Highly Effective Organic Marketing Tricks. EP #313 - Den Lennie

I'm a big fan of organic marketing strategies when you're starting out in a video business. So I want to do something a little bit different today and actually give you a live insight to a coaching call from our free scale your video business community. In this particular clip I'm going to share why LinkedIn is a powerful strategy for connecting with potential clients and how using that organic method can help you get business for just the cost of your labor. I would just say to everyone, hands down, don't do anything else but LinkedIn hit 20 connections a day and do it consistently. 100 people a week on average. We do outreach for our VBA elite members. Some of them. He's been doing it for nearly, what's that, nearly eight, nine months now. I forget how many people have reached out to, but he's got 226 active conversations on the go in a big spreadsheet and last week he just went through them all individually and pinged them all a message, pinged them all a note going, hey, how's it going? We've not been in touch for a while, picked up 15, 20 grands worth of work, had another 10 conversations, people going yeah, we know you're there, we love your stuff, we see your stuff on LinkedIn. He posts once a week on LinkedIn and he was saying to me today, in fact he messaged me and said his exact message was basically how pumped he was. He'd had another conversation with someone on Monday, he just reached out, followed up. In fact my team had just connected with someone. They immediately went, actually this timing couldn't be more perfect. And he quoted on I think it was about, I think it is eight or 12 events. It was about 40, 50 grand's worth of work that she was pitching for and she'd contact another company, didn't go back to her, was like, oh it's our meeting. And she's I just need to get an idea of costs. We banged it off to her same day and she went, we win this job, it's yours. And he said, oh, you need to scale LinkedIn team man. If you don't, if you didn't, I'm gonna have to. Haha. It's such a good service because he's just like a busy one man band. He's got an assistant and they do live streaming and they're just like, they're just flat out. And he's scaling, he's gonna buy an AV company and so we're able to just do that for it. But if you don't have that resource. The key is to do it consistently and don't pitch too soon, but literally find a way to connect. We actually have scripts that we share with our paid clients and they're like, they use these follow up scripts and it's a very cool, simple, kind of casual approach.

The most successful, and this is going to sound crazy, the most successful job ever won from these scripts was an outreach made by one of my clients who connected with the company, got talking and a year later they were asked to pitch on a £300,000 project. And they want it all through LinkedIn. And I've got dozens of stories of people who just win amazing gigs on LinkedIn. But here's the caveat, right? It takes a long time. We're talking three, six, nine months of day in, day out connecting and maybe getting 75 no's on average. We see between 15 and 30% accept, maybe a bit lower than that. It'd be 20 to 30% accept rate with our methods. And out of that we get about 9% between 7 and 9% who end up in an active conversation. So.

Really in every hundred people, we end up having conversations with about seven to nine people, of which one to three might buy something. So you can see that you have to do the volume to get the results. And what's challenging is that if you like creators first and foremost, right? Like it's pretty soul destroying, just banging out 20 connections a day. But if you've niched down or niched down, then it's so easy to find people in that niche and connect with them all and become known as the guy or the girl who's in that niche. And what happens with niching is that let's say you're in the renewable energy space and that's all you do. And your website talks about renewable energy, you're renewable energy experts. You use all the language that renewable energies use, the, you know, the kind of, the specific phrases they use. And you connect with everyone on LinkedIn who's in the renewable energy space. You do a job for one of them and you are the renewable energy experts. What happens is after the job you go, hey, would you leave us a Google review? Do you know anybody else in your sector who might be a good connection for. We want to focus on expanding this and they'll be like, yeah, I've got a client who works with universities and that's all he does, he just helps universities who have a department that raises money for private enterprise to come in, get them involved in the University and that's all he does. And he was on a job recently at university and he was working with one client and during that visit they were like, oh, you must meet Bob in this department. Hey Bob, we're working with Alex. You should speak to him. Yeah, cool. You must meet Barry over here and Sid over here. And he walked away with three new connections, all wanting quotes for work because they're like, it's like cows walking through a field, right? They go through the path of least resistance, they don't go through the straight line. So niching allows you to.

Take the path of least resistance. Work with people who already know and trust you in a sector that they already know. And if you're in the renewable energy sector and you want a video making and you've got 15 production companies talking about themselves and how they're so great and love storytelling and then you've got a company that's hey, the seven biggest mistakes renewable energy makes when hiring video production companies. Oh, that sounds interesting. Someone's going to download that because they're like, they're talking my language. So let's go there first. And if you provide value to someone first.

As and when they are ready to buy, they are something like 98% more likely to go back to the source that provided them information right up front. So it's counterintuitive. A lot of people worry about niching because they think, oh, if I niche down I won't be able to do other work. Another client of mine niched down into the manufacturing engineering space with he spent a whole year building a network in distribution, haulage, manufacturing, engineering and got right through the year. And he's hard. These manufacturing companies don't have marketing departments. They don't understand video. It's a nightmare. The haulage ones don't like him working for the company. So it was a really challenging year. But during that process of him reaching out on LinkedIn every week and posting content, they he had someone approach him from an aged care facility and turned around and said, oh, would you be interested in making these films for us? He's sure. How many do you want? He's 25 and it was like 25 films and 25 aged care homes and I think they got so far. Then Covid hit but it was still a sizable multi six figure project. So even though he was niched down in manufacturing engineering and haulage and distribution, a healthcare company came along and went, we like what you're doing, would you do this? And now he's moving his focus to healthcare and just had a big conference up in Cairns here. And niching down doesn't restrict you to only working in that niche. What it does is it gets you very focused on telling a story to that market and it gets you focused on building that network. And it is by and far the companies that I see with the most success, they niche down and they serve a particular vertical, they serve a particular market. So it really is something that you want to try and overcome that fear of niching. Because they say there's a phrase in America, they call it niche. In America, it's niche makes you rich. So I hope you found that helpful. Now, if you'd like to get involved and maybe come and be part of this free community, you can do so by clicking the link below. It's completely free to join, or if you want to, you can watch our free training.

You've been listening to the Video Business Accelerator podcast with your host, Dan Lenny. If you are a video business owner who is tired of going it alone and would benefit from mentorship, support and weekly accountability, then mouse over to www.videobusinessaccelerator.com to learn more about how the Accelerator program can help you today. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show over on itunes, and we'd really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a.