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The Power of Organic Marketing w/Justin Rowe
57 Plays1 year ago
Welcome back to the Attention Podcast, where you'll learn how to gain and retain the attention of your buyers to grow an audience. I'm Dan Sanchez and today I'm talked to Justin Rowe who is the Founder at Impactable about the power of organic marketing.
Timestamps:
[00:02:58] Growth audience led to restaurant investor partnership.
[00:04:14] Restaurants grew, COVID hit, new venture succeeded.
[00:07:37] Organic and paid ads have pros and cons, but diversification is important for marketing success.
[00:11:58] Average post: 10 or 20,000, sometimes 60-100,000.
[00:13:53] Experimenting with content, going deep on LinkedIn ads.
[00:20:16] Consistency and quality are top priorities.
[00:24:24] Using lead magnets to identify pain points, build an audience, and generate leads.
[00:26:10] Differentiate audience, curate content, improve lead generation.
[00:32:05] Consistency, community engagement, building relationships, support.
[00:35:54] Cogniz cognism decent, refined labs dropped off, hockey stat doing great with "Can you dashboard it?"
[00:37:01] Find me on LinkedIn: Justin Rowe/impactable, impactable.com, & YouTube channel: impactable.
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Transcript
Introduction of Justin Rowe and Impactable
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome back to the Attention podcast, where you'll learn how to gain and retain the attention of your buyers to build an audience. Today, I talked to Justin Rowe, who's the founder of Impactable, about how he grew an audience in order to grow his paid media agency. So in this episode, you'll learn about Justin's number one tactic that he used to grow his audience and generate a lot of leads for his agency,
00:00:26
Speaker
Plus you'll learn about what he needs to do next in order to unlock the next level of growth. Make sure to stay until the end where I give my hot takes on what was said in the interview. See you there.
Impact of LinkedIn Audience on Business
00:00:43
Speaker
Justin, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.
00:00:48
Speaker
Man, I think it's been a long time. I mean, you've been on LinkedIn for a while. I've been on LinkedIn for about three years and we've bumped into each other. Man, probably dozens of times now. And I'm like, it's finally time to have like an actual face to face time with Justin and learn how you've built your audience. So in preparing for this interview, I was looking around and you've got a good size audience.
00:01:08
Speaker
And I'm sure it's making a massive difference for your business. But to give our audience some context, tell me a little bit more about how big is your audience? What kind of people are you talking to? And what led to you even wanting to start building an audience at all?
00:01:27
Speaker
Um, our audience right now on LinkedIn is about 65, 66,000, uh, which is pretty crazy to me. Um, we also have 2000 YouTube subscribers, which is not as easy, uh, two jets. Um, that first thousand is hard.
00:01:42
Speaker
That number sounds less impressive than 65,000, but, uh, friendly app for anyone who knows what it's like to go from zero to a thousand. Uh, I'm proud of our 2000 YouTube subscribers as well. Also have a couple thousand newsletter subscribers and we get decent website traffic, probably like 10,000 monthly visitors. I don't consider that part of the community, but our blog traffic actually is pretty decent. Like those articles are pretty legit, just like my LinkedIn posts. So that traffic is probably stronger than most. So.
00:02:09
Speaker
That's a decent audience there. The majority of it is on LinkedIn. We run a LinkedIn centric agency.
From Job Seeker to Business Opportunities
00:02:15
Speaker
But the biggest thing that made me want to create an audience was probably five years, five, six, seven years ago, whenever I first got into LinkedIn, I was a job seeker.
00:02:24
Speaker
And I started growing my network just to find opportunities for like jobs. And I realized that growing an audience and network was really powerful back then. So back then I was just using it to open up opportunities as like a worker, but now obviously as a business owner and a growing agency, I see it unlocking partnerships, revenue, trust, uh, you know, a lot of things.
00:02:46
Speaker
Man, so you started pre-business growing an audience. I discovered the power of LinkedIn and the power of networking. Back then, I thought of it more as networking than audience building, but I was growing my network in a targeted way that eventually did become a nice audience.
00:03:06
Speaker
Yeah, a network is like a pre-audience, right? Yeah. There are people, I almost find that the best audience growth is just building relationships. I don't even like calling it networking, because it just kind of has this sleazy feel to it. I just kind of like making friends. I'm making friends, I'm helping them, they're helping me. We're just friends, right? And that's where audience starts from. That's where you build your crew, your loyal crew that shows up, comments on your post, gives it distribution. That's how it starts at first.
00:03:35
Speaker
That's the best way to go. So you did that.
Network Growth and Business Partnerships
00:03:38
Speaker
You, did you find a job doing, doing that? Yeah, I did. So I was, I was a market training manager with young brands at the time. And I was just kind of looking for something else, but yeah, I, I grew a targeted network or audience, whatever I packed it with intentionally with.
00:03:53
Speaker
District managers, company owners, HR managers, recruiters, um, all over, you know, in my city, in my space. And yeah, it worked like a charm. I was getting recruiters, um, reaching out to me with job openings. I had lots of, I had a dozen interviews. I had offers, you know, to make more money in the same kind of job.
00:04:12
Speaker
Um, or like, uh, kind of a lateral, uh, move. And so those opportunities started to come and that's why that's kind of how I discovered the power of building audience. And then my first side hustle after I, after I used that to actually, so that's how I found a restaurant investor.
00:04:28
Speaker
So I went from looking for a restaurant job to actually discovering a handful of investors through my audience growth. And one of those actually partnered with and became a part owner of a small sandwich shop franchise, Potbelly Sandwich Shops. And then I came back and turned that into a side hustle and I helped other people kind of do some LinkedIn lead generation was my first little side hustle slash startup.
00:04:51
Speaker
Okay. And then from there, did it become the business you have today?
Transition to LinkedIn Ads Agency
00:04:54
Speaker
Did it like evolve into LinkedIn ads agency? Yeah, I, the restaurants grew from one to four. Um, but I had nights and weekends cause it was a pretty cushy job. It didn't pay that much. The whole, the whole idea was that eventually I would make, you know, uh, we'd pay down the loans and I'd be getting money from that, but it was, it was a low salary, but I had extra time. And then yet the, the side hustle turned into my main hustle COVID hit and I pivoted out of the restaurant, uh, took myself off the payroll, but kept the ownership.
00:05:21
Speaker
I dove into my startup. We scaled it to about 210 active LinkedIn lead generation clients. And then it was acquired a couple of years ago, a data heavy investor actually bought out 80% of the company. And then I stayed on to run and scale it. And that's when we pivoted into a LinkedIn ads agency, which is what everyone knows us for now.
00:05:42
Speaker
But that's been a couple of years after a couple of years to pivot into this and audience growth was a big part of that because we took our our foothold in the LinkedIn world and pivoted into, you know, LinkedIn ads, which I don't think we would have been able to do very smoothly if we hadn't created kind of that audience and buzz and trust and credibility around that LinkedIn vertical that we then harness that and probably made a smoother pivot than then we would have been able to make. How big was your audience before you pivoted?
00:06:11
Speaker
Uh, couple of years ago, it was about 30,000. So it's probably doubled now, but yeah, I had about 30,000 followers back then. Yeah. I remember three years ago, I was like, LinkedIn ads, ah, overpriced. And then I think everybody woke up that year to like, actually underpriced because you can get so narrow in your targeting and only target the right people. Like, wait a second. And then it became all the rage.
00:06:40
Speaker
The demand gen movement I think only helped us because then it became expensive compared to what? If you were just saying your goal is to get cheap leads, then yeah, LinkedIn will never be. But if your goal now is quality leads that close higher or bigger deal sizes, then LinkedIn started looking more attractive and it's like, I would definitely pay more for a better lead. It's not about getting cheap leads. That was never the goal. I think LinkedIn's coming around in that perspective as well. As demand gen movement picks up speed, I think that's good news for LinkedIn ads too.
Complementing Paid Media with Audience Growth
00:07:11
Speaker
So you're living the dream, man. I'm like usually shouting from the rooftops, like build an audience. Like I love paid media. I like built my career off the back of paid media and getting leads because you can market to people that are in market now and get them to find your thing and sell them. Like it's fast, it's convenient. You can build a whole system and engine around it for pretty good growth. But I've personally run into points in my own career and marketing certain jobs or
00:07:40
Speaker
companies that I've worked for and have hit plateaus because there's only so many people on a market at one time. And that's when I discovered audience growth because I'm like, well, if you can grow an audience, you can start building affinity with people before they get in market because they're probably going to come into market sometime or convince them to come in market.
00:07:57
Speaker
Otherwise, they wouldn't have been in market before, but because they've been listening to you, now they are. You're doing the dream. You have the LinkedIn ads power, but you also have the knowledge to build an audience. How has it been working knowing you have both now? How has that played into impacting your agency's revenue?
00:08:19
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, they're, they're both really powerful lovers. And I think usually most people lean one way or the other. They either lean really hard and organic. Um, and I mean, there's so many benefits to that. Like it is, yes, it's time, um, and it's, you know, consistency, but it, the beauty of it is it builds momentum. So my favorite thing about organic is that it is a changing equation X amount of input month one.
00:08:42
Speaker
gets X, you know, Y amount of output in, you know, whatever, but every month that equation is like that plus you get some momentum from what's previously built. So a year from now you're, you know, that equation is dramatically different. You're getting a huge benefits and momentum beyond just that same equation.
00:09:00
Speaker
The bad thing about, the good thing about paid ads is that it's quick. It doesn't need a year of momentum. It's not like SEO. If you got the money, you can get page one, you can get in front of, you can let whoever in the world you want to know you exist, you can let them know you exist like that. Problem is, yeah, it's not scalable. If you're talking Google search, there's only so much volume out there. There's only so much demand. There's only so much people in market. So it does have a plateau. Almost all channels have a scale. But then, yeah, what I realized is,
00:09:30
Speaker
They're different levers and most people choose one or the other. I started with organic because I had all this time and energy. I didn't have a budget for ads. And then as I got budget for ads, I didn't, you know, I did actually lean away from organic at one point. It took a whole year off.
00:09:47
Speaker
And I regretted that. I leaned out of organic and into ads and we scaled pretty nicely for that. But then when I wanted to pull my organic lever because my paid ads were plateauing, I didn't have that traction anymore because I had taken almost a year off of LinkedIn.
Balancing Paid Ads and Organic Growth
00:10:02
Speaker
So about probably, yeah, maybe the beginning of last year is when I really came back with a vengeance. And it's been like every day since then video pushing the YouTube channel around that time.
00:10:12
Speaker
Um, but that's, and that's what I've discovered is that they're both separate levers and you never know when you're going to need them. And one thing is like diversifying my portfolio of an, of like marketing investment, because I've had my LinkedIn account, like restricted for a week. I've had my LinkedIn ads account taken. Um, LinkedIn sent my original startup, uh, a cease and desist letter because we were called Lincoln learn.
00:10:35
Speaker
Link and learn and selling LinkedIn related products and they shut down, sent a cease and desist seized my account. I never got it back, lost all of that data. Uh, so yeah, I'm all about diversifying my portfolio of marketing now. Yeah. Dang. It's ugly. Never thought about how your ads account could get shut down so fast. Yeah. But anytime you have a rented channel, it's just, that's just how it goes. Um, all good things, but.
00:11:00
Speaker
I don't know, I've become a big proponent of email more and more, even though I was like, I mean, I love podcasts, hence we're on a podcast doing this now, but newsletters have become a big thing for me just because for so many reasons, but one of them, it's just like, okay, MailChimp can shut me down, but I could still download my email list and take it somewhere else. It just starts sending again, you know what I'm saying? It's kind of like, I could take it. I can keep my domain reputation and bring it with me to different vendors. I'm not isolated to just one tool.
00:11:27
Speaker
And that's another lever, the newsletter subscription. I mean, you start somewhere and that builds momentum. And then, you know, those are people that, that trust you. Um, and you know, they might not read every single thing, but I've seen great success from our newsletter, especially if we're rolling out a new product or we have like something. I use that. I use that lever to like get an announcement out to people and it works. Uh, yeah.
Newsletters as a Direct Audience Channel
00:11:50
Speaker
How big is your newsletter? Like how many, how many subs you get?
00:11:52
Speaker
It's, it's in between two and 3000, nothing big. Uh, we didn't, we didn't, we haven't, the only, the only place we push it is on our, on our website. And then we have a retargeting lead gen form that funnels people into there, but we haven't pushed it as much. I wish we had some massive list, but it's a couple thousand. You should start pulling your, your LinkedIn following over to it. That's what I'd be. I mean, that's what I'm starting to do more and more heavily just because.
00:12:16
Speaker
You don't know how long LinkedIn will work like it is right now. Right now, you get good organic reach, but it could go the way of the Facebook page in like three years from now. You're lucky if you reach 0.5% of your list on a good post. That's true. Kind of sucks. Speaking of, how much reach are you getting with your average post on LinkedIn? You got 65K followers, but what's your average post reach? I would say my average post is like 10,000 or 20,000, and then probably like
00:12:46
Speaker
you know, once a week I might have a post that's doing 60, 70, 80. And I usually have like, I mean, anyone who's been posting for like years and has something like, well, now LinkedIn, you can look back at your old posts or you have shield. Like I know what my top like 10, 15 posts are. And I have like a handful of guaranteed, like if I post this on a Tuesday morning, like
00:13:05
Speaker
it'll probably get like 70 or 80 or 100,000. And I'll usually like I have five of those that I'll repurpose almost on a monthly basis. And yeah, they'll usually do like over 100, but most of mine are maybe 10, 20, 30,000.
00:13:19
Speaker
Still a lot. That's a lot of attention, especially since you're posting multiple times a week, it adds up. What kind of content are you creating and who's usually reading it? So my audience is mostly comprised of B2B startup founders, a lot of marketers. My content is mostly on startup, my experience of growing a startup and then also marketing. And I don't limit my advice to just like LinkedIn.
00:13:48
Speaker
I really kind of consider myself like a more of a full spectrum marketer or full stack marketer, whatever you want to call it. So yes, I run a LinkedIn ads agency, but I've always done like, I've always been the one man marketing band in our company and I've run most of the channels. It's only been in the last maybe three months. We're actually handed off our own channels internally to a Google ads specialist to LinkedIn on our team to, you know, outreach. Um, but yeah, uh, that's kind of ours.
00:14:18
Speaker
What methods have worked best for acquiring new audience for you? You've been working at this for a long time. You've gotten past the infamous 30,000 connections, so I know you didn't connect your way to 65K. Yeah. How have you been growing your audience?
Content Strategy for LinkedIn
00:14:32
Speaker
Is it slow and steady, post at a time, or what else have you done?
00:14:35
Speaker
Um, I tried, I tried stuff early on I would post, uh, like early on experiment with so many different things, like just trying to be more entertaining, trying to be whatever. And, you know, I had, I was actually more viral and had more reach, uh, three years ago than I do now. But when I came back, one of the things I realized was like.
00:14:54
Speaker
after my most viral post, which was like a cat being pulled out of a drawer, um, and talking about the stress of work and, and no leads coming for that. Of course, I kind of, you know, adjusted my strategy and I said, you know what, I'm going to like, just go really deep on like one thing on LinkedIn ads. So beginning of last year, it was just like, and my whole, my whole playbook was, or my whole strategy was pretty much give the whole playbook away.
00:15:17
Speaker
So I'm literally going to make posts. And my goal was like, if someone would read all the posts that I make from this year, they should be have a full education on like LinkedIn ads, be able to do exactly what clients pay us a lot of money to do. I'm just going to give it away. And that was a lot of my content, just actionable tips, me actually showing how to optimize accounts, how to how the mechanics and how things actually work. That content was gold for us because it only usually two things happen.
00:15:45
Speaker
people who have time but don't have budget sure they will take that advice they will try to you know do their own marketing and they'll they won't use us but they were probably never our target market anyway because they have you know the time they don't have the budget
00:16:00
Speaker
those with a budget and don't have the time, they see maybe they try to put some of it into action, but they realize, hey, this is more complicated than I thought. And these guys know their stuff that those kind of posts got to get us the most actual revenue. Hey, this was an actual client that this was their issue. This is what we did for them. This was the results or here's my actual strategy. Here's exactly how I set it up.
00:16:22
Speaker
Here's exactly how it works. You can do it too. Um, those, that kind of stuff is gold. So probably my following now is growing slower than it did like the first 30,000, but it is much more like targeted. And when I see my incoming connection requests, it's like, it's like 80% on target. It's like high level marketers, startup founders, co-founders, managing partners.
00:16:44
Speaker
like those are the kind of people who are now a thought leader ads i'm specifically putting my personal content in front of a very target audience so it's really hard to tell which ones are coming in organically or which ones are coming in from the paid side. That's a whole nother talk about attribution we have so that's the kind of content that has been helping me grow very very tactical and basically giving our playbook away.
00:17:05
Speaker
It's huge. It's huge. The more I learn about this stuff, the more I'm like, that's just what works. Anytime I get away from that, I get in trouble. You have to have something worth sharing. Once you have something that's successful and is working, if you just open it up and be like, oh, this is how I'm doing it. I remember I ran into a situation where I tripled the enrollment of a university.
00:17:28
Speaker
on the back of some cheap software. And this university had hardly any budget to grow. I was probably spending $5K in ad spend, which is nothing for a university a month.
00:17:39
Speaker
And I didn't have, I didn't even have budget for HubSpot or anything. I had to buy Infusionsoft, you know, cost 500 bucks a month instead of 2,000, 3,000 a month is what I would have paid for HubSpot. I rigged it to do all this stuff, the whole admission sequence and had it like freaking humming. And people were walking up and they heard, they're like, Dan, I heard you're doing something with Facebook.
00:18:00
Speaker
I don't know why I gave it like more of a Southern accent. I'm in Indiana. So I hear it all the time. It's like, I heard you're doing the Facebooks. Cause it'd be like boomers coming to me and they'd add a nest to it. And, uh, I'd be like, Oh, well it's not, I'm not posting to a page to do this. Like I'm running Facebook ads, sending them to a landing page and then I'm split testing it to the nth degree. But then dude, I would literally just try to get a meeting with them to show like, here, this is what I'm doing. Go take it. Every time they'd be like,
00:18:29
Speaker
How much? How much for what? How much for you to do this for us? Every time they're just like, take my money. I'm like, dang.
00:18:40
Speaker
Just show them the goods. That's the secret, right? Don't have any secrets. Just show them how to do it, and they will give you money because it's hard. It's hard to do, right? There's a lot of steps, and as simple as you make it, the more they want to give you money because they figure out, oh, it takes a lot of time. As simple as you, the more I understand it, the more I don't want to do it. Yeah, exactly. The best example I had of that is actually how I got into that original startup, BAMF.
00:19:09
Speaker
was a pretty notable, um, company in the LinkedIn influencing space. They've kind of come and gone. Um, they had some co-founders, uh, but one of them wrote this, it's called the Banff Bible. And it was basically A to Z how to do LinkedIn automation. And to me, it was like the definitive guide on how to do automation step by step. And this was, um, uh, I.
00:19:36
Speaker
They had a LinkedIn automation kind of, um, sequence built. And so I literally took that and that was the basis that I launched my first startup that turned into that, you know, being acquired. Like I was that one out of, you know, how many probably tens of thousands or a hundred thousand people who saw that, who actually then like, you know, maybe took a little bit of business away from them, but that was their, their biggest revenue generation, uh, element was this BAMF Bible. Cause yeah, anyone who read it.
00:20:05
Speaker
I mean, yeah, I had to have been the only one who like actually became like a slight competitor. Everyone else was just like, either they'll do it themselves and they weren't a client or it was like, wow, this is like genius. You guys are amazing. I have no desire to do this myself. Like it was, it was like 50 pages of just like technical like set up. And it was like, dear God, if you, if you are not like trying to create a startup to pay for like new baby clothes, I'm a baby on the way, this is not going to be for you, but
00:20:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I stole. And I was like, that's beautiful because yeah, the chances of something like that happen are so minuscule. Like you shouldn't be worried about that. What are you doing to grow now? You've been at it for a long time. LinkedIn changes. What are you doing to grow your audience and develop more depth or just grow, get more followers? What are you doing now?
Consistency in Content Creation
00:20:57
Speaker
One of the biggest things I'm doing right now is trying to stay consistent and that is actually really hard. Um, and so one of the things that I've done to do that is we did actually have an internal hire early this year, who is going to help with content for us, but also content as an offer for clients.
00:21:15
Speaker
Um, and consistency has been one of the, one of the things that Jasmine has added. So every Monday we have a 30 minute session. Um, we have, you know, our pillar topics. I show up, she's kind of in charge of that. Um, we record that session and then it gets kind of chopped up into, um, social posts, clips, YouTube videos. So that system has been helpful and our, our flow is.
00:21:39
Speaker
We're using Riverside or Zoom and then chopping it up into script. Yeah, it sounds like you have a little more compact flow than that. But that's kind of like our flow. And then prioritizing it, prioritizing consistency. Because like I said, I've had times where I got all the work, I dropped off the map.
00:21:58
Speaker
And my consistency dropped and I didn't have that strong organic lever to pull what I needed. Um, so just making our priority. So on days that I don't have scheduled content and I have to do something like my own, um, I'm either repurposing my greatest hits or I'm, um, you know, really thinking through the next, uh, content topic. And the other big thing I guess I'm doing, uh, so consistency is a huge one, like consistency on different platforms. And I guess like.
00:22:24
Speaker
different topic, but you know, choose one or a couple and go deep and be consistent versus trying to be everywhere and then burning yourself out and being nowhere. And then really focusing on the quality of the content and the distribution. So yes, you can consistently show up and make it, but if you also don't make the effort to make sure that gets consistently published in the right places, like if you are going to do a podcast, YouTube, LinkedIn,
00:22:47
Speaker
you know wherever it goes and then the quality really has to still be there so we're always looking to you know i don't just want to be a broken record and say the same stuff i'm really looking to stay on top of new trends like is it demand jen principles or hub spot attribution or is it the new thought leader ads like i don't.
00:23:06
Speaker
I want to be, I want to be mobile and agile as new topics come up to really dominate those. So when thought leaders came up, we dominated that for like a month and a half. Like we have a ton of thought leader ads content out there on YouTube, on my LinkedIn. Uh, we're already running thought leader ads on LinkedIn about thought leader ads. Um, and so yeah, I guess that's a couple of things we're really doing to, to grow consistently and keep it a priority.
00:23:30
Speaker
Yeah, man, newsjacking. That's like one of the biggest hacks of all time is like taking whatever is trending right now and then just bam, like being all about that and getting it right. As long as it fits within your core message, like LinkedIn ads does for you or thought leadership ads. There's probably a bunch of things like that and trying to remix it and figure it out. Let's see.
00:23:52
Speaker
one question for you. I've thought about, as an ads guy, it's like this is getting beyond audience growth, but I had an idea on how to grow, how to achieve, essentially how to kill two birds with one stone with an ad
Effective Lead Magnet Strategies
00:24:05
Speaker
campaign. You could do this with LinkedIn or Facebook. But I was thinking of a couple different things and I'm like, as a LinkedIn ads expert, I'm gonna throw it your way and you can say like, huh, that might work or this wouldn't work. But I thought recently, I was reading, you know, Alex Hermosy, right? Yeah.
00:24:22
Speaker
He's got the, you just launched his new book and I've been like- A hundred million leads or? That's right. A hundred million dollar leads. It's a big book. One of the best sections in it though is a section he has on lead magnets. And he does lead magnets like way more intensely than I've ever seen anybody do. He'll come up with 12 lead magnets, split test them.
00:24:42
Speaker
kill the underperformers keep the performers and then like Take you know the winners probably the three winners out of the 12 and then you know Optimize their split test the the headlines for them the images for them and then the sub headlines so that you walk away with a couple of lead magnets in rotation that are just like like us to the bus
00:25:06
Speaker
And if you do it right, they're lead magnets that indicate pain on your buyer side. They're only getting this if they're in the market-ish for what you do, if you did this right. Now, I was thinking about that and how to actually use them to better not only build an audience, but also get qualified leads. I'm like, if you just sent them a typical lead magnet to landing page where they give up the email,
00:25:34
Speaker
And then maybe you ask just one qualifying question, maybe like what role are you at in your company? Like, and you give them like, VP, like CMO, VP, director, manager, specialists, something else, like solo, solo printer, maybe a few others, but you just take that one piece of data and depending because you're targeting your ads towards your ICP already, you get that one piece of data,
00:25:58
Speaker
If they're not in your, quite in your ICP, you know, you send them to an audience activation, how to get the most out of that lead magnet. So you get a quick win with them and you push them to your podcast, your social, you know, you build an audience with it. But for everybody who's downloading this lead magnet that has that one, like qualifying factor, like, oh, this is a VP or a director, I send them to like a,
00:26:20
Speaker
some kind of value-added sales conversation like an audit or of some kind or something where it's like you're actually bringing them things that they can walk away with that are valuable but it's ultimately a pitch like a one or two call closed pitch. You ever done anything like that? How would you think that would work if you just like used it? Because then you could build an audience
00:26:41
Speaker
and probably get some MQLs now. Most people just go straight for the jugular though. They're like, sign up for a demo. I'm like. Oh, yeah. And it's usually one way or the other. It's ungate everything and give everything away. And you're not really capturing emails or whatever until they're begging to talk to you. Or there's
00:27:05
Speaker
you know, double gate everything. And I've seen this where they fill out a lead gen form and get sent to a landing page where they literally have to leave their information again, or more information to actually get the asset they were promised, which yeah, the double gate. But I think what you're talking about, that would actually be good.
00:27:21
Speaker
Um, and then I, I mean, I guess I would, I would almost think about it in different terms of just like they're that fit or not. If there's like, say they're a fit, but there's different, like, you know, are they the founder? Like the actual, are they approving the budget? The one actually using it, like approving the tool or the people using the tool.
00:27:38
Speaker
like depending on who it was maybe you have like three or you have not a fair whatever but you could also there's three different people who might still be like in your target account who could be part of the equation who each would be interested in different parts of the solution and so depending on their position you could you know yeah send them to an activation that was
00:27:54
Speaker
more curated to them. Um, I like the idea, but no, I have not done something like that. Probably the closest would be what I do in retargeting where I send them like from the traffic and website. And yes, I'm going to reference LinkedIn ads. We can qualify them and we can be like, okay, website visitors, regardless of where they came from, maybe it was Google ads or clutch or SEO or LinkedIn organic, regardless of where they came from website visitors who are, um,
00:28:20
Speaker
Are founders of marketing agencies so director level and above or ownership status in marketing industry I want to send them these kind of videos ads or resources that are more curated to that specific specific group And I'm qualifying them with like LinkedIn ad filters and retargeting, but it was you know, whatever that sent them there
00:28:42
Speaker
I like the idea of the lead magnets though, actually showing intent or being valuable. Cause to me, that's the biggest thing with like these enterprise accounts were doing lead magnets. It's like they're putting lead magnets. They're terrible. Like no one would ever pay for them. And they're putting them in front of a cold audience who's never even seen their website before. So it's like, yeah, there's just no intent. There's no, yeah, I think that's the big, that's why you got to do the Hermosy Hermosy model of the a hundred million dollar leads, create a bunch of them, split test them. Honestly, I think this would be.
00:29:10
Speaker
This is in the kind of the gray area, but you could honestly just create the marketing for 12 of them. Yeah. Send them all to a landing page being like, Hey, we haven't done this yet. What, what, what were you hoping to get? And then just having to subscribe to the newsletter. You know what I'm saying? Just to test it, see which ones are the winners and just build the three that are the fricking winners because people clicked on them the most. You know what I'm saying? The losers aren't even, then you can send them the lead magnet after you make it.
00:29:36
Speaker
Right? Because you build the three, and the ones that were losers, well, not a lot of people clicked on them anyway. And then they'll forget about it. I don't know. That's kind of in the shades of gray. But I'm like, uh, the amount of time you're putting in real time to make them good.
00:29:49
Speaker
They take some time, you know, it was a lot, but if you only had to made four and you knew they were solid, they'd be pretty, they probably be pretty good. Most, most people would not be confident enough to, to run that test where they're like, I don't even have the asset. I'm just like asking, but if you actually wanted it, I'll make the asset.
00:30:07
Speaker
Um, I actually liked that though, cause I've done that a couple of times where I'd make a LinkedIn post and I'd be like, I really need to build this asset. I'm going to make a post and be like, comment below and I'll give you this. I was like, yeah. I mean, if it flops, like, and I mean, no, not that many people are going to be disappointed, but then like a hundred people comment and I'm like, Oh crap, I got to make this asset this weekend. It's in demand. Love that. You save yourself time. That's, that's the one benefit of having an audience is like, you can actually split test things without paying for it because you can pull your audience and that's like,
00:30:37
Speaker
Like I just did it yesterday for my kind of developing a lead magnet trying to follow her mosey here. Um, but I asked them like, Hey, which title works better? Hey, which image do you, would you be more likely to download it on? And then I, they give me feedback in the comments. I'm like, great, this works. Um, that way you can have a reasonable belief that the lead magnet you put time into is actually worth.
00:30:58
Speaker
worth making, I think that's the whole of an audience, but otherwise you can pay to get that data. Yeah. Like winter. I'm pretty sure that's like winter's, uh, business model is that, um, it's the guy that founded a CXL, I think. And then he went on to found a winter, but they give you like that feedback above the folder. They have other people who meet the criteria of your prospects, giving real feedback about your actual landing page. I thought that was cool because yeah, you might not have that yourself. You might have to go pay for.
00:31:27
Speaker
Uh, that kind of feedback, but yeah, if you have it yourself and you have an audience of like short target demographic, like, yeah, it's pretty badass. Cool. Well, it's moving to rapid fire questions starting with how did you learn how to build an audience? Like what sources did you get that from?
00:31:42
Speaker
Um, early on, I do think I was influenced by Gary V. Um, I feel like he's less people are probably referencing him. Now it's maybe, uh, um, some other people, but Gary V was one of the big ones. Um, I read his first couple of books. I thought they were pretty good. I mean, I don't agree with all of his stuff, but the dudes at hustlers.
00:32:01
Speaker
And he like, I mean, I, I respect that like, so she hustles and he does amazing job with like, he understood the power of audience and content creation and like sheer volume. Like I, yeah, so I respected that. That was probably my first, um,
00:32:18
Speaker
audience building kind of whatever influence there, I guess. Probably the main one. Nice. Where'd you consume his content the most? Back probably when I was like actually on Facebook, I feel like I haven't been on Facebook for like years, but it was actually like Facebook stuff and then YouTube, I think. And then I kind of got into YouTube more for educational, less audience building. But yeah, I think I was consuming it on Facebook at the time and YouTube. What's the largest obstacle you're running into with audience growth?
00:32:46
Speaker
Uh, consistency and community engagement. Uh, the other thing that's really hard to, I mean, you can't outsource it is I can post, I could have someone help, you know, assist me creating content and post daily. That would be one part of the equation, but that will not do.
00:33:03
Speaker
anywhere near as much as you want if you are not also manually engaging the community around you, building relationships, supporting other creators, mixing up in the comments. And I think that's a big thing that people don't realize is that it's like this, the secret of growth isn't just like,
00:33:19
Speaker
post really amazing content and the connections will follow. It's like post content and then like engage in the community around you, support other people. It's a quid pro quo. It's a relationship game. And like that is way more important than actually the quality of the content sometimes. So yeah, that's the biggest obstacle is that consistency and that time investment that I kind of, I don't
00:33:41
Speaker
I can't comprehend outsourcing that. So it's on my plate and I don't see that going away. That's the biggest, the biggest part. There's always a few exceptions to that, but I'd say there are exceptions. Like I don't think Alex Hermosi engages with a lot of people in the way that Gary V did a lot in the beginning.
00:33:57
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Once you get to that level, I'm sure you could, but yeah, it's those people that they already have like millions of followers somewhere. So if they come on to LinkedIn, like they don't have to engage on LinkedIn. They are probably, they probably are mixed, but Gary Vee's probably, I imagine he's probably, there's some like platform that he's active on and mixing it up on. And the other one's like, yeah, probably just getting republished. What single tactic has been the most reliable for you to acquire new audience?
Leveraging Google Search and LinkedIn Retargeting
00:34:25
Speaker
Um.
00:34:28
Speaker
Google, uh, as a LinkedIn ads agency, but the first word out of my mouth is Google. Google for cold, like Google search combined with LinkedIn retargeting is a fricking killer combo.
00:34:42
Speaker
Google is picking up people with intent, but it's hard to qualify them before, after the click LinkedIn is qualifying that traffic. So if I can afford to go after high intent clicks and pay probably higher than my competitors are willing to pay or higher than I would typically willing be willing to pay knowing that I can qualify.
00:35:00
Speaker
and convert that traffic on the back end with LinkedIn, I feel like gives me a competitive advantage and has been one of the most consistent levers that we've pulled for the last, you know, three or so years that combination. Holy cow. You're using that to grow an audience.
00:35:16
Speaker
Oh, to grow an audience using that to generate leads to generate new clients, that combination. But I mean, the other, everything else feeds into it. So I guess, you know, it was Google and then LinkedIn retargeting, but now I linked in organic as a big source of that cold traffic. It's probably way less, uh, intent fold than the bottom of the funnel Google. Um, but to grow and.
00:35:41
Speaker
Was that the question is grow a biggest, uh, you can use pay to grow an organic audience. I'm wondering what single tactic you've used to grow or get a single tactic to grow an organic audience. Um, probably is giving the whole
00:35:57
Speaker
damn playbook away in my posts. That has probably been the single biggest tactic because I do think setting aside the engagement requirements aside for a second, like if I didn't have that part, all my engagement would just be like fluffy, whatever. Like what am I supporting? If my main core content that I'm trying to be known for isn't like exactly what I want to be known for. So probably consistent content that's going deep on our niche.
00:36:26
Speaker
consistently. That's probably the biggest lever on LinkedIn. Yep. And in your opinion, what companies are doing audience growth? Right. I do think Cognizum, is that how you say it? I think they do pretty decent. I do think Refine Labs for a while was probably at the top of the list. I feel like they've dropped off dramatically.
00:36:48
Speaker
from, from, I wouldn't say they're at the top of the mountain anymore, um, for like company led community growth. I think Cognizism doing really well. I think hockey stack guys are doing great. Um, and one of the things like hockey stack came out with, yes, they have the flow, which I think is great. Um, but they also have like one of their best series that I think, uh, was really good for them was the, can you dashboard it so that the biggest obstacle with most attribution is like, it's really hard to like.
00:37:15
Speaker
to figure out, set up adapt. So they came up with like, can you dashboard it? Uh, that was genius. So I think those two are doing really good. Um, there's some others, but those are the top ones that stick out, I think. Cool. I need to reach out to cognizant because I've already had hockey stack on the show. So I'm going to reach out to them next then. Yeah. Uh, man.
00:37:34
Speaker
A lot of golden nuggets in today's interview. Thanks for joining me on the show today.
Connecting with Justin on LinkedIn and YouTube
00:37:38
Speaker
Uh, before we go, where can people connect with you online? Uh, so if you go to LinkedIn, uh, you should be able to find me just in row or impactable. Usually we'll show up in the top of those searches. Uh, our website is impactable.com. Uh, and also I do like to tell people about our YouTube channel. Uh, it's a LinkedIn ads, YouTube channel, the impactable YouTube channel.
00:38:01
Speaker
Uh, that's one of the places that we have the most information. There's an entire like LinkedIn one Oh one, uh, playlist that would probably be like a $400 course somewhere else, but it's just a free playlist that walks you through the basics as if you're a newborn baby learning LinkedIn ads. Uh, so those are the main places you could find us. Fantastic. Thanks for joining me again. I appreciate it, sir.
00:38:29
Speaker
What I loved about this episode was the fact that Justin is running a paid media agency yet still finds massive value in growing an organic audience. Yes, he's running paid media for himself, but he's also spending an enormous amount of time as a CEO of a paid media agency in order to get more qualified leads for his agency.
00:38:51
Speaker
I find a lot of companies are stuck on the hamster wheel of only running paid media. And I love paid media. Paid media can go so far. Like we talked about in the interview, it has a growing, it has a plateau that you reach that you can't, it's hard to break past at a certain point. That's when you could start using paid media to grow your own media. Just like Justin was talking about using retargeting ads in order to grow the owned media. You could do the same play. You could take 10% of your paid media in order to grow your own media.
00:39:20
Speaker
It works because unlike paid media, organic media can keep going and going and going and can become a whole new channel for you to unlock, uh, getting more marketing qualified leads. Some of my favorite things he talked about was what I've known long for a long time now is the art of engagement is something that you need to focus on. It's not enough just to hire a social media manager, just to post, but you have to be actively engaging in the conversations, not just with your posts either, but with other people's posts.
00:39:50
Speaker
This is how social like organic social media works. You have to be social.
00:39:56
Speaker
And the one thing that he knows he needs to do in order to unlock more growth to be more consistent, man, that just hits home. Cause it's like the hardest thing for me even to be consistent because well, it's hard. Like you go through different ebbs and flows of life personally, professionally, things are going on. You get a client, you have to work a lot of hours and it's BAM. It's hard to be consistent. It's the thing that I'm certainly learning how to do myself and I'm slowly building more processes to make posting easier so that I can be more consistent.
00:40:22
Speaker
So it's interesting to learn from someone like Justin who's, you know, like twice as far ahead of me in the audience growth front, say something like that, that you can grow a lot, but it's really in the consistency where you really start to multiply the growth. And I can see it with even like much larger creators, like they're just way more consistent and post more often. And of course their quality is usually better too.
00:40:43
Speaker
So, those are the things we have to work on as audience growth builders, right? We have to focus on getting a little better in our quality over time, you know, so it's getting better and better and better, being a little bit more consistent, and then posting more frequently. Hard things to do, but as you get better at it, as you build better growth systems, those things start to take care of themselves. Because again, you need to be able to build the systems so you can make it predictable.
00:41:09
Speaker
So thanks for joining me on another episode of the Attention Podcast. Again, I love it when you connect with me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is where I spend most of my time engaging with my audience. So connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find me at LinkedIn.com slash IN slash digital marketing Dan.
00:41:27
Speaker
Tap that connect button, tap the bell, shoot me a DM, tell me that you heard that I sent you over from the podcast and I will give you an emoji high five and say, well done. And I'll ask, is there anything I can do to help you grow your audience? Because I love helping people there. So go connect with me there and thank you for joining me on this episode.