Building Your Personal Brand as an Agency Director
Last update: 6 July 2023 at 10:38 am
2.33/5Today, there are many channels and types of content you can use to talk about your expertise (and indirectly give visibility to your agency).
Content strategy is one of them.
To talk about it, we organized a private call with Théo Lion, CEO and Founder of the Social Ads agency Coudac.
The goal of the call was for him to tell us how his content strategy has fueled Coudac’s exponential growth.
Today, Theo has :
- 30,000 LinkedIn followers
- 12,000 Instagram followers
- 11.000 YouTube subscribers
How did he get there? All the answers are in the notes that follow.
Presentation of Coudac
Théo launched Coudac in 2020, a Social Ads agency dedicated to E-Commerce.
At first, Coudac only offered Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads, before expanding to other social networks:
- Pinterest,
- TikTok,
- Snapchat.
Today, Coudac has a team of 35 people, all of whom are remote.
One of the specificities of Coudac is that they have grown a lot thanks to their content strategy. In two years, they have gone from 1 to 35 people. Content has allowed them to grow exponentially, thanks to a presence on several social networks.
Now the question is where to start.
When you want to create content, what topics can you talk about? How do you come up with your ideas?
How to find content ideas?
Theo explains that coming up with ideas is not a problem once you start publishing.
Most people think you have to have ideas, and then start writing. But ideas call for ideas.
Therefore, the most important thing is to write a first post, so that inspiration comes to you.
The best is to share first contents about the subjects you want to speak about. For example, Theo was doing Facebook Ads, so he started by talking about Facebook Ads.
Here, the takeaway is simple: get started. Share content on topics that make sense to you, and see where it takes you.
Structuring your content with the TOFU-MOFU-BOFU framework
Then, once you have content ideas, it is necessary to organize them. You have to have a strategy.
In the call, Theo presents the TOFU – MOFU – BOFU framework.
- TOFU = Top of the Funnel
- MOFU = Middle of the Funnel
- BOFU = Bottom of the Funnel
The idea is to create content at each of these stages, to address a more or less qualified audience.
You should always start from the bottom, i.e. the BOFU, and work your way up to the TOFU.
The role of the BOFU is to address specific topics, which will allow you to generate conversions and therefore have new customers.
In comparison, the TOFU is there to give you visibility and allow the greatest number of people to discover you.
In the middle, the MOFU is there to make the link between the two and to qualify your audience so that a part of it becomes a customer of yours.
For Theo, that means he structures his LinkedIn posts this way:
- BOFU: Facebook Ads content where he shares tips, but that will reach fewer people. It’s pretty advanced content that will resonate with fewer people.
- MOFU: We go up a layer, with more E-Commerce content and more global than Social Ads. For example, Theo can talk about trends that interest him.
- TOFU: And finally the top stratum, with more general public content, to reach more people. For example, Théo will talk about HEC, its positioning on business schools, and entrepreneurship in general. This content won’t get him new customers, but it will help him get on more people’s radar.
Therefore, try to find one or two topics for each of the strata of the BOFU-MOFU-TOFU model and start publishing regularly.
The difference between audience and prospects
There is one important difference to keep in mind: the people who will interact with your content are not necessarily those who will become your customers.
This is what Thibault Louis, number 1 on LinkedIn in France according to Theo, mentions.
It’s not the people who like and comment on your LinkedIn posts that will work with you.
The people who like and comment on your posts are the ones who will give you visibility to your prospects.
Having a publication rythm
Afterwards, there is a major issue: the rhythm of publication.
The challenge is not to publish once, but to publish regularly, consistently.
How to set a rhythm, and keep it?
One answer: don’t over-intellectualize. The reason people don’t publish regularly is because they overthink.
In the call, Theo explains that he sets a time, every day, when he writes a post. Today, he has an extra person who accompanies him, which allows him to send 3 posts per day on LinkedIn. So 21 posts per week. Imagine the visibility that brings him.
To achieve this, Theo has set up a ritual. 45 minutes every morning to write.
He doesn’t ask himself any questions: he publishes, takes the feedbacks, and writes a better one the next day.
That’s the only way to publish a lot and regularly: don’t worry about what people will think and don’t over-intellectualize sharing content.
Be careful that said: for this to work, you need to analyze the results of your posts, learn from them, and then improve.
Ask yourself:
- How many people are interacting with your content?
- How many people saw it?
- How many contacted you for a discovery call?
- Etc.
Today, Theo has the following publishing pace:
- 3 LinkedIn posts per day.
- 3 YouTube videos per week.
- 1 post per day on Instagram.
- 1 post per day on TikTok.
- 1 podcast per week.
It may sound intimidating, but in reality, a strategy like this is hyper profitable.
The profitability of a content strategy
In the call, Theo shares that even if it took him 4 hours a day, he would still do it.
It’s so profitable. Writing a post is free. And it can bring you 3,000, 4,000, 10,000 views.
Just calculate the average CPM on Facebook or Google Ads to see how much you’re saving by creating your own content and publishing it. That’s huge savings in terms of advertising.
And on top of that, you build your personal brand as well as your agency’s brand.
How to get an important reach
When you know all this, the question is how long does it take to get good visibility on LinkedIn?
In the call, Theo mentions that he’s made posts with 700,000 views. But how long does it take to get there?
In reality, it’s exponential. It’s very slow to start, but if you do it long enough, the results come.
Just like when you start a blog, and there’s a lag time before it starts to generate enough traffic.
That said, keep in mind that there are two criteria to consider:
- The number of posts you publish.
- Your learnings and the quality of your posts.
Also keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of LinkedIn users never post. Just the fact that you publish content already puts you in the top 1% of most visible users.
So there is no clear answer. Arm yourself with patience and post regularly.
Producing multi-platform content
So far, we’ve talked a lot about LinkedIn. But Theo is also present on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
An example on YouTube:
To manage his entire production workflow, he has put together a team of 4 full-time people whose sole mission is to produce this content.
His YouTube video production workflow is quite simple:
- Ideation
- Writing
- Recording
- Editing
- Thumbnail and title
- Publication
- Recycling for TikTok and Instagram
In this flow, Theo delegates everything he can delegate to go faster.
Today, he only handles the ideation and writing. Everything else is handled by his team.
Knowing that:
- Writing a 15-minute video will take him 3 to 4 hours.
- Editing takes 1 to 2 days.
So yes, YouTube is time consuming. That’s why few people are on it.
Afterwards, this content is recycled for TikTok and Instagram. One idea can become lots of different ideas, on other channels.
You can:
- Take clips and put them on Instagram as Reels.
- Turn them into TikTok videos.
- Make a transcript for a blog post.
- Etc.
What’s important, once you have an idea, is to make it as profitable as possible and to spread it on as many channels as possible. When Theo has an idea, he tries to send it to all the networks, adapting it to the codes of each platform of course.
An example here is Gary Vee, with his Content Pyramid:
The impact of content on Coudac
But ultimately, what is the impact of all this content on Coudac? How do they manage all their lead flow?
Today, all the content Theo posts (LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok) generates between 25-30 discovery calls per week. That works out to 5-6 leads a day.
That’s a lot. And more importantly, it’s growing exponentially.
That said, keep one thing in mind: don’t put everything on one channel.
In the call, Theo mentions that of the 30 discovery calls he gets each week, 8-12 come from LinkedIn and the rest come from YouTube, his podcast, Instagram and TikTok.
You can’t be too dependent on one channel.
How much time does a content strategy take?
Finally, the last question we address in the call: how much time does Theo spend on his content strategy?
Count 2 days per week, so 40% of his time. After that, keep in mind that he has a team to support him:
- 1 person for LinkedIn
- 4 people for YouTube
All the commercial part is also delegated internally. Coudac has 35 employees on permanent contracts, so it’s a real team effort.
