Podcast appearances and mentions of clare carr

Learn how Clare Carr, VP of Marketing at Chief, combines creativity and data in content marketing to reach and move her target audience.

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

Parse.ly's marketing team cut its staff back, reduced PR spending by 50% and scaled back content creation by half, all while increasing website traffic and leads. Here's how they did it... This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Parse.ly VP of Marketing Clare Carr shares how her team revamped its approach to marketing and content creation and drove increases in traffic, leads and editorial coverage by productizing the company's data. Today, Parse.ly's unique, data-backed insights into how audiences are consuming publishers' stories are sought after by journalists and media companies alike, fueling the marketing funnel and driving growth for this software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford Connecticut and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with special guests including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS".  Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my conversation with Clare include: Media companies use Parse.ly to understand how their stories are performing. Parse.ly has always analyzed the data from its customer portals (on the order of 100 million articles per month) and aggregated it to extract insights. Early on, the company published these insights in something called The Authority Report, which was distributed as a PDF. Now, it has built a dashboard, called Currents, that is updated in real time and which can be accessed by anyone on the web. Back when they were publishing The Authority Report, the team at Parse.ly used a public relations firm to send the report out to journalists, and it generated significant interest and press coverage. The challenge they had was that journalists increasingly came to them looking for information on specific data sets and timeframes, and that was time consuming to create. Now that they have Currents, the Parse.ly team has been able to reduce its spending on PR by around 50% by promoting the data through their own bi-weekly email newsletter. Clare estimates that every time the newsletter goes out, the company gets two to three editorial placements in the press.  Parse.ly's data shows that, on average, publishers get the bulk of their website traffic from Google and Facebook. But Clare points out that there are some other emerging referrers worth watching, including Flipboard and Instagram. By focusing on creating content that centers around the insights gleaned from its data (rather than other topics of interest to its audience), Parse.ly has been able to cut back its marketing team and produce half as much content each month while still seeing its website traffic grow. Clare conducted an experiment where she had her team stop producing new blog content for a month. Overall website traffic didn't decline but blog traffic and leads dropped to one third of their usual numbers during this time, proving that the articles the team was producing were getting results. To support the marketing team's consistent need for data and insights, Clare hired a data analyst who now works full time within Parse.ly's marketing team. The Currents product is a freemium offering that serves as a strong lead generator for the company. It just came out of beta in the fall of 2018 so the team is still learning how their customers use it and developing upsell strategies. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the Parse.ly website Check out Parse.ly's Currents product Connect with Clare Carr on LinkedIn Subscribe to the Parse.ly blog Subscribe to Parse.ly's data newsletter Listen to the podcast to hear exactly how Clare and the team at Parse.ly has gotten incredible marketing results by leveraging data. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Clare Carr, who is the VP of marketing for Parse.ly. Welcome Clare. Clare Carr (Guest): Hi. Thanks, and welcome to our office Kathleen. Kathleen and Clare having fun while recording this episode together in Clare's NYC office Kathleen: I know. This is a first for the Inbound Success podcast. This is the first time in now 94 episodes that I am doing an interview with my guest and actually in the same room with them. Clare: We're here. You can't see it, but we're here. I'm very excited that I'm joining you for this one. Kathleen: Yeah, and amazingly, being a totally non-technical person, we somehow figured out how to make the video and the audio all work, even though we're in the same place. So I'm going to call that a win. But I'm really excited to have you as a guest for a couple of reasons. One is that, full disclosure, IMPACT is a client of Parse.ly. We use Parse.ly for our publisher analytics. We're building a brand publisher business in the company, and we felt like it would deliver a different set of insights and value to us than the other platforms we were using, so it's great to use in conjunction with them. So for that reason I'm excited to talk to you more. But also, my team and I voraciously consume your content. We are trying to be as sponge-like as possible when it comes to learning about how you build a media company, and I think that Parse.ly does a particularly good job of publishing content that delivers a lot of really good insight from that. Clare: Thank you. I've spent almost six years now trying to do that, so it's always good to hear when people see it. I think one of my favorite things is when a team member comes to me and says ... We have numbers and data, it's great, but I think one of the best feelings is a team member saying, "I was at a conference and so-and-so said how much they love our newsletter," or, "So-and-so said how much this post helped them talk to their boss about something." So we put a lot of heart and soul and effort into it, and we have numbers for it, and we also have emotions tied to it. So thank you for fulfilling my emotional side today. Kathleen: I was going to say, any good marketer, you have to have the data, but the best marketers I know are also very emotionally invested in the success of their strategy. I love that, and I can relate. About Parse.ly and Clair Kathleen: Before we dive into what Parse.ly is doing, and what you're doing with the marketing strategy here, maybe you could just talk a little bit about what Parse.ly is for those who are not familiar with it, as well as yourself and your background and how you came to be doing what you're doing right now. Clare: Yeah. Parse.ly works with ... Actually you are such a great example of a Parse.ly client. Typically we're understood very well in the media industry. A lot of media companies use our platform to understand how their stories are doing. I think your typical media reader, if you're not someone that works in the media industry, just assumes that every media company knows how many page views an article is getting, or that it's really easy for them to figure out which author is getting more readership, or more engagement. It's actually really challenging, and it's a big technical lift for those companies. So what we've done over the past 10 years or so is provide a way, and maybe someone's out there, I'm going to just preempt you, you're thinking, "Doesn't Google Analytics do that, or other systems?" And they do, you're not wrong, but they provide it for someone who's very trained in Google analytics, they provide it for an analyst team, or maybe a product team. But your typical writer or editor or content creator, they just don't have the bandwidth to understand an analytics platform soup to nuts, and they're not trained in it, and maybe they absolutely don't really need to be. So we make it very easy for them to have a data driven culture without needing to teach everyone how to use a very complicated and very technical platform. Kathleen: What you just said really struck a chord with me, because what first drove me to explore Parse.ly as a solution was what I would call my authors. So we do have Google Analytics, we also use HubSpot as your content management system, so we have a lot of data. And we actually have a team that is, I would say, fairly sophisticated in its ability to use data, because we're all marketers by trade. Clare: I was going to say, marketers, way more sophisticated than the typical media industry employee. Kathleen: Yeah. We're marketers writing about marketing, so it's not that we can't dive into these platforms. But the one thing that I was having a really hard time solving for was buy-in. Because unlike a traditional media organization, we don't necessarily hire a lot of people just to write for us. We have a requirement that everybody that works for our company, no matter what you do, whether you're the comptroller, whether you're a client-facing marketing account manager, or whether you're the head of editorial content, all of us, including me, has to write for our publication. And we try to work with them to find topics that, obviously, fit with what they understand and know. But I think our biggest challenge, honestly, is buy-in. Some of the team looks at that writing requirements as a burden, and it could be because they don't feel comfortable writing; others look at it and they think, what effect is this having? Like so what? So for me, one of the challenges is, how do I more effectively communicate the value that you as an author or a contributor are delivering to the organization? And the platforms that we had didn't actually give me good information at the author level for what the content was doing and how it's performing, and it didn't give me, as you've pointed out, an easy way for the authors to access it. So one of the biggest things that we did with Parse.ly as soon as we got it was create dashboards for each of our authors. And I love that the system has a way to create a URL that anybody can just plug into a browser, they don't need to be logged in, and they can see the performance of the content that they've written. Clare: Yeah. Just like I was saying before, everyone's ego is wrapped up in it, and when you know there's business value to it, you need to tap into that ego to get them to do things you ... You want it to be win-win. You want them to feel good about it, and then you want it to have an effect. And if you don't have something to show people, if you don't have a way to get them excited, there are big internal comes programs at many companies, and maybe they're not dealing with this exact problem, but that's why they exist. They exist so that you can get your own team excited and motivated and moving in the right direction. And we see that culture shift being ... So this is across industries, it's true in media, it's true of content marketers too, that once they see the data, once they understand it, and the easier you make that for them, the more they're onboard, and the more they're excited to be apart of it. We just hear that again and again, and it's true here too. It's true for my own team. So we create it, and then I make my team look at their own content and their own data, and they get just as excited about it. Kathleen: Yeah. The other interesting thing to me that we've started to layer on top of that is that we have external contributors who are not a part of our company, and obviously giving them access to our Google Analytics wouldn't really make sense, and so it's been a really easy way to communicate to them what they're getting in return for their time and effort that they're putting into creating articles. And then we also have sponsors who pay to contribute sponsored content, and I think having that ROI conversation is a lot easier when they can, on a self-serve basis, go in and see what sort of traction their sponsored articles are getting. Clare: Yeah, and hopefully it's not taking you- Kathleen: No time. Clare: Time to do it, which means- Kathleen: "Set it and forget it," as Ron Popeil would say. Clare: Yeah. And you asked about my background. The other thing I'll add is, I came from a B2B media company called Greentech Media, and it's since been acquired by Wood Mackenzie Verisk Analytics, and they are in the renewable energy technology industry. I was a number of things while I was there, but at the end of my tenure I was the marketing ... What was I? I was director of marketing and operations maybe? I ran a lot of the website promotion and a lot of the ... I started their Twitter feed eight plus years ago. Probably more now. I would go into Google Analytics every month and send out a report, and I understood it and I could sort of tell what was going on. But man, no one else good, or they just didn't have the time, again, to sort of care about it the way I did. And so that's how I found Parse.ly. I actually was a client there, and all of a sudden my editor is having conversations with me that I had been wanting them to have for years, and it was just so exciting to have them be able to understand the data in the way that I always had, but clearly just wasn't accessible to them in any way, shape, or form prior to having Parse.ly. So that was my introduction to the company as a very happy client. Then when they raised their series A, they were looking for their marketing, and I was really excited to focus fully on marketing. I'd been doing a lot of different things, and I really love the aspect of brand, and marrying it with the data side, and lead generation and demand generation, and it's been really fun to work with content creators from Wall Street Journal, to other content marketers. It's just sort of my favorite thing in the world to talk about this kind of stuff all day. How Parse.ly Has Leveraged Insights From Its Data Into Traffic and Leads Kathleen: Yeah, it's so interesting. And I could spend a lot of time singing the praises of Parse.ly, but what I really think is so great is what you guys have done with your data. So you have a lot of different companies that are using your platform, that gives you a certain degree of access to information about how content performs across different industries and topics, et cetera. It was after I became a customer that I started to feel like, I keep seeing Parse.ly's name popping up everywhere. And I really began to consume a ton of content, from case studies that you have on your website, to just news reports I was seeing that featured data that you had about where publisher traffic was coming from by channel, how different social media platforms were performing by publishers. There was just so much good information. So I was really excited to pick your brain on the strategy on that, because it sounds like it's really worked well for you as a company. Clare: Yeah. It started a very long time ago. Even the initial founding of the company, our cofounders were just super interested in how digital content was shaping people's opinions online. So from very early days, even before we had a product running, anything like that, they wanted to know ... I think their original question was actually around the 2008 election, and were more people reading about Obama or were they reading about McCain. And to be honest it was not something they could really answer at the time, but fast-forward 10 years, and that's something that we can absolutely use our data to look at today. And so from a marketing perspective they realized early on that one thing they wanted to do was to have that data available, to look at it, and to be able to answer interesting questions with it. Clare: So I believe our first effort was called ... We called it this for a long time, The Authority Report. And it was sort of your typical PDF, our cofounder and CTO was a part of it, I think we had an engineer working on it, and we looked at sort of the ... It's a simple quote-unquote question, but with a lot of implications of where traffic is coming from. And the very first one we did, Google I think was something like 40% of traffic, Facebook was 5%, 2%. Kathleen: Wow. Clare: It was low. Yeah, it was some sort of not very interesting number. And there was a lot of traffic coming within the network of publishers too, like to each other. And obviously we sort of kept that particular question very top of mind, and then expanded it into all these ... A lot of the strategy is just, keep asking questions. So once we've put that data out there we look at it every quarter. Now we actually have a live dashboard that people can come look at on our website. We have a product that people can actually log into and look up that data for themselves. And then we say, what else do people want to know about it? At a very high level that's how we've grown the content strategy over time. Reducing PR Expenses  Kathleen: When you were talking earlier about how when you first started distributing data ... Let me rephrase that, turning data into stories. Because that's really what you've done, is use the data you have to distill insights and tell a story about that, that's useful to your audience. When you first started talking about that, you mentioned how you were more reliant upon traditional PR to get that out into the world. Can you talk about how that began, and what that evolution's been for you? Clare: Yeah. We, very early on, noticed that when we didn't talk about ourselves, but when we talked out these big companies, like Google and Facebook have sort of been the big two drivers, that people pay more attention to us. So we really wanted to get in that conversation early, and over the years we've worked with a couple different ... We've had our ups and downs with PR. We've really tried to figure it out, and we've always felt that the data was sort of our foot in the door there. So our first goal ... And honestly I can't remember ... I don't think we were working with a PR ... No, we were, we were working with a PR consultant at the time. And we took the PDFs, and we would email them to people, and it was data that these journalists couldn't get anywhere else, and so they started quoting us. And then they knew over time that they could come to us for that stat. And what actually was the biggest pain point for us was, there was a while where we couldn't keep up with the amount of inbound interest in those specific numbers, because the journalists ... We would have it from the quarter before, but when a journalist wanted to write a story about it, they wanted it from the month before, or the very specific timeframe, and that was proving to be really challenging to get in the turnaround that they needed. And frankly a PR firm, or a PR person even, internally, couldn't really help. Kathleen: It would just be a game of telephone. Clare: Right. Call an engineer… "We need this yesterday" ... Kathleen: Right. Actually I should say game of telephone with a 100% markup. Clare: So that was the inspiration for this live dashboard we had, was to say, "This is the number one thing people ask of us." We actually don't want to spend all of our time and effort from a content team and content strategy perspective just saying what these numbers are over and over again, but clearly we want, from a PR perspective, to have them continue to be cited, and our name continue to be in the conversation. And so our senior data scientist decided, you know what, let's make this public. Let's just make it constantly updating. The number of ... People still will write to us, but instead of us having to go and run the numbers, we just point them in the direction of the dashboard, and easy. And that alone has just driven so much trust, and so much ... And then it gets further conversations going, like I said. So then someone will ask a deeper question, because they were able to get the answer to their first question so quickly. Now ... I'm skipping a couple steps here, but we have a newsletter that I lead, and I think when we send a story out through that newsletter, by doing nothing else other than sticking to about a biweekly newsletter schedule, I can count on, about, I would say two to three places minimum. But in really targeted, great outlets that we just adore having our name associated with. And I will say there's no work, quote-unquote now, because we've done all this work for five or six years to get it there. But it's just so exciting to see these publications you respect literally just take your blog post and do something with it, or come back to you and ask a deeper question, or respond to your newsletter and say, "I saw you mention this. Is this noteworthy? Should I cover it?" Clare: And then we have a PR firm that we work with, and they're wonderful, and they don't have to deal with this. So they no longer have to play telephone, they can work on more brand awareness or company initiative PR stories that don't have to deal with data. And from a financial perspective, if they had to be doing the data stories and the company stories, we would have to be paying twice as much. So it's just been a really nice way to keep that cost down, but also still have the effects be X amount what we saw eight years ago. More On Parse.ly's Data Kathleen: For anybody listening who might not understand completely the data that you're talking about, it's data around trends, and what people are writing about and reading, correct? Clare: Yes. Our system analyzes something ... I just saw the stat from our team - something on the order of 100 million articles a month, which is billions of page views, and it's people reading these news websites and content websites and media websites across the world. And so what we then do is say, in our back end system, how many of these people ... Each client can obviously, in their own day by day, "10% of my traffic comes from Facebook, 20 comes from Google, 15 comes from my direct sources," and you can see your own breakdown, but what we're able to do is see that and a network level, and say across the board, it's actually about 23%, I think, comes from Facebook, 50% of external comes from Google. Those are just external refers, not internal. And we can break down to LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, other search platforms. There's a lot of little aggregators that have been really growing in popularity. We like to emphasize that our aggregate numbers aren't things that people should try to match, necessarily, because it really depends on the audience and the type of content you have. But it does give this window into these big platforms, that frankly without this data no one would be able to see. So we are probably the best picture of how Google, and Facebook in particular, but also those other platforms, impact content and media online. And prior to that data, I think people were really unaware of, just fundamentally, how much it's changed the industry. I meant they're aware from an advertising perspective, but it's not just advertising. It's really how these companies are getting their readers. And they've had to adjust to that over time. Kathleen: For me it's been interesting, because obviously we have access, as you said, to our own analytics, and so we have a deep understanding of where our existing traffic is coming from. But I think any organization that wants to grow traffic, the question ... Yes, you can optimize for what you already know, but the bigger opportunity sometimes is what you don't know. I will share that one of the insights we got from looking at your data was how many publishers were seeing an increase in traffic from places like Flipboard. We didn't all of a sudden pivot and put a lot of resources into Flipboard, but I did create Flipboard magazine just as an experiment, just to say hm, let's dip our toes in the water and see what will happen, because it's working for others. It's things like that, that either I might not have been alerted to or it might have taken me a lot longer to make that move, that I think are really interesting opportunities that come out of having access to that aggregated data. Clare: Yeah, I like to think of it as ... A phrase I use is, you can't AB test content. Marketers like to test things, and we all sort of agree fundamentally, we should be, and you have to test these strategies. But there's so many options, there is so many out there, and there are so many things you could be doing. And to have set of data, or a system, to say "Here's your three best bets to try testing in," versus, "Man, I've just got to come up with something," having those three best bets is something that makes me feel much more confident in my strategy, and hopefully what we're providing to other people too. Instagram is the other one that we just had some data out on recently, that I was actually sort of floored by. Because Instagram is this huge platform, 500 million daily users or something like that I think, and they refer this tiny, tiny percentage of traffic back to media sites and to content sites. So you have marketers who are obviously very familiar with maybe their ad platform, maybe their influencer. Some people use influencers, some people don't. But I wanted to go digging for, okay, there's got to be some way of getting traffic from Instagram, just because aggregately it's not happening. And there are, and there are some companies that are seeing good results. And we also found that the link in bio tools are adding a sizable amount of traffic that we really wouldn't have caught if we weren't looking for it, and it was just such an interesting little tidbit. Then when we started talking to the people running these content programs, they're sort of like, "Yeah, without the link in bio tool, we wouldn't ... Between that and stories, those are our two sort of main sources." Then we also got to talk to some of our clients about how they actually are doing their Instagram strategies. So again, it sort of started at data, and then we found this really interesting thing, we got people to pick it up and talk about it in the social media world, and these are people that are on our newsletter list. And then finally we got these really cool examples of what people are actually doing in content on Instagram. And that all flowed from having access to data in the first place. Kathleen: Yeah, that is really fascinating to me, because I've been kind of personally obsessed with exactly that for us. Which is, we've been using Instagram very casually. We use it more as a culture tool and a recruiting tool than anything else. But I've been stalking other publications' link in bio strategies, and I will say personally I go down the link in bio route all the time with The Today Show. They do a really good job with it. And it's something that I would love to use, so it's fascinating to hear that you're seeing... Clare: Yeah. We had a webinar though a while ago, and it's interesting, because it's like from 2017 I think, and it was interesting to listen to them talk about it, because they said something like, "We're noticing this little traffic source called Instagram." And I've heard from them, and I think they actually did a case study with Instagram directly. I think they've just seen huge amounts of success in it. Obviously they're Vogue, they're style and fashion, it really just sort of hits all the notes there in terms of the right audience. But the article I was talking about, we looked at Harvard Business Review, and just even what you can see on their feed, and I just thought their strategy was fascinating. Harvard Business Review is not what I associate with Instagram. Kathleen: Right, not the most visual ... Clare: Yeah. But what I think really works for them is, they have evergreen content. So they weren't doing breaking news, they weren't trying to keep up with something. That's something I think a lot of marketers can tap into with their content on Instagram. Because you don't need to, necessarily, maybe post every day, or keep up with stuff, but if you can keep reuse content, and then tap into these methods that get people actually to click back, then maybe it's a place to explore. Kathleen: Yeah, I love what you said earlier about picking the two things to experiment with, instead of, marketers in my opinion, the ones I know, including myself, can easily fall victim to shiny penny syndrome, and get stretched really thinly and accomplish nothing, and so it is really helpful if you have data that can help you hone in on those ... We were talking about this earlier with my team, the 80-20 thing, the 20% of things that are going to give you the 80% of results. Clare: Yeah. That's why from our own content strategy, like I said, we sort of never varied from using our data. Because a lot of people have come to me with good intentions and sort of said, "Why don't we talk about this on the blog," or, "Why don't we ..." this is actually a really common one I get, is "Why don't we do more hot takes." Like something happens in the industry, why don't we write our opinion on it? And again, good intentions, they're not wrong, in that hot takes can be super effective for some companies. Certainly getting your opinion and your brand voice out there can be very powerful, but my stance has always been, "Hey guys, here's our data. We write a post about traffic from Facebook and how it's impacting the world of content, we get 10,000 plus views." If we write a post about what GDPR is doing to publishers, no one reads it. So I can easily say no to that, and it allows me to keep a super narrow focus from a marketing perspective, and just sort of never vary from it. Or be very focused on what those tests are, and then get a really good glance of, nope, this isn't going to work either, we're not going to try this again. Kathleen: Yeah, and GDPR, writing about GDPR or anything like it, has a ton of competition. I know, because we write about it. Whereas you have no competition for your own stuff. Clare: Yes, absolutely. That's a big part of it too. Again, those topics, it's not that anything is bad about the idea of them, but we can just so quickly see that this other thing works so much better for us. We're a small team. We don't have a ton of dedicated ... Like you said, we use people internally at the company to write freelancers, contributors, and you have to be super dedicated about how you divvy up those resources if you're going to get what you want out of it. And I keep that really top of mind when considering opportunity costs of our own time. How Parse.ly Has Staffed Up To Provide Insights On Its Data Kathleen: Let's talk about your team for a second, because you mentioned something really interesting to me before we got started, which is, not just what writing about data has done for you from a visibility and a reach standpoint, but what it's meant in terms of how you staff. Clare: We're so meta. We use our own data, we look at our data, we write about data. One of the things that I'm super proud of this year is that we actually have been working with a smaller team within the marketing and content departments specifically. That's meant we've had to produce about half as much or even less content than we did in the prior six months, and that was really hard for me, because I think for a number of reasons, frequency is still very important. This is not a pitch for anyone out there to cut their frequency if frequency works in their workflow. But it was just not something that we had the capacity for at the moment, and we also just wanted to sort of see what would happen. And so instead we really dug into the data. I wrote a post about it, I think, in January, sort of looking back to 2018 and seeing what really worked and what really didn't, and what are we going to commit to this year. And we've written, like I said, I think about half as many posts, and we've had just as much traffic. And that has been one of the most rewarding things I've had happen all year, because it sort of ... I love when we can eat our own dog food and prove our own theories right. And we will be increasing our frequency. This isn't to say we're going to stick to this. It's actually made me able to make that argument internally. Even here, I still have to make that argument internally for content. And we will be increasing the frequency. Another related stat is, and I will actually be writing a post on this, is that we took a month off from content. Kathleen: Oh wow. Clare: Yeah. So we didn't really announce it. I sort of looked at what we had to do and I said, "I'm going to try something. I kind of want to level set, and I want to know if all these things I'm saying from a marketing and positioning perspective are true. And also we've got some other priorities, so let's take April off, and let's just not worry about content. And then we'll come back to it in May. Kathleen: That was a daring move on your part. Clare: I think I undersold how daring it was, and I sold some of the other projects that we would get to do instead. And some of them were just, that's a good chance to clean out some salesforce stuff. It wasn't very exciting other work, but I did it, I finished it, and then I looked at the numbers. And our overall ... This is what was so interesting to me. The overall site traffic to our public website, Parse.ly, didn't really change much. There wasn't a huge impact on it. Blog traffic was way, way lower. I think a third or something that we would normally see. But the blog traffic is still a small percentage of overall site traffic. But here's what's so interesting to me. Leads were down almost exactly in line with the blog traffic. And those leads don't necessarily convert on the blog. So we have forms on the blog, the forms, they were a little lower, but it wasn't really even that noticeable. But the other lead forms across the website, the demo forms, pricing forms, we're a B2B business, so these things are huge for us, those were all down precipitously. It's technically still correlation, not causation, but we obviously restarted our content in May, and leads are back up. And it's just, with such a good opportunity to sort of show our own team we mean it when we say content works for our clients. We mean it when it's not just about volume and growth and scale, but it's about business objectives for those companies as well. And I'm excited to sort of say that we've proved it, even if it hurt a little bit to do it. Kathleen: At your own expense? Clare: Yeah. Kathleen: That's interesting. And you also added a data scientist, or a data analyst, to your team, right? Clare: Yes. I was able to ... And this was one of those sort of, we were in the right place at the right time. One of our account managers, who has been with the company for years, and has always had a very strong interest in this side of the business, she taught herself SQL and how to sort of pull some of these numbers that I still can't get into those systems can use, and I said, we're a little bit low on staff, but if I could have one person who's just doing data, I can make everything else work. I can work with freelancers, I can work with the content workflow, I can figure it out using internal people. And that has made a huge difference, I think, to those numbers, posting in half but getting twice the results. And again, that was just because I was able to see from our own data that these data posts work. So I said, give me the one person. Kathleen: Yeah, who makes it all possible. Clare: Can make it possible. And we can write about it. How Parse.ly Has Productized Data Kathleen: That is so interesting. I love how you guys are doing it, and I think the most interesting to me is that, not just that you're mining the data and turning it into these insights that have become almost like a product in and of themselves, but that you've built a dashboard, so that your audience could access the data in a self-serve manner. That's a really interesting approach to doing it. Clare: Yeah, I should probably name it by name otherwise my product team will kill me. We also have ... We did this initial text with just a dashboard that you can access on the public website. It was just a single page you could see the numbers, and that is still there. But now we also have a product called Currents. When you sign up for it, it's a freemium model, and it's also for me a lead gen tool as well, and you can go in and look up any topic online and see how people have been reading about it. So it's totally self-serve now. If you want to see how much attention people are paying to Game of Thrones, you can see it in Currents. If you want to see how much attention people are paying to Donald Trump you can see it in Currents. And of course any sort of niche topic that you might write about too. Then of course the flip side of that, to your point, is now we have a product that's individual dashboards where people can see their own data, and this other dashboard where people can see the aggregate data, and so you have both the, I know what's going on in my audience, but also now I know what's going on with everyone's audience, and I can tap into that. That product came out of beta last fall, so it's still nine months or so, and we're just starting to really see how people use it, and it's really exciting. So I'm excited to see more of what people do with Currents. Parse.ly's Clients Kathleen: Just so that everybody who's listening understands, we've talked a lot about the aggregate data. Can you just give my listeners a sense of the type of media company slash publications that use your platform, so that they understand the breadth of where that data is coming from? It's big and small, it's across a range of industries, right? Clare: Yeah, so major media companies, think of your local newspaper, their parent company is probably a client of ours. So we work with Berkshire Hathaway, and Gatehouse Media, Advance Digital, which are some of the major newspaper owners. Then of course, like I mentioned, The Wall Street Journal, NBC, some of the major ... Now they're certainly very digital players. Then you have online only publications like Slate, Bloomberg, and of course B2B outlets. A huge variety of industries. And it's funny, occasionally you'll see a domain name, I think there's Farmer's Journal, I forget the exact title of one of the companies, but there are very niche B2B sites using this. And then marketers, like I said, like yourself, and Hello Fresh, and Convene, and Artsy, TheLadders ... It's really this wide variety of different types of content. The way our Currents product works, which is super cool, is that it reads all of the articles that people read online, and then it uses natural language processing to understand what those articles are about. So that's how we can say, if you want to know how much attention Donald Trump is getting online, we look at every article out there, and our system is smart enough to say, "This article is about Donald Trump, and about Kelly Anne Conway, and here's how those things relate," and we can parse that all out and give you data on it. Which is also, if anyone was paying close attention, how our name came to be, which is a pun on data. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Yeah. It's also just incredible how timely the product is, given everything that's happening in the world, and all the talk about news and the role that media plays in our lives. So lots of interesting stuff here. I can talk forever about this but we don't have all the time in the world, so two questions for you before we wrap up. One is, when it comes to inbound marketing specifically, is there a particular company or an individual that you think is really just killing it right now? Clare: Well I know you've talked to them, but I think that the name that gets brought up the most, and I get why, Drift, they just really ... I think this play ... I don't know, I haven't seen a real huge breakdown of this, but this sort of write-the-book play, where you literally write a book. And I think Uberflip is also doing some interesting stuff here, and then you use that book for all your content, but you also get speaking positions out of it, you really don't have to say that much that's different. I think they have such strong positioning in these ways that really speak to marketers' needs, that they have just crushed it from that sense. And to my knowledge they don't have to use that much data, so I would love to sort of learn from their playbook, and maybe find our ... Kathleen: Write your book? Clare: Yeah, it's been a long time dream of mine to write a book. So I would name them, I think they're sort of the obvious ones. I'm trying to think of anyone who is sort of off the beaten path a little bit more. Give me a second, if someone comes to me I'll share. Kathleen: Yeah, we can come back to that. I bet you have some clients that probably are crushing it. Personally, how do you keep up with digital marketing and all the new developments? Because there is so much, and pretty much every marketer I know, that's the number one pain point, is "I don't have the time to stay on top of it all!" Clare: It is. Actually the woman we were talking about, the data analyst that just joined the marketing team from the account management team, that was one of her big questions. She said, "What do you read every day?" Because we had been working together very closely on her stories and on editing them, and when I attempted to add industry trends going in she goes, "I want to do that, but I just don't know where to find them yet." So I read a lot of newsletters, I love newsletters, we write about newsletters, so again, very meta, write my own. But a lot of ... Frankly I actually try to bring a lot of media tactics into the marketing world, because I don't think they're used as much in marketing, which is somewhat ironic, because media companies have the biggest audiences out there. And obviously some people are picking up on that, but there's still a lot of companies that haven't figured that out. So the Wall Street Journal CMO newsletter, The Atlantic's The Idea is a great one, Neiman Labs, American Press Institute. There's one that's like One Good Idea, I'm forgetting who officially sends that one out, and they just dive into what one company did. Kathleen: Oh, okay. I was going to say, it sounds like Quartz Obsession. Clare: Well Quartz Obsession is just a fun read. Kathleen: Yeah. Talk about going down the rabbit hole with one thing. Clare: Yeah. We actually had them on our podcast talking about their newsletters. That was a really cool thing to hear, how they think through their obsession newsletters. Way more work than this. Kathleen: Yeah, exactly. Clare: Than I have time for. So yeah, newsletters would probably be one of my biggest led. And then we have a Slack channel internally where we try to share articles with each other, and just read. I don't know, I don't think there's a shortcut. Maybe that's why I love content marketing so much, is I love reading a lot. Kathleen: Yeah, I was just saying on a recent episode that I've now done almost 100 of these interviews, and the best marketers I know, and that I've interviewed, just are naturally super curious, and can't get enough. They're big readers, they do it in their free time, they listen to podcasts, they read newsletters, they're always just consuming, for their own sake, and that kind of has side benefits. Clare: Yeah, and I think the biggest things that I've learned ... And then the places I've seen the most success in my own career have been taking things from one industry and applying them to another. I think there's this sort of idea that you have to follow what other companies have done, and certainly there's this nice scalability to knowing exactly what the basics are, and you need to have that at some level. But then, I don't just like to read the marketing stuff. My favorite book that I've read recently is called The Power of Moments by the Heath brothers. Someone else recommended to me, Annie Duke has a book about decision-making, and how we consider luck and skill, and sort of taking these concepts that have nothing to do with marketing, or may be very tangential, or even fiction right, and making sure that I'm not separating my brain when I read that stuff, when I'm thinking about it, how can this also apply to my marketing and professional life. How to Connect With Clare Kathleen: Yeah. Love it. Well if someone's listening to this, and they want to learn more about Parse.ly, or they want to check out Currents, or they just want to check with you, what's the best way for them to do that online? Clare: The best way is for them not to spell it like the herb, is pretty much the only advice you need. It's Parse.ly, and we are fortunately, thanks to a lot of articles and this data that we are getting written about, hopefully somewhat easy to find. Currents is available for free. If you come to the website you're able to sign up for it. And if you have a content program and are interested in your own Analytics dashboard, we'd love to speak to you. I will be gone on maternity leave so someone else will have to get back to you, but ... Kathleen: Yeah, you can't see this, but I'm sitting across from Clare and I will attest to the fact that she's probably got a month or less. Clare: Yeah, it's very clear that I will be going on maternity leave soon. Our team, we actually do a lot of events, and I'll now shout out Kathleen for helping us out. Kathleen is hosting an event tomorrow in the city, in New York City, and we love connecting people that do content, work, and programs together. That's one of our big initiatives for the year as well, and then creating content out of it. So if you are, particularly in New York City, but also we do this in other places as well, and ever want to come to a Parse.ly event, please, please let us know, we'd love to have you. Kathleen: Yeah, it should be fun. I'm looking forward to meeting all of these other people who are facing the same challenges I am. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: Well if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, or you learned something new, as always I would appreciate it if you would leave a five-star review for the podcast on Apple Podcast, and if you know somebody else who's doing kickass inbound marketing work, you can tell it's getting to be that time, Tweet me, @WorkMommyWork, because I would love to interview them. Thanks so much Clare. Clare: Thanks for having me.

Subscribe to Social Business Engine Apple Podcasts |Stitcher |Google Play | Google Podcasts There are many conversion optimization services for your website out there and all of them are based on analytics. In the realm of analytics, there are free and amazingly powerful platforms available, like Google Analytics. With so many low-cost ways to access the data you need to do conversion optimization, is there any advantage to paying for a service that enables you to do it better? On this episode, Bernie chats with Clare Carr, Vice President of Marketing at Parse.ly, Inc. If you’re wondering what Parse.ly is, it’s not food related, despite the name. Rather, Parse.ly is an analytics platform that does a lot more than the free options. In this conversation, Clare explains exactly what their platform analyzes and demonstrates how companies use their comprehensive data to measure the performance of their content, conversions, and shares three examples. Metrics Matter For More Than Just Conversions In this conversation, Clare Carr mentions that while every sales organization should rightly be focused on conversions, there is a lot more to analyze than visit to lead conversion or whether people buy your product or service or not. She points out that marketing teams gain a competitive advantage by knowing which of the many content pieces they are publishing are getting the REAL attention of those who find it. You can track those metrics in an elementary way in your Google Analytics dashboard - if you can find it - but all it will tell you is the time spent on each page by a visitor. But you need to know if they are really consuming the content, or if they have left the browser window open while they are actually doing something else and not consuming the content. In this week’s episode, Clare explains how Parse.ly measures true engagement through what they call “heartbeat” assessments of web page actions. Don’t miss it! Content Analytics Enable You To Create More Of What’s Working Imagine that your marketing team has invested weeks in the creation of a number of content pieces aimed at your target market. You’ve done your keyword research. You’re confident about them. They all seem like good bets when it comes to drawing attention and engaging readers. But are they? How will you know? It’s important to have a specific, tangible way to evaluate content pieces, and whether or not they are achieving your goals. Clare Carr explains not only why this kind of analytics assessment is important, but also how it can be done in a way that gives you more data than typical platforms provide. It’s all on this episode of Social Business Engine. The Right Measurements Of Engagement Enable You To Ask The Right Questions If you don’t have accurate data concerning the messaging you’re sending into your target market you’ll never know if what you’re doing is effective. And even once you know what’s effective, you need to know the right questions to ask that will enable you to know WHY it is effective - so that you can produce more of that same type of content. On this episode, Clare Carr explains how to get the right data about your content and conversions so that you are able to ask the right questions. It’s the only way to truly know what’s happening with your marketing, content, and conversions and thus, the only way to refine your campaigns based on data instead of hunches. A Free Tool To Know The Inside Data of What’s Getting Attention Online With over 1 Billion people online, it’s hard to track what the important topics being discussed worldwide really are. Powerhouse Google has a platform that enables them to make use of search and social data, but the rest of us don’t have access to that type of information - until now. In this podcast, Clare Carr introduces Parse.ly’s newest analytics tool - Currents. It’s the world’s first public view of what those 1 billion people who are online care about. You can use attention trends to uncover the content that matters and is being talked about to better aim your marketing and content curation efforts to attract the audience you want to attract. In this conversation, Clare reveals how you can become a beta user of this exciting new tool and have access to it for free. Featured on This Episode Website: https://www.parse.ly Connect with Clare on Linkedin Reach out to Clare on Twitter: @ClareOndrey Current: https://currents.parsely.com/ https://www.parse.ly/resources/data-studies/referrer-dashboard/ Outline of This Episode [1:52] Parse.ly’s powerful analytics platform for evaluating content [2:55] Metrics are important for more than conversions [5:16] What does it mean to measure attention and why is attention valuable? [11:10] Use cases to show how to do website analytics in a more powerful way [19:27] The power of the Parse.ly “Currents” tool Resources & People Mentioned www.DigitalSellingBenchmarkReport.com - Get your free report Google Analytics Strategy Plus Hello Fresh Slate.com Flipboard The Selling With Social Podcast with Vengreso CEO, Mario Martinez, Jr Connect With Bernie and Social Business Engine https://www.facebook.com/socialbusinessengine/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernieborges/ https://twitter.com/bernieborges https://twitter.com/sbengine Subscribe to Social Business Engine Apple Podcasts |Stitcher |Google Play | Google Podcasts There are TWO WAYS you can listen to this podcast. You can click the PLAYER BUTTON at the top of this page… or, you can listen from your mobile device’s podcast player through the podcast subscription links above. This podcast originally appeared on Social Business Engine