Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: 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 castos web application, mobile app, WordPress plugin and marketing site. You know, I think that, you know 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 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 castos from, 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, you go to clearly dot 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. Hello, welcome back to rogue startups. I'm your host Craig Hewitt. Today I'm chatting with the manja Zivkovic all about creating content on LinkedIn that converts, converts into leads and deals and opportunities and revenue dollars in your pocket. I think this is the crux of LinkedIn for a lot of us as b, two B SaaS founders, especially kind of indie. Indie or bootstrapped is. It's like, gosh, LinkedIn, it's great. Like. But is this like a vanity metric or vanity effort for me? I'm not seeing, I'm not seeing deals, I'm not seeing opportunities. I don't want to grow a personal brand. I want a business. And if that's you, then today's conversation is a goldmine of really practical steps you can take in your and your companies and your employees LinkedIn activities to drive more engagement that results in deals and opportunities and dollars in your bank account and in your MRR. I hope you enjoyed this conversation.
I think one of the hesitations that a lot of B, two B founders have about LinkedIn is like, why am I going to go grow a personal brand? Like, I want to grow my business? What do you say to people who come to you with that objection about being more active on LinkedIn?
[00:03:03] Speaker B: Yeah, there are a couple of things that people forget when it comes to LinkedIn. It's different than the other platforms, meaning LinkedIn is focused on people. Right. On personal profiles, instead of focusing on company profile. If you look at the mission of LinkedIn is to connect those professionals and make them more productive and successful. Right. So if you do that, you will be successful no matter if you are a company or a person. But having that in mind, what can companies do?
One thing that I always say, like, the company brand is like, the umbrella. And people or the employees are those that are holding the umbrella together, right? If there are no people, there is no umbrella, and it holds nothing. So from that perspective, you know, it's important to have in mind, you know, who are people in front of the company, but also, like, what does the company brand represent? What's the culture? Who are we targeting? And all those people. So they're the, there needs to be kind of a mixture between the two worlds.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: Okay, gotcha.
Do you typically like to see, like, from just from a strategy perspective, like individuals within a company posting on their personal accounts? Do you like to see them reposting stuff from a company account? Like, what's the best kind of mechanical way to set that kind of umbrella metaphor up?
[00:04:30] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the straightforward. No, you know, people sharing the stuff from the company page. Sure.
You know, like maybe three to 5% of the executives who usually do that. Usually they do it. You know, they don't, you know, usually that small percentage are the people who actually give a value alongside with what they are. Resharing. Right. They usually click the reshare and they go on. Besides that, they have a content which is, you know, maybe once a quarter. They say, this is how we do, you know, or they share PR articles published in, you know, big publications. This is all what majority of the, you know, c level executives are doing.
What is a good strategy when it comes to the personal profiles? And if you don't have, for example, if you're just growing the company brand and you don't have that many resources to kind of build the company page as well, while you're focusing on personal profiles, you can retweet the posts from the personal profiles to the company page, like so in reverse, that can work, because actually it gives kind of the overview of somebody who comes to the company page. Okay. There are multiple people in this company. They're actually having opinions, thoughts. They are sharing expertise. We can get to know them just by scrolling through the fit on company page.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: Yeah, gotcha. Okay, so we've kind of explored already some of the things that don't work from an individual contributor, individual poster and account level.
What do the really good users on LinkedIn do different from most of the rest of us? When you see something great, what does that look like?
[00:06:25] Speaker B: Yeah, when I see something great, I know that there's a narrative and the strategy behind it. And, you know, a lot of companies don't have this, like, strategic narrative, or however you call it, depending on a company. Usually narrative is for the tech companies or those innovative, but there are different ways to frame the narrative. But they know exactly who they are, how are they different and who are they targeting? Right. So from that perspective, they have a point of view which is unique, and they use it to differentiate when it comes to the content. Now, it can be different types of content, all depending, you know, what works, what doesn't. But that's the starting point, and that's the thing that differentiates them from the others. So when we start with that, how do we actually know which content is the one that works? Right. Because on LinkedIn, it's totally different. The target audience is different. What do I mean by that? It's not just like our recipe. Right? You cannot go to the search and type in whoever is the CEO of the, I don't know, construction companies in Oklahoma, for example. You cannot go and do that because a lot of those people are maybe inactive, only they won't see the connection request, they won't see the message. So you need to go in a different way. Okay. That's one target audience. The other audience is, are there influencers or subject matter experts who are gathering those people who are from your target audience under their post. Right. And it means that, you know, this is our second audience. So, like, the influence of subject matter experts, because people won't become active just because of us, right? Yeah, they're already active. And if we engage with them and actually steal them from, let's call them influencers, then they will see, okay, our content resonates as well. It's already. It's all also good. So they will react to it as well. And there's a third audience, which is important. One. And those are people who hold the media, podcast, news portals, whatever it is in the industry, so they can give us the visibility, the pr moment, and, you know, and the awareness. So those are kind of the three different groups with whom we need to engage. And there's a fourth one, which is our peers. Those are people who will never buy from us, who will react to things, but they will refer us to the others. So when we have it like that and we think from that perspective, then we say, okay, so how do we know which content is good, right? We cannot know that.
A lot of companies make that mistake that they decide inside the company what's good content and what's not, right. So that's not a good thing. We need to come up with content and see what resonates. So I usually call that content market fit.
And it's basically, is this the right type of the content for this platform?
So this audience resonates with it and the practice show that it takes. Now, I will demotivate people. It takes around a year to figure out to find the right content market Fitzhen. But it can take a lot faster if, for example, we have that in mind. And we use time when we start posting to kind of test different types of content, right? It can be videos, it can be text, it can be PDF, it can be text. A lot of different stuff. Now, it all depends who we have in the team, right? And to go a little bit back before that. So we need to make sure that we have the right pillar contents before we come to LinkedIn. What does it mean? It means, for example, we can record a podcast like this one and get articles out of it, get short leaves, get quotes, whatever it is. We get the content from the company page. For example, you posting my part of the conversation and you use your part on your personal profiles, and you kind of merge those two things together on the company page. Basically, you build the company page. Bye. Building the personal brand of somebody who is your ICP, right. From that perspective, you can have a research, you have different things. I'm mentioning this because mainly that's the reason why we are not persistent on LinkedIn. So we start and we don't have where to pull out content from this way. If we have the main content pillars, then we have the content, then we have the content when we have before that, the point of view and the narrative, and we know what we're talking about. See? Okay, who are the people in front of the company that we can kind of involve in the strategy? Usually those are the people who are, you know, we have the first tire, which are decision makers, managers, directors, team leaders, those kind of people who already are subject matter experts in their field, and they have unique opinions to share, right? So they use the narrative and they come up with it and they share it. Usually another layer are the sales and marketing leaders.
And one thing here to remember is that those needs to be the people who understand before we come up with the strategy. Why?
What's the personal benefit of them becoming active on LinkedIn? If they get that, they will be involved in the strategy. If not, it will be. My boss told me to do it. It will take from two weeks to two months, and I will stop. So that's one layer. Another layer are the people who will post here and there, who will comment here and there, but they will amplify what's happening. Third layer are the people who you mentioned who will share something from the company page from time to time. Or we can make that, improve that by, for example, giving them inside a company slack or whatever channels that we are using. We can give them, like, here are the three different versions of this that you can use. Maybe, you know, add your own words and those kind of things. And, you know, the fourth layer are the people who will just, like, maybe add a comment, you know, bravo, super, or whatever it is, right? And there's the fifth layer, which are basically people who will. Who still aren't ready, but, you know, you know, maybe eventually we'll get there so we don't waste time on them. They need motivation, and they just need somebody from the company to basically guide them. And that's the key to kind of, you know, success on LinkedIn as a company, having a leader, making an example, and also helping others get there, right? Sharing the frameworks, sharing what works, what didn't, giving the feedback, those kind of things. To give you an example, what I did with funky marketing at the start, okay? So it was easier because we are, we were all marketers, right? In a way. Somebody were writer, people were writers. There are people doing research, but we were all marketers in one way or the other. So whenever somebody comes to the company, I have this, like, set of 15 questions about them. You know, who am I? What do I want to achieve? What can I teach others? What can I influence? Who can I influence? Those kind of things.
Like which books did I read? Some kind of, you know, common questions. And I give them those questions to answer. They give me the answers, and we together craft the first post out of those things, right? Because somebody, starting from the start, we want to, you know, them to present themselves for who they are, not to start with some company, you know, related stuff and those kind of things. And then I ask everybody from the team to give the feedback and it goes in circles for everybody. And in two weeks, everybody, you know, becomes a practitioner because they get the feedback before they post and they know what works, what doesn't, why this hook works, what doesn't, you know, those kind of things.
[00:14:54] Speaker A: And you do that just the one time or you do that for every post, for like a new employee?
[00:15:01] Speaker B: I do. When somebody comes to the company, we usually do it for like two weeks. And it goes in circles. Usually in two weeks they already have what it takes. Right. And the most important thing is that people talk about what they do. They don't talk about the things that they don't do. For example, what does it mean? It means like the CEO or the founder is talking about leadership, about investments, about the strategy. CEO is talking about processes, about setting up the company for success. From that standpoint, CMO, of course, is talking about marketing, about strategies, those kind of things. Copywriter is talking about psychology and writing, you know, from that standpoint, that's it. But I mentioned writing because of one single thing. Because text posts are the hardest one to write because you don't have anything else to help you, right? With visual, you have the visual. So it takes a little bit of attention and can make somebody look. A post, a video, it's different. And having all that in mind. Now, when it comes to the LinkedIn, usually what we do, in most cases, we say, okay, I can write, I'm okay with that. I can go with just text posts. Other one says, okay, I'm great with video. Perfect. The third one says, okay, I can go with visuals.
And that works okay if we are all aligned together, right?
[00:16:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:31] Speaker B: But on a personal level, LinkedIn says, okay, that's not how it works, right. I want you to have different types of content.
I want you to have, you know, for example, a combination that you can go with. Today I'm writing a personal post with just text. Tomorrow I'm on a holiday. I'm going to take a photo of it and say something else. Next time I'm going to create like the animation with infographic that will give people in depth knowledge. So it goes basically sounds natural, right? But we are, you know, creatures of habits and we see what works and we explore it until, you know, we are bored with everything.
[00:17:25] Speaker A: And what is that? Good mix. I mean, we're recording this towards the end of June 2024. Like, as of today, I know video more and more popular and important on the platform. There's like the whole video feed. Like, what's. If you're kind of coaching a founder to say, okay, you're going to post every day, whether that's five or seven days a week, what's a good mix?
[00:17:46] Speaker B: Yeah, a good mix is, first of all, let's start with video. You mentioned video. Video is, I would say, the crucial type of content for LinkedIn, even though reach is getting lower.
But on video, we measured views. So who viewed the video and how many people actually viewed the full video? I think that's 30% they count as a full video view. Why? Because in b two b, there is one thing that is important to know, and it is that we don't sell, we solve problems. And people accept others to solve their problems if they trust them. And trust is the most essential thing in b two b, sales. And with video, we create trust. Let me give you an example.
You probably know one of the guys that I go to when it comes to the account based marketing LinkedIn, Andrey Zinkevich.
And he's somebody who's coming from Ukraine. And when he speaks English, he has this accent, he says like Z. Right. And he creates so much video content. He does webinar once a week. You know that, you know, you get used to that. And when it comes to the expertise, it's top notch. So in time, you don't actually pay attention to the accent, you pay attention only to the expertise. So that's how you can actually, you know, go over some of. Some of the things that you know are maybe your limitations when it comes to the. To the content, to the sales and those kind of things. Second one that works and always has worked very well is text. But you need to be great in creating the great hook, which means giving them in the first three and a half lines, everything, and then causing emotions, which is like maybe rage or maybe sadness, not happiness, because people don't react when they are happy.
[00:19:51] Speaker A: And then curiosity.
[00:19:53] Speaker B: Yeah, they go further. So the most important CTA on LinkedIn in your about section and in post is see more. Because people, you want people to stay more on your post related to that when it comes to the video and then mixture with text post, always have with video, a huge chunk of text post what is actually said in the video. Because some people will read the videos with transcripts, I will read the post, but they will make them stay more on the post. And if it's video under three minutes, then basically while you read the text, it goes in the loop and it gives signal to the LinkedIn that this guy is actually interested in that. Okay. We have photos, which is always getting good, no matter how big they are, what works actually very well. And I need to say that because I want a lot of people who are running the companies to hear this are memes.
They are actually doing really well. And they are a great way to explain complex things. Especially if we go, like, I talk about b two b, to explain complex things in a funny way. So we make people laughed and we give them also the, we give them also the knowledge and explanation. Like Elena Werner is, I guess the best example, maybe the number one go to person when it comes to go to market, product led sales and marketing. She has more than 100,000 followers and does mostly memes. Right.
[00:21:31] Speaker A: We're running some ads right now, and all of the creatives are memes.
[00:21:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:35] Speaker B: Because especially in the second. In the second layer, you know, you have like first layer when it comes to the cold audience, but the second layer, when you want people to get engaged, you go with, with memes. Right. Gifts are also good, but I like to use them in the comments especially, you know, one good thing to advise is creating your own gifts. You know, like, I'm doing this or I'm doing this, if the course is not good or something like that, and then people remember you. Right. And basically, you know, going a little bit further. Okay, those are like the types of content. But if we go and talk about what should we post? Like first tire is usually talk about, you know, what we are selling. So it's the product or is the service and what are we doing about it? Especially in the service based businesses, it's extremely important to go to the social before the search, because what's coming from Google, if we go to the PPC, it's usually spam and it's not worth it. So you need to go to the communities, to the social before people have the intent and, you know, establish a real estate in their hearts and in minds that when, you know, they say, okay, I need to go to somebody for this, they go to that person or they go to you. So that's important to know and start from that perspective and having that in mind. The second thing is, you know, what comes after the product is results. Right? Success stories, testimonials. Who are we working with? How are we doing? The third part is always, then the processes. How are we actually achieving those results, you know, how are the things going? Then we have the point of view, of course. How are we different than the others? And then we have the fifth tier is actually talking about the things outside of work that are actually connecting us with other people. You know, I'm lucky that I named the company funky marketing. So I talk about funky music usually resonates very well.
You know, I'm riding a bicycle, hiking. So those things kind of connect people and actually get you to the closure before, you know, talk things only about business things.
[00:23:48] Speaker A: Yeah. Gotcha. Okay, so I think it's good. So kind of variety of topics, a variety of formats. I think one of the big questions and hesitations in people's mind is like, okay, I have, I'm posting, I have people engaging in my stuff, but I'm not seeing dollars in my pocket. Right.
How do you effectively kind of bridge that gap from like content and engagement to conversations and sales calls and closed deals?
[00:24:15] Speaker B: Yeah, let's go. So we have the content. Content is way back. So we have the optimized profile, which is actually a sales landing page, right? We need to have it optimized. So when whoever comes to our profile does one thing that we want them to do, and it's not a big ask, it's like schedule a call or download this ebook or something like that. So when we have that, then the content is actually our tool to get people to the page, right? So we do that. We go with that. What I call like similar, like the advertising is the engagement. Engagement is the fuel that actually makes the LinkedIn work because we mentioned mission of LinkedIn connect the world's professionals. So we need to engage, want it or not. When I say engagement, I mean comment on the post. Couple of posts before we post on our profile, then comment a couple of times after we post. So not post and ghost, but continue the engagement. Then also turn off notifications. We mentioned a couple of people who are subject matter experts or they are influencers, turn on notifications, see when they are posting, and then, you know, in which time you need to be on the platform and engage. Be the first in the comments, but give value, like the insights, huge chunk of posts. Or just say, you know, like I'm ten years in the industry and what you say is actually bullshit. It doesn't work that way. So that can also be a good comment. Then you see if this gets traction and then you go and add your post, tagging all those people. So that's second thing. Third thing is actually engaging in the DM's in direct messages. A lot of people forget that part, but it works the same way as the commenting. If you are engaging with people in the, in your inbox, basically you will see more of their content and they will see more of your content. So from that perspective, you need to take care. Who are you also engaging with in your inbox? What I like to do, if we have good content and I send content requests to the, to the people, I like to connect with them without sending a message, with connection requests, just blank so I don't eliminate myself.
And then basically give them around two weeks without sending them a welcome message, engaging with them, possibly they engage with me. And after two weeks, sometimes it can be a month, depending on how busy I am, and send welcome messages to all the people that I've connected with. And usually what I say, hey. Hey. Just wanted to drop a line, say hi in case I can help you. Everything is on my profile, so I don't try to sell, I try to direct them to my profile. Like it took me three and a half years to get that last part, but now I can share it to shorten the time for other people. So. And that's one way to get to it. Second thing to get, you know, is to see who's reacting on our posts, who is engaging, and then when we post who is coming to our profiles. Are those the right people who is searching? When they search, what do they type? Are those the people from the right companies? So we always check those things. If they are the right people coming to our profiles, send them a message. That's the easiest way to go and connect that also what I like to track to see if this is actually working. Have a lot of people talk about it. Self reported attribution on the website, which is actually the form, and they say, how did you hear about us? And I like to add the second one, which is, why would you like to work with us? And basically it should be the blank field, not with, you know, prepared answers like LinkedIn or podcast or offline events, whatever it is. And you will get the last thing that's on a person's mind. So they will say, I get answers like Nemania jobs out of path on LinkedIn, for example. So, or I was, I was writing about, about specific things. Go to market for the, what was the industry, let's say constructions, doesn't matter. But, you know, somebody scheduled the call and says, I like your hypothesis about go to market for the construction industry, and I would like to test it. It's totally different. Than what I'm seeing from anybody in the industry doing.
Right. So it can get specific other thing we mentioned, peers and recommendations. You will get recommendations from other people. Like, I get recommendations from Piplaya, I get recommendations from refined labs, for example, you know, from different people. I get recommendations for some companies and people that I don't even know who they are. We are not connections. So they say, from our consultant recommended you. I don't know the company. I don't know the consultant. Right. But he knows me.
[00:29:25] Speaker A: So I think that's probably how we got connected, possibly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. Just to go back a bit to kind of all the activities, so kind of seeing who's interacted with your stuff and sending those connection requests and sending welcome messages to people who accepted those connections. Is all of that manual? Are you automating any of that?
And if it's. If it's manual, like, how much time does that take?
[00:29:49] Speaker B: Yeah, that's, that's a good question. So here's how I usually operate and how the companies can operate. Let's go for myself. So I'm somebody who does a lot of stuff and, you know, has a lot of things to say, and I'm writing every day from 2017. So for me, it's easy. I come down and I write things and I usually have a lot more than three posts per day to share, but I'm kind of restricting myself to maybe two. Right. So from that standpoint, I have a lot of to share, and it doesn't take much time. Sometimes a schedule post, sometimes I don't. If I go on a vacation, I schedule post. Because if you don't post anything, you go back to square one, you know, after the vacation. LinkedIn works like that, unfortunately. So that's it. I don't automate the welcome messages, but what I do, for example, I use Lynd Delta, which is the tool that works like Chrome extension, and it's kind of like a CRM for LinkedIn inbox, improved with tags, with a lot of stuff. And basically I can create a template message and I can send to 25 people at once. That's like not breaking any LinkedIn rules and those kind of things. And I usually say P's in that message. This is not automation or AI. This is just me not wasting time on sending the template message to everybody. And it actually, you know, gives people, you know, gets them to smile and, you know, creates the engagement. So, but if you look at as a, as a company, and if, for example, somebody who is listening is a marketer that likes to involve the C level executives and those kind of things. I usually get the sea levels to like an hour a month. When we prepare the questions, when we prepare the topics and I get the content out of them, it can be video, it can be transcript to the text, it can be anything. I give them to check the posts, you know, whenever they comes the time for them to post. I usually like for them to post, but I prepare, we prepare the post and, you know, tell them now go through it and add your little spice to it. Right, right. So that's, that's kind of one thing. But 1 second thing that cannot be on is engagement because, yeah, like, they know their stuff, we don't know their stuff. So they need to be the one who are engaging. And from the start, what I like to do, I tell to the people, create a post for like, let's say you start with three posts a week.
That's kind of like twelve posts per month. 36 posts for three months. Write 36 posts and then start posting. Schedule those posts and then start. Because you don't, you won't have a pressure, you know, what do I need to do tomorrow? I need to post. I don't know what I'm going to do. And then you just stop right at one moment. So it makes it a easier psychologically. And then it takes like I always say, like twelve minutes to 30 minutes a day when you come to the LinkedIn. So you have notifications, you check who posted, you engage with them, you return the engagement from the previous day, you see who have visited your profile and you know if they are the right fit. You send them messages or connection requests and you post. So. And then you go the next day. When are you sending connection requests? That's always a good question. And maybe, you know, spend more time to connect with people. You go out to throw garbage, you go out to walk a dog, you lay down on the couch between the sessions to kind of, you know, release your back. Those are the times when you can send messages. And important thing, I don't know if you know this as well. I think it's important to say for the people to, to know is try to look at LinkedIn from the mobile and from the laptop or desktop, because what you will see is totally different. And if you add some people on mobile, you won't see them on desktop and reverse. Sometimes I forget that I, you know that some people are there. I think that they are not posting. But then I go through my laptop and then I see them.
[00:34:23] Speaker A: Interesting interesting. No, it's good to hear about the automation and stuff. I've looked at using tools like expandy or dripify, which automates a lot of this connection requests and welcome messages and stuff like that. I'm using one currently and I largely like it, but it only does about a third of what you're talking about. It doesn't solve the whole. Yeah, one other tool, I kind of just like that. It gets me started.
[00:34:52] Speaker B: Yeah, that's cool. You need something to get you started. Authored up is another tool, like authored and then up.
Both tours are kind of like the people from Serbia that are building them, which is interesting. And there are more tools for like LinkedIn automation for LinkedIn outreach that are building from people from here, but outward app basically it's when you click to post on LinkedIn, it opens up, it's kind of improved version of that. And you can track, you can find there and download all the saved posts, you can search the same post, you can search your own posts, you can find the stats and analysis from the previous years, basically sort of like shield, but better because it gives you more option. And I know that they are preparing some stuff related to the AI, like AI, helping you create a better headline, the better about section, those kind of things you can see, for example, like if you have that many characters in the post, you have like yellow, green or red light, you know, if you need to shorten the post or go because they analyze the algorithm and then gives you the best suggestions. You have templates for the hooks for the CTA, so it's really useful.
[00:36:14] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's authored.
Oh, authored up. Okay, yeah, cool. We'll include a link in the show notes for sure. Cool. Okay. And then DM strategy, right. So we post it, we got the company behind us, we're all posting, we have a good kind of synergy and strategy there. We're engaging with folks, we're getting you the DM's, your initial messages, like hey, great to connect, referring them to your profile.
And then if folks start engaging with you from there, do, do you try to send them to a call? Are you like trying to close deals in the DM's? Like what is your kind of current?
[00:36:53] Speaker B: Usually, usually all of them, you know, if they, if it's the right feed, you know, they respond and you get also the feedback for the content because some people are not active, right. Usually those who will convert are those people who never liked or commented on your post. Usually those are the slippers. Somebody called them the voyeurs. But they are the ones who, the ones who convert. And, you know, you see right away if somebody is willing to engage more or know from that message, right. Somebody sells, I'm not interested. Right. But I said, but I'm not selling, you know, and they say, oh, really? That's actually true, you know, so they start being active.
[00:37:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:36] Speaker B: But I move them because in that welcome message, I need to have something that kind of moves them.
And one thing that's actually important is, like, acting like human, you know, being relaxed and being you because there are so many people spamming others that, you know, people have that guard, you know, you know, like they are ready for the punch when they get the message. So you need to get out of those things. A lot of people won't respond, but they keep reading the posts, right, and those kind of things. So, you know, maybe it's not the right time or they are not in the right position or whatever it is. But so what I like to do, you know, at least once a year, you know, kind of catch up with people. I use like a month to kind of send messages. Now I have like around 16,000 connections. I like to send messages to each one of them and, you know, say, you know, just wanted to see what's new, what's old, you know, those kind of thing. And then if they didn't respond to the welcome message, you know, they feel ashamed, sort of, or like, or bad. Maybe not ashamed, but feel bad and, oh, I totally forget about it. Or these kind of things. Or in the meantime, if they change the position and you are the first thing on their mind because, you know, they see you every day in your feed because if you post like three times a week, they will see you every time they log into LinkedIn, their feed. So it works like retargeting and basically so they will go out to send you a message to kind of schedule a call or whatever it is and then they will see the welcome message and then you are in advance because they didn't respond to it.
So another small thing, but actually meaningful. And what I usually do, I have on my profile, the CTA, is schedule a call. So whenever somebody is ready, they can go. There's the CTA that goes along whenever I post, they can see my headline and they can actually see the link to my calendar where they can schedule 30 minutes call so we can get to know, to know each other. Right. And usually I start from that. But, you know, a lot of times it got to the people coming to my profile and I see who they are, right. A lot of people don't realize that. I can see with paid LinkedIn, I can see exactly everybody who comes to my profile, right? So I send them a message. When I see a couple of people from the same company, you know, that's how it goes. Like, you know, recently a huge 1.5 billion company, I saw three people coming to my profile, and I send all of them a message. And sending, okay, I see, you know, two or colleagues also visiting my profile. Those kind of things. They say, yeah, we were checking you out and, you know, like, one of, one of them will send you soon a message, we want to work with you on influencer strategy, for example, or something like that. And it happens inbound.
[00:40:54] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Awesome, awesome. I love it. I mean, this has been pretty intense and a lot for us all to kind of consume. I think it's like a good natural place to wrap up. But I'd like to ask, like, one thing from your end. Like, if someone leaves this conversation and just does, like, one thing really well, what would that be for you? Like, what's the biggest indicator of success for you on LinkedIn?
[00:41:21] Speaker B: Success.
I will say, what's the indicator of success? And I will say the second thing. What are, like, the two steps that they need to do to kind of get there if they didn't start? So indicator of success for me is, you know, getting my ICP come to me in bump.
Right? So that's saying they come from LinkedIn, they come from the podcast, from those things where I'm investing my time, right, from the. From the content. If they say that we come from Google or you are the big name in the industry, something like that, I know that they have no idea and they found on Google. So I want that. And that tells me that my efforts are actually getting results also. One other thing besides that is, you know, people typing Nemanja Ziukovych and coming to my website. It actually happened in the second year of funky marketing that I saw in Google search console. Like Nemanja Azukovich has the keyword, so it doesn't happen to a lot of people. I was like, okay, it actually means something because we closed more than 40 clients in the first year of when I founded the company. On LinkedIn, Rich was much bigger and it was much easier.
It's not only what we did, but LinkedIn was also easier. And what I recommend to people to do right away is look at their profile and see if it's optimized for conversions, just like they will create the landing page for PPC. So look at from that perspective. And then also, if you are not already active on LinkedIn, start engaging with other people in the comments. That's it.
You don't need to post ever on LinkedIn because every comment is also a post. When I say engage, I mean add meaningful comments, insightful. That actually means something. And trust me, that will get you noticed. You will grow your follower base and you will get the right people. Check out your profile and then it's up to you what you're going to do next.
[00:43:30] Speaker A: Yeah, awesome, awesome.
This is great. We'll include a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes in the description below. Is there anywhere else that you would like folks to connect with you?
[00:43:42] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe funky marketing podcast on any podcast platform? That's also a good thing there. Around 200 episodes 196 97 talking about all these things and much more. So yeah, that's it. If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a message on LinkedIn anytime. I'm always happy to respond and help if I can.
[00:44:07] Speaker A: Okay, awesome. Thanks so much.
[00:44:10] Speaker B: Thank you.
