Marketing Strategies Podcast

Today I’m joined by Matt Lerner, who is the founder and CEO of Startup Core Strengths. Matt has a long history of growth marketing, most prominently at Paypal and 500 Startups. Matt created and lead PayPal’s first website marketing team driving over 85% of PayPal’s small business acquisition and generating $67M over three years. Matt then became a partner at 500 Startups where he invested in 35 seed-stage companies and also set up and ran the "Distro Dojo" growth marketing program for their portfolio companies. In this episode we discuss the 5 core strengths a company needs to have and focus on to successfully grow their business based on Matts broad experience at 500 Startups.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Tim Soulo from ahrefs. Tim has been instrumental in ahrefs growth starting as the sole marketeer for the business in 2015 and growing the business to over $40million in ARR today. He has done this by doing every marketing activity himself before hiring experts to take over and improve his processes. Today they are flying in the world of SEO and create some of the best content on the topic. This episode is filled with takeaways so enjoy and let me know what you think.

Typeform exploded into popularity with their unique conversational form builder in 2012. Their product disrupted a market that was used to filling out static forms files by field. Typeform was able to boast form completions of 60%+ whereas a standard form completion rate is typically 15%. This helped Typeform grow phenomenally, they have 200 employees, have received $50 million in funding and are growing well. In this episode I speak with Sancar Sahin who is VP Marketing at Typeform about all the tactics and strategies they have used to grow.

I speak with Ben Aronsten who is Chief Marketing Officer at Seedrs. We discuss how Seedrs has grown in a competitive and regulated financial industry. Seedrs is the most active equity crowdfunding platform in Europe with 700+ deals and €175 million in investment. We discuss big advertising deals with London Underground all the way through to targeted remarking campaigns based on highly targeted geo location. Seedrs a fascinating business and this episode provides a lot of takeaways.

I speak with Amy Porterfield about marketing and promoting courses. Amy has extensive experience with creating and promoting successful online courses. We discuss her full funnel from growing an email list all the way through to generating course subscriptions and supporting students. We discuss paid marketing, webinars, marketing automation, social media and a ton more. If you’re interested in creating your own course you can’t miss this episode.

I speak with Kevin Heung who is Head of Digital Marketing at Uber. This is a fascinating look into how Uber conducts their digital marketing and how they acquire new users. We discuss paid search, paid social, display, content marketing, organic social and search. Our conversation switches between Uber Rides and Uber Eats. Both are different marketplaces with their own stakeholders.

I speak with Susan Su who is Head of Marketing at Reforge. Before this Susan worked as a growth partner at 500 Startups and Head of Content Partnerships and Email Marketing at AppSumo. We discuss email marketing in detail and I understand Susans passion for making sure her email list is performing to it’s best ability. We discuss email list growth, SEO, and content marketing. This is a fascinating episode with tons of takeaways from Susans time at AppSumo, 500 Startups and Reforge.

I speak with Yuriy Timen who is Head of Growth & Marketing at Grammarly. We discuss how Grammarly has grown from a small paid for product used by students to a widely available web app used by 10 million people. It’s Grammarly’s ambition to be everywhere people write. And this ambition certainly comes through in this discussion. We talk about SEO, product marketing, display advertising, user retention and more. This is a fantastic opportunity to learn more about Grammarly’s rise to popularity and the marketing tactics they used to get there.

I speak with Douglas Cook who is Director of Growth at Skyscanner. Skyscanner operates in the extremely competitive travel search space. They have seen phenomenal growth in their website visits and user numbers and they’re still growing aggressively in EMEA. In this episode Douglas and I speak about the marketing strategies they’ve used to get there. We spend a lot of time talking about product, SEO, direct response, digital marketing, personalisation and display. We also discuss how Skyscanner use a lean and agile approach to marketing to make sure they see success on a small scale before they grow any new marketing campaign.

I speak with Patrick Moran who is Global Head of Growth Marketing at Spotify. We discuss the marketing strategies Patrick and his team have used to grow Spotify. Even with strong competition in this space Spotify has grown from 57m paid users in June 2017 to 70m in Jan 2018. Patrick also used to be Head of Digital Marketing for Netflix so we dive into the strategies Netflix have used to grow past 125 million paid users today. This is a bumper episode that you won't want to miss!!

I speak with Allen Gannet founder and CEO of TrackMaven about their marketing strategy. Allen tells me about how they mange their content, we discuss the gated/ungated debate, how they have run up to 10 events per month in the past, how long their marketing cycle is (longer than you might think) and the strategies that are really killing it for them. They also undertake a lot of paid social media and search marketing. We also discuss Allen’s new book (The Creative Curve) and how MarTech is taking over. This is a fascinating episode with tons of insight into a fast growing SaaS business.

I chat with Saranya Babu Vice President of Marketing at Instapage. We discuss how they have created a new business category called post-click optimisation. This is the part of the funnel after someone clicks on an advert and before they convert on your website. We also discuss the strategies they have implemented to attract new users and grow their business.

I speak with Will Critchlow, founder and CEO of Distilled. Will and his team have grown Distilled into a hugely reputable SEO firm. In this episode we discuss how they have done that through building their network over time, having a low entry point to their brand through DistilledU (their training site) and their global conference Search Love. There is also a lot of discussion around content marketing as well. This is a fascinating episode that touches on most parts of marketing.

I speak with Val Scholz, Head of Growth at Revolut. They have just raised their series c for $250 million valuing the business at $1.7 billion. We discuss the strategies they have used to get there. This episode is very product focussed as Revolut believe strongly in making the product so good that they have a viral word of mouth engine. Revolut has seen extreme growth and this episode gives a fascinating look into Europes most recent tech unicorn.

I speak with Yoann Pavy, Head of Performance Marketing at Perkbox. We discuss his past experience at Deliveroo as their Head of Paid Social. We discuss how Deliveroo use paid social media to drive traffic and sales across multiple countries. We also discuss how Perkbox conduct their marketing. This includes experimenting with multiple different channels to see which areas help them grow most effectively. This focuses a lot around paid media.

I speak with Mike Morris who is Head of U.S. at Get Response. Mike has had an interesting past as he was at Grasshopper for 7 years. He helped grow the company to a $165 million acquisition by Citrix. We discuss partnerships, events, content marketing paid promotion. In fact, there isn't much we don't talk about in this episode. It's super interesting to hear how Mike directed the marketing team at Grasshopper to a big buy out and now how he directs the U.S team at Get Response. There are a ton of takeaways in here so take a listen and let me know what you think.

In this episode I speak with Nadya Khoja from Venngage. We discuss content marketing in detail. Specifically we discuss how Venngage find content opportunities that they feel they can rank for and their audience wants to see. We also discuss the importance of link building, how Venngage go about link building and how they target their marketing team on new links built. This is a great example of a bootstrapped company who have used content marketing to generate 5,000 new user sign ups per day.

In this episode I speak with Lukasz Zelezny, Director of Organic Performance for ZPG Plc. Lukasz specifically works on the companies uSwitch brand. He has a vast experience with SEO and organic acquisition. We discuss the things he does to consistently improve the rankings for uSwitch. This touches on the customer experience and conversion rate optimisation as well. There are a ton of takeaways in this episode. Lukasz often refers to how the things we discuss relate to small and medium businesses.

In this episode I talk with Hana Abaza, Head of Marketing for Shopify Plus. We discuss the range of channels and strategies she used at Uberflip, a fast growing marketing startup, and Shopify Plus, a 3,000 person ecommerce powerhouse. We discuss the differences in marketing at both companies, what's worked, what  strategies generated the best ROI and what they are focused on in 2018. This is a super interesting episode.

In this episode I speak with Jay Acunzo founder of Unthinkable. Before founding Unthinkable Jay was Digital Media Strategist for Google and Head of Content for HubSpot. He’s now host of his podcast Unthinkable. Which was called "one of the hottest new podcasts out there" by Entrepreneur. In this episode we discuss content marketing, how to create exceptional content and the step by step process Jay goes through to test, experiment and understand how content is performing as he scales up.

In this episode I speak with Joe Chernov from Insight Squared. We discuss how Insight Squared create content to support their customer journey. They use data and detailed mapping to understand how people move through their lifecycle before during and after using the product. It's interesting that Joe says the word "Lead" is a curse in their office!! Instead they are looking to create content to support people with their questions and pain points at each stage of their journey. They then create flags or alerts to help them understand who is ready for a sales conversation. This is an insightful conversation and one you won't want to miss.

In this episode I speak with Dave Charest from Constant Contact. We discuss everything content marketing. Dave and his team use content to generate traffic and support their existing customers. In this episode Dave tells me how they have evolved their content strategy over the last 7 years.

In this episode I speak with Kevan Lee, Director of Marketing at Buffer. Kevan and his team have built Buffer to become a household name in social media management software. They have grown their business organically through content marketing, social media and a focus on SEO. Their blog now receives an impressive 20 million visits annually. In this episode we discuss the strategies that have helped them get there. It's an interesting chat where we explore the wide spectrum of the Buffer marketing strategy.

In this episode I speak with Andy Crestodina. He founded Orbit Media 17 years ago and remains at the head of the company. Andy has an interesting marketing strategy where they use content not to generate leads in the form of downloads or subscribers to their content but to generate authority to help them rank their main website pages. This strategy helps them rank for highly competitive keywords in their niche. Andy uses simple tools to generate extraordinary results.

In this episode I speak with Guillaume Cabane, G to his friends. G is the mad scientist who has worked in the growth team at Mention and Segment before joining Drift as VP of Growth. G loves experimenting with marketing tactics and tech tools. He is also passionate about customer psychology and how provide the best user experience possible. This is a jam packed podcast where we talk marketing history, SaaS tools and marketing strategies.

In this episode I speak with Joe Lazauskas from Contently. We discuss how Contently has grown into a content marketing powerhouse through storytelling. Joe’s passion for storytelling is clear. In this episode Joe talks us through how telling stories has helped Contently stand out and connect with their audience. Joe also explains a range of strategies Contently used to get their message out there and grow their email list to 100,000 people.