Organize, Follow Up, Grow: A New Digital Marketing Mindset

[00:00:00] Most people think digital marketing is all about attracting new followers. But what if I told you your real growth is buried in your DMs? In this episode, I'll share why organizing your contacts and mastering the follow-up is the missing piece in your strategy and how a simple personal CRM can help you unlock the value of relationships you're probably neglecting right now.

[00:00:25] If you've ever wondered where your warmest leads, super fans or hidden opportunities went, they're probably waiting for you to reconnect. Let's fix that in this next episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach Podcast.

[00:00:57] If you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neal on your side. Because Neal Schaffer is your Digital Marketing Coach. Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your Digital Marketing Coach and this is Neal Schaffer.

[00:01:27] Hey everybody, this is your Digital Marketing Coach Neal Schaffer and welcome to my podcast. Well, before we get into today's topic, I've reached out to some of you personally. I have also mentioned this in my weekly newsletter. Go to newsletter.nealschaffer.com to sign up. But I'm working on revising and expanding my Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth book. You can find it on Amazon. It is actually on Kindle Unlimited now if you are a Kindle Unlimited member.

[00:01:54] But I'm reaching out to those that have read it before because I want to hear your feedback. I'm going to be scheduling some completely free Zoom calls where I want to hear your questions about LinkedIn that I could respond to in the next book. If you hear this, please reach out to me. Neal at nealschaffer.com. The real Neal, N-E-A-L, S-C-H-A-F-F-E-R. I would love to hear from you. Or as appropriate to the conversation today, you can DM me in the socials.

[00:02:21] So part of what I'm going to go through today comes from doing research for the revision of my upcoming book. And I had a few epiphany moments that I want to share with you today. And I'd like to start with the fact that there's a moment in every business and honestly in every career where you look back and you realize just how many opportunities slip through the cracks.

[00:02:47] It's humbling. And for a lot of us, it's not because we didn't have the skills or the content or the network. It's simply because we didn't follow up. So this episode has been brewing for a while, but it's really come to manifestation through my most recent activities, which I'm going to share with you shortly.

[00:03:07] But if you're like me, building a personal brand, writing books, speaking, consulting, starting a company, running a company, scaling a company, you probably pour a ton of energy into attracting new people to your LinkedIn profile, your website, your social media DMs. But here's the question. What happens after you connect?

[00:03:31] So while working on the new edition of Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth, I went back to the core framework that I teach. And for those of you that hadn't read it, well, I recommend you do, but even if you haven't, it's a four-step process. You begin with your profile because all roads lead to your profile. So you need to polish your profile. It needs to be aligned with your personal branding, your business objectives. Number two is you need to grow your network. This happens organically, but at the beginning, you should be proactive.

[00:03:58] People you've worked with, gone to school with, what have you, right? You want to have a certain scale so that when you share messages, which is step number three, which is sharing content to amplify your personal brand, which helps you build new connections. You stay in better touch with your current network, and it's how ultimately you implement your personal brand. And then number four, I mean, number three is hard enough for a lot of people. Number four is even harder, which is engaging to stay top of mind at a regular basis.

[00:04:28] And this is really, as I was doing research for the book, I was wondering, are there any other stages that I should introduce in the book? And that's when I realized I'd left something critical out because we're always so focused on attracting people that we forget that we also need a system. Now, engaging to stay top of mind isn't really a system, right? We need a system to keep all of those connections alive.

[00:04:57] And that's where this conversation about organizing your contacts and mastering the follow-up comes in. And this is where most people drop the ball. I mean, I get it, right? I've been in B2B sales, so I know the power of a good CRM. But a lot of entrepreneurs, creators, and even marketers that don't have a sales background, obviously, they, first of all, don't think of themselves as salespeople. But they don't think they need a CRM.

[00:05:25] So, like me, they rely on social inboxes, which are, let's be honest, absolutely terrible. LinkedIn's messaging, a mess. Instagram DMs, good luck finding that one convo from six months ago. Your Gmail, full of newsletters and spam. Man, if I could only get a dollar for every sub-stack newsletter that I am opted into without my permission. But I digress.

[00:05:51] So, we work so hard to attract people only to lose track of them. And here's the truth. The fortune really is in the follow-up. So, my aha moment was when I was on the hunt for new tools to feature my book. So, I'll tell you how I rediscovered this. When I was reaching for new tools for LinkedIn, I found plenty of automation tools, which you know me, I do not recommend.

[00:06:19] And yes, I've had people kicked off of LinkedIn for using them. So, don't use them. I found some good analytics tools. Love those. I'm going to share in my book which ones and how I use them. I even found some cool AI content tools. And you should go back to episode number 404, which I just published a few months ago, called the LinkedIn Growth Hack No One Is Talking About Yet, where I shared some of these tools and how they work and the opportunity.

[00:06:48] And I will delve more into this in my book as well when I revise it. But what caught my eye this time was this new breed of LinkedIn-focused CRMs, CRMs, or let's call them PRMs, Personal Relationship Managers. Now, some of you may have heard of one of these called Lead Delta. Well, maybe you haven't heard of it, but I actually have a lifetime membership from an old AppSumo deal. It basically gives you a database of your LinkedIn connections,

[00:07:16] you know, the ability to tag and sort. It includes an inbox and some other things. So, it is useful, but it stops there in terms of the functionality. And I know that they're developing more functionality. But it wasn't what I was looking for. And then I found something, honestly, that blew me away. It is a tool called Kondo. And if you're going to check it out, I would be honored if you would use my affiliate link, which is neilshafer.com slash K-O-N-D-O. If you sign up, I get a free month. Easy peasy.

[00:07:46] But anyway, picture this. What Kondo does is it pulls in your entire LinkedIn inbox, but makes it feel like Gmail with real folders, tagging, reminders, and templates. I can now tag contacts into different groups. I might have a group for authors, for podcasters, for book reviewers, for people in Japan, for people in Irvine. I think you get the picture.

[00:08:12] I can set reminders to follow up on any message so nothing falls through the cracks. I can see who never replied to my messages and try again. I can even use save snippets for quick replies to save me time. For a guy like me who lives and dies by inbox zero, but now I can do this in social media, well, this was an absolute game changer.

[00:08:36] So now the real impact of this is I've been processing a month's worth of LinkedIn messages every day. I'm now back to June of 2024. And yes, there's just, you know, there's a lot of messages to process. I get a lot in my inbox, but it is something that once you start to do it, you unearth lots of different opportunities. I found conversations I completely forgot about.

[00:09:04] People I met at a conference, podcast guests, potential partners. And it's made me realize this inbox zero mindset we have for email, we need it for social too. And if the social platforms don't provide it to us, we need to create it ourselves. Otherwise, we are leaving relationships and opportunities to literally die in the depths of our DMs. So, of course, organizing LinkedIn messages is one thing.

[00:09:33] But what about your email contacts, your newsletter subscribers, those spreadsheets you keep with client lists or speaking contacts or webinar signups, you're super fans. The next step is pulling all that together into a true personal CRM or a personal relationship manager. It's not necessarily about tracking leads down a sales pipeline. Though if you do that, great. And a lot of these CRM tools were created for that.

[00:10:00] But what I'm talking about here is it's about remembering who's important, when you last connected, when you last had a conversation, and how to reach out again at the right time. So, I want to introduce you a few tools that I've been looking at. And the one that I recommend you look at first, which is a tool that I have been using for more than a decade. And the founder, John Ferraro, was actually a guest on this podcast, is a tool called Nimble. So, Nimble, created by John Ferraro, who created Goldmine,

[00:10:30] which is the first CRM I used in my B2B sales role before this amazing new cloud-based tool called Salesforce emerged in the world. Nimble is a classic social CRM. Good integrations. They recently started doing email sequences as well, which is great news. But it also is mainly for sales, right? It is more of a traditional CRM with social functionality, but it has a lot going on. So, for some, you may love it. It may seem like you're at home.

[00:11:00] For others, it might be a little overwhelming. Another one that I have been experimenting with is a newer CRM called Folk, F-O-L-K. I'm liking it for its simplicity. And similar to Nimble, which has something called the Nimble Prospector, which is a Chrome extension, this one also has a Chrome extension, so you can add people from anywhere online. There are two other CRMs that I'm looking at that also have Chrome extensions,

[00:11:26] and they promise to have somewhat LinkedIn integrations, although I'm still sort of checking them out. One is called Copper, C-O-P-P-E-R. Another one is called Break Cold, which has a lot of social functionality, similar to how Nimble has, where you can see people's social feeds when you go into their profile in the CRM. And then there's one that's completely different, which is truly the personal CRM that I envision, which sends you reminders,

[00:11:55] it helps you keep in touch with people when they change jobs because it integrates really deeply into every social media platform. It is called Clay. And there's also an AI tool called Clay. So this is clay.earth. But it is a really innovative tool with tight social integrations. It's probably the closest to what I would recommend as a personal relationship manager, but it doesn't have email built in yet. So if I just wanted to email all of my connections in Vietnam on LinkedIn,

[00:12:25] I could create a group message, which would be a hassle. I could individually email them or within Folk or Nimble or these other CRMs, if they're grouped in Japan, I can easily send a group message or individual personalized messages through Folk or Nimble. And that to me is just a way more efficient way of doing that, especially when we also integrate our Gmail contacts, right? And our contacts from other social media platforms outside of LinkedIn, email becomes the common denominator. So none of these are perfect, right?

[00:12:53] And if you were to do a little bit of research, the user interface and how you naturally use these is going to be a very personal decision. But here's the point. The tech exists to help you never drop the ball again. So it's a matter of choosing your tool and starting from there. So I want to be clear. This isn't just about money. You know, if you are in sales, you probably already have a CRM and maybe you're already logging information

[00:13:23] from LinkedIn to that CRM. If you are a Sales Navigator user, you can integrate with Salesforce and HubSpot natively. I'm talking about the rest of the people who don't use a Salesforce or HubSpot or a Sales Navigator like myself. So I want to be clear. So it's not about the money, although that can be part of it. It's about the relationships. It's having a system in place with the technology to support that where you develop a habit that helps you stay in touch with partners or distributors or collaborators more often.

[00:13:52] It tap your fans directly when your social posts don't reach them because they reach fewer and fewer of them. And also to remember important moments in people's lives and show up when it matters. So if you've ever felt like, oh wow, I wish I'd remember to tell so-and-so about this event, a personal CRM fixes that. So getting back to my book and my updated framework, profile, connect, create, engage, organize and follow up becomes a critical part

[00:14:21] if you want to reap the most value out of LinkedIn but really out of anywhere, out of relationships, that is what you need to do. You need to treat your connections with as much care as you do your content. And this is something I'm really passionate about. I'm already seeing the ROI of doing this and I, like I said, I'm developing a lot more content around hand-holding you through the process of doing this. So what to do next? Where do you start? So yes,

[00:14:50] the revised book is about LinkedIn but I know that maybe not all of you have a lot of conversations on LinkedIn. The more active you become on LinkedIn, the more conversations you will definitely have there. But I want you to start by doing a quick audit. Where are your conversations happening? Is it LinkedIn DMs? Is it Instagram? Is it just Gmail, right? Pick one tool like Kondo to help you get to inbox zero in at least one channel. And like I said, the native tools are very inefficient. You can't tag people, put them into groups,

[00:15:20] send reminders. So if LinkedIn is the place, Kondo is really a one-of-a-kind tool that I highly recommend. And if you have product questions, please let me know. I'll be more than happy to help you. But their co-founder is also very helpful and I'm like on a LinkedIn DM basis of asking questions and he's very, very quick at responding. Then start to group your contacts into groups that make sense to you. Are there groups that you would want to bring together that you would want to message for a certain purpose? So it could be partners, it could be super fans,

[00:15:50] it could be the press, it could be prospects, it could be podcasters, it could be bloggers, collaborators. There's a lot of different ways to think about it. But if you think about your business and your personal brand, what are the groups that matter? And I think that's where you're really going to see the value. And now carve out one hour a week or maybe 15 minutes a weekday to follow up with people you haven't talked to in a while. And if you just go through the process of using condo like I'm using it

[00:16:19] and taking one month's worth of messages at a time, you will easily eat up 15 minutes a day and be keeping in better touch and reigniting old conversations. You will be amazed about how many doors open when you simply reach out again. And that's going to be the ROI of not only your listening to this podcast, but any investment you make and a very, very small investment to make in one of these CRM tools. So I'll wrap up with this.

[00:16:50] When we think about digital marketing, we think about posts and videos and AI content and all this shiny stuff. But truly the real gold is in the relationships we build and nurture over time. I'll tell you, I get companies reach out to me, hey, Neil, we can introduce you fractional CMO clients. And I'm like, I don't think you can because all of my clients come from a no like and trust relationship. That's the gold. is in the relationship. Social media algorithms won't help you here.

[00:17:18] Clearly search engine algorithms won't either. And email blast alone won't do it either. You need a system and you don't have to be a sales rep to use one or create one. You just have to care enough to show up consistently. So are you dropping the ball or are you ready to tighten up your follow-up game? DM me on LinkedIn, email me at neil.neilschafer.com. I'd love to hear how you're staying organized or what tools you're using to keep your relationship strong.

[00:17:48] And hey, maybe I'll feature your case study in my upcoming book. So all I have to say is I want to remind you that your next big opportunity probably isn't a new follower. It's someone already in your inbox. Until next week, this is your digital marketing coach, Neil Schafer, signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links,

[00:18:17] go to podcast.neilschafer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilschafer.com to tap in to the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community. If you or your business needs a little helping hand, see you next time on your digital marketing coach.