Ep. 92: How Can B2B Branding Drive Growth in 2026? Lara Acosta of Literally Academy Explains

Welcome to The Payments Shed Podcast, the weekly podcast that dives into the big topics, trends and people shaping the worlds of payments, fintech and business leadership, with your two co-hosts, Grant Evans and Justin Hanna.

Grant Evans:

Welcome back to The Payments Shed Podcast.

I am riding solo today. Justin, unfortunately, is not available yet again. He's going to start getting a reputation.

Today I'm joined by Lara Acosta. You are CMO and co-founder of Kleo.

Welcome to the show. I'm excited to have you on.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and your journey to founding Kleo?

Lara Acosta:

There are multiple aspects where I can go with that. I guess what's more useful to your audience, the B2B background or where I started?

Grant Evans:

I think a bit of both.

Lara Acosta:

I'm an accidental entrepreneur.

I started my first business by complete accident, all because I wanted to get a job on LinkedIn.

I started doing some freelance gigs here and there, and ultimately that resulted in me building my first agency.

I scaled that to six figures and then built two other seven-figure businesses as a result, all because of LinkedIn.

Grant Evans:

And you are, without doubt, one of the most recognisable voices and faces of B2B sales on the LinkedIn platform now, I would say.

Lara Acosta:

I don't know if I'd say that, but sure.

Grant Evans:

I think you are. I think you're being modest.

You've built this huge audience, and I really want to dive into brand in B2B with you today.

We've got a large following across financial services, which is interesting in this space because there are all the rules and regulations that we often have to adhere to in our industry.

But we are seeing a change in how B2B marketing is approached.

If we start with something that still divides opinion a little bit, why do so many B2B companies still underestimate brand, in your opinion?

Lara Acosta:

I don't think they underestimate it. They simply do it wrong.

Most B2B companies are doing marketing in their own sense. However, the marketing they're doing is outdated.

That's the difference.

I don't think that in their weekly reviews they'll be asking, "What are we doing for marketing?" and they'll say, "We're posting on LinkedIn, we're doing some ads and we're doing some emails."

At this point, that's not enough.

For most B2B businesses, the old model is what they think is supposed to be working.

"We're posting our updates on the company page, we're posting once a week on the CEO's page, and we're running a million ads that look like ads."

That's a playbook they're following which is completely outdated.

The new playbook is: build a personal brand for the CEO, the CMO and the employees so you can capture what's now called mind share, especially in B2B.

It's the same playbook every B2C or D2C business has used, but now B2B companies are adopting it faster.

Grant Evans:

Do you feel like there's a point at which brand starts driving revenue and not just engagement?

Is there a tipping point?

You can keep doing the rinse-and-repeat thing where you're chucking a lot of cash at the same old thing, but is it actually helping you drive revenue?

Lara Acosta:

Here's a distinction we need to make clear: organic engagement versus paid engagement.

I was on a call the other week with one of our new customers, and I was showcasing my best case study from 2026.

His name is Guy Macy. He talks about cable engineering and AWS on LinkedIn.

His content goes viral nearly every single week. Two thousand likes, 3,000 likes, 5,000 likes.

One of the people there asked me, "But is that an ad?"

And I'm like, "No."

That reminded me of the main distinction: people only believe engagement like that can be bought, but it can't be manufactured.

Organic attention is also monetisable.

The problem when you're throwing money at ads is the ad itself.

Most B2B companies aren't creatives. They're also not D2C companies that have specialised in copywriting for the last 10 years.

It's not engagement versus conversion.

It's about how to get the best engagement from the right people so we can maximise conversion, and then we can put some ad money behind it and turn it into thought leader ads or an ad itself.

Grant Evans:

What are some of the biggest mistakes founders are making when they're trying to build a brand at the moment?

Lara Acosta:

They're using ChatGPT.

They're writing generic, fluffy, long content that no one cares about.

And they have a lot of ego.

"Because I'm the CEO, you should listen to me."

That is not how social media works today.

It's the length, the overcomplication of the topic and the assumption that people know who you are.

Those are the main three problems people are experiencing today.

The fastest solution is to understand what makes you the most useful in the market today.

If you're the CEO of a B2B company that produces sales for another company, gets leads, creates some sort of conversion or leads someone towards an ideal goal, that is what you should be speaking about.

Not the long, boring thing you did over the weekend that you think people care about.

Grant Evans:

Do you think it's even worse when some of those founders have outsourced to companies that aren't creating the right content for them?

We know that market exists, but that AI slop you talk about is sometimes even being paid for.

Lara Acosta:

That's at the discretion of the person doing the hiring.

Obviously, yes, there are a lot of agencies that do that.

But I actually find it's usually the founders trying to skip some steps and save some money.

They say, "ChatGPT and AI is the best thing now," or "AI is so advanced, it can do all my copywriting for me."

It can't.

Even if it could, you need to be good at using AI first. That's also a problem.

ChatGPT can write incredibly good content, and we use AI with our businesses.

We use Kleo, which is one of my businesses.

But it still requires the right information, the right prompting and the right angle.

Only a few people understand how to do that. Otherwise, they need coaching and the right strategy set for them.

Grant Evans:

I think there's a misconception that anything using AI can't be good content.

That annoys me a little bit because we produce a lot of content on the show and our channels.

Of course you're going to use AI to speed up the process, but it doesn't have to be to the detriment of the product.

Lara Acosta:

I think for you and me, because we've done these things without AI, we understand what good versus bad looks like.

If you and I hadn't been in the industry creating content for five or 10 years, we wouldn't be able to differentiate good and bad because we hadn't had that exposure to patterns.

Something I have is incredible pattern recognition.

That cannot be paid for. It cannot be learned in a few months.

It's almost something I engineered by accident because I'm on social media all the time.

I see patterns rather than the right system.

I can tell good versus bad rather than waiting for ChatGPT to write me a LinkedIn post saying, "I'm so excited to announce that my podcast just launched again." Fire emoji, rocket emoji. "This has been the best thing in the podcast industry."

Shut up. No one cares.

But if you prompt any AI and say, "I want this to be short, concise, to the point, focus on doing eight words per line," that gives you a better output.

But that's only 30% or 40% better.

The more you give it the right context, the better it will be.

Grant Evans:

There are a lot of people building an audience right now.

LinkedIn is obviously a big channel for you.

Justin and I built our brands primarily on LinkedIn before we started this.

Lara Acosta:

I met Justin at a LinkedIn event.

Grant Evans:

There you go.

Lara Acosta:

He was speaking and I was like, "Hello."

Grant Evans:

Big up LinkedIn.

You've been on that journey of building an audience and then turning it into a full-blown business.

Where was the tipping point, and how does that process start to manifest itself?

Lara Acosta:

As in how you turn your content into a business?

Grant Evans:

Yes.

There's probably a point where you're like, "Okay, I can take this full-time now."

Lara Acosta:

It starts by using this framework I have. It's called the SMPV: skill, market, problem, value.

A lot of people go on LinkedIn because they want to quit their job, start marketing their business or start something new.

They start creating content because they heard Gary V say you need to post 10 times a day to get volume.

Then you end up posting just to post because you feel like you have to.

It's like a law of averages thing.

"The more I do it, the better I'll get."

Sure.

But when we're taking sales principles and applying them to direct-to-consumer marketing, person to person, it makes sense to get the reps.

On LinkedIn, especially with the algorithm, the more content you create that isn't specific enough, the more you confuse the algorithm and the harder you make it for yourself to be allocated to the right people.

That's the problem, especially on LinkedIn.

It works differently on all social media platforms.

I have about 55,000 on Instagram and 50,000 on YouTube, and it's different.

On LinkedIn, especially over the last two years, the algorithm has changed.

It reads your content almost like a prompt, from your Featured section to your headline, banner and content.

It's looking for signals of mastery.

That was literally articulated in the 360Brew article.

When you're posting just to post, you're not creating signals of mastery. You're just posting.

You're posting about the holiday you went on, the book you last read, the conference you went to or a cool B2B report you have nothing to say about but found interesting.

You assume that because you find it interesting, everybody else will find it interesting.

"Oh, I went to this conference. Look at me."

No.

"This conference was incredible because I learned this about sales."

There's a big difference.

Grant Evans:

We're a video-first podcast, and LinkedIn has happy months and sad months with video.

Sometimes it flies, sometimes it doesn't.

We've found our natural home on YouTube as a result because more people are viewing video-first podcasts there.

That's been a real learning curve for us, growing the YouTube channel.

We've not really dipped our toe properly into Instagram and TikTok yet, but I do think being multi-platform with content is really important when you're looking to scale.

Do you disagree?

Lara Acosta:

I disagree.

It depends. There's nuance.

If you're a beginner, starting your first business or someone who wants to start something new from corporate, you've got your podcast, LinkedIn content, Instagram content, YouTube Shorts, Reddit, Substack, email and a CRM you have to use to get leads.

That's eight things, and I'm probably missing some.

Out of the 24 hours an average person has in a day, do you think they have eight, or even four, to spare?

If we set someone to do eight things at once, every day, do you think any of them will accrue to a maximum result?

No.

I believe if you use those four to eight hours to focus on one platform first, then when it comes to redistribution, like you guys can do now, you understand specifically what you're good at, what you're useful at saying, what you're knowledgeable about and what you're well positioned to speak about.

You guys have a very good podcast name. You have a defined, clear positioning and niche.

But a lot of people see you or me. They see YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and think, "That's exactly what I need to do to get leads."

No.

We're doing this to play the attention game.

We're not necessarily doing it to play the attention and conversion game.

If I was playing the conversion game to the best of my capacity, I would say: one platform, one offer, one person.

That's it.

Until I scale to a point where I have more resources, better clients, multiple offers and understand exactly what they need help with.

Grant Evans:

I'm really interested in the audience-to-monetisation journey.

You're 300,000-plus on LinkedIn, a huge follower base.

What was the tipping point where you felt you could convert the audience into monetisation?

Or did the monetisation come first through the quality of content you were publishing?

Lara Acosta:

I had the privilege that when I started my LinkedIn journey, it was never about the money.

It was about exposure and trying to get more opportunities.

I didn't have that instinct of, "I need sales tomorrow."

I had that privilege.

I monetised from almost month one in 2022 without even saying I had an offer.

I didn't have an offer.

My clients built that offer for me.

When I had my first inbound lead, they said, "I like what you're doing. Can you do it for me?"

I'm like, "Yeah."

I had no idea how to do it, but I figured it out.

Grant Evans:

That's true entrepreneurial spirit, to be fair.

Lara Acosta:

After that, of course, I thought, okay, now I'm building this business. I'm all in. I need to convert this audience into clients.

But the assumption that every single person who follows me should buy from me is a cardinal sin a lot of B2B companies or founders make.

I heard this quote, and I hate it: "I'd rather have a thousand people follow me who would buy from me than a hundred thousand people who wouldn't."

That's wrong.

Grant Evans:

I agree with that.

Lara Acosta:

We're in the attention economy.

If you're getting attention from 100,000 people, do you not think you can make a million dollars if you have a really good offer and exposure?

Yes.

I believe that quote exists because a lot of people cannot get 100,000 followers.

It's a cute little, "It's fine, I'd rather just have my clients follow me."

No.

You have to focus on creating above-average content every single time to turn people who wouldn't even need your product into people who need it.

Three hundred thousand followers is cool.

A million-dollar business is cool.

Both of them combined? Insane.

I don't have to hop on sales calls if I don't want to.

For the past three years of my business, I didn't do any sales calls because I had the attention that created the conversion almost seamlessly.

My content was objection handling, one post at a time.

People don't realise that.

People create content to create it.

They don't create it with intention.

They don't create it with the intensity of, "I want this piece of content to solve this very big problem and ultimately handle an objection before it comes up."

Grant Evans:

As you've scaled to that level and built the business considerably, you're still massively central to the content. You are the brand.

What does the business behind the brand look like?

Have you got a fleet of people working with you now?

Lara Acosta:

The first business, the agency LA Digital, a £100K business, was a solo business.

I had one employee, and that was me.

Well, I had multiple employees. They were all me.

Marketing, sales, everything. It was all me.

The architecture was me, Trello boards, Looms and LinkedIn as our lead-generation machine.

I literally didn't even have a website for it.

The company page looks horrible. You guys can look at it. LA Digital.

The banner, I don't even know how to change it. I can't access our profile anymore. It's horrible.

But that created a six-figure business from my school bedroom and a broken chair.

From there, I got to what my mentor at the time called the revenue ladder.

I remember very vividly the day I was contemplating quitting.

Either dropping out of university because I was doing my master's at the time, or quitting the business because I couldn't do it.

Everybody talks about scale, SOPs, hiring A-players, the best leadership tips.

Obviously, I read a lot of LinkedIn content and I'm thinking, "I'm doing it all wrong. I'm doing it all wrong."

Then I had a conversation with my mentor.

I said, "I don't know what to do. I cannot physically sustain this business beyond what it is today. I think I need to drop out of uni or stop the business and finish my master's."

In that moment my mentor said, "There's a third thing you can do. Climb the revenue ladder."

That means from the first business, you create a different resource where you can serve more people at the same price, or even more, because you now have the authority to do that.

That's where attention becomes conversion.

If I hadn't had 50,000 followers, or 20,000 followers at the time, I wouldn't have been able to promote coaching, consulting or company-wide workshops that allowed me to scale the business without having to scale the employees.

The first two businesses I ran without a team.

Right now, in 2026, we have over 10 people working across every business.

But the first three years were mostly me and maybe someone else, a VA or some freelancers doing design.

Grant Evans:

You've built in a space that, particularly in B2B, has traditionally been quite male-centric.

From a social media point of view, there's the whole manosphere thing going on at the moment.

You've probably had a lot of that crap. I've seen it creeping into LinkedIn comments and things like that.

How do you approach that as a female founder in this traditionally quite blokey space?

Lara Acosta:

I didn't pay attention to it.

It wouldn't benefit me.

If you pay attention to things, it gets into your head.

Everybody's talking about the manosphere and how society is doomed.

If I think about society being doomed, what am I going to feel? Doomed.

If I thought about the times it was hard to be a female entrepreneur, no, it's hard to be an entrepreneur overall.

I appreciate that women overall have different challenges to men, but entrepreneurship is all about challenges.

I didn't want to become a victim to my gender.

I appreciate and care about this topic a lot, but if you're asking me honestly, I just didn't pay attention to it.

I still try not to, otherwise it gets into my head.

That's the way I survive.

It's not because I'm trying to lack empathy.

It's more about: how do I make it?

If I focus on bad things, bad things are going to happen.

If I focus on good things, I'm technically weaponising my incompetence.

Grant Evans:

I don't even feel that comfortable talking about it as a thing because we've made great strides forward in our industry.

But even when I look across financial services and payments as a sector where Justin and I both worked for a long time, there is still a lack of representation at boardroom level.

What you're doing as a founder, and the growth and companies you've created, is inspirational to that generation coming through where boardroom representation in traditional company verticals doesn't exist.

You can go and do it yourself.

There's opportunity out there as well.

Lara Acosta:

I wish I could talk about that, but I've never really had that happen to me.

What I can say is this.

A lot of people are worried about not getting a seat at the table instead of building their own.

You cannot be denied a seat at the table if you build your own.

How about finding ways to collaborate with men?

I've had a lot of luck.

99.9% of experiences I've had with men in the workplace or my career have been positive.

Every man I've come across has helped me.

I think it was because I was leading with a lot of love and humility rather than, "I deserve this. It is my right because I am this or that."

I was like, "I'm going to earn my place here."

And I did.

It was really hard, but I just ate the frog.

I thought, this is what it's going to take.

Luckily now I get to be in a position where I can represent women to the best of my capacity.

Any woman watching this, it is not about becoming a victim. It is about becoming the hero of your own story.

That's what I want to lead with.

If you're not being given opportunities, you can go and create them elsewhere, then create those opportunities for other people too, especially women.

I hire a lot of women now as well.

I don't go, "There must be men, there must be women."

Part of my ethos is empowering women, not from a place of sadness, but empowerment, because women are very skilled and very intelligent.

A lot of female CEOs are actually some of the best decision-makers.

They're not emotional like people say. It's often very logical and structured.

Grant Evans:

I think the B2B creator economy is quite a collaborative space.

There are different niches where people create content, but we've all been on that mission to change the status quo of what B2B can be.

It's not necessarily seen as the sexiest arena, but a huge amount of revenue globally exists within that B2B environment.

What sort of collaboration opportunities have you been able to lean into on your journey?

Lara Acosta:

With companies?

Grant Evans:

Companies, but also other creators.

Lara Acosta:

My entire business was built off collaboration.

How I grew my LinkedIn was built off collaboration.

LinkedIn is literally a networking place.

Everything I did, even before I hit 10,000 followers, involved collaborating with people who had similar followings and having them like my content because they were supporting me, and we supported each other.

That's collaboration on a very small scale.

The next step was collaborating on content.

My friend, who is now my co-founder, Jake Wood, had an SEO audience.

I had a copywriting, content and sales audience.

We started creating content together, carousels on how to grow on LinkedIn, how to format content and how to write.

A post on my page would lead people who followed me to his page, and similarly the other way around.

That's how you collaborate with your peers without competing.

It's not a competition.

There's enough space for everyone to get clients.

Grant Evans:

What's your advice to people thinking about creating content for the first time?

Lara Acosta:

You need to understand the SMPV.

Skill, market, problem, value.

Your skill is the thing you're essentially going to be monetising.

Your skill cannot just be "web design".

It should be web design for B2B companies in the AI space that want more leads.

That's a skill.

The problem is lead generation. You're fixing that lead generation problem using landing pages or web design.

The market is B2B AI companies.

Then the value is the content you're creating.

The value branches into three things: educational content, storytelling content and sales content, usually a lead magnet or case study.

Educational content is: how are you fixing this problem?

Storytelling content is: why am I the best person to fix this problem for you and why should you trust me?

Sales content is: I did this for this person, here's why I can do it for you.

For the web designer, educational content might be: "This is how you can increase your conversion rate by 10% overnight by doing this one thing."

That's education.

Storytelling is: "I built my first design agency when I was 21. Now it makes $10,000 a month."

Sales is: "This client just got two new leads because we fixed this one thing on their website."

That's it.

But it starts with a skill.

If you don't have a skill that's very well defined, your content will become sloppy or vague.

Grant Evans:

I think everyone thinks they can do it, and I like to see everyone have a try, but you have to be quite consistent.

It doesn't mean doing the same thing, but having brand consistency.

People say it to us with our stuff, "We recognise your stuff now."

Even if you change it up, it has a certain feel and flavour to it.

Lara Acosta:

Taste.

Grant Evans:

Yeah, who knows?

I want to dive into B2B sales.

People don't always like admitting it, but B2B sales is still very hard.

It can be a very tough space to operate in.

What do people underestimate most about buyers in the B2B arena and what they expect?

Lara Acosta:

It depends on the ticket of the sale.

When it comes to $10,000 to $1 million deals, that's a longer sales cycle, and that's to be expected.

But I play in the arena of high-ticket sales between $3K and $15K or $20K.

The biggest hack I've found is actually selling by chat, which a lot of people automate or just don't do because they're banking completely on content.

There's an entire system around this: the content mechanism, sales mechanism and positioning mechanism.

We've covered the first two already.

The sales mechanism is lead magnets.

You drive people outside of LinkedIn because you can't guarantee your content will always be seen by the right person at the right time and place.

With lead magnets, when you post one a week, you're funneling that attention into something much more trackable.

LinkedIn is hard to quantify because you don't always know where the leads are coming from.

But when you take a post that's really good, turn it into a lead magnet, have people download it and subscribe to your email list, you put them onto a list.

Then you can market to them consistently and track the back end using Klaviyo or a CRM, or book calls if that's your mechanism.

That's how I do it.

The second thing is having calls to action, which people don't do.

People don't promote themselves enough.

They say, "I'm creating content every day. I'm not getting leads."

I look at their content and say, "What is your offer? When was the last time you promoted your business? I don't see it."

It's getting out of hand where people are upset at the algorithm, shadow bans or lower impressions.

That's going to happen all the time.

But they're not fixing the main thing, which is: where are you selling?

I ask, "How many DMs a week are you sending?"

"Oh, one."

Grant Evans:

How much of this starts with marketing teams, though?

Have they got sloppy? Have they always been a bit sloppy?

Lara Acosta:

The blame often sits with the person leading marketing.

Having had a marketing agency, it usually comes back to the decision-maker.

They're like, "I don't want people DMing people on my behalf."

"Okay, you do it."

"I don't have time."

"Okay, let us do it."

"No."

Marketing teams can also do it, and a lot of them do it incredibly well.

Ghostwriting and personal branding agencies have had to pivot because personal branding isn't enough of a moat or mechanism to retain clients.

Most people think they want a personal brand to become an authority in their space.

In reality, they want leads.

It starts with the shiny object of, "I want to be an authority in my space."

But underneath it is, "I want to be an authority in my space because I want to get more leads on demand."

When a content agency starts creating 30 posts a month for that person, they're like, "Where are the leads?"

And the agency says, "Where's your sales team?"

Marketing teams aren't sales teams.

You can hire a marketing agency to do your content, but then it's up to you to do the sales or have a sales team embedded into it.

There are hybrid marketing agencies now that do that because we've realised the intention behind it.

Even I now have to do a lot more.

Here are the frameworks to sell by chat. Here's how you do social selling, and here's how you convert.

It is both.

You need marketing and sales.

If you're posting really good content and it's going viral, that's great.

But if you don't have a funnel engineered off the back of that, you're getting all this attention and it's not going anywhere.

I love going viral, but I also love going viral, getting leads and converting them.

That's really cool.

Grant Evans:

Numbers mean nothing without anything behind them, I guess.

Do you feel content has made sales easier, or has it actually made it more difficult because the quality and approach to go-to-market is now very different from 10 years ago?

Lara Acosta:

Content is the ultimate asset any CEO, entrepreneur, freelancer or person who wants to escape the nine-to-five has to have.

It's the one thing that can actually get you leads because you become recognised in your space.

Obviously, you have to do it right.

Even if you're creating average content, the bar is already average.

If you produce slightly above-average content in your space, you're already winning.

Especially in B2B, it's insane.

It's the biggest advantage B2B companies have.

I just need to do this a little bit better.

I need to understand how to write a really good hook.

I need to understand how to format it well enough and have a good image, infographic, carousel or video that captures attention the way I want it to.

I need my profile optimised so that attention then converts into a sale.

Maybe that's a CTA in one of the posts, a lead magnet pinned in your Featured section, a link or a call to action.

"DM me the word 'podcast' if you want to be featured."

But because we see content as such a simple thing, it's, "I'm just going to post this post."

That's it.

The funnel isn't a funnel. It's just volume.

Grant Evans:

What are the worst sales techniques you're still seeing, particularly on LinkedIn, where you just think, "Come on, it's 2026"?

Lara Acosta:

Automation.

All of these tools, I won't name them, have created a frenzy and fluff around what personalisation really means.

Personalisation used to be cool five or 10 years ago.

"Hey Lara, love what you're doing at LA Digital. Would you need some help with your marketing?"

That was cool because there was no AI and no automation.

Now when you and I get, "Hey [name], love what you're doing at [name of podcast] with X number of company employees, scaling so fast..."

You can literally see they've copied what your profile says.

There's no personality. There's no human element.

That's what people are doing wrong.

The process still works perfectly fine if you do it with a little bit more intent.

Even two years ago, you'd send a personalised Loom recording of yourself going through someone's landing page.

"Hey, I looked at your landing page. Here's exactly what's wrong."

That's also been automated.

I get those twice a day, if not more, where it's supposedly a personalised Loom recording, but the video was pre-recorded and AI has just added my landing page.

You're literally pointing at nothing.

I cannot see you actually going through my landing page or LinkedIn.

I get pitched personal branding services all the time.

"We see an opportunity for your B2B engine to become even greater."

And I'm like, "Who is this?"

Is that the law of averages?

"If I do this enough times, I'm going to get at least one person."

Grant Evans:

There's an easy starting point for this for me: get rid of the bloody LinkedIn InMail system.

It feels so legacy now. It's just a spam funnel.

I don't see how LinkedIn can still look at that and think it's working.

Even Sales Navigator, teams have used it for years to go out and build lead lists.

You can build lists outside of LinkedIn to feed LinkedIn in a better way in many cases.

Lara Acosta:

Yeah, but then LinkedIn bans all the automation tools that help, so we're kind of stuck.

Grant Evans:

But it's not been updated for years.

I love LinkedIn, don't get me wrong, but sorry guys.

The actual InMail system, I just don't get it.

Some of the video stuff initially made me think, "I'll spend a little bit more time. I'll watch."

Then they became bots and automated and I'm like, "This is just..."

Lara Acosta:

There are people I've seen doing this, and I love it.

I wouldn't do it myself, though.

They take an hour out of their day, go for a walk and send a hundred personalised videos.

It's still them.

Hats off to them, because there's volume, but it's still personalised.

I can see them literally saying my name and saying, "I really love your content. I love that post."

Okay, cool. You've actually seen my content rather than it being a message written by AI.

If it's video or a voice note, that's cool.

That actually converts very well, even more now than before because AI still can't do voice notes or video that well.

Grant Evans:

If you had to start again, knowing what you know now, how would you win your first customers?

Lara Acosta:

I would do a fake case study if I didn't have any skills.

If I wanted to do lead generation on LinkedIn, I'd use myself as a case study.

I'd create content for 30 days optimised for lead gen.

I'd get my first client and say, "This is exactly how I did it. Now I'm going to teach you how to get your first client."

That's it.

I'd create content about that until I got my second one.

Then create content about that until I got my third one.

That's it.

Grant Evans:

So that's the build-in-public mantra as well?

Lara Acosta:

It's build in public, but again, the phrase has become so overused.

"I'm building in public. Here's what I had for breakfast."

Grant Evans:

There's a founder who does it a lot, where he talks about when his company is struggling and he's very public about where they've made bad decisions.

I quite like the openness of that because people founding businesses see that you can have a bad day or a customer that goes horribly wrong.

Lara Acosta:

I like that.

But take someone like Matt Kelly, who's the founder of Spacegoods, a multi-million-pound company.

I don't think I would care if he hadn't already built a multi-million-pound company or had a track record.

That's important to bear in mind with building in public.

Why are people paying attention to you?

What is the thing that makes you interesting to listen to?

I wouldn't recommend building in public about your life.

That's not the thing.

The thing is what you're good at and why you should be listened to.

Grant Evans:

Let's talk AI in a bit more detail.

We've touched on it, but how much of the AI conversation, particularly in content creation, is real versus noise?

Everyone says, "Use this AI tool and it'll help you do this and that."

You're someone who's familiar with the reality of what does and doesn't work well.

Where have you seen AI make a real difference for a brand or business trying to scale its B2B proposition?

Lara Acosta:

I would say most AI content is pretty much useless to any business.

On LinkedIn right now, everything going viral is an AI agent or AI system.

"You can automate your video creation and this and that."

People like it, but they don't even have videos to automate.

What are you doing?

"This system is going to get you 100 more leads."

But you don't even have an offer.

They're useless for someone who doesn't have the thing that actually makes them work.

But I believe AI is the future, 100%.

I'm in the AI business.

We built what I believe, and I'm obviously very biased, is one of the best ways to write content on the platform.

It's helping thousands of people actually feel like they can write about their niche and get attention as a result.

The best use case for AI is understanding what you need AI for.

A lot of people want to use AI, but they don't even know what they want AI for.

One of my friends, Ruben Hassid, is one of the most followed LinkedIn creators around AI.

I remember a conversation I had with him three years ago.

I said, "Oh my God, Ruben, teach me how to use AI."

He said, "What do you need it for?"

And I said, "I don't know."

That resonated with me then and still does now.

People want to use AI, but they don't actually have a use case yet.

That's what becomes noise.

"AI this, AI that."

Okay, AI for what?

AI for content creation? Okay, you can use Kleo to write content faster.

AI for sales generation? Okay, you can use another tool to automate your CRM faster because you already have the leads.

Grant Evans:

One of the pushbacks is that AI in content dilutes authenticity.

What's your view on that?

Lara Acosta:

What is authenticity anyway?

I truly hate the term authenticity now in content because it's become one of these fluffy terms everybody desires to have, but they don't even understand what authentic means.

Social media in general is not authentic.

You are a heavily curated version of yourself, and you're debating whether AI is making you inauthentic.

What is authentic about building a personal brand based on lead generation?

That's not your 100% authentic self.

It's a version of you with a goal and a means to create revenue.

On Instagram, your desire might be to get more followers because you want to be known for X.

You're not going to document every time you cry or every time you forget to take a shower, unless that is your brand.

There are levels to authenticity.

If we're debating AI versus authenticity, I feel like we're losing.

You can still be authentic using AI because if you give AI enough things to base its content on, the content will still be you.

AI just speeds it up.

With Kleo, for example, we have lots of customers writing personal stories with it.

The AI tool didn't make those stories up.

You gave them to us.

We just generated them in a way that's consumable.

It doesn't start with, "When I was 25, I lost my dog, then my grandma had this thing and she told me this..."

That's boring.

It's: "When I was 25, I started my business because my grandma told me I couldn't do it."

Boom.

Big difference. Same story.

AI just helped format it.

It speeds up the learning process.

It reduces the learning curve.

That's the part people debate as inauthentic. It's not.

You can still be authentic.

At the end of the day, you choose whether you post that piece or not.

You're still part of the process.

These AI tools aren't going to take full autonomy of your personal brand unless you let them.

If you just say, "Create five pieces of content and schedule them," and you don't read them, then yes, that's inauthentic.

Grant Evans:

I agree.

People have to feed the ideas into the tool.

You need to know the starting foundation of that idea or story.

The tool helps you curate the right post, but using a tool doesn't automatically make it inauthentic.

Lara Acosta:

It's the same thing with companies paying people to write their content.

Is that less authentic? No.

If you hire a ghostwriter, but the ghostwriter is basing the content on a book the client wrote, the client still wrote that book.

We're removing the middleman on a £2K to £5K pay cheque every month and reducing it to a $99 tool that does it in less time, while you're still heavily involved.

I think AI can actually allow the creative process to be more honest because you're involved.

When it's a ghostwriter, and I love ghostwriting because it was my first business, we have to use our own thinking.

"If I were this person, I would say this."

As a ghostwriter myself, I had to go through 20 rounds of iterations because the client hated something.

"I would never say that word. I would never talk about my children this way."

With AI, you can say, "I don't want this word, this word or this word," and it won't happen again.

Grant Evans:

Is there an argument that you're not creating your real self online anyway?

You're creating a version of yourself.

Maybe that isn't exactly what you would say naturally, but if you want to grow your brand, perhaps that's what your content strategy needs you to say.

Lara Acosta:

That's a creative strategy conversation rather than an AI versus non-AI conversation.

It's a person who has an idea of how they should be presented, and then the content writer, ghostwriter or AI helps with that.

It's the same conversation either way.

AI has this reputation for being robotic or generated by internet bots.

But it's still you.

It's you and what you prompted it with, the signals you gave it and the ideas you gave it.

That's on you both ways, whether it's a ghostwriter or AI.

Grant Evans:

Is there anything you think people are overusing AI for?

Lara Acosta:

Thinking.

Grant Evans:

Can you elaborate on that?

Lara Acosta:

We're outsourcing our thought process to AI and relying on it too much.

I see this especially with my generation, Gen Z.

It's annoying and sad because I had the privilege of growing up without AI.

Everything I learned was hard work and skill, and I had to use my brain to understand it.

With AI now, you go to AI and say, "How do you build a million-dollar business?"

"Okay, you do this, this and this."

There's a lot more to it.

Another problem is people overusing generic AI tools for the wrong things.

For example, ChatGPT for LinkedIn content.

That doesn't really work.

ChatGPT has a general overview of LinkedIn and how content works, but it doesn't understand all the nuances within written content.

When you go into ChatGPT and ask, "Write me a post," it will write you a generic post.

People overuse it because, one, ChatGPT is free, and two, they believe ChatGPT knows a lot, which it does.

But it doesn't necessarily understand the nuance of creative writing or copywriting for that platform.

That's why we created our tool, because I needed it.

People are using free AI tools for lots of things like a Swiss Army knife that does 18 things.

It's got scissors, a knife, clippers and everything else, but none of them incredibly well.

When you use specialised AI tools to do the one thing you need rather than 10 things, it's much better.

It's not necessarily overusing AI.

It's using one AI tool for 10 different jobs.

Grant Evans:

We had Tim Hughes on the show a few weeks ago. He wrote a book on social selling.

We were talking about impressions versus likes on the platform.

People obsess over impressions.

What are your thoughts on them?

Are they relevant, or are you looking at likes on your content and thinking they correlate more closely to the inbound opportunities you get?

Lara Acosta:

If I knew how impressions were measured, I would be a lot more in favour of them.

But we don't have statistical data to understand where they're coming from.

We don't know how they're measured.

We don't know why they change.

We don't know why they're increasingly lower.

At the very start, I usually tell my clients not to look at impressions.

One, it's a metric you can't control.

Two, it's a metric only you see.

Three, if you focus too much on it, you're going to reduce your chances of seeing success because you'll limit yourself to a small quantity of data saying, "This gave me more impressions, therefore I should post more of this."

But you don't know where those impressions are coming from.

I would rather look at quantifiable data where we know where it's coming from.

Likes come from real people.

Comments come from real people.

Reposts come from real people.

Follower growth is real people following you and connecting with you.

Grant Evans:

We've had some viral posts.

You look at impressions, but then you have the Members Reached section as well.

It's clear that an impression is not qualifying as a reached member.

I had one that was around 600,000 impressions and maybe 300,000 members reached.

It's not saying 600,000 people saw that content.

Technically, maybe 300,000 LinkedIn users did.

They work in weird ways.

Why have impressions if they're meaningless?

Or are they not meaningless?

They need to tell us what the actual story behind them is.

Lara Acosta:

It's not as clear as we would like it to be.

When they published the 360Brew report, it had a lot of data in it, but it's kind of illegible if you're not a nerd, which I'm not.

I tried to read it eight times and got the basics of it.

Grant Evans:

Have you seen correlations between like count, comment count and what then tracks through as a qualified lead for your businesses?

Lara Acosta:

No.

For that, I would look at profile views.

If I'm intentionally trying to get leads, I'm going to post, then 12 or 24 hours later I'm going to look at who's viewing my profile.

That's a literal signal.

If you have LinkedIn Premium, you can see, "Okay, I reached CEOs in the USA who are decision-makers."

Cool.

This post is an indicator that this type of content gets me the right audience.

But then let's say I post a fluffy mindset-shift tip.

That's good for virality.

I'm going to get a lot of people who aren't decision-makers, freelancers or beginner entrepreneurs looking at that.

That's also okay because I'm catering for them as well.

That's the purpose of a multifaceted personal brand.

I'm catering for my ideal followers, the people who are aspiring, who will support me, come to an event I host one day or know someone who knows someone who knows someone.

Then my ideal client persona is the person who's going to buy from me immediately or within the next two or three months.

Grant Evans:

You've grown this huge following on LinkedIn.

Are you now at a point where you're making the transition to YouTube?

What's the platform evolution for Lara?

Lara Acosta:

It was never about a transition.

For me, I was just following my curiosity.

I always wanted to be a content creator.

I'm a content creator first, entrepreneur second.

I think that's why I have an advantage with content creation because I was doing this before I even got paid for it.

That's something my mentor, Richard Moore, always says when people ask about me.

"How did she do it?"

And he says, "She would have done this if she wasn't being paid. She was addicted to the internet."

I literally say, "I love the internet more than anyone."

I'm on it 24/7.

I was on it 24/7 before I understood the idea that you could be an online entrepreneur.

The evolution came from thinking: okay, I have LinkedIn content.

I have a validated skill, a validated market, a validated problem and a validated value proposition.

I can now afford, from a monetary point of view, camera, microphones, time and presence.

All of that takes time, money or skill.

I had that skill.

Now I'm going to move onto YouTube because I want to test it out.

It ended up being a great lead-funnel magnet for us.

But it didn't start like that.

It started with, "I want to do long-form."

Okay, I'm going to do long-form.

It wasn't this mega-visible sales strategy.

It becomes that over time.

If it was up to me, I might have done LinkedIn and email.

At the start, I wasn't sure I wanted to do video.

I was 24 or 25 when I started YouTube.

I was 23 when I started my first business.

I was thinking, "Who the hell am I to talk about LinkedIn on video? Who's going to pay attention to me?"

So I tested it.

I got invited onto my first few podcasts and realised, okay, people like this thing.

I put my toes in the water.

"I'm really good at speaking, I think."

I got better over time.

People liked it when I spoke because it adds authenticity in real time.

That's the authentic part.

Me swearing and playing with my glasses, that's authentic.

People liked my personality offline as well.

They were watching the episodes and saying, "We want more."

That's a signal.

I'm always looking for signals and patterns.

I'm not looking to see what I feel like doing or what's cool.

That's the wrong approach.

It's signals.

Ten good signals watched that podcast.

They emailed me. They sent me a connection request.

Cool.

Go on another podcast.

Try and deliver even better.

What about my first YouTube video?

Then I launched the YouTube channel because I had enough signals to see that it could actually work.

From there, it's Twitter, Instagram and so on.

Grant Evans:

We've found our demographic reach really interesting since going onto YouTube and seeing where people like to view our content.

I'm always looking at YouTube and Spotify now.

I'm obsessed with metrics: age demographic, gender, countries, things like that.

Then the brands that come on the show start asking us about that.

I'm glad I'm obsessed with it now.

This has been a brilliant conversation.

We have a final section at the end of the podcast called the Shelf of Shame, where we ask our guest to nominate something from their world, whether that's B2B marketing, business generally or content creation, that if you could banish forever, what would you nominate?

Lara Acosta:

In the B2B world?

Grant Evans:

It can be B2B, business, content creation, whatever you like.

Lara Acosta:

People leaking my number.

What is that?

Grant Evans:

Okay, that's very personal to you.

Lara Acosta:

I know.

Somehow, somewhere, I appeared in a CRM that has now been publicly leaked by some sort of third-party B2B sales company because all I get is pitches.

Whoever did that, I hope your pillow is really warm at night because I need to change my number.

I'll show you off camera.

This is actually crazy.

I get one of these a week, and they're video messages of people pitching me LinkedIn growth services.

Grant Evans:

On WhatsApp?

Lara Acosta:

It's horrible.

Grant Evans:

Why is he eating crisps?

Lara Acosta:

Why is he eating crisps?

Grant Evans:

And he's just got your personal number.

Wow.

Okay, so tools that give people's mobile numbers away.

I think we can definitely put that on there.

Lara Acosta:

That is illegal.

Grant Evans:

I just love how he's eating a crisp at the beginning of his pitch as well.

Talk about shooting your shot and then just eating food at the beginning of it.

Lara Acosta:

He's blocked.

He's blocked on LinkedIn as well. I'll go and find his LinkedIn and block him.

Grant Evans:

That might be one of my favourite Shelf of Shame nominations ever.

Thank you very much for coming on the show today.

Where can people get in touch with you, not on your personal number that's been leaked, but through your businesses and find out a little bit more about what you do?

Lara Acosta:

Find me on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, @laraacosta, and please try Kleo.

Grant Evans:

Cool. Thanks for joining us on the show.

Lara Acosta:

Thank you.