These AI Marketing Agents Get You Customers

0:00It's true. Marketing agents are the new coding agents. Just like coding agents were such a big deal and people were able to create software on demand, deploying marketing agents are so important because you're able to get customers on autopilot. So how do you actually set them up? What do they look like? Well, this has got to be my most requested episode in a long time. I bring back Cody Schneider and he shares all the sauce. How you can use Codex or Cloud Code to build these. What are the other 20 tools that you need for the marketing infrastructure in order to deploy these marketing agents? And by the end of this episode, you're going to get your creative juices flowing around some of these growth tactics that are going to help you stand out.

0:43They're going to help you get customers so that whatever it is you're building, you don't have to worry too much about traffic. You don't have to worry about too much about revenue. And you can focus on building an incredible product while your marketing machine is running. Enjoy the episode.

1:00Cody Schneider:The startup I just podcast. It's sipping time, baby. Welcome to Greg Eisenberg's podcast called Sip, Baby. I'm your co-host or guest today, not co-host. I'm never the co-host. I'm Cody Schneider. I'm going to be your guest today. And today I'm going to teach you how to build an AI agent that does cold outbound both on email and on LinkedIn. This is based off of the comments from last video. If you want to learn other go-to-market motions, you need to comment below right now. Do it right now. It also helps us with the algorithm. So you're supporting the show and it keeps the lights on here. Welcome to the show, Cody.

1:39Marketing agents are the new coding agents. We only shared one marketing agent last episode, but the people aren't satisfied with one. So you need to come back on. You came back quickly. And by the end of this episode, you're not going to share one end-to-end marketing agent, right? You're going to share two marketing agents, how people could set it up. So by the end of this episode, people can go stop the video and actually go set this up and actually get customers to their vibe coded startup, right? This is exactly what I'm promising you today. You're going to have two of these in the wild. I'm going to teach you everything that you need to know.

2:16I'm also going to share all the tools that you need. There's no gatekeeping here. I despise people that do this. Don't buy a course. Literally DM me. I'll teach you anything. I'll just make a public video for everybody. So let's do it, G. All right, let's run it. Awesome, man. All right, so today we're going to build a system that basically monitors LinkedIn posts of influencers within your niche, within your category. And then it's going to go and extract the engagers from those posts. And then we're going to do what's called a waterfall enrichment to find the emails and even potentially the phone numbers of these people.

2:53so that you can then go and do an outbound motion to them doing cold email and then also doing LinkedIn DM. So that's what is going to happen. And then I'm going to teach you how to basically have it so you can have an agent that's wired up to both of those inboxes, like managing those inboxes, say, for example, answering questions or trying to push them into booking a demo with you as an example. So, yeah, man, that's that's really it. The I don't know if there's any other like specifications on the high level. I think the only thing to mention with this is like the strategy around this. So right now, cold email is getting decimated.

3:27Reply rates are down. Everything is down. Actually, every marketing channel is down right now. Let's be real. The reason is just because like AI slop is flooding the zone and it's becoming just red ocean everywhere. But the way that we have found that you can stand out is you have to look for signals or triggers that basically show that people are hand raising, saying, hey, I want this thing. I have an interest in this thing. Right. And a great way to do this is with these LinkedIn engagements. They're basically when they like content, that is a hand raise or a signal that I am interested in this specific thing.

4:05and from that we can use that as a way to measure okay is this my target customer that i'm trying to sell to and not just like their firmographics or their demographics or their psychographics which is like what we would traditionally use for for outbound um this is specifically like no they they have a propensity or an interest in this topic and we are going to go and now get in front of them okay so how do we actually do this and this is an exact strategy that we implement for you know the companies that we're working with so i'm going to teach you that right now so let me screen share and I'm going to walk through it.

4:36So the first thing that you're going to want to go to do is literally go to LinkedIn and find influencers within your category. So last episode, we talked about AI for WordPress or AI WordPress. And so I'm just going to use this again as the example, you know, like target demographic that we're going after. So on LinkedIn, what I would go do is I would go try and find people that are talking about WordPress development potentially. Let's see what comes up with that. Development. And I would try to find posts. This might actually be a terrible category. So we might have to explore something entirely different.

5:18But I would try to find posts or creators that are talking about these specific topics like on a daily cadence. Right. So like this, like again, just for this example today, this is probably going to be like a lot of like just not good signal. So a better way to look at this is like we'll say we'll do AI for our AI marketing. Right. Let's see what comes up. And we're going to try to find these posts here. So and what makes a good search? Like why why was AI for WordPress not good? And why is AI marketing better? Yeah. So it's really just like is the content that's being served what your target customer would be interacting with.

6:00Like, that's what you're trying to get down to here. Right. So like how I would be going through this. And honestly, I use the for you page of all these algorithms is so good now that it's like it's going to show you the content that's relevant. Right. Like this is literally an exact like perfect, like perfect example. First one that comes off. It's like awesome. People trying to do some type of video editing for obvious. It's probably for marketing. Everybody that's potentially engaging with this is like a target customer. Right. So I would say, okay, cool. I'm going to find these creators and then I'm going to build a spreadsheet of all of them, right?

6:34Like all of these people that I'm going to try, that I'm going to source these leads from. So, right. I would build this spreadsheet out and we'll just do a handful of these like from my own feed. It can even be business accounts. And I think this is the thing that people don't realize. Like if there's business accounts that the people would be interacting with, that would be your target customer that can work as well. Right. So it It can be literally clay. And we're going to do the posts from clay. And we'll just keep going down on this. So MCP, it's probably too broad. And you're doing this manually.

7:08Like you're not using agents to do this. Why? I wouldn't even. Typically, the company knows who is interacting. Like when we're working with a business, right? They know who their target customer is interacting with, right? So you can, all you need is typically like 10 to 20 of these and you have more than enough to be able to like source the lead volume that's necessary to actually make this like a viable channel. I'm using the feed here because like what it's going to show you is what is most like relevant to you. So it's probably going to be stuff that's, you know, in the niche that you're in.

7:47But you can also use the search for this as well. We used to do this where we'd like do the search and we find the trending posts from that. In reality, it's like there is a handful of outliers within any niche and everybody is engaging with those handful of outliers. If you just monitor those outliers, you're actually going to get, you know, 80 percent surface area coverage for that entire industry. You don't need more than that. Right. Or it's it's it's just like the marginal return of trying to go for all of it. It's not there for that system. This is the same idea with, we do this a lot. We try to solve this entropy problem within ads, paid ads in particular, where it's like, if you just have the agent go in this loop, it'll just kind of make the same ideas over and over again.

8:30How do you solve for that? Well, you find human creators, like 10 of them on Instagram, and you track the content that they're publishing. You look for the outliers. And then from that, you typically can get signal of like, oh, here's this new hook format or here's this new topic. I can just pull that. I can remix that. And that's the way to do this. So, all right. I find a handful of these companies. And then from that, what I'll go and do. And just for the sake of, you know, the example today, we use as an example. We'll say everybody that interacted with this post, we're going to use this post as an example.

9:09So once I have these people, I need to use Appify and I will find the actual one that we like. And what's Appify for people who don't know? Yeah. So Appify is a scraping API. So I can use a single API key and then I can use it to scrape LinkedIn. I can use it to scrape Twitter. I can use it to scrape all of these different channels. So it's a way for me to get data into the context for my agent so that it can have awareness and have that context for it to make decisions on or make content based off of, etc. So, OK, so the one that you're going to want to use or the one that we like, we've worked with him a decent amount because it's the most stable connections.

9:51There's tons of these. And the challenge with Appify is finding good ones that are actually like being monitored and being maintained. And so this guy, API Maestro, has a ton of these for LinkedIn. You can see all of these here. It's all of these different functions that you can do. So how Appify functions is you get an API from Appify. And then this enables for you to be able to have your coding agent, like ClogCode or Codex, call through the Appify API to one of these endpoints that are here. So, for example, you can do this post scraper. For the one that we're going to do, it's going to be engagements.

10:31So let me find that. Post reactions on LinkedIn. I believe this is it. This is exactly it. Yep. So post comments and then post reactions are the two that you're going to use. and what this enables you to do is everybody that has engaged with that post so the post that we are just looking at here so everybody that's interacted with this and commented on this we're going to be able to pull this out i'm going to show you how you can actually do this in uh cloud code right now so i'm just going to spin up a terminal real quick and let me reshare my screen and so i have that I have that Appify API key in already saved locally within the directory that I work out of for all of my growth work.

11:17And if you don't know what I'm talking about here, I have a whole video on my channel that's basically a crash course into how to do this. It's called Go to Market Engineering or Marketing Engineering. It will walk through the entire setup process. Takes about 10 minutes. But basically, this Appify API key is shared here. And I've already written this script. I had the agent go and read, how do I use this endpoint to pull out all of the posts and comments information, all the people that have interacted with this. So I can give it this post URL and I can say, extract the engagers using the Appify API key.

11:52And it's going to go and run that process for me. So this is how I would go and build this automation or build this agent as I would basically take this code and I would deploy it into the cloud. And I would say, okay, on a daily cadence, I want you to check for net new posts. So that is where I would look at the profile posts. So this is the profile post scraper. So I would extract the post URLs from this person, right? So every net new post daily is getting extracted. And then from that, I'm then extracting the engagers using that API endpoint as well, right? So right now, as you can see, deduped by public profiles, they're 63 raw, and it's about to pull all of those contacts out.

12:37So once I have those contacts, this is done, man. Like game over. As long as you have the LinkedIn profiles, you can go and find the email addresses of them. You can find the phone numbers of them. You can find everything that you need on the cold outbound. And I'm going to show you that right now. What are the tools to actually go and use to do this. So let me just show you, though, again, just the final completion of this. And what makes this a marketing agent versus a marketing automation? Yeah. So the agent component of this is that it is running on a cron job daily. And then you're going to have an agent that's later on, we'll have it responding to the inbox.

13:16And this is this blurry line, right? Like what is an agent? People ask me this every sales call. And the answer to all of this is like, it's how I think about it personally is it's something that's doing a job to be done, right? So the job to be done here is finding leads and outbounding to those leads and then responding to those leads as they're asking questions or, again, driving them deeper into the pipeline. In reality, though, G, what is a marketing agent? It's code. It's maybe some thinking loop. And it's a live data stream. That is really how this functions. And the thing that you can make, you know, extend this further with is like what you're who you're outbounding to.

14:00You want it to basically do an ICP fits or a target customer segment fit. So before it even does this enrichment that we're about to do, you would be like, OK, agent, research this person and the company that they're at. How many employees do they have? All of these things. And then based off of what we find, if it fits this customer profile, like it's you're going to have the agent basically think through that, right? Using an LLM. If it fits this customer profile, then it goes into this enrichment. Then we're actually going to cold email them. So that's where that thinking loop could potentially be here as well.

14:34But really, the blurriness between all this, I think about it as software anymore, like to be transparent, like everybody. the thing a different way to say this is like everybody tried to put god in a box and give it access to a facebook ads account and we realized that is not the right way to do this whatsoever the right way to do this is like what was the human doing they were running this very specific process with like media buying they were researching ad creative angles they were making new ad creative they were testing the new ad creative and then they were like pruning the losers promoting the winners right like that is what the top media buyer does okay how do we go and make a piece of software that does that exact same thing.

15:12So when you hear agents like really just think software with potentially a thinking loop, like you shouldn't be paying a different like way to think about this. And this is something I'm obsessed with right now. You should not be paying Anthropic. You should not be paying Chad CPT to do an API call. You should be paying them to make the software that uses CPU to do the API call. Why are you paying this tax on tokens every time that you're trying to do this marketing activity that's ridiculous. Build the software that does the solution for you, not tokens burning every time that you're trying to do the action.

15:43So anyway, OK, so we've got these LinkedIn URLs. And what do we do with them now? So we're going to do what's called a waterfall enrichment. And so we're basically going to use these LinkedIn profiles to go and find the email addresses and then the phone numbers of these individuals. So how do we do this? The first thing that we're going to use in a tool stack is called get leads that I own. So this is a database of, it's basically they aggregate all these B2B contacts and you can access it via their API. The emails that we don't find within Git leads, we're then going to use something, or then get a waterfall down to something like Apollo.

16:20And then you can take this even further down into something like Origami. It's another tool that we have been using and experimenting with. Also their team is just doing awesome work. Like Finn and his whole team is incredible. So anyways, for Git leads, let's go back to our terminal right now. So again, this is me hands on keyboard doing the process to teach it to you. But everything that I'm doing right now, this is all just going to be code under the hood. And once it's code, I can deploy that into a cloud system. As long as it has the necessary data that it needs and the necessary access that it needs, it can go and run this operation autonomously.

16:56And then you're just they're basically jockeying the agent or modifying the system right so we're building a system here so from here um what i would then go to is say use the get leads api uh to uh find the emails and phone numbers and like dumb question yeah that's legit like you know like it's not great to get these people's emails it's like fully legit it is fully legit to get these emails. What you do with those, that's where things like from a compliance standpoint change. You can cold email technically in the United States. You can also add people to a email newsletter and be CAN spam compliant.

17:41There's like tons of like things. You basically have a checklist of things that you have to do. With this said, though, like this is one of these, like on the cold email side and the contact lookup, you're basically just buying data from a data broker, which is legal, right? That is accessible. So these companies, how they do this is they basically are buying all these lists and then aggregating them from all these different data brokers. That whole piece is a whole authoritative network. But this, like what we're talking about here, you know, on the spectrum of like black hat to white hat is pretty far on that white hat side.

18:15So cool. Yeah. I mean, I don't think anyone would, you know, mistake you for a lawyer also. So no, totally. Take this with a grain of salt, you know, and like there's also different compliance rules within the United States research. Exactly. Exactly. Within the United States versus like the EU has totally different compliance pieces. Exactly. But with that said, like the, you know, the finding of people's information and then like reaching out to them there, you can do this basically. it's kind of the high level but again this i we don't have time today to go into all the the specifics about like all this the finite details here so once i found this um each of these individuals and then the emails um from there what i'm then going to do is validate these emails so i would send it to a software called million verifier so million verifier um enables me to basically check if the email is good, risky or bad.

19:15You know, more technical terms would be like good, catch all, you know, risky, et cetera. The reasoning for this or the reason you want to do this is the emails that come out of these providers. So out of GitLeads, out of Apollo, out of Origami. I think they do some checks like a little bit deeper though. So I don't know much as much about this, but I know for sure with Git Leads and Apollo, it's like do the second verification. You're basically only wanting to send cold email to valid emails, because if you send to invalid emails, you're going to basically just run into deliverability problems.

19:54And probably right now you're asking yourself like, okay, cool. How do you send these cold emails? I'm going to show you that in a second. Bear with me. So we've done that waterfall enrichment. We found the emails. We found the phone numbers. And when I say a waterfall enrichment, what is happening here is we're taking that list of 50. And just to use this spreadsheet as an example. So say we have, you know, 50 that we have 50 LinkedIn URLs that we found. And on Git leads, maybe we only find, you know, 32 emails of those people. Right. Right. So that next cohort. So those other 18 that are left, I'm then going to send those 18 to Apollo.

20:34So of those 18 that I send, maybe I only find 10. And then those eight, that's when I would send that to something else like Prospero or Gami or these other enrichment tools. And the reasoning behind this is you're starting with what is the cheapest, most accurate, and then moving your way down into the more expensive validation tools. But from this, you can pull out basically from a list, you know, this is the way that you get to, you know, an 80 % fine rate, et cetera. And you can chain as many of these together as you want. It just, you know, depends on your budgets that are available, et cetera.

21:11And there's also aggregators of this, like Origami, as an example, like aggregates this waterfall for you. So you can just send them a LinkedIn profile and it's going to like waterfall through the options that are available. OK, so the other other thing to throw in here that will be valuable to your team is a software called Lead Magic. So this is one that we use a lot for like mobile phones in particular, but same strategy here. It's just basically, you know, another enrichment tool, but specifically on the phone number side, we've used a decent amount. So once I have that contact information, I now need to go and actually build this outbound motion.

21:45So on the cold email side first, how do we go and do this? We need to buy inboxes. So a couple different ways to do that. I can use a tool called Inbox Kit. I can use Instantly AI's pre-built emails that you can buy from them. or I can use a company called HyperTide, which is the partner that we use and we work with. They are some of the best info in my opinion. So when you're buying these emails, you're buying or you're really what you're doing is you're buying inboxes and domains that are burner domains that enable you to send cold email, not from your core domain. And the reason that you have to do this is so that you don't burn the deliverability of your core domain.

22:32So what do I mean by that? If you send from your exact domain and say we send 10 ,000 cold emails from that, we will nuke the deliverability of the business URL, the actual domain that we use to run our company. You don't want to do that. So typically what you want to do on the marketing side is have this separation. So you have domains that are for your cold email. You have domains that are for your email marketing. You have domains that are for your transactional marketing. So this would be our transactional email. So this would be email that's being sent directly from the product to a customer.

23:08Imagine like a password reset as an example. And then you want to have your business domain email, which is what your team actually uses to run the company, etc. etc. So with HyperTide, as an example, we have a partnership with them, so it's a little bit different. But we can send about 10 ,000 cold emails just to give kind of the cost breakdown here. We send about 10 ,000 cold emails with them for about$100 a month in infrastructure costs on the inbox side. It's about the same for a majority of these. So InboxKit, as an example, is very similar pricing. They also run like sales all the time. So look for those on the domain side.

23:46So you basically buy the domains and then you're paying a subscription to have these inboxes hosted for you. And then on Instantly side, you can typically get started with this$97 a month tier. So in total, you know, out the door to get going on this, the infrastructure costs can be in that range of about$100 to get started, or sorry, about$200 to get started for the sending software and then also the inboxes. So again, just to reiterate this, because I know I've talked through a lot. I'm pulling the lead list from LinkedIn. I'm finding these people. How do I know that these are people that I want to reach out to?

24:19It's because they're engaging with content that I know my target customer would be interested in. And so these people are basically hand raising that they are, would potentially be my target customer. Which is insane by the way, right? Which is insane. It's so hard to find this, right? Yeah. It's impossible to find this. And so the so I'm finding these people. I'm then doing a waterfall enrichment to find all of their contact information. And then once I have their contact information, I need to actually be able to send to them. So I'm getting inbox infrastructure to be able to send. And then I'm sending with a platform like instantly.

25:00And then on the LinkedIn DM side, what I'm sending with is a platform like HeyReach. Another one that we like is called BotDog. Both of these have APIs. But what these enable you to do is basically do LinkedIn DM campaigns from these accounts. I also know people that are just like using LinkedIn DM or sorry, LinkedIn InMail for this and seeing incredible success right now. using this strategy. So again, just throwing out all the strategies that are available. So this is how you can build this pipeline, right? Now, how do you actually like have an agent that is managing that inbox? So looking at Instantly as an example, they have an API and that API allows for you to monitor and manage the entire account.