Jeff Walker (00:00): The reason it’s lasted so long is because it’s based on strategies as opposed to one hit wonders as opposed to short-term tactics. It’s rooted in psychology and the way our brains work. And so the formula has been working for coming up on 30 years now, and it’s going to keep on working for another 30, I think for 300.

John Jantsch (00:23): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jeff Walker. He’s the creator of the Product Launch Formula, revolutionized online marketing with a step-by-step process that generated over a billion dollars in launches since pioneering the concept in 1996. His formula has become the gold standard for online entrepreneurial training. He lives in my favorite state of Colorado, way down in the corner of Durango, enjoys Outdoor Adventures and Family. We’re going to talk a little bit about his updated and revised version of his bestselling book Launch, how to Sell Almost Anything Online, build a Business You Love and Live the Life of You. So Jeff, the show.

Jeff Walker (01:07): Thanks, Jen. I’m really happy to be here.

John Jantsch (01:09): Been a long time since you’ve been on the show, but fortunately you and I got to bump into each other recently in Nashville, which is greatly connecting. So for the two people that don’t know, what is PLF?

Jeff Walker (01:21): PLF stands for Product Launch Formula and basically is a process and a system to launch your products online, whether you have an online course, a membership site, coaching program, any type of training like that, it’s also used for art and for books and even for widgets.

John Jantsch (01:43): Awesome. So I always like to ask in a revised book, updated book, you’re in the online space, a lot of stuff changes every day in there. What would you say to somebody who bought the original version? Like what’s new?

Jeff Walker (01:57): Yeah, what really changed? So Product Launch Formula is the reason it’s lasted so long. So as you mentioned earlier, I started developing it in the mid nineties. That was when I did my first launch, was 1997 and developed it, started publishing this as a course in 2005, came out with the first edition of the book in 2014. The reason it’s lasted so long is because it’s based on strategies as opposed to one hit wonders as opposed to short-term tactics. It’s rooted in psychology and the way our brains work. And so the formula has been working for coming up on 30 years now, and it’s going to keep on working for another 30, I think for 300 years. But the online world does change quite a bit. So with that in mind, I revised it and really what I went into deep in the book is social media, which really wasn’t, there was no social media when I started out, and even in 2014, it was definitely a thing, but it wasn’t a thing at the level it is now.

(03:04): And also paid traffic, the ability to, there’s just great ad platforms that there weren’t back in the day. So those are a couple of the really big things. And then one thing that’s really changed is the timing of the sequences. So Product Line Formula is built on sequences, well, it’s built on stories, sequences and mental triggers and the sequences. It used to be there was this pre-launch sequence and that was the star of the show. And then you would actually open up and start taking orders, and that was almost an afterthought, that portion what we call the open cart or the open cart sequence. And that has become the star of the show now. So a lot of the emphasis has shifted from, yes, I’d say it used to be the pre-launch with the open cart being an afterthought, and now the open cart is a full on major sequence.

John Jantsch (03:56): You mentioned when you were describing what it was that you have a lot of pretty big variety of use cases, right? Oh yeah. But somebody might read the word formula and think, oh, there’s one way to do it mean, how do you address that idea?

Jeff Walker (04:12): Yeah, I mean, it’s more, I think that marketing is often, there’s a science and then there’s the art. And within product launch formula, there’s certainly room for the art. And as formulaic as I try to make it because I’m teaching people to do it and the people I’m teaching, some of them are starting from absolute ground zero, have never sold anyone anything, have never done any marketing whatsoever. So I have to assume that’s where we’re starting from. But as you get more experience, there’s all kinds of room for creativity within the formula, the whole idea, it’s about delivering value before the sale. It’s about delivering. One of the ways I like to think about is the value. It’s value before reveal and before you reveal the full extent of what your offer is, you’ve already built great value for people. And then there’s this idea of desire before availability where you’re building up this desire before someone can get it. And if you look at the way, I mean, this is used by big companies, like Apple does this so well, yeah, I mean Hollywood does it. People

John Jantsch (05:24): Waiting around the block for the new thing, right?

Jeff Walker (05:27): Exactly. And that is possible, even if you don’t have a budget like Apple has or the Hollywood studios have or the big gaming companies have, we can absolutely do that by putting together a pre-launch where you walk people through a series of you define a problem that they have, whatever market or niche you’re in, whether it’s quitting smoking or learning meditation or having a better love relationship or building your business or hitting a better tennis serve. It doesn’t matter the people they’re there, they’re in your world because they want something different in their life. And our job is to either still deliver it, is basically to take away pain or deliver pleasure to people, give them more pleasure, take away pain from them. And so they have a series of problems. And if you can solve those problems through your pre-launch and not like the big overarching problem, but if you can start to thin slice some of the things that are keeping them up at night, and you can define those problems really well and then start to solve some of them in the pre-launch, then that just, it builds trust. It builds relationship, but it also builds anticipation that they’re going to want to get whatever the thing is.

John Jantsch (06:52): Would you say that this sort of came about organically, like 1995, I was on 9, 9 2. We were all trying to figure out, Hey, how can I make money on this thing? So you created something and worked. People started asking you, Hey, Jeff, how’d you do that? Would just kind it. Yeah,

Jeff Walker (07:10): That’s exactly it mean. So when I started, I started publishing a newsletter in 1996, and it was about the stock market. And that’s something I had some knowledge on, and I don’t even think I ever told you this, but I started that newsletter, a free newsletter back when there very many free newsletters there. No,

John Jantsch (07:27): We called ’em Easy or something like that, right?

Jeff Walker (07:30): And there weren’t very many, and I think there was probably about zero free ones about the stock market back then. There might’ve been couple. And I actually started publishing that because I needed some to put something on my resume to help me get into grad school. So it’s just by these ridiculous, ridiculous path people started subscribing to that newsletter. And then after I had about six or eight or 900 people, and I’m like, oh, maybe they’ll buy something from me. But at that point, there was no teaching or training about marketing online in 1996. It just didn’t exist. And I had no sales or marketing experience. And furthermore, I thought I had this feeling messed up feeling about marketing and messed up feeling about sales that if I asked them for money for something that they would hate me. And so I decided to romance them, and I gave them a whole bunch of really high quality content, and that gradually led it to the sale. And that one seed of an idea has led all these years later, my students have done a billion dollars in sales. It’s just ridiculous.

John Jantsch (08:38): You mentioned the idea that there is a psychological strategy or psychological component, a lot of this, so you talk a lot about authority and scarcity. Reciprocity. So how do you bake that in a way that doesn’t seem manipulative, but also certainly does the job?

Jeff Walker (08:58): So there’s all these mental triggers, and the pre-launch gives you this amazing time to use those triggers and one of them authority you mentioned, and you absolutely have to lead with authority anytime you’re doing any type of marketing, even if you’re just doing content marketing, if you’re just getting people to try to pay attention to your message out in social, you have to establish some authority or else there’s just no reason for them to pay attention to you. So anytime, any presentation you give of any sort, anywhere, you have to tell people why they should pay attention to you. Now, there’s elegant ways to do this, and there’s clumsy ways to do it, like

John Jantsch (09:41): The picture in front of your jet.

Jeff Walker (09:43): Yeah, right, exactly. I think one of the best ways to do it is to deliver real value and to show up and know what you’re talking about, not have the intro that I just had on this podcast where I was stumbling over myself trying to describe what PLF was. But yeah, so I think authority is a big one you want to lead with, and reciprocity is a mental trigger where if you give something to someone, they want to give something back to you. And when you are giving true value in your pre-launch and it doesn’t cost anything, that’s not manipulative, you’re just giving value. But it does develop reciprocity. So yeah, I mean, I think with a lot, any type of marketing, there’s ways to go to the dark side, and I hope my clients aren’t doing that because I think the reality is if you just show up and you deliver real value, you’ve automatically built up authority and you’ve built up reciprocity and you’ve built up likability. And so yeah, those triggers are built right in all the way through the process.

John Jantsch (10:46): Where I see people, what I was talking about, I’m sure none of your students do this, but we’ve all seen the oh sale ends at midnight every day for the next six months. The sale ends at midnight. And so it’s just manipulative, it’s, it’s not honest and authenticated. It’s my pleasure to welcome a new sponsor to the podcast. Our friends at ActiveCampaign, ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with the must have platform for intelligent marketing automation. We’ve been using ActiveCampaign for years here at Duct Tape Marketing to power our subscription forms, email newsletters, and sales funnel drip campaigns. ActiveCampaign is that rare platform that’s affordable, easy to use, and capable of handling even the most complex marketing automation needs. And they make it easy to switch. They provide every new customer with one-on-one personal training and free migrations from your current marketing automation or email marketing provider.

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Jeff Walker (12:36): I think there’s a couple ways, and one of ’em is the people that are just amazing salespeople. And the incredible salespeople, often they have a sales message or a pitch that they’re used to giving. And as an aside, I don’t like the word pitch. I always use the word offer. So I’m using that intentionally here where these folks have a pitch and what they do is they’re like, oh, pitch. And I’d see it in your formula. You usually put out three pieces of pre-launch content. Well, I’ll take my pitch and I’ll just cut it into three pieces. I’ll take my webinar and I’ll make it three 20 minute segments instead of a 60 minute segment that’s not following the formula, that’s not delivering value. So I think the people that are just really good at selling, and I don’t consider myself one, I’ve gotten, I’m really good at marketing. I’ve gotten pretty darn good at selling, but it’s been a long journey for me to get there. But the people that are just natural salespeople, the one that can sell sand in a desert, they get into trouble because

John Jantsch (13:39): They don’t want to waste the time on all that other shelf. Right,

Jeff Walker (13:41): Exactly. Maybe they don’t need to. I don’t know. Maybe they don’t. So that’s one. And the other one is where people, they just get enamored with is, oh, deliver value before the sale. I love that. And then they just teach and teach and teach. And they’re like, if I teach, you say, I’ll put out three pieces of pre-launch content. I know I’ll do three hour trainings. And so they don’t actually follow the formula because the reality is you can easily over teach. And when you over teach what you’re asking people to invest a lot of time with you before they’ve really truly chosen to invest with you monetarily, but also emotionally and intellectually, intellectually. So if you’re just like, I’ll tell you what, for free, just give me your email and I’m going to give you a Harvard MBA. It’s going to take you about three years to get through it, but that’s okay because it’s going to be great. And even if you delivered that, no one when they give you an email is prepared to spend three years getting an MBA and the same. They’re not going to go through three or four hours of training with you until you’ve moved them

John Jantsch (14:51): Or establish some value of that. It’s like, I’m not going to invest the time because I don’t know if it’s any good. Right.

Jeff Walker (14:57): Exactly.

John Jantsch (14:58): Exactly. So alright. What do you tell the person that says, well, okay, I don’t any, I don’t even have a course. Can I make this work or do I need to go to work on sort of the preprint stuff?

Jeff Walker (15:10): Yeah, I, so I think first of all, you need to start anyone who’s building an online business, anyone who’s building any business, you need to start to build an audience. I would start that immediately. And the great thing is you can start that on social these days, but then you want to move people off of social onto an email list. So you want to start to build that audience. And as you build that audience, I consider myself a publisher. It’s like when I’m on the ski lift and someone asks me what, I’m a publisher, that’s what I do. I put out, well, these days often it’s video, but I put words and thoughts and video out into the world, and I think we all need to do that. And the great thing is when you’re just starting out and you don’t have an audience yet, you don’t have to be amazing.

(15:59): Like John, you and I, were at this point now where if we’re going to publish something, there’s an expectation that we’re going to be pretty good because we’re experts in our field. We’re perceived as experts in our field. But when you’re first starting out, no one’s paying attention. You have time to practice and get your chops down and find your voice and find the hooks in your message and find what it is you’re going to bring to the world. I think that almost every one of us, I think probably every one of us has something we can bring to the world that we can teach something that people, what do people come to you to ask you about? What seems like incredibly easy to you but seems hard to other people and some of the niches that people have had success in? John, there was two guys. They had a six figure launch, so a hundred thousand dollars launch teaching people how to scream. And I was like, they wrote in, after they went to the court, they did this launch, they wrote in, they said, yeah, we thought screaming. And I’m like, okay, we got to get these guys on a call and find out what this is. And it turns out that it’s for, I’m like, it’s for screaming for heavy metal, for heavy metal, vocal, how

John Jantsch (17:12): To scream. I was going some sort of mental health release or something, but

Jeff Walker (17:16): Turns out there’s a technique for it, and they knew how to do it, so they taught it. You only had someone teaching sword fighting. It goes on and on, the different types of things. So I think pretty much all of us have something we can bring to the world. I am a big fan of this, what I call a wisdom business, where you’re, whatever you spent time learning how to do, you could show other people how to do it.

John Jantsch (17:41): And what’s interesting too, I think a lot of people underestimate this idea that everybody’s on the continuum of their journey somewhat. So people that have read all the books and gone to all the courses, maybe they’re farther along in their journey, but there’s definitely people back here starting their journey that you can teach something to. I think that’s a lot of times when people, they read your book and they think, I got to be like Jeff, but Jeff serves a certain audience. There’s a whole lot of people out there that your stuff, they’re not ready for your stuff.

Jeff Walker (18:10): And the reality is there’s more people at the beginning. There’s more beginners in any market because everyone starts as a beginner. If you’re teaching guitar, there’s some people that are masters, Eric Clapton, the masters, but there’s a lot more people that just bought the guitar because everyone starts, Eric Clapton bought a guitar one day. Everyone starts and only a few people get to the expertise. So it’s like a pyramid. There’s just more beginners in any field.

John Jantsch (18:41): Yeah, I hesitate. We’re violent at the end of our time. I hesitate at opening up new still, but how has AI impacted what you do and what marketers do in your view?

Jeff Walker (18:51): Well, obviously we’re still in the second inning in the AI revolution, I think. So we don’t know where it’s going to go. I just have no idea right now where it’s at is, I think it’s great for ideation.

(19:10): It is absolutely amazing. I’ve spent my life over the last 30 years becoming a very good copyright. I’m really good at putting words together that convince people to move forward with me. And those words might be delivered via an email, via a blog post, via social media or a script that I say on video. And it’s something I do I’m great at, I’m proud of, but it’s not necessarily an easy thing to do. I’ve spent three decades getting better at it, but right now you can use AI and cut out the first 80% of that. So I think it makes it a lot.

John Jantsch (19:50): You can tell it to write like Gary Halbert

Jeff Walker (19:54): And it won’t write like Gary Halbert. In fact, John, just in the last week I was going back and reading the old Gary Halbert letters. For those of you don’t know, Gary Halbert’s, one of the legends of copywriting. He’s passed away quite a number of years ago now, but one of the absolute legends. But I think AI can get you the first 80% there. AI can help you design a course. AI can help you brainstorm hooks, AI can help you brainstorm lead magnets. It’s just it’s

John Jantsch (20:23): Pain points,

Jeff Walker (20:25): Right? Get to know your avatar. Yeah,

John Jantsch (20:28): I’ve signed it really good at, it’s terrible at creating original content in my view right now, but it’s pretty good at repackaging your good original content. And so for me, for a lot of marketers, you start with something really good. And now because we want to maybe or make sense for us, participate in a lot of different platforms, you can actually take that original content and make it through the podcast. But again, you can’t tell it, write me a 700 word blog post on X or it’ll be pretty garbage.

Jeff Walker (20:58): But something a lot of people struggle with is avatar research avatars, your ideal client. And because a lot of us are more advanced, if you are the guitarist who’s this amazing guitarist now, and you’re trying to remember what it was like to be a newbie because you want to teach some newbies, it’s hard to remember what it’s like. But you can go to AI and ask AI what it’s like to be a newbie and what the concerns are and what the hopes and dreams and fears are. And it’s really good at that.

John Jantsch (21:26): And I think the hopes and courage and dreams, when I picked up the guitar, had more to do with Patty McCormick than learning how to play the guitar. A lot of junior high guitarists. Right,

Jeff Walker (21:36): Right.

John Jantsch (21:37): Well, Jeff, it was awesome catching up with you. Where can people find more about your work and certainly pick up a copy of the updated revised launch?

Jeff Walker (21:46): The book is called Launch. It’s available anywhere books are sold, including Amazon, and there’s all the different types of versions there. Then you can find more about the product launch formula at product launch com. I’ve always got all kinds of great free resources there for you to have.

John Jantsch (22:05): Yeah, and depending upon when you’re listening to this, I know you have a new launch of PFL coming up, and we will let people know where that is. But again, following you listening to this, you’ve can find the latest and greatest.

Jeff Walker (22:18): John, this is great. Thank you.

John Jantsch (22:20): My pleasure. Hopefully we’ll run into one of these days out there on Highway 50.

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Sean Malone (00:00): The one thing that’s different about dms, and actually the numbers prove it, is that when somebody sends you a dm, if it’s good messaging, you don’t discard it. What do you do? You click on that person’s profile and you creep on them a little bit on social. Make sure that they’re real, and then if they’re real and you like their stuff, then you come back and you respond. This is why dms have a high response rate way higher than anything else. And then if you’re not a clown, when you’re actually chatting in dms and you do it well, then you can start actually converting higher than any of the other methods of communication.

John Jantsch (00:32): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Is this John Jantsch My guest today is Sean Malone. He’s the co-founder and CMO of flowchat.com, a software tech company that is refined how people use dms for business agency owners and founders Turn to Flow Chat to set up an effective social selling system using dms seeking automation and one click power. Sean’s built eight companies. It’s first to achieve multiple six figures annually. The next four reached multiple seven figures, and the last two exceeded 10 million sales a year is aims for Flow Chat to become his first $100 million company. So Sean, welcome to the show.

Sean Malone (01:12): Hey, John, thank you so much for having me. I’m so grateful to be here, man, you’re a legend, obviously you writing the books that you’ve written in, so I’m really honored and humbled just to be here and chatted with you today. So thanks for the time.

John Jantsch (01:23): Well, I appreciate those kind words. So when I was reading your bio, I built eight companies. I kept wanting to hear about the total bomb. Was there not a total bomb in there?

Sean Malone (01:34): There’s plenty of bombs in there, I think. Yeah, for sure. Where do we start? Holy cow. This takes me back into when I was 15, I was pushing the shop room for my dad and I was learning, I was watching him. He had immigrated from South Africa to America when I was a young kid, and he just had this work ethic that I still haven’t seen rivaled Today. He was working like 120 plus hours a week, I guess maybe he had to because we moved here with little to nothing. And so he just started to just building stuff on his own. He’s a metal just by trade. He ended up, he was selling metal as a day job, and then he started a small business on the end, which was a import export cookware business. And so that’s where I really kind of started to learn entrepreneurship and I just kind of saw what it took to actually do it.

(02:24): And so then I went off into college and I started my own little auto detailing company. I would say that one kind of bombed. I got it to the point where I was doing work for the city and I was cleaning cop cars and some of those types of vehicles. And then my college career kind of came to an end and I didn’t know what to do. And so I just kind of gave the business away, even though it was making some pretty healthy money. It was, I don’t know, I’d say it’s probably making about 15,000 a month, but when you’re a college kid, that’s a lot of cash. So after that, I started selling as a manufacturer’s rep. I did pretty good, made a bunch of commission, ended up buying my first electronics manufacturing company, and that one I started, I think I negated a lot of failure in the early part of it because I always had somebody that was kind of in the game that knew how not to fail.

(03:15): And so I think it goes a long way to talk about mentorship. But that business, I grew that one from about 250,000 a month in revenue to, well, we were doing about 8 million a year, so that was almost, it was, it’s probably like 650 to, yeah. So I basically doubled that, tripled that business in about a couple of years, and that one got sold out from underneath me without me knowing. I was actually on a sales trip in California and my business partner called me back. He’s like, emergency, and I come back and there was no emergency. He just ended up selling a company without telling me in two weeks, which kind of hurts. Well,

John Jantsch (03:50): I was halfway kidding. But I mean, obviously you learned a lot from every one of those experiences. One of the things that seems to me that was a through line through all of your experience, your journey, including where you’re today, is mastering sales. Would you say there’s an element of that in that? So in fact, I think I saw another interview where you talked about being kind of a sales training junkie along the way. So I talked about Flow Chat being a software tech company, but would you say that at its heart it’s really a selling enablement tool?

Sean Malone (04:26): Yeah, definitely. Tech, sales, enablement, tech, I call us a communications organization. I’d say that’s probably better fit genre than anything else that we want. And like you said, yes, so I learned a tremendous amount of, throughout my journey was all sales related stuff. So I came out of college and I said, Hey dad, how do I make a boatload of cash? And he said, there’s three options. First option, are you a CEO? No, I’m 21. I don’t know what those letters mean. He’s like, are you an entertainer? No, I can’t sing or dance. He’s like, well, you better go and learn sales.

John Jantsch (05:03): Oh, he forgot another one. Can you throw a hundred mile an hour change up with your left hand? That would’ve been another good one.

Sean Malone (05:08): That would’ve been another great question. And the answer to that is also no, but yeah, and so then he said, you better go learn sales. So I was like, okay, great. So I took a job sales so I could learn sales, and I was terrible. I think that was probably my biggest bomb. I made 2,400 cold calls and I never booked a single appointment. That’s really bad. That’s like 80 calls a day for six weeks straight. And I was about done with it. I was like, this sales thing is stupid. I’m done. And I told my dad and my dad was like, don’t quit. I was going to quit. And he was like, go to the library and read a book. Okay, cool. Well, I went to the library, I picked up a Tom Hopkins, how to master the artist selling stuff book. And I was like, oh, there’s a theory. I can get really good at this. I was good at theories in school. I can definitely do that here again. And so that’s really where I started my junkie, I guess down the path. And 500 K later in my own investments of learning every selling system you could think of, I really distilled it down to there’s five to seven things you have to do in every sales situation, and if you do those things consistently, you’ll always win. That’s kind of the idea.

John Jantsch (06:14): So you and your partner, Chris, developed a prospecting system that you use today and have really built into this software. Can you give us the high level? You kind of mentioned five things. I suspect that the five things are in it.

Sean Malone (06:29): So the last start of prospecting is one side and then high ticket sales is on the other side or sales, I guess I should say. And so here’s how it came to be. So we had our software company that completely burned me out, the first one, and I almost took my own life because I was in a very dark place, and we could go really deep on that story anytime you want, but I’ll skip over that for the highlight of where we at. So at that time, my coach, Russell Brunson says, because like, what do we do? We just sold this software company that was doing lots and lots and we were doing 10 million plus a year. We ended up selling it, and we were like, what do we do now? We didn’t even know. And he said, well, what are you good at? And we said, sales.

(07:06): And he said, all these online entrepreneurs, all these agency owners, these SaaS founders, they don’t like to do sales. Like, oh, cool. So we called ’em up, Hey, do you not like to do sales? Yeah, every one of ’em like, yeah, we don’t want to do sales anymore, Sean, fix it. And we’re like, well, we know how to hire on board and train sales teams. You want us to do that for you? And boom, our agency was born. So we find five clients, showed ’em how to hire onboard and train sales teams, and then we showed ’em how to close deals in their warm market. We were doing sales training, and then about five months in, they had big gains in those first couple of months we were actually closing deals with them. And then five months in, they come back and they’re like, Sean and Chris, thank you for the sales team, but now I can’t sleep at night because I don’t know how to put more leads in front of the salespeople that you just built for me.

(07:55): And we’re like, oh, well, we have a system for that that we’re using even before the internet existed. Just put this in your business. It’s direct conversation. One-to-one at scale. Here’s the system how to work. Every one of ’em hit a home run. After about six months of that, Chris and I looked at each other, we’re like, that is more important than all the other stuff that we were doing in the first place. And so how do we do that at scale? And then one of our friends was like, you should do a mastermind. And so then we launched a mastermind and we did a $25,000 three months of put this in your business, nine months of advanced sales coaching to close the deals that the system created had 83% success rate of the dozens of businesses going through the system. And about two years into 18 months into that, one of our clients is like, you guys need a software.

(08:37): And so it was like, okay. We ended up, our messaging ran into our CTO’s messaging and what do you do? I have a software, but I have no clients. What do you guys do? We have hundreds of clients, but we have no software. What if we just did that? And so that was what happened in 2020. We kind of merged, acquired, did the whole thing, redressed the whole thing, and then we brought a hundred clients into this thing and saw how it worked and everything broke, whatever. It was great. And then we put another a hundred clients in, more stuff broke, and eventually we got the machine just ripping. And so now we’ve been into it four years. And really what it does at a high level is it allows anybody at any time to go anywhere and find, connect, nurture, and close deals through dms, personal messenger, dms, and it does it just more than one or two platforms.

(09:23): We actually work on 14 of them. The idea is based on three principles. First one universally importing or extracting what we call suspects. Then we have a qualifier, turns ’em into prospects, and then we take them through basically. So universally importing from anywhere on social at any time, go to a Facebook group, whichever one, click one button and click the whole group list. Go to your post that has thousands of comments, reactions and engagements. Click one button, get ’em all right. That was the idea. Second one was Pipeline view or Kanban Trello style board, but we built it for personal dms and as soon as we launched it, everyone copied it, which is great validation. And then the last principle was that of reporting, because anyone does anything organic, their reporting is usually really messy. So that’s really in a high level of what Flow Chat does. It sits in front of A CRM. It allows you to filter out all the bad and only put the really good into a system like a HubSpot or Salesforce or a pipe driver, a go high level or anything like that.

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(11:24): That’s oracle.com/duct tape oracle.com/duct tape. Hey, digital marketers, this one’s for you. I’ve got 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things that you can do in 30 seconds or less when you manage projects on Wix Studio, work in sync with your team all on one canvas, reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites. Alright, time’s up, but the list keeps going. Why don’t you step into Wix studio to see more? Do you find that, I mean you’ve really built, obviously you’re using technology to do some things that used to take hours to do, right? And do you find though that DM conversations in particular are more effective, different, say because there’s tons of people doing cold outreach, similar sort of approach. So what have you found has been really the driver of, or why you’ve really leaned into dms?

Sean Malone (12:36): So great question, and it kind of goes along the case of your book. You find your ICP and you speak with them in the right way, you’re going to have the right thing. So we just made it so that you can do that at scale. And I think if you look at the methods of communication, there’s usually there’s five, but I’ll say the main four are phone calls. So if you have phone calls, you get spam risk, you don’t even answer, you get a text message, you still don’t know who it is from, unless the words are dead on perfect, you’re probably not going to respond to the text, even though text has highest open rates, has a very low response rate because of that reason. Then you’ve got email marketing, which is you’ve got CAN SPAM and GDPR and A two P and all this other stuff that’s happening now, deliverability down, you’ve got MPP from Apple, there’s all this stuff that’s happening there.

(13:22): So email is a source, right? So you’ve got phone, text, email, but then you have dms. And the one thing that’s different about dms is that it’s better than I think all of them. And actually the numbers prove it is that when somebody sends you a dm, if it’s good messaging, you don’t discard it. What do you do? You click on that person’s profile and you creep on them a little bit on social to make sure that they’re real. And then if they’re real and you like their stuff, then you come back and you respond. This is why dms have a high response rate way higher than anything else. Open rates similar to text, but response rates for dms are the highest. And then if you’re not a clown, when you’re actually chatting in dms and you do it well, then you can start actually converting higher than any of the other methods of communication. I’ve just seen this over the course of almost 30 years in the sales games, like one-to-one communication, if you can do it at scale is pound for pound the best.

John Jantsch (14:16): So really the trick, if you will, is getting the conversation that’s whether it’s on the phone or email or whatever it is. And what you’re suggesting is that the dms have been more effective at getting the conversation. You can still fumble the ball, but you’re not even in the game if you don’t get the conversation.

Sean Malone (14:34): Yeah, I mean, just from a sure volumes perspective, if we looked at, let’s say a hundred is the number, if you’ve cold call a hundred people, you might get two to answer. Just statistically, if you text a hundred people, you’re usually going to get about, I’d say 75 of those people will open your text, but you’re only going to have about six or eight of ’em that respond. Emails send a hundred emails, you’re getting five opens. Maybe two people actually read it, but the dms is different. If you send a hundred dms and you’re really good, you’ll probably get 50 or so people to open those dms. But if your profile is in alignment, you’ll get 30 to 40 responses. So if you’re actually looking at the stuff that truly matters, this is why dms I think is just superior to everything else that’s out there.

John Jantsch (15:27): And maybe the day will come, especially with the success of a platform like yours. But do you find that there’s some people that get angry about a text or get angry about an unsolicited email? Do you find that dms will eventually fall into that category?

Sean Malone (15:44): Yeah, I mean, people will throw shade at any which way that you market to them or sell to them at any time, and dms are no different. But the thing is about dms or text message or any form of communication, if you do it wrong, everyone’s going to hate on you. But if you do it well, then it’s okay. And there’s a few strategies that work really well and for whatever reason, completely unbeknownst to me, when people get into the dms, they just try to just vomit verbally on everybody and sell them everything from one single message. When you can’t do that, it’s like if you go to a live event, you don’t walk up to John Jans and say, Hey, man, do you want to buy my stuff? It’s really amazing. You’d be like, get out of my face. But most people speak that way in dms, which is really unfortunate.

John Jantsch (16:32): Have you found that certain types of businesses do better or this is more suited, or do you feel like this is something that used correctly, could be used by just about any type of business?

Sean Malone (16:43): I think used correctly could be used by any type of business, but there are a few niches and verticals that really hit pretty well. I think business to business and then a lot of business to consumer. If it’s brick and mortar, that’s really a really suited very well for this type of technology because all we’re doing is the same thing that we would be doing anyways. In the old days, you’d get a phone book and a bunch of numbers, right? Today you have technology like ours where you can just go to a Facebook group and collect the whole list. That’s like getting a phone book. And so now you was like, oh yeah, I got the phone book. Let’s use some automation to just filter it down to the ones that I really want to start speaking with. And then you don’t even go, you keep going. Another filtering mechanism is like, let’s send out a series of our first messages to get some responses, and that’s the big key. When you’re DMing, remember, we don’t try to sell in our first message. We don’t even try in our second or third or fourth message. Usually you don’t even ask for anything like a call until message is six, seven, eight, nine. They say 80% of sales deals are closed at 13 touch points. Well, getting engagement usually takes four to six of ’em, right? So it’s like if you design it right, it works really well. Awesome.

John Jantsch (17:53): Well, Sean, I appreciate you taking a few moments to drop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you’d want to invite people to connect with you and learn more about Flow Chat?

Sean Malone (18:01): Yeah, so just flowchat.com. Fl O-W-C-H-A t.com. Go check out the site and then if you want to talk directly with me, just look me up on Facebook and say that John sent you my way. We’ll take care of you nicely. Awesome. Yes.

John Jantsch (18:15): Again, I appreciate you dropping by and hopefully we’ll run into you soon. I usually say on the road, but you’re just down the road, so we ought to get together soon. Anyway,

Sean Malone (18:24): Let’s go have a lunch. I would love it. Love it, love it.

John Jantsch (00:00): I think that this definition, this pyramid, this graphic, offers a much more comprehensive view of how integrated marketing or strategy needs to be. It’s not just a one-time thing that we do. It never ends. You’re always refining and making it stronger based on these three elements.

(00:25): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guest today. I’m actually just going to chat solo today and I want to address a burning, burning question or one of those things out there that I think just has gone unanswered for too long, and that is what is marketing strategy. Now, don’t click off or next or set it at three times speed or whatever it is that you do to fast forward through things because you think you’ve heard this before. I think that I am going to present, or at least that’s my attempt today to present to you an idea about marketing strategy to show you once and for all what I believe is the way that we need to look at it. Now, there’s a lot of confusion on this. I know that if I poll 10 people, that I’m going to get 10 different answers on what marketing strategy is, and I’m going to suggest eight of them would be wrong or maybe just have one piece of it and certainly you turn to the Google and ask and you’re going to get presented a whole bunch of tactics.

(01:34): Marketing strategy is really the through line for how you’re going to compete. So if I were going to give it a kind of an emotional definition, it’s the place or the way you’re going to place the flag in the sand to say, here’s how we’re going to compete, or better yet, here’s how we’re going to dominate. But that’s probably not very helpful in terms of, okay, how do you do it or what do you do or how do you explain it? So I want to today to present to you something I call the marketing strategy pyramid to show you that there are components to this and that they all actually need to be integrated and working together. There is no one magic marketing strategy or marketing tactic. It’s really more about the integration, and that’s really what we do for when we work with clients, something we call strategy first.

(02:23): It’s what we also teach to other agencies to do, and it really is built on this pyramid, or at least I think this is the way we all need to start thinking about the comprehensive nature of marketing strategy. So I’m going to use this fancy tool here, stream deck to show you a slide at the same time I disappear into the corner of the slide. So if you’re just listening to this, you’re not seeing the graphic, but if you watch the video, or you certainly will have the graphic at Duct Tape Marketing, and when you go consume or if you go consume the actual post, imagine if you will, or those of you looking at it, can see it that there is a pyramid that has five layers to it, and the middle three layers are really the marketing strategy component. But even those, quite frankly, need to rest on the overarching business strategy.

(03:17): When we come in to work with somebody, and we are there primarily, or at least initially to create a marketing strategy, we don’t do it based on what we think they ought to do or what we think. There’s certainly of our experience we bring to it. But the main thing we are doing, the main thing, that marketing strategy and then the list of tactics to employ that strategy are there to do is support the overarching business objectives. So if growth is a business objective, if dominance in a market is a business objective, if retention say of clients is a business objective, then the marketing strategy is built around that and only that to begin with. So the very first thing we do in working with a client is try to understand where they’re going, try to understand the profit that they want to make in this business, try to understand the market share that they want to enjoy before we ever start really suggesting anything.

(04:14): And unfortunately, very few marketers actually take that approach. Very few business owners actually take that approach. They want to hire a marketer to generate some leads, and frankly, I think that leads them often to doing a whole bunch of things they shouldn’t do, let alone maybe not focusing on the things that are actually going to allow them to meet their marketing objectives. So that’s step number one. That’s job number one. Before we can even start going. But then what I want to suggest is that, or what we do is we then break marketing strategy into three distinct parts, brand strategy, growth strategy, and customer strategy. And the reason is that I believe that this is how somebody effectively moves through a business. This really reflects the marketing journey inside of marketing strategy. A lot of times people end marketing strategy with a clever tagline and colors and logos and call it a day.

(05:12): And what I want to suggest is a marketing strategy actually runs through the entire customer journey, the entire momentum that you’re trying to build inside of a journey. Now we use something called the marketing hourglass. I know many of you have heard me talk about that. That’s another tool that we use to reinforce this idea of the customer journey. But the three components, brand, strategy, growth strategy, customer strategy, brand strategy is where we will actually help identify who makes an ideal customer, narrow the focus to who makes an ideal customer, quite frankly, and really define the products and services that customer is looking for. We also are going to focus a great deal of attention on messaging. Are we promising to solve that ideal customer’s biggest problem as opposed to here’s what we sell, so nobody cares what we sell, they want their problem solved.

(06:03): So we’re going to focus the brand strategy on that. Then obviously things like personality, how do we want to be perceived? Are we fun? Are we very serious? Are we analytical? I mean, those are all things that come into the overarching decision about how we want to then produce things like content. And then lastly, and frankly, a lot of people put this first, when you say the word brand, we want to make sure that the names and colors and graphics and logos and things all support the message and the brand promise that we are trying to put out there. So that’s the first part of marketing strategy. The second then is probably the part that most people spend a lot of time on, and that’s the growth strategy. What are the actual tactics we’re going to use to attract, to build trust, to actually get people to try in some cases and then buy from us?

(06:55): So it’s all the sales things, it’s all of the communication. It’s a great deal of content that moves people through that stage. Certainly it’s advertising, it’s all the things that create awareness. And then the last piece of this is the customer strategy. Okay, what happens after somebody says yes? Do we have a marketing strategy or is part of our marketing strategy making sure that we have an amazing experience to onboard people, to really wow them in the first 90 days to communicate, to upsell and resell them, to retain them, to actually generate referrals? Those are all the components that go then into the customer strategy component of the marketing strategy pyramid. So everything is built on this base foundation of the business strategy. Those three layers of brand strategy, growth strategy, customer strategy, really allow us to intentionally focus on creating an amazing customer journey and attracting the right clients who expect to pay a premium.

(07:57): In fact, we’ll pay a premium now because we’ve focused on building trust, create a great buying experience, create a great customer experience. Those three things all get mapped together as we build a marketing strategy. And again, I think that this definition, this pyramid, this graphic offers a much more comprehensive view of how integrated marketing or strategy needs to be. It’s not just a one-time thing that we do. It never ends. You’re always refining and making it stronger based on these three elements. Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t add the fifth, the point of the pyramid, if you will, and that’s team strategy now. And quite often the business objectives, the brand strategy, the growth strategy, the customer strategy, are delivered by people in your organization, delivered by your team. Certainly as you grow, in many cases, you start having frontline people who are interacting with prospects and customers, and leadership is really not in tune with that.

(09:01): So you have to actually then understand how your business strategy, how your brand strategy, growth strategy, customer strategy, is both communicated and set into really a process that can be delivered by the team in the way that holds the brand promise, in the way that build allows you to build revenue and grow as your business strategy has suggested and certainly allows people to have a great experience anytime they’re interacting with anyone in your organization. So their overarching business really builds on this business strategy, has marketing strategy in the middle, and it’s really the cherry on top is then the team strategy that is going to deliver on all this. So you have to build it first, you have to then communicate it, and then you have to execute on it. But taking this, what I believe is a much more comprehensive view of marketing strategy is how you do it. So that’s it for today. If you would love to hear more about how we build that marketing strategy, certainly reach out John at Duct Tape Marketing and love to talk to you about building a marketing strategy for your organization that takes this comprehensive approach. You can also get some free resources at DTM world slash growth. Alright, till next time, take care.

Testimonial (10:25): I was like this founded. I founded. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients, it’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly, it’s the best investment I ever made. What

John Jantsch (10:42): You just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash Scale.

John Jantsch (00:00): I think that this definition, this pyramid, this graphic, offers a much more comprehensive view of how integrated marketing or strategy needs to be. It’s not just a one-time thing that we do. It never ends. You’re always refining and making it stronger based on these three elements.

(00:25): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guest today. I’m actually just going to chat solo today and I want to address a burning, burning question or one of those things out there that I think just has gone unanswered for too long, and that is what is marketing strategy. Now, don’t click off or next or set it at three times speed or whatever it is that you do to fast forward through things because you think you’ve heard this before. I think that I am going to present, or at least that’s my attempt today to present to you an idea about marketing strategy to show you once and for all what I believe is the way that we need to look at it. Now, there’s a lot of confusion on this. I know that if I poll 10 people, that I’m going to get 10 different answers on what marketing strategy is, and I’m going to suggest eight of them would be wrong or maybe just have one piece of it and certainly you turn to the Google and ask and you’re going to get presented a whole bunch of tactics.

(01:34): Marketing strategy is really the through line for how you’re going to compete. So if I were going to give it a kind of an emotional definition, it’s the place or the way you’re going to place the flag in the sand to say, here’s how we’re going to compete, or better yet, here’s how we’re going to dominate. But that’s probably not very helpful in terms of, okay, how do you do it or what do you do or how do you explain it? So I want to today to present to you something I call the marketing strategy pyramid to show you that there are components to this and that they all actually need to be integrated and working together. There is no one magic marketing strategy or marketing tactic. It’s really more about the integration, and that’s really what we do for when we work with clients, something we call strategy first.

(02:23): It’s what we also teach to other agencies to do, and it really is built on this pyramid, or at least I think this is the way we all need to start thinking about the comprehensive nature of marketing strategy. So I’m going to use this fancy tool here, stream deck to show you a slide at the same time I disappear into the corner of the slide. So if you’re just listening to this, you’re not seeing the graphic, but if you watch the video, or you certainly will have the graphic at Duct Tape Marketing, and when you go consume or if you go consume the actual post, imagine if you will, or those of you looking at it, can see it that there is a pyramid that has five layers to it, and the middle three layers are really the marketing strategy component. But even those, quite frankly, need to rest on the overarching business strategy.

(03:17): When we come in to work with somebody, and we are there primarily, or at least initially to create a marketing strategy, we don’t do it based on what we think they ought to do or what we think. There’s certainly of our experience we bring to it. But the main thing we are doing, the main thing, that marketing strategy and then the list of tactics to employ that strategy are there to do is support the overarching business objectives. So if growth is a business objective, if dominance in a market is a business objective, if retention say of clients is a business objective, then the marketing strategy is built around that and only that to begin with. So the very first thing we do in working with a client is try to understand where they’re going, try to understand the profit that they want to make in this business, try to understand the market share that they want to enjoy before we ever start really suggesting anything.

(04:14): And unfortunately, very few marketers actually take that approach. Very few business owners actually take that approach. They want to hire a marketer to generate some leads, and frankly, I think that leads them often to doing a whole bunch of things they shouldn’t do, let alone maybe not focusing on the things that are actually going to allow them to meet their marketing objectives. So that’s step number one. That’s job number one. Before we can even start going. But then what I want to suggest is that, or what we do is we then break marketing strategy into three distinct parts, brand strategy, growth strategy, and customer strategy. And the reason is that I believe that this is how somebody effectively moves through a business. This really reflects the marketing journey inside of marketing strategy. A lot of times people end marketing strategy with a clever tagline and colors and logos and call it a day.

(05:12): And what I want to suggest is a marketing strategy actually runs through the entire customer journey, the entire momentum that you’re trying to build inside of a journey. Now we use something called the marketing hourglass. I know many of you have heard me talk about that. That’s another tool that we use to reinforce this idea of the customer journey. But the three components, brand, strategy, growth strategy, customer strategy, brand strategy is where we will actually help identify who makes an ideal customer, narrow the focus to who makes an ideal customer, quite frankly, and really define the products and services that customer is looking for. We also are going to focus a great deal of attention on messaging. Are we promising to solve that ideal customer’s biggest problem as opposed to here’s what we sell, so nobody cares what we sell, they want their problem solved.

(06:03): So we’re going to focus the brand strategy on that. Then obviously things like personality, how do we want to be perceived? Are we fun? Are we very serious? Are we analytical? I mean, those are all things that come into the overarching decision about how we want to then produce things like content. And then lastly, and frankly, a lot of people put this first, when you say the word brand, we want to make sure that the names and colors and graphics and logos and things all support the message and the brand promise that we are trying to put out there. So that’s the first part of marketing strategy. The second then is probably the part that most people spend a lot of time on, and that’s the growth strategy. What are the actual tactics we’re going to use to attract, to build trust, to actually get people to try in some cases and then buy from us?

(06:55): So it’s all the sales things, it’s all of the communication. It’s a great deal of content that moves people through that stage. Certainly it’s advertising, it’s all the things that create awareness. And then the last piece of this is the customer strategy. Okay, what happens after somebody says yes? Do we have a marketing strategy or is part of our marketing strategy making sure that we have an amazing experience to onboard people, to really wow them in the first 90 days to communicate, to upsell and resell them, to retain them, to actually generate referrals? Those are all the components that go then into the customer strategy component of the marketing strategy pyramid. So everything is built on this base foundation of the business strategy. Those three layers of brand strategy, growth strategy, customer strategy, really allow us to intentionally focus on creating an amazing customer journey and attracting the right clients who expect to pay a premium.

(07:57): In fact, we’ll pay a premium now because we’ve focused on building trust, create a great buying experience, create a great customer experience. Those three things all get mapped together as we build a marketing strategy. And again, I think that this definition, this pyramid, this graphic offers a much more comprehensive view of how integrated marketing or strategy needs to be. It’s not just a one-time thing that we do. It never ends. You’re always refining and making it stronger based on these three elements. Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t add the fifth, the point of the pyramid, if you will, and that’s team strategy now. And quite often the business objectives, the brand strategy, the growth strategy, the customer strategy, are delivered by people in your organization, delivered by your team. Certainly as you grow, in many cases, you start having frontline people who are interacting with prospects and customers, and leadership is really not in tune with that.

(09:01): So you have to actually then understand how your business strategy, how your brand strategy, growth strategy, customer strategy, is both communicated and set into really a process that can be delivered by the team in the way that holds the brand promise, in the way that build allows you to build revenue and grow as your business strategy has suggested and certainly allows people to have a great experience anytime they’re interacting with anyone in your organization. So their overarching business really builds on this business strategy, has marketing strategy in the middle, and it’s really the cherry on top is then the team strategy that is going to deliver on all this. So you have to build it first, you have to then communicate it, and then you have to execute on it. But taking this, what I believe is a much more comprehensive view of marketing strategy is how you do it. So that’s it for today. If you would love to hear more about how we build that marketing strategy, certainly reach out John at Duct Tape Marketing and love to talk to you about building a marketing strategy for your organization that takes this comprehensive approach. You can also get some free resources at DTM world slash growth. Alright, till next time, take care.

Testimonial (10:25): I was like this founded. I founded. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients, it’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly, it’s the best investment I ever made. What

John Jantsch (10:42): You just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash Scale.

Kevin Rains (00:00): Women tend to to talk to each other face to face. Men like to be facing the same direction. It feels safer for them to share more openly. So having these two seater UTVs going off road and we’re driving together and there’s an adventure element, once again, it allows…

John Jantsch (00:20): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Kevin Rains. He’s a devoted husband, father of three and grandfather who’s always embraced the joys of the outdoors. As a former body shop owner, entrepreneur, marketer, off-road writer and fisherman, some of my favorite things there, Kevin has prioritized family nature throughout his life. In 2021, he and his family transformed their 50 acre property in zoo Kentucky into a haven for outdoor adventures and simple living where they’ve created lasting memories for over 15 years. So Kevin, welcome to the show.

Kevin Rains (00:57): Thank you. Honored to be on excited.

John Jantsch (00:59): You and I have known each other for some time, like everybody knows each other these days right on the internet, but I’ve followed your journey, entrepreneurial journey, especially in the autobody days. So I thought this is a little different take on a show, but I frankly, I’ll just be honest, I had a personal interest in learning about it, so why not record it? So maybe give us a little background because I know you had a very successful autobody business that I believe you sold, and so I’d love to hear a little bit about your journey as an entrepreneur and then obviously where we are, where you got to today.

Kevin Rains (01:34): Yeah, so I started my career in the ministry actually in my twenties and early thirties. Pivoted into the family business when I was 33 and felt like I had a bit of a knack for that and started to grow in large part thanks to your books and learning. Coming out of Bible college, they did not teach marketing, so I had to learn it from John Jansch, and I learned step by step course by course, book by book, pieced it together. Eventually grew to five locations. So we went from doing about $250,000 a year in revenue to doing over $12 million a year in revenue and private equity. Came knocking on my door, wasn’t interested. They told me their number. I was interested, and that shifted quickly. So I thought I was going to retire. I was 50 51 at the time and thought, this is it. I’m going to kind of cash you out and do a lot of fishing.

(02:25): And quickly realized that I was not made for retirement. So my kids came to me and said, Hey, let’s do something different. Let’s do something else. I said, what do you want to do? They said, why don’t we start by developing these 50 acres we’ve owned for at that point, 18 years in zoo, Kentucky, and here we are, we’re building it out. We have 10, sorry, 11 rentable structures on the property. Now after a couple years, we’ve been doing a short-term rental business, and we’re pivoting now into more of a retreat business. So it’s been 80% short-term rental, 20% retreats. We’re just going to try to flip the script on that and go 80% retreats, 20% short-term rental starting in 2025.

John Jantsch (03:05): Well, first off, maybe what was your inspiration? I mean, what made you think, other than this is a what I want to do next or a business opportunity, was there any sort of driving, I’m envisioning the ministry playing a part, maybe even in just the retreats. I mean, was there any drive towards we want to have this place where people can gather?

Kevin Rains (03:24): Yeah, definitely. It’s not connected to any religious tradition. Our retreat center is not, but as a pastor, I would take retreats. I’d go to different, I went to monastery for a week at a time, at least twice a year, and that would fill me up and fill the pipeline with ideas and things that I could teach on to the church and all that. And it’s just always been a part of my personal formation as a person and how I’ve lived my life. And one of the things we talked about as a family is we have a high value for hospitality. So we said, what can we do to open this property up? We had really protected it for almost 20 years, 18 years, just for our family. And then we thought through the gift of hospitality, what would it look like to really open this up, use some of the resources we had gotten from the sale of our businesses and put those to work in a setting where we could invite more people onto this property. So I think that was the inspiration was kind of like my early formation going on retreats and then our family deciding together, we want to use our gift of hospitality and open it wide up.

John Jantsch (04:26): So what challenges did you run into turning a private resident, zoning, crazy neighbors, whatever it might be, and just even construction, large scale construction. What did you learn? What were the challenges? How hard was it?

Kevin Rains (04:43): So when we started this in 21, we didn’t have any utilities on the property. So my family would go there. We would basically be, at first, we would just literally camp and over time we’d get a trailer, but we didn’t have any running water, so we’d have to carry our water in. There was no place to really prepare foods. We had to learn to cook over the open fire. We eventually built a yurts on a cliff edge on one side of the property that became the foundation for a cabin that we built. It was kind of an off-grid cabin for all that time. So the earliest challenges were actually not zoning, believe it or not, that part of the world, central Kentucky, they don’t care what you build, as long as it’s like, honestly, I can’t think of it. We went to the building department and said, please give us any warning or restriction because we want to do this, right? They said, honey, it’s your property. You all do what you want. And we’re like, okay, well, we did. And cooling all those utilities on was probably the biggest challenging. So we wanted to bury the utilities. So we have, there’s no electrical lines running on the property, so everything’s in the ground, the water, the electric internet, everything is run under our driveway now. And then we branch out from there to the various structures.

John Jantsch (05:52): And then most of the buildings then outbuildings were built from scratch. Well, then

Kevin Rains (05:58): That’s correct. Yeah. We had a contractor come in and they started drilling posts in the ground and we built decks and then we put tents on top of those. Now we’re building a 2000 square foot, we call it the rookery, which is a place where birds gather because all of our tents are named after birds because they’re elevated in the canopy, so they’re kind of in the tree, like tree house type places. So we’re calling it the rookery, and it’s going to be a couple thousand square feet with a 2000 square foot deck. So great place for retreats to gather in that space.

John Jantsch (06:29): So I think we were chatting a little bit before we jumped on the air, and you said that to date, it’s been a lot of short-term rental, Airbnb kind of thing, but you are now really trying to move towards people having retreats, maybe coming in, reserving the whole facility. Are you just kind of learning what you have to offer for that kind of thing, ways to, whether they’re activities or adventures that you need to add? What’s that going to look like, you think?

Kevin Rains (06:55): Yeah, great question. So the area is really well known and it balloons in population on the weekends and in certain seasons. So there’s an underground kayaking area, there’s canoeing, there’s rock climbing all around us. There’s guided hikes and climbing. So there’s all kinds of, it is an outdoor enthusiast dream because of the way the cliffs are constructed. And we have great hiking on our property and we have access to Daniel Boone National Forest coming off of our property. So we’ve hiked, I think we hiked seven miles one direction with no trail in the national forest, just to see how far we could get and if we ran into anything, saw nothing. So we have this beautiful playground and we’re just introducing people to it. There’s a 200 foot waterfall that cascades off of our property into the national forest. People can hike down there. So we’re trying to think of some things we could do maybe eventually like a ropes course or some other things on property. But the area is so rich with opportunity. We feel like our main role is really to host people and create a very comfortable place for them to be as a base of operations for their own adventures.

John Jantsch (08:04): I’m curious, how are you running this as a family business then? The kids are all, everybody’s involved. So I’m curious, how has moving to hospitality business in a way changed any impacted your family dynamic at all? Because obviously that’s different than going to work and working on the cars now we’re hosts. What has that done to the family dynamic? I’m curious.

Kevin Rains (08:25): It’s been interesting. So it was a chance for my kids to kind of elevate into, because at the time they were coming into my business, we were already three, four shops at that time, ended up with five. So they kind got slotted as customer service reps or helping me manage the part room or something kind of simple. My daughter helped me organize my office and create an operations manual for our office team at the time. She was 17, believe it or not. But I did put ’em into some roles. It may have been a little bit outside to give them a chance to spread their wings, but now it feels like they’re really kind of at the top of an organization that’s going to grow over time. So we’re starting fairly small. We’ve invested a few million dollars at this point. So it’s definitely starting to be built out.

(09:12): We’re not seeing a big return on that. So they’re having to think through how do we do marketing? How do we sell retreats? How do we handle HR for this size of organization? So they’re learning the resource constraints that I had early on as a business owner. I’m letting them experience that as we go. And the secret for me is like I don’t care if it turns money for the next couple years, but at some point it’s going to need to so I can be patient even though I watch them kind of freak out about trying to get the break even.

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(10:51): So what are you waiting for? Fuel your growth, boost revenue and save precious time by upgrading to active campaign today. I’m curious, you talked about a lot of people that really love outdoors experiences. It’s not just the doing, it’s actually the being in a relationship with land. I’m curious if bringing guests onto that, if that’s going to, are you going to be able to impart that same sort of feeling or ambiance, and I’m making some assumptions that you have for the land itself now that you’re bringing in guests that are going to be there very temporarily. How do you get them to experience that?

Kevin Rains (11:29): Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say that initially a lot of the retreats that we’re running are people that we know love and trust to use your language. So we’re being very selective about some of the early days of people that we do bring on to the property. They share many of our values. They understand how important this space is to our family. Now through the short-term rental, there’s been a lot of people on the property that we don’t really know,

(11:55): But it’s been an opportunity to get to know other people and to bring them into the fold. So I travel down as often as I can. My son travels down very regularly and we have an onsite property manager as well who welcomes people onto the property. So I think having eyes on the property is helping us feel a little level of comfort about, it’s just not come one come all. We have a gate at the front and we’re kind of making it a secure environment for people to feel safe and to have an experience that their family can enjoy. And we make it clear that this is really for families

John Jantsch (12:30): Just because a lot of my listeners expect me to talk about business and entrepreneurial ventures. Have you had business retreats? And if so, what have you learned from doing those? Because I’m sure they run a little differently. And again, I’ll stop there and just ask one question at a time. What have you learned from hosting some business retreats and how they kind of differ from say, the family reunion?

Kevin Rains (12:54): Yeah, great. It’s interesting. One of the things I found that I actually love is when you get men in particular around a fire, sometimes there’s an adult beverage and a cigar involved in that as well. But the fire, the adult beverage is cigar. The relaxed environment, it really tends to open people up, especially men who may not be as open with their feelings or how they’re really doing or peeling that onion or not trying to posture or position. So I’ve taken several retreats that led several retreats there with small business owners from my area who want to scale, who want to leave a legacy, who want to do what my family’s been able to do and enjoy that space with them and get them into an environment where they can start to open up. So I love getting around that fire. Sometimes there’s tears, there’s always laughter.

(13:42): It’s a place of transparency. Transparency. The other thing that we do along those lines is we have side-by-side, kind of those off-road vehicles. And I don’t know, I’d have to do a little more research on where this came from, but I’ve heard that women tend to talk to each other, face-to-face. Men like to be facing the same direction. It feels safer for them to share more openly. So having these two seater UTVs going off road and we’re driving together and there’s an adventure element, once again, it allows some of those walls to fall. So retreats for me are really about helping business owners lower their defenses and get real and honest about what’s really going on in their life and their business.

John Jantsch (14:27): So on that vein, have you seen a lot of times, I do a lot of events and we some struggle with how much downtime or playtime versus say, working on whatever it is. Ostensibly we came there to work on have you seen some mixes or best practices or even ways in which people have incorporated those two

Kevin Rains (14:51): Of the opinion? And it may not be the majority opinion that whatever needs to be talked about will get talked about. So I go very low on the curriculum side for my retreats, and I trust my own facilitation skills in that moment to kind of pull the group together to talk about what we need to talk about. Sometimes it is a business topic and I’m more than comfortable talking through those topics as well as family or personal challenges that they may be facing. So we’re not trying to pigeonhole people and say, come to a retreat, and you end up crying and sharing your heart and going through all the layers, and it’ll be like therapy. That’s not the point. It’s just the point is to let them be the curriculum so the content comes out of whatever they bring into the retreat versus me having a script or a pre-packaged. I love teaching, I love content, I love books. But I also think there’s, the wonderful thing about retreats is it’s kind of open-ended, and I can bring some of those things I’ve learned to bear on their real call ’em live animals, whatever live animals they come with, we wrestle with those

John Jantsch (15:59): Well, and even people that go to conferences constantly comment on, I heard some good things in the meeting rooms or in the keynote, but it was the three or four conversations I had at break that really made the difference. And you hear that all the time, and I do think there’s a real feeling by event organizers still like, let’s pack a whole bunch in. But sometimes you just bring people together around an idea and just see what happens.

Kevin Rains (16:23): That’s it. I think it could

John Jantsch (16:24): Feel scary, but yeah. So let’s go over the numbers. How many people could come to an event? Is it get catered? I mean, what are the logistics?

Kevin Rains (16:37): Yeah, so if you could imagine that the 10 rentable structures, each of the tents are set up very well appointed hotel rooms. We have large like queen size or even king size mattresses, Tempur-Pedic, wonderful pillows. They’re beautifully designed. They’re probably a few hundred square foot. I think they’re 310 square feet each. So it’s a big space of big room. So you could put one person. So when I do men’s retreats, one guy in each tent, so they have solitude. If we do a couple’s retreat, then it’s like obviously two per tent. So if it’s a couple’s retreat, easily 25 people. And then we work with a local barbecue joint. There’s a kind of a grass fed beef that does hamburgers and tacos. Also in our area, we partner with local restaurants to bring food on. The rookery that we’re building is going to have a nearly almost like commercial grade kitchen in it. And our dream is to bring chefs down for certain retreats so that there can be meals prepared on site that are healthy, beautiful, and delicious. So that’s the dream. But I’d say our retreats tend to be anywhere from five to six people all the way up to 25, even 30 once the rry is completed.

John Jantsch (17:56): And any plans for making it a hundred person place or is this kind of the intimate sort of scope that you want?

Kevin Rains (18:04): Yeah, so I have a partner in that area and we’ve bought up more property down there. So we have about 500 acres in that area, and we’re currently using seven acres. So yeah, the long-term answer is yes, we plan to go bigger, but we want to get really good at those five to 25 retreats before we start thinking about more conference level type stuff.

John Jantsch (18:31): So any advice that you would give now? I don’t know that there’s going to be a lot of people listening to say, I’m going to build a retreat center myself. But to majorly pivot, whole different industry, whole different skillset, whole different customer based, different vibe, everything. Is there any advice or something you’ve learned along the way to somebody, a family or an individual that was contemplating their next thing?

Kevin Rains (18:55): I would say that I’ve learned most of what I’ve gained over the last 20 years of being in business applies to what I’m doing now. So there’s not a huge disconnect. It’s still we want to do great customer service now we call them guests. Previously, I called them customers. But really it’s the same idea. We’re dealing with people that need to be cared for and given an effortless experience and done, they need to be communicated with in a way that’s meaningful and helpful to them. So a lot of those skills are highly transferable, I would say if somebody’s considering a big pivot to feel like you’re not starting over, you’re just taking what you’ve learned and you’re applying it in a different context. And for us, it’s like any fears that I had around, could we do this or not? Over the last two years have been completely set aside. Our confidence is very high that we can make this happen, drawing on the skills we’ve learned in our previous enterprises.

John Jantsch (19:55): So how would you describe where Z Kentucky is?

Kevin Rains (19:59): It is in central Kentucky, so it’s probably about an hour east of Lexington, so it’s not easy to get to. It’s a couple hours from Cincinnati, an hour from Lexington, a couple hours from Louisville. So some of those major metropolitan areas, like three hours from Nashville. So it’s not always easy to get to the payoff is the cliff edges. We could have bought property a lot closer, but to have these 200 foot soaring cliffs on one whole side of our property, you can’t get that within an hour of Cincinnati. So we feel very lucky to have what we have.

John Jantsch (20:34): Yeah, I spent some time, what’s the national park in Kentucky? Down in Southern. It’s a cave, wind cave or something like that. Right?

Kevin Rains (20:41): Mass

John Jantsch (20:42): Cave. Mass cave. There we go. So I’m envisioning some of that same limestone.

Kevin Rains (20:46): It’s a lot of limestone, some sandstone, Mitch, which makes it really good for climbers. I don’t know a lot about climbing. I’m not built for climbing. I’m more built for podcasts. But the climbers tell me the way the rock formed down there, it’s just ideal. So it’s a world-class. It shows up in almost every climbing magazine every month

John Jantsch (21:03): Somehow. Oh wow. Wow. Awesome. Well, Kevin, again, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Where would people connect with you or certainly find out about a facility, which I don’t even think we’ve mentioned. The name Dappled Light, is that right?

Kevin Rains (21:17): Yeah, that’s right. Dappledlightadventures.com. So dappledlightadventures.com, everything’s there. You could see our facilities, you could reach out. If you email us there, you’ll get to my son Isaac. But would love to have any dialogue with people who are interested either in retreats, talking about a business pivot or want to talk about the hospitality industry. Things that we’ve learned in our first two years. I’m an open book.

John Jantsch (21:40): Alright, awesome. Again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we’ll run into you soon. One of these days out there on the road.

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(01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is AJ Wilcox. He is a LinkedIn Ads Pro who founded b2linked.com, the LinkedIn ads agency in 2014. He’s managed over 150 million in spend on the platform and he’s an official, or his company is an official LinkedIn partner. He is also the host of the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast has managed five of the world’s top 10 LinkedIn ads account. So aj, welcome to the show.

AJ Wilcox (01:35): Thanks so much, John. I’m excited to be here.

John Jantsch (01:37): I think we’re going to be, I saw your name somewhere. I’m speaking marketing profs maybe, or agents have Change Marketing World

AJ Wilcox (01:44): Or Inbound Agents of

John Jantsch (01:45): Change for sure. Okay. All right. So one of those coming up, depending upon when you’re listening to it, the fall of 2024, so I was saying all air. I wanted to have a LinkedIns ads specialist on the show because I hear from so many of our clients, particularly B2B clients who feel like, Hey, my target market is on LinkedIn, but I can’t figure out how to do LinkedIn ads. I’ve tried, they’re just expensive. So give me the high level. Maybe start with why everybody else is failing and you’ve cracked the code on it. What are they doing wrong?

AJ Wilcox (02:15): Yeah, so LinkedIn ads, as you compare it with any other platform, they look very similar, especially to Meta, but they act very differently. The really big positive we get, this is the reason why people, they just, even if they failed at LinkedIn ads, they keep getting drawn back, no substitute for the audiences that you can reach there. You can target people by their job title, their seniority, their size of company, their industry, and it just goes on and on. So LinkedIn owns, they have an absolute monopoly on our business data. So if you’re trying to reach a specific B2B professional, it’s the only way to go. But the challenge that everyone finds is, wow, the costs are three to five times higher than meta. They’re oftentimes in line with Google, and when you’re paying bottom of funnel kinds of prices, but your traffic acts like top of funnel, there’s always going to be a little bit of friction there.

John Jantsch (03:07): Well, one of the things that I find, I mean I’ll be the first minute. I mean, I don’t hang out on Facebook and frankly I go to LinkedIn for some engagement and things, but I’ve probably clicked on ads in Facebook. I don’t know that I’ve ever clicked on an ad in LinkedIn. Is that just me? Is that because the environment is so different that they haven’t kind of gamified it the way that the Facebook seems to have? Again, I’m willing to be completely wrong on this, but I, I’m in the same camp as the people that I haven’t been able to figure it out either. So help me out. Is the environment different in a way that makes us respond to ads differently there?

AJ Wilcox (03:45): It definitely could be. We find that when we launch a normal ad, because a normal ad will show as being from a company and you see a company post, come down your feed and you’ve never seen or heard of that company before. Most of the time you’re just going to keep scrolling. We see the average click-through rate being half of a percent, so 200 people scroll past your ad, one’s going to click on it on average. All of that changes when just last year, LinkedIn released something called Thought Leader ads. This is the ability to promote an individual’s post on LinkedIn and we see click-through rates. Being anywhere between about 2% on the low end to 11% is as high as I’ve seen. And so I think the fact that it’s coming from an individual, not a faceless organization, totally changes those mechanics.

John Jantsch (04:31): And you opened the door there. I was going to go certainly down the thought leader ads track because it seems, I mean definitely what you just explained, I’m more on LinkedIn. I’m way more likely to engage with a person, and in a lot of ways that’s what you’re saying a thought leader ad is. Tell me a little bit about how it works. Like you do a post and then that ad, it’s almost like a boosted post if

AJ Wilcox (04:53): You will. Exactly, yeah. You’re boosting an individual’s organic post that they put on LinkedIn, and it used to be that it could only be an employee, so they had to be an employee of your company in order to boost. But here, just a few months ago, they gave us the ability now we can boost anyone’s post so long as they have to give approval. So this opens us up to influencer promotions, customer testimonials, all of those kinds of things that are

John Jantsch (05:21): Well, or even just agencies, right, running the campaigns. Right. Yeah. You probably couldn’t do that before. So is it kind of one of those things where the consensus is, oh, LinkedIn ads don’t work, so people are not paying attention, and then this thought leader ad now is for people to get it or is really rocking it. Would you say that there’s an, why aren’t people using it more, I guess is the real question there?

AJ Wilcox (05:46): It’s an apt question. They’re really difficult to make work. You have to have a lot of things in place to even be able to sponsor one of these posts, so you have to really know what you’re doing. I think that’s keeping most people from trying ’em out. But to your first question, why is everyone saying LinkedIn ads don’t work? I think I know what it is. I think it’s because one reason is LinkedIn has a whole bunch of pitfalls in your way as you go to create the campaign. So we can sure talk about what those things are that are making people pay too much. But I think there’s also this aspect of people, they start advertising and they go, well, if I’m paying 10 to $16 a click, I better send them right to a demo

John Jantsch (06:29): To talk to sales. And

AJ Wilcox (06:30): We know cold audiences, they are not ready to talk to someone. They’re not ready to start a product trial, they’re not ready to get a demo. They’re still in research mode. And so if you start out by showing these perfect, ideal cold audiences, your talk to sales ad, they’re not going to respond and you’re going to say it doesn’t work. If you can segment things, sorry, not segment. If you can give them in the right order, first touch with them is something valuable and interesting. Second touch is something a little bit more involved. Maybe the third touch is where you finally get to say, okay, now do you want a demo? Talk to someone in sales. When we set up the funnel that way we actually do see actual results.

John Jantsch (07:09): Yeah. So you mentioned the word demo in terms that maybe are more related, like software companies. Are there industries or types of businesses that you see this working for? You mentioned a couple. I mean, imagine the high ticket consultant or even agencies. Is it working for service type businesses like that as well?

AJ Wilcox (07:30): Yeah, it’s mostly B2B because especially if we’re paying 10 to $16 a click on average, most B2C does not have that high of a ticket, but we do see some B2C working, so it’s mostly B2B. We’ve seen products and services work equally. It’s really LinkedIn, add this access to this audience that you can’t reach any other way. And as long as you approach them the right way, giving them the things that are engaging to them, then they’ll respond no matter what kind of product you have.

John Jantsch (08:00): So you started to mention, especially DIYing is a little tough on this platform, Swiss, I always find ’em frustrating because as soon as you figure ’em out, then they completely change where everything went. But what are some of the things that you have found like on Google Ads? I mean, if you just follow the path that Google tries to take you down, you’re going to spend three times as much money. So what are some of the pitfalls in LinkedIn ads or some of the things that people need to definitely watch for so that they get at least the most at or at least not waste their money?

AJ Wilcox (08:32): Oh yeah, several I could cover, but just for brevity, I’ll cover the very biggest ones. First one is after you design who your audience is, there’ll be a little checkbox that LinkedIn auto checks called LinkedIn audience expansion. We’re already paying a premium LinkedIn, please don’t put irrelevant audiences into our audience and say that you’re helping us, you’re not. So always uncheck that box. Another recommendation is down a little bit below that. LinkedIn will sometimes yes and sometimes no. Include the LinkedIn audience network. And when you advertise to the audience network, these are people who are supposedly the LinkedIn members, but when they’re around the web on trusted sites, sounds really cool. And when you advertise, you see, oh, I’m getting higher click through rates. My cost per click is a 10th of what I’m used to on LinkedIn. This looks great, but we don’t see very much quality come from that traffic. And a hundred percent of your traffic will go to the audience network and none to LinkedIn, so not super worth it.

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AJ Wilcox (10:47): When you go to pay LinkedIn, there’s the section that’s all the bidding and budgeting. The default bidding method that they set there and that they recommend to everyone is called Maximum Delivery. And it’s a pay by the impression, and LinkedIn can bid as high as they want in order to spend your budget for the day. And so we find that’s the most expensive way to pay for your traffic 90% of the time. And they’ve actually hidden the option for manual cost per click bid, which is the lowest. And so I always recommend always start manual cost per click bids significantly less than what LinkedIn recommends because their recommendations are trying to pad their pocket not yours. And if you can get past those three initial roadblocks, chances are you’ll probably pay a third as much as what you would’ve. Yeah, I

John Jantsch (11:34): Always loved those recommended bids. It’s like, here’s what we recommend, you should pay us. Exactly. It’s like, wait a minute,

AJ Wilcox (11:41): Should I just hand you my wallet and you

John Jantsch (11:43): Just take

AJ Wilcox (11:43): Whatever you want and give it back.

John Jantsch (11:45): Talk a little bit about creative. I mean, have you seen, again, this changes all the time, I suspect, but what’s working right now? Is it the same thing that’s working well in the feeds for ad creative? Yes, of course. Yeah. So what does that look like?

AJ Wilcox (11:57): I noticed as I’m scrolling through my organic feed, just seeing what my friends are posting and other thought leaders, I get a feel for what engages me. And I generally use that to come up with ideas for creative video is working really well, but it’s not just any video, it’s personal video. So just like you and I are talking right now, if an ad pops up in your newsfeed and it’s someone giving you good advice, sharing a viewpoint, someone who’s authoritative, even if it’s only 15, 20 seconds, that’s going to perform really well, people eat that up and you can retarget anyone who’s watched at least 25% of that video to show them another touch. We see that if it’s single image featuring faces is great, especially if the photographic of an image, sorry, photographic image of a person, if they’re either looking directly at the camera or if they’re looking towards the call to action, that performs really well. And we’re also finding that documents are working really well and it’s not just, I’m going to upload my whole white paper or something like that. It’s you design each page of the document, like it’s a blown up version of, here’s one big stat, flip to the next slide. Here’s one big stat or one main takeaway. Those also tend to be performing really well.

John Jantsch (13:20): Talk a little bit about segmenting again on some of the traditional, or I should say other ad markets. You want to segment small and have your ads be very relevant to that segment is a similar type of activity on LinkedIn.

AJ Wilcox (13:36): Very much. I’ve heard a lot of people who advertise on meta saying, Hey, we used to micro segment and choose these very specific audiences, and now we find that the broader we go, the better it performs. LinkedIn is totally the opposite. I think it’s LinkedIn just doesn’t have the same level of data that Meta has. And so even though LinkedIn says, we recommend that your audiences have at least 300,000 people in them, oh wow, I recommend segmenting those down to 20,000 to 80,000. Keep a really small, tight segment ‘EM based off of specific job titles or departments or seniority industries, company sizes, you can get really specific and then treat all of your data a private focus group where you get to see how each of those segments performs and reacts to your ads.

John Jantsch (14:22): And I’m sure everybody has their own way to organize, but in terms of structure, campaign structure, how you keep things straight, do you have a methodology that you really have developed that again, especially when you’re working with multiple clients, it’s really important, but just for that person trying to do it themselves, are there some tips?

AJ Wilcox (14:41): Oh, absolutely. I name all my campaigns. There’s this natural reaction to name a campaign after the asset that you’re advertising. So if a marketer goes, Ooh, I just got this new ebook, I want to go publish, they go in and they create a campaign and they call it ebook. And we don’t do that. What I highly recommend is you name your campaign after the things about that campaign that won’t change. So the things that won’t change about that campaign, the ad type that you’ve chosen, the objective that you’ve chosen, those all stay the same. You’re going to add all this targeting. Maybe it’s like these job titles at this size of company in this geography, put all of that in the campaign name. And now as you’re looking through all your campaigns trying to keep things straight, you have this one entity. It’s an evergreen entity that anytime you want to show that kind of ad to that audience, you can put in it. And that campaign’s going to live forever. Otherwise you’re just creating like, here’s an ebook, here’s a guide, here’s a thought leader. And all of these campaigns just clutter up your account and after they’ve served their purpose, you throw ’em away. And then LinkedIn never gets a chance to learn from your history.

John Jantsch (15:50): So do they have, showing my ignorance here, do they have a business manager type of platform? Yeah. Okay.

AJ Wilcox (15:56): Yeah, they totally do. I would say it’s fairly recent. We’ve gotten in the last couple of years, but it’s actually gotten a lot better in the last couple of years.

John Jantsch (16:04): So you mentioned retargeting. That’s a fairly new capability on LinkedIn ads, isn’t it?

AJ Wilcox (16:10): Yeah, it’s had the ability to retarget website visitors since, I want to say 2017, but LinkedIn keeps adding all these others because retargeting your website visitors is totally based off of you having a cookie in your browser.

John Jantsch (16:24): And

AJ Wilcox (16:25): IOS devices wipe the cookie. Mozilla doesn’t store it either. There’s lots of reasons why people would delete their cookies in between, so it’s not all that great. LinkedIn realized that and said, well, hey, when someone is logged into the platform, we know who they are and all we have to do is pay attention to what it is that they’re clicking on and interacting with. So now we can create what we call engagement based retargeting audiences. I can go to LinkedIn and say, Hey, build an audience of anyone who’s watched at least 50% of one of my video ads in the last 180 days. And it can go, oh, I remember all the people who did that. I’m going to build that. And then two days later, I have an audience to target. They have a whole bunch of different retargeting audiences like this, and I don’t know of any other ad platform that has that capability that many different ways of building these retargeting audiences.

John Jantsch (17:18): When you launch campaigns on LinkedIn, you probably have a hypothesis about what will work, how do you approach testing ad copy, ad creative segments the whole bit? I mean, how do you go about really launching a bunch of things to see what works?

AJ Wilcox (17:33): Yeah, we could definitely go really deep here, but in general, when a client comes to us and they say, here’s an audience we want to go after, I’m trying to define what is an AB test going to look like? So if they came and said, Hey, we have three different podcast episodes. We want to try advertising here, I’m going to say, alright, let’s test episode against episode. We have a lot of things, but if they came to us and just said, we only have one guide. This is our big research report that we do every year, I might suggest, Hey, let’s come up with two different variations or four different variations, all that are covering that same asset. And then let’s test and find out which assets are more interesting to your audience and what wording imagery are you using to try to draw people in. And so we design everything like an AB test to gather later and find out what works to which segment of the audience.

John Jantsch (18:30): A very common funnel for marketers is, let’s sell a low ticket item. Obviously they become a buyer of that low ticket and then we’ll sell them other things. Do you find that working that works pretty well on Facebook? Do you find that type of approach or anybody running that kind of buy the $12 ebook kind of thing?

AJ Wilcox (18:49): Not great on LinkedIn, because the cost per click is so high, you’d have to have a really high conversion

John Jantsch (18:55): Rate. So there’s no way to get your ad spend return. Yeah, okay. Yeah, makes sense. So it really is, so to summarize a bit, the thought leader ads really kind of promoting education and just what you talked about, the thought leadership is really the approach that you’re seeing the most effective

AJ Wilcox (19:12): And realize that these audiences you want to go after because they’re perfect for you, they’re not ready to buy until they’ve had multiple positive interactions with you. So quit jumping right to the bottom of the funnel with these audiences and warm ’em up. Use the retargeting to graduate them down to where they’re going to be more open to that kind of interaction.

John Jantsch (19:32): Yeah. Awesome. Well, aj, it was great catching up with you. Has spent a few moments on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Is there somewhere that you would invite people to learn more about your work or connect with you somehow?

AJ Wilcox (19:42): Yeah, if they go to b2linked.com, that’s our website. So there’s plenty there. There’s our podcast, our blog. I’d also love for you to connect with me on LinkedIn. Find me, I’m AJ Wilcox, and just make sure you send me a custom connection request. Just say you’ve heard me on John’s show, and then I’ll make sure I see it and accept the connection. I share. Lots of good stuff there.

John Jantsch (20:03): Awesome. Again, I appreciate you spending a few moments. I look forward to seeing you when we’re both out there on the road.

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(01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is AJ Wilcox. He is a LinkedIn Ads Pro who founded b2linked.com, the LinkedIn ads agency in 2014. He’s managed over 150 million in spend on the platform and he’s an official, or his company is an official LinkedIn partner. He is also the host of the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast has managed five of the world’s top 10 LinkedIn ads account. So aj, welcome to the show.

AJ Wilcox (01:35): Thanks so much, John. I’m excited to be here.

John Jantsch (01:37): I think we’re going to be, I saw your name somewhere. I’m speaking marketing profs maybe, or agents have Change Marketing World

AJ Wilcox (01:44): Or Inbound Agents of

John Jantsch (01:45): Change for sure. Okay. All right. So one of those coming up, depending upon when you’re listening to it, the fall of 2024, so I was saying all air. I wanted to have a LinkedIns ads specialist on the show because I hear from so many of our clients, particularly B2B clients who feel like, Hey, my target market is on LinkedIn, but I can’t figure out how to do LinkedIn ads. I’ve tried, they’re just expensive. So give me the high level. Maybe start with why everybody else is failing and you’ve cracked the code on it. What are they doing wrong?

AJ Wilcox (02:15): Yeah, so LinkedIn ads, as you compare it with any other platform, they look very similar, especially to Meta, but they act very differently. The really big positive we get, this is the reason why people, they just, even if they failed at LinkedIn ads, they keep getting drawn back, no substitute for the audiences that you can reach there. You can target people by their job title, their seniority, their size of company, their industry, and it just goes on and on. So LinkedIn owns, they have an absolute monopoly on our business data. So if you’re trying to reach a specific B2B professional, it’s the only way to go. But the challenge that everyone finds is, wow, the costs are three to five times higher than meta. They’re oftentimes in line with Google, and when you’re paying bottom of funnel kinds of prices, but your traffic acts like top of funnel, there’s always going to be a little bit of friction there.

John Jantsch (03:07): Well, one of the things that I find, I mean I’ll be the first minute. I mean, I don’t hang out on Facebook and frankly I go to LinkedIn for some engagement and things, but I’ve probably clicked on ads in Facebook. I don’t know that I’ve ever clicked on an ad in LinkedIn. Is that just me? Is that because the environment is so different that they haven’t kind of gamified it the way that the Facebook seems to have? Again, I’m willing to be completely wrong on this, but I, I’m in the same camp as the people that I haven’t been able to figure it out either. So help me out. Is the environment different in a way that makes us respond to ads differently there?

AJ Wilcox (03:45): It definitely could be. We find that when we launch a normal ad, because a normal ad will show as being from a company and you see a company post, come down your feed and you’ve never seen or heard of that company before. Most of the time you’re just going to keep scrolling. We see the average click-through rate being half of a percent, so 200 people scroll past your ad, one’s going to click on it on average. All of that changes when just last year, LinkedIn released something called Thought Leader ads. This is the ability to promote an individual’s post on LinkedIn and we see click-through rates. Being anywhere between about 2% on the low end to 11% is as high as I’ve seen. And so I think the fact that it’s coming from an individual, not a faceless organization, totally changes those mechanics.

John Jantsch (04:31): And you opened the door there. I was going to go certainly down the thought leader ads track because it seems, I mean definitely what you just explained, I’m more on LinkedIn. I’m way more likely to engage with a person, and in a lot of ways that’s what you’re saying a thought leader ad is. Tell me a little bit about how it works. Like you do a post and then that ad, it’s almost like a boosted post if

AJ Wilcox (04:53): You will. Exactly, yeah. You’re boosting an individual’s organic post that they put on LinkedIn, and it used to be that it could only be an employee, so they had to be an employee of your company in order to boost. But here, just a few months ago, they gave us the ability now we can boost anyone’s post so long as they have to give approval. So this opens us up to influencer promotions, customer testimonials, all of those kinds of things that are

John Jantsch (05:21): Well, or even just agencies, right, running the campaigns. Right. Yeah. You probably couldn’t do that before. So is it kind of one of those things where the consensus is, oh, LinkedIn ads don’t work, so people are not paying attention, and then this thought leader ad now is for people to get it or is really rocking it. Would you say that there’s an, why aren’t people using it more, I guess is the real question there?

AJ Wilcox (05:46): It’s an apt question. They’re really difficult to make work. You have to have a lot of things in place to even be able to sponsor one of these posts, so you have to really know what you’re doing. I think that’s keeping most people from trying ’em out. But to your first question, why is everyone saying LinkedIn ads don’t work? I think I know what it is. I think it’s because one reason is LinkedIn has a whole bunch of pitfalls in your way as you go to create the campaign. So we can sure talk about what those things are that are making people pay too much. But I think there’s also this aspect of people, they start advertising and they go, well, if I’m paying 10 to $16 a click, I better send them right to a demo

John Jantsch (06:29): To talk to sales. And

AJ Wilcox (06:30): We know cold audiences, they are not ready to talk to someone. They’re not ready to start a product trial, they’re not ready to get a demo. They’re still in research mode. And so if you start out by showing these perfect, ideal cold audiences, your talk to sales ad, they’re not going to respond and you’re going to say it doesn’t work. If you can segment things, sorry, not segment. If you can give them in the right order, first touch with them is something valuable and interesting. Second touch is something a little bit more involved. Maybe the third touch is where you finally get to say, okay, now do you want a demo? Talk to someone in sales. When we set up the funnel that way we actually do see actual results.

John Jantsch (07:09): Yeah. So you mentioned the word demo in terms that maybe are more related, like software companies. Are there industries or types of businesses that you see this working for? You mentioned a couple. I mean, imagine the high ticket consultant or even agencies. Is it working for service type businesses like that as well?

AJ Wilcox (07:30): Yeah, it’s mostly B2B because especially if we’re paying 10 to $16 a click on average, most B2C does not have that high of a ticket, but we do see some B2C working, so it’s mostly B2B. We’ve seen products and services work equally. It’s really LinkedIn, add this access to this audience that you can’t reach any other way. And as long as you approach them the right way, giving them the things that are engaging to them, then they’ll respond no matter what kind of product you have.

John Jantsch (08:00): So you started to mention, especially DIYing is a little tough on this platform, Swiss, I always find ’em frustrating because as soon as you figure ’em out, then they completely change where everything went. But what are some of the things that you have found like on Google Ads? I mean, if you just follow the path that Google tries to take you down, you’re going to spend three times as much money. So what are some of the pitfalls in LinkedIn ads or some of the things that people need to definitely watch for so that they get at least the most at or at least not waste their money?

AJ Wilcox (08:32): Oh yeah, several I could cover, but just for brevity, I’ll cover the very biggest ones. First one is after you design who your audience is, there’ll be a little checkbox that LinkedIn auto checks called LinkedIn audience expansion. We’re already paying a premium LinkedIn, please don’t put irrelevant audiences into our audience and say that you’re helping us, you’re not. So always uncheck that box. Another recommendation is down a little bit below that. LinkedIn will sometimes yes and sometimes no. Include the LinkedIn audience network. And when you advertise to the audience network, these are people who are supposedly the LinkedIn members, but when they’re around the web on trusted sites, sounds really cool. And when you advertise, you see, oh, I’m getting higher click through rates. My cost per click is a 10th of what I’m used to on LinkedIn. This looks great, but we don’t see very much quality come from that traffic. And a hundred percent of your traffic will go to the audience network and none to LinkedIn, so not super worth it.

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AJ Wilcox (10:47): When you go to pay LinkedIn, there’s the section that’s all the bidding and budgeting. The default bidding method that they set there and that they recommend to everyone is called Maximum Delivery. And it’s a pay by the impression, and LinkedIn can bid as high as they want in order to spend your budget for the day. And so we find that’s the most expensive way to pay for your traffic 90% of the time. And they’ve actually hidden the option for manual cost per click bid, which is the lowest. And so I always recommend always start manual cost per click bids significantly less than what LinkedIn recommends because their recommendations are trying to pad their pocket not yours. And if you can get past those three initial roadblocks, chances are you’ll probably pay a third as much as what you would’ve. Yeah, I

John Jantsch (11:34): Always loved those recommended bids. It’s like, here’s what we recommend, you should pay us. Exactly. It’s like, wait a minute,

AJ Wilcox (11:41): Should I just hand you my wallet and you

John Jantsch (11:43): Just take

AJ Wilcox (11:43): Whatever you want and give it back.

John Jantsch (11:45): Talk a little bit about creative. I mean, have you seen, again, this changes all the time, I suspect, but what’s working right now? Is it the same thing that’s working well in the feeds for ad creative? Yes, of course. Yeah. So what does that look like?

AJ Wilcox (11:57): I noticed as I’m scrolling through my organic feed, just seeing what my friends are posting and other thought leaders, I get a feel for what engages me. And I generally use that to come up with ideas for creative video is working really well, but it’s not just any video, it’s personal video. So just like you and I are talking right now, if an ad pops up in your newsfeed and it’s someone giving you good advice, sharing a viewpoint, someone who’s authoritative, even if it’s only 15, 20 seconds, that’s going to perform really well, people eat that up and you can retarget anyone who’s watched at least 25% of that video to show them another touch. We see that if it’s single image featuring faces is great, especially if the photographic of an image, sorry, photographic image of a person, if they’re either looking directly at the camera or if they’re looking towards the call to action, that performs really well. And we’re also finding that documents are working really well and it’s not just, I’m going to upload my whole white paper or something like that. It’s you design each page of the document, like it’s a blown up version of, here’s one big stat, flip to the next slide. Here’s one big stat or one main takeaway. Those also tend to be performing really well.

John Jantsch (13:20): Talk a little bit about segmenting again on some of the traditional, or I should say other ad markets. You want to segment small and have your ads be very relevant to that segment is a similar type of activity on LinkedIn.

AJ Wilcox (13:36): Very much. I’ve heard a lot of people who advertise on meta saying, Hey, we used to micro segment and choose these very specific audiences, and now we find that the broader we go, the better it performs. LinkedIn is totally the opposite. I think it’s LinkedIn just doesn’t have the same level of data that Meta has. And so even though LinkedIn says, we recommend that your audiences have at least 300,000 people in them, oh wow, I recommend segmenting those down to 20,000 to 80,000. Keep a really small, tight segment ‘EM based off of specific job titles or departments or seniority industries, company sizes, you can get really specific and then treat all of your data a private focus group where you get to see how each of those segments performs and reacts to your ads.

John Jantsch (14:22): And I’m sure everybody has their own way to organize, but in terms of structure, campaign structure, how you keep things straight, do you have a methodology that you really have developed that again, especially when you’re working with multiple clients, it’s really important, but just for that person trying to do it themselves, are there some tips?

AJ Wilcox (14:41): Oh, absolutely. I name all my campaigns. There’s this natural reaction to name a campaign after the asset that you’re advertising. So if a marketer goes, Ooh, I just got this new ebook, I want to go publish, they go in and they create a campaign and they call it ebook. And we don’t do that. What I highly recommend is you name your campaign after the things about that campaign that won’t change. So the things that won’t change about that campaign, the ad type that you’ve chosen, the objective that you’ve chosen, those all stay the same. You’re going to add all this targeting. Maybe it’s like these job titles at this size of company in this geography, put all of that in the campaign name. And now as you’re looking through all your campaigns trying to keep things straight, you have this one entity. It’s an evergreen entity that anytime you want to show that kind of ad to that audience, you can put in it. And that campaign’s going to live forever. Otherwise you’re just creating like, here’s an ebook, here’s a guide, here’s a thought leader. And all of these campaigns just clutter up your account and after they’ve served their purpose, you throw ’em away. And then LinkedIn never gets a chance to learn from your history.

John Jantsch (15:50): So do they have, showing my ignorance here, do they have a business manager type of platform? Yeah. Okay.

AJ Wilcox (15:56): Yeah, they totally do. I would say it’s fairly recent. We’ve gotten in the last couple of years, but it’s actually gotten a lot better in the last couple of years.

John Jantsch (16:04): So you mentioned retargeting. That’s a fairly new capability on LinkedIn ads, isn’t it?

AJ Wilcox (16:10): Yeah, it’s had the ability to retarget website visitors since, I want to say 2017, but LinkedIn keeps adding all these others because retargeting your website visitors is totally based off of you having a cookie in your browser.

John Jantsch (16:24): And

AJ Wilcox (16:25): IOS devices wipe the cookie. Mozilla doesn’t store it either. There’s lots of reasons why people would delete their cookies in between, so it’s not all that great. LinkedIn realized that and said, well, hey, when someone is logged into the platform, we know who they are and all we have to do is pay attention to what it is that they’re clicking on and interacting with. So now we can create what we call engagement based retargeting audiences. I can go to LinkedIn and say, Hey, build an audience of anyone who’s watched at least 50% of one of my video ads in the last 180 days. And it can go, oh, I remember all the people who did that. I’m going to build that. And then two days later, I have an audience to target. They have a whole bunch of different retargeting audiences like this, and I don’t know of any other ad platform that has that capability that many different ways of building these retargeting audiences.

John Jantsch (17:18): When you launch campaigns on LinkedIn, you probably have a hypothesis about what will work, how do you approach testing ad copy, ad creative segments the whole bit? I mean, how do you go about really launching a bunch of things to see what works?

AJ Wilcox (17:33): Yeah, we could definitely go really deep here, but in general, when a client comes to us and they say, here’s an audience we want to go after, I’m trying to define what is an AB test going to look like? So if they came and said, Hey, we have three different podcast episodes. We want to try advertising here, I’m going to say, alright, let’s test episode against episode. We have a lot of things, but if they came to us and just said, we only have one guide. This is our big research report that we do every year, I might suggest, Hey, let’s come up with two different variations or four different variations, all that are covering that same asset. And then let’s test and find out which assets are more interesting to your audience and what wording imagery are you using to try to draw people in. And so we design everything like an AB test to gather later and find out what works to which segment of the audience.

John Jantsch (18:30): A very common funnel for marketers is, let’s sell a low ticket item. Obviously they become a buyer of that low ticket and then we’ll sell them other things. Do you find that working that works pretty well on Facebook? Do you find that type of approach or anybody running that kind of buy the $12 ebook kind of thing?

AJ Wilcox (18:49): Not great on LinkedIn, because the cost per click is so high, you’d have to have a really high conversion

John Jantsch (18:55): Rate. So there’s no way to get your ad spend return. Yeah, okay. Yeah, makes sense. So it really is, so to summarize a bit, the thought leader ads really kind of promoting education and just what you talked about, the thought leadership is really the approach that you’re seeing the most effective

AJ Wilcox (19:12): And realize that these audiences you want to go after because they’re perfect for you, they’re not ready to buy until they’ve had multiple positive interactions with you. So quit jumping right to the bottom of the funnel with these audiences and warm ’em up. Use the retargeting to graduate them down to where they’re going to be more open to that kind of interaction.

John Jantsch (19:32): Yeah. Awesome. Well, aj, it was great catching up with you. Has spent a few moments on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Is there somewhere that you would invite people to learn more about your work or connect with you somehow?

AJ Wilcox (19:42): Yeah, if they go to b2linked.com, that’s our website. So there’s plenty there. There’s our podcast, our blog. I’d also love for you to connect with me on LinkedIn. Find me, I’m AJ Wilcox, and just make sure you send me a custom connection request. Just say you’ve heard me on John’s show, and then I’ll make sure I see it and accept the connection. I share. Lots of good stuff there.

John Jantsch (20:03): Awesome. Again, I appreciate you spending a few moments. I look forward to seeing you when we’re both out there on the road.

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(01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is AJ Wilcox. He is a LinkedIn Ads Pro who founded b2linked.com, the LinkedIn ads agency in 2014. He’s managed over 150 million in spend on the platform and he’s an official, or his company is an official LinkedIn partner. He is also the host of the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast has managed five of the world’s top 10 LinkedIn ads account. So aj, welcome to the show.

AJ Wilcox (01:35): Thanks so much, John. I’m excited to be here.

John Jantsch (01:37): I think we’re going to be, I saw your name somewhere. I’m speaking marketing profs maybe, or agents have Change Marketing World

AJ Wilcox (01:44): Or Inbound Agents of

John Jantsch (01:45): Change for sure. Okay. All right. So one of those coming up, depending upon when you’re listening to it, the fall of 2024, so I was saying all air. I wanted to have a LinkedIns ads specialist on the show because I hear from so many of our clients, particularly B2B clients who feel like, Hey, my target market is on LinkedIn, but I can’t figure out how to do LinkedIn ads. I’ve tried, they’re just expensive. So give me the high level. Maybe start with why everybody else is failing and you’ve cracked the code on it. What are they doing wrong?

AJ Wilcox (02:15): Yeah, so LinkedIn ads, as you compare it with any other platform, they look very similar, especially to Meta, but they act very differently. The really big positive we get, this is the reason why people, they just, even if they failed at LinkedIn ads, they keep getting drawn back, no substitute for the audiences that you can reach there. You can target people by their job title, their seniority, their size of company, their industry, and it just goes on and on. So LinkedIn owns, they have an absolute monopoly on our business data. So if you’re trying to reach a specific B2B professional, it’s the only way to go. But the challenge that everyone finds is, wow, the costs are three to five times higher than meta. They’re oftentimes in line with Google, and when you’re paying bottom of funnel kinds of prices, but your traffic acts like top of funnel, there’s always going to be a little bit of friction there.

John Jantsch (03:07): Well, one of the things that I find, I mean I’ll be the first minute. I mean, I don’t hang out on Facebook and frankly I go to LinkedIn for some engagement and things, but I’ve probably clicked on ads in Facebook. I don’t know that I’ve ever clicked on an ad in LinkedIn. Is that just me? Is that because the environment is so different that they haven’t kind of gamified it the way that the Facebook seems to have? Again, I’m willing to be completely wrong on this, but I, I’m in the same camp as the people that I haven’t been able to figure it out either. So help me out. Is the environment different in a way that makes us respond to ads differently there?

AJ Wilcox (03:45): It definitely could be. We find that when we launch a normal ad, because a normal ad will show as being from a company and you see a company post, come down your feed and you’ve never seen or heard of that company before. Most of the time you’re just going to keep scrolling. We see the average click-through rate being half of a percent, so 200 people scroll past your ad, one’s going to click on it on average. All of that changes when just last year, LinkedIn released something called Thought Leader ads. This is the ability to promote an individual’s post on LinkedIn and we see click-through rates. Being anywhere between about 2% on the low end to 11% is as high as I’ve seen. And so I think the fact that it’s coming from an individual, not a faceless organization, totally changes those mechanics.

John Jantsch (04:31): And you opened the door there. I was going to go certainly down the thought leader ads track because it seems, I mean definitely what you just explained, I’m more on LinkedIn. I’m way more likely to engage with a person, and in a lot of ways that’s what you’re saying a thought leader ad is. Tell me a little bit about how it works. Like you do a post and then that ad, it’s almost like a boosted post if

AJ Wilcox (04:53): You will. Exactly, yeah. You’re boosting an individual’s organic post that they put on LinkedIn, and it used to be that it could only be an employee, so they had to be an employee of your company in order to boost. But here, just a few months ago, they gave us the ability now we can boost anyone’s post so long as they have to give approval. So this opens us up to influencer promotions, customer testimonials, all of those kinds of things that are

John Jantsch (05:21): Well, or even just agencies, right, running the campaigns. Right. Yeah. You probably couldn’t do that before. So is it kind of one of those things where the consensus is, oh, LinkedIn ads don’t work, so people are not paying attention, and then this thought leader ad now is for people to get it or is really rocking it. Would you say that there’s an, why aren’t people using it more, I guess is the real question there?

AJ Wilcox (05:46): It’s an apt question. They’re really difficult to make work. You have to have a lot of things in place to even be able to sponsor one of these posts, so you have to really know what you’re doing. I think that’s keeping most people from trying ’em out. But to your first question, why is everyone saying LinkedIn ads don’t work? I think I know what it is. I think it’s because one reason is LinkedIn has a whole bunch of pitfalls in your way as you go to create the campaign. So we can sure talk about what those things are that are making people pay too much. But I think there’s also this aspect of people, they start advertising and they go, well, if I’m paying 10 to $16 a click, I better send them right to a demo

John Jantsch (06:29): To talk to sales. And

AJ Wilcox (06:30): We know cold audiences, they are not ready to talk to someone. They’re not ready to start a product trial, they’re not ready to get a demo. They’re still in research mode. And so if you start out by showing these perfect, ideal cold audiences, your talk to sales ad, they’re not going to respond and you’re going to say it doesn’t work. If you can segment things, sorry, not segment. If you can give them in the right order, first touch with them is something valuable and interesting. Second touch is something a little bit more involved. Maybe the third touch is where you finally get to say, okay, now do you want a demo? Talk to someone in sales. When we set up the funnel that way we actually do see actual results.

John Jantsch (07:09): Yeah. So you mentioned the word demo in terms that maybe are more related, like software companies. Are there industries or types of businesses that you see this working for? You mentioned a couple. I mean, imagine the high ticket consultant or even agencies. Is it working for service type businesses like that as well?

AJ Wilcox (07:30): Yeah, it’s mostly B2B because especially if we’re paying 10 to $16 a click on average, most B2C does not have that high of a ticket, but we do see some B2C working, so it’s mostly B2B. We’ve seen products and services work equally. It’s really LinkedIn, add this access to this audience that you can’t reach any other way. And as long as you approach them the right way, giving them the things that are engaging to them, then they’ll respond no matter what kind of product you have.

John Jantsch (08:00): So you started to mention, especially DIYing is a little tough on this platform, Swiss, I always find ’em frustrating because as soon as you figure ’em out, then they completely change where everything went. But what are some of the things that you have found like on Google Ads? I mean, if you just follow the path that Google tries to take you down, you’re going to spend three times as much money. So what are some of the pitfalls in LinkedIn ads or some of the things that people need to definitely watch for so that they get at least the most at or at least not waste their money?

AJ Wilcox (08:32): Oh yeah, several I could cover, but just for brevity, I’ll cover the very biggest ones. First one is after you design who your audience is, there’ll be a little checkbox that LinkedIn auto checks called LinkedIn audience expansion. We’re already paying a premium LinkedIn, please don’t put irrelevant audiences into our audience and say that you’re helping us, you’re not. So always uncheck that box. Another recommendation is down a little bit below that. LinkedIn will sometimes yes and sometimes no. Include the LinkedIn audience network. And when you advertise to the audience network, these are people who are supposedly the LinkedIn members, but when they’re around the web on trusted sites, sounds really cool. And when you advertise, you see, oh, I’m getting higher click through rates. My cost per click is a 10th of what I’m used to on LinkedIn. This looks great, but we don’t see very much quality come from that traffic. And a hundred percent of your traffic will go to the audience network and none to LinkedIn, so not super worth it.

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AJ Wilcox (10:47): When you go to pay LinkedIn, there’s the section that’s all the bidding and budgeting. The default bidding method that they set there and that they recommend to everyone is called Maximum Delivery. And it’s a pay by the impression, and LinkedIn can bid as high as they want in order to spend your budget for the day. And so we find that’s the most expensive way to pay for your traffic 90% of the time. And they’ve actually hidden the option for manual cost per click bid, which is the lowest. And so I always recommend always start manual cost per click bids significantly less than what LinkedIn recommends because their recommendations are trying to pad their pocket not yours. And if you can get past those three initial roadblocks, chances are you’ll probably pay a third as much as what you would’ve. Yeah, I

John Jantsch (11:34): Always loved those recommended bids. It’s like, here’s what we recommend, you should pay us. Exactly. It’s like, wait a minute,

AJ Wilcox (11:41): Should I just hand you my wallet and you

John Jantsch (11:43): Just take

AJ Wilcox (11:43): Whatever you want and give it back.

John Jantsch (11:45): Talk a little bit about creative. I mean, have you seen, again, this changes all the time, I suspect, but what’s working right now? Is it the same thing that’s working well in the feeds for ad creative? Yes, of course. Yeah. So what does that look like?

AJ Wilcox (11:57): I noticed as I’m scrolling through my organic feed, just seeing what my friends are posting and other thought leaders, I get a feel for what engages me. And I generally use that to come up with ideas for creative video is working really well, but it’s not just any video, it’s personal video. So just like you and I are talking right now, if an ad pops up in your newsfeed and it’s someone giving you good advice, sharing a viewpoint, someone who’s authoritative, even if it’s only 15, 20 seconds, that’s going to perform really well, people eat that up and you can retarget anyone who’s watched at least 25% of that video to show them another touch. We see that if it’s single image featuring faces is great, especially if the photographic of an image, sorry, photographic image of a person, if they’re either looking directly at the camera or if they’re looking towards the call to action, that performs really well. And we’re also finding that documents are working really well and it’s not just, I’m going to upload my whole white paper or something like that. It’s you design each page of the document, like it’s a blown up version of, here’s one big stat, flip to the next slide. Here’s one big stat or one main takeaway. Those also tend to be performing really well.

John Jantsch (13:20): Talk a little bit about segmenting again on some of the traditional, or I should say other ad markets. You want to segment small and have your ads be very relevant to that segment is a similar type of activity on LinkedIn.

AJ Wilcox (13:36): Very much. I’ve heard a lot of people who advertise on meta saying, Hey, we used to micro segment and choose these very specific audiences, and now we find that the broader we go, the better it performs. LinkedIn is totally the opposite. I think it’s LinkedIn just doesn’t have the same level of data that Meta has. And so even though LinkedIn says, we recommend that your audiences have at least 300,000 people in them, oh wow, I recommend segmenting those down to 20,000 to 80,000. Keep a really small, tight segment ‘EM based off of specific job titles or departments or seniority industries, company sizes, you can get really specific and then treat all of your data a private focus group where you get to see how each of those segments performs and reacts to your ads.

John Jantsch (14:22): And I’m sure everybody has their own way to organize, but in terms of structure, campaign structure, how you keep things straight, do you have a methodology that you really have developed that again, especially when you’re working with multiple clients, it’s really important, but just for that person trying to do it themselves, are there some tips?

AJ Wilcox (14:41): Oh, absolutely. I name all my campaigns. There’s this natural reaction to name a campaign after the asset that you’re advertising. So if a marketer goes, Ooh, I just got this new ebook, I want to go publish, they go in and they create a campaign and they call it ebook. And we don’t do that. What I highly recommend is you name your campaign after the things about that campaign that won’t change. So the things that won’t change about that campaign, the ad type that you’ve chosen, the objective that you’ve chosen, those all stay the same. You’re going to add all this targeting. Maybe it’s like these job titles at this size of company in this geography, put all of that in the campaign name. And now as you’re looking through all your campaigns trying to keep things straight, you have this one entity. It’s an evergreen entity that anytime you want to show that kind of ad to that audience, you can put in it. And that campaign’s going to live forever. Otherwise you’re just creating like, here’s an ebook, here’s a guide, here’s a thought leader. And all of these campaigns just clutter up your account and after they’ve served their purpose, you throw ’em away. And then LinkedIn never gets a chance to learn from your history.

John Jantsch (15:50): So do they have, showing my ignorance here, do they have a business manager type of platform? Yeah. Okay.

AJ Wilcox (15:56): Yeah, they totally do. I would say it’s fairly recent. We’ve gotten in the last couple of years, but it’s actually gotten a lot better in the last couple of years.

John Jantsch (16:04): So you mentioned retargeting. That’s a fairly new capability on LinkedIn ads, isn’t it?

AJ Wilcox (16:10): Yeah, it’s had the ability to retarget website visitors since, I want to say 2017, but LinkedIn keeps adding all these others because retargeting your website visitors is totally based off of you having a cookie in your browser.

John Jantsch (16:24): And

AJ Wilcox (16:25): IOS devices wipe the cookie. Mozilla doesn’t store it either. There’s lots of reasons why people would delete their cookies in between, so it’s not all that great. LinkedIn realized that and said, well, hey, when someone is logged into the platform, we know who they are and all we have to do is pay attention to what it is that they’re clicking on and interacting with. So now we can create what we call engagement based retargeting audiences. I can go to LinkedIn and say, Hey, build an audience of anyone who’s watched at least 50% of one of my video ads in the last 180 days. And it can go, oh, I remember all the people who did that. I’m going to build that. And then two days later, I have an audience to target. They have a whole bunch of different retargeting audiences like this, and I don’t know of any other ad platform that has that capability that many different ways of building these retargeting audiences.

John Jantsch (17:18): When you launch campaigns on LinkedIn, you probably have a hypothesis about what will work, how do you approach testing ad copy, ad creative segments the whole bit? I mean, how do you go about really launching a bunch of things to see what works?

AJ Wilcox (17:33): Yeah, we could definitely go really deep here, but in general, when a client comes to us and they say, here’s an audience we want to go after, I’m trying to define what is an AB test going to look like? So if they came and said, Hey, we have three different podcast episodes. We want to try advertising here, I’m going to say, alright, let’s test episode against episode. We have a lot of things, but if they came to us and just said, we only have one guide. This is our big research report that we do every year, I might suggest, Hey, let’s come up with two different variations or four different variations, all that are covering that same asset. And then let’s test and find out which assets are more interesting to your audience and what wording imagery are you using to try to draw people in. And so we design everything like an AB test to gather later and find out what works to which segment of the audience.

John Jantsch (18:30): A very common funnel for marketers is, let’s sell a low ticket item. Obviously they become a buyer of that low ticket and then we’ll sell them other things. Do you find that working that works pretty well on Facebook? Do you find that type of approach or anybody running that kind of buy the $12 ebook kind of thing?

AJ Wilcox (18:49): Not great on LinkedIn, because the cost per click is so high, you’d have to have a really high conversion

John Jantsch (18:55): Rate. So there’s no way to get your ad spend return. Yeah, okay. Yeah, makes sense. So it really is, so to summarize a bit, the thought leader ads really kind of promoting education and just what you talked about, the thought leadership is really the approach that you’re seeing the most effective

AJ Wilcox (19:12): And realize that these audiences you want to go after because they’re perfect for you, they’re not ready to buy until they’ve had multiple positive interactions with you. So quit jumping right to the bottom of the funnel with these audiences and warm ’em up. Use the retargeting to graduate them down to where they’re going to be more open to that kind of interaction.

John Jantsch (19:32): Yeah. Awesome. Well, aj, it was great catching up with you. Has spent a few moments on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Is there somewhere that you would invite people to learn more about your work or connect with you somehow?

AJ Wilcox (19:42): Yeah, if they go to b2linked.com, that’s our website. So there’s plenty there. There’s our podcast, our blog. I’d also love for you to connect with me on LinkedIn. Find me, I’m AJ Wilcox, and just make sure you send me a custom connection request. Just say you’ve heard me on John’s show, and then I’ll make sure I see it and accept the connection. I share. Lots of good stuff there.

John Jantsch (20:03): Awesome. Again, I appreciate you spending a few moments. I look forward to seeing you when we’re both out there on the road.

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(01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is AJ Wilcox. He is a LinkedIn Ads Pro who founded b2linked.com, the LinkedIn ads agency in 2014. He’s managed over 150 million in spend on the platform and he’s an official, or his company is an official LinkedIn partner. He is also the host of the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast has managed five of the world’s top 10 LinkedIn ads account. So aj, welcome to the show.

AJ Wilcox (01:35): Thanks so much, John. I’m excited to be here.

John Jantsch (01:37): I think we’re going to be, I saw your name somewhere. I’m speaking marketing profs maybe, or agents have Change Marketing World

AJ Wilcox (01:44): Or Inbound Agents of

John Jantsch (01:45): Change for sure. Okay. All right. So one of those coming up, depending upon when you’re listening to it, the fall of 2024, so I was saying all air. I wanted to have a LinkedIns ads specialist on the show because I hear from so many of our clients, particularly B2B clients who feel like, Hey, my target market is on LinkedIn, but I can’t figure out how to do LinkedIn ads. I’ve tried, they’re just expensive. So give me the high level. Maybe start with why everybody else is failing and you’ve cracked the code on it. What are they doing wrong?

AJ Wilcox (02:15): Yeah, so LinkedIn ads, as you compare it with any other platform, they look very similar, especially to Meta, but they act very differently. The really big positive we get, this is the reason why people, they just, even if they failed at LinkedIn ads, they keep getting drawn back, no substitute for the audiences that you can reach there. You can target people by their job title, their seniority, their size of company, their industry, and it just goes on and on. So LinkedIn owns, they have an absolute monopoly on our business data. So if you’re trying to reach a specific B2B professional, it’s the only way to go. But the challenge that everyone finds is, wow, the costs are three to five times higher than meta. They’re oftentimes in line with Google, and when you’re paying bottom of funnel kinds of prices, but your traffic acts like top of funnel, there’s always going to be a little bit of friction there.

John Jantsch (03:07): Well, one of the things that I find, I mean I’ll be the first minute. I mean, I don’t hang out on Facebook and frankly I go to LinkedIn for some engagement and things, but I’ve probably clicked on ads in Facebook. I don’t know that I’ve ever clicked on an ad in LinkedIn. Is that just me? Is that because the environment is so different that they haven’t kind of gamified it the way that the Facebook seems to have? Again, I’m willing to be completely wrong on this, but I, I’m in the same camp as the people that I haven’t been able to figure it out either. So help me out. Is the environment different in a way that makes us respond to ads differently there?

AJ Wilcox (03:45): It definitely could be. We find that when we launch a normal ad, because a normal ad will show as being from a company and you see a company post, come down your feed and you’ve never seen or heard of that company before. Most of the time you’re just going to keep scrolling. We see the average click-through rate being half of a percent, so 200 people scroll past your ad, one’s going to click on it on average. All of that changes when just last year, LinkedIn released something called Thought Leader ads. This is the ability to promote an individual’s post on LinkedIn and we see click-through rates. Being anywhere between about 2% on the low end to 11% is as high as I’ve seen. And so I think the fact that it’s coming from an individual, not a faceless organization, totally changes those mechanics.

John Jantsch (04:31): And you opened the door there. I was going to go certainly down the thought leader ads track because it seems, I mean definitely what you just explained, I’m more on LinkedIn. I’m way more likely to engage with a person, and in a lot of ways that’s what you’re saying a thought leader ad is. Tell me a little bit about how it works. Like you do a post and then that ad, it’s almost like a boosted post if

AJ Wilcox (04:53): You will. Exactly, yeah. You’re boosting an individual’s organic post that they put on LinkedIn, and it used to be that it could only be an employee, so they had to be an employee of your company in order to boost. But here, just a few months ago, they gave us the ability now we can boost anyone’s post so long as they have to give approval. So this opens us up to influencer promotions, customer testimonials, all of those kinds of things that are

John Jantsch (05:21): Well, or even just agencies, right, running the campaigns. Right. Yeah. You probably couldn’t do that before. So is it kind of one of those things where the consensus is, oh, LinkedIn ads don’t work, so people are not paying attention, and then this thought leader ad now is for people to get it or is really rocking it. Would you say that there’s an, why aren’t people using it more, I guess is the real question there?

AJ Wilcox (05:46): It’s an apt question. They’re really difficult to make work. You have to have a lot of things in place to even be able to sponsor one of these posts, so you have to really know what you’re doing. I think that’s keeping most people from trying ’em out. But to your first question, why is everyone saying LinkedIn ads don’t work? I think I know what it is. I think it’s because one reason is LinkedIn has a whole bunch of pitfalls in your way as you go to create the campaign. So we can sure talk about what those things are that are making people pay too much. But I think there’s also this aspect of people, they start advertising and they go, well, if I’m paying 10 to $16 a click, I better send them right to a demo

John Jantsch (06:29): To talk to sales. And

AJ Wilcox (06:30): We know cold audiences, they are not ready to talk to someone. They’re not ready to start a product trial, they’re not ready to get a demo. They’re still in research mode. And so if you start out by showing these perfect, ideal cold audiences, your talk to sales ad, they’re not going to respond and you’re going to say it doesn’t work. If you can segment things, sorry, not segment. If you can give them in the right order, first touch with them is something valuable and interesting. Second touch is something a little bit more involved. Maybe the third touch is where you finally get to say, okay, now do you want a demo? Talk to someone in sales. When we set up the funnel that way we actually do see actual results.

John Jantsch (07:09): Yeah. So you mentioned the word demo in terms that maybe are more related, like software companies. Are there industries or types of businesses that you see this working for? You mentioned a couple. I mean, imagine the high ticket consultant or even agencies. Is it working for service type businesses like that as well?

AJ Wilcox (07:30): Yeah, it’s mostly B2B because especially if we’re paying 10 to $16 a click on average, most B2C does not have that high of a ticket, but we do see some B2C working, so it’s mostly B2B. We’ve seen products and services work equally. It’s really LinkedIn, add this access to this audience that you can’t reach any other way. And as long as you approach them the right way, giving them the things that are engaging to them, then they’ll respond no matter what kind of product you have.

John Jantsch (08:00): So you started to mention, especially DIYing is a little tough on this platform, Swiss, I always find ’em frustrating because as soon as you figure ’em out, then they completely change where everything went. But what are some of the things that you have found like on Google Ads? I mean, if you just follow the path that Google tries to take you down, you’re going to spend three times as much money. So what are some of the pitfalls in LinkedIn ads or some of the things that people need to definitely watch for so that they get at least the most at or at least not waste their money?

AJ Wilcox (08:32): Oh yeah, several I could cover, but just for brevity, I’ll cover the very biggest ones. First one is after you design who your audience is, there’ll be a little checkbox that LinkedIn auto checks called LinkedIn audience expansion. We’re already paying a premium LinkedIn, please don’t put irrelevant audiences into our audience and say that you’re helping us, you’re not. So always uncheck that box. Another recommendation is down a little bit below that. LinkedIn will sometimes yes and sometimes no. Include the LinkedIn audience network. And when you advertise to the audience network, these are people who are supposedly the LinkedIn members, but when they’re around the web on trusted sites, sounds really cool. And when you advertise, you see, oh, I’m getting higher click through rates. My cost per click is a 10th of what I’m used to on LinkedIn. This looks great, but we don’t see very much quality come from that traffic. And a hundred percent of your traffic will go to the audience network and none to LinkedIn, so not super worth it.

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AJ Wilcox (10:47): When you go to pay LinkedIn, there’s the section that’s all the bidding and budgeting. The default bidding method that they set there and that they recommend to everyone is called Maximum Delivery. And it’s a pay by the impression, and LinkedIn can bid as high as they want in order to spend your budget for the day. And so we find that’s the most expensive way to pay for your traffic 90% of the time. And they’ve actually hidden the option for manual cost per click bid, which is the lowest. And so I always recommend always start manual cost per click bids significantly less than what LinkedIn recommends because their recommendations are trying to pad their pocket not yours. And if you can get past those three initial roadblocks, chances are you’ll probably pay a third as much as what you would’ve. Yeah, I

John Jantsch (11:34): Always loved those recommended bids. It’s like, here’s what we recommend, you should pay us. Exactly. It’s like, wait a minute,

AJ Wilcox (11:41): Should I just hand you my wallet and you

John Jantsch (11:43): Just take

AJ Wilcox (11:43): Whatever you want and give it back.

John Jantsch (11:45): Talk a little bit about creative. I mean, have you seen, again, this changes all the time, I suspect, but what’s working right now? Is it the same thing that’s working well in the feeds for ad creative? Yes, of course. Yeah. So what does that look like?

AJ Wilcox (11:57): I noticed as I’m scrolling through my organic feed, just seeing what my friends are posting and other thought leaders, I get a feel for what engages me. And I generally use that to come up with ideas for creative video is working really well, but it’s not just any video, it’s personal video. So just like you and I are talking right now, if an ad pops up in your newsfeed and it’s someone giving you good advice, sharing a viewpoint, someone who’s authoritative, even if it’s only 15, 20 seconds, that’s going to perform really well, people eat that up and you can retarget anyone who’s watched at least 25% of that video to show them another touch. We see that if it’s single image featuring faces is great, especially if the photographic of an image, sorry, photographic image of a person, if they’re either looking directly at the camera or if they’re looking towards the call to action, that performs really well. And we’re also finding that documents are working really well and it’s not just, I’m going to upload my whole white paper or something like that. It’s you design each page of the document, like it’s a blown up version of, here’s one big stat, flip to the next slide. Here’s one big stat or one main takeaway. Those also tend to be performing really well.

John Jantsch (13:20): Talk a little bit about segmenting again on some of the traditional, or I should say other ad markets. You want to segment small and have your ads be very relevant to that segment is a similar type of activity on LinkedIn.

AJ Wilcox (13:36): Very much. I’ve heard a lot of people who advertise on meta saying, Hey, we used to micro segment and choose these very specific audiences, and now we find that the broader we go, the better it performs. LinkedIn is totally the opposite. I think it’s LinkedIn just doesn’t have the same level of data that Meta has. And so even though LinkedIn says, we recommend that your audiences have at least 300,000 people in them, oh wow, I recommend segmenting those down to 20,000 to 80,000. Keep a really small, tight segment ‘EM based off of specific job titles or departments or seniority industries, company sizes, you can get really specific and then treat all of your data a private focus group where you get to see how each of those segments performs and reacts to your ads.

John Jantsch (14:22): And I’m sure everybody has their own way to organize, but in terms of structure, campaign structure, how you keep things straight, do you have a methodology that you really have developed that again, especially when you’re working with multiple clients, it’s really important, but just for that person trying to do it themselves, are there some tips?

AJ Wilcox (14:41): Oh, absolutely. I name all my campaigns. There’s this natural reaction to name a campaign after the asset that you’re advertising. So if a marketer goes, Ooh, I just got this new ebook, I want to go publish, they go in and they create a campaign and they call it ebook. And we don’t do that. What I highly recommend is you name your campaign after the things about that campaign that won’t change. So the things that won’t change about that campaign, the ad type that you’ve chosen, the objective that you’ve chosen, those all stay the same. You’re going to add all this targeting. Maybe it’s like these job titles at this size of company in this geography, put all of that in the campaign name. And now as you’re looking through all your campaigns trying to keep things straight, you have this one entity. It’s an evergreen entity that anytime you want to show that kind of ad to that audience, you can put in it. And that campaign’s going to live forever. Otherwise you’re just creating like, here’s an ebook, here’s a guide, here’s a thought leader. And all of these campaigns just clutter up your account and after they’ve served their purpose, you throw ’em away. And then LinkedIn never gets a chance to learn from your history.

John Jantsch (15:50): So do they have, showing my ignorance here, do they have a business manager type of platform? Yeah. Okay.

AJ Wilcox (15:56): Yeah, they totally do. I would say it’s fairly recent. We’ve gotten in the last couple of years, but it’s actually gotten a lot better in the last couple of years.

John Jantsch (16:04): So you mentioned retargeting. That’s a fairly new capability on LinkedIn ads, isn’t it?

AJ Wilcox (16:10): Yeah, it’s had the ability to retarget website visitors since, I want to say 2017, but LinkedIn keeps adding all these others because retargeting your website visitors is totally based off of you having a cookie in your browser.

John Jantsch (16:24): And

AJ Wilcox (16:25): IOS devices wipe the cookie. Mozilla doesn’t store it either. There’s lots of reasons why people would delete their cookies in between, so it’s not all that great. LinkedIn realized that and said, well, hey, when someone is logged into the platform, we know who they are and all we have to do is pay attention to what it is that they’re clicking on and interacting with. So now we can create what we call engagement based retargeting audiences. I can go to LinkedIn and say, Hey, build an audience of anyone who’s watched at least 50% of one of my video ads in the last 180 days. And it can go, oh, I remember all the people who did that. I’m going to build that. And then two days later, I have an audience to target. They have a whole bunch of different retargeting audiences like this, and I don’t know of any other ad platform that has that capability that many different ways of building these retargeting audiences.

John Jantsch (17:18): When you launch campaigns on LinkedIn, you probably have a hypothesis about what will work, how do you approach testing ad copy, ad creative segments the whole bit? I mean, how do you go about really launching a bunch of things to see what works?

AJ Wilcox (17:33): Yeah, we could definitely go really deep here, but in general, when a client comes to us and they say, here’s an audience we want to go after, I’m trying to define what is an AB test going to look like? So if they came and said, Hey, we have three different podcast episodes. We want to try advertising here, I’m going to say, alright, let’s test episode against episode. We have a lot of things, but if they came to us and just said, we only have one guide. This is our big research report that we do every year, I might suggest, Hey, let’s come up with two different variations or four different variations, all that are covering that same asset. And then let’s test and find out which assets are more interesting to your audience and what wording imagery are you using to try to draw people in. And so we design everything like an AB test to gather later and find out what works to which segment of the audience.

John Jantsch (18:30): A very common funnel for marketers is, let’s sell a low ticket item. Obviously they become a buyer of that low ticket and then we’ll sell them other things. Do you find that working that works pretty well on Facebook? Do you find that type of approach or anybody running that kind of buy the $12 ebook kind of thing?

AJ Wilcox (18:49): Not great on LinkedIn, because the cost per click is so high, you’d have to have a really high conversion

John Jantsch (18:55): Rate. So there’s no way to get your ad spend return. Yeah, okay. Yeah, makes sense. So it really is, so to summarize a bit, the thought leader ads really kind of promoting education and just what you talked about, the thought leadership is really the approach that you’re seeing the most effective

AJ Wilcox (19:12): And realize that these audiences you want to go after because they’re perfect for you, they’re not ready to buy until they’ve had multiple positive interactions with you. So quit jumping right to the bottom of the funnel with these audiences and warm ’em up. Use the retargeting to graduate them down to where they’re going to be more open to that kind of interaction.

John Jantsch (19:32): Yeah. Awesome. Well, aj, it was great catching up with you. Has spent a few moments on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Is there somewhere that you would invite people to learn more about your work or connect with you somehow?

AJ Wilcox (19:42): Yeah, if they go to b2linked.com, that’s our website. So there’s plenty there. There’s our podcast, our blog. I’d also love for you to connect with me on LinkedIn. Find me, I’m AJ Wilcox, and just make sure you send me a custom connection request. Just say you’ve heard me on John’s show, and then I’ll make sure I see it and accept the connection. I share. Lots of good stuff there.

John Jantsch (20:03): Awesome. Again, I appreciate you spending a few moments. I look forward to seeing you when we’re both out there on the road.

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(01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, my guest, today’s Jodi Wellman. She’s a speaker, author, assistant instructor in the Master of applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania and founder of 4,000 Mondays. She really just wants people to live squander free lives without deathbed regrets. And we’re going to talk about her book that deals with that very topic. You only die once, how to make it to the end with no regrets. So Jodi, welcome to the show.

Jodi Wellman (01:34): Oh, thanks. I’m excited to be here with you.

John Jantsch (01:36): So obviously the point of the book is no regrets, right? Or how to make it to the end without regrets. The hook, of course, is to shake people and say you’re going to die. So how do you find that people take that? I mean, especially Americans, we don’t like to talk about death. I mean, in Eastern cultures it’s actually a very common practice. How do you find particularly people on this side of the ocean taking to this idea of you telling ’em they’re going to die?

Jodi Wellman (02:06): Yeah, we are really weird about it. And yet it’s a funny thing because on one hand there is the eyebrow raised. I mean, right now half of people listening are like, do I keep listening? What am I doing here? Wait, I’m kind of all lured. What do I do? And so I’ve noticed this really kind of cool, wait, tell me more. And yet we’re scared and it’s okay. We come by. Our denial, honestly, especially like you said, Western cultures, we don’t really want to talk about it, and yet we do want to talk about it deep down where it gets a taboo and it’s like, therefore it’s alluring. And so it’s this kind of neat dance between don’t talk about it, but can you whisper it? And so for me, I mean, I make fun of it. I clearly, I use a tone that’s irreverent and which I couldn’t not do, but I doodle about it. If you can doodle the grim reaper, I mean, you can talk about anything if you could doodle it.

John Jantsch (02:54): So I am sure you’ve done a lot of, there are a lot of texts that have dealt with this. One of my actual favorites is, it’s going to sound really creepy, but the Tibetan Book of Death is actually an amazing work. And I feel like your book is kind of the Tibetan book of death with humor.

Jodi Wellman (03:09): You know what? I’m going to log that one. That’s the compliment I’ve received of the week woman.

John Jantsch (03:13): So I suggest if folks want to pick up Jodi’s book, I suggest you get the audio book because it’s basically a standup routine.

Jodi Wellman (03:21): Thank you for saying that. We do have a lot of fun. There are a lot of F-bombs. And I mean, if we’re talking about the fact that we’re all totally going to die, and I think you’re hinting at this, we’re talking about death in a way that is not just to talk about death, even though it is sensational and ridiculous, it’s in service of carpe diem of living before we die. But we need the prod, we need the cattle prod, or else we do just take life for granted. Do you find that?

John Jantsch (03:46): Yeah, and I think particularly, so you talk about 4,000 Mondays. I’m on the three digits probably of Mondays. So it’s certainly been a wake up for me. And I think a lot of people in my position in life, I do think a lot of people particularly, I mean we don’t think about it all. The first 1000, right? 2000 through 3000. I think that’s where everybody gets stuck in, well, this is what I’m doing. You use the stapler idea that maybe you could actually recount that story in your own unique way to talk about that idea of just being stuck.

Jodi Wellman (04:17): Yes. Well, here I was in my corporate existence, things were good, but they weren’t really adding up how you’re in life and you’re like, why am I not happier? The trappings of success. I wanted to make a change, but I didn’t know what to do. And so I remember being at my desk and I was stapling stuff together, and lo and behold, I run out of staples. That’s no big deal. All right? I get up, I go find the storage room, I get a row of staples, and I replace it in my stapler. And I distinctly remember saying to myself, if I’m still here, by the time this row of staples is here, I better not be. And I felt encouraged by this notion like, oh, I’ve got a 200 staple deadline only. The thing is, John, is I did nothing about it. So about a year goes by, I’m at my desk again, ready to blow my head off, but pretending everyone thought I was engaged. And then I stapled more pages together and my stapler runs out, and I felt sick to my stomach, but obviously I was hoping to be saved. I was hoping someone would headhunt me and pluck me out of this quiet life of desperation when oh my gosh, I had to learn that lesson. And the truth is, I reloaded that stapler like three times

John Jantsch (05:23): Before, and staplers weren’t exactly having a day still, right? I mean, there weren’t a lot of things that we were stapling anymore.

Jodi Wellman (05:30): No, yes, this is an indication of several years. But I needed to learn that in a way, holy, why can we have agency? We have to clue in sometimes to where we are feeling like we are settling in life. That for me, is a real warning sign if we’re settling and tolerating for long. Oh my gosh, back to this idea that life’s short. Let’s do the thing even though it’s hard to just take the plunge and take the risk to shake it up and find more happiness.

John Jantsch (05:56): So there are a lot of examples, and you have some in the book, near death certainly wakes people up, right? Going bankrupt wakes people up. I mean, there are a lot of things where comfort is actually kind of like the enemy, right?

Jodi Wellman (06:09): Oh, you said it so well. I mean, I love a good comfort zone. Give me a fleece blanket and I, I’m under it. And it doesn’t do much for making stuff happen in life. So these are called boundary situations in psychology where it could be a big birthday, it could be retirement, it could be a loss of a job. Any rite of passage in life that jolts us a little bit to go, whoa, my world has been moved. Maybe it is a bit of an existential reminder when you have the big birthday, but those are important to be super honest. I mean, a lot of us in the science of positive psychology, we talk, it’s like a crappy reality, but it’s the crappy stuff that elicits the most meaning in life. And most of us will, we need the impetus, we need the inciting event, and we’re just not motivated enough to do it on our own accord.

John Jantsch (06:57): So I mean, the person that you described is stuck in a job, stuck in a marriage, stuck in whatever. Is the fear of leaving that so much scarier than just staying put? That’s kind of a vice, isn’t it?

Jodi Wellman (07:10): Absolutely is. And this notion, as I said in my TEDx talk, this line I still think is really important. And it’s like our fear of death is rivaled only by our fear of living. Most of us are not pleased about the idea of death or of public speaking, but we can at least deny and get around that. But the idea to commit and participate and maybe make some bold choices, even though we know they’re the ones that are probably going to be the best for us, the ones that, again, back to regret, you started our conversation by outlining the books about avoiding regret. It’s like when you’re lying there, hopefully lots of morphine coursing through your veins at the end would be there with their vein thing where you’re like, I just regret not doing that. And if that could be the case, now’s your chance to course correct it and maybe take action on it. Literally starting this afternoon,

John Jantsch (08:01): And I’m probably guessing it is not. I just wished I would’ve worked a few more hours,

Jodi Wellman (08:07): Only I’d answered more emails.

John Jantsch (08:09): So you have some quotes in here. One of my favorites in this topic, I believe is attributed to EE Cummings, the poet, and he said, most of us will regret on our deathbeds, not our sins of commission, but our sins of omission. And I think that to me beautifully wraps that up. The things we didn’t do, not the bad things we did, but the things we just didn’t get around to.

Jodi Wellman (08:29): It’s so true.

John Jantsch (08:30): Yeah. So you cite, there’s a lot of literature really on this. Ryan Holidays stoics, you put Mente Maori in there. That’s been a symbol that he’s used in his writing. I had Oliver Berkman on the show, 4,000 weeks, I think it is. And so is there something going on that is causing people more to consider this, to write about this, or have I just noticed it more recently?

Jodi Wellman (08:58): Yeah, you’re just tuned into it with those triple digits.

John Jantsch (09:00): That’s right.

Jodi Wellman (09:01): Yeah. No. Well, I believe that there has been, again, this equal kind of repelling and yet fascination with death. But let’s just be honest. I mean nothing like a global pandemic to wake us up to our temporary nature. So I do think that has tuned us in a little bit more to, whoa, whoa. The things I thought were, we do this delusional thing where we like to think, oh, I’ll have time to do it later and later is very elusive and it’s very comforting and fuzzy. And now whether it was the pandemic did help us go, wait, I want to reorganize my priorities, and maybe now that means that I have to take it more seriously. Yeah,

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Jodi Wellman (11:13): Yeah, I mean, that would be one hell of a month

John Jantsch (11:16): Because

Jodi Wellman (11:17): I think you would whoa, the party and then you would drain your bank account and you would probably ostracize yourself from all of your friends potentially, and certainly your partner. And yeah, here’s where I look at this. There is a potential for some people who maybe are a little more impulsive and maybe don’t have as good of a self-management skills about the idea, do I go and spend more money now to enjoy my life and then maybe risk not having as much later, or do I save every penny I have so that I make sure I’m comfortable in retirement and live life then, which we all know is, but then I’m going to be, again, wasting my life and living small. Now, it’s always going to be the awkward balancing act. And my shortcut to finding the answer to that is about asking yourself what you would regret and what you would regret doing and not doing.

(12:07): So there’s one woman I know who is, she’s planning a really big expensive family reunion trip. She’s going to finance it and take her family on a really fabulous cruise. And she said, I’ve done the math, and her grandma’s about to die. So there’s a bit of a sense of urgency, nothing like death to prod us along again there, John. So she’s like, I’ve done this and I’ve calculated it. It’s a big deal for me to do this financially and with time off. And she’s like, I would regret not doing it. But she also knows that by doing it, she’s not going to compromise her retirement or she’s not going to not pay the mortgage for seven months because she took her family on this cruise. So these are about choices where it’s like, am I on the verge? Is it still technically responsible, or is this going to cause more anxiety and peril because well, wow, on a whim, kids, we’re just going to move to the Croatian coast, but you haven’t planned any immigration stuff and next thing you know, that’s going to be a bigger problem. So I do think it’s always about what would I regret doing and what would I regret not doing, and am I going to blow up my life later?

John Jantsch (13:08): So the middle ground, I suppose, is living astonishingly alive. Perhaps somebody comes to you and says, they probably just come to you saying, I have a feeling I feel stuck, or I feel like something’s missing or whatever. How do you help them unpack and find and reroute the course, I guess?

Jodi Wellman (13:29): Yeah, I like that term. Well, the number one thing is to diagnose the dead zones. Lots of tools and ways in the book. It’s in a pre-mortem, which is like, let’s look at your life today, what’s working, what’s not? And it’s about saying, whoa, now that I do this thing, I realize my social life or my lack thereof, or the fun and recreation category. Whoa, I didn’t realize that had flatlined as much as it had, and that, wow, I think I might want to pick up a hobby again. And so sometimes it’s about identifying in, you can’t unsee it ways about where your life is feeling dead. That gives you a starting point to know where that you might want to throw yourself a fricking buoy in the water and say, well, what would that look like? I also look at life in two dimensions.

(14:12): So it’s wider with vitality, which is the fun and the pleasure and the neat fun experiences. And then it’s deepening it with meaning, and that’s having a sense of purpose and good meaningful relationships, and maybe spirituality if you want, but it’s deeper stuff. And so for most of us, we do have a sense of whether we want more of the vitality and or more of the meaning. And again, that’s a diagnosis of like, no, my life is meaningful enough. I’ve got a job that makes me feel like there’s purpose, but I am just so freaking bored. I might want to add in a little more fun. What would that look like? And again, all we can ever do is one thing at a time. So would maybe in this example, hypothetically, what would one thing be? Can I get nosy and ask you if you’re thinking about your life widening with vitality, deepening with meaning, is there a dimension that stands out to you that you might want a little more of, even if it’s already

John Jantsch (15:01): Good? No, mainly because I’m very intentional about this. The one thing I will say that’s lacking a little bit, and this is just I have a distributed team. I’m here in the mountains in Colorado, in a rural area. I can go for literally weeks without seeing another human being besides my wife. And so probably forcing some of that interaction that, and I think some of us have just developed that habit because of this stupid thing called zoom. We don’t even have to go see clients anymore. It’s amazing. So I would say that’s probably the area that would come to mind first.

Jodi Wellman (15:33): Maybe just a touch more of the social side. Yeah, yeah. The antis shining situation.

John Jantsch (15:38): Yep. Yep. So you, I’m assuming that because you work with people, you’ve had a couple successes with people breaking through a little bit. What are some of the things you’ve learned actually from seeing people make a change?

Jodi Wellman (15:52): I love this question. Well, I think about in workshops I do, which is mostly the case now doing keynotes and workshops with groups and teams and events. And it’s like there’s something that’s really cool that happens when you socialize your regrets that you might be having or your desires for more vitality and or meaning and bucket list stuff. People love to learn and go, oh, oh, that’s right. I wanted to learn how to speak Italian too. And all of a sudden, everyone’s adding to their lists. There was a group I worked with recently that did this really cool thing, which is kind of what I advocate, but they actually did it, which is what if you supported each other in living these full lives? Oh, outside of the confines of work. Because the presumption, and this is based in research, which I go into in a hopefully not boring way, is about how if you’re happy and well-rounded and fulfilled outside of work, you’re going to be way better when you’re in work and more productive and more creative and this, so this group all committed to things that they were going to do to either feel widening, deepening, and they held each other accountable.

(16:53): So then I came back around one quarter later and it was like, someone’s like, oh, wait, what a rafting. I’m so proud I did it. And someone else was so excited because they rekindled their music habit. Someone else was really excited because, well, this person did the orientation to be a volunteer at the local whatever, because you have to go through all the steps. So they were actually holding each other accountable and high fiving each other for not just the work outcomes, but for living. And that was a pretty cool thing that again, builds trust on a team. Then you’re all supportive of each other’s lives in a broader sense.

John Jantsch (17:25): Yeah, you start seeing ’em as people. Oh my gosh, that’s got to be against some HR policy somewhere. So I think I said actually, sorry, instructor of master of applied Positive Psychology. So how do you take that academia and bring it down to practical applications for human emotions?

Jodi Wellman (17:47): Yeah. Well, everything that do, every intervention, every recommendation is rooted somewhere in the science. And it’s typically positive psychology, but it could be other branches of social psychology or cognitive or other parts of psychology. And so for example, if I’m talking to somebody about one little life tip, if you will, I call it like this, the lowest hanging fruit is anticipation. It’s having something to look forward to. And so I have this very simple intervention where it’s like, take out your calendar and you want to have something to look forward to one week in advance, one month in advance, and one year in advance. And these can be big or small, I don’t care. But that is all rooted in the science of savoring. And so I don’t need to necessarily give people the references or details, but I will let them know at the beginning of every workshop that it’s rooted in the science. And when I’m writing my blog posts, I will post it. I will give the reference. But I’m glad you asked that question because it matters to me that things are generally empirically based, not just like an instinct. Not that those things don’t also deliver for some people. There are some people I know who swear by putting out manifesting, and that’s really great. And if that works for you, do it all the time. And I don’t have the evidence necessarily on some topics, and so I just would not go there personally. Yeah,

John Jantsch (19:01): Yeah, absolutely. So it is funny, as I listen to you talk about the anticipation, I remember, that’s certainly advice people give when I have aging parents and things that my father passed. It’s been a few years now, but I remember them actually talking about saying, make sure that he’s got something to look forward to. And obviously that works at all ages of life, but I imagine it’s probably even more dramatic in a case where somebody feels like they don’t have much going on.

Jodi Wellman (19:32): It’s a really good point. It also has applications for people who have more of clinical issue in terms of mental health issues, depression, just having that little thing on the calendar that might be just a glimmer, and we’re just really simple creatures at the end of the day. Right? It’s like, just tell me I’ve got a good meal coming on Saturday night and I’ll live for it.

John Jantsch (19:49): Yeah, it’s our subconscious completely controlling us. So Jodi, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by. The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is there’s someplace you’d actually invite people to connect with you and find a copy of. You Only Die Once.

Jodi Wellman (20:05): Oh, well, thank you for asking. I am over@four.com and the book’s there and fun stuff. Resources, you can calculate how many monies you have left there. So no excuses not to do your mortality math.

John Jantsch (20:15): Yeah, there’s a lyric in a song that I heard the other day that I thought was so funny. The artist goes on and says, if you’re only young once, how often are you old? And thought that’s really like a lot of people say, oh, you’re only young once, right? And I thought, well, okay, how often are you old? I think you ought incorporate that in somehow.

Jodi Wellman (20:35): Thank you. I’m writing that down on my yellow sticky. Thank

John Jantsch (20:37): You. John Craigy is the artist, so go look him up. He’s hysterical. Too alive. Well, again, Jodi, I appreciate you taking a few moments and hopefully we will run into you one of these days out there on the road.