Should you send a note when you invite someone to connect on LinkedIn?
What about when they accept your connection?
At what point should you reach out to a new connection?
And what the heck should you say?
Should you ask for a meeting or send them a joke? :)
And what about posting – how do you write a hook that makes your people stop scrolling?
These are just a few of the questions answered by this week’s guest, Brenden Delarua, a growth marketing strategist, when we talked about how exactly he hit recently 10,000 followers on LinkedIn!
I worked with Brenden when he was a wee one, still in college, studying marketing but not learning what he wanted to know.
That's when he Googled “marketing mentor” and he found me.
We worked together for a couple years and then he continued on his journey.
So it was a thrill to recently hear how Brenden has taken what he learned and run with it, turning it into a thriving business 10 years later.
If you want to grow your network on LinkedIn, but find the platform’s algorithm confusing, Episode 553 of the Marketing Mentor Podcast is for you.
I love Brenden’s take on LinkedIn and on AI – not melodramatic, not overly pessimistic. I find him to be super realistic and keeping his eyes open for how he needs to evolve and adapt as the unknown future approaches.
So listen here (or below) and learn…
If you like what you hear, we’d love it if you write a review, subscribe here and sign up for Quick Tips from Marketing Mentor.
And If you want my help figuring all of this out, take advantage of my free mentoring session.
Read the transcript here
ilise benun: Hi there, this is ilise benun, your marketing mentor, and this is the podcast for you if and only if you are ready to leave the feast or famine syndrome behind. And I mean for good.
Should you send a note when you invite someone to connect on LinkedIn? And what about when they accept your connection? And at what point should you reach out to a new connection? And what the heck should you say? Should you ask for a meeting or send them a joke? And how effective is commenting on LinkedIn? These are just a few of the questions answered by this week's guest, Brenden Delarua, a growth marketing strategist.
I worked with Brenden when he was a wee one, still in college studying marketing but not learning what he really wanted to know. And this was before I even named my framework the Simplest Marketing Plan, but I was already teaching the three tools: outreach, networking, and content marketing. So it was a thrill to hear how Brenden has taken what he learned and run with it, turning it into a thriving business 10 years later. So listen and learn. All right, Brenden, welcome to the podcast.
Brenden Delarua: Yeah, thank you for having me, ilise. This is a dream come true.
ilise benun: Awesome. Well, tell the people who you are and then I'll kind of tee it up.
Brenden Delarua: Yeah, I'm Brenden Delarua. I'm co-founder at Stella Incrementality, which is a marketing technology company. I'm also a consultant. I go under the DBA of Growth Marketing Machines where I help run paid media programs for up-and-coming e-commerce brands.
ilise benun: All right. I'm going to ask you to just tell a little of the history of how we met and what the foundation was and then where you went with it. But first—and maybe this will come out as you're doing that—my listeners, as you know, are self-employed creative professionals, lots of copywriters and designers and marketers and photographers. I'm not sure they understand what you just said you do with Stella. So, if you would just put it in layman's terms and then we'll go back in time.
Brenden Delarua: Sure. Yeah. I'm not even sure if I know what I do at Stella. I like to pretend I say big words and it confuses people so they don't ask questions. But now you've called me out on my bluff.
ilise benun: All right. Well, tell us in plain language then what you do.
Brenden Delarua: Yeah. So incrementality—that word does not seem to be a real word. Not in the dictionary. If you type it into an email it'll have the line under it that says it's not a real word. But incremental means an additional—like a sale that would not have happened without some sort of intervention. So an incremental sale is an additional sale that would not have happened. Incrementality is measuring those incremental sales.
How you do that in paid media is ultimately turning off ads. So what we do at Stella is we help brands figure out regions to just turn off ads in and then we start to monitor their source of truth, which is revenue. Basically, if we turn off Meta, how much revenue do we lose? If we think Meta is driving X when it comes to our revenue and we turn off Meta and we see no drop in sales, then we know most of our spend on Meta is wasted. So that's a very high-level version of what incrementality is. It's becoming a big buzzword.
ilise benun: Good. That's definitely clear. And one thought I had as you were defining incrementality is that it also seems to be about baby steps somehow. Would you say that's true?
Brenden Delarua: I guess it depends, right? It's basically data science, and when marketers get into data science, it gets a little weird because there's so much nuance. I've learned just since starting Stella working with my co-founder Vinnie, who is a data scientist, there's just so much nuance of what's an actually good model or not. But yeah, I guess there are baby steps of leaning into incrementality and then getting further into the weeds and figuring out how to use it. The end goal is just identifying what's causing new revenue to happen and then figuring out where to invest to get more incremental revenue to happen.
That's why larger companies have been leaning into incrementality testing because there's this big misconception about multi-touch attribution or just dashboard records where everything is click-based. They need a UTM—basically the URL that tells you where the click came from.
ilise benun: We call it a "fancy link" here over at Marketing Mentor.
Brenden Delarua: A fancy link. Okay. Yeah. So you need a lot of fancy links that tell you where things come from. But the issue with that is that's showing you correlation. Someone saw an ad or clicked an ad and then later converted, but it doesn't tell you what caused an ad to convert. So what you end up getting, especially on a larger scale, is a lot of misattributed conversions like branded search or retargeting—sales that would have happened regardless of your media spend. As a marketer held to a ROAS (return on ad spend) goal, you're kind of incentivized to lean into higher ROAS campaigns which sometimes are actually bleeding the company dry and you don't even know it.
ilise benun: Interesting. Now, all right. So, that's enough about that. Now, forgive me for this question, but I feel like it's relevant. Brenden, how old are you?
Brenden Delarua: I'm 29.
ilise benun: Okay, good. Excellent. And when we met, I don't remember how long ago it was, but you were still in school, I think, studying marketing, but you're not a data scientist, right?
Brenden Delarua: I mean, not by title, but I think I probably know a lot more about data science than I thought I ever would.
ilise benun: Mhm. So, I guess my point is more it's not what you studied. So, start back there. Start with what you studied and how we met.
Brenden Delarua: Yeah. I went to college in Tampa for marketing, and I think it's pretty standard with most colleges where the first year or two you're in a bunch of classes that have nothing to do with your major. I had one or two marketing classes in my first few years of college, and at the same time, I was reading so many books from Barnes & Noble or whatever I could get from eBay. I was reading a lot of marketing books, but then the college classes felt so dated at the time. I felt like the marketing they were teaching was almost more like a data analyst—observing ethnography data or census data—and I was like, "This is not what I want.".
So, I just Googled. I believe I was 19 when you and me met, ilise. But I Googled "marketing mentor" because I wanted a marketing mentor that actually has done what I want to do and I want to learn from. And then I found you. I reached out and I don't remember if I said it or if you said it in your reply email, but you were like, "I don't normally do that—like talk to a student.". But you were happy to have calls, and then you and me started meeting weekly. Oh my god, I'm so appreciative of it. It taught me way more, and I still use the insights—it taught me way more than my entire college education did.
ilise benun: That's amazing actually. And you know I'm thrilled that was the case. I don't remember saying that to you, although it was definitely true that I was not marketing myself to students. But I'm always open to whoever is gung-ho to learn and just take the ball and run with it. And that's what you did, and that's what always makes me very gratified and satisfied.
In a recent LinkedIn post that you put out there, you talked about hitting 10,000 followers on LinkedIn by using the tools of the Simplest Marketing Plan. So, let's also talk about how to increase followers on LinkedIn because I think my listeners would love to know about that.
Brenden Delarua: Yeah, I think the whole content, networking, and outreach—it's so simple, and that's why it's called the Simplest Marketing Plan. But the more I think about it, the more it will transcend time. Even when AI takes over, if you're growing any type of business or following, it is all coming around to networking, content, and outreach in whatever form that you want. I have a specific strategy that I use on LinkedIn specifically, but my TikTok following is six times what I have on LinkedIn, and I still did the same thing over there.
But I think like when you and me started talking, ilise, I was a broke college kid. I was negative money, in a lot of debt from college, and you were the one that recommended I look into BNI (Business Networking International). I went to my first one, I think I was 19. I couldn't even drink yet. I went to the one in-person networking event—this was before the pandemic—and later that day, I signed a social media management client for a thousand bucks a month or something like that. It was insane.
Then I just kept going and that was a big source of referrals, but that was the networking, right? And then when it came to outreach, I was a part of a lot of local Tampa Bay Facebook groups where people would ask for a website or an SEO guy or someone to run ads. I would be the first one into those comment sections or I'd have people recommending me as well. And then my content—I was posting a lot of blogs back then and trying to post content on LinkedIn and everywhere else, but nothing was really successful for a while. It took me a while to find my voice, but I was doing all three of them and basically, it started my marketing career.
ilise benun: And if you can remember, what exactly were you offering in terms of services at that point? Because I see a lot of people struggling with not knowing who they are and what they're offering.
Brenden Delarua: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I had no idea what I was selling. I think I would joke to you, "If a client asked me to mow their lawn, I would do it.". I had no bounds because then I started getting some clients and that was my first introduction to working with business owners. A lot of them are kooky, and I would get calls from my clients at midnight because they had an idea, and I would answer it. I was a constant ball of anxiety.
When I went to the first networking event, I knew I wanted to offer marketing services, but I didn't know exactly what it was. So, the first contract was social media management for a health insurance provider. I'd build websites because people needed websites, and word got around that I was charging hardly anything—like 300 bucks for a website—and I could turn it around in 48 hours.
Eventually, people were like, "Okay, I have a website. What do we do now with this?". And I'm like, "Well, I guess we can get people to the website." And that's when I started getting into paid ads—running ads on Meta and Google working with tiny budgets, like $5 or $10 a day. What I liked about paid ads was it was the easiest way to prove value. If you're doing social media management, you make a post, it gets 100 likes, but the client asks, "How many people bought from this post?" and it's hard to quantify. But when I'm running ads and we're spending 20 bucks a day and returning a trackable $100 a day in revenue, it's very easy to be like, "Oh, okay. This is working.".
ilise benun: And it took time, right? It doesn't go fast.
Brenden Delarua: Yeah, I think that whole process took like two years for me to find advertising. And then I stepped away from freelancing for a while to work at an agency in Tampa where my whole job was just advertising. I got exposed to a lot of larger accounts and running bigger budgets. I loved that job and I didn't have to worry about the stress of inconsistent income. I had health insurance and I didn't have to go to networking events anymore.
ilise benun: And so, I remember when you took that job, I think you said something like, "I just can't deal with this self-employment thing." Is that how you felt?
Brenden Delarua: Yeah. I think what it was was there were months I made a decent chunk of money, at least for back then. I had two months back-to-back that were very good for me, and I think I was like 21. And then I remember that December—Christmas—I made $300 total. I was like, "Oh my god." Even though I had money from the months before, it started making me think every check I got, "I need this to last until the day I die.". It was very scary. I had bills to pay and I got engaged to Bonnie. So I thought if I got a job, I would have consistent income and that might be what I want.
Now that I'm working for myself again, I've found a lot of consistency, which is much better.
ilise benun: And so the part where you were working for the agency and then how did you build Stella? Where did Stella come from?
Brenden Delarua: Yeah, so Stella is named—my co-founder named it after the Marlon Brando skit or A Streetcar Named Desire.
ilise benun: Streetcar. Right.
Brenden Delarua: Yeah. I'm too young, you know. I'm 29. But that's where it came from. Also, I like the idea of a personified SaaS platform. Anytime I sell Stella, I talk about her like "Stella can do this and do that," which is cool.
I worked at an agency based out of LA for a while and I got exposed to so much more. I worked with VC-backed companies that had infinite budgets to scale—they didn't care if they were profitable, they just wanted to scale as much as they could for two years then make an exit. Then that agency got acquired and I got to work with huge clients. I ran all the ads for one of the 2024 presidential campaigns and one of the largest movie studios.
What I started noticing was basically what incrementality is—I just didn't know the name for it. For example, I worked with this publicly traded pharmaceutical company. I looked at all their campaigns and I was like, "Oh, let's just cut budget from the campaigns with the lowest ROAS and invest in the campaigns with the highest ROAS.". When I did that, profitability increased dramatically, and I was very rewarded. I won an award, 30 under 30 performance marketers.
But then about 3 months later, we started to see this decrease in conversions and demand. What ended up happening was we cut the top-of-funnel tactics like CTV, display, audio, or YouTube. Those tactics are hard to track because people don't really click on them, so they have a low ROAS. I turned them off, but there's this long customer journey or payback period—a longer lag time—but it is incremental. It was driving new customers into our pipeline that we would not have had without that money, but it's not something you can track in dashboards.
So I learned about incrementality firsthand from running these paid media programs, and then I started realizing it's called incrementality and I found some competitors of Stella now in the space.
ilise benun: Mhm. And that's really what I want to emphasize is finding the problem, living the problem.
Brenden Delarua: Yeah. Exactly. It's a real problem everyone has even if they know it or not. I get on calls with really cool brands and they'll be like, "We keep hearing everyone talk about incrementality, we have no idea what it is.". I have to explain to them that multi-touch measures correlation, not causation, and Stella measures causation. What's causing sales to happen?
ilise benun: I guess I want to use that as a way to connect to building followers and connections on LinkedIn. Tell me how you are educating your market through content marketing and how people can build their LinkedIn following.
Brenden Delarua: Yeah. Like I said, I've lived this, so I know the pain points. I do a lot of psychographic work, which is also a term I believe I learned from you, ilise, a long time ago. Basically, I write LinkedIn posts myself and I try to be as human as possible. With AI, a lot of people's posts kind of blend together.
On LinkedIn, everyone is just glorifying everything and patting themselves on the back. The "where everyone zigs, we zag" kind of thing is that the more human you are and talk about failure or a learning experience, those posts seem to do really well. So I just try to be as human as possible. Sometimes I will intentionally curse because a lot of people don't do it, or I'll have improper grammar. I just try to write the way I speak.
But the hook is the most important part of a post on LinkedIn because people need to click that "see more" button. The hooks I write are very specific and relevant to the pain point that my ICP (ideal customer profile) has. I've come to find especially through working with CMOs is that the CFO is like the big scary dog. CMOs are terrified of CFOs because they need them to prove that the budget given to them is causing sales to happen. And that's exactly where incrementality comes in. Basically, I'll start off with a hook.
ilise benun: Here's one from the post I was talking about. You wrote: "I just hit 10,000 followers here on LinkedIn. Here's exactly how you can too." And then you have a pointing down arrow. I imagine that's what you're calling the hook.
Brenden Delarua: Exactly. Yep. So, I say my own personal experience in the first line and then for the people reading, I say, "This is how you can too," rather than "Here's how I did it.".
ilise benun: And actually let me just stop there for a second because that small detail is huge—using the word "you" instead of "I.". Marketing is all about you. And so you have to use the word "you.".
Brenden Delarua: I think you're right. I did used to write posts specifically using "you" language. But what I will do is look at what I call "LinkedIn viral posts"—anything with over a hundred likes—and look at the structure. What I started noticing was utilizing the "I" statement to talk about your own personal experience but then making sure that throughout the post you are translating what this means for the viewer. So I'm hitting both: showing my personal experience—I've done it—and now this is exactly how you can too.
The idea is to start with a hook that my ICP can resonate with or instill a little bit of FOMO—like you're being held to a ROAS goal but your CFO is not even looking at the halo effects on Amazon. Then I explain that Meta has a halo effect on Amazon, and here's how you measure it: you use a tool like Stella. It's valuable content even if you don't use Stella.
ilise benun: All right. So we're going to have to wrap up soon. I do want to follow through on the promise of how you hit 10,000 followers. In a nutshell, tell us.
Brenden Delarua: Yeah, let's do it. First is content. We need to provide value for our specific ICP. If you have not lived their pain, use AI like Claude or ChatGPT to work through: what are the psychographics? What keeps them up at night? Do they want a promotion? Do they just want to look good to their CFO? What's their deepest fear or deepest desire? Those are the things that should be interwoven into your content.
All content does not need to be pointing back to your offer. If people like you, they'll click on your page, they'll follow you, they'll see what you're offering. As long as your posts are valuable and people can leave after reading that post with value, that is the main important part.
The second part is networking. On LinkedIn, that means reaching out to the right people. For me, I might like a brand like Graza Olive Oil. I'm going to connect with their CMO, their VP of marketing, their director of marketing. I will not send a message with my connection. I'll just connect directly. If they accept, they accept. And then I just continue posting content. I'm not reaching out to them yet. I post content so they can see my face and I'm growing trust. You accept a connection and someone messages you immediately asking to buy something, you immediately lose trust. After maybe two or three months of consistently posting and connecting, that is when I'll start doing the outreach. None of it is automated. I will reach out offering a free month or an audit, or I'll read their content and DM them a joke about it. I'm never asking for anything in my outreach. I'm building a following of the people that could potentially be my ICP now or in the future.
ilise benun: And what about commenting, Brenden?
Brenden Delarua: Commenting is huge. There's a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People. One of the things is the best way to get someone to care about you is to show you care about them. So having authentic comments. I've met so many people on LinkedIn by commenting on their post and then they will DM me later. Commenting and engaging with other people's posts earns you so much more trust as well. And when you comment on someone's post, you get more visibility from their followers who are reading their comments. It's a win-win.
ilise benun: Love it. All right, last question since you brought up AI. I'm curious how you see AI infiltrating your world.
Brenden Delarua: Yeah, I've been taking plumbing classes to try to make sure I'm ready for the AI takeover until they make robot plumbers. This is a big conversation we're having internally at Stella. What we think is there's some things we can't fight. Anthropic or OpenAI are building screwdrivers—tools to help people build things themselves. They won't specifically build Stella, but they are providing the tools to help you build a Stella.
So what becomes the moat is the data that we collect. We have tons of data on what's incremental and what's not. How we think about it is if people are moving to utilizing AI more and more, we want to move towards that and figure out the additional value prop of Stella. Stella will be more of an app that you call into your AI. All your data lives in Stella, so you can make more informed decisions when you're optimizing your ad campaigns in Claude using Stella's causal data to know what's actually causing growth to happen. A lot of AI companies are getting replaced because they're just building features that AI can easily replicate. We are a little concerned, but overall we are optimistic about what AI will allow us to do.
ilise benun: And actually one more question. How's business?
Brenden Delarua: Business is good actually on both fronts. My consulting side is doing good, especially from TikTok—a lot of people find me from TikTok and I'm very surprised by the quality of people there. And Stella is doing really good. Tons of people have been moving over just from my organic marketing, which is interesting. I get on calls weekly with huge brands. We work with Tushy Bidet—I've always admired them—and PopSockets and Plunge. It's growing. It's definitely growing.
ilise benun: Awesome. And do you have a bidet?
Brenden Delarua: Every toilet I ever have sat on, ilise. I bring one in public. I only have two bathrooms, but I have four bidets in this house.
ilise benun: Oh my god, you are too funny. Okay, tell the people where they can find you.
Brenden Delarua: Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, Brenden Delarua. I'm the co-founder of Stella. I want to give a lot of credit to my co-founder Vinnie; I wouldn't have been able to build any of this without Vinnie. And on TikTok, @BrendenBuilds. I highly recommend TikTok; even if you have zero followers, you can have a viral video. @BrendenBuilds on TikTok, Brenden Delarua on LinkedIn, and Stella is https://www.stellaheystella.com/ if you want to check out the incrementality testing platform.
ilise benun: Beautiful. And let's just specify that it's Brenden B-R-E-N-D-E-N, right?
Brenden Delarua: Correct. Yeah. My mom cursed me with a harder-to-spell name, so I've always had to do that. And my last name is terrible to spell as well.
ilise benun: Yes, I'm sure they'll find you. And thank you so much, Brenden, for sharing.
I just love Brenden's take on AI. It's not melodramatic; I find him to be super realistic. He is keeping his eyes open for how he needs to evolve and adapt as the unknown future approaches. Could you do that too? I think so. So, if you want my help figuring all this out, I invite you to take advantage of my free mentoring session. You can find that and lots more resources at marketing-mentor.com. So enjoy and I'll see you next time.