Pick 'n' Mix Marketing (Halloween Edition)

Ever walked into a room and realised you’re in the wrong crowd?
That’s exactly what happened to Victoria at a Halloween event (a totally embarrassing situation) and it sparked a big lesson for LinkedIn and business growth.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• What to do if your LinkedIn feed feels full of the wrong people
• How to quickly spot who’s worth connecting with (and who’s not)
• Why the right crowd means more leads, referrals, and real conversations
• A simple daily habit to start building a network that works for you

If you’re tired of showing up online but not getting traction, this one’s for you.

Grab free templates, checklists and guides at allstarmarketingclub.com/resources - everything you need to market smarter, not harder.

About Victoria: Marketing Coach & Trainer Victoria Vickery serves up marketing advice with fewer buzzwords, more belly laughs, and stories you’ll never un-hear... because memorable marketing starts with memorable lessons.

For More Tales, Tips & Tangents: @victoriav1ckery

Transcript

So off I went to the Halloween party dressed in my sexy little witch outfit, only to walk in the door and be met by a room full of crazy toddlers all dressed up for the child's Halloween party bouncing off the walls thanks to the amount of pick and mix that was on offer. And that, my friends, is what is going to happen unless you really think about your audience. When you're using Link or any other social media platform for that matter, you really have to make sure that you are in front of the right people. Welcome to what's that Got to Do With Marketing? Where we start with a story you did not see coming. It might be fun, could be funny, or even a little bit frantic. But in the end it will all make sense, leaving you with a takeaway a to do or a transformational way forward. And I'm your host, Victoria. And you my friend, are here for unlikely lessons and unforgettable marketing advice. Just for small B2B expert led business owners. Let's get into it. This episode is called Pick and Mix Marketing. Now, it all starts here. It was Mr. V's birthday. We'd not long been together. So I decided I would treat him to a three night trip too. Dun dun dun. Center Parks. Oh yes, good old Center Parks. So I start arranging it, I go online and I think what can we book while we're at Centre Parks? Have a jolly nice time. And I see it there in all its glory. A Halloween party. Sign me up. I am ready to get into my witch's costume and shimmy along to the party and have a jolly nice time. And that's what we do. So I tell Mr. V to pack his best Halloween outfit because we are going off to a party. So that's what we do. We get ready. I have dressed as a little sexy witch and we walk from our little lodge at Centre Parks to the big venue that is hosting the party. Only to open the door and inside is a whole bunch of of children, little toddlers running around and they are basically off their tits on sweets is the only way I can describe it. Lots of screaming going on, lots of kids dancing around to the music. Not the sort of music I was expecting it to be. It's much more kind of nursery rhyme based than I would have liked. But we have to move on. We've booked this thing, we've got dinner here. So we're shown to our table. Now imagine that everyone else that is in this venue, families are all sat around large round tables with white tablecloths with all of Their kids dotted around them. Now, as we are just two adults on our own, they have done the right thing. They have not sat us on a table full of children, bearing in mind we didn't have kids at this point. But what they've done instead is these round tables split into four. So imagine that you've got a quarter of a round table and that quarter of a round table is dotted in between all of the large round tables in the room. So there we are on our little tiny table for two with the two flat edges, one chair each side, and we are sat there looking at each other thinking, what the hell is going on here? But we make the most of it. So we get up, we go to the buffet table to be greeted by bowls and bowls of jelly sweets, little jelly snakes, bags of what sits and all of these different foods that have been kind of carved up into Halloween related foods. Red sauces to, you know, as blood and that kind of thing. We find something, I think it was something like a hot dog, something of that nature. And we go back to our table and we sit down. They're serving alcohol, luckily, so we've got our glass of wine and we look across and at the other side of the room there is another quarter table with another couple that have done exactly the same thing as us. So we kind of give them a yeah, you've done it too, kind of wave and we get out of there as soon as we possibly can and back to our lodge to carry on enjoying our evening. Now what has this got to do with marketing? Well, I want to talk about LinkedIn today, because with LinkedIn, this is exactly what happens. If you show up and you are not connected to and you are not building relationships with the right people, you will be in the same situation as we were just hanging out with a bunch of people that you really don't want to be around that have got no interest in you. You've got no interested in interest in them. And there's nothing good that is going to come out of that for anyone. So I want you to have a little think about LinkedIn like a Halloween party. So let's imagine that you want to go into a Halloween party and you want to be around a whole bunch of sexy witches. Now if you don't have sexy witches in your audience, you've got to go and get them. You've got to go and grab hold of them and bring them in. So instead of accepting that right now your LinkedIn profile and your connections are filled with a bunch of pumpkins that you really don't want to be there with. Now, let me give you an example of that. It might be that you left corporate life and you are still connected to a lot of the people that are from an old business that you no longer really do much work in. That's going to mean you've got loads of pumpkins in the mix and you're not just around your witches. It could be that every time someone tries to connect with you, you go, yeah, I'll let them in. And you've not really thought about what kind of role they actually have in your business life. So you've let more pumpkins in and you can continue to do this, letting the wrong people in. So instead of that, the first job when it comes to LinkedIn is to make sure that you've got the right audience. So there's two ways of doing that. You can either A, get connected to a whole bunch more witches, so go out there, find your witches, connect with them, or B, you can go and disconnect with all your pumpkins. What I would say is there's no real need to do that. What you want to do instead is just drown out the pumpkins with the witches. So just put more witches in, more and more witches, and that's going to really do a good job for you. Because what we're then showing LinkedIn is that this is the person I want to be connected to, this is what I'm all about. And then what we're going to find in turn is these are going to be the people that start basically getting engaged with your stuff. Because if you've got the wrong audience, you are not going to get that engagement, you are not going to find leads, you are not going to get sales, because you're basically just talking into a room full of the wrong people. So that's really important. Now, don't be afraid to let other people into your network that are not directly your ideal customer, but they have some kind of value to bring. So let's call them our vampires. So we. I love a vampire, love vampire stuff. So we're going to bring their vampires in. Even though some people would not want them there, we do. So we're bringing in some vampires now, vampires. They might be, for example, people that are your suppliers. They might be people that, by being connected to them, they serve another purpose. So, you know, they, they like your brand, or they might be people that can refer to you out of their network. So we do want some vampires in there, but we don't want them to kind of be the biggest community. We still want our witches to be the biggest community. Can you see where I'm going here with this story around Halloween? So have a little think right now whether or not you've got the right audience in place, and that is job number one, is to make sure that you have curated the right audience for your business that will then serve it by showing LinkedIn that, hey, this is who I am, this is who I connect to, this is what I say, this is who I do business with, this is what I stand for. This is what my brand is all about. Now we're talking business. Now we're getting into the right realms where we can start making some meaningful, meaningful actions on LinkedIn. So what I'm going to tell you next is how you can spend 15 minutes a day in LinkedIn, because anything in social media, it shouldn't drain your time. And if you've been thinking, you know, day in, day out, what am I supposed to put out in social media? How am I supposed to spend the time? I feel like I spend hours and hours and hours and I get no return from it because that's frustrating, isn't it? So I'm going to tell you now how to spend 15 minutes a day in social media. And if you're thinking, Victoria, I don't even manage to spend 15 minutes a week in social media. So how am I going to possibly fit this in every single day? Well, let me give you permission. I'm giving you permission to spend 15 minutes however many days a week you can fit it in to start with. So if that means you do it twice a week for 15 minutes a day, excellent. That means it's going to be maybe half an hour more that week that you than you've spent in it previously. If you're currently spending two sessions in LinkedIn per week, let's up it to three. So just think about moving on from where you are now and doing a little bit more. Now, when you do get in there and you spend your 15 minutes, here's what I want you to do. And it is not just writing a post and sending it out there, because that's keeping the lights on at best. So what I'm going to show you or tell you now is the key actions that you can take in that amount of time that I've given you that will start making more of an impact and building your visibility and building your presence and making you stand out, because that's what we want. So the first thing is, number one, I want you to go and connect with your right audience. Spend two or three minutes of your 15 minutes just going out using the search functionality in LinkedIn, because it's bloody good. Use that to find the right people to connect to. First of all, use all of those searches. So search by job title, search by location, search by profession, all of that's there for the taking. You don't need to be on a paid version of LinkedIn to do that. Yes, there are caps in terms of volumes that you can connect with. But let's get started. Let's use what's free first of all, before you upgrade to a paid account, because I want you to get it working first of all before you start putting money into it. So that's the first thing is go and connect with some people, two or three people even. Because if you were to connect with two people every day, that's 10 at the end of the week. If you do it daily, that's 40 or more in a month. That's a lot of people. Especially if it's the right people. And once you're connected to them, what happens? They start seeing your content and now they're starting to build up this picture of you, a picture of your expertise, a picture of the value, value that you bring to them, a picture of what you stand for. They're building that know like and trust factor because they're seeing you all the time. So don't put this activity off. Make sure you are connecting regularly with the right audience and drowning out anyone that is a pumpkin to you. Okay, so let's just. I just want to make it that even into a bigger point. If you've got 40 people per month now imagine after three months, we've got 120 now and if you do that over a year, you do the maths, it adds up to a lot of people. And even if you can then scale that a little bit more. So I teach lots of strategies that help you to scale even more than that. But this is just about getting your lights turned on, getting people to know you're there. So just start with this very, very small move. The second thing I want you to do is to stop being socially selfish. Now, I know you don't mean to do it, but often when people are posting in LinkedIn or any other social media platform, they post when they need some love, they post when they need to make some sales, they post when they need something from other people. Have any one of you got those relatives where they only contact you when they want Something. How does that feel? It doesn't feel great, does it? So you think, well, they only ever get in contact with me when they need something, so, you know, they don't talk to me any other time, so why would I bother to help them Now? Have a little think about that. Instead of turning up and posting something on LinkedIn when you want something, for example, hey, we're attending this event. Come and see us on our stand, or we are selling this thing at the moment. Click here and come over and get some more information. When you're always doing that, it turns your audience away from you. So instead of doing that, what I want you to do in your 15 minutes is spend two or three minutes now going out to the people that you're connected with. Have a look through your feed. What meaningful comments can you go and put on other people's posts so that it's not just always about you, it's about giving back to them as well. And mark my words, people absolutely love getting comments on their posts. So when you do it, your name is remembered, you will be remembered. When you react to the posts, you will be remembered, especially if it's something that's not getting a lot of engagement. So that's another thing that you should do, really go out there engaging with other people's posts. And when I say engage, number one, don't just like it, love it, or support it or find it funny or any of those other reactions that are there. Don't just like it because that's an easy action. Let's make it a little bit more fulfilling for that person. And instead of saying, great post, or oh, good viewpoint, no, put something meaningful on there because it helps with the algorithms for that person. LinkedIn, it knows when somebody's just kind of doing it for, you know, a couple of words just doesn't really cut it. The algorithms are at play. So I want you to put something more meaningful. Really think about your response. It's really key that you do that if you are going to go to the efforts of putting content on someone else's post. Okay, so we've used about six minutes of our time now. The next thing I want you to do is craft your own post. So what can you write about? Think about the unpolished version of you. Think about your personality. Think about what's happened in your week. Think about questions that you're always asked. So, for example, you might start with doing a post on. I was asked this by a client this week and my response was this, okay, so you Might think about something you've been asked that week, you might do something. For example, this week I did a piece of work that involved X, Y and Z. If you are wondering how to do this, here's some top tips for you. All right, so you are showing your expertise by answering questions and giving top tips. You might have been somewhere this week and you can show a picture behind the scenes or a little video clip from behind the scenes. Again, lovely content to share, but what I'd make sure is when you do your post, always make it about the reader. No one wants to know that, yeah, I had a really great client meeting this week and really had a great time or went for dinner with this one this week. No one wants to hear that. So when you're writing it, make it about your audience. So you could say, for example, had a great meal out with this client this week we got into a discussion about this particular subject. What's your take on that? So you're going to ask your audience, you're going to put it back into your audience's corner so they can go, what is my take on that? So you're involving them in the conversation. So we don't want it just to be about you, you know, just splurting out whatever it is you want to say, invite them into the conversation. That's quite a key part of what you do out in social media. So Q&As, top tips behind the scenes, all of that kind of content's really, really good. You might have things that you can share about wins that your clients have got. And again, it might be that subliminally you're telling the story of, hey, look how great I am, I'm helping my customers to succeed. But actually, what's sitting behind that is, hmm, that person could help me too. So you might give a little bit of content away on, you know, two things that you can do to get this same success. They're recognizing you then as the expert. So that's job number three. So recapping so far, we're connecting with people, we are commenting on other people's posts with some really great content or some really good thinking, and we're putting our own posts out there. And the next thing I want you to have a little think about is how can you then engage with people you're already connected to, Drop them a direct message. All the best stuff goes on behind the scenes in LinkedIn. It's not happening necessarily in the feed. That's how we get people to take note of us. And that's how we get people to kind of, you know, continue to see us and build relationships with us. But the good stuff goes on behind the scenes. So have a little think about what you can do there with direct messaging. And my advice is have three different levels of direct messaging. Number one is just conversation starters. So you're just trying to get a conversation going again, not all about you, about them. So, you know, ask them some questions, get the conversation flowing. Your middle tier, which is kind of just like, how can you get things moving without just relying on a bit of conversation? So that tier would be something along the lines of, hey, I've got this free guide. I thought of you because I know that in your industry this is going on right now and therefore this guide helps you to actually tackle that. So that's your kind of mid tier. And then try also having your top tier message that is much more direct. So it might be, hey, I do this. Is this something you're looking at right now? If so, would you be open to having a conversation with me? So you've got three different tiers of messaging. Try them all out, see what one works best for you. Don't be afraid to do it. So that's going to take you your 15 minutes or so in LinkedIn. Let's have a conversation now, very briefly about AI, because AI is absolutely phenomenal. What are you using? Are you using Chat? GPT? Are you using Claude? Are you using Gemini? Are you using Copilot? So what are you using to help you with content creation? Right now, I'm a fan of AI because I don't think it's doing the work for you. I don't think that it's, you know, taking everything away from your own knowledge and expertise. Think it's the rocket fuel that gets you there faster. However, I have seen so much rubbish content directly in those social media channels, which is a blatant copy and paste job from the AI generator. They've put it into LinkedIn, not edited, edited it at all. And it is mediocre at best. And the telltale signs, I'm sorry to say it, because I used to use emojis and all sorts of things in my own content before AI. But when you see emojis these days and you see those M dashes that sit in the content, it's a dead giveaway that you've used an AI generator. So I really want you to think about taking some of that stuff out and just making the content way more you. My personal opinion is, especially in LinkedIn, it's not the home of using AI. I think the authenticity really pays off. So if you've got the time to craft something yourself, I would much rather you do that. And if you can't, you have to get really, really good at prompt writing. You have to be like expert prompt engineer, because you've got to be putting so much into the prompt writing so that the output of that becomes you. It's your voice, your personality, your views, your beliefs. Okay, so you really need to get good at writing there. Custom GPTs and all that jazz, that's a whole other topic. We'll cover that at some point in the future, I'm sure. But right now, I just want you to think, first of all about using some of my tips today. I'll repeat them one more time for clarity. So, number one, you have to be connected to the right people. Go away, pumpkins. Welcome, witches, and a few of you vampires. Secondly, I want you to have then a little think about commenting on other people's posts. Then it's crafting your own meaningful post, pulling the reader in and making them think. Yes, I want to be part of this conversation. Number four, dms and underpinning it all, ladies and gents, AI, be cautious. So coming back to the whole story here and wrapping it up, if you don't want to be in a room full of toddlers that are feasting on pick a mix. And you want to be in the right room with the right people, the ones that are going to grow your business, you've got to put the effort in. However, we're only talking 15 minutes a day, a few days a week, and I know you can do that. Now, as always, I'm not leaving you to your own devices. I am here to help you. So over you go, allstarmarketingclub.com forward/resources. Go and grab my 15 minutes of LinkedIn checklist. It's going to give you that guidance and that reminder because you might be driving right now, you might not have a notebook and you're going to be thinking, well, how am I going to remember all of this? So just go over to resources on the website, grab that checklist. Great little reminder for you and I'll see you here for another episode of what's that Got to Do with Marketing? | 00:00:00.720 - 00:22:35.010