Spec Work: When Free Work Wins Marketing Jobs and Clients

Kind: captions Language: en Hey there guys, my name is Andy. I own a solo marketing business here in Columbus, Ohio. That last month generated $15,600 month before 26,000 and in its entire lifespan has generated just under $400,000. This is my daily marketing channel where I take you in underneath the hood of my business and I show you what's working in live time, answer your questions, and just provide as much upfront value as I possibly can in a compressed amount of time. The format we usually follow on this channel is we'll do live lead genen. I take you over my shoulder while I generate leads, send emails, LinkedIn DMs, all the variety of mechanisms. Also podcasting that I use to generate leads for my business. Then I build and strategize in public where I talk transparently with you about the decisions that I'm making and the levers that I'm pulling strategically in order to grow and scale. And we usually finish with some updates and growth stats across the channels and products that I'm trying to be accountable towards growing. And we actually log those in a little custom software that I've built in order to inbuilt accountability and create awareness around the things that I'm trying to grow in order to make it reinforcing. [cough] Excuse me. So today uh we're actually going to do almost none of that and we're going to do a Q&A instead. So um if you guys don't know already, you can go to columbusmarketing.org/ask. go to that page and you're going to see something that looks exactly a firm to this and you'll be able to answer any questions that you may have related to, excuse me, the related to the job market, freelancing, getting leads, career switching, job interviews, growing your independent marketing business, anything in the marketing and creative landscape, I am your resource to answer. And you may think that I'm doing you a favor by doing that, but actually you're helping me. I upload daily on this channel and having those topics helps me create packaging titling of the videos and it allows me to learn more about this as I share with you my experiences that I hope you find valuable. So today we have a whole variety of questions that I've gone in and sourced from the tally form and I've anonymized most most of them. But I'm going to go through and answer these with as much gusto as I have probably jump between a few different links and you know provide reinforcement imagery and things like that that may reinforce the value of the answers that I'm asking and provide more context. So without further ado, let's get into it. Jamie, a freelance content marketer, says, "Andy, I have two steady clients, but if either one leaves, I'm in trouble, and I can't spend every Friday sending cold pitches. How could I use AI to find Columbus businesses that I actually that I could actually help and build a weekly outreach routine that gets conversations started without me making me sound like everybody else?" Wow. So, I think the crux of this question is how you want to use AI to make your time more efficient when it comes to lead generation and business development. And kind of a two-parter. um how do I build a weekly outreach routine that gets conversations started? And the third part I would even say is without sounding like everybody else. So I'll kind of answer those in reverse order here because those are the answers the the answer the the order in which I answer these are going to be how you're going to be most efficient. So without sounding like everybody else, this comes down to your positioning. Believe it or not, most independents, most job seekers, most marketers take off to run this marathon called starting a business without actually putting their shoes on first. And while that may sound ridiculous, it is more or less true. If you don't spend time refining your positioning, getting deep into the unique value that you can add to customers based on your experience, your inbuilt curiosities, and the thing that only you can do and applying that to the only the audience that only you could serve, you are really selling yourself short. For every specialized agency that you see that is crushing it, there are thousands and thousands of flagging generalized unspecified freelancers who flamed out or are not as successful as they want to be because they did not refine their positioning and they have commoditized and they amongst themselves are in a race to the bottom. So the highest leverage activity you can you can do especially in the beginning is refine your positioning and as you're refining your positioning you're doing that in tandem with selling. When you talk about creating a weekly outreach routine, this right now for you, if you if business development is a priority, you said you have two steady clients. If either leaves, you are in trouble. You need to block a dedicated business development or lead generation time, ideally early on in your day. I use it the first hour of every of every of my working days. It's always the first hour. And whatever channel has gotten you the most customers, that's what you double down on. And if you haven't had time to run experiments, like I said, if you are early on, you do have two customers. Now, this gives you an idea and a framework of which to double down on. If you have two customers, think how did you find each of those customers? Were they from referrals? Were they from an ecosystem? Were they from a community? Were they from an outreach mechanism? going to places where whether it's online or in person to where people that are like both of these customers show up is the highest leverage use of your time and should to some extent likely [clears throat] make up the first hour of that first part of your day. So that's what I would do. Now when it comes to using AI for the second or third parts of your question, this is kind of a hard line to tow. I do use it in my process. And if you guys go to the YouTube channel, you will see every single day I post a long form video that is just a live overview of how I use how I'm doing business development, emails, pipeline generation, cold cold emails, DMs, things like that, podcasting. You will see that I use AI most often in the tedious parts, which may sound obvious, but I mostly use AI for the sending of connection requests, drafting of emails that I then go and create. I use its integrations with my CRM to assign new stages to pipelines to contacts and a pipeline to move them along things in the pipeline. I rarely if ever use I also use it AI for surfacing opportunities that I might not have top of mind. So like, hey, scan my inbox for emails that I might have missed and bring them to my iMessage so that I can respond over text and have an agent like respond to them there. But I'm always writing the message. I would say in terms the more volume plays in your lead generation routine, the more AI can help you because it can help you scale messages, personalization, and things like that. But if you are small, it's actually your advantage to do everything manually because it's going to likely resonate so much better. When you have bad positioning and when you're shooting one to many without any real grasp in terms of the value that you can offer to these people, it's going to be really hard to templatize to send a templiz message to a lot of people and have it have it resonate with anybody. And in your situation, you have two clients. One client is immediately 50% more of your workload. So, it's a high it's a much more leveraged activity of your time to spend a lot of time getting one customer rather than a diluted amount of time trying to get a 100 at the same time. That makes sense. So, three-part question there. I hope that helped you out, Jamie. Great question. A lot of good fuel there. Next up, we have Morgan. I'm going to take a sip of water here. Actually, not water. Coke Zero. Mom has these many cans at home I'm really enjoying. So, next up, Morgan. Marketing manager looking for work. Morgan says, "Andy, I'm spending hours tailoring applications with AI, but I'm still rarely hearing getting interviews, and honestly, I'm starting to question whether my experience matters anymore. Since you run the local job board and connect with other marketers, how would you use AI again to decide which roles deserve my time and figure out who I should actually talk to?" So, number one, uh, get subscribed to the newsletter. A shameless plug, we don't use AI for that. I have a team member whose sole responsibility it is to check the validity of all these links. Make sure that they are in the Columbus area and that they are still active by the time they land in your inbox. So, number one, subscribe to the newsletter. Shameless plug. Number two, tailoring applications with AI. There is actually a way to do this, but it's kind of the same application as it is to outreach or outbound. It is it's a zero to when it's even more applied to job search and submitting applications. Getting a job is a 0 to 100 fulfillment. Meaning one conversion then is your entire customer base. So it's a very high lever activity. And I know I use that phrase a lot, high leverage activity. But it's just such an eloquent term because it really we all have the same number of work hours in our day unless you're hormony or someone like me who's 25 and single and [laughter] really really can work a lot. It's okay though because I enjoy it. But if you're going from a zero to 100 conversion bucket, think about all it takes is one conversion and then you are set. So that's why a onetoone approach by nature goes works far better. So whatever advice I give on the lead generation front if you're a freelance marketer looking for customers is going to apply on more of it's of a mass on more of a onetoone scale when it comes to job applications. meaning you should spend more time on a job application than you should on a customer sales process. Obviously, there's variance in between there. But if you're sending hundreds of job applications per week, I would not recommend doing that. Using AI to tailor your applications, have a base framework. A lot of you guys probably already do this, but with AI, it would make it a lot easier to handle the manual parts of updating your resume. Excuse me. Have a base version that has all of your experience and all of your, you know, credentials. List out your your history in the best way possible. Have it designed in a way that's branded and unique. Don't waste a ton of time designing a one of one resume or portfolio. That is not a however use of time. Have a baseline you can go from. Just make it differentiated enough to where it can stand out, but still be clean, legible, readable, under two pages. All the best practices that you guys already know if you've been doing this for a while. Um, and then use AI to make the tweaks to the applications. You can paste in the job title and the uh the job title, the description, and the role and say, "Hey, what are one or two small changes I can make in order to make this resonate slightly more?" Adapt those changes and then use that as what you send in. If you are applying to jobs, I highly recommend some kind of offmarket strategy such as going on LinkedIn, finding the hiring manager. Those are almost always listed if the job application is local and if they have a LinkedIn portal or the LinkedIn company page is where the job is coming from. Find someone at the company whether it's a hirer or a hiring manager, the lead marketer, someone on the marketing team there that's an executive. LinkedIn Sales Navigator does a very good job, that's what I use, of surfacing out decision makers. and you can filter by whether or not they're active on LinkedIn and send them an email with a personal video and make yourself sound like a human, you know, like, "Hey Melanie, I came across this role and a few things that that stood out about it to me. I just I really strongly feel like I am really convicted that could be a great fit. In fact, one of the opportunities that I see on your team is XYZ." And as a matter of fact, I actually went ahead and built something that I think could actually help you and solve that problem. If you spend a little bit of time doing free work, I'm incredibly bullish on doing free work. I have a whole case study video uh video on this YouTube channel. It's the very first video. I give a full presentation for the SEO search summit about doing a free work for a customer who eloquent who honestly over time ended up paying over $10,000 for us. Um but I did their first website for free, strategically applied. If you start solving someone's problems, it's going to they're going to want to pay you. You know, you have to find the line to where too much free work is eventually gonna become a become a problem. But if you start solving people's problems right away, it's going to be hard to get them to not hire you. So, if you notice a problem in their sales process, on their website, in their funnel, I sent over a hundred DMs pitching websites to people and solving the first step of what a website redesign, a website process would look like. That should be your first initial free offer. You can definitely take a business owner mindset to job applications to say, "Hey, I want to solve something in your marketing program as part of my application. Hire me, i.e. the paid product if you're a freelancer. Fix fix the problem for free that then leads to your paid product. The paid offer is you the job and use that as a very warm foot in the door. I guarantee you sending three applications like that where you send a personalized video is worth 50 plus 100 plus if you're just spam cold templated emails like this that you use using AI. So use AI to find the right at bats and then you the human is the one that should step up to the plate and take the swing. So shout out to Morgan. Great question there. Um hopefully I didn't pitch the job board too hard to you there. I hope you enjoyed that. Pria. Next up, another question here. Pria, so a marketer at a services company. Andy, my boss keeps asking what our AI strategy is, but I'm already handling email, social, the website, and sales request by myself. If you were in my seat, which workflow would would you improve first? And how would you show what's helping us win business instead of just produce more stuff? Pria, welcome to marketing. This is the joy, isn't it? We get to do everything and when anything goes wrong, it's our fault, right? So, let's take a first principles view at this here. So, AI strategy is what you're focused on. Let me draw a little bit of a diagram here so I can conceptualize this a little bit. AI strategy is what you're focused on and you [sighs] are handling email, website, social, and sales. social sales and your job is to show attribution and what you should improve first [snorts] and how would you show what's helping us win business instead of just produce more stuff. So this is like the age-old attribution problem and when you're in charge of multiple channels at once it's increasingly hard to become expert and technically lead generating at any of them. So what I would do is depending on what industry you're in, uh you said you're a solo marketer at a services company. So when it comes to services businesses, a lot of times paid is going to be a high leverage activity and could be productive for you. So what I would do is after you find the results of your highest performing organic organic content, then that's when you put paid behind them. So I a lot of this would start with the available resources that you have. So you're solo, you don't have a lot of team members, but do you have a budget to work with? Whatever you can do, double down on your expertise and what's already working. So look at your best customers, the ones that are get the best out of your services and do what you can from a company standpoint to attribute those back to the channel that they came from. Maybe one came inbound, maybe it was from organic social post, maybe it was from some kind of email marketing. If you have any attribution in your current CRM, I hope to God that you have a CRM setup that would be very high leverage. That would be that would be very helpful in this situation especially. But when you're kind of, you know, shooting from the hip in a situation like this, look at three of your best customers and try to reverse engineer the customer journey and really double down on that. And that's when you can start to build systems around getting more of the best leads that you have already made their way through the funnel. That's like the classic doubling down on what's already worked philosophy. Now, when you point AI at something, what a lot of people do is AI is a very blunt object when it is not specific and it's not it's not told exactly what to do. So, if you were to say, "Hey, I'm managing all these channels. AI, boom, help me and solve all of my problems across all these channels." It's going to do a very bad job. So what you want to do is build specific guard rails and specific processes and unique processes as to how it applies to each of these channels. Obviously you want to give it as much context and visibility into each of them as you can. But I would say that you ideally want to build isolated process around each of these and have them communicate with each other in terms of updating CRM status, updating customer details. Attribution AI is going to be a gamecher I think for marketers and attribution here in the future. So when it comes to building integrating AI into your process as a marketer apply it first to the rules where your to the attribution sources where your best customers have come from. Enhance that productivity. Enhance the efficiencies. Use that to kind of take your fingers off. Also if you have marketing budget hire people hire out help. Hire out specific experts in domains where they have proven results for people like yourself. That's where a budget is going to go the furthest for you rather than just burning more tokens on asking AI to do everything for you. If you have any budget available, hire experts. Use AI in a targeted sense towards each individual channel and target them one at a time. It's kind of like if you are a finance person and you were able to read um David Ramsay's, you know, total money makeover when you were 13 years old like I did. Not saying many people do that or I was a total weird kid. So, if you didn't, no worries. But that's kind of like the philosophy of tackling your highest debt first and creating this thing called a debt snowball. So, whatever is mountaining up and whatever is the biggest problem to tackle, you go at that first with all of your momentum. tackle that channel and then move on to another one. That is how I that was how that is how I would use AI to kind of help your efficiencies. And when you are a solo team, I will say 2026 is prime time for solo marketers to be able to manage a full marketing program. It would it's really would have been impossible without the tech that we have now. But you are more capable and you are more leveraged than ever to be able to do so. But take it one at a time. Don't feel pressured to do everything at once. And I would even acknowledge to leadership too be like hey I am tasked with doing the job of 10 people here. This is my plan. This is my plan to work with the constrained resources that we have. Have a little bit of grace with me as we figure this out together but this is my plan. Be confident in it. Get buy in. Let them know that hey this may take a little bit of time to get the results that you want but this is what the situation we're working with. So overcommunicate with leadership. Get their buy in and trust and then that's going to make everything smoother as you go down the line too. All right, we are knocking through these one at a time. Uh, number four on to Chris, freelance brand strategist. Andy, a prospect just asked why they should pay me for positioning when they can ask AI for a marketing strategy and I didn't have a great answer ready. How would you explain the value of my judgment and package an AI supported service so Columbus business owners can understand what they're paying for? So this is a great question positioning against AI especially as a marketing consultant. Um the the nature of the way the landscape is now a lot of lower market smaller businesses are going to use AI for the majority of their marketing because they feel empowered. They see that the output is relatively good. Not saying that it's differentiated or unique or productive for them, but they see a tool that can take a lot of the execution off of their plate and they see that as the finished product. I saw a webinar recently from Katie Dill. She worked at Stripe, but she compared AI output and marketing to a microwave burrito. She said like, okay, it's the illusion of a complete package. It's quick. It's ready. It gives the illusion of a fully cooked meal, but it just shortcuts all the execution and effort. And the output is similar to what you would get in AI. It's radically fast output for a seemingly great result, but when you take a bite into it, you're like, "Oh, man, this kind of tastes like shit." That's what AI output is in marketing. So now, what can we do about that? Ideally, your biggest levers are to position yourself not as a competitor to AI, but a totally different service. So the people who are and I found this to be the case as well. The people who are going who are going to use AI for marketing in the first place likely weren't going to hire you at all. There are use cases where people who were paying website providers or were paying strategists to execute on marketing for them. They've now switched to AI and said, "Hey, I'm replacing you with quad." You know, there are horror stories of that. They are few and far between in my experience and I've heard and the stories that I have heard there are some of them that eventually went back came crawling back to the consultant said hey I [ __ ] up I need your help what do we do from here so you need to position yourself as a user of the tool and this is the exact same thing that happened when you know userfriendly web development platforms and marketing platforms like HubSpot came out these at the end of the day are just tools Um, so to answer your question directly, when they ask AI for a marketing strategy and you didn't have they asked why they should pay you for positioning when they can ask AI for a marketing strategy, tell them that the output is totally different. Like this is like asking, you need to tell them that the output is just totally different. It doesn't have rationale. It doesn't have experiences. It's convincing them with something that is just not even real. You know, it's a hypothetical best guess and it's expensive guessing because the execution of that is going to be nominally expensive for them as they go in and take themselves further and further off the path they need to be, whether it's positioning, etc. AI is not present in their sales conversations, they know that when you get when a customer asks you why you are better than AI, it shouldn't even be a comparable factoid. Something I recommend all freelancers do is a compare create a U versus AI comparison page on their website. We did that for our studio a while back and I used it for quad and uh codeex just to you know have a couple different reference points and if we go to MMG versus quad here literally a onetoone comparison. So if you're a copywriter have some copy that you wrote versus you know AI slop. So, you know, you're not a carrot, you're an onion, you know, something terrible like that versus an actual rationale, well thoughtout analogy that you would put together, something like that, and have a competitor comparison table, something like this. And literally, side by side, show the outputs that you could create versus what AI would give. And then that's how you can be transparent and just tell them, hey, you know, we've come across this before. If you are budget constrained, you know, it's the classic you get what you pay for with this stuff. That's what I would say if a customer said, "Hey, Andy, you know, AI is really good at building websites. How why can't we just switch to using that versus using you?" To them, I would say, "You get what you pay for. AI can really generate a great output, but it's not going to be dynamic. It's not going to move your marketing forward. It's not proactive enough to act on the signals of your customers and provide humanled insights that are actually going to convert. AI is trying to appeal to you and all the answers that it gives you are going to convince you that you're heading down the right path when in actuality it's convincing you of something that just isn't true. You know, at the end of the day, it's not true. AI is a great illusion when it comes towards giving a very confident answer in the wrong direction and you need to have an answer ready for that when the time comes up. So, now that you've had that experience, great. ask you take some time script out a very long response and the next time that question comes up you're going to be uniquely suited to answer it. So yeah, how would you explain second part of your question? How would you explain the value of my judgment and package and AI supported service so Columbus owners, Columbus business owners can understand what they're paying for? Lean on that. Lean lean on the comparison page or build something out that is uniquely suited and valuable to them. AI is going to have very generic output and most business owners aren't going to be able to use it well enough to be able to position directly towards a perfect answer for them. They're not going there's not a proprietary LLM for their exact business model that deeply understands their customers like them. So, if you can show that you understand their customers, that you are the proprietary LLM expert for their niche and their service. Again, going back to that positioning, that's what's going to make all of this easier. positioning is the it's the analogy that where the plane takes off, if you are one to two degrees off from your landing spot or from your takeoff angle in California, by the time you get to New York, you're going to be 100 miles off target. So having starting very close to the source, having great positioning and making sure that every piece of content, every offer, every sales conversation is headed down the right path because you started from that great source, that aligned source, that onarget source is just so so important. I can't overstress that. And when it comes to applying AI, like I said, a blunt tool to the efforts that you're putting into your business because you're going to be putting a lot of efforts in. Whether you're looking for a job or whether you're trying to get more freelance customers, it's really important that you have that positioning nailed down to begin with. So, Chris, hope that helped. That is about all of the fuel that I have. Uh we're creeping up on 30 minutes here. Uh what I'm going to do now is we're going to do a little bit of updates and brand stats tracking and we're going to close that out kind of in our normal format here. So YouTube channels, let's check up on the growth there over the last 30 days on LinkedIn. We're almost at 8K LinkedIn followers. 79.89. How about that? 11 more followers to get to complete on 8K followers on LinkedIn. 3989. YouTube main channel 427. Man, we're still at the same. Jeez, guys. 62 subscribers on the second channel. One up from there. Boom. I'm going to upload this video tonight. Newsletter subs. I think we're creeping a knock on the door on 260 257. Not bad. And Instagram, I think we are one in the same around there. 1854. Not a whole lot changed. About the same there. So, all righty. That is going to wrap it up for this episode. I appreciate you guys tuning in. Head over to columbusmarketing.org/ask this page right here and ask me for a chance to be featured in a future Q&A like this. I still have several more to get through in our next episode. Again, I ran out of gas a little bit there. I try and be as exhaustive and add as much context as I possibly can with these. But if you are a marketer focused on growing and want to do so with other high performing people, one to two steps ahead of you, learn, share insights, grow, connect. A lot of marketers are starved to community. I know I was. Head to that link below. Would love to have you in the community. I'll see you guys here tomorrow. Thank you again. Love you all. See you next time. Bye.