Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Hello. Welcome back to Rogue startups. I'm your host, Craig Hewitt. And today we're talking all about LinkedIn, your favorite topic and the thing that we have been talking about for the last few episodes of this show. And we'll continue to talk about for the next few episodes of this show because I feel that it is the place to be these days if you are serious about growing kind of the reach of yourself and your brand and your company and your customer base using social media. And so I think, first of all, let's just qualify. This is a promotional tactic, right? Nobody is building their entire business on LinkedIn. Nobody that listens to this show probably is building their entire business on LinkedIn. We're not talking to a bunch of LinkedIn influencers about how to sell content on how to grow your audience on LinkedIn. Right? This is a tool, just like many other tools in the sales and marketing world. It is a tool to further our businesses. Right? So we are bootstrapped, or mostly bootstrapped. Founders of SaaS product services agencies. LinkedIn is just another way to get your message out, have it resonate with your ideal customer Persona and get them to buy your stuff. Right? Get them to come into your world and love you and what you do and identify with, kind of your vibe, and then buy your stuff, right? That's marketing, right? That's sales and marketing. And turns out LinkedIn is a really great channel or avenue to do this in. So we've had a couple people on the show talking about LinkedIn ads, talking about LinkedIn organic content. We have several more coming, talking about video, talking about selling, talking about the DM strategy, which I'll go into in a minute. But I wanted to take this kind of interlude to talk about how I'm doing it, because I probably am like a lot of you, where I'm not perfect. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing most of the time, right? But I've picked up little bits from a lot of the folks that we're chatting with. I have tried to implement as many of them as I can. I'm not perfect. I don't know everything. I have a strategy and approach and a framework that is sustainable for me, first of all, because I think that's really important, is, hey, can I do this day and day out, month after month, week after week, is getting some results, which is always good. So we're not just wasting time and money. And I feel good about it. I think that's the other thing, is there's a lot of ways to get clients, some of them you're not so happy to tell grandma about, right? And so this one, I feel really good and wholesome, if you will, from a customer acquisition approach, methodology and kind of ethics perspective.
[00:02:28] You know, when you find that perfect partner for your business, the person you say, shit, where has this person been all of my life? I found that a few years ago with clearly design and Francois, who has helped us design almost the entire Kastos web application, mobile app, WordPress plugin and marketing site. I think that the old saying that software is eating the world, I think it's never been more true, right? Software and AI are getting easier and easier to build and cheaper and faster. And so what's differentiating you from all of your competition is how much your customers love using your software. It's not good enough anymore to just have good software. People have to absolutely love it. And to do that, unless you're a designer, which I'm not, you need someone who gets this stuff and is able to take the stuff that's in your brain as a founder and put it into Figma and put it into specifications for your dev team to implement. And it's really been transformative for us to work with Francois and clearly design on Kastos and really on every aspect of Kastos, from branding to marketing to product and to promotion, I can't recommend it enough. He's a really great human being, a really great service. And Francois running a special just for rogue startup listeners right now. If you go to clearly design, you can get a discount off of his monthly design as a service subscription. Tell him that we sent you and I hope that you enjoy. I know you won't be disappointed. Francois, absolutely amazing. And clearly design is our chosen partner for everything, design, UX and product at Kastos. I think, first of all, why LinkedIn? For me, why LinkedIn? I think you need a social platform to grow your reach, right? Things like content marketing and email especially are great to nurture existing people in your world. But if the goal is just to build a bigger world, a bigger sphere of influence, if you will, then to me, social media is the answer in some way. So you just got to decide, like, what's for you. And it may be that Twitter is better for you, it may be that Instagram is better for you, it may be that YouTube is better for you. And I'll put an asterisk there, right? Because YouTube is a bit of a hybrid crossover, right? It is a content platform and it is a social platform. So more on YouTube in the future, probably, but we'll just discard YouTube because it's not a pure social platform for now. So for me, LinkedIn is where it's at because it has my clients, right? And so I'm talking about both clients from my coaching business, where I coach founders on how to grow their businesses better and faster and more sanely, and forecastos, where we sell enterprise podcasting solutions to companies. So both of these are on LinkedIn. So for me, I like that I can get a two for one on a platform. And I talked with the guest of the previous episode, Sam Brown, about this, and he said every one of his clients, so he works with clients on how to grow their LinkedIn kind of audience and influence. Every single person struggles with this, and I'm sure you do too, right? You're like, hey, I run a business, but like, I'm a person. I want to talk about, like, me and my stuff, and I think that's the place where I'll talk about what I'm doing. Specifically, I like castos, and I like growing castos and I like getting customers there. But I also really just like talking about business and helping founders. And so I've just come to peace with, hey, my kind of world is split, right? If you go on my LinkedIn profile, you'll see I'm a Gemini, you'll see both sides of me, right? You'll see the casto side and you'll see the founder coaching side. And I'm just not willing to go and give up this platform for one or the other of them because they're both really important to me and I think both are beneficial to each other. Right. Because the coaching business gives me some credibility as the founder of Kastos, and being the founder of Kastos gives me some credibility as a founder coach because I've done this and we're at millions of dollars of arrows. So I think it's not wrong to have several things that you talk about on a channel or an avenue like LinkedIn now. Yeah. If you're whole hog entirely lined up on one thing, are you going to do better? Probably. Is that realistic for most of us? Probably not. So I gave myself the grace, and I'm giving you the grace. Hey, if you don't want to go all in on one thing on your LinkedIn profile and channel, like totally cool, just split it up and know that, hey, you're going to get diluted a little bit, and the results that you will see may not be as good or big or fast as if you were all in on one thing. The other reason I really LinkedIn is there's a whole lot of data that LinkedIn is where the money is, right? The average income of a user on LinkedIn is triple what it is on most other social platforms, and it is just where we talk about business. So I don't feel bad spouting off about business on LinkedIn because it's what people expect when they go there. Whereas on my twitter I could be talking about the great falafel place down the street, or the vacation I just went on, or I'm in New York where I get a bagel, whatever. But I could also talk about business. And sometimes weird and all, there's these kind of conflated or confusing themes to people's profiles on LinkedIn. Like it's business, and I talk about business. I love talking about business. I don't feel bad about it there. So that's why I choose LinkedIn as my kind of primary social channel these days. Let's talk about the kind of nuts and bolts of it. To me, there's three things. Three, four, three or four things to an effective LinkedIn strategy. Talked a little bit about each of them with Sam Brown in the previous episode. We'll talk about each of them in depth in future episodes. But first, let's talk about organic content. And this is no, by no means an exhaustive list, right? But this is what's sustainable for me and what I do as of today. I'd love to hear from you in the comments below. If you're watching on YouTube, what are you doing that's different from me? So we can all learn and level up together. But for me, there's a few parts to it. One is posting organic content, the other is sending connection requests and having DM conversations with people. The other is comment on other people's content to get my self and my message and my kind of ethos out into the world. And the other is cold prospecting. So the first posting I post almost every day. I like to post every day if I can. A lot of it are reruns and clips and mentions of this podcast, right? I use LinkedIn largely to promote my most important content medium, which is this podcast, because I'm 320 episodes into it. It's by far, like the biggest body of work I've ever had. And I love it. I love recording these episodes and chatting with y'all. And so for me, as a piece of thought leadership, this is really rich information. And so I don't want to recreate the wheel and record a podcast episode and then write a whole bunch of content too. I'll just take what I did in the podcast episode and post it on LinkedIn to convey who I am, right? So much of my organic content these days is clips from the podcast. I use a tool called Opus Pro to automatically ingest my YouTube videos. It cuts them up into a bunch of like 30 to 62nd clips. I go into AI, so I go in and clean up the bits that are wrong. And I have several of those to post throughout the next week. So this episode comes out on Wednesday. So I'll have a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Monday, maybe post to go out. I don't post on the weekends. I just don't. I just can't. It's just too much. Like, I can't create that much. I have in the past posted several times a day for 14 times a week or whatever, and it's just, it's not sustainable to me. So post every day during the week if you can. I like to use clips from this show and the YouTube video. If you have a YouTube channel that's not a podcast, that's great. Do the same thing if you're writing an email newsletter. And this is all Justin Welsh's like content Os approach, right? Is have a cornerstone piece of content that you then repurpose and redistribute in different ways and at different times across all your channels. So social, email, website, YouTube, podcast, right? That's just, we call it the media machine. So that's what I do. This is the cornerstone piece of content I do. And then I repurpose this into several different posts. If I don't have enough or I want to, I'll create some plain text posts and I post those, just talking about sales and marketing and SaaS and growth and stuff like that.
[00:10:30] Okay, so the next part is honestly just something I'm getting into, but I really the approach, and so I want to share what I'm doing. The other way to grow on LinkedIn for me is to just grow the number of connections I have and the number of people that see my stuff. Because I think this is one of the things about, if I compare with Twitter is I can't, I haven't at least actively gone out and connected with people. LinkedIn is a much more intentional thing, right? Like, I can follow someone on Twitter, but it's not the same kind of mechanism where they have to accept it as on LinkedIn. So I have automated ways to connect with my ICP, right? So my ICP is just, for instance, let's say sales leaders at companies with more than 5000 employees who've raised a series B round, just for instance, right? So I'll get that list from something like Apollo or sales navigator, and then I'll use that list in one of a bajillion LinkedIn automation tools. And you read LinkedIn terms of service and some of this against their terms of service, you might get banned, blah, blah, blah, whatever, you have fair warning, right? But what you want to do, whether you do this automatically and it's an automated kind of workflow or you do this manually, is like, figure out who you want to have conversations with and reach out to those folks. I'm engaging with their content. I'm liking it. I mainly go in and send comments to their content. If they're publishing new stuff, I'm sending personalized connection requests and then I'm sending like in mails, which is like a DM, if you will, that goes to email for people that you're not connected with in LinkedIn. So if you're connected with someone, you can send them a DM and it pops up in the little thing in the bottom. Right. If you're not connected with people, most of the time, you can't send them a DM and you send them what's called an inmail, which is like an email but inside LinkedIn. So however you approach this, whether you automate it and there's a bajillion tools out there to do it, or if you do it manually, you just got a big old list. And every day you go through and send 20 messages, you want to be intentional about who you're connecting with. Right? And I view the content that I create as just support for this because what do you do when you go check someone on LinkedIn? Like, you view their profile and that's the next thing I'll talk about. But you view their profile and then you view their posts. And if their last post was nine months ago talking about a new role they started, you're like, I don't really have much to get on with about this person, but if their post was yesterday talking about sales stuff, and you're a salesperson, you're like, cool, let's talk about sales stuff. This is great. We have a lot to, a lot of rapport potential. So most of my content is to support my outreach efforts, which the goal of all of those is to get into a conversation. So this is where we get into the DM's, right? So everyone says the magic happens in the DM's, largely, you're not allowed in the DM's unless you're connected with someone. The content supports the connection requests, which supports the D, which then enables the DM's and the DM's. The strategy will depend on what you're there for, right? What are you on LinkedIn for? For me, let's just say it's selling more casto stuff. I'll ask my ICP about the problems that they're having, and like, I want to get at how we can solve this problem for them. So I think of it as you're an attorney, right? And so they have all these lines of questions. The attorney knows what the person's going to say every step along the way, right? And I want to think that I do, right? So I get into a conversation with someone, I'm genuinely very interested in what's going on in their world and what they're trying to doing and problems they're facing and stuff like that. But what I really want is an opportunity for them to say, I got this freaking problem. And my problem is that my sales reps don't know what the hell is going on across the organization. And I go, man, sounds like your sales team needs an internal company podcast, because that would solve, like, all this huge knowledge gap and siloing problem for you. That's like what I'm trying to get at. So all of this is leading to that opportunity.
[00:14:14] And so social media and LinkedIn, in this example, is teeing up the opportunity to have a sales conversation with someone and a warm kind of way so that we can get them on a call, okay? And the last way I use LinkedIn and that I really is commenting. So if I've got 15 minutes, I'll go and comment on as many people's posts as I can. And my LinkedIn feed commenting is a really great way, again, to spread the exposure of you and your message to your audience, right? So people post stuff, right? Your ICP post stuff, or people that you want to be associated with post stuff on LinkedIn. You go and put an interesting and thoughtful comment in there. People see that. They see your kind of byline, right? So, like your name, your image, and then the first few words of your byline. So, founder, coach, or founder of Castos, we help podcasters grow their brands, whatever it is, right? People see that in the comments, and the comments should be like insightful and helpful and genuine, right? And it's an opportunity for you to share, again, something that, something that you believe, something that could help the original poster and everyone else who's reading the comments there about the topic. So I really commenting, it's a great way to increase your reach. I was chatting with a social media expert a while back and they suggested at kind of my level, I think I have 3000 followers on LinkedIn, not very many, right?
[00:15:39] That I should be posting like 30% of the time and commenting 70%. If I was taking like audience growth on here really seriously, I probably don't do that. I probably spend maybe 50% because even with creating this podcast, repurposing the content, posting it, creating text versions of it and all that kind of crap, that's several hours. And then I'll spend a couple hours a week maybe commenting on other people's stuff and connecting and doing DM's. Those are the handful of things, right? So commenting DM's connection requests, some of that's automated, creating organic content. And then for the DM's, the connection requests, like having a defined list based on your ICP and like who you want to be in your world. Just being intentional about that, because I think the cool thing about LinkedIn, and maybe it's the same for every social platform, and I'm just taking it seriously here, is you can be really intentional about who you're connecting with. So I view it very differently, as I do Twitter, which is the only other social platform I'm active on, is like I post and just get whatever I get. There's no, I want to go be friends with this person over here. I'm going to go send them a connection request like that. That just doesn't exist. Like I can go comment on their stuff and we can get into a dialogue that's definitely there and that's it. But I don't know, LinkedIn seems a little more, I'll say, organized and intentional. To me. The last thing is, and you might agree, and you might not agree with this, like Twitter as the other option for most of us, probably as founders, it is cool. I find the conversations there arguably much more interesting. LinkedIn today is still a little, kind of sterile, but I see Twitter as a pretty volatile place to be building your playground. Fair warning for those of you on Twitter. Like, I see a lot about shadow banning and reach way down and all this kind of stuff. I don't know. But I see the bet of building a social audience on LinkedIn as a little safer than Twitter these days. And this is June 2024. So that's it. That's how I'm thinking about and I'm actively using LinkedIn. This is not like philosophical ideal world. This is like how I'm using it. So if you've listened to the last couple of episodes, you'll know, like, what the ideal state might be based on some really amazing guests. Looking forward the next few weeks we'll be all about LinkedIn with really amazing thought leaders and people who absolutely are experts in this space. So I wanted to have this kind of in the middle here to say, this is the reality. And your reality probably is similar to mine where like, it's not perfect, right? It's not a fine tuned machine, it's not creating exponential results. But I will say, like, I've 100% gotten customers for Kastos and I've gotten customers for my coaching business directly from LinkedIn, and so a hundred percent works. I just wanted to share what I'm doing. I would love to hear how it's wrong or how you're doing things differently that you think are working really well. Drop a comment in below if you're watching on YouTube. If you are listening, shoot us a message podcast Oak startups I would love to hear from you and just hear how you're viewing and using LinkedIn as a b two b kind of growth channel for you and your business. Until next time.
