This episode of the Grow Fast Podcast featuring Joshua Stout, LinkedIn Certified Marketing Expert™ and Director of Advertising at Influent, focused on leveraging LinkedIn for B2B marketing success. Joshua shared his journey of scaling an agency and developing expertise in LinkedIn advertising, highlighting how businesses can effectively use the platform to generate demand, build trust, and drive conversions. He explained the key differences between demand capture (Google Ads) and demand generation (LinkedIn Ads), emphasizing the importance of a multi-channel strategy to nurture leads and optimize ad performance. Joshua also discussed the role of branding and content marketing in LinkedIn campaigns, stressing that businesses should invest in long-term brand awareness before expecting immediate returns on ad spend.

Another key topic was the strategic approach to LinkedIn advertising and content optimization. Joshua provided insights into setting up a full-funnel ad strategy, including top-of-funnel brand awareness, middle-of-funnel engagement, and bottom-of-funnel conversion campaigns. He shared best practices for A/B testing, targeting decision-makers, and utilizing LinkedIn’s advanced professional filters to reach the right audience. Additionally, Joshua explored how AI is transforming digital marketing, from automating audits and strategy planning to enhancing ad targeting with data-driven insights. The conversation wrapped up with advice on building a strong LinkedIn presence, balancing thought leadership with personal branding, and leveraging both organic content and paid ads to establish credibility and drive business growth.

You can find the whole episode of the Grow Fast Podcast with Joshua Stout here:

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This is the transcript for this episode:

Mark Shriner [00:00]

Music. Welcome to The Grow Fast Podcast, where we talk with leading sales, marketing and personal growth experts about how companies can accelerate sales, optimize marketing and grow their businesses fast. Let's go.

Joshua Stout [00:15]

Hi Josh, how are you? Hey Mark, I'm good. Good to be here.  

Mark Shriner [00:19]

Hey, this is my first podcast in 2025 so thank you for coming on The Grow Fast Podcast.

Joshua Stout [00:25]

Yeah, it's my pleasure. I'm excited to talk today. Where about you located? I'm in San Antonio, Texas.

Mark Shriner [00:32

Oh, must be nice down there. What's, what's the temperature?  

Joshua Stout [00:35]

Right now, it is 61 degrees outside, and it's sunny. It's beautiful. I know we have that cold snap coming, but I think everyone's going to get hit by that.  

Mark Shriner [00:45]

Yeah, that's supposed to be that, like, especially if you're up in, like, North Dakota or something. Can you imagine they're talking like 35 below? I mean, that's just, that's just nuts.  

Joshua Stout [00:52]

That's crazy. We had that one year it snowed here for like a week, and I was like nine degrees, and it shut down the state millions.  

Mark Shriner [00:58]

I think all the windmills, and everything got shut down to the wind power and everything windmill

Joshua Stout [01:02]

Everything in the windmills got stuck and power overloaded. So, you know, we're not we're not used to the cold here.  

Mark Shriner [01:08]

Yeah, Well, fingers crossed, it won't be so bad this time. Hey, you know, I'm looking forward to talking to you, because you know you and the firm that you work with are really deep subject matter experts in terms of optimizing LinkedIn strategies for businesses. And, you know, I want to get into a couple different parts of that, both in terms of the content creation, personal brand building, and also advertising. And it's something that I have, I've dabbled with, but I've never, really, really, never, you know, gone deep on so but before we get into that, maybe you can tell me a little bit about your background and your company.

Joshua Stout [01:47]

Yeah, sure. Let me go ahead and give a quick introduction. I appreciate that. So, I spent the last five to six years growing an agency from the ground up with a couple partners at another company I ended up becoming specifically in charge of the LinkedIn ad service. So initially we started as a messaging agency, and we quickly scaled that. And as we grew, we, I mean, clients were begging us to run LinkedIn ads. We would tell them, hey, we don't have any experience running ads on LinkedIn, and they would tell us, like, we'll pay you to do it, and if you consider the timing of it, you know, the company was founded back in 2019 so COVID hit where, like March 2020, was when everybody went home and you couldn't go to, you know, business functions anymore, and you couldn't go to conferences. And so, all these people were looking for a way to network their businesses. So, it just kind of blew up on the messaging part of the business. But over the next year, as more restrictions came out from LinkedIn about messaging, people wanted to run ads, so we released the ad service April 2021 and LinkedIn came out with the big restriction on connection requests, May 2021 so my role was to grow the LinkedIn ad segment. Basically, took on, you know, enough counts that I couldn't handle anymore. Started hiring the next person, and training so on and so forth. I ended up, during my time there, over the next three years, seeing over 1000 accounts on LinkedIn, wow. And so, after that, in October this past year, I became a LinkedIn certified marketing expert. LinkedIn flew me out to London, gave me the certification. I also got my LinkedIn top voice badge at some point last year. So, I think I'm one of less than five people in the world that have both of those.

Mark Shriner [03:30]

Well, congratulations. That's awesome. You know, when you're talking about LinkedIn ads, it's interesting because we're talking in the context of B2B, so you're helping companies promote their businesses. I always think that when people are looking for a particular product or service, they're going to typically go to a search engine Google and search for that product or service. I kind of feel like LinkedIn is kind of like the B2B version of Facebook, where people are there to do other things, and then they get served an ad. Maybe you can walk me through the you know, when you're when you're advertising, are people actually searching for a product or service on LinkedIn, or you just trying to figure out their intent?

Joshua Stout [04:17]

Yeah, that's a great question. An important differentiation between the two types of platforms, I guess, two methodologies on what it is that you're marketing or how you're marketing. So, Google's demand capture. When people are out there, you're looking up a solution, you're literally, you know, in research mode to find some type of service to fix a problem. Google's there to capture that interest and then elevate the companies that are, you know, bidding on those keywords to come up in front of that interested audience. When you run on LinkedIn, for the most part, if you're if you're doing full funnel strategy, you're running a demand generation approach, which means you are trying to appeal to the people that you know, make them. Decisions for your type of service or offer, and you're trying to get some semblance of interest right. And, and same on meta, right, but, but meta is kind of like a different game, like, if you're on meta, it's probably B2C type of play, because that's where the you know, clients or customers are. And in the B2B space, it's LinkedIn, because that's where the professionals are. So. So, you're trying to generate interest, and then you're trying to influence those people that you generated interest in into a conversion. And you do that by setting up strategies on the platform to grab the interest, build trust and credibility, and ultimately ask for the conversion.  

Mark Shriner [05:40]

The next part of that process, and I want to kind of drill down on all of those areas. But let me just ask you, you know, when you create awareness through that demand gene, how do you like? Because if it were me, I'd be like, Oh, I didn't know that this kind of, you know, I run a company that does RFP software, and maybe I'm a proposal manager, and I didn't know that there was such a thing as RFP software, and I'm like, Oh, here's an ad. And I might click on it, or I might just go over to Google and just type in and see and see what Google you know what the results are there. So how do you kind of balance that out?  

Joshua Stout [06:14]

Well, it's important to have an element of both, okay, right? It's important to maintain some type of demand capture element on Google to capture that traffic. And it's important to build that demand in the first place. And it is true that somebody else could have created the demand, another company could have created that demand. They had the ad. Someone got interested. So, when they went and googled the solution, somebody else came up because they weren't on Google. So, capture exactly, and, you know, I talk about this pretty often, but you know, marketing and advertising work best in an ecosystem. It works best by using or utilizing different channels in a cohesive way to make sure that you haven't you know, different strategies to both engage people and get people interested but also capture that interest and then still work them into your funnel.

Mark Shriner [07:06]

Makes a lot of sense. Okay, why don't we do this? You know, let's, let's back up a little bit. And do you work with any SaaS companies?

Joshua Stout [07:15]

Oh, yeah. So, SaaS has always been the main vertical. There seems to be always a lot of need within that industry. So, SaaS is probably the biggest industry that I've worked with.

Mark Shriner [07:26]

Okay, so as I mentioned, I'm running a small SaaS company. We're targeting SMBs. And you know, if you were going to work with us, where would we start? You know what the questions would be you'd be asking. And then what would the first few steps be like?

Joshua Stout [07:45]

Yeah, so, you know, first would be an analysis. It would be a discussion saying, you know, what type of product you have? Is it a sale of LED? Is it product LED? Are you funded? Like, what kind of budget are you going to have for advertising? You know, all the preliminary information to figure out what we even can do. You know what the budget allows us to do? I often say you either have low budget, which means you have to put in more work into building your presence and building your brand, and you can supplement that with other channels, or if you can have, you know, the more you increase your budget, the more budget you put behind it, the more you can have done for you so, so once I take that initial assessment, figure out, you know, all that information. Do you have blogs? Do you have white paper? Do you have contents? Like, what do you have? From there, it would then be to figure out or build a strategy around how we're best going to advertise and market you. So, as I mentioned, probably one of the definite things I'm going to have in place is Google. I'm going to have something there to capture demand. Now keep in mind, Google, a lot of times, is also not scalable. There's a limit to how much you can get on Google, and also, it's very competitive, especially if you're in you know, in your SaaS offering is in a space that has a lot of competition in it. So that doesn't mean that you shouldn't have it, though, right? You, at the very least, want to make sure you put some budget behind your high intent keywords and behind your name. Now, the other part of it that I would do, I'd probably put more money in if you're just getting started, and you're just starting to really start your marketing and advertising, is you have to build your brand. And one of the biggest mistakes I see a lot of times is people have an expectation that once they start marketing or advertising, they're going to get short term ROI from it, and most likely, you're not going to do that. And it's really difficult, right? Especially when you're when you're a startup or you're still in the preliminary stages of your business, because every dollar that comes out of your pocket hits you harder than some larger, you know, enterprise, corporation, but you have to see it as an investment. Because what the first step you have to do is you have to build brand equity. You have to get your name out there. So that's where LinkedIn comes into play. If you're a B2B, SAS company, LinkedIn has the most up to date professional data. Data in the world, right? And anybody changes jobs, they change roles. Anything that deals with their profession, LinkedIn is the first place that's going to get updated. They teach this in college. Now you don't leave college without having some one of your classes tell you about starting a profile on LinkedIn and making sure that you maintain it. And then the other is the professional filters. So if you very specifically want to make sure to target the people that you know would make the decision to buy your product or your service, that's that's where, that's where you're going to do it. So if I'm going to start with the SaaS company, it's going to be a preliminary analysis over what you are, what your approach is, who you are as a company, what's your brand, what's your voice, what's unique value proposition. Then from there, it's going to build out an ecosystem. We're going to have an element of demand capture, and then we're going to start breaking it down on LinkedIn to see, how are we going to engage people, draw that interest, and from there, fulfill the other parts of the funnel, which is build trust and credibility and ultimately drive conversions.

Mark Shriner [10:58]

So, you know, what does it take, in terms of time, resources and tactics and strategy to build that, that that brand awareness, yeah.

Joshua Stout [11:09]

So, you know, it doesn't have to start with a lot. You can start getting meaningful data without having like your full Well, I like to call storefront ready, right? Because, obviously, you want your website in place. You want it to be as conversion friendly as possible. And a lot of people, you know, I know they're not, they're not web designers, and it's not their job to do that. I will try to simplify it. If you look at your website, it is friendly and inviting, right? Is it easy for people to use? Is it easy for people to navigate. That's step one. Now, even when you start running ads, and even if you're trying to do some preliminary testing, which by that I mean, you can put a small budget to add ads, put in your target audience, your full ICP, full addressable market, let that run for about a month or so with maybe a few different messages that you think would appeal to people and see what they engage with the most. Look at the data and see who out of your total addressable market is clicking the most on the ads. That's the specific ICP that you're most likely to gear your messaging around and specifically target them and then the ads that they're engaging with. That's also the message that you want to start building content and additional ads around. So, to me, that's kind of step one. Do some research. Find out what's appealing to the market right now. Find out where the need in the market right now is. You don't need a lot of budgets to do that. You can run a $500 campaign and get some of that data. The other part that you want to spend your time working more on is content and visibility. So, creating content for your site, any blogs, right? The expertise that you can put down, any white papers, any resources you can provide, also on your LinkedIn profile, you want to make sure you're posting about these things. Don't do it for the likes or the engagement. Just post, because it's going to come to a point when, when you do start getting traction, and you start getting a lot more people looking at your business, you're starting to get a lot more volume that they're going to go back and they're going to see this history of posts, and they'll even start engaging with your old stuff, right? So don't worry about the engagement. Start sharing your expertise. Okay?

Mark Shriner [13:19]

So let me ask you, because when it comes to jump back to Google for a second, there are kind of couple different school schools of thought in terms of the posting content. One is, you know, you want to post very super high-quality content that engages with your target audience. Another one is, you know what, your target audience probably isn't going to find you if you're not ranking in Google. So, you just post a lot, because really, your target audience is Google and that algorithm so that they start to boost you up in some of the organic search results. Okay, then if you take some of that content and put it on LinkedIn, it's not the highest quality content, so maybe you don't want to do that. So, you know, how do you do and balance that out.

Joshua Stout [14:02]

Yeah, so kind of one of the tricks with Google is you look at the keywords that people are looking up that doesn't have a lot of difficulty to place with. So, you know, you could do some keyword research, see what in your industry people are searching, and then create content on your website around that to make it easier to rank those types of keywords. That takes a lot of time to, and you need a Google expert to do so, unless you're proficient with Google yourself. But that's kind of the trick in knowing, like, what type of content is great for your site. That's not always the same kind of content that you're creating for LinkedIn. So, it does, it does take time. There's no easy way around that. You know, obviously I didn't speak much yet about our business now, but with influence, that's a service that they offer, right? And they offer it because it is so busy for people to post, to come up with meaningful content, to establish themselves as thought leaders, to reply to comments, to come. Comment on other people's posts, because that's almost equally important. If you're calm, if you see other people in your industry and you're making meaningful comments on their posts, people see that. I would say they probably see that more than they actually see your posts. But look at what's trending. You can look up your competitors and look up the ads of your competitors and LinkedIn ads library and see what type of content they're running, and see what they're posting about, and see what kind of engagement they're getting, and then you can start making content on the same kind of trending topics.  

Mark Shriner [15:31]

So what I've heard you say a couple times now is, you know, with minimal spend, you can use LinkedIn platform and some of the tools they provide to do some kind of AB testing, to see, you know what works for you, but then also check on the competitors, see what's working for them, so you can learn from that very, very quickly.

Joshua Stout [15:50]

Yes, exactly. And you'll want to do that. You'll want to know what they're you know what they're doing, right? And that helps you position yourself as well.

Mark Shriner [15:59]

Let me ask you again, coming back to the SaaS example, tell me a success story, and also put in the timing. Like, if you wanted to manage expectations, let's say somebody selling, you know, a SaaS solution, and they're like, because when you're in startup mode, you need customers. You need that traction ASAP, right? Tell me. Tell me a success story. And then also, you know, manage my expectations in terms of, how long is it? How long does this take? How much money is it going to cost?

Joshua Stout [16:33]

Yeah, so, you know, kind of, I have a story that mixes both of those together, because, in reality, it's going to take three to six months to really start seeing results. If you're starting from nothing, right? And keep that in mind, I say that very specific way, because you have to build it from the ground up. You have to build a funnel where most was, most conversions and most leads come from, is from retargeting interested prospects. It's people that visited your website, they visited your company page, they interacted with your top funnel ads. And now you need to stay in front of those people, right? Because you want to stay at the top of your mind. I If you really think about it, I have multiple stories around this about your own process, right? And your own process, buying process and things that you may have purchased. There was a product I recently purchased that I think took me, like, two years, or maybe three years to actually get, but that company kept running these ads. You know, I would actually click on the ads every now and then, just so I stayed in their funnel. I didn't forget, because I knew I wanted it, I just couldn't get it at the time, and finally I ended up converting. So, it's the same here, right? These people and business moves are hard. I know you want results quick, but I know when I was growing the last agency, when even just switching from a spreadsheet to click up, you know, a project management tool that we all see in the CRM, that was a lot of work to migrate all our information from the spreadsheet and to teach the team how to use it, to learn how to use it, right? There was that's a lot of money too. So, there's no really small moves in business. So, you have to keep that in mind. What's really important is starting that engagement and then retargeting. So, very specifically, with the company I worked with is actually a CRM tool, and it was same kind of thing. We had to go from the ground up, and you have to optimize based on the data that you're getting. So, when we started it, you know, month one, we focused on brand awareness, we're focused on volume. We're focused on top of funnel, figuring out which pain points and benefits are going to drive the most volume, and then start a, b, testing those and optimizing for that. What month two looks like is just starting your retargeting campaigns. So now it's taking those assets, either your posts that you've been doing for thought leadership on LinkedIn, any blogs or white papers, eBooks, articles, anything that we have that can give you credibility into what you do instead of your competitors, you're going to start that on month two, and that's going to start building up those touch points. And what you're also going to see is like 10 times more engagement when one of those prospects clicks on those and goes back to your site, they're going to start exploring your site and spending a lot more time there. Now keep in mind, even if you Google it, it says, you know, you need 12 to 18 touch points for conversion. I think in my experience, it's more like 20, 3040, it's hard to put an exact number, but we know it's quite a bit. So, in that second month, you've built up maybe three to six more touch points. So, we're talking about like six maybe seven, right? So, in that third month, that's typically when you'll start getting results, because now your kind of getting to that point, another additional three to six touch points. Now you're mixing conversion ads, right? Because you know somebody's engaged with your brand, you've been building trust and credibility. Now it's time to ask the question and take that relationship to the next level. And so now you're mixing in their social proof and testimonials. Big bull. The benefits of ways that you've improved revenue or your offer has, you know, made companies more efficient, or whatever it is, percentages, numbers, right? And you're asking for that next step, and now you should be getting leads after the third month. Now you can really start optimizing for leads, AB, testing conversions on the site, maybe lead gen forms on the platform, figuring out exactly which demographics are converting at the highest rate and at the lowest cost, and optimizing again and again for those things to achieve the best ROI. So, so a very specific example, and this was actually with a company that was running, they're running $10,000 a month. And this is, this is different from the CRM one. Excuse me, I'm getting a little tapping the CRM one. We ended up running them for like two years. From that fourth to sixth month, we started seeing results. But the reason this other one comes to mind is I have very specific numbers here. They're running $10,000 a month in the first month, think we got one conversion, maybe two, at $10,000 a month. The second month we had like five, I think the third month we had like 10. So, we're talking about $30,000 in the hole with about 15 conversions. You know that that doesn't equate there, right? The numbers aren't good enough to justify if they had stopped there, it would have been the worst thing, right? Everybody that stops after that third month, when you're finally getting to that point where you've built up and that's enough touch points, you're now losing it, you're stopping dead in its track. Any additional touch points that you might be running, or any conversion led to ads. On the fourth month, we had 20 conversions. Wow, on the fifth month, we had 40 conversions. And this isn't cumulative, right? This is month to month, the amount of conversions that we were getting. So, something you see, like even on the advertising page, on our website, on influence, is exponential results. Long term solution with exponential results, because the more people that you get into your funnel, the longer that you can build those touch points, the more people you're going to end up converting, right? That's not easy, right? It takes analyzing the data. Takes optimizations, it takes testing. But if you're doing it the right way, and you keep moving forward and investing in it, you'll continue seeing those results grow.

Mark Shriner [22:12]

And you said the budget for that was like 10k a month.

Joshua Stout [22:14]

For them, it was 10k a month.  

Mark Shriner [22:18]

Yeah. I mean, this seems like pretty reasonable pricing and timing. I'm sure that's a success story for a reason, because it's, you know, a big success. What's been the most challenging product or service that you've tried to promote awareness of on LinkedIn? And you don't have a company name, but like, maybe just talk about the type of service.

Joshua Stout [22:45]

So, I mean, the first thing that pops up in the mind, without really, like thinking about it twice, is, like coaching, it's, it's a professional services, and it's a highly competitive area, and then it's really hard to differentiate yourself from other coaches, but a lot of a lot of coaches want to do it because they're targeting business professionals. So, they want to run on LinkedIn, but it is extremely difficult. A lot of times they have the money to do so also, but it's just hard to get those kinds of results. There's also situations in almost every industry where you're targeting something so niche that it's hard to justify a continuous type of program on LinkedIn, because if you don't even have 510 1000 people in your ICP or total addressable market, you're really not going to be able to grow your results. You're going to milk that for everything that you can, and you can hammer it as much as you can, but you will see diminishing returns after a while.  

Mark Shriner [23:52]

Makes a lot of sense. LinkedIn also gives you the capability of running campaigns by country. Have you ever done anything outside of the US?

Joshua Stout [24:01]

Yep, I've run worldwide campaigns. In fact, the CRM example I was giving earlier, we did that like in the Dutch Holland area, like we targeted Sweden, we targeted Germany, targeted Holland. So it was like out in the European area.

Mark Shriner [24:20]

How do you help a company decide? I mean, obviously they have an idea of where they want to market their services, but you would have a perspective in terms of when they're going to get more bang for the buck in terms of those other markets, because I know, for example, if you want to advertise in India, for example, it's going to be less than if you're going to advertise in Europe, right? So how do you help the customer decide that?

Joshua Stout [24:47]

Well, typically, it's the quality of the conversions as well, and that's something that you just pick up over time. But a lot of times it's also just the data. So, it's hard to tell someone exactly how effective a. Going to be in each country, like a lot of people want to target us, right? Because that's where a strong market is. That's where you have a lot of potential prospects. It's also highly, highly competitive. Sometimes it's easier to get in and like a European market, but it can depend. Now there is additional research that you can do to figure out, you know, what kind of reach you can get in a country, what typically for your type of offers a conversion rate for other companies, LinkedIn makes that information available, so you can find that information, but it takes some upfront research, and a lot of times for me, it's about testing, right? So what I do, and even for the CRM company, we did the same thing is I segmented countries into different campaigns, and I ran ads for each of those countries, and based on where I saw us getting the most engagements and leads, we started moving budget more and more to those until we shut off the countries that weren't performing Okay.

Mark Shriner [25:54]

Pretty much every part of sales and marketing is being impacted by AI in AI powered tools. What are you guys using to make your job or life easier or more impactful?

Joshua Stout [26:08]

Yeah, so I use AI as an assistant, and it works pretty well. So, when I'm first building out a strategy plan, and I want to find competitors and I want to find the positioning, so I've seen over 1000 ad accounts that doesn't make me an expert in every single industry that there is, right? And when you work with somebody, you want them to be an expert in what you do. So obviously, there's some verticals like SaaS, it, services, marketing agencies that I've worked with the most, that I have specific knowledge and that helps me be more, have more expertise in those industries. You know that being said, I use AI to help me come up with marketing plans. I help. I use AI to help me edit or create like statements of work, depending on what a customer wants to review contracts a lot of times, especially once you get with bigger companies, they have a lot of nuances that they have in their contracts, or they want to edit your contracts with a lot of red lines based on you having to adhere to their company's policies, and I would miss some of the jargon that's in there without using AI, I even help it come up with some creative ideas. Now, though, you don't want to, you don't want to take out the authenticity, right? So, so creative is kind of that, that that line for me where you don't want copywriting done by AI and you don't want designs done by AI, I might swallow my words a little bit because some great campaigns have had AI images, and I'm like, Oh, this is going to be horrible. And then everybody clicks on it, right? I don't know if those are high intent clicks, but I've seen it, but you can tell when AI runs the copy, and it loses the authenticity of having a person behind it. So instead of that, how I use it to supplement what I do again, is more of an assistant to get strategic ideas, I'm actually building AI bots. So, I have fed all my audits that I've done into an AI bot, so that I can then share that AI bot, and people can ask it questions about their own setup, and it can give them an audit based on that, oh, that's going to be cool. I've also done the same with strategies. So, I was obviously built, you know, a ton of different strategies from all kinds of budgets, from $500 a month, up to over $100,000 a month. Feed them all into AI. So, people ask that both strategy questions. It can come up with the top of funnel, middle funnel and bottom funnel strategy for you based on my best practices and the way I typically structure them.  

Mark Shriner [28:35]

So, I mean, we in the challenge, traditionally with the service industry is it's hard to scale without adding more people. And what I'm hearing you say is these AI bots are allowing you to scale without adding more people. That's great. Where do you go and what resources do you recommend to kind of stay ahead of the curve in terms of best practices on LinkedIn, and what LinkedIn is going to be doing tomorrow.

Joshua Stout [29:04]

Probably the best thing to do is follow people on LinkedIn. You know now that I have more of the inside perspective as well, so now that I'm a LinkedIn expert, I have access to the LinkedIn trainings that are things that are either coming out or most relevant for them, they will invite you to different things, like being a LinkedIn advisor. They have LinkedIn articles and really the content creators, because LinkedIn gives them the newest, best things so that they can go post content about it. I guess it's the same kind of mentality over if there's people talking about it, people trust people over the company, and so, you know, LinkedIn, when they, when they, when they, you know, paid for the ship to London and gave me the certification. You think, like, wow. Like, that's, that's crazy. They're paying for all this. But what's the tradeoff for them? I'm out here posting regularly about their best practices, new industry tips and tricks, and, you know, up to date information. So, it is the best place to do that. And again, follow the kind of people that are posting on these things. Find the people that are those LinkedIn experts, and they have a LinkedIn influencer, they have like a LinkedIn influencer group now, and they feed all of them that information, and just agencies in general. So, if you are going to work with an agency, a lot of agencies have kind of like the up-to-date information, so LinkedIn is going to be the best place to find out about that.  

Mark Shriner [30:26]

Sounds like some great advice. Last couple questions. You know a lot of people, I would say the majority of people that I know and that I see on LinkedIn, they post once in a while, and they'll like something or comment, but it's very much an ad hoc kind of process or activity. There are some people who are really trying hard to become quote, unquote influencers. And I see some people fail and then I see some people who have amazing success. You know, maybe have 100,000 followers on LinkedIn, for example. What's the difference, and how do you get from because everybody, even the people who do the random post, I know most people, they want more likes and more shares and you know, but so many people just can't figure it out. How do you get from here to that influencer level?

Joshua Stout [31:15]

Yeah, it's tough. You have to constantly stay on top of the LinkedIn algorithm, and this is something even I appreciate. You know obviously, I have a really good understanding of the effectiveness of doing thought leader posts and utilizing those for campaigns and building your brand. Sometimes it's a grind, right? You share your expertise, slowly but surely, you start gaining followers. But one thing that I've learned from being with influence is like algorithm hacks, so there are things that they want you to post about. And you know, as I kind of mixed feelings about this, because you can do things in a certain way that helps LinkedIn promote your ads more. If you look at the impression that you're not your ads, excuse me, your post. If you look at the impressions your posts are getting, if you do something that's like if you post on something that's recent news that LinkedIn put out there, they will promote your ad more. If you do something that's contradictory or conflicting, basically to cause some kind of emotion within you, right? They will promote that more, the way that you even structure what you write and the way that you start your heading or your headline on a post, that can get more, you know, interactions. There's a lot of little details like this, and then I'm not, I'm not perfect at perfect at it, either. So, you know, I started kind of like that, you know, I when I started the ad section, the owner of the previous, kind of the founder of the previous company, he was already a LinkedIn influencer. He had like 30,000 followers. So, I just started posting once or twice a week. I really wouldn't mind. I tried to step it up, and it was hard, like you said, I'd go, like, a couple things every now and then, maybe make a comment. But now that I'm the face of this branch of our company, I'm making it. I'm making an effort to do it every day as much as possible, right? Like three to four times a week I'm posting. I'm engaging with other posts, and that's the way that you pick up followers. Yes, you can try to figure out the algorithm. You can try to hack the algorithm. You could try to get a million impressions, and something goes viral. But really, the way to build those followers is consistent posting and consistent engagement, and that's the that's what you need to follow. And sometimes you'll have something go viral. I had one go viral that I've had multiple posts go viral, but one that upset me. I didn't have something to post one day, and LinkedIn had come out with this new catch-up feature, and it shows like, people's birthdays and other kind of like information that's not professionally relevant. You get these notifications, and I didn't want to see these notifications, and there's a way to turn them off. But before I even like, looked into that, I took a screenshot, I made a post and ranted about it, and I had like 10,000 impressions within the first few hours, hundreds of people posted.

Mark Shriner [34:07]

Was it? Was it a negative post against this new feature? Yes, and LinkedIn still promoted it, or they just didn't throttle it down. Well, right?

Joshua Stout [34:18]

No, no, they didn't. They didn't necessarily promote it, but you can tell when LinkedIn gives you a lot more impressions or it doesn't.

Mark Shriner [34:26]

For example, anytime that I link outside of LinkedIn in a post, I just get hammered. I mean, even little stuff that I would call it petty. So, for example, I do a podcast, and I put the thumbnail, or I put the link to the YouTube video of the podcast in there, LinkedIn will give me this tiny little image, right? But if I, but, if I, but if I screenshot the thumbnail for the podcast and put the link to the podcast underneath. It, the screenshot comes up big and it because it's just a graphic, right? And it's not necessarily a link off their platform, I kind of find that. But, you know, well, what am I going to do? Right? Yeah, machine. It's not going to work.

Joshua Stout [35:15]

They're going to do those things. And you know, as much as you still want it also to be like, what's LinkedIn? They should just promote the more professional things they also want as many users as they can get on the platform, yeah. And things that people engage with are typically, like, inflammatory type content. And you know, you want to try to remain professional at the same time, like they're going to show you what people engage with. Wow.

Mark Shriner [35:39]

Well, he Josh, you know, I learned a lot already here, and you've got me motivated to learn even more. I realize that I've been just missing, missing some big opportunities on LinkedIn, as you know, because, as I said, my usual strategy since the beginning of LinkedIn is just post something once in a while and hope for the best. Yeah, but both on the advertising side and on the content creation side, I think there's a lot more that can be done if people want to reach out to you or find you know, find out more about you know, influence and the services you offer. What's the best way to do that?

Joshua Stout [36:14]

Yeah, absolutely. So, the best way is to go to our site. It's influent.co I'm on the advertising page, so it gives more information about me. My emails are on there. You could also book a call with me if you ever want to chat. Alternatively, you could always contact me through LinkedIn. It's linkedin.com forward slash. In forward slash, Joshua dashed out. You just look up Joshua stout. There are multiple Joshua styles, but you'll probably see mine. But yeah, check us out on influence. You know, again, we have two halves of the business, so we have the executive thought leadership offer, which means that, you know, we help people build their LinkedIn presence. We help them come up with engaging posts. We try to get them viral post, and we really build that, that thought leadership. The other side of it is LinkedIn ads, and that's what I run. I brought my extensive experience and running ads on LinkedIn, and now I'm building out this segment here. So really, and you'll find this on LinkedIn, the trending topic right now is thought leadership in conjunction with paid ads, it's you, it's building your presence, but also implementing a paid ad strategy to one boost and promote that. So that's something we didn't get a lot of chance to talk about. Mark You can post, and then you can on your ad platform, on campaign manager, you can put some but some budget behind boosting that to your target audience, I see. And not only that, but you can also put an audience in place so that anybody that engages with those posts, you can move them to a separate bucket, and then you can target them with more of your posts. And so, what you're doing is you're finding the people interested in engaging with your posts, and then you're putting more posts in front of them to engage with.  

Mark Shriner [37:59]

Well, let me, let me ask you this, because there's a lot of talk about, hey, you know, you need to develop your personal brand on LinkedIn, and which is a little bit separate from thought leadership, okay? Because thought leadership could be specifically about the problem that your company or service is trying to solve, or that that domain. And then there's the advertising to boast, to excuse me, boast, to boost either your personal brand building post, or to kind of accelerate or create additional awareness around your thought leadership. And then there's just, you know, you're targeting these, this ICP, and you're going to run, I wouldn't call them random ads, but targeted ads towards the ICP. There's a couple different moving pieces there, because again, I could be, I could be promoted, promoting my personal brand, promoting thought leadership, or our product and service to our ICP. Walk me through how you balance that out. Okay, because a lot of CEOs like, I want to build my brand, but wait a minute, we need to focus on thought leadership. Oh, wait a minute, maybe we just need to focus on that ICP. And then, then I have a question about the actual ad itself, but go ahead, balance those first so.

Joshua Stout [39:13]

So, from even what I've seen on, you know, my other half of the business here is, there's, pillars that he creates. And one pillar is thought leadership. You know, one pillar is talking about yourself, maybe entertainment type of post. Another might be like inspirational type of post. And there's a percentage breakdown there, so the heavier percentage lies on thought leadership, because it's your expertise, right? What makes you the best but, but you're absolutely right. Thought Leadership is separate from brand, because brand includes a human element there, right? Thought Leadership, it would just be pure expertise, posts all the time and, and that's really, doesn't necessarily not building your brand as a person. So, as a person, you want to include those other elements in. There. So, so he has like, three or four pillars in his strategy on how we divide that up and then makes a posting schedule based off of that. So that's how you build your brand, and that's also the difference. Actually, made a post when I came back from London about the difference between content creators and thought leaders, because thought leaders, they don't care. They're just posting their expertise.  

Mark Shriner [40:24]

Content creators are doing a mixture of things, and yes, the answer, yeah, absolutely. Let's go. I said the last question a couple questions ago. Sorry, but let's go back to the to the I Can where we started with just the ads. What are your best practices in terms of add the tagline, the call to action, the copy, I don't, I don't even know, like, how much, what are the limitations in terms of content on ads on LinkedIn? But maybe talk a little bit about that.

Joshua Stout [40:52]

Yeah, so, so I want to give you the best advice that I can for almost anyone running on LinkedIn, if you're running at least $1,000 on LinkedIn, you can follow this basic setup, and it's really separate your funnel layers, so ensure that you have a top of funnel specifically dedicated to targeting cold traffic, right? People that don't know about your brand. We're going to define it by these are people that, as far as I know, have never seen my brand before and use a variation of at least five ads. Typically, it's five ads top of funnel there this audience, if it's 20 to 80,000 up to 500,000 really don't want to go that high. Definitely don't go over 500,000 if it's that big, you want to use additional filters but use five ads and use a different pain points, different images and different copy to appeal to them. And we spoke a little about this earlier. You're trying to figure out which of those is the most appealing. Then you can stop the other ads. Start. AB testing the high performing ads, but you need to figure out what's sticking out to people. And I'm a really quick tip on the intro part, because it's intro, yeah, it's the text on the ad, and it's a headline for the intro. Try to keep it under 70 characters. If you can. You want, don't want it to be truncated where they have that button to hit. See more. The most effective one has a shorter intro to it, but a B, test it right there. One answer for everything on the call to action. Learn more. It should be learned more. You should send people to your website so they can find out more about you without feeling the obligation to convert. Then when you build your middle of funnel campaigns, use 10 to 15 ads. And I would, I want to use a variation of content. I use, I say, variations. So much if people did it as a drinking game, everyone would be drunk. You want different things. You don't want to bludgeon someone over the head with the same testimonial or the same blog or the same white paper over and over and over again. Use as much variation as you can. So, one day they can see a blog, and another day they might see a white paper, another day they might see a testimonial with a direct call to action. And again, these are still learn more, and you're sending someone to a blog or something they can read or they can download the content straight from the platform. Now finally, for your bottom of funnel layer, these are the ads that we talked about earlier, that highlight revenue and percentages, but they ask for the next step. Those say, schedule a demo, right? Yeah, sign up or whatever this asks for it. Now, if you're running at $1,000 budget, mix these in with your middle of funnel ads. I would probably run like six and six or seven and seven, something like that. If you have enough budget to create a separate bottom of funnel layer, run another 10 to 15 ads in there, and again, variation right, a variation of testimonials, success stories, awards, partners, revenue percentages. And if you can keep distinct ads around those things and create that variation of it, that's the best advice that I can give you. And you would be surprised at how many people don't do that, and how you can take advantage of implementing a system like that.

Mark Shriner [44:03]

Wow, that's a lot there. And, and that's something you guys all do.  

Joshua Stout [44:06]

Yes, yeah. So, we do all of that.

Mark Shriner [44:11]

And I'm like, how am I going to do all that?

Joshua Stout [44:15]

That's one thing that, even with our posts, the things I've always done with my posts, like, do you share your secret sauce, right? So if you share your secret sauce, so that people are going to learn well, the way I always thought of it is, if you can take what I do best, or what we do as an agency, best, great, if you can use it to help your company, great. But a lot of people also say, Man, that's a lot. And so for those people, they're just seeing the expertise that we have, the reasoning, the logic behind why we implement systems and what it takes to test it, and they'll want a partner that can do that for them.

Mark Shriner [44:49]

Awesome. Well, hey, Josh, I really enjoyed this conversation. Learned a lot, and like you said, you've got me motivated now to go down that rabbit hole even farther. Thank you so much for being on The Grow Fast Podcast and wish you an amazing 2025.

Joshua Stout [45:04]

Thanks. Mark. I appreciate it. It was a pleasure. Cheers.

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