How the Fxck - Marketing Podcast

No time to listen? Join our premium community (click here) for just $8 per month to get this episode's written strategy playbook (find it here) which is also jam-packed with extra tips and explanations to help you execute the strategy yourself. How the F*ck SEO edition kicks off with an interview with the awe-striking Dimitris Drakatos. After stints at leading tech companies like Workable and Revolut, Dimitris joined Peanut to build their organic growth engine. And, what a wild ride it's been. In 12 short months, the Peanut blog has exploded from 400 monthly visitors to 2.3M. This kind of growth is extraordinary even in the world of exponential SEO graphs. So, what types of content was written? How much? Who was involved? What were the secrets behind the success? In this episode we answer these and many more.

Subscribe to the newsletter over at www.thefxck.com. This week's guest is Jen Montague, Director of Marketing at Dixa (the Europe-based customer service platform that just raised their $105m series C round). We dig into Dixa's lead gen process, from content creation; distribution process; paid advertising best practice; audience segmentation; and most importantly, the process of taking an inbound lead and turning it into something that your sales team can't WAIT to receive. Enjoy the episode. Drop us a note on LinkedIn with your feedback, I'd love to hear from you.

“I don't believe in creating lots of top of funnel content. When you are part of a startup or a mid-market company, everything that you do needs to map to a result.” In this episode, we catch up with Yaag Ganesh, Director of Marketing at Avoma, to hear about some of the content that he and his team have been creating to drive the startup's growth. We deep dive into a couple of blog post examples to understand the philosophy and process behind them—and find out a ton of best practices for writing content that *actually* resonates with a reader.

This week's How the Fxck interview is with the incredible Anthony Kennada, CMO at Hopin. Anthony was the first marketer and founding CMO at Gainsight, which grew to $100m ARR and sold for over $1bn to Vista in 2020. At the time of recording this episode, Anthony had just joined Hopin, the explosively fast-growth hybrid events management platform. (Hopin is the fastest growing SaaS business ever with a valuation of $5.6bn in under 2 years.) So, safe to say, he knows his stuff and had a ton of tactics to share. The episode focuses on the demand gen and content tactics that Anthony has used along the way. In particular, we focus on events. The Gainsight team is well known for creating the category of customer success, and a big part of that journey was championing the profession through events. You'll hear the story of how Anthony and his team created a conference of 300 like-minded people and grew it to +6,000 yearly attendees. "I started breaking it apart and saying, 'what do I love about my career? What do I love about marketing?' And at the atomic level, I realized it was connection between people, whether digitally or in person, and events are the channel by which that happens. Some of the most inspired work we had at Gainsight was there." We discuss why most startups should not create a category and the difficulties and common mistakes of those who do. Towards the middle-end of the interview, we dive into Anthony's first three weeks at Hopin. We chat about: - Why Hopin is not just a natural fit for Anthony, but a brand mission that aligns with his own. - What growth strategies are underway already. - What will be prioritised at Hopin? And how will marketing contribute to Hopin's continued fast growth? Visit www.thefxck.com for the breakdown, video and timstamps.

Subscribe to the newsletter at www.thefxck.com. In this week's podcast, we talked to the founder of Planable, Xenia Muntean. Planable is a social media collaboration and management used by marketers to plan, collaborate, approve and schedule their social media posts. Planable boasts clients like Social Chain and the United Nations. So, in this episode, we deep dive into the content strategy used to win those customers.

This one is better seen on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyZWuEG3sFQ Visit: www.thefxck.com Subscribe / Follow / Send love

Subscribe to the weekly marketing newsletter at www.thefxck.com. In this episode of the How the Fxck podcast, I chatted to Zvonimir Sabljić, founder of AWW App. Zvonimir and his team built a powerfully engaging customer experience, which they leveraged to rank #1 in Google for some highly competitive keywords.‍ In this episode, you'll learn how they grew to 1.5 million monthly users, what marketing techniques they used, how they built a competitive advantage, and eventually sold to their biggest competitor, Miro. What's in the episode: 00:00: Brief summary and intro to the podcast 01:00: Welcome 1:56: Discussion of SEO success on Google 1:43: How did SEO and Google help with the growth of AWW App 3:32: How customer experience helped with the success of AWW 4:26: Discussion of AWW's customer experience principles 5:06: How simplicity can be used as a tool for success 5:55: Demonstration of how AWW works 10:23: How customer success and speed of engagement of AWW helped them have a low bounce rate 12:06: How does focusing on the user and prioritising their experience by giving them relative content help with ranking on Google 13:20: How many monthly active users is AWW attracting? 13:44: What are the main things you can rank on one page for? 15:00: How did Miro and AWW join forces? 15:30: At what point in AWW's journey did they start to convert customers to paid? 17:40: How did AWW attract paid users?

Get a mini-Q&A and timestamps for this episode over at www.thefxck.com. It was an absolute pleasure to interview one of my favourite marketers: Nemanja Zivkovic. ‍ In the episode, we dig into the Funky Marketing success story. ‍ Funky Marketing started in 2019 and Nemanja & co. closed 33 deals in 2020 alone. ‍ If you want to replicate his success on one of your projects, startups or marketing campaigns, this is a must-watch episode.

Download the written playbook on www.thefxck.com. ‍ This week, I had an extremely insightful and in-depth chat with Tom Bangay, the Director of Content at the Series A stage contract automation startup for lawyers, Juro. ‍ We got to the heart of some of the biggest conversation going on in the marketing world right now: brand vs lead gen; gated vs ungated; inbound vs outbound. ‍ But the main topic of this week's podcast is Tom's extraordinarily successful ebook building strategy. ‍ Using the techniques in the playbook we're about to discuss, Tom and his team consistently get over 1,000 organic downloads on their eBooks. ‍ You'll learn: ‍ • How to get influential people from top brands to contribute to your content (even if you've got no brand yourself) • How to design content that people want to read • How to decide what to write about: should it be product related or designed for persona fit? • How to decide WHO should contribute to your eBook • The secret sauce for getting so many downloads • So, you've got 1,000 downloads. We also go through what to do with all those contact details to get REVENUE! ‍ Follow us on LinkedIn for regular content!

Watch on YouTube. Download the Playbook. Kicking off season two with a bang, we've got Tim Soulo, CMO of Ahrefs.com. ‍ In this episode, we cover: • Growing the Ahrefs blog to 1.5 million monthly visitors • Why traffic doesn't matter (and why Ahrefs has never used Google Analytics or retargeting pixels) • How to design content that drives sign-ups (and why you shouldn't waste your time on anything else) • How to rank #1 in Google (like Ahrefs does for everything) • What type of content Ahrefs writes and why it works so well • How to make 'you' focused content that also adds a lot of value • What are the limitations to this approach? • How do Ahrefs promote their content? How do they build backlinks? • What are the six ways content marketing at Ahrefs contributes to revenue growth? • Are backlinks really important? If so, why? ‍ Join the How the Fxck community to get instant access to this episode summarised into a PDF playbook. Download here. ‍ "You can be successful with a few simple fundamentals and by getting rid of non-essential stuff. Create a product that's genuinely useful to people. Forget growth hacks, make your product indispensable."

This week's marketing leader is Andy Culligan, the CMO of LeadFeeder. ‍ Andy joined LeadFeeder in 2020 and took on the task of creating fresh pipeline and growing revenue through marketing. ‍ In this podcast, he tells the story of cutting the marketing campaign budget to a third (by reducing paid and agency fees) but still getting the same volume of leads. ‍ We learn how Andy and his team put on multiple webinars over the year that more than 15,000 people attended. ‍ Interweaved with the story of webinar success we learn: ‍ Andy's secret to success (i.e. scaling Exponia from $4m ARR to $16m ARR) Why SDRs under marketing works can be vital to growth Why you need to make sure leads actually trickle down to a sale. Matching lead gen to revenue outcomes. How to design content around your what's keeping your customers up at night How to get 1,000s of webinar attendees even if you don't have a big email list How to score your leads to only push the best ones to your sales development team Why you must immediately follow up on demo requests Advice on whether an 'eBook download' should be called immediately, nurtured or just wait for them to have higher intent How to get from SEO to a lead Why actionable content is king (or queen) Why you shouldn't overcomplicate things (which marketers so often do) ‍ Next week, I'll release a playbook. Subscribe on thefxck.com to get it.

Here's a man who needs no introduction: Eddie Shleyner. ‍ I've been wildly excited to release this episode since I recorded it over a month ago. ‍ I was hanging off of every word the first time and the second time I listened to it back during editing. ‍ Eddie displays his deep knowledge of copywriting in this episode. ‍ Having studied the greats, he seamlessly draws on their experience to deliver an explosive number of tips and tricks for anyone aspiring to copywriting excellence. ‍ Eddie's the ex-copywriting lead at G2, copywriting consultant at HelpScout and Drift, and the +7 year founder of VeryGoodCopy. ‍ VeryGoodCopy is vividly useful and educational copywriting blog, newsletter and premium community. The blog hosts more than 250 lessons and interviews and four valuable micro-courses. ‍ He brings all those years of dedicated practice to the interview in which we cover these points: ‍ (1) Eddie's copywriting journey. How can you learn and master the skill of copywriting like Eddie? (2) VeryGoodCopy's growth journey. Learn the tips & tricks Eddie used to gain 15k subscribers, making this his full-time career, and growing his LinkedIn audience to 32k+ followers. (3) Why Eddie's process for writing helps him be such a prolific high-quality content producer. (4) There are 5 elements to every email. Learn what they are and how you can leverage them to grow your business. (5) 5 high-value pieces of advice for aspiring copywriters that will either kick off your career or take all of your marketing to the next level. (6) Eddie tells us the strongest human incentive and you can use in your copywriting to consistently drive action. (7) Eddie gives me a lesson that boosted the conversion rate on my latest eBook. (8) Learn why the skill of copywriting isn't necessarily your mastery of English. Which copywriter made $200m in sales despite it being his second language. (9) Towards the very end, Eddie gives us one actionable tip to help generate creative connections that will boost your copywriting conversions. ‍ If any of this blog post convinced you to listen...that's because I've listened to the podcast TWICE. It's that valuable. ‍ Listen here.

I'm excited to welcome Danny Gavin to the podcast this week. ‍ Danny's the founder of the Optidge, the digital marketing agency based out of Texas. ‍ In this episode, we discuss Danny's expertise areas: SEO & paid social. ‍ We focus on one social media ad campaign in particular. ‍ Optidge ran an advertising campaign for Degs & Sal, the eCommerce jewellery brand available to buy D2C (a channel pivot from selling through major retailers like Nordstrom, Macy's and Bloomingdale's). ‍ Degs & Sal had one requirement: to have 2x ROAS on their Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns. The Optidge took over the campaigns and these were the results: 400x increase in total revenue 130% increase in DIRECT ROAS to 2.66x 72% decrease in cost per purchase, 29% decrease in cost per add to cart 24% decrease in CPMs. Finally 278% increase in unique orders 2020 AMA Crystal Award for Best Plan B Marketing Campaign ‍ In the episode, we look at the method behind the success. ‍ You'll learn: How to build audiences that convert Why you need to design a funnel The importance of testing How much you need to spend on testing What you should test Examples of long and short-form copy used in the campaigns ‍ And all in 30 minutes. What's not to love? -- Subscribe to our weekly newsletter and podcast here. Follow us on LinkedIn for daily marketing tips.

Hello and welcome to the How the Fxck podcast, this week we have an incredible marketing leader, Kris Hughes, who I had the pleasure of grilling about content strategy. Kris has been a senior content creator and content manager for 10 years. Starting off growing a sports blog that evolved into a 15 million visitors a month network of websites, he's since been a director of content specialising in driving traffic and generating inbound leads for a number of award-winning companies like projectmanager.com and QuickStart, Inc. He's recently launched his own business aimed at helping solopreneurs and startup teams smash their first 120 days of content creation. In this episode, we go into How the Fxck-style detail on the first 30-60-120 days. From driving value from your first post, how to conduct in-depth research to find gaps in your competitors content, through to lead generation, Facebook Ads, guest blogging and distribution. I got excited by this one, it's so clear and actionable. I hope you enjoy it. Follow me on LinkedIn to get the playbook.

This week, I interviewed Michael Norris, the CMO of YouTech (a Chicago marketing & design agency). He also hosts YouTalk, a podcast about business and marketing, which I was interviewed on a couple of weeks back about how I built this podcast. I can't bring myself to listen yet… This week, we focus on Michael's work with one of his early clients, Urban Matter, which is a news and entertainment website like Time Out. He helped them grow to a large following and high volumes of monthly traffic (500,000 on one viral post!) through SEO, PPC campaigns, viral marketing and inbound marketing in general. I dig deeper into how Michael approaches SEO, what tools he uses, how he does keyword research, where he starts with clients and how to drive leads that way. If you're looking for an SEO refresher, this is your episode. Substack link: https://howthefxck.substack.com/ Website link: https://www.thefxck.com/ Hope you enjoy this episode!

This week I chatted to Holly Enneking, the VP of Marketing at Lev. I love Lev. And I want to copy their marketing. So it was awesome to dig into the detail with Holly about their 'All You Need is Lev' brand awareness campaign, which was hugely successful and has helped solidify Lev as a leading SalesForce partner. We start off the podcast talking about channel marketing, which is Lev's main channel, before talking through the campaign that involved adding the word Lev to song titles and sending Bluetooth speakers to people who open their email campaign. So fun. Hope you enjoy the podcast, and if you do please leave a review and make sure you subscribe. We've got a ton of recordings in the backlog that I can't wait to release. Read the full insight and more of the interview at www.thefxck.com.

This week, I interviewed Rand Fishkin. You may know him as the founder of Moz.com, a company with +$50m in annual revenue that's used by marketers worldwide. He's recently left Moz to found SparkToro so I caught him at the perfect time to ask: what marketing tactics are you using to launch your new startup? He launched earlier this year to a waiting list of 18,000...and we learn what he did to build that list. We cover: - Rand's SparkToro journey - 4 methods used to build his audience - Rand's advice to marketers just starting out - What Rand thinks is the untapped opportunity in marketing right now. Check out the full insight on www.thefxck.com

This week, we interviewed Nadya Khoja, the Chief Growth Officer at Venngage. Nadya joined Venngage when they were a small team of four with (a relatively small) 20,000 organic visitors month. 5 years later they're a team of 50 with 1.5m monthly visitors, driving 150,000 product signups every single month. We deep dive how they achieved this success, looking at: - Tapping into trending topics to create content that goes viral - How to get high-quality backlinks that build your site's authority - Incorporating journalists into your campaign strategy - Ranking for content that converts vs branded keywords. Hope you enjoy this episode! I'm sending out a summarised playbook to everyone who's subscribed to the email list, so if you want that please join us at www.thefxck.com. ‍

Thinking of starting a podcast for your company? This is the only podcast you'll need to get started. This week's guest is Lindsay Tjepkema, an experienced marketing leader and founder of Casted. Lindsay was VP of Content at Emarsys when she first saw the opportunity that podcasting presented in the B2B space. A podcast can be the fuel behind a powerful, focused content engine. Think about it, just one podcast recording with one of your prospective clients can be turned into: A transcript Multiple blog posts An eBook 5 audiograms to post on LinkedIn 3 audiograms your sales team can send in their outbound work Etc, etc, etc. It's rocket fuel. And for those of you still teetering on the edge of starting one yourself, this podcast is a great place to get you started. We cover everything you need to create a podcast that cuts through the noise, tackling challenges that set you as an authority in the industry.

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"Gosh, it's like you guys are everywhere." Want your ideal customer to say this about you? Then you gotta listen to this week's interview. Stephanie Cox, VP of Marketing at Lumavate drops her entire ABM playbook. I was so excited by her method that I got our team at SentiSum to start doing this straight away, resulting in me reaching out to Fred Perry with a video of me playing tennis (badly) while trying to recite a sales pitch. Ask and I might send it to you. Head over to thefxck.com to get the summary of what we learned from this podcast.

It is not a risk to be different, it's a risk to fit in. This week I have a genuinely exciting guest: Louis ‘bonjour bonjour' Grenier, the host of the marketing podcast Everyone Hates Marketers. He's interviewed the likes of Seth Godin, Rand Fishkin, and Neil Patel in more than 160 interviews and is also a Senior Marketing Strategist at HotJar. In this podcast, we talked about radical differentiation and the four steps you need to take to discover your strengths, double down on it, and stand out against the noise in any market. As a young startup, building brand mental availability requires you to be radically different. Here's how. Being different is how you make marketing fun.

This week on the How the Fxck podcast we have a KILLER interview with Todd Clouser. In the last few years, Todd has built up a Youtube channel with around 550,000 subscribers. And it's growing at a rate of 15-20k new subscribers per month. If you wanna know how to do this for your business, then you're in luck because Todd's come on the podcast to share his secrets in detail. We go over a 4-step process for getting a large reach from engaging content. 1. Identifying the best host and guests (tips on choosing a host and approaching influencers) 2. Content strategy (where you can get tips on how long to plan for and how to identify topics that people in your industry really want to hear about) 3. Execution 4. Leveraging YouTube's analytics Bonus: how you can promote your content so you get REACH and business growth. Learn marketing faster by connecting with me on LinkedIn /in/benjamingoodey Thanks for listening!

This week's interview is with Jonny Plein, founder of Global Savings Group acquisition, Pouch. Pouch is a browser extension that automatically applies voucher codes at checkout, reducing basket abandonment for brands and finding the best deals for users. Pouch works with most of the largest UK brands and has around 150-175k weekly active users (!). In this interview we discuss: - Getting in +150 large publications. - Appearing on Dragon's Den (that's the UK's version of Shark Tank). - Skyrocketing visitor count (40k live visitors) and user conversions (2k to 60k in days) after the show. - Dealing with churn. - Reaching product-market fit. - Creating 'wowing' customer experiences. - The acquisition of Pouch 18 months ago by GSG. This is such an exciting interview and the second one we've done with Dragon's Den founders (check out Pasta Evangelists.) They've always got an interesting story to tell. Read the full interview with Jonny at How the Fxck, where we interview marketing leaders every week. #MarketingStrategy #Marketing #Branding #DragonsDen #BBC

This week we interviewed Ian Luck, VP of Marketing at CustomerGauge. They've done some incredible things in the past few years, including: • Creating a category: Account Experience. • Won world-leading clients: IKEA, EventBrite, DHL, Philips, and many more. • Written an 80 page eBook based on original research that drove 30K leads and $2m in revenue without PPC. • Taken on goliath competitors. We talked about all this in enough detail for you to do the same and drive growth at your company. Covering everything from strategy to distribution to the marketing technology used in Ian's campaigns. Read the interview with Ian Luck here.

This week on the How the Fxck podcast, we have a true marketing leader: Paula Monteiro. Paula is Head of Marketing at Wikitude, which has been a leader in the augmented reality (AR) world since 2008. Working with clients like Jim Bean, Nissan and Herbal Essences, Paula and her teamwork to build value-adding, brand-building experiences using AR. I was lucky to grill Paula on AR, well, specifically the connection and uses for AR in marketing. Like most people, I had only a basic understanding of AR from Pokemon Go and Instagram filters. But, it turns out there's much, much more that you can do to connect with your customers using augmented reality. We discussed use cases like Nissan letting customers look at the inside of their cars in the showroom, using augmented reality to project the engine and its components to their car-lover customers. I can see the value that can come from brand storytelling with AR. Perhaps not quite yet, but I soon expect to see a more mainstream addition of AR in the marketing tool kit Find a summary of the insight here: Paula Monteiro on Augmented reality in marketing.

This week we catch up with serial founder, Ariana. She's a passionate storyteller and an expert in creating multisensory experiences. a big believer in the founder-activist. In this episode, we talk about customer experience. You could not get a more passionate speaker to discuss branding, storytelling, purpose and founder activism. This is a must-listen if you want to get inspired. Read it here: Multisensory brand experiences with Ariana Alexander-Sefre.

Today's interview is with Devon O'Rourke, founder of Fluvio, the product marketing consultancy. We discuss the fundamentals of a successful product marketing team so that you can improve both your product and marketing metrics. This was a great chat, full of stories from Amazon and Etsy, so make sure you come back for the full podcast when you get a moment. Until then, here is a summary of the insight. Read the full story at How the Fxck. Devon O'Rourke: Establishing a product marketing function with an ex-Amazon, ex-Etsy product marketing leader

This week, I am interviewing Dan Ritzke, the founder of Third Act Marketing, a marketing consultancy that helps businesses clarify their messaging and tell a better story so that their marketing efforts are not wasted. In this interview, Dan and I dive into his area of expertise: messaging. We cover examples of good and bad messaging, as well as the common mistakes he sees and how you can make sure your message resonates. Spoiler alert, you need to make sure you understand your customer and put them first. We summarised everything you can learn in this recording on the How the Fxck website.

This week's interview on the How the Fxck podcast is with Gareth Morgan, Founder of one of the UKs largest marketing agencies: Liberty Marketing. Gareth regularly speaks to audiences about SEO, PPC, and other marketing strategies, and after his +15 years of experience in SEO he is uniquely qualified to do so. We conquer the world of SEO today. Covering onsite and offsite SEO, from content optimisation and how to do proper keyword research, through to creating sharable content that generates backlinks, this interview is a rare glimpse at how the marketing professionals approach SEO. Read a summary of the insight here: Gareth Morgan.

This weeks interview is with MJ Peters, VP of Marketing at FireTrace and host of The Industrial Marketer Podcast. MJ has worked in manufacturing companies her whole career across product and marketing. She's largely a self-taught marketing leader, and she's a pro in marketing strategy and inbound demand generation. In this interview, we start with MJs career and the differences in marketing in manufacturing rather than software, before covering techniques for marketing strategy and breaking into new customer segments. You can expect to learn how to gather customer insight, how that insight should influence your business model, building out marketing hypotheses, and how to experiment across channels, content type and content topic to determine what resonates with your audiences. Visit www.thefxck.com to get a summary of the insight in this interview.

Finn Lagun is the Co-founder & CMO at Pasta Evangelist, a high-growth fresh pasta delivery company in the UK. Back by the biggest names in retail (Harrods, M&S, Ocado), Pasta Evangelist has raised more than £5m from investors. In this interview we talk about the startups' growth journey, before moving on to Finn's tips on building a brand through content, PR, and events - the examples are SUPER fun.

This week's interview is with Gaetano DiNardi, the Director of Demand Generation at Nextiva – a tech company that was recently voted in the top 100 companies to work for by Glassdoor. Gaetano had an unorthodox route into marketing, starting out as a musician and music producer before transitioning into roles as an SEO Manager at Pipedrive, VP of Marketing at Sales Hacker, and Growth Marketing at Outreach. In this interview we discuss demand gen without the big budget. How you need a marketing flywheel of content, distribution, and promotion all executed through strategic, free channels. We also dive into what metrics to analyse to make sure your leads are high quality, and there's much more marketing insight dotted around in the conversation.

This week's interview is with Iona Ratcliffe, CMO at Ocean Bottle, and previously a brand and comms strategist at Wieden and Kennedy, Portas, and Droga5 where she worked on projects with brands like Converse, Nike, Google, and Gucci. We use Ocean Bottle as a case study to talk about building a brand. We look at the four truths: consumer, category, culture, and company, and how we can weave a thread between them to create a compelling brand story. We also talked about Ocean Bottles growth, how partnerships on the B2B side have been so valuable, and how they got their bottle in the hands of Ed Sheeran while at Glastonbury Festival.

Chris Walker, CEO at Refine Labs, talks to us about inbound demand generation. Chris tells us why marketers need to focus on high volume, buyer-led content, and throw away the useless ebook strategy. Doing that will mean more qualified leads from buyers who come to you, and fewer time-wasting leads passed to your sales team. Read the full interview with Chris Walker at How the Fxck.

Ali Shahrestani is the incredible CMO of three companies, the primary one being Peyk. Peyk is a London-based courier platform that was nominated in the top 5 startups by Startup Grind last year. They have 5,000 riders and their demand is shooting through the roof at the moment. We caught up to discuss partnerships. Ali recently discovered the power of partnerships as win-win relationships that cost-effectively improve your value proposition. Here Ali tells us which partners he goes for and his 3 step process for winning them for Peyk. Find the full transcript over at www.thefxck.com

April Dunford is a renowned positioning consultant and author of the incredible Obviously Awesome! We caught up and she told us the story of positioning a product from her early career, as well as insight into her methodology. Find the full transcript over at How the Fxck: April Dunford.