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Mastering the Art of Engagement To Grow an Audience w/Mason Cosby
87 Plays1 year ago
In this episode of Audience Growth School, host Dan Sanchez interviews Mason Cosby about his successful podcast, The Marketing Ladder. Mason shares his strategies for connecting people through the podcast, leveraging LinkedIn, and building a loyal audience. He also discusses the value of deep relationships and the impact of the podcast on his career.
Timestamps:
[00:02:05] Podcast focuses on marketing careers and ABM.
[00:04:30] LinkedIn: 16K followers, 80 downloads/episode, 250 dedicated listeners.
[00:08:23] Delicate balance on LinkedIn for career professionals.
[00:11:49] Podcast host grew audience through engagement and tagging.
[00:16:32] Connecting people through podcasts for mutual benefit.
[00:21:24] LinkedIn notifies me when guests post, allowing engagement. I focus on building relationships with guests.
[00:23:36] Building audience, trust, and achieving business goals.
[00:26:31] Personalized engagement deepens connection and retains audience.
[00:33:04] Early traction requires unscalable personal messages, handwritten cards.
[00:34:31] Taking the next step in marketing consulting.
[00:39:55] TV show changed lives, transitioning for audience.
[00:43:51] Podcast audience leads to career growth and opportunities.
[00:49:32] Takeaways: personalized messaging, staying in touch.
[00:50:57] LinkedIn to launch new show on scrappy ABM, adding consultants and developing playbooks. Scrappyabm.com will be main resource hub.
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Transcript
Introduction to Audience Growth School
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome back to Audience Grows School, formerly the Attention podcast, where I'm documenting how creators and businesses have grown their audiences so we can do the same.
Meet Mason Cosby and The Marketing Ladder
00:00:10
Speaker
I'm Dan Sanchez, and today I'm talking to Mason Cosby, who has built an audience on LinkedIn and with this podcast, the marketing ladder. Soon to be a whole new show, but we're going to get into that in a moment.
Diverse Audience Growth Journeys
00:00:21
Speaker
Mason, welcome to the show.
00:00:23
Speaker
Dan, thank you so much for having me. I'm so honored to be here. I've learned so much about how to grow an audience from you. So I feel like I get to speak to the master and just share a couple of things that I've stolen from you.
00:00:35
Speaker
If you repeat a few back to me, I'll be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good. And I probably forgot that I was the one who might have even said it. But everybody has a different path to audience growth.
Combining Career and Marketing Content
00:00:45
Speaker
It's one of my favorite things about the journey is that everybody's journey is a little bit different. And we can learn a lot from the common threads, but we can learn a lot from
00:00:53
Speaker
The individual ones as well and you have been you were i mean since i've even come into contact with you like a year and a half ago ish like you've been crushing it i think before i got connected with you on linkedin through through james carberry
00:01:09
Speaker
remember thinking i'm like someday somebody's gonna join the career bucket with the marketing bucket and put it together and talk about just essentially niche down on both and just talk about career marketing career progression and is going to frickin dominate because it's just a massive field i mean there's a lot of marketers out there and a lot of us are wondering i know i was when i was an entry-level marketer like
Advancing from Director to VP in Marketing
00:01:32
Speaker
How do I become a manager? How do I become a director? Dang, even now I'm still like, dang, getting a VP is hard. What the heck is the break between those two things? I've been a director for like 10 years now. My goodness. And I've learned piece by piece, but then I knew somebody was going to come along and just destroy it with that. And then you came along and that's exactly what you did.
00:01:51
Speaker
Now, but I'm excited. I want to kick it off with a kind of the first question here, which is for everybody else, Mason, who is your audience?
Understanding Mason's Two Primary Audiences
00:02:00
Speaker
What kind of content do you make for them? I know I've previewed it a little bit and where, where can we find it right now? Yeah. So this will be an early interesting conversation. Cause I would say I actually have probably two specific audiences. So like you've mentioned, I have been building a podcast for about two years at this point called the marketing ladders. And.
00:02:18
Speaker
Man, there was a very large audience of either like young career marketers or to your point, for a lot of people they get to this point in their career and they're like, I don't know how to like move from manager to director or director to VP. So like a lot of people that were kind of stuck in like one specific role for the long time and wanted to make that level up. And then the other one that was really interesting
00:02:42
Speaker
Again, a year and a half ago, I feel like we just saw a ton of teachers transition out of education into marketing. So I had a super large audience and very engaged audience of career people that are making a massive career transition. So that would be kind of one audience.
00:03:00
Speaker
And then the other audience is for the past two years, I've worked at an ABM agency and I've been posting a lot around like tactical ABM type stuff on LinkedIn. So the two things that people have known me most for have been marketing careers and ABM and trying to figure out now, and this is kind of what we'll, we'll talk a little bit probably about is around, you know, how do you not have two distinct audiences? Cause the goal is that you have one main audience that you serve really, really well.
00:03:29
Speaker
So yeah, that's, those are my two places podcast really serves the career audience. And then LinkedIn really probably serves more of the, the ABM audience.
Transition to Account-based Marketing Focus
00:03:39
Speaker
Okay. And that's what your new show is all focused on. So yeah, the new show is going to be entirely focused around account based marketing and scrappy ABM. Um, because to, to your point around like owning career and marketing, I've actually seen a number of other people.
00:03:55
Speaker
that have come up. And I built the marketing ladder out of a desire to help people, but like there's no business around the marketing ladder. Like it's just a great show. Whereas what I've actually seen are some really, really influential, really solid people that have built businesses around being able to actually help pass their content. So I'm kind of passing the torch off to some of those people in the last episode here in the next couple of weeks. But yeah, moving forward, I'm going to really hone in specifically on the scrappy ABM audience.
Audience Size and Engagement Metrics
00:04:25
Speaker
how large is your current audience on LinkedIn and the marketing ladder? Yeah, so as we look at LinkedIn, I've got about 16,000 followers. So not the most massive audience in the world, but I would say a fairly engaged audience at that. And then with the with the marketing ladder,
00:04:43
Speaker
you know, as we both know, podcasts are a little bit difficult to tell. So I can see on average, I'm getting roughly, you know, 80 downloads an episode, but we also live stream every single episode. And I'm typically getting, you know, 30 likes on a live stream of an episode plus 500 impressions on a live stream to LinkedIn. So as I have tried to quantify the exact audience around the marketing ladder,
00:05:08
Speaker
I would say there's probably about 250 people that religiously listen to the show. And I've got a lot of people that kind of float in and out. That's the other interesting thing is I'll have people that listen for a very extended period of time. Cause the other piece around the marketing ladder was I was specifically interviewing those that were hiring. So if someone was looking for a job, they'd hear about the marketing ladder, they would binge 40 episodes. And it was always, it was always fun. Uh, cause it was always on a Saturday where I had my lowest listens typically, but then there'd be like,
00:05:37
Speaker
the occasional Saturday, like probably once a month where I'd see like 500 downloads. And I was like, Oh, I guess a couple people just decided to go binge the show. Like, and you just kind of, you see that in your, in your data. So that, I would say probably the, the dedicated audience from the marketing ladder of actual listeners was probably 200 to 250. And then again, just a lot of the in and out. So I think the show has probably been listened to by about, I would say roughly 2000 people, just based on them, people that have actually said, like, I loved this specific episode.
00:06:07
Speaker
Okay, so you're averaging like 300 ish downloads an episode. Yeah. Makes sense. Still, you got a pretty dedicated crew with 16,000 on LinkedIn, 300.
Platform Engagement Comparison
00:06:20
Speaker
I mean, it's funny as people or a lot of people and I had this argument at Sweetfish a lot like, well, we only have 300 listeners compared to our thousands we're getting on whatever short form platform. I'm like,
00:06:31
Speaker
You're not comparing apples to apples. If you want to compare apples to apples, compare minutes consumed. Maybe they spend one, two minutes consuming a LinkedIn post versus the 30, 45 minutes consuming a podcast episode. If you compare them like that and add up minutes, they're actually much more, like a few hundred on one podcast is more comparable to thousands of views on Twitter, or maybe even tens of thousands of views on Twitter, maybe thousands of views on LinkedIn, right? Absolutely.
00:06:58
Speaker
So it's funny that you're changing now from marketing ladder to an ABM approach.
Niche Selection and Career Opportunities
00:07:05
Speaker
I find that this is one of the biggest hurdles. Even once you get established, just trying to figure out, well, what niche should I be?
00:07:16
Speaker
should I stay in the one I'm in or should I pivot later or pivot to something else that maybe in the B2B influencer space, I feel like what niche you pick is also plays into like where I can be employed later, like what potential employers want to find me as an expert in to and of course, if you're well known for that one topic,
00:07:36
Speaker
You know, that can lead to a much higher salary than normal. Well, at least that's the hope, right? Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, I don't see B2B companies picking up influencers hardly ever because of their reach and use of them as just pure evangelists. Every once in a while you see that, but it's still very far and few in between. Still, I could see where the leaning into ABM is going to make a big difference.
00:08:01
Speaker
in that regard. Still, I know it's probably a huge battle internally, trying to feel like, oh, well, how much of my LinkedIn content now should I take there? How do you even see promoting your new show, knowing that a lot of your LinkedIn content, people were expecting a certain amount of marketing career advice there? Yeah.
Shift from Careers to ABM Content
00:08:23
Speaker
I think that there's a delicate balance for sure. And I think that admittedly, I mean, LinkedIn is a platform for career professionals. So I think that there will still be the occasional thing. Like even, I mean, for example, Chris Walker had a season where he talked a lot about career advice and it got a ton of engagement. And then what he recognized for himself is this is growing the audience, but it isn't serving the audience in the way that I can best serve the audience uniquely.
00:08:48
Speaker
So he's talked publicly about how he stopped doing that because it didn't actually drive specific business results for refined labs. So I think that there will still be the occasional piece, but again, I think the value and I actually don't see it as like moving away from careers. I see it as kind of an evolution of my own personal brand and better serving the audience because as I look at what I'm able to do from this idea of a scrappy ABM type approach,
00:09:16
Speaker
I feel that the marketing ladder in 120 episodes has helped people figure out in a lot of ways, how do I land the first role? How do I grow in the career? The challenge is now how do I actually get the results? How do I actually like do the functional job versus the contract negotiation and figuring out compensation and how to network? It's now more of I've landed the role. What do I do now? So I think that in helping people create con or by creating content on LinkedIn around scrappy ABM,
00:09:45
Speaker
It will still help people advance their career. It just won't be necessarily dedicated to like, here's how you negotiate a salary. Yep. It will be less career, more marketing, which doing better marketing, of course, is the number one way to progress your career as a marketer. All the other stuff is in the mix, but producing good results is what people are looking for.
Strategies for Acquiring New Audiences
00:10:06
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:10:08
Speaker
So let's talk about how you got to where you're at today. When it comes to audience growth, the number one thing you first have to figure out is how do I acquire new audience? How do I find them? How do I get them interested in what I have going on? How did you do this in the beginning? How did you start?
00:10:24
Speaker
Yeah. So I think it was serendipitous at the time. And now looking back, I can say like, Oh, here are some really helpful lessons. So to that point, the marketing ladder was started because a friend of mine that was an agency owner said, Hey, I got LinkedIn live. Who would want to do a LinkedIn live together? And it was supposed to just kind of be a one off episode. Um, and then he, he was like, well, what if we turn this into a podcast? I was like, all right, let's do it. And I had, you know,
00:10:51
Speaker
I'm a relatively young career marketer myself. So he was much further along in his career. So I just said, you know, what if we did a careers focused podcast? Because I looked up on Spotify and to your point, there were two other podcasts
Building a LinkedIn Audience from Scratch
00:11:04
Speaker
that even were focused on marketing and careers, but they were both posting like once every four to six weeks. So I mean, there just wasn't, there wasn't really anybody trying to do a lot in that space.
00:11:16
Speaker
That friend ended up being not being able to commit long-term. So it ended up happening is we had already lined up six or seven other guests and it just kind of turned into a Well, this show is now happening. So Mason like why don't you own it? So I started to own it and The I think the immense value there was again being Relatively young in my career. I was the audience as the host so I was asking
00:11:46
Speaker
10, 15, 20, 30 year veterans, how did you do this? And to that point,
00:11:53
Speaker
Again, if you ask anybody, how did they get started in marketing, they would always typically say, oh, I kind of fell into it. So again, then the show became really diving specifically into, no, how did you land this role? Like, how did you get started? What did you learn there? What were the lessons you took away? And then how did you leverage that into your next role? And it actually ended up, what was interesting, people have compared it to the show, like how I built it.
00:12:18
Speaker
And it was, instead of like a business, it was like how I built my specific career. And over time, again, people started to listen in. And this is a, I think a fairly commonly known tactic at this point. But it's, I would create these episodes and then people would post about those episodes and I draft off of their audiences. And the only thing that I would do
00:12:41
Speaker
to your point, because there's a ton of people on LinkedIn that talk about careers. There's a ton of people that talk about marketing. There was not a lot of people that talked about specifically marketing and careers. And there was like only one real podcast dedicated to it.
00:12:55
Speaker
So I just found a bunch of other people either talking about marketing or careers and then would share lessons from the marketing ladder in the comments. And I wouldn't like link back to the episode and like try to hijack the post, but I was like, I was just engaging and I'm speaking with CMOs and VPs on a weekly basis. So I'm learning a lot myself. And as a result, people then come check out my profile. They'd see hosts of the marketing ladder. They then.
00:13:20
Speaker
go click on the LinkedIn page and then go find the podcast. So to your point, this is nothing crazy. And I've done it kind of as an experiment to see, but I've never made a post from the marketing ladder LinkedIn page, nor made a post.
00:13:33
Speaker
But it already has over a thousand followers after a year because of just tagging and like people finding it. So again, from that perspective, it was an experiment around the company page of like, how do you grow a company page without doing anything just to kind of see what would happen. But from that perspective, like that was how it all got started and how we started to build the audience of.
00:13:52
Speaker
Let's get guests lined up. They're going to post about it. We'll actively engage with them. We'll find other people that talk in a similar space. Essentially, I'm providing additional content in a different format than anybody else is providing. And I can drop off of their larger audiences to actually grow the show. Did you have a LinkedIn audience before you started the podcast? Or did you grow your LinkedIn audience because of the podcast?
Tactics for Audience Growth
00:14:15
Speaker
I think it was a yes and so I
00:14:21
Speaker
Again, I worked at an ABM agency and I had no audience at that point. To give quick context, I had come from the fintech lending space before I was in the marketing agency world. So like there was no audience carry over when I moved to the agency world. And what audience was there? I mean, there may have been like 300 lenders that followed me for how to grow their lending business.
00:14:46
Speaker
It was just so small, it's not even worth considering. So what I have been tasked with doing for the agency was building an ABM program that was really scrappy. So I started to specifically connect on LinkedIn with target accounts and creating content there, but it was not
00:15:04
Speaker
the audience at that point, I think when I started the podcast, I had 1600 connections and followers. And to be clear, they were only followers because they were connections. There was nobody that was specifically seeking me out to follow me for my content. They were connecting with me because I had sent them a connection request. When the show really started to pick up,
00:15:23
Speaker
was when I started to have days where I would gain 300 to 500 followers in a single day because an episode would drop. Or I would make a specific post that was really tactical and really specific around how do you grow your career and it would blow up. Or the other thing I ended up doing, and these are still to this day been some of my most
00:15:43
Speaker
helpful, but also audience growing posts is I would look at everybody that had ever been on the marketing ladder and I would create a list of everybody that was actively hiring at that moment and tag them and their company. And those posts always got, you know, tens of thousands of views because everybody's looking for a job and they're always hearing you got to connect with the hiring manager. So then I essentially took that content and said, get career advice from your potential future boss. This is their episode. This is what they're hiring for.
00:16:13
Speaker
If you match this, go check out this episode and then go use that as a way to personalize your outreach and actually get on their calendar. So again, those kinds of posts really helped to blow up the audience. But I mean, there was no real audience prior to the marketing ladder. It was just those intentional steps that helped to develop that audience.
00:16:32
Speaker
Man, I mean, you essentially did something magic by finding two groups of people who wanted to meet each other and you're just connecting them via podcast, right? You're taking people who want to meet the hiring manager, people who want to find more applicants, bam. I did find there was one podcast that did this to like a whole different degree. I mean, they ended up getting like 90K downloads an episode.
00:16:59
Speaker
because they went after Google and then Facebook. I think they like landed Spotify as their first guest and then talked about their internship programs. That's who they did. They'd find people who were the intern manager for their big, these big intern programs. And then what allowed them to promote and talk about their internship program at these like wildly like
00:17:19
Speaker
like sought after roles. And then they're, of course, naturally, if you just have Salesforce, Facebook, Google, Netflix, all the internship programs, yeah, they got a lot of downloads because they're connecting two different groups where it's kind of like, where do you find out about these internship programs? They're kind of hard to find even now.
00:17:37
Speaker
and they were making it available and then just killing it in the process. You're doing something on a smaller scale and much more niche, but still kind of finding that same thing and finding two different groups of people and trying to help them find each other. But what I think is really valuable is how you used it to grow your LinkedIn audience, especially like taking the things you're learning from it and then bringing it back into comments. Were you tagging the guests being like, what I learned from tag so-and-so is this, and then like continuing to build that relationship, getting more engagement into it. Is that what you were doing?
00:18:07
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it is. So which is a great point. And for lack of a word, there are some lessons that were just so repeated that it was like, this is what I'm learning out of the show. But then there were other lessons that were like very tactically and very specifically one individual. So I actually did a mix of like, if this was a theme throughout the show, I would tag the show. If this was a lesson from a specific person on a recent episode, I would tag that person.
00:18:35
Speaker
Man, what a great way to build a community. So we all know LinkedIn, if you're listening to this and you're not in the LinkedIn game, LinkedIn is very much a social, social platform. You could probably post to TikTok and grow a following there without actually commenting and engaging too much. It helps, but you could probably grow viral without commenting a lot.
00:18:56
Speaker
But on LinkedIn, no. It is like comments and conversations are the game. That is how you grow and build something on LinkedIn. So being able to pull your past guests into the things you're learning in there, I'm like, ooh, I haven't done that that much. I think I need to start doing that with this exact show and just bringing guests back into the conversation, strengthening the relationship because it's based on the relationships that helps you go viral.
00:19:21
Speaker
Um, I don't know how the algorithm, the algorithm can kind of understand your relationship to people and how strong it is because you're talking to each other more little DMS, a little tag, little comment here, LinkedIn keeps track of all this stuff and then brings your content back in front of those people more often. And if I may add one thing onto that, I mean, the, the monthly posts where I'm tagging everyone actively hiring, it doesn't matter when your episode was like, if you're in a larger organization, I had some people that were,
00:19:48
Speaker
working at really large companies that were literally always hiring. So they heard from me in a way that was not asking anything, but was providing explicit value literally every single month. So just through that perspective, again, it's thinking through, okay, I want to grow this audience. And the best way to grow, at least from my perspective, is the best way to grow a larger audience is to have a really, really loyal, small audience that you really take care of, that you really specifically nurture.
00:20:16
Speaker
because they will then go and talk a lot about you. So again, from that perspective, I have had 120 guests at this point, but I have 16,000 followers because that 120 that I can manageably.
00:20:32
Speaker
keep in contact with. I try to keep in contact with most everybody at least every like two to three months and like make a post about them. Like do something to maintain that audience that is the guests, but then they will go and talk about me on my behalf. And that's how you get scalable audience growth.
00:20:48
Speaker
So your answer there kind of bleeds into like my next question of like, what were you doing to intentionally retain
Retaining Audience through Engagement
00:20:54
Speaker
your audience? Cause it's one thing to get them to come and tap follow once, but as we all know, I mean, they can unfollow, but more likely like people just engage a little less and less over time to the point where they just don't see your posts anymore.
00:21:06
Speaker
or think about you. And you talked about one thing when you're doing it with the guests, right and building relationship with them and keeping them in the loop one through tagging them, though, I'd love to hear what else you're doing to stay in touch with guests. But what are some ways that you're actually retaining and being intentional about retaining your audience? Yes, we know the thing that I did.
00:21:24
Speaker
is on LinkedIn, you can get notified whenever somebody posts. So I actually went through and picked out anytime I have a guest, I go and set the notification belts and whenever they post, I actually get notified so I can go and engage on their content. So again, from that perspective,
00:21:40
Speaker
I view my audience. Yes, it is everybody that is the listener, but also, like the easiest way to continue to engage the listener, the listener didn't necessarily always come for me, even though now people generally like me, but especially when it was getting started, they were coming for the guest, like the guest was the one that brought the value, the guest was the one that brought the authority, I was just a host of a party. So where I can engage with a guest, the more I can
00:22:02
Speaker
Associate myself with those guests that are providing incredible value The more that the audience will then come back to listen to engage to hear than the thoughts that I have so again from that perspective I Cannot it is not feasible for me to keep one-to-one engagement with 16,000 people like it's just not gonna happen. Yeah, so instead I Focused on the ones that I did build a one-to-one relationship with through the actual interview and then
00:22:31
Speaker
the nature that we're constantly now showing up on each other's content. The listeners see that they continue to engage and it creates a symbiotic relationship where everybody is actually being helped. So audience retention just by
00:22:48
Speaker
Pulling in essential out of other info all your guests are like influencers but are sources of new audience but by maintaining the relationship with them you're actually strengthening your relationship to the audience because
00:23:03
Speaker
that that source of new people, you're maintaining a connection to where you got them from, you're maintaining a connection with the person you got them from, which means if they disengage with you, like, well, you're gonna engage with so and so again, that that person you had on as a guest, hence getting your post back out in front of those people, and they might re engage that way. I never thought about it that way. But it's, it's actually a smart way to stay in touch with your audience. Something I haven't done as well as a guest when I was hosting for B2B growth.
00:23:31
Speaker
Um, but now I'm starting to think I need to start doing for the show ASAP. Well, and again, like I come from most things with this account based mindset. So as I think about, I mean, some of the guests ended up, it wasn't always, but many of the guests when I was working in an agency were actually target accounts that I was trying to also then actually re-engage to come buy ABM programs. So like there is that level at which.
00:23:55
Speaker
like the more I can engage with the guest, because it's not just necessarily for a lot of people trying to grow an audience. Like there is an end outcome that is typically some level of a business result. So like, I think especially as we talk about the idea of audience growth, like I'm never going to be a Mr. Beast and I'm probably not going to do these massive brand deals.
00:24:15
Speaker
But if I can build a large enough audience that attracts and essentially gives me the social proof that I generally know what I'm talking about and gives me some level of credibility, I can then engage with people that are my buyers with whatever business I'm engaging in or I need to land a new job.
00:24:30
Speaker
like the people that can help me land a new job. Or again, from that perspective, if I ever decided to go launch my own business, I have a built-in audience that trust me already because I've been a valuable source for years. So again, I think especially as you think about audience growth, it just is a matter of like I'm probably never gonna have millions upon millions of followers and that's okay with me.
00:24:50
Speaker
Like what's the size audience that I'm trying to build and what's the end state for that audience? My goal is to help them build a better career and actually build better ABM programs. The best ways to do that are through a variety of means, but like when I can set that goal from the start, I can then actually have a better outcome.
00:25:08
Speaker
That's a whole podcast episode in and of itself the value of a personal brand and specifically not just a personal brand But it's a valuable enough personal brand that it actually has an audience because you're putting out useful enough stuff Because it I mean one it solidifies your career So it's easier to get jobs better better jobs higher paying jobs
00:25:29
Speaker
But it also kind of gives you a wiggle room to try other things. It gives you leverage to be able to then launch your own company. With an audience, it's more easy to do that, especially if your company's focused on the target audience that you already have.
00:25:47
Speaker
or to have a little side hustle going on, or maybe you sell some courses or some things and you can diversify your income that way. It just gives you more options. If you have an audience, you get more career choices, more ways to start a company, more ways to earn some side money.
Deepening Audience Engagement
00:26:03
Speaker
It gives you more options to play into all these different ways to earn money, but ultimately add value to the world. Add more value to your employer, add more value to those people, hence it becomes more financially lucrative. Yeah.
00:26:17
Speaker
So are you doing anything with your audience to help them go deeper, to dive into your, your mission, your message? Like what are some things you're helping them grow depth, not just like getting them to retaining an audience, but helping that audience care more.
00:26:31
Speaker
Yeah, so there's two things. One, and I used to feel a lot better about it, and it's something that I've seen, I don't know if you guys are familiar with Sam McKenna, but Sam McKenna is incredible at this concept of show me, you know me. So whenever somebody would follow or connect, I would actually typically try to send a one-to-one message that just says, hey, thank you so much for following, or hey, thank you so much for connecting.
00:26:59
Speaker
like the fact that you think I'm worth being in your feed means the world. I just wanted to understand from your perspective, like what is it that got you to give me a follow? Because especially, and I know this is not the right thing for audience growth, but I did talk
00:27:19
Speaker
for about two big things for about two years of both ABM and careers. So it just depended on where the audience found me, if they wanted to learn more about careers or ABM. But from that perspective, like building that one-to-one, I can't maintain that. And I know that I can't maintain it for everybody every single week. But those little touch points that actually said, hey, I didn't just like get the notification that I got followers today, but I actually specifically sent you a message
00:27:49
Speaker
and wanted you to know that I see you, then I value the fact that you think I'm worth following is a great way to help actually, again, retain. And then what would typically happen is some people would reply back and they would, you know, whatever the message was, they would say, this is why I learned about you. That's what I'm interested in learning more about from you. I can then send them a resource. So again, if it is
00:28:14
Speaker
about careers. I had tons of podcast episodes that I could then actually say, Hey, I don't know if you listen to this one. But that thing that you're talking about, like we talked about that in this episode. And we go really deep on that. So again, it's plugging the same content and going deeper on that content. Or if it was a VM, again, I worked with an agency, I was writing a ton of content around account based marketing. So I could say, Hey, if you want more about this, like here's this piece of content. Or the other thing
00:28:41
Speaker
And I don't remember where I got this piece of advice, but if people were like, I just really love like your perspective on things, you know, being the host, I actually didn't talk that much as the host, but being a host of a podcast, I ended up getting a lot more podcast and guest opportunities. So I ended up creating, I think it was Nick Bennett that recommended this to me, like create a playlist of all of your guest appearances in Spotify. And then people were like.
00:29:05
Speaker
I really want to hear more about X topic. If they're like interested in hearing that, you can then send them the playlist and say, Hey, you know, these are all the appearances that I've been on. And this specific episode, I go really deep on that topic. So like, for example, I've been talking a lot about how do you use AI for content repurposing? And I know that there's a lot of mixed feelings and thoughts about AI. So I'm not claiming to be an expert in any way shape and form, but I'm like,
00:29:31
Speaker
This is how i've been doing it and i went really deep on it and an episode with justin simon on his podcast distribution first if you want really deep thoughts on that go check out that episode. The last thing that has been really helpful for going deeper with the audience. Is sometimes you will ask me a question.
00:29:52
Speaker
And specifically, when it comes to the really deep nuances around contract negotiation, I don't know that I've done a specific dedicated episode to the really nuanced complexities around equity versus bonus versus salary versus commission. There's a lot of things that go into your total compensation.
00:30:13
Speaker
But by the nature that I built a podcast around careers and the other thing is like I personally just made a career transition like four or five months ago.
00:30:24
Speaker
and got about 10 different offers in that process and really negotiated hard on a variety of things. So I just have some more personal experience now. I can then send a voice message that two minutes, it's two separate voice messages in LinkedIn that then answer the question directly.
00:30:43
Speaker
It'll be faster than typing it and they feel really seen and valued because I sent a voice message like. It's been an interesting transition for me personally as people have like sent me a message and it's like hey no you're probably busy but I didn't get that previously so like.
00:31:00
Speaker
I recognize that people do think I have some level of value. So the more that I can try to actually engage in a personalized way, the more that they will feel seen, the more that they will feel valued, the deeper that they will actually feel a personal connection to the content that I create, and the more that they're likely to stick around.
00:31:18
Speaker
It's one of my favorite ways to retain an audience or go deeper with them is one-to-one messages, specifically multimedia. I like loom videos is kind of been my thing, but you're absolutely right. It's just faster because sometimes you like dig through your past archive of stuff. You're like, uh, where was that again? I don't know. By the time you find it and tell them maybe where it starts in the episode, you're just kind of like, screw it. I could just literally answer the question in one minute. If I could just record it and BAM, blast it off to them. And it's way better for them. It's actually faster for you.
00:31:48
Speaker
I'm surprised you're you're one of the few that does it I've been recommending it I feel like for a long time and very few still take advantage of sending voice text or loom videos in order to answer questions, even though the the Return on that is as far as their their I don't know I can't count loyalty but like they're all of like you is like through the roof I don't know what it is about it, but like they're like oh What you took the time to talk to me?
00:32:18
Speaker
You're like, dude, it was literally faster, but yeah. And like, if you think about it, I can go refill my cup of coffee, record this voice message, send it off. And like, I literally didn't take any time out of my day, but to your point, I got a voice message from Darren McKee and like, I felt so valued and so honored. And he was like, yeah, I've seen your content on LinkedIn. Like I'd love to figure out like when it would ever make sense for us to like meet up before ever in the same city.
00:32:42
Speaker
And if it happens or not, I have no idea, but the fact that Darren McKee sent me a voice message and like, I can recall almost exactly what he said. And it's been a month and a half and it was 17 seconds. And I know all of that just shorthand because I really valued Aaron McKee. And I'm just like, I think about that and how I've been impacted by that. I'm like, okay, I can do the same thing for other people. Yeah, absolutely. I love the going back to what you said earlier too. I took like a mental note is that you're doing things that are unscalable in the beginning.
Importance of Early Unscalable Efforts
00:33:12
Speaker
like doing personal messages to people in the very beginning. And it's honestly that kind of stuff that you need to get the early traction. I remember way back when there was like a form software, I can't remember, WooForms, boom, WooForms, like when they were like, I don't even know where WooForms is now. I think they got acquired and like have died somewhere. But like when WooForms was a thing, it was like the Mailchimp of forms. It was like the easy drag and drop system for building forms.
00:33:37
Speaker
Um, they got the early start by handwriting. Thank you cards to every single new customer. Completely unscalable, but guess what? It helped them get a lot of traction and build a lot of favor for them. And of course, those people would talk about it a little bit more and help them get the traction. So doing, doing the unscalable things early is like one of the things you just have to do. If you want to build an audience, you kind of have to do give people a reason to follow you early on. And in the beginning, the thing you have more of is time. I know it doesn't feel like you have more time to do it, but
00:34:07
Speaker
Compared to when you have a lot of audience asking you lots of questions, you actually do have more time than you think. It just takes more time to build an audience than anybody like signs up for or thinks about in the beginning. Absolutely. So what's next steps are you taking to grow an audience?
Next Steps for ABM-focused Show
00:34:22
Speaker
You've made a massive transition from going from marketing ladder now to this scrappy ABM show. What steps are you taking now to make that transition?
00:34:31
Speaker
Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. And the next step is, you know, I love the marketing ladder and the thing that I've always gotten questions around to your point is like, how do we, how do I go deeper? Like, how do I learn more? How do I take the next step? And like for the marketing ladder, it was always just that, like it was, this is it. Like, you know, if you, like I dabbled in the idea of like building a job board or building a community and like, you know, when I looked at those things, it really just came down to,
00:35:00
Speaker
I'm not gonna add any more value if I go build this job board than I would if I just post about these things on LinkedIn and I've done those things.
00:35:11
Speaker
So from that perspective, how I'm now taking the next step is I, again, coming from the agency space, I documented every process that I've done for the past two years. And I continue to build process documentation around everything that I build, even current state. I've got my whole content repurposing playbook mapped out just for myself. I'm a big fan of the bus lottery theory, which is I could get hit by a bus or win the lottery.
00:35:37
Speaker
today. Either way, I'm probably not going to work tomorrow. And my job as an employee is to help make sure that those things can continue without me. So the thought process is, I can now and please don't go to the website, it's not finished. But it is like if you go to scrappyabm.com, like I'm building out playbooks. And
00:35:58
Speaker
you know, probably get it started. I don't think I'm even like, there's not going to be any dollar sign associated with it. Like I just want to genuinely help people with these playbooks. So I think I'm a big fan of just like doing an MVP and getting something launched. So from that perspective, there will be a podcast. I'll create a ton of LinkedIn content around it. And then there'll be free playbooks that are likely going to be Google docs. If we're being honest that you can just go and clone, but like I'll document all those playbooks and like those will be all readily accessible. The other thing is a lot of people have,
00:36:28
Speaker
You know, I I'll be blunt starting with another abm or recently and
00:36:34
Speaker
The past two or three years, we've just given away like a lot of free consulting and like, we'll just hop on a call with anybody and just talk through anything. Um, but I'm expecting my first child in August. It's like, that's probably not going to be the most scalable thing. So again, creating forums through which I can still provide free advice. So we may do like a monthly live where people can just ask questions, but like, if you want a dedicated one on one time, like I'm now offering like a, just a general consulting service. Um, so like that's like a paid calendar link.
00:37:03
Speaker
Yeah, like, hey, if you want an hour, this is the cost for an hour and we can just do it really clean and simple. I'll show up for an hour and like talk through anything that you want. So just kind of working through all of those things because practically I, again, I love the marketing ladder, but I think what makes the most sense and the way in which I can own
Transitioning from The Marketing Ladder
00:37:26
Speaker
and be more helpful is taking the playbooks that I've built, making those publicly and readily accessible, and then being able to dive deeper with people in a way that helps them and be somewhere they are today. So that's kind of the next step of building the audience is, and I should say one other thing.
00:37:47
Speaker
I've, with the marketing ladder, I've set up a last live stream. So I'm doing with Alexa Scott and Briana Doe that are both massive career marketing people.
00:37:59
Speaker
And we're doing it all together. I'm going to sunset the show in that way and say, look, if you want more of this, like these are the people that you should go and follow. But moving forward, like this is my lane and the goal I've got. I've done a repurpose of episodes where I've talked about scrappy ABM and I should have 20 repurposed episodes. Like live by the time we actually did that last episode. So I can say.
00:38:22
Speaker
And if you want to dive deeper into this new lane, then I'm staking my claim on. I've got 20 podcast episodes that you can go and binge to now get an understanding for this. So I'm sunsetting it in a very intentional and specific way. And then having it immediately available to where the playbooks are ready. The podcast is up with 20 episodes ready to go. And then I can just go and say, this is what I'm doing moving forward.
00:38:47
Speaker
I love how you're sunsetting that. I mean, there's been a few times where I've wondered like, you can't retain an audience forever. And I've toyed with the idea of like, can you graduate audience members? Can they learn most of what you have to learn? Even if they haven't implemented at all, can they graduate and then you recommend they go on to a next step? In this case, you're exiting that field to move to a, I don't know, it's not entirely different fields. It's still within marketing, but you're leaving the career space. Yep.
00:39:16
Speaker
but instead of just leaving them or like publishing your last show or just pushing them all to trying to push as many as you can to the abm which you'll announce where you're going and they can follow you there but you're handing it off to somebody in the career space building a better relationship with some some people that are going to be big advocates for you in the future.
00:39:33
Speaker
Yeah blessing them a lot by transferring your audience over there But giving the audience someplace to go which I think very very few I've ever seen do that. Usually they just stop posting and then all of a sudden the show just dies So well done i'm on putting a good cap on the end of that show I appreciate it. I again, I love the show it
00:39:59
Speaker
And what I know, and this is actually what has been so fun, is I can tangibly tell you names of people that have reached out to me and said, this show changed my life. I was able to transition a career. I was able to get the promotion.
00:40:12
Speaker
Like the show has helped a lot of people, so I don't just want to let it fizzle out and die. I really did want to sunset it in a way that still helps a lot of people.
Benefits of Focusing on a Single Audience
00:40:22
Speaker
But admittedly, I think this is an interesting thing to talk through from an audience growth perspective. My audience growth has slowed significantly because I've been trying to serve two audiences versus
00:40:32
Speaker
like just making the transition. So that's why I'm now making the transition and I'm saying like, look, I will likely have an audience decrease for a little bit of time. And that's okay because I'm recognizing, and I'll just put it really bluntly. I know that I can better serve the scrappy avian audience because I have never had people specifically say, let me pay you money to do career coaching. It's happened maybe, I shouldn't say never, it's maybe happened twice.
00:41:00
Speaker
I have had 10 people in the past three months reach out and ask me to do consulting on Scrappy ABM. So just from that perspective, I can see that the audience engagement and the need for what I'm talking about is so much clearer in the way that people, I haven't built a website, but people are just reaching out and are like, I don't know how much I need to pay you, but like, can I pay you to do this for me? I didn't see that in the career space.
00:41:26
Speaker
makes a ton of sense. Some markets are better than others, and more lucrative. One thing that I want to make clear for anybody who's listening who's like, you haven't even started yet, and you're like, what should I do? Should I pick A, B, or C? If I could go back and give my younger self advice, it would be like, it doesn't matter, just fricking pick one.
00:41:45
Speaker
write it for a year, year and a half, two years. You know what? You will end up in a much better place to even see what you should have picked and have more momentum going forward. Kind of like you picked one. It was good, but now you found something. You're like, okay, the ABM thing actually was better, but you're not launching from zero anymore. You're launching from a whole different place. You have momentum now. Again, if I can add, I couldn't have launched into the ABM space two years ago.
00:42:11
Speaker
I didn't have a unique perspective. I didn't have anything to really add to that space. Whereas again, when I started with careers, selfishly, I was just trying to figure out how to grow my own career and help a bunch of other people along the way. And just like, essentially it's, Hey, how did you do this? And then I'll let a bunch of people listen into our conversations. Whereas now, like.
00:42:33
Speaker
knowing what I know now, I know that I can be a far more valuable individual to a very specific audience and grow that audience far more quickly and effectively based on what I learned out of growing an audience for the marketing ladder, but also now having clear understanding and expertise in a different space. So from that perspective, I couldn't agree more with the idea of, and I know that people have a love-hate relationship with the advice of like, just get started, like don't overthink it, because in the process, I love how Gary Vee has also talked about this idea of like,
00:43:02
Speaker
If you do something for a year and nobody engages, that's your answer. And that's OK versus deliberating for a year and you have no new information. Just get started. Do something for a year and see where it pans out.
00:43:17
Speaker
Yep, advice I would have wished I've taken earlier, but you know, we're in it now. So it's good. Now, last question, before we jump into the rapid fire questions, is that every good story has a B story.
Personal Growth from Audience Building
00:43:32
Speaker
There's the A story of the things that happen, which is all the things we've been talking about and all the things you've done to grow this audience.
00:43:39
Speaker
but tell me a little bit about the B story, the things that are happening inside. Like how has building it growing an audience like impacted you inside? Um, so the B story and I, I have shared this and in some passing conversations, but, uh, for me personally, it, it has been the greatest career accelerant period. Um, cause I don't know how else I would have spoken with,
00:44:08
Speaker
I'll put it bluntly, I'll call out some specific names. Like I don't know how I would have met James Carberry. I don't know how I would have met Sangram Verghe or Chris Walker or I mean, just the Kathleen Booth. Like the list just goes on and on and on of the incredible leaders that I've had the opportunity to speak to for an hour. You know, it's, it's nothing like, I'm probably not going to be able to go get, you know, a drink with Chris Walker unless, you know, where I happen to be at the same conference.
00:44:35
Speaker
Chris Walker and I have had a really great conversation around how do you build an innovative culture within a marketing organization? Super, like I learned a ton through that conversation. So there's that piece of like, I personally have just grown dramatically and I think I've been able to cram about seven years of experience in about two. So there's that piece. The second piece, I threw out this earlier of like,
00:45:01
Speaker
When I finally looked to make a job transition after about two years, I had about 10 offers. And three years prior, I had been laid off because of COVID and spent four months sending out literally a thousand job applications unable to land a job. But then after the podcast, after growing an audience, and after being able to be a valuable, helpful person within the space, I sent 40 messages
00:45:30
Speaker
to people that had been on the show and just said like, hey, I'm looking, this is what I'm looking for. Do you know anybody? It was like the week of Christmas. And I still got, I had 20 interviews from the span of two weeks that resulted in 10 offers. And I was able to be really, really choosy. And I specifically said, I want to work at sales assembly. And I did everything in my power to do that and was able to, I think it was over 30 different referrals.
00:45:57
Speaker
to the executive team at Sales Assembly to hire me out of the audience that I had built for the podcast. And again, like all of that comes together into the greatest job security and safety net for my family. So the B story that is the value of an audience is, again, with this audience, I don't know that I will ever be unemployable again. And there was a period of my life where I was unemployable because I had no
00:46:27
Speaker
I didn't bring specific value to an organization. Whereas now to your point, I actually had people that I interviewed with that said, you seem really big in like this ABM and marketing career space. And like, we don't do anything close to that. It's like, we're not going to hire you. But for those where I did bring specific guys. So for example, sales assembly specifically serves the B2B tech space with skills development across the revenue organization.
00:46:50
Speaker
relationships and the deep relationships that I have in this space made me exponentially more attractive as a candidate because it was an intangible that I bring with me. So there's all of those pieces that play together. And honestly, about 1000 other sub stories of people trying to build businesses with me around the marketing ladder and just a ton of inbound job opportunities and a number of people that were like, why don't you just go build your own? But like, there's so many subplots
00:47:20
Speaker
that could be in that B story, but the long and short of it is with the marketing ladder and with the audience, I have more options than I could ever possibly pursue. And I get to be really, really choosy about the life that I now build professionally, which then helps build a better life personally.
00:47:41
Speaker
So if I hear you straight, it's in the process you've gained, gained a team of like mentors because you were able to go and talk to all these people you didn't have access to before. It's almost like being able to read, you know, the people have talked about having a tribe of mentors because you can read all their books and stuff. But in this case, you literally just had one-on-one conversations with people that charge a lot of money per hour.
00:48:01
Speaker
If you were to hire them for that, except you get to just interview them for free on your podcast. Um, and then at the same time you developed a safety net that makes you know, you know, you have a level of peace now about if you lost your job, you'd be able to pick one up really quick because of what you built. So to move on to the rapid fire questions, memories are 30 second, 30 second answers or less.
Rapid-fire Audience Growth Strategies
00:48:28
Speaker
Who influences your thinking on audience growth the most? Dan Sanchez. Yes, I probably need to change that otherwise I'm going to come up too often. Where do you consume? I'll skip the second one. What's the largest obstacle you're running into with audience growth right now? Content repurposing personally. What single tactic has been the most reliable for you to grow and acquire or grow and acquire a new audience?
00:48:57
Speaker
Asking people that have an established audience to come on my podcast and being the nicest, kindest, most helpful person that I can to those people so that they like me and then talk about me. In your opinion, what companies are doing audience growth, right? Lavender. Okay. Uh, sorry, I'll, we'll start that over and sorry to make you edit Lavender, Apollo. Um, and.
00:49:27
Speaker
I think Refine Labs still is doing audience growth well. Okay. And Exit 5.
00:49:37
Speaker
Great. Mason, thank you so much for joining me on Audience Grow School today. I've learned a ton. Two of my actionable takeaways that I wrote down that I'm like, I'm doing this this week is it's creating a system to send a one on one message to every new subscriber that comes to Audience Grow School, which I have an email thing going on to where people can subscribe.
00:49:59
Speaker
I'm like, man, I need to get a reminder, like a reminder to reach out to them within the first couple of days, shoot them a loom video the way I do. Like, I just need to do that. I'm not big enough that I can't, that I wouldn't be able to do this. And then building a system to stay in touch with guests. I'm like, it, it's something that I've seen work so well for fricking James Carberry. It's like, he's the master at that, right? And I'm like, it's working for James. It's working for Mason. I got to build a system for this because I know that it works. I've seen it work too many times.
00:50:29
Speaker
So even as an audience retention play, just staying in contact with your guests is a great way to do it because honestly, relationships matter. That's why we're here. It's what makes it fun. So those are two massive takeaways that I'm taking. Is there any final thing that you want to announce to the audience, um, for this podcast, um, for them to be able to find you online or to check out that website that you mentioned for your new podcast? Where can they find you and subscribe to you? Yeah. I mean, admittedly LinkedIn is going to be the biggest.
00:50:59
Speaker
And, um, this I'll be also on it. So this is the first time I've talked in any level of depth about scrappy ABM. I've just kind of alluded that there's going to be a new show. Um, so I just want to be clear. Um, I am having a baby in August. So for a little bit, there's going to be just the initial 20 episodes, but the goal is that come September, I would start doing weekly releases on scrappy ABM and.
00:51:24
Speaker
you know, continue to develop some playbooks, adding people in that I've got a number of people that have said, Hey, I'd be interested in being a consultant on scrappy ABM. So, uh, there will actually be a roster of people with different areas of expertise. If you need just specific tactical, like one-off support around the ways in which you're thinking about growing a business in a very scrappy way. So, uh, scrappy ABM.com is going to be that website and it's going to be kind of the main resource hub for all scrappy ABM content moving forward.
00:51:52
Speaker
Nice. I'm looking at it right now and a lot of this is up and looking good. It's not finished. There's still some, um, you know, some sore on the website, but we're getting there. Go there, subscribe, get the guides. All right. Again, thank you for joining me on the show.