LinkedIn Experiment: Finding the Best Strategies for Reach and Engagement

Adam Spencer: I'm Adam Spencer and this is Earning Ears, the show that helps you earn your audience's attention. In this episode, I speak with Kayla Medica, a product marketer who specializes in B2B SaaS products. 

Kayla Medica: And I think if you don't enjoy creating content, you won't do it. It's like people that say find an exercise you like, like you might hate the gym, but you love a sport or like whatever, like do the thing that you actually enjoy because then you can do it over and over and over again.

Adam Spencer: Kayla writes a weekly newsletter covering different areas of B2B tech marketing, with a particular focus on providing useful advice to those with small teams or small budgets. I wanted to talk to Kayla to learn more about how she's grown the audience for her newsletter. As well as built a sizable following on LinkedIn.

In our conversation, Kayla shares tips for content marketing, the lessons she's learned from testing different approaches to LinkedIn, and why she believes that you need to find an approach to marketing that you'll actually enjoy.

Welcome to Earning Years, Kayla. 

Kayla Medica: Thanks for having me. 

Adam Spencer: What's been earning your ears lately? Doesn't have to be a podcast but just, yeah, what's been capturing your attention? 

Kayla Medica: I did just finish binging, um, a podcast which is called Ghost Story. A friend recommended it to me. It's true crime. Basically, this guy who is a reporter finds out that his now wife's family grew up in the house next to him and her great great grandmother Was murdered there.

And he always thought that weird stuff happened in his bedroom, which like shares a wall with the room that she was murdered in. And so he does like, well, now I'm a journalist and I found this out. So now I have to dig into it. So that like that, the historical stuff's really interesting. I mean, the murder was like over a hundred years ago.

So if you don't like fully wrapped up stories, maybe don't listen to it. But if you want like a short and sweet kind of one season podcast, it's really good. And then I have a couple of like. ongoing podcasts that I listen to. I usually listen to more like entertainment podcasts, not really work ones. My like ongoing series that I really love is Normal Gossip.

It's like people send in gossip stories, they anonymize it, they like invite comedians on and they just tell the story. Um, there's some like cracker stories on there. Um, so yeah. And then my other like ongoing podcast, which actually just finished a season is Dungeons and Daddies. So I listen to, uh, Dungeons and Dragons, uh, live role play games.

Adam Spencer: I'm always interested in how can we do podcasting better? And because I do a lot of business related content, which can generally be pretty 

Kayla Medica: dry topics. 

Adam Spencer: Sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not, none of our podcasts are that, but other business podcasts could be dry. Any lessons we can take from entertainment shows? 

Kayla Medica: I think it's the chemistry of the people who are on the podcast that make it.

Because even when they're talking about boring stuff, when they click, the banter, the back and forth, that's what keeps you going. 

Adam Spencer: Yeah, that's, that's a really good point. Yeah, how the hosts of the show, I think, yeah, 80 percent of the battle. Especially if it's a co host, like our first Czech show on the Day One Network.

Uh, I don't know if you've come across Cheryl Mack or Maxine Minter. Yeah. But they are the co hosts of that show and that is 90 percent of our work done. Just because they are so good together. Anything other than podcasts that have caught your attention? 

Kayla Medica: I just finished watching Shogun, which is the Japanese historical, um, it's on Disney Plus.

I didn't realize it was based off real people, so when I like, finished, I finished things and then I Wikipedia for like two days straight. And yeah, I read that it was based off real people and then I was like, okay, this is like a thousand times cooler now, so. It's like Game of Thrones set in feudal Japan, essentially.

It's like political backstabbing, planning, war. 

Adam Spencer: I read your most recent newsletter. I think you mentioned that you were going on holidays to Japan. So I'm guessing that there's a lot of, yeah, a lot of interest in Japan. Love Japan. Yeah, so 

Kayla Medica: before I was a marketer, I was a Japanese translator. So, 

Adam Spencer: yeah, 

Kayla Medica: my uni degree is in Japanese and linguistics.

So did not intend to be a marketer straight up. 

Adam Spencer: Uh, I think all I've got is konnichiwa. I think that's the only thing I've 

Kayla Medica: got. I keep hearing, like I get heaps of TikToks and stuff that are like, oh, language in Japan is changing and like they're, they're using more and more English. So I haven't been since before the pandemic.

So I am like a bit rusty. And I'm going there next week and I'm very kind of anxious about whether or not it'll all come back out naturally. Or if I'm going to be like, oh, wow, like the slang and stuff is, is totally moved on. 

Adam Spencer: Well, let's, let's jump into the tough questions now. Um, I've, I had a note from my editor, uh, on the last episode that I fluffed around too much at the start of the last interview.

So let's jump into it. Andy, can you actually just cut that bit out? Um, so you just, you, you discussed, uh, he's going to keep it in, I'm sure. You discussed, um, in one of your recent posts that you've been doing a LinkedIn experiment. Yeah, I find this really interesting. I'm really fascinated by LinkedIn. It is pretty much where all of our, our content is, is repurposed to, uh, for the day one network.

Um, so I really wanna understand how to do it better. What specific strategies have you kind of taken from those experiments? 

Kayla Medica: Yeah. I think the most surprising finding that I got from it was that posting regularly is actually not good. Or at least for me, like all these experiment results are for my account, right?

So I. Tried posting every day, which if you look at LinkedIn advice, everyone says you have to post every day. But I found that if I pulled back from the post, I started doing it every two days, then my reach was better. And then I pulled back even further from that, and if, um, I'm not sure if you can access this if you don't have creator tools turned on, but I'm pretty sure everyone has access to creator tools anyway, it's just a setting.

And it shows you your impressions over a time graph. And I pretty much found that like, you post, your impressions go up, they'll go up for a few days, and then it's when they start to come back down that that's when I'm like, okay, now it's time to post. The algorithm has put my stuff out there. It's done.

It's not going to do it anymore. And so that post, there's nothing else to milk from it. Let's move on to the next one. So I kind of more intuitively post, um, if something's doing well, I just leave it. Don't touch it. Don't touch it. 

Adam Spencer: Have you come across Tom, I can't remember his surname, that does strategy breakdowns?

Kayla Medica: Yes. 

Adam Spencer: The newsletter? He recently, I don't know, in the last couple of months, he did a interview on a podcast called Send and Grow. 

Kayla Medica: I think I listened to that one, yeah. 

Adam Spencer: Oh, yeah. So good. I love that interview so much. I haven't tried any of the things that he recommended yet. 

Kayla Medica: This is like one of the questions he sent me for later, but I, he mentioned in an interview, possibly the same one, maybe a different one, that he was using a company called Refined, uh, for his subscriber acquisition channel.

It's basically an, a newsletter that consumers or people, uh, you sign up, you tick boxes for what topics you're interested in, and then they aggregate. And curate topics for your interests and then you'll get an email that's like today's news in marketing or whatever your topic is. And then me as a newsletter can place an ad so then my newsletter gets promoted to anyone who's also interested in marketing.

Right. And so I've been testing that as an acquisition channel, but I got that from Tom. That was his, he recommended it in an interview, yeah. 

Adam Spencer: It sounds similar to, I mean, I think you, the Send and Grow podcast is, I think, by a company called Sparkloop, um, and I think they do something similar to what you've just Yeah, he 

Kayla Medica: recommended two, and then I sort of saved both, and I was like, I'll just try one, uh, to begin with.

But they're the same concept, yeah. 

Adam Spencer: Any findings on, on that yet? 

Kayla Medica: This might be really different to Sparkloop. spark loop. But what I, so the experience of being a person to receive the sponsored ad, I don't think it's that great. You basically get shown a banner. They write the copy for you. Like, luckily they actually just like copy pasted my own description.

Um, but they write the copy for you. And then if you click it, it goes to an a page on the refined website, which I have absolutely, I did not make, I have no control over it. And then there's no button to go to my newsletter. There's only a subscribe button. And then I, uh, publish on Substack and there is no Substack integration with Refined yet, I guess, uh, maybe they're working on it.

But that means that I have to manually download a CSV of the subscribers, upload them to Substack, which means that they don't receive a, like, welcome email straight away. They receive it whenever I get to it, which could be a day later if I'm super busy, right? Which is not ideal. And then my biggest concern with it is that they're subscribing without ever having seen the newsletter or like me or how I write and the topics that I cover unless they are copy pasting the name and then googling it and going directly to the newsletter which then like refined won't get a cut um so I do pay I pay for the ads but then they won't get the Subscription from me, um, so my biggest concern was open rate, like my newsletter also is weekly, so they're not going to, if they subscribe on a Friday, they're not going to get it until Thursday, the next week, by which point they could forget that they've subscribed 

Adam Spencer: and then unsubscribe straight away, 

Kayla Medica: or they just never open it or markers spam, right?

Like, who's this? I don't remember this straight to spam. 

Adam Spencer: Yep. 

Kayla Medica: Um, so my biggest concern was that the type of people who subscribe from this are people who are a little bit. subscribe happy. Very quick to sign up to something. They've never seen it. Maybe they're signing up to four or five newsletters a day.

Like who knows? And then they're not serious openers. Yep. So I, I did like small batches. Um, I would turn the ad on for a week or so, and then I'd turn it off for two or three weeks. At the moment it's off because my season has ended. So there's no point adding people when I'm not sending newsletters, but I would just watch to see like how many of them actually open.

Is this worse? going forward with. And what I kind of found from it was that the open rate is a bit lower. So my open rate was around 50%, pretty consistently every season. And like first issue back from a break, it'd be right back up to 50%. And now it's sitting at about 45. So it has impacted my open rate, but they take a few weeks and then like the third time they see it or the fourth time they see it, they start opening it.

So some of the subscribers who came in from Refined like two months ago or a month ago. are just now recognizing the name enough in their inbox to open. 

Adam Spencer: What else have you tried for audience acquisition? 

Kayla Medica: Um, prior to, I got a lot of subscribers through Refined. It was very effective, um, in terms of acquisition.

And then prior to that, I was doing a lot of, like, manual promos. So, Um, I'm in, probably like many people, I'm in like 30 Slack groups or something ridiculous, like they don't all fit on my screen. And I would, depending on what the topic of the issue was, I would selectively pick Slacks that I thought were aligned and I would post in them.

But I'd also be careful not to only ever post when I have something to promote, but to engage in those communities as well. And then over, um, some experimenting where I would like only promote on one Slack for one issue and I wouldn't promote it anywhere else. I would. process of elimination, see which slacks were good and which ones were bad.

Um, but it's when you're in a big slack, it's so hard for people to notice your message. Like plus some of them are just so promotional that everyone in there is asking for stuff and no one's really giving. Um, so I tried to make sure that, you know, I give as well, um, and would answer questions that people had and.

Things that weren't related to my newsletter at all. 

Adam Spencer: Yep. 

Kayla Medica: Um, otherwise I would just look like one of those scammy people. 

Adam Spencer: Yeah, I, I've never had any luck, and, and, well, I probably haven't tried hard enough with any of those kinds of, you know, Facebook groups that were back in the day, um, Slack groups, any of those groups like promoting, because I've always felt a bit icky about doing that, and I, and I wondered, Does anyone actually see any success, um, through promoting on those?

Kayla Medica: I think it depends how genuine you are. 

Adam Spencer: Mm. 

Kayla Medica: Slack has performed the best. Um, the difficult thing is that Substack's reporting is not very granular, and so Substack, um, Slack gets reported as direct. 

Adam Spencer: Right. 

Kayla Medica: And SubSec doesn't really count UTMs, so I can't tack on UTMs to do my own tracking. And then what I've found is that, um, Facebook, good old trusty Sydney Startups Facebook group, is really good for people clicking and reading, but then they go back to the Facebook post.

To comment, they don't comment on the post, they don't subscribe, whereas I found Slack is good for the conversion rate to subscriber and Facebook is good for view count, or they might send it to their friends and stuff like that, but they don't subscribe. 

Adam Spencer: Let's jump back to LinkedIn. How did you land at, I want to run this experiment and, and do you have any kind of, like, I don't know, workflow or structure around, you know, how you decide to do all these different experiments that you're doing.

Kayla Medica: Um, it comes out of frustration. I just wait until something really annoys me and then I'm like annoyed, annoyed to a level where I'm like, I've got to take action. 

Adam Spencer: Yeah. 

Kayla Medica: Um, so LinkedIn, I was posting sort of irregularly. I've always posted on LinkedIn, like, um, my whole career. So it wasn't like I suddenly woke up one day and decided to post.

Like throughout my career, I've had different reasons for posting, but I've always been a reasonably consistent poster. Most recently, my reason for posting is to promote my newsletter and also promote that I work for myself now. So I just want people to know that I'm around. Like, I just want people to be aware.

Yeah. It was like around this year, like January this year. Took a break over Christmas, didn't post, didn't log on to LinkedIn, came back, and then the algorithm had changed. They'd done a product update in that time, and now my posts were getting like 200 impressions, whereas before I was getting like 3, 000, 5, 000, and I was like, what the hell's going on?

Like, this is not, A quality thing, because I'm posting the same stuff. Like I'm, I'm still just being me and posting what I would normally post. And it was, the algorithm had changed, preferences had changed. And I just was like, okay, I need to. Get on top of this. And around the same time, a bunch of reports came out from other people, like social agencies and stuff like that, who did annual reports on like what works for different platforms.

But they were like, one of them was like 120 pages. And I was like, I'm not going to read it. I don't have time to read this. And then. There were there other people post about like, oh, this is what works for me and stuff as well. And like I was saying before, there's people who will say like, oh, just post every day.

Like, that'll work. Or they're like, you gotta be posting three times a day. And it's like, I don't have time, like I've got actual work to do. And so I was like, I'm just do it myself so that the experiment starts with my capacity for what I can actually. sustain past the experiment. So yeah, I basically just scraped manually because LinkedIn doesn't have an option for this.

My last 50, uh, I think I did the last 365 days of posting and then I, the top 50 posts. Um, so I just had to keep clicking like see more until I got 50 posts. 

Adam Spencer: Oh my God. 

Kayla Medica: I put them into a spreadsheet and then I looked at like which ones. Got a lot of impressions, which one's got a lot of engagement, which is the list was not the same, like the rankings, not the same.

And then I looked at what did the post that performed really well have in common from like the topic, the way the post was structured, whether or not it had images, whether or not it had hashtags, uh, tagged people and links and images. So. 

Adam Spencer: Yep. 

Kayla Medica: Basically, what I found is that the basics work really well.

Long text, um, super broken up, like the classic LinkedIn, lots of line break structures. 

Adam Spencer: Yep. 

Kayla Medica: And if you're going to post an image, one works best. Cool. I did experiment with documents, which is the carousel style post videos and polls, but none of them really turned up in my top 50. So I just was like, okay.

The way that I make those things doesn't work. I'm just not going to do that anymore. And I'm going to do the things that come naturally to me and work. So I've always been a writer. Like I've written is my probably preferred medium across everything. So like writing on LinkedIn is pretty easy for me.

But like making a video is a lot of effort. And I constantly will say, yeah, okay, I will make a video and then I never do. So I'm not going to commit to that because I don't do it. Whereas writing I can do. And it doesn't feel like a chore. So I stuck with like what works for me. And I think because of text and a single image being so basic as a LinkedIn post, like that's a good starting point for other people.

So just get their base up, so either get your engagement or your impressions up and then from there, throw in one or two experimental posts that's in a format that you prefer. Like if you really like polls, go for polls. If you really like video, do video, but like a long text post works well for everyone, I'm assuming, like grain of salt, um, but it's a good place to start.

Adam Spencer: Lana Will, who works with Meet Day One, that's what she recommends, the long text posts with And that seems to be performing the best for us as well. Yeah, I would not have guessed that before I hired Lana. I still had in my head that LinkedIn was, you know, really favoring video. Because they were like, for a while, I don't know, four years ago or something, weren't they?

Kayla Medica: Yeah. 

Adam Spencer: Ages ago. And so I've just been posting a lot of video and Um, since Lana's come on, like our, our reach and engagement has both gone up. I'm very happy. 

Kayla Medica: Good job, Lana. 

Adam Spencer: So, so would you recommend that text and long text and image as the best place to start for people? Is you, would you recommend that to everybody?

Kayla Medica: It's like, I wouldn't, if you hate writing. And you struggle to string a sentence together, I wouldn't recommend it because you're gonna not enjoy it. And I think if you don't enjoy creating content, you won't do it. It's like people that say find an exercise you like. Like you might hate the gym but you love a sport or like whatever.

Like do the thing that you actually enjoy because then you can do it over and over and over again. Like showing up consistently is important. But if you're showing up consistently and hating it, then you're going to stop. Like, it's great if you can get it going with a long text, but if you really, really can't write and it's just not for you, then I, like, don't beat yourself up over it.

Adam Spencer: Yeah. Okay. Well, that's pretty much me. I want to be posting more on my personal LinkedIn profile and like, valuable things too, stuff about podcasting that I know. Um, I want to share, but oh. I just cannot stand to sit there and write something I wouldn't be doing, you know. Podcasts, or, yeah. 

Kayla Medica: Have you tried like, I've forgotten the word, but like where you speak and then you just speech or text and like just post that?

Adam Spencer: Dictation. 

Kayla Medica: Dictation, yeah, that's it. 

Adam Spencer: No, I haven't. I should try that. 

Kayla Medica: Try that. 

Adam Spencer: Yeah. 

Kayla Medica: Speak your mind. Post it. Don't edit. 

Adam Spencer: A few months ago I found, there's, there's a bunch of these AI tools now where you can do a little voice recording and it will summarize what you've said. I bookmarked that a few months ago, but I've never actually got around to trying it.

So maybe I will. 

Kayla Medica: You're really fun. Hey, even like on this, uh, Riverside platform that you use, you get a transcript at the end, don't you? 

Adam Spencer: Yeah. 

Kayla Medica: Come on here by yourself. 

Adam Spencer: Yes. Uh, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. I need to try that. So, we've kind of talked about audience, oh, I forgot the word, acquisition. What about, there was another, something else you did where.

You, you mentioned something about, um, reach doesn't always mean engagement and engagement doesn't. 

Kayla Medica: Oh, yeah. 

Adam Spencer: Before we dive into that, like, which one do you value more, the reach or the engagement? 

Kayla Medica: I think this is where your ego comes in. I prefer impressions and reach. 

Adam Spencer: Yeah. 

Kayla Medica: But sometimes you get really good engagement and you're like, oh, but it's all from like people I know.

Like it's my friends. Yeah. Um, which is great. Thank you for the support. But the purpose of this post was. to reach people outside my network. So thanks guys for the help, but it doesn't give me that endorphin rush the way like, uh, post doing really well in terms of impressions does. 

Adam Spencer: Does that, that engagement or that initial engagement, does that help with reach?

Kayla Medica: Yeah. So I, this is weird. Like. LinkedIn is so unclear in what they want. I, this is my thinking, right, that LinkedIn has said nothing to indicate this. But I think if you get people to post a comment, um, and start a conversation on your post, that counts for more if it happens first. than if they just liked it and then commented.

So like when I was evaluating my 250 posts, it was like, Oh, how many comments did they get? How many likes did they get? And I found that there was like wild discrepancies between, Oh, this post got 50 likes and, and 10, 000 views or like, and, and that post got five likes and 10, 000 views, but it's got 20 comments.

Whereas the other one also has 20 comments. So like when there's a discrepancy in only one of these things, like, where is that coming from? And so I think the first action you take on someone else's post is it gets the biggest weighting and then a comment has more weight than a like is my hypothesis, but then you can't really control what other people do on your post, right?

So my thinking is that maybe they think that if your post is so good, it drives someone to write a comment, then it must be really good. Whereas if it's just a like and keep scrolling, like that doesn't count as as much. 

Adam Spencer: Yeah. What do you think differentiates those people like Tom, what's his surname? I don't know, it'll stuff my head.

Tom Alda. Anyway, what, what do you think separates those kinds of creators from everyone else? Like where, where, where hundreds of people are commenting or liking, you know, their posts? Is it a combination of time? And quality, or is it, what's the most important factor? 

Kayla Medica: I think, and this is like, no disrespect to Tom in any way, but there are like certain topics that you just know are gonna be big hits.

Like Tom's doing, um, breakdown, like strategy breakdowns of very successful companies. Everybody wants to know, like, what's the secret to success? So that's always going to do well, and it's not particularly outside the box or experimental. It's a tried and tested strategy that's going to work 99 percent of the time, unless you have really bad execution.

Whereas, I think people who are trying to do something different, there's just less of a proven market or appetite for that kind of content, whatever it is. Um, so. It's just harder to do. 

Adam Spencer: And Soit and I talk about all the time with, with podcasting or really any content is before we start thinking about anything else, how can we come up with an idea that is truly unique, that that is not necessarily necessarily unique, but it could be it's topic that's done again and again and again, but what is that really cool angle on it that makes it so unique that people can't not click it, you know, read it.

Kayla Medica: Yeah. It's, 

Adam Spencer: I, I think to, I think top kind of. Got that 

Kayla Medica: yeah 

Adam Spencer: with that. I also also think of another newsletter out there. That's called my first Thousand or a thousand thousand something first selling customers or something like that. 

Kayla Medica: Yeah 

Adam Spencer: I love going really niche like that with a cool little angle on it I think that's a good place to start with any content.

Kayla Medica: I think it's also like Those two topics are extremely similar, right? Like, uh, successful strategies of successful companies, and then how companies acquire their first 1, 000 customers. It's in the same ballpark. But where you can differentiate is like, a deep dive versus a five minute read. Um, or key takeaways that's in dot points versus paragraphs.

Like your execution of the idea. is where you put your own spin on it. Like everybody has different preferences. I like reading. I don't like watching videos for like work related purposes. Whereas there are some people who are like, I hate reading. Give me a video tutorial any day on how to do this thing.

So if you cater to different people's preferences, whether that's long versus short or audio versus text or whatever it is, like you can, like, if you think about that, you branch all your options off, like, If you have ten branches, that's like a thousand, you know, combinations, or whatever. Like, go down that decision making tree and find your unique combination of things.

That no one else is doing. 

Adam Spencer: Yeah. How did you land on the newsletter for yourself? 

Kayla Medica: It's, you can actually, if you go way back to like the first issues, it's very different to how it started. So I started it because I was in a team of one, um, which is kind of still what I am now. But I realized that I didn't have a very good marketing network.

And I hated every, this is like a time where everyone was saying like, stop reaching out and asking if you can pick my brain. Like Leave me alone. And so I was like, okay, if I do reach out to other marketers, like I need a reason to reach out to them. And so I was like, interview, like everybody loves to talk about themselves.

Everybody loves to have, I was featured in a newsletter, so I made a marketing newsletter so that I could reach out to people and say, Hey, I would love to talk to you. I want to interview you. Here's the topic I want to interview you about, and here's the newsletter that it'll appear in. 

Adam Spencer: Yeah. 

Kayla Medica: So the first issues are like very, very short, um, not very in depth, and they were very much whatever I was working on at the time.

So if I was doing content that week, I would do a content issue. If I was doing lead generation, I'd do a lead generation issue and it evolved from there. And so now they're a lot longer than they used to be. I think I go way more into depth. Um, also cause I'm more experienced and I have more thoughts and opinions to say, and more experience.

And now working for clients, I can compare like. These two clients use different methods to achieve the same result. So like, here are your options. But yeah, it, it came out of a frustration of like, I need to talk to people, but I need to have a reason to talk to them. Now I actually do a lot less interviews than I used to do.

So it's more like I still need to soundboard my work that I'm doing week to week with someone, but there's not always someone available, but writing it out helps me. Organize my thoughts and 

Adam Spencer: yeah, 

Kayla Medica: reflect on what I'm doing. 

Adam Spencer: I really want to write more for that reason and it's been a constant thing that I've been trying to get convinced myself to do and do consistently is to write to help me just, yeah, organize the thoughts and yeah, it's very envious of you that you can so easily do it.

Kayla Medica: I mean like it's not always easy. Sometimes I, there was like one issue, I can't remember which one it was, but I remember I like rewrote it from scratch like three or four times because I was like It's not coming out of my head in a way that makes like sense, even to me, like reading it back, it's, it's not coherent.

Um, so like, you know, sometimes it's really easy, it's at the end of the project and you're just reflecting on like, oh, here's what I did. And sometimes it's like, I'm in the middle of this and I still don't have a solution, but like, here's what I've done to date. 

Adam Spencer: And so we're talking about newsletters, we're talking about podcasting, we're talking about LinkedIn and social media.

Um, you analyzed a bunch of different distribution channels, I think, is this right? Um, where did you land on which, which method or combination of methods would be most effective for B2B? For 

Kayla Medica: B2B, it really depends on the product. So, you have your partnerships and sales, the sales partnerships channels, um, make sense for certain businesses, doesn't make sense for all of them.

You have your direct, like your LinkedIn ads, your Industry publications, things like that. Um, and then you've got your out of home, your TV ads, your bus shelters, posters, whatever, and events. Um, I'm, I realized the other day I have never written a Medica issue about events because it's like the area of marketing that I just never go to.

Um, so I can't talk too much about that, but I really think industry publications are underutilized. Like, they have already gotten your audience together uh, as long as you can confirm that the open rates and the click rates that they're providing you are accurate and you can talk to customers and say like, Hey, do you subscribe to this newsletter or this magazine or whatever it is?

And they can say yes or no. Um, that works, but really it's when my buyer is in the mood for researching, where are they researching? Is it on Google? Is it on Instagram? Is it on LinkedIn? And then make the ads for those locations. 

Adam Spencer: Yeah, so I'm thinking about right now, I'm running some ads for our podcast workshops.

Um, and they're generally for universities and larger corporations, things like that. I'm just thinking, where do those people go to research podcasting? 

Kayla Medica: Or even like, where, if you're targeting an industry. It's not so much where does that person go to find out about me, but it's like, where does that person go for industry updates?

So universities probably have like university news. Um, that goes to all universities, right? Like if you work in universities, here are issues that you care about. And so I don't know, like you've got to think about where they are together as a group. And then sometimes it doesn't have to be super relevant to you, but it's just where they are.

Adam Spencer: Where they are. Yeah. 

Kayla Medica: Like I think about, I've worked with people who've said like, Oh, you know, we do B2B marketing. We really want to try Instagram. And I was like, when you're scrolling Instagram, are you thinking about software? Or are you like, I'm here to unwind and like, potentially get some consumer ads because I'm relaxing and shopping is fun, but I'm not here for work, like it's the weekend, I don't want to be thinking about work, I want to be thinking about my personal life.

So where are they when they are in the work mode? 

Adam Spencer: That's so interesting. I don't know if this happens to you or if it's just me, but, and when I'm rarely on Facebook, I see so many ads on Facebook. But not, not consumer related things. People trying to sell me, I don't know, some kind of business course, um, or, you know, slash scam.

Kayla Medica: I have a good story for this. When I worked at a company called Perkbox, we sold to HR team members and like, Facebook did so well. Because, no offense to HR people, but they do tend to, like the buyers tend to skew older, older people like Facebook and they are on Facebook. 24 7. They're there during work hours.

They're there outside of work hours, but they, they love Facebook. They love seeing pictures of their grandkids and they see it as like a 24 7 channel. 

Adam Spencer: What was the price point of that product? 

Kayla Medica: It was like a per employee per 

Adam Spencer: Save kind of thing. 

Kayla Medica: Month. Yeah. It was a few years ago now. I think like a 10, 000 annual contract was like mid market and then it was kind of It'd be lower like some companies were paying like 500 bucks because they had like three employees, but 

Adam Spencer: huh, 

Kayla Medica: they were they were corporates there as well 

Adam Spencer: Maybe I will experiment with Facebook for my podcast workshops 

Kayla Medica: Maybe all the people want to make podcasts.

Adam Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. Well, especially you know at universities and and larger corporations, the people that are making those decisions to buy that kind of thing, they, I've found they are generally a little bit older. 

Kayla Medica: I do think you need to be quick to cut stuff. Like if it's not working, don't, don't keep trying to push, like find something that works and double down on that.

Obviously, spread your wrist, don't put all your eggs in one basket, but some people are like, I hear it so often where people are like, I'm determined to crack this channel, and it's like, okay, how much are you spending on that? And how much money have you wasted? 

Adam Spencer: Yeah, it's a bit of a balancing act, I think, because it does take a little bit of time to, and this is me talking with not a whole lot of experience doing paid, direct paid ads, but all the advice I've heard is that, It takes a little bit of time to find something that works on those platforms.

But would you, would you still say cut and run if you're not? Yeah. 

Kayla Medica: Set your boundaries up front. Say, how much am I willing to lose? Like that, that's, do the, do the gamble, right? Like when I go to a casino, how much money am I willing to lose and walk out and be okay with that? And then how long am I willing to sit at that poker machine?

Is it a month? Is it six months? Is it 12 months? Like whatever it is, just set your boundaries. And then when you hit those boundaries, respect them, because a lot of people will be like, Oh, you know, one more month or whatever. And if it's, if it's not working in the timeframe that you've set for it, you're now eating into the timeframe for other work, which could work.

So it's, it's not so much about like, Oh, make it run for 12 weeks and spend 50, 000. And then if it works, it works. And if it doesn't, it doesn't. It's going to be different for everyone, but it's how comfortable you are with risk. 

Adam Spencer: Do you have an opinion? on podcasting. Do you have an opinion on podcasting for B2B?

Kayla Medica: I don't think I'm a great person to ask that because I will occasionally listen to B2B podcasts but I am not a diehard listener to any in particular. I'm Like I said, I listen to podcasts when I walk my dog, and when I walk my dog, it's usually a break from work. So, I will listen to B2B podcasts if I'm doing research on a specific topic, or research on a provider, or whatever it is.

So, I do listen to them, but I'm a real stickler for learning and development is something that should be done during business hours. So, I will only listen to them during business hours, and outside of that is my entertainment time. 

Adam Spencer: Yes, my lines are very blurred there. Um, I don't know what I'm learning.

So, just rewinding for a sec for, you know, you've never written about any events stuff in the newsletter. Maybe time to go back to an interview style edition. 

Kayla Medica: Yeah. 

Adam Spencer: Highly recommend reaching out to Paz Pazarski from the Community Collective. 

Kayla Medica: Oh, I've heard of them. Yes. 

Adam Spencer: Yeah. 

Kayla Medica: 8 list is to interview someone for events because that's obviously a gap that 

Adam Spencer: Through your LinkedIn experiments, have you found any way or how do you deal with the, the link penalties in posts?

Kayla Medica: I've just stopped. I've, I've given up. So I'm now trying, you might've heard of like zero click content where it's like you, you don't have to click through anything to, to read the thing. So a lot of posts I see online, like on LinkedIn and other thing is like. Teasers of like, juicy tidbit, uh, find out more by clicking through the link.

It just doesn't work on LinkedIn. That link is just going to prevent people from seeing it. And so rather than that, I give away the bulk of the takeaways, um, in the post directly. No link. And 

Adam Spencer: just ask them to follow you. 

Kayla Medica: Yeah, just ask them to follow on LinkedIn or go to the page and click the link if they are really good.

Like if they're finding this really valuable, you don't worry about whether or not LinkedIn serves it to you, just sign up to the email. Um, so I'm trying to do that and I'm trying to make content specifically for LinkedIn. So, rather than like, trying to make a generic social media post, I try to make a LinkedIn post that panders to the LinkedIn algorithm.

Adam Spencer: What's the differentiation between those two things? What makes a LinkedIn content, LinkedIn content? 

Kayla Medica: It'll be like that long test. Text, formatting, no link, you know, tag lots of business accounts if you can. The style, the tone is business y. Like when I post in a Slack channel, it's very like, hey everyone, where like I would never start a LinkedIn post with, hi guys.

We came from a time when you could write a social media caption and you could post the same caption to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. But they're not, they have diverged so much in the algorithms that that doesn't work anymore. So now it's, I write a caption for LinkedIn. I'm not actually really testing any other social media channels, so I don't bother.

Like, but previously I would try with Twitter, or I would try with Facebook, or Like I write Slack messages that are very Slack styled. It's like, here's the thing. If you like it and you want more detail, then you can go here, but you don't need to have already read the issue to get the reference in this post, or you don't need to read the entire post to get something valuable out of seeing this.

Adam Spencer: Yeah. 

Kayla Medica: And, and if you see this and this is the only thing you see, you still have a good experience. 

Adam Spencer: I've been advocating for that both to clients and internally to the team for a long time. I just didn't realize it had a name, no click, no click content, zero click content. Ah, okay. Yeah. All right. Cool. I'm not caught up in all the lingo.

Um, we are, we might have to do a part two of this at some point because we're running out of time. I want to ask you the last two questions. Is there anything that I haven't asked you? this interview that you really want to talk about. 

Kayla Medica: The only thing is that I'm currently testing WhatsApp communities. So I didn't even know that existed.

And then I think in a newsletter that I subscribed to in like the link section, they had put a link to like, uh, some regional town in the U S. Their social media or the digital marketer or like someone on their team had, was like, Oh, Facebook's going to like ruin news and like our, our Google's going to ruin news because they don't recommend us anymore and blah, blah, blah.

We need to figure out how to get directly to our local residents because it's a local newspaper. Yeah. And so they tested WhatsApp communities and they, they were saying that it works really well for them. And now the traffic to the news site is like doing really well. And it's growing and the community is growing and I have always hesitated from, cause like, if you run a newsletter, everyone will be like, build a community and then blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then build events. And like, that's, that's the path. Yeah. But I hate the idea of. community moderation. Um, I don't want to have to deal with people being rude or posting promotional stuff when there's a no promo rule or whatever. Like it, it, I don't have the time for it. I don't think I would enjoy it.

And so I'm just, I was like, I'm never going to make a community and I'm not an events person. So I'm not going to make events. Um, and then I saw this and I was like, you know what? Biggest piece of recurring feedback I get about Medica is that it feels like a message in a group chat. And I was like, the idea of an actual group chat is really appealing to me where I can just throw stuff in, or someone else can throw in like, hey, has anyone seen this article?

Like, fun, or news, or whatever it is. Because one of the other rules I have with Medica is that it is on a schedule. And so I try to steer away from staying on top of the news, or like chasing the news cycle, because I'll always be the last person to get to it if it comes out on a Friday. Also, like, I've had times where I've sent a newsletter and, like, within the hour, like, breaking news happens.

And it's like, well, I can't send another newsletter to talk about this because I just sent one. So I liked the idea of, like, a group chat that I kind of treat like social media in a way. But it's like with your friends, um, so yeah, and like people can't see each other, each other's phone numbers. Most people already have WhatsApp.

You can do channels like Slack that I've created to one is like strictly marketing stuff. And then one is it's called chitchat because I really like art. So I was like, I still want to be like, Oh, look at this nice piece of art or like, look at this music or album or TV show that I want to recommend because I'm enjoying it.

And like, is anyone else like happy to chat about it? Sorry. That's it. That's all it is. 

Adam Spencer: I also didn't realize. What's that? Except I recently got invited to one it's like a school FKS I think or something like that. It's for like meetups for people who are going going to start up events Um, in Australia. I didn't realize that was a thing.

I noticed you have a link in your most recent newsletter too to join that WhatsApp group, I think. Yeah, and when you're 

Kayla Medica: in it, you can invite other people as well. So like, if you want to invite your colleagues, go for it. I do have a one strike policy. You do one thing I don't like, you're out. Because I don't have the time to track three strikes.

Adam Spencer: I like that. 

Kayla Medica: Um, so yeah, it's very much I'm a dictator. This is my group chat. 

Adam Spencer: Last question. Um, I mean actually before we did the last question like where What's the URL for people to subscribe to the newsletter? 

Kayla Medica: Yeah, so it's medeeka. substack. com 

Adam Spencer: And when they get your first email, there'll be a link in there to join the WhatsApp community as well?

Kayla Medica: I literally updated the welcome email this morning to add the WhatsApp link in there, so yes, you will! 

Adam Spencer: And to sign off, from everything we've talked about today, what do you think for content marketer, creator, entrepreneur, whoever's listening right now, what would be the biggest takeaway for them that they could take and implement?

Like what is the most important thing that we've talked about today? 

Kayla Medica: I really think it's do what you find enjoyable. So if content's not for you. That's fine. There are other marketing strategies to use, like, don't beat yourself up over it, don't feel like you're behind or that you should be doing it and that's going to make you feel guilty and it's not going to be a great experience.

If you have a certain type of content that you really enjoy producing, Which could be different to the type of content you enjoy consuming. Do that, and do it sustainably. Don't burn out. Um, and the other thing would be, don't post everyday on LinkedIn. Chill out. 

Adam Spencer: I think we do on our day one page, which really sucks.

Um, maybe I should stop doing that. I don't know 

Kayla Medica: if it's different for company pages. I'm, I'm testing company pages at the moment. But for personal pages, watch your engagement. 

Adam Spencer: It's getting worse and worse actually, because we, we are planning on having 12 shows by the end of the year. Um, and so a lot of content is going through day one FM company page.

We're really thinking about spinning out new pages for each show. Um, just so. Yeah, that actually makes 

Kayla Medica: sense. 

Adam Spencer: Yeah, I'll get around to that eventually. Anyway, thank you so much, Kayla. Thanks for joining us on Owning Ears. 

Kayla Medica: My pleasure.