Josh Turner: It would be great to just come here about what you're doing and share some things about what we're up to and see if there's any opportunities to do some things together. And that message and then a follow up to that. You always want to follow up. Did you just send one message to somebody saying, "Hey, I'd love to have a conversation with you sometime." And then you never follow up with them again, you're just throwing leads in the toilet.

Speaker 2: This is the Fighting Entrepreneur, the podcast dedicated to entrepreneurs looking to change the world. Learn how to start, build and scale a business in today's highly competitive business environments. Here's your host The Fighting Entrepreneur on a single.

Anik Singal: What's up you crazy fighting entrepreneurs. Welcome back to the Fighting Entrepreneur. This is your host Anik Singal. And we've got a great episode for you today. You know what? I am going to reveal one of the projects that I'm working on right now. It's completely at its beginning stages. I would never reveal a business idea this soon, but I'm going to do it today selfishly, because I've got one of the world's leading experts in LinkedIn marketing here. Now my idea that I'm working on right now, I believe it truly needs LinkedIn. And here's the deal. I know nothing about LinkedIn, I got all these followers, I got all these people waiting to ... that have requested to add me to their network. I just don't, I barely ever go on there. And I think I'm missing out on a lot. And then this idea comes up and I realized, okay, I think I am really missing out on a lot. I reached out to my network. And I found in my opinion, he calls himself world leading I say he's the number one expert when it comes to LinkedIn, especially for we're going to do today.

Anik Singal: And what I'm going to do is use this opportunity to have him build me an entire business model, a marketing model on how I would market this idea on LinkedIn. You get to listen and learn from it, and actually use everything that he teaches. We're pretty excited and without further ado, I want to introduce you to this guy is just going to blow your mind with LinkedIn marketing. Josh Turner. Josh, thanks so much for being here man. Really appreciate you taking the time to be with us.

Josh Turner: Oh man, the pleasures mine and I appreciate you having me on. I'm excited.

Anik Singal: Yeah, this is going to be great. Honestly, it's going to be better for me than anyone else because I'm going to use this time to really just pick your brain for some amazing stuff. Josh, it's pretty powerful what you've been able to do with LinkedIn, so many people are not using LinkedIn at all. You've built an Inc 500 company, you've got up a wall street journal, best selling book. And honestly, I don't think you can search on Google for more than 15 seconds about LinkedIn before you come up. And so many people, myself included guilty are ignoring LinkedIn. I'm really excited to dive in and ask you a ton of questions. A message for our listeners. I'm going to be taking lots of notes.

Anik Singal: I got blank pages here, I'll be taking lots of notes. Now you guys have been watching me take notes in the past, and some people have been asking for those notes. If you go to Anikpodcast.com, you can actually download my scribble Scrabble. I always grab the key points, put on them on notes, so anikpodcast.com for all the show notes and of course our YouTube video and YouTube channel is there as well. Josh, we have a little tradition here at the Fighting Entrepreneur, if you don't mind, following along here, if you could raise your right hand and say, "I Josh Turner do solemnly swear."

Josh Turner: I Josh Turner do solemnly swear.

Anik Singal: "To tell the truth and nothing but the truth."

Josh Turner: To tell the truth and nothing but the truth. I hope you don't ask me questions that are...

Anik Singal: "And reveal all my LinkedIn secrets."

Josh Turner: And reveal all my LinkedIn secrets. I can agree to that.

Anik Singal: Awesome. All right, don't worry, we will not ask you anything outside the spectrum of LinkedIn. We will not ask you for the real dirt, maybe, maybe in the rapid fire round. Let's see. Let's see how things go. All right Josh, I want to start right off if you're good man, let's start right off into round number one. I got to ask you a very simple question, because I've felt for the longest time that I'm the smarter one, right? Ignoring LinkedIn, I'm obviously not. Why LinkedIn? Tell me a little bit about your story. Everyone else runs away from LinkedIn. You ran towards it, why?

Josh Turner: The reason I ran toward it was because when I first started working for myself, I knew that it was really the only place online that I could go identify the exact people that I wanted to do business with and get connected with them and execute a campaign to move them from online into a real world relationship. We're talking back in 2010, when I first got started, I was working as like an outsourced CFO here in St. Louis, for small businesses. The Facebook social media stuff and posting stuff on Twitter and blogging and this and that it wasn't getting the results, at least not nearly as quick as I needed to get them when I was first getting started. And so I knew I got to get on LinkedIn. I got to start connecting with prospects and drumming up some real business and LinkedIn was really the only place to do that.

Josh Turner: And still to this day, that's the reason why so many people are paying attention to me because they know wow, look, there's all these people here that look like amazing prospects for my business. How can I leverage this? How can I be investing some time and resources here to generate some ROI for my business. And that's not to say that Facebook and Twitter and everything else isn't effective as well. I have, a presence and invest in all those places, but for B2B, and for generating appointments, with sales prospects, and a lot of other things these days, LinkedIn is really the place to be and it's getting hotter and hotter these days. LinkedIn is kind of blowing up again, they're having kind of like a rebirth, if you will. And over the last six months to a year, it's really, really blowing up a lot of people like Gary Vaynerchuk are really kind of becoming evangelists for the power of LinkedIn, and [hypen] it up big time. It's an exciting time to be jumping in.

Anik Singal: Basically, to summarize, for you, you were an outsourced CFO. You were really truly looking for executive type of people that you would talk to, founders, CEOs. People always say, B2B, B2C, I've always wanted to really draw the distinction for our listeners. Basically, if you're looking for high level business dealings consulting gigs, where you're going to talk to business owners or VP or directors or really professionals I should say, that's where LinkedIn, that's where you said, "Hey, I wrote this down, identify exact people you want." That's where that really comes into play versus Facebook's more of a blanket. You can do blanket marketing to draw in the type of person. Would that be a good summary?

Josh Turner: Yeah, it absolutely would be. And now there's things you can do on Facebook to reach a business audience. And we do some of those things for our clients. And we're big on Facebook ads for our own business. But for relationship building, and more organic, social media kind of stuff, you just can't go on Facebook and go reach out and connect with a bunch of small business owners or CFOs of decent sized companies. I mean, you can, there is an organic Facebook strategy that can be executed. But a lot of people just don't want to connect on a business level on Facebook. But on LinkedIn if you approach people the right way, they're very open to it, you can really get in the door with a lot of amazing people.

Anik Singal: That's very interesting if you put it that way. Now I have to ask you a question. So you mentioned LinkedIn is blowing up. And I agree, I can just tell from the massive amounts of reach out. I'm getting the messages I'm getting Ryan Levesque today. I don't know if you saw he posted something really funny. And I responded to it on Facebook where he said, you know, anyone else recently log into their LinkedIn and see over 200 messages? I'm getting bombarded now, with these fake, let's connect, et cetera, et cetera. Fair to assume that no longer works, it's blowing up. But is there? I guess we're going to talk about that. Is there ... are people using it the wrong way?

Josh Turner: Well, most people are using it the wrong way. Most people have been using it the wrong way for a long time. And now there's more people using it the wrong way. And that's one of the things that really gives LinkedIn a bad name. We call those people leghumpers. You meet them, they connect with you and immediately they're pitching you on their services. LinkedIn recently, you're somebody that has a lot of connections on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has recently changed their algorithm now to where they're going to recommend people connect with people who have lots of mutual connections to you. Now I'm the same way, I'm getting 100 connection requests a day, from people that I don't even know because LinkedIn is kind of gamifying it to make it really easy for people to just connect, connect, connect, connect, connect with people that they don't know. I just kind of have to weed through all these. I have over 2000 pending connection requests in my inbox right now because I don't have the time to vet them all.

Josh Turner: Hopefully, eventually LinkedIn puts that to bed, but they're probably doing it for a reason. It's probably creating more engagement on the platform overall. But that's just the initial connection request. Then you have the one on one messages that people are sending, when you do connect with them, then they instantly come across and start pitching you on their services. In some cases that can work. But typically what we've been doing from the start in my business, and what we still do to this day, is we believe that business is built on relationships. And that if you are in it for the long haul, you don't want to just be cold pitching people on LinkedIn and getting maybe 1% of people that you send your pitchy message to, to say, "Okay, sure, I'd like to have a conversation about that." But instead, play a little bit of a longer game, build a little bit of a relationship with people, position yourself as an authority and a leader and appear in your space, put some good content in front of them.

Josh Turner: And over the course of a couple months, if you follow an approach, like we teach, which we'll talk about in depth today, I'm sure. Then you'll get more like 20% of the people that you connect with to raise their hand and say, "Yeah, I'd like to have a conversation with you." At the end of the day, yeah, most people are doing it wrong. But it still is a numbers game, if you're really using it for proactive business development and prospect. You're never going to get 100% of people. 20% is what we found is pretty damn good.

Anik Singal: Let me ask you because we're going to get into the details of this. I know a little bit because we did a pre interview before we did this. I know a little bit about your strategy. But people think LinkedIn, people think great, let me go Connect, connect, connect, connect, connect, connect, connect, connect, connect, connect, connect message, message, message, message, message. And you're saying that's like a 1% success rate, your strategy takes us up to a 20% success rate. If you had to summarize in one sentence, or just one word or a few words, what is the crux of your strategy that allows you to build this kind of relationship?

Josh Turner: Its positioning yourself as somebody that your prospects see as a valuable resource and appear in whatever niche market you're trying to serve. Then leveraging that authority that you build really systematically and really quickly to then get your foot in the door for a real world conversation, a phone appointment, coffee, lunch, whatever it might be.

Anik Singal: Got it. All right so I know that's what basically we're going to spend the rest of this episode talking about. Is how exactly do you get that authority status in a niche market? Really, really interesting. Basically, if I'm not mistaken, you currently allow people or companies to come on as clients and you'll manage their LinkedIn campaigns and all of that. Is that correct? Is that your business right now?

Josh Turner: Yeah, that's our main business. In a nutshell, we've got a couple different things we do, One, we can do it all for you. Or we have a program called rocket launch where we kind of get it all set up for you and then give you the tools to run it on an ongoing basis. We do kind of the heavy lifting on the front end, and then you take it from there. That's more for the Do It Yourself person. We have a division that runs LinkedIn ads for clients as well and some other things.

Anik Singal: All right, beautiful. Listen I want to move into round number two. And in this round, I'm going to explain to you what I want to do, what I'm trying to do here, what my business idea is. Then we'll spend the subsequent rounds, basically building a business model marketing plan around it on LinkedIn. Let's do this. Let's move into round number two. All right, round number two, here it is. I'm still like a little nervous. I don't want to reveal this out there but heck, whatever I'll do it. All right we got a 26,000 square foot beautiful center here called the Learning Center. It's in Rockville, Maryland. It's not in a major city. But we're about 45 minutes to an hour away from DC. We're 45 minutes to an hour away from Baltimore. Those are two obviously very big cities and major hubs for businesses. We've been trying to figure out how to properly monetize the Learn center and we've tried a few different things and it's not really worked out that well, not the way we want it.

Anik Singal: Until we recently had a conversation. See, one of the things that's great about our center, is that we have an amazing lecture hall where we can take about 200 people. It's ours, A/V is built into it. There's no cost of running it. We have classrooms, we have just amazing co-work space for people to collaborate during some time. What we decided to do is we wanted to run training. So we said, let's go out and allow people to pay us a membership fee like a gym, and we will run training all throughout the week. Now, we found that that was really difficult to make work, the amount that we need to charge to make it viable for us is not something that the local community, the B2C market, which is the person who was just trying to learn internet marketing or entrepreneurship, there's some willing to pay those fees. There's not enough of them out in a suburban area.

Anik Singal: You can't really go out 45 minutes to an hour, because then people say, "Well, I can't really come regularly. I don't want to travel an hour every day or every other day." That model fell apart until we had a conversation with someone who runs an ad agency. He's the head of marketing at an ad agency. And it was really funny what he said. He said, "Wait, you guys have access to the top experts." For example, Josh, we have access to you. I said, "Yeah." If we paid Josh enough money I'm sure he would travel down and run an entire training here. Obviously you would have an opportunity to pitch all the people that are in the room and all of that. And he said, "You have access to experts all over the world Facebook ads, Instagram ads, YouTube, Google, blah, blah, blah?" I said, "Yeah," He's like, "I would pay a ton of money to send my team, my marketing team to your event, because I don't have to pay for them to fly. I don't have to pay for all that dead time they lose when they're flying. And when they're in hotels, all that money on food and all."

Anik Singal: If you told me once a month, you have an event around a specific topic, I would pick a team member and send them and I'm happy to pay five, six $700 for a day's training. I'm thinking, whoa, that's awesome. We start to put the things together and I thought there's something to this. We talked to a few other businesses, few other marketing departments, and they're like, Yes, please. I would love to send a couple of my team members to stuff like that regularly build a mastermind once a month. And we could do like four or five different topics, right? We could do a session once a month for each topic. We could have like six, seven topics we're running this place. It's using the lecture hall. We're serving the community, we're serving local businesses. Now, the challenge is, it's a different marketing. I'm a B2C marketing guy. I'm a Facebook guy, YouTube ads guy, Google guy, I'm a guy who builds big email lists and builds big communities. All of a sudden, we're going into B2B marketing.

Anik Singal: That's not something I know much about. And of course, the light bulb goes off. And I said, "Bing, LinkedIn." Right? I need to go to LinkedIn. And then I thought, well, I don't know what the heck is going on LinkedIn. I don't know how to do it, except for this connect, connect, connect, connect, connect message, message message, I want to do that. I don't have time for that. Our goal is to be selling these annual seats that are about $5,000 a seat to local businesses, small big whatever. Some businesses might buy 10 seats some business might buy one seat. Some might buy only, an event, whatever the case We definitely will have a sales team that's running it, but we need to get them leads and I don't think Facebook in my opinion is the right place to go or YouTube is right place to go. Because exactly what you said in round one, we need to hit the exact people we want. Josh, that's my download any questions you have to clarify. Otherwise, let's start building the marketing plan for it.

Josh Turner: I think I got it, man. Well, actually, I do have a question. How many people do you want at each of these events?

Anik Singal: I would want at least 100 if I had my awesome dream of about 100 person at each event.

Josh Turner: Okay, got it. Got it. And do you have any interest in starting with some free events to build some buzz around it or no.

Anik Singal: Absolutely. Do whatever we need to do.

Josh Turner: Okay. All right, cool. I got it.

Anik Singal: All right. That's round two. Round Two is all about me. I took Josh's is time. Here's what we're going to do real quick. All right, because now I got you super interested. Super hooked is the best time to throw an ad towards you. We're going to take a quick break hear about what all is happening on learn nation. When we come back. Josh is going to give me a marketing plan on how to sell local services to local businesses. And you better not steal my business idea or I'll come after you guys I'm watching you, all right. All right we'll be right back. Let's hear what's happening on Lurn Nation.

Abraham: Hey, my name is Abraham and I am a copywriter here at Learn. Just want to ask you a question. Are you a member of Lurn Nation? Well, Lurn Nation is a powerhouse of knowledge and courses taught by industry experts. We teach everything from copywriting, creating Facebook ads, to building funnels and an email list. How awesome is that? And that's yeah, that's pretty much just the beginning. You want to hear the best part? Signing up is totally free, no credit card required. Just go to learn.com/register. Again, that's Lurn L-U-R-N.com/register and join Lurn Nation today.

Anik Singal: All right we're back round number three. Josh, take it away, man. I will position the next rounds based on the advice that you start to give me right here.

Josh Turner: On a local level like this, our strategy can work really, really well, when you're interested in not only using LinkedIn to get phone appointments and appointments for your sales team, but combining it with an in person event strategy. We have a client, local here in St. Louis, just by chance. His name's Tom Swip, his company is called swift systems. They're IT software development, network maintenance. They do kind of big projects for a lot of manufacturing companies. That's one of their primary niches. They started working with us about five years ago. And when we first started working with them, they wanted to just create a campaign to get clients hiring them for their software projects. They wanted to create this LinkedIn presence that would position them as the experts in software development and we said, "No, we can't, it's not going to be successful. You're just going to come off as pitchy, like all the other people from all over the world pitching software services, and IT stuff."

Josh Turner: Instead, we said, why don't we create a community for manufacturing executives. They work with manufacturing companies all over the Midwest. We created a LinkedIn group called Midwest manufacturing leaders. We then started connecting our client Tom with tons of manufacturing CFOs and CEOs. And because he is the founder of Midwest manufacturing leaders, his group on LinkedIn, a lot of these people see him more as a peer and kind of a player in their space, as opposed to just another IT vendor who's coming to hump their leg. It's a little bit of a Trojan horse strategy to get the initial connection when you have a LinkedIn group like that, that's backing you up so that you can position your LinkedIn profile and your LinkedIn headline, which is the first thing people see when they connect with you. You can position it in that way to come across as more peer to peer than vendor to CEO. That gets the initial connection. We started inviting lots of people into the group. Over time the group now as I think over 10,000 members, I'm not exactly sure but several thousand.

Josh Turner: At a point, about I don't know a year or so into the campaign, and we were initially just driving prospects into phone conversations with Tom. And since then he's now transitioned to where he has a sales team handling those conversations but at about a year in he said, "You know what? Why don't we turn this into a real world event.? Fast forward to today, Midwest manufacturing leaders now has quarterly in person events here in St. Louis that have about 200 people attend every meeting. It is an unbelievably powerful marketing channel for Tom and his business because now they are the ones organizing these events. They're the top dogs, they get all the visibility from it. Tom's on stage introducing the speakers and doing a little spiel about his business, building all the relationships with all the people in the room. And it's really been a powerful thing. And so that's the model I think that I would go down if I were in your shoes.

Josh Turner: If you're trying to get in front of more marketing executives who want to send people on their teams. Some sort of a LinkedIn group called the Maryland DC Marketing Leaders network is going to be effective at getting you in the door. Now also Anik first off, I would use your personal profile to do this. And because of your notoriety, you'll be able to get connected with a lot of people because of that. But then if you also have this group, it's a reason for why you're connecting with them, and why you're inviting them to be a part of this thing. Then you basically use this LinkedIn group, to create a community for people like that. Keep some good content going through it. Those groups will grow slowly. But really, the main thing is you just want to be connecting with lots of these people. And then over time, the way we do it, is we then have a messaging strategy where you're sending one on one messages to these prospects, not just pitching them on what you do, but at first, the messages would be like, "Hey, just want to make sure you saw this new post in the group, would love your feedback on it."

Josh Turner: "Oh, hey, here's a cool case study from a company here in Maryland that we're really excited about, I thought you might think it's cool to know." Then maybe on the fourth or fifth message, you would say something like, "Hey, Terry ..." Let's say you got a salesperson named Terry. "Hey, Terry on my team, notice that we're both connected and said he was planning on reaching out to you and I thought it would make sense to do a bit of a warm introduction, would be great to just, hear about what you're doing and share some things what we're up to and see if there's any opportunities to do some things together. And that message and then a follow up to that you always want to follow up. If you just send one message to somebody saying, "Hey, I'd love to have a conversation with you sometime." And then you never follow up with them again. You're just throwing leads in the toilet. There's a Microsoft study done where they found that 50% of sales people quit after one touchpoint. And if you're still in the game at the ninth touchpoint, you have a 90% chance of getting business if anybody's can get it. But most people don't make it even close to nine.

Josh Turner: Then you've got a mechanism to build a campaign where Anik is the figurehead of this LinkedIn campaign. You're building lots of first degree connections with prospects. And then you're also building the LinkedIn group. And then because you're not the one that wants to handle the every conversation with all of these prospects, you've got a mechanism to build a relationship with Anik and then do a warm handoff to one of the folks on your team to have a conversation with them. And then you hopefully move a percentage of them into signing up for your events. The reason why I asked if you were open to doing a free event, as part of it is that you could potentially use free events as a feeder into the paid events. And you could get hundreds of people to come to the free events and basically use the free events to enroll people into the next level, the paid events where they can obviously get much deeper.

Josh Turner: I think that's really cool. A great friend of mine in our industry, Suzanne Evans, who has an amazing business, she recently moved her business to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, she's doing something very similar, where she's doing local events in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and doing the same kind of thing. I don't know that she's using the LinkedIn strategy as part of it. But using free events locally, to then get people into some next level thing. It's not like you need to organize some massive conference to try and enroll people into your programs and services. In a nutshell, that's kind of the playbook that I would have in mind. Now with our client Tom, and his IT company and Midwest manufacturing leaders. How we get people to come to these events, his events are free once every three months, they do not charge people to come. It's a combination of things.

Josh Turner: We're messaging people on LinkedIn about the events. We're promoting the event within the LinkedIn group. Over the years, we've built up a nice email list that goes along with the group. Once every couple weeks or once a month, there's a Midwest manufacturing email that people get, and we're promoting the events with the emails. It's kind of a full court press, to get people to come to events. You're going to have to have a few different things in motion to make it happen. How we make that happen, and how you would really leverage all this LinkedIn stuff to then create some of these other assets to promote the events to would be. And this is getting a little tactical, but I think it's important because LinkedIn groups, you can no longer send an announced ... you used to be able to send basically like an email blast to all of your LinkedIn group members and they would .... once a week, you could send an email to all the group members that you have. Now, LinkedIn doesn't let you do that.

Josh Turner: And they also don't allow you to export the emails of your LinkedIn connections, which they used to do. Recently took that away, which is big. But there's tools out there that will get that information for you anyways. There's one that we use called Get Prospect. And you can actually sign up for free and get some free contacts with the free plan. I don't get anything from it. It's just a tool that we like to use.

Anik Singal: Get prospect is that plural or singular?

Josh Turner: Singular.

Anik Singal: Singular getprospect.com. Awesome.

Josh Turner: Yeah, and I'll stop talking in a second. But basically, what that'll allow you to do is scrape your LinkedIn group and or LinkedIn connections, and get those people's emails so that you can then reach out to them and some other ways. You got to be smart about how you do that. But it's there if you're careful and know how to do that.

Anik Singal: By the way, I don't want you to stop talking. That's the whole point of this here. You're dropping gold here. This is amazing. I've been taking all kinds of notes and again, if you're watching this, or listening, I've got notes, man, you want these? I'm going to take pictures of them, put them up on anikpodcast.com. I'm feverishly taking notes because I want to do this for myself. Man, I got all kinds of questions. I don't know where to start. But let me just regroup. Let me summarize. I think I'll start there. Step one, I create a group on ... sorry not Facebook, on LinkedIn. And we create a very good name, not a marketing type of name. Like a leaders of like you said, I wrote it down. You said, Maryland DC Marketing Leaders network, right? And we could even go deeper and we could say, Maryland DC, Virginia, Digital Marketing Leaders network, so that we get even more specific. Then we start to ... this is where I have some questions. This is going to be round four.

Anik Singal: I've already determined what we're going to do. Is we're going to talk about how the heck do you grow a group? We'll talk about that. But you grow a group, you start to post content on that group, that'll be round five. We're going to talk about what is content. And then you basically over time are building that relationship. But then, and what you do is you start to message the group individually. Like people, you start to message them, "Hey, I've put some good content up. I put up a good case study, go check it out." And by your fifth, fourth or fifth reach, you start to think about kind of carrying that introduction over to someone on your team who could then bring it in for an appointment. And then obviously, I love the case study of Microsoft, you talked about the ninth touchpoint being 90% chance of closing a deal like God, I'm going to literally leave this room at the end of this and walk right over to my sales team and just throw that at them because they're not good at that.

Anik Singal: I've got a bunch of questions in regards to how to do all of this. The biggest one that comes up, so here's my gut reaction I had when you talked about all this messaging. I was like, "Oh, God, I just, I don't have time and I don't want to do it." Two questions, one is could I outsource that to someone? Could someone be in my profile doing that on my behalf. Yes, could I outsource it or are there tools that can I can outsource it to or people or even my team?

Josh Turner: Yeah. Well, obviously, it's something my company does.

Anik Singal: Okay.

Josh Turner: You could hire us to do something like that for you. A lot of the folks that go through our training programs might have an assistant or someone on their marketing team that will do it for them. That's common as well. Are there tools? Yeah, there are tools out there. LinkedIn, it's kind of a whack a mole kind of thing with those tools. You remember a few years back when there were a lot of like scrapers and different tools for Facebook, and they just totally put the kibosh on all that. That seems to be coming for LinkedIn, and it started to happen within the last year. Where there certain tools if you're using some of these bots that do different LinkedIn automation things that people have been getting warnings that pop up and say, "Hey, we see you're using this tool, you need to click okay, and agree that you won't use it anymore or we're going to shut your account down.

Josh Turner: That kind of stuff you have to be careful with. Some people are using those tools and taking the risks and know how to use them and stay safe and under the radar. It's out there.

Anik Singal: Got it. Okay, so let's talk about your services, so very selfishly asking here. We could potentially say, Josh, fill a room do what you need to do. We're going to do a free event in two months, start posting content grow the group, message everybody. Is that something you guys would say, "Okay, move aside we're in, we're doing it."

Josh Turner: Yeah. It's something we do.

Anik Singal: We'll grow the group. Okay, we'll post the content we'll connect with people, we'll get your appointments booked, we'll just do it all you just focus on closing sales. All right, that's good to know. All right, man. Well, I've got questions more specific. If you're good with it, let's keep rolling. We'll move into round number four. All right, round number four. We're going to talk about groups here. I'm very intrigued by it. I understand the general concept of groups. I've built Facebook groups and all of that, but I've never built a group inside of LinkedIn. Talk me through, I'm assuming it's easy to set up the groups. I'm not going to go into any of that. Let's draw the scenario out, I got a group. It's called Maryland, DC, Virginia Digital Marketing Leaders. And here I am, I got a nice little banner up there, the group looks good zero members, walk me through the step by step of what I would do to grow that group.

Josh Turner: One of the first things that you're going to do is you want to make sure you have a lot of prospects who are going to be interested in that group that you're already connected to, so that you can do kind of a bulk invite. Once you get the group set up, you can do a bulk invitation to invite all of them to join. There's an automated way to just do a couple clicks and send it to a bunch of your connections. That'll get you your first probably, maybe a couple hundred people joining the group, maybe 100. Not a ton, usually. A lot of people will say, "Well, do I then start the group before I connect with people?" Yeah, typically we do and then people say, "Well, how could I, when I'm connecting with people? How can I call myself the founder of the Maryland DC Marketing Leaders Network when the group has zero people in it, and it's not even a thing yet.?

Josh Turner: People don't look into that. When they see your connection requests come through, they just accept it. They're not like, let me research and see if this thing exists yet. If somebody did that, you just be like, "Hey, it's just getting started, man. It's all good."

Anik Singal: Can I pause you real quick there? Because I have a question. I have 20,000 connections, and I have so many connections with people that would be completely unrelated to this. And I may not even want them in the group.

Josh Turner: Sure.

Anik Singal: They're from all over the world. They're not executives or professionals necessarily in that regard. Do I want to do a mass invite?

Josh Turner: The efficiencies that you gain by doing that, most of the people who aren't interested in it will just be like, "Oh, that's not for me." And they just ignore it. And then some people who are goofy and have nothing to do with that, but still want to join it because they just love your stuff. Well, you need just got more people in your group and it helps the numbers to show that there's more members here. I would say to do it, but if you really don't want to there's ways to get around it, but you're creating a lot more work for yourself.

Anik Singal: Nah, I don't like work. Let's not do that. All right. Okay. Step one, make sure you have a lot of contacts already. I can say for myself, check mark. I don't know how many local contacts I have. But the other ... Okay, so let me ask you this. I don't have a big local network necessarily, because I've never needed it. But my executive vice president of sales and marketing, who's going to be leading this project he does. He's connected to a ton. Can he also be an admin of the group and do the exact same thing I'm doing with my contacts? Can he do that with his?

Josh Turner: Totally I love that. You could leverage anybody in your office. You could have all the people on your team, doing the same thing to all of their connections and inviting them all to be a part of it.

Anik Singal: That could get fun. All right, well, then we got a lot of connections. All right, great. Now all of a sudden, we do have a lot of targeted people that could be getting into that group. Make sure you have contacts already. Step two was do a bulk invitation to not only all of your connections, but hey, anyone else that's connected. In my case, I've got quite a few, actually four or five really strong team members that would have strong LinkedIn profiles. All right, let's keep going step three?

Josh Turner: The next step from there is really going to be, for what we do, is we're going to just be doing ongoing prospecting. One of the very first things we do almost at the same time that we create the group is we go out and connect with lots and lots of prospects. We're going to then also include in that messaging campaign that I talked about earlier, your invitations to join the group. Because some people are just not going to see that automated invite. Some people will maybe just ignore the first one. That's going to be a way to get more people in the group is to just manually invite people with one on one messages in LinkedIn and then as you continue prospecting on an ongoing basis ... that's a big part of our system. We need to keep adding lots of people into the top of the funnel, so that we get that 20% in the fall out at the bottom. And then every month, we've got people working through this process like clockwork. And part of that messaging campaign on an ongoing basis is inviting people to join the group.

Josh Turner: That's a big part of it. Other things that you can do from there, you can run ads to get people to join the group. You can put little badges on your website, promoting the group. Now with ads, it's interesting that LinkedIn ads are more expensive than Facebook ads. LinkedIn ads to get people to join a LinkedIn group probably more expensive than what you're going to want to spend. But with Facebook ads, interestingly enough, I don't see many people do it but you can use Facebook ads, to get people to join a group and get people in there for a buck or two a piece at times. Depends on the market, but it's certainly worth trying. Those are just a few ways to do it. You might if you've got other email lists with people in your local area that you built in other ways you can promote the group that way. Then really, it's just an ongoing effort of continuing to promote the group, continuing to connect with new people, invite them into the group and so on.

Anik Singal: When you talked about the Facebook strategy just a second ago, were you talking about getting people into a Facebook group or using Facebook ads to get people into your LinkedIn group.

Josh Turner: Facebook ads to get people into your LinkedIn group.

Anik Singal: Ah, smart. Because I know for a fact on Facebook, I can easily target within a 50 mile radius of where I am. People that are listed as marketing professionals, CMOS, VP, Director of Marketing. It's not a small pool, it's probably about 100,000 or so once I start to even get a little bit down, to the mid level management. That's a great idea. Actually putting that in a video ad and then just linking directly to the LinkedIn group to get them to join. That's awesome. We do have an entire round where I'm going to talk to you about AD strategy. I'll save some of my ad questions for that. I had a question when you said ongoing prospecting to engage them. Am I ongoing prospecting for new connections or ongoing prospecting to existing connections to get into the group?

Josh Turner: Well, it can be both but really what I was speaking to is ongoing prospecting to get new first degree connections.

Anik Singal: Okay, basically, like I said, I have 20,000 connections. My goal is let's grow that. But now, let's strategically grow it to local people.

Josh Turner: Sure. Right. Yeah.

Anik Singal: When we talk ... we could talk more-

Josh Turner: You can use the profiles of a couple of other people in your office as well to do it. You mentioned you've got a VP on your team who's got a lot of local connections. Might make sense to have him developing connections as well because you've already got 20,000 connections, he probably has a lot less than that. He might have more runway, you max out at 30,000. When you get to that point for your account, you might have to then have someone go through and weed out people.

Anik Singal: Kick people, I didn't know there's a max, so now I got to start kicking some people out.

Josh Turner: Yeah.

Anik Singal: I don't need you.

Josh Turner: The other thing I want to say about LinkedIn groups before we move on is a lot of people will say LinkedIn groups? Is that still a thing? It is, if you do it the right way. And the other thing too, is that LinkedIn has come out and said within the last year, that basically they see that Facebook is kind of eating their lunch with Facebook groups. They're going to make a comeback. They're reinvesting into LinkedIn groups to try and have a resurgence. LinkedIn groups are going to be be gaining in popularity.

Anik Singal: I was just going to say this, this is probably the time to get in. Because they're about to move a lot of focus point on it and give it probably more organic reach and all that fun stuff.

Josh Turner: I think so.

Anik Singal: I have a question. I don't know if this falls into the ad section or whatever. But we are talking a lot about prospecting connecting. LinkedIn offers you these three levels. I forgot what they are, you can buy up like Sales Navigator and they have a couple of other ones that you certain amount ... does any of that help? Is there one that you immediately would tell me if I came on as a client, is there a level that you'd immediately say like, "Listen, you have to buy that level of membership because it makes all the difference in the world."

Josh Turner: Yes, it's the Sales Navigator Account.

Anik Singal: Sales Navigator.

Josh Turner: That's it.

Anik Singal: Okay. Now I don't know if we're even allowed to publicly talk about this. I'm not going to give the name but one of my very good friends CEO of a company bought into this crazy wicked plan at LinkedIn which costs a lot of money. We're talking five figures, but he swears by it, he uses it for hiring, he swears by it. It allows them unlimited use crazy amounts of data ridiculous search ability to get super pinpointed. He's hired like four or five very high level people from it. We've been considering getting that tool here just for the hiring perspective, but I'm trying to ... Do you know what that tool? I don't know what it's called. I'm supposed to get connected to it. But would something like that add even more legs to this strategy for us if we had that kind of prospecting tool?

Josh Turner: I think it's LinkedIn recruiter that you're talking about. And in our experience, most of the time, it's not necessary for executing the system that we're using. There's probably some bells and whistles that come with it that are super helpful though. It's been a while since I've really looked at that one. Most people Sales Navigator is so powerful. I think it's about 100 bucks a month.

Anik Singal: It's nothing. All right. What about InMail ? Do you use InMail a lot? Is that a big part of your strategy? Or do you not bother with it much?

Josh Turner: It's not a big part. But with a Sales Navigator account, you get some InMails and so will utilize them. But it's not a big part of our strategy. InMail is used to send messages to people that you're not connected with already. Marketing to people who are not already connected with is not a huge part of our strategy. The way that we bring them into your network is with the connection request.

Anik Singal: Okay, got it. How big of a group do you think I'd have so I can put 200 people in my auditorium here. Let's say I wanted to plan an event three months down the line, that's my kickoff event. That's when I'm going to announce our B2B services. I want 200 professionals in the room, roughly. If you had to just ... right off the top of your head, just say you would need at least this many members in your group, what would you think?

Josh Turner: Well, the client that I shared with you earlier has in the neighborhood of 10,000 members in his group, and he gets 200 people at his events.

Anik Singal: Those are 200 paid though, right? They pay to come-

Josh Turner: [crosstalk] free.

Anik Singal: They're free. Okay.

Josh Turner: Yeah.

Anik Singal: About a 10,000 group, and I could pretty much say, hey, I should be able to get 200 people in a room. If I can get 200 people in a room, I'm pretty sure I could close a good percentage of them with what we're offering. That's really helpful. All right, so to recap, growing a group. Make sure you've got connections already. Make sure you do bulk invitation to all your connections and to anyone else that you might be connected to in your company. They could invite their individuals. Ongoing prospecting to build the top level means new connections. And then of course, in your communication plan for second, third, fourth messaging, invite them into the group. Run ads on LinkedIn if you want, they're a little bit more expensive. But you can also run ads on Facebook and pick up members for $1 or two into your group and you can do pretty good targeting on Facebook.

Anik Singal: And last but not least, Sales Navigator, hundred dollars a month will really help you in your prospecting. Last question for this round again, self serving Josh, I'm just curious. Let's say I just came to you and said, "Josh, here you go. You do it. Here's access to my profile." What are the pricing? What range of pricing do you guys offer? Because there's a lot of people watching right now they're probably thinking, Man, I really want to do this, but I want to know the reality of what's it going to cost if Josh does it for them?

Josh Turner: Yeah, absolutely. We just do it all for you. It starts at 2500 a month and that's for really, we're going to aim to get you somewhere between 10 to 15 sales appointments a month at that price point. And then if you want us to also include the promotion of an event, that's really a custom deal where we'd have to dig in deeper to put together a special proposal for you on just doing that. Most of our clients are just saying, "Hey, get me some sales appointments." Then a little further down the road in the relationship, we might say, "Hey, why don't we start doing some more stuff to convert this online thing into a real world community?" And that's usually ... that's going to be a higher price. Then for our program, where we get it all set up for you and do the initial build out and get you connected to lots of people. And then kind of hand you over the corvette and all you got to do is that drive it away, is $7,000 One time investment. Takes us about a month to build it all out for you.

Anik Singal: Got it. All right, awesome. All right. Well, let's keep moving on. And let's move into I think we're up to round number five here. Yeah, round number five. I want to talk about the content. How do you get this group to fall in love with you and really build that authority with the group? Let's move on to round number five.

Anik Singal: All right, round number five, content. Here's the deal, Josh, I'll be at level with you here. I love the idea of content. I love posting content. I love giving content. But I'm that guy, that for, first I've been doing this for 15 years. For 15 years, there would be a point in my life, I get excited, I'm going to do a blog, I'm going to post every day, I'm going to go crazy on it. I do it for four days, and it would be awesome. And the fifth day life kicks in, this happens, that happens and I'm off the blog. I would do it with my Facebook page, I would then do it with my Instagram. You can even see right now if you go to any of these pages, you'll see like periods where I go crazy, and then I fall off. The one thing in my life that I've actually been very devoted to and done every single week has been this podcast.

Anik Singal: And that's mostly because I use it for this exact reason I learned so much from it. As soon as you say post good content to a LinkedIn group regularly to engage, I started to have anxiety. One more thing I got to do, one more social media profile. Coming in with that, talk to me a little bit about what is needed. I got this group. Let's hypothetically, I got a group of 10,000 people, all local leaders of digital marketing in the Maryland, DC, Virginia area. Talk to me, what do I do? What's next? How do I post content? How often? What kind of content? Let's go through that strategy.

Josh Turner: Most of our clients are even worse than you. They're not even thinking about going on a run of creating lots of blog posts. They don't want to create content, they're not going to do it. If we required them to do it as part of our strategy, it would fail. What we do, and we find this by design initially, this was what we set out to do by design, not because people don't want to create content, but we found that it's better to just share resources and curate content so find other people's stuff. Third Party blog posts, third party news related to your area industry, different case studies you can come across. And there's all sorts of tools out there, like Feedly is a big one that we use.

Anik Singal: What is it, sorry?

Josh Turner: Feedly.

Anik Singal: F-E-E-D-L-Y

Josh Turner: L-Y.

Anik Singal: Feedly.com.

Josh Turner: It's a content aggregator curator kind of tool. Basically, what you can do is plug in different keywords and interests and things like that. And it will just give you a fire hose of content from the web. And then you can review it and pull out the stuff that it looks awesome and that you want to share into your group and including some of your messages on LinkedIn post the status updates, et cetera. Our concept is that if you're talking about yourself all the time, and you're just posting your own content all the time, in most cases, it just comes off as very promotional. It also comes off as something that your prospects don't care about at all. In most businesses and most industries, that's the case. In some cases, it's different. I mentioned Gary Vaynerchuk earlier, right? People like him who are just creating this amazing content all the time. That's a little bit of a different story, right?

Josh Turner: But for Tom Swift, running the IT company, the manufacturing executives that he works for don't want to read blog posts about what he does. They're not that interested in it. It's a very small sliver of their world. Instead, he curates lots of great content from all over the web, from all over, all sorts of sources, on the things that keep them up at night and the things that they are actually interested in. It's a wide variety of resources, the manufacturing executives care about like supply chain stuff or lean manufacturing or, sales strategies or safety issues or latest news from the manufacturing industry, all that kind of stuff. That's what's in the group primarily for our clients that do have their own content. We basically say, why don't we just sprinkle that in every once in a while. You can call it the 80, 20 rule or the 90, 10 or whatever it is.

Josh Turner: In a lot of cases, what it ends up being is more like, one out of every 10, or one out of every 20 posts in the group is something that's a little bit more about our client, maybe a little more promotional, or maybe one of their blog posts or case studies or something like that. That way, we're really showing up as somebody who's just providing value, not just pushing on old stuff all the time. And the byproduct of that is that it doesn't require you to really create any content at all, which is cool.

Anik Singal: That is the exact opposite of what I thought you would have said. Honestly, that's so relieving, right? Is that you're actually saying it helps you build authority more by not just constantly promoting your content, it actually helps you by ... because I guess you're looked upon as an aggregator, you're looked upon as a person just trying to help them out giving them ... you're out there seeing ... I love it. Okay, I understand it, I get the psychology of it. That's not that hard to do. And that can be done by someone else. Doesn't require me to make more videos which I do enough of, or write more content or say more things. How often? Okay, you have your ideal client right now, Josh, you've got the ability to ... they'll do whatever you want. How often would you want them posting to the group?

Josh Turner: Once a day.

Anik Singal: Once a day?

Josh Turner: Yeah, you need 20 to 30 pieces of content a month, if you're going to literally do every day, including weekends, 30 pieces of content a month is all you need. You could do twice a day, if you really want to have a lot of stuff happening in there. But you got to remember other people are going to start posting content too as the group grows, quality is better than quantity, I believe. In a nutshell, that's really just what we recommend and what we find works and it's a good balance. The thing is, a lot of people will get into this when you start the group, don't be surprised if initially there's not a bunch of people commenting and liking and engaging on it. LinkedIn groups, when you're first get them off the ground, you're not going to see a bunch of engagement. You got to stick with it and continue growing the group. And eventually that'll turn around.

Josh Turner: And one of the ways to get engagement, if that is important to you, is, like I said, in the messaging campaigns, when you're messaging your connections, invite them to comment on things in the group. And a lot of people will, a percentage of people will. That's a good way to get things active in the group as well. Depending on your industry, in your space, and with a marketing focus group, you're going to have other people in there who are going to want to be posting content too and making their presence known. And you just got to have to keep an eye on it and moderate that content and make sure that people aren't spamming your group and whatnot.

Anik Singal: Well, I thought that was really awesome. I know nothing about LinkedIn group. I didn't realize other people can post there too. That now you become an aggregator at another level because other people are contributing to your group and in some way, basically helping you with your authority in getting active in there. Wow, very, very, very cool. We talked about aggregating content feedly.com, posting things in there. Now you had mentioned in the past round, which is, and you'd mentioned it just now again, where you communicate with people to get them to the group. But if I'm posting once a day, obviously, I'm not messaging everybody once a day saying, "Hey, I posted something new. Hey, I posted something new." How do you determine when and how, where you post? How do you determine that? I mean, communicate who you send, what to?

Josh Turner: Right. Well, typically, the people who are in the group are going to see some of that content in a couple different ways, just naturally. Now, they're not going to see everything you put in there, but maybe once or twice a month, they end up seeing something that you put in that group. You're able to stay top of mind with them in that way, just with these light touch points providing value. Now aside from that, it really depends on kind of what your current strategy is in the group. But our baseline strategy is that prospects who are in a current messaging campaign, which will be five or six, LinkedIn messages, sent one on one to prospects. Those are the people who are going to be getting touches related to the group. That could be, by the time we ramp it up, because what we do is we add a new batches of prospects in every couple of weeks into these messaging campaigns.

Josh Turner: And then they all are getting cycled through these five, six, seven message campaigns, that if they're getting a message every couple weeks, and it's seven messages, right? That's ... what is that? 14 weeks, so that's four months or something like that three and a half months, right? By the time you get to that three and a half month mark, you have hundreds of people a month, who are getting some touchpoint in interaction about the group. Which is typically going to be enough to get enough people into the group commenting and posting and stuff.

Anik Singal: I get it. You're not messaging existing group members saying, "Hey, I posted something cool. Go check it out." This is part of the prospecting initial communication plan. I got it. All right, perfect.

Josh Turner: At the same time a lot of the people that do join the group and become existing members, though, they will end up receiving those messages at some point too. They're already in the group and you're just saying, "Hey, just posted something new in the group. Go check it out."

Anik Singal: I love it. All right. Brilliant. Well, that sounds easy enough. Nothing big challenge there. Love it. Thanks so much, you cleared up so many things, misconceptions I would have had about starting a LinkedIn group. Random question, completely not a part of this topic. But have you seen it to work the same way with Facebook groups? With a Facebook group is it also like, hey, curate content and post curated content in there and keep it active? And that's actually appreciated more than just always putting your own content in there?

Josh Turner: There are a percentage of people in our programs, it's a small percentage, but we have a lot of folks in our programs that go through our training, and have implemented the strategy on Facebook, because they've determined that for their target market, people actually are approachable on Facebook, more so than LinkedIn. For some businesses, they're prospects, they're just not going to reach them on LinkedIn. Because it's not a business professional kind of market. Yeah, the strategy can work really well on Facebook too. And I think the same thing applies there. If you're a member of a Facebook group, you join it and it's got this great promise and you think it's going to be really cool. And then person who runs the group is constantly pitching their own stuff, after a while, it gets a little old. You see some of the some of the experts in the online space who use Facebook groups and have lots of group members.

Josh Turner: I've joined those groups with the people when they're just talking about themselves all the time and hype in their programs and stuff. It just quickly becomes clear, this is just like a feeder group for this person's program. And there's really nothing but hype here.

Anik Singal: Get it. All right, I love it. Let's move on. If you're if you're cooler, I really want to move to round number six, you've been addressing, you probably demolish three of my rounds, Josh, because you've just been addressing them as you go. That is so awesome. Let's do this we're going to move to round number six.

Anik Singal: All right, round number six, advertising. Now, I feel like there is a big ... Well, I don't know anything about LinkedIn advertising. I will admit this to Josh, I was super gung ho super excited about LinkedIn advertising. I went in and I created a campaign, this is four months ago. And I was like, I'm going to use it to get more Lurn center members. The campaign that we've tested has come and gone. We've already canceled it. And LinkedIn is yet to spend a dollar. I get updates every week. They're like, "Hey, sure ..." And I never even went there to look at what's going on. Maybe my bidding isn't high enough, I didn't care. I was like, "Okay, I'm not getting enough flow from there." Anyways, I really I'm intrigued right now with the idea of using LinkedIn ad system to grow the group at least.

Anik Singal: Talk to me a little bit about it. Let's say you did have a client that said, "I got a lot of money, I want to get to 10,000 members fast. I don't got time to do it organically. Let's go buy them." What would your strategy look like? Which of the ad platform? What would you use? How much money would you plan on spending per member like some idea of how you would use advertising?

Josh Turner: With LinkedIn ads, almost every client that we work with on LinkedIn ads is using it to generate sales appointments. Not to get people into LinkedIn groups. Because I really believe it would be cost prohibitive. You're looking at probably three to $5 per click. If I was going to do it, though, I think the way that I would play it is that I would go to, first have the ad to sending people to a learning page, basically get people to opt in to be a part of this exclusive community. And you're probably if you do it right, and if you you nail the hook, and all that kind of stuff, you're probably looking at $20, maybe 15 per person that opts in to be a part of the group. They opt in on the landing page with their email and name. And then on the next page, it says, great, you're in next step, just go click here to join the LinkedIn community.

Josh Turner: You get their email, so you're building that list, and then you get them into the LinkedIn group. The reason why I recommend, put that that email gate in front of the LinkedIn group, if you're using ads. Is because then you can kind of position this exclusivity on the front of it to where it's almost make you feel like they're applying to be a part of it. If you have a LinkedIn add it just goes straight into a LinkedIn group. You're going to probably have a lot of leakage from people that don't even know what to do? Because it's not like a super clear instruction of, "Click here to join the group." You're looking at this kind of gross looking page. You know what I mean?

Anik Singal: Yeah, yeah.

Josh Turner: [crosstalk 00:58:13].

Anik Singal: That's $20 a group member, but you are building an email list also. But Initially you had said, "Hey, if you really want to grow your group using ads, go to Facebook ads. What would that ad look like? Would it go ad opt in page group, same strategy you just said? Or would that go ad straight to LinkedIn group?

Josh Turner: Personally, I think you almost ... you can do whatever you want. But I think you would almost have to do the ... get them to opt in and give you their email first, so that you could at least have some pixels on that page. You can't put your pixels for tracking on your LinkedIn group page. Just for that reason, I would have that first. But yeah, also just for the same reasons, I said with LinkedIn ads. But definitely your costs on Facebook are going to be cheaper. You're also going to see a lot more people probably from Facebook who aren't maybe the exact right person that you want. In a lot of ways people said LinkedIn ads are too expensive. And what we say to that is, well, really, at the end of the day, do you care about cost per click? Or do you care about ROI?

Josh Turner: And for a lot of businesses, not all, but the ones that where LinkedIn makes sense for, they're willing to pay more to get leads, because they're very high quality leads and the ROI makes a lot of sense, once people get all the way through the funnel.

Anik Singal: Makes perfect sense. Let's go back to your original, here's what it would look like for me. By the way, I do want to ask a question because I know I've been very self serving for this, but everyone is listening. We have a lot of students that are local marketing consultants. Would your strategy ... is pretty much the same, right? I'm going to assume if you brought on a digital marketing consulting company, they want to sign clients the same thing, right? May be they don't have geographical limitations, in which case you create a group that doesn't have geographical limitations. But would your strategy remain the same for them as well?

Josh Turner: Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Anik Singal: Okay.

Josh Turner: We have a lot of the marketing agencies that are clients.

Anik Singal: All right, brilliant. Now let's go back to using LinkedIn to book appointments. In my case, I'm going to have a sales member who would be able to get in a car even drive down to them if they need to, and sell them on the value and have a beautiful package that shows, Hey, when you put your team in here they'll learn this, it's ROI is ridiculous. I'm assuming I have to create some page that really, shows the value of that. Talk to me though, about the ad strategy that goes straight to appointment. What kind of numbers? What kind of conversions? What do you usually see?

Josh Turner: Yeah, there's a few different things at play here. I'm going to pull up a deck from a talk I get recently so I can give you some specifics on it. But one is called, we call it the RTA funnel, which is essentially just you get people to opt into a free report some sort of giveaway. And then on the thank you page, have a video inviting them to have a little one on one session, and then email follow ups driving people back into that appointment page. That's pretty standard kind of funnel for people trying to get appointments.

Anik Singal: Yeah, we use that funnel all the time here.

Josh Turner: Yeah, yeah. That that kind of thing works well, if your offer's good, you've got a good hook for why they should book an appointment, that can work well. And you're probably going to be looking at 150 to $200 per appointment. It's typically, what I would say to expect. It can be more, it can be less it just depends. In our business for my own company, for example, we spend about 20,000 a month on LinkedIn ads, generating appointments for my sales team. And usually generate about five to one ROI on the sales from that. We're fine paying, we don't care what Cost Per appointment is really if the ROI is there. The other funnel that we'll use is what we call the DTA funnel, which is direct to appointment. Typically what that's going to look like is you're going to have an ad that's going to show up in somebody's LinkedIn homepage feed. And that's what LinkedIn calls sponsored content, or sponsored posts.

Josh Turner: You've got basically an invitation in the ads to have a conversation, sometimes we'll have a video, that's part of it, it can be an animated explainer video or a talking head video talking about your services and what you do. Then a lot of times it'll ... the button that call to action on there is just, get quote, or sign up for a time to have a conversation. That's really a very direct message. And then that would go once they click that button, it will take them to a LinkedIn lead form. You can start it up without having to create landing pages using this kind of a funnel. That can work and we get good results doing that. The third one is dynamic retargeting. On LinkedIn, there are a couple ways to retargeting, which is a complete no brainer for almost anybody.

Josh Turner: And this is something that is new within the last couple years on LinkedIn, but you can have a pixel on your site. Just like retargeting works on Facebook, then anybody that hits that site, you can do a few things. One, you can obviously show them ads, there's a few different types of ads, you can show people on LinkedIn. But the really, really cool thing that we're excited about is you can send a sponsored InMail to them. Anybody that hits that pixel, it can then trigger them getting a message from you on LinkedIn. You're not connected to this person. This is just somebody who hit your website and was checking you out. And then at some point down the road, they get in email from you that can say whatever you want to say it has a nice little banner image next to it. And that is surprisingly cheap right now. Getting that message in front of people for like $1. It converts really well if your message is on point.

Anik Singal: So it's $1 per message, what percentage of people receiving that are you seeing currently kind of opening it?

Josh Turner: Over half.

Anik Singal: Wow. And you said at some point down. Let's say I have an ad on LinkedIn, and it's talking about the local group on digital marketing training come to a free event, blah, blah, blah, they go to an opt in page. It's offering them the ability to get a seat to a free event to up level their digital marketing skills. They don't opt in, or better yet, you know what they opt in, they go ahead and opt in and the next page is like a book a call with me, they don't book a call. I can trigger an InMail that would go to them. How long after that event would you say an InMail should go to them?

Josh Turner: Well, it depends because here's the thing with retargeting. If you're manually sending InMails and you just kind of decide based on your preferences, how soon should we follow up with people. But if you're having it automatically be triggered through retargeting, you don't really have discretion on that. There are some ways you can set it up but you're not guaranteed to get the message to anybody because LinkedIn won't allow somebody to get more than one of these a month. Because they don't want people getting bombarded with these kinds of promotions.

Anik Singal: Okay, okay, okay.

Josh Turner: Yeah. You're not going to hit everybody that hits your site immediately. It'll happen sometime a little bit further down the road.

Anik Singal: They don't let me do like, "Hey, two days in send this. Four days in send this." Not like a retargeting ad, we can do all of that.

Josh Turner: Not exactly like that. Now, with LinkedIn ads, you can do things like that, because of course, you could show text ads or ads that show up in their homepage feed and things like that. You can have those triggered a little bit more accurately, I guess.

Anik Singal: Got it. That's awesome. It's crazy some of the data that you've given it's to the T what I get from even Facebook. You said 150 to $200 per appointment on the RTA funnel, that's like to the dot what we get when we run on Facebook ads. The difference is we're going from B2C in that market. And here you're telling me I can get B2B, I can make a three X ROI on a B2C lead at 150 to $200 a lead all day long. That's we've been proving that in our business all day long. And now I can completely see how a ... I can use LinkedIn to get the exact same dollar amount per lead, but I'm going after a much much better, more money buyer. You said five X ROI, 500%, it makes perfect sense, the numbers are lining up almost exactly. Really-

Josh Turner: The key here is that you don't just turn on LinkedIn ads and get those results. I don't want anybody messaging me saying like, "Hey, Josh, I tried some LinkedIn ads, and I wasn't getting appointments and I spent 1000 bucks and I didn't get any appointments." And because there's a lot more than just turning on some LinkedIn ads and setting up who you want the ads to show to, right? So much of this comes down to the offer, the hook, what's your lead magnet going to be, your positioning, right? There's a real soft skill, there's an art and a science to this stuff. But for somebody like yourself Anik that's already got a funnel that's converting really well over here. Or that understands marketing, understands your prospects, that can really work. Now we have a lot of clients that come to us that need help with that stuff. And it takes time, it can take several months to dial in and offer that's going to convert at a good level.

Josh Turner: If you're new to this kind of thing, you have to have that kind of runway.

Anik Singal: No, that's beautiful. I get it makes perfect sense. One more question about advertising and that is, text ad, video ads, image ads. I know it works and what I like to do on Facebook, what works on LinkedIn?

Josh Turner: A little bit of all of it really.

Anik Singal: Okay. [crosstalk 01:07:51]. Like Facebook, you'd lean towards video, it just does a lot better but not the case with LinkedIn necessarily?

Josh Turner: Well, right now video on LinkedIn is is great. They're really promoting it and the feed for organic engagement. And video is very effective in ads as well. I love that LinkedIn live is a thing that's coming out they've started. Some people are in it on a beta and I've started to see it pop up. Yeah, LinkedIn is definitely pushing video. But we like to do a mix of all the different things, and kind of see which one's going to work best. Now if I had to only do one thing it would be the sponsored InMail because like I said, we're getting those messages into people for about a buck apiece sometimes as low as 50 cents, sometimes as high as a couple bucks. And they're converting so well because those people have already been to our site and indicated some interest. Those appointments coming from that sponsored InMail are sometimes 50 to 100 bucks apiece. I love that one.

Anik Singal: That's amazing. Man, this has been such an awesome awesome episode. You got my brain going crazy. I don't know if you realize it, but you may have just completely outlined a marketing strategy that'll go on to make me, deca millions. I promise you, I will buy you a really nice watch when that happens, man, I appreciate that, Josh. Yeah, let's move on to round seven.

Anik Singal: Round seven, it's all about Josh. Josh, I can honestly tell you, I think I'm going to be coming down your alley, I think I'm going to want your help. I want you guys to really help us put together a marketing strategy. We're about two, three months away from going into that B2B market. We have a few other things we're addressing, but I really want to hit it hard. And I know that everyone watching right now they may not be able to come in and hire you as a consulting level that I want to, but where can they connect with you? LinkedIn is ... I completely agree LinkedIn is being ignored. Hey, listen, if you are a coach, if you are a consultant, if you have any kind of service where you'd like to sell something for multiple thousands of dollars, where you want to reach businesses, you got to be on LinkedIn.

Anik Singal: The other thing is I've been ... Josh the other thing I couldn't help but think about and think through as you're talking is that I'm in the process of launching a financial services company, an investment advisory company. Again, I want to go after people with money. I want to go after people that have a lot of money to invest. And I find like that would be LinkedIn. I felt like they could be ... your strategy as you went over it with me. I'm thinking, I could use this. I have two other companies that I could use this in. And actually, one could argue I have three other companies outside of Lurn that I could use this in. I'm seeing massive scale here. How can people connect with you? How can people learn from you? How could people consider having you, working with you like having you do their LinkedIn, please tell us a little bit more.

Josh Turner: Sure. Well, for one, I'd love to give anybody that wants to dive even deeper into this, we've got something called a Rocket Launch playbook, which is a 30 page guide. That goes into our entire organic strategy in depth and includes a lot of scripts for a lot of the messages. And really a lot of meat on the bone if you're wanting to really dive deeper into this and I'd love to give that to all of your listeners for free. If you go to linkedselling.com/tfe, for The Fighting Entrepreneur, /tfe. You can get that playbook for free as well as if you want to sign up for a one on one with one of the coaches on my team so that we can walk through the same conversation with you that I just walked through with Anik and no obligation buy anything from us or anything like that, all totally for free. We'd love to give that away to all of your community Anik.

Josh Turner: Other than that, just look me up on LinkedIn and send me a connection request and tell ... Make sure when you do it though, that you include a personal note and say, Anik sent me, because if you just hit that connect button, I'm going to assume that you're one of the people just spamming people and I'm going to ignore it.

Anik Singal: Your one ... wait, wait, wait you're one of the, what was it? leghumpers?

Josh Turner: Yeah, that's right.

Anik Singal: One of the leghumpers. Don't be a leghumper. All right. That's the biggest lesson you'll learn today. LinkedInselling.com/TFE. Now you're not proud

Josh Turner: Not LinkedInselling.com, linkedselling.com.

Anik Singal: Oh, yeah, that would probably be a problem if you were doing that. Okay, linkedselling.com, I'll change it on my notes here, linkedselling.com/TFE. If you've ever wondered why it's awesome to be a fighting entrepreneur and be in our community, I just got you the ability to book a free call with a LinkedIn expert on Josh's team to do exactly what we just did here with your business. How cool is that? If you don't take it up, that's your problem. Go to linkedselling.com/TFE, look up Josh on LinkedIn connect with them. Make sure you tell them Anik sent you otherwise you he not add you and you will be labeled a leghumper and that's not cool. Don't do that.

Anik Singal: All right. Few more notes here. Everyone Anikpodcast.com. Look at this. Look at this right here. If you're on YouTube and watching, if you're on iTunes, don't look at anything because you're driving probably. All these notes. These are awesome notes. There's like the cliff notes of it. Go grab these at Anikpodcast.com. Make sure you leave us a great review. If you're on YouTube come on you got to leave a comment right now. Give some love to Josh, he revealed his entire strategy that's so cool. Hit subscribe, hit the little bell icon make sure so you get all of our updates in the future. And hey, make sure you head over to Lurn.com L-U-R-N.com. Sign up for a free account. There's so many awesome courses in there for you to take and keep up leveling your entrepreneurial skills.

Anik Singal: All right, so make sure you do all of that before we close up Mr. Josh Turner we do have a rapid fire round to ask you some fun questions. I do have to remind you, you did swear the oath of The Fighting Entrepreneur.

Josh Turner: Yap.

Anik Singal: All right, here we go. Rapid fire round, if you were doing that. Okay, linkedselling.com let me change it on my notes here. linkedselling.com/tfe. If you've ever wondered why it's awesome to be a fighting entrepreneur and be in our community, I just got you the ability to book a free call with a LinkedIn expert on Josh's team to do exactly what we just did here with your business. How cool is that, if you don't take it up that's your problem. Go to the linkedselling.com/tfe look up Josh on LinkedIn connect with them, make sure you tell them Anik sent you otherwise you will not add you and you will be labeled a leghumper and that's not cool. Don't do that.

Anik Singal: All right. Few more notes here. Everyone Anikpodcast.com. Look at this. Look at this right here. If you're on YouTube and watching, if you're on iTunes, don't look at anything because you're driving probably. All these notes. These are awesome notes. There's like the cliff notes of it. Go grab these at Anikpodcast.com. Make sure you leave us a great review. If you're on YouTube come on you got to leave a comment right now. Give some love to Josh, he revealed his entire strategy that's so cool. Hit subscribe, hit the little bell icon make sure so you get all of our updates in the future. And hey, make sure you head over to Lurn.com L-U-R-N.com. Sign up for a free account. There's so many awesome courses in there for you to take and keep up leveling your entrepreneurial skills. All right, so make sure you do all of that before we close up Mr. Josh Turner we do have a rapid fire round to ask you some fun questions. I do have to remind you, you did swear the oath of the fighting entrepreneur.

Josh Turner: Yap.

Anik Singal: All right, here we go rapid fire round. You could time travel, Josh, any period, what time would it be?

Josh Turner: I'm going to say the 60s.

Anik Singal: 60s? All right. What personality trait has gotten you into the most trouble?

Josh Turner: I would say, boy, that's a really tough one.

Anik Singal: There's so many.

Josh Turner: Probably, I'm just going to say, being an introvert.

Anik Singal: Okay. All right. What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

Josh Turner: It's a whole life. [crosstalk 01:15:45].

Anik Singal: ... best. Yeah, one of the best pieces of advice you've ever received?

Josh Turner: Yeah, yeah. It's a whole life. A mentor of mine told me that a long time ago.

Anik Singal: It's a what, sorry?

Josh Turner: It's a whole life. You can't just focus on just business all the time. You got to take care of every aspect of your life. Your health, your family, nutrition, working out, reading, all that stuff.

Anik Singal: Love it. And what book are you reading right now?

Josh Turner: I just picked up a book called Solitary, which is a Autobiography of a man who was incarcerated for 40 years in solitary confinement and was found to be innocent and released. And I think it proves to be a really touching inspiring book.

Anik Singal: Holy moly. 40 years?

Josh Turner: Yeah, here in the US.

Anik Singal: And he's is he sane?

Josh Turner: He seems to be coherent. Yeah. He's out right now.

Anik Singal: Man, I don't know if I can read that, [crosstalk] that's nuts. I hope he's suing someone. That's crazy. Hey, what accomplishment are you most proud of?

Josh Turner: Well, my son is amazing. And I am so proud of him. He's two years old. His name is Eddie. I'm going to go with that.

Anik Singal: All right. Hey, Eddie. That's awesome. Hope you're watching this. A few years from now, Eddie, and know that your dad is super proud of you. That is awesome. Hey, Josh, thank you so much for giving us your time and you have been amazing. Again everybody LinkedSelling.com/tfe just offered every single person is listening to this a free call to do your own strategy session on your business and how to use LinkedIn for it. Josh, you have been absolutely awesome. Thank you one more time.F We hope to have you back again in the near future. And for those of you watching right now remember when life pushes you stand straight, smile, push it back. This is Anik Singal and I will see you on the next fighting entrepreneur podcast.

Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to the fighting entrepreneur with your host Anik Singal.