B2B Content Marketing and LinkedIn Advertising | Industrial Product Marketing Part 4, Jim Londeree

B2B Content Marketing and LinkedIn Advertising | Industrial Product Marketing Part 4, Jim Londeree

Note: This transcript (of the video version of this episode) has been provided to assist you in finding extra information specific to your needs and goals. We have not edited it line by line for grammar, spelling, punctuation, or spacing. Please forgive errors.

00:00 – John Bertino (Host)

What happens when you mix a 23-year-old content production house specializing in commercials, infomercials, print, et cetera, and you blend it with decades of B2B content marketing experience?

Well, you get my next guest, Jim Londeree, the COO of Dream Factory, a B2B Content Marketing Powerhouse Agency in Orlando, Florida.

Not only are they a powerhouse, they literally market power companies, from energy suppliers, plastic manufacturers, to healthcare groups. What more could you want in an industrial marketing interview?

So, as we know from my previous industrial marketing guests, the key to succeeding in B2B is hyper customized messaging coupled with hyper customized targeting, and one of the absolute best places to accomplish both of these is LinkedIn. From leveraging LinkedIn ads to promoting events or other time-based occurrences – you can amplify and refresh content to grow your network.

When was the last time you amplified your organic content on LinkedIn with ads? If it’s been a while, you should listen up.

And, last but not least, we’re talking about how Dream Factory is blending offline and online tactics, like LinkedIn, to get optimal results for clients.

The riches are in the niches, and that’s why the niches are what we cover on the Niche Marketing podcast. If you want more content like this, focused on the industrial marketing segments, don’t forget to smash that like button, hit subscribe and stay tuned for this amazing episode of the Niche Marketing Podcast.

01:44

All right, and we’re back with another episode of the Niche Marketing Podcast.

I’m super excited for this episode. Today I have my amazing guest, Jim Londeree, the Chief Operating Officer of Dream Factory, headquartered here in Orlando.

Jim, thanks for being on the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me, appreciate it.

Awesome.

So, before we get into the content, we’re going to focus on LinkedIn Outreach today and a few other aspects of B2B Outreach. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you’re from originally? What brought you to Orlando, if you haven’t always been here? You know, wife, kids, that type of stuff.

02:16 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

Cool, yeah. So, I actually grew up in Central Florida. I had the typical Krovenpole County – good country upbringing and moved to Orlando in ‘94 to go to UCF, and then graduated here in ‘98. And then right out of school, I went into a kind of brokerage and financial service work where I cut my teeth.

02:34

And then I met my business partner, and we started Dream Factory about 24 years ago now and have been doing that ever since. When we first started out we were more like a production house. We were in the Universal Studios back lots for like 11 years. and then moved downtown about 10 years ago, and we’ve been in the Orlando area ever since.

02:52 – John Bertino (Host)

When you say production house, you mean like audio video content stuff?

02:54 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

Oh yeah, infomercials, commercials, doing DVDs for, you know, clients all around the place. So, yeah, we were.

We started out with a lot of production. This is back when you knew you needed a pretty big edit facility. You know, things like that. So when we first moved in there, we had leveraged a lot of the people we knew there to grow well, as a marketing agency.

03:13 – John Bertino (Host)

I think having that background in creative and content production certainly serves you well and your clients for that matter. A lot of agencies don’t have that background, so they kind of need to figure it out after the fact. So that’s really interesting, yeah.

03:25 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

So a lot of our network is built around that from the very beginning, and so whenever we look at any kind of campaigns, we, you know a lot of people are, like you say, are kind of forced into the video. And it’s kind of in our DNA.

03:35 – John Bertino (Host)

Yeah, yeah, that’s fantastic, great, and tell us a little bit more about Dream Factory. How many years in business? What do you guys focus on today? What are your core offerings and skill sets?

Sure.

03:45 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

So, Dream Factory is primarily a B2B marketing agency. We focus on industrial manufacturing, large scale clients that really have the very least, a domestic footprint, mainly global, nowadays. But I think, our core differentiators is we start with strategy. So we don’t go in there, you know, trying to sell one piece of the pie. We’re really trying to figure out a holistic approach for the marketing of our clients, and we also are always looking for ways to leverage new technology for them.

04:11

Many clients, and you probably deal with this, with a lot of different companies, but they have a marketing stack or a tech stack that’s been sitting there, not being developed on for a while and they probably need to make some adjustments and so, or they have something that’s too big for them – you know, like they might get into a really large engagement, and they might use 20% of the product that they’re using, and they really don’t need all of that.

So, what we do, especially in the initial part of an engagement, most of our clients are retainers, so we’ll go in there and say, “Well, here’s where we can tweak and add and delete and things” – like that, and kind of you know, “re-engineer things.”

04:44 – John Bertino (Host)

Yeah, systematized.

04:45 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

Yeah, automate as much as possible.

04:47 – John Bertino (Host)

Yeah, automate, and set up all those analytics as you should.

Yeah, Great.

So we’ll get into some specific case studies if we have time later in the show. But just to start, since this episode is targeted or focused on the industrial product or industrial supply space, could you talk a little bit about either company you’ve worked with and or you know, specific verticals within the space that you have experienced in your Dream Factory?

05:10 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

Sure. So, I think the most interesting ones are the ones where they have specialized manufacturing of some type, or they have a product that’s super niche.

So, we have a number of clients that are in power plastics, you know, just really niche kind of product lines, and so their target audience is usually like a buyer that has a very narrow focus. And so, what you’re always trying to do is develop highly relevant content, which in this case, means you have to get really deep, you have to really get into the why, and the details of those products. So, in most cases in a B2C arrangement, it’s kind of a more Mass Communication Shotgun Approach, and while what we do, is more of an Account-Based Marketing Sniper Approach, where we talk directly to those people and we target them through channels that speak to them, and that they find relevant.

05:59 – John Bertino (Host)

Yeah, yeah, ABM is no doubt the key to cracking the code on marketing to, you know, professionals in the industrial supply space.

We’ve had a massive, good deal of content on that so far, and that’s a perfect segue to why we wanted to have you on the show, Jim – because you guys are masters at all things: LinkedIn, LinkedIn Outreach, Warm, Cold, Groups, Ads, all of that, and we want to get into it as much as possible.

But let’s start with just flat-out outreach. You know, right now I’m reading Alex Hormozi’s book. He’s incredible and he’s got a real knack for simplifying things down to the least common denominator. And he’s got something called the Core 4, which he’s essentially saying “Look, all marketing, all trying to get your word out, your message, to anyone, falls into basically four buckets.”

So, I’ll give them in the opposite order. You’ve got the calls which are just posting content. That would be, you know, whether that’s on social media or on a blog, foresee, whatever it is content marketing. You’ve got ads. So you’ve got earned and paid, in a sense. But then the other part of the core quadrant is, you know, warm outreach to people you already know, and cold outreach to people you don’t, and that’s marketing in a nutshell.

07:10

So, we’re going to talk about those top two here.

This is very top of mind for me because I’ve been doing a lot of it recently and there’s so many little nuances.

I’m sure a lot of our listeners have tried this to some degree in the past but there’s so many little nuances that make it tough.

So, let’s start from the top. We want to do outreach on LinkedIn. Let’s say we’re going to start cold. What are some tips you have for building a list in the first place? That’s going to be a good list and you know it’s going to get you in front of the right people with as little wasted time, effort and outreach as possible.

07:43 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

Sure. So, I take this in one of two ways. Number one, you really know your client already. You already have a really good kind of profile of their behavior and what they like.

07:52 – John Bertino (Host)

Got to share with personas and archetypes. Exactly. Let’s assume you got that.

07:55 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

Let’s say you’ve got that.

So, in that case you’ve got a couple of different ways you can go, and I think that, in LinkedIn it has so many parts to it now that you kind of have to take a holistic approach to it. It’s not just a one size fits all: create an ad campaign and target it, then go and spend money, and hope it works.

But in the case, where you really know who you’re talking about, you have to have a couple of different things set in stone. You have to have a consistency to your communication, so it has to speak to them consistently and it can’t be targeted in general. They had to look you up and find that, “Oh, they are experts in this area.”

The second thing is, and what I love the most is, whenever you have an existing clientele, they’re really like brand ambassadors for you. Ask them, just ask them. You know, where do you co-mingle with people in the same industry?

You know, find those choke points, and a lot of times there is, especially in B2B. There are always trade shows and events, and these trade shows and events are typically planned out months and months in advance and we’ve done a ton of the campaigns this way where you will invite the people who don’t know you necessarily, but maybe they’ve heard of you to your booth.

Invite them beforehand, get them aligned with the messaging, send them LinkedIn campaigns and then email campaigns, and concert the same kind of messaging at the same – some kind of cadence. Don’t overload them, but make them aware, and then line them up, so that when you meet them in person again, you establish that person-to-person connection.

09:14

And that in the B2B space. It’s about longevity. It’s about, you know, building your business long-term. And when you’re targeting the right kind of clients, you get a lot more traction. Right?

It’s not as much pop-in and pop-out, it’s more like “Oh, we’re sticking with somebody because we trust them as a vendor,” “We trust them as a supplier,” – that kind of thing.

09:29

So that’s the part I loved really, focusing on it when it comes to most of my clients now.

But when it comes to purely LinkedIn, I feel like one of the things that’s kind of lost is getting the right kind of content to the right kind of people.

And so, while you’re speaking about like – we were producing blogs all the time about different detailed topics and LinkedIn being one of them. But one of the things that most of our client’s kind of come in with a misconception of, is that by just having a website that talks about these things, that’s good enough and we have to take that content where 10 years ago that was kind of the approach right? SEO, bring them to me.

You have to go out, and find them, and push that content, and continually get that top of mind.

10:09 – John Bertino (Host)

The leadership, yeah. To some extent it’s like we’ve gone from push to pull, back to push again. Exactly right, because there’s so much noise.

10:16 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

Yes, and there’s so many people trying to get those people’s eyeballs and attention. So, I think, when it comes to, you’re already doing the work. We talk about content development, like how do you distribute your content? And really it comes down to in these niche markets, it’s about being really specific and then giving them multiple ways of connection. It doesn’t have to be like right now, hey, call me right now. But the end mail campaigns are critical nowadays and if you’re really good at end mail, you really have a good idea. And I’m not saying you’re chatgpt-ing a bunch of stuff but make it like you would actually be speaking to someone when it comes to this kind of stuff.

10:48

Don’t make it generic, because then people can see right through this, just delete. And then they think, while they’re using some kind of generic approach, that doesn’t really engender any kind of trust or belief in the brand. So, I feel like that’s the part that’s kind of starting to get missed a little more, because people are relying upon automation a little bit too much in areas where they shouldn’t. You really should have a personal touch in those areas.

11:08 – John Bertino (Host)

So I feel like your typical business professional is already starting to cultivate oh, I don’t know a little bit of a filter or radar for what might be a I generate content versus something that has that human touch.

11:18

Certainly, Google’s looking at that very closely but sticking with the step by step.

On the outreach, okay, so you’ve got your list, you’ve identified who you want to reach out to. You have to start crafting or drafting those emails. So I don’t know if it’s as simple as for some clients you’re doing one to one, every email is crafted individually, or if for other clients you’re doing more small, mass, or small group lists.B

In situations where you’re going to do somewhat larger groups and you need to templatize it at least a little bit, do you have a formula for how you’re going to draft those emails?

What’s the key to personalizing at scale, which is a bit of an oxymoron?

11:58 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

If you’re into your content marketing pretty deeply, like you already have a ton of blogs and you can take a look at your analytics and see where you’re getting traction in terms of viewership and in terms of in a level of engagement, you stick with that, and I think that’s something that people don’t do enough.

They think that it’s a totally different ballgame. Well, if you’re hitting the right market and the right market’s going to your website and you’re seeing the analytics from the correct market, then you can pretty much derive their interest in those topics and so you can hit those topics in the order that they’re interested in them in terms of importance. In the email and like most email campaigns are centered around subject line and initial approach. So, when someone says something in a subject line that’s really interesting and it’s something that people are interested in, it’s also timely.

12:43

But really that’s the biggest part is not to delete it out. And to your point about size of list, if it’s like a 10,000-person list, there’s no way you can do individualization unless you have a giant sales team, right. But if you have like a more segmentation in that way, you just take the ones you really want and you do individualize, and then you can do some A-B testing on the larger lists and give it two or three shots and see what it looks like in that initial email in terms of click-through rates and engagement with the content.

But yeah, you have to really think these things through. You don’t have to spend a ton of time on it, because I mean, if you have a more mature salesforce and you have a really good idea of what your clients like in terms of your existing client personas, then you can pretty much know what they’re interested in and you can write emails to those points.

13:24 – John Bertino (Host)

Okay. So, when I asked you about how to craft the email, you talked about going into analytics or just recalling back what’s worked with your other content marketing efforts to prioritize that in your outreach. And so, I guess innate in that response is the assumption that when you’re doing cold outreach, is it correct that you’re avoiding directly almost making a pitch and trying to book a meeting? Do you almost always aim higher in the funnel and try to outreach with content or address that? Are you going right for the meeting? Are you doing those softer sell content or how do you find that right balance or mix?

13:56 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

There has to be a balance. It’s a great point. So, you have to have a little bit of both. And so, I like to.

14:01

In a lot of sales jargon, it is like you know the test close. You know you get to the midpoint of the email, and it might be a paragraph or two paragraphs in and you say, if you’re looking for that right now, click here and we can you know. And then go beyond that and say if you’re not, you know that doesn’t interest you.

Then what’s the next thing on your list of analytics that you’re interested in? And you have another test closed. Then you have the final one at the bottom.

14:20

So, you can kind of, you know, segment those things out and give people multiple ways of clicking or engaging with your content and not necessarily make it a singular focus. And I think that’s like I would rather have.

In my experience, I would rather have 100 email signups for one of my clients and two leads in a lot of cases than have three or four leads and zero email signups. I’d rather have that consistent relationship of fill the funnel yeah, fill that funnel and more and more you have people that are listening to you as a thought leader, the more you can then have them share that content, the more you can have them give you responses, comments, and it brings that one to one communication and you know how it will it must be to be.

15:01

It’s not like tomorrow, it’s more about the projection right, like what’s going to look like a year or two or three. You know what products are really selling, but more importantly is their seasonality that we need to talk about as well.

So, I think about this in terms of if I can get everybody in the industry looking at my client as a thought leader, then whenever they have that specific need that my client has, the first top of mind is going to be my client and therefore you can have a mix of information and want to talk. So, you can do that over and over and over again, as long as you have the cadence right and you’re not filling up emails with spam. Basically, then, you’re doing it right.

15:37 – John Bertino (Host)

Okay, very good, alright, and so you’re reaching out cold. You’re doing some mix of transactional prompts for calls to action coupled with, you know, layering different value-added content that they can reference.

How about your existing and or mutual connections to very different things, I suppose, those that are already connected to you, versus those that are one or two layers removed? For nurturing existing connections, is it safe to say that the play there is just organically posting content? Or tell us a little bit about what you might do to build value for your existing connections and how you’re going to go about doing that?

16:12 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

Great, so it’s interesting. I was looking at my LinkedIn yesterday and preparing for this and I was thinking about how many of the connections I have do I actually know.

16:21 – John Bertino (Host)

You know a lot of.

16:23 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

I don’t know if you have the same experience where?

16:26 – John Bertino (Host)

I’m probably at about 30% at this point. I think that’s pretty high. It’s very high. You heard of most people. Very high.

16:32 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

Because most of the LinkedIn population came on LinkedIn after a lot of the methodologies kind of shifted towards just expanding your network open to work and all that kind of stuff. So, when I first started on LinkedIn it was probably like the first. Like two months after it was open I started doing these seminars and we had like a little theater downstairs in the building we ran at Universal back in the early days and I’d bring in all the C levels that I knew from my networking groups and I would, because none of them knew anything about LinkedIn.

It was kind of brand new and initially that was the first thing I would tell them: Take out your Rolodex, take out your business cards, right, and go through them and invite everybody that’s on there with their emails. And then all of a sudden you know, within the first couple months you’d have a few hundred you know, typically, and those are the people that you want because they’re your friends to see all your posts.

17:20

So that’s the easy thing. So, I think that approach in B2B is kind of the first way of going about it, the first level, and make those your brand ambassadors, where they see all your stuff and then you have communication with them via phone and you have regular coffee, lunch meetings, things like that’s kind of a core thing. But now to your point about how you really get great traction, I guess, with your existing LinkedIn connections. For me it comes down to identifying how you can kind of niche market with the content a little more.

So in my case I’ll give you an example. I have a lot of clients that are marketing directors, and marketing directors typically will change jobs every few three to five years or so, you know and so the goal of any agency really is to have a friend and the marketing director. So, when they move companies, they take you with them and then you also keep the company and then you double your business every three to five years.

18:09

I think that’s a standard agency 101 kind of thing that most people subscribe to. But when it comes to marketing managers and things like that, that’s another one where for me, it’s a different message.

Let me help educate you as well. And then when they move up into the marketing director role, wherever they move up in the world, then they take you with them as well, right? Well, it’s the same thing with clients. Like if you have a client that, for example, sells plastics, and they’re selling to a specific type of buyer for that specific category of plastic, and then when they move on, guess what? They’re taking you with them.

18:41

So, you want those people to be your best friends. You want those people to really understand who you are personally. You want to have a mixture, if you’re a really good salesperson, of not just throwing out stuff about the company but throwing stuff out about you. So, I think that’s kind of lost a lot of the personal connection, especially in the B2C realm. But where we live in B2B, I really want the personalities to come through. You’re in that long sales cycle.

19:03

Yeah, you want people to care about you. Play the long game.

19:05

Yeah, and realistically, that’s where most people in B2B live. They want to put out personal stuff, but it can’t be too personal. But when they’re at a trade show and they’re on the trade show floor, that’s one kind of a post. When they’re hanging out with a client at night, it’s a man.

19:20

It’s really great to see my client and my friend out here while having drinks on the strip at Las Vegas, here while during the trade shows, and that’s one of those fringe benefit things. But it does create a camaraderie and a feeling of wow, this guy’s not just a salesperson or not just a marketing person or not just a whatever, they’re a friend.

And so, I think that’s the part with the messaging campaigns where it’s getting a little bit lost, something that can be utilized a lot more nowadays because everything sees it kind of as a numbers game. But realistically, long term, from a personal branding standpoint, you want to be that source, you want to be that trusted leader in that market, and so I think that’s how you can do it a lot better than what most of my clients had been doing before we became their agency.

20:00 – John Bertino (Host)

Okay. So, you’re building that personal brand as a way to demonstrate one to one kind of thought leadership and value. You’re paying close attention to job changes because those often result in major opportunities. Anything else comes to mind, for you know, if you bring on that plastics client and they want to make more of their existing network. Are those the two main things, or any other tidbits? Today’s episode is brought to you by the agency guide.

20:26

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21:28 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

There’s tons more data available, especially intent marketing data. If, for example, you have a really good handle that you talked about before on your persona targets, one of the things that we’ve been doing a lot of for years now, but now it’s becoming more effective is taking intent data and bringing it into LinkedIn and overlapping email with LinkedIn campaigns with actually outbound call campaigns.

There’s a lot of different ways you can do this. When you have that triangle of activity, it really does help you at least eliminate what you know is not a really good targeting group. You can get more focused on what does work, at least on the front end. Then you can get down to the nitty gritty of what messaging is. The tip of the spear.

22:14

I think most companies nowadays where we’re thinking, hey, the market’s going back up, how do I get in there first and start to get these new employees that have come on board with hey, we’re the leader in this space, try this out and give us a shot. That really comes down to again.

Here we are with intent. Someone’s searching on Google and now you know that they’re interested in your product or service. We need to hit them with a one, two, three and call them, maybe four weeks after the initial emails, after the initial LinkedIn campaigns, tweak a little bit during the process. That to me has been probably the most successful part of an addition to our campaigns in the last two to three years, at least since post-COVID.

22:51 – John Bertino (Host)

I’m glad you brought up intent data. Thanks for that. Any resources, tools that you might want to plug, or name drop for our audience, it’s a good place to get reliable intent data, because it’s-.

23:02 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

There’s a lot of them. What do you like? I like ones that allow me to size it for the clients. A lot of times I don’t like the one size fits all, because you know how. This is where you get like and again, everyone has their niche right?

23:17

Like a Salesforce marketing cloud is not necessary for a $5 million company that has three salespeople. You need to be able to find the right fit for you. I will say just from a structure standpoint leveraging LinkedIn is a fairly easy thing to do with the minimal budget. Before you get to the intent data side, I’ll give you that in a second. Giving like a sales navigator plus an octopus or some other program like that that allows you to do actual send out, like maybe a couple hundred notes a day that are catered to the market.

That’s a really easy way to multiply efforts and you can also prove actual ROI fairly quickly from an investment like that. Most of them are month to month. You can get out of them if it’s not working for you. You get a new salesperson on board. You want to supercharge their efforts. You already have kind of an idea of a cadence and a scripting. That, to me, is like the first thing I would do is salesperson octopus. Thank you, sales navigator. Here’s the stuff. Set it up and go. That’s pretty much a layup.

24:16

And then, when it comes to the intent data, you know we’ve used Bombora data through a number of different other systems, but some clients have Zoom info and we’ve had some good results from that.

There’s another number of other different solutions Lead 4 and 1 and a couple other ones like that but I would say you know, googling that is a fairly easy thing to find and then just take a quick gander at the pricing and again from my client’s perspective, it’s not really about the spend as much as the ROI, like how usable the data is, and so if the sales people actually understand how to use it, then you can go a little bit deeper.

24:50

If it’s an agency level thing, then it comes down to okay, what are we going to get for the price, and you have to kind of bundle it or you have to have a separate line item.

24:58 – John Bertino (Host)

Well, and you talk about how to use it properly. That gets back to crafting that ultimate message that you know the target messages that you had in the targeting.

25:07

The target, the key, I mean it’s a big, jumbled knot that needs to be kind of untied, one string at a time. That’s where Dream Factory comes in. Okay, speaking of that jumbled knot, let’s talk about the paid side of the equation a little bit, on LinkedIn and hopefully in the context of how you might integrate LinkedIn’s paid offering, which has multiple types of inventories.

Perhaps you could talk a little bit about just macro, how you’re layering these pieces in right. So sorry, that was a bunch. How are you using LinkedIn paid? What types of inventories do you like and how do you layer that into the overall strategy of the organic, the posting, the outreach?

25:48 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

No, it’s a. When you go into LinkedIn, advertise at the top right and you click the button and you go in there and it has, like all these different options, that can understand why. If you’re new to it, it’s overwhelming.

25:57 – John Bertino (Host)

Well, you know, I’m sorry to interject, right, but in preparation for this interview, right, I’m on LinkedIn like every day. I’ve been using it my entire career, probably 20 years. I didn’t realize how little, how few aspects of LinkedIn I actually use in comparison to how much is available, right. So, again, I’ve been on LinkedIn. My entire career barely touched the ad side of things. So, you talk about all the different types of ad inventory. If you could expand on that a little bit, that’d be great.

26:24 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

So, the easiest way to think about this is what are you already doing? Are you already creating? Like? A lot of my clients will come in and they’ll have like a marketing department that’s working in Canva or some you know Adobe suite and they’ve got ads and they’ve got content that they’ve created. And some of them come in and they’re even as advanced for a B2B company as having a TikTok account and they’re throwing out small video content, things like that.

26:44

If you’ve already got those things, you want to repurpose them, and because you already know your Austin’s right, hopefully you know your audience and you know your personas, you know your targeting. So, when you go into the LinkedIn ads there is no wrong answer really, especially when you’re first starting out you might be able to just do basic text ads.

You might be able to do sponsored updates. You might be able to just replicate what you’re doing in other media and slightly cater it to the LinkedIn audience. Right, do a quick little edit on your video. Maybe you said it being you know, 20 second, 30 second video on one platform. You might want to make it into a 10 second quick hit video on LinkedIn. And then it’s that backend stuff too. It’s like where are they going to go? What are you trying to get them to do?

27:24

LinkedIn has native forms. You can click and they pop up and they’re already pre-populated with the data that’s in the person’s LinkedIn profile. So, for example, if I were to look at an ad and I click on it and the thing pops up and it says send me more information, and it says Jim Londeree Dream Factory phone number, click. And I’ll have to just click one button and the lead is sent to the person, the client with it, that created the ad. And so there are simple ways of doing this where you don’t have to spend a ton of money and time just getting started.

And so, I think that’s the part that, to your point from earlier, it can be overwhelming. You can look at it and go. I don’t know where to start, what do I even do with this? And so, from my perspective, it comes down to just get started. You can do the minimal budget thing and you know, throw in like 50 bucks a day kind of thing and see what happens.

28:10

Most companies that I’m dealing with are again. They already have like a lot of content to deal with, or they have a good idea of the content that they want to push, or they have a timeline, a deadline for, like, before to enter a trade show, and so we’re trying to do a very specific kind of push, but it doesn’t mean that that’s the only way you can use it. There’s a million different ways you can use it and one of the things too, that kind of. I had a client call me last week. We were in the middle of moving offices and stuff, and we were talking about how you cater existing content that’s old right, because a lot of clients have stuff that’s like three, four, five years old right and Google has their algorithms always changing right. But there’s no harm in going back and taking a look and seeing what’s changing that content that we need to change in the blog and then repost the blog and say it’s updated.

28:54

In fact, google loves that right, because what are you

28:56

Doing? Exactly, you’re refreshing old data, and they already know you are. You have authority because that was previously ranked and so therefore you know, and so you take that same thing and you and you, you post that as a new sponsored update. You know, you update your regular page and then you click it to sponsor it and boom, you hit the. The market. That’s the right market, with the in terms of the targeting group. Hit the button, put a couple bucks towards it and then you’re right. People are going to see it when they log in and see it in their scroll.

29:22 – John Bertino (Host)

So that’s like an easy one to do, to jump in and it sounds like I guess, on balance, if you’re going to start from, just if you’re choosing between transactional ads hey, I’ve got this thing by this thing right or you can take content you have and aim more high to mid funnel and, you know, put advertising dollars behind that first. I guess you know the kind of gun to the head type situation. You lean towards the ladder.

29:45 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

If you have a lot of people you’re trying to target, yes. If it’s a very, very niche, like a focused group of people, I would. I would overlay a ton more of the personalized end emails from your sales navigator account, because then they’re seeing it both. Right, they’re seeing the news, and we all have this kind of idea growing up in the television era, like if you’re on a media like its special right, lawyers, car dealers do it well, tv billboards same kind of thing. Mass communication media is still there.

30:13

But with digital you can be a superstar within your market. You can be the first brand they see within a market. Because if your audience is only a few thousand people, if they see you every single day with very minimal cost, then you’re winning. You’re winning that top-of-mind argument, right? So that’s and that’s why I keep pushing with all my clients is if we can kind of think of everything for you in terms of your, your personas you’re targeting is like a microcosm and just just keep on in that universe, just owning that first top-level brand, that that cost is not very high.

30:45 – John Bertino (Host)

You know, and it’s a really good point, especially in industry space, an industry that is industrial, where there usually is a small group of people or companies you’re really trying to get in front of.

30:56 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

Right.

30:58 – John Bertino (Host)

That’s why account-based marketing is what it is. That’s essentially the idea by definition, and so if you can just throw a little LinkedIn sponsored ad dollars behind your content and just stay in front of that group of people, that’s money well spent, okay, and real quick following on that.

31:13 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

So you have a whole content marketing effort going on and you’re spending a lot of money and creating the videos and the blogs and the graphics, all these things. Why wouldn’t you spend a little bit more to push it to the right people? It’s just the simple thing of creating a TV commercial and having it just kind of sit on the shelf Like it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

You know, and to the point of what we talked about earlier about the push and pull change in marketing, it used to be that you did focus all of your effort on SEO for your website, right, but now you’ve got all these different other programs like LinkedIn, like Tabool, like Outbrain, where you’re pushing content to people yeah you’re literally distributing that content on the websites that your target audience is on and then you’re seeing which ones are actually pushing the leads through and you’re optimizing that.

31:53

So I don’t want to do tangential, but that’s like. The whole goal of marketing is to find your customers right 100% Okay.

32:00 – John Bertino (Host)

So help bring it all together for us right, and perhaps through the lens of maybe, a client you’ve worked with in the past. Moreover, I find that when it comes to larger businesses with larger budgets, things get arguably a little bit easier in that there’s money to test everything, absolutely. You know, it doesn’t mean getting an ROI is necessarily going to be easier, but there’s more you can play with, more levels you can pull.

But for, say, a somewhat smaller business, a couple million, 10 million in revenue, something like that they have to be very careful with how they approach LinkedIn and, again, which levers they’re going to pull from what we just discussed. Walk me through kind of the play by play, organic outreach, ads, how you’re going to bring it all together for a smaller client, maybe through the lens of a case study, perfect.

32:46 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

So number one identify your strengths. So if you have a really good say, you have your 10 million dollar company and you’ve got two salespeople, do they have all the tools they need to multiply their efforts? Are they constantly busy answering leads Right? If the answer is no, then we need to get more leads right. And then, at the same time, is there a support staff that needs to do the work on the proposal side and on answering emails on that kind of stuff? So there’s an internal focus initially, when you have an engagement on that part of it.

33:13

The next part of it is: Are you already producing content? Do you have content that can be repurposed and can be added onto very easily? And then, are you already doing events? Are you already doing trade shows? So taking those things and supercharging those efforts is like the bare minimum, simple way of doing it, and that can be done very quickly in the first month or two At the end stage. So what makes you the most money as a company? What clients are the good long-term clients for you?

33:38

And that’s a part where you need to kind of sit down and just have a meeting of the minds and say we really do like this type of persona but we only have like 10% of our revenue coming from that persona. Well, why do you like it? Well, it’s less human time, it’s easier to close, our products are more aligned with their needs.

So you start looking at all those things and then you want to focus on that persona more aggressively. Well then you take all those differences again, the intent marketing. You can overlap with your LinkedIn ads, with your email campaigns, all the other social stuff that you’re doing, and you want to align your messaging to that audience. And then you want to go back to your point.

34:12

It doesn’t take a lot of money, right, but it takes a lot of focus. So, when you get into the ABM side of things, you want those in-mails from your salespeople going to those people, to speak specifically about the products that they love the most or that they need the most right, and about the advantages you have over your competitors.

Sometimes you get that kind of scripting done right and then you get all the outreach aligned and you’re seeing everything real-time on a dashboard every single day. You can make slight adjustments and very quickly take the AB test, even with a minimal budget. For a company at that size it doesn’t necessarily take a lot of people, but it takes a really great focus and it takes a great system of content production and distribution.

34:50 – John Bertino (Host)

When, if ever, for a smaller company, are you going to use just the transactional approach to advertising?

34:58 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

In my markets it’s usually a seasonal thing, so we’ve got extra stuff in the warehouse or it’s the time of year. There are some of that, but primarily if you’re trying to get something really really quick, something external that’s happened that has to be taken advantage of. Rates are high, it’s time to do this, rates are low, that kind of an approach, so something more you can’t control but you have to react to. So that’s typically where we make it. I think most of our campaigns for my clients at least are centered around that kind of an externality.

35:29 – John Bertino (Host)

That’s a great answer. And then, so then, on balance, kind of just taking that a step further, would you say you’re maybe waiting again for a smaller business, you’re waiting most of your advertising dollars towards promoting content and just carving out a smaller percentage for these time-based events that might occur.

35:46 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

Yeah, and then obviously always being consistent with the person-to-person connection. Again, getting back to my personal branding, you want your salespeople to be experts right for your client base. So as long as you’re able to take those testimonials that you get from clients and able to get referral partners that are great and brand advocates that are great, then you should be just fine in terms of the expansion and at the speed that you want to. And I will say this too. There’s one thing that I’ve always kind of as a side note: adding a salesperson or like a marketing person or just a support person within a company of that size is critically important. But you have to know what time to do it and when to do it and how to do it. So all those different pieces being in place allow you to very quickly scale right because they have a very defined role.

36:30

When you don’t have those things in place and you add, what ends up happening is it’s just like oh, it’s this thing I don’t want to do, throw it to that person and it just adds to the king of the muck you know.

36:39

And so what I always try and talk to my clients about when it comes to like campaign efforts is we typically handle like most of the marketing strategy, but we need their subject matter experts to give us really what the meat potatoes is of the messaging when it comes to oh, this is great because it applies to this person in this way. So they have that knowledge and we’re really good at taking that and making it into promotional and getting people actually to respond to it. So I feel like that’s kind of the one differentiator that’s hard to quantify until you get into a specific example. You know, and especially when it comes to clients that are a little bit on that high growth but smaller revenue number, they typically will skip over that structure and get to just add people and that structure is scalable. The people aren’t. So you have to get the structure first.

37:28 – John Bertino (Host)

Good stuff. Okay, so with the remaining time we have, there are a few other random aspects of LinkedIn that I want to just touch on to kind of round out our view of the platform.

But let’s talk a little bit about groups and events. Let’s start with events. Actually, you know, I didn’t even know LinkedIn had an events feature. Those people don’t and so, leading up to this, I did a search on that and they launched it right before the pandemic. That’s why, and I used to host a bunch of events and I was like how do I not know this?

Anything specific comes to mind as it relates to LinkedIn events, how you might blend that in. Do you like LinkedIn events versus other event platforms like an Eventbrite or Meetup or something like that?

38:10 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

Yeah, generally, yes, but I think that the fun thing about LinkedIn events to us at least, for our clients is that you can take that whole idea that, hey, we’re the leaders in a market and we have all these great ideas and you can push it to a specific audience and you can convert every effort that you have in terms of training into webinars and so, at the end of the day, most people will think of you as a thought leader pretty quickly if you teach them something.

So what we love to do with our clients is set up webinar series, because if you can do just four or five ideas that are 15 minutes at a time, 20 minutes at a time, and leave a 10 minute for Q&A at the end, it’s really simple to set things up and execute them through that platform and then, at the same time, obviously there’s hopefully a little bit of a viral aspect to it, whereas you don’t get that from a lot of other platforms.

39:00 – John Bertino (Host)

So that’s where I feel like there’s the most benefit to our clients, because you can just release it as a piece of content after the fact.

39:07 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

I also like limiting it, like saying only 40 people can join this webinar, or whatever that needs to be. You know, yes, that’s scarcity urgency.

Oh, it’s great.

39:16 – John Bertino (Host)

Again makes me think of Alex Hermosi’s huge on that. I mean, everybody that’s smart is big on that but, that’s a great tip. It’s also interesting you rattle off the number, maybe 10, 15, 20 minutes. That caught my attention because I think the natural inclination is oh hey, we’re gonna do a webinar, so 30, 45, an hour.

39:36 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

Keep it simple 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and it’s just a concept. It’s just a simple concept that is, this is how this works for this application and who are you targeting? The people who are interested in that application. So at the end of the day, it comes down to really that specificity and that depth of knowledge, not necessarily that kind of wide approach. Right, it’s a mile deep, inch wide, kind of thing.

39:55 – John Bertino (Host)

Yeah, and then you’re gonna send that out to your email list and nurture that with that conversation and of course, you’re recording it.

40:01 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

And you’re putting it behind some sort of gate. Put down your name and email to get this information and then you add to your list and it just adds to an ecosystem of content. And you have to think that way as a company because over the years you just don’t wanna do hit and miss stuff. If you’re gonna put the effort into it, you might as well get some long benefit from it, right?

40:20 – John Bertino (Host)

Okay, and then last but certainly not least, groups. So again, this is one of those things I’m well aware of on LinkedIn groups. They’ve been there forever and the few times I’ve really tried to use it prior to recently I’ve been given another look, but prior to recently it’s always just kind of looked like a bit of a spam fest, even though there’s these, well, spam fest or like a self congratulatory.

40:43 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

An astroturf. Yeah you know what I mean. It’s like we create this thing and it’s run by the company that benefits from the conversation directly. That’s right and a little bit disengines.

40:52 – John Bertino (Host)

The moderation. So how have you found them useful, if at all? And if you have found them useful, what are some quick tips you can give our listeners so that they can get more benefit out of it –

41:03 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

Other than

41:04 – John Bertino (Host)

calling Dream Factory to have you help them with it?

41:06 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

Yeah, Well. So here’s the thing I’ve always told all my clients. This is like if you’re gonna do social media, do it well, and if you’re not gonna do it, just don’t do it, Because the effort is the key. So if you’re gonna be the cost yeah, exactly, Well, in this case, it’s time right. Do you have someone who really understands how to leverage it and is it really integrated into the rest of your sales and marketing effort?

So, when it comes to groups, the thing that I kind of struggle with on LinkedIn is that it’s kind of a low bar, you know, for someone just kind of, hey, I’m just throwing this out there and seeing what happens.

41:35

And so there’s a lot of kind of just eight member groups that speak to something that I want to, I’m interested in, but there’s no activity in them so finding the effort of creating a group and maintaining a group and consistently trying to push you know content to that group can be super helpful, but you have to have an effort that actually makes a ton of sense.

Now, having said that, there are some great groups out there and you can find them. You know, my company, like most companies in marketing advertising, has really been integrating AI as much as possible and automation as much as possible.

42:08 – John Bertino (Host)

Right as you should as you should.

42:10 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

But the groups that are there, you have to ask yourself like well, what is the general, you know kind of direction of the content here? You know what they are really trying to push? And when it’s just a reference like here’s new, a new technology, here’s what it does, check it out. I like that. That’s a simple thing, right. And if it’s just the same one over and over again, I don’t like it, because everybody tried that. It doesn’t work very well. You know that kind of thing.

So you need to have, kind of, in my estimation, a more broad, based, accepting kind of a group to make it really grow, and to do that, most companies don’t like having competitors in it, right. And so you have to be careful about, kind of, how you’re leveraging the group if you’re gonna create one.

Now, having said that, the opposite is also true for most of my clients. I tell them if we’re gonna create some kind of great content posted in a group that it applies to, and that’s perfectly fine, right, but finding those groups and supporting that and having someone to go ahead and do the comment, response and stuff like that is an effort. So if you’re gonna do it, do it well. If you’re not gonna do it, don’t do it.

43:06 – John Bertino (Host)

Yeah, something we’ve been looking at doing in full disclosure.

It’s a new strategy we’re testing, although we feel pretty good about it. It is going into some of these groups ahead of time, knowing that we’re ultimately going to post maybe an interview like this or a snippet like this, or something I learned from you today, Jim right.

So to be clear, going on to LinkedIn, finding groups about marketing maybe a B2B industrial supply company and saying what are some ways you can leverage LinkedIn groups to market an industrial supply company, allow the group members to talk about it, allow them all to have the opportunity to provide their own value, demonstrate their own thought leadership, allow them to do that, and then come back after the fact and say those are great answers, here’s what we found, and then post Jim Londeree from Dream Factory in Orlando, Florida, talking about his strategy for it, and so to consolidate that down is essentially setting the table, positing the question to the group, allowing the other group members to riff on it and then later at the end, coming back with what your thoughts are.

44:07 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

Right, and hopefully layering four or five more questions, while you’ve got that one kind of simmering right.

44:12

Yeah, that’s a really good model for group activity. The thing I’ve always kind of said is you can’t appear as if you’re just being self-serving the whole time, right. There has to be some sort of a just conversation going on, and that’s really what social is supposed to be about.

It’s best practices and everyone kind of. It’s the way I kind of think about it. When I’m at home on the weekend and my wife’s like “You gotta fix that XYZ thing,” it’s like DIY time. Here comes the YouTube search, right.

44:36

And then at the end of the day, for the next hour, you are fixing something that you didn’t know how to fix 15 minutes ago.

It’s a beautiful thing, right?

It’s a great thing about social media. So that’s why I feel like a lot of times your kind of caught in this.

Well, what’s the ROI?

And if your return on investment is dictated by some sort of immediate return on investment, like in the next week, or month – it’s probably not gonna say, “Hey, let’s go to LinkedIn groups and do some effort.” It’s gotta be a long-term plan, right.

45:03 – John Bertino (Host)

Well, and that’s a great place to really close, because, other than the ad products we talked about, the whole thing is a longer-term play, as is marketing a B2B company in general. If you’ve got that short-term focus, it’s probably not gonna work out too well.

Maybe pick off some low-hanging fruit, but then what? And that’s when most companies think to contact someone like yourself, Mr Londeree.

So, Jim, thanks so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate your insights. You brought a lot to the table. I’m sure our listeners are gonna love it.

45:35 – Jim Londeree (Guest)

Thanks, so much.

Thank you.