The Viral LinkedIn Hack That Generated 838 Leads Overnight

I'm going to show you how we got 838 leads accidentally from one LinkedIn organic post. And so the story here is that my CTO, we're just sitting in the office and we were talking about product development with our LinkedIn account-based marketing product. I just decided, hey, you know what? We've seen some success with clients already with this product that why don't I just go ahead and post it to LinkedIn? And so the first day that I posted this, maybe it got 20 likes on it and 20 replies or so, which is not terrible, but it was not anything to write home about. I'll just read you the post real quick. So LinkedIn doesn't let you run account-based marketing campaigns at scale until now. Before, you had to go into LinkedIn ads painstakingly and make each campaign individually. Imagine waiting to target 500 campaigns and having to make 500 individual campaigns. It would take forever, right? So I'm kind of scratching the itch over here and kind of addressing the problem that people have, right? And so we— here's like, we created a custom solution. So far with early testing, here's the results that we're seeing. So it's like, scratch the itch, here's the result. And then we kind of confirmed over here to make people even more interested in this, that LinkedIn says that nobody else can do this right now, right? Only we can do this right now. And then the secret sauce here is if you're interested, like and reply to this post with ABM is cool. And so what happened? We got about 500 likes or so, 838 comments, about 71,000 impressions, 6 reposts for this. And you can kind of see what it looks like. Those of you that are interested in LinkedIn ABM, and you can see our customized ads, our customized kind of custom variables as well. And all that to say is when you look through the people here, there are a lot of great companies. This Cognism company is well known as well. So I'm just going to click on this guy. So let's just see how big this company is over here. So he's a demand generation lead, right? Cognism, they have about 1,000 employees or so, or 500 to 1,000, but these are legit companies. I remember there was one enterprise security company that's publicly traded. They had reached out over here. And then there's a bunch of agencies over here that would be interested in this as well. This SVP of marketing at FlexPlay. I think they have FlexPay. They have a good amount of employees as well. So 51 to 200. After we sifted through this, we kind of individually message a lot of people, right? This guy's a good example. I sent this templated text over here. So it said, hi, saw your ABM is cool reply. How much are you slash your clients spending per month on ABM right now? When I send these LinkedIn InMails to people, usually if there's a subject line, I'll just put ABM is cool because they already typed that in. So they know what that's referring to. I get a response from him. And then I said, okay, great. You know, why don't we get on a call over here? Right? Right now, that's what's happening. There's a lot of agencies that are reaching out that they want to do this for their clients. Also, a lot of in-house people are doing this as well, right? And so what I would just say here is that we built something that people want and not anybody that not anybody can do, and we scratch an itch, and we talked about some of the results, and then the results are interesting enough for people to leave that ABM is cool comment. And so far, we've we in terms of the 838 leads, we have about I want to say. Close to, and this has only been within the last week or so, but close to 20 to 25 of them that are marketing qualified leads. And so far we've booked about 4 sales calls from this. And this is all LinkedIn organic. We haven't paid for this, right? And if you think about the impressions that you'd be paying for on LinkedIn, 71,000 impressions, I think the CPM might be a little higher on LinkedIn. You might be paying a couple thousand dollars for this, right? And we got this all for free at the end of the day. If you're an agency owner and you want to grow faster, check out the Agency Owners Association that's hosted by my podcast co-host, Neil Patel, and myself. And we have other agency owners that are doing 8 figures a year. They were doing 9 figures a year. They sold their business for hundreds of millions of dollars, and they're going to share their experiences with you. There's a whole host of other benefits. And the cool thing is that there's a 7-day free trial and you should check it out now because we're going to take the prices up. So just go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more and we'll see you inside. If we kind of try to dissect this a little more, go a little into more detail, well, you might be saying, Eric, well, I can't build any products. I'm not technical. Well, neither am I. What you can do is if you're working with, if you have developers on your team or you're working with any developers, you can use a product like bolt.new or you can use a product like v0. You can create a frontend and you can use, literally you can use prompts to create a frontend that you want to build a product that you want. And then you can, that basically gets you 50 to 60% of the way there. And then you have a developer. Complete the rest of it. What used to be hard for us to mock up as marketers back in the day is now much easier with products out there like Bolt.new and V0. And so they're not paying me to say this, but for us, we think about the products that we're making right now. So there's the LinkedIn ABM product that I just showed you. There are internal linking agents that we built for SEO. Okay, how do we give that away for free? There's, when we talk to some of our clients over at Single Grain, people are talking about, oh, well, how do we do inventory management for our are e-com and a lot of people need that, that are not necessarily enterprise companies. Like they need to understand when they need to order more inventory and things like that. So we've been doing a lot of customer development to figure out what makes sense to build. Definitely you can use these tools to help you make the front end, but you don't want to do too many of these things at once because if you build too many things at once, it's going to be hard to focus. And so right now we're just focused on the LinkedIn ABM aspect. And then maybe in the next month or two, we'll talk about the internal linking agent for SEO purposes. And we'll probably do another post that's similar to this. This keeps us top of mind and this helps us get more leads for the agency, Single Grain, but also gets more potential customers for the product themselves and we can do more customer development. And what happens is once they get into the product, they might need more agency help. And so that's when they— that's where everything kind of comes full circle at the end of the day, right? And so I think the cost of software, I don't think, I know, the cost of software is going to continually come down just like the cost to train a model is continuing to come down. The cost of compute is going to continue to come down as well. I believe the cost of energy is going to continue to come down as well. What that means for you is that you're going to be able to build product a lot faster and ship product a lot faster. In fact, with this product over here, it would have taken 7 months to build it, but this took about 1 month to do. And so developers are going to move a lot faster. And that's exciting because you're going to be able to ship product a lot faster. And to me, the world that we're going into is we might move into a world of a lot of customized SaaS because the cost of software is coming down so much. And I think that's exciting. All right. Quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain. And Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. And so I want to talk about a couple of news strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site, we're building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from a, from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website. And also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint, and our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you inside. I showed you the message that you can DM people with, and I showed you the potential that this thing has. I think the future here, kind of talking about customized SaaS is if we go to clients and we say, hey, what are your problems? Okay, you need inventory management. Okay, over here we have one customer, they have a lot of patient data, right? They need to aggregate that data and they also need to build a new app for talking to their clients or communicating with their clients, right? Because the app that they use right now isn't that good. And I'm actually a client of their product. And so I think being able to build customized SaaS solutions or software solutions for clients And then managing it for them, that's going to be a lot stickier for agencies, right? And so we see the potential of agencies as sky high long-term because the cost to start an agency is not that high. And as long as you continue to hire great talent over a long period of time and you build a strong customer acquisition machine and you just stay in the game for a long time, you're going to be able to do these things. And the more you help your client, the more they're going to want you to help with things. The way I see it is, When we talk about defensibility around a business, there's a great book called 7 Powers. And it talks about one of the 7 powers of a business is switching costs. When you have so much value that you're adding to a customer, it makes it harder for them to switch out over into another vendor or another agency because you're just adding so much value. And even if you're doing things at maybe 8 out of 10 across the board on everything, that 8 out of 10 is still much better than the 10 out of 10 they're doing on one thing, right? And so as you continue to layer on more services, at the end of the day, that's going to help your business grow your contracts into much larger sizes and the clients are going to stay for a lot longer because you've now de-risked yourself in the eyes of the client, right? And so that's where I think this is all going. And I think, sure, it's amazing that we generated 838 leads from one post and we're going to continue to do this. If you continue to build things, you continue to maybe use v0 or bolt.new, build out a front end, developer completes the rest, and then you ask for people to comment on LinkedIn, you keep doing this over and over, I think this is just going to be the gift that keeps on giving. And I'll give you another example today. Maybe you don't have to build a product. I took my talk from speaking at a conference and I chopped it up into 3 to 5 minute segments for little takeaways. And I said, hey, if you want the slides where I spoke at a conference with 20,000 people or so, go ahead and leave a comment with so-and-so, right? Like SEO is cool or something like that, or organic social is cool. that's doing a lot better than the posts that don't have that. And so there's a lot of ways to do this on LinkedIn. You can go build out a product that's going to take you more time. You can offer to share your slides. Maybe you have proprietary information in there that you're okay sharing with a larger crowd, but that the better your offer is, the more likely it is to get more reach. That's really the crux of this. Because if you say, oh, if you leave an email and if you— sorry, if you leave a comment, I'm going to give you a PDF on SEO basics. Not a lot of people are going to be opting in for that because it's not new information necessarily. And it's not that— that's not that interesting to most people. But when you share something, for example, this one, it's a LinkedIn product on LinkedIn for people that are interested in doing more business. And so it's kind of an amalgamation of all the things that people are interested in on LinkedIn, which is why it did as well as it did. I'm looking forward to testing this out more. Leave in the comment below on what else you're interested in with it. With, in terms of LinkedIn organic social, and keen to see what that is.