Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Well, how about we start with you just kind of giving us your background?
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Yeah. So currently co founder of Aware, which is a SaaS for LinkedIn. Before that I built and sold an agency that initially focused on sales and SDR and then on content creation and finally it was mostly an SEO agency. And then before that I had no background in SEO. I was the head of sales and previously sales rep for a Silicon Valley company.
Really a services company like masquerading with a little tech layer on top. So I got experience in both. Before that I was a sales rep who did not want to be in sales. I thought I was going to go into the hedge fund world and didn't. And before that I studied moral philosophy in college.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: It's reverse journey I'm getting here.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: You know, talking about micro comp, I feel like there were a lot of guys there who started in the service side of things like SEO or like an agency and then went to SaaS. So what was your reasoning for making that switch there?
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Apart from enterprise value? Yeah, agency is stressful. Yeah, that's a big one. The stress per enterprise value gained ratio is way off in agencies for me. Totally my personality type. If you're somebody who doesn't feel that like obsessive pull to make sure all the clients are happy all the time, you probably have a less stressful agency. Maybe arguably not as good of a one or maybe a better one depending on.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: Yeah, if you're not stressed about giving clients out, you probably don't have much of an agency.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: You could. Or you might have a great team and just you as the CEO are so detached that you just don't give a shit about the clients who are angry and you just focus on the good ones and paper over the bad spots and you build a big company. So don't ask me. The agency capped it. Yeah, like a 3 billion run rate. So don't ask me how to build $10 million agency. I don't know.
[00:01:51] Speaker A: 3 million is a big agency though. I actually had a similar experience. I came from agency and then I made the switch to SaaS for basically the exact same reason. It was like stressful and then you have to deal with clients and then I just felt like the stress per dollar gain was like not that great.
[00:02:08] Speaker B: Totally agree with you. We have a short time on this earth, so.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: Yeah, actually this is kind of a crazy story. So when I was running an agency, it was fairly big. It wasn't 3 million, but it was fairly big. And I was basically the operator of it. And The CEO was like, you said he didn't care that much. We had one weekly call and it lasted 30 minutes. And that was the extent of his involvement. And I was like young 20s and I was so stressed out. I remember one day I was in Brazil, I wake up and I'm like having chest pains. I was like, this is crazy. And, yeah, I mean, I decided to quit then. Cause I was like, this is not. Totally not worth it. No, but Sass is. Sass has played better. Sass is so nice.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: Way less stressful. Yeah. I mean, the worst that happens is like someone has a delay between loading their lead lists and LinkedIn comment engagement feed, which is just so not life or death that it just feels way better to have that be the extent of the issues versus, you know, you broke my website, like, still bad, but it's not like nearly as urgent, you know, at least for our SaaS. I'm sure there's some, you know, if you're like deep in web hosting infrastructure, you can have total fires. Right. Or crap. I mean, if you're in, I don't know, some sort of healthcare SaaS, then, like, it might be kind of life or death. That's why I don't touch those industries. But yeah, it's way easier than agency.
[00:03:23] Speaker A: That would be a little bit the case for us at Churnkey, because we handle cancellations. So, like, if in theory, Churnkey went down for some reason, someone's cancel flow is like, this might not work. Actually, I don't.
[00:03:34] Speaker B: Fuck.
[00:03:35] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't really know how that would work, but I don't know of any cases where I've had that happen. So maybe I should. Maybe I shouldn't have said that.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: Well, if it hasn't happened, then that's. That's good. I mean, in theory you want to know what happens if it. If it does happen, but it's. It's good that it doesn't, you know?
[00:03:50] Speaker A: Yeah. I am curious though. So you made the switch from agency to SaaS. If you were starting over, is that the route you take again or would you just go straight to SaaS?
[00:03:59] Speaker B: I would probably try to build SaaS as a side hustle for longer. Build up the kind of personal Runway and then start SaaS earlier and then go full time on it earlier too, and just accept the. Like. There was a period where the agency was really early. I hired a lot upfront and I had a bit of a personal burn rate, like it wasn't enough profit to totally sustain. So I was still, eroding. Savings in the early months of the agency can do that anyway. Why not have it be assessed? Arguably, I learned enough doing an agency that I'm a better SaaS operator. And I mean, it's, it's a good cash flow tool. I mean, once an agency's up and running, like it's good cashflow, but it's kind of a job, right? So it's like a high paying job, maybe a better one than a corporate job because it's less bullshit. So two senses. I mean, in one sense, if I knew what I wanted to do back then, I would have done it earlier. But the truth is I didn't. So it took me building and selling an agency to know what I wanted to do and why.
So I can say like, oh, should have done SaaS first. But I mean, the reality is that if that was the path I should have taken, I would have taken and it didn't. So I would say if you have confidence in either path, take SaaS for sure. But if you're just like, I gotta get started as an entrepreneur and learn the ropes, then like a services business is the easiest and best way to just learn business. So, yeah, perfectly good option, do that. But I wouldn't pick it if all things were equal.
[00:05:19] Speaker A: Yeah, that was a much more eloquent answer than the way I would have phrased that. But 100% agreed. Like SaaS is a sweet place to be, comma, and I think getting started, like, it's extremely difficult to get into SaaS, especially if you don't have any business experience. Because like SASS just has some guys that like I was telling someone the other day, software engine, like software engineers at sas, we like them, we like, like, we like olive oil, like extra virgin. Because those guys, like, they're just super smart. Like SAS just has incredible brain power behind it. So I think it's a lot easier to start as an agency. But anyways, we'll move on from that. I think that's probably not super relevant to a bunch of people here. I was just curious.
[00:05:56] Speaker B: Fair enough.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: But now you're doing LinkedIn, SAS, serving LinkedIn. So I'm really curious as to why you chose LinkedIn as opposed to other platforms. Whether that's YouTube or TikTok or whatever.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: I didn't really have a Choice. I mean, LinkedIn was the platform I used to grow the agency and so it was pretty much all I knew and know. Our company has a very small YouTube channel and I'm starting to kind of get a sense of how YouTube works. And I mean like at a more fundamental level. Like, I know how LinkedIn works so fundamentally that it's like obvious what to build in the sense that if I was building SaaS for YouTube, I would have to like do a lot of customer development, right? Whereas with LinkedIn, I know better than the customer, doesn't mean that they still want to want to buy, but I generally have a better sense than most customers of what they should be doing on LinkedIn. And like, we learned about a microconf and is just true generally, if you know the workflow, you know the SaaS you should build. And then it's just a question of, you know, how many people use that workflow. So LinkedIn was the source of millions and millions of agency revenue dollars. So it was just natural that, like, having done this successfully, I know how it could be easier. And SaaS makes a business workflow easier than spreadsheet, bookmarks, bar just using the platform natively. It's sort of the equivalent of like, as you start in a sport, you eventually go from rented gear or no gear to professional gear. And Aware is the professional ski gear for someone who's for whom LinkedIn works. If you don't know yet, you may not know what to do with it in the same sense of like, you may not know what ski gear to get. If you are like me and you've been skiing five times, you may not know I just got some ski gear. Which is why the analogy is there. Like, I finally was like, all right, I think I get enough to know what to buy, but till you're there, you're not really sure. So we're kind of serving that like, segment of people for whom LinkedIn is already producing pipeline and up to the kind of pro level segment where you need advanced tools for managing large numbers of inbound comments, things like that. We don't really serve very well. The like, I'm coming over from X and I don't know what LinkedIn's all about, but I thought I'd get this tool. You might not know what to do with Aware, but if it already works for you, they're gonna be like, oh, this is built for me. So that's kind of who we serve today.
[00:08:02] Speaker A: So you mentioned knowing like LinkedIn better than the customer. How do you prioritize, say, new features, like how much customer request is involved in that versus you just knowing what to build?
[00:08:11] Speaker B: It's like half and half. A lot of the features customers didn't ask for because they didn't know it was possible or what to ask or like, they didn't. They felt the pain, but they weren't aware of a solution. Like, we built a feature recently called Influencer Discovery where you can find new influencers by topic. They talk about by what's in their profile. And people didn't know that that was the feature they wanted. They just knew. They just came to us and said, ah, it seems like Aware doesn't help me build lists. It helps me engage with the lists I already have, but if I don't have my own engagement list, like, Aware is not really helping me. And I was like, yeah, it's not like I can help you as customer success to build lists outside of Aware and put them in. But we don't have anything in product for that yet. The feature wasn't really requested. It was like us considering how best to serve this class of customer. Whereas other ones, for a while we didn't have at Mentions and tagging brand pages and personal pages in Aware. And it was just like every day people would be like, can I mention and tag in Aware? And be like, no, no, no. It's actually really tricky to build. So it took us a while to get around to it. Finally we sat down, we're like, okay, we gotta build Mentions sucks, but we gotta build it. And then that was just very clear. So I'd say it's half and half. Half is just like feature request list piles up, get a lot of the same feature requests. We built. Those other half is like vision. We knew it should be there and we didn't ask anybody. And once we released it, they were like, wow, this is cool. But it was new, so. Yeah, 50 50ish.
[00:09:36] Speaker A: Okay, cool. And let's talk about kind of the durability of LinkedIn. So there's a lot of change happenings, say, in the SEO world, which sounds like we both kind of have backgrounds in. So I think if you're looking back maybe like 5 years, SEO is pretty much the game to play. And as far as like a growing marketing pipeline, and now it's like, not maybe. I think by the time it takes to get SEO results, SEO is going to like continually decrease. Like my brother, he doesn't use Google, he just uses ChatGPT, you know, and now they're coming out with AI search and AI deep search and, you know, all that stuff. So anyways, SEO is a very changing game. AI is obviously changing a lot of stuff. Um, and I think in my experience too, there's been like a lot of AI posting on LinkedIn. So I'm just curious as what you feel like is like the stability of the platform. Like are strategies that worked five years ago still working today? Or what's kind of like the rate of change there on a scale of like SEO to YouTube? Because I feel like YouTube's been pretty similar for 20 years. Whatever.
[00:10:35] Speaker B: If YouTube was a 1 and SEO was a 10, it's probably like a 3 to 4. I'd say on LinkedIn some things are changing, but when I talk with, you know, experts of LinkedIn in my own opinion is that very, very little has changed. Some tactical things have changed of like little things that don't really matter that much. The way you format your posts, the media types that are getting the most organic boost and reach, the presence of pay to play rising, but the fundamentals are still very much intact. Not to get too deep into this, but I have a different opinion on SEO. I think if people are trying to find a brand that a solution, it's still worth it to try to get them. You're just seeing like top of funnel SEO is totally nuked, bottom of funnel is little changed. So if I were to segment, I'd say we get people finding us and my agency still via ChatGPT all the time. It's the same stuff. Like good SEO is still leading to good geo or AI SEO. In the same sense, good LinkedIn, like good non hacky LinkedIn remains a really good strategy. So if you were like a total broetry hacker in 2018, just taking the Josh Vector playbook and being like I'm going to copy that word for word, two words, line, break, line, break, two words. And just really maximizing mobile readability, you're not going to get anywhere with that strategy today. But at the same time, if you're going all in on short form video to capitalize on the trend that pushes has been short form video on LinkedIn which is still one of the biggest formats. But it's there was like a huge spike three months ago and now it's much more moderated. Good format but not the only thing to do. So if you had put all your chips in short format a video on LinkedIn you wouldn't be that creative position right now. Still good. But you should know other formats to. You should know other tactics, you should know how to send DMs, how to engage, not just produce video. I say this as somebody who maybe six months ago invested more in short form video gear, learning how to do it and so forth. I totally appreciate that I did that. I just, it's not the only tool I have. I think that should be the same for everyone. So like it's just good marketing, like good important, core message to the right market said in a way that's easy to consume and compelling. Yeah, you might adapt formats a little bit, but that's kind of surface level stuff. In the same way, I think how SEO is like your underlying strategy for the last five years should always have been really bottom of funnel asset focused. If it was really top of funnel focused, you were kind of playing the wrong game. Whereas same thing on LinkedIn. If you were, if you have been reposting viral YouTube videos and TikTok videos on LinkedIn for the likes in a way that didn't really correlate to your value prop, you were never really winning the game. You were just getting likes and reach, but it wasn't translating to business results. It's the same thing now. You can still get likes and reach doing that. But at some point, just like top of funnel SEO got nuked, you're going to see that tactic, I think get nuked too. So if you were playing the right game, the rate of change is very slow. If you're playing the superficial kind of short term game and you haven't done that philosophical work to figure out what part of your product is really meaningful to people and what's the thesis behind it, then your game is going to have to shift every three to five years or more frequently. Right. As you learn. So it's kind of like which game are you playing?
[00:13:52] Speaker A: So what games are winning on LinkedIn and how much is pay to play a thing or pay to win?
[00:13:58] Speaker B: I still, I still don't pay to play very much. Um, it's, it's happening more like average organic per post to reach is declining for most people, although for people who post at least weekly, it's not declining within that there's a bunch of spread. Right. Like we analyze the aware customer base and they are increasing reach total and only losing a little bit of average per post reach. But they're posting 28% more on average to make up for. So they're gaining reach outside of that. Median per post engagement beginning one year ago to date March 2024 started dropping like a rock. Something changed in the algorithm March 2024. And yeah like median engagement went from like 18 per post to like 8 per post. Just like sheer number of engagements. So something shifted. It doesn't mean you need to pay to play anymore. I certainly don't myself but that's going to be more and more of a focus. Right? Just the amount of people creating on LinkedIn is rising much faster than the amount of people using it. Right. United States LinkedIn usage is increasing at maybe 1 to 1.3% per year. The amount of creators falling for the like get rich on LinkedIn scheme stuff is way more than 1% a year. So supply and demand, right? Not to mention the presence of more ads in the feed, LinkedIn monetizing their platform, more supply. So supply and demand just dictates they're going to see declining reach. Unless you're a better than ever at content or you pay to play. So one of those two things, I chose path one a lot. I'm not against path two. I just think if you can do it organically, you're better off than just paying. Same reason why you go to the powerlifting gym. Just full knee sleeves, weightlifting belt, you're gonna be able to lift more weight, but you might be hiding some underlying weaknesses. You go on LinkedIn, you just boost all your posts, throw thousands of dollars at it, but you don't worry about your underlying content. You're masking weaknesses. So crush it with organic and then pay. And that's how you know you won't be hiding issues with your underlying content. Because you're paying, you're still paying to show content. You gotta know that it's good.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: Yeah, that. Okay, well that's all really good info. So I'm just on a personal level, I don't use LinkedIn, I never have. And I've always heard like, well, if you're in sales, marketing, you have to have LinkedIn and hasn't it doesn't seem like it's affected me a ton. So I would like for you to talk me out of that position because I hear all the time like, dude, you've got to get a LinkedIn and it's going to launch stuff off. So how can say founders or others use LinkedIn and kind of succeed and sort of what, what results should they be expecting there?
[00:16:28] Speaker B: I would say if you are starting on LinkedIn, you have like no credibility. If you're just sort of coming on the platform for the first time and you're like just on the younger side in your career, then you're going to see that doing the same things doesn't give you the results you see others get. You know somebody who has big 20 year background in their industry, people know them, they've been to a lot of trade shows, done a lot of offline reputation building or they just straight up have a good reputation in their industry but they haven't been posting. They're going to have it on easy mode. You Post Once on LinkedIn, people are going to flood because they haven't seen you like oh shit, like this guy wrote a post and he never does. So you're going to see like pipeline happen right away. But like they said, the same is true like if you have a perfectly crafted post that mimics or is even better than a big creator, let's say just say like a lead magnet, you're like amazingly formatted post, really cool looking lead magnet, great graphics, but you yourself aren't well known for whatever it is that your value prop has to do with. Your post can get no, no likes and no attention and it's just not going to go anywhere. And it's kind of a, a weird thing being in like the social media world saying it's not about social media, it's about all the other stuff because your, your content is going to do better if people engage with it, if they spend longer on it and if you're well known by a higher percentage of people, in some cases a much higher percentage of people, then your like technical user signals, your dwell time. All the things that make a post do well or series of content do well are going to be better, but not for social media reasons, but for offline reputational reasons. And that explains the lion's share of the difference between all else being equal. Social media presences is what's the offline below the iceberg Reputation and quality and caliber of the person, the industry they're in, who they're backed by, all this stuff, it's not your hooks. I mean that's important. Again, all of the reputational factors being equal, your hook is important. But if you hold constant the social media quality, like the format, the media, all that stuff, then the rest of it comes down to the offline impact. And that's the biggest difference between someone who follows the playbook to a T and sees great results versus no results at all.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: Yeah. So let's say you have two founders who are both doing all the right stuff, the in person stuff, like they're going to conferences or you know, whatever, they're in person brand building. One has a LinkedIn, one doesn't. What have you seen as the difference between those two companies in lead gen?
[00:18:56] Speaker B: Huge, enormous. It can be like major strategic channel where you get arguably most of your pipeline from LinkedIn or not at all. Like maybe one lead every couple of months.
The difference is really, really widespread. Take like an Adam Robinson, for example, right? Bootstrapped founder, like clearing, you know what, 600k of net income per month with reinvestment across two different SaaS companies. That has offline credibility. His hooks are good, but it doesn't really matter as much because the results are real. You take somebody who's just starting out, you know, just founded their agency or SaaS company or whatever, their, you know, their presence, and they're, they're writing this amazingly formatted content. You're probably going to get almost no leads. We have almost no leads from YouTube. That's an example. Like, as good as we are on LinkedIn, YouTube hasn't worked for us yet. So it's the same idea, like another YouTube creator with huge following and who knows what they're doing. You're going to print money from YouTube, whereas we're going to be like, I haven't gotten shit from it. It's the same deal on LinkedIn. It's, it's, it's totally widespread. It could be tens of millions in value per, per quarter or more, all the way down to zero. So huge spread. I definitely wouldn't say that if you do LinkedIn very well, that you're guaranteed to have results on it, even if you do it okay. And you have that offline factor in place. And just the credibility is real. They do damn well. The style part of it is like an enhancement. The substance is the thing that makes it go, and then the production value is the thing that makes it go from good to great. So you can be, you can be good if you have substance. You don't have substance, you're never gonna crack even good results.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: Gotcha. Interesting. So let me, let me ask some questions kind of closer to my specific situation. Hot tip for anyone listening. If you want free advice from really smart people, just start a podcast. So what we're kind of doing right now is we're just posting, I think, two or three times a week. We have some kind of mix of, like, shorts, some mix of just text content. I think our LinkedIn views are growing connections, growing followers, growing all that stuff. So the surface metrics all look pretty good. I don't think we've, like, really started to convert. And these are the founders who are posting. Yeah, and of course, it's all organized by marketing. We provide the content and so on. Probably shouldn't have said that. So. Oh, well, anyways, as far as, like, what am I doing wrong to not get maybe the results we're looking for. I won't have you diagnose it right here, but sort of where should I start looking to move needles and change things to boost how many results we're getting out of LinkedIn or boost our lead gen?
[00:21:30] Speaker B: Is the average engagement per post increasing?
[00:21:33] Speaker A: Yes, maybe. Actually I said that I'm not sure.
So I'm sorry, I haven't slept in a while and I thought you were asking a different question. So my mind was like already geared on yes. Yeah, I thought you were about to ask like is our average views for post increasing? And I was like yeah, but engagement? I'm actually not sure. I think we get a little bit of an engagement. Like it's not zero.
[00:21:55] Speaker B: Yeah, well. So if average engagement per post is increasing and the breakdown of relevant vs non relevant engagers on the post is also increasing, it just comes down to the message. So how close is the message to your core value prop? And if the message is too far away, you can increase reach all day and you won't see results. The trick is if you're very, very close to your value prop and you're pretty much just listing product features, then you have a harder time growing average engagement. So the balance and the art of it is can you grow attention while not sacrificing relevance? And that's tough. That's why like you need to kind of know the conversation on LinkedIn. You need to know what works. You need to be able to dress up product features with an entertaining or really highly consumable content style. Like that's where substance comes into play too. Do you have a compelling thesis? You can get likes on posts that have no compelling thesis, but there's not a lot of like through line through them. What you want is for people to really understand what you believe and what your product does and how it can help them over the course of a few months. And to do that you have to have the combination of the company message coming through like here's what we believe about running a better subscription business. You're working in all the reasons why people have churn how typical churn management solutions don't work from not doing it at all to competitive solutions and then like kind of the new way of doing things and tricky part, it has to go well with the people who are the brands, right? So it has to like sound like the founder. It has to sort of be, you know, in, in their voice almost ideally. Um, so there's a lot of factors at play and it just, it's the combination of the Personal and the professional that make it so tricky. But once you nail that, all those things and you hammer it for a few months and be in way better shape. But the tricky part of LinkedIn is there's so many reasons why one other one is are you doing outbound engagement? So if you're not doing outbound engagement, like frankly, a good amount, that's another thing where on LinkedIn you used to be able to not and now you can't grow without it pretty much unless you're starting from a very high baseline. So that has emerged as a necessary factor. Where it used to be an optional accelerant, it's no longer optional. You pretty much won't take off without a ton of time without outbound industry engagement.
[00:24:11] Speaker A: So when you say outbound industry engagement, what exactly are you talking about on LinkedIn?
[00:24:15] Speaker B: So build a list of 50 SaaS founders or 200 SAS founders and or other people talking about churn, like industry people, you know, elder statesman of sas, that type of stuff and engage with lots of their posts per day. Aware makes that easier. That's kind of our value prop is you can do that on aware, it makes it easier, blah, blah, blah. But you could do it with a spreadsheet. But if you did, keep everything the same that you're doing and do 20 relevant comments per day on posts that are more than 12 words and you're not embarrassed by, and then talk to me and see if their results are similar. Right? Like that's what I would say to do as far as like one more thing you could do to take things up a notch on LinkedIn.
[00:24:55] Speaker A: Gotcha. So we're doing almost zero outbound. In fact, I'm not aware of any at all. The founders might be doing some on their own. But okay, that's interesting. So how much in terms of like percentage, how much of your effort on LinkedIn is outbound versus just posting whatever high quality stuff, but posting.
[00:25:10] Speaker B: If you have the same, let's say three hours a week of LinkedIn execution, whatever, you can't fill up by inbound engagement responses. Meaning there's so much on your post that you're filling up that bucket with inbound response, you're filling up with outbound. There will be a point where you have enough inbound response engagement. You don't need to do any about outbound. I mean, it's the same thing as marketing, right? Like if your sales team is so full of inbound leads, they don't got a prospect. I mean, you can argue that point, right? But in theory, that's kind of the same thing on LinkedIn. Take your same three hour bucket and if you have 300 comments a week that you have to respond to or more, you're not going to be doing much more than posting and responding to people on your own posts. You're not getting that. Well, fill it up with outbound until it creates so much, so much inbound that you're just managing that balance over time.
[00:25:59] Speaker A: Gotcha. Okay, well, that's super helpful to me. So maybe I need to start doing some outbound stuff or something because we're definitely not getting that kind of like inbound engagement. And our effort on LinkedIn is probably less than three hours a week. But I have people tell me all the time like, that I should be investing more into LinkedIn.
[00:26:16] Speaker B: Fair enough. I mean, certainly you don't have to, but if you were to fill, let's just say one hour a week, I would spend 20 minutes writing one good post and the rest of the time engaging with relevant content.
[00:26:29] Speaker A: Okay, that's very helpful. Good to know.
[00:26:32] Speaker B: And then you're kind of keeping them in stair step. But when I asked a couple larger influencers on a webinar yesterday, Brianna Doe and Morgan Ingram, they said 95% of their time investment is engagement versus content creation. That's too extreme for me. I, I would balance that to more 60, 40, but my time investment is always going to be more on engagement than posting. Just not quite that extreme. Unless. Unless you want to take it there and see how it goes. In which case I'd love to see that experiment. But I mean, I know people that use aware to write a hundred comments a day in 20 minutes a day, and they grow really, really fast. It just kind of takes a lot of discipline. It's like the marketing equivalent of cold calling to do that much commenting.
[00:27:13] Speaker A: Yeah, what's. What's like typical, say time to results on LinkedIn, so maybe go back to the SEO versus Google scale. So like, I'm sorry, SEO versus YouTube, you can tell that I've not slept in a while. Um, so like YouTube, I mean, we can post videos and like we've got views in, I mean, minutes, you know, whereas SEO is not that way. So for anyone not aware, it takes much longer. Like definitely months. And there's exceptions. But in general, anyone listening to this, it's going to take you months to get SEO results.
So what's kind of like the time to results on LinkedIn?
[00:27:48] Speaker B: When I was doing ghost writing at my last agency, those people that came in With a good industry credibility, they would see two opportunities in the first hour after writing a post like a fresh post they haven't posted in a long time, finally write a good one 2 ops in the first hour because people come out of the woodwork and then once the woodwork come outers have done that, then there's a bit of a dip and you got to build back up and reach new audiences. So I would say if you have a lot of like unactivated latent brand awareness, you can activate that real quick. But then reaching new audiences. Well, it's a brand awareness scheme so you're, you're talking, talking weeks to a couple months at least.
[00:28:25] Speaker A: Yeah. Actually when I think about brand as far as our marketing efforts here at Turnkey, like our time to ideal results from brand is a year. So when we're thinking about our, our marketing, it's like how do we fill our pipeline this quarter? And then the branding stuff's technically everything after this quarter. But a lot of it's like how do we fill our pipeline in one year, three years, five years? You know, LinkedIn is both.
[00:28:45] Speaker B: LinkedIn can. I mean the beauty of it is like, you know, we were talking about, with LinkedIn being demand gen, the right kinds of content can blend both. Here's an example. Get really tactical of a type of content that does that. You in the same post talk about a loop in your career history, how you learned of the problem, the new way of solving the problem, what this means for your customers. Drop the feature and then a gif of the feature being used, like a literal moving image of the feature being used in the Same post. Write 20 comments before the post goes up. Respond to all comments you get on that post within few minutes.
There's your simultaneous brand building because you're talking about your history, your personal brand belief system and demand gen because you're showing the product itself. I do that all the time. Cleans up.
[00:29:30] Speaker A: Interesting. Okay, that's a very helpful, helpful little tip there. Good.
[00:29:33] Speaker B: Yeah, send me the post if you want like the draft before you post it and we'll look it over, tighten it up and then we can use this as like a hey, we tried it after the show and here's how it went type of thing.
[00:29:42] Speaker A: Okay, I will absolutely do that.
[00:29:44] Speaker B: Great.
[00:29:45] Speaker A: And I think one question before we hop off here. So are there any kinds of people who should not be doing LinkedIn?
[00:29:50] Speaker B: Yeah. If your market doesn't sit at a desk. So if your market is like plant managers, leaders of mining operations, I mean These are real things that I've come across. You know, you also gotta be mindful of your LinkedIn Active Tam. So if your LinkedIn Active Tam is, I mean, everyone's got one, right? I mean, you have retail store managers using LinkedIn, there's just fewer of them. So if your LinkedIn Active Tam is very, very small, you're gonna have a, you're gonna have to a connect with them first, a lot of them, and then expect that your growth be kind of capped. But if your LinkedIn active TAM is huge, right? Like people who run SaaS companies, it's freaking huge. Like, you're going to have a lot easier success and you'll be playing the game on easy mode. So if you're playing the game on, if you look at the game and you're like, a lot of our market doesn't use LinkedIn, some do, but so many don't, it's going to be hard. Then you got to weigh the value of doing LinkedIn on hard mode versus other marketing channels entirely. And that's a qualitative decision. But you might just look at SEO and be like, oh man, that for us, that's an easy game to win, right?
We got high domain authority, we got really good content. We're going after, I don't know, or a personal injury law firm and just like super competitive, but not in this one random city that I'm in. Makes so much sense. LinkedIn for that suburban Kansas personal injury law firm is like, heck, how are you going to do that on LinkedIn? It's going to be, you can do it, but it'll be way harder. So it becomes like a weighing machine of how difficult will the game be for you. And that's the percentage of your market that is extroverted and uses LinkedIn. Oftentimes, the closer to sales, marketing, founders and people who care about revenue or recruiters. Just like recruiting HR is another big. Like, they use LinkedIn more, they post more. A while back I posted the percentage of people on LinkedIn by industry that post. I can dig that up somewhere. But tech is like 28%. Agriculture is like 4%. So you can do that math and that's the multiplier of your difficulty. You sell to tech, LinkedIn's going to crush. You sell to agribusiness, it's going to be really hard. You can do it, but expect an uphill climb. And then the next part is just what level of the org. The higher up you get, the closer to executive and revenue you get. Easier, lower the harder, you know, accounts payable people, there's a, there's somebody growing their account in the accounts receivable industry. They're using Aware and so forth and they're like the only one. So I was like, all right. They're gaining steam pretty fast because there just are no accounts receivable influencers. So you're getting that LinkedIn active TAM knowing that 95% of them don't post. The 5% is still a good amount if you're the only one. So. So for her it's like, ah, it's medium difficulty. It's a good channel. Especially because it's so cheap you don't have to pay anything to post.
[00:32:37] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. You know, talking about like agriculture, I live in a little town in Costa Rica and there's literally more cows than there are people.
[00:32:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:44] Speaker A: And I would not be surprised if you told me like half the people in that town literally don't know how to use a softball.
[00:32:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:48] Speaker A: I'd be like, yeah, okay. That tracks.
[00:32:50] Speaker B: Door to door. Postcards can be way, way more effective. Right. Like shaking hands and dropping off a bag of fruit is what I'd do. Uh, I'm, I'm not a LinkedIn guy. I'm just, you know, a revenue guy. So I'm not attached to this and just like, yeah, if it works for you, great. If it's not, then cold call, you know, like do whatever you want.
[00:33:06] Speaker A: Oh, they really do drop stuff off at my door. Like not always fruit. They'll like leave little candies and flyers.
[00:33:11] Speaker B: Love that. Love Costa Rica. I'm going to be there in a week and a half, so. Yeah.
[00:33:16] Speaker A: Oh my God.
[00:33:16] Speaker B: Amazing.
[00:33:17] Speaker A: Yeah, it is amazing. You have to tell me where you're going after the show. Maybe I'll give you some tips.
[00:33:22] Speaker B: West coast, but I'd love some tips. We're going to stay in this like treehouse three hours from Iberia, but.
[00:33:29] Speaker A: Oh my God.
[00:33:30] Speaker B: Pumped. Yeah.
[00:33:31] Speaker A: Yeah. That's gonna be amazing. Good for you, dude. Well, hey, anything else that I should have asked you about LinkedIn that I didn't in my ignorance?
[00:33:38] Speaker B: A lot of people treat LinkedIn as a place to prospect via comments and DMs and they only engage with people who are like, they definitely want to sell to. I think it's a bit close minded. That's like going to a conference and not saying a word to anybody but your target customer. That kind of sucks, you know, like, just make friends. So do the same thing on LinkedIn. Just make friends. Yeah, you're there to eventually grow your business. But if you only do that, you're like that guy, you know, the guy that only wants to talk to you if you're a lead. And that's not going to create the best reputation. So don't lose the social skills. When you're a social selling. A lot of people do get behind a screen, they lose all of that juice of just like, how do I interact with humans? And it does not go well for them. So don't make that mistake. Be social.
[00:34:23] Speaker A: It sounds like you're speaking from experience of people who don't know how to interact with people.
[00:34:27] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, definitely.
[00:34:28] Speaker A: Yeah. In our industry, in SaaS, that's. That might be the majority.
[00:34:33] Speaker B: A lot.
[00:34:34] Speaker A: It's a lot. Well, Alex, thanks so much. This has been awesome. When people want to learn more about you, what you're doing, where should they go?
[00:34:41] Speaker B: LinkedIn's a great place. Our website is Useaware Co, but it's called Aware, not Use Awareness. There's a little how to address the brand, but LinkedIn's the best place to figure out what I'm doing. I'll direct traffic for whatever we're working on if you go find me there.
[00:34:55] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, Alex, thanks so much for hopping on and. Yeah, see you guys later.
