You’re Using LinkedIn Wrong (The Ultimate B2B Strategy) | Jim Marous

I've been rated as an influencer, and I always said it's probably more because of the duration of industry knowledge I have. You know, it's been 5 decades, 50 years in the banking industry. I have 258,000 connections on LinkedIn and 100,000 on Twitter. That's why I'm in it still at my age, is that if I'm not learning, I'm dying. So I keep on trying to evolve. You know, the challenge we have now, we have a very good database of 50,000 names. What I'm interested in now is and saying, how do I get those numbers so that we're fishing beyond our own pond? How do we amp that up? I think there's gonna be an extraordinary consolidation in the banking industry, not because of financial needs, but because of truly being able to keep up with what's going on, digitalization and through AI and things of this nature.

If one bank gets acquired by another and you have a piece of that, that'll pay for like 10 years of your speaking gigs. All right, we got Jim. Banking Transformed, Mastermind member. One of the things we always do is connect one-on-one, see how I can help. So you're here in Toronto. Here we are. How you doing, man?

It's great. Thank you. Glad to see you again. Yeah, well, we see all the time on the videos. In fact, this morning I saw that you're going to be meeting with people and recording, so I'm, I'm living up to your claims on what you're doing online.

I like it. We got our, we got our almost matching shoes, colorful shoes. So maybe a little history context for the audience, and then however I can help.

So we're relatively new to podcasting. We started podcasts, actually me interviewing people, probably around, geez, it's 5 years ago now. It's crazy. It goes very fast. And have over 500, 600 podcasts up. And because of our engagement with you, we started doing what we were calling Banking Insight Videos, which is my face to camera. We started that back in March. And I made a commitment to you during our mastermind meeting then that we be doing, uh, 2 a week, every week. And we started a little bit slower than what we thought, but we, we were in that rhythm, um, got, got some rotation going. And it's been impactful in that, um, one of the things that your, your team brought up is that when I'm interviewing somebody in the banking industry, retail banking, which is what we focus on, um, the star is the person I'm interviewing, and my perspective is pulled out in shorts. But really, you have to look for it within the long form. With the Insight Video, it's me on camera giving my perspectives on things, and that's all there is.

Were you doing the solo videos before? No. So you're only doing podcasts, interviewing people in the banking space, which has led to some awesome deals for you.

And we also had videos of my presentation because I— because the content I create, both written and video and webinars and other things, I also speak internationally. So that is really the funding mechanism for the most part for the whole podcast. And our overall goal is a little different in that because you have a limited audience, because it's a very confined, very defined audience of retail bankers that pretty much are front-facing, so they're the ones that deal with customer issues as opposed to accounting and finance and back office. Our podcasts and everything were focused on this narrow industry, and what we found was what were— our overall goal was to get more opportunities to speak and to work with boards and things of this nature. And while we got some good business from that, Um, the Insight Videos, the things we've done since, which are my perspectives forward, really have worked really well in generating the kind of results we were looking for. We're having many more people reach out and say, hey, can you, can you give us an idea of how you could work with you on an influencer agreement? Which is basically sometimes—

You're an influencer now, Joe.

Sure, yeah, yeah. Well, it's kind of crazy because I've been rated as an influencer, and I always said it's probably more because of the duration of industry knowledge I have. You know, it's been 5 decades. It's right, right, turned 5 in July of, uh, 50 years of in the banking industry. So it's the duration of that, plus timing's a lot of it. Um, I was into LinkedIn and Twitter right at the beginning, 2008, 2007. So they would promote what I was promoting because I'm promoting content, and there would be longer stays on the site. So they saw it very early that I was able to bring that So I have, I have 258,000 connections on LinkedIn and 100,000 on Twitter or on X. And, you know, that only goes so far. So, you know, we're trying to evolve and see what's going on. I've been, as I said, I've been doing the podcast for more than 5 years now and Insight Videos now since March. But we have seen, um, we've learned a lot. That's why I'm in it still at my age, is that if I'm not learning, I'm dying. So I keep on trying to evolve.

So you have the podcast that is geared towards making connections with the people who can hire you or work with you in some capacity?

Honestly, just to provide what I consider to be interesting content to make banking better. So it sounds very altruistic and sounds very much, you know, soft, and the reality is, to a degree, it is. I started writing for the financial services industry on a blog-type platform over a decade ago, and found that people were actually listening to what I was saying and giving perspective because I had seen so much. And so what this does is this keeps the education process going for me. So every time I interview somebody, I make a connection that helps me learn more about the banking industry, which provides new ideas I can use for Inside Videos. Before then, it was simply to put it out to the industry, and we would sell opportunities to be interviewed by solution providers. So another way we'd get funding for the podcast is to have third parties that sell to the banking industry reached out to us and said, would you be willing to interview our executive about what we provide the banking industry? It can't be a sales video, so the interviews are not sales-driven. They're problem-driven and how they can— suddenly we present how they can solve what that problem is. But there's other providers as well. So it's about, as my wife says, about not losing money in the process and at least breaking even or better. And it's been very successful. It's been a lot of fun.

And that leads you to speaking gigs as the number one thing? Yeah, revenue source,

probably the biggest speaking gigs, but also overall content development. So for a lot of our clients, we also develop reports. So I'm gonna also have a research company. So we build reports which are lead magnets. So everybody who downloads a report, we collect names from that. So that's, that's where the inside videos and podcasts drives Drive names, database builds.

What are the size of the ideal clients for you? Because the banking world is very different in the US obviously than Canada.

Yeah, for interviewing for a podcast, any size. But most of our database, we have a database that came from the, the what I'm gonna call the blog, the publication called The Financial Brand. We have about 50,000 names on that that are global. They're bankers, they're also solution providers, they're fintech companies, they're people in the financial services industry. The leaning toward that are probably very much like a regular traditional database of financial institutions, which means there's many more under $20 billion than over $20 billion. There's only 5 to 10 that are megabanks in the US. If you took it globally, you maybe have 20 at most that are the megabanks. Our real audience, our preferred database would be those organizations, the $5 to $20 billion, but even smaller, because they're doing more. What's interesting, you have the very big banks, the Canada— the Canadian 5— Huge. That are doing a lot, but because they have the funding, they have the money for it in most cases. In the U.S., it's the same thing. The top 5 or 10 are— have it because of funding. They're doing a lot. But we also find that the smallest financial institutions are the ones that are really exciting to watch because they're doing about what the big banks are doing but with a whole lot less because they have third-party solution providers that provide them the capabilities now with digitalization and AI to do some really exciting things as financial institutions. They're the ones I'm trying to get to move from the standpoint of not funding but basically just engaging because that's who the third-party firms that want to help That want to fund our podcast want to reach. They, they know that if they hit, you know, 10% of that base, it's a lot easier win to sustain than trying to hit one of the big banks.

So it's speaking, it's the research, and then selling sponsorships on the podcast?

Yeah. Yep.

What about boards?

Because of the inside videos, I've done more board presentations this year than I've done since I've started, and I'm saying board plus executive leadership. We just did some things for the Farm Bureau. There's major financial institutions in the U.S. called Farm Bureaus. There's, there's a number of them, but I've spoken to the boards of 2 major ones, and then yesterday I just came back from speaking to 9 leadership groups within these Farm Bureaus. These do not collect checking accounts. They're not traditional financial institutions. They're funding mechanisms for Farmers, people in the ag business, in the cattle and chicken business. It's interesting to get introduced by somebody and somebody introduces themselves. So, hi, I'm Bob. I'm in pigs. That's an interesting introduction. I haven't heard that one before. Hi, I'm Susan. I'm in chickens. And I go, okay, this is dairy. You have corn, you have wheat. But it's interesting because in meeting with those leadership groups, you get a good perspective. We did workshops. So I was leading workshops in that field.

What about joining boards?

I get offered all the time.

You don't want to?

It becomes a drain in that I don't know if I can— you get paid, you get engagement. I don't get in the weeds that much. I'm not the person that gets into financial reports deeply because I built content and built the nuances of how you serve customers. I could probably add something. It's just something that I haven't entertained up to this point.

I'm just thinking, like, you have such expertise. What I love about your business, we help people and millions of subscribers, et cetera. It's such a niche. God, yes. Which is great, right? You're not gonna have a million people subscribing to a retail banking channel. Right. But establishing yourself as the go-to person inside of a niche, and a very well-paying niche, is fantastic. As you get better and better at the thing, and all of your industry expertise of what you've been doing for the past, you know, few decades, is valuable. And I'm just trying to figure out, how do you— how do— how do we also get you paid more? I mean, you can keep raising your speaking fee. The bigger market penetration you have to retail banking, the more you'll make from sponsors and everything else. But typically, for someone like you who has the expertise, it's then taking a percentage of the businesses that you're helping with,

right?

Which, which in the banking world is, uh, usually boards. So—

And it's interesting because there are people like me that focus on the fintech space, the startup space. That's not who we focus on. While we understand that business, we've really settled in on the retail banking space. So you're right, the boards would be that angle of that and be able to do board assignments. As I said, it doesn't come close to the number of people that say they want to be on my show. For sure, for sure. Which is interesting. But yeah, it would be an angle.

But it's not like joining the board of American Express. That's a giant thing. But for the people that are— for the companies that are under, whether it's the $5 billion companies, where your insights are really valuable to them, workshops are fine, and it pays— it's time for money. Where if you're on a board, and you're getting a piece of the company as part of shares, as part of joining, as long as the terms are laid out in advance, Yeah. Like, people go to boards— they have boards for different reasons. Sometimes it's just for connections. Sometimes it's like you have to help bring in deals. Your responsibility on the board is bringing research that's always up to date of what's going on in the industry. And I can also help be a platform for people. And then lead training, which is part of the conference.

That's a very good idea. Yeah, and something we hadn't pursued.

But you're not in charge of governance.

Right, right, right.

And compliance. Right. Or making introductions.

But, you know, more and more boards have to build these specialties within them. 100%. Interesting. I just interviewed a person from a small financial institution in Colorado. He was a preacher. He was in the, in the preaching business for 20 years, and he moved into banking because of a friend that said, we'd like you to lead, you're a good leader. And he talked about the first thing he had to do was not only revamp the back office of the organization he took over, but he had to revamp the board. Because the board was, as a lot of small institutions are, you had the person who was the, the wife of somebody that was here, or somebody who was a banker in the past. And to bring them up to speed on what they have to do now, he's actually had his, his leadership team assigned to train the board to be the governance of them. So they're training them to be their bosses to a degree. But that's more important than ever because the industry, again, is moving so fast. The need for an up-to-date board has never been more important and more valuable. And what we see when in our interviewing, the biggest gap between what's possible and what's done is leadership, both at the regular management team, but also the board, that too many people right now are not keeping up with what's going on in the industry and they're vulnerable. I think there's gonna be an extraordinary consolidation in the banking industry. Not because of financial needs, but because of truly being able to keep up with what's going on digitally, digitalization, and through AI and things of this nature.

As long as you can set the terms.

Yeah.

Meaning like you're not going to be on a call every week, you're not going to be in the weeds of their operations, you're not going to be doing things that maybe some of the other board members would be doing. Maybe you go to a quarterly meeting or an annual meeting, like you set the terms of what it would look like to work with you, but you're basically getting a piece of the company. Instead of it just being you get the engagement plus the fee, and your expertise at the board level is beyond just— I mean, the training is great. You'll take it. And is there a world where you join the board, bring all your expertise, but you're not treated like every other board member because you're bringing in more domain expertise and other things?

They get the training as part of the deal. I mean, that's— yeah. It makes a lot of sense.

Well, you get paid for it too. You get paid for that. That's separate. But you're not the governance guy. You can speak to it. I'm sure you've seen it. But you're not responsible for being in the weeds on anything. You're providing high-level insights, maybe some connections. I mean, if there's going to be a consolidation, that's a—

Yeah. Well, that's one of the things with duration in the industry. As I tell people when I leave after an engagement, I say, connect with me if you have a question. I may not know the answer, but I guarantee I know the person that knows that answer. The connections is a big deal right now because it is still a very small group of people that can really guide an organization into different dynamics of what's going on right now in areas that I'm not the specialist in. But again, I know who to contact or who to refer them to, which is—

It's the highest— like, what happens to presidents after they stop being president? They join boards of—

Write books and join boards. Yep.

Because that pays incredibly well and they get to use their connections, but they're not going, you know, to weekly meetings or in the weeds of the business, right? But it's just much higher upside than just trading time for money.

Great idea.

Well, I mean, it's— if you like it, then it's also, okay, how do you make the content that helps facilitate those things as well? So like, one, it could just be, hey, all the relationships you had It can be part of the package. Just ask.

Right, right.

And say, hey, I have this thing. I'm looking to join 4 boards. Here's the kind of compensation I'm looking at doing. Does that fit for what you're doing or not? Because they may not have thought of— they think of you as a guy coming in and training, being the influencer, and the leader, and the speaker, but maybe not— they may not have thought of that before. And with the transition everybody's going through, it's like it's so hot. Right now, especially if they're going to be consolidation and you're going to help facilitate even the merger and acquisition of different banks together.

The questions to ask, if nothing else. Yep.

Yeah, if not the connections, right? Or even like seeing around the corners because of what you're doing with all the research. So, one is just asking your existing network, right? But then 2, what is it— what does a content package look like for them in a sense of how does the How does the podcast maybe change in terms of the guests that you have on? So do you interview some of the other board members?

We don't interview board members, but we interview the top of the food chain within the organization. Because board members tend, at least now, tend to be— they don't like to be questioned about their financial institution. relationships, at least my example, even in a one-to-one situation where I meet with the board and with the organization, they're very cautious about talking because most of them, many of them, don't feel skilled at the banking side of what they're going to be asked. They're more likely to know their niche on what they bring to the table. You know, maybe real estate examples. It may be that They worked for an ad agency or something like that. It's very interesting, but I think to your point, I think where you're going is that talking to the leadership about their boards, and that's where the interesting discussion came with this gentleman out of Colorado, is most of the discussion was around how he brought his board up to speed and how important that is today. So more of those kind of conversations.

I'm thinking more on, who are the relationships that you need to go further with?

Yeah.

And if you knew the board members of the— I don't know if the top banks are the most— are the best angle for you, or the ones that are like $5 to $20 billion range is a good one for you?

Yeah.

But if you knew— and you know some of them already, obviously— but if you had deeper relationships with the people who are on the boards of all those banks, What does that do for everything? And they may not be able to speak exactly to the financial operations of that bank, but why are they on the board? What— why did they join? What do they look for in a board? What trends are they seeing in, in the space?

Well, a lot of this could come out of the, you know, as I said, I get reached out to quite a bit. It's actually to extend that conversation beyond the, no, thank you very much, but I don't do that right now.

Yeah.

It's to take that extension a little bit more and going, okay, what do you— what are you looking at? What are the roles Ask those people that as well.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of times, how do the new board members get picked? Well, the existing board decides who they're gonna—

Right.

So, if you knew the existing board, you're more likely to get called in, at the very least to come in and do training.

Right.

But at the best, either to join the board or to facilitate the acquisition or merger between companies. Like, if you have— if you're on the board of a $5 billion bank that, you know, is going through some trouble or is looking to merge, get acquired, and you had connections into all these other boards of banks that might buy them.

Well, it's interesting. As I said, the insight videos I'm doing now, the growth videos in your terminology, what is interesting is the number of organizations that have reached out to us. We haven't made every engagement work, but many more than we've ever had want me to bring these insights to their team. So they're hearing something in my discussions that says, we need, you know, most leadership is going, we need our board to hear this. We need them to buy it from a third party because we've been talking about it for 4 years. The board doesn't seem to be buying on. This person can be brought in to talk about that. But it's interesting, it's a difference between the podcasts I was doing and the inside videos that I'm doing are driving different types of engagements and more of them.

Yeah,

which is kind of exciting.

You'll make way more, and I'm not— money's not the only thing, obviously, but you'll make way more having a piece of the pie instead of just a fee, a structured fee for doing it. Like, you get paid handsomely to do speaking gigs and presentations. It's great, you're not complaining. Fee can go up as you get more, even more notoriety and more insights. And it's still nothing compared to if, like, if one bank gets acquired by another and you have a piece of that Yeah, no doubt. That'll pay for like 10 years of your speaking gigs.

Yep.

Right? So it's like, at least that's where my mind goes. Like, how do you structure— because for someone with your caliber and all the experience and history within this space, how do you best leverage that? Because nobody else is— there's some people who might have comparable knowledge or industry expertise, but who also has a brain where they're doing a show and interviewing people and and speaking doesn't exist.

Yeah, it's still— it's nice. I have an enviable position, even for me, having an enviable position within myself that I haven't fully leveraged, I'm sure.

Anyway, just to keep you down the content path, like those videos might not be the best viewed videos, but if it leads to relationship that leads to a $100 billion acquisition, it's like it's—

Yeah.

Definitely worth it.

Yeah.

Did you have thoughts or questions? I know we— I do. I dominated a bunch there, but—

No, no, you asked a question I wouldn't have asked, but it was a great conversation because it got me into another mindset, which is really, you know, why we're engaged. You know, the challenge we have now, as you said, we have a very limited audience. Um, we have a very good database of 50,000 names, but we know what we're going to get from a view standpoint, from an Insight Video standpoint, from a activity and engagement standpoint on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, whatever it may be. What I'm interested in now in saying, how do I get those numbers so that we're fishing beyond our own pond? We— I'd say about half of our, our views or engagements on anything we're producing comes out of our emails we do 3 times a week to the base. So we, we know almost like clockwork It's had some hiccups recently, and as you know, as the algorithms change, other things change. But we're seeing— we can predict what's going to happen. What we want is a bigger pond. I got the approval. We went through a year. My associate said, why did you do what you did? And what I did is I made it so that anybody that bought reports, they could put it on their site and not on my site. so they could generate the leads directly, even though every lead that I generated from a download of a report, we'd share with the client. It got into the, oh, let's put it on our site. There seemed to be a value to that to them, but it made it so I didn't have the contacts anymore. I could, but it would be going to the client and I wouldn't be getting it. I need the name.

Yeah.

So now we've— there's 6 of them that we had from last year, so 6 really good reports that now we have content that we can have as a lead magnet as part of videos that we're doing, things of that nature. We're building that out, and the— we're building out a whole lot of things at the same time that will get us more. My question is, how do we amp that up? And you, you buy ads on social media, I believe, at least that I get them enough that I think it's paid, paid ads. How does that work from the perspective of generating new, new people, new leads of people that are raising their hands. So for what I'm looking at is I not only want to potentially create ads for the reports to get downloads as opposed to ads for the, the content, because once I get downloads and they buy into that, I'll get them into the content we're creating. And I'm thinking that the thing of most value we can give to people is to let them know we have reports on this subject, this subject, this subject, but to push it out to everybody that fits a certain profile within LinkedIn. I'm wondering, is that a viable strategy, and does it generate the brand new names? Because while we have 50,000, the people that hit an executive manager, a vice president, executive vice president, director, things of this nature, in— within the 8,000 financial institutions out there. There's a lot of them and we don't have those. And I'm wondering, is advertising to get downloads a viable amp-up strategy for getting more names so we can get the more activity on the channel? Yeah,

so ads are the fastest way to get downloads. interest. It's also the most expensive.

Right.

And as soon as you stop it, it stops. So, to do it, you typically need to be pretty sophisticated on tracking who we're targeting and then how many of those actually lead to revenue, which is a little more challenging for you because you're not selling a product that just goes e-commerce. It's a direct hit. You could track all of the sale, right? So at some point they have— if somebody's going to hire you, at some point they're going to talk to you on the phone or Zoom or whatever. And you're going to ask them, how did you hear about me? And, oh, we saw you online. But it's like, yeah, but was it— did it get you paid or was it— Right. Right? And so that's where maybe with the reports, like if you can track from the reports, Who downloaded, what's their name and email, and is that the person who's calling you? Sometimes still the challenge though is the person who downloads it isn't the one who makes the decision, so they pass you off to somebody else who introduces you then to the CEO who then hires you, but the CEO never touched any of the reports. So, it's hard to get attribution. That's—

It's not a direct hit.

That's the hardest part is like, is it working or not? You might see an increase in revenue hopefully, but to say this came from an ad campaign is hard. And there's a lot of people doing it. So there's a level of sophistication that needs to be in place or you just burn money. It's super easy to burn money on ads. Every platform, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, those two probably not your target demo. Right. X, they will all take as much money as you want to give them. Right? They'll take $10 million a day. They'll take it. It's easy to burn money and get no results.

Well, as you said, in your situation, there's a tighter association between ad, lead, sale than there is with me, which is ad, name, they see, you know, it's maybe a 4 steps away type dynamic.

I mean, content and ads can work very well together. If we're running an ad for Movement Makers, or actually we don't run for Mastermind, but for Movement Makers, the more people already know me, the easier it is for them to wanna join. If they don't know who I am at all from content, then it's a much more challenging, somebody doesn't know who you are, you have to tell a story, and versus, oh, I've seen your stuff, it's much warmer. So the challenge becomes, can you make an ROI on it? And like, can you? Yes. Will you? I don't know. Well,

and the other, the other issue here is I'm getting more offers to sell or partner the business, even though I'm the, I'm the, the, I'm the face of the company and the face of what I'm doing. The database we have becomes fairly valuable.

Yeah.

And the database becomes, um, something has an investment value. And what we're trying to do is also make it so that there's a value to the business, if for no other reason than the database itself.

Sure. I mean, harder to quantify, right? So, like, are you going to throw $10,000 a month on ads or $100,000 a month or whatever, right, because the database is growing, because in 3 years you might exit or whatever? Like, it's harder to—

Oh yeah, right. It's one more layer. Yeah,

right. Everything helps increase enterprise value, but is it you Likely need to make money along the way, as opposed to I'm just building this database and then I can sell on some unknown point in the future, right? Yep. So tracking it, like for us, generally the person who signs up is the person that ends up working with us. Yep. Where for you it may not be; it might be the lower level person who then makes an introduction. So it's a little harder to track, and you can ask, like you do your best. How did you hear about me? People don't remember. That's the challenge, right? It's like oh,

a little bit here, a little bit there.

Yeah, or like Johnny sent it to me. How did Johnny find out? And Johnny doesn't remember. So it's harder to track, that's the challenge, and it's expensive. LinkedIn in particular has the highest floor, which isn't great. So they're the most expensive ads, 'cause you can target, like they're the most targeted, like banking.

And they're the most used by the bankers, yeah.

Well, the bankers are everywhere, it's just a matter of how do you best target them? Like the bankers are, they're on YouTube watching videos, but the targeting, through an ad platform is a lot harder, 'cause you can't target by position, you'd have to target by intent. It's like, what would they be searching for? And then you show up versus LinkedIn, you can say a VP at whatever company, you can target those people directly, but it's the highest floor. So the other platforms, if nobody's advertising, the floor is super cheap.

Right.

LinkedIn sets like an artificial floor, so you're paying a higher amount even if nobody else is advertising.

Right.

So it's still super doable, but the— you need a higher level of sophistication to make money doing it.

Our first step is going to be to truly over-promote the report, the research we do. And, you know, because LinkedIn now makes it so that you can't have the link within the— it hurts you if you have the link in the post, in the post. So you make it the first comment, but still, it at least gives us a ramp to say, does this sell? Does it create interest? And then, you know, they're also seeing a lot more from me with regard to what we're showing from a con— from what we're developing content-wise, from what we're doing video-wise.

How engaged are you with the comments and the people who follow you on LinkedIn?

Less on Instagram, quite a bit more on LinkedIn. And it's interesting because we're seeing people that automatically follow and make— I'm starting to see it doesn't matter what I post, this person, these 2 or 3 people are going to be on every single thing I post. And it's interesting because you wonder, okay, how much are they really engaged? You know, we have AI tools all over the place on people putting posts up there, but we're seeing much more engagement again from what we're doing from the inside videos than what we did from the interviews, from the podcasts. People saw it, but it didn't drive the number of— the amount of engagement on LinkedIn that we are on LinkedIn now.

I would recommend before spending a ton of money on a LinkedIn ads campaign, that's still there, it's just because it requires a level of sophistication that you can burn money and see nothing, especially LinkedIn because it's more expensive than the other platforms. You know, if it was like this studio, Toronto Dance Salsa, great. You want to do Instagram ads within a 10-mile radius, Throw $100 a day, $300 a day, whatever. Like, it's fine. Go do and test it. It's harder for you to test it well. So what I would recommend is first have a targeted campaign to have engagement with the people who follow you on LinkedIn or who engage with your stuff. So who follows you? Who comments on the post? Like, who's engaged with your stuff? And a lot of LinkedIn and Instagram but less so for Instagram, for you, happens in the DMs,

right?

We have someone coming into Mastermind who came from LinkedIn, and my team was talking to her, uh, on LinkedIn in the DMs. I think she commented on one of our posts or liked one of our things or followed me or whatever. My team reached out like, hey, what are you doing? What are you up to? Um, do you want to talk with someone on our team eventually? Like, you filter people through, right? And then she talked to, I think, Ida, our growth strategist, and now she'll be here tomorrow.

Yeah.

Through LinkedIn. But it's like an active outreach campaign to the people who are engaged with your stuff.

Correct.

And that is worth, I think, 'cause you know LinkedIn works. I'm sure you get DMs. I'm sure you get people reaching out.

Yep, yep. And actually, Much more of what we're getting from, hey, would you be in— it's interesting how people don't probe very deep to figure out where my— it's not like my email address is invisible.

Yeah.

But there's a lot more reach out on LinkedIn as the first step, direct through DMs and everything, saying, hey, wonder if you'd be interested in doing X, Y, or Z.

Yep.

And that's the way they're engaging.

Yeah.

And I move them quickly to email. Yep. But yeah.

You might not want to. Move them to email. Because the more they're on LinkedIn in the DMs, the more they're gonna see your content again popping up, and that's then something they can share, or you're staying top of mind. But I think you have an opportunity to make LinkedIn and Instagram, the DMs, a lot of business gets done there.

Right.

YouTube doesn't have that.

Right.

I mean, they're building it, but whatever. YouTube's not really a social platform the way that the other ones are.

They don't, comments don't flow. Yeah.

So, if you created, and this is something we've done, we could talk about it, but you can create your own version of it, a map for people so that when somebody follows you or when somebody likes your post or if they reshare it or if they comment on it, there's an auto— there's a— well, it's not an automatic, but somebody on team reaches out and says, thank you for blank. Let's say somebody follows you. Thank you so much for following Jim. My team doesn't pretend to be me.

Right.

It would be more effective if you said, thank you for following me.

Yep.

We just don't like to trick people. But thank you so much for following, Jim. Whatever the next question is, like, what is your connection to retail banking? Question mark. I don't know what the best question is. I don't know.

Is that good? Yeah, right, right.

Yeah. Let's assume that.

Whenever anybody starts to follow you, you have a system to keep that engagement going when they follow you.

Someone on team reaches out in the DM, and I turn my content person. So we have somebody who, one person dedicated to LinkedIn. She now is also in charge of the outreach. And at some point that outreach game will likely be a full-time job between LinkedIn and Instagram, just outreach, talking to people. But if that was your first, it's like somebody follows you, A follow or a like or a comment, it's not— a lot of times it's— they never see you again. It doesn't mean a lot. But if you reach out and try to make a connection, you can hopefully solve a problem that they're facing if it's a good fit for what you're helpful with.

Right.

So this scenario, right? Somebody follows you. Hey, thank you so much for following, Jim. The classic line is like, are you here for the free content or are you looking to blank? Like, what would the blank be that would lead to engagement for you?

Are you looking to learn more about whatever they've— wherever the link is? If it's a comment, yeah, then I talk about whatever that content was. Because if it's a comment about marketing, are you interested in learning more about what we're doing in the marketing space? That would be a normal comment. If it's simply a follow, I'd probably ask them really raw, what are you doing from a perspective of why did you decide to follow me? I mean, probably a little bit more soft than that. Well,

what would lead— let's say somebody follows you, and the more simple you can make it, the easier it is to scale, right? So are you here for the free content, which can cover everything, right? Welcome. Or are you trying to blank? Or are you—

Sell something. You know, what's your biggest challenge right now?

Yeah, or is there a problem you're trying to solve?

Yeah.

You know, is there a specific challenge you're trying to overcome? You know, like just some, some question to try to— what we're trying to do is not burn your time first,

right? You

don't want you hopping on a call with everybody who follows you on LinkedIn, right? That's not going to be a great use of your time, probably, right? Then we don't want to burn team's time where they're spending a ton of time on every single person. You're trying to filter them, filter opportunities to the right place. So you're here for the free content, or you— or is there a specific problem you're trying to solve?

That communication is going on on LinkedIn as opposed to through email?

Correct.

Okay.

Well, they followed you, so you don't even have to email them.

I mean, you can use Sales Navigator, right? Mostly.

But that happens on— somebody follows you, you send that message. Thank you so much for following, Jim. You know, my name is blank. Are you here for the free content, or are you trying to solve a specific problem? Like, where that first question, then you see what they say. Some might not write back, so you can follow up. Like, hey, just wanted to follow up to see you know why you follow Jim and what you're here for. Tell me more.

How far back on LinkedIn can you go with people that have followed you, or actually not followed you but connected? Wanted to connect him. I'm just wondering how far because

you could go all the way back. I mean, you look at your followers and you can start messaging them.

You only can go so far back with oh you just don't have emails. You have follow. You can get the names of people that follow you.

Yeah, who your connections are, and then you send them a DM. Like how many how many people are following you on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn we have let's see followers. I think followers are 295, and then connections are, uh, 24,000, something like that.

Okay, so that'll take a lot longer to go through, right? But, and your, your limits if you're not using Sales Navigator, so the— but it's fine. But you don't even need to pay. I mean, Sales Navigator is not expensive, but you don't even need to pay for that to start proving the model. And you start with the people who are most recent.

That's better than ads. I mean, basically going to the people that are already connected in some way, shape, or form.

What I'm trying to do is prove the outreach model.

Right, right, right.

Because they don't want you burning money that goes nowhere. Right. Right? And so your, your best version is the people who are already connected to you loosely, who you haven't created an engagement with yet because they don't know enough about you. The easiest way is, hey, they already know you, just send them a message, thank them, and get to know them a little bit more. So start with the newest people. Like, you're not getting 1,000 people a day following you on LinkedIn. So if you have 5 a day or whatever, great. Message all 5 of those every day with that message, and then apply it to the likes and apply it to the comments. Comments is the same thing, like, hey, thank you so much for leaving a comment on Jim's post. Are you here for the free content? Are you trying to solve a problem in banking?

Yeah. Right?

It's like you have your same kind of flow, and then 1 or 2 follow-ups after that. Hey, just following up. We'd love to hear from you what your challenge is with—

The whole process of engagement is a whole lot easier nowadays than it used to be.

You train this person to look at, so for us, what's valuable for us? Well, somebody who has an existing business and somebody who's already been making content. Have we helped people who have never made videos? Yes, but it's a lot harder. My team is trained to, when that comes in, they then look at the person's profile again and they'll see, can we find a YouTube channel on this person? You know, we make a lot of content for entrepreneurs who they may not even wanna, like Movement Makers is a tiny piece of my audience compared to who we're serving, right? Yeah. So we wanna make sure they already have a channel of some kind, they're an expert, we're not doing like a slime channel or something. So whatever the criteria is that you have your team go through, like there's definitely people who've commented or followed you or connected with you who are maybe switched jobs or now are in the ideal place.

Oh yeah.

To be able to hire you, and you have no idea that they're there.

Yep. And

if you just outreach to them, like, and maybe they haven't engaged with your stuff, In a month or two, or year, or five years. Like as you start going back, like oh yeah, like a lot of it is just staying top of mind and timing, right?

Yeah.

Especially how much people job hop. So now they're in the right position, like oh yeah, maybe we can use Jim, and they love you, they've heard of you, or they've seen your stuff, but they just didn't think about you. Then depending on what the answer, you can send them to different paths, right? So some people, if people are here for the free content, or you know they're struggling with whatever problem. If they don't look like they're the kind of person that might be engaged with you, you send them to your YouTube video. Hey, Jim just made a video on this. Jim made an insight video talking about blank. Oh, you're in this space? Jim's made a video on that. So you use your YouTube catalog as free value, right, in the conversation because you know what they struggled with. And you can use AI to help you with that, right?

Well, and we're building a— rebuilding our website now to have an AI Ask Jim component based on all the videos we've done, all the writings I've done, basically going back history-wise in a reverse—

Great. But don't send them to that, right? Send them to a personal video.

Okay.

Meaning, that's a great tool for anybody visiting the site. Awesome. Like, to be able to direct people to find the right piece of content is extremely valuable, but it's like Um, what we want to do is create a personal touch with people. It's like when you say, hey, here's my Calendly link to book in my calendar, versus my assistant will make sure that we get you a time,

right?

If you send them, hey, Jim's done a lot of videos, like, uh, what's a recent video that you made that might be interesting for people?

Um, on, uh, new customer onboarding.

Okay, how to onboard new customers. If somebody's in that world, Right? Based off what they've posted or their job description or what they wrote in the messaging. If we know that about them and then you say, hey, go to Jim's website and you can ask Jim anytime to find videos, they're not going to do it. But if you said, hey, you know, Jim actually just recently made a video about customer onboarding. Here's a link if you want to go check it out. It's more personal. They're much more likely to go click on it.

Right.

hand-to-hand combat, building a relationship.

Rather than having to find it.

Correct. For the right people, right? For somebody who's maybe just getting started or not in the right industry, or like they're a— they have a marketing agency or something.

Do you ever try to get into the email side of that for being able to build a database, or no? You keep that— all those conversations strictly within the LinkedIn profile, within LinkedIn, um,

Getting their email is great for your newsletters and everything else. The more the conversation itself happens on LinkedIn, the more likely they're going to see your stuff. I don't know how much you're in the Instagram DMs or LinkedIn DMs, but if you notice when you DM somebody, you go back and forth and then you go back to the homepage, you start to see, oh, why is this person showing up now? Like if I sent you a DM on Instagram, I'll see a gym video now on my homepage.

Yeah.

So you wanna stay top of mind. We need their email address for the newsletters, for the follow-ups, for your database. So if you had some kind of opt-in, like ultimately you're thinking about this conversation we're having in the DMs, where do people go next? So the people who are just here for the free content, who are not like, it's an SEO agency who's gonna fix your website or whatever. Okay, that's not a client. They're not gonna hire you. we don't need to continue to spend a lot of time talking to this person, right? As they are more down the path of this might be a potential client, then some may need to go to you, some may need to be put through, hey, here's our— we have this report on blank that can be behind an email, like leave me your email, like lead magnet. We capture the email address. Yeah. But the main goal there is just to figure out how can we use LinkedIn proactively now instead of just content to connect with potential ideal clients. And if you get some engagements from it, it's easier to justify going and spending money on ads to really turbocharge it.

Yeah, yeah.

Right? So I would do, start with LinkedIn, start with your DMs, create that sequence. What are the questions that you're gonna ask? who gets to you, what criteria do you need to have?

Yep.

They have to be in the banking world. It's not an agency of doing something else, right? They have to be in North America. I don't know if you care about like Australian bankers.

Most likely, yeah.

Right? They have to have a profile picture, right?

Yeah, oh yeah.

Well, it's not— or not somebody in their undershirt, you know, which doesn't really happen as much on LinkedIn, but still, right?

Right.

And whatever other criteria They would need to go through before it justifies you hopping on a call with them.

Yeah,

but then you train team on doing that. That is a part-time thing at the beginning that then could evolve into a full-time role as you start going through 21,000 connections.

I'm benefited by the fact that most of the people that connect with me have heard of me in some way, shape, or form and know of me quickly after they connect on LinkedIn, whatever else, because all the other content I'm doing.

Yeah, the recent ones for sure. But now if we start going back into your 20,000+ connections, they might not have heard of you for 3 years.

Right.

It's still like, oh yeah, yeah. But those are great.

Yeah.

That's way better than a cold ad that—

No doubt.

Somebody just started at Bank of America or whatever, and now they're showing

up. Who isn't on LinkedIn that often or doesn't look for what we're doing.

Right.

Yeah.

So the goal becomes prove it with the warmest audience and then move to colder and colder.

Yeah.

And then spend more and more.

And I have the benefit of a very large database within LinkedIn. I've always just been anxious about the fact that we don't own anything of that in many cases. But what I think you're sharing with me is that that really doesn't matter if you're building engagement through their platform. It's not something that's going to hurt because they'll pick up the other things. And from the same— I

still want their email address though, right?

No, no, I, I understand, but we can get that by, by sending, you know, saying, hey, if you want to get the free report, because that's how we capture the email addresses through the reports.

Yeah. So the more you're engaging with them on LinkedIn in the DMs, the more your stuff will show up. Yeah. And you want it to show up, especially for the people you're having conversations with. So that's where the YouTube content can be valuable. Because you have a video from

them. Yeah, for on the DM. Yeah, LinkedIn's model makes it so that they're seeing more of my stuff after we've had that connection.

Yes, it's not like it's, uh, uh, you know, now only going to be Jim in there in their feed, right? But any form of connection, like a DM, if they're engaging— if you just send a DM and they don't write back, then maybe not— but if they're engaging in it, it's a signal to LinkedIn that—

They're engaging.

They like you. Yeah. So let's show more gym stuff to them. Right. Right? And showing it to, especially to the hot people who you're having conversations with, is valuable because they might be in buying mode. Maybe they hire you. Maybe they forward a message you have to somebody else.

There's a reason why they're engaging.

Right? Yep. But then the one-on-one kind of concierge backend where they're having the connection, the conversation with your team, where you're giving insight reports, or you're linking to the latest podcast, you're sending them to a video, that's targeted, that's where you can use the Ask Jim. Like, your team uses Ask Jim to say, hey, here's this person, what do I send them?

Yep.

'Cause your team won't know all the—

Yeah.

Every video and, you know, how relevant it is. But if you start with your warmest people first, prove that it works, that— 'cause you only need one gig for it to pay off handsomely.

Yeah.

Right?

Right.

That then, Get Sales Navigator and start going back through all of your contacts and have a separate sequence built for followers first, but then comments, likes, reshares. That could easily be a full-time job. Yeah. And then prove that that works and then go ads.

Maybe we don't go any further than that. I mean—

Well, that could be enough.

The good news is I'm not sitting here with only 3,000 or 500 followers.

Connections. Yeah.

It's a pretty doggone big pot I got here.

And that could be enough.

Yeah.

I mean, it's a lot of work, but hopefully it's opportunities. Like, if you're— if you were in touch with those 21,000 people, how many hidden opportunities are in there,

right,

to hire you?

Right.

Just nobody's reaching out and talking to them.

And it's certainly more than the 50,000 we have on our regular database. Yeah.

Yeah. The ad world is— it was newer for me when I started with just content. And then I got into the ad world from the other side where a lot of people were coming to us who started with ads and they couldn't make any more money on ads.

Right.

Because the colder audiences you go, the more expensive it gets. So, they basically tapped out of their warmish audience and the more new and broad they went, they just were spending money and it wasn't turning out to anything. So organic converts the best.

Right.

So they wanted to grow their organic so that they could retarget them with ads, right? Which is another thing you do for YouTube as well, right?

Yeah.

Like the people who watch your content, you can retarget them with ads to then go download your report or whatever else.

Right.

Again, like it's harder to track. So I want you making money along the way.

Yeah.

So, I think you still have lots of room on the organic side.

Right.

There's still more you can be doing.

I'm not really doing much on the LinkedIn organic. I mean, when I regularly now go and find people that are in what I consider— I have certain parameters. If they have an overlap of 100 followers with me, then I want to see them, you know, because they have 100 people that are like what I already have, they're good. And so anybody— and they're always bankers, they're always executives, banks who I'm not connected with now. But I don't do anything once I get those people to say yes. And I don't have a path for that right now. So that's an easy one also.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, but even within YouTube, there's still a lot more, right? There's still levers to pull. There's still— what is the hook? What is the click-through rate? What is the retention of the videos? How do we get more culturally relevant? I mean, there's still room to grow. So organic and ads don't compete against each other. They're very complementary.

Yeah.

The better your organic does, the easier the ads are to pay off. But then there's this third thing in the middle for LinkedIn and Instagram, which is the hand-to-hand combat, direct outreach, which would be likely incredibly valuable for you, which is where I would start before moving or worrying about ads.

And the other thing we're doing now is, is in rebuilding the the website. We're connecting the reports within the website, which were not ever updated and correct. We're connecting all the YouTubes, all the audio, which we still have all the audio we do on the, on the podcast and on the inside videos, and going to have them all capsulated in the jimroos.com website. Mm-hmm. But still on their separate platforms. And we also, all of our, all of our YouTube and video is, or audio is also On the Financial Brand, on a dropdown of podcasts. So we're get— we have various different ways where people can connect with us and still see the stuff that we're doing.

Yeah. So the difference there is then it's also outbound, right? So like the— you're going to reach out to people instead of waiting for them to reach out to you, right?

And

it's what we're doing. Like, we're actively testing. Like I said, we have somebody coming tomorrow who came just from LinkedIn, and we're going to get to a place on our team where right now the person is doing both. LinkedIn content and LinkedIn messaging, but it'll likely get to a point where she has to pick.

Yeah,

meaning like there's too many people to reach out to and have conversations with. Yeah, that if it's continuing to convert like this, she needs to decide what she wants to do because that is a full-time job just messaging people.

Yeah,

and not even cold. There's people who are— they've connected with you in some capacity. Right. Right? You're not like— the whole 100 people, what is it, the overlap between you, if we have 100, that's great. That's you trying to go out and reach and make connections, but they don't know who you are. They just have similar connections. They might have seen something at some point, but they haven't raised their hand in any capacity and said, I know you.

They haven't come to me, I've come to them.

Right, which is fine. And you have over 20,000 people who have already raised their hand in some capacity.

Right.

And more have already—

They're a lot warmer.

Right. At least they know who you are.

Right. Yep.

That haven't done anything with you, a good chunk of them, that now with the outreach could. So just, I don't know, I like starting for lower-hanging fruit first.

Yeah. Well, and I get 30 to 50 requests to connect on a weekly basis. A lot of those are, we want you to follow this site, which is not— I don't respond to those, never have, because it just bombards me with stuff I don't want to read.

Yeah, and it's fine. And you'll get pitched a lot on LinkedIn because so much business happens. You get spammed a ton on LinkedIn and on Instagram and DM, just like you'll get spam on email. Like, you know, what does Seth Godin say? Marketers are in everything. Or is that GaryVee? I don't remember. But marketers ruin everything. So that's where not everything goes to you.

Yep.

Like, even if you're having, or team is having 300 active conversations, that's a lot of conversations.

Right, yeah.

So what's the criteria before something gets to you?

Yeah.

Somebody just saying, follow this person? No.

And why did you, when somebody asked for me to be involved in something, On LinkedIn. What was your philosophy between— about not moving them to email?

Because the more they are on LinkedIn engaging with you, the more your stuff will show up on LinkedIn.

Gotcha. For email, in these cases, what I'm bringing up is the, the, oh, by the way, we have an event coming up on X date. No, no, we want to do email because I want them— I want to be able to track it. It's a better communication vehicle for me, plus because I have a management company that works with me on that. That helps because I can send them to them.

Collecting their email is great. I want their email. I want that 50,000 to be 100,000. Yeah, right.

I don't mean that. I mean, when you— I thought you said when somebody reached out to me to get engaged with something, keep them on the LinkedIn platform to be— to begin with, as opposed to moving them to email, saying ask me again on email because it's a better communication platform for me to deal with and to get the back and forth.

What you're optimizing for is your happiness and productivity, which is, I like— I don't want to be on LinkedIn, I want to be on email. And that, that's fair, that has its own ROI. If, if you were agnostic, it's better to keep them on LinkedIn.

Gotcha.

Because they reached out to you on LinkedIn, so they're already on LinkedIn.

Yep.

So that's fine. So we're making the friction less of like, now they have to email you somewhere else, and they may not like that as much.

Right.

But then 2, your content's more likely to show up for them the more they're engaged with you on LinkedIn.

Gotcha. Makes a lot of sense. Yep.

So all else being equal—

If they're warm leads, they become warmer because they'll start to get fed a whole lot more with me engaging with them there. They'll see more of— they'll get more reinforcement about their decision they haven't quite made yet.

Right. They may not have seen your stuff in a while, but now they're going to see it more because you're talking to them on the DMs.

Gotcha.

But that might be harder for you because you—

It can be. We can do both.

Well,

the reality is I can still communicate with them on LinkedIn and also through email. But I, I— makes a lot of sense because if they're— most of these comp— most of these people are having to sell to somebody else internally, or with an— especially with an ad agency that's being told, oh, I want you to reach out to Jim on an influencer program, and and they don't know me from— the agency doesn't know me from Adam, they'll start seeing more reasons for, oh, this is why my client picked them.

So it's a little less convenient for you and a little harder to track because now if somebody's doing outreach and you're having 300 conversations, you gotta go find that person. What I'll do is my team— I'm not in my LinkedIn DMs. Like, anybody I'm having conversation with, we're not doing it on LinkedIn DMs. Any of my clients or friends or whatever, I don't talk to anybody on LinkedIn. But if we get an email, we get a DM from somebody who is an opportunity or an old friend of mine or whatever, some contact, my team will send me the link right to that message. So it's in my email,

right?

But I click on that link, it takes me to the LinkedIn conversation where I can message back. So a little less convenient. So like, are we optimizing for your convenience and happiness? Which maybe is fine. It's just, there's a trade-off.

So you use both?

Your stuff gets seen a little bit less. But it's fine if you're happier, right?

It makes more— I understand the logic of it reinforces their decision to at least reach out because they're going to see more of me.

Yeah. And especially if it's an active conversation.

Yeah. Yep.

Right? Like if they're on the fence or not sure, like, maybe Jim, I don't know. Okay, maybe next quarter. But then they see another thing of yours. Huh. Maybe Jim, maybe we should. Yeah.

Yeah.

Right?

Makes a lot of sense. Yep.

Yeah.

Good.

All

right.

Yeah. Jim Mariz, we're gonna have some fun.

A lot of having a blast. Keep on learning.

Let's go.

Out of my demographic group for what I'm doing right now. I love it.

That's great.

Yeah. My wife keeps on going, really? She, she hasn't— she, she's bought in. She knows I'm having fun.

Yeah.

That's the key.

That's cool, man. Yeah. Great. To turn your YouTube channel into a sales machine, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. You need to hear this coaching session with Drew if you want to turn your YouTube channel into a sales machine. Drew runs Moon Audio and sells incredible stereo gear to serious music lovers all over the world. He already has a 50% return customer rate.