3 Growth Hacks You’ve Never Tried 📈 Jay’s SCOOP | Ep. 345

Jay Schwedelson: We are back for do this, not that podcast presented by Marigold. And one of the reasons I love marketing is that there's all these little tricks and tactics and things. It's like this never ending, uh, supply of things that you could be trying, that you've never heard of before. And when you hear them, you're like, really?

Jay Schwedelson: And then you go and try it and it works, and you're like, well, that's awesome. And that's marketing. There's never just one thing that you're gonna do, that's just gonna be it. So I have three tactics that you probably have never tried, never heard of, that are kind of awesome. Take three seconds to try cost nothing, and I wanna rip through them.

Jay Schwedelson: So two of them are about social media and then one's about email. So the first one is related to LinkedIn. Okay? So you're like, oh, you know, I wanna get more engagement on LinkedIn. What could I do? Is there any little trick, any little hack? Well, I'm gonna give you one that works really, really well. And it's this idea of waking.

Jay Schwedelson: The dead. Have you ever gone back intentionally to old posts of yours on LinkedIn and commented on your own old posts? You're like, what? Why would they do that? Now if you go back and you actually comment on any of one of your old posts, uh, it actually tells LinkedIn, Hey, this thing's active again. right And it starts to circulate a little bit more, but that's not exactly what you want to do.

Jay Schwedelson: If you actually go back to posts that are from three months old and older, you can go back to a year, two years, whatever, and you go back to those posts and you comment on those posts again, first off, people that are connected to you are going to get a little notification that, Hey, you commented on that.

Jay Schwedelson: In addition to that, if you tag somebody. In that comment, they're gonna get notified about that post. They're gonna go back to that post. That post is gonna get recirculated again. And then what you really wanna do, and you wanna be very intentional about it, is you can go back to these old posts. I'm gonna give you the stat as to why you should and comment on your posts.

Jay Schwedelson: Maybe it's from six months ago and you write You know this is still true, or this aged poorly, or you know, we're doing this differently now. And then tag a few people in it, right? And then here's what we found. This is so wild. We ran this test across 50 different LinkedIn accounts, uh, where we commented and the person commented, or the company page commented on posts that were from 3 months to 12 months old and it increased profile views and overall account engagement.

Jay Schwedelson: By 20% for personal accounts and 25% for company page accounts. And all you did was go back to your old content and recomment on it. This takes no time, it costs you nothing. It's super easy. Try it with 3 old posts today, uh, and wait 24 hours and see what happens. You're going to see. A little bit more profile engagement.

Jay Schwedelson: You're gonna see more overall engagement with your overall content, and this is a great thing to kind of put in your arsenal and do as an ongoing, uh, thing. Now let's talk about the Instagram hack before we get into this email tip. So on Instagram. Something that's really under the radar that you can do is sharing your own reels.

Jay Schwedelson: What? What are we talking about? So when you put out a reel, which is the best form of content on Instagram, easily, and again, this applies just similar to LinkedIn, that's not just for your personal page, that's for your company page or your personal page. This applies the same way on Instagram. It could be your company page or your personal page when you put out that reel.

Jay Schwedelson: What you wanna do is you wanna share that reel within the first 30 minutes. That's key to 20 different people. And when you share it to 20 different people, what you can't do is just say, share, share, share, share, share. And with no comment in it, you need to share it. Each with a unique comment when you share it.

Jay Schwedelson: 'cause if it's not unique, it's gonna look like it's a bot activity and you share that reel, you know, with whatever you wanna say. I thought you'd love this one. This one's so cool. This one's on point for you. The one to make you aware of this one. Whatever it is, share it 20 times. When you do that, what you're doing is a few things.

Jay Schwedelson: First off, you're making some micro ambassadors for your content, for your brand. People you know will feel like they wanna engage with it. They see that little red dot all this stuff, but not only does it do that, it actually increases your overall engagement significantly. Okay. So what we found in World Data Research found that by doing this with reels, it increases the overall engagement on your post by over 40% versus not doing it.

Jay Schwedelson: So you wanna share. To 20 different people each with a custom note. You don't automate this. You don't get some sort of piece of software to do it, and you change the comment every time you share it. Okay? And it does incredibly well. It kind of gets to that little boost right outta the gate. And by the way, I.

Jay Schwedelson: 100%. Instagram does not view this as a negative. This is not something they're gonna ding your account for. This is not view as you being a spam or anything like that. They love it because you are helping to circulate the content on their platform. And the key thing is that you are not just, uh, spamming everybody with the same message.

Jay Schwedelson: So 20 people's key. You don't want to go more than that. This last tip is kind of bonkers. So, um, this is wild. We didn't mean to, to trip into this tip. It's a subject line tip. And the tip basically is, and we messed it up for our client, and then we went deeper and tested it. We were doing, the client wanted to do for our agency, uh, personalization in the, in the subject line, first name personalization, which by the way, isn't great anymore.

Jay Schwedelson: You know, J comma, whatever. But they wanted to do it fine. Who cares? Fine. But we sent it out by accident. Um, we screwed up and all we did was put the person's first name. So the subject line literally said for, you know, zillions of emails we sent out. It just said, you know, Jay, that was it in the subject line, or Mike, I.

Jay Schwedelson: That was it in the subject line. It was just the person's first name, no other words. And the open rate was sky high. We're like, wait a minute, what's going on here? So then we decided to go further and said, we gotta run a test. So we ran the test 15 more times with consumer clients and then 15 times with business clients and saying, okay, what's just personalized with first name?

Jay Schwedelson: That's it. We wanna see what that does. And this is not a test you wanna do all the time. It also won't work. But if you've never tried this, I don't care how boring your B2B brand is, or what consumer category in try just doing the person's first name, that is it. On average, we saw it lift open rates for our emails over 25% for that tactic.

Jay Schwedelson: I never would've tested that. So that's a super random one to try, is just first name in the subject line. Alright, before we get into, since you didn't ask, which is the totally. Ridiculous portion of this podcast. I wanted to let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Emma. Which is my email sending platform from Marigold.

Jay Schwedelson: Emma's awesome. And just for listeners of do this, not that they're offering you all the first three months at 50% off, come on, you don't like your email platform. If you go to J schon.com/emma, that's j schwa.com/ema. You can get right here right now, 50% off the first three months on the Send Platform that I use to send out my emails.

Jay Schwedelson: It is. Incredible. All right. Let's get into, since you didn't ask. So my, uh, my son just graduated high school and, uh, before he heads off to college, him and a bunch of friends, they just, uh, left on a trip and he's sharing, uh, they're gonna something, hotel, whatever, and they're sharing him and a, like four of his friends are sharing a hotel room and, uh, they're gonna have a great time, whatever.

Jay Schwedelson: But it got me, it got me thinking about the most ridiculous thing that happened to me. I don't know why I share these stories, but this one was kind of funny. So when I was. In college. I went on spring break to Cancun and it was out of control. I mean, straight up it was. Bonkers, but I'll never forget. So one night everybody went out, like everybody, it was a zillion.

Jay Schwedelson: People went out and we all lost each other while we were out. And when we came back to the hotel that we were staying in, I was, I was alone. I didn't know where anybody was. Whatever. I don't know. It had to be three in the morning. I don't even know what time it was. And I, you know, I went out, okay. I'm not gonna lie, I had a good time.

Jay Schwedelson: And when I went out, I'm like, oh, I gotta get back to my hotel room. So I find, and the whole hotel was filled with a bunch of college spring breakers. It was out of control. So I get to my hotel room and I get there and the door to my room was like slightly propped open. I have no idea why. And the lights were all off 'cause everyone was already sleeping.

Jay Schwedelson: It was like, forget it. It was so late. And so I go in the room and everyone's like sharing beds and whatever, and I climb into bed and I just pass out, I don't know how long, maybe a half an hour, maybe an hour later. I have no idea. Then all of a sudden I hear a click and the lights turn on in the room and I'm like, what's going on?

Jay Schwedelson: And I hear this person, it was this woman screaming in my face. I was in the wrong room. I was one floor lower than where my room was. And she's screaming in my face, she goes. What are you, who are you? I go, I don't know. I don't know where I'm, what's going on? And she's like, cursing at me. Everyone's like throwing things at me.

Jay Schwedelson: Get outta here. Get, I had no, I mean, to be woken up from asleep like that, I was so confused. I was in the wrong room. I was one floor off, and these people thought I was like outta my mind and trying to break into their room. I'm like, no. I'm like, I'm a regular person. I'm just in the wrong room and I'm an idiot.

Jay Schwedelson: I'm a straight up idiot. I shouldn't be in here. Oh my God. I'll never forget that moment because I was like, what? What happened? I was so confused. So. That's, um, that's really the level of intelligence of the person that you're listening to right now on this podcast. Wow. I don't even know. I, I don't even know what to say about that.

Jay Schwedelson: Listen, I appreciate you all and, um, you should check out, by the way, um, a fantastic, it's coming up in, in just a few days. June, uh, what is it, fifth and sixth? It's free, it's virtual. I will be there. It is the world's largest event about events. If you put on webinars, if you put in in-person events, um, if you go to events, if you do exhibit hall sales, if you do public speaking, care about public speaking, anything, event task.com.

Jay Schwedelson: We have only about a hundred virtual seats left. We have 11,000 people are gonna be there. You should go and register now. A fantastic.com. Uh, see you there later.