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The Power of Social Selling for B2B Growth | Laura Erdem
24 Plays2 months ago
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The Efficient Spend Podcast helps start-ups turn media spend into revenue. Learn how the world's top marketers manage their media mix to drive growth!
In this episode of the Efficient Spend Podcast, Laura Erdem, Sales Manager at Dreamdata, discusses the art of social selling and its impact on aligning sales and marketing efforts. Laura delves into building brand trust through authentic engagement, the role of content consistency across touchpoints, and the balance of organic versus paid strategies, offering actionable insights for developing long-term business relationships.
About the Host: Paul is a paid marketing leader with 7+ years of experience optimizing marketing spend at venture-backed startups. He's driven over $100 million in revenue through paid media and is passionate about helping startups deploy marketing dollars to drive growth.
About the Guest: Laura Erdem is a sales manager with over four years of experience driving growth for Dreamdata, where she leads the US sales team in outbound strategy, sales excellence, and team development. With a proven track record of closing major enterprise deals and building sales practices from scratch, she is passionate about aligning marketing and sales to drive measurable impact.
VISIT OUR WEBSITE: https://www.efficientspend.com/
CONNECT WITH PAUL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulkovalski/
CONNECT WITH LAURA: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lerdem/
EPISODE LINKS:
https://dreamdata.io/blog
https://www.salesforce.com/blog-hub/
https://buffer.com/resources/
https://www.socialmediatoday.com
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-strategy/
https://contentmarketinginstitute.com
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Transcript
Effective Social Selling on LinkedIn
00:00:00
Speaker
So if there are two things on LinkedIn that nobody cares about when you're doing social selling, it's you and your company. And when sellers drop the you and marketers drop the company, that's where the magic happens because then you merge the two. You don't talk about yourself or about your company. You talk about the problems that your buyers are trying to solve. That's the easiest part of it because that's what attracts them. They care about their own problems. They don't care about your company.
00:00:30
Speaker
But you happen to solve the problems and then that that's how they find you.
00:00:41
Speaker
I'm super excited for the conversation today. We're going to talk a lot about social selling, measurement and core mentality, dream data. But just to maybe kick things off, who are you and yeah, what is your experience with with social selling?
00:00:55
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. So my experience with social selling is a bit more than four years old. And before that, my experience with social selling was working at large enterprises where you just reshare your stuff, like what marketing tells you.
00:01:11
Speaker
But four years ago, I joined Dream Data, it's a startup. And as a startup, you don't really have a lot money to but invest into marketing. So we said, okay, we need to be on LinkedIn. And we have to figure out how, because this is the media where marketers are at.
00:01:27
Speaker
we're selling to marketers, let's try to reach them. So it was very natural and organic to try to figure out how this works. But suddenly with getting more team involved and trying to measure it, it became a thing. We became known for being on the platform and marketers can find us there. And that's where it started. So I'm in sales. I'm a sales leader for our Americas team. And I love social selling and seeing how it grows in smaller companies as well.
00:01:54
Speaker
you know I think as much as you are ah a salesperson, I would say you're also a marketer, you're probably a smarketer.
Collaboration Between Marketing and Sales
00:02:01
Speaker
There's this interesting hybrid hybrid of things. And I should have kind of asked to to kick things off, but you know social selling, it it feels like a common term, but maybe folks are not super familiar with it. From from your perspective, what is social selling? And also why is it so important today?
00:02:21
Speaker
Yeah, and very nice that you mentioned that part of marketing, because social selling only works well if it's coming both from marketing and sales teams. Because if you only adapt it in your sales team, it becomes those pitchy messages coming out to your prospects that nobody wants to respond to. But if it only comes from marketing, then it just becomes that type of a brand thing that Only marketers care about and not all of the companies grasp because we don't talk about the problems enough. We talk about o ourselves. So if there are two things on LinkedIn that nobody cares about when you're doing social selling, it's you and your company.
00:03:04
Speaker
And when sellers drop the you and marketers drop the company, that's where the magic happens because then you merge the two. You don't talk about yourself or about your company. You talk about the problems that your buyers buyers are trying to solve. That's the easiest part of it because that's what attracts them. They care about their own problems. They don't care about your company. But you happen to solve the problems and then that that's how they find you.
00:03:29
Speaker
Right. Yeah. I love that. I love that so much. And you know if you if you think about the psychology of anybody using LinkedIn and like how they're scrolling and how they're interacting with with content, we see so much of it. And if it's not about me, I care a little bit less. And I'm just going to scroll by.
00:03:48
Speaker
and And there's probably this, I don't know if like cynical is the right word, but you know ah for me, I've been in this game a long time doing sales and marketing and now performance marketing. When I hear, when I get a pitch, like and it's a shitty pitch, I get very annoyed.
00:04:05
Speaker
And I almost get angry in some ways. I'm like, you didn't try hard enough. you're not you know It's either the generic kind of email template, you know ah hey, can we grab a quick call, like this type of thing. Or so some of these, um you're right, even you know LinkedIn posts where it's like, we released this new product and this is everything a about our company and this type of thing versus being very customer centric.
00:04:34
Speaker
but exactly Exactly. And for marketers, it is a very important message to remember as well. We're marketing for the problem. We're not marketing to sell our solution. Because if you're able to just talk about the problem and other problems that the same buyers care about, then they'll suddenly start to understand, okay, this product or this company and these people are speaking about the stuff that I live every day.
00:05:03
Speaker
And later, when that problem arises, they know where to find you. So it's what is it like? Only 5% of your target market is in the buying mode here and now? So it's close to impossible to hit the ones that are actually buying here and now. But if you're building that awareness that this is the company that understands my problems,
00:05:24
Speaker
and it's not necessarily just attribution, then whenever the attribution problems comes up, then they will reach out to you.
Building Demand and Trust in Social Selling
00:05:33
Speaker
Or you will hit them with the message at the right time when they're in the 5%, but they will know you. It will be so much easier for you to be relevant, on point, and familiar for them to speak with you.
00:05:44
Speaker
Sure. i I love that and and it kind of brings up different marketing touch points. what of One of the terms that I've kind of coined is this concept of paid marketing fit, which is an extension of product marketing fit. With paid marketing fit, we want to think about how do we align our marketing budget with demand for our product and or service.
00:06:05
Speaker
And it's one of those things where you know the first dollars you so you spend, whether that be in paid marketing or organic or what have you, is to go after a high demand audience because that's where the conversion rates are going to be best. That's where your CAC's going to be lowest. That's where you're going to be able to scale. But then you quickly tap out of those audiences and then you want to go after these kind of lower demand audiences. And so I really think of everything in sales and marketing as you're either capturing demand or you're building it. And then the question is like, okay, well, how do you capture demand and how do you you build it? Demand is the intention to take action on something and you talk about challenges and pain and you talk about moving away from that. So yeah, it's it's a nice mix of, you know, just user, yeah human psychology mixed with like how you can use that to hit your business goals.
00:06:55
Speaker
But it's hard. It's really, really hard because a company hires a marketer to do those quick fixes. Like you hire a salesperson, go out, do outbound, and we're going to start to measure how many meetings you book. The same for a marketer. Go out and capture them out. You can't build the demand within a couple of months.
00:07:16
Speaker
And that's why due to that kind of misunderstanding of what marketers are supposed to deliver, we're seeing so much churn of marketers or so many marketers being fired because they are set to the expectation to go out and capture those 5%.
00:07:33
Speaker
And it's not that easy. They will have to build that up from the ground up. And if somebody has been doing that before, great. But even if somebody was doing that before and was not doing a great job, you're actually up for even worse because you will have to redo the work and build that kind of a trust.
00:07:53
Speaker
The same for sales. When you have to build out those outbound lists, they don't just book meetings with you because your message is amazing. It's because it's a collaboration between marketing and sales. As soon as that is smoothly executed, it's so much easier for sales to book meetings and for marketers to start seeing the impact.
00:08:12
Speaker
and knock either not to fight for that kind of a credit. Oh, we booked this meeting from the call call. No, you didn't. We were doing LinkedIn ads on that account for half a year. That's where you build this. That's why I booked the meeting because they knew about us already. And it's not about the credit. It's about knowing when to push, to capture, and when to build it.
00:08:34
Speaker
you know this A lot of this is incentive problem as well because when you know ah a lot of marketers are are still held to last touch attribution and so they go to the places where the last touch attribution is is the best but then if you have any experience with incrementality or MMM, you realize that there's a lot of cannibalize spend. And then on the other hand, salespeople are a lot of times incentivized by meetings booked or qualified leads, and there's different ways to game that system. So as you think about kind of like building incentives to create synergies between marketing and sales, what does that look like?
00:09:14
Speaker
To start with, it's not just last-touch attribution that is has flaws. It's also, in general, how we measure last-touch attribution. Because if we leave last-touch attribution to a Salesforce report, well, even that one's incorrect because it will capture what's being put into it. And you can even change that last-touch attribution in the reports for them to look better.
00:09:36
Speaker
So incentivizing sales and marketing for the same goal, maybe be marketing just for creating pipeline, not creating MQLs or form submits, creating pipeline and for sales to close it. And then what happens in between, there are some incentives for you to help out sales to close those deals for marketing side, then it's so much easier. But it's easy just to say this, it's very hard to do.
00:10:04
Speaker
because there are so many touches that are impossible to measure, which means that both your leadership and marketing have to live with that kind of unknown. We know social selling is working. We can't really measure it. Yeah, we can see the likes and the comments and the engagement, but we actually don't know if they ever land in on your website or they ever booked with a salesperson before they actually do or tell you that they saw that.
00:10:30
Speaker
But we trust that it's working because we can see website traffic growing, we can see branded searches coming up much more than it used to do, and we start mapping most of the touches that we can do, including LinkedIn ads impressions, organic engagement, and stuff like that as well.
Data-Driven Approaches in Campaigns
00:10:51
Speaker
So a lot of things are broken, but there's a lot of trust to be had in those teams as well that what we're doing is building up to a bigger form submission rates, SQLs, new business within a long time period. Sure. And and a lot of this is is top down as well. I feel like the the conversation regarding, you know, measurement of of marketing spend activities Even at my full-time role at itself, this is something that we've kind of you know changed and adjusted over the years as new measurement has come out. right so there We all have different biases on what's working and and what's not. and Then the more that you can bring data to a CMO or a CEO, and the more that they're thoughtful about that, you can start to to make adjustments.
00:11:43
Speaker
Now, if they're not bought in, then the whole thing goes to shit. right so like there is that level of that's a That's a big problem to to solve. That's a problem that dream data is obviously helping to to solve a lot. and you know one of the what One of my favorite things, i was I was complimenting you and your team the last time we talked on on your website and how engaging it is an awesome site. I definitely recommend folks check that out.
00:12:07
Speaker
But I love the view of the different touchpoints of different marketing and sales activities and how they you know work together to convert folks. But my question to you is, with all the the clients that you know you have access to in Dream Data and maybe the the case studies and and stories,
00:12:27
Speaker
What does that look like for folks that might be onboarding dream data or are just struggling with this kind of incentive problem? How do you how do you see them? you know What are some of the stories that maybe you could share for folks that have solved it? Yeah, so usually when clients come to us, they do have the problem of credit giving.
00:12:51
Speaker
Because this is how most of the companies are built. It's like, how much did marketing bring in? How much sales bring in? How much did the ABM team bring in? And everybody comes in with their percentages. And usually the percentage comes down to 178 or something like that, because everybody thinks they bring in more than they actually do. And the mindset shift to the actual understanding was driving revenue.
00:13:17
Speaker
In looking into the data, rather than just look at my report, I'm bringing in 70%, you're bringing in 30% and then we calculate it all. The customer journey view brings in a lot of those customers who want to understand that credit. It's like, oh, sales always say they booked those meetings within like a couple of times they try to call them, but we know we have been targeting them, but we just don't know if they ever saw our ads.
00:13:44
Speaker
And that customer journey view brings the customers in, but at the end of the day, they start to act on that data. but Because a customer journey view is a nice gimmick to have when you don't have it. It's like a little view into the world that, oh, this is how they actually buy.
00:14:02
Speaker
But what you want to do when you have thousands of clients, you want to understand, okay, what's bringing them in, what's helping them close, and how do we automate to get more of that? So bringing taking it to the next step that the next clients you're bringing in are either brought in faster, cheaper, or bigger deal sizes. And and that's the big shift that happens for those clients, because moving from self-build report from Salesforce and Excel sheets to something that is a huge data set where you have to understand what's working, what's not, it's a huge shift. But when you start bringing in those gimmick stories to your management, look, those LinkedIn ads and pressures have actually brought in this huge client that sales have brought in through a cold call call. Great, we did the job, they did the job, nobody wants to credit.
00:14:55
Speaker
We want to bring more of those clients and these stories are the best because our clients see huge amounts of changes in their LinkedIn ads targeting their Google ads targeting as well. It's insane. It's like at least all of the clients save at least 20% on their cost per acquisition for their clients. And this is the smallest number of all just accumulated from everybody. Maybe some of them were good at it anyway, but.
00:15:22
Speaker
The biggest shift is don't see credit, automate what's working, and then everybody is starting to work as a whole team. Sure. On a more kind of like macro level and back to active social selling, you know i'm ah I'm a paid marketers. I think of everything in terms of just like dollars in, dollars out. right And over the past, I would say year or so, I've become much more interested in organic content as as a compliment and just a synergy to to paid media. And that's kind of what we've been talking about a lot here.
00:15:58
Speaker
If we think about you know different size of of business deals where any B2B brand is going to be selling to SMB mid-market enterprise, there's different allowable caks for each one of those different categories. and so Those allowable caks inform a different strategy, right meaning if I am selling to Salesforce,
00:16:21
Speaker
my CAC might be 10X or 50X of what it is if I'm selling to random small business restaurant, what have you. And so I can leverage that increased CAC to do different things. When when you think about the different kind of strategies synergistically within these different categories, what does that kind of look like and what have you seen?
00:16:46
Speaker
Yeah, very, very relevant point because this is one of the first things that our CMO taught me when we started to look into dream data at the very early days because it was one of the first reports that we used to sell within dream data when the dream data was a very, not that rich of a product, I could say, four years ago. And he's saying, okay, so the way I work as a marketer, as a CMO,
00:17:08
Speaker
I look at what does it cost for me to bring in an MQL, SQL, new business from a specific channel, and how much am I ready to pay for it? I bring in my report, look at each and every campaign, and look at the cack of those campaigns.
00:17:24
Speaker
And filter literally the ones that are too expensive, have a look at it, am I overbidding for those? Am I underbidding for some of them? Maybe some of them are bringing in the big accounts and I'm ready to pay for it. So brett building out those filters for you to understand how much of i am I paying for some specific leads and To top it off, how long does it take to close that client? As you mentioned, Salesforce CAC will be very high if you were to sell to them. And it will probably take you like three years to sell to Salesforce. Maybe you are going to sell in a small deal and it's going to increment grow within time and so on. But if you don't know how long time does it take for you to close that SMB versus Salesforce?
00:18:10
Speaker
And what is the CAC of each and every campaign bringing in similar types of sizes of
Aligning Messaging Across Channels
00:18:16
Speaker
accounts? Then it's very difficult to take those data during decisions because you need to put your small ups and downs of filters to understand where do I cut.
00:18:25
Speaker
Or where do I add more money? The worst thing is, is under paying for campaigns and under investing into those if those are actually working. That's the worst part. You can waste some of the money. It's okay because it's trialing, baby testing and so on. But don't under invest into the ones that are actually working.
00:18:46
Speaker
Sure. And how does that kind of relate to maybe a more broader content strategy? I want to get as micro as like talking about, you know, the anatomy of a LinkedIn post and LinkedIn social selling index. But when you think about just kind of like a broad content strategy that that, you know, can optimize for a lot of these goals, how do you think about planning that?
00:19:09
Speaker
Most of the times I get a question, how do you in sales work with marketing for social selling? And that's a little bit of a similar topic because the way we do is there is a lot of freedom for salespeople to post whatever they like, like personal browse, whatever, and so on. But marketing has their own schedule that is aligned with product as well. What are we releasing? What are we talking about? What do our clients care about?
00:19:33
Speaker
And in within those pillars, then there is a calendar that we're doing this release right now or very soon. So start talking about, I don't know, audience building. Or right now we're talking most of the times about LinkedIn ads impressions or G2 impact on revenue, on customer journeys. And then the whole sales team also starts to talk about that.
00:19:53
Speaker
The beauty of that is besides that marketing's message is amplified from what they're building in organic, what they're building up on our website, on any guest posts and so on, is that it's very easy for the sales team to create that type of content because we're literally copy-pasting each other's posts and nobody notices.
00:20:16
Speaker
We do change a little bit or I'll add a selfie. Somebody else will add another visual and the audience would not notice that. But what they will notice is a similar topic that is aligned with what DreamDare is talking about in general. And from there, then it will be so much easier for your buyers to find you. And that kind of snowball effect comes in from all of the teams speaking about the same thing.
00:20:41
Speaker
Yeah, lets let's maybe look at a specific example of this. so You mentioned you know you have a content calendar, different promotions, different content pillars that that you're trying to talk about. If we said we know that we have this new feature coming out and so for the next month, we're going to you know drive paid ads on on LinkedIn, in Google, etc., etc. We're going to target specific buyers and they're going to see, here's this new feature, here here's the challenges that that we that we're trying to solve for, etc. And then they're also going to you know get emails in their inbox probably from from salespeople talking about
00:21:21
Speaker
these challenges in addition to other things. And then they're going to go on LinkedIn and they're going to see posts about it. And so this's this nice little like hybrid, is that is that kind of the the idea? Is that they're getting you know a mix of organic and and paid content all around these specific areas that are like reinforced because it's very timely?
00:21:43
Speaker
but Yeah, I would say so, but it's not that cleanly engineered as you put it. You put it really nicely and it would be nice if it was like that. But most of the time is like, we get a message, well, marketing definitely have their own calendar, but sales does not really care about it or they ever look at it.
00:22:02
Speaker
And marketers, our CMO would say, okay, next month we're releasing audiences. So it in one of the Slack channels. So let's start talking about this and we're preparing for this. Or he's saying, we're doing a huge release of feature X. Please don't talk about it because marketing needs to release it first with product and then you can go after your clients. You can.
00:22:26
Speaker
talk about that on sales calls with your prospects that never speak about this online. So they are steering what's being spoken about online. And then there are those evergreen topics like customer journeys that if you don't know what to post about, just post a customer journey and everybody will love it. So prospects start to feel that the company is everywhere and is pretty well aligned on the messages that they see or they get through their newsletters because we talk and we get slack messages. What's the importance of a prospect knowing that a company is everywhere and that their message is aligned? Why does that matter?
00:23:10
Speaker
Because when they speak with you, you're already familiar. So imagine if I were to buy from you, Paul, that would be so much easier because I've met you before, or I kind of know how that will feel and I can trust you. I can trust you. I can trust that you will deliver the pricing that I can trust. I can trust that your team of customer success is going to deliver my support later as well. I can trust that your CMO understands what I'm talking about, and he's a co-founder, and that means that they've built out the product the way that marketers understand it. So you feel that familiar fees to buy from is so much easier and you can trust giving out the money to that company rather than trusting another company that probably is less trustable or you have heard some bad things or like it's not that transparent. And when you go on G2 and you usually would search for the negative reviews, you always filter out the good ones because you know that somebody asked them to do it.
00:24:10
Speaker
You filter out the negative reviews and then you understand, okay, so people who are actually commenting back, they're genuine and they do give some of the feedback to the product. But I still trust them because they can address each and every of those on a call together with me. And I trust that either it's worked on or it's not as negative for me as it it was for somebody else. So that trust of being everywhere is just the familiarity of marketing and sales working together.
Long-term Relationship Building
00:24:39
Speaker
I love that. it It also just makes me think about adopting a long term mindset to relationships. Gary Vaynerchuk actually got me into this where his thing is I want to make sure that my kind of goal in life is to have as many people come to my funeral as possible, which is like ah a little bit weird, right? but but I just think about that and you know in in so much of the kind of business relationships i'm I'm building. Even when I'm doing a deal, like we recently onboarded a MMM and then them and you know we're going through contract negotiation. It's like, how can I work with this person for the next five or 10 years? like How can I trust them? how How can this be the first deal that we do of 10 deals? right And maybe some part of that is when you're going through negotiation,
00:25:24
Speaker
I'll give you this you give me this like there's this give and take there's there's this openness and yeah t trust goes such such a long way Love that. Yeah, absolutely. And it's both in business and as you're saying, in your personal life, even though you think it's software and you can change it for next year, but you've invested so much of your time to buy the product. So you better buy something that is familiar and trustable that if something goes wrong, then they will be able to fix it and we can work this together out.
00:25:56
Speaker
a little bit more granular into LinkedIn. so You actually have a course on on social selling, which is awesome and I'll link it in the in the podcast notes. I wasn't aware of this social selling index until until I found it on on your page. What should you know folks that are looking at both content on LinkedIn know about the the social selling selling index and why does it matter?
00:26:19
Speaker
LinkedIn has released a social selling index for people to become a bit better at what they're doing because they're very simple topics to follow. It's like, are you building connections with people? Are you messaging the right ones? When you post, do the right people react to your posts as well? So it's kind of, or how often do you post? And so a very simple way of building out a more robust way of being on LinkedIn and being findable by the audience that you want so to be found by. And since it is so simple, there is a threshold when you reach it, I think, and that it doesn't really matter anymore. But for people who start
00:27:05
Speaker
In social selling and want to figure out so how can i be better at this is really really great because it's. Simple and then then later you move over to the other part of how easy it is for me to write reach the right audience not just by posting.
00:27:22
Speaker
What if i reach out to some people do they respond to me in a familiar way. Or is there something else that i need to do do i need to change my strategies of how i speak about on link in because it's like one too many. And then when i go one to one why don't they respond to me says like then there are layers of what you can do in addition to that as well.
00:27:44
Speaker
And on the courses part, I'm building a course with LinkedIn about social selling measurement as well. It's going to go out somewhere at the beginning of next year, which goes beyond social selling indexes more. How do we measure that it's actually working within revenue? How do we make sure that sales teams are not just pitch slapping and we did get response and how do we measure that it's actually bringing in in revenue?
00:28:10
Speaker
That will be awesome and when that comes out.
Leveraging LinkedIn's Tools for Success
00:28:12
Speaker
I wonder, you know the and you're right, I think it's very simplistic and it's a good like way to to kick things off, more so to give folks a sense of what they should be doing. The other big part of LinkedIn that everyone's always talking about is is the algorithm.
00:28:29
Speaker
and how content it is is served to the to the right folks. And I think that there's there's kind of two ways to to think about this. One is I want to create viral content that gets a crap load of impressions. The other is I want to, to your point, create content that is resulting in in a business action and resulting in revenue. And sometimes those things might actually be be different. A lot of times they are.
00:28:54
Speaker
But from your perspective, like you've spent a lot of time you know building your audience on on LinkedIn. What changes do you see happening in the algorithm today? What do you think folks should should know about the latest on the LinkedIn algorithm?
00:29:09
Speaker
Yeah, to start with, if you're starting off on LinkedIn, don't worry about the algorithm. Don't worry about the views and the engagement and so on, because what matters is, are you reaching the right audience? Are the people who are engaging on your posts the right people who you should be speaking with? Which means that you have to Create content about those problems that they care about. This is the first step before you care about any algorithm. Because in a second, I'll tell you how to create viral posts and that they don't matter. so Because if you created a viral post, let's say some funny meme or something like that, you can copy them. There are so many on LinkedIn and a lot of people just post them as their own and then you get insane amount of engagement. People start to follow you and connect with you that you actually don't care about.
00:29:58
Speaker
Do you care about connections in Australia who work within finance? I don't. So, kind of, you have to create content that is relevant for you to connect with, to start with, and then later, if you happen to hit that button of any very high engagement post within the right audience, that's just like a gift that you should be thankful for, but it's not something that you should strive for all the time.
00:30:24
Speaker
How to create viral posts. What people like to see is other people. So to start with, if you want to have high engagement, put yourself out. Before in time, it used to be selfies on LinkedIn. If you do a picture of yourself, a selfie, something that people want to see another person. So think of what stops their scroll. A branded picture never stops the scroll.
00:30:46
Speaker
Text does stop the scroll if the highlights the first line of text is engaging and is interesting. Pictures stop the scroll. Think about the size of the pictures because if you're pick ah posting a horizontal picture, it will take less space of your phone than the vertical one. Make sure you post the vertical pictures because they take up more space. People stop scrolling even naturally with their thumbboard.
00:31:16
Speaker
The next thing that LinkedIn is pushing are videos and I am seeing a new shift as well within videos. So they started, they did that video ah part of the feed where you can just do TikTok like videos and stuff. Always vertical. They optimized for phone. Always vertical.
00:31:36
Speaker
Always your own face. Make sure that your face is close enough to the video as well. So please stop this girl because you're talking or do something at the beginning of the video that attracts them to stop and just to watch the first couple of first seconds.
00:31:51
Speaker
The next thing that actually also works very well, what I'm noticing right now is if you open your video feed and start scrolling upwards, company page videos are appearing more and more. Not personal, company page videos, which is really strange because usually company pages are forgotten and don't get as much followers as people in your company and so on. And we used to say people follow people.
00:32:17
Speaker
But LinkedIn somehow started to push company pages with personal videos in them. Try to have a look at your video feed. Every second, every third video is company page. And if it is a person talking, maybe us on a podcast, and now we are going to repost this and talk about Dream Data on Dream Data's page, it will be so much more exposed to the algorithm than the other one. So it's changing all the time, don't optimize for the virality, but Take notice, you're following Gary Vaynerchuk and he's doing crazy stuff as well. Our team will always also say, oh, look, Gary's posting two second videos. Should we do that too? Oh, look, Gary's doing this. So follow that. Be aware. But don't over optimize for that because that is going to change so fast. So make sure that the messages that you're doing
00:33:05
Speaker
are relevant for your buyers, talk about the problems and put yourself out there. It's in uncomfortable. But if you're not getting much engagement, nobody can see it anyway, so it doesn't matter. And then at a point, you're going to hit the right button. Wow, that was that was amazing.
Content Creation and Authenticity
00:33:20
Speaker
And you know i think about I think about this all from a psychological perspective and why do we as humans engage with other human faces a little bit more, things like this. I was actually watching a Netflix documentary about dogs yesterday and how dogs know to look up in look up into your eyes and show the white spot of their eyes because for some reason we engage with that more
00:33:47
Speaker
which is why they give you those puppy dog eyes and they know to do that when you're cooking lunch or whatever. um I always give my pups a few slices of banana when I'm doing my morning breakfast. But anyway, you know I think a lot of that makes sense in terms of the maybe some of the more qualitative aspects of of the the content or maybe some of the more that the structural things. When it comes to the content itself though,
00:34:15
Speaker
This is something that I struggle with. I feel like sometimes I try to over engineer my posts or you know try to over edit them and try to sound really smart or whatever it is rather than just like being myself and talking like a human being. When it comes to the content itself, what have you seen work well for you?
00:34:34
Speaker
Remember that the only person who notices your posts as much as you put the time into it is yourself. So if you were to repost the same post, let's say you created five posts and you would post the same post the next week and the next one, maybe just re-shifting a couple of words or adding a picture, nobody will notice.
00:34:59
Speaker
Remember that when you're doing your over-engineering of your posts. So maybe you can over-engineer one post and then cut it out or ask chat GPT to cut it into smaller pieces and then just add a picture or create a video out of it or do something different. It will make it so much easier and so much more fluid for yourself to just come out with the content because it's it's basically marketing and advertising.
00:35:23
Speaker
It's this space that you take up on LinkedIn feed. And if somebody noticed that you have recreated the same post the second time, the second week, nice. That means they're watching. when You have to be happy for that. And so what, I mean, for me, usually most of the content is just repurposed because you have to find a pillar where you're at.
00:35:48
Speaker
What is it that you have to be remembered for? And maybe once a year rethink, okay, do I still want to be remembered for walking head videos or do I want to sit down from now on and like be more, I don't know, wear a shirt or something like that to be more approachable because I don't know, I want to reach more C level or something like that.
00:36:07
Speaker
And if you recreate that only once a year, then it will be so much easier for you to not overstress about posting because you've got so many other jobs to do, just not the LinkedIn Plus either. And make it easy, make it fun. And if it flops, nobody can see it either. It doesn't matter.
00:36:27
Speaker
it's ah it's an it's It's an experiment at the end of the day. I think there's something you know different though. like When you're launching an ad and you know that 20% of the ads are going to do really well like over time, you have this experimental mindset. It's a little bit harder when it you know you're posting different photos of yourself trying to do things or you're telling about your you're talking about your life or you know these type of things. um And it can feel weird when you don't get the the engagement. But at the end of the day, I think like we kicked off this conversation with you saying, I think it's so true, like people don't care about ah people care about themselves, they don't care about you. And so if your content's not working, that's just an indication that you're not creating
00:37:16
Speaker
You're creating content for yourself more so than you're creating content for the audience, maybe in some aspects. Exactly. And if you feel like posting personal content, do it. But remember that most of the people on social media are never genuine. So like positivity sells, positive posts sell. But if you feel like you want to share something more personal and that is not as positive as you usually would post, big be ready that people will not engage with it as much because they don't know you.
00:37:51
Speaker
and they don't know the struggle that you have gone through. If you came out with some very exciting news or something, well, everybody will be clapping because, well, we know what to do. It's like, good job or something like that. But if you told some sad stories, something happened, well, people who care, they would write directly to you or write something a little bit more thoughtful on comments. But most of them would also choose to scroll past by it because it's hard. It's hard and you don't really know how and what to engage with it.
00:38:20
Speaker
so like So it's social media, literally. Sometimes I do have a feeling of posting something more personal, but there are months where I just don't want to, and I don't even put my face out into this. And unless it's like, I don't know, a paid partnership or somebody who really wants a video, it's like, okay, I'll do the video, but it's just going to be a talking head. It's okay.
00:38:44
Speaker
Sure. Yeah, that that's such a good point too. like I think sometimes, and this is just like a broader kind of issue with social media too, of different you know emotions that a lot of us face trying to enter enter engage with these platforms and do so in like a healthy manner. and Yeah, i I've kind of had that experience as well where you gotta go for a walk outside sometimes too.
00:39:14
Speaker
so It's better, better go out for a walk if you have some like heavy thoughts to put it out on social, because most of the people are and not your friends, especially on LinkedIn.
00:39:26
Speaker
And then go for a walk, get some easy thoughts, and just create a totally irrelevant post for that day. And you're good. Look at your dogs. that They're happy eyes instead. Cool. This was a great conversation, Laura. Thank you so much for for being on the the show and where can folks find you? I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn. and And if I'm not there, then I don't think, I mean, I've got an email address, but you won't write to me.
00:39:55
Speaker
LinkedIn is where you find me. Cool. thank you Thank you again for coming on. Thank you so much, Paul.