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These AI Marketing Agents Get You Customers

44m 3s

These AI Marketing Agents Get You Customers

The episode, hosted by Greg Eisenberg with guest Cody Schneider, teaches how to build AI-driven marketing agents for cold outbound on email and LinkedIn. The core strategy leverages social signals: by monitoring posts from 10-20 influencers in a target niche, businesses can extract users who engage with relevant content, treating those engagements as "hand raises" indicating interest. This approach stands out amid declining cold email reply rates caused by AI-generated content saturation. The technical setup involves using Apify, a scraping API, to extract post reactions and comments from chosen LinkedIn posts. A coding agent (e.g., Codex or Cloud Code) automates this process, running on a daily cron job to fetch new posts and engagements. Once LinkedIn profiles are collected, a waterfall enrichment process using tools like Kitleads, Apollo, and Origami finds email addresses and phone numbers, with Million Verifier validating email quality. The agent then performs outbound campaigns, and a separate agent manages responses to answer questions and drive leads toward booking demos. Cody emphasizes that marketing agents are essentially software with thinking loops, not token-burning AI calls. He advocates for building reusable code to reduce costs and scale operations. While the data sourcing is legal and white-hat, compliance varies by region, requiring caution. The episode concludes with a call to action for viewers to comment on other go-to-market motions they want covered, reinforcing the show's educational, no-gatekeeping approach.

Transcription

8629 Words, 45854 Characters

English
It's true, marketing agents are the new coding agents. Just like coding agents were such a big deal, and people were able to create software on demand, deploying marketing agents are so important because you're able to get customers on autopilot. So how do you actually set them up? What did they look like? Well, this has got to be my most requested episode in a long time. I bring back Cody Schneider, and he shares all the sauce. How you can use Codex or Cloud Code to build these. What are the other 20 tools that you need for the marketing infrastructure in order to deploy these marketing agents? And by the end of this episode, you're going to get your creative juices flowing around. Some of these growth tactics that are going to help you stand out, they're going to help you get customers so that whatever it is you're building, you don't have to worry too much about traffic, you don't have to worry about too much about revenue, and you can focus on building an incredible product while your marketing machine is running. Enjoy the episode. ♪ The start of my despot class ♪ ♪ Is it been time, baby? ♪ Welcome to Greg Eisenberg's podcast called SIP, maybe. I'm your GoHose or guest today, not GoHose. I'm never the GoHose. I'm Cody Schneider. I'm going to be your guest today. And today I'm going to teach you how to build an AI agent that does cold outbound both on email and on LinkedIn. This is based off of the comments from last video. If you want to learn other go-to-market motions, you need to comment below right now. Do it right now. It also helps us for the algorithm. So you're supporting this show and it keeps the lights on here. Welcome to the show, Cody. Marketing agents are the new coding agents. We only shared one marketing agent last episode, but the people are in satisfied with one. So you need to come back on. You came back quickly. And by the end of this episode, you're not going to share one end-to-end marketing agent. You're going to share two marketing agents, how people could set it up. So by the end of this episode, people can go stop the video and actually go set this up and actually get customers to their bivocoder startup, right? This is exactly what I'm promising you today. You're going to have two of these in the wild. I'm going to teach you everything that you need to know. I'm also going to share all the tools that you need. There's no gatekeeping here. I despise people that do this. Don't buy a course. Literally DM me. I'll teach you anything. I'll just make a public video for everybody. So let's do a G. All right. Let's run it. Awesome, man. All right. So today, we're going to build a system that basically monitors linked in posts of influencers within your niche, within your category. And then it's going to go and extract the engages from those posts. And then we're going to do what's called a waterfall enrichment to find the emails. And even potentially the phone numbers of these people so that you can then go and do an outbound motion to them, doing cold email, and then also doing linked NDM. So that's what is going to happen. And then I'm going to teach you how to basically have it. So you can have an agent that's wired up to both of those inboxes. Like managing those inboxes, say, for example, answering questions or trying to push them into booking a demo with you as an example. So yeah, man, that's really it. The, I don't know if there's any other like, specifications on the high level. I think the only thing to mention with this is like the strategy around this. So right now, cold email is getting decimated. Reply rates are down. Everything is down. Actually, every marketing channel is down right now. Let's be real. Let's be real. The reason is just because like AI Slop is flooding the zone and it's becoming just red ocean everywhere. But the way that we have found that you can stand out is you have to look for signals or triggers that basically show that people are hand raising saying, hey, I want this thing. I have an interest in this thing, right? And a great way to do this is with these linked in engagements. They're basically, when they like content, that is a hand raise or a signal that I am interested in this, you know, specific thing. And from that, we can use that as a way to measure, okay, is this my target customer that I'm trying to sell to? And not just like their demographics or their demographics or their psychographics, which is like what we would traditionally use for outbound. This is specifically like, no, they have a propensity or an interest in this topic. And we are going to go and now get in front of them. Okay, so how do we actually do this? And this is an exact strategy that we implement for, you know, the companies that we're working with. So I'm going to teach you that right now. So let me screen share and I'm going to walk through it. So the first thing that you're going to want to go to do is literally go to LinkedIn and find influencers within your category. So last episode, we talked about AI for WordPress or AI WordPress. And so I'm just going to use this again as an example, you know, like target demographic that we're going after. So on LinkedIn, what I would go do is I would go try and find people that are talking about WordPress development potentially. Let's see what comes up with that. Developments. And I would try to find posts. This might actually be a terrible category. So we might have to explore something entirely different. I would try to find posts or creators that are talking about these specific topics, like on a daily cadence, right? So like this, like, again, just for this example today, this is probably going to be like a lot of, like, just not good signal. So a better way to look at this is like, we'll say we'll do AI from our AI marketing, right? Let's see what comes up and we're going to try these and find these posts here. So. And what makes a good search? Like why was AI for WordPress not good? And why is AI marketing better? Yeah. So it's really just like, is the content that's being served, what your target customer would be interacting with? Like that's what you're trying to get down to here, right? So like, how I would be going through this. And honestly, I use the, the for you page of all these algorithms is so good now that it's like, it's going to show you the content that's relevant, right? Like this is literally an exact perfect, like perfect, perfect example. First one that comes off, it's like awesome. People trying to do some type of video editing for, obviously, it's probably for marketing. Everybody that's potentially engaging with this is like a target customer, right? So I would say, okay, cool. I'm going to find these creators and then I'm going to build a spreadsheet of all of them, right? Like all of these people that I'm going to try, that I'm going to source these leads from. So right, I would build this spreadsheet out. We'll just do a handful of these like from my own feed. It can even be business accounts. And I think this is the thing that people don't realize. Like if there's business accounts, that's the people would be interacting with that would be your target customer that can work as well, right? So it can be literally clay. And we're going to do the posts from clay. And we'll just keep going down on this. So MCP, it's probably too broad. And you're doing this manually. Like you're not using agents to do this. Why? I wouldn't even typically the company knows who is interacting. Like when we're working with a business, right? They know who they're like their target customers interacting with, right? So you can all you need is typically like 10 to 20 of these. And you have more than enough to be able to like source the lead volume that's necessary to actually make this like a viable channel. You I'm using the feed here because like what it's going to show you is what is most like relevant to you. So it's probably going to be stuff that's you know in your the niche that you're in. But you can also use the search for this as well. We used to do this where we'd like do the search and we find the trending posts from that. In reality, it's like there's a handful of outliers within any niche. And everybody is engaging with those handful of outliers. If you just monitor those outliers, you're actually going to get you know 80% surface area coverage for that entire industry. You don't need more than that, right? Or it's it's it's it's just like the marginal return of trying to go for all of it. It's not it's not there for that. This is the same idea with we do this a lot like we try to solve entropy. This entropy problem with within like ads paid ads in particular. We're like if you just have the agent like go in this loop, it'll just kind of make the same ideas over and over again. How do you solve for that? Well, you find human creators like 10 of them on Instagram and you track the content that they're they're publishing. You look for the outliers and then from that you typically can get signal of like, Oh, here's this new hook format or here's this new topic. I can just pull that I can remix that and that's the way to do this. So all right, I find a handful of these these these companies. And then from that, what I'll go and do and just for the sake of example today, we use a we as an example. So we'll say everybody that interacted with this post. We're going to use this post as an example. So once I have these people, I need to use apify and I will find the actual one that we like. And what's apify for people who don't know? Yeah. So apify is a scraping API. So I can use a single API key and then I can use it to scrape LinkedIn. I can use it to scrape Twitter. I can use it to scrape all of these different channels. So it's a way for me to get data into the context for my agent so that it can have, you know, awareness and have that context for it to make decisions on or make content based off of etc. So okay. So the one that you're going to want to use or the one that we like we work with him like decent amount because it's the most stable connections. There's tons of these in the challenge with apify, finding good ones that are actually like being monitored and being maintained. And so this But this guy API Myestro has a ton of these for LinkedIn. You can see all of these here. It's all of these different functions that you can do. So how appify functions is you get an API from appify. And then this enables for you to be able to have your coding agent like log code or code x call from app or call the app through the appify API to one of these end points that are here. So for example, you can do this post scraper for the one that we're going to do. It's going to be engagements. So let me find that post reactions on LinkedIn. Leave this is it. This is exactly it. Yep. So post comments and then post reactions, though too that you're going to use. And what this enables you to do is everybody that has engaged with that post. So the post that we are just looking at here. So everybody that's interacted with this and commented on this. We're going to be able to pull this out. I'm going to show you how you can actually do this in a cloud code right now. So I'm just going to spin up a terminal real quick. And let me reshare my screen. And so I have that I have that appify API key in already saved locally within the directory that I work out of for all of my growth work. And if you don't know what I'm talking about here, I have a whole video on my channel that's basically a crash course in to how to do this called go to market engineering and marketing engineering. And we'll walk through the entire setup process takes about 10 minutes. So basically this apify API key is shared here. I've already written this script. I had the agent go and read how do I use this endpoint to pull out all the posts and comments information. They'll all the people that have interacted with this. So I can give it this post URL. And I can say extract the engages using the apify API key. And it's going to go and run that process for me. So this is how I would go and build this automation or build this agent as I would basically take this code. And I would deploy it into the cloud. And I would say, okay, on a daily cadence, I want you to check for net new posts. So that is where I would look at the profile posts. So this is the profile post scraper. So I would extract the post URLs from this person. Right. So every net new post daily is getting extracted. And then from that, I'm then extracting the engages using that API endpoint as well. Right. So right now, as you can see, the duped by public profiles, they're 63 raw. And it's about to pull all of those contacts out. So once I have those contacts, this is done, man, like game over. As long as you have the LinkedIn profiles, you can go and find the email addresses of them. You can find the phone numbers of them. You can find everything that you need on the cold outbound. And I'm going to show you that right now. What are the tools that actually go and use to do this? So let me just show you though, again, just the final completion of this. And what makes this a marketing agent versus a marketing automation? Yeah. So the agent component of this is that it is running on a cron job daily. And then you're going to have an agent that's later on, we'll have it responding to the inbox. And this is this blurry line, right? Like what is an agent? People ask me this every sales call. And the answer to all of this is like, it's how I think about it personally, is it something that's doing a job to be done, right? So the job to be done here is finding leads and outbounding to those leads and then responding to those leads as they're like asking questions or again, like driving them deeper into the pipeline. In reality though, gee, like what is a market, like what is a marketing agent? It's code. It's maybe some thinking loop and it's a live data stream, right? That is really how like this functions. And the thing that you can make, you know, extend this further with is like what you're, who you're outbounding to, you want it to basically do an ICP fits or a, or a, or a, a target customer segment fit. So before it even does this enrichment that we're about to do, you would be like, okay, agent, research this person and the company that they're at. How many employees do they have? All of these things and then based off of what we find, if it fits this customer profile, like it's, you're going to have the agent basically thinks through that, right? Using an LLM, if it fits this customer profile, then it goes into this enrichment. Then we're actually going to call the email them. So that's where that thinking loop could potentially be here as well. But really the blurriness between all this, I think about it as software anymore, like to be transparent, like everybody, the thing, a different way to say this is like everybody tried to put God in a box and give it access to a Facebook ads account. And we realized that is not the right way to do this whatsoever. The right way to do this is like what was the human doing? They were running this very specific process with like media buying. They were researching ad creative angles. They were making new ad creative. They were testing the new ad creative. And then they were like pruning the losers, promoting the winners, right? Like that is what the, a top media buyer does. Okay, how do we go and make a piece of software that does that exact same thing? So when you hear agents like really just think software with potentially a thinking loop, like you shouldn't be paying a different way to think about this. And this is something I'm obsessed with right now. You should not be paying anthropic. You should not be paying Chad G.P.T. to do an API call. You should be paying them to make the software that uses CPU to do the API call. Why are you paying this tax on tokens every time that you're trying to do this marketing activity? That's ridiculous. Build the software that does the solution for you, not tokens burning every time that you're trying to do the action. So anyway, okay, so we've got these linked in URLs. And what do we do with them now? So we're going to do what's called a waterfall enrichment. And so we're basically going to use these LinkedIn profiles to go and find the email addresses and then the phone numbers of these individuals. So how do we do this? The first thing that we're going to use in a tool stack is called kitleads.io. So this is a database of, it's basically they aggregate all these B2B contacts and you can access it via their API. The emails that we don't find within kitleads, we're then going to use some, then get a waterfall down to something like Apollo. And then you could take this even further down into something like origami. It's another tool that we have been using and experimenting with. Also, their team is just doing awesome work. Like the Vin and Pizzle team is incredible. So anyways, forgetleads. Let's go back to our, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, terminal right now. So again, this is me hands on keyboard doing the process to teach it to you, but everything that I'm doing right now, this is all just going to be code under the hood. And once it's code, I can deploy that into a cloud system as long as it has the necessary data that it needs and the necessary access that it needs. It can go and run this operation autonomously. And then you're just there basically jockeying the agent or modifying the system, right? So we're building a system here. So from here, um, what I would then go to is say use the Git leads API, uh, to, uh, find the emails and phone numbers. And like dumb question. Yeah. That's legit. Like, you know, like, it's not great to get these people's emails. It's like fully legit. It is fully legit to get these emails. Um, what you do with those, that's where things, uh, like from a compliance standpoint change, you can cold email technically in the United States. You can also add people to a email newsletter, um, uh, to be, and be can spam compliant. There's like tons of, uh, you, like thing, you basically have a checklist of things that you have to do with this said though, um, like this is one of these, like I'm the cold email side and the contact look up. Um, you're basically just buying data from a data broker, which is, uh, is legal, right? That, that is accessible. So these companies, how they do this is they basically are buying all these lists and then aggregating them from all these different data brokers. That whole piece is, it's all the shading network. But this, uh, like what we're talking about here, you know, on the spectrum of like black hat to white hat is pretty far on that white hat side. So cool. Yeah. I don't think anyone would, you know, mistake you for a lawyer also. Oh, totally. Take this with the grain of salt, you know, and, and like, there's also different compliance rules within the United States research. Exactly. Exactly. The within, you know, the United States versus, uh, like the EU has totally different compliance pieces. Exactly. Um, but with that said, like the, uh, you know, the finding of people's information and then like reaching out to them, uh, there, you can do this basically. It's kind of the high level. But again, this, I, we don't have time today to go into all the, the specifics about like all the, the finite details here. So once I've found this, um, each of these individuals and then the emails, um, from there, what I'm then going to do is validate these emails. So I would send it to a software called million verifier. So million verifier, um, enables me to, uh, basically check if the email is good, riskier bad, um, you know, more technical terms would be, uh, like good, catch all, um, you know, risky, et cetera. Um, the, the reasoning for this, so the reason you have to, you want to do this is the emails that come out of these providers. So out of Git leads, out of Apollo, out of origami, I think they do some checks like a little bit deeper though. So, you know, I don't know much as much about this, but I know for sure with Git leads in Apollo, it's like do the second verification. You're basically only wanting to send cold email to valid emails because if you send to invalid emails, you're going to basically just run into deliverability problems. And probably right now you're asking yourself like, okay, cool. How do you send these cool emails? I'm going to show you that in a second. with me. So we've done that waterfall enrichment, we found the emails, we found the phone numbers, and when I say a waterfall enrichment, what is happening here is we're taking that list of 50 and just to use this spreadsheet as an example. So say we have 50 that we have 50 linked in URLs that we found, and on Git leads, maybe we only find 32 emails of those people. So that next cohort. So those other 18 that are left, I'm then going to send those 18 to Apollo. So of those 18 that I send, maybe I only find 10, and then those eight, that's when I would send that to something else like Prospero or Gami or these other enrichment tools. And the reason behind this is you're you're starting with what is the cheapest, most accurate, and then moving your way down into the more expensive validation tools. But from this, you can pull out basically from a list, like you know, this is the way that you get to an 80% fine rate, etc. And you can chain as many of these together as you want, it just depends on your budgets that are available, etc. And there's also aggregators of this like, Orgami is an example, like aggregates this waterfall for you. So you can just send them a LinkedIn profile, it's going to like waterfall through the options that are available. Okay, so the other thing to throw in here that will be valuable to your team is a software called Lead Magic. So this is one that we use a lot for like mobile phones in particular. But same strategy here, it's just basically, you know, another enrichment tool, but specifically on the phone number side, we've used a decent amount. So once I have that contact information, I now need to go and actually build this outbound motion. So on the cold email side first, how do we go and do this? We need to buy inboxes. So a couple of different ways to do that. I can use a tool called inbox kit. I can use instantly a eyes prebuilt, like emails that you can buy from them. Or I can use a company called hyper tide, which is the partner that we use and we work with, they are some of the best in front of my opinion. So when you're buying these emails, you're buying or you're really what you're doing is you're buying inboxes and domains that are burner domains that enable you to send cold email, not from your core domain. And the reason that you have to do this is so that you don't burn the deliverability of your core domain. So what do I mean by that? If you send from your exact domain and say we send 10,000 cold emails from that, we will nuke the deliverability of the business URL, the actual domain that we use to run our company. You don't want to do that. So typically what you want to do on the marketing side is have this set, have this separation. So you have domains that are for your cold email, you have domains that are for your email marketing, you have domains that are for your transactional marketing. So this would be a transactional email. So this would be email that's being sent directly from the product to a customer. Imagine like a password reset as an example. And then you want to have your business domain email, which is what your team actually uses to run the company, etc. So with hyper tide as an example, we have a partnership with them. So it's a little bit different, but we can send about 10,000 cold emails just to give a kind of the cost breakdown here. We said about 10,000 cold emails with them for about $100 a month and infrastructure costs on the inbox side. It's about the same for majority of these. So inbox kit as an example is very similar pricing. They also run like sales all the time. So look for those on the domain side. So you basically buy the domains and then you're paying a subscription to have these inboxes hosted for you. And then on instantly side, you can typically get started with this $97 a month here. So in total, you know, out the door to get going on this, the infrastructure costs can be in that range of about $100 to get started. Or sorry, about $200 to get started for the sending software and then also the inboxes. So again, just to reiterate this, because I've no, I've talked through a lot. I'm pulling the lead list from LinkedIn. I'm finding these people. How do I know that these are people that I want to reach out to? It's because they're engaging with content that I know my target customer would be interested in. And so these people are basically hand raising that they are would potentially be my target customer, which is insane by the way, right? Which is insane. So I find this right? Yeah, yeah, possible to find this. And so the, so I'm finding these people, I'm then doing a waterfall enrichment to find all of their contact information. And then once I have their contact information, I need to actually be able to send to them. So I'm getting inbox infrastructure to be able to send. And then I'm sending with a platform like instantly. And then on the LinkedIn DM side, what I'm sending with is a platform like HeyReach, another one that we like is called Botdog. Both of these have APIs. But what these enable you to do is basically do LinkedIn DM campaigns from these accounts. I also know people that are just like using LinkedIn DM or sorry, LinkedIn in mail for this and seeing incredible success right now using this strategy. So get just throwing out all the strategies that are available. So this is how you can build this pipeline, right? Now how do you actually like have an agent that is managing that inbox? So looking at instantly as an example, they have an API. And that API allows for you to monitor and manage the entire account. So you can have an agent that's literally writing copy for each individual email or person that you're contacting or reaching out to and writing those variables. And then that can be basically pushed into instantly. So this happens outside the platform gets pushed in. But the bigger thing here is they also have web hooks. So when a positive reply happens, you can send that web hook confirmation back to your agent that's hosted on some type of cloud server. And that agent, you give it basically like a base prompt of like here's all the context that you need and your goal is to try to get people to schedule demos on this link. It can manage that inbox and answer questions, push people deeper. But the thing that gets really fascinating and really powerful with this G is like it can do these follow ups like months later. So it's like okay, like also like every six months, I want to program that in to like re reach out to these people that went cold. I can also plug it into my scheduling application like Calonly or like Cal.com. I can give the agent access to see okay, did this person that we reached out to? Can we, did they actually schedule a discovery call? Did they actually, you know, produce the action that we're, you know, make the action that we're trying to optimize for? And so from this, you can basically build this like SDR in a box, right? That is again, finding new people for you based off of the engagements that they're interacting with on social, finding the emails, actually writing the emails, deciding if this is a good ICP fit, and then sending that to the sending platforms and then managing the inboxes of those sending platforms. And again, when I say agent, right, like when I'm saying, oh, it's managing this inbox, it's literally just code under the hood, right? It's code under the hood with an LLM attached. That is an agent like in this context here. You don't have to over complicate this. You don't have to have God in the box managing an email in box. Be a very simple setup to actually produce this. I also get asked this question a lot like do you need use like some agent framework on the hood? It's like a lot of the times you don't need it. It's just bloat. You can just have a very simple like a very simple solution for these finite problems, right? It doesn't have to be this over complicated or over-engineered thing. So anyways, happy to answer any questions about that or dive deeper on any of this. Again, it's hard to show code. And so I didn't really do that today of like this is how you do it. But what you need here basically the final piece is you need to set up a server. So use something like a railway or this is what we do at like graphed, right? It's like we have the data pipeline warehouse and then the server to deploy these agents to that's like off to the live data streams. But yeah, happy to answer questions, D. I mean to be clear, you're you know, you're using a harness like Cloud Code or Codex to actually build out all of the thing. But this the hard part is the strategy around, you know, you're going after why you're going after them. What's your tool stack that you like what's amazing is you just like outlined here's all the tools that you need to get like set up. Then it becomes okay, I have to go into, you know, that's what people are talking about software factories like we're all in the software factory business now, right? Because we're just going and we're spitting up stuff like this, the software to actually go and complete these tasks. Absolutely. I think the thing that we are like focusing on like, so to say like a good way to think about this is like if you can build it in Cloud Code and like have some type of local system that you're running, you can probably deploy that to a server somewhere, right? And have that run on an hourly cadence or a daily cadence or whatever that ends up looking like. The challenge ends up being how do I set up the infrastructure that's necessary for the agent to be able to do this, right? And the solution is like the open source solution as an example, like we talked about this on the last call, use something like air by with click house to get like create your data pipeline and your data warehouse. So you have that data stream for the agent to make those decisions. And then you have to have some server and like when I say server, what is that right for the uninitiated? It's just the computer. that is on all the time somewhere else that you're putting code on to, right? I think this software factory thing is super fascinating as well. Like really, it's funny, this is how I'm thinking about marketing now. Like marketing is just code. Like when I generate and you know, when you have an image, like that's just the JSON prompt under the hood. Like when I make you know, seed dance AI avatar videos, that's just like an LLM that like scraped Reddit, like read some things, wrote a script, and then we, it's just an API call that's happening to KIAI to generate that image with like, okay, here's how you chain this together to make it into 30 seconds. Everything now, like in my co-founder, this is his firm belief. Like Max always says this, he's basically like, the only agent is a coding agent, actually. Yeah, everything else is just software that's being made by the coding agent. I think this is like this paradigm shift. And like something that we are obsessed, it's like, why are you paying tokens for things that can be just code that is running on super cheap compute? You don't, you don't have to have like inference every time that you're doing this action. Only use inference when you need it. And this is kind of this like differing viewpoint that I think, you know, everybody's just like, oh, token abundance, I'm going to token Max. I'm like, I'm actually totally like probably the opposite of that. Like why? It just, it is wasteful. Like do the thing that is the simpler thing that has less likely hit a breaking like if you have homie, start to run your Facebook ads, high likelihood, it might just like absolutely nuke the account. But if you have it run based off, you build a piece of custom software for yourself that's running based off of a system that a normal, like a real human run, totally different, you know, outcomes that you're going to get from that that are probably higher quality. So. Okay. Do we have time for a second marketing agent demo flow? Yeah, I can talk through. I just did this. I just did this for my team. I don't know if that'll be super interesting. Actually, I mean, you tell me we basically were like, okay, how do we at scale make social content on LinkedIn for like the entire team and like, so we have them, what it basically we're interviewing them. We take the transcripts, we pull out the insights, the insights get rid of the posts. The posts automatically get scheduled to their LinkedIn accounts using a tool called ordinal MCP. Yes, stop. Yes, this is interesting because a lot of people, I mean, a lot of people might have heard, you know, listen to this cold, cold email approach or cold reach out approach and are like, I want to go the organic route. So like, what's an example of setting up a marketing agent in our organic route and can you break that down for us? Absolutely. Yeah, I'll do a LinkedIn one because it's super topical and like we've had a lot of interest in this lately by companies, which has been pretty fascinating. They're using this with like their sales teams like they want, you know, their seven person sales team to be posting daily. How do they actually do that and make unique ideas? So this also pairs with the cold email. I'll talk about that as well. But yeah, just to run through the process super simple, it's like literally record a conversation like this. Like I have a weekly call like one-on-one with like the people that we're doing this for and they work. And I'm just like tell me everything that like you've learned in the last week. I just basically interview them, have a conversation, right? It doesn't have to be anything like you don't have to have any focus. It's just like what are the things that jumped out at you after being in these sales calls or whatever your job is? You can do this for like technical people as well at the organization. You can do this for everybody. And I imagine this is how the large like the real companies are doing this. There's no way that like everybody at like a lovable is running the content that's going out across all of the accounts. Maybe that's happening. But I think what's more likely is that there's somebody behind the scenes that's orchestrating this. It also doesn't have to be an interview. It can just be sales calls or internal comms like Alex Lieberman as an example has been talking about this a lot where they're basically sourcing like so much context is happening within their notion, within their code base within their their Slack. We see this as well, right? You can use one of these agents to query those data sources, right? Like query the sales channel or query the gong transcripts and that's where you can pull this insights from. And honestly a lot of the times you find that it's really in like it's really good content that's trapped in there. Like these ideas like for example, a customer had a customer said that or a potential customer said this and it was like why they didn't buy the product. And that can turn into an unbelievable piece of content that you can extract from. So you get source material. Why do you have to get source material? The reason is because if you go and you try to just have the agent like think about this, you're like right good LinkedIn content. It's going to be the most mid thing. You I mean it's you're going to waste the person's time on the other side, right? Or you're going to get flagged for AI slot by LinkedIn's new feature that just released this morning. The better way to do this is source this from real human conversation because that's where these original ideas are coming from. Another example of this is like literally this podcast. You could extract all the insights from the transcript and that can be used as social content. This is like a strategy I use for myself, but it doesn't have to be just your own. It can be somebody else's as well. It can be you know a podcast with Naval. It can be whatever. It can the source material can be anything. But the system that you create is some type of source material that's happening on you know, some type of cadence. And then from that I'm building basically this writing and scheduling process. So what I'll walk through now how to actually like do this. So take that source material. You're going to do an API call into you know some LLM as an example for this. Like you could I mean we've even used just like Claude Saunid as an example and it's probably good enough on the writing side. And then once you have that those written posts, you're then going to go use scheduling tool. We like ordinal for this. They're a partner of ours as well. But it allows for you to have multiple LinkedIn accounts connected to it and then they can also interact with each other which is amazing. But you can through their API or their MCP schedule these posts to each of the individual accounts. And then ordinal also has I can just go into this actually show you. Orinal also has the analytics data that pulls in from your LinkedIn posts there as well. So we can see the breakdown of like which content is actually performing well. So it has the analytics of the multiple accounts. You can actually see the breakdown of the individual posts. And that data string can go back to the agent so that it understands okay this is what's getting impressions. This is what's doing well. Let's go do more content like when it does it cycles of writing that can influence the next round of creative. So topics like this perform better based off of the source material we pulled how can we snowball or remix use those specific words snowball or remix to have it go further right. And this is where the LLM is thinking on top of that data string. And when you look at like what is happening here. Like what does the social media manager do? I actually think the social media manager job like full stop is I think it's already dead. But if I won't get into that if you're listening to this, please learn how to make and manage content and scale across multiple accounts with agents because that's going to be I think that's the real meta. Now is like how can a single person manage 10, 20, 100 accounts across all of these different channels. But when you look at what a social media manager did previously I could good one that was actually excellent excellent at their job is they would prospect for ideas. They would make content about those ideas. They would publish it. They would look at the data to see which got the most impressions. And then they would turn that into a recurring content calendar. They're like okay, I'm just remixing this the same ideas over and over again. If you look at my Twitter like post that as an example or even my LinkedIn it is the exact same thing remix every 90 days. Like full stop. That is all that's happening. And that when you get enough information like a bigger enough corpus you have you basically understand what's already going to go viral like I have these posts that I've literally used for the last two years every time I post that I know it's going to go viral. I can't post it every day. You post it every 90 days right and that's how you can go back and this cadence. And so again have this mentality of I'm prospecting for ideas. I'm prospecting for winners. Once I find those I'm trying to use those as as often as I can because I know that that's what's going to work. That is what the audience is resonating with. And this is this applies to product as well. I think that a lot of first time founders they spend time thinking about like I'm trying to get the market to buy this. And in reality it's like I'm sure the pros at this is like what does the market want to buy can I build it and can I sell it to them. That is actually how you start a business. And for some reason it's this flip thing where they're like I'm trying to invent a new idea. I don't want to invent a new idea. I don't want to be like what do people want to buy that currently like they can't buy and can I go and figure out the way to build that thing. And then I know I can sell that back to my notes. The market is going to be receptive to and you need to think about content in the same way. We're like what is the content that the market is currently receptive to. And by mining that content from other sources that has already had a viral moment this is a way to leapfrog that to identify that. And then you're going and you're putting your own spin. You're putting your own angle on this. So anyway. A lot of thoughts there. Agreed on the social media manager is like that role is dead or it's evolved. It's going to evolve. Like it's going to evolve into the social media agent manager. So you're going to need to be able to spin up agents so that you can create a bunch of accounts on the fly that systematically creates content like you have like you get millions of impressions. a month, free impressions, actually, the platform just hang you, which is insane. To do it, it's insane. - I could pay the bill to lead pipeline. Like think about that. - That's crazy. - And like, it's so funny, man, I'll talk to like founders or like, you know, large like people that run bigger companies and they'll be like, why would you invest in social? And I'm like, look at the earned media. Like if you were paying for those impressions on platform, for example, on LinkedIn, it's like $22 per thousand impressions, the average, right? It's like every post that you get, even within account that's like 500 followers, you can get a thousand impressions. That's like $20 that you just like put into your pocket for free, right? But it's, so there's the earned media side and then there's also like the platforms pay you. Like YouTube literally pays you to do marketing for a late checkout. Like what the hell? - It's crazy. It's crazy. And then, you know, for the people who are like, well, I don't want to do a personal brand, make sense. What Cody is suggesting is like, have people on your team have these personal brands. And if you don't want, and by the way, I'll give you a piece of sauce. If you don't want to do that, another really smart thing to do with agents creating content for you is creating theme based pages or topic based pages. So for example, my good friend, Julian Shapiro, you know, he had a company, a growth agency called Demand Curve. - Absolutely. - And by the way, his blog is incredible. And he's the guy that's what I came up on. So I'm just like, one of those, he's the. - I actually grew up with Julian. - No, I did you know? That's amazing. - Yeah, he was like, my name's like a farm now or something, right? - Yeah. - That's great. - So I need to get him on the pod, but Julian, being the smart guy, he is, it's not like he created a ex account that was slash Demand Curve. I mean, maybe he has that, but he actually created an ex account called @growthtactics. So he's creating content on this growth tactic page. People interested in growth tactics follow it. And then they learn about his agency and his products through that. - So we need to be company, right? - Exactly. - We need to be a company. And like again, it doesn't, I mean, there's the ones that are my favorite are like Chase passive income. I don't know if you've seen this. - Yeah. - They're doing it more as a meme page, but like you can use this attention that you can garner for free is a way to drive inbound for whatever, whatever it is that you're building, it doesn't have to just be you. It can be this like anonymous thing that is still providing value that you're aggregating and organizing for the internet, right? So I'll leave it there. I don't know if you're gonna get the question. - Really, you know, impactful marketing agents that you just broke down. I wish we had 40 hours together and we did like a crazy comment below. That's the only way I come back. That's the only way to have me, all right? So you have to do this. You have to comment what you wanna learn. I'll teach you whatever you want. It can be how to build social media agents like for TikTok clouds. It can be like how do I actually run and pay to ads account? It can be anything that you can imagine. It can be direct mail. I'll literally walk you through. How can you send direct mail at scale by scraping Google Maps? You name it. How do you advertise on TV? And what's the meta there? Like how do you get cheaper clicks on LinkedIn? I can break down any of that. So I appreciate you, Cody. We'll see you in the comment section. Like always, I'll include links for where to follow Cody on the internet in the show notes in the description. - And I shout it out. Give me the opportunity. - Go for it. - Hell yeah. Go find me on Twitter LinkedIn. That's where I'm the most active. And if you want to deploy these exact agents that I talked about today, go to graph.com. We have both the platform solution for this and also we forward deploy software engineers to do these actual implementations on our platform. We would love to help you. If you're a fast growing company, that is who we're seeing the most success with. So thanks for having me, gee. God bless you, Cody. I'll see you next time.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Marketing agents are positioned as the next big evolution after coding agents, enabling automated customer acquisition.
  2. The strategy focuses on monitoring LinkedIn posts from niche influencers to extract engaged users as high-intent leads.
  3. The workflow uses Apify for scraping LinkedIn engagements, then waterfall enrichment tools (Kitleads, Apollo, Origami) to find emails and phone numbers.
  4. Email validation is done via Million Verifier to ensure deliverability before outbound campaigns.
  5. The system operates as a daily cron job, with an agent managing inboxes to qualify leads and push them toward demos.
  6. Distinction is made between marketing agents and automations
  7. Emphasis on building software over token-burning AI calls to reduce costs and scale efficiently.
  8. Cold email is framed as legal but compliance varies by region (e.g., US vs. EU), with a white-hat approach to data sourcing.

Summary:

The episode, hosted by Greg Eisenberg with guest Cody Schneider, teaches how to build AI-driven marketing agents for cold outbound on email and LinkedIn. The core strategy leverages social signals: by monitoring posts from 10-20 influencers in a target niche, businesses can extract users who engage with relevant content, treating those engagements as "hand raises" indicating interest. This approach stands out amid declining cold email reply rates caused by AI-generated content saturation.

The technical setup involves using Apify, a scraping API, to extract post reactions and comments from chosen LinkedIn posts. A coding agent (e.g., Codex or Cloud Code) automates this process, running on a daily cron job to fetch new posts and engagements. Once LinkedIn profiles are collected, a waterfall enrichment process using tools like Kitleads, Apollo, and Origami finds email addresses and phone numbers, with Million Verifier validating email quality. The agent then performs outbound campaigns, and a separate agent manages responses to answer questions and drive leads toward booking demos.

Cody emphasizes that marketing agents are essentially software with thinking loops, not token-burning AI calls. He advocates for building reusable code to reduce costs and scale operations. While the data sourcing is legal and white-hat, compliance varies by region, requiring caution. The episode concludes with a call to action for viewers to comment on other go-to-market motions they want covered, reinforcing the show's educational, no-gatekeeping approach.

FAQs

Marketing agents are software systems that automate customer acquisition, similar to how coding agents automate software creation. They are important because they help get customers on autopilot, allowing you to focus on building your product while the marketing runs.

The strategy is to monitor posts from influencers in your niche and extract the people who engage with them. These engagements act as signals of interest, indicating potential customers who are 'hand-raising' for your product, which helps you stand out in a crowded market.

Key tools include Apify for scraping LinkedIn posts and engagements, Kitleads.io for finding emails and phone numbers, Apollo as a fallback for enrichment, Million Verifier for email validation, and coding agents like Codex or Cloud Code to orchestrate the process.

First, find 10-20 influencers or business accounts in your niche whose posts your target customers engage with. Then, use Apify's profile post scraper to extract new post URLs daily, and use the post reactions scraper to pull all engagers from those posts.

Waterfall enrichment is a process of finding contact information by using multiple data sources in sequence. You start with a tool like Kitleads.io to find emails, then fall back to Apollo if not found, and finally validate the emails with Million Verifier to ensure they are deliverable.

Yes, finding emails via data brokers like Kitleads.io is legal in the US, as it's essentially buying aggregated data. However, compliance rules vary by region (e.g., EU is stricter), and you must follow regulations like CAN-SPAM when sending cold emails.

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