As soon as they started work, the results were phenomenal! The engagement on the content, the messages, the new contacts coming through were all sales drivers for my company to grow and scale.
Jack Pinkoski, Founder of PInk Mktg
The story of Jack is one of our favorites at BAMF.
Why?
Because it’s a “zero to hero” to story.
Literally.
Imagine starting from scratch and racking up 150,000 LinkedIn content views in just 45 days.
For a lot of people, that’s stuff we dream about.
But anyone, with the right skills, mindset, and support system, can be like Jack.
So, how exactly did we do this?
Gather round, today we’re going to take a look at Jack’s case study and figure out how you can do the same for your organization.
Who Exactly is Jack?
Glad you asked.
Jack Pinkoski is the founder of Pink Marketing, a digital consulting firm that “partners” up with clients and helps them grow and scale in the digital landscape.
He’s been around for quite some time helping clients with their marketing and online presence and ensuring that they are in the position for sustainable growth.
But, this year proved to be a little problematic, even though he specialized in helping other people grow, he found that his own growth was starting to dwindle.
What Was the Problem?
2020 was already a terrible year to begin with, and 2021 wasn’t proving to be a great one either.
Jack, like a majority of founders that survived the initial beating, started experiencing his funnel starting to slip.
And, that was alarming.
It was a make or break situation where he had to decide if he was going to let people go or double down.
He needed to get things rolling, and he needed to do it fast.
That’s when we reached out to him.
What Needed to Be Done?
Apart from new clients coming in to sustain his own growth, he needed a way to revitalize his funnel and improve his presence on other platforms.
Most notably, LinkedIn.
LinkedIn, being the world’s largest and oldest professional social media platform in the world, is a gigantic source of leads and he needed a way to tap.
Jack was already on LinkedIn, but it wasn’t being actively – or passively – being used as a lead generation mechanism.
He needed three things:
- To establish himself as a thought leader to enhance his online reputation and social proof to start building passive lead generation funnels.
- To create an outbound prospecting system that allows him to expand his connections and prospective clients.
- To put out content that serves not only the goals of points 1 and 2, but also reflects his dedication to inspire and educate people around him.
These three things would serve to be a way for him to open a new channel for lead generation and marketing.
This is how he did it.
What We Did
Profile Optimization
Jack already had a great profile set up.
It was pretty complete, it had all the important elements filled up, and it looked professional.
But, here’s the thing.
It still didn’t bring Jack in any leads or serving as a landing page that gave him social proof to convert passive visitors.
So, we applied the BAMF profile optimization methodology to get him started.
The first thing we did was optimize all the elements that were above the fold.
This is the first thing that potential prospects see on a profile, and some of these elements are also seen in LinkedIn search and suggestions, making it extremely important.
We loved his profile photo, it was professional and he had a great smile on, but it needed a little touching up and some color correction. We sorted that out and added elements of his branding behind his photo itself.
After that, we changed out his cover photo and made sure that there were elements embedded in it that allowed it to be actionable.
As much as we like rustic pictures of buildings, a lot of professionals use this technique and it won’t stand out from the competition.
We added some client badges for trust by association, added the services he provided in his company, placed another photo of him with his signature smile on, and added a lot more design elements from his company branding.
Check out our guide on creating LinkedIn cover photos here!
We also got rid of his one-liner for his headline.
We stuck in his vocation, a trust signal, a smaller one-liner, and a little bit of humor to show prospects a sneak peek into his personality.
At first glance, any visitor to his profile would now automatically know what Jackson did for a living without having to analyze different elements.
It looked cleaner, what he did was clearer, and you could automatically feel that you could trust him.
Apart from that we also optimized other areas of his profile such as his about summary and other little nooks and crannies so that it’s fully complete.
Increasing Connections
LinkedIn influencers need connections.
When Jack first started out he had an average number of connections given his status as a founder, but he wasn’t actively engaged in increasing the amount of people that he was connecting with.
Why is this important?
Your number of connections and followers determines how many people get to directy see your activity on the platform.
Think about it.
It’s more effective to have a lot of people be a part of your connection list because this means more people that you can reach and engage with.
With more people comes more prospects, and with more prospects comes growth.
But, that wasn’t the only aim.
Jack also wanted to give back and inspire others to do more, he wanted his story to be told, and he wanted to start collaborating with people.
He wasn’t just increasing his connection count, but his influence as well.
Creating an Outreach Campaign
LinkedIn is a great platform for B2B lead generation since almost every single professional with an internet connection has an account on it.
Pink Marketing didn’t have an active lead generation campaign on LinkedIn and we were about to change that.
We decided to come up with a simple outreach campaign that targeted highly specific industries.
Now, we can’t put the exact messaging that we used here, but it worked.
We’ll show you the results in the next section.
Releasing Meaningful Content
Jack has his own voice, and that’s the voice that we wanted translated into his content.
By taking his values, goals, and his message, we were able to craft content that came from his heart, and resonated with his followers.
This was actually the easy part.
The more we worked with Jack, the more we were able to translate his stories into inspiring messages that people related to and could stand behind.
Since the content was aimed to inspire, it was more transparent, heartfelt, and easier to write. We only had minor edits for LinkedIn mobile optimization and the sort.
We started compiling his stories and started scheduling them out across this week. This way we had a steady supply of posts and didn’t have to come up with new ones each time. Regardless, if he or the BAMF team was busy, there would always be a scheduled post ready for release.
Our target was a maximum of three stories a week, this was to make sure that we were not saturating his audience, but gently reminding them about his brand.
Get Some of the That Content Viral
After getting the first four objectives done, getting content to go viral becomes a little easier.
Here’s why.
The more you grow you connections, the more people get to see the content that you put out.
If you put out content that is meaningful or valuable, people will want to engage with it, and the more engagements you get the more likely it is for the content to appear on other people’s feeds.
LinkedIn wants people to spend more time on their platform so that they can show them ads, if your content is engaging people will want to spend time with it and LinkedIn will want to show it to more people.
Those extra people mean extra engagements, and that turns content viral.
The Results
LinkedIn Content Views
On the 45th day of working with Pink Marketing we did an audit.
And, the results were spectacular.
150,000 LinkedIn content views in just 45 days.
Yes, 45 freaking days.
Starting with April he was getting at least 50,000 content views a month, and during the month-and-a-half that we had him it totaled out to 150,000 LinkedIn content views.
This meant that he had about 150,000 people looking at his content in this period, which meant he had the potential to inspire, collaborate, and help that many people.
These are the same numbers that would-be influencers rack up, and he started from scratch, which is amazing given that we didn’t do much apart from focus on optimizing his content to better resonate with his prospects.
This post in particular was able to rack up 17,739 views, 29 reactions and 25 comments, and it’s just one of the many posts that were published that racked up more than 10K views at a time.
Connections and Messages
We put Jack on a simple outreach campaign that aimed to increase the number of connections he had and find other people to collaborate with.
Starting with no LinkedIn outreach, we were able to increase his connection rate and bring it to 24 percent.
Now given connecting with new people on LinkedIn is difficult, especially with B2B DMUs, getting almost a quarter of the people you’re requested to connect with you is a pretty big deal in itself.
Next, we started recording the message reply rates.
More than third of all the messages we sent out were getting proper replies and this was a good.
This meant that people were responding well with the messages that we were sending out.
With general outreach emails, you can expect a message reply rate of less than ten percent. Given that this is LinkedIn and we were using highly personalized messaging, we were able to bump that number up.
So, what does translate to?
Leads Generated
The outreach methods translated into real revenue for Pink Marketing.
Starting in March, we had a steady increase of qualified sales calls being booked for Jack.
We ended the 45-day period with a total of 12 calls being booked for Pink Marketing.
These came from a mixture of small and large companies that were interested in working with him for thier own growth in their respective industries.
Jack used to maintain his LinkedIn account to keep up with his colleagues, but he has now managed to turn it into a LinkedIn lead generation machine in just less than two months.
He now gets active leads coming through and he’s set to receive passive ones.
Jack Pinkoski
Traditional Outsourcing was an Option, but There’s a Problem
“It isn’t my voice,” says Jack.
The traditional outsourcing of LinkedIn optimization, lead generation, and content production has long been an option for a lot of founders and marketers out there, but it presents a problem.
DFY-outsourcing on LinkedIn doesn’t necessarily carry the same voice, branding, and values that a client would want on the platform.
What Jack, and a lot of other entrepreneurs and founders want, is a partner that serves as an extension of the company, and that’s what BAMF specializes in. We make sure that we bring out the true voices of our clients, and put them on a path to industry leader status.
In less than two months, we were able to get his account going towards influencer status, bring up his content views and land him a lot of qualified leads.
We’re not a traditional outsourcing agency, we’re a growth hacking agency.
Takeaways: Everyone’s Like Jack When They First Start
I’m personally still excited for Jack.
Pink Marketing’s momentum is still rolling, and his lead generation has gotten into a predictable rhythm that we can easily scale.
But, the one thing that really gives me joy is how inspiring this story is.
A lot of my clients – even I – were like Jack in the beginning, we all started from scratch, and sometimes just a little doubtful that it could be done.
But, trust us, it can be done.
There was no luck involved.
There were no illegal hacks.
It was just the purely strategic marketing that BAMF is know for.
Are you going to join Jack and the rest of our clients in growth?
Are you still in doubt?
Book a call with us today.
