Dave: Hey everyone, Dave here with another episode of the Philly Tech Connect podcast. Today, I’m speaking with Ben Wise. Ben is the founder of Story, a ghostwriting studio that helps B2B tech leaders turn their LinkedIn profile into a growth engine through strategy, content, and outreach while adding as little as possible to their cognitive load. Ben, how are you doing today?
Ben: I’m doing pretty good, thanks. How about yourself?
Dave: I’m doing well, thanks so much for hopping on this podcast to chat. I love it when it’s a topic that I’m also very interested in. I’m a B2B founder, I have a fair bit of cognitive load, and I very recently started re-engaging with my LinkedIn profile. For some reason, I have over 10,000 followers. I don’t know why. I think it’s a fair amount. I’ll take your reaction as proof that that is quite a lot.
Ben: Well, see, this is where things get interesting because it depends on who those followers are, right? Are they relevant to my ICP and stuff? Sorry, go ahead.
Dave: All good. Yeah, like, are they relevant to who I’m trying to attract? Is that where you’re going with this?
Ben: Yeah, exactly. That’s something that we educate our clients on, like their vanity metrics, right? You could potentially generate millions of impressions by putting out text-image posts about why people quit bad bosses, very innan kind of HR stuff that appeals to LinkedIn’s recruitment routes, and you can go viral. But that might not only not bring you any ROI, it might create a lot of noise in your life and add to your plate because you’ll get all these notifications and people who have nothing to do with what you’re offering reaching out to you. So sorry to take that on a tangent, but it’s no, but it’s a point, numbers are very interesting, right?
Dave: Yeah, and I, you know, I’m in marketing, and I know all about vanity metrics, so it’s a very valid point you’re making. And I’ve noticed that as I’ve started to post on my profile some more, it’s great to get engagement, it’s great to get likes and some comments, and I try to, and I’m at a point where I can kind of individually respond to each comment or at least I try to. But it’s sort of like, hey, is it really your target audience? And I suspect over years and years of having this LinkedIn profile and doing whatever I was doing, I doubt it’s 10,000 of everybody I want. It’s some sort of random distribution. So, you know, somebody comes to you and they say, hey, I want what really what they want is leads, right? And they think that LinkedIn is a good platform for them. So how does that conversation go? How do you evaluate whether or not somebody is the right fit and how do you determine where you’re going to take the service with them?
Ben: Yeah, that’s a good question. So the first question is financial, economic, right? Like, if we charge between, let’s say, the average retainer with us is four to eight thousand dollars, does it make sense for them to invest that kind of money, right? What is the size of the average engagement for them? Is it a retainer? Is it a four-figure retainer? Is it a five-figure retainer? Is it a six-figure? I don’t know. And then, what’s their sales cycle? Are the people they’re selling to on LinkedIn? So when I’m on a discovery call with someone, I’ll unpack all that. I’ll ask a lot of questions because, since we’re month-to-month and we don’t lock anybody into long-term engagements, I’m trying to work with people where I know that it’s going to be a highly fruitful, long-term collaboration. And so, yeah, so it’s basically understanding what success looks like to them and is it realistic for us to attain those goals.
Dave: Yeah, it makes perfect sense, starting with the financials because honestly if the math doesn’t work, then every other part is like not really worth having that conversation. I find myself in a similar boat. I sell agency services at a similar price point. We’re an SEO, and you know, links are expensive, things you know, SEO is expensive, and it’s often sort of, you know, hey, I understand that you believe or you’ve heard or you think that you want this or you need this, but are you actually going to get like a good ROI on it? Because it’s very easy to spend thousands of dollars and then, you know, X months later come back and say, you know, but what did that actually produce? And then obviously, they’re pointing the finger at you. And similarly, we’re month-to-month; there are no contracts, so people can kind of cancel any time. So you want to be kind of investing in the right clientele. So, you know, let’s talk about the result side of things because, as I mentioned, with SEO, it’s always very difficult sometimes to kind of really determine ROI and things like that. How do you kind of go about it with LinkedIn? Is there some tracking? Is it individually tracking of conversations? Is there some pixel conversion tracking? Like, how do you kind of go about it?
Ben: Yeah, that’s a great question. So the main way we track it is, ordinarily, we have two one-hour interviews with clients a month, and the first part of the interview is asking them, hey, what’s been going on, you know? And part of that is, have you gotten any leads? We can potentially, so we have some add-ons, so we can potentially charge clients a bit more money, let’s say, to monitor their inbox or their comments and to send them like, you know, every week or a few times a week to send them a spreadsheet or whatever that says, hey, you should reach out to this, you know, you should connect with this person or respond to them; they might want to work with you, or they’re inviting you to a podcast. But it’s really, it’s hard. We can put, you know, we can put like UTM on like, like a like book an appointment or visiting my website premium button on LinkedIn, or CTAs, but it’s hard to track. And the other thing that’s really hard to track is kind of the lubrication, if you will, right? Like, let’s say someone is referred to you, they didn’t come in through the content that we’re creating, but they go and they check your profile. Your profile looks great. You have, you know, it’s congruent. It’s got great copy, and the content that you’re putting out looks really substantive and thoughtful. They mention that on a call. They say, “Hey, you know, love your LinkedIn content.” Would they have converted otherwise? I don’t know. That’s one of the challenges that I face or that we face, is that some of what we do is easier to quantify and qualify, and other parts of it are not. If you go to a conference and five people walk up to you and say, “Hey, absolutely love your LinkedIn content,” then you start a conversation, and you end up with a new client, would you have talked to them anyway? So that’s, you know, I’m being candid, that’s one of the challenges that I face in my line of work.
Dave: Yeah, a lot of it is building trust and credibility. That’s a lot of what leads to sales. And having a profile that’s active on LinkedIn with quality content is a piece of creating that persona, and it certainly deserves credit in the sales process, but it’s not as easy to track, right? You know, in terms of the content, you mentioned, you know, early on that like, hey, there’s content that sometimes can be viral, and it’s nice, obviously, to get like lots of impressions and stuff like that, but it might not necessarily be beneficial. I see it when I, now that I’m more active on LinkedIn, some people will post like a funny video or something, and they just, they get hundreds of comments, and I’m like, and I feel like I’m writing real, genuine, you know, from the heart, like value, value ad type stuff, and maybe I get 10 or something. You know, what works, you know, what, how should we be kind of thinking about the style that we create?
Ben: Well, I mean, you know, not just like the analytics and the math, but the strategy around, you know, should you have a little bit of both? Is it, or hey, you know, genuine should be number one priority all the way? I mean, what, when you create content strategies for your clients, how do you typically approach it?
Dave: Yeah, that’s a good question. And if you want me to talk about impressions later, I’m happy to do that because I have some nuance kind of frameworks there. But I think, so in order to understand what’s effective on LinkedIn, you need to understand social selling, and the foundation of social selling is that you’re not here for yourself; you’re here for other people. So you’re here to provide value to educate, potentially to entertain in an appropriate, appropriate or thoughtful way, and you’re, and the way that you, so another way of thinking about it is, let’s say you need people to see your content about seven times, but it’s not just seeing your content; it’s seeing you, it’s see you talk about a certain problem that you solve, or a certain way for you to, to that you help clients like them. So it’s really airing on the side of, hey, is my content educational? Is it providing value? Now, I would say that the one exception to that, which is something that we do for clients, is content that we call humanizing. So for instance, a kind of post that we’ll do for new clients is we call it a let me introduce myself post, which is with a selfie, or if you want, you can include your spouse or your kids or your dogs or whatever, and it’s like, hey, how’s it going? I’m Dave. You know, I’ve been lurking here for years, thought I’d introduce myself. And you could talk, you could talk about your hobby. You can talk about things you like to do outside of work. But there should also be some kind of or there should also and always be some kind of tieback to what you do. So even in that more personal content, or even if you decide to talk about a habit or a hobby or post a selfie, you need to go about it in a thoughtful way. And somewhere, there should be some kind of tie to what you do, or at least some kind of Trojan horse. We like to call it a Trojan horse, where there’s a line that says, you know, and we got this client these amazing results, but it’s kind of, it’s lowered down unless that’s the hook, unless the kind of post that you’re doing is here’s how we just helped this client, you know, like bring in an additional whatever seven figures in MRR, obviously, like, that’s, that’s crazy. And then like, here are the steps we took. And then you’re, you’re still offering value and educating and demonstrating expertise. So it’s really, it’s really about leading with value and with trying to connect to others rather than seeing them as this like commodity or something that you need to monetize. That will come, that will come later. There will be an opportunity in the DMs to parlay conversations to discovery, but initially, just be helpful, be kind, be thoughtful. I don’t know if that’s too broad, but that’s how I think about it.
Dave: No, I, I mean, it makes sense. That’s the way I like to think that I kind of go about it. And, you know, sometimes you hear people recommend, or maybe I’ve heard some people recommend that like some portion of the content is educational, and the other portion is maybe salesy or something, let’s say 80/20 or whatever. But it sounds like the way you describe it, the content should rarely, if ever, be like very salesy. It could maybe have an angle that’s salesy, you know, it could be about a case study or results or something that would genuinely lead someone to be interested in sales but not necessarily like, hey, this is my service, you know, this is what I charge, you know, is anybody interested type of a thing, like never just so on the nose, right?
Ben: Yeah, I would say, yeah, I would say with the caveat that so it depends on a few things. First of all, it depends on whether you already have like a very engaged following, which is hard to accomplish. If you do, it’s easier to just say, hey, who wants to work with me, right? But it’s, that exists a longer continuum, right? Like, you can, you can start out with some kind of story of, or you can talk about the way you’re thinking about the coming months, and you can say, hey, and we have, you know, like, what like, we have room to onboard like one more client in this month, and, and here’s what we can do for you. And so it’s, I’m hesitant to give like blanket advice of never be salesy or direct, but it’s kind of, I mean, think about how you would go about things in person, right? You’re not just going to walk up to someone in a conference and say, hey, buy my service. You’re, you’re going to try to connect with them and then see if it’s kind of appropriate to, to talk about what you do and, and, and how your service can help them.
Dave: Yeah, let’s talk a little bit about the metrics because you mentioned impressions, and, you know, as I’ve been more active on LinkedIn, I’m seeing the various analytics which LinkedIn provides, which I think are pretty good. You know, they’ll tell you about impressions for your post, they’ll tell you about profile views, maybe some other things. What’s the stuff that you pay attention, you know, and everything’s been like going up basically now that I’ve started kind of being active, but of course, you know, thank you. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, I’m not saying it’s, uh, money is falling from the trees, but you get the idea that like engagement, you’re in the right direction.
Ben: Cool, it’s heading in the right direction. So, you know, I’m curious how you think about metrics. Which ones within LinkedIn tend to be more vanity? Which ones do you pay attention to? Are there some mix of metrics, like a conversion rate from impressions to post views or something, that profile views that is that maybe LinkedIn doesn’t show but you pay attention to? Tell us a little bit more about metrics.
Dave: Sure. So imagine there’s a continuum, and one end of it is zero impressions, and the other is a billion. So you, you probably don’t want to be, you don’t want to be in the zero because then that means that no one’s reading your content, and even if it, I mean, obviously, if it’s great content, people will read it, but then, like, no eyeballs, right? Like, if you make a sales pitch in, in alone in the forest, right? On the other end, you probably don’t want a huge number of impressions unless you got there by putting out, paradoxically, content that wasn’t designed to, to, to get so many impressions, right? Like, you probably don’t want to put out the funny videos or whatever or the inane inspirational stuff that’ll get you a lot of lots of eyeballs if you’re, if you are a leader or, you know, an executive or a founder in B2B or tech. So let me try to explain by giving two examples of existing clients. So we have one client, and they sell um Intel, like MarTech, you know, marketing technology Intel to help vendors um win RFPs with like huge brands, right? So think about, hey, you want to be Gap’s next whatever, like retention, customer retention platform, or email or whatever, right? So if you come into that RFP with Intel and what’s working for them or not, then you, so for that client, we don’t really optimize for as many impressions as possible. We, in fact, we just had a post last week, I think, that got like 13 likes and 15 comments that got them a lead because we also built their network. We also connected with the kinds of individuals that we would want to see that content, and the way the LinkedIn algorithm works is if you make a new connection, it’ll prioritize your content in their feed and vice versa. And also, in general, your content is prioritized in the feed of first-degree connections. So for that person, we don’t necessarily need to be creating content that’s going to get a lot of eyeballs. We just need to speak to exactly like, hey, if you’re thinking of applying to this RFP, you know, we just kind of need to provide them some value but tease the rest. Now, we have another client that has like a SaaS solution where your subscription is $50 a month, right? So if they’re paying us thousands of dollars, we need to rely more on LinkedIn’s discovery feature. And when I say discovery, I mean having your content served to second and third-plus degree connections. That requires the content to be compelling and engaging enough, right? We’re always optimizing for that, but in, in, in the case of that client, it’s not that we’re going to try to make things go viral, but we almost have to get the content. We almost have to kind of like package it or, or, or optimize it so that people who are not connected to that person see it for the ROI to make sense, for them to get enough new customers for their SaaS solution to pay for our engagement. Does, is that, I mean, it’s, it’s pretty nuanced and complex, but does that, does that paint like a, some, does that give some kind of clarity over that?
Dave: I think I get it. Of course, you know, like, I’m coming from an area where I, you know, this is sort of my domain. You know, as for listeners, hopefully, some will, some will kind of catch, uh, catch the thought process there. Last, last question, really, to, to kind of ask here because we didn’t really speak so much about profiles. You know, I, I hate to say, “What’s the biggest mistake everybody’s making?” But what are sort of the common things, you know, a new client kind of comes on board, and nine times out of 10, they’re maybe not doing XYZ with their profile that you immediately know that you want to fix?
Ben: So you mean a client of ours versus just in general on LinkedIn?
Dave: Well, anybody who honestly is making an anyone who wants to use LinkedIn to generate leads, you know, let’s put it that way. A potential client.
Ben: I would say number one is that you haven’t optimized your profile. I go into your profile, and I have no idea what you do. I have no idea how to do business with you. Like three seconds in, I’m like, I’m out of here. You lost me. You lost that opportunity. That’s number one. Number two is not having a strategy. Simply putting out content for the sake of putting out content, that’s not going to work. You need to have a strategy. You need to sit down and think, hey, what are my content pillars? What should I be thinking about? What are my aims, content pillars tied to, to aims? Number three is that you need to treat it as a community. You can’t just come in, drop content, and expect leads to come in. Spend some time on the platform, engage with other people’s content, ideally people you want as customers, but even if not, right? Like, start to develop that, you know, reciprocity, so other people also engage with your content, and so that you develop relationships. Respond to everybody who commented on your post. That might be someone who will either want to do business with you or who will continue to engage with your content and help you scale your impressions if you give them that kind of affirmation that you see them and that their, their, their input is important. And I would say that number four is not looking for signal. So you should not just be sitting there and waiting for leads to come in. You should be looking at who sent you connection requests. You should be looking at who viewed your profile. You should be looking at who commented and even liked your post. And you should be spending time every day, even if it’s just 15 minutes, to say, okay, no, no, no, yes, this person is someone I might want to connect with. I’m actually going to, you know, they viewed my profile. I’m going to send them a connection request that says, hey, name, saw you viewed my profile, you know, like, would love to know what you have in mind, or even just like, you know, like, like, happy to have you in my network, and see if you can, you can continue the conversation from that. I mean, I, I, I can think of, like, many, many, many others. Oh, and I, and the other thing is just like commitment. Even if it’s just two posts a week, commit to two days a week, commit to a time, commit to being there so you can engage, engage, and, and, and stay with it because it takes time. You’re not going to start, you know, you’re not going to become whatever, you’re not going to overnight.
Dave: Yeah, well said. Yeah, I, uh, you know, as you’re kind of going through this checklist, I’m thinking like, am I doing that? Am I doing that? And I felt like I was hitting most of them except, and this is an important one, engaging with other people kind of out off of my profile. I mean, I respond to the comments and stuff like that, but as you mentioned, you know, looking at other people’s content, leaving comments of your own on their stuff. Um, so definitely something that, uh, I can take home right away today.
Ben: Yeah, and there are two reasons that’s important. One reason I said is because it’s possible that they’ll start engaging with your content and help you scale your impressions. But the other reason is that LinkedIn has like its algorithm. It kind of categorizes you. It almost assigns you like all these invisible scores behind the scenes, and if it’s, if it quote-unquote sees, and I’m anthropomorphizing obviously, if it sees quote-unquote that you’re someone that you’re an engaged community member who’s not just dropping content but also providing value to others and leaving thoughtful comments, not just like awesome, but actually like, hey, you know, love what you said here, or like, hey, here’s where I disagree, and, and kind of something substantive, then it quote-unquote rewards you by increasing the, the output, like the, the, the aperture, if you will, of your content.
Dave: Yeah, makes total sense. Awesome, Ben, thanks so much for this chat. For those who want to get in touch with you and learn more about their services, where should they go?
Ben: Yeah, so they can go, um, they can either go to the website, which is storyd.studio, that’s the website, or they can obviously connect with me on LinkedIn. Hopefully, send me, uh, in the connection request, like some kind of message that says, hey, heard you on the podcast, so I know who they are. And on LinkedIn, my handle is Ben Wise, so B-E-N-A-W-I-S-E.
Dave: Awesome. Okay, thanks so much again for being on the show.
Ben: My pleasure.