Harnessing LinkedIn Events: B2B Lead Generation Mastery with Mark Firth

TRANSCRIPT

Michelle J Raymond: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Good for Business Show. I'm your host, Michelle J Raymond, and I am joined by the wonderful Mark Firth from the other side of the world and thank you for making time this week.

Mark Firth: Thank you for inviting me. I'm so happy to be here.

Michelle J Raymond: And you can tell where it opposite ends of the day. I'm just waking up, just had my coffee ready to go. I've grabbed you at the other end of your day, where you've had a massive one, because business is good. B2B is good and I am looking forward to sharing how you and I both use our B2B events strategy to generate leads.

Now, for some people who haven't met you, can you do a quick intro? Who you are, what you do and who you help.

Mark Firth: Hi there. Mark Firth, CEO of B2B Growth Team. I'm British. I'm here in Florida and we just moved here from Colombia. My wife is Colombian. We help small businesses, consultants, professional services to grow without being wholly reliant on LinkedIn. [00:01:00] And we do events, but we do it differently to Michelle. So I'm really looking forward to this conversation today.

Michelle J Raymond: And what was really important, and I wanna put it out there so people know, is that we do go around things very differently. You are probably a couple of years ahead of me in my business. So I'm two years in, I think you're a little bit longer than that. What I love about this whole process is that we can both be successful, go around things different ways, and our encouragement to the audience is, listen to both, choose what resonates and then implement it. Is there anything you wanna add to that, Mark?

Mark Firth: Yeah I would wholeheartedly agree. And in fact, I would say we're about to hit five years in, in September. So we're one month shy of five years. And I would say the only time that my business took off was when I took responsibility for figuring things out myself. That is to say, instead of taking the templates and tactics, I was like, I like a little bit of this, don't like this and that's when things started to work. So I'm looking forward to this as well. I really [00:02:00] am.

Michelle J Raymond: Yeah, it is that. It is trial and error, is experimenting. When it comes to LinkedIn Lives, even my personal strategy for that, I have literally tried, personal, Company Pages, registered, non-registered.

Mark Firth: Yeah.

Michelle J Raymond: Back when there was private, non-private. So I have literally played around with everything to find what works for me.

Let's have a quick chat about what have you seen change in those five years around B2B marketing in 2022? Has anything changed or is everything old, new again?

Mark Firth: Yeah, it's a bit of both. The best way to answer that question is I've never been a huge fan of social to media. That is to say, I don't love LinkedIn or any social media platform, but I do love LinkedIn and every social media platform as a tool to grow my business. And early on in 2018, I had a great conversation with a great mentor and he told me I was going about building the business the right way, because my whole strategy was focused around the social media platforms.

And he [00:03:00] said, Mark it's not going to be a good long term bet to grow your business by being focused just on the social media platforms, because it's really hard to get the time, energy and focus of your clients because whatever you're doing, we all need the time focus and energy of our clients. And it's really hard. If you reliant on an algorithm you don't control, notifications you don't control and the platforms change. And that goes back to the platforms are changing. They have changed and they're still changing. We'll discuss that today.

So what I did at a very early stage, and I'm very grateful, is I see the platforms, especially LinkedIn, as a place from which to grow an audience I own. So all we do and all we've ever done is focus on bringing prospects off there, onto email, to SMS and onto events. So I have a greater chance of getting their time, focus and energy.

So coming back to what's changed in 2022, we had the pandemic. We continue to see growth on the platform. It's now past 800 million. When I started 2017, the statistics had 500 [00:04:00] million. LinkedIn have pulled back on the number of messages you can get. They're trying to get people on their platform with all sorts of features and new projects. But at the end of the day, it's got busy. We can't deny it's got busy. So I think it's harder to get attention and we've had to find new ways to do it in 2022. That make sense?

Michelle J Raymond: Absolutely. And that's what I've seen. So I think we saw everyone flock to the platform while COVID was on, that adjustment to working from home. I see now there's a bit of a drain and a bit of a move away from it, eventhough the numbers are going up, I feel like it's a bit more of a slog for a lot of people, because we haven't had holidays. We haven't had breaks. We haven't had time away from the computer.

So I think LinkedIn, based on my conversation with them, are looking for different ways to make LinkedIn more social, more community based these kind of things that we're seeing come through with the new features. I'm excited to see the 'discover me' page, but again, I'm with you, we're relying on algorithms. It's out of our [00:05:00] control. We don't own it. And I'm only just getting to this stage now. This is why I wanted to have a conversation, cause I read your posts and for anyone that's listening in, you should go to Mark's profile, underneath the cover image on the right hand side, top right hand corner is a bell go and press that. I assure you, with each post, you will learn something just like I do.

Mark, when it comes to events, there's all kinds of different events that we talk about. What do you think works best to generate inbound leads? Cause we all want new business, right?

Mark Firth: I think you've got to do what works for you. So we started doing events because of my personal circumstances and what do I mean by personal circumstances? My skillset. And the circumstances we had, which at that point we were stuck in Colombia. We couldn't travel because we were mid visa process and we have kids, so I had to figure out a way, again, I always come back to the time focus and energy of my clients, because I'm not good on a short form post. I'm not good on a two minute video, I'm not everybody's cup of [00:06:00] tea. And I love that because if you stand for everything, you stand for nothing.

So what that means, in a B2B marketplace, people need to see me, experience me, get a sense of my ideas, concepts, which means I'm not going to do well if I'm just doing the posts every single day. Whereas some of you might be very good at that. That's not my strength. So I knew I had to get people on for 30 to 45 minutes.

Now we've been doing an event every week since 2018. So I now do a webinar and I've done tons of them. What I always say to people, if they want to get started, is to do a simple Q&A Session. What's a Q&A Session? This is the reason why I think it's so important that you should do this.

There's a book called The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes, and he talks about the buyer's pyramid and there's always various statistics around about the buyer's journey, levels of awareness. What they all say, we all know this instinctively on LinkedIn, only a small percentage of any given market is urgent. Even moreso in B2B. A lot of B2B offers like leadership coaching or anything, no one's banging down your door saying, please take my credit [00:07:00] card. And if they are, please message me.

There's lots of people that are not in that 3% as Chet Holmes says, but there's a huge percentage of people that are still open and receptive to information. So I'm not interested in competing with all the people trying to book calls. Not at all. That's too busy and it's a small percentage of the market.

I'm just interested in opening a relationship and the fastest way to do that is answer questions about what you know already. There's no preparation. You do the event, you invite people on for 30 minutes or 45 minutes. You have 10 questions written down because I tell you what happens, no one wants to ask the first question.

You'll go on. You introduce yourself. You'll go, who's got a question? It'll be silence. I knew that happens, so I prepared one. Here we go and you're off to the races. That's all I do. I now do webinars, but when we get going with clients, they just schedule in the Q&A, invite people.

I don't know why Michelle, maybe you can give a perspective on this, but they're more open and receptive. Even when we're inviting them to Q&A's, we end up booking calls. I don't know if it's cause they feel it's less invasive. I don't know if they feel they've got more control and they can see from afar. I don't know, but that's all I do. I don't bother with [00:08:00] calls.

Michelle J Raymond: I think it's a bit of a test. I've done the, 'ask me anything' Q&A type sessions. Really popular. I think they're probably one of the most popular types of events that you can hold. It's almost like the self-service like I come to the desk, I've got a question, the expert answers and I think it's that accessibility, we make ourselves accessible to people. We're not up on a pedestal, regardless of how many followers we do or don't have, we are there in service and there to actually do why businesses exist we're there to solve problems, for the people out in the world. And the exchange of money is why business exists. Like it is, at the end of the day, that's all we're there for, and I know LinkedIn talks about stats of, 5% of people at any one time being in the market to actually buy services.

So how do we nurture the 95% that as you said, aren't in the market to buy anything and, we can play around with those numbers and stats. That's not the important part to focus on. I think the importance is there's a whole bunch [00:09:00] of nurturing over a long period of time.

Ask me anything type services, you have to think on your feet. It really shows people that, you know your stuff because it's not being planned and they get value. Anything else you wanna add to that?

Mark Firth: I'll tell you what's interesting because as I mentioned, we've done this since 2018 and really the event is not the strategy. The event is the way to collect people's email and SMS.

And what we see is we see that people come on events like four or five events and they get to know you. And then, six months later, sometimes two years later, they just pop in as a client. And they've spent all this time getting to know you, and then they're like, yes, it's the right time. And look, I appreciate that people we need to grow a business, but for me, we've got to balance short term success with long term sustainability and growth. And I always think fast forward 12 months, we have 5,000 on our email list. 3000 SMS. And I always ask myself and I did ask myself in early in of the growth of the business.

Do I want to be chasing tales on social media? Because to me that's not a business. And again, I'm not telling you to [00:10:00] stop as Michelle said at the beginning, because if something's working continue. But all I say is, if you are doing something, there's no way that this kind of approach can't enhance. What you're doing and certainly give a safety net, if there is a quiet week, a quiet month or the recession bites.

So that's all I'd add because I don't think there's many businesses on the planet that don't have some form of data on their clients and own that data. Apart from social media influencers, and even they do. They have more sway. So there we go.

Michelle J Raymond: I also find there's a couple of things, it keeps me top of mind. People know that I'm gonna be there every week. They can see me, they can access me, they can pop in and out. I've found because I have a consistent time that I do this particular event. They look out for it. Now I see familiar faces coming each time.

I had an example just, I think it two weeks ago where someone reached out and said, I saw you do a LinkedIn live with, and they mentioned the person's name. And that was almost 12 months ago. And I was like, okay, I didn't even know you existed, but it had an impact [00:11:00] that stayed top of mind. And I think you get to see people's personality, energy, and what they stand for because it's those brilliant parts that, we let out while we're speaking that we may potentially edit out of posts, the thing that I enjoy is the free flowing. Events can be webinars. They can be lives, they can be audios. There's a tonne of different ways that we can do these. I just happen to choose it.

Okay. If your goal is to collect emails, if I've got this right, your goal is to collect emails and potentially phone numbers that you can then reach out to people later on, but before they get to this event, we can't skip over the step of how do you get people to your events?

 You and I were having a bit of a discussion in a post just earlier this morning. So I'm excited to expand on that.

What is your invite strategy to get people to your events and then I'll share mine.

Mark Firth: All right. So I'll tell you exactly what we do. We're pretty relentless and we've we simply take the [00:12:00] email. So let's, we do an event every Wednesday and by the way, I completely agree. It's funny. It's just there and people come and you start to enjoy it and it so much comes from it. So let's say they registered Thursday before they'll get a sequence of gentle emails and just two SMS to let them know they've registered legally, if you're using SMS, I dunno how it's in Australia, but in the states you have to give people the opportunity to stop.

And then on, on the day we, we have a sequence. So we did it today. And so we send a reminder at 6:00 PM the night before email and text, we send at nine o'clock, 12 o'clock, 1245 and 1259, email and SMS. We get very few unsubscribes. We consistently get 25 to 30%, which is about of registrants for the event, which is about normal.

But then the next week we invite them again. And we see it when we see people drop in over time. The point being that once people have joined that they'll eventually come to an event. Then for nurture we follow into we push into nurture. And then I think this is [00:13:00] something where we're both doing the big game changer for me and my business this year has been YouTube. We've just been uploading YouTube video , after YouTube video, I've just been doing LinkedIn Lives, talking, uploading it, no editing doing it. And we just send the YouTube videos to our list. For the nurture every once, two days, I think you are on it, Michelle.

And what we find. The click rate is higher than anything I've seen over the years, possibly because people trust YouTube. The engagement rate of my list is higher than anything I've seen. And I think it's because once they go to YouTube and watch when I'm on videos, when they go look for something else, because nobody goes and looks for Mark Firth right on, on a Friday night, they go look out for a recipe or they're looking for kids' nursery rhyme.

I'm smart enough to know nobody cares about me, but they do see me in suggested videos. So we're seeing like a hundred hours of watched time a month and there's no way for me to attribute the YouTube, watch time to the growth of my business because we can't link it, but it's changed it. That's all I know for sure.

And so that's all we do. Do the event, send to YouTube [00:14:00] invite to an event, send to YouTube. And so forth. Yeah. Simple.

Michelle J Raymond: I am subscribed to that newsletter. It's something that I did as part of my research when I was getting you on here. So I could look for cool things that we could talk about. So what I love about your newsletter, it's simple to the point and effective, and it doesn't take up hours and hours of my time.

That's why I can quickly snack size, consume it, move on, get on with my day when I want. We had a question earlier this morning from Mary and she said, look, Michelle, people don't turn up to events. What do you do about that?

And You and I, we put things on YouTube and have a follow up process. I have to confess, I haven't built my email list. It is literally being finished today.

So I've taken that big jump to be able to really nice then nurture people. And I'm super excited, something I know. I should have done and should have been doing. But I just had to give myself the grace to know that I wasn't ready to actually manage that and nurture that. For me, I'm excited that now I'm going to be able to take that to the next [00:15:00] level inspired by what you've been teaching us about, making sure I own my own list.

So there's lots of cool things for me. My inviting strategy is all through LinkedIn events at this point. I'm looking forward to being able to have different options. So I know if I use my thousand invite credits that LinkedIn gives me, I'll have probably around 150 to 200 people will accept. They will then turn into around 30 or 40 that will show up live.

Mark Firth: Nice. And then it that's good.

Michelle J Raymond: Then it doubles in the 48 to 72 hours afterwards. Now I think because of the time zone, like sitting here in Australia on a random time zone, the UK's not awake, US it's end of day. I feel like people catch up on things, in the next 24 to 48 hours.

When I look at the lifetime views of the people that come, that's why I don't get stressed, whether people are here or not. I appreciate those that have joined live, cause I love seeing the comments and the conversation. And I think that's where I love building my community [00:16:00] as part of my strategy, not just here's my events.

So yeah, it's a bit of fun seeing how that all plays out differently for you and I.

Mark Firth: Interesting.

Michelle J Raymond: Yours is offline and you see it and you can nurture it. But I just wonder do those people on your list have an opportunity to interact either. So that's just obviously where our two strategies are a little bit different.

Mark Firth: Yeah. It's awesome. And you to get that show up from LinkedIn is really high that's high.

Yeah. Look, and it's not something that happened overnight, there are things like quality guests, making sure I have the right people. My shows that I do by myself, outperform, most other shows that I do because people expect me to talk about company pages and I know when I do them, I go that next level, and so it's really interesting. I'll have on average between 200 and 400 comments per show, which is crazy.

Wow.

Michelle J Raymond: That engagement is through the roof. Again, this is why this is such a huge part of what I do because company pages don't get shown in the [00:17:00] feed, but company page LinkedIn lives look, there's so much upside. It's a little bit crazy.

 Let's talk about another thing one of your post slash videos that I saw, which really piqued my interest, cause I thought what I love about you Mark is you don't just regurgitate the same old. You always give me something to think about.

So I appreciate that. But one of the things that you said. Moving towards B2B events to generate leads more than Sales Navigator. Can you expand on that for people that wouldn't have seen the post?

Mark Firth: Yeah. So there's a book called Blitz Scaling, which I maybe right. I thought it's Reid Hoffman that wrote it, or maybe it wasn't even that book, but it's the story of Airbnb the apartment rental company, not a fan after my last experience, but I think we all know who they are and what they do. But less commonly known and is Airbnb when they got going, they obviously potentially their market is people that own a property, because they help people who own property to rent out their property [00:18:00] and make a profit and share experiences.

Yada, yada. So when they got going in theory, demographically speaking, because there's two types of data, right? Demographic data, psychographic data. Anyone in the United States owned a property, could in theory be a potential client just like on sales navigator is predominantly demographic. The group you're in arguably psychographic behavioral, cause it's the type of data, but it's usually old.

And had you posted in 30 days, doesn't really do much these days anyway, because just tells if you are active, it doesn't tell you are intention to buy something. So what Airbnb did is they targeted to get going Craig's list where they could find a vacation homeowner who had an apartment already on rental because that's an in that's demonstrating intent, a behavior, or at least the idea that they're prioritizing something and just like all business owners on LinkedIn, we've all got many things on our plate.

[00:19:00] We've all got different areas of focus. We've all got different things that we're looking into. So what's the way we can find people that are focusing on what we do. And one of the strongest behavioral indicators for me is to take advantage of LinkedIn, trying to build lots of virtual events. The last statistic, which we spoke about a chart shows 24,000 a week events.

I believe it's a lot more now that's March. So if you look at the events, people are attending. That, I dunno if you're in re retention and there's event on how to retain employees, they're not gonna go there to learn how to make cupcakes. So it's probably a good event to register for, and then connect with people.

But here's the caveat. This is really important. I didn't put it in the live, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna say here is there's a lot of people that that then go, oh, "I saw you at the event". I don't personally think that's the right way to do it. It feels a bit How can I put this? It doesn't really create the right frame for the conversation.

So we just attend, recommend, connect as normal and start a conversation. And [00:20:00] there you go. And oftentimes we've done that.

Michelle J Raymond: I find that's the same as when people connect after who viewed my profile and they send a message and say "I saw you viewed my profile. Let's connect." I find that one of the creepiest messages.

Mark Firth: Yeah.

Michelle J Raymond: I take the thought that if you went to my profile, It's really easy to press the follow button. You don't even have to talk to me. If you went away and it wasn't for you, you landed there by accident, or you just wanted to have a look and that's okay with me walk away. So I'm with you.

I found I only got onto sales navigator. I'm gonna say maybe four months ago for different reasons. Just so I could keep up to date with my contacts cause the feed just grew too fast and I, my systems and processes, hadn't grown with it. I find sales nav for exactly the same reason that it doesn't, I'm not a demographics person.

I'm a, I want ambitious, innovative and purpose driven business owners. That's who I wanna work with. Now I can't type that into sales navigator. So I feel your pain as far as that goes. I can't [00:21:00] find the right kind of person, and it's fine if I'm targeting a company, if I've done my own research or come across someone elsewhere.

But for me, I found it frustrating cause I don't think the whole world revolves around demographics anymore. Events for me, I keep an eye on who's been, I make sure I invite them to the next one. Of course, sending out a thousand invites every week. I'm not gonna lie.

There has been two people in 18 months that have said, Michelle, you're sending too many. So that two in 18 months. Oh yeah, I'm okay with that strike rate I can live with. But the upside. The upside is fine. And those two people, I just just walked away and went, okay, whatever, I'll just turn your notifications off.

Mark Firth: yeah, it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen.

Michelle J Raymond: For the most part, everybody likes to show up every Thursday and I have these cool conversations and we get on with life because with events, click attend don't click attend come live, don't come live, watch the replay. I'm like you, if after a couple of days, I let the LinkedIn live sit.

And from [00:22:00] then on, I promote the YouTube channel for other reasons, cuz I've got other stuff going on over there. So we're very similar in how we use that and the podcast and different bits and pieces.

Let's talk about repurposing content from events. Do you use your event content and put it out there in other ways, or what's your process for that side of things?

Mark Firth: I don't actually use. Oh, I do. I've of put some of the event stuff on onto YouTube as videos and that's done. Okay. But really I find it hard to take content that's designed as long form content, what's long form content? It's nebulous phrase. Isn't it. To me, anything over two minutes is long form content, four or five minutes, eight minutes.

And I'd like to cut up to two minutes. It's very hard to do that effectively. I like to to do that very quickly and get interviewed by people and then pull out the answers. So it's designed. I get people to ask me questions. I answer the question. We pull out the answer and there's a piece of software called descript.com.

It's $30 a month, [00:23:00] no commercial relationship, but it's just what it allows you to do is you throw the video in there and then you can edit the video by editing the transcript. It transcribes the video for you. So then instead of editing the video by moving around on the timeline and stopping and starting to see where you got started, you just highlight the the section where you answer the pest, the.

You press copy paste to new video and you have a video. You do that 10 times for 10 questions. You have 10 pieces of content in under 30 minutes. I used to have a video editor that it is just actually more inefficient now to have a video editor. It makes sense for me to do it cause I can spot the good stuff I can pull.

I can delete a word here or a phrase there. Bang. Boom. So that's high repurpose content get interviewed. And the other thing, could I just add the other thing that's good about that? Is it takes a long time to get comfortable on camera. It did, for me, a long time and I know not there yet.

Speaking to camera is a skill. It's it? It takes news anchors, years and actors, some of them are good at some of them are not, but if someone's interviewing you, you're speaking to a [00:24:00] human being, you forget the camera's. So just answer the questions and it's much better content. So there we go

Michelle J Raymond: Look a hundred percent with you. It is a skill that develops over time. I was not like this, the first one that I did quite the opposite and even forget. If I look back, I forgot to press go live. There's a whole bunch of things that happen and I laugh now and think, oh my God, did that really happen? But yes I love Descript. It's a game changer.

I use it exactly, like you said, I'm doing short video clips. There's a reason that we've had five questions today, so I can pull out the answers to those questions with your pearls of wisdom. I also use it for audiograms.

I use it for the transcripts so I can make my content accessible . It helps with the put captions on things, like there are so many different ways that you can use Descript. I take these LinkedIn lives I'm gonna repurpose it probably in a newsletter. I would, as I said, audiograms, short clips, it's going on to YouTube,

it's going on to Twitter. There's just [00:25:00] so many different ways that I love particularly live events on LinkedIn for me. It's not the only place that you can do things. It just happens to be, it made sense for me because my community's on LinkedIn. And I want to really focus on building a B2B community.

Because I think that for me is the focus of this year. How do you build beyond an audience and turn it into a community? And I think having people interact in the comments is the difference for me versus say a webinar or something where people can attend. I get to interact, but the audience doesn't interact with each other.

Anything that you wanted to add?

Mark Firth: Yeah. I think interaction is the number one defining factor and the number one factor that's gonna help you build your community relationship.

When I do a webinar at the start, I'm asking questions, I'm eliciting. If anyone's ever been, I don't feel I was ever bit to webinar, but we have 30 on today and there's just people we're asking questions. We're getting interact. Sometimes we bring them on audio. So interaction is important and there's just [00:26:00] a stream of conversation.

Those webinars where we don't manage to, cause sometimes we've seen everything, right? Sometimes we have a crowd that's not really up for interacting and they're never good webinars in terms of profitability, in terms of building the community in terms of growing the business. But the ones, when loads people interact, they're always fantastic.

It's as simple as that.

Michelle J Raymond: Every week I end the show with one actionable tip that you think business owners that are listening into this podcast, what can they go away today and do as an action that you think will really move the needle?

Mark Firth: I think if they know what they're talking about, that's the one qualification factor for it. Everything else is cool. Put it in the diary, put it in the diary for next Wednesday or next Thursday, 12 o'clock Eastern or one o'clock Eastern lunchtime, wherever you're in the world.

Put it in the diary, cuz if it's not in the diary, doesn't count Q and a how to deal with problem they're dealing with right now, ask me anything and go and invite people for the next week and be happy if you get five, 10 [00:27:00] people on cuz you probably will and just enjoy it.

Michelle J Raymond: Yeah, I think practice makes perfect. That very first one will be the hardest after that. It just gets easier.

Next week we're actually gonna be talking to Trevor Young about how you "Build yourself up as a credible authority on LinkedIn."

 Thank you to everyone that's joined us. Thank you, Mark. I appreciate you. Cheers.