Podcast appearances and mentions of case study buddy

Ever notice how we're all drawn to a good story? That's especially true when it comes to marketing your business. This week on the Agents of Change, I'm chatting with Joel Klettke, founder of Case Study Buddy (now sold to Testimonial Hero). Joel breaks down exactly why customer stories are so valuable for businesses of all sizes and—more importantly—shares his repeatable process for creating them without the usual headaches. If you've been struggling to showcase your best work or convince prospects you're the right choice, this episode delivers the actionable tactics you need. https://www.theagentsofchange.com/582 Need help with your branding, website, or digital marketing? Reach out to me (Rich Brooks!) today at https://www.takeflyte.com/contact

In this episode, Sam Shepler, CEO of Testimonial Hero, steps in for Dustin and he's joined by Joel Klettke and Jen Enns, Founders of Case Study Buddy (acquired by Testimonial Hero in March 2024). They delve into the founding story and growth of Case Study Buddy, discuss the importance of customer storytelling, and share valuable tips from their experience as entrepreneurs. They also discuss overcoming early challenges, the significance of investing in quality talent, and strategic tips for creating impactful customer stories. If you have any questions or thoughts, you can reach out to Joel and Jen through LinkedIn.

"Acquiring a service you want to offer helps your company leapfrog years of trial and error. " – Sam Shepler, Founder of Testimonial Hero We welcome back Sam Shepler, Founder of Testimonial Hero, a global video testimonial company that helps B2B SaaS companies close more deals through customer stories. After a quick recap on what Testimonial Hero does (listen to episode 55 for part one), Corey and Sam get into the topic of acquisitions. Testimonial Hero recently acquired a company named Case Study Buddy that, just as the name suggests, provides written customer content like case studies. Sam's clients kept asking for case studies and written content as a service, and the fastest path to offering that at the level of quality Testimonial Hero's clients expected was to acquire a shop that already knew the ropes. Beyond the acquisition, Corey and Sam also cover topics like productizing services, sales process, and leadership lessons. Here's what we discuss in this episode: Testimonial Hero's latest acquisition of Case Study Buddy. The evolution from video-only to various forms of customer content. The various types of customer content Testimonial Hero offers. Agency sales challenges and how to navigate them. Here are some actionable key takeaways for agency founders: Customer testimonials accelerate sales cycles because they build trust. Challenge your preconceived notions as a leader not to miss out on business opportunities. Successful M&A calls for the right timing, alignment, and mutual respect, so start building relationships early on. For mentorship, seek out advice from people at a level you want to reach next; people who are several years but not decades ahead of you. The resources mentioned in this episode are: - Connect with Sam on Linkedin Here- Learn more about Testimonial Here

In this episode, I speak with Joel Klettke, Founder of Case Study Buddy. We had a great conversation on B2B case studies - namely, how to create ones that stand out from the usual legal-has-killed-all-joy-from-this-piece-of-content crap that fills our feeds. We also covered a topic near and dear to my heart - what can I do to convince a sceptical customer to sign off a case study? There are a bunch of different methods Joel shared, but the one that stood out to me was creating an 'anonymous' case study. Follow Joel here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelklettke?originalSubdomain=ca

A lot of copywriters talk about building a "real" business, that is a business that isn't solely built on writing copy for clients. In the 382nd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Kira and Rob talk with copywriter Joel Klettke who used his writing and sales expertise, developed as a copywriter, to build a team and service business bigger than what he might have built on his own. And he shared what he's learned from the experience. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Over the past 7 years of publishing this podcast, it's pretty rare that we bring guests back for a second visit. And the guests that have been back three times? I could be wrong but by my count, that's only happened twice. Today's episode makes it three.  Hi, I'm Rob Marsh, one of the founders of The Copywriter Club. And on today's episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, my co-founder, Kira Hug, and I interviewed copywriter and founder of Case Study Buddy, Joel Klettke to catch up on what he's been doing for the past couple of years. Joel has gone from being a top performing, in-demand copywriter to the founder of a million dollar business. And in our discussion, he shared some of the lessons he learned along the way. But first, this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. It is truly the membership for copywriters and content writers… where you can find the training, coaching, copy reviews, and community you need to build a successful copywriting business. To learn more visit thecopywriterclub.com/tcu And now let's jump into our interview with Joel... Kira Hug: All right, so Joel, I'm not going to ask you how you ended up as a copywriter because we already covered that in episode, Rob, which episode? I know you know. Rob Marsh: Episode 21 is the first time and maybe like 107, I think, is the second time. It's been a while though. It's been a while since we chatted on the podcast. Joel Klettke: Yeah. I like these, it's almost like a snapshot in time, like journal entry to go back and listen to myself on somebody's life. Rob Marsh: How much better life was back in episode 107? Kira Hug: Well, going back to 21, I think that was the one I was listening to and reading the transcript from. That's when you were, correct me if I'm wrong, but that's when you were just starting case study, buddy, right? That was the origin of it when you were getting into case studies. Or was that 107? Rob Marsh: I think it was even before that. Kira Hug: Yeah, it was before that. We were introducing it. You had that business running at that time. Joel Klettke: Yeah, like technically Case Study Buddy is almost eight years old. It was off the side of our desks initially. And then right before the pandemic, we kind of pivoted to focus full-time on that. So that became kind of a big transition point. And then it's continued to be the full-time focus since then. So we've only really been two years, maybe three now, full-time pushing this thing. Kira Hug: Okay, well, let's go back then to before pandemic when you went all in and just curious, like what, what triggered that decision for you and your business partner to go all in on this business? Joel Klettke: I think there are a whole bunch of different factors. I think, you know, at the time, the grass is always greener in life in general, you know, like you always want to be doing that new thing. The headspace I was in at that moment was I had done the freelance thing and I'd done it well, graduated to basically being in a position of consulting for some pretty great brands, some really great projects. You get to the point that you are now making what your heroes made.  I remember listening to Joanna Wiebe talk about charging $10,000 for a landing page and thinking,

In episode 128, Joel Klettke of Case Study Buddy drops by to discuss the underrated value of the case study for SEO and beyond.Joel argues that a well-designed customer story is not a fluff piece. How do your buyers talk? Should you use jargon in your customer stories? Klettke shares his experience of creating a buffet of content from your customer story interviews.----------[0:00] Intro [2:57] How can B2B companies effectively integrate SEO strategies into their customer success stories to enhance their online visibility? [5:17] From an SEO and human perspective should you try to use jargon in the content of the customer story? [7:35] Don't limit the use cases and potential of your case studies. [10:50] Leveraging case study videos for SEO value. [12:45] Are SEOs involved in case study creation? Should they be? [15:10] Who should own case study creation? [17:45] Does the case study deliverable go according to plan? What's the output? [23:25] Rapid Fire RankingsRank your best SEO marketing win:Having multi-billion dollar enterprises come to us due to word of mouth/our niche specialization. Rank your top 3 SEO tools: My opinion on these is worthless lol. Honestly, I don't do SEO anymore; so pretty light here.AhrefsSemrushScreamingFrogRank your best SEO or trick or tactic:Have a repurposing plan that includes video. What's the biggest scam in SEO that you've recently seen?There was all the controversy around that brand generating a huge amount of AI content and 'stealing' market share from competitors.I had to laugh -- yes, the generating content part might be questionable with the tech, but SEOs have been ripping off each others' strategies for YEARS, so I'm not sure what made this so special other than the cockiness in the way it was shared.Rank what you love most about the SEO industry:Probably what I also hated most about it when it was my job: it is always changing.Rank your top 1-3 marketers:Sam WoodsAndy CrestodinaJohn-Henry ScherckJoanna WiebeStefan GeorgianWhat's your Generative AI hottake?My hot take on this is that generative AI can, in fact, generate creative content.There's this weird notion that since it was trained on other content, generative AI is unable to come up with original ideas. That's only somewhat true because we're missing half the equation: the human using it.I've seen how introducing creative prompts can drive wild, new ideas out of generative AI, especially when it comes to imagery. Yes, it's anchored in the past, but it can iterate toward the future. Rank your best SEO learning resource: I... honestly wouldn't even know where to go these days. Rank your top cause or charity:Ronald McDonald House -- meaningful to me because we've had friends make use of it; having a place to be close to your children in their worst and most heart-wrenching, uncertain moments is a HUGE blessing for those who need it.

In this episode of the Customers First Podcast, your host, Tacey Atkinson, welcomes Joel Klettke to the boardroom. Joel is the Founder of Case Study Buddy, a company that helps you share your customers success stories with the world. Joel shares his background and how he ended up starting his own business. He explains that he initially worked as a freelancer focusing on content writing but later shifted his focus to conversion copywriting. He then talks about how he got into the case study business after being asked by a client to create customer success stories. Joel realized the opportunity to start a company specializing in case studies and testimonials for B2B companies. He started Case Study Buddy with his partner, Jen, and the business has been growing ever since. Joel emphasizes the importance of customer success stories that are warm, collaborative, and customer-centered. We discuss building trust with clients, creating a program rather than a one-time story, and authentically sharing customer experiences. The key takeaways are aligning internal teams, crafting specific asks, and focusing on the customer as the hero. The goal is to create a customer-centric culture and turn clients into brand champions.   Timestamps: 0:02:23 Joel's journey to starting Case Study Buddy 0:10:45 Tailoring Stories for Different Audiences and Platforms 0:13:18 Building Trust with Clients and Tips for Leaders 0:18:30 Turning Customers into Brand Champions 0:20:13 Tell a Story that Highlights Customer as the Hero 0:23:01 Overcoming Legal Hoops to Use Customer Stories   Joel's Contact Information: Website: https://casestudybuddy.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casestudybuddy/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelklettke/   Tacey's Contact Information: https://linktr.ee/taceyatkinson   Thank you for tuning in, and I look forward to having more valuable conversations together in the future. Remember: Customer-Centric Cultures Create Magical Customer Experiences. Now Go: Spread the Magic!  

Joel Kletkke, Founder of Case Study Buddy, shares how he creates snackable customer success stories that sell. Download the free powerups cheatsheet: https://marketingpowerups.com/028

- What's an efficient process for creating customer stories? - Can one scale the process? - Do you have a secret formula to get around this and still tell compelling stories? - How to tell stories when you can't share numbers - How to hook the visitor from the get-go? Tune in to hear from Joel Klettke, Founder at Case Study Buddy. About the show The SaaS Growth Hub podcast is powered by Growth Marketing Agency Advance B2B. We cover marketing strategy, sales and marketing alignment, content marketing, and brand marketing to help B2B marketers grow and scale up their companies.

Joel Klettke (Founder, Case Study Buddy) talks about how to create case studies and video testimonials that sell in B2B. He explains why storytelling from the customer's point of view is paramount and the importance of understanding customers as well as their buying journey. Joel also provides some actionable tips.

- Why are customer stories so important? - Why is it so difficult to create and publish quality customer stories? - How to ensure customer stories serve business and revenue goals? - How should marketers measure the ROI of a case study? - How to ask a customer for a story? Tune in to hear from Joel Klettke, Founder at Case Study Buddy. About the show The SaaS Growth Hub podcast is powered by Growth Marketing Agency Advance B2B. We cover marketing strategy, sales and marketing alignment, content marketing, and brand marketing to help B2B marketers grow and scale up their companies.

If you like distribution and repurposing playbooks, you'll love my weekly newsletter (it's free). Join 1,800+ subscribers here: https://news.justinsimon.co/ In this episode of Distribution First, Justin is joined by Joel Klettke from Case Study Buddy to uncover the untapped potential of case studies and customer stories. Joel shares his insights to help businesses make the most of these often-overlooked resources. They debunk common myths surrounding case studies and shed light on the power of proactive planning, the versatility of case studies throughout the buyer's journey, the importance of cross-team collaboration, and the opportunity for creative storytelling.LinkedIn: @justincsimonTwitter @justincsimonEmail: hello@justinsimon.coThanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of my podcast production.They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more.

One of the most powerful forms of stories for copywriters is the case study, and I think it's fair to say most of us don't use as many of them as we should. Today we're going to talk to an expert who has vast and successful experience in this kind of marketing. Our guest today, Joel Klettke, is the founder of Case Study Buddy, a business that helps companies like HubSpot and Loom to scale up their case study production and include it in every segment of their marketing—from lead generation and upsells to outreach and nurturing. Overall his company has done more than 2,000 case studies for more than 300 clients. Joel's also a copywriter and a proud dad of two. I believe his one regret in life is being a fan of the Calgary Flames hockey team. I don't blame him one bit. The last time the Flames won the Stanley cup was in 1989, and I suppose we should just leave that there. But lucky for us, Joel knows a lot about case studies and he's generously agreed to share some great tips and insights with us today. Here's what we asked Joel: 1. What are case studies, the way you look at them? 2. What are the different types of case studies? 3. Why do case studies work, and how do they work? 4. How did you get into specializing in case studies? 5. What does Case Study Buddy do for your clients? 6 . Could you give us an example of a good case study? 7. What would be an example of a bad case study? 8. What are your top tips for writing great case studies? Joel's company has a newsletter you can get for free: https://casestudybuddy.com/newsletter-sign-up/ Download.

In this episode of SaaS Marketing Superstars podcast, I spoke with Joel Klettke. Joel is the Founder of Case Study Buddy, a specialized team that help B2B brands like HubSpot, Loom, and Extensiv scale their customer stories and drive more ROI from each one. Episode Highlights: • Why Joel built an agency focused on Case Studies (0:57) • The unique insights case studies provide to SaaS companies (4:15) • How companies can tell engaging stories in their case studies (7:26) • The differences between case studies and success stories (9:54) • The biggest mistakes companies make in their case studies and how to avoid them (11:51) • Joel shares his thoughts on using case studies as a lead magnet (16:06) • Why companies should avoid gating case studies (18:20) • A creative way B2B SaaS companies can gate and ungate their case studies (20:39) • Favorite books and business leaders (21:40) Check out the show notes and get links to all the resources mentioned in this episode here: https://aaronzakowski.com/podcast-customer-success-stories-joel-klettke

“If I lose my curiosity in those things, if I stick my head in the sand, I will lose. If I refuse to evolve, I will lose. And to me, curiosity and evolution go hand in hand because you'll either be forced to evolve or you'll evolve because you're curious.” In Season 5, Episode 23 of the Boss Uncaged Podcast, S.A. Grant sits down with the Real Founder of Case Study Buddy, Joel Klettke.

Today on the show we bring on Joel Klettke to talk about his journey from copywriting/SEO to founding and managing Case Study Buddy. Joel talks about his successes and struggles launching and running his own company. LinkedIn: Joel KlettkeWebsite:  Case Buddy StudyTwitter:  @JoelKlettkeHire our agency: https://www.cavesocial.comTake our course on growing a service business: https://www.hyclass.co/six-figure-sales-pageJoin our newsletter: https://www.hyclass.co/think-forward

Welcome to another insightful episode of The Advocacy Channel! We're thrilled to have Joel Klettke, founder of Case Study Buddy and a renowned specialist in case study development, join us for today's episode. With years of experience under his belt, Joel is an expert in harnessing the power of storytelling, customer reviews, and case studies to drive business growth. In today's rapidly evolving marketing landscape, it's crucial to understand how to create persuasive stories and maximize the impact of customer advocacy. Joel's expertise sheds light on the best practices for leveraging these key components in your marketing and sales efforts. Listen in as we dive into a range of engaging topics, such as: The critical aspects of crafting captivating case studies How to make the most of customer reviews in your marketing strategy The role storytelling plays in fostering trust and credibility with your audience Proven methods to uncover and highlight your best customer success stories Overcoming common hurdles in collecting and managing valuable customer feedback Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn from a seasoned industry expert and elevate your marketing game by embracing the full potential of storytelling and customer advocacy. Get more customer marketing insights and strategies at: https://www.saasquatch.com/blog/ Connect with host Will on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wifraser/  Connect with Joel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelklettke/  Check out the resource Joel mentioned to help you measure the ROI of your customer marketing and advocacy efforts: https://cmasoulmate.gumroad.com/l/cma-course  Check out Case Study Buddy blog posts to learn how to write effective case studies: https://casestudybuddy.com/blog  Have a question? Suggestion? Want to be a guest on the show? Email us at marketing@saasquatch.com 

As a business owner, you're probably juggling many things at any given moment. You're trying to keep up with the latest trends in your industry, keep your customers happy, and ensure that everyone on your team has what they need to do their job well.But too often, these tasks are competing for your attention and are all important. You can't afford to let any one of these things fall through the cracks. But if you want to succeed, you need to remember that there's always more work to do. That means ensuring you're not just doing what needs to be done today; you're also thinking about how your business will grow tomorrow.Case studies are focused on one specific client or customer. They explain how your company helped them reach their goals and how that has impacted their overall success as an organization or individual. If you want more clients but don't know where to start, then case studies are the perfect place for you! They show potential customers exactly what they'll get if they choose to work with your company, which makes it easier for them to decide whether or not they should hire someone like you.In this episode, one of the co-founders of Be Omniscient, Alex Birkett, is joined by Joel Klettke, the founder @ Case Study Buddy | End-to-end case studies and video testimonials that sell for B2B, who shares deeply about his experiences in business marketing in case studies and how to put best case studies practices into your business to nature it effectively as it grows.TopicsHow Joel's Mindset of Self-Reflection in Self-Management Has ShiftedHas Adding Constraints Forced the Idea of Being More Effective?Ignoring Small Problems To Focus on Bigger Stuff Ahead of YouThe Biggest Challenge in Making the Transition From Being Solo to a Business OwnerMaintaining the Path That Keeps the Business Fired UpHow To Get Successful Multiple BusinessesJoel's Point of Realization in His BusinessThe Importance of Having a Homogeneous ProcessWhy Large Companies Struggle To Produce Case StudiesWhat Case Studies Really Entail in BusinessHow To Identify a Good Case StudyImportance of Looking for Value Beyond the ResultsHolding On to Your BusinessAI Content in Business MarketingShow LinksVisit Omniscient Digital for more amazing podcast contentConnect with Omniscient Digital on LinkedIn and TwitterConnect with Alex Birkett on LinkedIn and TwitterConnect with Joel Klettke on LinkedIn and TwitterConnect with Joel Klettke's websitePast guests on The Long Game podcast include: Morgan Brown (Shopify), Ryan Law (Animalz), Dan Shure (Evolving SEO), Kaleigh Moore (freelancer), Eric Siu (Clickflow), Peep Laja (CXL), Chelsea Castle (Chili Piper), Tracey Wallace (Klaviyo), Tim Soulo (Ahrefs), Ryan McReady (Reforge), and many more.Some interviews you might enjoy and learn from:Actionable Tips and Secrets to SEO Strategy with Dan Shure (Evolving SEO)Building Competitive Marketing Content with Sam Chapman (Aprimo)How to Build the Right Data Workflow with Blake Burch (Shipyard)Data-Driven Thought Leadership with Alicia Johnston (Sprout Social)Purpose-Driven Leadership & Building a Content Team with Ty Magnin (UiPath)Also, check out our Kitchen Side series where we take you behind the scenes to see how the sausage is made at our agency:Blue Ocean vs Red Ocean SEOShould You Hire Writers or Subject Matter Experts?How Do Growth and Content Overlap?Connect with Omniscient Digital on social:Twitter: @beomniscientLinkedin: Be OmniscientListen to more episodes of The Long Game podcast here: https://beomniscient.com/podcast/

Have you ever been curious about how to get more deals in your business? Or perhaps you've been curious about growing your team? For most people, it's a lot of trial and error. But if you listen to the advice of our guest today, you might just be able to skip past a lot of those trials.Today, we're welcoming Joel Klettke, founder of Case Study Buddy, a company that helps businesses create and scale case studies and video testimonies so they're able to close more deals. Joel is known for being an OG in the copywriting field.Tune in and listen to episode forty-one of The Entrepreneur's Ecosystem. Joel shares why he went full-time with Case Study Buddy, how to build a team of writers, and his thoughts about where copywriting AI will be in the next few years.In This Episode, You Will Learn:Joel tells us what Case Study Buddy is and does (9:11)How to build a team of writers (13:05)How having children changes your business (30:43)Why Joel got into running (35:04)Joel shares his thoughts on the use of AI in copywriting (46:02)Tell us what you want us to talk about:www.chantizak.com/feedbackFind Out Your Own Unfair Advantage:www.chantizak.com/unfairadvantageConnect with Joel:WebsiteLinkedInInteract:Interact blogInteract podcastQuiz CollectiveConnect with Chanti: WebsiteFacebookInstagramConnect with Dawn:WebsiteInstagramLinkedInSome of our quiz funnels:https://horizonfound.com/quizhttps://learn.kaysemorris.com/ceo-teacher-type-quizhttps://www.consciousconversion.com/quiz/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Episode 3 of Grow and Convert Deep Dives, we took a question from Elliott Davidson, where he asked us: "What are your go to posts you know straight out of the gate will help you start lead generation for a new client engagement? Even better if they have no domain rating (DR) for the purposes of this conversation. i.e. founder story backed in with pain points etc." and answered it using 3 different company examples.In this episode we explained how we would think about forming a blog content strategy in the first few months of a client engagement, specifically what topics we'd go after, what keywords we'd target, and more!Sections of the episode:0:00 Intro4:35 How customer research ties into content strategy10:05 A High-level overview of our content strategy11:28 ParcelMaster content strategy20:07 Quick note about selling in blog posts23:33 Making SEO content interesting26:54 What are disruption stories? And how we use them36:25 Case Study Buddy Content Strategy48:55 Summarizing the first 3 posts we'd produce for Parcel Master 51:33 Devesh's “Rant” 54:03 Summarizing Case Study Buddy's first 3 pieces55:44 Testbox.com content strategy- rapid-fireWebsites we case studied:https://parcelmaster.com/ https://casestudybuddy.com/https://www.testbox.com/Articles we sharedRainforest QA disruption story: https://www.rainforestqa.com/blog/acc...Work with our content marketing agencyhttps://www.growandconvert.com/conten...Take our content marketing coursehttps://www.growandconvert.com/top-co...

Topics discussed in the episode: Tips for Creating an Effective Agency Case Study The Benefits of a Great Agency Case Study What is an Ideal Agency Case Study Tips for Conversion Copywriting What Makes A Great Case Study Presenting Sponsor: ZenPilotZenPilot helps agencies build more productive, profitable, and healthy teams by streamlining their operations in ClickUp.As ClickUp's largest implementation partner, we've served over 2,300 agencies and would love to help you scale operations.Learn more about our agency solutions.Resources mentioned in this episode: Joel Klettke on LinkedIn Joel Klettke on Twitter Case Study Buddy Website Joanna Wiebe on LinkedIn Jonathan Dane's Agency Journey Episode Joel Klettke's Newsletter KlientBoost Website Gray MacKenzie on LinkedIn Andrew Dymski on LinkedIn ZenPilot

My guest on this week's episode of Suds & Search is Joel Klettke, founder of Case Study Buddy and Business Casual Copywriting. In my humble opinion, Joel is one the very best copywriters in the industry. He frequently presents at conferences on topics related to copywriting and case study creation. A few places you may have heard Joel present include Content Jam, Learn Inbound, the Unbounce CTA Conference, and the Utah DMC conference. Case Study Buddy has become the go-to resource for creating case studies. Joel and his talented team handle all of the nettlesome but important work of creating compelling case studies. They work with businesses of all sizes. I'm going to spend a lot of our conversation talking about case studies and how to effectively use them as a multi-purpose asset, And of course we'll chat about copywriting. Joel is described as a “conversion” copywriter. I'm going to ask him what differentiates conversion copywriting from more traditional copywriting. Grab something cold to drink and join me for a conversation with Joel Klettke, one the top copywriters in the world. We'll talk about what mistakes businesses make with their case studies, how case studies can help improve CRO and increase inbound traffic, and I'll ask him a little bit about a trip he took to New Zealand. Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9teXNvdW5kd2lzZS5jb20vcnNzLzE1OTUzNTQ3MjgwNTZz Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suds-search-interviews-todays-search-marketing-experts/id1526688363 Spotify Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5ALxRpeDgIvg63bK6eoUTe SearchLab 1801 W Belle Plaine Suite 107 Chicago, IL 60613 (312) 256-1574 Catch SearchLab on these platforms: https://www.linkedin.com/company/searchlabdigital/ https://www.facebook.com/SearchLabDigital https://twitter.com/SearchLabAgency https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3kf-yP3bwhI6YvFFeKfegA Suds and Search Video Series https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqSrUsIw8Jit8A6IwPpFw7IPKuuyGF0Ii Local Search Tuesdays Video Series https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqSrUsIw8JiuxY0eDWZr7Us_WgNNP-GDnSubscribe to Suds & Search | Interviews With Today's Search Marketing Experts on Soundwise

My guest on this week's episode of Suds & Search is Joel Klettke, founder of Case Study Buddy and Business Casual Copywriting. In my humble opinion, Joel is one the very best copywriters in the industry. He frequently presents at conferences on topics related to copywriting and case study creation. A few places you may have heard Joel present include Content Jam, Learn Inbound, the Unbounce CTA Conference, and the Utah DMC conference. Case Study Buddy has become the go-to resource for creating case studies. Joel and his talented team handle all of the nettlesome but important work of creating compelling case studies. They work with businesses of all sizes. I'm going to spend a lot of our conversation talking about case studies and how to effectively use them as a multi-purpose asset, And of course we'll chat about copywriting. Joel is described as a “conversion” copywriter. I'm going to ask him what differentiates conversion copywriting from more traditional copywriting. Grab something cold to drink and join me for a conversation with Joel Klettke, one the top copywriters in the world. We'll talk about what mistakes businesses make with their case studies, how case studies can help improve CRO and increase inbound traffic, and I'll ask him a little bit about a trip he took to New Zealand. Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9teXNvdW5kd2lzZS5jb20vcnNzLzE1OTUzNTQ3MjgwNTZz Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suds-search-interviews-todays-search-marketing-experts/id1526688363 Spotify Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5ALxRpeDgIvg63bK6eoUTe Catch SearchLab on these platforms: https://www.linkedin.com/company/searchlabdigital/ https://www.facebook.com/SearchLabDigital https://twitter.com/SearchLabAgency https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3kf-yP3bwhI6YvFFeKfegA Suds and Search Video Series https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqSrUsIw8Jit8A6IwPpFw7IPKuuyGF0Ii Local Search Tuesdays Video Series https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqSrUsIw8JiuxY0eDWZr7Us_WgNNP-GDnSubscribe to Suds & Search | Interviews With Today's Search Marketing Experts on Soundwise

Discover why identifying the missing processes for other businesses is an opportunity that service-based business owners can miss and how Joel invested his time to build a delivery process that set him and his team up as the go to experts in an uncontended niche. Joel Klettke is the Founder of Case Study Buddy a specialized team who help B2B brands capture, share and cash in on customer success stories. He is  also a sought after conversion copywriter for SaaS and B2B, having served clients like Hubspot, WP Engine and Scott's Cheap Flights. On this episode of Small But Mighty Agency: 10:08: What is the the value of being in a deep niche and why it's the opposite of limiting14:46: Using one simple marketing strategy to grow both his businesses 16:44: The power of defining and articulating his process to exponential growth19:53: Why he thinks of his company as a powerful process masquerading as a company 20:43: How he went through “the muck” to figure out what works30:13: The catastrophic failure of hiring 10 people into his business and why it failed32:10: Why people who are good at their craft have a difficult time stepping into the manager role and building a team for their business 34:57: How he decided on the right partner for his business and perspectives on partnerships Show Links:Case Study Buddy WebsiteLinkedIn: Joel KlettkeTwitter: Joel KlettkeThis episode is brought to you by the FREE Strategic Connections RoundtableJoin the free Strategic Connections Roundtable where creatives, consultants and service-based business owners can meet new business connections without the awkwardness of traditional networking. It's a curated experience where the group fit is curated so that connections and conversations thrive.That means that every month, a strategic connections roundtable will bring together a group of service based business owners in similar stages of business who can benefit from knowing each other SO that you canMake connections easierShare what your business offersDiscover new resourcesAnd have an opportunity to mastermind a challengeSave your free seat right hereNow it's time to build your Small But Mighty AgencyThanks for tuning into the Small But Mighty Agency Podcast! If you enjoyed today's episode, head over to Apple Podcast to subscribe, rate, and leave your honest review. Connect with me on Instagram, LinkedIn or visit my website for even more detailed strategies, and be sure to share your favorite episodes on social media.Listen on AppleListen on Spotify

Joel Klette is a well-known copywriter and entrepreneur. He currently runs two businesses. He's also a prolific writer and educator. I don't know anyone who has shared as much knowledge on copywriting as Joel. Check out Joel's businesses, Business Casual Copywriting and Case Study Buddy, as well as his fantastic Twitter account. This is a preview of Superpath Pro. If you want a whole lot more of this, check out https://pro.superpath.co/membership.

Case studies are a killer way to show off how you've changed the lives of your customers. But many businesses don't write them in a way that's useful to the prospective customer. Conversion Copywriter & Founder of Case Study Buddy Joel Klettke joins Katelyn Bourgoing to explain: How To Get New Customers To Take Action Through Conversion Copywriting The Formula For Deal-Closing Case Studies How To Use Customer Concerns As A Lense To Look At Your Marketing And So Much More Joel Klettke is the founder of Case Study Buddy, a done-for-you service for high converting case studies and testimonials. Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoelKlettke Case Study Buddy: https://casestudybuddy.com/ ---- Follow Katelyn Bourgoin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KateBour Get your free Customer Ranking Calculator: https://www.subscribepage.com/newcalculator

Case studies and marketers in the manufacturing space have a love/hate relationship. We love to get them, but too often find ourselves not in love with the end result. But what if the success of your case study had more to do with preparation than the actual interview? Matt and MJ talked with Joel Klettke, who outlines an absolutely masterful method for designing the perfect industrial case study. He walks through identifying candidates to designing the right questions to the proper Case Study format and finally proves that you can even make an impactful Case Study from the dreaded "anonymous" customer. This is 41 minutes of pure gold. Grab your notebook.

What’s up everyone! We’re back this week with Joel Klettke, the founder of Business Casual Copywriting and Case Study Buddy. Joel has created very successful workshops and courses and he’s here to talk copywriting, course creation, and growing a client base. Joel launched Business Casual Copywriting in 2013, focusing on content marketing assets and website copy. He’s worked with clients like HubSpot, WP Engine, Safelite, and Ion Interactive. Two years later, he started helping clients understand their customers better and improve their conversion rates with conversion copywriting. Tune in to hear Joel’s copywriting journey, how he created Case Study Buddy, his copywriting advice, and how you can write effective case studies. Enjoy!  Episode Quotes"The best way to grow your client base is to network and make connections.""My strategy has always been to solve problems in public, be useful first, worry about selling later.""It's not about genius, it's about discipline and repetition.""Confidence is a byproduct of a solid process - when you know what you are doing and why you are doing it.""I don’t want to work to make a living. I want to work to build a life." Listen to Learn00:21 - Rapid 5 Questions04:45 - How Joel got into copywriting09:41 - Going freelance growing a client base13:14 - The shift to course creation  18:17 - Marketing as a service-based business24:23 - How Joel started Case Study Buddy32:51 - Copywriting best practices & pitfalls40:36 - Leveraging audience feedback 45:39 - Tips on copywriting for course creators   47:52 - Exciting things coming up from Joel Connect with JoelBusinessCasualCopywriting.comCaseStudyBuddy.comFollow Joel on Twitter!  Looking for the Transcript?Episode 130

Want to get free tickets to SaaStock Remote Conference happening June 10-11 ($129 value)? I'm writing a book about how other successful founders got their first few paying, please consider helping other founders by taking part in the creation of this book and fill out this 5-minute survey here: https://s.surveyanyplace.com/grow_your_saas On this episode of SaaS Boss show I interview Joel Klettke of Case Study Buddy about how SaaS can capture, share, and cash in on customer success stories. Joel is the founder of Case Study Buddy, a team of case studies specialists who help companies capture, share and cash in on customer success stories He is a sought after conversion copywriter for SaaS and B2B companies where he has helped clients like Hubspot and WP engine turn more visitors into customers. On this episode we discuss: Laying the foundation to creating case studiesCreating the study/success story and conducting an interviewPromoting the customer success story

What are your thoughts on customer research? Do you think it takes too long and is a dirty word? Or do you rely on it for your business? My guest is Joel Klettke, owner of Case Study Buddy, a company that helps you to create case studies. In this episode, he explains how your research and analysis will not only produce killer copy but will inform many aspects of your business - from branding to landing pages and everything in between. We Covered: How good customer research is not just research for research sake The benefits of review and testimonial mining The consequences of not doing effective customer research How changing just a few words can make your copy more vivid What to look for in negative competitor reviews How to translate all the data you collect into one page of copy Why focusing purely on current customers is a big mistake The principles and practicalities of writing good copy How all writers are different and there’s no one way of writing The questions to ask yourself as you read through your copy Resources: Case Study Buddy Hubspot WP Engine Scott’s Cheap Flights Benevity Traffic Think Tank Deputy Clockspot G2 Capterra Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die - Chip Heath Never Lose a Customer Again - Joey Coleman The Ultimate Sales Letter - Dan Kennedy

Today I chat with Joel Klettke, Author at Case Study Buddy. Joel and I talk about seeking and leveraging customer testimonials to best grow your business as well as approaching your audience amidst Covid-19.  We also discuss:  - How hiring a professional copywriter has impacted growth - Making effective use of your customer's time - Scaling for growth with your supporting talent - Best tactics for utilizing case studies in growing your online business  https://casestudybuddy.com/ Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!  Free Mini-Course! How to Write an Engaging Email Sequence:  http://onlinesuccesscollaborative.com/welcomeseries Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/success_collab/ Facebook Group: http://bit.ly/2I2yUVg 

Testimonials and case studies hold enormous marketing potential (without coming off as salesy). Our guest today is Joel Klettke, the founder of Case Study Buddy. You'll learn what makes a powerful case study, how to produce one yourself, and how to use them in your sales & marketing process.Podcast feed: subscribe to https://feeds.simplecast.com/4MvgQ73R in your favorite podcast app, and follow us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play Music.Show NotesCase Study Buddy — Joel's service we're talking aboutSome of their case study samplesPingboard, Varonis, Buffer — some of the companies that do great case studiesCrisp Video — a company producing amazing video testimonials for lawyers (see one of the samples)Get your free copy of The Complete Guide to Growing Your Revenue with Case StudiesFollow Joel on Twitter: @JoelKlettkeToday's SponsorThis episode is brought to you by Lightmatter. Lightmatter helps some of the world’s fastest growing companies design and develop their software applications. Whether you don’t yet need an in-house engineering team, or you’re busy growing the next unicorn and can’t hire fast enough, there’s an immense value in working with a group of experts like Lightmatter. Check them out at lightmatter.com/uibreakfast to learn more.Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here. Leave a ReviewReviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here's how.

In this episode, I’m really excited to have as my guest, Joel Klettke, conversion copywriter, founder and Case Study King of Case Study Buddy, a done-for-you case study writing service that gives B2B businesses (like SaaS and agencies) an easy way to capture and share customer success stories. Their case study specialists take care of everything, from interviewing your customer to writing the study and managing revisions.  As Joel points out in the interview, case studies are an asset whose value is enormous, yet often overlooked. Case studies can be used in all parts of the customer marketing journey. In our discussion, Joel talked to me about: What makes a good case study - it's about human connection and the story He pointed out that "the story you tell will be the story you attract" Transformation - the before, during, and after, framework of the case study process Joel and his team use Listen to the podcast to find out more. Show Notes and Blog The Podcasts

Today we're chatting with Joel Klettke, who is a sought-after conversion copywriter and consultant.   With a background in entrepreneurship, Joel brings a strategic approach to building and scaling a writing business. He's also great at teaching freelancers how to confidently sell their services and scale their business.   Today he runs Business Casual Copywriting where he's helped clients like WP Engine and HubSpot double their conversions. He's also the founder of Case Study Buddy, a done-for-you case studies service that helps companies capture, share, and cash in on customer success stories.   Building and scaling companies of this size is notoriously difficult, so today we're asking Joel how he's gone from profitable side-project to full-fledged company in a strategic way.   And stay tuned until the end for a hilarious side tangent about the evil nature of red tailed hawks.   Let's dive in so Joel can tell you all about it.   Episode Highlights   How to avoid having an employee mindset as a freelancer so you can take charge of client relationships Why "solving problems" is the unconventionally simple way to close clients confidently How Joel built up his sales confidence to pitch clients from a position of strength Ways to leverage an 'in house' job to jump start your freelance career How Joel identified a big hole in the market and used it to start a specialized conversions business Joel's secret to developing processes that help you scale your writing business The biggest flubs of his early days that taught him some of his most important lessons How to show clients what it's like to work with you before you ever get on a sales call The questions Joel always asks before hiring or partnering with someone on his team Why 'looking expensive' could be the best thing you do for your business growth How to give yourself an edge over other freelancers  

Today’s co-host is Joel Klettke. Joel is a conversion copywriter and the co-founder of Case Study Buddy. Joel is a sought-after consultant, having worked with companies like Hubspot and WP Engine, among others. Today, Joel is talking with us about his strategies around conversion copywriting.

On this episode, we chat with Joel Klettke, the founder of Business Casual Copywriting and Case Study Buddy.We discuss copywriting, especially for B2B companies, and how to create high-converting content on your site.Please subscribe to YIM at http://bit.ly/yours-in-marketing.

Writing case studies are hard to do well. They take a lot of time, you have to interview clients and if you don't do it right, you've completely wasted everyone's time. What's the right way to write a case study and how do you market them afterward? Joel Klettke is the Founder of Case Study Buddy and he's on the mission to help companies unleash the power of case studies. When done right, a case study can not only be a content piece to use on your website or sales, it can be that unique differentiator that closes a potential deal. We're going to learn the process of writing an effective case study and learn all the different ways a case study can be used. All this and more, today on the EDGE!

Conversion optimization is the new SEO. It’s a hot topic right now. Why? Because it’s crucial. You’re spending tons of money on driving customers to your site. But what good is that if they don’t convert? Joel Klettke is a conversion expert. He’s a conversion copywriter to B2B and SaaS companies. He’s also the founder of Case Study Buddy, a done for you case study service that helps companies capture, share, and cash in on customer success stories. Joel recently came on the 1 to 10 podcast to talk about creating copy that converts Here’s what he had to say.

Joel Klettke is a conversion copywriter by trade, helping SaaS companies like HubSpot (ever heard of ‘em?) drive sales through the roof. But this work also lead him to create Case Study Buddy, a productized company focused exclusively on… you guessed it: case studies. Here’s where Case Study Buddy came from, how they structure interviews to get exactly what they need to produce revenue-generating case studies every time, and where to use case studies to produce the best ROI.Support the show (https://copyweekly.com/)

Tips for writing copy that converts by Joel Klettke Customer driven copy, what does that mean, exactly? It's amazing how saying the same thing but slightly different clicks a whole different set of switches in somebody's brain. You can never trust one data source on its own. You have to look at multiple sources to get the real story. Both of those clients just saw great results because they were open-minded and open to being wrong. Too many businesses are defensive, they're scared. I used to get a ton of pushback about doing the research, doing the homework. People said, "Just write the thing." One of the things that you cannot be a great conversion copywriter and have a huge ego But copy remains I think for way too many businesses an afterthought Case studies are one of those things that everybody needs, most people know they need. But I truly believe if we're going to exist as a company five years from now, we have to be a video first company. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ TIPS FOR WRITING COPY THAT CONVERTS [just click to tweet] TIPS FOR WRITING COPY THAT CONVERTS Joel Klettke on writing copy that converts into sales _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _   Doug: Well, welcome back listeners, another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today, I am pleased to have joining me in the studio, another fellow Canadian Joel Klettke. Now, Joel is an interesting guy. He is a copywriter, but if you read his bio on his Twitter account, it says "pray for your competitors, after you hire me they'll need it." So, he is a conversion specialist, and a copywriter, and a consultant to B2B businesses. He is the founder of Casual Copywriting. One of the articles I read on Joel prior to inviting him and having him on my show was a case study that he did for a company named HubSpot, so I'm sure you've all heard of HubSpot. The case study was how a customer driven copy helped HubSpot increase their conversion by nearly 100%. So if you want to know how Joel helped HubSpot increase their conversion and how they can help you and increase the conversion of your landing pages and sales pages and all the online marketing tactics that you use, I would suggest that you tune in. If you stay at the very end, we're going to have a discussion about something new that Joel's doing that I think is really cool, that you may find interesting as well. He started a new venture called Case Study Buddy and what he does is he works with businesses and he manages the entire process of building out case studies for you to use both internally and externally for your marketing. So, with that said, I'd like you to join me in welcoming Joel to the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today. Hey, Joel, I'm super excited to talk to you today, for a couple reasons. First of all, I love copy and copywriting. But more importantly, I like copy that converts. I couldn't help but notice your introduction that you have in your Twitter account. It says, "Pray for your competitors after you hire me." So, it should be a great conversation and as well as what you're doing with case studies. I had a guest on a while ago saying, "Hey, If can give you a tip to get your business fired up, you should make sure to do case studies early." So, here we are talking to you. So, welcome to the Real Marketing Podcast. Joel Klettke: Yeah, thank you so much for having me here. Doug: So, why don't you give us a little bit of background? You've got a number of skills, but obviously, one of the biggest skills is moving the sales dollar for people. So, why don't you tell us how that works? Joel Klettke: Yeah, certainly. I'm a conversion copywriter in my own consulting firm. As you mentioned, I spun off case study a few years ago. Where I come at it from and what I'm really passionate about bringing to businesses and evangelizing and getting people to see the value in, is customer driven copy and how you can essential...

What does it take for a company like HubSpot to double its website conversions and inbound call volume, increase demo requests by 35%, and increase product sign ups by 27% This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, conversion copywriting expert Joel Klettke shares the process he used, along with a team from HubSpot, to achieve such remarkable results. Known as "the guy who 2x'd HubSpot's conversions," Joel is a world renowned conversion copywriting expert and the founder of Case Study Buddy. Listen to the podcast to learn exactly what Joel and the team from HubSpot did and get specific takeaways you can use to improve the copy on your site and increase conversions. Transcript Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. My name's Kathleen Booth and I'm your host. This week, my guest is Joel Klettke. Joel came to the podcast via a casual mention at first by Ian Cleary who was on a few episodes ago. And Ian, for those of you who don't know, is the founder of RazorSocial and OutreachPlus, and a well known marketer and keynote speaker. He happened to mention the great work that Joel did at HubSpot and then lo and behold, Andy Crestodina, one of our past guests as well, commented, "Joel, you should come on the podcast." I love when this happens! So Joel, I'm so excited to have you on and I love that you came via Andy and Ian. Welcome to the podcast. Joel Klettke (guest): Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm really pumped to get a chance to chat with you. Kathleen: For my listeners, Joel is a conversion copywriter who has worked with some incredible brands and gotten really great results. I already mentioned that he did some work for HubSpot. He's also worked for WP Engine, which is a platform that we love here at IMPACT, InsightSquared and others. He is also the founder of Case Study Buddy. So Joel, I could probably talk a lot about you - you've got a long and interesting resume - but I'm going to ask you to tell the audience a little bit about yourself. Joel: Yeah. I mean, the quick and interesting, hopefully interesting version, is that I got my start kind of fresh out of business school. I knew more about the type of place I wanted to be than what I wanted to do. I sort of randomly found my way working agency side doing search engine optimization (SEO) and that was my whole world for about five years. I really enjoyed the analytical side of it, but always had this sort of passion for writing. I just never thought there was a job in it for me. I didn't want to be an author and that whole world of kind of writing websites and landing pages wasn't on my radar until I started working on them for SEO and went, "You know what? Someone's got to write these. And it's not enough that they get found, they probably have to convert people." And so little by little, over time, I got to pick up more of those types of projects. And in 2013 I went out on my own focusing mostly on the content pieces at that point - so blogs and E-books - and then kept getting deeper into this conversion stuff and it finally became my whole focus by 2015. So I've been doing it since then working with a lot of cool companies like you mentioned - HubSpot and WP Engine and InsightSquared - to get more customers to convert. And then about two years ago, I saw an opportunity to build a business product. I was kind of working on making case studies available to these awesome agencies and software companies. This was an area I saw them really struggling in, struggling to capture these stories, share them, how do you use them. And so I saw an opportunity and created Case Study Buddy. I've got a team and we've been kind of stealthily moving along and this year it's becoming increasingly part of my focus. Kathleen: I think it's really interesting what you're doing with Case Study Buddy, because having been in this business for a long time and owned an agency and worked with just a ton of different companies, case studies seem to be one of those areas where we as marketers really phone it in. Like, there's this formula like "This was the challenge. This was the solution. They came to us, and here's what we did, and here's the results." It's that three part formula and I think we feel like as long as we're following the formula we can say, "Check! I did a case study." I have to believe tremendous opportunity to innovate in that area because we know from experience that case studies are of huge interest to different audiences. Everybody wants to see examples of your experience. They want to see the proof that you know what you're talking about. But for something that that is so valued by the consuming audience, it's amazing how little effort we put into them. Joel: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's funny too, because it is formulated. People always say "Well how hard can it really be?" and they go off and they slap these things together, but they don't realize that there's so much to capturing a story worth telling. And then telling it in a way that's worth reading. Even though the "problem - solution - results," yes, that's always going to be the heart and soul of it. But what's different, what's interesting, is how you tell that story and how you bring in the customer and how you weave it all together. And then increasingly too, how you use it. Where and how you wield that proof to make it useful. So a lot of companies, the big problem, once they have a case study is it gets relegated to a little resources section. And maybe sales pulls it out once in a while, but they don't have a plan for it. Both in the creation side of things it kind of gets overlooked or neglected or slapdash, and then in the actual using it, we're kind of like, "Well, okay. We'll email it out." Then we're yelling, "We have it and resources section, good work for us." And that makes me sad, because case studies are the one content asset that can play across the entire funnel. From acquisition, to nurturing, to upsells, to retention -- you can use them everywhere, but we don't. And so that's why I'm so excited about that space. Kathleen: Oh, I love it. Well before we dive too deeply into case studies, I really want to talk about the work that you did with HubSpot. Because as I mentioned, this came up when I had Ian Cleary on as a guest and I don't remember the context of exactly what we were talking about, but he was like ... he didn't even mention your name. He said, "There's this guy who was at HubSpot and he 2X'd their conversions." And it was so funny because HubSpot is a company that is known for being good at maximizing conversions. Like that's what they're all about is lead generation. And so, to know that there was an outside expert who came in and helped HubSpot take it to the next level - that immediately caught my attention and I was like, "Ooh, who is this guy?" And that was when I think it was Andy who chimed in and said, "That guy happens to be Joel." So, I would love to hear this story of what you did at HubSpot. We could start with what was it? Problem-solution-results or you tell a story that makes it interesting. Joel: Yeah. Well, before I dive into that piece, I want to make one thing really clear, because I love the fact that people are talking about it. This was such a rare opportunity to come into a situation and work with a company who is known for their lead gen. I want to make sure people understand that this is not something that I did alone. There's a great team there. People like Pam Vaughan were really instrumental. Austin Knight who was doing their design at the time was so instrumental. So this was definitely a team effort and I couldn't have done it alone. And it was a fantastic kind of case study, I guess, as we'll dive into here, in what can happen when you've got a whole team of people committed to doing this and committing to getting it right. So with that as the backstory, I want to kind of lead up into how this happened. So I had known Matt Barby for some time outside of that context before he was even at HubSpot. And so Matt and I had kind of chatted on Twitter during my agency days and we just continued to have a casual friend relationship. When Matt went into HubSpot, something he identified really quickly was despite the fact that yes, they are known for lead acquisition and they're quite good at this whole inbound mentality, he saw opportunity for them to grow. Opportunity for someone else to come in and objectively look at what they were doing and make some recommendations. And so because he'd followed me along, he knew where I was at in my career, which was I was working with one or more software companies on this type of thing. And so we decided, "Okay, well, we don't have buy in for the full project from the outset." You can imagine that for a company like HubSpot, they've got this brilliant team and there's a lot of moving pieces. So we thought, let's just focus on doing one section at the beginning. So originally, I got to work with Matt on revamping the CRM page. So just that product. What I introduced there with Matt was a very customer driven approach to writing copy. Customer driven research. So we were doing things like running a customer survey. And we were looking at things like, when people talk about the CRM out in the wild, what are they saying? What benefits are they mentioning? What pain points are they saying that it solved? And how does that stack up against how the company itself is talking about things on this CRM page? And so as we dug into this customer research, and as we pulled in the data from these surveys, we learned a lot of things. We learned, for example, that there was some language customers were using about the outcomes they achieved that we could pull in and we could put into the headlines. We learned that the things that the company thought was really important as far as features to be emphasizing, didn't necessarily align with what customers thought was important and the features they wanted emphasized. So, we revamped that landing page, saw positive uptake and that was the buy in that Matt needed. So, from there, I got a chance to be brought in for the whole big website project, which as you can imagine was a big endeavor with a short timeline. HubSpot wanted to have a brand new site ready for their INBOUND Conference. So our timeline was about 2.5 to three months to do the whole thing. Kathleen: What? Joel: Yeah. Kathleen: Oh, my God. Joel: Yeah. And that's why I say, you can imagine it took a village. I cannot pretend like I just was the hero riding in on the white horse. It took everybody being committed, and Kieran Flannigan and all those guys were there and present and so instrumental. I want to break down the process we used a little bit more to get the result that we got and how we did this on a scale. We took what we did with the CRM page, but we took it some steps further. So what we want to do when we're working on conversion copy, you can only sell to a customer you really understand. Everyone talks about understanding your customer but hardly any companies actually put the rubber to the road and do what it takes to do that. So again, we had a tight timeline, but thankfully HubSpot has got a huge customer base. So we ran some surveys to learn about how people were using it, whether or not they understood what the products could do for them and what the role of each was. HubSpot had recently split into these three products and the historical perception was that it was one thing. It was just HubSpot Marketing, but now they had HubSpot Sales and HubSpot Marketing and HubSpot CRM. And these are just different products. So we looked at customer surveys, and we asked questions like "What was going on in your life that led you to look for this solution?" And then we asked "How do you use this solution day to day?" to get them talking about the problems they solve with it. And then we got them to force rank the different features of the products they used by what was most important to them, again giving us a hierarchy for how we organize the page so people see that. The second kind of interesting thing we did that I always, whenever I give a talk on this, I always recommend companies do because it's so easy and it can be free, is we made sure that we went and looked at their chat logs. You can launch chat on your site tomorrow. It's dead simple. A lot of people are hesitant, because they're like, "Well, I can't monitor it 24 hours." You don't have to. Just make yourself commit to making yourself or your team available to do chat for a two week period and I promise you're going to be tempted to continue. After that point, you're going to want to make it a priority. But we looked at their chat logs, and we were looking for questions that came up again and again. Because those questions would be the things that the copy of their website wasn't doing a great job of answering. So if people are constantly asking questions like, "Which of the three products do I need to accomplish X?" Kathleen: Yeah. Joel: We found out really quickly that there was some confusion in the market about which product was right for each and how they interplayed and that sort of thing. So we started getting some insight into where people are at, what awareness level they're at, and what they're struggling with. We took all that information, combined it with the survey data and then worked closely with the internal HubSpot team and Austin -- as I mentioned, just probably the best UX designer I've ever had the privilege to work with -- and we started revamping the pages around addressing customer questions, around addressing features and benefits in a hierarchical way that met what the customer wanted to see and needed to see first. And then probably the most impactful thing we did, and I think it's still live on the site to this day (as you can imagine HubSpot's continually evolving) was we found some great language for talking about the way that their new tool suite worked. And so that's where the lines like "HubSpot tools are powerful on their own and even better together" come from. And we started being able to break down what each one was for and the benefits of each and then once you combine them, how they work well together. So clarity just went up and up and up. People started to finally get the picture of what HubSpot is today. Kathleen: That's really interesting. Let's go back to how you gather data because what I find interesting is you had a 2.5 to three month time frame for this massive website redesign. And having been through enough of these projects, I mean, I know that lots of people would hear that and it would feel like their hair was on fire and they just had to start writing and building pages from the day that the project began. But you guys stopped and slowed yourself down and did some homework. What I think is really interesting is not only did you do the surveys, which I feel like there's definitely people out there who do that, but I love the notion that your data already exists and you can find it by looking at the chat logs and looking specifically at the questions. Were there other existing sources of data that you drew upon? Joel: Yeah. Kathleen: And how long did this research process take? Because I can imagine you were under pressure to get it done pretty quickly. Joel: Yeah, really, really great question. I talked about surveys already and when you've got the customer base of a HubSpot, you can do that really quickly. But I should mention, you don't need 2,000 responses. Our threshold online is if we can get 1,000 or sorry, 100 really good responses. After that, you start seeing kind of diminishing returns. Chat logs were available to us, but other places that more companies who aren't at HubSpot's level can go are things like your testimonials, your reviews, and your case studies. We talked to sales. We interviewed their internal team. We asked sales and support, like, "What questions do you get all the time? What do you find yourself constantly having to explain that you wish you didn't have to constantly explain? So, myself and Josh Garofalo -- who I brought into the project to help me kind of cover the huge scope of it, because I couldn't possibly write all the pages alone -- interviewed that internal team. Often what our role becomes or what my role becomes in projects like this, is I'm unifying departments. Because they're all great at their own thing, and they all understand their own area, but sales might not have talked to customer support in a while. And marketing might not have talked to sales in a while. We can pull all these perspectives together, and then present to them and say, "Here's where you guys are actually at and where you're creating problems for the other side or where they're having an opportunity that you're not capitalizing on." So talking to your sales team, looking at existing reviews and testimonials to see what are these people already talking about, how are they talking about it -- those are existing data sources that are already there. One thing I want to drop as well. If you don't have a lot of these, go look at your competitors. And positive reviews are one thing for them, but go look at their negative reviews. Because those are things that you can exploit and position yourself against. So if, for example, people are saying, "Well, this solution is really slow and clunky." You can emphasize that you're agile and fast and easy to use. So by getting kind of a landscape of what your competitors struggle with, it also helps you understand how you can position yourself against them. Kathleen: That is a great idea. It's interesting because I feel like a lot of companies do the opposite, which is they look at the competitors but they look at the competitor websites. And they look at what the competitors are saying they do, as opposed to looking at what the customers feel that they don't do well. The result, when you look at your competitors and try to emulate them, is everybody starts to sound the same. Joel: Totally. Kathleen: And that actually suppresses conversions instead of improving them. Joel: There's this crazy fallacy that companies have that somehow their competitor knows what they're doing. They don't. I've written for the competitors. I've come into situations where I have written for both sides, the people being evaluated and the people being ... Often they're starting from the same point. Every company is just trying to figure it out. Just because someone launches a timer on their homepage, they didn't necessarily do that because it works. They're just trying stuff to see what works. Kathleen: They're throwing a bunch of darts at the wall to see what sticks. Joel: Completely. I would say more companies don't know what they're doing than really do, because why I'm so excited about conversion optimization and conversion copywriting as a whole, is I very much see what I'm doing now as in the same vain as where SEO was eight to ten years ago or inbound marketing was five to eight years ago or whatever it might be. It's still so young and so much opportunity and companies are waking up to the value of this. The tools are getting cheaper, the methodology is getting very defined. It's a fantastic time for companies to start thinking about this and to be moving ahead because we're getting to the point where if you're not, your competitor is. But there's still so much time to move and be the first to really measure and test and do this well. Kathleen: Oh, I couldn't agree more. CRO, conversion rate optimization, there's so much buzz and interest around it but there are so few people who really can claim to be experts in it, with true experience. One thing I want to talk about... so we start with all the homework you need to do before you can even sit down and put pen to paper or virtual pen to paper, however you decide to do it. Then there's really understanding the audience. There's the insights that come out of that. Obviously what you've talked about is to truly write for the audience but are there also certain universal truths or rules in terms of either how you structure copy on a page? I'm thinking of Joanna Wiebe who has her "problem-agitation-solution" formula or certain words that you should or should not use. Are there those universal truths out there that we should know about? Joel: Yeah. You know, everybody wants there to be this formula or this code. Plug in X, get out Y, but I think even Joanna would tell you the PAS, the problem agitation solution, that's a fantastic framework that can do brilliantly in some contexts and miserably in others. Joanna uses it all the time for emails and email series and that kind of thing. It works great. Let's put it in this context. There's different stages of awareness. So, if your customer already knows your brand and they already know they're sold on you, then a problem-agitation-solution format is just wasting their time because all they want to know is the deal. So, they just want to see okay, $50 off, boom. I know the deal. I know the value. I'm there. So, for that audience, a different formula entirely works. Whereas if someone is completely ... You know, they don't understand their pain even yet, they're still coming into the point where they realize that they've got a problem, then that pain can be addressed better. But there isn't just this sort of absolute truth. I think there's guidelines, there's best practices. For example, on language, there's some misconceptions. You can go read a bunch of blog posts that say never use jargon or never use a cliché or never use an acronym. Well, even in my work for InsightSquared, their audience uses and loves and understands acronyms. If we don't use acronyms, we're the weirdo. We're the ones who don't look like we understand the niche. If there is an absolute truth that I've found, if there are things that I can say every time, 100% of the time go and do this, it's you cannot be in the business of conversion without being in the business of talking to customers and having structured, documented conversations with them. You can't do it. You can guess, you can pull levers on a wall, you can change button color aimlessly, but you can't be in the business of writing conversion copy or optimizing your copy if you're trying to cut customers out of the equation and not spend time talking to them or researching them. It sounds so intuitive, but I guarantee there are companies listening to this where their methodology right now for how they come up with new copy is to huddle in a board room, copy up with a new tagline that they all feel is clever and represents management's vision, and never talk to a single customer until it launches. So, I wish I could tell you there are frameworks for these things, but there's best practices. It's more like a journey of well, if X, then Y. If you understand this piece then try this. But there's no one black and white this definitely works or this definitely doesn't work. Kathleen: So, when you develop that understanding of the customer, at some point you do have to sit down and write. The way you write and the volume of writing you do has to also be in alignment with the actual visual design of the page. Can you talk a little bit about how you think front end designers and content creators should work together on these projects? Which comes first? The chicken or the egg? Joel: Yeah. I'm so glad that you're asking about this because this honestly to me is what made the HubSpot project successful. When you've got a timeline like that, first, let's establish that if there is an absolute, its that copy should always lead design. You cannot just pop words into a pretty picture, otherwise you may be cramming a story into a frame it wasn't fit for. We knew that. We also knew we couldn't wait for copy to be done or design wouldn't have time to do it. So, the process that we used, and what made this successful, is that what you can do is you can iterate. So, when you understand the customer and when you've got a good understanding of "Okay, they're pain aware or solution aware or brand aware," then you know okay, you can define together with design. You can say, "We know these are the types of sections we're going to need to cover. We know this is the flow we're going to need to cover them in. We don't have specific copy yet but we know right now for example, we need a hero section. After that we need about a paragraph of narrative to agitate the pain. Then we're going to need this section on emphasizing particular features that solve that pain." So, when you've got an understanding of the customer you can sit down with design. What we did is we came up with a base framework, a base wire frame for the different types of pages on the site. In some cases you can template this a bit. So, one of the people that the project could never have been achieved without was Pamela Vaughan. Kathleen: I love her. Can I just say? I have to stop you for one second. I'm a huge fan girl of Pamela Vaughan's, because I've attended a number of her presentations and as a marketer, you can go to lots of conference presentations that are full of fluff and lots of "You should do this for this reason," but not a lot of "And here's how you actually do it." She gives the most detailed, useful, actionable information of ... Probably she's in the top three of anybody I've seen present. So, that's the end of my fan rant on Pam Vaughan. Joel: No, it's well earned. I mean, literally we could not have done it without her. She wrote a huge swath of the copy that ... You know, like the individual features pages. Those were Pam's. So, we worked together to define the template for common pages and then we were able to use that same template to kind of inform. So, we started with the base wire framed together with copy and design. Design was able to go away and mock something up while copy was working on our piece of the puzzle. Then we converged together, sent our wires to design and they would make our wire frames better and send it back. So, it was an iterative, collaborative process. That's the way it has to be. I love Unbounce and I love these companies that have these templated landing pages. They're great as a starting point, but if you're switching your brain off and not defining who the audience is or what they need to hear and just picking a template because "Oh I like the way that looks," you're missing the point. I think Unbounce does a good job of educating people there. Yeah, the design piece was a collaborative, iterative thing and for anyone listening who's thinking "I want to get into conversion copywriting" or "I want to hire a conversion copywriter," look for someone who's not just going to hand you a Word doc. Learn to wire frame. Josh and I both use Balsamiq. That was a common tool of communication so writing could be on the same page as design. It's a skill that I didn't anticipate ever having to learn as a writer, and it's one I'm loving exploring because the more I understand how the design interplays with the words that I write, the more effective I can be, and the more designers are going to like to work with me. So, the two are unbreakable, and actually Austin wrote a counter piece to my piece from design's perspective, so you can go read my piece on the HubSpot blog and you can read his. You can see where we both came from and how we made it work. Kathleen: That's great. I love that you mentioned Balsamiq because my next question was going to be are there certain tools that you find are really helpful through this process? It's funny, I'm not a designer either but I've had to create wire frames. There are many wire framing tools out there. We have one that our actual design team uses. I don't remember, I think it's called Moqups and it's super detailed. It's amazing, but it's too much for me. It would be like me going into InDesign and trying to create a webpage. I like Balsamiq because it's really streamlined and simple, and for a non-designer it's a great wire framing tool. Any other tools that you have used either in that project or in other projects that are really helpful for this kind of thing? Joel: Yeah. Basically, so for mock ups and wire frames Balsamiq has been the tool that I've found easiest to use, most versatile for me. I know the platform inside and out. I've also heard really good things about InFlow. So, inFlow is another one where you can experiment with that. I'm not an affiliate for any of the tools I'm about to mention, so none of this is a paid ad but I genuinely love them. Typeform is what we constantly use for surveys. Fantastic interface. Fantastic ability to use logic jumps to show different questions to different groups, which when you're segmenting information like we were was totally invaluable to be able to just naturally do that. So, Typeform is great. For chat, the one I always recommend to companies is Drift. Drift continues to innovate, continues to do really cool things and on their basic free plan you can get your feet wet, you can control manually the hours it's live and not live so you don't have to worry about being present at four in the morning. So, Typeform and Drift. Balsamiq is really helpful. These days I've been using Hotjar to look at both heat maps and recorded user sessions and I've been really pleased taht they just announced some innovations today where they can capture more in those recorded user sessions, so that's really exciting to me. We can get a deeper look at how people are actually interacting. So, those are kind of my old standbys. Then I'm increasingly looking at Google Analytics, which you know, it's kind of people are like ... It's been around forever but people still don't have a clue the fraction of the power you can get out of Analytics. One guy that I really admire in this space who is worth following and learning from is Michael Aagaard. He just knows the analytics piece really well. I think he would even tell you, he comes by it honestly, he's not necessarily like a numbers and analytics guy but he's found all these cool shortcuts and custom reports and ways to very quickly get at data that can highlight a problem so that you can respond quickly. So, that's kind of my stack. That's my toolkit. Occasionally you'll see things like FullStory or whatever, but I think that's one thing I want to communicate, is you don't need to have tens of thousands of dollars of budget to do this type of work. You just need to have the willingness to make the most of these free or basic plans for the period that you're using them. The barrier to entry to doing this stuff is only getting lower. The tools are only getting better. So, there's really no excuse for companies to just be turning a blind eye to this and saying well it's too complicated or too complex. No way. You can start doing this stuff tomorrow. Kathleen: Yeah, you could do it all probably in Google Docs too if you really had to. Joel: Totally. I used to wire frame in Word with like tables. I mean, it's not as pretty as Balsamiq. It's not as easy to communicate, but it gets the job done. If you're going to start there, start there. Just go with what you know and evolve, but just get started. Kathleen: Yeah. Absolutely. I love all the tools you mentioned. We use a lot of those. On my team we use Drift. We have Drift on our site, so I'm absolutely going to go back and look at the chat logs after we stop talking. You know, a number of those other tools ... One of the other ones that we're huge fans of, which if you haven't checked it out you might want to, is GatherContent. It's awesome. Our content manager has hacked it in a way that when we do website pages she's able to create blocks for the different content pieces that are needed and she can add in background on personas and guidance on how it should be written. It's really cool for content collaboration. Joel: Yeah. That actually ... Kathleen: That was my addition to the list. Joel: That reminds me, there's one more. It's funny I forgot. The tool that I'm really, really excited about I haven't had the chance to use it as much as I'd like but RightMessage. Brennan Dunn launched this tool. They continue to launch all these different sub tools, but RightMessage, if you believe in conversion optimization, if you believe that this is going to be important and integral for the future, RightMessage is what comes next. It's personalization. I have yet to see a tool working harder to make that easier, working harder to make it more intuitive, to make it more accessible. So, I'm really, really excited about what Brennan and his team are doing over there. I'm trying to bake it into my proposals more often because more people need to use this stuff. Kathleen: Oh, I'll definitely check that out. Now, circling back to the project at HubSpot. You somehow got this website rewritten, you and the other team of people in this two to three month time period. The new site launched. I've heard lots of different numbers thrown around about the results you guys got. Can you break it down for us? What was the change? Joel: Yeah. I'll pull those numbers up here, but the biggest change was we effectively doubled site wide conversions. So, on the biggest broadest level across all of their conversions, we saw a doubling there.  Then, to we break down some of the more specific conversions, HubSpot started seeing two times the inbound call volume. So, not just conversions on the site. Twice as many people phoning in. They saw a 35% increase in demo requests. They saw a 27% increase in product sign ups. For a company the size of HubSpot, with the traffic of HubSpot, those are some serious, serious numbers. So, the efficacy of having customer driven copy and really a design team who cares about conversion and about telling the story the right way, and then a support team and a sales team who are open about what's working for them and how to nail that down, it all comes together to create impacts like that. Kathleen: So, I have to ask. To what do you attribute that increase in inbound call volume? Because that's an interesting stat that I was not expecting you to mention. Joel: Yeah. That one was surprising to me too. You know, if you haven't ever had Matt Barby on the program, having him come in to talk about attribution and tracking and that sort of thing I think would be fascinating. Kathleen: Oh, I would love that. Matt, if you're listening, call me! Joel: Yeah. So, I mean, Matt. Matt would be the guy to really help pin that down. Not only did we change the site, and the copy, and the way we presented their products, during this time they also started playing around with kind of a freemium model and looking at some of these more freemium-type calls, so it's possible that maybe kind of having that angle correlated with more people being willing to check it out. I really do think, though, that it was the clarity, it was the ability for people to understand on their own very quickly how the different pieces of the tool connected to feel comfortable enough to make that call so they wouldn't feel like an idiot, or they wouldn't feel they'd have to spend all day trying to just sort up with sales, getting a sales pitch on everything, they could ask more direct questions about the things they actually needed. So, that's my hypothesis, that's what I would guess. But it would be fascinating for you to have somebody on the in-house side come in. And they continue to do some really cool and innovative things, and the site's changed and grown since then, so I'm sure they'll have even more stories. Kathleen: Yeah, there's so many very, very, very smart people on that team. Joel: Mm-hmm. Kathleen: I would take any one of them as a guest. So I assume that some of the lessons that came out of that particular project, or things you have applied in other places, fast forward to today and are there certain things that you're really excited about when it comes to conversion copyrighting, or conversion rate optimization? Joel: Yeah, two things in particular. So the first is that personalization piece. With RightMessage, like I mentioned, that's becoming more possible. What I'm really fascinated by is just before, if you wanted to have different conversations with individuals, it was clunky. You had to create a whole bunch of different stuff, just even pages upon pages, and you had to really do a ton of work to try to make it happen technically. So it wasn't always possible, and I love that the bar for that is coming down. I'm really having a fun time learning more and more about how to segment and identify the differences in user groups. So, that piece, I think, is so important. It is the future of this stuff, and I'm really excited about that. For me personally, where I'm seeing the most growth for myself, this year, interestingly, I've made more off of audits and reviews than any writing. So, I still continue to offer writing, but I'm doing more and more analysis and helping companies identify what's going wrong and how they can fix it with copywriting, and UX exchanges, and things like that. So for me, what I'm excited about and continue to grow in to, it's nothing sexy, but Google Analytics. Just unpacking the power available on Google Analytics, and how to deploy that properly, and the types of things you can learn. I want to share ... I'll make it quick, but I want to share a quick story, just kind of the stuff you can learn when you're paying attention. So, I was working with a client, and I was doing a review of their site. They offer divorce packages in the UK. One of those stats we found that was fascinating to us through Google Analytics that sent up a little red flag was men converted better than women, and we know that more women initiate divorce than men. So it was kind of like, that's an oddity. Something is amiss here. So, long story short, through Google Analytics, a combination of looking at Google Analytics, the times people were actually on the site, combined with chat logs to learn what challenges were unique to women, we were able to come up with a cool hypothesis that women are in more financially vulnerable situations, they're working multiple jobs, so they want to convert in later hours, but chat was off during those hours. Kathleen: Oh, interesting. Joel: So through that, we figured out well let's test extending chat hours and see what the impact is. So, stuff like that just gets me pumped up because it's ... The amount of stuff you can learn when you're paying attention is fascinating. Kathleen: Oh, I love it. I love ... I always say I'm a marketing nerd, and I feel a sense of kinship with you on this because when I discover the little nuggets like that, it does, it gets me super excited. And I'll admit, I definitely am not as much of an expert in Google Analytics as I would like to be. I feel like every time I start to get really proficient, it's like the grocery store when they reorganize it, and then you don't know where the milk is. Joel: Right. Kathleen: Google Analytics likes to do that to us sometimes, too, but it's like an ice berg, and we kind of see the tip, but there's so much there under the surface, so much power and so much data. But I think I agree, there is so much to be learned. Joel: Totally. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: So two questions that I ask all of my guests. I want to make sure I ask you before we wrap up today. One is, company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Joel: The women are crushing it. All of the people that I- Kathleen: Yes. Joel: Most admire doing this right now are all women, and they're doing brilliant jobs in really different ways. So as an individual, someone who recently came on my radar and now I'm so excited to be able to collaborate with is a woman named Val Geisler. I'm not sure how you pronounce her last name. She does email onboarding series and optimizes those. What she's done, you know, she's a one woman shop, so she doesn't have the ability to publish thousands of things, but she does such targeted, relevant content. She does these really cool email tear downs of companies people know and respect. Her candor in those, you know, she's not rude or mean, but she's also very honest and very great at exposing it. "Here's what they're doing. Here's what they could do better." So Val is doing fantastic. Claire and Gia at Forget the Funnel, so they've launched this really ... Like, they are, to me, a lot of people ... we talk about blogs, we talk about e-books, but what we don't often talk about as much is building yourself a platform, giving people a reason to want to listen to you and come to you, and see you as an authority. That's what Claire and Gia have done. Two extremely bright, very talented women, who have launched this thing, and created this avenue to get exactly the right customers that they want to work with, exactly the right sets of people to listen to what they have to say. They do these great webinars, and they do these great interviews. So those would be two examples. Then one group of fellows, I think who is doing is good, is Grow and Convert, and they're putting out some really great case studies, and really great content, and really great pieces that are helping Mark [Rozano 00:38:06] and myself just stay relevant and level up what they're doing. Kathleen: Okay, what's really cool about what you just said is those are three groups of people, places, brands, etc. that are totally new to me. I love when I get answers like that, and I have new places to check out. I'm particular interested in these email onboarding series right now, because we're revamping ours, so I will definitely be checking that one out. Second question, and I'm going to narrow it down. I usually ask people, with digital marketing changing so quickly, how do you stay up to date. But I want to get a little bit more specific than that with you, because I'm intrigued that you're focused on conversion rate optimization. I want to ask you how you stay educated for yourself, and build your skills in the field of conversion rate optimization? Joel: Yeah. So there's some really important sources that I consult and I look to, just to see what they're publishing. So, Joanna Wiebe, obviously. Anytime she's publishing a case study, or puts out a course, that's relevant to me. I'm almost always going to buy it. I'm really tuned in with her, and she's got tons of free content, but even if you can find her legacy content. It's just as relevant as it was then. Conversion XL continues to publish really valuable things. So, that's been really helpful. To me, in particular, and Michael Aagaard, like I said, he's done some recent webinars and that sort of thing. Expanding beyond that though, what's been really important for me in this field, and I think anyone coming in to should know, is that it is still young, and there is so much bad information out there where's it's like we change a button color and things would- Kathleen: Yeah. Joel: You can really educate yourself the wrong way, or you can educate yourself into a corner where you're like, "Well here are the rules. And here's what worked well in this situation," and you can treat it like gospel and try to apply it everywhere. So what's been really valuable to me is I've got Mastermind, just a little group of people in the same space, and we compare notes. We talk about what's going on with each other, and what they're learning, what they're coming across. In this industry, I think in all industries, it's valuable. But in this niche in particular, being tuned into what's going on with others, and what they're learning, and the context they learn it in is really important. Then the last one I'll mention is a site called GoodUI.com. He publishes a lot of, kind of tests and examples of stuff that people are trying out. Actually, one more that I really want to mention, and I'm excited to mention because it's not going to be on hardly anybody's radar, but I guarantee it's about to be on everybody's radar- Kathleen: Ooh. Joel: There's a company called User Insights. They have launched just the best tool for user testing that I have ever seen. Small batch user testing, very targeted, way cheaper than the competition, just as good, faster, but that service aside, that's really exciting. But they are doing some very interesting stuff. They haven't launched it all yet, but they're doing some very interesting stuff with case studies and actually testing in context a lot of different things that I know people are like, "Well should I have this? Or should I have that?" They're doing a lot of that practically now with ... across multiple sites, and verifiable outcomes. So they will be on people's radar because they're doing it at a scale I don't think anybody else is yet. So, I'm learning a bit from the people running that quietly in the background, and they're about to blow up. I'm sure of it. Kathleen: I can't wait to check all of this out. I feel like that's going to keep me busy for a while. That's great. I assume that everything you've learned through all of these projects, these engagements that you've done, you are bringing to bear with Case Study Buddy to help people improve their case studies. And you have a team there, right? Joel: Yeah, so Case Study Buddy is a different kind of a venture for me. Like I said, what excites me are these content assets that are easy to get wrong, super valuable when done well, companies struggle with the process, the strategy, the ownership of it. And so I've brought kind of all this stuff I'm doing in conversion. I'm trying to bring into the elements of how do we write something that appeals to multiple different scanners and readers and user groups, and how do we educate our clients on how to use these? For example, something I learned recently that I found fascinating is lots of companies are doing cold outreach. They're sending these cold emails. I can't remember the name of the company who did this study, but they tested out what is the impact of mentioning a famous "customer", so just a known customer in these cold outreach emails. And they've tripled the number of interested responses. Kathleen: Wow. Joel: So, the power is there, and if you can imagine attaching a case study, the impact that would have. Yeah, it's a different adventure. I've gotten to build a team and work outside of myself, and all the joys and pains that come with that. Yeah, it's been really fun, and that's going to be, like I mentioned, I'm still going to be doing this conversion work and that will be my bread and butter, especially on the back half of this year, growing Case Study Buddy, and getting it in front of more people and growing that initiative is high on my priority list. Kathleen: I can't wait to see where you take it. It sounds like you're on to something here. Joel: Thank you. Kathleen: Well, I know I've had a million questions throughout this, and I've had the opportunity to have you answer many of them, but if somebody's listening, and they wanted to reach out to you and ask a question, or get more information on something you've talked about today, what's the best way for them to find you online? Joel: Yeah, so I'm very active on Twitter. I do my best to respond to everything that comes in, whether it's a DM or a Tweet, or whatever. You can find me @JoelKlettke. That's one way to get at me fast. You can also email me. You can check out my ancient and desperately-in-need-of-being-updated site at BusinessCasualCopyrighting.com. Don't judge me. I built in 2013. It's due for an upgrade, but you can email me through there. I'm happy to field questions and if there's something you're struggling with. Then surprisingly, I always kind of shun the platform, but the past two months I've gotten a ton of value out of having conversations on LinkedIn. So, another space that you can see. I publish more there, actually, these days than my own blog. I do little snippets, and pushes, and tips and tricks there. I always try to make sure I'm responding to people who come through that channel, too. Kathleen: Yeah, LinkedIn- Joel: Those are kind of the three places. Kathleen: LinkedIn's making a comeback big time. Joel: Oh, huge. Kathleen: A lot of people are mentioning that on this podcast. Joel: They went from being the platform nobody wanted to talk about, to the platform everybody's publishing on. Kathleen: Yeah. Joel: It's remarkable. Even begrudgingly, there's still the joke about wanting to connect on LinkedIn, and after the apocalypse, only those emails remain. But joke all you want, they've become a serious contender. It's amazing that that team has done. Kathleen: Definitely. I agree. Well, thank you. This has been fascinating. I've learned so much. I have a feeling I'm going to learn a lot more when I go check out all those websites you mentioned. So I really appreciate you spending the time on the podcast. If you're listening and you liked what you heard, you learned something, I'm going to ask if you would please take a moment and go on iTunes, or Stitcher, or whatever platform you choose to listen to the podcast on, and leave a review. It would mean a lot. Finally, if you know someone doing kickass inbound marketing work, Tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because I would love to interview them. Thank you so much, Joel. Joel: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It was really fun.