How Would You Spend $10,000 a Month on Marketing?

This week, Shawn Busse, Hans Schrei, and Sarah Segal explain what they would do if I gave them $10,000 a month to spend on marketing. As we all know, there’s a lot going on right now. No one’s entirely certain where the economy is headed, and no one’s entirely certain where digital marketing is headed. So it seemed like a good time to ask our regulars where they would place their bets if we offered them each an imaginary pot of money to promote their brands. Spoiler alert: Their responses gave us a good sense of what these business owners think is working right now—and it’s definitely not billboards.

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

Shawn Busse is co-founder and CEO of Kinesis.

Hans Schrei is co-founder of Wunderkeks.

Sarah Segal is founder and CEO of Segal Communications.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word Productions.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome Shawn, Hans, and Sarah. It’s great to have you all here. This week, we’re going to talk about marketing, specifically: What would you do if I gave you $10,000 a month to spend on marketing right now? Sarah, I think you told us in a previous episode—correct me if I’m wrong—that one reason you haven’t done a lot of marketing for your public relations firm is that traditionally, public relations firms just don’t do a lot of marketing. Do I have that right?

Sarah Segal:
Yeah, you do have that right. What’s interesting about your question that you pose is I didn’t actually include any marketing, in terms of my allocation of what I do with the dollars.

Loren Feldman:
That’s cheating, Sarah.

Sarah Segal:
Well, the reason why is this, because it’s… I still have to figure out that equation, in terms of what real PR marketing would be.

Loren Feldman:
Well, let’s start with the bigger picture, then. It seems like a case of people who aren’t willing to eat their own dog food. I mean, PR is a form of marketing. Why do PR firms traditionally not spend money on marketing? Do you know?

Sarah Segal:
Well, I think it’s one of those things where it’s a big investment. For example, you buy a car, you buy a wedding ring, you buy big ticket items. You kind of want to have affirmation that it’s going to be a wise investment. So for those kinds of products, like traditionally in PR and marketing, it’s really hard to go 100 percent virtual for those industries, because people still want to test-drive or try on their products. I think with PR and marketing, it’s kind of the same way. And the way that you get that validation that it’s the right investment is that you find peers who are gonna refer you to good PR agencies and marketing agencies. And so traditional advertising doesn’t really have a strong fit.

Loren Feldman:
I’m a little skeptical. I don’t know.

Hans Schrei:
Maybe define traditional advertising. Because if you’re talking billboards, for sure, you’re not gonna see a billboard for an ad agency. But what would you say is traditional marketing?

Sarah Segal:
I don’t know, everything from a billboard to a digital ad on LinkedIn. I think I have to do a little bit of A/B testing before I invest in that. So where I would put my investment dollars would be in hiring an analyst, right? Somebody who could help me look at the numbers and look at the traction—

Loren Feldman:
Which numbers, Sarah?

Sarah Segal:
The overall question of, if I had an influx of investment or in money to invest over time. Maybe you should ask your question again.

Loren Feldman:
You said you would take the $10,000 a month that I’m pretending to offer you, and you would spend it on an analyst. But an analyst to look at the results of the marketing that you’re not doing?

Sarah Segal:
No, no, no, somebody to look at, for example, how are people getting to my website right now? How are people engaging with my company already? And then using that data to eventually, maybe, do a marketing campaign.

Loren Feldman:
So you’re saying, before you spend the money, you want to do some research and try to figure out if it would be well spent? What a crazy idea.

Sarah Segal:
I know. The second place I would invest the money would be hiring a videographer or photographer. We have a lot of clients that need that kind of content. And as we know, on social media, video is king, and having that capability in-house would really be an upsell for me. And then the last piece would be hiring somebody to help me set up my CRM, but I think that would be like a temporary investment.

Loren Feldman:
You’re getting a lot for your $10,000 a month.

Sarah Segal:
Well, you know, they’re all temporary positions. I think that all these roles—except for the videographer or photographer—are part-time or consultancies.

Loren Feldman:
All right. Well, you are cheating a little bit. Let me ask you this question. You impressed all of us when you told us about the transparency with which you operate your firm—the idea that when a client engages with you, you commit to keeping them informed on who your media contacts are, and exactly what your conversations with them are like: whether they respond, whether they don’t respond, just letting people know that you’re actually doing the work. I hadn’t heard that before. I’m sure there are other PR firms that do it. But I actually had not heard of one doing that before. Seems to me, that’s the making of a good marketing message.

Sarah Segal:
It is. I don’t know that that would translate into the kind of clients I want, though.

Loren Feldman:
That’s interesting. Why do you say that?

Sarah Segal:
Well, because traditionally, larger companies who want to retain a PR agency aren’t gonna go for what the commercial tells them to buy. They’re going to do their homework and research the agency that they’re going to eventually hire. So I don’t know that those kinds of traditional sales methods are going to have any value, because it’s a big ticket item. We’re a big ticket item.

Loren Feldman:
Shawn, you’re in a related field. How’s this striking you?

Shawn Busse:
I guess I’m kind of curious, Sarah. If you were to kind of throw out the outliers, like the small hotel you mentioned that you do kind of almost as pro bono work, your average customer: What would you say is sort of their annual value to your firm?

Sarah Segal:
About $100,000.

Shawn Busse:
About $100k. Yeah, okay, so it’s a big ticket item. I mean, I think a lot of the things Sarah is saying resonate, in that the buying cycle for somebody buying $100,000 and more, it usually starts with kind of talking to people in their networks—more of a, “Hey, who do you work with? Who do you trust?” It’s just not so highly transactional. I think digital marketing, which is kind of the thing that we’re talking about as the other way to go, is often more transactional. And it tends to attract a different type of customer. I don’t know if that’s been your experience, Sarah.

Sarah Segal:
Yeah.

Hans Schrei:
Can I say something from my perspective, as someone who is not in the industry, but has been looking at these types of vendors lately?

Loren Feldman:
Please.

Hans Schrei:
And definitely it is not an ad situation. I would never go to a PR agency with an ad. But it’s very hard. Actually, it’s a whole thing, but we had an investor pushing for a particular PR agency. And they had a crappy deck, an outdated deck. They didn’t have a social media presence themselves. They weren’t really on LinkedIn.

Whereas the one that I actually want to hire—I love them, and they are probably already out of my price range—they are constantly putting themselves out there. But what I’m saying is that, in this game, it’s credibility. Because if I were to hire a PR agency, then we will have to commit for, say, at least six months, usually, right?

Sarah Segal:
Yes.

Hans Schrei:
And it’s not realistic to expect results tomorrow. Because if it’s a creative agency, you get a creative, a few credits, and then you judge if they’re good or bad. But with a PR agency, we need to trust the process and trust that it’s gonna be a few months and that you’re building relationships for us for the long haul. And this thing that happens a lot—like, we’re very aware that we want to be featured in The New York Times, but that’s probably going to take a while and a lot of relationship building. And that’s what we want to partner for.

I don’t know if you’re doing this, but a lot of the time, the first thing you’re doing is you go to their Twitter. I’m a big Twitter person, for instance and a lot of people in my industry are on Twitter a lot. And I want to see what that person is doing on Twitter, who she’s talking to, her whole footprint. Same with LinkedIn. These agencies that I have been talking to, that I’ve been eyeing, they are all over the place on LinkedIn, offering very valuable content and also showcasing what they do. I really feel confident that this person knows what they’re doing. Whereas the other one that we’re considering was kind of—

Shawn Busse:
Invisible.

Hans Schrei:
Invisible, yeah.

Shawn Busse:
Hans, let me ask you a quick question about that. So you’re kind of working through the funnel of marketing, of saying, “I’m evaluating them for credibility.” So it sounds like you became aware of them through their, shall we say, organic efforts on LinkedIn, is that correct? Or is it paid efforts on LinkedIn?

Hans Schrei:
It’s all organic. I don’t think they’re putting out ads. If you see an ad, it’s like, now you’re probably kind of doubtful. But at the end of the day, I think that what you need to cultivate is the social proof, because not only does this person have a lot of, “Oh, we got this brand on The New York Times for Valentine’s Day.” Awesome. And then there’s the comment by the founder of the brand, and people commenting on it, “Yeah, we love working with you.” And that is what really gives credibility, because then I don’t have to ask for them. It’s all in public, and I don’t have to ask them for referrals. The referrals are just there, and there’s no way of faking them.

Sarah Segal:
Can I ask you a question? Why do you want to be in The New York Times?

Hans Schrei:
We’re a consumer brand. So in our case, it’s a lot of eyeballs, but I’m just saying The New York Times as an example, because it’s one of the top of publications, but it’s just a hypothetical.

Sarah Segal:
Well, I don’t know. I don’t go to The New York Times to buy cookies. That’s why I’m asking. It’s a lot of eyeballs. And yeah, it’d be appropriate if you were doing a fundraise, and you’re looking for investors, but—

Hans Schrei:
Oh, I’m doing a fundraise. [Laughter]

Sarah Segal:
So that’s why you want to be in The New York Times.

Hans Schrei:
Oh, of course. We don’t expect sales from The New York Times. For instance, we do our own PR, and we just got a column published in Inc. magazine. We actually wrote it. And that’s not going to sell a single cookie, but that is going to give us a ton of credibility with investors and with retailers.

Most of America doesn’t buy The New York Times, doesn’t read The New York Times, but the name does carry a lot of weight. So if I get to put on my website, “As seen in The New York Times”—and people do it all the time. We were mentioned once on Vanity Fair, and we tell people, “As seen in Vanity Fair.” Yeah, we were seen in Vanity Fair, but you had to look really hard. But it gives you credibility.

Loren Feldman:
All right, Sarah. I’m gonna let you off the hook this time. I suspect we may come back to this question in the future, though.

Sarah Segal:
I feel validated.

Loren Feldman:
Hans, how about you? You told us last week that you are one of those businesses affected when Apple changed its privacy settings, which created problems for Facebook where you were doing your marketing. I guess I would start, have you adjusted to the changes in digital marketing?

Hans Schrei:
The thing is this: The funnels are longer. It used to be that Facebook would normally bring you—say we’re selling cookies. Facebook and Google, they will not only bring you people who are customers for cookies, but they will bring them to you at the right time when they’re looking for the cookies. Because if I ask, “Who is in the market for cookies?” Everyone. Across the year, everyone buys cookies. But that’s not very effective if you’re talking about direct-response marketing.

So with the changes in iOS 14, Facebook’s ability to do that got handicapped. So what you need to do now is a longer funnel, and you need to be like, “Hey, cookies! We make amazing cookies! You may not be ready to buy them, but we’re here.” And we need to find ways to engage people, even if they’re not ready to buy.

That’s the name of the game now. It’s not really like, “I’m looking for this person who’s gonna take it right now and spend $60 on cookies.” So that’s good and bad. It’s good if you are a powerful, well thought out brand. It’s better for you, in the sense that you’re getting quality customers, as opposed to people in a rush.

Think of this: It’s 11 p.m., you need diapers. You go to the closest gas station or whatever and buy whatever diapers. And that’s fine. That’s revenue, anyway. But ideally, you want them to be in love with your diapers. Same thing applies to cookies. So what we’re doing, and we found that worked, was, one: We needed to change the positioning and we needed to stop talking about how delicious cookies are. Because I say that, and the competitor next door says the same thing, and every single cookie competitor says that the cookies are delicious. And, probably, they are.

So we need to find a better positioning, something for people to latch on. Because they’re gonna have to think of the cookies for a longer time—from the first time they saw it to the time that they actually purchased. So it’s a longer consideration window. And the other thing that we found was that whenever we ran PR, we got an uptick in sales—but it signaled the algorithms to show the lower costs, because there was interest in what we’re doing.

So for instance, we had an article published about us in Austin Monthly, which is a big deal here in Austin. And we got an insane amount of sales in Austin, but because Facebook got the signal, “Hey, these people are talking about this,” this is because Facebook wants to show you things that are interesting to you. So if everyone in Austin is talking about this, and it’s getting shared all over the place, they want to talk about the company.

That’s when we learned that PR is the name of the game for us. It’s no longer the direct response and the direct, “Hey, I saw this. I’m gonna buy it.” Because we’re so bombarded by messages that a lot of them don’t really register directly, but it creates this interest so in the ether, and people are going to be looking for you. So that’s worked great for us.

And then we got, for instance, the Today show. And we were on the Today show for, I think, 30 seconds because Hoda was talking about the brownies and how delicious they were and then Jenna interrupted her. She really messed us up. But that was $17,000 in sales. It was a fantastic day. Because our marketing, all of a sudden, becomes very efficient.

Loren Feldman:
How did you get on the Today show?

Hans Schrei:
We got our brownies in the Oscars gift bags. So yeah, that’s how they landed on Today.

Loren Feldman:
How did you get your brownies in the Oscars gift bags?

Hans Schrei:
Luis talked to this girl here who runs 2512, which is a community thing here where like every event that’s happening in town is published. And we were not trying to pitch her anything. We’re like, “Hey, we’d love to talk to you.” She came to have coffee and cookies. And they talked for an hour and a half because Luis has that thing going for him that he can talk to a rock. And she was like, the day after, “Hey, I just remembered that I know this guy. He was with me in high school. I haven’t talked to him for a while, but let me call him,” and that’s how we ended up there.

Sarah Segal:
If you had not gotten a mention on the Today show, would those gift bags have been worth it to you?

Hans Schrei:
Oh yes, because you know what? It was not only the Today show. It was a ton of different things. But what we learned—and this is the reason we didn’t hire that PR agency—they wanted to keep talking about the brownies, and no one cares about the brownies. I mean, they are very good, but… You need to tell the story and position the founders and tell the reason why this company exists. So what we learned also was that the Oscars were not really relevant to Inc. magazine. No, they don’t care. But that allowed us to say, “Hey, here’s an excuse to talk to you Inc. magazine. Here’s the founder talking about their product. And this is our story.” And they were like, “Respectfully, we don’t care about the brownies. We love your story. We want to run a story about you. But the brownies are not really for us.” So the way we see those collaborations is more of an excuse to keep, frankly, talking about ourselves. I’m sorry, it may come across that we love to do that.

Sarah Segal:
No, it’s smart.

Hans Schrei:
We position it like that.

Shawn Busse:
I think what I hear you saying is that, in the beginning, you were buying ads on Facebook, and you were sort of just transacting. You were saying, “I have cookies.” Some people click on the ad, they buy cookies. And basically, you were buying customers, and it was an efficient way to buy customers. And now that you can no longer buy customers quite so easily, you’ve had to pivot the positioning to say, “I have an immigrant story. I have kind of a gay rights story. I have something more here than just cookies.” And so that gets you conversations with influencers.

Hans Schrei:
Pretty much, pretty much. It’s a lot easier to engage people.

Shawn Busse:
Right.

Sarah Segal:
You’re selling the brand. You’re doing what Clif Bar did. You’re doing what Red Bull did, where you’re selling the lifestyle and what’s associated with it, as opposed to the product. That’s why those companies have been so successful. They’re not selling a drink, and they’re not selling a protein bar.

Hans Schrei:
Yeah, because you’re not curing cancer, and you need to be very aware of that.

Loren Feldman:
So Hans, how are you going to spend the $10,000 a month that I’m not really giving you?

Hans Schrei:
That’s unfortunate. I believe for us—

Shawn Busse:
Because he could really use the money right now.

Hans Schrei:
We could use the money. For us, what makes a lot of sense, and it’s something that we’re kind of weak on, is what we have learned during this fundraising thing and the PR we started doing—we started doing our PR kind of out of a bit of a crisis mode, and Luis really got the hang of it, thank God—but we haven’t been great at engaging with influencers. That is because we were treating them kind of in a transactional way.

I think it’s the same thing that I was saying about media: I cannot just talk to a reporter every time I want them to pitch something. I need to keep a conversation going. So the way I would spend that money would be on sending product to influencers—not trying to get Kim Kardashian to post about us, but smaller influencers who have credibility, who have smaller followings. But I think with $10,000, say at $50 apiece, we can do 200 influencers and just share the product with them.

Sarah Segal:
Well, it’s brand ambassadors, so you’re working on creating people who will consistently talk about you.

Hans Schrei:
Yeah, but we have learned that if you tell them, “Hey, I would love for you to post about our cookies. Would you like me to send you some?” That doesn’t elicit a response. You need to treat people like people, and you need to build a longer-term relationship and to engage them with the whole thing that you’re doing as opposed to, “Hey, how much are you charging for a post?” Because two things happen: They have a ton of offers like that, and people can smell it from a mile away.

Loren Feldman:
So what offer does work? What’s the right approach?

Hans Schrei:
First, you need to follow them and know who they are and who their audience is. And then, the way it works is you need to talk to them, engage with them. It is a full-time job, because you need to engage with them, and these are people at the end of the day. So it’s a lot easier to say to an influencer, “Hey, I love what you’re doing. I would love for you to try our product.” Obviously, not everyone is going to post about it, not everyone is going to take the offer. A lot of them are going to take it and not mention it ever. But the ones who do get it, they will get really engaged with you. Because you’re saying, “Hey, I would love for you to try us.” And if they love it, they will.

Sarah Segal:
We do this a lot with influencers, where we have brands where we don’t even pay the influencers. We just position it as, “Hey, influencer, one of our clients is a regional donut company. And they’re always coming out with new flavors.” Influencers love to be ahead of the game, in terms of what’s new. So we say, “All right, every time we come up with a new flavor, you’re gonna be first to know and be able to be the first to post. And we’ll obviously give you free product,” and that has created long-term engagements for our client that have been very fruitful for them.

Hans Schrei:
Totally, totally. Whereas if you’re just paying them, people don’t care. I mean, you can tell. You can tell. As a customer, you can tell when they’re just reading a script.

Loren Feldman:
What you’ve described, reaching out to 200 influencers and not just being transactional with them, but trying to build a relationship, that’s a lot of work. Is that something that you personally are going to do? Or Luis is going to do? Or you’re hiring someone internally? Or you’re going to hire an external firm? How are you going to get all that work done?

Hans Schrei:
I would say that we’ll probably have to hire someone to do that. It is a full-time job, because at the end of the day, you have to find them first, which is a lot of work in itself, and you need to constantly engage with them. Because that’s the other thing: You need to be top of mind.

So that is someone, actually, we’re planning on hiring. Once our funding comes through, we’re planning on hiring someone to do just that, because if it’s well done, it can yield a lot. Because the other magic trick that a lot of people don’t know is that when a TikTok or something gets a lot of engagement, then you repurpose it as an ad, so you get your creative out of that. But yes, managing that is a lot.

Loren Feldman:
Sarah, have you figured out how to find the right influencers for a product? As Hans just described, you’re looking for people who don’t necessarily have a huge footprint. They’re not necessarily famous. How do you match up the right people with the right brand?

Sarah Segal:
Well, we actually do ours manually. And we have test-driven and looked at all sorts of influencer tools that help you find the right people, but we’ve never been satisfied with the results of them. So we actually manually find them.

And so we have a team of people that literally go through. And we’re looking for certain kinds of people, we’re looking at different hashtags. And yeah, maybe we miss out on a couple. But we also may find many more that an algorithm doesn’t find. We want to make sure that whatever influencers we choose are going to reflect the brand in a positive light. So we’re looking at their posts, we’re looking at their reels, we’re looking at the hashtags, we’re looking at who they follow, we’re looking at their engagement levels. I mean, you can say, “Oh, yeah, I have 100,000 followers,” but when only 25 people like your posts, that doesn’t match up.

Hans Schrei:
I absolutely agree with all of that. It is not something that you can outsource to an algorithm, and it’s never going to be. It’s real people that you need to treat like real people.

Loren Feldman:
One last question before I put Shawn in the hot seat, Hans: I noticed that in spending the $10,000 I’m sort of giving you, you did not mention Facebook. Have you come to the conclusion that, in part because of what happened, you don’t want to be dependent on one platform the way you have been in the past?

Hans Schrei:
I think that at the end of the day, you need a mix of channels, and they support each other. Because I can do what I was saying, when we were on the Today show, sales were spiking on Facebook as well. If you get a ton of interest, say, on TikTok, your profile, your brand is getting a ton of interest because an influencer is posting about it. Then you also run ads to the people who engage with that, and then you get a second point of contact to people who are already engaged with what you’re saying. So that’s more efficient.

So I don’t think one is a substitute for the other, but what I do think is that the way it works now, there are so many touch points across different stages of the funnel, and they all need to work in concert. The same way that it’s not really effective to just run Facebook ads without any social and organic presence, and social and organic presence by itself is probably going to be way too limited. So you can get fuel to the fire, if you will. That’s probably a good analogy.

Loren Feldman:
All right, Shawn, your turn. You’ve told us previously that the pandemic kind of blew up your marketing, that you were largely dependent on going to physical events where people actually gather. And that stopped for a while and threw you off, so I’m giving you another chance with 10,000 pretend dollars. What are you going to do?

Shawn Busse:
Our strategy before the pandemic was largely a center-of-influence strategy where we would go speak at events, we would conduct workshops, we would find places where multiple buyers would be in one place. That’s the center of influence. And we’ve had a CRM for, I don’t know, eight years now. So we have a lot of information on where customers come from, where the best customers come from. And we had drilled it down to almost mathematical formulas. If we did a certain amount of activity within the year, that would yield a certain number of inquiries. Those inquiries would yield a certain number of qualified leads. A certain number of qualified leads would turn into a certain number of customers. And a certain number of customers would return a certain dollar value to us. So it was amazing. I mean, to be fair, it took us some years to build it, but we could actually forecast revenue, and then hire based on those forecasts.

The pandemic really messed with that for a lot of obvious reasons. And then, kind of to Hans’ situation, when a marketing channel or multiple marketing channels get interrupted, sometimes the other ancillary channels you have get disrupted in other ways. So for example, we also had email marketing, we had content marketing. Those channels have been really messed with in the last couple years. What I mean by that is\ data security and privacy have become much more important, so IT companies are really locking down email. So a lot of times now, your email never arrives at its intended location, so that’s created a lot of challenges for marketers. And so I think in the current landscape, marketing is harder than ever, for everybody. I think Hans illustrates those challenges.

I mean, we’re spending more than $10,000 a month right now in marketing, and if I were to get even more money, what I would do is build out our Catalyst community to its full potential. And what the Catalyst community is, is it’s an event that we sponsor where we invite small business owners. We only invite owners of companies. We don’t let salespeople into that event. And it’s a learning event. So this year, we’re going to invite 100 people to it, and there will be no insurance salesmen in the room. Because we need to create a space of trust, where people can kind of share their experiences and don’t feel like they’re being sold to. So I would put a lot of energy into that, which we already are, but more.

And then the other aspect of the Catalyst community that’s been very successful for us is, we call them Catalyst Labs. And so we have Zoom connections of maybe four or five owners in a one-hour roundtable, and then they’re all unified by a theme. So the theme might be commoditization of your product. It might be hiring and recruiting. It might be retention. We just help people learn from each other. And those are really great positioning activities to sort of put Kinesis as somebody who can help in these areas, but we’re not selling to anybody. And so for us, it’s a long-tail marketing strategy.

Sarah Segal:
So your long-tail investment on these, it’s almost like free education, free discussion, free opportunity. That eventually turns into new business for you, because you’re becoming this kind of trusted adviser to business owners. I think it’s the same way PR works, is that we generate a lot of blog content that just kind of gives you a how-to or educates people on how to navigate the PR world. And so it positions us as a trusted adviser, where we’re giving out information for free.

Maybe some of those people who read our free information will eventually pay us, because they don’t want to do their influencer program by themselves, because they know that it’s a headache, and also a lot of work to do. Because they don’t have a media database, because they don’t have the right tools and resources to do it. But we kind of line up with what you do.

Shawn Busse:
We’ve been giving away free stuff for a long, long, long time. And in the early days, that was coupled with an SEO strategy, and it worked really, really well. The thing that I see changing, Sarah—and I think the pandemic really accelerated this—is I think people are becoming exhausted by digital. And I think that the content is reaching fewer and fewer eyeballs when distributed through traditional blog strategies. So I’m really looking, like, I’m really active on LinkedIn. It’s been a tremendous source of new community and ability.

Loren Feldman:
I was going to ask you about that, Shawn. I’ve noticed how active you are, and we engage a little bit there. I’m curious, it has moved the needle? You’ve seen it make a difference?

Shawn Busse:
For sure, yeah. I mean, and what’s really crazy about it is, there are a lot of people, I never see them active. And then I’ll talk to them in the real world. And they’re like,“Oh, yeah, I’ve been watching you on LinkedIn. I really liked what you said.” And I was like, “I’ve never seen you there.” And so I think that’s an opportunity for B2B sales, especially. But I see Hans, for example, like actually, you’re drifting into a B2B kind of arena, right? Or B2-influencer, as opposed to buying customers one at a time.

Hans Schrei:
What you’re saying is absolutely true. And the thing is, people are absolutely exhausted. If you are on Instagram or TikTok, every third post is an ad. And people are exhausted about it. The way we are setting it up, and we’re seeing brands succeed, is by really being credible, like this person knows what they’re talking about, be it cookies or PR or whatever, accounting, I don’t know. It’s really about demonstrating that you really know what you’re talking about.

So the way you position yourself is we keep talking about this thing that we do, in our case, the building of the safe spaces. And we keep really digging in on that so people believe in us. And the other thing about LinkedIn, which is a great example, is that you get to talk person-to-person. And I love what you’re saying about this person. “You never liked my posts, you never comment on my posts, but you read them.” And I think that it’s sometimes a mistake to just measure engagement as, “Oh, only five people liked this.” But then you realize that you’re building kind of a drip, like little by little, you’re building the presence. So people get kind of frustrated by that, but it’s absolutely necessary. Otherwise, you’re just cookies.

Sarah Segal:
Shawn, when you say you’re active on LinkedIn, what are the things that you do? And what do you think drives results for you?

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think the pandemic—because I had so few options, especially in the early days—I was like, “What am I going to do?” And I had been active on LinkedIn for a long time, really cultivating a network and not accepting invites from folks who I hadn’t actually met in the real world. So as a result, I have several thousand connections. None of them are people who are just strictly trying to transact with me. And so that’s part of it. I had cultivated a really strong owner-centric community on LinkedIn. And so when the pandemic hit, and I’m locked in my house, I just started talking about business challenges, and even bringing the personal world into it, like, “Hey, I’m really struggling with this pandemic, and leading teams and all this stuff.” And over the course of a couple years, I ended up posting, like 400 times.

I wasn’t counting, but I had asked one of my teammates to log into my account and just copy every post I made and put it into a spreadsheet. And so we were actually gathering data on engagement, likes, responses, views, because that’s actually kind of hard to see with LinkedIn tools. And so we’ve built a database of what I said and when and what happened. And then, we’re actually in the process right now of evaluating that.

But I would say, without saying, “The data says this,” anecdotally, the things that say celebration, building, creation, moments of joy, those things tend to create a lot more momentum. And the things that I find don’t are things that are highly critical. And I can drift that way. I can be very critical of the marketing ecosystem, for example. And so I’ve had to really tamp down my tendency to be a critic and amp up my tendency to build things. I don’t know if that helps.

Hans Schrei:
It’s very helpful.

Sarah Segal:
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Loren Feldman:
I think it’s important to be clear about what you mean, by being critical. I think, if it’s just an opinion, and you’re kind of shooting from the hip and being critical of someone or something, I can see that not playing well. If it’s an analysis of why something didn’t work, that’s not really being critical. That’s an analysis. And to my mind, I think those can work. But anecdotally speaking, I see the same thing you do. I think the through line for me is with inspiration, whether it’s about a person, personally, individually, or whether it’s a business that has survived through difficult times.

Shawn Busse:
That’s been my experience, too. I mean, for example, we set up a school—I think I’ve talked about this on the show—for the parents on our team when schools were shut down. We took our old office, we turned it into a school, we hired a teacher, and one thing led to another, and it ended up in The New York Times. Like, we didn’t promote it. There was no goal to get PR from this. It was just, basically, one of my employees went on Facebook and asked around about teaching resources. And then a reporter just happened to see it. And then the next thing you know, we’re featured.

I promise you, that article got us zero new customers. However, sharing it on LinkedIn, which says, “Hey, here’s an owner who cares for his team. Here’s somebody being innovative. Here’s somebody who’s not accepting the status quo of suffering.” That’s got a tremendous value to us. And then the credibility of The New York Times saying, “Whoa, this is a thing.” That’s a celebratory moment, to a degree. And if nothing else, it’s an awesome hiring tool. So to just say, “This is what we stand for as a company.”

One thing I should mention—I think it’s really important for people to understand—is that there’s a real shift going on right now, where the platforms do not want you to leave. And the old strategy had been: Create some content on your website that’s awesome, go to a platform, post a link to that awesome content, and get people to come to your website to learn how great you are. Right now, the platforms are actually punishing that strategy. So I no longer post any kind of links in any of the content I create, especially on LinkedIn. And so the actual post has to stand on its own merit.

Loren Feldman:
But you do include it in the comment section.

Shawn Busse:
There’s a question whether they’re starting to see that—

Hans Schrei:
Really. I haven’t seen that yet. It makes sense. But that really forces you to be everywhere. And that’s what makes it hard. I’m from a consumer brand. We need to be on TikTok, which, frankly, is hell.

Shawn Busse:
It’s expensive. What it means is, you’ve got to spend a lot more money across a lot more channels, and you gotta be really smart.

Hans Schrei:
Don’t I know it.

Sarah Segal:
It brings everybody back to this brand visibility. A long time ago, when PR first started, it was just about getting your name out there. And it wasn’t about these links. And now, the links and the value of those links, as you say, are dissipating.

Shawn Busse:
Yep.

Sarah Segal:
My question for you: If somebody includes a link to a New York Times article—like I just included something the other day on my channel about hacks—does LinkedIn punish that if it’s like a third-party news source? Or are they smart enough where they’re punishing you only for linking back to your business website?

Shawn Busse:
That’s a great question. I haven’t quite figured it out yet.

Loren Feldman:
We’re just about out of time. Hans, I’ve gotta ask you: How do you do your TikTok stuff? Are you handling that internally?

Hans Schrei:
We are not really doing much in the way of TikTok. Actually, it’s something that we need to do, but we haven’t really, and part of it is because it’s really time-consuming. So our priorities right now are elsewhere. So one of the goals with the new funding is to hire someone to do that. It’s trial and error. I wish there was a formula. And it used to be like, “Okay, let’s put pretty pictures on Instagram.” It’s no longer the case. So it’s a lot. And I mean, I have better things to do.

Sarah Segal:
Hire an intern. That’s a perfect opportunity. We just helped a client hire a digital intern. Their entire job is going from donut shop to donut shop taking pictures and doing videos of donuts. We actually got international coverage of the job because it was for a donut enthusiast. And now this 20-something—or I don’t even know how old she is—she creates amazing content. But that’s what they do. And if they’re a digital native, and they understand it, and it’s not laborious for them, and they’re very focused on what it is. Your job is to look at TikTok. Like, I swear, my 16-year-old would do it for you.

Hans Schrei:
I would be happy to. I guess the reason I haven’t done it yet is because with the fundraising and the whole thing, there’s so much in the air right now that we want to be able to manage this. So we don’t need to clear the bandwidth to do it ourselves. But definitely, we need to clear the bandwidth so we can manage it. But yeah, it’s definitely one of our priorities right now. Because we have done it, and we do it, but it is not really an engaging presence, because it’s very sporadic.

Sarah Segal:
Yeah, with TikTok, you have to be consistent. You have to post every single day. Otherwise, it’s a waste of your time.

Hans Schrei:
Absolutely.

Loren Feldman:
All right, well, unfortunately, we are out of time. I suspect we’ll come back to most of these conversations fairly frequently. Please look for those $10,000 checks in the mail. I’m sure they’ll be on their way soon. But for now, my thanks to Sean Busse, Hans Schrei, and Sarah Segal. As always, thanks for sharing, guys.