Blah, Blah, Content, Blah, Blah, Content

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I don't know if you're old enough to remember the Far Side.

But it was a fabulously funny, witty, sarcastic, erudite comic strip in the 80s and 90s, back when my sense of humor was being formed. There was this great comic which is posted below about what dogs really understand when you say things to them.

Well, I sort of feel like all you've heard me say over the past month is "content, content, content, content."Today, we're going to talk about what you do with that content after it's out in the world. Buckle up, buttercup.

Content is the collector of signals

When we publish content, we're really hoping that somebody reads it or engages with it, comments on it, click through on whatever magical URL that you've got shoved in there, and then they buy something, or they call you, or whatever your desired first conversion is.

The reason why we have been so focused on content creation that is based around these sorts of essential truths of your business, the particular pains of your target persona and their iterations inside of your target market and matching them specifically to the problems you solve or the things that you do better than anybody else. The reason why we've been focused on those is because those are the things that actually collect the engagement - they collect the clicks, they collect the likes, they collect the shares.

And that's some internet gold there, my friends!

This is an ad for Superhuman AI. And I can honestly say that this newsletter when it greets me every morning. It is something that I actually truly do read. (I even read the special weekend issues because it's really good. You should read it too.)

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Tap into this reservoir of delicious engagement.

In the olden days, back when Google Analytics made sense, we used to look at Google Analytics as the source of truth for all content. Back in the pre-LLM days, and back before social media platforms were everything, your content lived on your website.In summary, in respects, it was just simpler if you wrote good content - it would get indexed by Google, somebody would click on the search link, somebody would read the article, but you never knew who it was. So content was largely for awareness, and if a conversion happened that was a really happy accident.

Today it's wildly different. Very little of the content that we create actually exists on a property that we own. Most of the engagement happens at somebody else's house. On TikTok, on LinkedIn, on Instagram. You don't have the keys to any of those. So the content that you create might seem like the efficacy of it is thrown into the wind and it blows about without any connection to your brand, to your business, or to your benefit.

But in every social platform, we do get data that talks about the impact of our content. On these properties that you don't have access to all the juicy analytics bits, the platforms are nice enough to show you things like:

• Impressions and reach

• Likes and comments

• Profile visits

And while it isn't always easy to get to, the little crumbs that the platforms do leave behind for us to discern can lead us to being able to aggregate an audience that really grooves on us.

It's kind of interesting that we have an plug for Roku Ads Manager in this newsletter because it does allow me to talk about how for a long time, the most prominent and powerful advertising media on the planet (broadcast television) was really terrible for attribution. You could guarantee that a huge swath of the country would see your broadcast television ad when there was some sort of event. If you were an enterprising brand, you might be able to tie that back to a lift or a lack of lift in sales during that event window. But to tell the truth, you didn't know. There was no direct correlation between broadcast TV and commercial activity. Crazy! Well, connected TV and specifically Roku has really changed that. If you are serving D2C clients in Q4, Roku Ads is a pretty solid channel to investigate.

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There's this well-aligned audience out there that has interacted with your content.

Your LinkedIn posts tickle their fancy, or maybe your crispy moves on TikTok really get the buyers ready to whip out their credit cards…or your beautiful B2B blather blastin’ on Reels is just so freakin’ on point that people can't get enough of it…

But every time there's a like, there's some kind of signal.Every time there's a comment, there's some kind of signal.Every time there's a profile view associated with content posting, there's a signal. And if you pay any attention to the GTM world, you'll know that signals are everything.

The really challenging thing is that platforms make it hard to aggregate these signals. There are some ways to aggregate these signals in a useful way, but they tend to be either on the edge of sketchy or really expensive. And LinkedIn is making it harder and harder to get around their data scraping rules. Side note: that's cool, but they ought to make their data product, Sales Navigator, way more useful. We can talk about that another day. So there are solutions like Phantom Buster that will allow you to aggregate the engagement on your personal posts. That's on the edge of sketchy because while I am not a lawyer, it seems to me like Phantom Buster probably violates the terms and conditions, of LinkedIn. But what do I know?

But you don't have to do this automatically. I don't know about you, but most of my posts don't get 83 bazillion likes and comments. I've never been one of those go-viral guys. So if I have a post that I think is really on point, and I look at the people who have engaged very quickly (just by clicking on the like button or seeing who has commented). If they are in my target audience, I am going to dive in a little bit deeper.

About a month ago, I had a post hit 50-60,000 impressions. Pretty good, IMHO.

Here are the analytics from LinkedIn (wanna connect?). I'm not saying they're good or they're bad, but this is data that you can get about every post you make.

My point is, even on a post that reaches over 37,000 members, I got 101 reactions, 11 comments, and 4 reposts. Freakin' cool! But those 115 people left a signal for me. They found what I said to be interesting. 63 people followed me after this post. 66 people looked at my profile. So basically, 244 people left some sort of signal for me. Now am I gonna go look at every single one of those 244 people? Sadly, the answer is absolutely not. I don't really have the patience to do that.

What I do is scan the people who looked at my profile. I will also quickly scan the people who left a reaction.

As I look down the list, there are people I know and people I don't. But I know who my target audience is, and so I can quickly scan down this list and see who makes sense for me to want to engage with as a prospect. Or there may be people that I want to engage with strategically because they might know people that are interesting or have interesting things to say. I'm going to spend maybe 15 minutes zipping through this list of a couple hundred people. I'm not going to visit all their profiles because I'm going to make strategic assessments of their fit as a potential buyer of my services or as somebody that I want to know.

I do a lot of LinkedIn on my phone, so if I see a profile that I like or that I want to engage with, I'll just do a screenshot. Later on, I'll let the magic of text recognition and photos figure out who that person is, and I'll go check them out.

I do read a lot of newsletters (…it's kind of what I do since I can't stand to read the regular news in the morning with my coffee…), and the AI Report is also really good.This is a quickie read. It isn't something that really makes your brain work. It's sort of like a surface-level assessment of everything that's going on in AI on a particular day happening at rapid speed. Definitely worth a read.

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I've got this informal list of people who have engaged. WTF do I do with it?

It's really simple… as I collect these people during the day, or when I'm on my desktop and I check out their profile, if they are a fit, I'm going to send them a connection request and a really short intro message. No crazy 12-step sequence with emails and phone calls tucked in between because I think automation and faux personalization has dramatically impacted, in a negative way, the ability to start a discussions Because of the sheer volume of useless communications. Pro Tip: When I'm looking at at an interesting profile, I make sure to also check out the related or suggested profiles that LinkedIn suggests because their algorithm is really good at knowing who you want to engage with.

Anyhow, I've got this list of their names and LinkedIn URLs. I may or may not have already made a connection request. But the signal that I got from them engaging with my post isn't necessarily an indication that they want to engage with me, regardless of how much I would like to engage with them. Certainly the topic of the post matters When considering how strong a signal it might be, I made a post about AI being totally incompetent earlier this week. anybody who engaged with that they might be in my target audience, but because they engage with that post doesn't give me any sense that they are in market.

What I really want to do with this list of people who have given me a weak signal, I want to see if they are somewhere else in my life.I will check those people against the subscriber list to this very email newsletter.I will check those interesting people against the subscriber list of the Agency Inner Circle LinkedIn version of this newsletter.I will check to see if they are one of the handful of people who have been de-anonymized by my little vector widget that sometimes tells me who visits my site.

I've just aggregated a bunch of easy-to-understand signals.

In order for this list to be useful, I've got to assign some national values to the signals people leave.

Let's just see where this goes - this is Tim’s Terribly Unscientific High Interest Scoring Mechanism:

1. LinkedIn engagement on a relevant topic: +5

2. LinkedIn engagement with a great or insightful comment: +10

3. LinkedIn profile vibe. If I like it? +10

4. LinkedIn profile vibe. If I don’t like it? -20

5. If they are an AI spam commenting machine? -100,000

6. If they are subscribed to any version of the Agency Inner Circle? +15

7. If I know that they have visited my site before? +15

This might seem like a lot of work - It isn't because, unless you are some social content freak, the numbers from your target market aren't overwhelming. This quick and dirty fit assessment methodology to discern potential measurable interest is doable on a regular basis. Every couple of days, or once a week, you can figure out what content is vibing with your audience and who in your audience is vibing with you.

I've got this ranked list and I'm not connected to one of the higher value folks, I'm going to connect to them. If I see somebody who is maxing out their score by engaging with social content and reading this newsletter, I might send them an email out of the blue. Not a 12-step, terribly written, awful, gross email, but a real email that might say something like, "Hey, I saw that you commented on one of my LinkedIn posts, and you're on the Agency Inner Circle email list. I really appreciate that."

Tim's terrifically unscientific high-interest scoring mechanism isn't for everyone.

If you are running a high lead volume business or a sales machine that looks vaguely enterprise-ish with multiple sellers, a marketing department. This sort of by-the-seat-of-your-pants is somebody into me kind of figuring isn't rigorous enough or thoughtful enough to move the needle at scale.But for most of us who are prospecting individually, even if we work as part of a team, we are carrying out our own individual prospecting activities. This actually works really well because this method isn't necessarily about scaling the number of people that you should engage with or reach out to. It's scaling the number of people that you should engage with or reach out to first.

Tim’s Tool Of The Week - Orbit Flows

Orbit Flows: This is what happens when the editor of your high school newspaper gets together with the biggest software nerd you know and they decide that it would be an amazingly good time to stitch together a bunch of complicated stuff to allow you to write, research, inquire, wonder, ponder, punctuate all in one interface that helps you create written content in about 50 different ways: LinkedIn posts, blog posts, emails, you name it.

Now I really like writing; it's fun for me, but so many of the people that I work with hate it. It's awkward. They don't know what to do. They don't know what to say. Orbit Flows is software that a newsletter company made to help their own writing process. I've only been playing around with it for a couple of days, but holy guacamole it allows you to make good content even if you're not trying. Is it going to turn you a bestselling author like RF Kuang or Freida McFadden? I doubt it. But is it going to allow you to make good content with about 25% of the effort that it takes you right now? Yeah, it is. They have a 7-day free trial. Take it. Try it. I think you're really going to love it!

Big Things Happening

PowerBall: This cuckoo lottery is at $1.8 billion this weekend. I'll tell you what - if you win $1.8 billion, I will excuse you from ever following Tim's terribly unscientific high-interest scoring mechanism ever again.

Jobs Data: I don't care if the President says that the job numbers are rigged or politically motivated or whatever other stuff spews out of his mouth. For workers who are 50 and above and workers 30 and below, this job market is terrible. With only a meager 22,000 jobs being added in the last month, it's so clear that this is a growing concern that is going to affect everybody in some way. (If you are 50+ and considering how to launch an entrepreneurial venture - check out chapterneXt.fm - it’s made just for you.)

Interest Rates: Interest rates rose in efforts to fight inflation, and then we enacted trade policies that exacerbated inflation. Those same economic policies have slowed down job growth, so the president is probably going to get what he has been begging for for years: a big chunk of interest rate cut sometime later this month. I wouldn't be surprised if that spurred a little economic joy and drove some excitement in consumers, and maybe we have a little bit of an early Q4 bump because people feel like that interest rate cut will be helpful. However, you should know that interest rate cuts are never a sign of a good and healthy economy; you cut interest rates because nothing is growing the way that it used to.

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