approach at an organization? Definitely by department would be cool. So for instance, I used to work at a job where they did that. So like the human resources department or the social team, like some of them even had their own brand socials and they would collaborate with the people within those teams who had personal brands online. I think that could be very effective in terms of building personal brand as well as bringing attention to, who the brand is personally, not personally, as a brand as a whole. It really just depends on what the company's goals are, by department that could be a little tricky sometimes because that's a lot of work and a lot of streamlined content. But I do find that sometimes depending on what the department is or who the brand is, people will take autonomy of it on their own. And then I go in and I make tweaks and fix like, okay, like maybe try this or do this. Or, if there does need to be approval, then we'll talk about that and create a strategy. But, sometimes department by department can get tricky because there's a lot of things going out. It can be a little bit confusing. Fair. Makes sense. Megan, thank you again. Sorry. Thank you again for being here with us. Thank you guys. I'm going to give you 10 seconds of that camera there. If there's a brand, a personal brand, someone who's saying, Man, I'd love to work with somebody to help me. You've got 10 seconds to pitch them. Why should they work with you? Okay, I'm Morgan Cox, and I am the personal brand enthusiast. I love to help people position themselves online authentically, and I would love to help you to get your next opportunity, whether it be a job or just, interviewing and doing cool things like a podcast. But everybody has, a secret sauce. Everybody has something that's authentic to them, and you just haven't tapped into it yet, so I would love to help you do that. Awesome. Thank you again for being here with us. We'll leave Morgan's details in the description there if y'all want to check it out. But again, I think the theme of this, and we've talked about this in a couple of different podcast episodes before, is personal branding. And people want to connect with people. Of course, the brand content is there and there's a place for it, but we want to connect with people and we definitely see better results out of having people build their personal brands at organizations. So appreciate you for being here. If you want to join us in the studio next time, like Morgan, you want to make sure to head over to vistasocial.com/beyondsocial and we'll see you next time. Thank you.