How to Use 1:1 Communication to Scale Your LinkedIn w/ Stapho Thienpont

UX Marketing

All right. On the podcast today, I have Stapho Thienpont who is here to talk LinkedIn with us. Somebody that is not only a consultant about this thing, but he's, he actually acts on his own advice. You can go check them out on LinkedIn and we'll get to that later on. First off, Stapho, how are you doing today?

Ah, I'm doing great. I just came off my own show and you know, I'm just enjoying talking so much on the nice thing like this. Nice to be like here in Europe.

Do you like hearing your own voice?

Not really, but I do enjoy talking.

I'm the same way. Hearing my own voice on on microphone. It's kind of weird, but you get over it cause it's

fun to talk to people.

Yeah. 100%. Awesome.

Well, before we get into the details of LinkedIn, I know you're going to give us a ton of advice on how to grow on LinkedIn, but first and foremost, I want some quick context on you so that the audience knows who they're dealing with here. So first and foremost, just curious about the story of your career so far, where you got started and how you ended up where you are now, as briefly as you can.

As briefly as I can. Okay. So I lived in issue to Jim and Stockholm, even though I'm originally from Belgium, which is the other side of Europe. one day I realized, you know what, by beating up my friends all day, I'm not really providing much value to the world. I figured I have a knack for both language and systems.

And then. What I figured out was that, marketing is right on the edge of that. I started a Facebook group, got to start working with my favorite author, all this kind of stuff. and before I knew it, I got started with LinkedIn cause I wanted to learn a new platform. I somehow got into a super secret group of people that were basically the best to ever do it on LinkedIn.

And I just started picking their brains and I started learning all this kind of LinkedIn stuff. I did it for myself, and then I figured, you know what? this is so helpful for myself to generate leads and also generate awareness and build connections and network. I'm going to do this as a service for other people.

And since then we've been turning our people into LinkedIn thought leaders and generating leads for them. some highlights were when the multibillion dollar multimedia Titans started reaching out to our clients purely based on the content, but also getting some of our call bites on sales calls with Microsoft Lyme and the like.

So, yeah, it's been a, that's my journey so far, I guess.

And you're still going, okay. Yeah, the beginning right.

Definitely, definitely. I don't know if I'm going to limit myself to LinkedIn forever, but I'm definitely still growing strong every day. Awesome.

And if I were to ask you what you think your professional super power is, what would you say.

That's a really good, a really good question. I'm actually a really good networker. I would say, even though I don't spend much time, I'm really good at building relationships fast and somehow I don't know what it is, but it's when I talk to people, they walk away with the idea that I really know what I'm talking about with makes, it makes it easy for me to sell, but also to get buy in when I'm working with people, which ultimately lasts me to get good results.

But the networking of personal impact is for sure the key, I would say. Well

that's, that's good because that's what LinkedIn is all about. So let's dive into that and just start talking about how this group of of listeners that are bootstrappers and micro-influencers can actually grow on LinkedIn. My first question really would be, if you are starting out with zero, you're a micro influencer, you are an entrepreneur that's just starting out.

How can you actually get anybody to take your thought leadership seriously?

Well, first and foremost, you gotta have at least some skill and some area, so you've got to be good at something and have something to say about it. I would say that's pretty important. The second thing that I would say you have to do.

Or what's it's optimal if before you actually start creating the content and and doing all that search stuff to also know who it is that you want to talk to. So your ideal target audience, a good way to figure that out is to interview the best clients you have. So not just any of the clients with the best clients that you have, and figure out how we can find more of those people.

Now, on a tactical level, well, that means it's too. Figure out the type of people that you want. Then going in LinkedIn search or LinkedIn sales navigator, finding those exact individuals, sending them a connection request, and then after they accept to start a conversation with them, LinkedIn voice messages work really well because they're an extra personal touch there.

not really. You know, as I'm sure many people have said on your shows. Building thought leadership on any social media platform. It's about scaling one to one relationships. So building a relationship with one person and then the next, and then the next will ultimately catapult you. So it goes beyond just the amount of one-to-one conversations you can have.

But

that sounds like a lot of effort. Yeah, there's, there's no way to cheat the system. You're saying I had to put in

work. And, well, actually there is. but it depends on, on bootstrapping what kind of a budget you have. One thing that I'll say is if you take, yeah, either sales navigator and use that to find like the ideal people that you want or external lists such as top 10 entrepreneurs in the city.

Top 100 marketers in that city, whatever, and then find those people on LinkedIn. You could actually automate a part of the work with tools such as reconnect or grow fleet or Phantom Buster and send these people automated connection requests and follow up messages. No. The issue with that when you're starting out is that you don't know yet which messages people will respond to and you might just burn like thousands of people that you could have.

But then she builds really good relationships with, so my advice is to start doing it manually, at the very least. And then once you get a good fit between your message and your audience, that's when you can scale it up by either using automation tools or by using virtual assistants. Oh, I have to say, does this obviously against the terms of service.

So it's not something I would officially recommend. Hmm.

Well,

let's, let's start out

at, at the very bottom then, and just talk about briefly what the most effective ways that you've seen to start building an audience.

The most effective way. Is to do this, the things I mentioned, earlier, which is knowing exactly who it is that you want to talk to, and then actually talking to them on all the touch points you have. So touch point on LinkedIn would be the other person's own content. So commenting on their stuff as well as the LinkedIn DMS.

So chatting with these people directly. those are in my. In my estimation, the best, most effective tools. And the reason for that is that the personal contact has the highest amount of impact per individual. So if you can get to a hundred true fans, meaning a hundred people that you actually communicate with on a weekly basis, one-on-one, that will just spill over into a larger audience over time because of the network

effect is, it's an audience on LinkedIn.

In terms of your content, is that as valuable as having a good audience on, say, YouTube or Instagram?

Do you mean if they have a similar size? W I mean it just, just like if, if you're actually,

if you're treating your LinkedIn almost like a channel where you're putting out content to reach an audience. So not necessarily touching on the outreach and sales navigator side of things, but just creating content.

If you're trying to reach that audience as a, as a channel, is LinkedIn as a channel through content, as effective as having like a good YouTube channel or a good Instagram channel.

I would say that the best 100% on who? Your target audiences. So if you're trying to. Get to generation Z or whatever, probably take take is going to be way more.

The talk is going to be way more effective for you. but if you're trying to get, you know, like young professionals, seasoned professionals, executive CEOs, people that usually have a high amount of spending power, and I think LinkedIn is second to none. So it depends 100% on who it is that you're trying to target now, Is, is a hundred. Then the question is, if you have. If, if you have the perfect, if YouTube is the perfect best friend for you, and LinkedIn is a perfect bathroom for somebody else and you have a thousand followers on both, which is going to be bringing me, bringing you the most ROI, and that's going to depend on how good you are at using platform.

One really big benefits is that on LinkedIn, somebody that is connected with you, you have to immediately have an open line of communication. So that means you can immediately message them and advanced the conversation while on YouTube. you don't really expect somebody they're subscribed to to reach out to you directly.

So I think the nature of LinkedIn is that it's built for a two way communication stream. And if you have solid sales skills, I think that it's a really good platform to monetize. Let's, let's move into

the actual, the money side of things. Cause that's, that's the point of all this, right? We're not just building side projects for the fun of it.

We want to make money off of it eventually. So

how can people

use content and use these connections on LinkedIn to actually drive revenue down the road given that they probably don't actually have a business right now. It's more of either an idea or something that they're trying to build.

So wait, can you rephrase the question?

So is the question on, is the question, how can you monetize your LinkedIn audience?

Right.

Well, so, so the thing is, if you want to monetize your LinkedIn audience, it's all about social selling. So that means, like I said, if you're connected to these people that we've been talking about, the ones that are your ideal audience, the best way, in my opinion, is to just.

Move, move from somebody, engages on your post to connecting with them two messages in them or commenting on their stuff, and then turning that into it into a some kind of a discovery call or an audiobook download too, not an ebook download or whatever, and to then sell them through whatever the next step of your funnel is.

I wouldn't say. Selling directly on LinkedIn is the best thing to do, in my opinion. Any social media platform they can build an audience on all about, getting off that platform, you know, so do you want to use LinkedIn to get the phone call? You want to use the phone call to either make the sale or to get an real life meeting.

and I think that is similar across all platforms. So. And to that, I would like to add that if you're going to do LinkedIn, usually it's not really worth the efforts unless you have a product that's going to be a lifetime value of a fair, least $500 but I would recommend more looking into LinkedIn when you have a lifetime value offer on $5,000 per client.

Well, that that

kind of takes me into, and another question then around that. Basically. If I'm trying to sell on LinkedIn, get somebody off the platform. What if my platform is still in progress? What do I do then? Is LinkedIn still effective for me if I'm still kind of trying to the old my website or my product that's off the platform?

Should I still be trying to create content on LinkedIn and build that up or is it something I should wait on?

I made a couple of hundred thousand dollars of LinkedIn and I've never even built a website. So the thing is. The thing is, it's not about, you know, getting the perfect email list, getting the perfect landing page, getting private to whatever.

Those things are good. And if they, if they are the tool that you need to reach your goals, you should definitely invest in those. But In my opinion, for most people, the best thing they can do is to just get them on a phone call. You know, it could be a zoom, it could be a w whatever. Apple has FaceTime, it could be Skype.

I think. Those are things that you can use for free in order to talk to people on the phone and in most, for most people, that is just the very best chance you have, of selling somebody, right? Like, if you have five people visiting your landing page, or you have five people getting on the phone with you, the, the, the chance of you converting them to a paying customer.

For most people, it's going to be higher by getting them on the phone. I'm

curious. Then you talk a lot about one-on-one communication and then trying to scale that. That's the most effective way to use LinkedIn or pretty much any other social media platform. What I see a lot on LinkedIn is people will DM me and immediately without context, they will say, Hey, this is what I do.

I think that this could be really helpful for you. Let's jump on a 15 minute call. And I've never responded to one of those and I get them all the time and they're really frustrating. So I'm curious, I see very little good outreach on LinkedIn. How would you do outreach if you're trying to get people on a call to talk about your product or something, how would you do it so that it's not annoying and that people will actually

respond to you?

Yeah, so that's a really good question. the thing is. I would say the, the, the specific examples you just mentioned, the problem there is the copy more than anything else. So it's a, it's a very different thing. If you message somebody and say, Hey, I have the school thing. Do you want to buy it? It's a very different thing to say like, Hey, yeah, I was on your website.

I noticed that the design, that there's the small mistake in your design, what are your design? Could be a little bit better. I think I could help you with this. I don't necessarily think I need to charge for this. I really just want to help. would you be interested in just like talking to me for 15 minutes and see how I can help you went to design of your website or any of those kinds of things?

There's a couple of main things that really make cold outreach work or outreach, because if you're creating content, it's not necessarily cold outreach. And that is knowing exactly who it is that you're talking to. And that doesn't mean knowing their job title. That means knowing what is a day in their life look like?

Which problems do they have and how can you relate to those problems? So understanding your audience, being able to turn that into copy that works for the platform. So knowing how to write to it all being spammy and how to write in a way that makes other people feel seen and heard. Th those are the, in my opinion, the two best ones.

But then you also need to have a product that actually has product market fits, you know? We've seen campaigns where. Wherever things were, where we know exactly who we're talking to, we know their problem. The copy is written by the best in the world that I know, and still nothing happens. And it is because there's not necessarily a fit between the product and the markets.

So there's many things that go into it. Another thing that will get, that will like to add to that, that I think is extremely important. It's figuring out a way to give value first. So if you, if you, if your target audience is. Let's say CMOs and you want to help them with let's say, starting their own podcast, which is, which might be a common need for CMOs, might not be, how bout you actually create a video explaining how, somebody could start a podcast even though they're super busy CMO, and then how they can do that without having.

the problems that they think they might have so that they might be afraid of ruining their reputation. It might be afraid that they don't have the time. I'd be afraid that nobody's going to listen to it. If you already know these things about your audience, how about you just make an ebook up front?

How about you make a video up France or any of those kind of things and give that first before you ask again on the phone call. Now to add to that real quick, yes. If you're creating content, and I think a lot of your audience here and a lot of people listening are like micro influencers want to or want to be micro influencers, that means they're already creating content and that means that you most of the time don't have to do outreach.

Most of the time people start reaching out to you because you're already providing value in the seed as content. And then that there's a whole paradigm upside down because the, for example, I haven't really had to do any cold outreach on my accounts. Basically ever, because I get people coming in based on my contents and I get friends of happy clients coming in to do my DMS.

And I have other like influencers. Referring me as well. And then I don't need to do much of those things because there's already that trust and that impacts that's created upfront. And all I have to do is send my booking link and they'll show up. So, The goal off LinkedIn is to get off LinkedIn, but that doesn't mean that you have to do cold outreach.

You know, there's many ways of like establishing this personal connection over chat. Oh,

I'd love to dive in a little bit into your personal content cause I know that they're, like you mentioned, a lot of the people, if not most, that are listening here are creating content in some form. So they could probably use some help.

And in terms of LinkedIn specifically, I'm

curious what

your posting conventions look like, if you've noticed. That you need to post at certain times, for example, like does that stuff matter? The technicalities of it, the time you post the format, what have you noticed that actually matters when you're

posting?

So like, I, so, okay, before I really go into it, I, I have made a checklist, unlike a Google doc that people could have if they wanted it. And it's basically 10 points. And in my opinion, if you're both. adheres to those standpoints and it's at least a nine out of 10 or a 10 out of 10. It has everything in nice in order to be successful in the field.

So if you want, I'll just send you this link to this Google doc after the recording and then you can share. That's what your audience, I think that's very useful. Right? Apart from that, I'm gonna, I'm just, I'm...