Ecosystems, meet amplification

Plus a lesson in mentorship

Aug 31, 2024

I opened up my LinkedIn DMs earlier this week to see this message from Chris Daly:

I forget when exactly Chris + I crossed paths in the past handful of years, but that’s usually how it is with many of the unexpected mentors who come into your life.

Beneath the message he sent, he shared two visuals with me:

He knew I’d been going down an ecosystems vs. channels rabbithole lately, and like other great leaders, knows how to “lead a horse to water.” He could’ve jumped right in and started telling me his thoughts, ideas, and how he would recommend running a strategy like this, but instead he put the ball in my court and merely suggested that mapping this out in here or on LinkedIn would be helpful for the larger community.

Aside from the thread he gave me to pull, my favorite part was the conversation that ensued. It’s the perfect example of mentorship/leadership in practice, and 100% authentic.

He had no clue if I’d run with this idea
He had no ulterior motives in sharing this thought with me
He simply shared his perspective on something he saw I was working through

So Chris, thank you for the inspiration and subtle push on this 🙏

Ecosystem amplification

I’ve been talking about ecosystems for the past few weeks. And my favorite part has been seeing this really resonate within the marketing community on LinkedIn.

MC (Marie-Claire) Silfer shared a nugget of wisdom about it.

Kacie Jenkins grabbed the bull by the horns and has been hitting on the topic hard this week as she thinks attribution may be the biggest factor in the abbreviated average tenure of CMOs and then took it a step further by comparing how ridiculous it would be if we applied last touch attribution to anything else in our lives.

Even my brand vs. demand marketing sparring partner Liam Moroney joined into the conversation by pointing out that integrated marketing is one of the most slept-on approaches to driving results because of how we are forced to measure marketing. (Side note: I LOVE that Liam and I don’t see eye to eye on absolutely everything in marketing. He knows a LOT more about brand marketing than I do. And I’d like to think that I might know just a smidge more than him about demand marketing. But the magic that follows from our back + forths on LinkedIn is because we view each other not as an opponent, but someone with another POV, and by losing our egos, someone that can help us think another way and use that input to refine our knowledge.)

Coming back to ecosystem amplification, now that we understand that the most successful companies moving forward will be building ECOSYSTEMS. They’ll be using attribution and data to understand the interplay between all of their GTM efforts vs. trying to understand which singular channel they should be investing more/less in because of an attribution model assigning credit to it.

So now for the next step…

How do we further amplify the ecosystem we’ve fostered?

And that’s why I love the visuals Chris shared. Now that we know ecosystems are comprised of channels, how do we use those channels not as single checkboxes of “do we have a profile on there that we’re posting from?” but instead as ecosystems in themselves by asking “how many different ways can we show up on that channel?”

To quote Chris: “A single demand generator with 20000 followers might do well, but when you add in BDRs and CMOs and CEOs and CTOs the AUTHORITY, which is likely the biggest driver of conversion, expands exponentially.”

Let’s take LinkedIn for example. Say you have a company page, your CEO’s page, and a community group:

The CEO’s profile might have 20,000 followers
The community group might have 2,000 members
The company page might have 1,000 followers

In the perfect world, that means you have 27,000 people you can reach. We all know there’s likely heavy overlap in those groups + that you never reach 100% of followers, but again, just painting a picture here.

Now contrast that with creating an ecosystem within the LinkedIn channel:

The CEO’s profile might have 20,000 followers, but if you also have 9 other individuals with smaller followings (7,000 each), you’ve just added 63,000 more people to your ecosystem
The community group might have 2,000 members, but if you join 5 other communities of 2,000 members each where your ICP spends their time + engage in conversation there, you’ve just added 10,000 more people to your ecosystem
The company page might have 1,000 followers, but if you promote the type of helpful (read: non-salesy) content through ads, you can reach a much larger and relevant audience

In the eyes of your ICP, this changes their perspective of your company not as a “logo” or “entity”, but instead they associate it with specific people, knowledge, and topic (category).

Ecosystem amplification in practice: Refine Labs

I got to see the results of this approach firsthand while at Refine Labs.

We could’ve ridden off of Chris Walker’s personal brand and the content from Demand Gen Live sessions being shared from the company page. But instead we created an ecosystem within this channel through other team members.

Yes, Chris far and away had the biggest following, but on any given day there would also be 5-10 team members sharing and engaging from their profiles. And the magic was that the sum of those 5-10 team members often surpassed the reach Chris would have.

So people began to see Refine Labs not just as Chris, not just as a marketing agency.

But they viewed Refine Labs as the team members they would see and learn from. They viewed Refine Labs as a place to learn the philosophy and application of modern demand generation.

And they trusted us infinitely more than most other alternatives in the market because they saw the people behind the company and the actual knowledge being shared daily that they could validate, not just a sales pitch full of promises.

If you enjoyed this newsletter + know someone who also might, consider sharing this with them. This newsletter grows entirely by word of mouth from readers like you.

Kaylee Edmondson drops incredible idea after incredible idea (and she also knows how to execute💪). I honestly don’t know how she does it, but it’s one of the reasons I love following her as she shares tips like the one above in her posts. She also has a Substack where she writes longer-form newsletters, so I highly recommend you give her a follow there as well.

Song I’ve been jamming to all week

I get tired of songs quick. Overplay them to death while working and a few days I’m over them.

But I’ve been bumping to this song all week and have no intention of slowing down. Give me a song with good beat, a heavy bassline, and an energetic flow and it’s a guarantee I’ll be loving it.

Need a mid-afternoon energy pick-me-up at work? Turn this on
Need a boost to hit that last rep at the gym or final half mile on your run? Turn this on

This song has only been out for a month and on YouTube it’s already seen:

~85M views
171k comments
My favorite part: the worldwide love it’s getting - this is the power of music transcending cultures

What song have you been listening to lately? I’m always looking for new recs, so reply back with one of your recent favorites!

See you next Saturday,
Sam