The transcript below is available for those who prefer to read along. Please be aware that it may contain minor errors.

Grace Clark:

Thank you for joining me today, and if we could just get started by giving yourself a quick introduction?

Ghalib Hassam:

Yes, of course. Thank you so much, Grace. My name is Ghalib. I’m based in Pakistan, I run a business on LinkedIn where I have founders, B2B specifically, build their founder brands on LinkedIn. And why B2B founders? Because LinkedIn is the go-to platform at the moment for B2B target audiences, so that makes complete sense. 

For the past three years, I was working with different agencies based out of London, Berlin, and Dubai, but now this year, well you could say mid last year, 2024, I started to venture out on my own. Now I have my own agency called Baghi, named after my late father, and yeah, I help B2B founders build founder brands on LinkedIn.

Grace Clark:

Why do you believe, since today we’re talking about thought leadership with founders, why do you think thought leadership is essential for B2B founders?

Ghalib Hassam:

Yeah, that’s a great question because a lot of the times on sales order discovery calls, founders ask me, ‘well, why do we even need to be creating content on LinkedIn?’ Specifically thought leadership content. There’s a very simple way to assess whether you need to be on LinkedIn or not, and that is asking yourself one question, is my target audience on LinkedIn or not? If the answer is yes, then you absolutely need to be on LinkedIn because… Let me give you some stats. Okay, 52% of decision makers and 54% of C-level executives spend an hour or more on average per week reading thought leadership content. Now, the stats that I’m about to give you, they are from LinkedIn themselves, so they’re all credible. The next stat is seven in 10 decision makers say they’re likely to think more positively about an organization that consistently produces high quality thought leadership content and that thought leadership content that makes them think good about an organization comes from the C-suite, which could be a CEO, A founder or C level executive.

More 73% of decision makers say that an organization style leadership content is a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities as opposed to traditional marketing materials or product sheets you could say. 

So I wanted to give you these stats so you could have proof that this thing actually works and is important and I don’t want you to guys be like, well, is it even true? Well, it is true, right? LinkedIn itself says this for B2B organization to have a presence on LinkedIn through their C-suite, their founder or CEO, whoever that is at the top level, it’s massively important. We are at a stage, especially after Covid, that if the world was very vast, now it’s so small because everybody is online, everybody is in this digital world, and if you are not building your digital right now as a business and as a founder or a CEO in general, you’re not building your thought leadership out there, you’re missing out and it’s going to be the biggest missed opportunity for the next five years.

Grace Clark:

To you, what does it mean to build a founder brand on LinkedIn?

Ghalib Hassam:

First of all, if you want to build a founder brand, you have to understand, specifically on LinkedIn, what is your end goal? Because you could be in it for generating more revenue for your business. You could be in it to just position yourself as a thought leader on the platform in general to be more respectable within the industry that you are in to be seen as an expert, as an authority. Or it could be, well, I don’t want revenue. Thought leadership is great. That would be nice, but I want to attract talent. I’ve talked to so many founders who say, well, usually we pay recruitment agencies thousands and thousands of dollars to get one good applicant, but through your founder brand, by consistently talking about your business and your values and your culture in general, you can attract talent basically for free, right?

All it takes is two things. Number one, obviously time. There’s a commitment that you have to make that it will take some of my time. The second thing is a LinkedIn subscription, which is very cheap, and the good thing is you don’t even need a subscription actually to start creating content on LinkedIn. So the subscription is for a few more perks, but you could basically start off for free if you want me to define a founder brand. It could be something like your overall presence on LinkedIn specifically if you’re talking in that context, your overall presence where you share your bold point of views, your opinions about the industry and your opinions and thought leadership around your target audience’s pain points and how to solve them, as simple as that.

Grace Clark:

So when you are working with, or you see founders working to build this presence on LinkedIn, what are some of the biggest mistakes you see they make when they’re trying to establish thought leadership?

Ghalib Hassam:

Yeah, that’s a good question because there are a few misconceptions. First of all, founders usually treat LinkedIn organic content specifically as they look at it through a paid social lens. They think, well, if we spend two months on LinkedIn, create X amount of posts, we’ll get certain amount of ROI, which is revenue or anything else they have tied through end goal, that is wrong. That is a mistake. If you are starting to build your founder brand, you’re creating content, you’re interacting with other people, you are adding your target audience within your network through connections, you have to understand you need at least three months of consistency, consistency in content and in messaging to gain some sort of momentum. And once you have that momentum, then people start noticing you. Then your target audience starts noticing you, and then you get some sort of ROI, like three months is the absolute minimum. Even three months is no guarantee that you’ll get some ROI, right, depending on your goals. 

But the first mistake that they make is, well, let’s try it out. Let’s post randomly for a couple of months. Well, we’ll figure something out. Everybody else is doing great on LinkedIn. We’ll do the same. That is a mistake. You need to understand that it’s not a short-term play. It’s not like paid social. It’s a long-term play, right? You have to look at long-term benefits. So that’s number one, having unreal expectations when it comes to the timeline of your founder brand. That’s number one. 

The second thing is creating content on the go on the cuff and be like, well, let’s just create random content for three or even six months. The problem with that is if you’re not creating content that is tied to an end goal and has a strategy behind it, you’ll end up wasting time like nine times out of 10. Well, great. I mean you’ll know this as well, C-suites or founders or CEOs, they don’t have time. They’re busy people. So if you don’t have time, that’s the luxury you cannot afford, and you create content randomly for six months without an end goal or strategy behind it, then you are wasting time, and that is a precious commodity. You cannot waste time.

That’s the second mistake. They create random content in the hopes of something sticking through all. The solution to that is if you are creating content, you are making this mistake creating random content, step back, think about your end goal. That’s number one. What do I want to get out of this platform by establishing my thought leadership there? The second thing, how do I get there? What is the strategy? What am I going to be talking about? What kind of a service am I providing? Is my target audience even on LinkedIn, figure these things out and then these are the two, you could say major mistakes that these people make. The founder specifically, and by stepping back a bit and just thinking about it from different perspective, hopefully by listening to this podcast, they’ll have a different lens for it.

Grace Clark:

So you mentioned that consistency is so important to a founder who might be listening to this. What would consistency in that, let’s say that first three months, like you said, they’re going to try this for three months, they’re going to work to be consistent. What would consistency actually look like?

Ghalib Hassam:

Yeah, that is another great question because most creators on LinkedIn preach consistency as something that means you have to post five or seven times a week. That is completely wrong. I cannot imagine somebody who is a higher position, a CEO or a founder, they don’t have time to post five or seven times a week. That is one problem. The second thing is how are you going to create high quality content? If you’re talking about it every single day, it’s just not humanly possible unless you’re doing something incredibly incredible that you have a new update every single day. 

It’s really hard to maintain, and the thought of it as paralyzing. If you tell a founder or a CEO’s listening to this, and let’s suppose I said, in order to be successful on LinkedIn as a founder or a CEO or C-level person, you have to post every single day. You cannot miss it. They’ll be thinking, that is paralyzing. It’s so much pressure if I post today and then I know that I have to do it every single day for the rest of the week or month. It is so much pressure, so consistency. To answer your question, grace comes down to creating if one or even two pieces of content a week, but sustaining it every single week as simple as that.

So if you don’t have time, but you obviously have expertise to share your insights on industry, start with once a week, maybe do every Monday or Tuesday, and then with time as you get used to the platform and you get used to creating content, do it maybe two or maybe three times. So when I onboard clients, grace, we don’t do more than three times a week. Number one, it’s sustainable. Number two, it’s easy for me to, when I talk on content calls with clients, it’s easy for us to create high quality content as opposed to just putting content out every single day. So start with one or two and then I would say maximize your three. That is the safe spot. That is the sweet spot. So consistency three times a week, I would say, if you can do it and try to stay consistent with your messaging as well.

Grace Clark:

Yeah, I love that. Kind of shifting the focus just a little bit, AI is huge right now, like chat GPT, everybody’s talking about it. So with so much AI generated content just flooding the internet, how can a B2B founder cut through this noise and ensure that their content is actually being seen and heard by the audiences that they’re trying to reach?

Ghalib Hassam:

That is another good question. Because AI is absolutely everywhere. Content, the barrier to entry is so low now that anybody can basically create content, right? I did a video about this earlier today actually, that content creation is no longer an issue. It’s so easy now, anybody can write a post through AI, fine tune it a tiny bit to make it their tone of voice and just post it out there. 

The thing that matters most is substance. What is it that you’re talking about? Is it stuff that is relevant to your target audience? So the thing with AI is because of AI, content creators are everywhere, but at the same time, the quality is so low that you can easily stand out. All you have to do is speak your thought leadership and that is it. Then the next problem is Grace found was usually, well, they tell me that we have all of these expertise and our insights, but they’re in our head, and when we try to write content, when you try to ideate off the back of that, we just cannot seem to do it. It does not come naturally to us. Being a genius is one thing, but putting that genius out in the form of content is a completely different ballgame. 

My solution to that, it’s very simple. You either get somebody on your team to interview you for an hour or two every one or two weeks, or hire somebody, hire external help, but make sure they don’t just help you with copywriting, but they also know how to ask the right kind of questions, even if it’s in-house or if it’s external. The thing that matters most, as I mentioned earlier, is substance, right? So if you’re hiring somebody just to put out content, it’s going to be mediocre and everybody else is going to be talking about the same thing, and then you’re going to be lost in that sea of sameness of AI content and random content. 

But if you have somebody on your team or if you can hire somebody who knows how to ask the right kind of questions, who knows that I’m going to ask certain questions to this founder or CEO that is going to position him or her as somebody who is a thought leader within the industry who knows about the audience’s problems and who also knows how to solve them, then that is your golden ticket.

If you do that for long enough, create content like that three to six months, there’s absolutely no way that you fail with this.

Grace Clark:

Yeah, I totally agree. We’ve talked about this before. Customers are consuming content months before they’re actually engaging with you. So how should a founder who’s starting this thought leadership journey, how should they think about nurturing their audience even though they’re not necessarily getting immediate feedback?

Ghalib Hassam:

When you create content on LinkedIn as a founder or in general, there are people who are not in the market to buy at that very moment who are probably going to be in your ICP or target audience. These people, when you add them into your network, let’s say through connections, you’ll never see them interacting, and these are all real life stories because I’ve seen it so many times. Grace, we like to call these people lurkers. They look at your content, they consume it, but they lurk in the backgrounds. They never leave a comment, they never interact with it. They never leave a reaction, they never repost it, but I can guarantee you that people are watching, they’re reading. Most of the time, they will reach out to you or they’ll sign up through a website form, and then once you ask them, how did you hear about us?

They say, well, we’ve been consuming your content for a few months. We were not ready to buy back then, but now we were ready to have a conversation. And then you ask them, but you never interacted. They were like, yeah, we just didn’t want to because specifically in B2B, there’s a notion that nobody wants to publicly put out there. Like, Hey, I’m looking for a service, right? I don’t know why. I’ve heard this from somebody recently. They’re actually in the agency space in the US and they said the same thing that in B2B specifically or the high level executives, they don’t want to publicly encourage or show people that we are looking for a solution. They just consume everything, and then once they’re ready to buy, they’ve made up their mind. They reach out to a relevant person. So if you’re creating content, do not be worried about not getting a lot of engagement or not be worried about if people are not commenting, a lot of leaving reactions, they’re not in your ICP.

You have to stay consistent with your messaging. With time. When somebody has enough trust built, when they’ve been nurtured enough for a couple of months, they reach out to you. If you guys are good fit, if you guys are good fit, they will reach out to you. Or you could easily introduce yourself through a warm dm like, Hey, we’ve been connected a while, thought I’d drop by and say hi. That’s it. No hard selling. No hard selling in dms. No hard selling in content, but your job is to keep creating content that addresses your needs, shows them how to solve it, and then with time they will reach out. So that is what I would say, no, be worried about lurkers. They are reading your content. You just have to stay consistent.

Grace Clark:

We like the lurkers,

Ghalib Hassam:

We like the lurkers.

Grace Clark:

What would you say are some ways to measure success with that? Because again, they’re not going to be getting that type of engagement necessarily.

Ghalib Hassam:

Yes. If you’re talking about measuring, there are two is right. One is soft KPIs that you can measure, right? Soft KPIs, I mean, what kind of comments are we receiving? If we are receiving any, or what kind of dms are we receiving? That is one angle. Another angle is the hard numbers: reactions, number of dms, number of comments, this and that. 

But let’s say we are not getting a lot of that. Then how do we judge if something is working? First off, it’s going to take a while, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 months, no promises that everything’s going to be rainbows and butterflies, right? It takes time to build trust. If you want to measure it, if and when somebody reaches to you through a website form or LinkedIn, if somebody’s reaching out through LinkedIn to work with you or to inquire, then that is directly attributed to it.

But if it’s a website, try to set up another field in your form that says, how did you hear about us? And leave it open blank so people can type in it. If somebody mentions LinkedIn there, then great. 

You can attribute it to, let’s say, even that doesn’t happen at the end of the day. You have to remember LinkedIn is just a touchpoint in your buyer’s journey. Maybe somebody sees an ad, but two or three, four or five days ago, they saw a post on LinkedIn. Maybe they tell you in the custom field that, oh, yeah, we just went to Google and name and then we converted. But in reality, maybe they don’t even remember three months ago they saw a post of yours. So if you look at LinkedIn as, Hey, I want to be able to directly attribute something to LinkedIn, otherwise I’m going to stop creating my founder brand on LinkedIn and stop creating content, then you’re already setting yourself up for failure.

Marketing in general, I read a post about this today on LinkedIn, attribution is broken. Nobody knows exactly when and how somebody converts. Maybe you fill a website form and then analytics tell you like, oh, it was the website who converted somebody. But in reality, there’s dark social. There are places that we don’t necessarily track people like LinkedIn, let’s say, but they look at your content continent subconsciously are making that decision. So look at LinkedIn as a touchpoint in your buyer’s journey. That would make your life so much easier. If you’re on LinkedIn to specifically generate business and you want it to be attributing it to LinkedIn, like a hundred percent, I think you’re going to be disappointed because it’s just a touchpoint in your buyer’s journey, and yeah, you have to take it like that.

Grace Clark:

That’s a really, really good point. It’s something that builds up. It’s not going to work like they saw your post, I’m going to buy something right now. You got me, but you need that. It’s like building momentum. If you don’t have these places to keep that momentum going, they might look other places at people who are being a little bit more engaged, who knows? What’s a piece of advice you’d give to a founder who’s a little hesitant, but they’re willing to try? What’s one actionable step that they could take right now to starting this journey?

Ghalib Hassam:

The easy answer to that is just start documenting your journey as a founder, as a CEO, as a C-Suite Executive, you must have something happening, let’s say every one or two weeks. Maybe there’s a new update within the business. Maybe you’ve personally achieved the milestone within the business. Just talk about that. You don’t have to make it too pressurizing for yourself because I’m kind of torn with this, right? Because on one hand, I believe no founders will put out even a single piece of content before they have a strategy mapped out because I want them to save time and be as efficient as possible. Time is money. They don’t have a lot of it,

But at the same time, I’ve had a few conversations on my podcast about this, which made me realize that for some people, starting out with a complete strategy could be paralyzing. Maybe they’re chasing perfection and there’s no such thing as perfection. So in that case, I would suggest to come back to your question, Grace, is just start documenting your journey. Just talk about what’s happening within the business or on a personal level that ties to the service or the business that you have. Do not post absolute random stuff like, Hey, I’m at the beach today. And to be very honest, maybe your friends will like it. They will leave a comment on it, but does it move the needle? Does it attract your target audience? Does it help them in any other way? It doesn’t, right? That’s the harsh reality. So you have to treat it a bit with caution, but document your journey, document what’s happening within the business, what milestones you’ve achieved.

Tell us what happened last year, and that’s something that changed this year. Tell us what are your predictions for your industry in 2025? As simple as that. I’m sure a lot of founders or CEOs who are listening to this or watching this, let’s say they’ve been in the industry for years and years, what was it like back then, let’s say in 20 10, 20 15 as compared to today? So just giving out your thoughts in general. I think that’s a great way to start, and then with time, you can develop a proper strategy, but if you’re hesitant to start out, just don’t think about it too much. Document your journey, keep it relevant to your business, and yeah, that’s pretty much it.

Grace Clark:

That’s awesome. So that’s kind of the end of my questions, but is there anything I haven’t asked you that you really want to share or impart with listeners?

Ghalib Hassam:

Yeah, I mean, a lot of times people say founders specifically, again, sorry, CEOs and founders that we have a business to run, so why would we spend time on LinkedIn as opposed to just using the time running the business itself, which is a completely valid question and it’s completely valid. Why wouldn’t you spend time on your business?

The thing is, if you are thriving off LinkedIn, you’re not on LinkedIn, but you have a stable revenue coming in, you have a great lead flow and everything’s perfect, then maybe in that case, LinkedIn, you don’t really need LinkedIn. Maybe it’s a nice to have, so don’t force yourself into it, but if everything’s great, but at the same time you know that your target audience is on LinkedIn, then we live in a digital world, and as some of the stats that I showed you earlier, for example, 73% of decision makers, they assess a company’s thought leadership from the higher executives to see whether the company’s good or not, as opposed to traditional marketing materials.

So stuff like that, when you hear that, you know that, you know what? Maybe I should be on LinkedIn. So if your target audience is on LinkedIn and you want to justify the time spent on the platform, well, you won’t be able to justify it as long as you are in it for short-term gains, that’s for sure. But give it six to 12 months and then justify the ROI, right? The time spent, because it’s a long-term play. Was it that you wanted to attract talent judge after six months? Have I gotten any inquiries? Have talent started approaching me? Was it to generate lead to revenue for the business after six months? Judge it. Am I getting inbound flow right? Am I getting inquiries that are coming from LinkedIn? So if you want to justify it, and you hell Ben on saying, well, my business is already doing good, then it’s fine.

You don’t have to be here. But if your target audience is here and you know that you have interesting thoughts, you have strong point of views, and you have bold leadership, and you know that your thought leadership deserves content that needs to be out there so that you can stand out in the industry, maybe you’re against the status quo, right? And you’ve built a business off the back of it, share that. There’s literally no downside to it. What is the downside to sharing your thought leadership outside? Yes, some people might end up disliking you, but I mean if you want to stand out, it’s okay to piss some people off. That’s just natural. But if you want to be happy all the time and please everybody, then maybe LinkedIn isn’t for you. That’s all I’m going to say.

Grace Clark:

Very fair. And to kind of finish this up at, thank you so much for joining me, and where can people follow you and learn more about the great work that you do?

Ghalib Hassam:

I am on LinkedIn as Ghalib Hasam, G-H-A-L-I-B H-A-S-A-M, Ghalib Hasam. I am on LinkedIn. I run my own business there. I also have a podcast called The Founder Lore Podcast. It’s on YouTube under the same name, G-H-A-I-B-H-A-S-M on my channel. Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Those are my two main channels, and I document my journey as well as a founder and as a service provider for B2B founders. 

So if you guys want to learn about founder branding, how to do it, you can watch my podcast because I host founders who are good case studies of founder branding, or you can read content on my LinkedIn or watch my videos on LinkedIn. We break down every single thing that you need to do as a founder to stand out on LinkedIn.

Grace Clark:

Fantastic. Thank you

Ghalib Hassam:

Thank you so much. Grace.

Founded in 2009, Rivergate Marketing is a full service digital marketing agency, serving small to mid-size B2B companies trying to reach technical and engineering buyers. We are passionate about building strategic and data-driven marketing and PR programs to help our clients compete and be found in a crowded digital space against much larger companies with seemingly endless marketing dollars. For more information, visit us online at rivergatemarketing.com.