LinkedIn Content with Impact - Tips to Light the Spark. Jess Cook (LASSO)

TRANSCRIPT

Michelle J Raymond: [00:00:00] Welcome everybody to the LinkedIn for B2B growth show. I'm your host, Michelle J Raymond and this week we are talking about content with impact, not just content because someone told you to create some content. So I've asked one of my content creator favourites, Jess Cook, to join me on the show.

So welcome Jess.

Jess Cook: Hi, Michelle. Thanks for having me.

Michelle J Raymond: Tell me something before we get into the questions, how did your journey on LinkedIn start?

Jess Cook: I started posting April 18th, 2022. And up until that moment, I had kind of decided I'd seen others doing it. I knew that I had something to offer that I was very excited about getting out there.

And I also never wanted to apply for a job ever again. And that was really the big motivator for me was like, I just want to do this so that, the same reason we do marketing, right? I want inbound. I don't want to have to do outbound job search anymore.

That was the big reason. And I just started, I set myself a goal [00:01:00] of I'm going to be posting every weekday that I am not on vacation or not on a holiday or something like that. And I'm just going to see what happens. And, a funny thing happened, I became a better writer, which was a side effect I wasn't expecting after, almost 20 years of being a writer already.

But that's what happens when you write consistently every day. You can't help it but get better. And slowly but surely grew a following and met some incredible people and got to do really amazing things like we're doing right now with you, Michelle.

Michelle J Raymond: It is amazing that the more we do, it's this constant feedback loop. You learn what works and what doesn't work. And sometimes that can be brutal, but those days are good learning days. If we look at them that way and get back on the horse and start posting content the next day.

But something you said about posting frequency. Probably as a LinkedIn trainer, it's one of the first questions that people always ask me. How often, when should I be doing [00:02:00] it?

Let's talk about content for impact. So specifically not just content because, but content for impact. So in this case, we want to grow our business. Quality or quantity for content, which has more impact for small teams?

Jess Cook: So immediately I lean toward quality. I think for many reasons, one, it's just more sustainable. If you have a small team, it's really difficult to churn out tons of content, that's going to work hard for you. So I immediately lean toward quality, but I think there's another dimension that's really important, and I posted about this morning.

I'm making up this word. I know it's not a real word. Maybe we can campaign to make it a real word, but repurposeability is a really important factor to think about along with quality, right?

So the idea being that you're creating a piece of content that's going to be super valuable, really helpful and deliver, insights and information that [00:03:00] someone In your audience might need to do their job better or complete a task that they didn't know how to complete before, whatever the case is, but that it's created in a way that you can then split it up and use it really wisely, on LinkedIn or whatever that power channel is for you, where you're distributing.

I think that's a second thing to think about when you're trying to think of what can we create for the biggest bang for our buck quality plus repurposeability.

Michelle J Raymond: You can trademark that. It's here on the show, so repurposeability is now yours Jess Cook. Heard it here first listeners.

So a question for you, do you go long form content first and chop it back up into smaller pieces, or are you taking smaller pieces and putting them back together, what's your way of making something more repurposeable?

Jess Cook: Yes. All right. It's a bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes, we'll have an idea and it's we should test that first. Let's make sure that there's something there that can be expanded upon. We'll create some sort [00:04:00] of LinkedIn post, just to test the idea, see if it has legs.

And from there like, oh, it has legs. Let's turn this into something bigger. Maybe there is a blog post or maybe we can do an episode of the podcast, right? I think then it's figuring out strategically what is the best format formats that can work in.

On the flip side, sometimes you're hearing from sales repeatedly. If we had a piece that addressed this issue, it would help us. It would be day and night for us. And so maybe that requires a longer form kind of explanation. An example we just posted on our blog for lasso was a really nice long form piece about the 15 hidden costs that are causing event company owners to leave money on the table every year.

And that was, a decently lengthy post that, Hey, now I have one really great post that, my sales team can use and point people to when they're coming and wondering what are the things that lasso is going to help me find that can help me recoup some costs or time or [00:05:00] liabilities, but I also now have at least 15 different pieces of content because each of those hidden costs, is a post, is something in an email, can be part of a podcast episode, right? So lots of different ways to chunk that up and use it differently.

Michelle J Raymond: Exactly why we're doing this podcast recording on a LinkedIn live, because I can then take this and it goes to YouTube. Then we can chop it up into shorts, reels, tick tocks if I wanted to. It's an article, it's short posts, like it's just the gift that keeps on giving for me.

But I think there can also be the flip side to that for people starting out where you hear Gary Vee, be everywhere. It's all about the quantity. Be on every platform 50 million times a day. And if you don't, the world's going to end. Your business will die and it's all doom and gloom.

And then what happens is people realise that in small teams, it's near impossible to do that. He has a massive team that does it all for [00:06:00] him, but if it was just him trying to do the kinds of quantity that he puts out. Yeah, you'd be having another conversation with us all, I think.

So I think, my advice to people is get good at one platform, wherever the bulk of your customers are most likely going to be hanging out and then work on going to other platforms, then work on other systems and processes to help you expand. I just see people, they feel like they can't have all their eggs in one basket. And then they try and be everywhere.

Then they hate it because they're not spending any time growing their business and it's overwhelming. And they're like, how do we come up with ideas for everything and everywhere and worry about hashtags and algorithms? No wonder people don't want to create content because it's just a tool to burn yourself out pretty quickly if you take that approach.

So do you have any tips on that for people that might be listening?

Jess Cook: I think something really important you said, Michelle, was the right channels because when you're in the right channels, it feels like you're everywhere, right?[00:07:00] If LinkedIn is where your your target audience is majority of the time and you are on LinkedIn and you're doing content that resonates with them on LinkedIn. They're going to feel like you're everywhere, right?

They're going to see posts from you at whatever cadence you're putting out there. Content from you constantly there. And so to them, to the people that matter, it feels like you're everywhere.

So I think that's a really important point and it might not always be LinkedIn, right? Like it might be some other channel. The company I used to work for, we had a developer audience and they're very into Reddit, right? And so Reddit was a place where if we did it right, it felt like to that developer audience, we were everywhere. So you just have to figure out what that is.

Michelle J Raymond: I think that's really important. And there is no one size fits all for any of this stuff that we're talking about today. Now, Jess, I have a confession, I spent 20 years in B2B sales, so I have sales running through my veins. And as I've confessed many times, I thought marketing was those people that got us[00:08:00] the promo gear for when we went to events and not much else.

Now I have confessed many times and said, sorry, but how do you bring sales and marketing teams together to create better content that's going to have an impact? Cause you mentioned you work closely with your sales team. So how do you bring the two sides together?

Is it oil and water, or is there a way we can bring them together?

Jess Cook: I think there's absolutely a way you can bring them together. In fact, I think you have to bring them together in order to, create content that's actually going to move the needle, book demos, get, deals in pipeline, things like that. I think table stakes is like, Just making sure that you're checking in with sales, you're talking to sales. You probably have a Slack channel together, right?

Maybe you have a weekly meeting where you're like, sales is telling you things they've heard pretty consistently this week on calls. You're telling them, what you're doing to help them make their lives easier. Like here's, a program we're working on right now that we really think is going to, help bring you more leads. So there's that, but that's like [00:09:00] greens fees.

And I think beyond that, it's like really tight partnership and making sure that when you're creating content, you're making sure they also have some skin in the game with you. And here's what I mean by that. So let's say you spent an entire quarter, and I can speak to this from experience, this is something we've done. You've spent an entire quarter creating Really great case studies. You like worked really hard to put together as many case studies as you could.

They're great. They're long form. You've got video, you've got quotes, you've got, really awesome kind of social proof stats. And so you have this great, like one page of a case study, right? And so maybe at some point you need to sit down with sales after you have done all that and say, okay, which of these case study stories, if you had to pick one or two, which ones feel the most powerful?

Like they would be able to be a great story to share with most of your prospects, right? Which of these customers feel like they do that for you? And where I'm going here is you're going to create sales enablement [00:10:00] from those case studies, right?

So what formats would make your life really easy? What would be just a no brainer to send to somebody as a follow up about this case study? Is it one of the videos? Is it some sort of Hey, here's one page that kind of sums it all up and that links them to the full story?

Think through that with them because what that does for you is one it brings them into the fold. They understand what it takes to create really good content. They start to see that behind the scenes, which I think is really important for a sales team to understand like effective marketing.

So they know what they need to deliver you in terms of insights and information to create that kind of content. But two, then it's not all on the marketer, right? If I'm the marketer and I go off and I just create what I think sales would like or would be able to use. And I give it to them and they're like, this isn't going to help us.

What does that do for anyone? I think, then you're at a point where you've wasted time, you've wasted resources. So I think, going to sales and getting their [00:11:00] input. Getting them into the fold and having them put some skin in the game. One, just makes your content better. And two I think it just allows you to build that partnership where like going forward, that content is going to be better.

Michelle J Raymond: That to me is just how you make content super targeted, otherwise it just becomes almost like textbook or cliche straight from chat GPT or here's the things we think we should post as opposed to here's what our customers are demanding.

And so for me, the more that you can bring these two teams together and I also would include customer service teams in that cause quite often they're at the coalface and having conversations with people and getting questions asked over and over again. So I like when I'm working with some businesses to say, look, can we talk to these people just as much?

Because they're having that interaction with, customers and potential customers on a regular basis, just as much, and they have a different perspective. And I think sometimes people open up because they're not trying to sell them anything. They're there to be of [00:12:00] service and listen. And yeah, so there's lots of different ways that we can do this, but I love that you bring it all together because we're not just doing this for content sake and teamwork makes the dream work as a guy that I used to work with taught me. And I was like, yes, that's it. Like that needs to be on the billboard outside.

So a couple of things that I noticed on some of your content that you posted about recently is that you think about how you're going to distribute the piece of content before you start creating it. Can you tell everyone a little bit more about that process?

Jess Cook: Absolutely. So I think where a lot of, and I've seen this with really big companies as well, right? Where people have a very specific kind of role. I am the editorial manager and I manage the blog. And so my responsibility is the blog and I'm going to write this piece and I'm going to interview the subject matter expert to get the information and then I'm going to write it and then I'm going to post it and done. My [00:13:00] job is done because that is my role.

And where I think the kinds of companies that get this right a little more often are those small agile content teams, because they don't just have that one very specific role. They have to, you know, write the blog posts and produce the podcast and, generate demos booked and they have to, understand how to analyze everything and they also have to write the social posts, right? And then report back on all that.

So I think, the old way of thinking is I'm going to write this thing and I'm going to put it in the channel that I own and then my job is done. And I think the smarter approach is, okay, I have this idea and the idea is X.

And I think it could come to life in the way the story needs to be told as it needs to include some information about, the background of this topic some current thinking on this topic, some really interesting ways that people have done this new way of thinking. Now I have some kind of sections in mind and I [00:14:00] know how I want this story to come to life. Okay.

That could come to life in a blog post. I could do that on a podcast interview. I can take that blog post and then chop it up on LinkedIn. I can take that podcast interview and I can find some really nice clips in there. I can use that somewhere.

So when you start to think about the idea and how it's going to live in other places, you really start to nail down the framework of the idea before you sit down and start writing and trying to put it to paper. And I think what happens is then you realise the way that it's organised is going to help you.

Before the show started, Michelle, you and I were talking about, you have the little questions that pop up on the bottom of the screen and that helps you, later go back in and find where you asked that question and where I'm starting to talk about this topic, right?

That is exactly the same framework that you need to think about before you put pen to paper And when you do that now, hey It's much easier for you Michelle to go back in and find those sections and chop this [00:15:00] up and use it in the way That you want to.

And I think it just makes it especially for small content teams, if you're thinking about, okay, I'm going to structure it in this way, which then allows me to chop it up and atomise it and repurpose it in this way, you're going to create that piece of content much differently than if you hadn't thought about that.

You have to understand okay, my H2's need to be very skimmable. If someone only read the H2's, they should also understand the full story. So I think it's just a real, it's a shift in how you think about it. If you think about how it's going to be seen, before you actually go to create.

Michelle J Raymond: Look, I absolutely did that. If you go back to the earlier episodes of this podcast, you'll hear that I would just ask whatever popped into my head at whatever point in time and the conversation went wherever it went. And that was okay, like it had a purpose and I was learning and trying to find my thing. Then I realised over time, if I plan out five questions and five seems to be the magic number that I can cover enough, but not too much, then I could ask [00:16:00] those questions, make sure I delivered valuable answers from my guests to the audience, because I realised that I'm trading people's time.

They're listening to me. I want to give value back to the listeners. And then also the questions. If I don't put them on the screen, trying to scroll through, trying to find where is that? What is that makes it impossible for repurposing to become something that I can do in a small team easily, quickly, while I'm trying to grow my own business and do everything else that's aligned with that, my client work day to day.

 And so it really, if you have a look at it, if I can literally break this down into five separate pieces, posts, topics. My problem is I've got so much content that I'm like, where do I put all of this stuff?

Jess Cook: And what a problem to have, right? And it's because you thought about it in a way that allowed you to have too much content.

Michelle J Raymond: Yeah. So this half an hour that I spend on the podcast has content going, for months. If I wanted [00:17:00] it to easily without even trying by the time I mix up different formats, different bits and pieces.

But there was something you raised a really cool point the other day in a story that you shared on your posts and when I scroll through LinkedIn and I look at the advice that's given out, all of it Jess is about delivering value, always value. I think that word gets used more than pretty much anything else out there.

But I feel based on your story, you called it confetti moments, those moments of surprise and delight. Have we lost that by just always focusing on giving value? Can you tell the story and just share with people the whole point and what really surprised you with this? And can we do that more as marketers?

Jess Cook: Yeah, I love this question so much. So the genesis of this story was I'm a huge Taylor Swift fan. I went, she's amazing. I went to the concert and before I went, I didn't want to stand in a long merch line and I, so I [00:18:00] ordered my merch before I went and when it came in the mail, I opened it up and I cackled with laughter because confetti spilled out of the the bag and it just felt very like Taylor.

It was bright and colourful and all these stars. And I loved that. And I just thought here is this transaction that I had with someone who I, really admire. I'm a huge fan of, and she, she obviously personally didn't deliver. I think maybe she did for me.

Someone on her team, put that in there and look, I'm talking about it now. I've talked about it multiple times, right? So if that hadn't happened, I probably wouldn't have shared the story at all. I think to go back to your question, the idea that we focus on value too much. Have we lost the confetti?

And I would say we need to dare to always do both, right? We need to be able to deliver the value, but in a way that makes it feel like we have personalised it or just added a little something that lets my audience feel like I'm talking [00:19:00] directly to them.

And I don't think that requires you To do anything like physically putting confetti in a package, right? I think that can be sometimes as little as using the language they use. Going back to, sales calls and seeing how do they phrase this problem? And then using that exact language.

I think it can be as easy as, we've done this a couple of times now at Lasso, where we've had some product announcements and our kind of launch videos have been short, less than 30 seconds, first person point of view, quick storytelling moments, right?

Someone getting an alert on their phone that their gear has arrived. That's something this industry, the event industry doesn't have right now and needs, right? And so to see that first person and see that short story feels like a confetti moment, but I'm delivering product news, right?

So I think there's absolutely a way of doing this in tandem with value. It just means you have to get so close to your [00:20:00] customers to know what those things would be.

Michelle J Raymond: They can be big, they can be little, and I sometimes I think it's not even the expensive things that make the biggest difference. It's the personalised touches that do. So I'll give you my example of this. I often give away copies of one of my books. So let's just say it's the LinkedIn Branding Book. And I can see Barbara's joined us today. And recently Barbara was someone that won a copy of that book.

Now I could sit here and say Barbara's in the U.S. And it's going to cost me, I don't know, $30 in postage. I should just send her a Kindle version or an e-version, which is far cheaper and it will get there and she'll get the book as I said, but I actually go the next step further and I personally wrap those, I write a personalised thank you note, and it is me that writes them and me that wraps them as badly as they are.

I am not going to get any prizes for wrapping things, but it's in my colours and I just go that little bit extra effort. There's a couple of stickers on there, [00:21:00] just little things that take it from being here's another book, congrats, you got a book. To here's something that Michelle sat down, Michelle wrapped, Michelle wrote you a note, Michelle wished you all the best. And I'm appreciative of the people that join in on my content. And so what happens then is it triggers these, Oh my God moments. Thank you.

Barbara, in this case, she also did a post, which I don't expect, but I always appreciate. But it's exactly what happened with you with Taylor Swift. And I'm certainly not putting myself in that same category. Look, we're not going to talk about the inability to get Taylor Swift tickets in Australia on this episode, or I'll start crying. Yeah, 90, 000 tickets. 80 million people, you know, that's kind of what it felt like. The odds weren't in my favour as they say.

I think there's just little things that we can do that, especially in an online focused world, if we can take some other things and just surprise people, I call it the pattern interrupters. [00:22:00] We scroll the whole time and it's the same stuff that we expect from the same people in the same way. And even little things. I had a friend of mine took advice and she posted a black and white photo instead of a coloured one. Just these little things can make such a difference because it was like, huh, what's going on here?

This is different. It caught my attention. So value and confetti moments. And I hope the listeners plotting and scheming some great ideas here.

The last question that I want to ask is I'm going to ask you to share a bit of content magic that will help people get more out of their content and it will have a bigger impact with what is known as the magic of three.

So for those who are listening in, grab your pens, grab your paper, get ready to write notes. Tell us about the magic of three and how it can help us impact our content.

Jess Cook: Definitely. This was a little trick I had learned. My background is in B2C copywriting actually. So I started out as a junior [00:23:00] copywriter on the McDonald's account and wrote jokes on Happy Meals and moved on to work for, brands like Rice Krispies and Pop Tarts and Cottonelle and things like that. And so this was, kind of a trick I learned back in those days, that people can both remember three things and feel like that is a substantial amount of things, right?

And so there's some psychology behind this idea of magic of three. So if you take this into content, typically what that means is when you're providing examples, if you can give three really solid practical examples, it feels substantial and someone will be able to remember that number of examples.

And so I think when we're talking about delivering value, if you can find a way to think of, three examples, or you have three supporting points, or, you're providing three quotes from people, right? Three pieces of social proof. Those are the kinds of things that help someone, just check the box that like, They're thorough [00:24:00] and they understand and I'm going to remember this, right?

Like that message is going to sink in a lot easier. So that's the magic of three. It seems, like it's going to be this big, huge illusion or trick and it's very simple and very powerful.

Michelle J Raymond: Simple and powerful. Two things that I absolutely love because I think sometimes we like to make content a bit too overcomplicated and that's where we lose the magic, and so to bring it back into three things, even I can remember those kind of numbers.

But I love that it has substance to it as well. It's not just doing it cause you're taking shortcuts. It's not doing it because you're trying to find a fast way to do something. It's actually proven to be effective. So I really love that. So I appreciate you sharing that with the listeners.

Jess, I always ask any guests that comes on the show for one last actionable tip that you think people out there that are listening that want to create content for impact. And, ultimately I'm all about how can we use content to drive our business [00:25:00] growth? What would be your one tip that you would offer the listeners?

Jess Cook: Ooh, this is a good one. I think in this new age of AI, anything that you can do to be original and human will make you stand out, right? So if that is original research, even if it's really scrappy, we sent this survey to 300 customers, and this is what we got back. That stat you own it, right? It's yours that is original and no chat GPT is ever going to be able to pull that out of thin air. And human, so anytime you can have a face, you can have a podcast guest, you can have a customer in a video or at the very least a quote with their picture, right?

Anytime that it clearly comes from a person with a point of view that's going to help you win the day for sure.

Michelle J Raymond: No arguments from me. I love that, because chat GPT could not have [00:26:00] replaced this conversation that we've had here today. So we have all learnt so much and I hope to see more people creating content where we can hear them, where we can see them just because I want people to come out of the shadows and start to share their voices.

So if anything, if this whole ChatGPT generative AI in general, encourages some people to start getting out there and not just getting lost amongst the robots, that would be my dream come true as far as, my role goes.

So Jess, I appreciate everything that you've shared. Thank you to everyone that's listened in today. It's just been so great.

And I'm sitting here plotting and scheming some more confetti moments that will come through in my content, because even I can be guilty sometimes of, just getting stuck in a rut and, creating content for content's sake, rather than the impact that I want to have on other people. So I appreciate the reminder.

Jess Cook: Absolutely. This was a blast, Michelle. Thanks for having me.

Michelle J Raymond: It is my pleasure until next week, [00:27:00] everyone.

Cheers.