Episode 176: How to make your B2B brand famous with Tycho Luijten

This is the full Funnel B t B Marketing podcast, brought to you by full Funnel Dot. Let's start. Hello everyone, and welcome to the episode of Full Final Life. As we mentioned last week, we're going to invite our upcome and Full Final signed speakers, and today we have uh of Dapper Loud and of what you wanted to say and Flemish.

I went to. Practice my Flannish. I didn't have a lot of chance. Dio Latin is that very good?

Beautiful? So if you guys, probably some of you I feel following him on LinkedIn, but for you who maybe I didn't hear about. And these guy's honestly crushing with video content. And I remember like once I saw the first video about that that the guys have produced, it reminded me my good friend Todd Closer, who was running the worst marketer in the world.

So it was like the first video that I have seen was about the Wolf from the Wall Street and Why is Why one of my favorite movies, and quite often I use the examples from that movie to kind of call out the absurdity that we see in sales and basically a bit of the marketing and sales and the guys created just the brilliant video, all of that stuff about AI taking the job and see who's going gardening, so lots of that stuff. It's is really cool. So what we're going to do today, Uh, we're going to break down the framework.

We're going to dig deeper a little bit into video content production. Right, there's ours as their cause. Also how to pursue your leadership, right, especially if you're acting, if you're working for the conservative company, we're kind of being creative, can be it can fire back, right, let's put it like this, So lots of these things as always. Yeah, very welcome to ask any questions and let us know, guys, where you all join us from today?

Type in the chat your city and country. We are broadcasting this slot from SNIA, Spain, where you said you. Are now get down South Africa. Cape down nice quite historically, quite a historical for quite a famous place for the Dutch people, right yeah, yeah.

It's not not necessarily a part of history that we're proud of, but it is. It's nevertheless a beautiful place to be and it's actually the first time that I'm here and I'm in a house with a bunch of entrepreneurs from all over the world. So we have a beautiful house overlooking the mountain and the sea show. Yeah, it's feel very lucky to be able to work from here.

Great. So does that being said, let's do the stress test and of the niche famous framework. Lad Well, should we start? I think we should go back to nineteen ninety three and look at de Hoo in action.

How about that? Yeah to me, let me do a quick share because I think there is no better introduction for people who haven't seen you. Let's uh, let's look at that. I just don't hear a sound without sound.

It's also are good sound? Okay, we are not having sound. This is what happens when you're trying to stream something, right, what do you do? Do you do it before we out a sound?

Rich sound? I'll do it without sound. You can do it. I think I think the idea is clear.

Right. So basically what we did here is we we redid one of the most famous movie scenes there is, which is of course the starting scene of pulp fiction. And instead of John Travolta telling about his strip to Europe, I'm telling about my trip to B two C marketing and how it's different from B to B Marketing and this this video blew up. I mean, we've had a couple of these movie remix and this one had millions of views on LinkedIn alone, which is something well, millions of impressions, I should I should say I don't know how many views, but millions of impressions, which is kind of unheard of on LinkedIn, right, So, yeah, that's that's what we're looking at.

And if you listen it with sound, you'll of course hear the dialogue, but also the the sound of the radio in the background playing. So we tried to mimic the actual scene as much as as possible. We got an old card to make it even so not is green screen, it's all it's like an old American car that we used. But yeah, that's what we're looking at.

Nice. So where I think we need to start a large share of the link and the chat, so you guys can definitely go and visit Tea has profiled. There are lots of lots of video clips you'll need to watch. I think all of them are fun.

And what I love is that is just kind of a call out of all the absurdity webs of today. In B to B marketing. So that's but you're welcome and thank you for creating this. So why I want to start at our simmate.

You're going to present the each famous framework as you call it, right, so I want to live it for the Simmate obviously and for you guys. Will drop the link in the chat. You can sign up for free. This framework stands for how to raise priant awareness in a specific market, right and specific specifically fun that power.

You use the same framework to grow from seven people in twenty twenty two right to like sixty three sixty three people, accorded. Yeah, we're about sixty sixty five people right now. Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, correct.

Okay, so well got through what you actually changed in your girl strategy and what steps did you take in this five How does that help you to grow? Yeah? Yeah, I'm more than happy to talk about that. It's a very exciting journey.

So when I started this agency, we had this goal of building a global agency. We already knew that when we were a team of two people, my co founder and I, we wanted to build something big. And even though we had that vision, the first couple of years were very slow. So we hired a bunch of very good people, great marketers, but we we already hit the plateau when we were with about six or seven people.

And at that moment, I was wondering, why do companies not come to us right when they have when they need a marketing agency. Obviously it's a very fool market, it's very crowded, but also simply people didn't know us right. So we tried to do some Google ads, capture some intent, we tried to do some outbreach, but all of that didn't really work because it was very hard for us to compete with all the other agencies basically asking for that the business, and we were small and not that legitimate yet.

So then I thought, Okay, you know what, we have this amazing group of people. What if simply more people know about us. What if simply people know us and know how amazing we are and what we can do for them so that they come to us when they need us right? And this is I know this is marketing one on one, but that's what this framework is all about.

It's really really about going back to the fundamentals and making it stupid simple. So what I did is I started off identifying the group of people that we could help best, right the ICP, if you will. So in our case, we wanted to be the number one B to B agency of the Netherlands. That was like our first first goal before going to that next goal, which was like building a global agency, which which is what we're doing right now right But back then, we first wanted to be the number one B to BE agency in the Netherlands.

So we identified our ICP, which were B to B marketers at scale ups in a certain revenue range just in the Netherlands. And then we realized that group of people that all need to know and trust us. That's about a group of twenty k people in the nedlance, not more than that twenty k people. If all these people know us, trust us, know what we can do for them, have us stop off mind whenever they think of an agency, then business should come to us.

So we identified that niche and we started making content and for us, back then, we didn't have a lot of options because we didn't have any advertising budget, we didn't have any media budget, so we decided to just start posting on LinkedIn, which back then wasn't as popular as it is now. It was already done of course, but LinkedIn wasn't as crowded as it was back then, and we just started posting. We started sharing valuable information for B to B marketers, so nothing was commercial, but it was all value driven B to B marketing trips B to B marketing trips, just like you guys are doing, of course, and we decided to go for video content.

Why video content because I believe that there's no type of content that builds recognition and trust like video content does. Of Course I'm biased because I liked video content also, and I don't mind being in front of the camera, but I think if somebody reads ten posts of you, as compared to watching ten videos of you, the recognition and trust is much higher for that person that watched ten videos of you than that one that read them posted view. So we decided to double down on video.

We started making videos. We started posting on LinkedIn, not just myself but also my co founder, all the other colleagues in the business, and all of a sudden, we started getting inbound leads. In twenty twenty two when we just started doing this and it didn't have it affected we grew twenty percent the year after we grew one hundred percent. The year after, we grew eighty percent.

The year after we grew eighty percent, with the majority of inbound coming from our from our content and from our LinkedIn strategy basically. So that's just in a nutshell, how we went from seven people to where we are today, which is a very healthy agency of sixty five people and a lot of inbound leads all the time. So I would say that's, you know, the one bottleneck the agencies have, which is marketing and sales. We kind of cracked with our marketing strategy.

If you don't mind that, have a very quick fall up. I wanted to talk because you mentioned the video content, right, and you wanted to stand out at in twenty twenty two. I remember that was a boom of talk and hats video content. You now what I mean?

Obviously Chris Walker, he was leading on the stage. Yes, the video is so good. But then a lot of officials started copying that format, right, So you as a founder or as a CEO, you talk to the people. And for me, at one point we discussing on this was one and I said, I don't feel that I feel that everybody is doing this because Chris is getting traction and everybody wants to know this.

So what I want to ask you, how did how did you come up with this idea of creating, of creating these videos that you you are publishing right now, all these scenarios right calling out all of that stuff. Yeah, so well through the hypothesis. Yeah, that that's a really good question because indeed, what I realized at a certain moment, and this was about two years ago, the moment you opened LinkedIn, but also the moment you opened Instagram and any other channel, you see dudes in front of a podcast Mike trying to say something smart, right, And I'm like, if everybody does that constantly, my goodness, it's going to be so hard to stand out right.

And I still do it, and I still get business out of it also, But I also wanted to innovate. I wanted to break the pattern of what people see on LinkedIn, and I realized that humor is very much under leveraged on LinkedIn, and entertainment is very much underleveraged. So what I believe is that people are on social media have to laugh or to learn, right, and that also applies to LinkedIn. People aren't social media to see something that makes them laugh, or that they can learn from something education or something entertaining basically, and these are broad categories, right, that entertaining can also be relatable or something that makes you laugh just a little bit, not something hilarious.

That it's a broad category. So I realized, Okay, you know what, why don't we try to create funny content that is attention grabbing in a different way. And while it is funny, it should all also convey a message that we understand B to B marketing, right, And this is an interesting playing field because all of a sudden we could do much more than what we did before, and we started thinking of movie scenes and other recognizable situations. And so it started off with the realization we don't have to always make talking head videos.

We can also do something else because what I believe, when it comes to content, you want to optimize for grabbing attention first. So if you grab the attention of your prospect, after that you have a little window of time in which you can tell your prospect you have a problem that I can solve. If you don't succeed in grabbing the attention of your prospect, you don't have that little window of time so first of all, your content should grab attention. And again I think you can do that with educational stuff or you can do that with entertaining stuff, and that's why we chose that different routes to explore the entertaining content as well.

I like this. There was a very nice question that I'd like to just use as a follow up, and although we have foreseen it a little bit later, because you said something first of all, like, okay, you have to get known. They call it in B two B how do they call it brand marketing? Right?

So you have to be know, as you said in the video, you have to be known before they can even of course chat think of you and consider you, of course. And then you said something else. For us to be able to get known, we need to grab their attention, We need to stand out. You and Andre were chatting about the talking heads versus the more entertaining videos, and that was kind of your way to stand out.

Now we have an interesting question here from Carrie, and I'd like to share it very briefly on the screen. What if you're in an old school industry, how creative do you think you can get? And I just like to kind of like make this question a little bit, brother, because I think you said yourself, it's not necessarily just about humor, entertainment and being creative in the way that you guys are. I think it's about standing out and then also with respect to your industry.

So I still had how do you think about this? Yeah? Well, I think that first of all, in any industry, we're dealing with people, right, and that person that is a financial controller or a security officer or an IT manager is also just a normal person that scrolls on the Internet, that scrolls on Instagram, right, that follows TikTok trends, that appreciates humor and appreciates creativity. It's not that that IT manager is an IT manager twenty four hours a day, right.

So I think that in any case, you can speak to people with a little bit of humor, and of course it should fit your brand identity, even though I think you can push the boundaries there also usually a little bit. But I think that considering B two B industries traditional is already a mistake in reasoning, because generally B two B marketing was thought of serious and professional and a little bit of vanilla and now and and B two B agencies used to be like that as well, and we're and we're now changing that.

So isn't that possible in other industries as well? Then? So so I think that in generally, in a lot of industries, we treat the other the person that we're trying to reach as a corporate entity, a corporate entity that you should treat in a certain way, not with too much creativity, not with too much humor. We're gonna be very careful.

While I believe that in the end we're we're not marketing towards a corporate entity, such a cliche, but it's true. We're we're marketing towards a person in that corporate entity, right, and and usually that person appreciates humor, appreciates creativity. So I think we can push the boundaries there a little bit in whichever industry. And you know, funny can also be witty, and it can also it doesn't mean that you have to do it like we do, which is with gershing and joking about legal substances, and you know, we push it really far.

But also there you know, we're going further and further, and the only thing that I'm seeing is that people like it more. So, Yeah, I think generally we can also in traditional industries we can push the boundaries a little bit. I think there was there was kind of a second question behind that question, because one thing is, like you said, you're marketing to people people come the same people hang out on Instagram and watch entertaining or YouTube or whatever, and much more maketing videos and content.

But the other I think aspect there is you're in a conservative industry, so you need to take care of the prospects, but you also need to take care of your executives or whomever is paying your check, right, so you need to get their permission to stand out to be more creative. So I wonder how actually, like when you are with a client and you're pitching them a different way of marketing, how do you go about that? How do you get there buying? Yeah, Well, the great thing is that usually companies come to us because they have seen our content, and they see our content and they see what's possible if you if you spice it up a little bit, right, So usually they come to us and say, hey, what you guys are doing for you, can you also do that for us?

And these are not like you're the tyfficult type of companies that you would expect, right. These are for a compliance software for instance, or hr tech or cybersecurity. And then I tell them, well, we don't have to do exactly what we do, but I'm very happy that you want a little bit more of that creativity and and and and and potentially humor in your in your content. Now, what I would say that if you have to pitch towards your CEO that you want to think outside the box a little more, and if you that you want to add a little bit of creativity, what I would do is I would find examples of companies who do this successfully right.

And what you will see is that there's a lot of examples of companies that do content right, and a lot of them understand content in a way where they either apply use educational content really really well or they have or they understand entertaining content really really well. So if you use these examples of companies that do well, I've learned that data is basically the best way to persuade any type of sea level to start doing it or to be open to it. Right, And if you guys don't mind, I just kind of quickly everson that we have discussed It reminded me about like one anecdote.

It was from eighty hours ago, so it's quite by and blown, but it was like the first like fully structured, documented ABM campaign we did. It was one of the first clients that we worked with and the part of the engagement strategy. They were like some fall ups with the engaged accounts and I still have males just to show maybe quickly my screen because we were targeting like tech companies, mostly SUS tech companies. I forgot the industry, but this was companies ten plus k eployees.

So we have a target and senior leadership. So just to quickly share my screen. We have the copy of this e mail just to show you. And that's all about the Kumra right.

So while kind of the campaign was educational and a lot of stuff was going on about talking about specific use case et cetera, one of the last email collaps we had it was kind and you see on one of the drs, but the entire point was like, for example, we used just something like banjor alb honest imeled you last week and didn't get it. Plant I am well, that made me said, anyway, I can deal with it. But not how I mister BC, he had a heart attack, right, So if you get here to reply, even if it's telling me to politely go away, it would save his life.

At least I'll tell him, tell him that you responded fingers crossed. Right. So, and then we had software allow our broccoli live node right, something like this, well long ago. But as you can see, two kinds of yeah brought the discovery calls.

So even like just had this anecdote that even in super conservative verticals and like you said, target and the piece of my teas, et cetera, you can still do it. Well. So yeah, and you know what, people just like to be treated as humans. Right.

So a lot of these ads that I see of other of B to B companies because I look at ads of B to B companies every single day, right, and most of the ads look like ads. And that's fine and it makes sense. But if all your ads look like ads, what are people What are people going to do? People are going to scroll over it?

Right. The first response to an ad is that you want to scroll over it or you want to skip it. Right. If you have YouTube and you see this, you have this pre rule.

The only thing that you're doing is you're you're waiting and you're going to clicking on that that button that goes five for three two. So our natural instinct when we see an ad is that we want to click, click, or scroll over it. So if we make our content more human, less commercial, less complex words and sentences, it's most likely going to be more effective. And this goes for every single industry, right, And that doesn't mean that there's no time and place for long form content, in depth content, more serious content, professional content.

If you look at the content of dep or also a part are the funny videos. Funny of these perform the best, Like I must have posted five hundred videos over time, or maybe a thousand videos over time, just like this a talking head video on which I say something interesting about B to B marketing. So I did a lot of that. None of them ever went viral.

With the funny video content, almost every single video goes absolutely viral. And that also says something, right, And we have a bunch of leads that come in referring to the funny content. Even though B to B marketing is a serious topic, right, there's a lot of complexity in it. I also make podcasts longer form like this, but just me myself and I just for fifty minutes talking about B to B marketing.

So I think there's a time and place for both serious, long form in depth content, but also more short form entertaining with the content. And I think that B to B marketing B to B marketers generally understand that long form content better, but that short form, more engaging content is something that a lot of B to B companies haven't really discovered yet what the power of that can be. And I think you're touching onto something interesting here and related to a question that we've got in time, And what I'm hearing is say is like, look, you have to get the attention, and you know, standing out, doing things differently, being creative in whatever way is appropriate and you know you can pull off is going to help you with that.

There is also time for long term content. But I think in general, this question is interesting from Daniel, how do you ensure like, once you capture the attention, is there anything that you do to make them act beyond capture the attention? Maybe following you because you make fun of videos, but how does that translate into business? Yeah, so there was this research this report from was It sixth sense not too long ago, where it stated that in eighty one percent of the cases nowadays across the industries, across B to B industries, the buyer reaches out to the vendor right an eighty one percent of the cases.

What does that mean? Usually a buyer reaches out to the vendor when the moment is right. So something happens, A trigger happens in the organization. A company gets hacked prints they need a cybersecurity solution.

A company's marketing underperformance underperformance, or a marketer leaves, they need a marketing agency trigger. After that, a company is in market. What happens when a company is in market, they either look for companies that they don't know yet, so they start googling, start using GPT, asking peers, browsing websites of different vendors. They're in marketing.

You can capture them right. On the other hand, they think of the companies they already know and trust, and they reach out to these companies. So what I believe marketing should do is either be there where and when your prospect churches for a solution with a compelling story of why they should reach out to you, or it should make You should make your prospects aware of your existence and what you do and why you can be trusted, so they come to you when they need you. Right.

But in any case, I believe that, So let's zoom in on that educational content. We're not We're not forcing any behavior from the prospect, right, We're just making sure that when a trigger happens internally, our company is top of mind. So what does our content need to do. Let's dissect it a little more.

Our content needs to a grab and keep attention, right, that's the first one we talked about that already. You can do that with educational content or fundy content, grab and keep attention, but it also needs to make clear what you do, why you're different, why you can be trusted. Right. So if your content does that, if your content grabs attention and makes clear what you do why you can be trusted, then your prospect will think of you and act when they need you.

But that can only happen when there's a trigger, right, That's what I believe in. I think you cannot force people through a funnel. You can, I mean, if you like. In most cases, it doesn't really work like that, right, In most cases, something has to happen internally in a company which makes them in market and then they act right.

So you cannot get them to act. They will act when the moment is right. I need to make sure that you're find the bull with a good story, or that you're already top of minded that moment. Does that make sense?

Absolutely? And actually it leads us to one of the most important parts right long term marketing. But now it's the funniest story and I really really want to hear your opinions, so sure. I recall the conversation with one of the cmos working for our clients, and she said I can present data like industry best practices, examples, and my colleagues and sales in leadership CFO for example as well, they just say I don't agree with your data, and of conversation and CR says like, come on, yeah, revenue targets.

I don't care how you are going to do it, but I need to have these targets. I need to like you to work on these short term targets right so forever. I since that we had discussing this a kind of long time brand plays. How do you get buy in one leadership basically the pipeline created yesterday.

Yeah, so I always think you should try to balance it out right. I totally understand also the leadership wanting wanting results right now, and I think if you want results right now, you need to focus on things that can get results right now, right next to the long term brand and demand place. So if possible, run high intent Google ads on proper, properly converting landing pages, have your your outbound motion, things that have an effect on the short term, which buys you time for the long term if possible, right because you know, the only thing that you can do, I say, okay, there are a lot of companies that are successful in it, and yeah, and that's basically what you can do, right because if you don't have any historic data about this long term approach working, then the only thing that you can do is give an example of other companies and why it works for them, and maybe the theory behind it.

But that's it. And then other than that, it's basically a risky investment for the company because it's something that they invest in right now and might get a return on in half a year, nine months or twelve months from now, which is also not guaranteed because it has to be good content, it has to be good distribution. So yeah, I would say, if your leadership hasn't felt the impact yet of what you can call becoming niche famous or demand gen or building a brand, whatever you call it, right, it's all relatively similar, then just give the right examples of companies that have done it in the past, give the theory behind it, and in the meantime, try to keep them happy with some things that might get results on the short the mid term.

Google ads, direct outbound stuff like that. I think that's the only thing that you can do. And the moment that they realize, oh, most of our leads are now coming from LinkedIn, and these leads that are coming from LinkedIn, they're much warmer because they've had they've seen us one hundred times, so the sales conversation, it's good for sales velocity. You know.

As soon as they start realizing the power of that, then I think they'll say, Okay, let's double down on content. Let's double down on LinkedIn and anything that has to do with building brand and demand. On the longer term, I think there is just quick two cents there. Because we often hear from sales that they say, Hey, you know what, I've been trying to reach out to these prospects.

I've been trying to, you know, get the attention of those accounts, and it's really difficult. They don't know us. They're just ignoring my messages essentially, and they're saying that nowadays, with so much automation, AI and everything, it's even more difficult. So it doesn't even matter how well your message might be written, personalized or whatever.

They're basically saying, if they don't know you, they're just going to ignore messages. So what we hear often is that sales is the one who is asking for awareness. In other words, right, we are not aware our brand. Our prospects are not aware of our brand.

It's hard to get the attention. And also they're saying when we do get the attention, that's the second part what you were saying, like, it's important for you not only to be there when the business trigger is there when they're actually looking to buy, but actually, according to various studies is like recently there was a Pavilion I Believe and Trust Radio is published is that eighty three four percent of especially at enterprise buyers will select the vendor they discovered before they start buying.

Another word, exactly, you are increasing the chance of ending up in that consideration set if you're known before, right. So in other words, also like how does that translate into pure practical sales experience? We also to hear from sales we are losing out on brand. In other words, what that means is that we get somehow the meeting with the prospect they're in the market, but our buying committee doesn't want to choose a brand that they didn't know, like we losing out on brand, but against other brands that are more known.

So being known in our words, is directly linked to these sales outcomes and sales KPIs if you like, have you ever done any work directly with sales, which is something that we often do and experience. Is like, you know what, let's not go immediately company wide, organizationwide, but how about just working with one salesperson and helping them increase the awareness, get more meetings, but get more pipeline generated and revenue. Is that something you have ever done or have experienced it?

Yes? Yes, yes we do. And before I respond to that, just to emphasized of what you just said, Oftentimes what happens is that a buyer will book an exploratory call or start an exploratory process with three, four or five vendors, right, because this is just company policy. But the buyer already has a preference because of all the marketing touch points over the years.

Right. So, usually what I see is that the sales process is used as a way to confirm the preference that they already had. Not always, but very often this is the case. And because their boss asks them to look at three, four or five vendors, they will do it, but very often they end up with the company that they already knew and trusted before they started the sales conversation.

Now to your second question, do we ever help or work directly with sills, right, yes, we do. For instance, something that we really like doing is to build the personal brands of subject matter experts or thought leaders, whatever you call it, within organizations, and pretty often they are salespeople. Not always I like to work the most with the most senior people in the organization, but oftentimes, from a commercial perspective, it makes sense to help a sales rep build their personal profile, and we did this in various industries.

So We did this for instance for fintech, where we ran a test with the founder and two sales reps, and we found that one sales rep was just great in front of the camera and he loved doing it and he created great short thought leadership videos which people liked in his industry. So we decided, okay, you know what, We're going to proceed with just that sales rep and we're going to periodically create video content with that guy and help him build his personal brand with all kinds of written content on LinkedIn, and the content that performed, we boosted that with a thought leadership ad.

So their niche, their little niche of foot is it ten k people are something very niche. A solution saw this dude over and over and over again with great quality thought leadership content, and what we saw is that people started recognizing him on conferences, people started dming him and there, yeah, all of a sudden, marketing and sales clicked like this right, It worked together very well, and we did the same in another industry. I mean, we did this for a lot of industries, but their companies.

But now two examples are coming up. The other one was a basically a hardware for the process industry, so also very traditional industry, and they made some type of device for the process industry. Now you would think that this is not the most suitable industry, but still also here we found a sales rep that liked presenting, that wanted to do this program right us. We created a bunch of videos with him, structurally posted it on his LinkedIn page, boosted it to his niche target audience, and also he started getting leads out of that program.

So these are just some examples of how we really directly worked together with Schilles Rep on the marketing of themselves. And I can just like confirm this because this has been our experience as well. And what's cool about it as well is if you can do that, you know, with one salesperson maybe during a quarter or so, you can actually show the results quicker before you get a permission to scale this up to the wider organization, et cetera. There was a question that's very much related to your story about boosting the personal brand of the subject matter experts, whether those are sales engineers or maybe executives, which I would just like to use this opportunity to follow up with.

Let me just I cannot not found for some reason, I cannot share itself. Just going to read it from Chantal. She's saying, how do you ensure the companies actually start building person personal brands their their employees, themselves. I work with company.

How do you ensure companies actually start building personal brands? Yeah? Yeah, okay, yeah, go ahead, go ahead. I was just really good.

Good. She says that she works with companies in tech and admit this is such a hard job. People understand the power of branding, but building a personal brand thought, leadership is a completely different discipline. So what do you say.

To that, Yeah, this is of course something that we have dealt with about one hundred times or maybe a thousand times so often. I think there are a couple of different things. First of all, what you can do is leadership just to manage expectations right from the start. So if you really think this is important, and if leadership understands it, why not add it to the job description.

And as soon as you hire a Silverrip or whatever role you might hiring a company, tell them in this job, but is expected that you build a presence on LinkedIn because LinkedIn is an important driver of growth of pipeline more specifically, so we expect you to share your thought leadership on LinkedIn, and usually they won't go against it, right unless they really hate it. But if that is an agreement that you make although at the start of hiring somebody, and after that you also base their performance on it, then it becomes a lot more real, right because right now it's really treated as an afterthought, it's treated as an extra.

And everybody's busy, right, everybody has to hit certain quotas, especially if we're talking about sales reps. They are super busy. They have a commission structure which motivates them to work on very specific things and not on any other things. So if you want people to do this, make it a core part of their job.

I would say, Now that is one thing, and that is something you would need leadership for. The second thing that you can do also, hares show examples of other successful people in certain industries and what it can do for them to help make their job easier. So what I do to new salespeople that I want to convince to post on LinkedIn and other companies, I show them the examples of successful cases that we have helped and what it has done for them. As salespeople, how it has governed them leads and made their work the convert clients a lot, a lot easier now.

Lastly, and this is maybe something that you can do if you have a slightly younger team. This is something that I have done in my business. In Q three last year, I wanted to increase without leadership on LinkedIn. Not just me, not just some other colleagues who have done it already, but I wanted to basically have half of the company posting on LinkedIn.

So I told everybody, if you guys start posting on LinkedIn right now and commit to one two or three times a week, there's a certain reward at the end of this quarter for people who both once, twice or three times a week, which is like certain types of restaurant. With three times a week we go to a super exclusive Michi Leans Star restaurant. But also the first person to hit three likes of a three posts of one hundred percent likes, they get a trip to London. And then you might think, oh, a trip to London fancy dinners, Well, that's a lot of money.

But if you get twenty people to post consistently on LinkedIn, that's hundreds of thousands of people that you reach, right, if you would have ad if you add would advertise to reach that amount of people, it will be much more expensive endeavor. Right. Then, as soon as we somebody hit the London target, we did a weekend to barrass and as soon as somebody hit that, we did a weekend to Berlin. So in that way, there's always this competition and people wanting to post once twice or three times a week, and people going on cool trips as soon as they hit certain certain milestones.

Right. So that is also something that we. Do cool, which brings us to one of the most popular questions literally this question at Pears and Agenda. Every time the host you that a full funnel life.

It's all about attribution. So basically, how do you handle it? That's the first question, right, And you know the story because typically companies them attribution model is based on the last click. It's based on market on the model marketing sourced versus sales sourced.

Right, and I remember, so maybe you can share also your example. I know that for example, when you wrote a guest post for a CXL, you mentioned that sixty percent of your leads come and or let's say attributable to your niche famous framework. So let's kind of split it into two parts. How do you handle this and how do you handle it with the clients.

So marketers that let's say, spending money with you, they can prove that it brings ROI. Yeah, So when it comes to our own marketing, it's very simple. It's what Chris Walker was also preaching in the early days of his is his the LinkedIn fame, right, which is self reported attribution. So what I find is that there's nothing, nothing better yet than just simply asking leads where they where they saw us and why they reached out to us.

And what I notice is that if I ask this, they usually have a very clear answer. It's either oh, I see you guys on LinkedIn all the time, and if that's the case, then I attribute them to LinkedIn, and then I cannot make a distinct. Then I cannot distinguish between people who saw us organically or people who we ran ads on right, because if then if I ask you, did you see ads of us or posts? They say, I don't know if there are ads or posts, right, which is a bummer because I would have loved to also see if that money that I spent is justified.

But I'm just assuming that it's justified because I have such a narrow and perfect targeting and I know that I'm visible all the time because of these ads in my IP so, but that's the granularity, right, the only level that I can reach, which is basically, okay, did people see us on? Do people know us from LinkedIn? And right now, about eighty percent of the leads that come in know us from LinkedIn? So this is good.

This is more and more leads proportionally see us from LinkedIn. Now the other group of people say Google, right, and then it's also hard to distinguish between Google ads and and SEO. You can look at some of the data within Google ads to try and figure it out. But the people who find us on Google and then a fraction who sees us on who finds us on l them self for instance.

So it's simply asking the question where did you see us? And it's not enough to have it in your form on the website because yeah, I mean oftentimes people fill out the internet right where did you find us? The Internet? I'm like, yeah, thank you great, that's that's fantastic.

So we should do more of that more internet. But yeah, if we ask that question, if we ask them follow ups that work. So usually if I can't get a clear answer, I asked them where did you first see us? Where did you see us after?

And why did you reach out to us? Like ideally I get the answers to these three questions. And the great thing is I do with myself, right, I do sALS together with four other people in the company, which allows me to ask these questions. But of course, if you're working together with salespeople, they do not sometimes want to sacrifice time in the sales call to ask these questions.

But this is something you have to push for and you might have to ask a hundred times, even if it's just one simple question, how did you find us? Because it adds so much valuable data to your to your marketing. Right, So yeah, that's that's the the the answer for us. Now what we do for clients, clients also want leading indicators, right, are we on the right trajectory?

Now? What I love to look at are a couple metrics, a couple of things. One metric that I love to look at the start is dwell time or a percentage of video watch right, do people actually stop and scroll to watch your content? If people do not stop or scroll to watch their content, then we don't have their attention.

If we don't have their attention, it's impossible for us to tell them that they have a problem that we can solve. So that's one of the first things that I get now when we look at because that's not enough for executives, right they want to see some type of pipeline impact. And the most basic thing that we do is just have a look at the companies that we've reached with our LinkedIn ads and try to match it with the companies that are talking to right and in that type of way talk about influenced pipeline even though we, for instance, don't have a proper self self aboard attribution set up or leads, did not reach out to the company yet.

So this is basically what we do in the first couple of months of the collaboration to show, hey, we're reaching the right companies. So that's also one we're reaching the right companies the right company you're seeing our content, they're stopping to scroll to actually watch what we have to shay, and these companies were reaching most often and hey, that matches with some of the companies that you're talking to. So these are the types of things that we do. I love.

I think also like when you have the chance to work with a salesperson, that salesperson booking more meetings or they might also be more interested to ask that question that you want them to ask. Yes, that might be helpful as well because their impact is more visible, easier to show to the executives. I think now we spoke a lot about a video, and I'm just curious, from a very practical perspective, how does the let's say, the production, the content engine, if you like, how does it look like the team, the process, the cadence and the cost.

So maybe you are now at a certain level, right, you are now doing this for many many years, you have a team, you're a professional. Only are doing this also for your clients, So I'm curious to know how does it look like at your level. I also I'm interested to know for our audience. Let's say I'm a bit to B company.

Maybe I have a couple of people, I don't have any house creative studio. I might not have enough budget to hire an agency who will do this for us. What's kind of the minimal viable setup. So from your level, I don't know which level you are, Yeah, the minimal viable one.

Yeah, yeah yeah. So maybe to start off with just the concept, what I believe is that content creation is only valuable if you do it consistently, consistently, right at every single level. Whether you create videos or just write posts, or create infographics or whatever you do, it needs to be consistent. If you're visible every once in a while, it's never going to help you become top of mind, right, It's just like going to the gym and doing one rep and thinking that's it.

You have to do it consistently now. Now, for consistency, you need process, because if you're going to wait for that good idea throughout the week before you start writing a post, then probably you're not going to write that post right none, if you're a person like me who's all over the place sometimes. So what I believe is that you need structure on every single level for every type of content that you create, big or small. So whether you create one post a week or bi weekly, wide weekly, or even per month, you want to plan a block in your agenda for the same day at the same time every single day, week, bi weekly, or monthly, so that it becomes a thing that you do at a certain time, right, because another thing, content creation is never urgent, but it's always important.

It's never the most pressing thing on you to do. List Right, every morning when I write, sit down to write my post, and like, goddamn it, I have one hundred other things to do, and I have emails to answer, and I have important context so out and whatnot. But still I sit down to write that post because there's a block in my agenda that I commit myself to. Now, that's on the most basic level that everybody can do, right, But I also apply to other types of content creation.

So, for instance, it comes to video content creation. Every other Sunday, I and it's a Sunday because I'm the founder of the company, but you can also do it on a Friday or whichever day. But every other Sunday, I have a block of my agenda from ten to twelve, which is the moment I sit down with our videographer to record my thought leadership videos. Now my videographer knows this because I don't have to text him, hey be there at Sunday.

I enter the office Sunday ten in the morning, and he's there, right, and everything is set up and we record the videos. And because I know that, I know that the day before I have to write the script, the day after I get the first edits, the day after I can post the first video. Right. So the same happens with the creative videos.

We post two creative videos per month now these funny videos. I posted another one yesterday. These videos also have a gaidence. Once every month we have a week call our hero video, which is which for the brainstorm.

It is a brainstorm of two hours in which we go from concept to initial script and planning in two hours. So we start that meeting and we have a backlock of ideas, we select one. We start brainstorming back and forth my colleague and I. We get to a script, we divide the tasks, and we get to planning.

Right then we have another moment every single month at the same time, same day for the lean and Mean video, which is basically the video that you saw yesterday, which is a little bit more easy. We don't need as much for it, and basically the same start process also two hours going from concepts to planning. So as you can see everything from a post to a simple video to the more complex video is a reoccurring thing, same time, at the same day, same time, and the same type of process.

And the only reason that we are able to create so much content is because we have that as an answer your question. Yeah, absolutely, I love it that you started with a consistency because I think there's a lot of things who might start with a great idea with kind of a New Year's resolution in terms of content, but either overthink it or you know, make it complex as well. Okay, okay, we need our content to be like whatever type of quality etc. Making themselves also very difficult to actually produce it regularly.

So love that you started with that. That's a good framing. But I think Andrew you had another question. Sorry I interrupted you.

Now I just wanted to ask several fall up questions. So what we have discussed is the consistency, right, and the creative part. So this is fantastic, and I totally agree on the recurrent paths of doing this and just having this as your standard activity that you book and your calendar, right, so it's not like a random act of market and less. So what I'm wondering because I believe that would the questions from other people who are listening to us, resources that you need for this, and the costs, right.

Yeah, yeah, So it depends completely on how crazy you want to go and also where you live, right, because if you want a videographer in I don't know, Spain is going to be different than if you want a videographer in Romania, right or in the United States, it's going to be a more expensive. But I think that when you want to make video content, you could already do it with one shoot a quarter where you create a shooting day, create scripts, let's say twelve scripts, and you arrange that you have a videographer for one day and that that videographer edits twelve videos, which means that you have a video for every single week for that specific quarter.

That is already a setup that you can go for right now. In that case, what do you need? You need a thought leader, a thought leader or a subject matter expert, that person that you're going to put in front of the camera to say something interesting, and that person also needs to talk about or needs to give input for the content. Right.

So it's not the case that you're going to have somebody else write that content. That person is going to give input and together with the person, you're going to create the script. So the availability of that person is probably the most important thing, because also if you don't have a cameraman, you do need a thought leader still, so that's for the first thing. Then you need a videographer, which can be pretty cheap.

Honestly, if you have a videographer for a day, you could have that maybe for five hundred bucks if you find somebody that does it for a good price, and then the editing maybe another five hundred bucks, so you could have Theoretically, if you work with a young freelancer, you could do it for a thousand years. Right, You could also do it for ten thousand years if you want to do it very professionally, which depends on where you are in your organization, but you could also do it for a thousand bucks.

And I think that the bottleneck is not necessarcessarily the video or the videographer. I think the bubbleneck is oftentimes the thought leader. Right, do we have something Do we have somebody that wants to be in front of a camera and that actually has something interesting to say and that we can count on on a day like that to come prepared and is going to sit in front of the camera and record twelve videos right. Now.

What you also have to take into account is that if you're in B to B you have a niche audience. That's why I call it the niche mis framework, because you don't want everybody to know You want a very specific group of people to see you constantly and to know you. You also want to run ads, right, so preferably you want to run thought Leader ads from your personal account, which you also need to preserve depending on your dam size, perhaps a couple grand a month. And I'm just giving an example now of how to approach it.

If you want more creative videos, Yeah, you can go big or small. Right. A Dodd I believe his name is right, Andre does it super simple, right, He does like super simple funny videos with him and himself, He plays the two characters. He does it with his phone.

It doesn't cost anything, so that's also possible. And he has videos with hundreds of likes and ten thousands of people maybe even more more than that that that that that watched these videos. So you know, you can do it on the smallest possible level with zero budget. They also want to make sure that people understand that it's budget is not necessarily the bottleneck.

I would say, shouldn't be the bottleneck. But from the let's say, from the resources aside from the team's side. Am I correct says, so you need somebody who would be preparing the script, right, So the parson who kind of creates the storyline, right. Uh, the more creative videos, yeah for sure.

Yeah, the video guy, right. So the person who will better card than the videos than editing, right, somebody who will edited and quoting them. And then anyfe else, anybody. Else I would say an advertising expert.

And and you know, first of all, somebody who posts the stuff with a good piece of copy. But that could also be the person writing the script. And I would say an advertising expert if you want to after that advertising towards your niche. Yeah, But with the creative videos, the last thing that I want to say there is we want to find a good angle.

So if you want to create good videos and creative videos, you want to find a good concept and a good angle. And that's usually some brainstorming. It requires some brainstorming of people who know the product, know the ICP very well, so that's something I would take on internally before taking it externally with any videographer or whatever. But yeah, I would, I could.

I could talk about this for hours still, but I think we'll save that for the for the summit, right, absolutely, you should. There are a few questions that I think are worth answering, and always like to answer the audience questions. You mentioned several times asvertising, and we had a question about it, like whether you have advertised at the beginning. But I'd just like to take this brother in terms of like how important do you think advertising is paid promotion of your videos or other content once?

Should you start with that? Should you start first organic or advertising? And like I said, like how important is that for a company to foresee that budget then how quickly? Yeah?

So what I always say is that you want to create good content first and then advertise with it. If you advertise with content that is not good, then you're basically paying to show more people your shit content, right, You're paying for the distribution of shit content. So try to master the content creation first, get some engagement on your post, and after that boost it. Now, when I started off, I didn't pay for add because I didn't have money for adds.

I think I started paying for adds after like two years when we were in a healthy financial position. So if you have the money, definitely do it. If you have good content. If you don't have good content, fixture content problem first, because advertising is not going to texture content problem.

But like right now, we are a healthy company, and I spent a couple of thousand yeurs a month to make sure that my ICP ceios constantly. Yeah, I'm happy to do so love it. We have a couple more of questions that I think we need to cover and then we're done for today with the stress test frame markers. And by the way, guys, I dropped and me and what I dropped?

The link the links in the chat to the full final signate. Make sure to sign up and pring your colleagues see your team. Would love to see all of you at the SIMPS. And the question that I say, I think it's a good one from Angelika several years ago linked in as it was already mentioned, was not that crowded.

Right now, there is a feeling nobody reads so watches the content. Ninety percent of posts selling first and AI generated. You can write valuable content do it by hence but at ont being any longer. So what is the content?

So bring now? Don't you think that LinkedIn is that and turn themself a well and us growing? No, I don't think it's dead. I posted a video yesterday that reached three hundred thousand timelines and God's like to twenty one hundred likes, So it's definitely not dead.

But you do have to probably try a little harder to get noticed because LinkedIn is overflown. Generally, the Internet is overflown with content because everybody's a creator right now, and AI is making it easier than ever before to create content. So yeah, you need to figure out what you can do to be just a little bit better than everything else that you see in your little niche. Right So there's no such thing as, you know, a quick hack to create awareness.

You really have to be more thoughtful and more intentional than ever with your content. So also, when I think of content creation, I don't think of effectiveness efficiency. I think of effectiveness. So I create a lot.

I spend a lot of time in a post. I spent a lot of time creating a video, and I'm more unhappy to do so because I want good engagement, so it's definitely not dead. But yeah, I think you need to be more intentional and spend more time and attention to creating good content in order to be able to stand out. I'll just sort of just wanted to drop two sends because I had a good any thought around this.

You said that everybody's creator and the AI is kind of everybody is using AI, and I just de started that. What you shad it with me? Because there are guys that's kind of quite consistent with linked In Creation, a well known agency, but that was like really hilarious anecdote where they one of the employees posted that we have created an AI influencer that creates hundreds of videos for us and influenced two millions in pipelines. So what left The comments said, Okay, guys, I checked your website, I checked the ALKA page, I checked your YouTube channel, I checked your Facebook, and I have never seen any video, so you're not even posting the video contents.

I wondered, where is this AI influence and how they influence in these two millions of revenue? So sometimes people are just going nothing right. Yeah, yeah, but don't don't buy everything that people say online. For ridiculous part is that obviously they finished this post like live a comment and we will send you our like playbook to create this and people will commented like crazy playbook playbook, playbook, playbook like So this is what you need to keep in mind.

And I just wanted to show our own experience, our in terms of views, right it's going down. It's like, I mean whatever, compared to what we had two years ago, it's just nuts. It's nothing but a funny effect is said in the last two years, what we're just seeing we could like with the decrease and Linked and reach the pipeline, of the quality of our pipeline, the quality of the companies that are reaching out to us. It's it's uncomparable.

It's just like it's getting like if Linked and Riches going like let's say we have maybe experienced five x decrease right now more or less of seven x, I don't know whatever, but the pipeline quote, it's like maybe twenty times better compared than it was three years ago. So my time point is that maybe you're not getting the broader reach if you're like, for example and now a case we are pretty niche, but it's just getting in front of the right people. So this is what And you mentioned like you need to think about who your niche is and then be better than be a bit better than the other ones for posting in that inite.

So it's not like they don't have to beat everybody. It's about that industry. I think a lot of conservative industries there is still a huge opportunity. Like nobody is doing anything like that for sure, But I think like even before being better, I think you have to be irrelevant, right, And I think like a lot of companies or marketers or people who are trying this kind of like forget about that first part.

And that was just a way for me to introduce the question here from Nina. To be relevant, obviously you need to understand your ICP. So her question was about how do you figure out their pain points? How do you figure out what's actually relevant for them to create content for them?

They have a proosis. Yeah, yeah, so very practically speaking, when we talk about our own content, we know the pains of the marketers more than anything else, right, So you know that's also why it's so easy for us to create that content because I know the pains of b to B marketers because I work with them every single day and I'm in ten Sills calls a day, so there it's very easy for me. But when we work with clients, we interview their clients, so qualitative interviews, even if it's chats of twenty to thirty minutes, of the people that we're trying to sell to, and just get as much information from them as possible about their pains, what makes them happy in the context of the solution, of course, is invaluable.

And if that is not possible, because sometimes it's not possible. When we talk about really big enterprise clients and then the CEO of these clients, then we talk to Sills, Right, that's the second best person to talk to because they talk to clients every single day or customer success, so it's just talking to the prospects, which helps us to understand the prospects. Basically, that's the very straightforward question. As you prove it yourself, you said, like for us, we don't have to even interview because we know, but you are the subject matter experts.

So if I had to create content for you, I would and can't interview your customers, I will have to interview you so I think you're proving one like a good subject matter expert, especially somebody in sales who is actually sitting every day talking to the customers. The other day, I was talking to Cimo and he asked about, you know, AI and what we need to focus on, like in terms of human IP versus AI, what will be automated, what we need to kind of nurture in house and you know, our thoughts.

One of the things that I was thinking about. Actually, nowadays you even need to have like more senior people, like the knowledge that these people have about your customers, about you know, their pain points, and not just like abstract or general, but very specifically. Let's say you're working, you're selling to different kinds of industries all over the world, but now we're focused on let's say the German, the German speaking mid market manufacturing companies in industry manufacturing whatever, like very specific and right now because things are changing as well, So you want to talk to people who are actually in contact with those buyers like daily or you know, every week.

And this is like invaluable. This is exactly the difference between good content and back content starts there, and then of course you need to attract attention and all the good stuff that you're seeing. Yeah, definitely. Gosh, I do have to because I only have three percent left on my computer and I also have to run different but I also have another meeting.

At generous figure time. Thank you so much, and we'll get a chance to finish this up in uh yeah, in a month, about a month and a couple of weeks. Thank you so much, looking forward eyes. That was amazing, Thanks for the great questions, and very much looking forward to the summit.

So everybody sign up. This is going to be good.