LinkedIn Ads&the Blog Content that Books Demos - Ep 99 - a podcast by AJ Wilcox
from 2023-06-08T16:16
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Show Transcript
AJ Wilcox
What kinds of blog content reliably turns prospects into customers through your LinkedIn ads, you'll get the whole framework on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
AJ Wilcox
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! If you've been a listener for a while, you know, I don't do interviews very often, especially outside of LinkedIn employees and partners. But Parker on my team heard today's guest on the Exit Five podcast, and she dropped so much gold, we had to have her on here. She's a content creation master. And she's going to share how us marketers can use blog content, along with our ads to result in closed business. She's really opening the curtain and sharing her full strategy on how you can do it too. So get ready to take some serious notes. Today's guest is Lashay Lewis. She lives near Washington, DC, and has plenty of stellar case studies on how her approach works. First off, I have to tell you that Lashay is so my people. She's a hardcore lover of B2B SaaS, she's got lots of kids like I do, she's an entrepreneur at heart, you're absolutely going to love her. Before we get into the interview, I have to tell you, this is episode number 99, which I am so stoked about. But get ready because we're going to have a full on celebration for episode 100 next week. We've got a big announcement coming. And I don't want to spoil it now, but you're not going to want to miss it. The review we want to highlight this week is from user Daniel356. And sorry, Daniel, I don't know who you are from your username. So I don't know how to thank you personally. But Daniel left this review, he said, "Best LinkedIn Ads resource on the interwebs. The LinkedIn Ads Show is by far the most insightful and comprehensive resource to stay up to date on LinkedIn Ads. You also get cool ideas and strategies you can try right away. I can't think of another podcast or piece of content on the interwebs that provides so much actionable information to run LinkedIn Ads properly. You can tell AJ and his team spend a lot of hours preparing each episode. I love the structure, because you can always come back to any episode in case you need a refresher." Daniel, thank you so much. I absolutely love this review, because you shared specifics about what you love about the show. And I'm absolutely honored that you'd leave it. As an aside, I don't always know when I'm reviewing a podcast what to say or how to share it. So I have to say that your review is an absolute masterclass in giving feedback. Ahuge sincere thanks for doing it for our show. And you if you're a loyal listener, I would absolutely love to have you go and leave a review on the show. The best place I found to do that is on Apple podcasts. And if you leave us a review, I'd love to shout you out live like this. All right, with that being said, let's hit it and jump right into the interview with Lashay Lewis. All right, Lashay Lewis, I'm so excited to have you here on the podcast. For those of you who don't know, Lashay Lewis is the founder of AuthorityPlug. Lashay tell us like give us your intro, brag a little bit.
Lashay Lewis
Yes. So thank you so much for having me. First of all, like you said, my name is Lashay and I am founder of authority plug. So what I do is I teach B2B SaaS companies how to create profit driven content marketing strategies. And a little bit about my background like I've been doing this stuff since I was 16 years old. I started off building Amazon affiliate sites for all my people out there that remember those? Started off doing that. That's where I first really gotten to the methodology of different parts of the funnel, top, mid and bottom. And the funny thing is, ever since I started doing that, I kind of have ingrained this methodology in me, but as I grew in my career, I realize you know what, SaaS companies would pay me a lot more to do this than just me going off and creating these small microsites and you know, a really low percentage commission. I'm like, Saas companies will pay me a whole lot to do this. Fun fact, I did not like working with SaaS companies. In the beginning, I actually did ecomm in the beginning. But I feel like that experience in ecomm actually transcended to B2B. And I feel like it makes me bring a different angle to the B2B marketing space. It's not as boring and you know, things as kind of like the stigma that's out there, like, oh, B2B has to be B2B does not have to be boring. And I think my time and ecomm kind of helped me bring that direct to consumer experience to the B2B space.
AJ Wilcox
I totally agree with that as marketers when we start blending disciplines and blending skills, we're able to make things a lot more interesting. Yeah, B2B should not be B2Boring. Alright, so the reason I'm having you on the podcast, I got to hear you share a methodology a strategy with the Exit Five podcast, which is a podcast dealing all in B2B stuff. I was floored by what you shared and several members of my team were floored with what you shared. So I was so excited to have you on those of you who are listening, you know that I don't oftentimes do interviews with people that aren't product people from LinkedIn. So that should signal just how excited I am about the conversation we're going to have. Lashay, tell us a little bit about the strategy that you helped clients implement?
Lashay Lewis
Yeah, for sure. So first, to kind of bring it back, I noticed that there was a gap in the market, I noticed a lot of content marketers, and you know, even SEO agencies, content marketing agencies focused a lot on how much traffic can we drive a company, instead of how many leads can we drive a company. So just from that, I wanted my differentiator to be being able to tie a number to my name, and being able to say, I can drive you X amount of leads per month. And when I came into the industry, I seen a gap there. And even working in SEO agencies and content marketing agencies and seeing all the fluffy reporting and things like that. I just knew I wanted to bring something different to the space. So that's what really kind of helped my positioning and saying, like, I create profit driven content marketing strategies for B2B SaaS companies, instead of just, I help you increase traffic. I feel like there's enough marketers out there promoting, I help you increase traffic. But my differentiator is that I help you increase leads in the door actual demos in the door through content marketing.
AJ Wilcox
And I would say that's the biggest ask that we have from our clients is, yeah, get us all the MQLs you want get us leads or whatever. But what we are really interested in is we want meetings, our sales team wants to have demos or meetings set up. And that's what we're judging success. That's where we can actually tell our ROI. And what you're sharing with us here, you're talking about how you can actually prove and take content to the meeting to the demo to revenue. And that's why I think this conversation is so incredibly important. Tell us how did you come up with the strategy?
Lashay Lewis
Yeah, so basically, again, you know, going back to my history with building affiliate sites, I kind of just took that same methodology, and applied it to B2B SaaS. So, you know, other content marketers do and agencies do is they focus on top of funnel, so they're looking at the keywords with the highest search volume, the highest amount of impressions, and how many clicks is this going to get and I'm looking at it a little bit differently, I like to look at it like, instead of starting top down, I like to start bottom up. And when I say bottom up, I'm referring to the bottom of the funnel. And usually, because even though the clicks and the impressions and the traffic, which is what I call top of funnel metrics, it's like, even though those are present, it's like the money is at the bottom of the funnel. And the reason aaS companies can't really attribute content to revenue is because they're too focused on top of funnel metrics until six to eight to 10 months down the line. And they're like, Okay, our traffic was growing. This was great. But how are we making money? When honestly, you should be asking that question from the jump. I feel like asking that question from the beginning would solve a lot of issues that SaaS companies deal with. It's like, a lot of them don't ask themselves this question until they're already knee deep into an SEO campaign. And like, okay, great. Yeah, this is awesome. But how are we making money? And a lot of agencies and content marketers alike can't answer that question. So the methodology I like to come into every engagement is starting bottom of the funnel and working my way up from there, because this is the quickest way to actually drive demos in the door through content marketing.
AJ Wilcox
And then how are you proving these demos? I'm assuming this is a connection to the CRM system in some way. Like, when you're working with a client, how do you prove that you are getting an ROI?
Lashay Lewis
Sure. So again, you know, working with a lot of different content marketing agencies, this was a gap that I've seen. So what I like to do is I like to use Looker Studio, and Google Analytics. So what I do is I just really create a dashboard that is able to filter certain pieces of content. So when I would work with clients, or, again, when I was looking at content marketing agencies, I would create a look or studio dashboard. And I would put the content that I specifically wrote in there, and it would actually track the demos that came from the content that I wrote specifically, I love to do that because it shows the C suite in the higher ups like here is how content is contributing to your MQL and not just MQL, but actual demos that you have like coming into the door. So it's just really Looker Studio and Google Analytics is really the only two things I use. But yeah, that's how I kind of show like the higher ups here is how content is contributing to actual revenue.
AJ Wilcox
Oh, that's nice. You're able to set a conversion action inside of Google Analytics.
Lashay Lewis
Yes. So goals and events and just being able to tie that directly into the Looker studio so you know in a higher up and or someone that wants to get a deeper knowledge on okay, how is this content marketing working for us? They can come in literally see which piece says of content are driving the demos.
AJ Wilcox
Perfect. So I expect that when you go to a team and you start telling them like, no, your focus doesn't need to be on ads going to demos or something, it needs to actually be on content. That's going to be a little bit of a mindset shift, especially for the executive team. How do you suggest that marketers are positioning and messaging this internally to get buy in from the executive team on this mindset ship?
Lashay Lewis
Yeah, no, that's a great question. And I feel like marketers need to make an SEO mindset shift. So when I say SEO, I don't mean search engine optimization, actually means sales enablement optimization, right? So they need to start looking at content as sales enablement. Because in all actuality, it is. It's like, if you have someone, a prospect that comes through the door, and they're, they want to know more about the product, you can send them a written case study. Actually good content will actually warm up a prospect before they even get to sales. So I feel like if leaders start switching their mindset and stop looking at content as like, oh, just this thing that we're publishing every month, just for the sake of doing it, oh, because other companies are doing it, and they look at it, like this piece of content can actually drive in sales, we can actually use this to warm up prospects, at every stage of the buyer journey, you're gonna get a lot further than just thinking like, oh, our content team is just producing what I call company updates style content, like, oh, our company did this this month. And when the truth is, people really don't care what your company did this month. Like they care about how your product can help solve their problems.
AJ Wilcox
So true. Alright, so you've talked about the types of content and starting from the bottom of the funnel? What blog pieces are you suggesting we create? And how do you decide what blog posts to send traffic to?
Lashay Lewis
Yeah, that's a really great question. So I like to decide on what blog pieces to create. So there's a couple of different modifiers that kind of helps you determine what a bottom of funnel article would look like. So example, like a modifier would be like best, or versus, or top, or best product for use case. So there's a couple of different ways to identify a bottom of funnel term. And usually, again, like, that's where I like to start. Going back to your second question, AJ, I feel like ads can actually be ran to all types of content, top, mid, and bottom of funnel. So if we were to methodically go through this step by step, so usually, companies run kind of like brand awareness, LinkedIn ad campaigns to top of funnel content. So maybe they're trying to promote an e book or a white paper, very, like high level top of funnel. And usually a lot of companies just stop there. And a lot of time I see when companies are trying to get demo signups. They're just like, okay, boom, here's our demo, here's our ad, you know, sign up for the demo, when it actually shouldn't be done like that, you should actually be nurturing this person from the top of the funnel down to the bottom. So maybe, for a top of funnel piece, maybe if we were talking about sales enablement, a top of funnel piece will be what is sales enablement, right? So that's somebody that's not exactly sure what sales enablement, is, you know, maybe they feel like they'll need it now. Or maybe they need it in the future, very, very high level information. So a middle of funnel article and example would be like, how to improve sales enablement, or how to create sales enabled content, right. So they know a little bit about sales enablement, but you know, they're still trying to kind of put the pieces together a little bit. Again, this is the middle of the nurture, like this is where you really want to take the time to educate them and continue to nurture them. A bottom of funnel piece would be best sales enablement software, right. So as it relates to LinkedIn Ads, so if you were to start start at the top of the funnel, you would get them into a lead magnet, maybe like an ebook or a white paper, again, take a middle of funnel article and retarget, that same person that just came in through top of funnel, you know, whatever they opted in for. And then even from there, you can retarget a person again, with a bottom of funnel ads, so best sales enablement software, and you've effectively nurtured this person. Now, the sales process may not look that linear, but just for demonstrational purposes, just for example, purposes, like that's essentially how companies should do this. And a lot of times what I see is like they're only running like brand awareness campaigns, or they're only running, sign up for demo, It's like, if you were to actually create an entire funnel strategy on LinkedIn, you would probably be seeing more signups than you're seeing now. Probably higher conversion rates and lower click costs. But again, a lot of companies don't do that. They're just like, okay, let's try to get as many people into this ebook, into this webinar, into this white paper as we possibly can. But then they don't think about okay, how do I retarget this person? How do I continuously nurture this person down the funnel and that's exactly what we were talking about earlier with sales enabled content. A lot of SaaS companies probably already have the content in their arsenal to execute on this, but they just don't know that they do. But yes, essentially, you should be nurturing somebody from the top all the way to the bottom, not just like, pushing top of funnel and then automatically Okay, sign up for a demo. It doesn't work like that, like you need to be nurturing them at every stage of the funnel.
AJ Wilcox
And in this strategy, isn't there a place for gating content? Or would you advocate like you leave this ungated all the way up until they're ready to schedule the demo,
Lashay Lewis
I do feel like there's a place for gating content, right, because we do capture emails and things like that. But it's tricky to say, but I think like a lot of content that's gated should be ungraded. Because to be honest, a lot of people don't care about the thing that you're selling. So it's like you want them to care, you want to give them as much information as they need. You don't want to gate everything. Now, on the flip side, again, there are some things that you should be getting again, because you want to get this information to be able to get them onto their email list to retarget them and remarket to them. But a lot of things that you have gated, you probably shouldn't have gated. Like a webinar, I probably wouldn't get that. And again, like, if I'm super top of funnel, I don't even really know what my problem is, and you're making me put in my email to sign up for a webinar, I probably really don't care that much, I'm not gonna lie to you like. You need to worry more about educating the customer before you ask for something. Like don't just come out the gate and ask for something like, even when we're talking about top of funnel content, like educate the customer down to a point where they're like, oh, okay, so I've learned a lot from this post. Now, I feel comfortable enough to give them my email. And even if I can relate this to my own business, it's like, I give so much value on a daily basis before I ever ask for anything. People that opt into anything that I have to offer, they feel comfortable doing it, I don't have to push them to do it. They willingly want to do it because I give so much free value. They're like if her free stuff, is this good? What does her paid stuff look like? Like what is behind the wall? So it's like a lot of companies just jumped the gun with wanting to gate everything, when that's actually slowing your growth.
AJ Wilcox
totally 100% grade, I find that B2B marketers in the past, we've been so in a hurry to gate things to try to get email addresses because we feel like that's what we need to do in order to introduce them to sales and start that nurturing process. But that also feels really desperate to be like from your very first interaction, expose yourself, tell us who you are. So if all you're doing is just giving value, yeah, as marketers, we have to wait longer to see the lead. But under your strategy, we may not be generating an MQL now, and then, you know, waiting weeks or months until that turns into an SQL. We are delaying that until MQL and SQL happen at exactly the same time, it's like, but now their sales ready. And now sales is actually probably going to close this lead. And it's a little exercise in patience, I think for us, as marketers
Lashay Lewis
For sure. And if I can relate it to like a real life circumstance, it's like me going out on a date and the guy asking to marry me after the first date. It's like, bro, let's do some stuff first. Let's get to know each other. Let's date for a little while. You don't make that ask right away, you need to be giving as much value away as possible. And then the person will opt in when they're ready to opt in. You don't force them to do that, because what's gonna happen is they're gonna get pissed off, they're gonna be like, you know what, screw this. They're gonna go to your competitor that has their content ungated, where they can learn more about the problems that they have. And what they're gonna wind up doing is rolling with a competitor instead of you. So I would definitely tell companies like consider ungating some of that content that you have. I'm not saying ungate everything. But it's like, you're asking for too much for somebody that's extremely top of funnel, it's like, now if they're bottom of funnel, they know what their problem is they're hurting, they need a solution. At that point, yes, they're kind of ready to make a deeper decision. Even past the lead magnet, now they're actually like ready to sign up for demo. But again, when somebody is top of funnel, like they don't care about your webinar, they don't care about your ebook, you want to educate them into caring about your webinar, or your ebook. And I just think that if companies made that another mindset shift, which is like ungate some of your stuff, it's holding back your growth by you not ungating. Ungate some of your stuff.
AJ Wilcox
And so if we can transition now you understand the strategy, you want to start creating content that is on gated, and we talked about starting from the bottom of the funnel. What are some of the tips and recommendations you'd have for a marketer? How do they actually go to start creating bottom of funnel content?
Lashay Lewis
Yeah, another great question. So if I could start with the issue, the issue is, even companies that have bottom of funnel content, a lot of them don't know it, but the companies that do know it, that content doesn't convert how it should for them because they're writing their bottom of funnel articles same way, they would write their top of funnel articles. And that's not how you would do that, because somebody that's bottom of funnel is way more aware of what their problem is than somebody that's top of the funnel. So when you start writing bottom of funnel content, you really have to get specific with the pain points, you need to get specific with the features that solve that pain point for that prospect. And again, it's like top of funnel is just like, what is this thing, the history of this thing, maybe topics, statistics, it's like very, very high level things that even AI can possibly write. But when you get down to the bottom of funnel, it's like, there's a disconnect they don't need. So if I'm looking for best sales enablement software, there's no reason I should go into your article and see any paragraph that says, what is sales enablement? At that point, you've lost me like I'm bouncing. So I think the difference is just getting the information inside of your organization to be able to craft bottom of funnel articles. So to dig into that a little bit. It's just interviewing subject matter experts within the org and just getting the information from them just the years of experience and just being able to extract their brain and put it in written text and be able to again, match the features of your product to the specific pain points that your audience is dealing with. That's what's going to convert not high level fluffy information, like they want to get down to brass tacks, like they want to know, at this point, how does your product solve my pain point, so get right to it, it's no need for an extended long intro or anything like that. I noticed a lot of companies make this mistake as well, they have like this extremely long intro well, you know, 50% of sales enablement, is based or they don't care, right, get to the point. If you're looking for a sales enablement solution, you're probably dealing with one of these three problems, pain point one, two, and three. Here's how you know, boom, some of the article and then get right into it. It's just totally different from how top of funnel content is written. And again, it's like leaders need to go through and assess how their bottom of funnel, if they even have any bottom of funnel content, they need to go through and assess how that bottom of funnel content is written. Is it written for conversions, or is it written as if I'm talking to somebody in a top of funnel article, very high level fluffy information? So I think the first thing to do is to like scan that bottom of funnel content and to see, is it written for conversions? Because just because you have bottom funnel content, doesn't mean you're going to convert has to be written the right way?
AJ Wilcox
Oh, totally true. I'd say it's deceptive. It seems like it'd be very simple to do, because hey, this is you writing content that's very close to your product. It's bottom of funnel. But then I can also see marketers probably making some serious mistakes, like you talked about addressing, like too much of a top of funnel piece when you're not in the mindset that your prospect is actually in at that moment. Yeah. As a consultant as an agency, when you're helping other people to do this, is this very difficult? Because they know their product better? They know their customer better? And you're helping consult like, is there a world where someone from outside could come in and help with this? Or does this need to be done by someone who's internal?
Lashay Lewis
Yeah, that's a great question. So even as a consultant, a lot of companies don't have their information together consolidated. So even if I'm coming up as a consultant, I can still help drive the strategy. It's just the gap is companies don't have their information all together. And not just for me as a consultant. But even for your in house writers, you need to have all of this information together for them. Because what's happening is, they're hunting around or trying to, you know, if you guys were even doing interviews, because I know a lot of SaaS companies don't even hold subject matter, expert interviews, and they should, but your writers are going around trying to land these interviews and trying to do this and trying to do that. When if you had all this information consolidated for them, they could spend more time writing and less time trying to reach out to different stakeholders to get information. Because this was a huge pain point for me, when I was writing with content marketing agencies and in house at aaS companies like I would have to go and dig and search for all this information that should have been together for me previously. So I think that's the first thing. It's like having all of your information consolidated. So not just me as a consultant, but an in house writer can come in and say, Okay, here's the ICP, here's what they struggle with. And you might have different ICPs that's when it gets a little bit more nuanced. It's like, you'd need to have all of this information together for you know, consultants for in house writers, for freelance writers, for SDRs that come in that need to learn about the product. It's so many different use cases of why you need to have all of your information together. And so many companies missed the mark on this. I was freelancing for years and years and years and none of the SaaS companies that I worked for dot this right, none of them. So I think just being able to speak on that alone, I know I'm good. I resonate with somebody right now, you need to start consolidating your customer information, it's going to help your team so much better, they're going to spend less time researching actually more time creating high quality pieces.
AJ Wilcox
And that is so worth your time as a marketer, actually defining these things. Because I think, right, like first touch, first blush, it probably feels to a marketer, like, this could be a waste of time, like, Oh, I'm taking time away from doing my actual work to create the strategy and think, but all of a sudden, when you have that, when you have this document, like you're talking about, where you truly understand your product, and the pain points that your customers are feeling, now all of a sudden writing content is super easy. And you can hand it to an agency because it's concise. And it's really easy to write ad copy and create new offers. So I think this is absolute gold, but you've just shared
Lashay Lewis
And I think, on the surface, it may seem like it's a waste of time. But once you have all this information together and your in house writers or freelance writers or, you know, SEO agencies that you're working with get a hold of this information, it's going to change the way you do content marketing, it's going to change the speed of which it's done, it's going to change the quality in which it's done. Again, because a lot of your competitors aren't doing this. So if you were to actually take this advice and actually go run with it, you're probably going to be ahead of a lot of your competitors that don't have their information together, they just have writers on the team, they're like, Okay, so choose a keyword, write some content around it, you know, boom. And here's another thing he gets like, this is the reason I'm able to get more inbound demos from four blog posts a month, and others are able to get the 20 plus a month, it's because I focus on quality over quantity, I'm talking to the ICP, I'm matching features with pain points, I'm talking about the feature benefit, I'm talking about the future consequences. It's not difficult to conceptualize when you have all of the information together, because it's like whoever's writing, the article can pick and choose what they want to put in the guide. And it's like, it all comes from subject matter experts within the company. So you may not and I know another pain point was like, oh, having to view you know, interview subject matter experts for every piece is such a time suck, and this and that. But again, this is the importance of consolidating that information. It's like, maybe hold one or two or three interviews, and then take the information from those interviews and put it together, you really don't have to interview too much more after that, especially for bottom of funnel pieces. Because a lot of the content is the same. It's just written for different ICPs. And the angles might be a little different. But the general features and the pain points are basically the same, but the angle might be a little bit different. But again, if you have all of that information, consolidated, you don't have to contact for five or six stakeholders, you have this consolidated info, and you're picking and choosing what you want to put in the article. And it's not just random information that you got from Google, you got this information from inside of your organization, this is exactly the customer that we're talking to, you know what I mean, it's just so much easier on your writers to do this. And this is something else I preach as a content marketer, I don't feel like we're appreciated the way we should be appreciated. It's like, good leadership is going to make sure these things are together for your content team to be successful.
AJ Wilcox
I totally agree. I feel like we should have a culture of interviewing, this shouldn't be something that you're just like, oh, all of a sudden, we need to start doing some of these interviews with subject matter experts. I think there needs to be this culture of we interview our prospects, we interview our current customers, so we can understand more about their pain points more about what they're looking for. So we can give them what they're asking for. We need to be interviewing, maybe someone in sales or engineering or something. But we need to be having these interviews with subject matter experts. So you've totally won me over on that. I think that's super valuable.
Lashay Lewis
Absolutely. And you just saying that just kind of reminded me of something else. Like, even outside of subject matter experts. Like you need to be interviewing sales and customer success. Because again, you know, like I mentioned on the exit five podcast, it's like, sales gives you a vision of what life is like for the prospect before they have your product. And then customer success gives you a vision of what life is like after they have your product. And your product is the bridge between the before and after. That's storytelling. If you can storytelling, your content, you're gonna be able to drive some sales. But the problem is companies don't storytellers. They go on Google and they copy what everybody else is doing when the reality is those people are probably not converting so you copying them is doing yourself a disservice.
AJ Wilcox
Totally. So I think we need to ask about AI because you did mention AI. There's bottom of funnel content that AI can't create. What do you see AI? Where does it play in to this process? And what do you see it doing to content strategy and content writing as we go?
Lashay Lewis
Yeah, so I feel like AI can definitely play a part in the process. It would be like I mentioned earlier, it'd be like more top of funnel because the way AI gets his information as it gets it from the internet, right? So it's getting it from other articles that are already out there, the thing that it doesn't do is it doesn't get information with inside your organization. So it's more difficult to have AI write, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel articles again, because that information is not coming from Google, it's coming from within your company. So AI plays a good role when it comes to just thought ideation, you know, okay, so how should I, you know, write this headline? Or how should I do this? Or what does a good outline of an article look like? AI is excellent for ideation, that I will say, I wouldn't even say it's bad for top of funnel content, because it's good. It's only so many ways that you can write a top of funnel piece with like, what is sales enablement, right? So again, when we go back to our sales enablement, example, there's only so many ways that you can explain the same thing. But even for top of funnel piece, I would still say maybe you should hold an interview for top of funnel piece as well, because a subject matter expert may have a contrarian opinion or something different to bring to the table that no other website or your competitors or whatever have even talked about. So I wouldn't even say go full blown AI on top of funnel content, but it definitely can be used more with top of funnel than it can with bottom a funnel, most definitely. Even, just to you know, I know, we kind of been talking about this, but to kind of like, touch on this a little bit. Something that I would love to bring to the industry is an AI product that can actually scan customer calls and customer information and be able to help you create an outline based on the specific information of your ICP, not information that was found on Google. So it's something I've got in the works right now. But as of right now, as you know, AI stands it's like, don't use it to write your bottom of funnel content. It's just not there yet. And until someone comes up with a product that can actually do these things, like let AI play its part but don't think that, you know, you can tell you, right, okay, you know, use Chapt GPT and AI to create, you know, 50 articles for us. Because what's gonna wind up happening is, somebody's gonna have to clean up that mess later on. You cheeping out on your content marketing, your SEO is probably going to be the most expensive mistake that you make.
AJ Wilcox
I think you bring up a really good point about where I think AI is going to go in the future. And the Jordan Harbinger show, it's one of my favorite podcasts, they actually ended up doing this. They pushed all of their episodes all probably their transcripts into ChatGPT. And then they have this chat bot that you can go and ask any question about the show. And it'll say oh, and in Episode 364, they talked about this topic, go listen to that. I would love that for the LinkedIn Ads Show because by the time we record, this is episode 99. We've 99 episodes, and I don't remember everything I said in all of them. And sometimes I shared some gold and then have totally forgotten it later. Yeah, I love the idea of like, sick AI on your internal content on the output from these subject matter experts. And now all of a sudden, you have more opportunities to create content without having to just have a new interview every time you want to write something. Absolutely.
AJ Wilcox
Here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive back into the interview.
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AJ Wilcox
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AJ Wilcox
Alright, let's jump back into the interview with Lashay Lewis.
AJ Wilcox
So we've talked about how to create the bottom of funnel content. Do you have any tips or recommendations for us on how we could create more middle and top of funnel content?
Lashay Lewis
Yeah, for sure. So middle funnel content, what a lot of people don't know about that is that middle funnel content can actually drive demos as well. It's just really all dependent on how you angle it. So for example, if we go back to our sales enablement example, it's like, you know how to improve sales enablement or how to create a sales enabled process or something along those lines. It's like two angles that you can use for middle of funnel. Okay, so let's say the term that we're going after is how to improve sales enablement. So if you have a product that helps people improve their sales enablement, one angle you could take is actually doing kind of like a demo walkthrough of how someone wouldn't be able to improve their sales enablement with your product, and then have a call to action to say, did you like what you're seeing, you know, sign up for demo. Angle number two is you could take them through the manual process of how to improve their sales enablement, and then angle it and say, well, instead of doing all that, you could just sign up for our product, we do this than the third, we automate this entire process for you sign up for a demo. And I know this is a common occurrence because as much as I love bottom of funnel, like there are only so many bottom of funnel terms before you exhaust everything. But here's when you start to get crafty with angles and things like that when you move up to the middle of funnel, because there are a lot more middle of funnel terms. And there are bottom of funnel terms. But again, it's really all about how you angle that content in order to be able to drive that demo. And with top of funnel content. It's really just, again, educating the customer as much as possible in order to be able to get them into something gated not pushing the gated thing right out the door. It's like, for example, there's no reason you shouldn't be getting a case study. Like I don't know who I'm calling out right now. But underneath the case study dude, like, let it go, you need to enable your potential prospects to be able to get a vision of what life is like, using your product case studies does that it's like no, they're not going to put in their email to get a case study from you. Like that's something you should be willing and able to give to them to show them value. Here's how our company can help you. Right. So I think, as it relates to just creating top of funnel pieces, it's just you want to educate them as much as possible. Again, if you can get a subject matter expert to give some golden nuggets of information or contrary and opinion, just deep expertise on the topic, it's going to shine through your content every time. So different stages of the funnel requires, I don't want to say a different level of expertise. But it just requires you to get deeper and deeper as you go down the funnel. Again, you know, top of funnel content can be pretty high level because the person doesn't know exactly what their problem is yet. And then as you get to the middle of funnel, they're starting to Okay, I have this problem. I'm not quite sure how to solve it. But let me look and then bottom funnel like they're ready to sign up. It's just about understanding the buyer journey, and then understanding how to angle each piece of content based on where they are in their journey.
AJ Wilcox
And I think the mark of success of a good funnel strategy is you start to see demos along the way, even when they haven't made it to the bottom of the funnel yet. Absolutely. And it's because you're answering the right questions, you're addressing the right things as you go. Yes. 100%. Alright, so as the time of recording thought leader ads at LinkedIn have not come out yet. The the date that I've heard is June 15, of 2023. LinkedIn is going to be releasing these new ads where we can start promoting personal posts rather than posts that come from companies. How would you see this as affecting the content sharing strategy?
Lashay Lewis
Yeah, I think this is going to be huge for product evangelists. Because this is something I've said time and time again, it's like personal profiles, at least from what I've seen, like do better than business profiles on LinkedIn. So I think this is going to be huge for people that are product evangelists for their company. If you're in leadership right now, and you don't have a product evangelist, you and you're actually running a LinkedIn strategy, you may want to think about getting one because I just feel like this feature is just empowering us more. And when I say us, I mean like individuals, it's just empowering us to be able to really become influencers in this b2b space. I know that's something that's, you know, arisen. And you know, a lot of people think that's only for B2C. But influencers are actually rising in the b2b space, I think it's a viable strategy that SaaS companies should probably start paying close attention to there's a reason that LinkedIn is coming out with this feature, because they see what's going on. I want to say if you stay ahead of the curve, you're going to be good to go. I'm not gonna say like, oh, this is a, you know, there's a certain time period that we're going to put on this. But I would definitely say like start paying more attention to having product evangelists in your company, because this is going to do nothing but push that initiative even more.
AJ Wilcox
Oh, beautiful. Okay, so in our pre interview chat, as we were talking, you mentioned several times where you've seen this work very well with Facebook Ads. I know that things that tend to work well on Facebook Ads are probably going to work really well, if not better on LinkedIn Ads. Yeah. Can you share one prominent example of this process working with Facebook?
Lashay Lewis
Yeah, for sure. So I have a client that's in the accessibility space. So basically, software that kind of helps websites become compliant with accessibility to people with disabilities and things like that. So one of the issues where he had a lot of top of funnel content, again, a lot of traffic, but it wasn't generating any demos. So what we kind of set in place was to run Facebook ads to our bottom from a content that we hadn't, you know, newly created, and what that did for us, at least I found anecdotally, like it helped us rank higher in Google. And it also gave us insight into which bottom of funnel pieces specifically, we're going to convert before others. So the reason that's so important is because if you know which content pieces are going to convert, even before they're ranking in Google, like you can put a priority on those specific content pieces. So just imagining having a crystal ball, and being able to see into the future and knowing this piece of content is gonna rank. One of those pieces of content is going to convert if you're able to rank it in Google. So that's how even getting into like how I methodically rank content, everything I do is data driven. If I'm running Facebook Ads to a bottom of funnel piece, and I'm seeing like, it's actually converting from the Facebook Ads, good chance that if I rank it organically, it's going to convert as well, it's probably going to convert even better. So that's really how I put a prioritization on which articles I rank. I'm not just guessing, and I'm really being very data driven. And it's like, if I see, you know, this article got to conversions. Okay, let's put a priority on ranking this piece. And then, you know, I know we're talking about Facebook ads, but this relates to Google Ads, because I know a lot of SaaS companies are running paid ads as well. So this relates to Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads, like right, so it's like, your paid ads strategy can actually fuel your organic strategy. So if I could dig into this really quick, like, another I know, we talked about two mindset shifts already. Mindset shift number three, stop looking at paid and organic as competitors and start looking at them as teammates, right? So your paid ads can actually fuel your organic strategy. So if you're currently running a Google Ads strategy, go to your AdWords account, and take a look at the content that's actually converting right now. And ask yourself, can I create a blog post around the same topic. And the thing is, it's like, once you do create that blog post, and let's say you rank it, you now have two pieces of real estate on the first page to be able to drive demos. Again, it's like Google AdWords will give you a forward view of what is already converting for us. Let's take that and use that to drive organic strategy. And again, it's just a leaky bucket. It's like something that companies are doing, you know, running ads, but they're not using that to fuel the organic side, they're just like, okay, these are two separate things, we need to keep them like that, when in all actuality, a lot of your organic strategy is probably rooted in what you've been doing on the paid ads side.
AJ Wilcox
I love that. Alright, so if LinkedIn advertisers want to start using the strategy that we've been talking about, where do they need to start?
Lashay Lewis
If I could give a step by step order on what they need to do? The first thing to do would be do a content audit, right? So do a content audit of the website. First, understand if you even have any bottom of funnel content, okay. So if you do have bottom of funnel content is it written for conversions? Again, defer earlier into the episode of how I you know, mentioned that bottom of funnel content should be written. If you feel like it's written for conversions, that's when you start retargeting people that are already in your ecosystem with those bottom of funnel ads. So it's really just as simple as that. It's really no more complicated than that. It's just really about putting your bottom of funnel glasses on and just starting to understand how these pieces play a role. And then just start incorporating them into your LinkedIn strategy. Just like that from top to bottom.
AJ Wilcox
And then what comes next, I know you've got some cool resources that you've shared on your LinkedIn profile. You even had some posts go very viral, where you were sharing some free resources. Can you talk a little bit about those and share with us those resources?
Lashay Lewis
Yeah, so one of the things I didn't mention is one of the places to start is by you know, like we said earlier in the episode is like consolidating your information. So I want to say three months ago, I came out with a content marketing dashboard that helps SaaS companies easily be able to consolidate all of their information for freelance writers, for consultants that come on board for agencies for you know, whomever, so I have that resource. And you can find that at authorityplug.com/content-dashboard, just go there, grab the dashboard, it's a notion, it's really going to help you think through who your ICP is, if you have multiple ICPs. It's going to help you run through that has quite a few things in it. It has a tracking dashboard that lets you set up your Looker Studio to be able to see which specific pieces of content are driving demos. But all in all, you want to start with making sure your information is consolidated how we talked about earlier in the episode. So more than welcome to go and grab a dashboard. That's going to be the first step into everything that we've talked about.
AJ Wilcox
Oh, and this is such a cool resource. I want to encourage everyone who's listening, go grab this dashboard. Lashay is giving this away for free. And it's awesome,
Lashay Lewis
For sure. And for anybody that kind of wants to visually see this methodology in place, again, what we talked about how starting, you know, with bringing somebody in through LinkedIn as top of the funnel, and then retargeting them with middle funnel and bottom of funnel content, I have a visual framework that will be linked in the show notes that gives a wonderful visual of kind of like, how this would work, what type of topics are considered top of funnel, middle funnel and bottom of funnel? And exactly just how to, you know, run through this process.
AJ Wilcox
And it works really well with the dashboard as well. They work well in tandem.
Lashay Lewis
Yes. And you know, speaking of that AJ like even on LinkedIn, like I come up with visual frameworks multiple times per week. So anybody that wants to learn content strategy through visual because I'm a visual learner. So anybody that's a visual learner that wants to learn content strategy, or more about how a strategy can fuel your LinkedIn ads, definitely follow me on LinkedIn, I dropped visual frameworks every week.
AJ Wilcox
Oh, I love that such a cool resource. Alright, so we are going to link to Lashay's dashboard and the visual framework, as well as her on LinkedIn. So make sure you go and follow her go check out these free resources. You don't want to miss that. All right. And then finally, there's the question I like to ask people that I'm interviewing, what are you most excited about personally, right now?
Lashay Lewis
I would say, probably my fitness journey. That's the thing that's really been fueling me. It's gotten my mental health so much better. And I've heard people say this so much. It's like, just the discipline. And everything that I've learned from fitness is just bleeding over into business. It's really bleeding over in every aspect of my life. So the thing I'm most excited about personally, is definitely what I've been doing as it relates to fitness and mental health, for sure.
AJ Wilcox
So cool. All right. And then what about professionally, what are you most excited about in your business right now,
Lashay Lewis
I'm most excited about being able to partner with B2B SaaS companies on creating their content strategy, like, content strategy, to me is just so fun. It's just like my zone of genius. The thing I'm most excited about is my consultancy, for sure. Just being able to really touch a lot of people. Honestly, when I first started this, I'm like, well, you know, how much of an impact and I really have, I'm really just talking about marketing and sales and things like that. But to read the endless amount of messages I get on a daily basis, and the emails I get, and just how I've been able to impact people in their processes and how they've been able to just achieve so many results, just from the basic knowledge that I think is basic, but to other people's gold. Yes. But just from the knowledge, I've been able to share just how it's impacting people like it's really bigger than marketing. When you take a step back and look at it. It's amazing. So I look forward to continue to provide value to anybody that's willing to listen.
AJ Wilcox
Well, let's share we are cheering you on. Thanks so much for dropping all of this gold. It's all stuff in your mind that's simple marketing, but honestly, so much of this was groundbreaking. So thank you so much for sharing it with the LinkedIn Ads Show audience.
Lashay Lewis
Thank you for having me.
AJ Wilcox
All right, I'vegot the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.
AJ Wilcox
So Lashay mentioned her content dashboard. So check right below in the show notes, you'll see the links to her content dashboard. I also put a link to Lashay's awesome LinkedIn post about her visual framework, she actually walks you through an example of gongs marketing that I think you're going to love, so check that out. You'll also see a link to her LinkedIn profile o go follow where there. Ask to connect and all that. If you're new to LinkedIn ads, or you know anyone who is check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning, you'll see the link right there in the show notes as well. It's by far the lowest cost and the highest quality course out there. If this is your first time listening, welcome, and make sure to hit that subscribe button if you want to hear more of this. But if this is not your first time, I would encourage you please do rate and review the podcast. It helps us share the show with more people who are going to find it valuable. And it's by far the best way that you can say thank you for everything we put into the show. With any questions, suggestions or corrections, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.
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