Podcast appearances and mentions of barron caster

Does your sales process line up with your buyer's journey? In this episode, you'll learn why addressing your customer's concerns during the buying experience can reduce friction and boost conversions. Tune in as I chat with Barron Caster, the Director of Growth at Rev. He reveals the methods his team used to triple Rev's conversion rates over the last three years—and how you can become a better marketer by applying these principles to your business. We covered: Why inexperienced marketers focus on selling the product features Where to get started with identifying your customers’ concerns Barron’s favorite place to find out how to improve conversion rates What happens when you only focus on the leads who don’t convert The surprising reason why you can’t rely on accurate tracking data Exactly what type of questions you should ask customers over the phone How to sort through your research data (and create a hypothesis) The pros and cons of running A/B tests individually vs. group testing Resources: Rev.com Hotjar Mixpanel Hiten Shah Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder Scientific Advertising Influence by Robert Cialdini How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie barron@rev.com How to Convince People to Buy (Without Being Pushy)

Barron Caster is the Senior Director of Product Management at Rev.com. In this episode, Barron takes us through his journey of leaving the mechanical engineering world to pursue his interest in startups. His decision to follow his passion gives him a unique perspective on switching career paths. He offers great advice from journaling and the importance of mentorships. Don't forget to subscribe! Top Picks Maddie: Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson Barron: The Libby App Mat: Netflix Documentary, American Factory --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/risingpodcast/message

The Inbound Success Podcast launched on August 28, 2017 and today marks the 100th episode, and 100 straight weeks of publishing interviews with high performing marketers. On this week's Inbound Success Podcast, I'm taking a break from interviewing guests to share with you 13 trends that I've observed from the 99 interviews I did throughout the last two years. Listen to the podcast to learn more about the 13 things that the world's top-performing inbound marketers are doing, and get links to the specific episodes where you can dive deeper into each topic. Transcript Welcome back to the Inbound Success podcast. My name's Kathleen Booth. I'm your host, and this is the 100th episode of the podcast. I thought this was a great opportunity for me to take a break from the usual routine of interviewing some of the incredible marketers that I get to speak to every week and look back on the last 99 episodes and try and digest some lessons learned. I've had the incredible good fortune of speaking to some really amazing marketers in the last two years as I've done this podcast. It's given me an opportunity to meet people I otherwise never would have met, to learn some things that have really kind of made a difference for me in the way I think about marketing, and have prompted me to take a second look and reevaluate the way I've been doing some things. So, thought it was a great opportunity to share some of those lessons learned with all of you. How The Inbound Success Podcast Got Started But first, I wanted to just take a moment and tell a story about why I started the podcast. It was about two and a half years ago that I had my own marketing agency, Quintain Marketing. I had had the agency for 11 years. I'd gone to a lot of marketing conferences and listened to tons of podcasts, and watched webinars, always looking to make myself a better marketer. I had a lot of clients that I wanted to help. I also wanted to market my own agency and do better every day. I always would listen to these folks talk about the marketing work they were doing and the incredible results they were getting, and so infrequently felt that there was anything really tangible that I could take away from it and immediately use to improve my own marketing. This podcast was really an attempt to solve for that. It was me trying to scratch my own itch, and in doing so hopefully helping some of you. The interesting thing about this has been that it has certainly done that for me, and it has also done so much more. I already mentioned that it's enabled me to meet so many people I otherwise would never have met. There are a lot of people in the marketing world that I really admire and respect. And having the excuse of saying, "Hey, would you like to come on a podcast?" is a great way to meet someone new and to meet and to form that relationship, so that's been great. I've also met some really incredible people that I didn't know about through my guests when I ask them who else is doing a really great job with inbound marketing. And those relationships have been amazing. One of the most amazing and incredible things about this is that it changed the entire course of my career. One of first people I interviewed when I started the podcast was Bob Ruffolo, who is the founder and CEO of IMPACT. Now, I work at IMPACT. The reason is that before we started to hit the record button for the podcast interview, we were just talking about how things were going. I was telling him that I thought I might be ready to make a change, and that led to me selling part of my company to IMPACT and joining the team. That's been a really major shift in my life and a great one. I've learned so much. I get to work with some really smart people every day and do very, very interesting work. All this has come out of this little podcast. And most importantly, I've learned a lot about marketing. As I said, that was my original goal. 13 Lessons From Interviewing 99 High Performing Marketers So without further ado, I looked back through the 99 episodes I've done before today and really saw 13 themes emerge. That's what I'm going to share with you today. 1. There Is No "Secret Sauce" The first one ... And some of these, by the way, are going to seem like no-brainers, but they're important because it's important to remind ourselves of the things that we kind of already know. First one is, in most cases there really is no secret sauce to being an amazing marketer. The folks that I interviewed who were the most successful have a few things in common. Number one, they are voracious learners. They're always trying to improve their knowledge. They're always hungry for more. And they're consistent. That's huge, the consistency. A great example of that is Goldie Chan. I interviewed her. She's often referred to as the green-haired Oprah of LinkedIn. She has the longest running daily channel on LinkedIn. She's posted a new LinkedIn video every day for I think it's about two years. It's incredible. It doesn't matter where she is, what's happening, whether she's feeling well, whether she's traveling, what her access to Wifi is, she finds a way to do it because consistency is so important for her. And it's really paid off. They also do a few things and do them really well. A great example of that is Rev Ciancio who I talked with about Instagram marketing. Rev has an incredible Instagram presence. Which by the way, do not look at it when you're hungry because his pictures are all of mouthwatering hamburgers, french fries, pizzas, chicken wings, nachos, essentially everything that's bad for you, but that tastes so good. But, Rev has a fascinating strategy for how he approaches Instagram and has built an entire business around it. He does one thing, and he does it really well. Alex Nerney talked about Pinterest similarly, just a platform a lot of inbound marketers overlook, but he's really figured out a way to make it sing for him. The hungry learners who are consistent and who pick a few things and do them really well, that's really the secret sauce, which essentially isn't so secret. That's number one. 2. Listen To Your Customers And Prospects And Use What You Learn in Your Marketing Number two is they really listen to customers and prospects and use that in their marketing. Again, sounds like a no-brainer. We always talk about the need to do persona research and to build buyer personas, but I think what happens is we get very often so caught up in building the actual persona that we forget the big picture, that it's not about having this fictional profile of a person. It's really about understanding the way our audience thinks, what their real pain points and needs are, and the language they use to talk about that. A couple of the interviews I did were great examples of this. Barron Caster at rev.com who uses their own transcription product to transcribe all of the conversations they have with customers and then pull actual words that customers have used out and feed that into the copy on their website and landing pages, and that's gotten them amazing results. Val Geisler and Joel Klettke, two of the most accomplished conversion copywriters out there, both also talked about this type of research and understanding deeply, deeply the needs of customers and prospects. Paul Blamire at Atomic Reach, who is head of customer success and makes it a point to speak to new customers shortly after they've onboarded and really understand what brought them to the company and how the product is solving their needs. And he feeds that back in not only to marketing but to product development, to every aspect of the business to deliver a better customer experience from first touch in the marketing process all the way through the experience of using the company's product. 3. You Don't Need Fancy Tools Or A Big Budget Number three, you don't necessarily need fancy tools or a big budget to get incredible results. There are some really great examples of this. Oli Billson who I recently interviewed about the small events he's doing that are delivering tremendous amounts of revenue to his business. Chris Handy who talked about marketing for a Pre-K school, really small campaigns, but they just really ... They understood their audience, and they used the available tools that they had and got terrific results for the school. Adam Sand, who's using direct mail in conjunction with inbound marketing, super old school, but very effective for him. And Harry Campbell, who's The Rideshare Guy, and he's probably the top content creator in the ridesharing space. So think Uber, Lyft, Lime, Bird. He just started blogging and has created some great content and a big following. You really don't need fancy tools or a big budget. You can do it on your own with what you've got, if I go back to the first thing, if you're consistent, if you pick a few things and do them really well, and if you're a hungry learner who is willing to roll your sleeves up and apply what you're learning. 4. Connect With Your Audience On An Emotional Level Number four, the best marketers connect with their audiences on an emotional level, another thing that might seem obvious but that I think a lot of marketers get wrong. We tend to put our marketing hats on and make our marketing all about ourselves or we fall back into that comfortable place of corporate jargon, and kind of robotic speech, and use words like leverage and synergy. Nobody talks like that in real life, or not at least the people that you want to hang out with. The people who talked about this were Kieran Flanigan of HubSpot who shared their hearts and minds strategy for creating content with two types of content, content that solves a person's problems and tells them how to do something, that's really that mind's content, and then the heart's content, which taps into a pain and emotional need that the audience has. Then, Katie Stavely from Mautic. This is ironic that these are the two examples I'm giving for this one because HubSpot and Mautic could be considered two different sides of the same coin, HubSpot being a paid marketing automation, CRM, customer service platform, and Mautic being a completely free open source alternative to it. Katie talked about how important it was to be authentic in your marketing, especially with their audience, which it's all about community. It's opensource software, so your community is helping you develop your product. But regardless, the idea is to really make that emotional connection. 5. Sometimes The Biggest Wins Come From Content That Is Not Related To Your Products Or Services Number five, with content marketing, sometimes the biggest wins happen when you don't create content about your products or services. We as marketers, as inbound marketers, think a lot about top-, middle-, and bottom-of-the funnel strategies. We're always brainstorming what are the questions that our audience is asking as relates to our product or service. That often leads us to create content that is very much about us and not so much about our audience. But, I had two interviews that I thought really highlighted how successful you can be if you flip that script and talk nothing about yourself. What I mean by that is ... I'll start with Stephanie Baiocchi, who was actually Stephanie Casstevens at the time I interviewed her. She hadn't been married yet. And funny enough, she was not working at IMPACT. That's another great outcome of the podcast. Now she is. But, she talked about a campaign that she was running for a client that sold solutions for medical waste from physicians' practices. Originally, they were creating a ton of content around medical waste, and it just wasn't working. The reason is that their audience, which is really the office managers for physicians' practices, already has a medical waste solution. You can't be in business if you don't, so they weren't out there searching for any information about medical waste. They didn't even realize they needed to switch providers or that they had a problem. It was when she kind of took a step back and thought, "What are the biggest problems that office managers have? It doesn't need to have anything to do with medical waste," and she realized it was patient no-shows. They created a patient no-show policy template that office managers could use. That was a total home run. What it did was it opened up the conversation with their audience so that eventually they could begin talking about medical waste. But at that top-of-the-funnel level, they needed first to really open that conversation, and product- and service-related content wasn't going to cut it. Another person who did that really well was Ryan Bonnici, who is now the CMO of G2 Crowd, but at the time was working at HubSpot. HubSpot's a company that has a huge audience. Of course, trying to broaden the top of the funnel at a company like HubSpot is challenging. All the low-hanging fruit is gone, and so you really have to get creative. He was trying to target a small business audience. He really asked himself, "What are the problems that small businesses have?" And, again, doesn't have to have anything to do with HubSpot. He realized when you're starting your business or when you come to work at a small business, one of the first things you have to do is come up with an email signature. You're usually either copying one that somebody else in the company has created or you have to create it from scratch, and it's kind of a pain. He built an email signature generator, an online tool where you could type in some information about yourself and it would spit out a really nice-looking email signature. That tool generated a ton of traffic, leads, and revenues for HubSpot, and it cost them only $6,000 to build it, but the impact was enormous. So, great lesson learned about getting out of the habit of creating only product- and service-related content and thinking bigger. 6. Paid Ads Are An Essential Part Of Any Inbound Marketing Strategy Number six, the old myth that paid ads are not inboundy is dead, or it should be dead. This one was woven throughout almost every interview I did. It's funny because when I first started working with inbound marketing, it was back with my old agency. I had discovered HubSpot. We were following their original methodology of attract, convert, close, delights, for those of you who've been in the HubSpot world for a long time and all. I remember many times going to INBOUND and seeing Brian Halligan stand on stage and talk about how the old way, the old interruptive way of marketing was paid ads, and people didn't like being interrupted. I think we all read that as, well, paid ads are not acceptable if you're an inbound marketer. That myth started dying, I think, several years ago, but it's worth repeating that paid ads are, I would say, not even just inboundy, they're essential to an inbound strategy in this day and age. I'll just list off a bunch of names of my guests who've talked about it. This isn't even a complete list, but Mark Rogers, who at the time was with Carney and grew The Daily Carnage newsletter using Facebook ads; Sterling Snow from Divvy who's used ads to drive leads for their platform; Moby Siddique who has his own inbound agency and does some incredible Facebook ads work with Messenger bots; AJ Wilcox, who is a LinkedIn ads expert; Ali Parmelee, who's one of my coworkers here at IMPACT who does incredible things with Facebook ads; Anthony Sarandrea; Rick Kranz. The list goes on and on. All of them attribute the success that they're getting and the incredible results to some form of paid ads. Let that be the final nail in the coffin of that old myth. Let's really embrace ads, and not just checking the box with ads and promoting our posts, but really taking a full funnel approach to advertising. Because that's the other thing that these folks talked about is it's not about boosting something on Facebook. This is about really digging in and getting good at ads and thinking how ads can be used at every stage of the funnel. 7. Content Distribution Is Critical Number seven, it's not enough to create and publish your content on your website. You've got to promote it and distribute it. This is one that I've heard time and time again. A lot of the best marketers I've spoken to say you should spend twice as much time promoting and distributing your content as you do creating it. I think for a lot of us that equation is backwards. One person who talked about that was Kipp Bodnar who is the CMO of HubSpot, probably one of the companies that is the best at inbound marketing. He talked about what a game changer it was in the last year when HubSpot really threw some muscle behind content distribution and how that impacted their traffic. This is a company that already had amazing traffic, by the way. Then, Phil Singleton. I loved my interview with Phil who is an SEO expert and an author. Phil talked about this great strategy he uses for clients where he's creating e-books, just like lots of inbound marketing agencies do. But then he takes the e-books that he makes for clients, or he takes a collection of blogs, for example, and compiles them into any book, and he publishes them as Kindle e-books on amazon.com, and also in some cases as hard copy books through Amazon direct publishing. It is so simple, and straightforward, and inexpensive. It blows my mind that more marketers are not doing this. It was a cool episode, so definitely check that out. But yeah, the lesson is don't just like write those blogs, create those e-books. Think about what are you going to do with them once they're published. How are you going to get them out in front of the world? 8. Original Research Can Drive Tremendous Results Number eight, original research can have amazing results. I had several interviews where people touched on what has come of original research. One of the people I think that that is most famous in the marketing world for doing this is Andy Crestodina. He has been doing a blogging survey for several years and really credits that with bringing a lot of attention to his agency, Orbit Media, out of Chicago, giving him a ton of backlinks and press. It's a pretty simple survey. He does put quite a bit of effort into promoting the survey itself so he can get a lot of responses, and then once he gets those responses into packaging that content so that he can turn it into things like infographics and articles, et cetera. But, it's not just Andy. Michele Aymold from Parker Dewey uses original research and data to boost her marketing results. Clare Carr from Parse.ly, they actually don't even have to do that much research because simply by the nature of the product that they sell they have access to a lot of proprietary data. She's really productized that and used it to get a tremendous amount of press. In fact, she was able to dramatically cut back the amount of content she was creating while getting better results because the data itself was so attractive to their audience, and it also helped her reduce their PR spend. Then, Rebecca Corliss at Owl Labs. They produced the state of remote work, and that's gotten them quite a bit of traction. 9. Community Is A Powerful Tool To Fuel Growth Number nine, community is such a powerful tool for marketing. This is an interesting one because here at IMPACT we've been working really hard over the course of the last two years to build our own community called IMPACT Elite, which is on Facebook. We've learned a lot about community in the course of doing that. I would say it has been a game changer for our business, certainly. We now have over 5,000 people in that community. It's a delicate balance how you run it. You can't make it all about yourself. It has to truly be about helping the members of the community and getting them to the point where they're almost running it, if you will. I spoke to several other people who have built communities and had similar experiences in terms of the community being a fundamental tool in the growth of their business. One was Bill Faeth who is a marketer who specializes in the limousine and transport business. He has Limo University, and he has a big community around that of limousine companies. Frank Gruber, who started Tech Cocktail in the beginning and turn it into Tech.co, which was then acquired, he now has a company called Established. But, he began this grassroots community all over the country of startups and people interested in the startup ecosystem and wound up building a tremendous media business from that. Nikki Nixon who at the time I interviewed her was running the FlipMyFunnel community for Terminus. Ameer Rosic who has a community focused on blockchain called Blockgeeks. And Mark Graham, who is an old friend of mine doing amazing things, he's up in Canada and has a software platform called Commonsku and has built a great community around that. All of these folks doing incredible things with communities in very different niches, I should say. For Bill, it was limo companies. For Frank, it was startups. For Nikki, it's people who are ABM practitioners. For Ameer, it's folks in the blockchain community. And for Mark Graham, it's people in the promotional products world. All of these different niches need communities and people are hungry to connect with others who have similar interests as they do. 10. The Quality Of Your Content REALLY Matters Content quality. I had a couple of great interviews on this. This is one that I'd love to talk with more people who are focused on this. In this day and age, you can't just be creating content and checking the box. You have to really create great content that is better than anything else out there if you really want to get amazing results. One person who talked a lot about this was Oli Gardner and how he is putting a lot of effort into really making the content that they create be the best that's available on the Internet. Emily Maxie from Very talked about this, too, really digging deep and creating unbelievable resources for your audience. Both of these folks are getting great results in terms of traffic, and that traffic ultimately turning into leads, because they took the time to create in-depth pieces that really added value for their audience. Seems like it should be obvious, it's another one of these, but it's really not too a lot of us. I mean, you might think your content's really good, but is it the best? When you Google that topic that you created content about, is your piece the best thing that you can find in the search results? If not, go back and spend the time and make it better. I think one of the lessons I've learned is it's better to make less content that's better content than it is to create a high volume. 11. Creating A Podcast - Or Being A Guest On One - Is A Good Way To Build Your Brand Another theme that came out was podcasting. It's sort of ironic because we're on a podcast talking about podcasting. But a lot of my interviews, as I went back and reviewed, had to do with podcasting, beginning with George B Thomas, who I've had the privilege to work with over the years here at IMPACT. He's now at Impulse Creative. George is a prolific podcaster, and he's ... It might seem easy when you listen to him. It just seems like, "Oh, there's a guy that just has a great rapport with his audience," but he puts a ton of thought into how he does these podcasts, how he structured them so that they not only deliver value for the audience, but that they have naturally built-in incentives for people to share them and to grow his audience. That's really worth listening to if you're somebody who wants to start a podcast. Andrew Dymski is another person who's been podcasting for a long time and who I've been a guest on his podcast. He's been a guest on mine. He's got some great insights. Ryan Hawke, who has The Learning Leader podcast, Ryan blew my mind just with how prepared he comes to everything. He talked about this, too, how before he does an interview the amount of preparation he does, the amount of preparation he does when he even just invites somebody to come on his podcast. This guy is serious business, and that's why he's so successful. He really has put the thought into it and turned his podcast into a business. Dan Moyle came on the show and talked about podcast guest interviews. So not necessarily starting a podcast, but if you want to get the word out, going on other podcasts as a guest. At the time, he was with a company called Interview Valet. What's been really cool for me is seeing the other side of that. I get pitched a lot by companies like Interview Valet, and there are certainly other ones as well. They'll send me an email and say, "Listened to your show. Thought it was great. Here's a guest that I think would be really good for you." That's how I've gotten a lot of my more interesting guests. There's something to that podcast guesting strategy that really I think can help you get traction and raise your profile if you're trying to build a personal brand or trying to get the word out about a product or a service. There are plenty of companies like Interview Valet that, for a fee, will take care of that for you. It's kind of like having a talent agent. I also talked to Jay Acunzo about podcasting. He is actually a consultant to other companies and helps them create, produce, and get the best results out of their podcasts. One of his clients is Drift, which comes up a lot on my show. People love Drift, always cited as one of the best examples of a company doing inbound marketing really well, and they have a couple of podcasts. Then, Jeff Large of Come Alive Creative. Lots of folks talking about podcasting. It really stuck out to me that it's not just about, hey, everybody should have a podcast, and I don't think everyone should. It's not right for everybody. But, podcasting can play a role in almost everybody's marketing strategy for sure. 12. Video, Video, Video Number 12, video. Can't have a list of trends and things that are important in marketing without talking about video these days. Some of the guests that I've had that have spoken about this are some of the more impressive people that have been on this podcast. In 2019, I opted to kick the year off with an interview with Marcus Sheridan, who is an amazing man that is a big role model for me. I currently get to work with him at IMPACT. But, he's somebody that I followed for years and I have so much respect for because he sees things about marketing and about customer behavior that a lot of other people don't, even though they're staring us in the face. One of the things that he has really seen and committed to is that when it comes to marketing and selling, we can't just tell people something. We have to show it to them, too, and we show it to them using video. He talked about how important video was going to be in 2019. I know that he's out speaking at conferences and talking about video all over the world. Also, Eric Siu. I kicked off 2018 with Eric Siu doing predictions for last year. He talked about video as well and was like, "Video's going to be huge in 2018." So in both of my kind of yearly prediction episodes, the guests that I've had have cited video as one of the biggest things we should be paying attention to. And then, of course, I already mentioned her, but Goldie Chan, who is a LinkedIn influencer and creates a new LinkedIn video every single day, has made a career around those videos. She's amazing. She travels all over the world and is sought after as a speaker because of the LinkedIn video she creates. And Dennis Yu who has turned video into a formula for building people's personal brands. It's really impressive what he does. They're these short little videos that he films. Using that medium has helped countless people create brands for themselves. 13. Lead With Brand Which brings me to my 13th and last lesson learned from 99 interviews with incredible marketers, and that is that all of these strategies, and tactics, and approaches are powerful. But at the end of the day, the most important thing in marketing is brand. Brand is paramount. Without it, you can have some quick wins but you'll never have a true success that will last over the long term. I'm only going to cite one example here because it's the one that comes up the most. And if you listen to this podcast with any degree of regularity, you know that at the end I always, always ask my guests, "Company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now?" There is one company/individual, the company and the marketer who's spearheading it for them, that by far comes up more than anybody else, and that is Drift and Dave Gerhardt, who I was very fortunate to have as a guest early on. I can't tell you the number of times people have mentioned Drift, and it's not just people from the marketing world. It's folks that have come onto this podcast from all different industries, and they all cite Dave Gerhart and his work building a brand at Drift as the one succeeding the most with inbound marketing. It's not for me to say what that brand is or to really try to encapsulate what Dave has done, but I think it's fair to say that they've built a brand that's incredibly authentic. There's no artifice. There's no fancy tricks about it. They, of everybody, really reflect everything I've said about the past, you know, this list of 12 to 13 trends I just spoke about today. When I look back through this list, they are doing a few things and doing them really well. They really listen to their customers. It's not about fancy tools or a big budget. The things that make them successful don't have anything to do with that. It's about connecting on emotional level. It's about creating content that sometimes doesn't have anything to do with your products or services. They do paid ads. And it's not enough to create and publish your content, you've got to promote it. They are so good at that. They've got a tremendous community, really high-quality content, a bunch of podcasts. They use video better than almost anybody else, especially on LinkedIn. Checkout Dave Gerhart's LinkedIn presence. And they just have a really strong brand. So my hat is off to Dave Gerhart and the team at Drift for ... If I had to give out an award for top inbound marketers, I think it would go to them. Thank YOU For Listening But really, everybody that I've interviewed over the course of the last two years has been so impressive. It is just my absolute privilege to get to do this every single week. I also wanted to say thank you to you for listening. Podcasting is a funny exercise. As I record this, it's Sunday morning, and I'm sitting in my home office, which is a tiny little room that actually had to be permitted as a closet because it's so small. There's chaos happening around me in my house. I'm by myself talking into a microphone. I'll go away, and I'll turn this into an episode. It'll go live tomorrow. You'll be hearing this Monday, if you get the episode right when it comes out or sometime after, and you're out there listening. But when I create these things, it's just me in a room. To know that there are people who choose to listen to this every week is just an unbelievable honor and a privilege to me. So, thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening to this content. I hope so much that you've learned something from it and that, even if it's in a small way, it's helped you get better results from your marketing and feel like a smarter marketer. If that has happened, then I feel like I've succeeded. With that, I will say I would love to hear from you. It's been a hundred episodes. If you are a regular listener, please take a moment and contact me. I always say at the end you can tweet me @workmommywork, which is my Twitter handle, but you can also message me on LinkedIn. You can email me at kbooth@impactbnd.com. You can send a carrier pigeon. However you want to do it, I would love it if you would get in touch and let me know what you like about the podcast and what's something that I can improve because I'd love to make the next hundred episodes even better. With that, I won't belabor it. Thank you again for listening, and I'll see you next week. Or not see you, I'll be talking to you next week for episode 101.  

Animalz is quickly gaining a reputation for being one of the top content marketing shops in the B2B SaaS world. Here's how they approach content creation... This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Animalz marketing director Jimmy Daly dives into his process for creating content for Animalz. As the guy in charge of both marketing AND sales for Animalz, he splits his time between marketing/lead generation and closing deals. When he's on sales calls, Jimmy pays close attention to the questions he gets from prospects and turns each of those questions into an article on the Animalz blog. This process has netted strong sales results that the company can track directly back to the individual articles Jimmy creates. This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford, Connecticut, and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with special guests including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS."   Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my conversation with Jimmy include: Jimmy is responsible for marketing and sales at Animalz, which is a B2B content marketing agency. Because Jimmy is involved in both sales and marketing, he is constantly listening on sales calls for the questions prospects are asking and turning them into articles on the Animalz blog. Jimmy thinks that a lot of marketers do buyer personas wrong and focus too much on creating fictional characters. In his case, he thinks of his audience on a spectrum from tactical to strategic. If he's writing to a tactical audience, that person needs instructions on how to do something. If he's writing to a strategic audience, they need a framework for how to make a big decision.  By focusing on creating content about the questions he gets in the sales process, Jimmy can in some cases attribute three or four deals worth $50,000 to $75,000 to an individual blog article. When new articles are published, Animalz emails them out to its newsletter distribution list, but Jimmy is also a fan of using Tweet storms to gain traction and visibility online. Another form of content that Animalz has seen get strong results for its clients is thought leadership articles. They define thought leadership as essays that express a strong, original point of view. The average new article on the Animalz website gets 3,000 to 5,000 views in the first two months after publication.  Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Connect with Jimmy on LinkedIn Follow Jimmy on Twitter Check out the Animalz website Listen to the podcast to learn more about how Jimmy leverages the conversations he's having with sales prospects to build a more effective marketing strategy for Animalz. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm Kathleen Booth and I'm your host. And today my guest is Jimmy Daley, who's the marketing director at Animalz. Welcome, Jimmy. Jimmy Daly (Guest): Thanks so much, Kathleen. I'm happy to be here. Jimmy and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: Yeah, I'm excited to have you here because your agency has come up twice on this podcast before. As my loyal listeners know, I always ask my guests who is doing inbound marketing really well, company or individual, and two times now I've had one of my guests say Animalz. I think most recently it was Barron Caster at rev.com. So whenever I hear that sort of pattern happen, I think I need to talk to that person. Jimmy: That's awesome. That makes my day. Kathleen: Yeah, so I'm glad you're here. And for the listeners, can you just talk a little bit about who you are, your background, as well as what Animalz does? About Jimmy Daly and Animalz Jimmy: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm a longtime B2B content marketer. I've been working in some capacity in content marketing for almost 10 years. I started as a writer, evolved to kind of managing freelancers and other writers, and now as a marketing director at Animalz, I'm responsible for new business. So I'm in charge of marketing the company and then also doing our sales, which has been a very interesting evolution, as I think we'll probably get into a little bit. Jimmy: Animalz is a content marketing agency. Primarily, we work with B2B SaaS companies. We've been around for about four years. We're a distributed team, a fantastic team too, we have some really great people. We work with awesome customers. I feel we've built a model that allows us to hire great people, pay them good salaries, that allows us to create really, really high quality work, which helps us attract fantastic clients. So it's a great system and a really fun place to work. Kathleen: That's great, and obviously, it's contributing to you guys producing great work, because the word on the street is that you're a good agency to work with. Aligning Sales and Marketing Kathleen: One of the things I was fascinated by when you and I first connected is how you talked about, I asked you what was really moving the needle and you talked about some of the ways that you're kind of aligning sales and marketing. Because you kind of are like a one-man sales and marketing team, correct? Jimmy: That is correct, yes. Kathleen: Yeah, and it's funny we talked about- Jimmy: To caveat by saying... Sorry, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. It feels unfair to take too much credit for all the amazing business that we get because so much of it is driven by word of mouth. I feel fortunate that in my first role doing sales that we have very low volume requirements, right? We're not like a SaaS company that needs hundreds or thousands of new customers a month. We only need two or three or four for a really fantastic month. Kathleen: Yeah, but it's interesting to me because I think there's a lot of conversations that happen amongst people that work at really large companies about what is the best way to achieve sales and marketing alignment. I think that sometimes the fact that there are just a lot of people involved kind of serves as a barrier to seeing what could be a much simpler and more elegant solution. I liked when you talked about how you address this issue that you could be a larger team doing what you're doing, you just happen to be one guy. It shows how when you're one person and you have to do it all, how you align with yourself. So I want to talk about that a little bit. Jimmy: Yeah, definitely. Well, certainly, it's easier with just one person, right? I'm a writer at heart and so I'm constantly looking for ideas to spark what will be the next blog post for the Animalz blog. Luckily, I get so much of that through our sales process, right? So I spend a lot of time on the phone, meeting potential customers, trying to close deals, onboarding new customers, and that provides me with a lot of fodder for blog posts. Jimmy: We have a very, very lean process where basically I am just constantly observing the things that I'm hearing in those sales calls, and then documenting them on the blog in one form or another. So if I hear two or three different people on a sales call mention a similar thing, then that gets jotted down. That goes in the editorial calendar. There's probably two dozen of those in the editorial calendar right now that have not even been written yet. Actually, one thing I've learned very related to this is that most B2B SaaS companies have very, very similar problems. Because we're so specialized in that niche, it allows us to by speaking to one company, we can speak to almost all of them. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a great point, and it really hits home, because one of the owners of IMPACT is a man named Marcus Sheridan, who has literally written a book called, They Ask You Answer. He wasn't a marketer by trade, he was a pool guy. He had a pool company, and he just started listening to the questions he was getting from customers because he was out on sales calls all the time, and then answering them. The answers that he wrote in the form of blog posts generated a tremendous amount of traffic, leads, and then eventually sales for the company. Now of course he's a marketing speaker and an author. But what I love about that approach and what I so appreciate is it's so elegant in its simplicity. I often say, at least in the case of Marcus, it took a non-marketer to figure out that that was a thing. Jimmy: Yeah, that's so interesting. Kathleen: It's common sense, right? It's solving for the people. If one person has a question, odds are there's like hundreds, if not thousands of them, out there with the same question. They just haven't happened to reach out to you directly to ask it yet. Jimmy: Absolutely. Now that I've had this experience of experiencing the full circle of someone finding a blog post, reaching out, talking through problems, realizing there's another blog post to be written that sparked someone else to reach out, et cetera, et cetera, I, thinking back on previous jobs, realized that I hadn't spent hardly any time talking to customers. I was just so focused on optimizing a piece of content for search or doing keyword research or trying to build links to a piece of content that I overlooked this very, very obvious fact that you have to actually talk to the people that you're trying to reach so that you can have a very nuanced understanding of their problems. Do You Really Need Buyer Personas? Kathleen: Yeah, and it's funny that you say this because I also have had long conversations with Marcus about the concept of buyer personas, because he actually says you don't need buyer personas in marketing, which is somewhat controversial because I feel like go to any marketing conference, read any marketing book, talk to any marketing expert, and then I'll be like start with buyer personas, right? Jimmy: Right, right. Kathleen: His point is, it's kind of related to what you're saying, which is that instead of spending a month doing all this research and interviews and this and that, and then creating this like fictional profile, if you spend that same month and just sit down and catalog 50 questions and write 50 answers out in the form of blogs, you'll be so much further ahead than you would have been had you done a month's worth of audience persona research, which I think is true. Jimmy: Fascinating. Kathleen: That's sort of what you're saying. Like, no staged interview can substitute for an actual live sales conversation. Jimmy: No, it's so true, and I would agree with Marcus that I'm personally not a huge believer in buyer personas. I'm sure in some cases they're executed in a way that's really useful. Typically, the way that we see them executed is like, Software Sally is a mid-career manager and she has this problem. It's so fictional that it's hard to take this fake demographic and turn it into a marketing campaign. Jimmy: We actually think about that in a very different way, which is so like when I'm writing a post for the Animalz blog, I'm thinking of the reader on a spectrum from tactical to strategic. If we're writing to a tactical audience, that person needs instructions on how to do something. If we're writing to a strategic audience, they need a framework for how to make a big decision. And a lot of little steps is actually not very helpful. They need more of an overarching principle. There's kind of a mix of those different things, but I found that to be a much more effective way to think through, okay, we have this topic, there's this tactical way we could go about it, but if we want to reach this more decision maker level person, we have to kind of take a step back and try to understand the higher level problem and address it from that angle instead. Kathleen: No, I always say we get caught up in this term buyer persona, and as you say, people tend to create these somewhat useless but entertaining profiles of people who don't exist. What we really need is buyer persona, it's good audience research, which essentially is what you're doing when you have these conversations with people and catalog what they're saying. Jimmy's Process For Capturing Content Ideas Kathleen: So let's talk through an actual example. You're having these sales calls, you're getting these questions. Walk me through your process. Is it simply you just make a note and you say, "Oh, I better go write a blog on this?" Or do you have a structured process around it? Jimmy: I wish I could say I had a very structured process. I don't though. I think over years of doing content marketing, I'm tuned in, right? I'm observing very carefully what people are saying, how they're saying it. Are they frustrated? Are they excited? I sort of pull those threads as I uncover that we're onto something. Jimmy: A very good example of this happened, I don't know, probably almost a year ago now, where I got on three sales calls in a week and three different people told me they had this exact same problem, which was that their organic traffic was actually declining over the last three months or so. I thought that was very interesting, and in each case it had prompted them to do some research about why their traffic was declining, reach out to some friends to try to help them figure out what was going on, and then that prompted them to reach out to an agency to potentially help them. Jimmy: To me, that was like the most obvious example because it happened in such a short period of time. But we wrote a blog post about that, about why organic traffic declines and things you might do to reverse that trend. That post has been hugely successful for us. It turns out a lot of people have that problem. Just through our very, very lean process, we made sure that it was documented, published, distributed, and I could attribute probably three to four more deals that were closed, at least in part, as a result of that exact article, and those deals are good for, $50,000 to $75,000 a year each. Kathleen: Wow. Jimmy: So, it's a easy, simple process with a big payoff. Kathleen: I love hearing that kind of data because you always have people who say, "I don't have time to blog," but I don't know anybody who's billable rate is as high as $50,000 an hour, or let's say it took you four hours, $10,000 an hour. Even some of the best attorneys I know don't charge that much. So, there's a good case there for spending the time. Jimmy: Absolutely. Animalz Content Promotion Strategy Kathleen: Now you've mentioned you write it, you edit it, you optimize it, and then you distribute it. Can you just talk through a little bit, I mean, is this a case of you write these blogs, you put them on your site, and it's, if you build it, they will come? Or is your content distribution or promotion strategy somewhat responsible for the results you're getting? Jimmy: That's a good question. So a few things happen. I should again caveat this by saying, as an agency, we have very low volume requirements. Our blog frankly doesn't get all that much traffic, doesn't need a ton of traffic in order to really help the business. Two to three new deals in a month is a fantastic month. So I actually don't go crazy distributing content. Jimmy: We have an email list with a few thousand people on it. They get everything. I have a personal email newsletter with about 5,000 people on it. I include our stuff in that. We have a really strong network of customers that we will sometimes ask to help us amplify content. Then other than that, I'm a fan of tweet storms. Whenever I publish something new, tweet storms have been a really useful way for us to get stuff out. Then I ask our team to help re-tweeting or sharing stuff. So again, it's simple. The reach is not enormous, by any means, but it's big enough that it works. Kathleen: That's great. Have you done this with clients or have you advised clients on doing this and have they seen similar results? Jimmy: Hmm, that's a great question. In a few cases, yes. In some cases, it just doesn't quite work. So like for example, many of our customers are B2B SaaS. Their primary objective is growing organic search traffic. So we're doing the things you would probably expect. We do a lot of keyword research, we write really long informative posts, we optimize them for search, et cetera, et cetera. That provides a certain amount of leverage in their distribution, because over time they can get a lot more traffic out of organic search than we'll ever be able to get for them doing one-off promotional things. Jimmy: For some of our other customers though, there's this bucket of customers that we work with, and we produce thought leadership content for them. That type of content also works very well using the same very simple mechanisms that we use for our own content, because it's more about making an impact, sharing an idea, and less about the more traditional content distribution where it's about basically page views. Kathleen: Now can you define what you mean by thought leadership content? Because I know people use that term in different ways. Jimmy: It's funny you ask that. I have a half-written blog posts about this exact topic, because you're right, people do think of it in very different ways. The way that it typically manifested Animalz, a thought leadership content strategy is built around sort of this idea that we internally call movement first, where the emphasis is really on sharing strong original ideas and that is like the core of the strategy for that type of content. It often looks more like an essay than it does regular content marketing. It often lives on Medium or a different part of the site than the rest of your blog content. Those things don't all have to be true. Jimmy: We do have a couple of cases with customers where we're doing SEO-driven content with thought leadership characteristics. Simply meaning that we've started with a keyword, but then we've taken a very different approach to the style and the tone of that article. I guess ultimately it means different things. To me the thing that it really means is this piece of content is born from a great idea and it is hopefully encapsulated in that article in a very concise way. Kathleen: That's interesting, and I love that you mentioned not all of this content lives on your site. You mentioned Medium, which I'm always curious about Medium. I think it has so much potential, but you can also, if you don't do it right, spend a lot of time with no results. Jimmy: No, totally. I'm actually personally not a huge fan for the problem that you just stated. We have encouraged a couple customers recently to launch personal blogs that are affiliated with the company that they work for, which is a strategy that I'm liking so far. Obviously, there are institutional hurdles to jump over when you do that kind of thing. Kathleen: Right. Jimmy: But owning the platform provides a bunch of advantages that tend to make it worth it. How To Approach Bottom of the Funnel Content Kathleen: Yeah. Going back to this notion of sales and marketing alignment, at a very, very simplistic level, what you're talking about is being very mindful of the questions you're getting in the sales process, and then answering those questions in your articles. I feel like this has the potential to be incredibly powerful, but it also has the potential to be insanely misused by content creators who venture into the territory of being overly self-promotional. In other words, using a sales question as an excuse to write a blog that is all about the company and their products as opposed to bigger picture questions that a prospect has. Can you talk me through, like do you have any personal guardrails around how you handle that type of content, what topics you'll cover, what you won't, and how often you venture into that very, very bottom of the funnel kind of topic area? Jimmy: Wow, that's a really interesting question. I don't know that I have come across a situation yet where the only answer to the question is you should hire Animalz. I mean, certainly I drop mentions in there occasionally, but just as a company we think about this so differently. Jimmy: I'll give you an example. You know our core business is content marketing services. Through this process of closely observing the problems that come up on sales calls and then also the problems that come up with customers, because there's plenty of those too, we're in the very early stages of building out some software solutions to address those problems. I anticipate that in the future, this problem that you bring up will become more top of mind because we're going to have more things to promote, right? There's just so few companies that are interested, willing, and ready to hire an expensive content marketing agency, that hopefully there will be many, many more that would be interested in paying $10 or $50 or $100 a month to use a piece of software that would solve some of these same things. So yeah, that's interesting. I imagine that's something that we'll have to be asking ourselves more closely over the next six to nine months. Kathleen: Yeah, I think a good example is a question that everybody gets at some point in a sales process is how much does it cost, right? That's a very different question than what do I do if my organic traffic is declining? How much does it cost in the wrong hands could be answered in the form of an article. That's basically like a substitute for your pricing page. In the right hands, it's an opening point for discussion around the factors that impact cost. Jimmy: Got it, okay. I think I better understand your question now, so that's a great point. In general, I would like for us to be as transparent as absolutely possible. Interestingly, we find that many of our customers do not have strong Google Analytic skills. So as I write the post about how to diagnose problems with the organic traffic, I just explain exactly the steps I would take in Google Analytics to start doing the research. We're happy to tell you exactly what those steps would be. Then the hope is, and often the reality as well, is that that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's one of so many possible things going on that they ultimately possibly could need help with. It sounds Cliche, but we established that little bit of trust early on, so hopefully they'll think of us when the time actually does come. Kathleen: Yeah, it sounds like your focus is much more on educational topics than it is on, I would call them sort of sales topics, but it's really that bottom of the funnel, those types of questions, which I like. So you're answering questions that are educating the audience and making them smarter, not so much answering questions that help them choose to pull the trigger and purchase from you. Jimmy: That is correct, yes. Kathleen: Yeah, there's an important distinction there. Jimmy: Definitely. The Results Kathleen: Can you tell me a little bit about, do you have any sort of data around like the traction? Do these posts tend to get, percentage-wise, more traffic than some of your other articles? You mentioned that some of them have led to deals. What have the results been from using this approach? Jimmy: That's an interesting question. I can tell you, as I mentioned, none of the posts on our blog are what I call whales. None of them are just like outliers getting tons and tons of traffic. For the most part, they all are, I don't know, they probably 3,000 to 5,000 visits in their first two or three months of publication, which is just okay, but it's not- Kathleen: Which is great, if that's the right 3,000 to 5,000 people, that's all that matters. Jimmy: Totally, yes. Kathleen: You could have 300 to 500 people, and if they were the 300 to 500 people that are looking for an agency, then that's all you would need. Jimmy: Yes, totally. The reason I'm having a little trouble giving you a really specific quantitative answer on how effective they are is because something I've noticed in our sales process is that almost no one reaches out as the result of one interaction or mention of Animalz. It's always two. So they might say, "I heard about you guys at a conference, or a friend mentioned they liked a blog post by you guys, or I'm in this Slack group and someone shared an article that you guys had written." Then sometime later on, they were on Twitter or they were searching for something, and they came across a second piece. It seems to be the power of those two things together that prompts people to reach out, but it's very difficult to track what what those two things are, because usually one of them, or in many cases, one of those things has happened offline and we're not going to be able to get data on it. Kathleen: It's funny that you mentioned that because as I mentioned at the beginning, I reached out to you after hearing your name twice. Jimmy: Yes. Kathleen: I think I'm proof in the pudding. Jimmy: Totally, yes. I think this is probably a little different than the way that most SaaS companies operate. So agencies are able to grow by word of mouth in a way that SaaS companies simply are not. I know I keep throwing out caveats, but we are writing about SaaS content marketing all the time, but we are not a SaaS company. Therefore a lot of it is like do as we say, not necessarily as we do. Kathleen: Interesting. Well, I love that. I love the process. Any other guidelines for somebody listening around how to write those articles or how to make them especially useful? Jimmy: Get feedback on them from people that don't work at the same company that you do. So that's something that I do. I don't do it as often now, but I did it quite a bit when we were initially getting the Animalz blog rolling. I just reached out to friends in the content marketing world and asked them to review drafts of our posts, and I got a lot of really good feedback on that. Kathleen: I love that. That is so simple. It's so simple and something that so few people do. Jimmy: Yes, totally. You can just get better feedback if you don't talk to the person you're asking to review it on a daily basis. I'm part of a couple of Slack groups full of content marketers, a Facebook group full of content marketers. Those have been really amazing resources for getting good feedback on work. I discover things in those feedback sessions that I can't imagine I ever would have figured out any other way. Kathleen: Oh, can you share any of those Slack or Facebook groups, the names of them? Jimmy: Yeah, so there are a couple. So there's a Facebook group I'm in that I believe is just called Content Marketers with an exclamation point. Very good group. I started a Slack group of my own called Content Marketing Career Growth. There is another one I'm in. It is called Content in UX, which is also very good. It's a huge one. There's a ton of people in there, a really, really good community. I'm sure there are others. If you'd like, I can send you links. Kathleen: Yes, please do, and I will include them in the show notes. That would be great. Jimmy: Cool. Kathleen: Yeah, I found similarly some of those groups to be incredibly helpful. I mean, we have our own group which has IMPACT Elite, that's a Facebook group, and then I am a member of Online Geniuses, which is huge. It's all different marketing disciplines. Then I think I might be a member of Content in UX. Sometimes there's so many groups I lose track. Jimmy: Yes, it is easy to lose track. Kathleen: But that's a great tip, to just go outside. If you were talking to a company that had a larger sales and marketing team, any thoughts or advice or insights for bigger company teams on how to operationalize a process like this? Jimmy: Yes, so the first thing, in a perfect world, this would be easy to do, I would have content marketers get on sales calls and I would have sales people write blog posts. Not as a way to test them, but just to have them operate in the other person's world every now and then. I feel like it's trendy, especially for SaaS companies to say every one of the company does customer support twice a year or something like that. I think that if you are going to be doing marketing to support a sales team or you're doing sales that is hopefully the result of high quality marketing, you have to be in the other person's shoes at least every now and then. I would definitely recommend that. Jimmy: Also, there was a thing, I spent a year working at QuickBooks doing content marketing for them, and they had a program set up where once a week they would have a real live QuickBooks customer in the office. They were there for the day and people from around the company could book time with them and ask them questions. So you knew that every Thursday from 9:00 to 4:00 a customer would be there and you could schedule time with them and you could ask them whatever questions you want about how they found QuickBooks, what did they find useful, what do they not, et cetera, et cetera. Jimmy: I think for companies of a certain size, assuming you have enough customers to support a program like that, it's a great idea because we would find that in our weekly content meetings, our team would get together and questions would come up that we just didn't have answers to. Then somebody would say, "Oh, well, why don't we just ask the customer on Thursday?" So we'd book time and we would do that. Kathleen: That is so nice to be able to do that. Jimmy: Yeah, it was fantastic. Maybe it's once a quarter, maybe it's twice a year for smaller companies, but formalizing the process is important. Kathleen: I love that. I wish that I could have a customer in the office every week, but alas, we are not in that position at this point. But no, that is a great point about switching roles and sitting in the other seat, because I do think sometimes there's this very natural tension that builds up between sales and marketing, I think you and I talked about this, I used to be on our sales team. Now I'm on our marketing team and I have much more empathy for our salespeople than I think I would have otherwise. Jimmy: Yes. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Yeah, it helps a lot. Well, shifting gears, I'm curious to hear now that I told you several people have mentioned Animalz name when I've asked this question, I'm curious to know who you're going to talk about. So company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Jimmy: Such a good question. So there's a few that come to mind. Am I allowed to offer more than one? Kathleen: Yeah, go for it. Jimmy: I tend to find that companies that do inbound marketing really well build steam and build a strong reputation over time. So I'm a big fan of not just people who are kind of off my radar today, but who have been there for a couple of years and a few that stand out. One company that I think has just done an incredible job over the past five or six years is Wistia. One, because their branding has evolved from, well, it's still friendly and kind of playful, but it's so refined now. It's tangible. The good vibes are tangible when you visit their site. They write really high quality stuff. Their videos are excellent. I mean, I'm not really a video person, but I find myself on their site all the time because I'm just curious what their marketing team is up to, because there's always something new and a little different going on. So that's one that I would call out. Kathleen: That's a good one. Jimmy: You mentioned Barron Caster from Rev at the beginning of this podcast, and it's funny, I was actually just on a call with him this morning. As I've been exposed to what he and the team over there are doing, I am increasingly impressed. One thing that I like about what they do is that their product marketing is straightforward, obvious, but not overly promotional at all. Jimmy: A good example is they have their product marketing team, and they've tied this into their content strategy as well, their product marketing team has come up with solutions for all the possible entry points to a transcription service, and I find that they've just done it in such a perfect little way. So for example, they built iPhone apps for phone call recording, right? That creates this very easy transcription workflow for journalists or anyone who has to do research or interviews for their job. They did the same thing with a voice recording app. They have a Zoom integration. They've just figured out all the little ways that people might work transcription into their day-to-day, and they've addressed that. Jimmy: I find that type of subtle, very useful product marketing to be inspiring, right? Because they're not hammering you with ads and obnoxious copy. They're just kind of offering you a dozen different ways to build their really, really good product into the work you're already doing. So I love that. Kathleen: Yeah, I would agree. They do a nice job of really tightly aligning marketing and product. Jimmy: Yes, yes, definitely. Kathleen: Well, a second question, digital marketing is changing so quickly, and the number one gripe I hear from marketers is that they have a really hard time keeping up with everything. So how do you personally keep up and stay up to date and educate yourself? Jimmy: I do most of that offline, to be honest. There's a couple of blogs that I keep track of, like Tomasz Tunguz blog I really like, especially now that I work in sales. He talks about sales quite a bit. He also talks about just the SaaS industry, which I find to be increasingly useful information as I spend less time on the ground doing the marketing and more time talking to customers. So that's one. Jimmy: I'm a very loyal reader of Ben Thompson's Stratechery blog. Similar thing, like his really deep dives on business strategy I find to be useful. I feel like that has provided me with a lot of context for conversations that I have with customers. Jimmy: But like I said, I try to do quite a bit offline too. So one really fantastic resource that I read recently was Jim Collins, Good to Great. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a great book. It's such a classic. Jimmy: It's so good. You know, the examples that he uses in there are just timeless. They've stood up so well. Kathleen: Absolutely. Jimmy: So that's one. I have a book on my desk that I keep keep with me all the time, called On Writing Well by William Zinsser, which helps me with the day-to-day writing of blog posts and emails, but also sales proposals now. Whenever I find myself getting stuck on something, I'll open up that book and the answer is always in there. Kathleen: And it's called Unwriting. Jimmy: It's called On Writing Well. Kathleen: Oh, On Writing, got it. Jimmy: Yes. William Zinsser is the author. Kathleen: Great. Oh, lots of new good ones here. I always like when I hear new ones, because this is how I stay up to date is I just ask other people and then follow their lead in my podcast. Jimmy: That's a great idea. How To Connect With Jimmy Kathleen: Well, Jimmy, if somebody wants to learn more about Animalz or wants to reach out and connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that? Jimmy: Yeah, animalz.co, we have a kind of outdated, not very fancy website, but hopefully the content there is helpful to you. We also have a podcast and you can find all that stuff on there. Kathleen: Animalz with a z, important to know. Jimmy: Yes, Animalz with a z, and then if you'd like to reach out, please do. Probably the best way to do that is Twitter. I spend a lot of time on Twitter, probably too much, but it's just Jimmy_Daly. Yeah, if you ever want to chat content strategy, hit me up. I love chatting about it. Kathleen: Great, well, thank you so much. And if you're listening and you liked what you heard, you learned something new, I would love it if you would give the podcast a five star review on Apple Podcasts. If you know somebody else doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at WorkMommyWork, because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Jimmy. Jimmy: Thank you, Kathleen. That was fun.

Rev.com's Head of Growth has tripled the company's landing pages conversion rates across all major products. Here is how he did it... This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Rev.com Director Growth Barron Caster talks about the company's process for conducting audience research, and how the insights gleaned from that process have enabled them to triple their landing page conversion rates.  If you like detailed, actionable takeaways, this episode is for you. Barron is sharing his exact process, right down to the nine questions he has his team ask when conducting audience research interviews. This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford Connecticut and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with special guests including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS".  Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my conversation with Barron include: Barron runs "growthproduct" and marketing at Rev. Marketing is focused on website traffic and growthproduct is about conversion.  Barron believes that the best way to improve your marketing results is to learn from your customers, so he tries to speak to at least one customer every month. In addition, the team at Rev uses Net Promoter Scores to track how their customers are feeling about the company's products. He also has a requirement that everyone on his team meet with at least two customers per quarter to conduct audience research, and they have a stipend to support that effort.  To ensure that the information gathered during customer interviews is accurate, Barron has created a one-pager that details exactly what should go into it, who they should be talking to, what questions they should be asking, etc. The one pager details the nine specific questions (shared in the transcript below) that his team must ask. All of the team's audience research interviews are recorded and transcribed using Rev. There are a dozen people on Barron's growth team and they meet for a half hour every week. During this meeting, they share the findings from their audience research in a "quickfire round" format. They pull key insights from this research and use the actual words of the customer to update copy on their website and landing pages. This has resulted in a 3X improvement in the company's landing page conversion rates. Another trick that Barron uses to understand customers is listening to what they are asking on the company's website live chat.  Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Check out the articles that Barron has published on Medium Read Barron's article on how he tripled Rev's landing page conversion rates Visit the Rev.com website Listen to the podcast to hear Barron's process for gathering audience research and using the findings to inform Rev's conversion rate optimization strategy. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and this week my guest is Barron Caster who is the Director of Growth at Rev.com. Welcome, Barron. Barron Caster (Guest): Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Barron and Kathleen hamming it up while recording this episode Kathleen: This is such a cool interview for me to do because I use your product every single week. And so for those listening who don't know what Rev.com is, Barron can give a more complete description, but I will just say I do this podcast. If you listen with any degree of regularity and if you visit my show notes, all of the show notes are transcribed using Rev. So I send Rev, through the cloud, I send my audio file, and then usually within a few hours it comes back, and it's this beautifully transcribed, written version that I don't have to do myself. So I love Rev.com, and we use it for other things too. As a team we create the SRT files, which is what we use to caption our social videos, and many other things as well. So I'm really excited to have you here for that reason. Barron: Thank you. I'm excited to be here and excited to talk about what you just did for us, which is using customers' words to inform and educate other people, and to show the value of the services you provide. So thank you for the glowing introduction. Kathleen: Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure. There's nothing better than talking about a product you actually use and love. Barron: Totally hear you. Kathleen: Speaking of which, though, I know I only use certain parts of your product. So before we dig into the actual meat of the conversation, can you just take a minute and tell the listeners a little bit more, first of all about yourself, because you have an interesting background. You've been an entrepreneur. You've been a venture capitalist. You've done a lot of different things, and so I think that's kind of interesting as far as how it influences the work you do now. And then also give us the quick spiel on Rev and all of its different products so that people listening have a sense for the full breadth of what the company does. About Rev.com and Barron Caster Barron: Cool. Thank you. Yes. I'll give a quick introduction on myself. I started with an education in mechanical engineering. I got my undergrad and master's from USC in Los Angeles. And then I promptly threw my degree to the side and became a venture capitalist looking at the wearables, healthcare, and mobile spaces. And I worked at a firm called General Catalyst, evaluated early stage investments, and realized that before I wanted to spend more time investing, I really wanted to get operational and figure out the inner workings of a great company and see what that looks like. So I joined the fastest growing company at the time. It was called Zenefits. Kathleen: We are also a customer of Zenefits. I love them. Barron: You're a customer. Rev is also a customer of Zenefits. It was the fastest company at the time to go from zero to $60 million in AR, and I was there at an incredible scaling time of the company, saw a lot of incredible things there, met tons of amazing people, and then after being there and seeing this crazy scaling period, they started to have some issues, but I saw a future for myself in product, which I was not doing at Zenefits. So then I moved to Rev, which I'd never heard of at the time, to join as a product manager. And at the time, Rev only had a few services. I joined as a product manager on our core transcription service. The one that you just talked about so gracefully. Thank you for that. And then I started our growth team. I've been at Rev now three years, and I now run all of our growthproduct, and marketing. So "growthproduct" is one word and then marketing. And growthproduct is a few product managers working on products that once people are actually on our site, convince them to use our services and marketing as all of the things that inform customers about our services. So you also think about it in terms of traffic and conversion. Marketing is the traffic and brings people awareness and educates them, and then conversion is once they're actually on Rev properties, how do we convince them to buy from us? Kathleen: Great. And one of the things I thought was so interesting about your background, and I'm kind of jealous I have to admit, is that I have always wanted to go through Brian Balfour's Reforge program. Barron: Oh yes. Kathleen: I follow him really closely online. I love every single thing he writes about growth and product market fit, and all of that. You've been through that program, so I'm kind of excited to see how that comes into the conversation, or if it does. Barron: Brian and everyone from the Reforge program are incredible. He leads the thinking in a lot of ways and has helped define what growth teams look like. I went through the program when we didn't have a growth team at Rev. I think it was a month old, and I was the first person on it working with one of our co-founders trying to figure out what should the growth team look like longer term and what should be build towards. So by looking at all the frameworks and ways it's built at different companies, that helped us inform what it should look like at Rev because growth teams are going to look totally different based on the company and the people within the company, but it's really good to talk to other people who have done it. And we do that for all of our learnings at Rev. We try to talk to industry experts and figure out how are the best people doing it. How Rev.com Conducts Audience Research Kathleen: Love it. So when you started talking about how you kind of handle marketing and you handle growthproduct and you think of traffic and conversion as those two sides of the coin, and when you and I first spoke, you talked about how a big factor that influences how you approach these things is the audience research that you do. So maybe we could just start out there and you could talk a little bit more about audience research and where that fits within your strategies. Barron: I think it should help inform almost all strategies at the company, not just on the growth team but in pretty much all the things that we do. And I think there's just a number of ways that you can do customer research. One of the best is talking to them. So, take it a step back. A lot of marketers really love... They work for companies. They know what their company offers, and they love talking about all of the things that their company does today because they know the features. They talk to the people that are building them. They hear a lot of about why they're great. But what you really need to do is get out of the building, talk to your customers and understand why are they actually using you. What value does your service provide? How do you change their lives? What do they like, not like about it. What they want to improve, to really narrow down what is special about your product and service. How are you differentiated? We do it in a number of ways. I think talking to people is always great. I try to have at least one very in-depth customer conversation a month, even though I'm not even working day-to-day on specific channels or features, just to help inform the sorts of things we're doing. And then we also have a lot of other inputs from customers, whether it be Net Promoter Score, online ratings and reviews, and reading where people are talking about you online, emails to support, talks from sales, all of these different places are ways to get as much feedback as possible to help inform what you're doing. Kathleen: And I like that you try to do it once a month. That's something that I'm kind of working on too which is when you're in marketing, you're not always in a position where you have direct customer contact, but it is so important to come up with some kind of a cadence so that you don't become so out of touch. Barron: 100%. And I've actually... on my team started creating requirements that people get out of the building, we have a stipend for it, talk to customers, meet them in person, hear about their journey, how they found out about us, what they're using us for, what they love, don't love, all those sorts of things for at least two customers per quarter. It's a requirement even though many people will never have customer interaction in their day-to-day. I think it's essential to have that empathy and understand what are we actually trying to do here. Kathleen: Oh, I love that. Let's actually get a little bit kind of down to brass tacks here. You're requiring your team to do these customer meetings or conversations. You're doing some of them. Do you have any kind of guidelines or framework that you use or that you ask them to use for those conversations so that there's some degree of consistency in the information you're getting? Barron: Yeah. I'm a huge documentation nerd across the board, so whenever I have an idea for a project or things that I want to work on, I write out a document to explain my thinking very clearly and get feedback on it. I think it's extremely important. So I have a one-pager about the homework, exactly what should go into it, who you should be talking to, what questions you should be asking, all of those kinds of things. And then everyone shares it back in their own format, and then we discuss it as a group. And I have the questions if you would like to hear them. Kathleen: Yes. Of course I would like to hear them. Rev.com's Audience Research Questions Barron: Great. I like to break it out into almost like the moment before discovery, and then questions around discovery, and then about the service itself. We have nine key questions and then a couple bonus questions, but they are how did you know that you needed a transcription service? Before Rev, were you using a different transcription service or doing it yourself? So those are kind of how did you know had a need, and what were you doing? Then how did you find Rev? How did you evaluate Rev, or which transcription service you wanted to use? Those are kind of on the once you've discovered it, how did you actually evaluate it? And then more into the use case. So what do you use Rev for? What does that process look like? How has Rev changed your life is a really interesting question because it forces them to think about the value you provide and quantify it, which can be very hard for marketers at times to figure out the specifics of value that you add to people. What is your favorite part about Rev? Least favorite part about Rev? This one is a personal favorite. How would you describe Rev to a friend? What is your service from their perspective? And then who else do you know that might benefit from using Rev? So what other use cases can they think of top of mind that would be relevant? And then my two bonus questions are what other product app services do you use and love? So you're usually talking to someone who is not like you but they use your service, so what is the typical person that uses your service? What else are they doing? What other things are they reading online? What other actions are they taking to try to see if there are any nuggets in there about other things that you could be doing to get in front of other customers and users. And then also what are your favorite newsletters, podcasts? Like what information do they consume on a regular basis? Kathleen: I love that. And I really like that you ask that question about how would you describe Rev to somebody else because what's that famous quote they say that, "your brand is what people say about you when you're not there?" Barron: Yeah, exactly. Kathleen: That's really what it is. You're finding out what your actual brand is out in the marketplace, as opposed to what you want people to think your brand is. And hopefully- Barron: I totally agree. Kathleen: ... those two things match up, but they don't always. Barron: You want them to, and then if you don't, then you can dig into why. Deriving Insights From Audience Research Barron: And then another big requirement around this homework assignment is that all of it is recorded and transcribed using Rev. So another big piece of it is dogfooding, which is another thing that marketers sometimes don't always do. They take their products at face value instead of really using it, understanding the nuances of what actually looks like for a customer to be spending money on this, and what is the value that it adds back to their life. So when I ask people what are the insights from it, they actually have to go back, read through our online, easy to use, interactive transcript viewer, and highlight things, comment, do all of those sorts of things, but it really gets them in the mindset of dogfooding and what is the user experience. How should we be talking about it? Rev's Transcription Services Kathleen: I'm going to digress for a minute because you as a company have two different transcription options. There's the one that I have always used which is $1 per minute. Really reasonably priced in my opinion, and it's very accurate, so I don't have to spend a ton of time cleaning up the transcription after I get it. But then I saw that you recently released, and I'm not sure if it's still in beta or not, a new option that is going to be 10 cents per minute. It sounds like it's AI powered, and it's a great option for people who want like really quick results. Could be a great application for which could be exactly what we're talking about right now which is audience research interviews. Can you just talk about that for a second and then we'll pick up where we left off? Barron: Definitely. Rev historically has had a lot- Rev.com has had many human services. We have human audio transcription. We have English captioning for English videos. And then we have foreign subtitles for English videos, and foreign document translation. And it's always had these human services. But over time we have served many transcription customers, and... over 100,000 transcription customers, and we have all of this information and data about accurate transcription. So we decided as a company to make an investment a few years ago in speech technology. And we said we have the world's leading English dataset around English transcription. We want to create a speech engine around this. And we have and we launched a consumer version of this under a separate beta brand called Temi.com. For a number of years it's been incredibly successful. So now we're going to put that automated service that has industry leading accuracy because we have top speech scientists working on our incredible data to make the best engine out there, and we feel like it's in such a good place that we're going to serve it on Rev.com. So we've been doing it under a separate brand name for a number of years, and we feel like it's more than ready for prime time, so we're bringing it to all of our happy Rev customers who may have always used our human services, and we feel like this will be a great option in addition to our portfolio for certain types of audio. As you were saying, you don't always need perfect transcription. For this podcast, we're going to have perfect transcription because we want to know exactly the things that were said, but in certain cases, you have tons of interviews and you really just need to know the gist of what people were talking about or pull out some key quotes here and there. And that's when the automated version is ideal. So right now it's still in early access and we're rolling it out for prime time for all new customers starting in a couple weeks. Kathleen: That's great. Barron: And we're really excited for that. And then we also serve it directly to developers through an API as well under a brand Rev.ai. Kathleen: Neat. That's going to be a game changer as far as I'm concerned because I have no problem paying $1 per minute for the podcast as you said because it's important. I'm publishing that text. And it's for a variety of reasons, for accessibility, for somebody who wants to read and not listen, it needs to be legible and accurate. But it would be cost prohibitive if I were going to use that service to transcribe every sales call my team did, every meeting we had, every audience research interview. That could get expensive. And so this makes it so... I love that it makes it so accessible and you almost don't have an excuse not to do it, right? Barron: 100%. And we at first, when we launched our own automated version, we were a little bit worried about cannibalization. We're saying, "Are we disrupting ourselves too much?" And when we started giving it to customers, we saw no, instead of switching from human to automated, there were actually just recording more and getting more things transcribed. So we saw a lot of lift instead of shift. So we're really trying to broaden the market and make transcription more accessible to a wider audience. Kathleen: Well, and I can say just... Here's a little bit of audience research for you. Again, we've used it extensively for podcast transcription. I haven't used Rev for transcribing audience research interviews. I will now. It just is... It's so simple. Not trying to do a commercial, but I do love the product, so I wanted to say that. Barron: I knew you'd turn this into a commercial. Kathleen: You guys... So you do these interviews. You have the question set. And then I think I heard you say that everyone shares the results of the interviews in their own format. But part of that format is having the actual transcription, correct? Barron: Correct. We share the transcripts and Rev invests heavily in our online transcript viewer so when you get a transcript back from us, it doesn't just come in a Word doc. It used to, and we realized that people wanted to collaborate around them, so sharing learnings around a transcript. So we invested heavily in making a very simple, easy to use but robust online editor that people can share with teammates, make comments on, highlight key things, take notes around. Almost like a Google Doc where it's like a online viewer that a lot of people can share and look at together. And that's... yeah. So everyone shares the transcript with other members of the team. How Rev's Team Uses The Insights From Audience Research In The Company's CRO Strategy Kathleen: So you're having periodic meetings. How often do those take place where you all get together and review these findings? Barron: I do quick-fire rounds so we do those like once a quarter based on recent findings, but I encourage people all the time to talk with customers, and we have a budget for that where people can go out and get them transcribed no problem. And I urge people to always share learnings in a transcript back whenever they have them, and then we have a more formal meeting around it once a quarter. Kathleen: Tell me more about what a quick-fire round is. Barron: Oh, well we have almost a dozen people on the growth team, so we have a half hour meeting every single week to talk about different key topics. So when I say quick fire it's just everyone talking for a few minutes about the key findings that they had or any interesting insights or use cases that they discovered that weren't on our radar before. Kathleen: So you're sharing all of this feedback with the team. The team's sharing it with each other. Can you talk a little bit about then how you actually incorporate this into your marketing and your CRO strategies? Barron: Definitely. Each person on the growth team is working on a different project. So for the marketing team, we're much more channel focused, so we have someone who runs our paid marketing, someone who runs content, someone who runs SEO, someone who runs influencers, and social, and PR. So whenever you hear a customer insight, people on the team try to think about, "How can I incorporate that into the things that I am working on?" And CRO at Rev lives under the product side of things, and I did CRO for my entire time at Rev. Almost my entire time at Rev. So when we were working on conversion in A/B testing, we used customers' own words to inform the tests we were doing and actually use it as our own copy. Because we believe that customers understand the value of our services a lot more than we do because they proactively sought us out, started using us, and find value to keep coming back. So they really understand what value Rev has to offer, and we want to use those insights to help inform the next batch of people that may come across us. Kathleen: So it's true like voice of the customer application, you're pulling quotes out. You're using those quotes... Or is it full quotes, or is it just instead of calling it a transcription, we call it X kind of thing? Barron: It's a combination. We have customer testimonials on our website as well, and we also have a Twitter feed that shows real tweets from customers, just more forms of social proof, so that's actually using their own words that they have written. But then we also just use it to inform the landing page copy. Like what are the types of things that customers say about us? And I could pull up an example. Let's see. Kathleen: Let's do it. Barron: On our website, Rev.com/transcription, Audio Transcription Made Simple, that's been a tagline we've had for a while. That's because all of our customers say we're so easy to use. And I manage our entire self-serve business so it's my job to make sure it stays that way, as easy to use as possible. But then under the fold, and under the main call to action, we say, "Rev's transcription service help you capture more value from your recorded audio." That came about from me from a customer interview. They said that. They said, "You helped me capture more value from all the things I'm recording." Kathleen: Great. I love it. Barron: And we used that, and now we put it smack dab on the page, and people relate to it, and they understand exactly what it means because that was a real problem that someone had. They said, "We're recording all this audio. We're not sure how to get value and insights from it." And they used us, and they said, "This is incredible. You changed the way I work," and I said, "That's amazing. Everyone needs to know that." Right? So that's one example. And then throughout the page there's other pieces that we've gotten from customers over time. Kathleen: Great. I love it. And so it sounds like the key to what's making it successful for you guys is having a very systematic approach of everyone's getting out there and doing the interviews. Everyone's having them transcribed. They're coming back. You're all sharing the learnings, and then that can easily be applied. The Results That Rev Has Seen From This Process Kathleen: Can you talk a little bit about some of the results you've seen from the experiments you've run using the voice of the customer? Barron: Yes, I can. And I read a post about this on Medium as well, but in using customers' own words we have managed to triple the... landing-page-to-paid conversion rate for three of our services. So for the audio transcription, our main service on mobile, we managed to triple the conversion rate, so that means tripling the effectiveness of your ads because you're paying for every time someone comes to your page and you want each of them to convert. So we've done it for our main transcription service. We did it for our automated transcription service. And we did it for another Rev side project that we ended up actually shuttering a year ago because Rev always tries new ideas and businesses, and we experimented with one that ended up not working, but it wasn't because of our acquisition. It was because of other issues with the business. Kathleen: Wow. That tripling of the conversion rate, is that kind of an average across the board, or... and are there some pages that have had amazing results and some that are smaller? Or is it usually quite a big impact that those kinds of experiments have? Barron: We experiment on our main service landing pages. We spend a lot of time and energy getting people to understand what the service is and what value it provides. I will also say it's easier to test on your highest volume pages because you have more data to make more informed decisions. And you have more customers that you can talk to and learn from as well. So most of our work usually starts on our highest volume services, and then we transfer those learnings to lower volume services as well. The lion's share of my work has been on our transcription businesses because those are Rev's most mature businesses. How The Rev Team Conducts CRO Tests Kathleen: And can you just talk me through how you manage those experiments? Are you starting with a hypothesis and just choosing one variable at a time like classic A/B testing, and how long do you let the experiments run? Is there a defined time period or does it just depend on volume of sessions to the page? Barron: Those are both great questions. So the first question was how do you run experiments, and it's very hypothesis driven, but I would say you can't start with a hypothesis. You have to start with learning that helps inform what your hypothesis should be. Right? So for our website, we realized that... I watched a lot of user sessions. I talked to people. And I realized they weren't actually reading the words on the page. We had so much copy on our website... this is two and a half years ago, and people just weren't reading it. We had all the information there; it just wasn't packaged in a way that people could digest. So we made it a lot more digestible, and we saw that it was working. But the hypothesis was people aren't actually reading even though the content is there. We need to make it better. So I'd say start with learning that will help you develop your hypothesis. And then in terms of how we test, yeah. Sometimes we'll package a couple ideas together into one bigger test, but it will always be testing a singular hypothesis because if you just make a bunch of changes that you're not sure will be beneficial, you could end up hurting things and you wouldn't know. Another thing is once you have a certain number of... Actually, I'll say really quickly that Andy Johns who is a venture capitalist at Unusual Ventures, and he was a founding member of the growth team at Facebook. He's worked at Twitter as well, I believe, Quora and Wealthfront. At Wealthfront, I believe, he was the VP of Product and Growth, and now he's a venture capitalist. He has a great framework for thinking about experimentation as a size of the company and your maturity level. When you are a small business you don't have a lot of data so you have to spend tons of time and energy working around crafting the hypothesis the right way. Is this the right way to test it? Being very, very thoughtful around each test because you don't have enough data to move quickly with. So you have to be very, very thoughtful before putting it live. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, you have people that have tons of data such as a Facebook or a Pinterest, and they are well known, their growth teams, for testing so many things as quickly as possible. Because they have all the data in the world, so they can run an A/B test statistical significance- Kathleen: In like hours. Barron: ... in minutes. I think faster than hours at times. They just... So they test as many things as possible because they have almost unlimited data. Whereas a lot of people listening to this podcast are probably trying to figure out how do I make the most with what I have? And it's around being incredibly thoughtful for how you do things. And then you asked how long you test for. We've had A/B tests... So it's always important to set like a minimum bar before starting the test because once you launch a test, emotion will come into it and it looks like something's really hot out of the gate, you said, "Let's call it right now. This is amazing." And then things normalize. So I've gotten really, really good over time in not checking results early because although it's tempting, it can definitely skew your emotion and your emotional state. Kathleen: It's like confirmation bias too sometimes when you see- Barron: Yeah. Exactly. So setting a baseline is good, and there's a lot of articles out there about statistical significance and the sort of time you should wait, but we did it anywhere up to months for statistical significance on key changes because data was limited on certain services, or certain pieces of the funnel. Kathleen: And I was reading the article that you wrote on Medium where you talked about this, and one of the things I thought was interesting, we spent a lot of time talking about customer interviews and audience research, but I thought it was really interesting that you also look at chats, for example, on the site. I think you guys use Intercom. Is that right? Barron: Yeah. Not only do we look at chats, I ran Intercom for months on the site myself so that I could fully understand what questions customers are having and what they wanted to see. By seeing the high volume of people in real time through whatever chat widget is hot these days, whether it be Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, there's a number out there, but getting in touch real time with your customers when they're making buying decisions is hugely important. So yes, we have a number of ways we're learning from customers, and another very popular tool, and I have another article about different tools out there, but full story, in session viewing, and I know there's tools like Hotjar are out there that do the same thing, but seeing how people are interacting with your site is extremely powerful because you can user test all day long and it will not give you real data what customers are doing. Seeing it live is almost magical. It's really cool, and it will help you be a lot smarter about your decisions. Kathleen: We use Lucky Orange for the same thing and it's amazing how it also can help you find bugs on your website that you would not have ever realized existed. We found this weird bug on mobile that was just on like iOS tablet versions X, Y, and Z, and it was because we were seeing, we saw a really strange change in the time on page and the bounce rate for that very specific device and started going into Lucky Orange and looking at user sessions for people using that device, and I was like, "Of course. There's a pop-up that's messing things up." And it's just amazing what you can learn the more you dig. But it is a- Barron: That is spectacular. Kathleen: It's a rabbit hole though. It's a deep one. Barron: I love that. The only other source that I'd say is... sources that are amazing are your support and your sales team. Your support team knows what the biggest customer issues are because they talk to them all the time, and sales is trying to convince people to use your products so they know what the biggest questions are from people when evaluating. And to help inform that, I've done rotations on both of those teams in the past. If your company would allow that, I highly suggest it because it just helps you understand what the problems are a lot better. Kathleen: Amen. I was on our sales team for six months before I took on this role as head of marketing, and it was hugely valuable. And we record all of our sales calls, so I still think listening to those is so important. Barron: Amazing. Yes. And getting them transcribed so you can read them easier. Kathleen: Exactly. Using the new 10 cents per minute tool. No, this is great. You have so many good articles on Medium. I'm probably going to put a few of those links in the show notes, so if you're listening and you want to see more of what Barron has written, check out the show notes for sure. And you are @BarronCaster on Medium. I'll put that link in as well. Barron: Thank you. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: And a couple questions for you that I ask all of my guests. I'm curious what you're going to have to say. First one is when it comes to inbound marketing, which is really what this podcast is about, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now? Barron: Yes. There are many people I think that are killing it. Kathleen: You can give me multiple names. That's fine too. Barron: I will. How deep do you want me to go on how I think they're killing it? Kathleen: Oh. Fire away. I'll stop you- Barron: Great. I think- Kathleen: ... if I need to. Barron: Okay. I think the first name that comes to mind is Neil Patel. I think he's done a great job of building an incredible content library that is extremely extensive, and he touches people on all different sorts of mediums. He's active across all social channels, and he's built up a personal brand that is extremely strong. And what he's done more recently in the past couple years is layer on tons of free tools that incentivize people to come to his domain to evaluate their website, and see what their SEO is, or look for keyword ideas through his Ubersuggest tool. And I know he's focused on acquiring these different tools to help bolster his audience and provide value to people. So he always leads with value which I think is incredibly important. So as an individual who is a brand, he stands out amongst the crowd to me. And then another company that I think is doing really well, is this company called Animalz which is a B2B, content marketing agency that I love and I've been in touch with recently because I subscribe to their newsletter and all their content was incredibly thoughtful and informative around content marketing. So I could tell they did an incredible job because I loved reading and opening their newsletter, and it led me to reach out to them about their business. So because I'm a converted customer, I am a huge fan of the work that they've done in being able to show their value to me. And then- Kathleen: And that's Animalz with a Z, right? Barron: Animalz, yeah. Animalz with a Z. And then the last company that I'm not a customer of but I really like what they're doing is G2 Crowd. Ryan Bonnici over there who used to be at HubSpot has created a content engine that is unparalleled, I think. And they're just producing a high volume of high quality content, which is very difficult to do, and I know they're investing heavily in doing that. Kathleen: Ryan's been a guest on the podcast. Yeah, he's a really smart guy. And you're the second person to mention Animalz, so I'm going to have to reach out to somebody there and get them to come on now, because that's- Barron: If you talk to Jimmy, he's great. Kathleen: Jimmy, I'm coming for you. Barron: Great. And what they do is they... Most agencies will shop out a lot of their work to other freelancers, and they believe in value and quality so hugely that they only have in-house writers. They only staff in-house people, which is difficult to do as a large agency, but it helps you keep quality consistent across the board. Kathleen: Interesting. Well, those are great examples for anyone who wants to check them out. Again, links will be in the show notes. Second question is with digital marketing changing so quickly, how do you stay up to date? What are your personal kind of go-to sources for great information? Barron: This is an amazing question. My first answer is that you shouldn't be looking for the latest developments. You should start by going back to the classics of marketing because a lot of the classic principles don't change. It's more of the mechanics that change. So like the people I love and refer to commonly are Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, like Robert Cialdini. These like great marketing minds and advertising minds where the principles last forever. Like I created a robust A/B testing program at Rev, and then I read Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising, which was written 100 years ago, and he had all the same principles. I was like, "Oh my God. I would have saved so much time by visiting this first." When before I had been reading all the blogs and trying to figure out what the best tech companies were doing. A lot of the principles are the same. It's more of how you actually bring them to market that's changing. And for that, I really loved Drift as a brand because I think that David Gerhardt, who runs a lot of their marketing over there, subscribes to the same philosophy. He constantly revisits the classics and then figures out how does that work in today's modern world, but he starts with principles. And I think the principles are extremely important. And then my last favorite, more general growth newsletter that touches across product development, entrepreneurship, marketing, and growth, is Hiten Shah who's actually related to Neil Patel, and he has a just incredible newsletter that's very informative, and he does deep dives on businesses and their go-to-market that will help inform you about how great brands that you know today actually made it, and the evolution that they went through over time. Kathleen: I love it. So many good suggestions. Lots of reading ahead. Barron: I don't mean to overwhelm, but- Kathleen: No, this is great. I think- Barron: ... if you have limited time, start with the old stuff and then work your way forward. I'm also a big fan of Nassim Taleb and Antifragile as a book, and he has this thing he calls the Lindy Effect. The longer something has been in existence, the more likely it is to exist for a long period of time. So these older principles still hold true in today's modern world. Kathleen: I can't wait to check some of those out. One thing I've noticed from doing so many interviews with different marketers is the best marketers are just these voracious learners. They're always wanting to find something more to educate themselves with. So lots of recommendations. If you're listening, go get all the books. How To Connect With Barron Kathleen: Barron, if somebody wants to learn more about you, or has a question, or wants to learn more about Rev, what's the best way for them to get in touch or find you online? Barron: You can check out my Medium that you will post later which is great. You can send me an email directly. It's my name barron@rev.com. Please reach out if you have any questions about anything, or if you have ideas of articles that you want me to write, I would love to hear that as well. I'm always looking for ideas on things that people are curious about so I can answer a question for a lot of people. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: Love it. All right. Well, thank you so much. If you're listening and you learned something new, which I'm pretty sure you did because I feel like there's a lot of good stuff in this one, I would of course love it if you would leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice. And if you know somebody else who'd doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, Tweet me @WorkMommyWork because they could be my next interview. Thanks, Barron. Barron: Thank you so much, Kathleen. This has been incredible.

Does your sales process line up with your buyer's journey? In this episode, you'll learn why addressing your customers' concerns during the buying experience can reduce friction and boost conversions. Tune in as I chat with Barron Caster, the Director of Growth at Rev. He reveals the methods his team used to triple Rev's conversion rates over the last three years—and how you can become a better marketer by applying these principles to your business. We covered: Why inexperienced marketers focus on selling the product features Where to get started with identifying your customers’ concerns Barron’s favorite place to find out how to improve conversion rates What happens when you only focus on the leads who don’t convert The surprising reason why you can’t rely on accurate tracking data Exactly what type of questions you should ask customers over the phone How to sort through your research data (and create a hypothesis) The pros and cons of running A/B tests individually vs. group testing Resources: Rev.com Hotjar Mixpanel Hiten Shah Influence by Robert Cialdini How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie barron@rev.com

Does your sales process line up with your buyer's journey? In this episode, you'll learn why addressing your customers' concerns during the buying experience can reduce friction and boost conversions. Tune in as I chat with Barron Caster, the Director of Growth at Rev. He reveals the methods his team used to triple Rev's conversion rates over the last three years—and how you can become a better marketer by applying these principles to your business. *** Tap on this link to access show notes+transcripts, join our private community of mavericks, or sign up to the newsletter: EveryoneHatesMarketers.com/links

Today's guest is the Director of Growth at Rev.com. You will discover how simplifying their on-boarding flow doubled conversions, a hack to get in-person user feedback and why adding a Facebook login didn't lead to the growth they were expecting. Barron Caster is the Director of Growth at Rev.