Making LinkedIn Work -- with Daniel Murray creator of The Marketing Millennials

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Hey. This episode is from a live session we did. It was myself and Daniel Murray, who runs the Marketing Millennials podcast. We did a session all about LinkedIn, organic LinkedIn, helping you grow your LinkedIn page. All the lessons that Daniel and I have seen and felt and done firsthand when doing a bunch of work on LinkedIn over last couple years, specifically for B2B marketing. So you're in B2B marketing, you're interested in social media, you're specifically interested in LinkedIn. I think you're going to get a lot out of this episode. Shout out to Daniel and the Marketing Millennials podcast. Make sure you go and check them out for letting us run this. But I thought there was a lot good stuff in here, so I wanted to grab it for the Exit 5 podcast. Here we go.

Yeah. Everybody, thanks for joining today. I'm super excited. I'm Daniel. If you don't know who I am, I'm part of the Marketing Millennials. I'm. I run the Marketing Millennials. If you haven't seen Our newsletter or LinkedIn page is probably where you found us from. Today I'm going to chat with the man DG. He was the OG LinkedIn guy before LinkedIn was actually cool. So super excited.

Actually, take any of my advice because my engagement is just gone now, so I have no LinkedIn advice to give anybody. I will just give you copywriting and thoughts advice, but I can't tell you what's happening on. On LinkedIn. They turned me down or I don't know and I've heard that from other people, but it's an interesting place to be right now.

Yeah, I'm so excited to chat about that, too, and what you're seeing in LinkedIn and also just how the format is going to go. The first 20 minutes, 30 minutes, we're just going to chat. LinkedIn chat, copywriting, Chad, what to do. And then the next 20 minutes after that, we'll bring a couple people up to audit their profile. So be ready at the end to raise your hand. Also want to give a shout out to my good friends at Chili Piper because they're awesome. They helped put on this event with us. So thank you, Chili Piper. You're always Supporting me. The market millennials ever since 2016. Love you guys. Go follow them. Go check out their website. They put out great content and also want to shout out Exit 5. One of the best B2B. Actually the best B2B community out there. It is not even one of the best. I've been in Exit 5 for like two years, so go check it out. DG put on a great, a great community there. It's live, it's popping off on like other communities where you get one little chat a day.

I was trying to get this teed up while you were saying that that's better that we can really hear, but that's kind of you for the shout out. If you're not in there, sign up and send me a note and let me know that you heard about us here, which I'm sure we will get some folks. So I'm happy to be here.

First, I just want to start like DG. How you the OG of LinkedIn? Could you just give a little background who you are when you started LinkedIn, when you started your journey on LinkedIn, what you saw on LinkedIn when you started?

I mean, I'm probably not the OG. I just probably see. I don't remember who it was specifically, but I've just, when it comes to marketing, just have always kind of been curious about what people are doing. We kind of found this opportunity where we were posting. So we were posting on LinkedIn because we were selling to B2B companies and we figured that that's where they were. And when we started posting there, like, the engagement was just. Was just insane, like, compared to what we were posting on Twitter and other channels. And so I think it's not that I have some secrets about LinkedIn. I just was lucky to be there early. And I think it just speaks to the importance of, like, as a marketer, the more you can be testing channels and testing new ideas, the better. And we were on LinkedIn early and that was. We were able to create a huge advantage from that.

One thing I want to chat about is why founders and leadership and the power of having personal brands at your company. I know you wrote a book founder Brand that talks about this a little bit, but, like, why should a founder start telling their story on social like LinkedIn?

The reason we also got on LinkedIn was if you forget marketing for a minute, like, you just think about you have a business, right? If you have a business, do you want more people to know about your business or less people to know about? Most of us, we Want more people to do that. Okay, great. What makes you want to spend time with someone, a person, a business or whatever? You want to spend time with people who are interesting and have things to say or make you feel good or make you smarter or give you a reason to laugh. And it's like that is if you just simplify marketing in the simplest form, it's about attracting an audience of people who might be a good fit to buy from you one day. And so as a founder of a company, you can be using social media to do those things. And I understand that there's lots of founders who don't want to do that, but I think that if I'm a founder and I'm looking for advantages and I want to compete and build a successful business, one of the most underrated, although obvious ways is to build a brand and build a following on social media. And a lot of people love to try to, like, shit on personal branding. This has nothing to do with personal branding. This has to me. It's like it's actually thought leadership, but better than hiring an expensive PR agency to do it. Because if you're the founder of this company, you're living, breathing, sweating, thinking about this business every day. You're talking to partners and customers and investors and advisors, and you're recruiting and you're hiring and you're having to have an idea, a point of view about what's happening in this market. All of that stuff is amazing content to attract your dream customers. And so if you're building a product to sell to people who work in HR and you're living in that world every day, talking about those things helps make you more relatable and attractive to HR people. And all of a sudden you can become a resource. And so I think I like to push founders and oftentimes also the founder. It's not like the founder of a company. It's very rare that a founder of a company got into this business because they want to get rich or they just because it's fun. Very often the founder of a company, she starts the company because she has an idea or some big thing happened in this person's life that was a catalyst to starting this company. And I think that's stuff is inherently very interesting and that can make for some of the great content that you can use to attract people to your business. But so often we just jump right into like marketing the product and features and benefits, and that stuff is important, but I think it's. It's having this balance of both where you can create an advantage.

I love that. I think also you did a great job with. You came up with the name Exit 5, but you were going back and forth with Exit 5 and more marketing name. But I think it's a cool story for people to hear how you came up with the name Exit 5. Because this is going into talking about like a founder story story and connecting the story and the background of like why the why behind of creating a brand.

So I had been wanting to rebrand my community because basically what happened was two years ago when I left Drift, I was really interested in talking about marketing, but I was going to a new company and I wasn't sure that I was going to have the same type of platform to do it because the company that I was going to privy is more in the B2C space. I didn't really have a lot of experience there, often talk about B2C stuff. And so I was like, well, I gotta. I'm gonna launch my own blog or podcast anyway where I can talk about this stuff. And I ended up launching it as a paid thing on Patreon and it worked really well. We had 3,4000 paying members in the Patreon thing. But it was called dgmg, which is just a Dave Gerhardt marketing group. I just made that name up in two seconds. My business is DGMG llc. Like that, that's what it is. But I don't care to be like the superstar solo content creator. I don't want to be Dave Gerhardt the marketing guy forever, like personally. And so I think it was. It was important to me to try to unbundle that a little bit. But also that came from this realization that like, oh shit. People are not just here to hear from me. This is becoming something bigger. And so we launched this Facebook group because what people wanted. I got so many messages of people who are like members on Patreon and they're like, look, we love your stuff, but it's not just about you, buddy. We want to talk to the other people here. And I was like, oh, wow, that's a great idea. There should be some forum for this. And so the idea actually came from Henry Johnson. He was like a big fan of my first million. And he's like, they have an amazing Facebook group. He's like, you might want to launch this on Slack or something, but I'm telling you, Facebook is going to be the move. And I was like, okay, fine, let's do it. Launch a Facebook group. The engagement in the Facebook group from day One has been incredible. And I think that was like a big learning was people are not just here for me. They're here to talk to each other about this thing that they're doing, B2B marketing. And so I wanted to try to like unbundle myself from that. And so I wanted to come up with a name that was separate from, from me so it could be its own media property and maybe could one day live on with or without me. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to rebrand this. I started messing around with names. I love marketing and I think of myself as a creative person, but I'm very bad at naming things. I always name them very literal. My first podcast was called Tech in Boston where I interviewed startup founders in Boston. Like, that was my first name. Tech in Boston. My wife gives me a hard time because she's like, everything you name is so literal. Liter Tech in Boston. Dgmg Dave Gearhart Marketing Group. And so I was like starting to go literal for this. I was going to call, I don't know, b2bmarketing.org or whatever, looked at a million domains. But then I messaged friend of mine, Harry Dry, who is. He runs marketingexamples.com, copywritingexamples.com and he has a lot of good framework show stuff. So I'm like, how would you think about naming this? I messaged with you a bunch to bounce ideas off you. I had a couple people I knew that I bounced ideas off of. Pep from Winter was another one. And Harry was like, well, there's two ways you can name something. You can do literal or you could do lateral. And he kind of explained, here's what literal is and gave me a bunch of examples. And I'm like, yep, this is kind of what I always do. Literal. So then I started messing around with lateral names. And so a lateral name was like, can you come up with a story that can relate to this business? And the story is when I was working in marketing, we lived in Boston and we'd always go up to Vermont for weekends and my wife's parents house and it was all week I'm in work, super busy doing stuff, but then I go to the woods and don't do any work. And it's amazing how when you completely unplug from work, that's when you get your best ideas. And so I'd always go to Vermont and on the weekends I'd come back to work and I'd have like three new ideas and be unstuck on some problem. And so we came up with the name Exit 5 because the exit that I took to get to her parents house is Exit five. Looked it up, Exit five is available. There's a story that I can tell about, like, hey, look, Exit 5 was my inspiration, my way to get unstuck on problems in marketing. Exit5.com, the community can be your place now to get unstuck. And that's how we came up with the name.

I love it. I think it's funny because market Millennials is pretty literal and then yours is like a lateral thing. And I have the same story as not the background story, but when I wanted to create, I was afraid of creating by myself under my personal name. So I was just like, okay, let's create the marketing Millennials, which is going to be like this behind the scenes, and I can do whatever I want and be whoever I want. And also, I know it's hard when you're starting your personal brand and you have to. You can't really say everything you want to say because you're working for a company. So there's a way for me to start saying some controversial, not controversial, but funny marketing things that I would want to say.

So I think, I think there's a great, great approach. I, like, have gone at it the other way and like, mainly built the audience that I have now has mainly been built through like, like my name. But I think that there's huge benefits to building something without your name also. And you're the person behind it. I think that what you've done with marketing Millennials is a perfect example of that.

Companies come up to you a lot and ask, should I get on LinkedIn? Should I do social? Should I do brand? How do you tell them to start doing it? When a lot of B2B companies are stuck in the mindset of, hey, how could I measure this? Or how could I? How could I see real results from posting on social media? So how do you get them to even start to do this?

I think I've changed my advice on this a bunch of times. Just as I've learned, I definitely wouldn't encourage everyone to do it because I think it only works if you actually have something to say. And so the biggest mistake is like, yeah, you can't just listen to a podcast and we say, post some quote images, take a picture of a book you're reading, talk about something that you learned, and that's how you grow on LinkedIn. I think that that was possible maybe two years ago. Two, three years ago or maybe into last year. But I think now it's become such a busy place, like every channel that, like the actual way to stand out and to build an audience. By the way, how you measure this is like, I think it's kind of obvious because it's a, it's a social media account. How would you measure a TikTok account? You would measure it in how many followers that account now has. Because if you have the hypothesis that the more followers I have on this property, I will be able to drive more traffic, people, potential customers to my thing, that's at least how I think about it. The goal is you don't have 10,000 people on your email list, but is it reasonable to build a LinkedIn account with 10,000 followers in the next year? Probably. And can you use that to then drive traffic to other things? Because remember, the game that you're playing is really LinkedIn is a social network which is like, here's all these people that are in my market. They're not all on my website, but they all hang out in this place called LinkedIn. You're trying to go over there to be like, hey, I also have interesting things to say. Come and follow me now. I'm getting your updates every day, I'm seeing your content. Ultimately, the goal is to transfer that audience from LinkedIn to your owned channels, whether that's a website, an email list. So I think that's the goal. But I think you have to be a founder who has a strong point of view on your market, a strong point of view on the status quo and what needs to change. You have to have interesting experiences and conversations and things to say. There's not just like, you can't just take some cookie cutter content template and be like, on Monday post a quote, on Tuesday post an image. Those things also help. But that's just the dressing. I think the meat is having a strong point of view. And so I'm actually working with one founder right now who I already know is going to be amazing on LinkedIn. They haven't done anything yet, but they're going to be amazing on LinkedIn because they're pushing their industry forward. And like, I see what they're actually working on and what's actually happening inside of the company. And the company is fundamentally has a strong point of view and they're going directly at two kind of competitors and an industry trend and like trying to smash the status quo. That's the perfect type of person to work with to then, like, then do those things and create good content. And so I think it's, it's got to be rooted in that strong point of view. There's a question just as I see this now, is this advice only for founders? How can I apply to small brands, new startups? Yeah, I think whether you're a small brand, a new startup, a founder, everything that I just said in the last five minutes can be applied to, to you for anything. Even if it's a side project, you're trying to grow an account focused on golf. Like it's, it's the same type of logic. Those are all principles that can be applied where, like if your goal is to build an audience around X topic because it's valuable to your business to be known for that topic.

Yeah, and I, that's what I was about to add in is I think before you start go posting on any social media, especially for a personal brand, you have to figure out what you're known for and what you want to be known for. And also as a brand too, as a company, when you start that profile, you want to be known for X in that industry, whether it's the best content marketing agency out there or the best thing. So what do you start doing to be known as the best content marketing agency? Start talking about content marketing. Start talking about how to do content marketing. Give valuable advice to your audience. And one thing that people mess up the most is like it's not about you. Like it's about what value you can provide at the end, it is about you in the sense that it's your story. But at the same time a lot of people want something out of it. They don't care. They like your story, but they want something out of it. So on the personal page side, on the company page side, you have to start giving valuable advice for whatever you're doing. If you're content marketing, talk about content marketing. If you're a dentist, I wouldn't, maybe dentist is a bad example. But say you're a SaaS marketing company, you start talking about how to be a better marketer and start bringing marketers in your audience and then those eventually become buyers. But it all starts with having what your end goal of what you want to be known for because otherwise you're.

Screwed because you just post. We can use an example that like we all have probably had in our personal lives. This is very relatable to any business. So like I, last year I wanted to get more into yoga. Like in addition to weightlifting, I wanted to get more into yoga. So I'm on Instagram, I'm on YouTube. You're watching all different types of stuff from all different types of people. Finally I find this one channel and they had a particular type. It was like, it was like yoga for athletes and yoga for people who don't believe in yoga. Oh, that's a cool little niche. Like, okay, cool. That was attractive to me. That's kind of what I'm, what I'm here to do. I'm not trying to become a lifetime yogi. I just want to get a little bit more flexibility. Okay, now I'm following that person on Instagram. I see that they post these daily YouTube videos with like a 30 minute workout every single day. I start following them, I tell a bunch of friends about that. Then they have actually a paid channel where you can get hour long workouts plus like calendar printouts and a bunch of other things. So I subscribe to that. That's like a real life example that we all go. We all have done that one, two, three, four times a month. We do that with consumer brands. I think it's no different for thinking about a business. You sell HR software, you sell finance software. My opinion is that the best marketing strategy you can have is to become an expert in that industry. And so who are you to sell finance software? Are you just some random person off the street? Oh, no, actually you and your co founder. I just spent the last 15 years running Finance at X Company and you found this big problem and you raised $20 million of venture capital money to go and build this company and do it. Okay. That's a huge ingredient to be trading with from a marketing standpoint. Right? And this is not just for like venture backed startups. I think that's, that's true in any example. Like if you look at Amanda from like Hallows of Wise.

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She does a good job of like they don't just talk about the product she like lives, she talks about all of the things like how that company was, was created and problems that she experienced or the challenges she experienced personally. That becomes then content. And by the way the solution is, oh, it happens to be this, this company that, that we're building. Right.

I think that, I mean you did a great job and a lot of founders as I think there's two strategies is either you showing expertise or you building in public and showing them what you're doing behind the scenes and giving them the behind the scenes version of it.

Let's just pause on that for a second because I Think, like, I think that building in public is one way you can do it. I also think there is another way to be successful now. Like, you know, building in public doesn't have to mean, like, you know, selfie of me at work. Here's me doing this thing. Like, that doesn't work for everybody. And a lot of people that either is not comfortable for them to do or like, I think the negative side of that is you're. You open yourself up to a lot of, like, just people can be jerks online and like, you. You open yourself up to that. But I think what does work is, like, you, you don't have to be the face, but. But your company has to be like, the source of expertise. And I think, like, the greatest example is we did this at drift. Like, we became resources for conversational marketing. Hey, we created this new way of doing marketing. It's called conversational marketing. Here's our way of doing it. You're going to listen to our podcast and learn about it and help your job. You're going to read our blog. You're going to get our emails. HubSpot is like the OG. Like, this is the greatest example of this. They built a whole movement around inbound marketing, and they said, we make inbound marketing software. But the reason that you're listening to our podcast, watching our videos, subscribing to our blog is because we're teaching you about a way to get better at your job and get promoted and get more love from your team at work and help your company grow faster. And so we're going to teach you inbound marketing. I think that one example is, like, still today can be applied to any business. Do you have to do it? No. Is it my opinion? I know you feel the same way. That's why we're doing this. Because it's my opinion that's the. The marketing strategy that I like the most. There's definitely other ways to do it. That's the, like, survivor bias that I have of the companies that I've worked at. But that's how we've. We've treated it. It's like, let's use the company to become the number one resource for our dream customer. And if they do that and we have the right product to match, we can build an audience and then we'll have a product to sell to them.

I also want to go back to even, like, the simplest form of like, creating an audience, which is a lot of people give up after like the first month or two or don't stay consistent on delivering that message. And they're like, okay, after a month I don't see any traction. Like let's step out. Like for example dg, it probably took him two to three years to even like a year to, for even people to recognize him on LinkedIn and now then people had to recognize him and then he became a bigger name and a bigger name and a bigger name. It takes time and I think think a lot of it is like committing to that who you are, what you want to do on social media, who you want to be known for and start doing it consistently I think and have that patience to wait it out a little bit. Because I think for me, even the first six months I don't even think anybody read my content. I think like five people probably liked it and part of it was some people like my mom and my girlfriend at the time who's not my wife but, but there wasn't a lot of people liking my content.

Yeah, I think that's true for any and I think like your, your advice is true for any, for any channel whether you're. I, I would give the same advice. If you're trying to grow, it starts with nobody should just do this because somebody told you to do it. It needs to start with like you using your own brain and coming up with a hypothesis about how you're going to grow your, your thing. Oh, okay. We think that LinkedIn might like right now I'm investing in TikTok for Exit 5 because I have a belief because here's like a real thought process. Exit 5 is great, continues to grow. I think it can grow more. I think one of the under invested in channels. I'm not the first person to say go on TikTok. It's not what I'm saying. I think that if I look across the other competitors to Exit five or other offerings in the market when it comes to B2B marketing content, there's very little B2B marketing content on TikTok. I've seen how videos work with Exit 5 on LinkedIn and in the Facebook group I'm making a beta that TikTok will be a platform that we can grow an audience on and take advantage of the all of the eyeballs there. And so the reason I'm investing in TikTok is to grow a following there. The way I'm going to measure if that's working or not is first, you can't measure. You also can't measure all these things at once. First, my very first metric is going to be Some type of follower number, because why? That's the equivalent of like website traffic. Do you have people there? Are there eyeballs? And so let's say we grow that page to 10, 20, 30,000 followers in a year. Would I be happy with that? That seems right. Okay, roughly seems right. Let's look at other pages. These people have 2000 followers. This page has a million. Probably can't do that. This is how I think real people think about this stuff. It's not always this perfectly quantifiable spreadsheet to make these decisions. Okay, so I think this is gonna work. Right now all I'm worrying about over the next six months is good content and putting out relevant and interesting and educational and entertaining content. Focus on B2B marketing, can that start to grow following then if we fast forward six months from now and it's like, holy shit, there's a great following on exit 5, but I haven't seen any new members from it. Now I'm going to shift my focus. Now. We're going to do two things, right? We're going to try to continue to build this audience, but we're also going to then try to drive people to Exit five. I mean, we applied the same framework to like building Drift. In the early days, we didn't have three competing goals. It was like, step one was build an audience. Step two, prove that that audience could actually would sign up and use the pro, would sign up for the product. Step three, prove that that audience would actually use the product. Prove that that audience would actually pay for the for it. And so like that type of thinking, you can simplify this all the way down. You have to have a point of view. You can't just be like, well, I'm going to be on LinkedIn, I'm going to half ass do it. No, like, why do you want to do this? Why is this the channel? Maybe it's not LinkedIn. Maybe it's YouTube, maybe it's Instagram, maybe it's in a newsletter, maybe it's an event. Have a hypothesis, put some thought into this about what could I do here? If I post here regular and create interesting content, could I build an audience about X topic? And if I did that, what would the benefits of that be? Like, I think that's how you come up with initial goals for social media. It's not as easy as like, we want to grow from. We want to go from 0 followers to 5,000. Because I bet you right now you have almost half a million followers on the Marketing Millennials podcast. I bet you grew that page for two, three years before you were like, oh, what should a goal for this? It just, it just happens. And I think you have to do this and make the bet that, yes, I'm going to do this for a year, six months to a year. And I would say that any channel could. Should you do YouTube for two weeks and quit? Quit, Is that going to work? Should you do Instagram for two weeks and quit? Is that going to work? Should you go to the gym for two weeks and quit? It's the same type of thing, just apply to marketing.

I love that. I love also the intentional focus on one channel and figuring it out in one goal. Because I think that's where a lot of people lose is they're measuring 10 things at once and if one of those things aren't working, they're like, okay, let's scrap this idea. I want to start bringing people up. So if you want to raise your hand and come up and we can either answer your question or answer a question about your LinkedIn page, you just raise your hand and I'll bring up people here. I know there's some questions in the chat too that we can answer.

While people raise their hand, you pull up somebody. I'm going to tackle some of these quick hitters. Nick Bennett in chat says, how can employers empower their employees to better become SMEs subject matter experts and drive pipeline organically through their content? I think not everyone's going to do this, but I've found that typically at the company, first of all, don't think that everyone's going to do it. It doesn't need to be everyone. You, I would rather channel, like, who are those really passionate people inside of the company and can you encourage them to do it and give them hints at like, things that they might be able to say? I also think that there's so much content that happens inside of a company, from emails to Slack messages to videos to wiki posts. One way you can help do that is be like, whoa, hey, hey, Daniel. That thing that you wrote internally, that was amazing. This would actually be awesome as content on LinkedIn. You could obviously take this out, like, find the internal opportunities that people have already written written, as opposed to trying to push people to go from like this blank slate and have to come up with new ideas.

Everybody, could you raise your hand again if you raised your hand before? Because I wasn't, I didn't put myself as co host. So if you want to come up and ask the question to me, And Dave, feel free. Or if you don't want to come up in front of a crowd, feel free to.

Here's another one. While you do that, Rachel says, what other ways outside of category creation can you differentiate your company in a mature, competitive industry? I think there's a million ways. I think you can be different or you can be better.

Better.

If you can't go and create a new category, like a differentiation could be your. Your company's like a benefit for an employee. You pay for 100% of college education. You give everyone a bike. Those are made up terrible examples. But it can quite literally be anything. It just has to be strategic to your business and something that you can actually live. Like, for example, a differentiator for Ben and Jerry's is not that they created a new category, but that they're very like social responsibility and political activism has been something that's a big part of their brand, and that in turn is a differentiator for them. I think it can be something like that.

What other companies are doing great for B2B marketing on LinkedIn metadata gong dually. The fact that you can't name a bunch of people that are doing well on LinkedIn is the fact that you should start doing something on LinkedIn if you're a B2B, like marketing, if you have a marketing audience or finance audience. Because. Because I think there's so much space of people doing it, not doing it well. I can't even name many. That means they have taken the space in the head on LinkedIn, I see.

More people than companies. Hold on. I think I have a list of. I'm going to look it up. But we should answer this question from Samantha. Can I, as the marketing manager, be the face of the company? We don't have any executives who are interested in creating or following on LinkedIn. Does it work for me to be the person on LinkedIn for the company? 100%. This is what I started to do at Drift. I was not even VP of marketing. I was marketing manager Dave when I started to do that. And it worked because at Drift, we were. I worked in marketing and we were selling marketing software to other people. And so it was like I talked a lot about how we were using our own product and others at the company did the same. And so that would work. I think this can totally work for you. And even if you're not selling into an industry where, like, you're using the product every day, I think you can think of yourself as like the tour guide for the company. And so you're like the spokesperson, basically. You're going to share all the news and information and, and maybe your execs don't want to be on LinkedIn or have a following, but, like, could you talk to them regularly and share their thoughts? I think I was at a point in my career where I didn't have much wisdom on my own. And so a lot of what I shared was from David, who's the founder and CEO at Drift, and it worked.

To grow both of our following.

So my question for Davis that I just started, I just been assigned a LinkedIn page and the page wasn't doing well before me. I have been posting on it for 15 days now, and I've tried to post every day, every day of the week. And I have seen an increase in the number of engagement and the number of followers. But I think that it might be difficult to continue this going forward because I would need, you know, a of lot, lot of new things to post every day. What do I do in that case?

I don't think you need to post every day. I think it's a good strategy. It might, might be working now, but I think, I don't like, I think the, the key to growing your page is not going to be like, well, I posted every day for 365 days and I grew X followers. I think the reason you might post every day is so you can figure out which content is more interesting or which content seems to be a better fit. Like, so of that stuff that you're posting every day, are there things that you're learning? I think it's not necessarily about posting every day, but I think we advice to post often because when you post off and you can learn more. And so like, also, it's only been 15 days. So that's kind of the other part of this. Like, come back to us in six months. That's kind of like the real answer. And like, seems like you're on the right path, which is like, it's starting to work. But like, yeah, you don't have to burn yourself out and, and post every day. Like, not to give you a cliche line, but like, it, it is true. It's not about posting every day. I think that having something to say is going to be more meaningful. And so I, I would now be like, okay, cool, I got, I got 15 days of, of, of data. I just would take it one week at a time and like, okay, what, what content are you going to create for next week based on what you know now like based on what you've learned and how can you keep doing that? The other thing I would say that you could do that doesn't require two things. Can you be commenting on other people's stuff to increase the reach of your page on the platform? And so like, can you make a list of a hundred people that are meaningful in your industry? And can you go and can you like request people to follow the company page? Daniel, how does, how does that work?

Yeah, you could, I think there's 250 people a month that you can request now.

I mean that would be a totally reasonable thing to do. 2, 250 is a lot. Could you kind of like basically go outbound and get people that you want to follow the page? Also, do you have any other channels? Do you have a website? Do you have an email list? Can you ask people to go to your page and follow your page? And like now that you're posting regularly, they might actually be a reason for them to do that. And I, I also think like there is a little bit of manual promotion, grunt work outside of the post thing. It's like, how can I tell more people about this LinkedIn page? And so like, do you have automated emails that are going out all the time and could you update like what's in the footer there? I mean I have like, I get maybe 15 to 20 new email signups a day and each one of those people gets an automated email that's from me. And in that email it says, can you follow me on, on Instagram and LinkedIn? Like little things like that. Where do you have traffic that you can get your page in front of? Could also be beneficial.

Yeah, I love that. I think scrappiness at the beginning is always great, like getting people commenting and getting people to go follow that is in your target audience, whether you outbounding messaging them, but also creating content. But thanks for the question. I see a question from Lorraine. Do you have any advice to produce content and how do you keep it up? My advice for creating content is you have to consume great content and leave. Keep your note taking and swipe files up. I think it's hard to create content if you don't continually consume great content. For me, what I do is any good idea. I hear in a podcast, any cool thing on LinkedIn, I either screenshot or I write in the notes in my phone and then it gives me a bank of things when I need to write content to do that. Also I think you could do a process for writing content that I think so Many people think they need to say so many different things. Really the best people, if you look at them on social media, are saying the same things but a hundred different ways. So if you could figure out what are the, like the three things you want to say in the main statements and say them in different ways, like one day a listicle, one day a story, one day a huge piece of an advice thing, one day something else, and say it 30 different ways. If you go look at Gary Vee, he does that. Great speakers do that. If you see the greatest speakers in the world, they basically are saying their same, the same speech over and over because they've repeated it, so it's really narrowing down your focus. And then also like saying it different ways.

That's such an underrated thing. It's like, you know, back to the previous question, it's like, don't post every day, have two or three kind of like talk tracks that you're always going back to. And there's different ways to hit on them. Like one, if I created a separate account for like, I have a job board or we've even kind of done it right, like, like Exit 5, we kind of came up with this tagline, like, because nobody goes to school for B2B marketing. Oh, cool. That's kind of a frame for like, that's our, that can be the content strategy for what we talk about on social media. That. And so I think like a lot of people jump right to like, I want to post on LinkedIn. And it's like, well, first, what's the story that you have? LinkedIn is just the platform where you're going to like, try to put that story out into the world. And so I love that you mentioned that, that you got to have that story first. Also you made me think of this. Like you said, you got to consume that. How many questions do we see from people? Yeah, who's doing a good job on LinkedIn or I want to be on LinkedIn, but I don't know where to start. It should be like required homework. That if you're going to go, like, if you're going to go use the platform and try to spend time there, people are like, how do I justify that? They ask us how all the time. How do we justify the time? I want to do LinkedIn, but I, I can't justify the time. But they haven't even put in the, the time to really think about this. Like, don't go, your time is limited. You can't just go spend and mess around on Every random channel. Before you even decide this, have a hypothesis, like we said earlier, have a hypothesis about why you want to do, why you want to invest time in LinkedIn, why you think it'd be beneficial, what types of stories you might have and then you can get into the tactics of like daily posting or whatever. But I love that you said that like to be a consumer it should be your home. Can you spend 20 minutes on LinkedIn and find stuff that you like? Like stuff that stands out to you or that you might have an opinion on? That's the best place to start.

There's another good question, and I mean I have a great answer for it is there's a few people at our company that have powerful LinkedIn followings. What's some ways to leverage those connections on our company page, get them to like and comment on your LinkedIn posts. The way I think about LinkedIn, if you go look at any other channels and a lot of people do this is you need to to if you early in the beginning, if you could find people in your industry a niche to like start hyping up your content and you have them in the employees, it hypes up your content. I think of it as like if you go look on TikTok and stuff, there's a bunch of people who co create together and they hype each other and bring up their followings. Like one person goes creates on their profile. That's the same way it works on LinkedIn. If you like someone's, if someone on your company just as simple as a, like it goes out to their network. But one caveat to that, just make sure those people, if you're, if you're using their following are in the niche because then you're just going to get a following of people who are not in your niche and then you get screwed for that, that reason. But if they're in your niche, it's a simple thing is just liking a post and I'm guaranteed they'll do it for you.

Nancy says how do we find the right people slash posts to comment on? I think that's one of the easiest slash best things about LinkedIn. Like with Twitter or Instagram you have to use something like hashtags which can.

Be complete garbage or searching.

But here you're actually searching for specific companies and job roles. And so you can literally, if you sell to VPs of marketing at X type of industry company, you can actually go and search and find all those people. And so I think you, you know, think about who is the type of customer that you sell to. And granted, we're talking about LinkedIn, so I don't, I don't know anything about your business. You could sell, you could sell cookies in a small town. And I probably would tell you that LinkedIn might not be the best place. But I think if you're in the B2B context or maybe the founder, actually even a consumer company, there's huge value in. It just has to be like, I think the value. There would be more about partners and network. But you can go find them. That's the best part about it. And so maybe you're a new company and you have five customers. Find people just like those five customers on LinkedIn and go and connect with them. That's exactly where I would say start.

Dg. I mean, there's a question here about renaming, rebranding. You just went through this process. Why is naming so hard?

It's hard because we, we make it such a big decision. It's not actually hard. There's plenty of companies that have like names that nobody really cares about and that, that's okay. You don't have to like, I think you sweat the name. We sweat the name more internally because it's like, I honestly, I could have called Exit 520 different things and I think they would have all been successful. It's a great story and it happens to work and so it works now. But I think you need to take some of the pressure off of yourself and like, just make a decision. Like, here's X names that we like and we're going to make, we're going to make a decision in the next 90 days and, and go.

I mean, if you think, if you think about all the big name brands out there today, I mean, they are good names, but some of them are bad names. They just became, they just had told a good story. That's why they remembered.

Like, is Craig, is Craig's list a good name? Like, you know, there's many. Or like, what does slack even, what does that even mean? Like, if 10 years ago I said slack, you'd be like slacking like ropes like I. And it's. Because now we know what it is. Like, it's a great comment, Daniel, because like your opportunity is like, name it and then go make it a. You know, there's other elements to the brand. The brand is not your, the brand is not your name and your logo. I, I think it's like what, it's the reputation that you're going to go and create. So take some of the stress off of yourself and pick one. If you only have shitty names, though, you got to work with somebody who can help you. Like, you need you. You gotta have at least one or two that you like. Marketing millennials. Great name. Was that rocket science to create that name? Nope. But you, you came up with it. It's perfect.

It's a great fit.

You picked it and you went with it.

We'll answer two more questions. If I'm wanting to grow my personal brand, how real should I be in real life? Even at work, I curse, I laugh at myself. But also on LinkedIn is viewed as professional, viewed as a professional network. What would you think about that?

I think that I see more and more people being themselves on LinkedIn every day. And I think that's the opportunity to stand out. You're always going to upset somebody if you curse or whatever, or have a different belief than they do, but that's just how it's going to be. And so also, I think it's just much easier. You will have a much easier time creating content if you're being your authenticity, authentic, ish self, then trying to think about, like, I'm trying to be some. I gotta be some character. And what would that character say here?

Someone asked about how to make content more relatable. What is the biggest key to figuring that out? And I. And for making content more relatable, I think to be able to make content more relatable, you have to, like, start looking what your audience is actually talking about. For the first, like, year on LinkedIn, I would to like, like, and I still do this to this day, but actively read comments on other people's posts and my posts and see those common trends of like, okay, people are talking about this, people are talking about that. And then to go post on the market millennials, I'll go say, hey, people are talking about TikTok. Maybe I should start posting more, like, memes and stuff about TikTok. I mean, mine's a me meme tweet shot page. But, like, you could do the same thing if you. It's a different, different avenue. But like, if you're doing it for your customers, go look at what your customers, the active questions they're asking or the audience you're active questions asking and create content around those active questions because that's how it becomes relatable. It's actual questions people are having at the moment or actual conversations that are happening at the moment. That's how it becomes relatable. Again, like, going back to you have to be a consumer. You have to actively read. Like, I see dg, DG runs X. And he's constantly in the comments answering people's questions. And that's probably where he gets a lot of these content ideas from, because I'm talking for you. But I actively see you in comments of people.

I could create 10 different businesses just from what I learned from Exit 5. And I'm not. But, like, it's been the most unbelievable source of feedback for that reason. You nailed that answer, by the way. How do you be more relatable? You got to be inside of the head of the person that you're talking about. Why do you. You, why do you send your friend? Like, when you see something on Instagram or tick tock, that makes you laugh. It's the funniest thing. I sent it to my wife because it's relatable. Like, there's some new young parent, like, little kids, like video. Like, it's relatable because we're living that right now. It's the same thing. Like, if you sell to cyber security and your content is not real or relatable to actual cyber security pros, then it's. It's gonna fail. So you got to get inside of the heads of the people you're trying to reach. And again, this is not. This is all rooted in, like, you're trying to sell a product. You're already talking to these people anyway. It's using that knowledge to your advantage.

Well, I'll end to one last question, because I think this is good. This market. Millennials does repurpose tweets. And I do not think if you need to be a thought leader, you need to repurpose tweets on LinkedIn. The reason why. I'll tell the story. The reason, the quick story, why I started doing that. I actually started doing that so I can get the people on Twitter to be on my podcast as guests. So I was trying to get my target audience on my podcast, and I started posting tweets, screenshots. And then I saw that they. It had reach. But then I started figuring out why they have reaches. Because it stands out in the feed. It disrupts the feed. It was a dark post, which means a black tweet, black background with text on it. It was easy to consume, easy to read. I think you could do the same exact thing with figure out a. A background that works and big text. Or you could just. I also say this to other people is just like, the reason why a lot of content does not work. And this is tough to say is that your content, like a lot of content isn't that good online because they don't like write how a post should be written. Like it needs to have a hook, it needs to have some value in the text and then it needs to have some sort of closing, whether it's a CT or something. That this is the takeaway from this post. And I think a lot of people just post and think it's going to do something. You actually have to write good content and have a good.

I mean when you're, when you're on LinkedIn, you literally pull it up on your phone and you're like, scroll, scroll, scroll. And so all you're looking at is the first 10 to 15 words, that headline. But for some reason when we go to post, we just take a long paragraph and copy and paste it there and it doesn't work. I think there's a line between people kind of do these gimmicky one line, one line, one line, one line, one line posts because you see the headline and then it says read more. But I think the non gimmicky version is like, like picture. You only have that line to explain what's in your post. How would you do that? And then you can expand on it later.

Awesome. Well, this has been great. Thank you so much, dg. I want to give you like a minute to just tell people. I honestly think that DG has a great community. So if you're in BB marketing and you have more of these questions, it's probably a good place to ask some of these questions.

You can just go to exit5.com I don't need to do a big promo. I think if you got value out of this today, you get, come and get the content. There's also an email list. So if you're not ready to join the. It's a paid group. If you're not ready to join it, just go to exit5.com you can get on the email list and I talk about this stuff regularly. Also, I was going to ask Daniel if we could grab this audio and run it on the Exit 5 podcast later. So maybe we'll do that and I think there'll just be other ways for us to stay connected. But you've already done all the plugging that I need. This is amazing. Thank you.

Awesome. Yeah. And anybody, if you want to ask, ask me questions, go. I know we didn't answer all the questions and I always feel bad when I don't answer all the questions, but There was a lot. Just DM me and I'll. I'll shoot you on LinkedIn and I'll shoot you a message back until I answer your questions. But thank you for all for joining. This has been great. Thank you for taking time out your day and thank you, dg.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

Of the Exit File podcast.

If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com we've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do. And they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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