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Be Brave and Network: Insights from Alex Low-Lately

The Low Down about LinkedIn, with Alex Low

💡Guest: Alex Low Head of Enterprise Strategy and Sales at Lately.

💡Who is Alex Low?

Alex has been in sales for quite a while, around 15 years, to be exact. He’s recently joined Team Lately to help launch them into the stratosphere.

💡You can find him on:

And take a look at Lately, at Lately.ai. 

🚀What is Lately?

Lately is a social media management platform that creates content for you using A.I. Lately’s A.I. takes your long-form content and turns it into dozens of social posts that drive engagement and use keywords that are proven to work well with your audience. Using Lately you can also schedule out posts, create social posts with video clips attached, and track your success and engagement across platforms. 

Creating and then distributing social posts across ALL social platforms takes forever, so using A.I. to turn content like blogs, podcasts, video, etc., into social posts and then distributing them saves tons of time. 

Using A.I., you have to teach it your kind of style. You give it the building blocks of your brand guidelines, but the secret sauce is in the analytics. Lately’s analytics looks at which words and phrases are getting the best engagement. 

💡What is the best piece of advice to give people on their marketing efforts?

The biggest thing? Talk to your customers in a way that is meaningful to them. Go talk to your existing customer base, and give them your 30-second elevator pitch to get them to tell YOU what they think you do for them. If you asked 10 clients, you would get 10 very different answers because everything is based on how they interpret things. 

Does what they say playback into your overall marketing strategy and messaging? Where is your audience? Do they use emails? Are they on social media? Should you use cold calling? These questions depend on the markets that you are marketing and selling to, which then dictates whether you should be cold calling, or marketing on social, or on the phone, or via email, etc. 

Alex highlights that you want to get what the customer is thinking INTO your copy. 

💡Opinion on marketers using A.I. to maximize their Facebook and AdWords spending. 

Using A.I. helps you understand what your customers want to react to, rather than what you may assume they want to respond to. 

💡Paid content versus unpaid?

  • Paid or unpaid, if a post is put in front of you, you’re going to react the same way.
  •  If you are looking at a paid post, you will react the same way you are organically viewing it. 
  • Your brain can’t differentiate between paid and not paid at that point. 
  • Each platform uses paid content. Differently, some platforms like Linkedin do not rely heavily on ad revenue, unlike Facebook. 

💡Linkedin

Linkedin has a lot of bells and whistles, like their Sales Navigator and their Talent Hiring. Linkedin is trying to sell us more, which does more work for us without necessarily creating more ROI. Alex describes that Linkedin is a lot about shifting your perception of what Linkedin actually is versus what it isn’t and how it can serve you in terms of your audience. 

Being constantly visible is big on Linkedin; that is something that Lately can help with. Leaving digital breadcrumbs for your audience to never completely forget about you. 

💡How do you keep learning?

Marketing shifts every month, so staying on top of what’s going on in the industry is not easy. Alex recommends listening to podcasts about this specific topic and coming out regularly so you will always stay on top of the trends. Websites like Social Media Today and a Facebook group called My First Millions are also helpful. 

Usually, you would want to look at trends in the industry, but the last 18 months have ripped the rulebook regarding what people are buying. Alex talks about how people are buying digital-first, which has never been the case to this extent. 

At the end of the day, be curious. And in this day and age, there is no excuse not to know about what’s happening today.  

💡How do you promote yourself, create celebrity status, and become better known as a content expert?

  • It does not happen overnight; it takes years and years ( it has taken Alex 15)
  • Don’t chase likes
  • Try different things
  • Consistency is critical in all social channels. 
  • Starting and contributing in conversations with others

When starting out his podcast journey, Alex just read a blog post that he had written and used the information in that blog post to craft a half-hour podcast. When you build your podcast audience and begin to have guests on, think about what value this person can bring to your audience before having them on. You’ll have to be brave and have conversations with people you don’t know, but that’s the name of the game. 

💡How do you view partnerships?

You can not be too rigid in partnerships. In the recent Lately partnerships with UpContent and Hubspot, they are formal partnerships in the terms that the content is simply integrated. And with things like this, you don’t have to worry about kickback because it’s all about helping people. 

There has to be something in it for both parties, either in terms of value that your wins and your market can bring.  

💡What is in store for Lately?

Version 2 of Lately’s A.I. is in beta. Version 1 was built in IBM Watson, version 2 is on open A.I. GPT, and version 3 is in Google Pegasus. 

Team Lately wants to drive best-in-class A.I. for their audience, and the new partnership with Hubspot has helped boost the brand into the stratosphere. 

💡What is something that you think is true but no one else would agree with you on?

The idea that social media doesn’t work for lead gen. Sales generation capacity is just complete BS. Alex himself is a proof point. You can’t have pure social without some kind of outbound. And outside of the marketing world, Alex is very passionate about barbecue. 

💡If you had 2,000 unread emails and could only answer 200 of them, which would you choose to answer?

It depends on what the emails are about, but Alex would answer the ones that make him money; that’s all that matters at the end of the day. Invoices and checks out are the 200 that will turn into happy, successful clients on the Lately platform.