Ep. 154 – STANFORD University Professor: Secrets to LINKEDIN Engagement! GUEST: Casey Hill [Growth @ Active Campaign]

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All right, we are here for do this, not that. And we have a guest. This dude's really smart. Okay? He just is.

His name is Casey Hill, and if you don't know Casey Hill, all right, he's with ActiveCampaign, and he's one of their senior growth marketers and all that. But the dude also teaches at Stanford. Like, you hear that? You're like, whoa, I got to sit up in my seat because I did not get into Stanford.

So this is my access to smartville here.

And what we're going to talk about is we're going to crush some information about LinkedIn, about your content on LinkedIn and what you can be doing to amplify your growth, your engagement, your pipeline, all of it. And Casey's got this thing which is like the 5 degrees of Kevin Bacon related to LinkedIn or something like that. It's amazing. Casey, you are here.

Welcome to do this, not that.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to get into it.

I don't think I have the Kevin Bacon part right, but that's all right. So before we get into the Kevin Bacon of LinkedIn, tell us a little bit more about you. How did you wind up doing what you're doing? And who is Casey?

Yeah, for sure. So I've been in the software space actually for about 13 years. My first company, Tech Validate, got acquired by SurveyMonkey.

And then I've kind of been working in software and in SaaS for a very long time. As part of that, I started to do a lot of work with small businesses. And so I started to get pretty deep into Consulting.

Then about four to five years ago, I started getting deeper into, like, institutional consulting. So working with like, Goldman's and McKinsey and other different firms who are looking to make series investments in different martech companies.

And I was kind of like a topical expert around SaaS pricing. SaaS churn like a lot of the go to market specifics there.

And then also started getting a little bit into teaching, first at UCSD and then most recently at Stanford Business 113 Modern Approaches to Creating Customer Demand. Kind of focusing on that practical side.

When they reached out, I said, I don't have interest in teaching a theory class, but if you want to walk through a class that is basically going to be like, each week we just get really deep into, like one week we did email, one week, did influencers, one week we did podcasting. Like, every week we would just get super tactical about a specific channel, what tools to use, how to think about it, and it was a blast.

We just wrapped it up like two weeks ago.

That is awesome. I like to take that class. That is so cool. All right, well, you're the exact right person to talk about all this then.

So let's get into LinkedIn and content. Because I think one of the fails is that people like, oh, I'm gonna post this. I got 7 likes now I'll post this. And there's no like, plan.

There's no thought about who, what, when, how, why. So what is this whole 5 degrees of content thingamabob?

Yeah, for sure. So I think that, yeah, like you kind of pointed out, oftentimes people start with the wrong approach, Right.

They're trying to regurgitate blog content, or they just don't have a specific goal in what type of content they build. So the first thing we want to think about is, like, what is the primary aim that you have if you're starting out?

If you don't have a lot of following and backing, you're typically trying to do two things. You're trying to build a following and you're trying to build an association. So when people think of Casey, they think of what associated topics.

I want them to think of organic growth. I want them to think of all these different areas that I'm talking about on a frequent basis. So here's how it goes.

First degree content is the most promotional. If I was to do a post that essentially said, how is ActiveCampaign different from Mailchimp or HubSpot? Right.

Some of our major competitors, it's like they have to have a very high degree of intent to be interested in that thing. If you don't have a huge following or base, you want to be extremely sparing with that type of content.

On the flip side, though, if you have a big following, oftentimes I find that those folks should be doing more of that type of Content to directly impact revenue numbers. So it's really about where your goal is and where your starting point is. Then you go to second degree content.

Secondary content is something that's very related to my product, but I just don't say the product. But it's also very specific. So if I said something like why predictive sending is so important, it's like that's a feature of my tool.

I'm not going to mention activecampaign, but it's still like a pretty narrow audience, right? I'm really drilled in on one target area. Then we go a step back, we get to third degree content.

So again, using just kind of activecampaign as an example here, this is where I might talk about the importance of building an owned asset. Why is email marketing important? I'm gonna talk about email marketing best practices.

Like now we're starting to get wider and that's normally what gets associated with kind of thought leadership content. If I was trying to say I, Casey, wanna be associated with email tactics or email strategy, I would be producing a high degree of that thought.

Third, that third degree content go one step back. Fourth degree content is stuff that is relevant to business folks, but it's broader.

So if I talk about organic growth and I do a little building in public, hey, we just did an experiment on Reddit. We generated 500,000 views and 45 demos. This is what we did.

That has nothing to do with my product, but it's relevant to my target audience of startups, of people that care about growth. And it can be very, very good for building following. Right? So if I'm trying to build a wider net, that can often be wider reaching.

Like, or if I talk about hiring, also not product related, but can be very good for building that trust layer. And then fifth degree is when you are really talking more about like personal stuff. Right?

Like you'll occasionally see someone who says, I, you know, I went abroad and I worked remote for three months in Italy and it changed my life. Right.

And so when you think about those five degrees of content, when you come in and you try to approach a platform like LinkedIn and build a footprint, having intentionality about where you're trying to be on that spectrum based on your goals. Am I trying to build following? Am I trying to directly convert people?

And depending on where you are, you should have a higher concentration of one or the other.

That is awesome. I love that. And so let me, let me, let me spin it back to you though. Okay, I'm listening. Let's say I got 400 connections.

And whatever sector I'm in, you know, I do want to ultimately be a thought leader, be regarded as a thought leader. Ultimately, I want to drive some, some business or activity for my company. But I got 400 connections.

Do you start out with number five, then four, then three? Is that like a spaceship blasting off or how do you grow that following out of the gate?

Yeah, for sure.

I would typically recommend that people start with third and fourth degree content off the bat because you want to build some topical authority and association. And I would say here's the biggest pieces. There's a couple different styles that can work. Okay.

Like if people want to have a couple like specific figures they can follow that illustrate some of these. Like there's someone named Adam Robinson. Adam Robinson does a lot of build in public.

So he basically just talks specifically about, like, here are the things that we, here's the things that I'm doing at my company. He's not talking a lot about his products specifically. So. So that's one approach.

And he's doing 2 million views per month and he's got 80,000 followers. So that was very effective, just sharing firsthand data. Then you have Rand Fishkin.

He focuses very much on a topical layer, so he's almost entirely talking about SEO and he's talking about audience research, which ties back very tightly to his product, SparkToro. So there's a couple different ways you can go and you can look at people like Rand or Adam Robinson or Chris Walker as like good blueprints.

But really at a core level, here's what I would tell people. Share real data. If you are not willing to share real data, I would just not Even look at LinkedIn like that. I would be, I'm literally that blunt.

Like, if you're going to stay high level, give people theory. Like in my space, this happened right when I'm trying to bring people on board.

People start out and they say things like, you need to have a nurturing email campaign. You need to run abandoned cart. It's like to me, someone telling someone to do abandoned cart is absolutely useless. Right.

What I want is we looked at 200,000 abandoned carts and we actually found that if you space it out by two days instead of by an hour, you actually increase conversion substantially. That statement is actually actionable. Someone could go change a behavior and get a better result.

And you justified it with an authority piece because you actually ran tests and you looked at real data.

That is the type of content that works and builds trust and builds following so if you had 400 connections, I would start third and fourth degree content and I would really try hard to share real data and get very, very specific.

I actually think you might be my brother from another mother because I could not, I couldn't agree with you more. It is so annoying to me when you see these generic posts. I don't know who they're for.

I mean they're literally for nobody and people hope and they don't understand why they don't get engagement and all this stuff. So I want to run down though the, the rapid fire, like five foot level stuff that you're like, this is the way you do it.

I post at this time of the day. I don't include a link. I do long form posts, like what is like secret sauce stuff that you don't tell your best friend about.

Literally how to really make it work on LinkedIn.

Yeah, for sure. So I can give people some specific tactical pieces. So number one is you kind of mentioned it, but yeah, don't include links, right?

Don't include links. And in fact don't comment to your own post as the first comment with a link. Right. Like they just clamp down on that.

What I've seen a lot of top people do and I've kind of experimented with having mixed results, but if you're going to include a CTA link, what top people like Lemkin and others in the industry do is they wait until there's like three or four comments and then they link. That strategy seems to at least have slightly better results.

But the two things I would avoid off the bat is like direct linking or having it as the first comment.

If you're going to do something like a video in the same way, like don't just Post in the YouTube, download the video that you've done and just paste the video directly in. So that's one piece.

The second thing is when you're thinking about the hooks I did in my class, I basically brought up every single post I'd done that got over 100,000 views and we just analyze them together. I was like, let's look through these 30 posts and let's have a conversation about like, what do they do?

Here's pretty much the blueprint on all of them. Number one is you tap into some sort of trust statement, right? Like why should someone pay attention to what you were saying? That piece is important.

The second thing is like piquing that interest. Like someone is scrolling through and how are you going to. It doesn't have to be Necessarily controversial.

But how are you going to tap into something where they're like, oh, like if you say, you know, something around, like, let's say transparent pricing. Like, I did a post that went fairly viral where I said, if I don't see your pricing, here's exactly what I'm going to do. So I don't just.

Don't just say the generic bit, which is like, if you don't have transparent pricing, that's bad.

Instead, what I said is I'm going to go to Google, I am going to search, and a Reddit thread from three years ago about your pricing is going to pop up. And all these people, I got a hundred comments where they were like, oh my God, I had no idea. I actually googled just my company and pricing.

And I saw, you know, xyz. And so it got people thinking, right? Like you're. It doesn't have to be necessarily controversial, but it's tapping into something that they feel.

I'll share another specific detail. I did a podcast where I had on Nick Mehta. He's the CEO of Gainsight. He sold his company for 1.1 billion.

I did a test where I posted the exact same post. One version I said, I just had Nick met on. He's incredibly insightful. And we talked about customer lifetime value, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Broke down all these different pieces. Exact same post. The only thing I changed in the hook was just had on Nick Meta, who sold his company for 1.1 billion to Vista Comma.

And then the exact same post. First post got 3,000, second post got 30,000. Right? So 10x difference.

And there was an authority piece about people don't know who Nick Meta is, right? Like outside of a very, very narrow few. But you justified why they should pay attention with some sort of authority piece.

In terms of short form versus long form, my content tends to be long form. A lot of the top personalities tend to have slightly longer form. But I also have seen short form content perform well.

I think really it's about the data side and it's about having like valuable, unique information. One other thing I'll note though, is if you go look at a lot of the top personalities, they get a ton of views. They post themselves a lot, right?

Like all those people I mentioned, Rand Fishkin, Adam Robinson, Chris Walker, like tons of talking head videos, right? And it's.

I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole, but it's like, if you look at YouTube, why does every YouTube thumbnail have a person looking at you, right? Like, go do a search right now and you'll see what I'm talking about. There's something to that human side you're trying to build.

So that's another thing that I would recommend is like start posting yourself, Post a picture of your face, post a picture of you talking through something that is going to pull in more attention as you're kind of going.

The other thing I would say is if you're just starting out, get into comments on high profile people in a related space and say things that are insightful. Don't come in and be like, great, great posts. Like, that's useless, especially with AI content. It's even more useless now.

But if you have real experience where you can expand on a point, provide a personal like, hey, actually we just went through that exact same thing and this is what happened with us. When I was starting out, I would have things on, you know, a popular CEO or a popular VC that would get 100 to 300 likes on a really nuanced thing.

And that actually helped drive followers as well. And it also helps you get exposed to like, what's working.

The more that you're engaging with those profiles, the more that you see the layout of that type of content. So we can drill down, but those were a couple areas.

Well, you know, something you said, I think is really important also is about turning the camera on yourself and posting yourself. Because a lot of times you'll hear people say, well, I'm uncomfortable with that. I don't like posting pictures of myself or videos, whatever.

And the reality is you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable or else get out, go out of business and get off LinkedIn. Because the more that AI takes over the planet, the more that humanity is going to be needed in everything that we do.

So I think that's a really important point. I'm curious though. I want to know if you're going to judge me.

So on my LinkedIn feed, I post probably, I don't know, four or five times a week, probably twice a week will be a really stupid meme sometimes that I make, usually that I make. And they're epically horrible, but. But they get a lot of traction. Are you seem like a smart guy. Are you anti meme? Would you look at my feed?

Be like, that guy's an idiot.

No, I'm not anti meme. I don't personally post that type of content. But I think it's all about affinity with your audience. Right.

I know a lot of very smart people who have a ton of deep expertise who also just have a light side. Right. And that personality comes across. And there's a lot of people on LinkedIn who feel like that, too.

And you build affinity with people that are like you. Right.

This is kind of getting into another side of LinkedIn, but there's kind of this, like, relationship, almost ABM side of LinkedIn that we haven't really talked about. We're talking very much on the thought leadership layer.

But there's people who have reached out for demos where there's not even like a direct starting need point. But I've seen so much of their content, and I like them as people. Where I'm like, this person is just seems like a really solid human.

I'll get on and I'll go through, like, I did this, you know, a year or two ago with a company called Gravy that was like, subscription capture. Like, they manually caught defaulted credit cards or something.

But this guy was, like, always posting and he was, like, hyping up his wife's business and he was sharing in public about how they were constructing. I was like, this just seems like a good guy. Like, yeah, I'm gonna hop on and just have a chat.

So there's an ABM side of it that I think can be incredibly valuable. So po, like, get your personality to come out across.

Like, the big thing is for you to not feel like you are an AI bottle churning out generic boilerplate content. So as long as you're not doing that, I think that that kind of stuff can totally work.

All right, good. Now I feel better about myself. All right, we're going to go into the last segment of the podcast, which we did not prep for. But that's the best part.

It's called, since you didn't ask, we talk about stuff that has nothing to do with LinkedIn or work or email, whatever. So I'm curious about something. So when. When I.

When I was, you know, getting to know Casey, I was like, this dude's, you know, doing a class at Stanford. I immediately judged you respect of, he's got to be really smart, intellectual dude. You see, Stanford, I think intellectual, whatever.

And so what I'm curious about is I'm a borderline, like, doofus. Like, I go home, I watch the Bachelor, the Real Housewives. I mean, epically horrible tv. Because I am a.

Now I'm curious, do you go home and watch, like, Masterpiece Theater, or are you also watching trash tv? Because I am judging you because you teach at Stanford.

So the answer is a little bit of both, right? So I Enjoy my Game of Thrones. I just finished Shogun as a TV series, which I thought was great. I definitely watch that kind of stuff.

I also though I'm a very weird personality in that I consume a massive amount of content in the B2B SaaS space, in the AI space. I am tuning in every single day to podcasts, to YouTube shows, all of those leading personalities. Like, I consume 10 to 20 hours of that per week.

So I'm like a weird. Like, I genuinely am like super into software. I think software can transform the world.

I'm super interested in the software space and so I also consume a lot of business oriented or tactical or kind of more like actionable style content, as well as my, my Game of Thrones and my Shoguns.

So would you know right now about the status of the relationship between Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck or is that off radar?

It's. It's off my radar.

If you were to ask me, is there an association between those two people, I probably could have told you yes, if it was like a true false. I have a layer of understanding that there's some relationship existing, but I couldn't go much deeper than that.

Okay, fair enough. That's good to know.

This is good because whenever there's a TV show that comes on, like, like Franklin came on on Apple or whatever about Benjamin Franklin, I'm going to reach out to you and be like, is this a good show or not? Because you will likely have checked out that show and I likely will have not checked out that show.

So you're now my resource for stuff I probably will not watch.

I literally just watched a show called Grant about the Civil War and profiling Ulysses S. Grant, like probably a month ago. So, yeah, I'm on it.

You're my guy. All right, listen, you just started a new podcast. You have a lot going on.

Tell everybody how to consume everything you're doing because everyone wants to follow you. And we're going to put this all in the show notes as well.

Yeah, for sure. So I think LinkedIn is the major spot that I post a lot of organic growth content.

So if you're looking to, like, learn from experiments, learn what I've kind of done at different stages of growth, go to LinkedIn. Casey Hill, the one that works at ActiveCampaign, that is like the number one best spot to follow.

Another thing that I think is kind of cool is I tried an experiment with a little bit of a new format, which is a debate podcast. So bring people on and have them kind of talk through different issues with opposing views.

So just launched Angles and Insight, which is two billionaire tech icons duking it out about some big issues like remote work and what is actually hype versus reality in the AI space and stuff like that. So if that kind of those topics are interesting, definitely check that out as well.

All right, we're going to throw this all in the show. Notes, everyone. Connect Follow Check out Casey's podcast. He's an awesome dude. Kasey, thanks for being here, man.

Yeah, of course. This is great. Thank you. All right, later. You did it.

You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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