How to Grow on Content-Deficient Platforms with Courtney Johnson

UX Marketing

Want to learn how to grow on platforms like LinkedIn and TikTok that are currently content-deficient? Listen in!

Blake: [00:00:00] Awesome. On the podcast today, I have Courtney Johnson, who is a fellow Austinite. Why more of a passer-by but Courtney, how are you doing today?

[00:00:11] Courtney: [00:00:11] I'm doing good. Excited to chat with you, Blake.

[00:00:15] Blake: [00:00:15] Yeah, this is going to be fun. Courtney is super active on LinkedIn, so that's where I've originally met with her and and decided to do this podcast episode, and it's going to be really helpful because if you go onto her feed, you will see all kinds of cool content, really great actionable ideas. It's not fluffy like a lot of other people's stuff, which I.

[00:00:34] Thoroughly enjoy you. You get a lot of meat in the, in the posts and a lot of specifics. So that's great. And hopefully I'm going to extract that for the audience today and we'll be talking about LinkedIn and then also take talk a little bit. The theme really is content deficient platforms, so platforms where there are more consumers than creators.

[00:00:53] And so we'll dive into that. But first I like to get context on you. So that we know kind of what your background is and who we're dealing with. So if you wouldn't mind just taking us through a brief history of your career so far.

[00:01:05] Courtney: [00:01:05] Love it. Well, I'm Courtney, as you all know. I actually started my career in sports marketing, worked for a lot of teams over in Dallas. then went to a few agencies, started getting hired on to build out agencies. and companies. Social media departments, you know, make them profitable, create service lines around them.

[00:01:24] And then I was hired on at scaled about a year ago to create the digital presence department, which is kind of the bridge between, digital marketing and sales through digital. So we do a lot on LinkedIn where, you know, building out sales teams, LinkedIn and personal brands. So it's been a lot of fun.

[00:01:41] It's been a wild ride so far. Working in social media is pretty crazy, but, I absolutely love it.

[00:01:48] Blake: [00:01:48] And then for for even further context, if you could just give us an idea of what you would consider your professional super power is.

[00:01:56] Courtney: [00:01:56] My professional super. It's definitely connection and audience building on social. So I think a lot of people, and a lot of agencies, brands focus so much on the content where they forget about the audience. You can have the best content in the world, but if the right audience isn't seat seeing it and it's not formatted in a way for that specific platform that's going to resonate with that audience, it's a waste of time.

[00:02:21] So I really try to focus on that audience and engagement element. Social media.

[00:02:27] Blake: [00:02:27] Well, I think that's going to fit in really well because the audience here, we've got a bunch of listeners that are side hustlers and a lot of people getting started out, not necessarily well on their way in their journey. So this is going to be helpful to give us ideas as to how to get going and how to start engaging properly.

[00:02:43] So let's, let's just start there. Like specifically with tech talk right now. It's so unknown for a lot of people. It's businesses like sign hustlers, everybody. Nobody knows what to do on tech talk except for gen Z people. So like for the rest of us, where should we actually start with TechTalk

[00:03:01] Courtney: [00:03:01] Yeah. So first place to start is just people . Brands are trying to do, just copy what they're doing on other platforms and put that on tick talk. But it's really about the people. So if you work for, you know, some sort of, whether it's a fun, like a fun, easy brand, like a B to C brand, or a little bit more difficult to B to B brand, you need to pick people out.

[00:03:23] That can be the representatives and beyond tick tock instead of just. You know, random things about your brand, you really got to give value. But the easiest way to start is true copy what others are doing. I mean, there's a reason why, you know, a 13 year old from like Michigan is getting more views on their tick talks.

[00:03:43] Then, the wall street journal with a content team of 200 that carefully curated and plans their content. Not because that 13 year old is more talented or knows more about marketing. They just inherently get it. So copy what other people are doing. Like, look at the trends. Look at the, the music that's trending, the styles that are trending, and try to emulate that, but emulate that with people.

[00:04:10] Blake: [00:04:10] But before we get into even more specifics about that, I want to take a step back and get foundational here because I know that one of the things that I've noticed that you're really good at is pinpointing the right audience. You seem to have really dialed into that, especially on LinkedIn, where I follow you the most.

[00:04:25] So how can other people pinpoint their right audience? Like what was the process that you took to get to the right people and stay on track with them.

[00:04:34] Courtney: [00:04:34] This depends on how segmented your audience is and how many audiences you have. So with LinkedIn, it's as easy as, you know, identifying who your audience is going in and out, adding them. Every single day connecting with them. Tick talk. It's more of following them every day and engaging with their content.

[00:04:54] But how do you know what your audience is? I mean, you should already know that if you don't know what your audience is and you have a product, that's a problem.

[00:05:05] Blake: [00:05:05] Yeah, no, for sure. Like that. For a brand specifically, you should already have that well thought out, but then on the other side, if you're just an individual side hustler trying to do a side project, like you're building an eCommerce store and it's really small, you have zero sales so far, how do you actually come up with it at that point?

[00:05:22] If you're totally starting from scratch.

[00:05:24] Courtney: [00:05:24] Yeah. My advice is just start somewhere. So I actually have an eCommerce PLA. I have an eCommerce product myself. And what was interesting about it is, so I have my side hustle, it's yoga mats. And what was interesting out it is we thought this would be B, you know, very much focused to like the hardcore yogis that go every day.

[00:05:45] And what we saw in the analytics approach, both our website and social, is this was transitioning to a lot of casual users, which isn't what we do. Beck did. Oh, go in one direction. Pick a place to start, but then look at the backend, look at the analytics, and use that to be able to flex where you can constantly be testing out new audiences to, based on user data.

[00:06:09] So we've got some user generated content of people using. These yoga mats for, things that we didn't even realize, like putting, like a rug in front of your sink or they're using it, or weight training and all of this other stuff. So be able to flex and grow with your audience because if you're so rigid with who they are and it has to be this person and people don't in that box, that can be problematic.

[00:06:34] Blake: [00:06:34] I totally agree with that. I think one of the most underrated skills in marketing and business in general is just being adaptable, not necessarily. Your inherent intelligence, but just your ability to continually learn, be humble enough to take hits and then get back up and then actually adapt based on what you've seen.

[00:06:52] Courtney: [00:06:52] Absolutely. And this, that's one thing that makes, you know, individuals are side hustlers. So much more in demand right now. The needs agencies, or big brands because their process, they're, they're being paralyzed by process where their process is so stuck in place and they have to follow the process.

[00:07:11] Which process is important. But if your process is still, you know, we're only posting on Facebook three times a week because we haven't changed it since 2012. That's a problem to where, you know, smaller shops or smaller freelancers, stuff like that, they can constantly flex. They can get on tic talk, they can get on LinkedIn, they can pivot to the personal brand side of things.

[00:07:34] And it's a lot more adaptable. So if you can, yeah. Adaptable and bring that adaptability into your strategy, you're going to be way ahead of . Okay. Everyone else.

[00:07:43] Blake: [00:07:43] This feeds right into that then, because one of the things that you talk about that directly correlates to adaptability is looking out for currently underutilized native features. So meaning like on LinkedIn, if LinkedIn live becomes available to everybody. LinkedIn is going to push that on everyone that they possibly can because as of then it's under utilized.

[00:08:06] So I'm curious, starting with tick tock, what are some of the underutilized current native features there that people can take advantage of.

[00:08:15]Courtney: [00:08:15] filters is a big one. Filters, adding texts on your video. and then capitalizing on trending hashtags and songs. So if. If ticktock is trying to push something or promote something, they're going to give that more views. So if you're scrolling through tick talk, you're going to see a lot of random hashtags on people's videos.

[00:08:34] Like again, 13 year old from wherever. he's going to have a hashtag of like hashtag found on Amazon, but his video is a video of him and his friends. Like. Doing something funny, playing basketball, you're probably wondering why that is, will taking advantage of those hashtags that, you know, tick tock is trying to promote, is going to push your content up.

[00:08:55] Now I know that it's not relevant to your actual post, so people may say like, Oh, I don't know if I want to put that on there, et cetera, but. It's not about doing every single element, but if you can include at least some of the elements of new features, you'll be, you'll be in a better place. And engagement is another one of those two.

[00:09:14] So, tick-tock, recently, you can now respond to other people's comments and kind of have a dialogue in the comments. So doing, that's another thing that's going to really push up your content and Joe to the fact that you're an active user.

[00:09:28] Blake: [00:09:28] Yeah. I don't think that a lot of people realize that take talks been number one on the app store for like six months, so it's not going away either. So it's a good time to start using these underutilized native features because eventually they're going to become commonplace and then the organic reach will down the road decline.

[00:09:47] So now now's a good time. If you're listening to this, start implementing these things that she's saying right now, because that's where you're going to see the most out of this.

[00:09:55] Courtney: [00:09:55] Exactly like you need to get on these platforms before they,

[00:10:01]

[00:10:01] before they get a few years in. Okay. All platforms start. If they start out any social media platform that's new, we'll start out favoring organic post. They'll start out favor and small creators, they want you to get on the platform and then as time goes on, it becomes more and more and more ads heavy, and you have to paint a play.

[00:10:20] It's not easy to get organic, so if you can start early on those platforms, you're going to be light years ahead of everyone else.

[00:10:28] Blake: [00:10:28] Yeah, and, and I think of it this way, if I'm starting some kind of forum forum website, like indie hackers or something like that, if I started my own thing and I was starting from scratch, if I had one person on there that was constantly posting for me, just doing that without me prompting them, I would promote.

[00:10:44] The heck out of them all the time. And I would try to get as many people to engage with that as possible because they're giving me free stuff. And so these, these platforms like tick tock or a few years ago, Snapchat, Instagram, anytime they see people that are willing to give free content and have their time all the time, they're going to push that.

[00:11:01] And now that's the stage that tech talks in it. Now moving on to like LinkedIn. They're a little bit more mature, so a lot of people have already started seeing organic reach decreasing, but it's still a pretty good time to jump in. Would you agree with that?

[00:11:16] Courtney: [00:11:16] It's still a good time. I believe there are, let's see, 800 million monthly active users now. That's a lot. And that's going to continue to grow. Yeah. It's still, we're still like a year or two into Tech-Talk. Yes, I know it was musically and they change it, whatever, whatever. But we're not at a place yet where ads have taken over, where have you scroll through your Facebook feed?

[00:11:40] ads after ads, after ads. But another thing regarding audience on tick-tock is a lot of people think, you know, this is too young. This isn't my audience. My audience may be older. Well, typically, early adopters on new platforms tend to be younger people. Yeah.