That's an interesting question. It may be a bit of a hot take, but I personally don't think there's a lot of value in the business page on LinkedIn. Mmm. That's good. And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee marketing Brew. I'm your host, Brett Deyster. And if you could please subscribe to the podcast, all your favorite podcasting apps. We have a five star review. It really does help.
But this we're talking about b two B and LinkedIn, the two things that people really want to know and don't do a great job with. That includes me. I'm like, I'm trying to figure out how to do LinkedIn effectively. I get the annoying emails that I ignore all the time because they're annoying. And podcast producers, please stop contacting me because I don't care. Anyways, I have James with me. He's b two B gen, lead Gen and LinkedIn expertise for accounting firms.
As a driving force behind nine to media, Donovan has specialized in streamlining b two B interactions, offering concise insights and demystifying the power of LinkedIn. He's featured on other top podcasts as well. He's the go to authority for maximizing growth in the accounting industry. But welcome to the show, James. Thanks so much for having me. And the first question. Oh, and the first question is all my guess is, are you coffee or tea drinker? Definitely not coffee.
I've maybe had five cups in my entire life, and then tea is a seasonal thing. I'll get into seasons where I'll drink it for a couple months. I don't remember the last time I've had a cup of tea, though. So you don't even know what type of tea you like? You're just like, I had tea one time in my life, and now I'm done. When I was drinking it before. I drink a lot of green tea. For the most part, I just haven't found my way back to having tea too often. I gave a brief summary of your expertise.
Can you give our listeners a little bit more about what you do? Yeah, for sure. So just touching on what you were talking about there, Brett. My team and I, we have a digital marketing company, and we work primarily with accounting firms across the US. 95% of what we do is outreach strategies and dming on LinkedIn to generate our clients leads and qualified appointments.
So there's a number of different strategies that go into that separate us apart from those annoying messages that you were talking about. But it's a platform that I think is extremely effective and extremely under, underrated and underutilized. There's so many people on there spamming and creating a lot of noise. It's just about breaking through that noise to find the ideal person you're looking to work with. So how do you do that? So for example, I get a lot of podcast promoters.
I think I get five a day. I just ignore them all. And a lot of times I just block them if they do spammy like comments on my things, because I'm like, I don't want this. So how do you get through that noise? How do you do the right message? Because I feel like a lot of people know how to message, they don't know how to do it well, yes. And two very different things. Right? Anyone can get behind a keyboard and send a message, but doesn't mean it's going to be the right message.
So I think what really comes down to it, there's a couple of different things. For one is setting up your profile to be the leader in your space. So before you even start reaching out to anyone, your profile needs to let your audience know, this is who I am, this is what I do, and this is the problem I solve as much credibility you can add to your page as possible.
So any reviews, testimonials, case studies, that all goes a long way when building that credibility before you even reach out to anyone. Second part is identifying who your target audience is. So using sales navigator, there's a lot of unique filters in there. Company headcount, how long someone's been in their position, their physical location, identifying that specific industry.
So rather than casting a wide net and trying to say to everyone, hey, I do x, let me help you really hone in on that messaging so that you're only reaching out to, say, owners of construction firms in the New York City who have 20 plus employees and they're three plus years in business. So now the messaging gets a lot more specific. And when you're reaching out to people, it's keeping it really short and simple. Get something that's going to catch their attention, know who your audience is.
So what is the most common pain point that particular avatar is experiencing? Identify that, agitate it, and then have something that's going to pique their curiosity. So something we like to do, we end most messages with, hey, let's say like the fractional CFO's we're working with. If you're looking to increase your, increase your revenue and cut your expenses, I got a couple of strategies I'd love to get your opinion on that's it.
And then the curiosity naturally in humans, they're going to want to know what some of those strategies are. They're going to want to give their opinion back on what, what we may have to say. And that's what gets the conversation started. The goal of the outbound messaging isn't we're not going to be collecting credit cards and getting clients for our clients right away on that first message, but it's opening up the door to have the conversation.
And then on that sales call, that consultation, they can do the rest of the selling or the speaking, whatever it is, but it's just how are we going to get the door opened up to start that conversation? And we do that by agitating the pain points and then peaking their curiosity. Now I just may be an albatross because I know when people are trying to set me up for a sales thing, but is there, can it change with person and should you really research the person?
Because I think people know when it's just a flat out, just normal message and it's just like you just broadcasted it to 100 people and it's okay. I know that you're trying to get me to do something. Yeah. So I'll just for any confusion there, we're not trying to use like bait and switch tactics and confuse someone into getting on a call. Then all of a sudden it's like, hey, we're here to sell you something.
We are pushing for these consultations and these informative discovery calls, whatever you want to call them, because we know this audience has that pain point.
So when they're responding back, for example, if someone was able to reach out to you, and I don't know what your entire process looks like, but if they said they could help you reduce the amount of time it takes for you to publish your podcast or just for getting it promoted on a ton of platforms, and it's not going to cost you a ton of extra money or any more of your time, there may be something there that is going to pique your interest of. Okay, I'll hear what they have to say.
So knowing when you get on that call, there is going to be a solution provided to you, assuming it is the right fit for you. Adding to that on the back end of our messaging when we push for the appointment, we may be getting ahead of ourselves here. But just to answer your question on getting on the sales call and avoiding that building in qualification questions before hopping on the call really does a lot of that heavy lifting.
So you don't have to get on and ask all these questions or type them back and forth before pushing for an appointment. We just let the booking link do that. Are you the owner or decision maker? What services are you looking for right now? List a couple of them. If nothing, you could put that as an option so the person can disqualify themselves. What's your annual revenue? So they already know. Cool. They're asking me all these questions for a reason. We've spoken about some of the pains I have.
They have some strategies. People know what they're getting on the. Call for at that point and to narrow it down. Like you said. Do you use like sales navigator or can you use the non premium account or should use the premium account on LinkedIn? I highly recommend sales navigator. Personally, I think it's the best $97. I think that's what it is right now per month. As far as prospecting goes, LinkedIn is an amazing way to prospect for a very budget friendly strategy.
Yeah, you can get into paid ads and all those things, and it works really well. You're going to get a lot more volume. But I think on LinkedIn, the quality of the leads you get are so much higher because of the intent. It's you, the owner, reaching out to another owner who's had that communication back and forth of saying, hey, this is what we helped solve. Do you have this problem? Yes, I do. Can we have a conversation versus someone clicking on an ad?
Maybe their information's outdated, they don't know what they clicked on. Their kid grabbed their phone, whatever it is. Right. So I think the intent on LinkedIn is significantly higher, even though the volume of leads may be a little bit lower. And like you said, positioning yourself as like, the go to leader. Should you be doing those new AI questions that pop up? I do it every once in a while, but I don't do it a ton of times. But should you be doing that? Should you be writing the articles?
Should you be doing like once a week or. Yeah, once a week. Newsletters. Once a month newsletters? Cause you can do that as well. Like, how should you be doing this? So the AI prompts, I think, I don't use them, but I think they're a great prompt. So I like to use that as a starting point. And we leverage chat GPT for a lot of what we do for our clients, a lot of what we do internally and even just in personal life, but it's just to help get started and get through that writer's block.
This is what I want to be saying, and you literally just spit out your ideas, the outcome exactly that you're looking for. So I think if you can hone in your skills on utilizing the prompts, you'll get what you're looking for with AI. But if you 100% rely on it is not going to come across as human and as genuine. As far as the articles go, we're starting to leverage that internally and for our clients as well.
LinkedIn loves when you use any of their own creator mode, anything that lives inside of LinkedIn's ecosystem. So rather than going and writing a blog on a different platform and then linking it in a post, it's not going to get as much engagement, it's not going to get pushed as much by LinkedIn. So if you just create your own posts, your own articles inside of LinkedIn, that's going to go a long way for your own profile, your own exposure, and it actually helps with your SEO as well.
And so I've read recently that they're trying, they're thinking about doing a subscription for your business profile. Now, how important is the business profile for your own company on LinkedIn? Because everybody focuses on the personal profile, which you should focus on. But I should there be some focus to that too? Because they have been adding features slowly, but they've been adding more and more features that make it like, you can showcase your company a little bit more.
That's an interesting question. It may be a bit of a hot take, but I personally don't think there's a lot of value in the business page on LinkedIn. The reason I say that is all the outreach is done as of right now. They may change this down the road, but my thoughts on it, and just the way LinkedIn set up right now, is you're doing the outreach from your personal profile to another person. So a business owner to business owner, there's a lot more rapport, and it just feels more natural.
If a message comes through and you see the profile picture of that person versus if a business page reaches out to say on Instagram, it feels all right. Who's behind the logo? Who's sending the message? Can I trust them? What's going on? Versus. Okay, there's James. I see his picture. I see what he's all about. I see where he lives. Here's more proof that's actually him on his page. I think, again, that just carries a lot of the weight and helps with that. No, like trust factor.
So zombie should grab some ideas from x Twitter when they have profiles and they have a little logo by it so you at least know who you're talking to in some ways. Yep, absolutely. I think just seeing who you're speaking to, I personally think it just goes a lot further versus the surprise of. All right. I don't know if there's one person responding back to me. I don't know if there's a team of 20 people behind this could just be going into a support channel versus.
And don't get me wrong, a lot of people have teams who manage their own LinkedIn account, and that's what we do for our clients. But we're still representing that one person and they can see the face and that's still who's getting on the call that we're eventually setting up for them as well. So the message goes out with our clients face, then they're the person who's sitting on that call as well with the prospect. I think that's what works really well.
And how often do you check out someone's LinkedIn business page? There's a few, but I just know the companies and for example, Elgato. But they'll announce products through their own business page. And I know them because I use a ton of their stuff. So there's, there are a few company pages that I do check, but most of them I don't.
Yeah. And I think not entirely off topic, but just more along the point of like personal brand and I forget what the exact figures are, but Kylie Jenner, she has a billion dollar business. Her business profile on Instagram, I don't know how many followers it has, is doing a billion dollar, over a billion dollars a year. There's not that many followers, quote unquote, not that many. Her personal profile I think has it might be one of the highest followed accounts on Instagram.
Could be wrong with that. But just it really just emphasizing on the point, this is the personal brand that people are buying into versus the logo. People are more interested in what you have to say as an individual versus what the company is saying. Yeah, that's fair. Like I said, it's very few that I actually check. It's road and Elgato, but they're all like podcasting type of. They focus on video and audio and all that stuff.
So I want to know what new stuff is coming up and then I might go over to YouTube and watch the other youtubers discuss the products that they have. Mine's a tier approach where I'm not looking at everyone. I may see them, but I don't really pay attention to. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. That makes sense. Moving on from that, like the messaging you talked a little bit about. Chat GPT. Should you be using AI, maybe for the first draft and then going it back over?
Should you write the first draft and then have AI go over it, or both or the combination of stuff that I don't even know about? Yeah, I would say probably a combination. It really just depends where you're coming in from. Right? If you have, again, it's more of a, it's a crutch for you, something to lean on for that assistance.
And when you're getting that writer's blog or you just want some new ideas, like you could type up something if you're able to spit it out onto paper and then ask chat GPT or prompt it. Hey, I want this to be written with a more casual tone. I want this to be 20% shorter.
Change all these paragraphs now to be two to three sentences, keeping the same style of messaging, have it interest peaking, have a call to action, and as it spits out new variations, you just continue to re prompt it until you're getting way closer to what you want. And then we would normally take, all right, we've prompted the message.
We've put a lot of what we're looking into it, almost as if when you're just thinking out loud, oh, I really just need this to be, one needs to come across more professional. Cool. If you're struggling to do that, just put it into chat GPT, let that do the heavy lifting.
And then, like I said, you get something you really like, then you can put the final pieces into it to add your own personality or make it sound a little bit more like you, but you have something that you probably weren't going to get on your own, but because you prompted it in the way you're thinking now you have something you can be really happy with and then it's just testing, right? Everything comes down to testing and marketing. I mean, there are a ton of AI tools.
This is the best way of saying it. So for example, for like writing questions for podcasts, I found that perplexity is a little bit better because it actually gives me like stuff they look at. But I might use gronk sometimes. That's if you have the x premium account, you get access to their own thing. Chat GPT I found pretty good bard I use, I haven't used Gemini too much and it's nothing too bad. So should you like mix and match and figure out which one's best for you.
I know Claude three is coming out and they have their, and they just release their own like prompters for you to figure out how to use them. So should it like, should you like mix and match, figure out which one is better for your workflow because like I said, there are like five or six I just named off and meta just is launching their own. Yeah, I think it really just comes down to personal preference.
My initial thought that's coming up and just looking at the screen here is even your web browsers on the computer, there's so many different web browsers. So what is going to be the most functional for you? What interface do you like? Do you like using it? They all more or less do the same thing. It's just I think, yeah, personal preference. And most of them are on the chromium thing anyways.
Like for example, I have opera, Gx, Google Chrome, Brave, I think Vinvaldi, I use like a bunch of different ones because sometimes one will just not work with me and I'm like, fine, I'll go over my fourth one that I actually have. Maybe that will work. Yeah, exactly. So what are the new trends or the new things that b, two b businesses should be doing to like, maybe gaining traction, maybe on their own personal profile? Should they be doing videos? Should they be writing more?
Should they be doing the carousels that have been popular for a year or so? Yeah, I think really all the above. The more content you can put out, the more value you can provide to your audience, the easier the ask is when you're going in for, say, a paid service, if you're just constantly providing value out to your audience. The way I see it is if this is the free information that is being given out, what does the paid stuff look like?
So I think far too many people are afraid to give that free value, thinking someone's going to run with it. It's their secret sauce. Someone's going to take over their entire business because they shared one piece. The reality is, and it may be a little bit harsh, most people aren't going to run and do anything with the free information you give them. What they're looking for is the accountability. So once they buy into whatever you have to offer, that's where the accountability comes in.
And then more implementation. Whatever someone wants to know in the world, they can go to YouTube and find it. There's going to be a video on how to do it. But yet people still pay for accountability, essentially. So, yeah, provide a ton of value. Showcase yourself as the leader in the space use if. If you're on LinkedIn, like use their own carousels and articles, but it just makes your ask a lot easier and it showcases you as that leader in the space.
Yeah. And to put a bigger analogy, like for podcasting, anybody could start a podcast. The problem with the podcasting is to continue to do it and continue to edit and do things. And that's the part that people don't really want to do. They just wanted to show up talking the microphone and have it like just show up everywhere. And that's not how this really works 100%.
And I've been wanting to get into podcasting, but for right now, it just feels like a shiny object for us where it's going to distract us from other avenues for growing the business. I think they're amazing. They're a great conversation piece and a place to showcase value, but I don't think I even understand half of how much work goes into it. And that's why we just haven't gone down that road yet.
For everyone who is hosting podcasts, it you guys are doing an awesome job because I know there's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes. It's not just as easy as speaking to a mic and all of a sudden you have the Joe Rogan show. True. And he has a lot of expensive equipment too. Yeah. Anyways, so let's say, for example, you want to do video. Should you do live over the actual recorded post production stuff?
Because live seems to get a little bit more of awareness and will broadcast to all your fans connections, or whatever it's called. The followers, they have two different ones, and it always confuses me. There's connections and there's following, and I'm like, ah, let's stop making this so complicated. Yeah, I think I haven't done many lives myself. I think there's a ton of value in them.
The recorded stuff, obviously, you can refilm it a couple times to get what you really like, but I think on the live side of things, there's a lot more authenticity that's showcased. So you can see the real version of someone they're going to mess up. They might have their ums and ahs, whatever it is. Right. So you're seeing who that real version is versus the polished video that went through production. And it looks super clean. And this person never makes a mistake.
So there's a lot of value in both. There's also a lot of different skill sets because live, you really have to think on your feet and you're not really good at that. You can get like a teleprompter, for example, and help you with that. I recommend the elgato teleprompter because it actually is pretty good. I'm actually using it right now. You guys can't see it, but I can see it.
But there are different skill sets because you can retake and retake and get it right, or you're live and you're like, gotta go on with it. Yeah, 100%. You just kind of have that, that blank moment, and it just feels like it's dragging on and on trying to find the words. And what do you see as the emerging trends for LinkedIn in 2024 and beyond? Do you see more videos being produced? Do you see more live, either audio video being used?
Do you see more events being used with the live feature as well? Because the live feature seems to be what LinkedIn is also pushing quite heavily. Yeah, the webinars going live and webinars, I find, are really big on LinkedIn right now. They're getting a lot of traction. There's. It's a great way, especially if you've been adding and building up your network for quite some time. By going live or hosting a webinar again, you're keeping everything inside of LinkedIn's ecosystem.
So when you send all these invites out for events or for your webinars, the great part is you don't have to worry about your own domain hosting and running into spam issues and getting flagged. LinkedIn handles all of these emails, which is great. Same with their articles. Every time someone subscribes and you post an article or, yeah, you post another article, one, it's going to show up in their newsfeed, they're going to get a notification inside of LinkedIn and LinkedIn's emailing them.
So you don't have to worry, where am I going to go buy my domain? Am I keeping the domain? Is it healthy? Is it get, is everything going to spam? Are people actually seeing this? LinkedIn's taking care of all of it. So if you were looking to grow your brand, your audience, LinkedIn is personally, I think, the best place to be. It's where other professionals are hanging out.
Anyone who takes their business serious is on LinkedIn and just stay inside of their own ecosystem and they're going to look after you. Should you eventually move it over to your own ecosystem? Because we can talk about rented and owned, and there are pros and cons, each one of them, like you said, you don't have to worry about too much. But the other problem is if you somehow get shadow banned or whatever, because you don't, maybe you didn't mean to do something.
Like, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but maybe you get banned, you lose all of that. So should you like start to do it and then be like, okay, maybe I should start to do it more on my own, but start on LinkedIn to grow it? Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And that does happen. People do get banned, unfortunately. The good thing about LinkedIn is that they're a lot more lenient than Facebook LinkedIn. They're like, they'll forgive you. Generally.
They can get your account back up in 24 hours and you can actually contact someone. I've been down the road getting banned on Facebook and it's a nightmare. It's impossible to get a hold of anyone. But yeah, I think you should always have a CRM management with whatever you're doing. So talking about keeping it inside of LinkedIn's ecosystem, I probably went a little too like aggressive or literal on that.
All the people you're connecting with, some different automations, pulling in their phone numbers, their emails, so you can build out your own list, you can utilize that for other marketing efforts. But yeah, the rented space inside of LinkedIn is safe, but definitely keeping your own records. So you can utilize that stuff just for different outreach strategies and different purposes. And what features would you like to see LinkedIn actually implement? Maybe in the next few years.
Because for me, LinkedIn has the square video, but everybody's using the shorts aspect ratio. But I still do the square one because it's actually what they're made for. And it gets annoying because then I have to do four different types of aspect ratios. You put me on the spot here. I'm not entirely sure what would be a cool feature in there. One that comes to mind is more so just on the referral side or the affiliate marketing side of things.
All of our clients that we bring on, we're referring so much business to LinkedIn, telling other people to use sales navigator. There's so many platforms out there that have awesome referral programs and affiliate programs. LinkedIn doesn't have that. I know they're massive anyways. They make so much money, but I think that would just help. If everyone's pushing their own product, I do think them giving back to others who are helping build that platform build might be a little bit aggressive.
It's just me, one person, but I think the referral program would be cool. And then my other thought, it goes something towards outbound messaging, maybe like email marketing directly from LinkedIn. So rather than the message itself, if you could set up like an email campaign that is built directly inside of LinkedIn, I think that would be really cool. All right, people listening to this are wanting to know more. Where can they find you online on LinkedIn? On LinkedIn?
Obviously, it'd be crazy not to say that after speaking about it for about half an hour. And then they could check us out on our website at 92. Media.com has all of our information. And if anyone wants to chat about LinkedIn, is looking for help with their own prospecting, appointment setting or wants to hear a little bit more about some strategies that wed be happy to share, id love to have that conversation. Robert, any final thoughts for listeners?
I think just get on LinkedIn, build your audience message as many of the right people as you can every single day, and youre not going to have any problem growing your business and having qualified sales calls. All right, thank you, James, for joining digital coffee Marketing brew and sharing your knowledge on LinkedIn. Thanks so much for having me, Brett. This is awesome. And thank you for listening.
As always, please subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite podcasts, five star review, help with the rankings and let us know how we're doing. Also, join us next week as we talk to another great thought leader in the pr marketing industry. All right, guys, stay safe. Get to understanding LinkedIn and how to use it better. And see you next week. Later.