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- [00:04]
Dave Gerhardt
Okay, everyone, look.
- [00:05]
Exit 5 Host/Announcer
We're all using AI right now. Point blank, that's. That part's done. Chat GPT. Like my dad's talking to me about ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. It's all gone mainstream and everyone's using it for copy help, idea generation, the baseline stuff. As Jess on our team head of marketing likes to remind me, I'm. I'm only scratching the surface and there's clearly a gap. Most marketing teams are using AI tools to think, but not actually do. And that's where things are heading next. Our sponsor, optimizely built this platform called Opal that lets you use autonomous AI agents to go and do the stuff you shouldn't be doing manually versus just being another chatbot. This is stuff like creating and optimizing on brand web pages, emails, SEO content and campaigns by audience segment. It catches brand, legal and accessibility issues before anything else goes live. It pulls data from your other systems like Google Analytics or your CRM and sales tools to auto build reports, summaries and recommendations. And guess what? It's completely no code. So marketers like you and me can build and leverage agents for any use case that we dream up without needing to rely on developers. Heck yeah.
- [01:12]
Dave Gerhardt
So get this.
- [01:12]
Exit 5 Host/Announcer
Optimizely has this awesome offer for Exit 5 listeners. They're offering a free personalized 45 minute AI workshop to help you identify the best AI use cases for your marketing team and map out which agents can save you time with a practical plan you can actually go and use right away. So if you need help demystifying all of this AI agent stuff and you want to figure out where you can put AI agents to work inside of your marketing team, go and check this out. Go to optimizely.com exit5 and check it out. That's optimizely.com exit5. You're listening to the Dave Gerhard show.
- [01:57]
Finn
1, 2, 3, 4.
- [01:58]
Emeric
Exit.
- [02:02]
Finn
Okay.
- [02:02]
Dave Gerhardt
Hey, everybody. Super excited to be back. I see a bunch of people rolling in. My name is Dave Gerhardt. I am the founder of Exit 5. We run the world's greatest B2B marketing community. I can say that. You can just say whatever you want and I'm having a blast doing it. Twice a month we do these live sessions. Don't you dare call them a webinar because they're not webinars. They're different. These are the. These are different. Where this is more fun. We're like, we're like cool webinars. I guess that's a webinar. We bring on a Bunch of subject matter experts to go deep on a topic that matters to you. And this, this month, this topic is really near and dear to my heart. My favorite marketing channel of all time, social media. We're going to dive into how to think about B2B social with a specific focus on LinkedIn. I hope that you leave this session with a better understanding about what's working on LinkedIn today. How to sell the value of LinkedIn to your boss, how to prove that this, this stuff works, what to do. And we have a great crew of people here. I got a great panel. We did a prep call yesterday. We just were hanging out in the green room. It's going to be, it's going to be great. Alex. Alex is already trolling me.
- [03:07]
Finn
Cool.
- [03:07]
Dave Gerhardt
Webinar. Yeah. Lindsay, this is the marketing. This is the marketing festival. So if you can hear me, okay, right now, just put in the chat, like your name, where you're writing in from, and then a quick line on. Why did you decide to come to this? Like, what do you want to get out of this session? What do you want to know yet? Somebody said, has it started yet? Yes, it has. This, this is it starting. Somebody says, is this the right link for the webinar? Yes, this is. Although it's not a webinar. So put your name in my. Matt said my boss made me come. Matt, that's not true. Your boss is out. He doesn't care if you go to this. Jason's in San Mateo. Robin does a lot on LinkedIn. Always improving, struggling with ad success. That's good. We'll talk about Thought Leader. We'll talk about Thought Leader ads. Love this. Okay, so today's session, I just want to give a shout out to Agora Pulse for sponsoring today's session. If you lead a marketing team and social as part of your gtm, which it is for basically all of us today, you' probably felt this pain. You're doing social because you have to, but it's not always clear what it's actually doing for your business. Man, if I had a dollar for every time I've had to ask that. Answer that question. That's exactly what Agora Pulse helps with their platform. Helps you plan and publish posts, then actually track how social is supporting, pipeline, brand and demand so you can prove the impact of social to leadership and clearly see the roi. That's the biggest thing that we're going to talk about today, is how to prove the value of this stuff to leadership. We're going to talk a lot about that. And it's your job to teach them it is. Even though it can be a pain in the ass. Also, I know that everybody here is on LinkedIn, at least in our world.
- [04:33]
Exit 5 Host/Announcer
On.
- [04:34]
Dave Gerhardt
In B2B. That's where you should be. Agorapulse is also excellent for LinkedIn publishing and reporting, especially employee advocacy and founder led social. So if that's part of your strategy, it makes it much easier to manage without having to use 20 different tools. Shout out to the team at Agora Pulse for sponsoring today's session. If you need more confidence that social is worth the investment, you should go and check them out. All right, we got a bunch of. I'm excited to get into this session. Aaron. Producer Aaron, you want to roll my, Roll my panelists out here real quick? Dash is first. So Dasha, I'm gonna let you. I'm gonna let you kick us off. Quick intro before we get things. We'll, we'll, we'll go. Dasha, Finn and Emerick.
- [05:09]
Dasha
Okay, Sweet. Hi everyone. My name is Dasha. I am the head of marketing at a company called Proton AI. We build software for wholesale distributors. Not the sexiest industry, but it's really fun. And our flagship product is CRM software and we're a series A venture backed company.
- [05:28]
Dave Gerhardt
I'm on a big kick of not sexy B2B. Like that is the whole world. We wrote about it last week in our newsletter. Just all the industries that are out there in B2B. It's, it's A. It's cool to connect with people.
- [05:40]
Finn
Okay.
- [05:40]
Dave Gerhardt
Mr. Finn. Hello.
- [05:42]
Finn
I saw that they gave you the wrong title. They still call you CEO in here.
- [05:45]
Dave Gerhardt
I put that myself. Dan's out. Dan's out for the next month. So I'm back. I got 30 days to change the trajectory of this company and I'm going to do it.
- [05:54]
Finn
There we go. I'm Finn. I run a little agency called Project 33. We do executive thought leadership. So we work with about 15 B2B SaaS companies and we partner with their founder, CEO executives and help them create content on LinkedIn.
- [06:08]
Dave Gerhardt
Awesome. Thanks for hanging out. Yes, sir.
- [06:10]
Emeric
Emma.
- [06:11]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah.
- [06:11]
Emeric
So I'm Emeric from Paris, France. I'm the co founder and CEO of AgoraPulse. And we started this 14 years ago now. So it's quite a long time. We're bootstrapped. We took that to 25 million of annual revenue, 160 employees. And what we love is solving this why we do social question. That's why we exist.
- [06:35]
Dave Gerhardt
We were backstage and we were talking about this before and it seems like the cheat code to figuring out impact on social is to have a CEO that understands how it works. But first I want to just let's level set. And so the reason we decided to focus on LinkedIn and we'll take all your questions. So the best part about these to me is the chat. All of our panelists here, we're all going to be looking at the chat, add in your comments, talk about what's working or not at your company. We will try to work those into our discussion. But there's also the Q and A. So if there's specific things you want to make sure we go back to put them in the Q and A and then we can sort those by upvotes. And by the way, there's 330 people live online right now. So for anyone that tells you that webinars don't work. Oh, damn it. I said called the webinar don't work or people aren't interested. Well, I would correct them. So let's start off with this. And this is just going to be a free for all. So grab, grab the mic, whoever, whoever feels passionate about this. But let's talk about LinkedIn. Like why LinkedIn? What I thought LinkedIn was, this is the. I know the answer obviously is a leading question, But I thought LinkedIn, like I only, I only use LinkedIn if I go to a meeting and I meet Dasha and I connect with her after the meeting and I send her a connection requests like everybody comments on my post every now. And like, all right, relax bro. This isn't Facebook. But it feels like something has changed over the last couple years on LinkedIn. I'm curious as to how you all think about it.
- [07:51]
Finn
Dasha, you go first. Okay.
- [07:54]
Dasha
I have a lot of thoughts on LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn has been awesome for me personally for our company as well. I think it is the only social media channel where the barrier to entry is pretty low. You're able to contact people specifically by where they work and what their title is. And it feels professional to scroll LinkedIn while you're at work. So if you send your CEO a TikTok of cats, he's going to be like, get back to work or she. But if I send my CEO something helpful from LinkedIn that's super professional and helpful. And so I think that it's content that you can get away with posting throughout the day that other people are going to consume throughout the day while they're working. And they're going to feel productive consuming that content.
- [08:39]
Finn
Yeah, I mean, I think the times of LinkedIn being the CV is long gone and it's now a social media platform. So people share content and pretty legit executives of pretty big companies do that too. And I think that's very cool. I sometimes give the example. My father, he's 60, he is head of IT at a German, partly government owned company. Three years ago, four years ago, he didn't have a LinkedIn account. Three years ago, he created a LinkedIn account, but probably locked in a month, once a month. He now regularly likes my posts. So if the head of it at a German, partly government owned company who's 60 years old is on LinkedIn, you can reach all kinds of people on LinkedIn.
- [09:18]
Dave Gerhardt
Emerick, you, you work with a bunch of companies. Like, you know, obviously you built, you built this company and, and it's been 15 years in the running. One question I always, maybe I, I just have a hard time answering this one, but there's inevitably someone out there who's like, yeah, I understand what you're saying, but our customers are not on LinkedIn. Do you. Is that true? Is that a false belief? Like, how do you answer that?
- [09:39]
Emeric
Yeah, I think it's a false belief. In 2025, 2026 for sure. When you said LinkedIn is the place where you go after a meeting, I was about to say, well, if you live in 2015, maybe, but in 2025 for sure not. It's really for any kind of professional. We used to be. We are in a bubble, guys. You know that. We are in tech, we are in software, so we live in a bubble. And in marketing. LinkedIn was everything for us, even 10 years ago, but it was not for the rest of the world. But now it has become the same thing for everybody. And I love your example, Fin. My parents are not 60, they're 80. And my dad likes my stuff on LinkedIn. So it's not working anymore, but it's everywhere now. It's for every profession, every industry and every type of professional need. And like Dash has said, people will go on LinkedIn to learn stuff from their peers, from people who do the same job in different companies. So it's, it's an amazing source of information and learning.
- [10:34]
Dave Gerhardt
I like this from Rachel in the chat. I usually answer that for CEOs by going to SparkToro and I happen to see Amanda, who runs marketing at sparktor, just happens to be in the webinar today. Damn it. Twice in a row. Look Look, I'm such a fraud. I usually answer that for CEOs by going to SparkToro and showing them how many people are having that conversation on LinkedIn versus other social channels. I love that. I just Google, like, what's the latest? Like, there's something like a billion registered users or hundreds of million registered users on LinkedIn. And it's like the way social works is like, even if your person per se is not on LinkedIn, someone they know is, you know, there's like a connection of a connection. And it's like some person I haven't Talked to in 20 years from college who work, does work in a completely different industry, like sees a piece of content or mine. So I think that's the first thing, right, is just like, let's, let's first accept that this is a channel, this is not the social network of old. And I actually, I think the best way to think of it is as, I like to frame this, as this is the new way of doing pr. And the biggest thing that's changed in the last decade. I started my career in PR. That was 15 years ago. And the consolidation of media since then has been crazy. Pick any industry, like, how many, how many big publications are there? There's just not. Journalism has, has shrunk. All of the power has gone to social media. This is not just in B2B. This is across the world, right? There's podcasters, substack, Twitter, like LinkedIn. This is the same is true here. So all the, all the conversations are now happening here from a business, as a business strategy, like, I want to be part of those conversations. Then you add on top of this that like LinkedIn actually happens to be the best advertising platform in B2B in particular because of what they have with thought leader ads. So you can take a post that you wrote or someone in your network wrote and, and actually pay to promote that which shows up as a regular post in the feed. There's just, there's, there's an incredible amount of leverage that you can have there. So I saw, this was my next question. I saw this in the chat. Okay, fine. Maybe like if you were Dave, if you were me and you started writing on 10 years ago, like everybody said, well, that's why you have so many followers, because you just did this earlier and it was easier then. It's harder now. How do you answer that question? Like, so A, it's harder now. What should you post? Like what? Like who should be posting? Should it be your personal page or the company Page, should it be the CEO or the intern who should be. Let's talk about who should be creating content and what type of content you should be creating.
- [12:54]
Finn
So definitely people, because I think there has been data that people with the profiles with the same amount of followers as a company page, I think at five to 10 times more engagement, something like that. I think it's kind of obvious now who should post. I think about it in terms of like three vectors. One is who at your company has relevant expertise and insights for the people that you sell to. So if you sell to VPs of engineering, who in your company has relevant engineering insights and expertise that VPs of engineering would find interesting? Maybe that's your founder, maybe it's your cto, maybe it's your cio. Then who is close to the customer? Because if you're close to customers, you probably have relevant insights. Maybe that's your CRO, your Head of Customer success, your CEO, hopefully. And then there's kind of like the X factor and it's like the people in your company who just have something special, maybe they're just super funny, maybe they're super charismatic, maybe they're the IC who are well respected in the open source community because they contribute a ton there and you kind of know them when someone asks you. And so I think those are the three types of people who are most suited to do it and then they need to actually want to do this.
- [14:00]
Dasha
So yeah, I would add that I think anyone at the company can post and maybe should post on LinkedIn if it's something that they're, that they're interested in doing. I think anyone can benefit from posting from even just an employer branding perspective people. It might not attract your icp, but it can attract people who care about what you're doing and get excited about this type of work that you're posting about and be the reason that they apply to work at your company. So I think to what Fin said, of course, if you have expertise and you're trying to attract more of your ICP to buy your software, that should be the person that's posting about those topics. It will come across much more authentic and credible. But anyone can be posting and it will attract, it can attract, has the power to attract someone to come work for your company.
- [14:49]
Emeric
Yeah, I think people for sure. And even if you're posting for a brand or a company page, make sure people show up. Like make sure you use images and videos of people. So we used our social media manager. She's very visible. And if you Follow our page. You're going to see her again and again and again. So eventually you will connect to her and not necessarily to the brand, but it will achieve both. Having your C levels or specialists in the company do that can be challenging because they have, like you said, Finn, they have to have a passion for this or at least have a motivation for this, otherwise it will stop pretty quickly. They have to do content on LinkedIn or anywhere else on something that they really enjoy sharing and they're really good at. And they have something to share, obviously. And sometimes it will not benefit the company's business in the sense that the company's product or service, but it will always benefit the company's employer brand. So, for example, our CTO is amazing at AI and AI infrastructure and how you build the software with AI and around AI and stuff like that and the kind of people we want to hire, they are interested by that. So if the goal for him in posting content on LinkedIn is to build an employer brand for developers, go for it. I don't care. It does not talk to our customers. But I'm very happy that we get engineers applying for jobs in buckets because it's visible. So you will have to find the connected tissue between what they enjoy and what's going to be the benefit for the business. And it's not always going to be sell yourself.
- [16:24]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, I think what, what you're all circling around is like, I think the thing that drives me nuts is then when we instantly, if we think about being on LinkedIn as a company, instant reaction is like, well, how's it going to drive sales? How are we going to measure sales when in the reality of it is like LinkedIn is more of a PR and reputation and awareness channel that if you do it right, you will get sales from that stuff over time. But what absolutely does not work on LinkedIn is if you just only posted about your company. Promo, promo, promo, promo, promo. Like, I see it in my own stuff that I've done this for a long time now, but I see it some. I love my job and I get fired up and like I just realized like, oh, shoot. The last three days in a row I like promoted something for Exit 5 and my engagement went down. Actually today I screenshot this. I sent it to our team. Dasha posted something that was. What did you write today? What was your post?
- [17:15]
Finn
Oh yes, the Google Drive thing.
- [17:17]
Dasha
Yeah. I said, am I perfect? No, but do I always remember to move stuff out of my personal Google Drive into the shared marketing drive also no.
- [17:26]
Dave Gerhardt
Right, Just like a little like witty one. I'm sure you just, I'm sure that wasn't planned or you thought about it and you just fired it off and.
- [17:32]
Finn
It'S like crafted it for three hours.
- [17:35]
Dave Gerhardt
Right. But the, this is social media and so it's like, it's, it's literally that. It's like, let's, let's be funny, let's be relatable, let's share stuff. And then now when she has something to say about work, she actually has an audience there. And so I think you need to get away and, and act in the Agora Pulse example. Like, sure, you're, you're CTO is not writing to your, your customers, but I'd actually argue that there are some points in that bucket that, that CTO is contributing to because to have someone out there, like being perceived as a thought leader around AI, like, at least in my head, increases the credibility of the company and it's harder to like measure that directly. So I think, I think you need to think about it like, why are we doing this? If we're doing this because we need to generate 10 more sales meetings this month than we did last week, that last month, then I would say, like, probably posting on LinkedIn is not the, I would, I would take there. But if we're willing to do this for months and maybe. Finn, you can elaborate on this because I, I saw you write something about like how long people work with you. Right? It could be three months, six months. It's so obvious that if you can commit more time and don't really care about the short term results that you will get better results from this. But can you help me make the point that I'm trying to make about like how this, this does take time. It's not going to be two weeks into this and you're getting new leads. Like, how do you, how do you help people think through that?
- [18:52]
Finn
I mean, what I tell people is there when they work with us, you know, three to six month or whatever, to see if it's a fit for us. But if you need to decide whether you want to do this, it needs to be at least 12 months in your head. So that's how I think about it. I think. Who was the guy who, who ran ClickFunnels?
- [19:10]
Dave Gerhardt
Bronson.
- [19:11]
Finn
He, he wrote this book and he basically wrote about podcasts and he said, don't ask me about how to grow your podcast. Do one episode a day for 365 days and then talk to me again. And I Think there's just a lot of truth in that.
- [19:24]
Dave Gerhardt
This is great. In the, in the chat, Caitlin says Dave, I disagree with you. Content has different goals depending on where it is in the funnel. Your bottom funnel content will get less engagement because you're talking to a very specific ICP who's ready to buy. Where I'm 100% in agreement is that people don't want to be sold to all the time. Totally fair on the, on the disagreement point, I guess, I guess what I'm saying is like 100% of your content shouldn't be about like the company or you trying to promote something. But I will agree on the bottom of the funnel content. There's a lot of times I'll do something like I will promote an offer of ours or something or I'll link to our newsletter because I want to get more subscribers on the newsletter. And that post will have 30 likes and like 3 comments, which for my page is terrible. But then I'll go into HubSpot and I'll see we generated 300 new contacts that day. And so there's like this other thing where like engagement, engagement is important, but engagement does not always correlate to like the result or today I did a post about this CMO group that we have and the only people that commented on were AI people, which by the way my hack is. I take that comment and then I ask my chat GBT to write the most absurd comment back to them from AI and then I post it back. But I got like five DMS from, from legitimate CMOs who saw that post. And so there's this kind of like, this is why so much of the, I know like traditional demand gen people hate this. But so much of this LinkedIn thing, it is, it is a feeling. And we talked about behind the scenes when you have the, the C level folks involved and they get it, it makes it easier because it is a feeling. When I worked at Drift as an example, we used to have a running joke in our company which we would say how are we ever going to measure what we're doing on LinkedIn? Because the reason why we joked on is because people would literally tell us all the time, from Fortune 500 companies to new employees to investors to advisors, people will DM you and they will tell you. And I think something you all mentioned behind the scenes as far as like something to help track the effectiveness of this is you all suggest having this self reported attribution in here as being a key piece to LinkedIn, right?
- [21:22]
Finn
Yeah, I think 100%. And you just need to have the right mindset because I don't know, I've been doing my podcast for two years and I've probably seen two or three people over that time mention podcast as self reported attribution. LinkedIn shows up all the time. But I'm 100% convinced that my podcast is super, super helpful. Let's just, you know, doesn't show up and self reported that much.
- [21:44]
Dave Gerhardt
Can we talk about. We can come back to measurement if there are questions on it in a.
- [21:47]
Exit 5 Host/Announcer
Bit, but can we talk about like.
- [21:48]
Dave Gerhardt
More specifically what to write? Because I hear you, you've all kind of said like, you know, anyone can write. And I believe that it's just hard to go from like 0 to 1. Where would you actually start here? Like, and let's say we want to invest in this channel. We want to start creating content. If you could only pick one person inside the company to do this, what would your strategy be? What would you write about and how would you do it?
- [22:13]
Dasha
I can go first. For us, we sell to, like I said, our ICP is the CEO of a wholesale distribution company. So we pick the person that has the most expertise in distribution, that is our CEO. If it was someone else, we would have picked them. So we just picked the person that has the most relatability to the people that we're trying to target. And the way we thought about what to post is what are insights that if you're so heads down in your own company, you might be missing that a CEO would have just because they're having way more conversations week over week. Right. Like our CEO probably speaks to 20 leaders per week and they're all kind of saying the same thing. And he has the value of being able to kind of distill those insights, package them up and then share those out on, on LinkedIn. And so that is how we share his thought leadership. Over time, we, as we see people engage and we see people mention this resonated with me. This is relatable. I learned something from this. We've grown more comfortable taking some creative liberties. And so now whenever we have something to share, our CEO is naturally a funny person. So we've leaned into that, which I don't think on day one, when I joined the company, if I said, benj, tomorrow you're going to start posting funny bits on LinkedIn, he would have said, absolutely, let's do it. But as you build more credibility and as your CEO starts to see, or your executive starts to see the vibe of it all or anecdotal evidence that it's working. You do, I feel, get more trust and someone is more open to hearing your ideas. So, like, one of our most successful posts was we were launching this product, soft launching it. We heard from prospects on calls that seeing this product was like a magic trick. And it was right around Halloween. So we had the idea as a marketing team to dress up our CEO as a magician and do a literal magic trick on LinkedIn. And it's our top post. And I was thinking about that today, knowing that we'd be talking about LinkedIn today. Like, I don't think I would have pitched that idea on day one. But because he was so bought in, when I said, hey, we're going to be Amazoning you this, this costume, he was like, ugh, okay, let's do it. And he, and he's game to do stuff like that because he knows it's working because he's the one getting the DMs. That's the other thing I would say on like reporting is if your CEO or your executive is the one getting DMed about stuff that they've posted, they will feel it and the pressure will be less on you as the marketer to prove that it's working. They will just feel that it's working.
- [24:48]
Emeric
The advice I give to everyone who is asking this question is, first of all, they should be using LinkedIn themselves and consuming LinkedIn at least so they understand the ecosystem. And I tell them for, for an entire month, go on LinkedIn every day. And every time you see something you really like, you want to click on it, you want to share, you want to comment, you want to, you want to save it, Write down what it is, what it is about and what's the angle, what's the topic, what's the angle, what's the tone? Like, what is that post? Is it someone telling a story about their journey? Is it someone sharing something they learned with you? Is it someone sharing a new product launch? Is it someone. What is it? And write all these things down that you enjoy consuming. Because if you enjoy consuming those pieces, it's probably the case for everybody else.
- [25:31]
Dave Gerhardt
I think that's such an underrated piece of. This is like, I think so often in marketing we. I see this all the time with people asking about, like, influencers. They're like, hey, is there like a magic database that tells influencer. That tells me who the influencers are in my industry? And it's like, no, really, what, what it takes to be at the top, you know, 25 or 10% of your, of your industry is it's like, you have to have tastes. Like, there's so much of that in marketing that matters. And so I love that as, like, oh, yeah, like, that's so obvious. But how much of us are actually doing that? Like, let's take a month, let's become really in tune with what content is working on LinkedIn, and then let's form opinions on, like, what might work, what might work for us. You're going to see a different company in a different industry, but you can take inspiration from that. Emerick. I, I love that as a suggestion, like, as almost like a timeless principle in marketing, right?
- [26:23]
Emeric
That's what you ask your salespeople to do. Listen. Well, do the same thing with your marketing. Listen, before you start speaking, can I.
- [26:29]
Dave Gerhardt
Can I also just say, like, I think one thing that we get caught up in is like, this channel to post here is free, and if you post something and it flops, like, awesome, you just get to go again. It's not like you bought a humongous billboard in the middle of Times Square and everyone hated your ad and they're just going to like, hate it forever. Like, it is gonna take lots and lots of, of reps even. And, and the social media algorithms are just these kind of finicky beasts. I, I will sometimes be like, oh, this. This is gonna be a smash. And then I'm like, damn it, like, what, what happened? Like, I don't know, maybe there was some other news that day. Maybe I, I put the wrong thing in it. It just happens. And so, so much of this is, is just volume. And I think one of the best things you can do is have an end of ideas. I want to put a wrapper on, on this for, for a bunch of people in the chat. If you could only pick one area to start. I think especially in B2B, I think the best thing to do is to be seen as the expert or a source of knowledge for your customers. Help them get smarter about your industry. Help them get smarter about your job. There's this guy, Grant Lee, who's the founder of Gamma. They're like a AI presentation and social media app. He doesn't just talk about Gamma. He talks about broader trend because they're an AI company. He's talking about broader trends about AI and what they're doing and what they're learning and how they're building a smaller company and that, that really works. Well, if, and then this is why I wrote this book. Founder brand a couple of years ago was that the idea was like, look, what wins is knowledge and expertise. You can also be funny, you can also be entertaining, you can also add humor to that. But what wins, I think, especially in B2B, is like having expertise, learning from something. The original example of this for me was HubSpot. They taught me how to, like, do marketing, and I became a fanboy of them forever. And so typically inside of the company, it's usually the CEO or the founder. You started the company because you have deep expertise in this industry. You didn't just wake up one day and said, you know what, I want to get really rich. And so I'm going to start a really niche, like, cybersecurity company. It's like, no, you that that person probably, like, she had some experience, like she worked at this company for 20 years prior to that, and then that led her to start this. My whole point in the book was like, that is what makes the best content for social media. And so if I could only pick one. I love the idea of, like, having other people in the company be, be, you know, advocates for our brand, but I want to lead with expertise and I want to work backwards from, like, what's it valuable for us to be known about? And then who's going to be the spokesperson? Almost always the spokesperson at the company is going to be the CEO or one of the founders. And so, like, let's work with that.
- [29:06]
Finn
All right?
- [29:06]
Dave Gerhardt
AI generated slop. I think it's the best thing to.
- [29:09]
Exit 5 Host/Announcer
Ever happen in marketing, actually, because it raises the bar, right? AI slop is going to kill deals, kill brand, and kill trust. Today, marketers, like, we're also customers too, right? And so we have to actually put ourselves in the position of our customers and think about all the AI slop they're seeing. And it's on us to create things that actually matter, things that have meaning and impact, things that are educational, entertaining, funny, useful, specific and relevant. And that's everything that our sponsor, Air Ops, stands for. They're helping reshape how people discover and connect with brands. Because AI slop is not going to win. Air Ops is built for marketers who want to create content that sounds like their best subject matter expert, not another chatbot. This is content grounded in real sources, real insights, and real information gain. Their content engineering platform helps you surface your highest value opportunities in AI search, then shows you how to actually take action on them. Not just see dashboards, not just get another recommendation or SEO report, but actually go out and execute and this is the topic that everyone is being asked to get smarter about right now. AI, search and SEO. If you care about this topic, then you want to go and check out Air Ops. They're built for you. It's airops.com exit5. You can learn more about Air Ops and what they're doing in the AI and SEO space. That's airops.com exit5.
- [30:28]
Dave Gerhardt
Any of you have strong opinions? This is a question in the, in the chat that got a bunch of reactions from Dana building on my point there, like thoughts about ghost writing for the C suite if they're not keen on creating content themselves.
- [30:39]
Finn
I mean, that's my whole business. So we do it. I don't think it's for everyone. I see these opinions someone sometimes on LinkedIn that no one should do ghost writing. And, and I mean, I think the best case scenario is your executive, your founder, your CEO is as great as at writing and they can do it themselves, then that's the absolute best. I don't think it's always the case. And so sometimes people get help and I think you do need their insight. You can't just like have someone write something and just put words into their mouth. So the way that we do it is we interview the founder or the CEO and we ask them questions, kind of like they go on a podcast and then from that we create content and then obviously they make the edits or whatever. So is that the best case scenario? No. Is it better than your CEO never posting anything? Yes.
- [31:23]
Dasha
So, so to what Fin said, I think like anyone, if you're doing the interview format, one cool AI use case is you can train a chatbot to write like your CEO based on emails that your CEO has written. You don't need like a big bank of past LinkedIn posts, even just take any writing their slack messages, their emails to train a chatgpt on it. And then you can work with the transcript of that interview and create posts that sound like your CEO. They will still require edits. It's not like a magic solution or a silver bullet by any stretch, but it is helpful. And you're going to present. If you are presenting some drafts to your CEO, they're going to sound, you know, 70% more like your CEO than had you just like, like what Fin said, like put words in their mouth based on that interview.
- [32:10]
Emeric
The CEO writing and creating content for social, obviously that's amazing. If they don't, then definitely what Fin does is very helpful. Like you said, better at doing that than Nothing for sure. 100%. AI is definitely going to change the game. I can feel that I've already cloned my voice on 11 labs and I can see me speaking on social without having me speaking on social very soon. Not convinced by heyjane and the avatar stuff yet but it will be there at some point so.
- [32:40]
Finn
But you will actually not hear this.
- [32:42]
Emeric
Is the my avatar and I have weird movement. But Dasha said she's absolutely right. You will have to feed the beast with you. So you would have to give them my tone, my brain, my knowledge, my story, my journey, like my book, my whatever you have that's making you you is going to feed that. So even if AI takes over those or helps or support that, it's still going to be AI being you instead of you so you can do more stuff or other stuff instead. So I, I still think that you, you'll have to inject that personality and.
- [33:17]
Dave Gerhardt
That DNA into Look, marketers have been ghost. This has been been part of the job forever. Marketers have been ghostwriting. I like I said my first job was in pr. A big part of my job was like ghost writing these contributed columns for like Inc. Magazine and Entrepreneur and Forbes and that whole industry was, was massive. And it's gone away now because now we have social media. I think ghostwriting is totally possible. I think that the challenge though is so much of the value and we were going to hit on this later so mention now. I think that so much of the ROI for LinkedIn and social media is not in the direct sales but it's in the engagement and the nuggets and the knowledge and like the little, the little like pieces of nuance that you can pick up. And so there, there's gotta be some like feedback loop there where so much happens in the comments and also commenting on, on your posts, replying to comments on your posts and commenting on other people's is a huge part to getting engagement and growing your following. And I also love comments. Comments are the best prompt, right? And so if it's like, hey, I don't, I don't know what to write. I'm just gonna read other people's stuff and I treat it as a prompt and I see someone write something and then I write my comment on there and that comment kind of pops off a little bit, I'm gonna, I copy that comment, I put it in a doc that I have and then like next, next week when I go and work on my LinkedIn content, I sit down and I write the like 500 word version of that, like, three line comment that I left on someone's post, I think that that part matters. I think it really does matter though, that you are interviewing someone and digging into that unique point of view. Because someone, someone earlier was like, yeah, I'm looking for examples. But like, nothing is good to me. Nothing inspires me. And it's like, okay, well then make your own, like, let's make your own version of this at some point right there. There are no one right now needs more podcasts and need more or needs more YouTube channels, but there are new YouTube channels that didn't. That haven't launched yet and in two years are going to be massively successful. And so I think there is an opportunity. But I, I also feel like if you're treating this as a marketing channel, like a bit of this, I, I hate to tell you this, but a bit of this is the game. It's like, do you want to play the game to drive meaningful revenue and impact for your customers? It's no different than getting a speaking slot in an event and you have to adhere to, like, their format and their topic and their rules. Like, part of this is trying to figure out a way to boost, to boost revenue. And so there's a question earlier where if I can try to scroll. Scroll back to this for a second.
- [35:43]
Finn
Just on the commenting. I think automating comments, which a lot of people do now, is one of the worst decisions that you can make. Not just because it's against terms of service and can get your account banned, but I think you're not just not building relationships. You're probably building negative relationships because you can just tell when it's like an AI written comment and it's not good.
- [36:03]
Dave Gerhardt
I like to use comments. So I actually do this. Like, I use comments to just be the most like, funny and real version of my. I mean, Finn, you see the nonsense that I comment on some of your stuff sometimes it's like, I actually think that's a perfect opportunity to like, take something that I wrote that may have been serious about something about marketing. And then that's like, oh, that's actually me. Like, I'm just waiting. I'm like in my house making a coffee and I'm just like being silly in the LinkedIn comments. And I, I think that that work, you know, that that matters for something.
- [36:29]
Finn
I think just, just because some people ask for it. Sorry, Amarik. I think what I've heard some people say, the best way to get started, if you're an executive, founder, et cetera, is to just start with commenting before you start posting. So a lot of people I know who are not quite active, they just spend dipping their toes into it by just commenting on five posts every day for two or three months and only then putting their own first post up.
- [36:52]
Emeric
Yeah, I think if you have the right tool. Shameless Plug alert Commenting. Managing competency is easy.
- [36:57]
Finn
So, Dave, did you find the comment, the question you wanted to find?
- [37:01]
Dave Gerhardt
No, I got distracted because Amanda said I sometimes comment nonsense on Dave's page. But I kind of worry that he thinks I'm cyber bullying him. That's okay. I was reading something the other day because I wrote this post the other day about how the CMO should be the top, the best storyteller at your company. And it's funny because once you hit the tipping point in a post, there's then people who like, get really, really mad at you.
- [37:26]
Dasha
Yes.
- [37:27]
Dave Gerhardt
And I'm like reading some of these comments to my wife and she's like, why? What's up with you? What's up with you? And these marketers? Like, why do people get so mad? And, and I was thinking about it. It's like, people, you have to be. Will you have to be okay with this? Because people will project their views of who they think you are. Like, they want to read this post of me, this angry little bald man sitting in his office just roasting marketers. And I'm like, that's not what at all. I'm just like, let's, let's bring storytelling back to marketing.
- [37:53]
Finn
People also don't read post anymore. You get comments where people push back on a point that you didn't even make. They just read the hook or something and then they like project their opinion onto that and they react to that. Even though you didn't even say anything about that.
- [38:06]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, the chat is really good. There's a, there's a lot of, there's a lot of pieces in here. Let's talk about like, where do, where do LinkedIn ads fit? Fit in this? Because I think a really interesting development that's like a peanut butter and jelly to this here is the development of LinkedIn Thought Leader ads as part of the social media strategy. Strategy. So curious if anyone can share their opinions on that.
- [38:26]
Dasha
Yeah, you should go first.
- [38:28]
Emeric
I thought leaderships that are absolutely amazing. Everybody should, should do them. They're groundbreaking. So, yeah, I, you know, I think among all the ads you can do on LinkedIn, this one's probably top of the list.
- [38:39]
Dasha
Yeah. Yeah, we run thought leader ads. I think to your point, Dave, about LinkedIn content being free, it's also a testing ground for what is resonating organically. When we have a post that does really well organically, we boost it and we make it a thought leader ads. A thought leader ad. And we use a tool. I know someone in the chat was asking or said that they're here to learn about different tools. We use a tool called Fibler, not sponsored to see influence of LinkedIn on pipeline, on the deals that get created in HubSpot. And it shows organically what's being influenced as well as paid ads that are influencing pipeline through LinkedIn. And again, in preparing for this, I was just looking at the comparison of thought leader ads versus all the other types of LinkedIn ads that we run. And for us, thought leadership ads are three times as as effective as all of our other ads combined. So for every dollar in, we get three more dollars back if it's a thought leader ad. And the cool thing is you get to test it, unlike your other ads, you're not really posting them, they're just an ad right away. Whereas thought leadership, you get to put it out organically, see if it hits and if it does, then you put ad budget behind it. So it really is like the best thing I think in LinkedIn advertising right now.
- [39:52]
Finn
I think the killer combination today is you run thought leader ads both cold and retargeting. You run conversation ads in retargeting. I think most people still haven't figured out that that's a new format. And then you use something like Fibler to track the engagement on the ads. You push that to clay and then you use that to prioritize your warm outbound or signal based outbound, however you want to call it. So I think that combination of those three things is I think a no brainer for almost any company.
- [40:25]
Dave Gerhardt
Can we just talk about the mechanics of why this ad unit works so well?
- [40:31]
Emeric
Yeah, it looks like a person. It doesn't look like an ad.
- [40:34]
Dave Gerhardt
Look like an ad. Oh my God. This is what drives me insane. I don't think I'm that good or smart at marketing. I just like try to use my brain sometimes and I'm like, all of our guys, all of our ads look like ads.
- [40:45]
Emeric
Yeah, like, and this one looks like someone's post. Like you, you're like, you're basically being tricked into. Well then you see it's sponsored, but that's not what you see.
- [40:55]
Dave Gerhardt
But, but if the content is dialogue. I heard Gary Vee talk about this and I Think it's a great, great line. It's like in the world that we live in today. And this is to all the people who like, love brand love, social love content. This is where we, this is where we fit in, in like the demand and revenue machine. Because of social media today, you should basically never run ads, you should never put money behind ads that you haven't tested organically first. Right? And so that means like before we go and hire the video company and we're going to spend 70 grand or going to make these funny video ads, have we even like tested the lines and like, are we even sure these are funny yet? And I'll, this is an easy example because of my job in my industry. I'll just give you an example. I started saying years ago, I started saying this line all the time, like it was on a webinar. And I treat it like bits. Like if I say something and I see a reaction to it, I kind of write it down, I use it later. And I said, life is too short to work for a CEO who doesn't get market marketing. And that like popped off. And then like I wrote that as a, just a text post on LinkedIn and that popped off. And then I had this idea of like, oh, if we made this into like a funny video skit, like it was gonna pop off. And I've never made any good video ads. I hired this amaz, this Danielle diamond who made this video for me a couple years ago and it was almost like I knew, I almost could guarantee that the video was gonna work because we already got that reaction. And yet so many times we go and we make these ads that A, look like ads or B, we've never tested them. That's what's so amazing about LinkedIn is we just did this. I wrote, I wrote a post this morning that is a post promoting this like CMO community that we have. And I sent into Jess, who's our head of marketing and I said, hey, this post would be a great ad. And she has it now set up to like be a promoted post in January. And we're going to update this. We do this all the time. We look at high performing posts. You can edit the posts. So we edit them, we change the link, we put a tracking URL on it and then we boost them. And it's, it's an incredible ad unit. And yeah, sure, LinkedIn is throttling your organic reach because they want you to pay to reach it, but it's the best ad unit going right now because exactly what Emmerich said. It doesn't look like an ad.
- [42:55]
Finn
I think the only problem with that advice is that oftentimes it gets applied naively. Where I think previously you said that sometimes the post where you promote something get 30 likes and three comments, which is horrible organic engagement, but they actually generate contacts. So that's a great signal that it could work as an ad. While obviously if you just look at the likes, you're like, that's a horrible, horrible post.
- [43:16]
Dave Gerhardt
Yes.
- [43:17]
Exit 5 Event Promoter
Dark.
- [43:17]
Dave Gerhardt
This is dark social. Let me kick it back to you all. Anything. Scroll. Like, if you scroll through the chat, anything like stick out to you that you. That you really want to like grab. Grab the mic and answer.
- [43:27]
Dasha
There's a question from Sam about approaching, like, who's actually doing the commenting on other posts. Should it be the company account or should it be someone at your company? I kind of find it like, as someone who gets some comments on my stuff from company accounts, I feel like those are like, faceless. I don't really know who's engaging with me. I don't find that the same way. Like, if Dave comments on my stuff, I know it's Dave. It builds like affinity for Dave. When a company comments on my stuff, I don't. Doesn't really feel like anything. And so I would recommend like only really engaging with other people from your personal account or your CEO's account. You can have like our content marketing manager, Katie has access to our CEO's account. Again, maybe not a day one thing. But as that trust gets built, if there are people close to the CEO that are doing some ghostwriting, some publishing on their behalf, they can be responsible for doing some of the commenting. But I think it's way better to comment as a human versus your company. Unless you're like a Wendy's, but that's.
- [44:22]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, like give yourself a character. I've always thought, like, we should create like a character for. For exit 5 and it should be like 5e or something.
- [44:29]
Dasha
I don't know if you have a mascot. It's cute and I, I would argue that that that works. Like Vector has their ghosty and sometimes ghosty comments on my stuff. I think of ghosty as like a person and so it's a little different.
- [44:41]
Finn
Has one too, right?
- [44:43]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah.
- [44:43]
Dasha
Fiddler's got their lion. Yeah. Mascots are like the hot thing in B2B right now. Kind of wish our company had a mascot.
- [44:48]
Emeric
I wouldn't be black and white like this. I do believe that there's a place for a brand to comment on stuff. First of all, it makes the brand recognize as the brand engages, which is good because if it's, if I go and engage with someone on, on they don't know who I am, what good does that do to me? But they will immediately see my brand, right? So if it can be associated to the brand, why not? But if you cannot, then it may make sense for the brand to engage. And if you have defined a tone, a personality for that brand, then it will become something that people recognize as well. So I, I'd say there are places for where the CEOs, the founders and the C levels should be engaging because it makes more sense. It's human engaging with humans. But there are many, many instances where it's okay for the brand to engage. It's actually a good idea.
- [45:34]
Dave Gerhardt
I think another, another thing that I didn't mention earlier, but I think part of what it takes to be successful on a channel like LinkedIn is basically like rewiring your brain to think about everything could be social media content. Like, if I could be a marketing intern and I could shadow Emrick, I could shadow the CEO of Agora Pulse and I could shadow him for a week. I bet I could point out 25 different opportunities that maybe he, in the thick of running the business, like, didn't see. That could be great content for LinkedIn because, like, so much of the time from the CEO and founder is spent presenting internally, talking to investors, talking to advisors, all hands meetings, sending notes, having a point of view. It's like, how can we switch our brain on. I do this with our team in Slack right now. Like, someone will say something and I'll like, comment. I'll be like, oh, this would be an amazing post for LinkedIn. And so if you want to, like, if you want your company to get in the mix here, I think you have to be the steward and like, advocate for this channel. And something I did early in my career that didn't help me was if someone didn't under. Nobody, Nobody understands the value of this. Like, nobody. This is never going to work. When it's like, if you haven't realized now, part of a huge part of the job in marketing is to understand the craft of marketing and then be able to tell the rest of the company about how marketing should work. They don't all get it the same way. I have no idea. I'm like, why don't the engineers just like, add this feature that I want? It's like, just not, not that easy. That's not how it works. Like, you can't just snap your fingers. And so I would like, take something like today's session, do a bunch of your own research, develop a point of view on this, then come back to the team and say, hey, here's why. I think heading into 26, I want to, like, I want us to have a presence and be active on LinkedIn. Here's why. Here's what that means. Here's how we're going to measure success and develop your point of view on it. I think if you go into this and you're like, not sharing any of that, detail, those details with anybody, you're just going to set yourself up for failure.
- [47:27]
Finn
The digital version of that. I recently talked to Casey Jenkins, who's now running marketing at Cloud Code. She had access to her CEO's granola, which is like a meeting recorder, whatever. Fathom many of them out there, and she would feed all of his calls into ChatGPT and then basically ask it for patterns. And anytime her CEO would, like, repeat the same story multiple times or make the same point to customers on a sales call, that was her signal that this is something meaningful and important. And then basically use that to draft a post for her CEO and then get that out there.
- [48:02]
Emeric
I think having a process and a workflow for sourcing IDs and content topics is a must do because otherwise it becomes very quickly overwhelming if you have to make IDs come to you at the wrong moment. Like, oh, I need an ID now. Shit, I don't have an id.
- [48:16]
Dave Gerhardt
ID now.
- [48:17]
Emeric
I had an ID last night. I had an id. Yeah, you know what I mean? So I have a Google task list on my Google task system where it's content IDs, and every time something pops up and it's five times a day, I say, oh, that, that could be a cool, a cool one. Like right now I'm like, thinking I should do a webinar for us about this whole LinkedIn thing, because I. I barely said 10% of what I wanted to say, and there's so much I could tell.
- [48:39]
Dave Gerhardt
That's how I feel. I'm gonna explode over here. I'm like, I could go for hours.
- [48:45]
Emeric
So I'm writing that down and I encourage very much everybody to do the same, because you have IDs all the time, but if you don't take them in a system, when they come to your mind, they go away.
- [48:56]
Dave Gerhardt
I think that having that filing cabinet has been so big. Also something we didn't mention, there's not a perfect science to this, I'm just giving you my opinion. I've seen a bunch of, There are a bunch of people who post on LinkedIn and share a bunch of data about the LinkedIn algorithm. I found that unlike, unlike say Twitter for example, where you could just post a thousand times a day into the abyss. The sweet spot seems to be posting once a day on LinkedIn, typically in the morning. Doesn't mean it can't work later. But I, I just have found like 6 to 9am is the best time for me and I'd write one post a day. If I was going to post again, it would need to be like six to eight hours later. But I've often found that that post doesn't have as much reach and so you can only post once a day. So let's like, when we have those ideas, don't just open your phone and. Or like, don't just expect the CEO to go post it. Like, let's really, let's really like make a content plan and let's map out a bunch of these ideas. And hey, if there's seven days in the week, like is it reasonable for us to start posting? I don't know, three of those days, like seems pretty reasonable. And could maybe two of those posts a week be about thought leadership or some like, point of view on your industry that matters to your customers? And maybe one of them is more of, more personal and it doesn't have to be like your CEO like skiing or something, but it could be like an old photo, a quote, a book that they're reading, a lesson that they learned, a story that has nothing to do with what you're trying to sell. I think it can be that simple to get started.
- [50:23]
Emeric
Yeah, agreed.
- [50:24]
Dasha
We have a Slack channel called Stuff Customers say that everyone in this company has access to and people post Slack messages in there all the time with like, customer did this really cool. Or like customer just said this. You won't believe the number of like posts that ended up on our CEOs page that were inspired by just something that someone posted and Stuff customers say. So I think like the ideas can really come from, from anywhere in the company and they don't have to be salesy. But for us that's a huge source of inspiration, is just giving everyone access to share what's happening with our customers.
- [50:57]
Dave Gerhardt
This is crazy. I've been doing this LinkedIn stuff for a while. We have the tools now. Like every call, every call has 15 meeting recorders on it now.
- [51:06]
Emeric
Right?
- [51:06]
Dave Gerhardt
And like all those things can be, I have a custom GPT that I have where I exported all of my LinkedIn posts sorted by the most popular ones. I said, hey, these are like the 25 best posts ever. Then I did a bunch of research on like what good hooks look like and other people's stuff and I wrote instructions on that. I don't ever like take this and write it verbatim because something, I love the AI stuff but something is still off. It's never good enough for me to copy and paste. It still feels like I didn't write it, but it helps me go from zero to one. And so just being able to build that, taking the transcript from this today, there's your play. Emmerich is like, give this to the team and be like, hey, there's 100 content ideas or let's export all the questions out of here. It's table stakes for fathom or gong or granola. That is a huge advantage to have those conversations. Even now we'll be on team meetings and we will like, I'll like hold on. I want to just re. Say that again because I know that we're recording this and I know that like our content team can then grab that and we can, we can take something out of it. So let's go Emrick, Finn, Dasha and just let's give me a closing thought. I'll give you a chance to grab the mic and leave it.
- [52:11]
Finn
Okay.
- [52:11]
Emeric
One thing, one thing I wanted to share earlier. I want to share a contrarian opinion to what Fin said earlier.
- [52:17]
Dave Gerhardt
Is this because he disagreed with you in our prep call yesterday.
- [52:20]
Emeric
You got, yeah, it's German, I'm French and we gotta fight. You guys said it's taking 12 months, taking a year, it's long term, it's three years done. It's. It's a long term thing. I. It's true. There's a lot of stuff that's going to happen in marketing, not only in social media, in marketing in general. That's long term. Like you don't build a brand in a quarter, you don't build a business in a year. You know it all things take time. But if you don't have a short term thing, a short term satisfaction for the people who are doing it or paying for it or promoting it or supporting it, then you take the risk of giving up or shutting down the budget or shutting down the job or the person. So I think it's really important that you think long term and short term. You had to have short term goals. So if like take my CTO example. If you take the CTO example, say, okay, we'll take the CTO content and we'll use it to promote to specific candidates that we're targeting on LinkedIn. Because we do target people on LinkedIn. That's where you hire most people. And you're going to use, we're going to use that content to put on our career page where hey, you want to work at our company as an engineer? Here's what our CTO says and that you can, maybe it's inspiring, maybe you can learn something. So basically do take what you do on social and make it a short term gain. So at least there's that motivation that doesn't dry up too too fast and it doesn't have to wait for 12 months before you're happy about what you're doing. That would be my, my contrarian point of view.
- [53:45]
Finn
I agree. I think, I mean I, I spend so much time on LinkedIn and I talked to so many people. Honestly I posted this recently and it resonated with people. Everything works on LinkedIn. Like there's so many people throwing out so many best practices of like you got to use video, you got to do carousel. So you got to maximum post once a day. What Dave said here and I've, I've, I've honestly seen it all. I see people who crush with text only. I see people who crush with video crush with carousel. I know people who crush posting three times a day. I know people who crush posting twice a week. Clay people say like maximum 3 minute long videos on LinkedIn. Clay recently started doing these videos with their founder and they're like 11 minutes long and they absolutely crush. So everything works on LinkedIn. I think you gotta just kind of try to be helpful, show up every day, engage with others, lean into your whatever unique strength. Maybe you're super funny, maybe you're super good on video, maybe you're very dry. But you can like break down a complex topic in great detail like lean into that and then anything could work.
- [54:50]
Dasha
I think my parting words are for the marketer who's considering asking or pushing for their company in 2026 to start posting and being more visible on LinkedIn. So I'll just share like how I would go about that if I were in your shoes. I found that with anything marketing related, pitching anything as an experiment that is time bound helps. No one wants to commit to posting forever. It seems daunting. But posting for a quarter and seeing what happens is a lot easier stomach. So I think I would pitch it as an experiment and I would clearly outline like this is what we're going to do. Here's how we're going to know if it's successful. Here's like two posts that I drafted based on the last two things that I heard you say on our last all hands or on your last two gong calls and just go from there. And also like if anyone wants to chat about LinkedIn, happy to offer my help. I know Colin was asking about thought Leader ads, so happy to kind of share what we're doing there.
- [55:42]
Dave Gerhardt
Love it. And you all are both in the Exit 5 community, so.
- [55:45]
Dasha
Yeah, we are. I think we met at Drive.
- [55:47]
Dave Gerhardt
Love that. Oh God, that makes me. That makes my little cold heart warm. Last thing to, to build on what you're saying. Just I, I think another thing would be like I, let's time bound it but also let's stack the deck and like let's try to, let's say we're writing for the CEO. Let's get her a hit like right out of the gate. Like not, maybe not like the first day, but it's like when you can feel that for the first time. That's how every time I've done this and I've worked with a bunch of founders over the years on this is like there's all this conversation is great, but they just need to get it. Like when, when we get Emmerich to write that first post and he gets a bunch of messages that that investor pops out of nowhere and DMs him like to re engage. It's like you need to get them to feel that early. And so like dopamine, let's spend a lot of effort. Well, it also just, it's not even just the dopamine though. It's just like, oh, this isn't just going to be like we got more people to register for our webinar. There's like people, this is a real human platform. People reach out. All right, producer Aaron. Roll it. Roll that poll. Roll it. We got to stay here. We make use. Please rate today's session by given by real humans. No AI involved. One through five. Five being the highest, four being the second highest. Three, two, one, zero. Lot of fives. We love it. Lot of four.
- [56:57]
Emeric
Totally a five. It's totally a five.
- [56:59]
Dave Gerhardt
Lot of five. It was a five. Hey, look, I'm, look, I don't know. Let's let the numbers. Let's, you know, we're, we're data driven here.
- [57:06]
Finn
All right.
- [57:06]
Dave Gerhardt
This was awesome. I've been in Slack Sending our team a bunch of ideas. Someone should export the questions from this. There's a gold mine of content you could use to train the L. I don't know. Anyway, let's just real quick give an applause for for my my panelists. They're awesome. Emma and Finn. Find them on LinkedIn, send them a connection request, tell them that you heard about them today on the webinar. And thank you. We got the CEO in the hoodie today. Love that branding today. The the thank you to Agora Pulse for for helping us put this on. Awesome company, awesome session. Maybe we'll do some more stuff together. I hope to see you all writing on LinkedIn and post more questions inside the agates @5 community. We'll help you. Thanks all. We'll see you later.
- [57:44]
Dasha
Thanks for having us.
- [57:45]
Finn
Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Bye everyone.
- [57:47]
Emeric
Peace. Bye.
- [57:53]
Exit 5 Host/Announcer
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast.
- [57:55]
Dave Gerhardt
If you like this episode.
- [57:56]
Exit 5 Host/Announcer
You know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that.
- [58:01]
Dave Gerhardt
I have something better for you.
- [58:03]
Exit 5 Host/Announcer
So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com our mission at Exit.
- [58:15]
Dave Gerhardt
5 is to help you grow your.
- [58:16]
Exit 5 Host/Announcer
Career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are.
- [58:36]
Dave Gerhardt
So you can have a peer group.
- [58:38]
Exit 5 Host/Announcer
Or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100 free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year.
- [58:51]
Dave Gerhardt
Go check it out.
- [58:52]
Exit 5 Host/Announcer
Learn more exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community.
- [59:05]
Exit 5 Event Promoter
Hey, by the way, we're doing a new event at Exit 5. On the heels of our very wildly successful and super fun drive, we're doing an event designed for marketing leaders. It's called the Exit 5 Marketing Leadership Retreat. It's a two day in person working session for CMOs and VPs in Arizona in March. Not a conference, not a marathon of content. It's a room of a hundred. Only 100 marketing execs from companies like Zoom, Snowflake, ManyChat, Bit Ly, G2, HP and more. You'll spend two days pressure testing real decisions with your peers who are doing the same job you are. What to hire next, what to cut, what's actually working, what's not. Small, intimate. Exactly what you have needed in a marketing event designed for leaders and CMOs and VPs like you and me. It's on March 18th through the 20th, 2026 at Mountain Shadows Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. We have a hundred spots and they're filling up fast. I think as of as of recording this, we had 42 tickets sold. So if you're a CMO or VP of marketing and you want to think better, move faster and lead with more clarity. This year, this event is made for you. We do awesome events. I'm super excited to have this one out there. You should go check it out. Exit5.com retreat that's exit5.com retreat.