Aaron Conant  0:18

Happy Tuesday everybody, my name is Aaron Conant, I'm the co founder Managing Director here at BWG Connect where networking and knowledge sharing group of 1000s of brands start up the fortune 100 up every vertical, that network and knowledge share together to stay on top of the newest trends, strategies, partners, pain points, whatever it is that shaping digital chat with 20 to 30 brands a week to stay on top of those trends, when the new things come up. And interesting things come up, we host an event like this. So I'd encourage everybody, check out our website as a whole, you can take a look at the different events, we're gonna do close to 250 virtual events like this, this year, probably 100 in person dinners, and then some full day events in New York City as well. So look forward to meeting people in person, a couple housekeeping items to get started just kicking it off a few minutes after the hour. And just you know, we're going to wrap up with one to two minutes to go in the hour as well. The other thing is, if you have any questions, we want this to be as educational informational as possible. So at any point in time, if you have a question, drop it in the chat. And we can get those questions answered. And so as I kick off this conversation, you know, LinkedIn over and over again now has been popping up as an important way of not only brand awareness, but personal awareness as a whole. And we just had a lot of people refer us over to Garret and Influent as a whole. And, you know, just thought it would be a great session to put on here today. So you know, Garret, I'll kind of kick it over to you. If you want to do a quick background on yourself and your company. That'd be awesome. And then we kind of jump into the content. Sounds good.

Garret Caudle  1:51

Yeah, that sounds great. Thank you, Aaron, and super excited to be talking with everyone today. You know, this is something I've been looking forward to I talk with b2b marketing leaders all the time. And the ability to talk to all of you today with with Aaron here is a privilege. So I want to give you all a quick background on me. My name is Garret, I live in Brooklyn, New York. And I've been here about a year before that I was in Seattle. I'm the founder and CEO of Influent. We've been around about a year. And we are a company dedicated to helping brands build their strategies on LinkedIn primarily through executive profiles. Now we'll get into why and what that really means. But it's sort of a novel new idea that, you know, social media really is all about the person, the people the connections we make. And the best way for us as marketers to take advantage of our social media channels is to buy arches made by leveraging the social aspect of it. So we'll kind of get into that. My background is in Amazon and eCommerce and b2b marketing for for service based agencies. So before I founded Influent, I was at Media Monks, which before we were acquired, I was at Orca Pacific. I was head of marketing there, I lead a small team to help us build basically the strategies the that you're going to see today.

Aaron Conant  3:10

Awesome. So again, everybody, if you have questions along the way, don't hesitate to drop into the chat. And we'll get them answered. So awesome. Yeah, yeah. So we got a brief like presentation here to walk through. And yeah, and again, feel free to drop questions. And just as we go along, we'll keep it.

Garret Caudle  3:26

Absolutely, yeah. And this presentation really is just a visual aid, I want to be able to help tell a story here about what the strategy is and why it's important and how you can use it. It's supposed to be tactical, this session should be extremely informative, more than anything else. So if you have any questions, please do feel free to jump around. So it really starts with this first premise, which is that the way b2b decision makers find solutions is changing. And as marketers we need to respond. Back, you know, five, even years ago, 7-10 years ago, the way the b2b decision makers found out about, you know, what, what solutions they want to use was through word of mouth, through referral, and through like conferences and events, where they would go find out about the latest stuff that's happening, the way that our digital world is evolving, that is changing quickly. And we're now faced with a situation where we have a little bit of a dark funnel is sort of what's being what it's being called. There's a lot of information sharing, and, and, and knowledge sharing that's happening outside of the vision of a lot of b2b service providers. We don't have insight into what happens you know, once you post a podcast and people listen to it, you know what, what happens to your sentiment of your brand as you post on LinkedIn. So there's a lot of, you know, channels that we need to be paying attention to, to try to help build our brand and generate some visibility were 5 10 years ago, there really weren't channels for us to do that. So one of those biggest channels today as marketers, we all know, his LinkedIn. Now LinkedIn is one of those things as b2b marketers that we all know we need to do. We need to be on. But we don't always know necessarily how. So I'm going to kind of cover this slide quickly because I think we all know the benefits of LinkedIn. But in case you weren't aware, it is the second fastest growing social media platform in the US behind tick tock. So if you were thinking that it's this old dead dinosaur of a platform, it's definitely not over 750 million users. And it's a blue ocean opportunity for any early adopters. It is early days on LinkedIn. Still, when you think of LinkedIn as a social media platform, there are so many opportunities that the platform is currently exploring. And if you get in early, you have the opportunity to have some staying power. Now, the obvious opportunities by building a LinkedIn strategy are things like brand awareness, warm leads, the things you may not know, or may not consider are how you can use LinkedIn, to attract top talent to your business, to retain top talent to increase your client retention and press investors gather marketing, intelligence unlocked partnerships, there really are a myriad of different opportunities available through a LinkedIn strategy. And we'll talk a little bit about them as we kind of walk through the strategy here.

Aaron Conant  6:03

Why do you think it's been ignored? He's everybody's on. I shouldn't say everybody. Yeah, business area, people are on it every day. Right? It's a great resource. Like why is it been ignored? It's surprising, I guess.

Garret Caudle  6:18

I think the reason it's been ignored is because marketers, b2b marketers, as savvy as we are, saw the LinkedIn platform got excited about the opportunities, and started just using the tactics and approaches that they've been using. For decades. This idea of thought leadership started coming up, let's write an ebook. Let's do a webinar. And let's just use LinkedIn as a bulletin board to throw all that content out there. Because hey, our audiences there, I think the reason that it has been a little bit, it hasn't been the focus of a lot of b2b brands is because they've been using it like a bulletin board for five years. And they're not seeing ROI. And they're confused as to how it's supposed to actually help their business. So I think that's the problem we're seeing is that brands are misusing it by doing some old tactics on a very new platform, and aren't necessarily excited about the results they're seeing.

Aaron Conant  7:13

No, okay. Makes sense that you see it, the results aren't there. So you're like, Hey, why would I keep pouring into this? is, you know, if I'm a direct consumer brand, it makes sense, right? Okay. I'm going to get obviously important to Facebook or meta. But okay, cool. And to be completely different. That's right.

Garret Caudle  7:31

Social Media for b2b marketers has for a long time been sort of the thing to give the intern to do, you know, let the intern run your LinkedIn company LinkedIn page, let them post something, you know, a webinar every, every week or once a month. And, and that's good enough. And considering people pour tons and tons of money into building out email lists and things that are maybe they feel closer to their brand. And that yet, when all of those people are active on a social media platform, the same people, the decision makers, they want to get in front of that they treat that as something to give to an intern. No offence to the intern, but I think it's something that needs a little bit more attention.

Aaron Conant  8:11

Yeah, I completely agree. No, I wish we could do a poll right now. We'll do that on the next one. How many people have done that use the internet or just a random person? Because I think that approach is exactly it is just a find a cool article and commented on it every day.

Garret Caudle  8:25

Yep. And, and to me, that is sort of the complacency we've got into as marketers, but if we start looking at it, b2c marketers were salivating when TikTok started growing. And b2b marketers are thinking, Man, if only I worked in b2c, that would be fun, right? Yeah, heck, no, man, you got your own platform right here waiting for you, and you're neglecting it. And so hopefully, as we talk through some of this strategy, you'll get an idea of what you need to be doing differently. Now, the second premise leads us into that question, what do we do differently? How do we treat this platform the correct way? The second premise is that people connect with people, not brands. If you've been paying attention to the world of b2c, you realize that the rise of the influencer has taught us something. And that is that people want to hear from other people. Now, we can talk all day about the power of your brand. And brand has a place. But at the end of the day, the people who are making the decision to buy your solution, your SaaS or your service, they are people and they are talking to a sales person. And they are going to work with people at your company. And at the end of the day. It's a all a people business, even SaaS companies. It's about your people. And so when we look at LinkedIn and start thinking of it more like a social media platform, the solution is obvious. Start investing in a social media strategy on LinkedIn that focuses on your people not just talking about your company page and what your brand is posting. But what are the people at your company up to and how can create a strategy around those people.

Aaron Conant  9:53

So I want to jump in here and a lot of times to hear like on Amazon drive traffic to the brand page, where you're saying This case on LinkedIn, in the b2b space is don't just be posting through your company brand page, right? Don't drive all the traffic. But that's what the thought was right is to build up the presence around the company brand page. And you're saying, No, or you're saying, I've seen it up, but put a different focus on someplace else. It just got to make sure I understand.

Garret Caudle  10:20

Yeah, absolutely. I'm saying company page has a place. And that place is further down the bench than you might think. You are you are thinking about LinkedIn, most of the time as a b2b marketer, as a bulletin board, where you can throw content up from your company page, and hopefully people will interact with it and great, but think about it as a social media platform like I like you do as a user. I usually challenge people to think when you're on LinkedIn, are you interacting more with people's posts or with company's posts, when you're on Tik Tok or Facebook? Are you interacting more with a company's content on those platforms, or with people on those platforms. And of course, we all know its people. And at the end of the day, LinkedIn is a social media platform. It's not a bulletin board where people go to find the next webinar. So if you can start treating it like a b2c company treats tick tock, then you're going to find that you're going to actually generate more actual engagement, more actual visibility than you would just by posting through your brand page. Which brings us to this stat here, executives, usually, on average, get at least 10 times more followers and eight times more engagement than brand pages. Now, this is a an average stat. This is this is just the floor. If you build a strong personal page on LinkedIn, what you were able to accomplish can be 20. 30, 100 times more than what you could through a company page. And there's two reasons for this one, as I mentioned before, people want to hear from people and to the LinkedIn algorithm knows that people want to hear from people and prioritizes personal pages, if you've just been posting your content from a company page. And then you might post once from your personal page, you may have found, wait a minute, why isn't? Why are my personal pages posts getting a lot more than my company page? Or why is when my executive when my CEO posted something? And my company page posted something? Why did the CEOs get 10 times more likes? This is why people want to hear from people and the algorithm wants to push personal pages link they don't LinkedIn doesn't want to be just a nonstop feed of company material.

Aaron Conant  12:27

So quick question that comes in who in the company should be targeted? Is it business development? Or is it executive leadership?

Garret Caudle  12:34

Great question. If the question who if the question is who in your company should be representing your company? Or should be should be the one posting? My answer usually is everybody. Now, it's almost impossible to come up with a management strategy, meaning your marketing team is behind the strategy for everybody from the you know, entry level intern to all that to the CEO. So you do have to be strategic. And in my opinion, we've seen the best results by starting with a senior leader, like a CEO, or a ce o or somebody who's really got that thought leader presents to them. And starting with managing some content for that person. And then over time, you know, rolling out more managed content to more people to your COO to your senior directors, to your business development, folks. Now, there are going to be other ways to utilize others, you know, you can give content to your employees and ask them to post you can give them, you know, training to help them post them on LinkedIn. And those are great ways of supporting all the people at your company in terms of LinkedIn, and your sales team. You can train them to be good social sellers. How can you get your sales team to spend one hour a day on LinkedIn if they're spending zero hours a day on LinkedIn today? So there are lots of ways to kind of go about it.

Aaron Conant  13:45

Just I mean, that allies, right with comment that comes in it seems like most brands leverage their people to effectively mirror what is on the brand's page, what I'm hearing you say is that companies need to invest or encourage their employees to put a creative spin on the brand they represent is in that's kind of a question. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

Garret Caudle  14:04

Absolutely 1,000% You are.

Aaron Conant  14:12

Obviously going through like right now if he could have everything I do, but the BWG Connect will post and then a few people go on and they'll like it, and they'll put a comment on it. And it's this is great to be learning real time. I love this.

Garret Caudle  14:26

This is the best way to think about it. We all understand the thought leadership matters. That's why we're on this call. Because we understand that, you know, if we share information and become experts in our industry, then we will you know gain the benefit of brand awareness and trust and build a great customer base. What we don't understand is that thought leadership in 2022 looks a lot more like influencing than people might realize. Thought Leadership is taking your brand and what you care about and the expertise that lives the brain trust that lives at your brand. And, and creating authentic expressions through your people where that can flow out in an authentic way. So if I'm the CEO of a, you know, company like Influent, where we're doing this really creative new stuff on LinkedIn that other companies aren't doing. Sure my company page might be posting some great stuff about some tips on LinkedIn. But for me, I think it makes more sense to talk about how, as a senior leader, myself, I have found tons of success talking about strategies on LinkedIn, and actually going on LinkedIn talking about my personal experience, and talking about the founding of my company and what the idea is, and in my journey, as an entrepreneur, there's so many ways that you can sort of merge the power of personal branding and the authenticity of personal branding with the sort of, you know, savvy marketing that we all do as b2b marketers, and create a sweet little, you know, managed approach. Questions. I'm gonna move on here, just because we have a few more slides I want to get to before we take some more questions here. If you doubt me about whether or not people matter, I want you all to think about who this is. I guarantee 90% of you know who this is. This is Gary Vaynerchuk. Everyone knows who Gary Vee is. What about this person? Chris Walker? How many of you know who Chris Walker is? I would imagine that at least 60% of you probably know who Chris Walker is. He's in the b2b marketing space. What about this person, John Doerr. So how many of you know John Doerr, so or at least know of him or have seen his face? Maybe 10 20%. This is a great example of what it can look like to build a personal brand in a way that benefits your company, Gary Vee is does a lot of things in a way that I do not agree with. However, what he does do right is that he's built up, you know, his brand through personal content, Chris Walker, it's a little bit more measured, and it's a little bit more brand forward. But it's the same concept. And I watched Chris Walker go from 20,000 followers to over 100,000 followers in the last 18 months. John, you're so this was my guinea pig. This was somebody that I helped build his social media, his LinkedIn presence, and helps him get his company acquired. So this is sort of an example of the person matters. And it can be an effective approach to use the person to generate the brand message. Okay, so then I want to make sure we spend at least you know, two or three minutes on how you do this, we've introduced the concept, I've hopefully convinced you, you need to do it, here's how I suggest doing it. And it's a five step approach. The first is building your strategy, meaning taking the time to actually you know, think about what it is you want to accomplish, who your audience is, what content you want to produce. Step two is optimizing your profile. So taking the time to actually build out the executive profiles, making sure they look and represent how they should look to a landing page. After all, step three is growing your audience. Unlike other social platforms, LinkedIn, you can grow your audience in a more targeted way. Step four is creating posting and engaging content. And step five is measuring, optimizing and activating. So when you do this strategy, right, you will generate a ton of data, who's viewing your posts? What companies do they work for? What are their titles? How often are they commenting, liking and sharing, and you'll start to build actual real interest in your brand. It's called demand generation for a reason. You're generating good feelings about your brand, and getting warm inbound leads. One of our clients they work for. He's a CEO of a retailer that sells running shoes. And he just went to we've been doing this strategy for him for about six months, he just went to a national conference where there was a big race. And it was, it was a championship race thing. And the CEO of ASICs comes up to him, shakes his hand and says, Hey, Chris, I've been following you on LinkedIn for couple months, I just saw your post this morning. I'm so happy to have you here. How freaking cool is that? Imagine if every sales conversation you go into that lead has already been seeing all of your content on LinkedIn and following you for a couple of months. And that conversation can close at a extremely higher rate than the conversation to a completely cold lead. There's so many ways that this can warm up your current leads, open opportunities, open up new leads for your company, there's there's lots of ways that this can happen, especially when you do it with this five step approach.

Now I want to pause, I have slides, I can go into each of these things. But I want to be mindful of time, we only really have another six or seven minutes here. So maybe if anyone has questions, feel free to drop those now. And if not, I can kind of breeze through some of the more important aspects of the five steps here that I laid out.

Aaron Conant  19:39

Yeah, so another question that comes in. Do you think the CSR team should take a larger role in working with brands or social LinkedIn, social LinkedIn teams to ensure that brands are viewed as more human versus pushing transactional interactions?

Garret Caudle  19:53

This is a fantastic question. And I think the answer is that it depends on different kinds. Companies have different, you know, structures for their sales team structure for their marketing teams CSRs have different roles for different companies. And so if it doesn't fit to have a CSR be more involved, that's okay, maybe that maybe you need to, you know, cater it to what your brand does? Well, I will say that having someone or a team dedicated to making sure that you're creating human interaction, rather than just doing a sales strategy or marketing strategy is extremely important. And typically, the best way to do that is to actually just get real interest from the thought leaders at your company to participate in something like this. This isn't just marketing team is handing you content that you publish, and that our sales team then follows up with some, you know, crazy sales questions. If we can have people thought leaders placed throughout the organization who are interested in building up their brand, their expertise and benefits that benefits the company, then you can create a sort of organic strategy that is naturally more human than something that maybe a marketing team would would implement themselves. But yeah, great question.

Aaron Conant  21:07

So the next one is around is, you know, from the executive standpoint, timing in a lot of times, I'm going to kind of elaborate a little bit on it, which is essentially executives don't have the time to do this. And a lot of cases, maybe a smaller business they do, maybe they don't because they're wearing 18 different hats. Where does it fall? Yeah, right. And the other one is around the budget. Great question. Where does this where does this fit into the budget as a whole from a marketing standpoint?

Garret Caudle  21:36

Absolutely. I'll try to answer both. Briefly. First, a lot of executives are busy as hell with that. That's, that's just what it means to be an executive, what we have to realise is that every day your executive is a fountain of content, every email, they send every call they're on, because their time is so valuable, every call that they're in is extremely, extremely valuable content that you can find. So what I would encourage you to do for the busy executive, is to just get, you know, jump onto a call where maybe you're talking strategy anyway, and just record that call. And then have your marketing team, listen to that call and pull out little nuggets of information, little things that can be used for posts, or get your executives to sit down for a one hour interview once a month, where you prepare a ton of questions. Tell me about your founding story. Tell me about what makes our company different. Tell me about what brands are not thinking about that they should be thinking about. Draw through an interview with your executive and you will have so much content, you can do this with your product officers, you can do this with your operating officers. And just generate interviews, content, grab the content from your teen, because it's there anyway, and start using that to create posts. And then maybe start putting those posts in front of your CEO, hey, I know you're busy, we've drafted three posts for you. You know, grab one of these when you're ready and post it. If you want to get really intense build out a whole strategy like using a partner like Influent we do this for you, we create the content for you, we build your audience for you, we do everything for you so that you can focus on what you do. Which brings us to the second question, how do brands do this? How do they fit it in their budgets? How do they fit it in their time, most of the time brands try to do this in house and fail. Now I don't think that's why Influent exists. That's why I created my company that isn't saying that you can't do in house. And I think every brand should maybe try at first to try to do this in house with their in house team, you have to work smart, you have to do a lot of research and you have to build processes. And typically brands will have their content marketing manager do this. Typically brands will have the content marketing manager partnered with some type of product officer or subject matter expert that they can you know, get content from. That's how I would recommend starting and then as far as you know, getting extra help with creatives, video production, content production, you can hire, you know, freelancers, contractors, if you need to, I of course, I'm gonna say the simplest step is just to work with a partner like influent, who does at all.

Aaron Conant  24:00

Awesome. So a couple questions, any best practices, your thoughts on LinkedIn for lead? Gen? How do you think this works for LinkedIn lead? Gen? Absolutely. So we'll tackle those and then we get into optimal number of posts per day or week. Thoughts on reposts on LinkedIn, like sharing promoting posts on new clients pages?

Garret Caudle  24:20

Absolutely. Stuff to tackle here. Yeah, let's touch on both first lead generation. In order to have a successful lead generation strategy on LinkedIn, you first have to level set your expectations. What you're doing here is you're creating a demand generation strategy. And demand generation is not lead generation. It's not going to be like Google PPC, you can't flip it on and expect leads to just pour into your inbox. That's not how it works. The nature of what we're doing is trying to build warm fuzzy feelings among a scalable audience of decision makers. Now with that said, there are things you can do in addition to this regular strategy here that I put in front of you to help plug in a little bit more lead gen. That looks like a couple of things. One, it paying very close attention to who is current who was engaging with your content, measuring who's liking who's commenting who's sharing, doing that for a couple months, and then using that data that list to hand over to your sales team, and to basically start generating some, you know, social social selling techniques with your sales team using the list of people who are engaged with you. That's one way. A second way is LinkedIn outbound messaging, if you're going to go out into LinkedIn, and start sending messages to brands that can absolutely work. But it needs to be authentic, and you need to provide value. You cannot spam people on LinkedIn and say, Hey, work with me, it's not going to work. Instead, get a piece of really relevant content, create a 100 day plan for new CTOs. And if you're a technology company, go send that that 100 day plan for free to a bunch of people on LinkedIn, who you want to get to know you better. By pushing out content through LinkedIn messenger, you can build an email list, you can get people closer to your actual sales cycle in a way that is not going to be, you know, sort of gross and spammy. And then the third thing with lead generation just to pay attention to is syncing up your current sales process with LinkedIn. So any anybody who's currently in your sales pipeline, anybody who's currently a referral, or maybe a client, that's not that that maybe could be upsold, or somebody who a client who is a threat of leaving, get those people into your LinkedIn network, connect with them, get them seeing your content, this isn't just a way to generate leads, inbound leads, it's also a way to help increase your conversion rate. Now we have barely any time so I want to quickly flip over to the optimization stuff. Um, as you can see,

Aaron Conant  26:35

I am more than happy to connect anybody with Garret after the call today. He's a leader in the space comes highly recommended. If you want to learn more, I mean, he's one of the few people out there that are doing it with a passion. And so it's worth a follow up connection for sure. Put some time on the calendar, we'll send an email intro to everybody. Let's see, there's other questions that that have coming in any chance we can get a copy of the slides. You know, what are your thoughts posted on LinkedIn? Like I said, I want to make sure that everybody gets their questions answered. If we can in the next couple of minutes, we'll host a follow up one of these and invite everybody back. And we'll get more questions answered. Maybe in another a few weeks out or next month. So

Garret Caudle  27:12

absolutely. Great. Maybe you spend like 60 seconds answering these and then we can wrap up optimal number of posts per day per week, we have found that three to four posts from an executive on any given week is optimal, no more than four because you start to cannibalize your own posts from a company page anywhere between one to three is optimal. If you're posting more than three on your company page, consider using some of that time to create executive posts. Running polls on LinkedIn Polls can be effective, it depends on the audience. And it also depends on what you're trying to do with the poll. If you're actually generating some interesting questions. Great. If you're just using a poll to use a poll, and no one actually cares about it, then don't use it. Just be mindful of the of your audience and what your audience has to say about it. Some people hate polls. Other thoughts on repost, reposting is not not doesn't work it you need to post native content on LinkedIn. So this is where this comes in. Rather than just posting a link to a giant podcast you did or posting a link to your ebook that is a giant tomahawk steak. And if you're at an open house, and someone's coming around with a giant tomahawk steak on a platter, you can't physically pick it up and start eating it. It's not digestible, it's not snackable, you need to create snackable content people are there to get a quick hit of content and then move on to the next thing. So do not reshare posts. Do not post links to your podcast, post a graphic of a quote that someone said during your podcast and then drop the link in the comment section. Post, you know, little clips from your video that you did don't post a six minute clip. Things like that.

Aaron Conant  28:42

Awesome. And so now I see here. We're right at 1130. I want to be respectful of people's time. Aaron, this is fantastic. Thanks for hosting, please give me an invite. Yeah, for sure. Everybody, we're gonna send out a follow up email. Again, this is a networking knowledge sharing group. If you want connected with anybody today, just reach out. I'd love to have conversations with people on the line today, pick your brain and what's what's top and new and relevant in your world. And with that, we're going to wrap it up. Again. We'll have a follow up one of these. I think there was so much interaction today it warrants having another one, maybe next month. Yeah, whenever we can make time. Also, if anybody wants to check out our podcast, you go to BWGconnect.com and go into the media feed and it's there. We'll have Garret posted on one of those as well. And with that, we're going to wrap up hope everybody has a fantastic Tuesday. Have a great rest of the weekend, buddy. Take care, stay safe and look forward to having you in a future event. Awesome. Thanks again Garret. That was awesome.

Garret Caudle  29:31

Thanks, everybody.