LinkedIn Events- How To Get the Most Out Of It

welcome to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson a show that brings you regular
interviews tips and tools for building your business online [Music]
well hello and welcome to the e-commerce podcast with me your host matt edmondson's great that you are here all
of this week's notes and links can be found on our website ecommercepodcast.net forward slash
well today you're gonna get to hear about how to get the most out of linkedin
events okay you don't want people walking away feeling like they didn't learn anything
or that their time was in fact wasted so stay tuned and learn some tips
and tricks on how you can make sure that those who attend your linkedin events
feel engaged and loved by your event and planning skills and you also are going to learn why all of this matters
in delivering e-commerce well don't go anywhere hey there are you a business owner here
at oregon digital we know firsthand that running an ecommerce business can be really hard work
as the online space gets more competitive it is becoming even more challenging to stay ahead of the curve
we totally get it so we want to help you succeed by offering a wide range of services from fulfillment marketing
customer service and even coaching and consulting just so that you can do what matters most save yourself the time and
the money and let us handle the day-to-day tasks this way you can run your business without having to worry
about the boring stuff so what do you say are we a good fit for each other come check us out at oreodigital.com and
let us know what you think
thanks for joining us on the e-commerce podcast like i said it's great that you are here it's always great you are here
loving the fact that every week more and more people are subscribing to the show the audience is growing and it's always
great to connect with new people so if this is your first time here a big warm welcome to you or if this is you know
you've actually heard all episodes then a warm welcome to you too my friend
it's great that you are here i had a lovely lovely message on linkedin from a listener who basically binge listened to
every episode of the e-commerce podcast recently just went from one up to uh whatever it was episode whatever
it was they decided to sort of join in i thought that was a little bit um
a little bit impressive him on if i'm honest with you maybe a little too much matt in one go but all power to you
it's great you are here the purpose of this show is to help you deliver e-commerce well
that's why we're here and to do that every week i get to chat to some phenomenal people
who share their stories and insights and this week is no exception uh the guy pat
collins is on the show i've known pat for a number of years i've worked with him i have used his services so i know
that this is a man that knows what he's talking about he is well he's a startup wizard he's helped startups build their
tech infrastructures and grow their businesses for the past years his own startup prospectlabs.co
saw massive success in its first year and he has advised startups that have raised over million euros in just
three years which is awesome and what sets patrick apart from other entrepreneurs is his
focus on having data-driven sales uh is what his approach with data-driven sales
combined with world-class customer support he genuinely has a love for people and this recipe i think has led
to his success and the success for many startups under his guidance you're going to want to listen to him especially around linkedin
because i think it's probably for most of us one of the most underutilized platforms with such possibility so
without further ado here's pat so patrick thanks for joining me on the
ecommerce podcast sir it's it's taken a little while to get you on the show but here you are joining us from sunny
cypress not your usual horns though is it no not at all so thank you so much for
having me um i believe this is series eight or series nine and i remember it was four or five years ago we were
discussing um how we could work together to help you get the initial i think the first members only podcast so it's it's
been a real privilege seeing uh sort of your journey and i think it's always inspired me by
consistency i think it's the hardest thing to achieve in business but everybody says to me
success is born success is boring you've got to just keep consistent if you start something keep going and i think to be
on season agencies is real testament to you to um to just keep an eye on it and do so well
but yeah i'm from um from uh newcastle upon time so from the north east but
live in lithuania and currently in cyprus okay get your head around that but on a little bit of a tour just trying to get
the the the life balance back a little bit um we had two years of covert we've had
two children two last two years um business has changed completely um based
on people working from home based on linkedin changes based on lots of things that i'm sure we'll talk about um and it
just got the point where i thought you know what i needed a bit of a refresh i need a bit of a break so we had a bit of a change and i'm in cyprus
at the moment and then we'll head back to lithuania but yeah thank you so much for having me on and as much as we've known each other
yes i think because you're so busy i think we've had hundreds of ten minute calls
or something like that so it'll be nice to get yeah no it is and it's it's great to
have you on and um the thing i love about the sort of the the life that we
have in digital business is actually you're in cyprus last week i was in the states and you know what we were still
doing stuff uh in the states you're still doing stuff from cyprus and that's a beautiful thing isn't it about this kind of world in which we live at the
moment is you can go on these mammoth trips and still work and still do what you do
and see the world a little bit the digital nomad you know it's um it's actually a thing you can get the digital
there's a digital nomad visa uh and a lot of countries now do this which uh yeah yeah it's incredible
i i sometimes consider if i was a digital nomad before was it was sort of
mainstream to be a digital nomad because i think it was eight years ago um i was working in a sort of sales job and
with my girlfriend's angry wife now obviously um and we were saying could we not just do this online it was
at the time i started to read tim ferriss's four-hour work week and everybody's thinking how do i outsource and how do i batch and how do i do all
those sort of those words of being able to work online um and so i thought if i have a good internet connection and i'm
doing sales online what's the difference i'm sure i could do this and so i i said to the company i was working out um
could you just take a risk and could we work from thailand and they said i'm not so sure and then i said well let me
rephrase that if i'm going to keep working with you i need to be able to do this from thailand and i said okay okay
so um we transitioned into work from thailand and we did six months of traveling and
working from there but at the time um there weren't the the sort of setup that you have now of
co-working spaces really good wi-fi airbnb uber so
a lot of it was just working from a coffee shop with really noisy bad internet and just trying to
get going so i think now it's a lot easier for everybody to actually work and travel abroad because you have the
consistency of a lot of different things like i know a lot of people have the same app for multiple countries now but
they just arrive in uber the food delivery and i don't really like i used to like when you travel you had to
really get lost and make mistakes and that was part of the experience of it but yeah we're really lucky that we can
um i don't work from anywhere and have an impact on people i do feel that i could do a little bit
more i see that if somebody does have a wi-fi connection it means that the they have the ability
to learn and study and watch your videos and that sort of thing so i do think further down the line i would love to help more countries um develop their
skill sets based on online training i think it's finding the time to do that
yeah this i'm like you i have a to-do list of things that i want to get done
and that grows it never gets shorter for some reason you have you know the the curse of the entrepreneur is you have
good ideas a day right and so yes um and you just write them all down and at some point uh you'll choose one or two
of them uh maybe possibly so here you are
yeah i was going to say and it's a muscle um i think my mother uh really instills this semester to say you should
be having a couple of business ideas every day and there's all sorts of terrible ideas that my family has had and some of them have
even gone through and actually started the business and that's because of terrible but um i live in a culture
where you have to be creative all the time and it's it's an environment where parents are created where to be entrepreneurial
all the time is almost like the only only sort of environment to be in so i think i have a
huge to-do list a huge amount of ideas i've got a to-do list to start working on a book which is a personal organizer
for to-do list
but uh i think you need to know when to start and finish but it's funny my friend i have a lot of friends that are business owners and they recommend
productivity diaries and organizers and it's finding your sort of niche network works and so
i had a mix of i started using notion a lot it's like a online organizer and i use notion
but i've created a sort of a checklist of how i use that for my daily routine so i have a a notion app that i use things like just
simple things meditation training vitamins stretching but i try and do the same things every day and then if it's a
routine i start adding little bits to that routine but in terms of business organization i have to have pen and paper and digital
means that it's just never ending so the pen and paper is one page you're doing this and you're checking it off so
there's different sides of my brain react to different things i need to do to stay organized basically
that's really interesting isn't it that you've um i'm i'm still like
during the conversation i take notes and i always take them on pen and paper um yet i have
uh all kinds of i i don't use notion i use something called craft but it's you know
it's funny how we how we we need still digital and analog and we and it's always worth thinking about
that so let's talk about um because i could get drawn into personal
organizers patrick i'm not gonna lie because i find the whole productivity thing fascinating but let's talk about e-commerce let's talk about linkedin um
and making that uh work people because as long as i've known you the the the thing that i've
always and it's probably unfair to say pigeon holed you with but in my head the expertise that you have held is in this
area of linkedin this is where we've had a lot of conversations and you've helped me a lot
um over the years with linkedin and growing audiences and followers and they don't call them followers do they on
linkedin but jeremy and that kind of yeah that network um on linkedin
so why linkedin what sucked you into that uh as a concept as an idea
yeah so i always think about this previously and i was thinking what's the best way to describe my approach and i've realized it's proactively lazy i
think that's the phrase and what i mean by this is that um i'm a bit of a control freak i'm always
tidy and so i'm always trying to figure out what's the the best system what's the most efficient way because if
something works once and you can repeat it then there's always an easier way and so the
reason why i like linkedin um is a few things the the the story was i think about eight years ago my one of my very
first jobs was cold calling and everybody who's done sales and cold calling realizes has massive impact if
you speak to somebody but the amount of work you have to do to get to that point you're speaking to somebody is impossible and all the data research all
the cold calling and so it was at that point i thought there's a better way there must be a database out there and at the time
i was working at sort of working with a number of clients and one of the ladies i was working with was a linkedin coach
and so um i used to sort of help organize her admin work with them just sort of shadow it for free basically and
say well what's all the fuss about what's going on here and i think the link the reason why linkedin is amazing
is just it's not regulated there's no rules about what you can and can't do that are public which means that anybody
can get going with this anybody we can become very very good at it but there's no rules that you can say what's the
limits now if you're very risky and you're not so reputable you can do a lot
of damage and a lot of bad things but if you really research and read and try and look between the lines there are so many
gaps of how you can get amazing results that other companies don't even realize so whereas most companies if you work
with google you become an accredited partner and you integrate with google the same with facebook the same with twitter it's all open source apis you
can build your machine around with linkedin nothing's public so there are no public rules about your activity
there's things you can't do no swearing no racism obvious things like that but in terms of how many people you can
interact with how many people you can message the types of messages you can send
it's really sort of closed door and so if you really dive deep into this you can put yourself as one of the top users
just by not being terrible because most people are and so because of that if you can stand out into an audience where
there's hundreds and hundreds of millions of people on it then you can very quickly grow to that to grow a brand and so
the reason why i really like linkedin initially was because you could just found find loads of people to sell to now obviously my
approach has changed from that but the initial idea was there are million business people on linkedin there's all
their first names so even if i was to call them i could just find matt edinson linkedin and then ring you and say can i
speak to matt and that enough was the starting point for me transitioning into looking at linkedin
um i think the world is a completely different place now that people don't want to be cold called they don't want
to be sold to and so over the past two or three years my whole approach to linkedin changed to say how do you mix
these two sort of circles and one circle is outbound and one circle is inbound and how do you mix them together so you
think about all the e-commerce businesses you work with um inbound is incredibly important seo backlinks paid
ads all these things to drive traffic to you but very rarely e-commerce will do too much outbound of go out and find a
client because it's it's a bit more difficult and what's really cool about linkedin is you have this
um sort of platform where you can create content you can create pro so you can create all the traffic to come to you we
can also find anybody and just send them a message and if you combine these two together you have this machine where
people are constantly coming to you and learning about you but at any one time you want to speed it up you can start to reach out and message them as well and
so i think this is why linkedin has a bit of everything but their support their platform their training is is awful that it's amazing
how how a company can get so big yet be such a mess of a software
basically that's a really funny thing to say about
linkedin because here's the thing right when you think about um when you think about e-commerce and
whenever you talk to anybody in fact i'm going through the conversations i've had with how many
people i've had that you know contact you and say i want to grow my e-commerce business
i've got some marketing budget and then the next statement is something like how do i do facebook or how do i do
facebook ads or how do i do instagram occasionally maybe five percent of the time people
ask you about pinterest you know yeah um maybe three percent of the time people
ask you about youtube never once never once in the whole time
that i've been doing e-commerce has someone come to me and said how can i use linkedin to leverage my e-commerce
business and that's what i find fascinating um about this conversation with you and
uh and and why we should think about it uh linkedin for uh e-commerce business so
uh we're gonna get into that don't go anywhere i'm gonna be back right after uh we have heard from this week's show
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[Music] hey there are you a business owner here
at oregon digital we know firsthand that running an ecommerce business can be really hard work
as the online space gets more competitive it is becoming even more challenging to stay ahead of the curve
we totally get it so we want to help you succeed by offering a wide range of services from fulfillment marketing
customer service and even coaching and consulting just so that you can do what matters most save yourself the time and
the money and let us handle the day-to-day tasks this way you can run your business without having to worry
about the boring stuff so what do you say are we a good fit for each other come check us out at oreodigital.com and
let us know what you think
so patrick like i said you know we've got the um we've got people who want to know about
you know the obvious ones facebook instagram and pinterest maybe youtube maybe but
linkedin why should i think about linkedin for my e-commerce business because no
one talks about this right yeah so i think think of this first of all every single person you'll ever hire
is probably on linkedin so regardless of your business just any person you'll ever recruit has a profile on linkedin
so all of your potential talent of your company are on linkedin then you think about every single
customer who'll buy from you there's a high percentage there also on linkedin now same as facebook instagram whatever
it is they're not always on that platform looking to buy but they have a profile on that platform
um and i think the final thing is any company that's willing to invest any blogger any journalist whoever it is
they're all on linkedin as well so generally the whole world is on linkedin from a business capacity now i do a lot
of training also on facebook instagram pinterest and the problem with all those channels is those channels are based to keep you on
there people on facebook even if it's an ad they're trying to keep you on facebook not to leave on linkedin
although a little bit like this linkedin are trying to say build a network build a connection build a relationship and
it's a platform more about people to people than business to business and i think this is the real differential that
um when you're growing your company regardless of how big it is i still say the main thing people buy for is from
the person the brand the culture the the touch that's whatever it is and on
linkedin you can just connect with somebody directly introduce yourself and get to know them but i think on a bigger
picture the reason why i love linkedin so much which sounds really geeky because i don't love linkedin i love a
lot of things but i don't necessarily love linkedin but i love the impact that linkedin can have on your business i mean that's a better way to send it um
it's just simply it gives you so much potential of growth so quickly and i think we'll discuss linkedin events
today but i think the reason why um linkedin is a platform is my number one even when i'm working with e-commerce
businesses i still say linkedin number one is because you can build the foundations of momentum and so if you
think about the difference between growth hacking and growth stacking and growth hacking is somebody will say you
might how do i grow my e-commerce business and you could say here's five or six things test them all out and see what works um growth stacking however is
the other side growth stacking is where you say i'm going to build one foundation do it well and then once that's working well another one and
another one and another one and with linkedin what i found is that if you just start one thing of saying i'm going to start growing my network and
everybody you connect with just show interest and say can i get to know you can i help you or can you help me you
build this army of people that suddenly you have a contact every single time you need something and what i've started to do particularly
with early-stage businesses that i've grown an e-commerce company i say to them step number one just grow your
network start reaching out to people who can become potential customers and just say i would love to learn more about what you're doing can we connect so
you're just saying i like what you do can i learn more about you and build your network and then from
there i try and say everybody you should be running linkedin events and i think this is the key thing that differentiates linkedin from facebook
twitter everything else is hosting events and a linkedin event we can talk more about in terms of what it is but
trying to get one sort of central point where you can educate your audience in the most valuable way is what i think
linkedin can bring better than anything else and i think if you can find a way where you've grown this network that sort of
know you but don't really know you too much but then can get them to watch you for half an hour one hour and
talk about what you do then you have that transition from cold lead to educated and then from there you can
really transition into signing up for your course your class whatever it might be but i think that the thing that people
miss so much is the importance of perceived value so when you're grown your e-commerce business there's not
much understanding of who you are there's not too much trust and so the perceived value of how good you are is based on
posts referrals tweets whatever it is to show you can trust me but instantly if you can get somebody to watch you live
for minutes and just ask your questions get to know you and if there can be in a room full of or thousand
people your perceived value instantly goes up you know how good you are your expertise and the product you offer
and i think what so many people have struggled with over the past year or two is this transition from we'll go to
physical trade shows we'll meet a customer physical we'll do different things so actually everything's online
how do you transition and i think we've been the opposite we've seen instantly that linkedin
events are the go-to strategy that any company should be doing to educate their audience to say
this is what we do this is how we work and um this is where you can find out more and i think because linkedin has this
platform of growing your network it's then very easy to invite that network to event to then say um we're running an
event next week why don't you come by take part and see what you think and we've had some spectacular results
so the the reason i did this was whenever i'm doing sort of um
lead generation i'm trying to find a new approach i'm trying to find something new and i realize i found this hack that
on linkedin um if you find any events and you click attend it certainly gives you a list of all the people that are
attending and i thought this is insane like if you go to a trade show the only thing you want to know is who are the
people going that might be buying not who's the other competitors there so linkedin just says here's a list of
people that are interested in the event linkedin training i thought that's my target audience there and then this is amazing so i thought i've got to write a
blog and show people how to do this hack so i started writing the blog and then i thought halfway through why am i not doing an event why am i
writing about scraping other people's events maybe it's about time to do it myself so um i thought yeah exactly so i
thought i'm a bit of a fraud here if i try and tell other people about how to scrape events and they say well why don't you do yourself if it's so good so
that okay i'm gonna host my own event um and i'd never really done a public event
i've always been booked to train companies so i usually do startup accelerators or business training but
you never have the pressure of advertising yourself you just turn up they pay you a day rate people are there and it's very easy and i think i had
that at first that imposter syndrome of saying well in my mind my brand is i'm a real expert i know what i'm do i'm a
confident public speaker what if i do an event in five people turn up that isn't in line with how i see myself or how i
want people to see me but i thought if i'm thinking like that everybody else is thinking like that so that's really good content to just write and go for it
and so what i did is i wrote the blog and i started updating the blog as i advertised the event and taken
screenshots of the posts i make the different things and i i basically thought i'll advertise for
two months that's long enough to build momentum um i'll invite everybody i know that could be relevant
about linkedin training and then invite them and then i'll talk deliver it and see how it goes and
the results there was people registered for the event um which blew my mind because um and
that's when everybody somebody registers for linkedin event you will also if you tick a box you can also get all their
emails so in one event for minutes i got
linkedin profiles and email addresses of people who are interested in linkedin training of what i offer as a service
and it just blew my mind thinking i would take two to three years to get email subscribers on a blog it just
doesn't happen but simply by an event it's this ultra powerful landing page that even if they don't attend the event
they've said i'm willing to give you my data just so you can get to know me educate me whatever it is so
um in the context of that of i think when you're saying of how do you advertise a course how do you grow
e-commerce business one of the most important things is you need people's information to slowly nurture them and educate them on what you do
i think very little nowadays people are willing to just look at something and buy they're used to watching online
reading online just generally building up a bit of trust and what i found from linkedin events is just simply if you
host an event and you get hundreds of thousands of email addresses you've then got all the automation that most
e-commerce business are very good at any way of following up with them and educating them on what you do sending them blogs that sort of thing
so yeah the first event i did was an enormous success and i i learned a huge
amount in terms of just what to talk about what to post what to write
what i didn't know though is if you think about when i'm used to turning up events they set up the webinar they set
up the recording i basically just turn up and speak i'm well prepared but that's it i wasn't so good at the
technical side so my first event was on zoom it was fine um and i made the room ready for
people because at the time and i think you'll know this matter of how you progress in terms of just how your
day rate is charged from when you first started to now or how your perceived value of how
many people should attend or something like what you think the time seems huge but now you look back and actually it's not that big but i thought i'll pay
euros for zoom um we'll get people attendance and if i get people in my first webinar that would be amazing
so i press start on the the webinar press play and you see the numbers come in and i'm looking at the
numbers whilst trying to just say hey everybody welcome and and trying to balance like just keeping it up and then
it hit within about five past one i think five minutes and i was like
we've hit capacity but there's registered what's going to go what's going to happen here so on my phone as
i'm trying to talk i saw the linkedin event and i just see high rate people i can't get in i've registered what's happening here and i thought oh no i've
made a big mistake so um one of the biggest advice is over exaggerate how many people are going to
show up just in case it goes a little bit viral um because if the room's too big it doesn't matter but if it's too small you've lost
that chance of speaking to people live yeah um you still use zoom then uh or
would you use something that makes facebook live yeah it's a transition so um what i've found
is all of these platforms are consistently terrible so zoom google
meets everything is they've all been to a party where they have the pros and cons yeah they have their pros and cons
so if i i get that i can understand why a linkedin event would work for a linkedin
trainer right and i i get i can see the the concept of that so that's what you do linkedin training a linkedin event is
an obvious thing how does it work do you think for someone who sells i'm
looking around my desk um i've got a little lego indiana jones here uh which is not in focus but
there's my little lego indiana jones let's say i sell lego right or kids toys how does linkedin help me or how how
would you think about linkedin events for something like that for example yeah so i think the main thing is no
matter how niche you are there's always a community who are as niche as you so
anything in the world for example so ignore linkedin um whatever you're into there's other people in the world that
are also into the same thing and if you can connect with them the conversation is amazing and if you can have a product
or service to offer them they love it so this sort of phrase of riches in the niches is really really important that
whenever you're offering a product you don't want to be that all you can do buffet you want to be the michelin star we do these a couple of things but we're
the best in the world and that's what you want to be and so what's really cool in linkedin is there are already amazingly specific
niches there that you just need to find so browsing on linkedin for example linkedin groups um there are thousands
of linkedin groups where you could just find e-commerce uk e-commerce london e-commerce customers there's lots of
different groups that you could just join and already have an audience in there um highly valuable although i
would say try and only join groups where there's less than maybe a thousand or two thousand people in there and the reason being that if you're
you're joining a group that is hundreds of thousands it's just simply not moderated and so the audience are going to be very deleted but if you can find a
really niche group with a couple hundred people in then already that's your audience where you can start to
interact with them and one thing i really like about linkedin groups is that if you're a member of the group you can message anybody in the group without
actually having to connect with them so you don't need to introduce yourself you don't say can we be friends and they accept you just simply message and say
hey can we have a chat or that sort of thing and so one of my strategies are i'll host an event for either myself or
any of my clients well one of our client is an e-commerce business at the moment so a company called nibble and they have a um i think
i'll show you the link uh sort of a chatbot that goes on a website that is a negotiating tool and
so we're working with them on linkedin and so what we've found is we've looked first of all at groups to say where are
their targeting means and then we've just run a series of messages messaging people in the group to say help you well uh we're both
really into whatever it is e-commerce or negotiating or sales i run an event next week we'd love to see you there and
although it's an automated message to quite a lot of people it's really harmless because it'll not upset anybody
you're just simply saying we're running an event if you're into this please come and so that's one side of it about
groups then you look at the other side in terms of linkedin courses and particularly for e-commerce this is
dynamite so if you google linkedin learning um i think it was called linda l-y-n-d-a in the past
long time ago yeah but yeah yeah yeah but if you google linkedin learning um you'll find that linkedin
has its own platform where you can um just study online basically so if you type in on linkedin learning e-commerce
you'll find hundreds and hundreds of courses on how to get better at x but again what's amazing about linkedin
that's completely different to things like udemy or all these other online platforms is that if you click on the actual
course you can see all the people who like the box and that's public data so what we do and
tend to do this for a lot of people is we'll go to e-commerce courses on linkedin and scrape them and then invite
those people to our event as well so you're generally looking for people who are online trying to educate themselves
where you offer the service so if you're offering a training course on how to build an ecommerce business then go on
to linkedin learning find people who are training about e-commerce business download the data and introduce yourself
and say hey we're running an event about how to grow an ecommerce business we'd love to invite you that sort of thing um yeah so there's linkedin learning
there's linkedin groups um the other one is linkedin posts and not many people do this well but um this is where we go
back to inbound and outbound so if you even have a linkedin post you'll find a lot of people if you're more into
branding and they'll say i create content all the time and it's about people coming to us
but i've seen some people i'll say you've got people who interacted with your linkedin post have you interacted with them and say oh no no i
didn't know you could and what people do wrong is they make a post but they don't actually connect with the people who
like the posts so what we teach a lot of people to do is say make content that's relevant to
um what you're doing what you're offering educate people but then download all the people who like your content and reach out and
connect with them and say hey thanks for liking my post let's connect and when they do connect you then say
great connect and just let you know i've got an event running next couple weeks about how to grow an e-commerce business
would be great to see that so none of the approach you should be doing is that horrible spammy code
message of just messaging somebody and said hey i've got an e-commerce course do you want to sign up that i think that
approaches but if you can go to people and say um i i see you're part of the same course
you're part of the same group can we get to know each other and can i invite you to my events then you take them from cold to
educating to then saying wow you really know your stuff you have a product to offer okay i'm now ready to listen
so i think in terms of linkedin you have all these moving parts posts groups courses where you can find people who've
got like-minded ideas now sometimes i agree sometimes if you've got a product that's so so niche the
only thing you can do is adds and so you can do ads to really target people on the buyer persona
but again if you do an ad i don't think you should do an ad to direct them to your site because the problem with that
is somebody looks at an ad they have no connection to your business no can actually use a person
mentally they weren't really ready to buy they click on the ad go to your site have a look and leave instead i would say do really targeted
ads but directly to your linkedin event and then you drive a really specific audience to the event they then watch
they give you an email and then you gradually convert them to a potential customer course sign up that sort of thing because they know what you're
offering yeah so i think all the moving parts in linkedin are awesome but i think everybody's approach should be
about how do you find somebody who has like-minded interests are they in the same group the same course do they post
the same thing and the final one is yes you can go direct and say he's e-commerce manager
so i'm going to message them but it doesn't really work that well because um just because that's their job title doesn't mean they're interested in
anything you have to offer they haven't published a show in any sort of buying sequence that's really interesting in fact i
think there's a lot of people listening to the ecommerce podcast going hang on a minute this sounds this sounds
interesting because i first connected with matt on linkedin and that's how i heard about the podcast
i was going to say i that's that's how it worked uh when we were starting up the podcast is i think
we reached out to i think about six or seven thousand people that had liked ecommerce courses and gone hey check out
the podcast and a bunch of people got in touch and gone man this is great and i've stayed
avid listeners ever since so um yeah yeah as you're talking i think people are
smiling that is what i think is happening well agreed and it's tricky because i'll run
linkedin events and i'll say to everybody thank you all for being here and what i'm about to show you is how i've done this approach and i'm sort of
sorry but not sorry because a lot of this had to automate but you're special but i haven't automated it
and it's a tricky one because i think what's really important about linkedin is and we covered this in the start the the talk um there's no public
rules so if you google something like how many linkedin connection requests can i send per day there'll be lots of
blogs but none of them by linkedin so linkedin doesn't share publicly what you can and can't do on the software and so
because of that linkedin don't like any automation and by automation any
e-commerce business will know about automation somebody buys your product and they go into email automation
somebody subscribes to your blog and goes into email automation chatbot automation so the word automation isn't a new thing but in terms of linkedin
linkedin don't want you to automate everything anything sorry they want you to do everything manual
but at the same time if you know that inviting people to an event works one by one and just clicking copy paste
invites then you might as well do that times a thousand people because it's the same approach so the the business that i'm in is trying
to find this happy medium where you automate things but you don't automate in a way that's spam or generic and it's
a very fine line but what i mean by this is if you have an automated message reaching out to people say hey mark i
saw you like the e-commerce online course would be great to connect and get to know each other i don't know if there's any harm if you send that to
people people because you still have the same intent you want to get to know them which is the method of actually
reaching out to them is automated instead of copy paste times but it's very very important to know
that linkedin don't really want you to automate anything they want you to do it all manual but if you're going to get the results that you want to in scale
you have to automate parts of it um and i think there's a discussion always going on people think
automation means spam and then i say well do you drive a car do you walk and they say drive and i say
well you automate that you're a machine to do that so there's a lot of things where i say automation done the right
way is spectacular but done the wrong way is highly impressive and spammy so yeah i think when we work together and
to start with the idea was number one your brand is a very recognized brand you couldn't just be messaging everybody
so hey let's have a call let's jump on it it's too generic so what we said was let's find people who like the
e-commerce courses and then introduce yourself and talk to them about your podcast and that would be a nice flow and i think that went very well so
i think when you look at it and linkedin um you need to find a mindset and maybe this is like all marketing can you
identify an approach that works that's highly highly bespoke manual and when you see some sort of formula how do you
find a way to automate that that you can replicate that the person on the other side receive a message still feels
valued especially they don't get some generic rubbish that everybody gets in a huge essay long email it's something
short just to say this is what we do and yeah funny enough i had this conversation with somebody this morning
and i sent him a message and he recorded a quick video and said hey pat thanks for your message i can tell this is recorded this is automated uh but uh
happy to join your event and i replied to him i'm more than happy to say this message is automated because all i'm
simply saying is i'm inviting you to linkedin event do you want to come um but i think there's a lot of people
who try and act like they're not automating messages and you can tell it's the big essays the big spam
messages and it's um it's it's it's just the wrong way to go so i i guess what's really important
with any of of linkedin is can you make sure that the other person on the other side feels valued can you message him to
say i would like to get to know you i'd love to connect with you um running an event i think you'd find it helpful but
it's about you not me and the best analogy i do to all of this is particularly when i'm training early
stage startups it's very funny because a lot of time they're very heavily developer focused but not so much sales
and marketing focused and i'll say to them i see your linkedin message and it's the most aggressive
message ever not an aggressive nasty way but the connection messages hi my name's
dmitry i run a link to i run the development agency are you looking for an app uh do you want to book a call
yeah that's like their connection message and i say to them do you have a problem and they say yes and i say okay what was the first thing
you said to that person and they said i don't know like can i buy you a drink or my name is pat i was like exactly when
you meet somebody in real life you don't say let's get married you say hi can we get to know each other and so i
try to say to people like don't go crazy on linkedin of messaging people that you wouldn't do in the real world if you
were networking yeah and the whole point of this environment is your digital persona and physical persona should be
the same you should speak to people saying your picture should be the same but your connection message you get to know people should always be about can
we be friends can we get to know each other not trying to push your i don't know your gender of do you want to sign up so
when i worked with you your your message was um i think i saw were both from the same e-commerce course and the
e-commerce fanboy i think that was your message would be great to connect but it wasn't i've got a podcast do you want to
sign up that's not the connection message yeah yeah yeah no it's just let's let's have a conversation
so i'm aware of time um and one thing one question that i do
want to ask in all of this patrick because we've talked about how to connect with people you know we can find people with groups with posts and and
courses which i think is super valuable so i'm inviting people along to this linkedin event what am i doing in the
linkedin event what what does that look like yeah
so there's a few things um i i got this training from my business consultant which is great he was working with my agency a couple years ago and he
taught me this about proposals first of all and he said whenever you send a proposal make the client feel like they're absolutely screwed and then show them
how you can fix it and then show them your prices i thought okay quite a good idea so then i thought okay
a linkedin event show people what's wrong at the moment so if you're an e-commerce business and you're trying to
show people how to build their e-commerce show people why something is wrong why it's hard to sell a product
why it's hard to build inventory why whatever it is show people this is the pain point acknowledge it and show
everybody this is the difficulty then show people real world solutions and i think the best types of linkedin
events even like blogs are practical how to i don't think people want to see slides
and slides and potential theory they want to see here's an example here's a template here's a guide of how to do
something and then what some primes people to say is i can identify that you're in trouble
but don't worry because i'm the solution and not only on the solution i now get a service which is the solution that you
can use yourself and so generally it doesn't need to sound as scary as that you're not saying people are screwed but
you're basically seeing here's the pain point that i want you to know about even if you know it here's the solution and then here's the
services that we offer and so that's tense to how the flow goes a lot of the time
but i know a lot of people who do linkedin events and they don't ever actually end up doing the event and i
think this is a huge scam but i know people do it they use linkedin events as landing pages so they simply have an
event that will say how to do something and then when people register they get the email and then they go in a
series of emails and they have calls and do one-on-one calls so i'm not a huge fan of that but a lot of people use a
linkedin event on linkedin is just for registration never mind the event but if you're doing events which is you should
if you're hosting a linkedin event it needs to be about identifying pain points solution and then where you fit
in and what's really great about linkedin is although they don't integrate with hardly anything at all they do integrate
with the software called zapier so z-a-p-i-e-r-dot yeah yeah and if you do a linkedin event and if you tick a tick
box called use linkedin registration form basically what it means is that everybody that registers you can sync to
zapier and then zapier sync to whatever software you want to use so the flow that i do is i'll advertise an event two
months in advance somebody might register for my event today they go into mailchimp by zapier and they'll get an
email saying thanks for registering please remember to add your diary and then a week later they'll get an email saying hey i've just been looking
through all the attendees i saw your name stand out i would love to know what you're looking to learn from the event
do you have any problems um would be great to have a call if you want to that sort of thing and so i'm trying to nurture people even
before the event takes place through these automated emails and then the event takes place i deliver
it all and then it's a series of emails afterwards the most important one obviously the recording of the event after
and then a couple of questions just about do you need any help here's our services what are you trying to promote
um if you're very organized you can even advertise the next event in the current event um but just
find the time to do that is tricky but trying to say on the follow-up emails um this is the services this is the divorce
here you go but generally i would say um linkedin events are the the most efficient way possible i've ever found
of getting people's email opt-ins in bulk and i think that's why it's so relevant to
e-commerce businesses because we've got in the past months i think email addresses just from linkedin
events now i really put my heart and soul into content and you might get subscribers or something and you think
wow but to get thousands and thousands of people opted in is enormous and then from that um we found so prosperous is a
linkedin software our income doubled after that first event so our monthly revenue doubled from just your one event
um which we were not expecting at all so i i would say for any great business um linkedin in a whole is is it like
facebook like google is all sorts of movement but if you can dilute it to what has the maximum output with a minimum input
it's update your linkedin profile so you look polished you look like branded and how you want to be perceived
grow your network just gradually of connecting with potential people from groups or courses or whatever it might
be and then when you have around about two to three thousand connections that's enough post a linkedin event and
whenever you host a linkedin event there's a button to say invite your network and if you invite all your network what
you find is that you'll get i don't know a couple hundred people from that alone that will register
but because your network starts to register the events all of their networks start to see a message match is registered for a
linkedin training event and your network starts to come and that's where you see the viral effect that although you're
inviting your network to start with it's their network that you're pulling in which is your potential customers and then so i think that whole sort of
loop there i would say do that once every three months and that alone um
would get your money's worth for linkedin and you can do all that for free you don't need to actually use any software you don't need a paid linkedin
account um you only pay for software to automate if you structure time but if you've got time to set this up all of it
can be done for free that's incredible and i here's the thing right um i can attest to the value of it
so i think if you're listening and going will this work for me i think you should just find out and have a little go
um patrick there is so much i think i could there's so many questions and so much i i i i know people listening
they're going to be going hang on what about what about what about um so maybe the best thing i can do is say
what's the best way people can get ahold of you well how can they reach out to you have they got any questions
well um funny enough i don't say get in touch with me on linkedin because i get hundreds and hundreds of messages so
this morning i was trying to reply to linkedin messages and it was getting tough so the best way i say is a few
things um number one is if you go to my linkedin profile you'll always see different events that i'm running and i think step one is just register for one
of my linkedin events because all of the things i do my approach is just train and just give lots of value there's no
hidden agenda um yes i'll have follow-up emails to say do you want a bookball or that sort of thing but generally i train
people because i have a passion for training and i like to to help other people that's that's the goal of all this um but the best way is my business
is called prospectlabs.com and we are a linkedin lead generation agency and we also have
a software so you either work with us as a company we do this for you or we have a software where you do it yourself and
we support you in training but i think i'm generally taking part in one of my events learning about that and then from
that you'll you'll get a series of emails following up and just replying we can jump on and call that sort of thing um all connect with me and get to know
me but the one thing i say would be if you're going to connect with me practice what i'm trying to preach which is
basically send a nice connection message and hey partner i heard about you on matt's podcast let's get to know each other don't just send the generic
connect and there's a blank message and i have no idea who you are so make me feel special to connect with you
the best way yeah yeah make him feel special i like that make me feel special and we'll connect that
listen um thank you so much for joining us from cyprus uh
and taking the time to chat with us it's been brilliant uh really really enjoyed it and i'm sure there's lots of thoughts
and uh uh what's the the spark the idea sparks that people are having so if that's you do reach out to patrick you
can connect with him like you said we'll put all the links to patrick in the show notes as well to his company to the
software that we use uh and also to uh pat's linkedin accounts where just don't
anyway you you know what i mean so um yeah we'll put all of that in the show notes so you can reach out to patrick uh
but patrick thank you so much for being with us real treat real privilege and uh finally we did it cheers it was a
pleasure well a big shout out and thanks to my friend and special guest patrick collins
what did you think he's a cool bloke okay love his accent love what he has to say love his advice and of course do
reach out to patrick do connect with him he would love to hear from you and if you weren't able to
to take notes when he was saying how you get in touch just head over to the podcast it's all there the links are notes transcript everything you can get
them for free at ecommercepodcast.net forward slash next week is episode check it out we
are getting close to the big and next week we are talking to oliver palmer we're going to be talking about
split testing one of these things that um every e-commerce business is told that they should do
and the title of the podcast is you probably don't need to a b test
is that controversial i think it probably is and so to help you uh get in the mood
here's an excerpt from next week's show so the job to be done with a milkshake is not sustenance it's not um quenching
a thirst it's giving me something to do while i drive and stopping me from being bored and that's often the sort of thing
that we're trying to find out with when we probe deeply in this sort of research to find you know what is the job to be
done with this thing why are you visiting the site why are you buying this thing online versus uh in person
um you know what are the really the deeper things that sort of sit beneath the obvious
you're going to want to listen to that conversation with oliver man's a legend it is super packed full of insight
if you have enjoyed this show then i would appreciate it if you could rate the show on itunes or wherever you get
your podcast from and of course share it out let the big wide world know we exist
uh it's great if you do thank you so much for listening and as i said we're
here to help you deliver e-commerce well so the fact that you guys keep coming back tells me well i think we're starting to succeed
which is fantastic thank you so much for listening appreciate you being here i'll be back next week
bye for now
you've been listening to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson join us next time for more interviews
tips and tools for building your business online
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