Unlocking LinkedIn | The Ultimate LinkedIn Playbook for Entrepreneurs

0:00This is the GaryVee Audio Experience.

0:30this episode and I'll see you all tomorrow morning. What is universally true for everyone in this room, regardless of where you are on the journey within this industry, is that the far majority of individuals, humans here, and companies are not taking advantage of what's happening in LinkedIn right now. So just from a pure practical standpoint, there's so many wants and dreams and hopes and and things that you want to happen in this room, and one of the most significant opportunities to make that thing happen is actually knowing how to make content for LinkedIn, and actually posting it, and actually reaping the benefits of it.

1:08LinkedIn right this second is acting like a social network more similar to what Facebook was in 2013 and 14, and the land grab for B2B companies, and B2B2C companies that I've watched over the last two years grow and explode and really, I won't use the word exploit, but just so everybody understands, no ads, just taking advantage of best practices to create organic reach is disproportionately the underpriced attention, the underutilized move of this collective room. You can literally make videos and pictures and run$25 to$50,$100 on LinkedIn against employees of venture capital firms and reach them and not have to go to conferences and pray that you'll run into them in the hallway to pitch them your startup.

2:00And this is results tomorrow. LinkedIn content for your business. You can literally reach everyone. So many people's agendas here today is to do business development. You'll listen to my talk, but what you're worried about is what's gonna happen out there and what's gonna happen tonight. That's why you're here. That's the actual business. The fact that I know that scales 365 days a year, if you spend the five or 10 hours to do research on how do I make good LinkedIn content. By the way, there's an incredible website that will tell you everything you should do. I know some of you are taking notes.

2:35I'll spell out the website for you. G-O-O, thank you for doing that. That made my fucking morning. You can literally type in, how do I make LinkedIn content for an insurance SaaS company enter and get obnoxious amount of results with best practices? This isn't about when I talk about this stuff they're like Gary but how do I do it? That's like saying how do I get into shape? Everybody here knows how to get into shape. It's called stop eating shit and go to the gym. Doing it is hard. I promise you that if every person here leaves and does proper, because there's the right way to do push-ups versus the wrong way, does proper LinkedIn content three times a day that they would see miraculous results for their business a year later.

3:29The first six months will be terrible. A month in, you'll be like, why did I listen to that fucking guy? It won't happen, because you don't know what you're doing yet. It's like everything. You didn't know how to swim as good as you did later, ride a bike. Your first kiss was a disaster. Right? You got better. And so when I think about this talk, what can I universally talk about? I can universally talk about content. I can't encourage the startups looking for capital, the B2B2C players, the people that are like literally instead of cold calling or praying or business developing your way into getting to a third party to put your insurance into, right?

4:11Like when I check out on a website, do I want to buy that insurance? Those biz dev deals are big, I get it. I know how it works. I also know that almost everyone in that sector is not producing content for the e-commerce retailers to make them consider them. We're fully reliant on sales when marketing and brand always beats sales. I love sales, I'm a salesman. But let me explain to you what sales is. It's what you do when you don't know how to market and brand. I need everybody to hear that. and I'm very aware of how people look at sales and marketing. People love sales in this room. It's black and white.

4:51Johnny got the gig, he brought home the bacon. Yay Johnny, even though he's a fucking asshole. We'll talk about culture in a minute. But what we don't understand, and we think marketing is a waste, what did that video do for us? What's the ROI? Everyone wants to be so last touch attribution. ROAS, CAC, it's fine. It allows marketing and brand to win. Almost every piece of clothes that everybody is wearing here is not because they sold you and called you on the phone. It's because they built a brand and you want to wear it. Marketing and brand works. There's a lot of big brands in this room. You see what they put out.

5:27You think they're making these silly commercials on TV for their health? You think it's not working? You think they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these videos to put out to the world and distributing them because it's funny? They like it, it's ha ha ha, I promise you it's not. It's called business. And I think for even the smallest people here, two founders who started their SaaS business today and are here hoping to stumble into a VC who will give them capital during a very hard market, even for that early stage company, all the way to the top five brands in the building that are billions of dollars in market cap, understanding how to be a contemporary marketer, AKA, how do you make content for this?

6:07This is the television. and not for long by the way. All of you that like hate that this is like you hate that your kids are on social all day wait till they sit in a pod on VR for the rest of their lives. You know what this is? This is the beeper. Remember the beeper? I know you do. You fuckers loved it. A lot of you didn't get a smartphone back in the early 2000s because you were like I don't want anyone calling me whenever they want. I got my beeper. They got my pager. They'll hit me up and I'll call them when I wanna talk to them, right? And then my favorite, let's talk about why people resist new technology.

6:45When this thing came out, I called my mom, who's the greatest, I called her and said, Mom, this thing is gonna change the world. And then I went out and I was speaking then and putting out content and I would say, who's getting one of these? And too expensive, why? And you know why? Because you guys loved your fucking Blackberry. You know why you loved your Blackberry? You needed to touch the buttons because you knew how to type without looking. How many people here are rocking a Blackberry with us right now? Nice, two. I gotta buy it from you and sell it on eBay as a fucking antique. I wanna go back to content because I wanna leave with tactical things before we get out of here.

7:23I wanna talk about the LinkedIn thing. I'm gonna bash it into your head one more time before I get out of here. This LinkedIn thing is crazy. this LinkedIn thing is crazy thinking about the people trying to raise capital thinking about the people that are trying to get biz dev deals thinking about all the people that have unlimited sales people trying to get into organizations and get them to buy I just couldn't push you harder to understand how big of a deal this is now you have to be good at it which is why I want you to do it for a while but for anyone here actually how many people here are posting every day on LinkedIn for their business?

8:02Raise your hand. 11. Good. That's good. I just really want, if I ever get lucky enough to come back here in two or three years, I just want 70, 80 % of this room to raise your hand. I promise you, if you happen to be sitting next to someone who raised their hand and you don't know them, I highly recommend you ask them what's going on. And I have no idea if they're good at it or not because it is a game of being good at it. but if they're good at it, they will explain and give you a story of a direct correlation of them hiring a good employee from a competitor because of one post, a story of getting a new client because of one post, a story of getting asked to be on a podcast because of one post that then led to business.

8:46The world is changing, we all understand that but it's changing faster than people realize and so what I ask is this as I wrap up. If you came to this conference, you didn't have to. If you came to this conference, my belief system is that you're ambitious, that you're hungry, that you're still growing. I don't understand that you would be willing to schlep to Vegas for a conference for a couple of days, but you aren't willing to spend 10 hours of real research on every new trend. Instead of taking one headline you read about AI or one friend saying something and taking it as your own and your belief system, why not actually Google how do I use AI in insurance tech, enter.

9:39How about 10 hours of research per every new thing? Whether you believe me or not on LinkedIn content can double your business if you become crazy about it. Why not spend 10 hours of research over a week or two or three and putting in how do I make content that works on LinkedIn, my industry. Again, a lot of you, VCs. VCs in this room. Good deals are competitive. Good deals are competitive. The reason I, for a decade, got access to all the best tech deals in Silicon Valley was because I had a personal brand. I didn't compete for them. They came to me. Sales versus marketing. Sales, you have to go and ask.

10:22Marketing, it comes to you. Your personal content, and by the way, as I wrap up, not everybody has to do video. This whole notion, yes, video works. Video's a monster, we watch videos, it's what we do. But for the people in here saying, man, I wanna do it, but I feel self-conscious on video. Two things on that. One, once and for all, can we put this to bed? Anyone here who's not posting, because they're worried about judgment of others, strangers and friends, making fun of them, who do you think you are, somebody leaves a comment saying you're ugly or stupid or wrong. I just really need you to hear this.

10:59Forevermore, please remember this. If somebody comes to your profile on social media and takes the time to try to take you down, you shouldn't feel bad for yourself. You should feel bad for them. Do you know what kind of shit life it is to go around the internet and try to make other people hurt because you're so hurt inside? once and for all, we've left middle school. You're all grown now. Don't let JohnnyPants97 leaving a negative comment stop you from growing your fucking business. Are you in? Please.

11:35Jesus, second point on that. You don't have to do video. Some of you are incredibly talented writers and in written form, you can get across what you want to the industry much better than you can with Gift of Gab. Some of you are good with gift of gab, but no matter how much I try to encourage you here, you still are self-conscious visually or things of that nature, then fine. Don't do a video, do audio. Record it on your phone and upload it as just audio with a title. My friends, the battleground for the world is happening out in social media content. For this industry, you have a gift. It's called LinkedIn.

12:12LinkedIn, as many of you remember, 15 years ago was a recruiting tool. It was not a social network. You all now know it is a social network. You consume content on it.