Podcast appearances and mentions of bob ruffolo

When you're running a business, it's common, and maybe easier -  to think that you should obsess over the customer experience.  But what if you spent as much time or - even more - obsessing over the employee experience?  After all, the better your employees are, the better your customer experience is going to be.Our guest on this episode has taken that perspective, and it's working well. Bob Ruffolo is the CEO and Founder of Impact, which is a sales and marketing training company that helps growing organizations end their dependency on outsourced agencies and, instead, bring that talent in-house. He's obsessed with his company's culture and growth. Plus, they have incredible results to back it up. Their employee onboarding program is like nothing I've ever seen before, and their hiring process can take 1-3 months. They also have amazing career development internally, and all this effort has resulted in a culture where employees and customers stay. When you obsess about the employee experience, everyone wins! In this episode, you will learn:why it's important to create an environment where people want to stay, especially when you're in start-up mode and want to convince people to be in it for the long haulwhy getting feedback from your employees and taking action is vital to your success as a leaderhow to create a culture where your team feels empowered to be a steward of the company alongside of youBob's unique new employee recruiting and onboarding process that results in new hires that are aligned with their “12 core competencies” much more!//WHEN YOU'RE READY, HERE'S HOW WE CAN HELP YOU//TAKE THE FREE 5-MINUTE EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT ASSESSMENThttps://turningthecornerllc.com/hr/employee-engagement/assessmentDOWNLOAD A FREE SELF-ASSESSMENT:https://turningthecornerllc.com/free-assessment/SCHEDULE A CALL WITH A HUMAN RESOURCES CONSULTANThttps://turningthecornerllc.com/

Are you struggling to grow your business? Is your marketing content attracting the right people? Do you need help building your marketing team? We talk with Bob Ruffolo the CEO and founder of Impact. Bob partnered with Marcus Sheridan at Impact where they are on a mission to impact 10,000 businesses all over the world.  They help businesses and entrepreneurs improve their sales, marketing, communication, and leadership. Connect with Bob Ruffolo:Website: https://www.impactplus.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/impactbnd/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/impactbndInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/impactbnd/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7g9zlgMdzeXievAF28QAxQBOOK: They Ask, You Answer, by Marcus SheridanFollow the podcast at @itsjustbusinesspodcast on all the major podcasting platforms.Connect with us:To get in touch with us, email the podcast at itsjustbusinesspodcast@gmail.com.Join us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn - we appreciate your support!www.itsjustbusinesspodcast.comYou can find Dana @adashofboss, @dana.dowdell and @hrfanaticDana Dowdell – Boss Consulting – HR ConsultingGoogle -  https://tinyurl.com/y4wxnavxYou can find Russ @reliable.remediationRuss Harlow – Reliable Remediation – Disaster RestorationGoogle: https://g.page/r/CXogeisZHEjMEB

How does a simple merger result in a highly successful business that houses both agency and consulting practices under one roof, creating what very well may be the business model of the future?Bob Ruffolo, founder and CEO of IMPACT, joins the podcast to discuss his merger with The Sales Lion, and how that led to growth that surpassed their HubSpot peers and made their consulting services a primary source of company revenue. He discusses how they've structured their business to host several independent teams under one roof, as well as how you can build consulting practices into your own business to increase profit and improve retention.Connect w/ Bob: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobruffolo/Want to get more content to support your agency life? Subscribe to the Agency Life newsletter, check out past episodes, and find more content at teamwork.com/agencylife. This podcast is brought to you by Teamwork and produced in collaboration with Circle Audio.

Click here to try Databox free, or learn more.Learn how Bob Ruffalo was able to grow IMPACT, a coaching and training company that helps businesses improve their sales, marketing, communication, and leadership, into a $12m firm that's in the top 93rd-100th percentile of his agency peers.

In today's episode, we have Bob Ruffolo, the founder and CEO of IMPACT; a company focused on helping people find success with inbound marketing through education, events, and agency services. Bob joined Hubspot in 2011 to help clients grow better, and today IMPACT finds itself at the top of Hubspot's partner agencies.Bob walks us through IMPACT's journey and how it has changed, grown, and revolutionized how inbound marketing is done. If you want to know what makes IMPACT's academy and coaching different, how does the 'They Ask, You Answer' methodology work, how to build a successful agency and hire the right team, and much more, have a listen to this amazing episode!You can learn more about the They Ask, You Answer Certified Coach Program here Join IMPACTPlus for free Check out more about IMPACT on their website

"If I only knew then what I know now..." We've all wondered how we would do things differently if given the chance for a do-over. Here's how Rand Fishkin applied the lessons learned from the past to the launch of his new startup, SparkToro. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, SparkToro Founder Rand Fishkin talks about starting over. Rand rose to marketing stardom as the Founder and CEO of Moz, where he became known as one of the foremost experts on SEO in the world.  When he exited the company a few years ago and founded SparkToro, he reflected on the lessons learned from his experience at Moz to develop a fresh new approach to everything from raising investment funding, to speaking out about issues some might consider controversial and the development of a marketing strategy for his startup. Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details. Resources from this episode: Visit the SparkToro website Get Rand's book Lost and Founder Follow Rand on Twitter Email Rand at rand@sparktoro.com Transcript Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I am your host Kathleen Booth. And this week I am incredibly excited to tell you that my guest is none other than Rand Fishkin. Welcome Rand. Rand (00:26): Thanks for having me, Kathleen. Great to be here Kathleen (00:28): To say that I'm excited is an understatement. I, this is, I'm just going to throw it out there and this is embarrassing, but I have had a marketing crush on you for a long time. Rand (00:39): Marketing crush. One of the most unusual types of crushing. Kathleen (00:42): I mean, you have to really be a marketing nerd to develop like marketing crushes and I truly have one. So I will just tell a brief story about how and why I developed this crush. And then I'm going to ask you to tell a little bit about yourself. So I, I started reading your content when you were at Moz and I always just loved, loved it for two reasons. One is, it was incredibly substantive. There's a lot of crappy content out there and I've been a marketer for a long time. And I don't like to waste my time with stuff that isn't going to teach me something new. Kathleen (01:17): And I just always felt like I learned something when I read your content, but I loved also your delivery and the fact that you let your personality shine through and you, weren't afraid to be kind of fun about it. And that's what first you know, turned me on to the content you were creating. But then I think what really cemented it was actually when you left Moz and you wrote your book Lost and Founder, I was a business owner for 11 years. I owned a digital marketing agency and I had what I would call a less than glorious exit. You know, there were a lot of failures along the way. I even actually toyed with writing a book. It's the first time I've ever said this to my podcast listeners. I toyed with writing a book called full frontal failure about like how important it is to just own it and put yourself out there and how, like being an entrepreneur is so lonely and nobody talks about the bruises and the, you know, the bad parts and I saw your book and I read it and I was like, Oh my God, this is what I'm talking about. Kathleen (02:18): So it really spoke to me and then you started SparkToro and I was so fascinated and impressed by how you built the audience first. And really again, what putting out incredibly substantive content, I loved everything you did with Jumpshot while it was still available. Anyway, so I mean, I could go on and on and on, but that was kind of my journey following you. And I've always just loved how unflinchingly, honest you are. And the most recent example of that is the amazing blog you put out about why you left Moz's board of directors and, and you've always been a champion of diversity, and I love that it made room for two women of to join the board. So I'm going to stop now, cause this is getting a little awkward. Rand (03:04): No, no. I mean I think what's, you know, what's wonderful, Kathleen is I always felt like the the contributions that I, that I wish, you know, resonated more in the world are exactly the ones you're talking about, right. Transparency around entrepreneurship and around the hard parts of broken relationships and broken systems and you know, work around diversity and equity and inclusion and those kinds of things. And yet, you know, mostly for better or worse, right? Mostly what I'm known for is like, Oh, you really helped me learn keyword research. Kathleen (03:45): Whiteboard Fridays. Rand (03:49): I'm, I'm very grateful and honored to have helped people with those things as well, of course, right. That, that built my career and, and helped build Moz. But I think there are, there are lots of places to get that information and to your point, it, it can be pretty lonely and challenging to find real people telling real stories about the painful and hard parts of work and life and and recognizing what opportunities they've had and which ones maybe they didn't earn. Which, which has certainly been the case with me too. So, Kathleen (04:29): Yeah. And I would add to that and helping other people perhaps avoid some of the pitfalls you did. I love that you shared your term sheet and lost and founder. You know, I, I actually sent that to a friend of mine right after I wrote it. He said he was starting to look at maybe taking on investment. He had a completely bootstrapped, very, very successful software company, but he didn't have a succession plan. He didn't have children who wanted to take over and he wanted to retire. And I said, I have a book, you have to read, read it before you take any investment. And I just think that's, so what a gift to be able to like, pass that on and allow people to, to avoid some of the things that you've had to encounter in your journey. So thank you for that. Rand (05:09): Oh my gosh. I'm honored. Thanks. Kathleen (05:11): Yeah. Well, the big reason other than the adulation I'm pouring on you, that I wanted to have you here was that I, the thing I think is so interesting and what makes me want to ask you like a thousand different questions is that you are somebody who has started and grown a very successful business in Moz and learned a lot along the way and SparkToro's a more recent journey. And you know, we always say like, Oh, if I had only known that, then what I know now, and you kind of had that opportunity a little bit with SparkToro. So that's really what I want to dig into as someone who has been there, done that and seen both the good and the bad of growth and what works with marketing and what doesn't when you decided to start SparkToro, can you, can we, maybe we could start by having you walk me through, what were the lessons you pulled from your earlier experiences to put together? What, in your mind was the plan that would work for a brand new company from a marketing standpoint? Because of course we talk about inbound marketing on this podcast. Rand (06:16): Yeah. let's see. I had a bunch of things that I really wanted to do very differently. And some of those, some of those, I kind of outlined at the end of Lost and Founder, but you know, I wanted to fund SparkToro differently. I knew that I wanted to raise investment because I didn't, you know, to your point around leaving a company and not having a financial exit, right. I didn't have a financial exit from Moz. And so, you know, I needed to I had a nice severance agreement, but otherwise right. Had to start getting income pretty darn fast. And I knew that I wanted to build a company that could be successful, successful, meaning for its employees and its customers and its shareholders be successful for all three of those groups without having to be hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Rand (07:16): And so the VC model just does not really allow for that, right. It is you know, Moz is a company that got to $50 million in recurring revenue and is considered kind of a, like frustrating mediocre plateau, you know, of a, of a company, because it just won't, it won't go away and die, which would be fine, right. In venture capital world. It's fine. If 98 out of a hundred companies that they invest in die or right. Or could it get to a fast growth rate and North of a hundred million dollars in revenue? That's fine, too. Everything in between is no good. Right. Kathleen (07:56): That's so funny because I feel like if you talk to any startup founder, well, I don't know any, but most 99% of startup founders would say $50 million company. Yeah. Sign me up. Like that sounds great. It's weird. Rand (08:09): And I think almost all of us, in fact, all of us should feel that way, but the venture capital asset class has biased a lot of people to think like, Oh yeah, that's, that's not good enough. And that's pretty, that's pretty dumb, right? Because what we want, what we want as a society and as people, and as human beings who are familiar with how capitalism and economics interact and politics, we should want lots of little companies, right? What makes a sector robust? What makes an economy vibrant is competition and lots of diversity of, of, you know, different companies owning parts of the market and innovating as a result of that. What you absolutely don't want. The last thing you want, if you want a healthy economy and a healthy politic and a healthy sort of income equality you want, you do not want Facebook owning 90% of social media, Google owning 95% of search Amazon owning, you know, whatever it is. Rand (09:16): Percent of e-commerce 50% of e-commerce, right? Those are negative externalities and the results of you know, a sort of system that gravitates toward the most powerful. And that is bad for everybody, right? Bad for entrepreneurs, bad for employees, bad for consumers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. So I knew that I wanted to build a company that could be successful without the forced venture type of outcome. I knew that I wanted to keep the team really small. I don't like building big teams. Casey doesn't either, both of us have worked at, you know, companies that are like at Moz when it was like 20 people and 25 people. That was great. 50 people. Okay. Still, all right. 75, Ooh. I'm not feeling as great about this hundred, 200 plus really I'm not a match for what the kind of working environment that I like. And so, yeah, that was another intentional decision to, to longterm. Keep the team small. We knew we wanted to build an audience before we launched a product. We knew we did not want to launch an MVP. We wanted to launch a very robust sort of impressive product. That would be remarkable to a lot of people. The first time they tried it. So all those things are very different. Kathleen (10:40): Yeah. Let's talk for a minute about building an audience before you build a product. That's something that I'm personally passionate about. I, I spent two years as head of marketing at IMPACT. And I, after I exited my agency, I always said I would never be in an agency again. But I stayed in IMPACT because that was Bob Ruffolo, the CEO, his vision was to build a media company around the agency. And I was like, that is interesting to me and that model was build the audience and then, and then we'll have products we can roll out to them. So it's not exactly what you're talking about, but it's that same mindset of, if you have a really passionate audience, it unlocks so much opportunity. I'm interested in knowing like, how did you go about that with SparkToro? I kind of saw it from a reader standpoint. Cause I think I've read every one of your blogs since the beginning, but maybe explain to my listeners a little bit about why you chose that approach and then how, how you approached it. Because I think a lot of people have a hard time understanding how exactly you would go about doing that. Rand (11:38): Yeah. Yeah. And I did it quite differently than with Moz, right? So Moz was like blog five nights a week you know, try and get traffic to all those posts, try and get good at SEO earn, you know, links to those posts. And then, you know, slowly build up this sort of content and SEO, flywheel and SparkToro was essentially built on the back of what I call social media marketing and digital PR. Right. So I did lots and lots of and continue to do lots and lots of podcasts and webinars and conferences and events and guest contributions and you know, get interviewed for other publications platforms, blogs, media channels, research reports get quoted in news, like all, all that kind of stuff. Right. Essentially leverage the power of other people's platforms because SparkToro, when it launched had none of its own and also leverage the social media platforms that I carried over from us. Rand (12:40): Right. So I didn't, I didn't get to carry it over, like my, you know, my content library and all the search traffic, but I got to bring with me, you know, some of that social media presence and, and that following on like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram that essentially kickstarted the SparkToro audience and the sort of what, what started as our beta invite list and then became our early access customer list. I think for any startup, for any business that's trying to build its audience and email addresses the most important thing to capture, you know, getting website visits, getting social followers yeah, those are okay. Not, not like a problem or anything, but an email address is so incredibly valuable. You can do so much with those direct communication, you know, broadcast communication. And of course all sorts of, you know, stuff on the ad platforms too. Rand (13:43): So we, over the course of about 18 months, which was essentially the development time, the R and D and testing and beta process for SparkToro we had about 15, 16,000 email subscribers who said like, I want to get notified at launch or like I'm interested in being a beta tester if you'll have us. And that helped us. And even though we launched in April of 2020, like the worst possible time in the last hundred years to launch a company we did manage to get our first, I think almost 150 ish customers via that, that list of folks. Right. Who said, like, I'm interested in what you're doing. And so that platform has done through, you know, social broadcasting. I published probably, I mean, you, you, you read them all. So I think over the course of 18 months, I don't think I published 30 blog posts even right. Fairly small limited number, but I probably did a hundred. Yeah. You know, interviews and conversations on other people's this sort of digital PR approach to things. And I would do that again. I think that's a, that's a great way to play it. I mean, you know, obviously we're having a podcast conversation. Kathleen (15:01): That's very meta. Rand (15:05): Yeah. Which is a little bit of the reason that's so valuable is because when you don't have an audience of your own finding the audiences that are, that potentially will resonate with you and leveraging them from other folks, platforms is a super valuable way to go. It also worked really well because we had that sort of free signup funnel, you know, before launch, it was give us your email address to get notified at launch. And after launch, it was tries searching SparkToro for free, and then, you know, register to create a forever free account. And that that funnel has also been very successful for us. So, you know, I'll be on a webinar, I'll be on a podcast. I'll, I'll do a video live stream or something I did when a couple of days ago. And you could see like the spike in Google analytics, right. Cause lots of people are paying attention to podcasts. We're having a conversation and they're like, Oh, let me go try this SparkToro thing. Right. So it works really well. As long as you've got your funnel optimized for that type of acquisition. Kathleen (16:05): It's interesting that you say, you know, you, you were successful because you essentially identified other people who had audiences and you were able to draft off of that a little bit. I'm going to put a pin in that. Cause then we're going to come back to what SparkToro does. Cause I feel like that's the perfect segue before we get there though. So I want to make sure I understand correctly. You had about an 18 month development period during which the product was not publicly launched. You mentioned you wrote 30, let's call it 30 blogs. In addition to doing your digital PR, I do want to add as the reader, that, that sounds simple, but it wasn't because these were not just opinion pieces or, you know, 10 ways you can write a great subject line. These were blogs that included a lot of original research that you did in conjunction with the Jumpshot data, as well as some real thought leadership around what was happening with Google and, and being able to get clicks in search results. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about that because I do feel like that was one of the reasons that I avidly followed you, was the quality of the information in those blogs was not to be found anywhere else. I couldn't find that information elsewhere. Rand (17:17): No I didn't. Yeah. I think that's absolutely right. So, you know, part of my thesis around building a successful whole marketing flywheel is going and finding a way that you can contribute unique value that your audience cannot get elsewhere. Right. And you know, I've written about this and I talk about it all the time and when you know, startup founders and marketers ask me like, Oh, well, where should, where do you recommend that someone new to marketing start building their their funnel, their channels, their, their, their flywheel. My recommendation is always something you're passionate and interested about somewhere where your customers actually pay attention and somewhere where you can add unique value that no one else is providing. And so this was, you know, this was sort of my stab at what, what can I do uniquely? I had this relationship with Jumpshot. Rand (18:07): I had been using their their data at Moz. I've been really impressed by their click stream data quality. And so I continued that relationship sort of helping them by being a vocal supporter and proponent of their day of using their data. And in exchange, they gave me a bunch of, you know, research time. So they, you know, they had someone super friendly guy named Sean who worked with me on their, on the R and D side of Jumpshot. And I'd be like, Hey Sean, can you pull this data for me? And he'd pull it, send it over, I'd put it into Excel and play around with it and produce some nice looking charts and graphs and publish that and try and try and tease out the interesting bits of like, Oh, here's the distribution of where web traffic is coming from? Like, you know, more than two thirds of all web traffic is controlled by the alphabet corporation, right. Rand (19:00): Between Google and YouTube and Gmail and Google maps and yada yada, yada, that entity was referring more than two thirds of all web traffic to sort of the top. I think we pulled the top 20,000 or so websites. Right. so that feels a little monopoly. Yes. Great. It's sort of, yeah. Sorta dangerous. And then you look at, you know, web search as a whole, and of course, Google at the same time was trying to claim to who was at the attorneys general of the United States who were looking into it from, I think like 40 some odd States, quote your research as part of that. Right. So, you know Congress through what's his name? Congressman David Cellini I think is the, the representative who's looking into an a, on the house subcommittee for antitrust and, you know, they're, they're asking Google, all these questions and Google is giving them these clearly obviously BS lie responses. Rand (19:59): And so I'm able to call that out, right. I'm able to look at the data and be like, Nope, you're lying to Congress. I don't know if there's consequences for that. Apparently there's not, but yeah. Let's not go down that road right now. Cause I'm yeah. If you would like to take away women's rights, apparently it is totally cool to lie to Congress, but, you know but yeah, so being able to call out, you know, Sundar, Pichai, Google CEO, and say like, look, the thing, the thing that you told Congress under oath is provably false. Maybe, maybe Congress wants to do something about that. Right. You know, maybe that's going to come back to bite you in the butt. I hope it does. Cause I, you know, I don't think that's acceptable behavior. And I don't think any of us should, should, should accept that, but, but these are kinds of things, right. Rand (20:47): That it did, it did two things, right? One, it brought a lot of folks like yourself to SparkToro subscribing to the, the blog, paying attention to the publications. And it also helped create in my opinion, a very accurate narrative around how do we, as marketers break free from the duopoly of Facebook and Google, like, can we do other things, other marketing things, can we pay attention to other channels? Can we spend our dollars and time to go find other publications in people and sources of influence that reach our audiences and not exclusively rely on these untrustworthy and potentially risky partners. And that obviously serve SparkToro's interest as well, because fundamentally at the core of SparkToro is I'm trying to solve this problem. Right? The, the reason I created the company is because I'm frustrated with the Google Facebook duopoly. Over-Marketing Kathleen (21:51): Well, let's take a minute and actually have you explain what SparkToro does cause we kind of skip that part in the beginning and I'm gonna make sure we don't completely miss it. Rand (22:01): Yeah. Fair enough. I, I don't love to be self promotional, which is a little, Kathleen (22:06): But I mean it's germane given what we're talking about. I'm the same way, but yeah, Rand (22:09): Yeah. Right. Is that weird? You, you like, you should, that, that's the goal of marketing and you know, Kathleen (22:16): I always say marketers are terrible at marketing themselves. I'm I'm, I've been trying to get a personal website launched for the last two years. And I don't know if it'll ever go live because having to write my own website copy is like the most insane form of torture about myself. Rand (22:33): Open offer. I have been working with a wonderful technical writer. I'm a woman out of the UK on some of our case studies for SparkToro. And she is amazing. If you want someone to interview you and then turn that into your copy, Kathleen (22:47): I will get her name from you because I can't, I cannot write about myself. Rand (22:51): I love working with consultants and agencies. I know that's weird. Like startup founders is supposed to want to build that strength internally. I don't, that's one of the things I did at Moz that like, we always tried to hire instead of work with consultants and agencies. I think that was a really dumb move. At SparkToro I'm using tons of agencies anyway. You would ask, what does the company do? This is very fair. Right? So trying to solve this problem around Facebook and Google's do opoly over online marketing and advertising. And if you're in e-commerce Amazon sort of makes how to try opoly. Essentially what we realized is that the, the challenge comes in when folks are asked to understand where they can reach their audiences outside, they're outside those platforms. So like, Kathleen, if you and I start a new company to sell, I don't know bone broth, we're like, Oh yeah, let's, let's do the, the, the bone broth thing. Rand (23:53): And like, w we'll we'll we'll make lovely stuff and then we'll sell it online. And where do we reach people who are interested in things like, you know, paleo and keto diets, right? Cause that has a big overlap with it. And people who are big into like college enrich foods and people who are big into cooking. I don't know the result though. And where do we, where do we find those communities? Like, okay, I, I know a few recipe websites, but are those the right places or not? And so what you want to be able to do ideally is go find all the people online who are talking about whatever bone broth or collagen or keto diets, or I don't know, maybe you have a big affinity overlap with yoga instructors or something, right? You want to go to those communities, go find those people and then figure out, probably figure out like their home address so that you can break into their house and steal their phone and log into it, right. Rand (24:55): Get their unlock code, log in and then see all the things they were browsing and reading and watching and listening to and following. But of course that's illegal and super unethical. And so the next best thing to do, because surveys and interviews don't work for this. Like that's the way most marketers get this data. That's how I got it before. And it does not work because people just can't. It's not that they don't answer, honestly. It's just, they can't remember. You know, if you ask someone like, Hey, tell me a hundred people you follow on Twitter. What? No, I can't. How am I supposed to remember that? I can tell you maybe like five, Kathleen (25:34): Right? The classic story. When I used to own my agency, I had a client I worked with who said, Oh, we, we train all of our sales people to say, how did you hear about us? And one of the most common answers we get is, Oh, I saw your ad in the Washington post. And my client was like, I have literally never advertised in the Washington post. You know? Rand (25:51): And this, this speaks to another fundamental problem, which we found with a ton of you know, agencies and consultants who would work with businesses. And you, you go talk to the executive team and they'd be like, all right, I want you to get us placed in the wall street journal. Why the wall street journal, like we're selling bone broth here. I golf with our customers every weekend. They read the wall street journal. You get us covered in the wall street journal. Like, no, my friend, I look, you you're getting super biased responses. And like you and your golf buddies, I'm sure do read the wall street journal, but that is not sample size of three. Yeah. Right. And so apart from breaking into people's houses, what the other way to do that? We saw a few really, really smart businesses marketing teams and customer research teams who had their engineers basically take a list of their customer's email addresses, send them through a service like full contact or Clearbit and get all of their social accounts. Rand (26:54): So like, you know, here's Kathleen and here's Rand and here's, Rand's LinkedIn account. And here's his Facebook page of it's public. And here's his Instagram, if that's public and here's his Twitter and here's, Kathleen's, you know, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, Quora, Medium, blah, blah, blah. And then they would crawl those social URLs. If they're public and extract all the data, they could like everything that's publicly shared by that person online just like Google. And then they would aggregate it together and be like, okay, our customers follow these social sources. They listen to these podcasts, they're sharing these YouTube channels. They're sharing these articles and websites. Now we can put our data together and go advertise and market in smart ways in smart places. And Casey and I were like, Oh, that's genius. Kathleen (27:44): Amazing. What is incredible? And also, are you kidding? Rand (27:48): You custom built with like three engineers on your team over nine months, this process, just to get that one piece of data. No, that's unfair. We should build that for the whole internet. Right. Let's just build that for everybody. So now you can go to SparkToro and sort of instantly, you know, search for any audience and discover what they read, watch, listen to and follow Kathleen (28:11): It's awesome. And, and I can, I will add, as we go through this conversation, I am a customer currently. I was actually one of your beta users at a different company. So your funnel works because I am the living breathing example of it. But now going back to, so you had 18 months, you created this awesome content. One of the things that really struck me that you said was you partnered with Jumpshot and, you know, they have this data and they assigned a researcher to you. And, and the reason that struck me is that I imagine there are probably a lot of people listening, especially if there are people who are engaging in, in creating a startup who are saying, that's great, Rand Fishkin could do that because he's around Fishkin. And he worked at Moz and people are going to give him anything. Kathleen (28:57): But I think the truth is though that the, at least the, the lesson I extracted from what you said is about partnership. Like if you are somebody who doesn't have a huge following, if you are somebody who doesn't have access to a ton of proprietary data, who out there is in an adjacent space to you, is complimentary, who does. And I mean, I did this in my last job because I worked for a small cybersecurity startup that had like no web traffic. And we put on a, a four day virtual summit on IOT security and the partners we had were unbelievable. Nobody had heard of us, but they had all heard of our partners. And my whole deal was, I'm not going to charge you to be a sponsor. You're going to get a speaking slot. All I ask is that you promote this and am going to put in all the elbow grease, right? Kathleen (29:43): Like I'm going to do the marketing. I'm going to get like 500 people to come to this thing or whatever it was. And I think to me, like, I love that example of Jumpshot because you don't have to be a Rand Fishkin. I think you just have to understand what's in it for the other partner and the fact that you were able to shine a spotlight on their data and give them visibility. You know, there's, there's something for everyone out there in terms of figuring out the right partnerships. So I feel like that's a really valuable lesson. Rand (30:10): Yeah. I was going to say a lot of, a lot of amazing data is public or publicly available. I a guy just emailed me in the, in the SEO space. Jeff, what's his last name? Jeff Baker, I think. And he had put together this study where he analyzed a bunch of SEO tools. It just use their public, like, you know, he subscribed to the free trials or paid for a month of access or whatever. And then like did a big comparison and published it on. He pitched it to search engine land, which is a big publication in the, you know, search marketing world. They accepted it, you know, despite that he didn't, it's not like he had a big history with them. He didn't have a big following previously. He pitched it to them. They published it. He emailed me and was like, Hey, I think you'd be interested in this. Rand (30:51): Would you share it? I was like, yeah, this looks great. And did really nice work here. Right? It's small sample size, but excellent methodology. Sure. I'll share it with my audience. Right. I posted it to Twitter and LinkedIn, it got picked up by a bunch of more people like great, you know, he had no special, you know, relationship previously. I think there's opportunities like that to find unanswered or unasked questions in virtually any topic and field, and then expound on that take advantage of that, that opportunity in the market, underserved opportunity in the market to create unique value that your audience can't find elsewhere. And if you do that even just a few times, you know, I am not talking about publishing every night or every week, you can publish, you know, five times the year and be very successful with this kind of thing. If you become known for providing that source of information, data opinion you know, analysis that is unavailable elsewhere. Kathleen (32:00): Well, and I would also say having a point of view, which is something that you've done consistently on everything. Yep. And this is a, this is something I want to explore just for a minute, because you know, having, having owned an agency, I've talked to so many business owners and, and, you know, heads of marketing having worked at other agencies like hundreds, hundreds over the year, the years. And there's a lot of, I feel like this is the third rail for so many of them. Like there are a lot of people who just firmly believe you don't take a position on anything period. End of story. I am not one of them, I believe in taking positions. But then there's this whole other gray space in between of like how, how firmly can you plant your flag in one direction or the other? Kathleen (32:45): And a lot of business owners get very afraid of offending anyone and then kind of shying away from that. They become, I always refer to it as like the milk toast of marketing. You don't offend anybody, but nobody really likes you that much either. So I would love to hear your thoughts on, because I think I do think it takes guts. You know, and what you take a stand on has to match your personal passions and what you truly believe in because you are putting yourself out and taking risks. So maybe talk through a little bit as the owner of the business, how you thought about this and, and how in your head, you reconcile the risks of taking controversial positions with what you see as the, the kind of things you could gain out of it. Rand (33:27): Yeah. So let's see, I think about this in sort of three ways. I think about it from a an ethics and philosophy sort of perspective. Like, am I a good person? Am I doing good things for the world? Am I prioritizing the goodness that I do for the world over a personal greed, right. Making more money? And if the answer to that becomes no, then I am obviously the definition of evil, right? Evil is not like I'm going to go murder people. You know, like that that's almost never happens almost all evil, at least in our society exists because people trade the courage of doing what they know to be the right thing for money or power or influence. Right. And that there's, that's evil. So I think about it from that perspective and on that vector, this is just an incredibly easy answer, right? Rand (34:28): Like you, you should obviously do it the second way. I think about it is from a marketing and branding perspective, which is essentially what kind, what do I want to be known for recognized for appreciated for what kind of audience do I want to attract? Who do I want to you know, bring to my community and who would I like to keep out of my community? And from that perspective, it, it also is a relatively easy answer, right? Like, I, I want people I'm happy to have you know, what would have been classically called political disagreements on like, well, what should the tax code look like? Or how should we do zoning and you know, a neighborhood or well, what about, what about investments in whatever it is, you know, military versus environmental spending versus regulation on mining, like, okay, those are all political conversations that I think are, are reasonable. And then there are unreasonable political conversations like, well, should we allow blacks and Jewish people to live? That's not a political conversation. Right? I of, that's not, that's just human, right. Rand (35:42): That's not an open for debate conversation. Right. And I think unfortunately there has been a a rash of sort of, well, don't you want diversity of thought and diversity of thought just means a diversity of thought to me is like a look I'd like to be white supremacists and not get criticized for it. And so can we just agree to, let me be like that? No, we cannot agree on that. That is an untenable well position. We're not, I'm not okay with it, so right. I'm I am, I'm happy to turn away those audiences and build a, you know, build an audience around that. That resonates with my perspective. I also think about it from a third perspective, which is what does the structure of the business that I'm building forced me to accept and allow me to work with them. Rand (36:37): And so this was one of another really big reason. I didn't want to raise venture capital because yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. Right. Like in the venture backed world, you do not that you need to be milk toast, but you are absolutely pressured to build a giant market and building a giant market often means attempting to turn off almost no one. Yeah. Right. Attempting to be uncontroversial in a lot of ways. And and I don't think that's a healthy or right thing. I am. I mean, I'll definitely say, I think probably a lot of Americans and a lot of people all around the world who are facing sort of this nationalist, autocratic surge in politics that we've been seeing globally. Right. A lot of, a lot of those folks, a lot of folks are frustrated that like these sorts of issues have become so front of the top of mind for so many people all the time, I, I feel that frustration too, right? Rand (37:43): Like I'm, I am absolutely in the world of, gosh, I, you know, I really disliked a lot of previous administration's policies and like things in the United States, but I never felt like they were going to absolve us of our democracy. And now suddenly we have to worry about that. And that that's very frustrating. I don't like that. So I think that this these sort of three things have guided me towards an ability to say, okay, the structure of my business, the way that I want to attract customers and market to them and the audience that I want to build. And my philosophy and ethics are all in alignment. I don't know that every business owner gets to do that, but yeah, I hope I hope they do because they should. It's absolutely. It's, it's obviously the, the best way to go. I need more people Kathleen (38:38): That hits the nail on the head, because I know I've always said this, like when it comes to taking a position, there's not like any one position everybody should take. I mean, that's where the owner of the company, the founder has to kind of a very much align with them as a person and you are going to attract the people that are naturally attracted to that same position. And so it is, it is interesting, but I think it takes a lot of guts and I really commend you for it. And, and you're right. Yeah. I don't think you could do it if you had traditional investment in your company. Rand (39:09): Yeah. I mean, I certainly could, but it would put me in conflict with some of the goals and expectations. It could create strife and you know, who knows if I would be able to maintain that longterm. I think, you know, as a, as a key example, right. You can see with with Facebook and Zuckerberg, this sort of like and, and Larry and Sergei and Eric Schmidt and Sundar Pichai at Google, you can feel this sort of tension between like, they sort of know what the right thing to do is, but they're really scared about doing it because of fears of a combination of like political interference from, you know, people who's in who's interested is not, and market fears around, you know, where, what their users will do, what their customers will do, and the fact that they have to generate billions of extra dollars of revenue every quarter. Kathleen (40:07): Yeah. Yeah. It's a prison that they've grown into over time. I think. Rand (40:12): Yeah. I mean, we, we amplify that, like there's a lot of, there are a lot of people I'm sure there are people listening to this podcast right now who equate a person's worth with their productivity and their economic entrepreneurial contributions, right. And their financial success. That is a pretty terrible metric of a person's worth, right? Like we all know we should be measuring people's worth in the kindness that they bring to the world around them and the way they build relationships and how they and, and fundamentally all human beings are worth while. Right. All of us have, that's why human rights exists. And, and reducing that to this late stage capitalist model of like, you are how much money you make. That's, that's a bad way to go friends. Kathleen (41:08): And this is why you are widely known as the nicest guy in marketing. Is that, so that is the word on the street. I'm just gonna, Rand (41:16): Or a significant number of people on Twitter who disagree. Kathleen (41:19): Oh, well, there's a significant number of people on Twitter who disagree with everything. So so going back for a minute to, you made a point about digital PR and again, I'm going to just sort of put this through the filter of, there are probably a lot of people who think, Oh, well, that's easy for Rand Fishkin. Cause he's everybody knows who he is so he can get the interview. So any advice for founders who don't have the reputation as to how to go about doing that? Rand (41:47): Yeah. Yeah. So this is an area where I think before you start your company, it is hugely valuable to build up your expertise in a niche and to build up a network as well. Right? So that doesn't have to be through, you know, blogging. It could be through your social channels. It could be through video. It could be through hosting your own podcast. It could be through unique research that you do. It could be through one on one consulting and help that you give people whatever it is, right. But build your expertise and then use that expertise to build your network so that you are known for having that talent and being able to contribute in those ways. Once you do that, then it is so much easier to do all of the forms of digital PR and, and earning amplification getting attention. I cannot recommend it enough, but I think for whatever reason, there's this sort of sense of in the entrepreneurial world. Like I start my company, I build my product and then I figure out how to market it. No, Kathleen (42:52): Oh, backwards. Rand (42:55): That's not how you do it. Right. First, if you build up a community of people who care about the problem you're solving, even before you have the product that solves it, your launch and your growth will be so much easier. Right. So don't, you know, I'm not, I'm not saying this from the perspective of like, yes, I obviously have the privilege of, you know, the 20 years that I spent at Moz building up a, a reasonably sized following in this sort of niche of digital marketing world. But that, that can be a relatively easy, easily achieved, not necessarily the same degree, but easily started down the path of, and you don't need 15,000 people on your email list if you have 1500 or 150, that is still such a better starting point than zero. Yeah. Kathleen (43:41): Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So when you think about the future of SparkToro and where you're going to go from here, what how do you think you're going to grow it moving forward? Is it still the same strategy of digital PR and really great content? Or are you changing anything starting anything new? Rand (43:59): I, so I really, Kathleen, I really desperately want to invest in self hosted self created episodic content. Like what I did with whiteboard Friday at Moz, right? Like a series, probably something with video. Cause I'm reasonably good and experienced with video. Maybe involving a whiteboard too. I don't know. But the what's holding me back right now is, is time and bandwidth and investment dollars. Right. So I know that, you know, if I was going to do something like that, I'd probably want a video producer that's super challenging during COVID just, you know, by for one thing. And it's also a really hard to make the time available when it's just me and Casey working on SparkToro. So I think, you know, it might be next year when we're, you know, able to grow enough, to be able to bring in another hire or to invest in a, you know, whatever a content agency that helps me produce that that content with some consistency. Rand (45:00): But I, I do think that would be a very valuable thing. And even doing that something like once a month, you know, having a monthly episode of a, whatever, 15 to 30 minute video series on topics related to things that are of interest to our audience, that probably would do pretty well. So episodic content I think is, is very under invested in because it's hard to start. It's hard to get the motivation to keep going. It, it generally doesn't, you know, take off immediately. Like it's a, it's a slow burn, slow build process, but it is something we really want to invest in. Kathleen (45:37): I love that. Well, I will watch it when it starts tell me then I'm in the Rand super fan club clearly. Rand (45:47): What I love, I love what I love about it is like the, it almost works like the Netflix model, you know, where you, you see one episode of the show and you're like, Ooh, that was really good. I kind of want to binge watch all of them. Right. And if there's a big catalog, you just get all this engagement and yeah, I'd like that. I think that model has legs. I don't see a ton of people investing in it. So I'd like to do something like that. Nice. Kathleen (46:13): Well, we're going to come up to the top of the hour and I have a thousand more questions I want to ask, but we don't have time for it. So what I'm going to do is shift gears because there are two questions that I ask all of my guests at the end of every interview. And I don't want to end without having the opportunity to find out what you have to say about this. The first one is this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that today you think is really kind of setting the gold standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer? Rand (46:47): Ooh. Okay. Kathleen (46:49): You can name more than one if you want to. Rand (46:51): Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch of folks who have been really impressing me lately. Let's see. So I don't know if you follow Melanie Deziel. She wrote a, she, yes. Yeah. Okay. So she writes, she just published, I think earlier this year Content Fuel Framework which I think, Hey, look at that. Hey Melanie, look, I'm promoting your book. No, I, I, I think, I think the world of Melanie she's extraordinary and she just she just keeps contributing in, in such a remarkable ways. I think she's keynoting content marketing world, the digital version, this week. Kathleen (47:30): Wow. That's awesome. Rand (47:31): Isn't it incredible. So amazing stuff from her. I've also been really impressed with, do you follow Nandini Jammi on Twitter? She's @nandoodles. Kathleen (47:43): I feel like I maybe even touched base with her about coming on the podcast. Rand (47:48): Oh, amazing. Yeah. So she is my God. She's so impressive. Like she's kind of my hero. She's she's been working on kind of a, a, a new version of brand safety and advert and helping advertisers save money and optimize their spend away from manipulative and sort of trolling. And I don't know what you would you call it, like sort of non-factual you know, Macedonian creatives. Kathleen (48:24): This is why, so I know her not through the podcast, but I'm in week four at a new job. And my company is, amongst other things, we solve for publishers. We have an anti malvertising software. This is why I know her. Rand (48:40): Got it right. She was one of the cofounders of Sleeping giants. Now she's the co founder of check my ads. And so they, you know, she, but she writes about and talks about all these topics on, you know, national media and and, and online. And she's just extraordinarily smart. I think she, she's a what I would say she's like a very sharp edged person on Twitter. And like many folks, right? She's, she's, she's much more sort of heartfelt and, and a little more, you know, leans into kindness off of Twitter, which, which we probably all do when we're not limited to 280 characters, but I think the world of her I'm super impressed with her work. Sarah Evans from, she's @PRSarahEvans on Twitter. She has a newsletter. She does amazing work in the PR field, especially for early stage companies. Super impressed with her. Yeah. So that's awesome. Kathleen (49:36): I love all of those and none of them have been on the podcast. So I'm going to have to reach out to them now and ask them to come on. Rand (49:41): I have so many recommendations for you Kathleen. Kathleen (49:46): We're going to talk. Second question is the biggest challenge I hear a lot of marketers say they experiences is that keeping up with the changing world of digital marketing is like drinking from a fire hose. How do you personally keep yourself educated, stay up to date on all of these changes? Rand (50:03): I built my own tool for it. I dunno. I dunno if you have checked out, but we have this thing called trending on SparkToro. It's just sparktoro.com/trending. And when you go there, it's basically like the 25 most diversely shared articles, every 12 hours by digital on Twitter. So we essentially just built a little system, you know, where people OAuth their account, their Twitter account, into the trending tool. It's free. It's not like part of our paid package or anything, but yeah, like, I don't know, seven or 800 marketers every day, read, trending, and check it out. And so, yeah, it's fun too cause people reply and be like, Oh, so cool. Our article was on trending today. Rand (50:51): You can get traffic from it. And you can, you can go there once a week or once a month and click the, like, what was the most shared article this month, this week, any given day. And that has been super useful. Like really it helps Casey and I just kind of stay on top of everything going on in digital marketing world. With very little effort, like we don't have to scroll through a bunch of feeds. We can just like, Oh, all right. That one looks interesting. That's cool. Kathleen (51:20): So it takes the firehose and turns it into a little garden hose for people. Rand (51:24): Exactly. Kathleen (51:25): I love that. Yeah. well we are now coming to the top of the hour and so unfortunately we're going to need to wrap it up. If people are listening and they have questions for you want to follow you or connect with you, learn more about SparkToro, what is the best way for them to do that? Rand (51:42): Sure. So my email address is rand@sparktoro.com. I'm pretty fast on email. I am most active on Twitter where I'm @Randfish. And if you are interested in trying SparkToro for free forever, it sparktoro.com. Kathleen (51:57): Awesome. All right, there, you have it. We, we could go for 10 hours, but we only had one. If you enjoyed this episode, as much as I did head to Apple podcasts or the platform or your choice, and I would love it, if you would leave the podcast a review because that's how other people find us. And if you know someone else who's a kick ass inbound marketing person, tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to interview them. That is it for this week. Thank you so much, Rand. This was amazing. Rand (52:25): Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Kathleen.

#018: If you run or work at a digital agency and don't know who Bob Ruffolo is, you need to watch this episode of The Verblio Show. Bob is the founder and CEO of IMPACT. Among his many accomplishments: he was the HubSpot agency of the year 2016, merged with They Ask You Answer author Marcus Sheridan, transitioned the agency from a traditional agency to a company that focuses on educating companies and agencies about inbound methodologies (to name just a few). In his conversation with Steve, Bob shares some outstanding insights into broad-ranging agency and management areas:How IMPACT is thriving through the COVID pandemicWhy his organization works with multiple coaches and consultantsThe deep flaw with being a superstar agency founderhttps://www.verblio.com/The Verblio Show is your weekly cocktail of content marketing fun and fruitful conversation. Hear the full interview with Verblio's CEO Steve Pockross and talk with more marketers, digital agencies, and an assortment of thought leaders anywhere you get your podcasts!

Bob Ruffolo is the founder and CEO of IMPACT, a company focused on helping people find success with inbound marketing through education, events, and agency services. They've twice been recognized as HubSpot's Partner Agency of the Year. Beyond being driven to grow IMPACT, Bob strives to be at the forefront of the inbound marketing movement and loves helping similar agencies execute their growth.

Our guest today is Bob Ruffolo, founder and CEO of IMPACT digital marketing (www.ImpactBND.com). He shares with us (1) the one trait you need to make your marketing a success (hint: it's probably not what you would have guessed); (2) how he's used the "They Ask You Answer" philosophy (articulated by his now-partner, Marc Sheridan in his book by the same name) to evolve his own business; and (3) they way his business broke through the ceiling each of the three times hit it. Enjoy!

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.  

In this episode, Bob Ruffolo from IMPACT joins us to share the story behind IMPACT - an award winning marketing agency. Among his lessons, he shares the struggle of getting stuck in the 20 ish employee range, and how he finally broke out of that to grow to over 60 employees today. About Bob Ruffolo Bob is the founder and CEO of IMPACT, a company focused on helping people find success with inbound marketing through education, events, and agency services. In 2017, IMPACT was recognized as HubSpot's Partner Agency of the Year. Personally, Bob is a graduate of Central Connecticut State University and was inducted into their School of Business Hall of Honor in 2014 for entrepreneurial excellence. In the same year, he was also recognized as one of Hartford Business Journal's 40 Under Forty. Beyond being driven to grow IMPACT, Bob strives to be at the forefront of the inbound marketing movement and loves helping similar agencies execute their growth. In his spare time, he is a regular speaker at HubSpot's annual Inbound Conference and local universities, an active member of several entrepreneurial groups, and sits on the boards of local educational and community foundations. He is also an avid Yankees and Jets fan. Resources from Bob Jim Collins Books: http://bit.ly/JimCollinsBooks EOS System: https://www.eosworldwide.com/what-is-eos The Game of Business: http://bit.ly/GreatGameofBiz IMPACT Elite FB Group: http://bit.ly/IMPACTElite IMPACT LIVE: https://www.impactbnd.com/live Follow Bob Online Impact Website: https://www.impactbnd.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobruffolo/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BobRuffolo

Live from HubSpot Headquarters in Boston, Bob Ruffolo joins the Hubcast today to talk about IMPACT's "publisher model," reporting on the original source of deals in your pipeline, and the Academy's site redesign.

Here at IMPACT, we work in an agile system -- inspired pretty heavily on Spotify's model -- and have gone through some cross-team restructuring over the past year. Because of this, a lot of IMPACT employees have questioned exactly how their performance is being judged and measured. IMPACT Founder and CEO Bob Ruffolo provided context to help give a little more guidance: "My advice: Be the person on your team that your teammates say 'don’t take them off my team, we don’t want to lose them! They’re too valuable to the team!' That’s the ultimate judge of performance, and that’s ultimately your job description, to be a valuable member of the team." Though I really appreciated his response, it led to some additional questions on how do we define "valuable." Defining what "valuable" means is pretty subjective per person and per team.  In today's 100th episode of Creator's Block Marcella and I discuss exactly what makes an invaluable team member and provide tips to improve on those skillsets and traits so your teammates will never say, "it's OK if they are moved to a different team."

On this episode of the podcast, we're pumped to welcome by Kathleen Booth from IMPACT Branding & Design. Kathleen runs the marketing team at IMPACT. She shares how her and the team are in the process of implementing Bob Ruffolo's vision of an agency that thinks of itself like a publishing company. Join the community at AgencyJourneyInsiders.com!!

As the host of The Inbound Success Podcast, how am I applying all of the many lessons learned in these podcast interviews to the marketing work I do at IMPACT? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, I'm flipping the script and sharing the top seven things I'm focused on for IMPACT's marketing. I spend a lot of time on this show interviewing other marketers about what's working and how they're getting great results. I wish there were enough hours in the day to try all of the incredible strategies and tactics that my guests share but alas, time is limited so we are forced to prioritize. Listen to the podcast to learn about the top seven things I and the marketing team here at IMPACT are focused on now. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. My name is Kathleen Booth, and I'm your host. This podcast has now reached an important milestone, at least for me. We've been going for a little over a year. I haven't missed a week yet, including Christmas and New Year's of 2017, which both fell on a Monday, which is the day I publish. So, I was really excited to reach that year milestone. Now that we're 60 plus episodes in, I wanted to take a pause and do something a little different. By that, I mean every week on the podcast, I interview somebody who's getting great results with their marketing, and I try to pick apart what they're doing that is working and make it actionable. That's always my goal. I know that's what I want out of podcasts. I really want things that are actionable that I can apply, that I can use to change my marketing, and get better results. So, I thought it would be interesting if this week, instead of doing an interview, I shared with you what I'm doing to my own marketing as a result of what I've learned hosting the podcast. If you listen at all regularly, you know that I love doing the podcast. I always say I would do it even if nobody listened because there's just so much great information and lessons learned out there from these practicing marketers who are doing this every day. I've gotten a lot out of it, and there are a couple of things that I'm pretty passionate about. You may know from listening that I work at IMPACT. I'm the Vice President of Marketing, and I have an awesome team of marketers that I work with. Our job is actually to do the marketing for the agency as opposed to the marketing for our clients.  A lot of the work that we do in our team trickles down to our clients because we like to think of ourselves as a laboratory, and we definitely like to test the unproven theories on ourselves first so that we can make those mistakes on us and roll things out to clients when they're working really well for us. So in no particular order, I want to share with you a few things that I'm really passionate about that we're testing that seem to be working well for us. 1. On-SERP CRO The first thing that I want to talk about is something that I'm calling On-SERP CRO. That's a lot of acronyms. So, on search engine results page (SERP) conversion rate optimization (CRO). Most of you know what CRO is, conversion rate optimization, and most CROs talk about how to improve conversions on their websites. That's actually not something that we spend a lot of time on at IMPACT because we have a fairly healthy conversion rate. We get a lot of leads. But honestly, we don't really work a lot of our leads. We work our bottom of the funnel requests, which are the people that reach out and say, "I want to talk to you." We're lucky that we can do that, and so we don't focus too heavily on the conversion rate on our website. Instead, we're focused on the conversion rate within the search engines themselves. The reason for that is that organic traffic is really important to us. I'll get into that why that's the case in a minute. But, we've been testing out a really cool tool called Click Flow, which I discovered after interviewing Eric Siu of the Marketing School Podcast and Single Grain earlier this year. You may have listened to that episode. It's from earlier in January. Eric started the company Click Flow to create a tool to makes it easier to do conversion rate optimization on search engines. So, we actually use Click Flow to test out the impact that changing article titles and meta descriptions can have on our click-through rates from the search engines. It's been really fun and really interesting to work with them and their tool to test this out. We've gotten some great results. We're definitely seeing improved click-throughs, and it's really taught us an important lesson in how critical title is. I mean, the title, if you think about it, of your content, your page, your article is really the equivalent of the subject line in an email. It's the deal breaker if you're getting traffic organically. So, that's one of the things that we've been working a lot on. Christine Austin, who's on my team, is our On-SERP CRO guru. She's been doing some really interesting experiments, and we're definitely seeing improved traffic. That's number one. 2. Optimizing For Featured Snippets Now, closely related to that as number two, which is optimizing for featured snippets. I've talked a lot about this this year. I've written articles about it. I spoke about it at our conference, IMPACT Live. This is something that has been a major game changer for us. So if you've seen my article or if you heard me speak, you might know that earlier this year, back in March, we saw a real kind of significant dip in our organic traffic to IMPACT's website. It was really a big challenge trying to figure out what was causing it. There was nothing immediately apparent to blame. The SEO on our site is fantastic. We've really optimized the site for speed and page load times, and we couldn't figure it out on the first pass. Luckily, I was able to sit down with one of the SEOs from HubSpot's in-house SEO team when we went up there for partner day. He looked at some of our data and pointed something out to me that I might have otherwise missed, which was that our rankings had continued to grow, and all the other kind of signs of have good SEO were looking great, but our click-through rates from the search engines were going down. There were a few other indicators involved there, too. But basically, what he concluded was that we were losing traffic to the featured snippet, which is essentially Google's position zero. So, you've seen these featured snippets. Some people call them the answer box. It kind of goes by a lot of names, but it's that box at the top of the Google results page that actually gives you the answer to whatever you were searching for right on the page. Google's moving more and more in this direction of just trying to answer your question on the page, and it makes sense if you think about it. Because for search engines, their ultimate goal is to give you the best answer as fast as possible. That's how they stay in business. That's what keeps Google at the top. So, it makes sense. Not great for those of us who are trying to get traffic to our sites through search engines, but an opportunity. So, we've been working all year to really try and optimize our content for featured snippets, and we've seen a payoff. We began going back and adding little modules to our articles in June or May, I think it was, to try and optimize for the featured snippets. We really started to get traction later in the summer. I think it was in August we had something like 280 featured snippets, which is great. And we really saw that reflected in our traffic. Interestingly, recently, we started to lose a few of those. So now, I'm digging into what's changing with how Google's optimizing or how Google's selecting what winds up in the featured snippet. Stay tuned, and I'm sure we'll talk a lot more about that. But, that's been a game changer. Definitely still works, and definitely something we'll continue to focus on. 3. Shifting to a Publisher-First Business Model Now, a few other things that are really top of mind for us here at impact. First, I guess would be really taking a step back and looking at this from a 50,000-foot view. We've really made this shift, and we're operating as a publisher first, meaning we used to be an agency that published a lot. Now, we are a publisher that has an agency inside of it. This is very much reflected in our homepage and what our website looks like. You know, we don't look like an agency site if you go to impactbnd.com. In fact, you have to go to agency.impactbnd.com to really see our marketing agency site, and that's by design. We've really committed to this approach. It's very much the brainchild of Bob Ruffolo, who is the CEO and founder of the company, and very much inspired by the writing of Joe Pulizzi, the Founder of The Content Marketing Institute. He wrote two books, Content Inc and Killing Marketing that are like our bibles around IMPACT. So, we've very much pursued a publisher strategy inspired by Joe's writings. So, as part of that strategy, we've really changed the way we're approaching the content on our site. We continue to publish longer form articles, but we've added a new category of article to our site, which you may have noticed if you visit at all frequently, and that is the news reaction category. We're never going to be, at least that I can imagine, breaking news. We don't have the staff or the newsroom to support that, but we are really committed to covering the breaking news once it has broken and putting a layer of added value on it and really trying to help marketers understand why it matters to them and what they might want to be thinking about or doing as a result of that breaking news. You'll see a lot more of those types of articles on our site. They're fun to write. They're quick. They're really interesting, at least to me. And they're fantastically helpful for marketers who want to stay on top of this incredible fire hose of information that is our industry. I mean, I know that's one of the challenges I face in my role, and I've heard a lot of other marketers say they face it, too. So, our hope is that we're really solving for that need on the part of the marketer. 4. A New Newsletter, The Latest In addition to really moving in this direction of covering more news, we've changed the entire way that we email our audience. This has been a really interesting evolution for me to be a part of. When I first joined the team, we really were focused on blog subscribers. So, a lot of the email we sent out was automatic digests, either daily, weekly, or monthly to people who subscribed to our blog. We had a lot of blog subscribers, over 20,000. But, we wound up doing a lot more that required us to email people in the time since I've been with the company, things like regular webinars, events and conferences, you know, other kinds of transactional events, like website throw downs or our presence at INBOUND. What wound up happening was we were emailing our audience a lot. It really did get to be a lot. We knew it was happening. We knew the volume was going up, but there didn't seem to be a great solution to address it until September when we really changed gears and we did away with all of our blog digest emails. We did away with the majority of those transactional emails to promote events, and we shifted gears and focused on a newsletter. That's something that IMPACT hadn't done in a long time. We had one a while ago, and we decided to bring it back but in a different way. We really didn't want to do your traditional agency newsletter where it's just kind of like, "Here's a few articles we've published, and here's an offer for an ebook." We wanted to do something much more personal. So, in September, we launched The Latest, which is the name of our newsletter. The Latest is really meant to be the one email that helps you get all the information you need as a marketer to have the most productive day. It's written by some folks on my team, mostly by Ramona Sukhraj, who is an incredible writer. She's our head of editorial content, and she's got a great point of view. She is the one that most frequently writes The Latest. You'll see it in your inbox coming from her. Sometimes Liz Murphy, who is our director of web and interactive content, will chip in and write as well. You may start to see more of her in the coming weeks. But really, it's from these two individuals, and that's by design. We wanted it to feel very personal. It doesn't come from a generic inbox email address. It comes from their personal emails. You can respond to this email, and they read every reply they get, and they answer most of them, if they're not complete spam. There's always a personal spin, or an anecdote, or a story, and definitely a lot of personality. We do include some articles, but instead of just giving you an executive summary, we try and say why they matter, why you should care. We only pick the best articles. Then, there's usually links to a few relevant podcasts or shows, upcoming events that you might be interested in. Sometimes we put in some funny things, especially on the weekends. We like to include throwbacks to old commercials or old videos that make us laugh. So, that's been a major change. In fact, if you get The Latest, I would love to know what you think about it. It's been a big shift for us. We're really hoping ... Our goal with it is to eliminate all of the other email we send. So if you are interested in staying on top of the content that IMPACT is creating or sending out, or you want to know about our events, the best way to do that is to subscribe to The Latest, and hopefully you find it useful. If you don't, I'd love to hear why not. So, you can either tweet me @WorkMommyWork or you can always email me at kbooth@impactbmd.com. So, that was another big change. I hope this year we will be continuing to move in the direction of eliminating all email other than the newsletter. 5. Conversational Emails Now, when we do send out email, here's another one for you, we are really trying to shift away from those classic marketing emails, the designed emails. We use a template that we built that we call the "conversational" template. It looks just like something that came out of somebody's Gmail inbox. That's by design. Now, it's not intended to fake out the recipient. What we're not trying to do is fool you into thinking you got an email from somebody that came from their personal email. It didn't go through a marketing system. We're just trying to strip away the unnecessary, and that means stripping away unnecessary design, and stripping away unnecessary formatting, and different spacing and fonts, and just boiling it down to what matters, which is the words, right? Bob Ruffolo, again, who I mentioned earlier, who's the CEO, is very passionate about this. I wish I had him here to talk about it. But you know, the idea is to create a one-to-one experience. It's kind of the same idea that underlies what we're doing with the newsletter to make it feel like it's one person speaking to one person. That means not only getting rid of fake formatting, which I would never use if I was just sending you individually an email from me to you, you know, I would just send it with text from my Gmail. But, it also means rethinking the wording, and the copy, and the subject lines, and getting rid of all that marketing speak, and that jargon, and really challenging ourselves, and asking the question, "If I, Kathleen, was writing this email to my friend Sally, how would I write it? Would I use the words that I otherwise use as a marketer?" You know, I think we all fall victim to this. It's kind of ironic where we are, as individuals, very discerning consumers and we can spot a spammy email from a mile away. But as soon as we put on our marketing hat and we write a marketing email, we break all the rules that we dislike when marketers use them on us. So, we've really been challenging our team to do this, and to rethink it, and to try and make everything feel very one-on-one. Our goal with these emails is to get a response, not a conversion per se, but a real reply. Because if you're sending an email one on one, that's usually your goal, is to get a reply, not for somebody to click through and get your ebook or register for something. It's to get a response. So, we're very much thinking through whenever we communicate with our audience, what's the response we really want? How can we add value for them and engage in a conversation? So, that's been really interesting. One of the ways we've tested this and challenged ourselves is by showing our work. Now, this was inspired by my interview with Dave Gerhardt over at Drift where he talked about how the team at Drift shows their work. I thought that was brilliant, and my team now has a slack channel, which is really for this, where we, before we send anything out, we send it to each other and we critique it, and we ask that question, "Does this sound like you sending it to me?" And if not, it goes back to the drawing board. So, that's been a really interesting evolution. It's been fun watching the team open themselves up to constructive criticism, to rethinking the way they do things. Sometimes that's a painful process. I'll be the first one to admit it, especially when you're the one writing something and maybe the rest of the team doesn't love it. But, we've all grown so much and learned so much this year by doing that. 6. Video, Video, Video Another big thing that we're doubling down on is video. We talk a lot about this at IMPACT, and we're passionate about it. We're putting our money where our mouth is because we have an entire video team in house, led by the incredible Zach Basner who is the video strategist behind our Film School for Marketers YouTube Channel. Check that out if you're interested in learning more about video. But, Zach has assembled a team of editors, and producers, and on-air talent and trainers that is formidable. His passion, and the company's passion, is to teach other companies how to do video for themselves. So while we do video production, you know, if you need a video made, we can do it, our real focus is more the teach-a-man-to-fish approach. So, Zach spends his time going into other companies and really training them on how to build their own in-house video departments and also training their subject matter experts, who will be the on air-talent, on how you get comfortable on camera and what makes a good video. Interestingly, we had to go through this process ourselves. Because even though we're a marketing agency and we've done video, we really haven't had a completely bought-in culture of video in the past, you know, that permeated every corner of the organization. So, Zach, in conjunction with Marcus Sheridan, who's one of the partners in the company, have really committed themselves to imbuing IMPACT with this culture of video. Today, it's kind of fun to watch. We have a sales team that uses video in all aspects of their selling. One of the superstars on that team is Myriah Anderson, who's our customer success specialist. I have never met anybody who is naturally more comfortable on camera and so great on camera as her. She's really come into her own, both in terms of how she uses video in the sales process, but now she's starting to speak about it. That's something that's really exciting. Now we're talking about, with Zach, you know, how can we really make ourselves the best example in the world of what it means to use video in your marketing? So, stay tuned because we're going to be working really hard on that in the months to come. 7. Telling IMPACT's Story Then, I would say the last thing that I'm really focused on is telling our story. IMPACT has undergone a tremendous transformation in the last couple of years, and it's really remarkable to watch that happen. Even though I've been on the inside for part of it, it really started before I joined. One of the things I noticed is that we haven't done a great job of completely telling our own story. So, that's going to be my goal going forward is to more effectively tell IMPACT's story, and our why, and what we're passionate about. We started that earlier this year and rolled out, I would say, phase one of that at our event, IMPACT Live, when we introduced our Inbound Manifesto, which I'm going to link to in the show notes. If you haven't seen it, it's pretty cool. I'm really excited about it. It is a strong statement about what we believe in and what we believe Inbound is and should be today. Underscoring that Inbound Manifesto are a couple of principles that we're very committed to of education, and community, and transparency. So, that's gonna be a big part of how we tell our story, but I think we have more work to do. Who Should I Interview Next? So, that's what my focus is going to be for the rest of the year. I'm sure there will be more things. I feel like every single time I interview someone for the podcast I add something new to my list of things that I want to test and try. It's been so much fun doing this podcast, and I'm always on the lookout for interesting new stories to tell. So if you've been listening to this episode or if you've been listening to this podcast for any length of time, I have a challenge for you. I really want to make this as useful to you as possible. So, my challenge to you is to get back to me -- to reply -- because as I said earlier, we're all about the replies, and tell me who I should be interviewing. Give me one name of somebody that you think has a great story to tell. It could be you. And if it is, I'm fine with that. You can recommend yourself. But if it's not, tell me about somebody else who's doing great work with inbound marketing. I would love to surface more stories, and I would love to learn more from others. There are two easy ways to get in touch with me. You can always tweet me @WorkMommyWork, or you can email me directly at kbooth@impactbnd.com. Please, please reach out. I would love to hear from you. I've thrown down the challenge. I'd love it if you'd step up. Let me hear from you, and let me know who you'd like me to interview, and I'll do my best to get them on. That's it for this week. If you've been listening, if you are a loyal listener, it would mean a lot to me if you would take a moment and visit Apple Podcasts, or whatever platform you listen to podcasts on, and review the Inbound Success Podcast. This is just really a labor of love for me. I don't do a lot of work to promote the podcast. I probably should do more, but I'm a one-woman show, and I would just ... If it means something to you and if it's helpful to you, I'd love to hear more about it, and I'd love to know why it's helpful. Put that in your review. I would be so grateful. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next week.

Hiring the right people can be one of the toughest parts of running an agency. Bob Ruffolo of IMPACT explains his hiring process and tactical tips we can all implement today to make hiring a positive experience.

Hiring the right people can be one of the toughest parts of running an agency. Bob Ruffolo of IMPACT explains his hiring process and tactical tips we can all implement today to make hiring a positive experience.

Bob Ruffolo, Founder and CEO of IMPACT (2017 Hubspot’s Partner Agency of the Year), talks about how to build a thriving community to connect with influencers and clients. Bob Ruffolo’s Journey Bob started providing marketing services as a freelancer. The growth of his client base inspired him to create IMPACT, his inbound marketing agency. The agency has experienced dramatic growth in the past few years, leading to its designation as Hubspot's Partner Agency in 2017. Now, Bob is growing the company's impact and presence by focusing on the power of community. Your influencer marketing story During our conversation, Bob reveals: How to leverage local networking events and associations to meet influencers and grow your business. The important role of mentorship in your personal and professional life. The #1 factor to deepen your business connections. How to build a community and its role in your ability to connect with new clients and influencers.   One Thing You’re Most Excited About Bob is thrilled about his growing community on Facebook: IMPACT Elite--where the sharpest minds in marketing are hanging out! The community plays an important role in the fulfillment of IMPACT's mission as a resource to support entrepreneurs. Resources and Tools Mentioned IMPACT Elite Facebook Group IMPACT Live, the annual live event in Hartford, Connecticut. Gino Wickman's Books, such as "Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business." Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink Double Double: How to Double Your Revenue and Profit for 3 Years or Less by Cameron Herold Hacking Marketing: Agile Practices to Make Marketing Smarter, Faster, and More Innovative by Scott Brinker More About Bob Ruffolo Bob is the founder and CEO of IMPACT, a company focused on helping people find success with inbound marketing through education, events, and agency services. In 2017, IMPACT was recognized as HubSpot's Partner Agency of the Year. Join IMPACT Elite: https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/marketing-community-impact-elite

Fast growth companies understand the value of core values, purpose and people that allow for the culture to support the growth. Hiring right and developing leaders from within becomes critically important. My guest today is Bob Ruffalo, CEO of Impact Branding and Design. Bob shares how his use of Internal Brand Ambassadors impacts more than growth, but the growth of the people too. Get the show notes for 303 | The Brand Ambassador Series: CEO of Impact, Bob Ruffolo Click to Tweet: Listening to an amazing episode on Leaders in the Trenches with @BobRuffolo ‏and @GeneHammett #growth #leaders #Branding Give Leaders in the Trenches a review on iTunes!

When most small to medium-sized businesses consider a redesign or relaunch of their websites, one of the first questions they should ask is, “How do I want to provide value for my customers?” and “How can I quickly explain what we do?” By asking these questions, you can quickly realize you might need some outside help to get this done. That is where a Digital Agency comes in. On this show, Bob Ruffolo, CEO of IMPACT, and Jeff discuss what a digital agency is and how to best engage with one. One of my favorite tips from the show is when Bob says marketing teams or business owners need to define for themselves what success will look like before ever engaging with a digital agency. By clearly understanding this core objective and communicating it early, you will have a higher likelihood of a win since both teams will be aiming for the same goal.We hope this show will help you think outside the box when it comes to an upcoming marketing effort your team has.If you liked this show and the others, I would encourage you to give us a review and a 5-star rating on iTunes. It helps us in the podcast rankings. Even though it is a huge pain to get to the rating screen in the podcast app, we would very much appreciate your effort.Team Challenge: Ask the members of your team the following questions and discuss the results:•What tools do we use to measure our success for our digital assets?•Are there any efforts on our team we are doing just because we have always done them?•Can you measure the impact SEO, social media, and other marketing tactics to your core business?•Can each member step through the process of how customers interact with your brand and engage in business with you?Full Show URL: https://enterprisemarketer.com/podcasts/enterprise-marketer-podcast-conference/mpb2b16-show-38-bob-ruffolo/ Additional Links:•iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/enterprise-marketer-podcast/id1153750828 •Twitter: https://twitter.com/BobRuffolo •LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobruffolo •IMPACT: https://www.impactbnd.com/ •Website: http://bobruffolo.com/

In this episode of Hubstaff’s Agency Advantage Podcast, we’re talking with Bob Ruffolo of IMPACT Branding and Design who shares how establishing a strong set of values saved his agency. To be honest, whenever I heard someone talk about their mission statement or core values, I thought of cheesy motivational posters with words like “Perseverance” and a... The post Agency Advantage 38: Bob Ruffolo on Why Team Culture Matters for the Bottom Line appeared first on Hubstaff Blog.

Today I'm joined by a man who helps SMBs increase their brand awareness, improve their lead generation, and enhance their customer acquisition. He’s the Founder and CEO of IMPACT Branding & Design. Welcome to DMR, Bob Ruffolo. [You can find Bob over at ImpactBND.com.] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqXRIe8bJDg On this episode of Digital Marketing Radio we discuss how to grow a business FAST, with topics including: Would you say that there’s a common theme to why some businesses just can’t get traction with their growth marketing initiatives? How do you know if you’ve got the right team to grow your business? What are the next steps to get growth underway? How do you know what to aim for – how do you set your growth goals and objectives? Do you think that using the right technology is essential in modern marketing? What type of technology is most important right now? And is it important to grow fast? What are some marketing strategies that are particularly successful at the moment for fast growth? [Tweet ""If your company is not growing, look at the people in your team." @bobruffolo #BusinessGrowth"] Software I couldn't live without What software do you currently use in your business that if someone took away from you, it would significantly impact your marketing success? Hubspot [Marketing automation software] Hotjar [Conversion rate improvement software] What software don't you use, but you've heard good things about, and you've intended to try at some point in the near future? Pokémon GO [Augmented reality game] My number 1 takeaway What's the single most important step from our discussion that our listeners need to take away and implement in their businesses? If your company is not growing, look at the people in your team. Are they working as a team? Are they getting along? Are they the reason why you can grow or are they the reason why you're not growing?

Bob Ruffolo, CEO of IMPACT Branding, shares lessons learned on the journey from a startup agency in his condo to a HubSpot Diamond Partner with more than 20 employees.

Have you have built a solid inbound agency, but looking to take things to the next level? Do you know how to deliver services, but struggle to scale your team? If so, this episode is for you! Bob Ruffolo & Natalie Davis share the process they use at Impact Branding & Design to grow their team!