Motion logo on a black background. The logo is three overlapping purple squares next to the word "Motion" in white.
Evan Lee: everybody, I I'm pumped for this one. Like this is going to be so much fun. I've had the pleasure of knowing, starting with Nick, I've known Nick for a while now. And for those who don't know because it is a B2B marketing audience, he's one of the world's leading authorities in D2C advertising. He spends over 100 mil on Facebook ads alone and as the founder of Structured Social, Nick famously helped PupSocks generate 13 mil in just 32 days. And for Diff Eyewear achieved 255 K in 24 hours. So this is why we talk about D2C knows what's going on. So everybody, welcome Nick to the stage, y'all.
A video call with three participants. Top left is Evan Lee, an Asian man with short black hair, wearing a white sweater. Top right is Nick Shackelford, a white man with a beard, wearing a yellow sweater and an orange baseball cap. Bottom center is Dave Gerhardt, a bald white man, wearing a light blue polo shirt.
Nick Shackelford: What's up Evan? What's up guys? Good to see you. Good energy so far. It's some people are coming in all over the place and so it's it's I get to play a little bit of a devil's advocate here because I'm definitely outnumbered compared to what I'm seeing on the stage and so Dave and I, we'll we'll have some interesting takes, I will tell you that much.
Evan Lee: And you have a super cool experience too where you actually have a lot of exposure to B2B SaaS. So whether you like your experience is in D2C, but you see the exposure and like work with a lot of B2B brands. So I think it'd be super cool.
Nick Shackelford: Cool. Thanks man.
Evan Lee: And then everyone, I don't think I need to introduce Dave, but I really want to because this is super fun for me. So think of it as selfish. But everyone, Dave run Exit Five, you already know him. He's probably your favorite guy on the internet at this point. But Exit Five is the number one community for B2B marketers. He's the former VP of marketing and CMO with over 10 years of experience in B2B SaaS. And he's worked at Drift and Privy to name a couple of them. Plus, he's authored a book called Founder Brand. So please go check that out. You know we have to plug, especially when we have guests on the stage. So welcome Dave to the stage as well.
Dave Gerhardt: Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm I'm uh excited to be here. I think you need to revisit your If I'm on the top of your favorite list, we got to send me send me a message. I'll send you three other people you should follow, but I appreciate the kind the kind the kind words and uh I'm always excited to chop it up and talk about marketing with people who, you know, who get it and uh want to do great stuff. And like you said, for some reason, B2B lags uh lags behind. Uh I don't think that needs to be the case and if anything, you can you can make the case that we should be spending more and investing more because the deal size is bigger, because the sales cycle is more complex. I did an interview with a CMO last week and she was like, people don't understand there needs to be more emotion in B2B. There needs to be more creative in B2B because it is such an emotional purchase. You're going to spend $100,000 on a piece of software or something for your business. That is much more emotional than me scrolling through Instagram and deciding to buy a new hoodie. So I think this is a great topic and I'm I'm happy to be here.
Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. Okay, this is a perfect segue to our first question here. So I want to set the stage of like when we talk about D2C being at the forefront of it. So Nick, this one's for you. But I think like there's probably a lot of other context you can fit into the one this one. But as a D2C guy, what's the first thing you would do at a B2B company if you stepped into the reins or you started holding the reins?
Nick Shackelford: Well, I think the biggest issue that we deal with is we don't have the margins that B2B has. So we're looking for any incremental win, which is usually creative iteration and speed of output. So we'll say like on on a handful of the brands that we have or manage, like we're trying to get 30 to 60 pieces of creative a week out. That's that's because we're trying to find just a little bit more improvement on any of the sales side and like look, our our usual consideration period is even if it's a more expensive 100, $300 product, it's still going to be maybe 48 hours, 72 hours the max. So that that ability to get instant feedback on some of these platforms, I mean, we we've been using Motion for quite a while on the the D2C side because we have to. Like we don't have the opportunity to kind of let it spend 1,000, 2,000, $3,000, which might be what it would be for CAC for a B2B side of things, but it is very important that we're getting speed, volume and that like creative start iteration and testing phase up and running. And I think that's that's something that I think on the B2B side is you do have to kind of let it run a little bit longer and you have those earlier metrics to make decisions around. And I'm super curious on like are the leading indicators the sign up? Are are we pushing to webinar first? And it's been interesting for me to dive deeper on the B2B side of things.
Dave Gerhardt: There's a piece of that that I that I think B2B marketers should take, which is Nick talked about 30 to 40 pieces of creative. Man, if I go to my LinkedIn, all the ads that I see for B2B companies look like ads to me. They look like digital business cards. They look like somebody went into Canva and just stuck to exact the exact brand guidelines and made like the equivalent of an email signature that is an ad. And what I think is so amazing, like as somebody who just studies consumers and studies people, um why do we make ads that look so much like ads? You go to the D2C side and you see humans, you see creative, you see different colors. Like we we have this for some reason because it's B2B, we are more obsessed with the ads being on brand and on brand meaning like has our colors and um there's a great I I don't know if um maybe this is the right crowd for this, but there's a great old school copywriting book from Gary Halbert uh called The Boron Letters. And Nick just lit up because he's like, okay, I like this guy. Yeah, he's like, all right. So in the Boron letters, um Gary Halbert's talking about how he he called he calls it like the A pile and the B pile. And it's like you come home from work, you go to your mailbox, you get the mail, you pull out this stack of mail and you have a uh you know, stack of, you know, flyers from Home Depot and Lowes and Bed Bath and Beyond and you sort through all that nonsense. And then there's this one white envelope with handwriting on it that looks like it's personally addressed to you and it's a note because you know, every year on your birthday, your grandma sends you $10 in the mail, right? Whenever we grab that pile of mail, that's the first thing we do. We go we go immediately to that one. We put all the catalogs and flyers and stuff to the side and we go to that handwritten note and we open that one first, right? So I want to think about as a marketer, how can I get my stuff in the A pile? And so I don't want to design my creative. I don't want my ads to come off instantly that that trigger that we get in our brain that this is an ad. I want to get in the A pile. I want to get someone to open that. I think people obsess too much over the creative being on brand versus what is the goal? The goal is to get you to stop scrolling in your feed, to take the next action and to to take the next step. That should be the goal, not to have like the perfectly, you know, blue and purple design motion looking ads.
Nick Shackelford: The crazy thing about this is like most of the people that are jumping on calls or booking it booking calls or demos with the sales teams are still a consumer of X, are still a consumer of Tik Tok, are still a consumer of put in any platform you want to be like it's still a human on the other side that's needing to justify why I'm taking this call for the potential investment of thousands of dollars over a year span or however long the contract's going to be. But those elements like the my favorite question we like to ask is like, what was the last ad you actually remembered? Right now, it's probably Jaguar because that's everybody that's what everyone's talking about. That's what all the feeds are going to be filled with. And you forget that the speed of forgetfulness, especially with what's going on in the world right now, especially what we just went through on the election and now we go into the end of the year, like they're not going to know what just hit them. And so the more volume and the ability to read the volume is actually more important than the is the logo off? Is did they say that incorrectly? Is it not as perfect? And it's maybe maybe Dave, it's because like they're the investment is so much that they feel that the ad has to look at a certain quality or a certain value. Do you think that could be it?
Dave Gerhardt: Yeah, there's a perception of like, oh my gosh, we're going to spend, you know, X dollars on this and so we have to have it perform. But then I I would just push people to think about like, think about like Nick in that world, like it it is a volume like I I think for some reason it's more about like the perfect creative than it is about a volume game. And you know that it is a volume game. It's like and it's actually like any creative exercise. Like anytime I'm trying to write a headline for something or we're trying to name something, like we did our first event this year in September and for for like two months, we were stuck on the name. And one day my business partner and I, Dan, we just were like, here's how this works. We need to each write 50 names in a Google Doc. Like 48 of them are going to be shitty and maybe one or two there is the right one. And I think like so much of the activity of of creative and marketing is like you just got to generate more ideas. Let's let the audience vote. Let's run quick tests on impressions and engagement and then double down with our spend. You also have another variable here, which I think is so important today. And um Gary V has talked about he talked about this in his latest book and I love I love Gary, but he says basically like what people don't realize today is that actually every one of those posts is essentially an ad, right? An organic post is an ad. There's no paid spend behind it, but it's an ad because it's a signal. Like every every time someone sees something from me in the feed, that is a drop in my bucket plus or minus. Maybe somebody ignores it, maybe somebody engages with it, but all those little things are ads. So let's think of them like that and let's think of each piece of organic content we put out as a way to get feedback and then that's going to actually inform our creative strategy. I'm sure this is how you live now, Nick, which is like organic is because of social media, you can get so much feedback that maybe I don't put I'm not spending a lot on paid right now, but I bet you that I could come up with 20 ideas right now because of how much organic content, I know what my audience wants. I know what those people want. Then we can go and invest and make the creative. I find that a lot of times like you're not doing high volume testing on paid, you're not doing high volume testing on organic. You're just literally making up an idea of what you think is going to work and you just spent 20 hours making one ad and Nick's over here saying, no, no, no, we need 50 times the volume of that. Well, why don't I just go to LinkedIn right now? I'll sort all my posts by impressions and engagement. We'll export them and we can go and make 20 or 30 ads like in the next two days based on what we already know from signals from social.
Nick Shackelford: You you and I'll this will be the last thing Evan because I know there's like one more question after this and we can go as deep as we can on this. So
Dave Gerhardt: No, we're making Evan's just going to chill, man. We're good.
Evan Lee: Take it.
Nick Shackelford: Dave, there's a little bit of a little bit in the in the in your book about this of like building the personal brand around it. Like those Chase Diamond, which is our partner who has like 375,000 followers now or or in in on LinkedIn. You're you're pushing almost 200,000 of your own. I'm growing on my side. Organic first that leads the strategy for the team to ideate around what should be long form, what should be episodal, and what should be a fleshed out download webinar, etc. That's the that's the tester and that if you were to back out and put a CPM a cost per impression, what you have like that is invaluable. You're doing millions of impressions, millions and millions of impressions that you technically aren't having to pay for, especially if you have someone on your team or if the company is building. And I know even Motion, you guys pump out because you're a creative team, you guys pump out across your figure heads and the branded uh LinkedIn page. You guys are probably doing on a CPM basis free $11 CPMs because of what LinkedIn shows. Like it's it's actually incredible doing organic ideation into paid.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because because paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us, they're going to see our stuff. Followers are only a vanity metric and irrelevant if it's like, you know, Nick has 50,000 followers on Twitter for, you know, mostly about D2C stuff and he's he's only posting about like CrossFit or something, right? The the the audience has to has to match. But I have seen a dramatic impact on my business as my followers have grown and I mostly only write about B2B marketing, so it's all related.
Evan Lee: There's something really interesting thing uh here about just like community building ultimately, because we're talking about those audiences that you are building because like paid is just a like almost a cheat code to be able to get eyeballs that wouldn't be able to see you at the end of the day if it wasn't for those algorithms. But both of you have really leaned into the idea of building community. So I'm wondering if both of you can speak to your thoughts on community, but one of the pieces I do want to make sure is I saw that there's like individual performance marketers and individual creative team members that are here too. So Nick, I'm wondering before we jump into community, if you can talk about the volume of creative a little bit more. So it's just like why is it so important to produce at volume there? And then Dave on your end, tie that to the organic side as well of like why do you post as often as you do? And then we'll just keep going on community after that.
Nick Shackelford: So the the issue around volume now more than ever is we used to believe that the targeting was more important to dial in the actual media buying, whether we're spending on X, LinkedIn or meta. I won't talk about any of the search platform more of like launch to discovery. They're they're telling us and this is like they're proving it out. We're spending the money on this. They're like, stop worrying about the targeting and worry about the what is the contents of the assets going live. And we we want to understand and control the reasons why things are working. It's just really difficult to choose what's working, which is why volume is the key where we're going to. Now, we measure three things internally at most of the the brands depending on the size they're at, but it's cost per asset, meaning like how much did it cost for the person that made that creation? How much did it cost for our designer to kind of edit it and how many did they produce for us? So I'm trying to optimize at a cost per asset that goes live. And this is before we start spending on it because people don't bake in, I have to spend on this, which means that asset's actually going to become much more expensive, hopefully that it actually produces for us. So it usually starts with macro concepts, so anywhere between three to four a week, that then gets turned into the various assets that we believe is it more video, is it more image? Is it a a human led or is it graphical led? And then we go live, how many did it hit? We believe a hit rate depending on the brand, it's like at their target CAC or target cost to acquire a customer and then a little bit above it because if we're able to spend at a profitable rate and get a little bit more out of it, we'll be like, cool, that's a hit. Maybe we should ideate around this. But it really is hard to understand why things are going to hit for various reasons because you might catch a different algo on a different platform. So I do think that the volume
Dave Gerhardt: This is funny because we've been using so like um for us, I I have this uh B2B marketing podcast and we've done 200 episodes and I use that as part of our like creative machine, basically, right? We just we get four or five clips. I work with this amazing company called Hatch. They produce all my podcasts, they do all the clips and everything. And uh especially with LinkedIn now like, you know, LinkedIn's always a little bit behind the game and in video, you know, they have this video feed and so uh Eric at Hatch was like, LinkedIn has this new video tab. They are prioritizing vertical video clips and so they're going to get more impressions than than a regular one. Anyway, the point in my my story here is there is something funny though, which is like, I'm sure Nick can relate to this. You can spend all the time and effort and money in the world and then I post, I go on a hike, like I'm I'm rucking with my vest on with my wife in the mountains of Vermont and I post a seven-second clip. That was the most that was the video that did the most impressions out of anything I've ever done. And I'm like just smashing my head against the wall and I'm like, this is the meta lesson for everybody. It's like that is why you need to be able to test. That is why you need to think about volume because you can you can hire the agency, you can go do three days of shooting in a studio somewhere and then lo and behold, like the seven-second raw video on my like shitty little iPhone 13 mini phone is the one that gets, you know, 50,000 impressions. And so, but but that's a learning. Now, I if I did every post like that, it's not, you know, this is why this is a fun game because it's not always the same thing that's going to work, but I think you have to be able to be open to just like seeing seeing what happens. You know, it's the same thing with text posts. Maybe it's a one-line post that goes off or maybe it's a super meaty and in-depth post. You have to be able to test multiple versions.
Nick Shackelford: That's super well said, man.
Dave Gerhardt: It's annoying. It's like we came up with the greatest ad idea in the world, but you know,
Evan Lee: It's so funny.
Dave Gerhardt: You asked about why posting on social media and I think you know, it's 2024, 2025, like I think especially in the B2B world, social media is still seen as like a other channel. It is like, you know, you give it to the intern, let the intern manage social media because you know, she's hip, she gets it, she's younger, right? There is not marketing and social media. If you haven't noticed, this is how we all like how did you see the Jaguar ad? Where did you see it? On TV? No, you probably saw it on on Instagram, right? Or you saw it on X, right? And so that is the same. That is the same for for B2C as it is for B2B. We are on those platforms first, right? And so I I often say like I I came up studying um somebody mentioned Dan Kennedy earlier, like I love classic direct response marketers like um David Ogilvy and advertising, Bill Bernbach, like those classic like VW ads, right? Those guys would literally kill to have the access to social media and customer feedback that we have today. You don't have to do focus groups. Like I I talk to companies that we work with now, it's like they got to spend a half-day focus group. I'm like, I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn in my niche. I can post an idea like when we decided to do our first event this year, I literally wrote a post and was like, hey, we're thinking about doing our first event, would you come? Okay, let's do the event. Like everyone comments, let's do the event. It is the ultimate feedback loop. And so the reason I post every day or roughly is because I can it's obviously a great way to promote our business, right? And and my company and what we're doing, but it's also a great way to test and get feedback on ideas. And so I can't think of a single thing that we've launched now at Exit Five that we didn't at least have like a breadcrumb or a little taste from organic social first that led us to take that next step.
Nick Shackelford: I'll I'll double down on that for us. Like from the I'm at 25,000 now on LinkedIn, 58,000 on Twitter, like the volume of quality after I hit like 10 to 15,000 on LinkedIn was night and day. Night and day. Like the quality of work and time and effort and content needed, especially graphics, um and and now video on LinkedIn, the value is definitely there. And and it's not it is very you'd be surprised having messages and videos and content coming from the company page versus figure heads within the company. Like there's multiple strategies that support this, but trying to go from a human-to-human perspective versus just the brand page has been and I say brand whether it's SaaS or not, but everything that we've done promotion wise for the SaaS side, if you're speaking to the one that's using it, a lot of like screen example, screen shares has been some of the best performing assets from a human-to-human for B2B perspective.
Dave Gerhardt: I've noticed now like I have plenty of followers now, but I'll notice that like in that example of that video, I just I kept going back to it and the numbers kept growing and so that told me that I don't have proof of this, but that told me that that video got put into the LinkedIn video feed and I started to get likes and comments and views from all these people who who not necessarily who who weren't necessarily following me. And then that that moment in time also correlates to like I did gain more followers that time. So I think that's one of the powerful things about social media is it can be one or two posts that go viral and viral is relative in in your niche, but the whole thing is like you have this machine that can distribute your content for you if you can strike the right chord and that's what you need to to start to build a following. And last thing on this, like people often talk about followers being a vanity metric. I can I can tell you with absolute certainty that followers are not a vanity metric. It's like essentially like getting people to opt in to see your content. Um when I was running marketing at Drift, David who's the CEO and I, we had this amazing play. We were selling into the enterprise. We made a list of the top, we went to our sales team and we got a list of our top 250 accounts, like all accounts that were like, you know, high, you know, high six-figure deals. We hired someone on Upwork at the time to go and make us a spreadsheet with the CMO and the CEO at all of those companies. And then we there's like a there was a limit. You couldn't do you can't connect with as many people as you want, but maybe we could do 10 or send 10 or 20 connection requests a day. Every day for like a month, we went and we outbound, we just tried to go and connect with all these people on LinkedIn. I would say it was probably about 80% because we look legit, we're a legit company. 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. Those are now then people who have essentially opted in to see our content. We can't guarantee that they're going to see it, but now that they're following us
