Adam Robinson: All right. Welcome to the show. We're very excited today to have Daniel Murray, LinkedIn extraordinaire, owner of the Millennial Marketing. Did I say that right? Or is it Marketing Millennials?

Daniel Murray: Marketing Millennials.

Adam Robinson: Marketing Millennials Podcast and LinkedIn group. For those who don't know about that group, that group has 500. Is it above 500? It's either it's creeping on 500,000 or is like slightly above 500,000.

Daniel Murray: We just hit 500,000 a couple of days ago.

Adam Robinson: Yeah, like no big deal. No big deal. And so, Tommy put us in touch and I don't know if you knew this before we started talking but I think we had our first conversation. And I had done zero, unpaid social media in my life. I've done like a few paid ads on Facebook that did well. And Tommy is just like, “You should talk to the best LinkedIn guy there is to get some strategic tips on how you should approach this.” And, man, your advice has been so solid that I just wanted to have you on this podcast because people who know me, they're like, “You're the last guy who would ever be doing social media, especially organic. Maybe ads but like direct response but like social media, organic, no way.” And then they see me posting frequently. I explained the machine that I built with Tommy and they're just like, "That's amazing.” So, I think more and more people are going to want to do this, right? Because there's this phenomenon which we discussed of a dearth of content on LinkedIn, in particular, content creators. And there's all these eyeballs and it's morphing into like I think these were your words like little stories that people want to read when they're drunk at midnight. Are you the one who said that?

Daniel Murray: No, but that's a good analogy.

Adam Robinson: Yeah. No, it's like it went from this like really serious thing to like bro text like tricked me a little bit, maybe, like make me laugh, whatever. And then I got put in touch with Tommy because like I've just been obsessed with Triple Whale social media presence, and their brand is like so casual and funny. Your stuff is hilarious. And obviously, you get a ton of engagement, right? So, anyway, I just wanted to just talk about all this stuff, right? Like, how do you get to be the guy? It’s the same thing I asked Chase Dimond last week, right? Like, how do you get to be the guy that is Chase Dimond with 80,000 or whatever it is, 100,000 Twitter followers about e-com email? Like, how does it happen? Like, when did that happen? So, yeah, opening question is to you, what is the arc of your career that brought you to this place where you are controlling such a massive audience? And I guess as a short follow-up, 110,000 personal followers and 500,000 brand followers. So, what was a career first? And then which of those like kind of happened first or whatever?

Daniel Murray: Yeah. It's kind of funny because I think a lot of people think you just start social media because a lot of people who are starting social media now get a lot of traction because they've seen what other people are doing. And they’re just repeating the formula. But when I started, I think I was actually in marketing ops at the beginning of my career but I always had this love for social media. I would always be an early adopter on social media platforms. I had a food account that I tested once. I had a bunch of different accounts and they were just not very successful failures. But I think they all taught me a little bit more about social media. And then I finally was in a role in one of a startup and I was like, "Okay. We should do organic LinkedIn,” and nobody believed me we should do an organic LinkedIn. So, I was like, okay, being a marketing ops guy I am, I'm like, “Okay. I'll go test organic LinkedIn myself.” And this was mid-2019 so before the pandemic and anything. So, I started just posting and I was posting some random stuff, and I was getting some traction but it was getting more traction than I've ever seen because I had 1,000 followers, and I was getting 3,000 impressions.

Adam Robinson: Define random stuff.

Daniel Murray: I would post like a marketing post and then I post like…

Adam Robinson: Okay. So, it wasn't subject-aligned. It was just like you were spreading…

Daniel Murray: Yeah. It wasn’t very niche.

Adam Robinson: And this is off of your personal account.

Daniel Murray: Yeah. It wasn't very niche. I posted like, oh, we did Halloween in our office and then I would post a marketing post. And then I realized, okay, some people are following me for this, and people will follow me for that and I was like, “I need to be super niche and just start talking about marketing.” And that's when I started seeing an increase. But also, what I started doing is like there's a lot of unscalable things I did at first, which I think really helped me is, one, I would comment 40 to 50 times a day on other marketing influences my stuff. So, my name would be in their posts. I would respond to every single comment. I'll say now I'm not good at that but I was better at that.

Adam Robinson: I mean, your stuff is insanely good. I don't know how you even do that. Right? Like, you would have to hire a staff or something to like to do this.

Daniel Murray: Yes, I would do the very unscalable things, which helped me at the beginning. And then the Marketing Millennials came out of a podcast that I wanted to create because I just couldn't come up with enough marketing content ideas and I say the best way to get content is have a conversation with another marketer, and then we can come up a content together. And then I was like, “Oh, shoot, I should create a LinkedIn page because this is going to get annoying if I just post my podcast stuff on my personal page. I should have another distribution channel for this.” And then what I use to grow Marketing Millennials is I started like using Daniel Murray like, "Go follow Marketing Millennials, blah, blah. Here's my podcast.” And then, after a while, I did this technique that it was very accidental why it worked but what I did was I would take people's tweets of people because I was starting being really active on Twitter, and I would take people's tweets that I wanted to be guests on my podcast. And I would post them on the Marketing Millennials because I knew they weren't active on LinkedIn, and they would reach out to me like, “Thank you so much for posting,” and then that's how I got my first like few bigger guests on the Marketing Millennials. But also, what I saw was like these tweets were getting so much traction on LinkedIn and nobody was doing that. So, I just kept the same formula and then just like started this rapid viral spiral.

Adam Robinson: Yeah. Which is one of the things that we talked about. And one of the things that Tommy told me like for he's like, “This is so dumb,” but like if a tweet is going viral from someone who is a hitter on Twitter in your sort of niche, a lot of times you can copy the tweet, hashtag them, say like 100% exclamation point. And the algo seems to love it, you know? Like maybe that…

Daniel Murray: But it's better to that point like people think this is like this has been happening for years and years like people would pose and has been doing that on Instagram for a long time. People have been doing it on Twitter for a long time. People are taking Reddit posts, putting on Twitter. So, this is not like a new phenomenon.

Adam Robinson: Right, right. Well, it's new to me. You know, it's probably new. So, like the audience for this is meant to be founders of big Shopify stores, right? So, like a lot of them, I feel like there's this moment where they're seeing people like me who are just working with people like Tommy, getting advice from people like you who know how the machine works, and then creating this machine that's just generating content that the algorithm seems to like. It's just a really like - let me tell you an example. So, I was resisting doing this for a long time because I literally didn't know someone like Tommy. I didn't know someone like you. I read the Dave Gerhardt book. I'm like, "Oh, like the founder brand thing, that's very compelling.” Right? Like, the argument that it's easier to connect with a person than it is with a logo. Of course, it is, right? Like, we're sitting here talking to each other with video. It's like people are going to listen to this for an hour and they're going to feel like they know both of us. But I'm just not someone that's willing to start posting knowing nothing about the game because there's people who play the game full-time.

And like the games that I play full time, I know that I'm way better than people who just like hop in on their day one. So, I just think this conversation is interesting to people because I was so resistant to doing it but then as I was digging to try to figure out Triple Whale’s system, how they were doing it, Tommy was like dropping these hints and I'm like, “That can't be true.” Like, literally, I was just like, “Okay, fine, like maybe.” I spent an hour-and-a-half writing my first post. So, proud of it, right? Like, it was this real thing that happened to me at the Triple Whale mastermind. You know, it was an interesting story like I was interviewing this dude for fireside chat. I said what our brand did and then I got harassed for 30 minutes, and they didn't let the guy speak. And I like made a whole post about it, wrote it kind of how I thought it should be written because I had watched this other webinar or whatever, like 10 comments or whatever. And then Tommy goes, week one, and like does this Twitter screenshot strategy and he gets like 1,000 engagements or something like that. And I was just like, “Okay. I surrender.” Like, I'm done trying to write texts for this.

And then the system we have now is I come in Monday morning. Tommy has like seven hooks for me. I have this view that we discussed, where I think there's this power in video that is under-appreciated, in general. If you can crank out video and you're good on the medium in like I have had some success with paid ads and video in the past. I just want to be doing it because like I'm doing like two longer-form video things a week and then we're doing seven, what would be called like the TikTok video or short-form video that we're having edited and like Hormozi style, putting whatever and like get 500 of those, make a TikTok. It's just like, eventually, I think there's this huge power to it. And we've got it now working to where Tommy's got hooks for me, I come in and write the bullets, I record them, and then he makes it to where it would actually like work on LinkedIn by whatever his interpretation of that is, as someone who lives in the game. So, if you're listening to this, that's probably a decent strategy, right? Work with someone who knows the game rather than just start kind of like posting on day one.

Daniel Murray: But I would clarify too like I think some people should just start the game. I mean, they should have an idea of who they want to be and stuff like that but it's just like you can hop into a workout like your first workout and expect to be like, “I'm in very good shape already because I have a good trainer.”

Adam Robinson: Yeah. Right.

Daniel Murray: It's like you have to have those little like a hard couple of posts and hard couple of like riding and hard couple idea/things before you get to a certain point. Some people get lucky and like are naturally fit and could go in the gym and start busting on reps and just like how did you just do that? But not everybody's like that. Some people have to get those repetitions before they can get to their first good-quality post. And I don't like people just being feeling discouraged that they can't go and be like just try a couple of times because nobody's going to see it if it doesn't be successful. That's what the power of social media is like. First, people won’t remember and, two, like if it's not good, the algorithm normally doesn't pick it up, and then nobody sees it.

Adam Robinson: Yeah. I mean, I keep referencing this conversation with Chase but it was largely about the same thing, just on different medium. I think, to your point, his biggest emphasis, point of emphasis was he's like, “Look, I've been doing this for six years. No one gave a rat's ass until 24 months ago. My mom was the only person reading any of it.” And he's like, "At some point, it just like I got good enough at it, like there was enough sort of wind behind it and it started really working. People cared.” Point number two, content creation is a muscle. And what I do want to emphasize with my system is like I'm creating 18 pieces of content per week, which are actually being generated by me. So, Tommy's taking a video that I made with bullets that I made with a subject that he recommended, and then he's writing text of it. Mason is taking work in public videos that I'm making, and posting on YouTube, and he's making a newsletter out of it for Friday. He's also synthesizing seven of the videos that we made for the week into a strategy piece. So, like the idea of this, to me, being someone who is just laser-focused on like whatever I was doing before. It was very daunting like where this all even comes from? But like to Jason's point, it's a muscle once you start doing it. I'm like riding my e-bike home and thinking of ideas for like the work and public thing or like, “Oh, this conversation I had, it could be really relevant for a strategy piece or whatever.”

And you know, we're just doing it, right? Like, 18 pieces have gone from 0 to 18 like that's probably not the recommended amount of action to take but like I have devoted four hours on Monday morning, every single week and it's been eight weeks now that I just come in and do it because my calendar’s full the whole rest of time and like super open on Monday morning to sitting down and just like creating, like publishing. Another thing I want to add is you can't just do that Twitter thing either, right? Because like, A, it's not going to work and, B, it's not allowing you to niche down into what you want people to actually be learning from you and like be known as, right? So, Tommy phrases it as like we're going to do like two awareness posts, five educational posts, and for me, it's about very specifically email, SMS, and like abandonment. And then there's the sort of work in public. So, like the way I view my content business, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it. It's like I have one line of content that I'm creating for potential customers someday. And that's related to the nature of what our product does and like the type of company we sell to. So, it's all direct-to-consumer, email, and SMS marketing.

Then I have another line that's work in public, which is like a glimpse to the inside of this company that's going like crazy. And it's exposing, really opening the kimono in a mega way, trying to get people to understand who I'm trying to recruit like what's going on here, how we approach things, how we're different than other companies like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's aimed entirely at people we're trying to hire. Like, do you think that's a sound approach? Like, there's these two totally different things. I'm posting different places. I post the work in public on my company page because I know that we reach out to people. They go to Retention.com’s company page. First thing they see, huge capital letters, Retention.com 2023 plans, excruciating details on 2022 accomplishments, 2023 details, and then me like explaining a 10-minute video. What's your thought there?

Daniel Murray: I think I'll go back to everything that I say to people. Everything on social media is what the intention of the person is. So, I think for your intention, that's exactly what I would be approaching. Like, some attention I say is like I want to take my social media audience to an email newsletter, and then the email newsletter is my funnel to my business. Some approach is like my social is…

Adam Robinson: By the way, is that your approach? Because I see after you post, you post a link to the newsletter.

Daniel Murray: Yeah. At first, that was my approach. My first approach was like people think of social media very like the problem, I'll go back to it. The problem with social media that a lot of people make this big mistake is that they don't separate social media and separate goals. They say, "Social media has to produce this much amount of revenue,” and if it doesn't hit this amount of revenue, they either stop or they start doing bad behaviors in social media. The first goal when you’re starting social media to see you successful is, is my followers growing? Are they the right type of followers? And am I getting engagement? Once you start getting that, then you could say, "Hey, my followers are growing, I'm getting good engagement. Now, let's focus on how can I take those engagements and turn them into whatever I want to do next with them, whether it's, I want to take them on a new email newsletter, I want them to convert on my website, I want them to read my blog,” whatever you want them to do. But a lot of people will say when they start or trying to get so fast to get people off the site and it's like you have to cultivate trust on the platform before you start asking stuff. So, that's one thing.

Two things I think also what you’re doing that I think is very smart is that you have to lean on the medium that you're best at when you start creating content, and your medium is video. Some people is written words, some people are imagery, some people. So, if you lean on that, that's a great way to get started because you could take a video and do what you're doing and chop it up into a newsletter. And so, the third point I will make is also like it's always great to create one big pillar of content, which you're doing like a podcast, a newsletter, or something like that, and then chop it up into multiple social media posts. So, then if you want to create more social media ideas, you start with a big piece of content, and then you take what you're doing and chopping up to several posts. But the approach you're doing is building public on your personal site so people could understand the journey and this is probably like understands behind the scenes of your company. And then on your other page, “I want to grow my following.” One is the intention and the other one is I'm trying to build trust at the same time. So, I think you need to have some sort of posts that's getting you more followers because otherwise if your followers are not growing, it's still good.

Like, that's also what attention like a lot of people come to me and say, “I want to grow my following.” And then I'm like, "Do you want to do these things to grow your following?” And like, “No, I don't want to do these things.” And I'm like, "Well, you're going to still grow your following by posting every single day. You’re doing good stuff but you might not grow at the rate you want to grow because you're very niche, and only a very small amount of people are going to care about that. So, you're just going to drop in a couple more people, which is fine. That's a good approach.” But a lot of people see numbers and they're like, “Okay. For me, I want to grow the biggest amount of following so I can get the most amount of cash and be at top of mind all the time. So, when everybody thinks of marketing, they think of the Marketing Millennials, they think of Daniel Murray. And then when they think about the Marketing Millennials, now they think about, “Oh, does he have a podcast, a newsletter?” And that's what they get. So, I call my LinkedIn like my Costco sampler, and then I call my other part like you could have the full meal in my newsletter and my podcast.

Adam Robinson: Yeah. I mean, not to bring it back to Chase again but I thought he's like copywriting is the widest audience that I get. So, I think about my reach in my audience growth posts as being the copywriting ones that I write about. And then he's like, "The people that I'm selling to are e-commerce email marketers. So, I'm working on my niche in that, and then he's like, "The people that absolutely love me, they're going to sit here and watch us talk for 45 minutes on a podcast.” So, he's like, “I have just found that this one subject I can talk about, and it's going to help me grow my reach.” So, like all that is to say I think I'm listening to what you're saying about like saying to somebody, "Do you want to do this, this, and this?” If you don't, you're going to stay super niche like maybe there's a tangential subject that you can start talking about that just touches 10 times more people, that is slightly less niche than the exact thing that you're talking about, that could help actually get this wider net.

Daniel Murray: I also think a lot of people, what they do is when they write about their niche, they are so super specific that only people in that niche would get it. Sometimes all you have to do is just take your niche and like make it so simple that more people understand what you're talking about. A lot of people just don't know how to do that. They just write like an email marketer will understand this. So, I'm writing like this but like, "How can I teach email marketing to my mom? And if my mom understands this, then more people would understand this, and then more people will start liking my content.” So, that's also what people don't do is they don't take it to the simplest form because they think it doesn't come off as expertise. But first of all, I always have this thing like just think about how you consume social media. It's so fast. Like, a lot of these posts are just so thought-provoking that you just don't have time to just engage with it because there’s so much detail. So, it's like if you could simplify it in the simplest form to get someone to actually understand it quickly, while they're on a walk with their dog or on the treadmill or on their e-bike on their phone, like whatever, a lot of the things is just taking their subject and just simplifying it even further down the funnel.

Adam Robinson: I think that's incredible. I think that's super important, especially for people sitting on the outside of the game. Like, I want to be perceived as smart. Like, that's just something that I'm kind of embarrassed if I'm not or whatever, right? Like, that's part of my identity with the people that I'm going after. And embracing this concept that with social media, people may not want to just spend a ton of brainpower to figure out whatever thing you're trying to convey as you're trying to make yourself perceived as smart. I mean, that I think is a very valuable lesson. And an example that pops in my head when you were saying that is a tweet that we reposted from you in like I may be messing the wording up slightly but the essence of it is, there's no other point than this. The essence of this tweet was, "Marketing is to make sales easier.” You know what tweet I'm talking about?

Daniel Murray: Yeah.

Adam Robinson: Like, it's something that it crushed on Twitter. When we reposted it, it absolutely crushed and it's like I almost think it's like social media, this is my observation, not understanding the machine. Tell me if you think I’m off. It’s like there are these kinds of tribes that people are loosely associated with, and you can make these statements that will just resonate so deeply with that tribe at almost like a religious level, right? So, like that statement, marketing is to make sales easier, it's like if I'm a marketer, I'm like, “That's what these salespeople need to know, man.” Get it through their head, like thumbs up, right? Like, in the same way, it's like Bitcoin is good, right? Like, Bitcoin is a religion like you look at Michael Saylor’s posts. He's doing these tweets that are just making this, it's almost for a Christian like Jesus Christ is good, right? If you posted that, people will be thumbs up all around because it's what they believe in. Do you think that that is sort of an accurate statement of kind of like what can happen with these very… It's like just a truth that resonates a simple, universal truth that resonates with this crowd?

Daniel Murray: I think, usually, it's your universal truth that a lot of people are resonating with but the way I think about it is like there's two types of content on LinkedIn that you can go after. It's like the keynote at a conference, which you have to go a little bit more broad because there's going to be 50,000 to 60,000 people at a keynote at a marketing conference, for example. But then there's also like breakout little pods at a conference that is more like niche. If I deeply want to understand email marketing, I can go there. So, like what you're doing right now is like I'm giving a keynote twice a week about something that more broad and then I'm also giving breakout sessions five times a week that people can go listen to that are more niche can go listen to more of the thing. And then to your other point is like a lot of people are not ready to buy right now. A lot of people don’t have the perceived pain point that your business has right now. So, the best thing you could do in marketing, in my opinion, is just always be in their head. So, whenever they need something that is your problem, they'll come to your business.

So, if you can just be in their head multiple times a day, whether it's with a broad post or a niche post, if you just show up daily and you're in their head and owning their mind space, then when they have that perceived problem that your business has to be like, “Oh, Retention.com. Oh, I remember I need SMS. I need email. I need to go to Retention.com because that's who I see on my feed every single day and I listen to the podcasts.” Well, the people are thinking of this. That's the difference between and there's someone came on my podcast yesterday and had this hot take but I truly believe and I'd never heard it framed like this but like demand generation is just brand marketing. And why they say that is because a lot of demand gen is that people run as demand capture, which means like they just taking existing people who have the pain in the market right now and bring them in their funnel. But demand creation is people have to know your brand. They have to be educated on your problem. They don't know who you are. They don't know who your brand is. So, you have to keep doing this like top-of-funnel stuff so people even know who you are, know your brand name before you can take them down this journey to more concise content.

Adam Robinson: Right. I love that. So, I'm just sitting here thinking asking you all these questions like if you would have given me this presentation in a PowerPoint eight weeks ago, I would have been mind-blown. I'm so far from thinking about social media in this way and I just know people that aren't playing the game like aren't thinking about it this way either. I think it's just a really interesting conversation for people who are like sitting on the sidelines, contemplating, taking the plunge like I did, right?

Daniel Murray: I also go back into like I understand because I know companies have revenue goals. I know companies have to waste time. So, but also like you have to say you need to choose you 10% of your company or 20% of your efforts to do something that is brand related. And this is one of the best things to do that is brand related that will help you in the long term to survive as a business five to six to seven years.

Adam Robinson: And you're talking about LinkedIn right now.

Daniel Murray: Yeah. LinkedIn right now. Organic reach is at its peak in LinkedIn right now, same as TikTok. Like, those are the two platforms that have organic reach, and maybe YouTube Shorts.

Adam Robinson: Yeah. And I think that, as it was explained in a presentation that I watched in this group called Pavilion that I'm in, the CEO, Sam, is in the process of building his LinkedIn brand too. I think I sort of used his profile, maybe I didn't. But he's working with the coach. The coach said right now like the eyeballs on LinkedIn are growing and only under 1% of people are creating content on LinkedIn, which is like so different than the balance of creators versus consumers on Instagram, right? Like, everybody's creating content on Instagram. So, like I hear that and I remember I wasn't even doing it at the time but like when the content creators on Facebook all of a sudden had to pay to reach their own audiences, they were like up in arms about it. And I perceive what happened there as Facebook 10 years ago was at the same position LinkedIn is now. There were way too little content creators for the amount of eyeballs on the platform. As people observed brands and creators on Facebook succeeding creating content there, then the balance flipped.

And the supply-demand was such that rather than basically getting content pulled out of you for free and distribute it to everybody, you had to actually pay to get at the top of the distribution priority list even to your own audience, which I'm sure as people listen to this podcast, they see what people like me and this guy, Sam from Pavilion, and several other people who have been talking to you recently like everything you're saying makes sense, right? It intuitively makes sense what's happening on LinkedIn platform. If you're doing B2b, in particular, your audience is there, right? So, why not do it? And then as more people doing it and have success doing it, it's going to flip and we're going to have to pay to reach our audiences.

Daniel Murray: I think there's also an inherent flip that's happening in the market too that like it's not only that. I think the inherent flip is people are not trusting institutions as they used to back in the day. When you used to go back in the day and trust as a buyer used to be like, “Oh, I'm going to go to Gartner or I'm going to go to like these third party things. I'm going to trust like a business for my HubSpot for my content. I'm going to go to these platforms to go to.” Now, people are going to like Justin Welsh, Chase Dimond, Amelia Sordell, like all these people, they're going to certain people. And so, the inherent flip is that people are having less trust for brands. So, the way to kind of counter that is have people in your company become like the faces of your company. So, people feel like they're working with someone that they trust instead of just a faceless brand.

Adam Robinson: I mean, that is exactly the read that I had. So, just personally, I think we're in the position to absolutely win the market for what we're doing. There's no direct competitors right now. Our indirect competitors are trying to sell the way bigger companies than like we want to sell to. So, the market’s totally underserved in what we're doing. And I think it would just take a long time for a new company to catch up to the feature set that we have. And, okay, so you're sitting there, you're like, "Well, then what is the problem?” It's like awareness because it works for pretty much everybody. So, it's like, okay, then what do we need to do? It's like people need to learn about the brand. They need to learn about the stories of the brand, right? Like what is it, right? And then it's like, well, what's the quickest way to build trust in the set of stories? It's definitely a person, right? I bought a huge domain to help with brand but it's going to be way easier for me to get connection to human beings as Adam Robinson, the CEO of Retention.com, than to try to tie these ideas to that logo, in my opinion. Especially given the fact that social media is a platform where you have to do it all in that. Social media is not set up for people to connect to a logo. It's set up for people to connect to a face and the ideas associated with that face.

Daniel Murray: Yeah. And the number one thing for content and B2B right now like what wins is expertise. And for the longest time, content has been just what? And I'm not saying that - shout out to a lot of good content but a lot of them was just like trying to be the best for the algorithm and copy some blog posts, tweak it, and make it better but it wasn't like a deep expert was coming in. Like for example, I worked at ServiceTitan, for example. Some of my audience were plumbers, some of our audience were electricians. So, we had people who were actually plumbers, like help us create content to resonate with plumbers like the problem is a lot of people don't have that and you are creating expertise for Retention.com, which inherently shows that like you understand the subject, which inherently say like, “Oh, if he understands the subject, then I must go with this product because they understand that my pain, they understand what I'm going through in a day-to-day. If you can’t portray that as a brand, it's hard to win.

Adam Robinson: Yeah. I hear that. So, double-clicking down on something you said maybe 15 minutes ago. Do you have the right followers? How am I supposed to figure that out? Like right now I'm getting followers. Do I literally look at the comments and the likes and just see the titles of these people? Like, do it by hand? I mean, is there another way? How do you think about that?

Daniel Murray: Yeah. So, if you go like if you've created a mode on in your profile, you could see that or in your posts, you can see like this many marketing specialists, this many people looking. So, that's one way that I will look. Also, what I have been doing, a good way is like having and I wish I did this earlier, and I'm giving this advice now but like start building an email list because an email list will start saying like, “Oh, I have these raving fans. They're in this niche coming on my email list. I'm headed down the right path.”

Adam Robinson: Because like a bot is not going to subscribe to your email list.

Daniel Murray: Exactly. And so, like for me, on the Marketing Millennials, at least in the company page, I started seeing that the number one following group was 60% marketer. So, I was like, “Okay. I must be heading in the right group.” 60% of my audience is marketers.

Adam Robinson: It's the last word of the group, right?

Daniel Murray: Yeah. It’s like 60% of marketers and then the next was like business development and the next was like media.

Adam Robinson: Still relevant. Yeah.

Daniel Murray: Everything was irrelevant. So, I was like I'm heading, then I looked at the comments but also like you'll notice that like, and this is very true like your content is also a good signal that you are in the right direction, and people are liking it. Because if you don't get engagement on your content, then you probably don't have enough people in your audience that care about what you're talking about. Because to be honest, I've liked posts from my own thing for someone else's posts, and it won't go viral, like it won't help. So, if I liked from Daniel Murray to another, it would say the same but I've sometimes liked someone else's post and it's helped them go viral. And I know that if I like someone in marketing, it will go viral. If I don't like someone on marketing, it won't go viral because inherently, I only have marketers and most of my audience is marketers. So, that's a way to tell like, one, if your content is resonating with people, then yes, it's working like you're getting engagement, you're getting followers. People don't want to follow you if they don't like your content. That's just how it works. That's how social works.

Adam Robinson: Yeah. So, like to recap that, it's like if you liked a post that Tommy made about like he always loves talking about like people think a social media person should be a generalist or whatever and his audience loves that, right? So, if you liked that, it would probably do okay but if you liked something about engineering, it probably wouldn't go anywhere because your audience doesn’t care.

Daniel Murray: Exactly. My audience doesn't care. And just people don't get like, one, the algorithm doesn't have any feelings at all like it doesn't care. It just wants to push out the content to have more people will like and like maybe people hate that LinkedIn pushes out tweets and pushes out this stuff but that's when more people are engaging with. Like, it's just how…

Adam Robinson: Right. This is reality. Yeah.

Daniel Murray: It’s reality and it's also like it's not that crazy to think about because people like thinking that on LinkedIn but they will go scroll on their Instagram feed right now and send eight memes to their friend today. And they’re saying like why do that on LinkedIn? Because also people are inherently people on LinkedIn. You’re just switching up the narrative from being like I'm giving you more of a personal post on Instagram of like something you care about in your regular life like I drink a lot of coffee. Coffee does this to like marketing and making more reality to marketing. So, like their mindset when they are on LinkedIn is like I'm a marketer right now but they’re still a human being who thinks things are funny, who go to happy hour, who are probably on their couch scrolling watching House of Dragons and on LinkedIn for fun, and then sending their post to their co-worker like, oh my goodness, this is a funny marketing post. That's what people just don't get. It's just like the reason why I do it is I started thinking like, I just want to give people a quick break in their LinkedIn feed. They get enough like in-depth posts of people.

And also, a lot of people who do in-depth posts, that's the only medium to create content. So, I applaud them. They can write longer but I also create a long three newsletters a week. I create a podcast. I don't have that much time to just dedicate a perfect post on LinkedIn. And that's another thing I'll say, too, is like if you can’t create great for a medium, like a great hook, then you shouldn't be creating on that medium long-form if you don't know how to do that. Sometimes I don't have time to do it so I just don't do it.

Adam Robinson: Yeah. So, I have a couple of things to sort of ask about. Let's talk about creating for a medium. So, as I mentioned, and by the way, I think that I might get this muscle if I were willing to work on it but like, man, that text post for me was so hard. Like, it was just so hard, and like getting these hooks from Tommy in putting five bullets and then just recording me free-flowing about the bullets and keeping it under a minute or something like that, it just feels so easy. So, I just think that's a good example of what natural gravitation towards a medium feels like for people. It's like if finding memes to send to your friend feels super easy then imagery might be your medium. If creating these long-form LinkedIn things just comes out free flow, I mean, then that might be your medium. Like, is that sort of…

Daniel Murray: Yeah. That's one thing but I also think a lot of people just don't take time to learn the rules of the game and spend time on the platform before consuming. So, it's like going on TikTok and never watching one TikTok video, and saying, "How am I to post a TikTok video?” So, what a lot of people just don't do is spend time and go, "Look what the best are doing on their platform. Why is their posts working? Why they don't?” and actually reverse engineer and then try to do it for themselves. That's also. But also, to your point, I think a lot of people like Dave Gerhardt, you mentioned earlier, you read his book, like he's very good at video and he's good at written word. But his videos are really good because he studied copywriting, he studied hooks, and he studied all these things to do that. But if you just study the - if you just… That's why Chase’s stuff works well and stuff like that but if you just study inherent copywriting, like if you took what you knew from ads and made it a LinkedIn post, and just switched up a little bit, like every ad needs a hook. And then every ad…

Adam Robinson: That was literally going to be the next thing that I went into like let's talk about the anatomy of a post in how close like have a written, I mean, the meme… Let's forget that for now but like what's the anatomy of an ad and how does it compare to the anatomy of a post, right, in terms of just like hook, body, CTA? Is that something that we think about in LinkedIn posting as well?

Daniel Murray: Yeah. So, the funny part is that, and you know this from being an ad guy, for the last like 10 years, a lot of the best ad people who won, one, because they understood how to target people better than others and that's why they won. Now, the best ads are going to start winning is the ones who understand that you need a good copy that hooks the readers. You need a great image or a great video or a great creative to make sure that and then a CTA that is compelling enough or an offer that’s compelling enough to get someone to take the next step. So, let’s go take that to like LinkedIn like eat, and also it works. This is why tweets work. Tweet is basically that imagery and copy just not in a text format. Like, it's just a hook and an image that stands out in the feed that doesn’t disrupt someone. So, that's one way to do it. And we used to do this on LinkedIn ads back in the day that worked very well at SnackNation. But the way you would think about writing posts and everything is like, okay, let's think about the hook first. In every platform, the hook needs to be a little bit different. For LinkedIn, you need to optimize for the See More button.

So, the first line needs to be very compelling that it either creates like, "Oh, this person, it's relevant to me.” “Oh, this excites me.” “Oh, this is controversial like why is this person saying that?” It has to invoke some sort of emotion or curiosity or something that makes things. And then if you go down to the next couple of lines, it's kind of like the setup before you start going into the meat. So, it's like you write a good first line and then the second line is be like, "But, well, here's how I did it, like you started teasing it a little bit and then you go into what the post is. And then the meat is like, okay, once you got them to see more, now you can start giving more inherent detail of what you want to talk about. And then the way you do that is how I think about as every line has to make someone want to read the next line. So, you have to write every line intent for that’s like this is why on LinkedIn like the choppy works because it's like it's short, it's readable, but it also brings someone to the next line to the next line to the next line. And then for a couple of things, it's like for the end part of that you either want to wrap it up and say like give them something that's actionable to take away like a takeaway of that. So, you wrap up what you said quickly like, "The takeaway of this is X, Y, and Z.”

Or you want to say how people engage on the post so you say, "What do you think about this?” So, then they start commenting and more people would they… Or you do something like, “Hey, if you want to hear more about this topic, come listen to my podcast. There's a full episode here.” So, then it's a CTA to do something either actionable like you, the reader, needs to take action to go do this today, the reader needs to take action to go comment, or the reader needs to take action to go listen to something more. There's something that wraps it up at the end to make someone do an action. And that's the same exact thing as an ad. But also, what works is you have to be writing great copy. Like, it has to be great copy. It has to be interesting that people are perked up to read like I think Joseph Sugarman and Adweek Copywriting Handbook says like slippery slide and first line and second line, and his principle is like the first line needs to be so compelling that people read the second line. And then also like what I noticed with a lot of people, they spend so little time perfecting the first three lines and that should be the most time you spent to actually the bottom of the posts like people read less off. Like, the goal is to get someone to read a lot to get people so the algorithm says, “Oh, this is interesting.” People are like clicking, spending time on this.

Adam Robinson: They're clicking to see more, you know, whatever. Yeah.

Daniel Murray: And you take that on TikTok too like if you have a hook and get someone to get past the three seconds, and they will read it, they'll listen to the video more. And then if you create a loop at the end to make it read more, that makes the algorithm say, “Oh, someone cares about this video more.” If you do on Twitter, on a thread, the first tweet on a thread is so compelling to get someone to read the next tweet, and then every tweet needs to be formatted as a tweet. So, every, like, you just had to take these principles and make it for the medium and I think a lot of people don't do that.

Adam Robinson: I mean, this is gold, dude. This is so awesome. How important do you think the pattern interrupt is? I mean, basically, you just said that's my whole business. I'm trying to give people a break like from the rest of the, I'm sorry, not your whole business. You're like my LinkedIn philosophies. I want to give people a break for a second which like, A, that may or may not mean pattern interrupt in your mind. To me, based on what I see on my feed in LinkedIn, that's definitely pattern interrupt because it's a bunch of people pontificating on God knows what, right? Like, if somebody's starting today, are you like try to be pattern interrupt on every post or is it like, you know what I mean? Like, how intense is a pattern interrupt just with the provocative hook or like is it pattern interrupt full stop, like what do you think?

Daniel Murray: I think you need like in everything that I tell people, this is a general marketing principles like you need to figure out how to be different in the platform to stand out. And like the link tweets when I started where I differentiate it from me to stand out. I think there's also a lot of different ways you can try things like video for you is a way for you to stand out that a lot of people aren't doing. I think when someone's starting like they either have to be such a great copywriter that their content has such great hooks but I do say like the thing that everybody should practice the most is like how to simplify the first line to get people so interested that they want to read more. The tweet is a little bit easier because what I try to do is make it so simple that that idea is so simple that people want to share it right now. And that's what I like. And it's so easy to share like I can take this in a group message. The problem with a long LinkedIn post, and this is the truth about long LinkedIn posts is like it's hard to screenshot and send it to a friend. LinkedIn doesn't make it easier to send a DM of a LinkedIn post to someone. But if you have a video like yours, it's easy to send a video and text for someone to read. It's easier to take a screenshot of.

So, how I think about posting or newsletters or anything is like, one, would I share this post in a group text message with all my marketing friends? Yes or no? That's the first thing I think about, like what I shared in a group text. If I wouldn't, is this a cool enough idea to share? And if it's not, and I think I've got to the point and I think the way to start learning this is, one, you have to consume a lot of good content to get to good content. It’s like that's how it works. Like, you just have to understand your audience. And second, I think, for what I was saying before that I lost my train of thought but, yeah, I do think when you’re starting off, you need to figure out how, one, what is your niche, what do you want to be known for? Two, like, how can I be different when my story, my hook, my format to stand out in the feed? Three, is this compelling enough to be shared? Yes or no. And that might not be your attention. My attention is to keep people on LinkedIn but I think my whole intention is like marketing is a game of attention. That's just what it is. They're fighting for people's attention the whole time. You're playing with the currency of attention.

Some of it is cheap attention and some of it is great attention but you’re still battling the mind of attention. A lot of people consume cheap attention. A lot of people consume but the problem with LinkedIn why I do mine is like I inherently know that LinkedIn does not feed me the content I want all the time. So, it's harder for me to consume on the platform so I make it easier for people to consume on LinkedIn. On Twitter, I know that it's curated to followers that I know so it's easier for me to consume so I can do more in-depth stuff. On TikTok, it's even more important to do what you should be doing on LinkedIn that should be working but it's not because LinkedIn just doesn't, their feed sucks. That’s the problem. And I don't think it will ever improve until it's like interest-based feed where you're fed like marketing content because you're a marketer.

Adam Robinson: So, what is it now if it’s not interest-based? It's just stalling.

Daniel Murray: It’s follower-based. Yeah.

Adam Robinson: It’s weird because you just kind of follow people and you're connected and like whatever.

Daniel Murray: Exactly. And Instagram is like that too. Like, why Instagram has been going through a trouble is like you don't care what your best friend's friend in high school is doing anymore with their life married with kids, and you don't need to see another baby pic. Like, it's not interesting to them. But if 10 years ago was interesting because you were in a group with those people, you saw them every day like it was cool. You guys were good friends. But now like that's why TikTok’s winning right now because it's not feeding you those pictures you don't care about. It’s feeding you like, “Oh, you like sports. I'll feed you some sports content. Oh, you like marketing? I’ll feed you marketing content.” And that's why TikTok is inherently winning because it's an interest-based graph where like most platforms are followed by this graph where like it's based on who you follow. You see Twitter a little bit doing this now. It's like starting to feed. If you follow certain topics, you'll get those certain topics in your feed too. So, I'm inherently optimizing that I know that a lot of people are getting bad contents out there in their feed or content they don't care about. That's a better way to put it.

Adam Robinson: This has been so awesome. We have like two minutes left. So, let's wrap it up. But thank you. I mean, these words of wisdom are just like incredible. You may not think it is because you live in the game. Like, I didn't know like 80% of what you talked about today. It kind of makes sense but like I just wasn't aware of it, you know? So, let's wrap it up with the final five. What’s your favorite…

Daniel Murray: One thing before you go into the final five. It's just so funny because the way you just said that is like to me, I'm trying to simplify it for you to understand it and it's new to you. That's why like if you want to simplify what you say to me and start talking to me in a simple way and I started getting it, like the simplest posts work because people just inherently just don't get the subject. That's why it blows my mind like you're trying to get people educated on the subject. So, that's just my little rant like on that but we'll go to final five.

Adam Robinson: Yep. Agreed. So, favorite book?

Daniel Murray: Influence by Robert Cialdini.

Adam Robinson: What a great book. That's one of my favorites too. Yeah.

Daniel Murray: Also, Alchemy by Rory Sutherland. It teaches you how to…

Adam Robinson: It teaches you how to what? Just finish that thought.

Daniel Murray: Yeah. It just teaches you how to think differently about like, not irrationally, about marketing. Like, irrational things work in marketing and that's how rational things just get you in a sea of sameness, basically.

Adam Robinson: Cool. Favorite person? Could be a CEO. Could be somebody else. Favorite person you're following right now?

Daniel Murray: That's a great question. The favorite person I'm following right now is probably Katelyn Bourgoin because I really care about like, I'd want to learn psychology more now and she helps distill psychology in marketing in a very distilled way. So, like right now like that's the subject I'm interested in learning. So, she's the best at telling me about that.

Adam Robinson: And married? Single? Kids? What's your status?

Daniel Murray: Married. You'll talk to Ari soon, hopefully.

Adam Robinson: Right. Yeah. Next week.

Daniel Murray: She's awesome.

Adam Robinson: Sweet. Where do you live?

Daniel Murray: Austin, Texas.

Adam Robinson: Rock on. We got to get a beer soon. I didn't realize that. I’m in Austin too. What's your favorite vacation you ever been on?

Daniel Murray: Fave vacation? I would say Australia. I love Australia. And New Zealand, it's like the same vacation.

Adam Robinson: Well, thank you very much, Daniel. This has been fantastic. I look forward to talking to Ari and getting you back on here again soon.

Daniel Murray: Thank you. This is great.

Adam Robinson: All right, man. Take care.

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