Podcasts about inbound success

Welcome to another engaging episode of the Owner's Pride Podcast! In this power-packed installment, your host, Dann "E" Williams, is thrilled to welcome the extraordinary Zach Basner, the They Ask, You Answer Coach, as a special guest. Join us as Zach Basner, a true transformational agent of change, shares his wealth of knowledge and expertise in training sales, marketing, and leadership teams worldwide. Discover how embracing a culture of inbound can empower your organization to become the most trusted voice in your industry. Zach's magnetic charisma and unique ability to inspire audiences, whether on stage or in the boardroom, are second to none. As a highly sought-after keynote speaker and consultant, he challenges business leaders and teams to reimagine their approach to connecting with buyers, fostering trust, and ultimately driving revenue growth. So, whether you're a business owner, a marketing professional, or a sales leader looking for actionable insights to elevate your game, this episode is a must-listen. Get ready to uncover the secrets of inbound success and gain a competitive edge in today's ever-evolving landscape. Tune in now to the Owner's Pride Podcast, hosted by Dann "E" Williams, and let Zach Basner ignite your passion for transformation and guide you towards unlocking your organization's true potential.

Sea 2 Ep 33 Kathleen Booth - “3 Things Top Performing Ecommerce Brands Do!”  8/18/2022   Ecommerce is complicated, so what should you focus on? ROAS, Attribution, email, targeting, creative, spend? Kathleen Booth can help! She crushes the myth of ROAS and last click attribution along with the 3 things she has seen to get top performance. Kathleen is the host of the long running INBOUND SUCCESS podcast along with being one of the leading marketing leaders in ecommerce. Bonus News section, we are joined by Spencer Soper with Bloomberg News to talk about his article on Amazon drop ship policy not being enforced and the story of how it impacted Spangler Candy Company and their Dum Dums lollipop brand. We play “What's That Keyword?” Join Scott Ohsman, Summer Jubelirer and Hayley Brucker for years of knowledge and some juicy nuggets. Ecommerce Simplified! Warning, you will learn and be entertained at the same time.    Brought to you by: Athletic Greens. Activate your great deal by going to: https://athleticgreens.com/partner/d35ctoffer-nutrition/en?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=influencer&utm_campaign=emerging_d35ct__a3878__o27&utm_term=cac__a3878__o27&utm_content=sport__a3878__o27   QUICKFIRE Info:   Website: https://www.quickfirenow.com/ Email the Show: info@quickfirenow.com  Talk to us on Social: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/quickfireproductions Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/quickfire__/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@quickfiremarketing LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/company/quickfire-productions-llc/about/   Guest: Kathleen Booth  LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathleenslatterybooth/ Website: https://www.kathleen-booth.com/   Guest: Spencer Soper LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spencer-soper-8558716/ Twitter: @spencersoper Website: https://www.bloomberg.com/   HOSTS: Summer Jubelirer has been in digital commerce and marketing for over 15 years. After spending many years working for digital and ecommerce agencies working with multi-million dollar brands and running teams of Account Managers, she is now the Amazon Manager at OLLY PBC.   LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/summerjubelirer/   Scott Ohsman has been working with brands for over 25 years in retail, online and has launched over 200 brands on Amazon. Owning his own sales and marketing agency in the Pacific NW, is now VP of Digital Commerce for Quickfire LLC. Scott has been a featured speaker at national trade shows and has developed distribution strategies for many top brands. LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-ohsman-861196a6/   Hayley Brucker has been working in retail and with Amazon for years. She is currently a Marketing Coordinator at Channel Key LLC. Hayley has extensive experience in digital advertising, both seller and vendor central on Amazon. Hayley is based out of North Carolina and has worked in multiple product categories and has also worked on the brand side and started with Nordstrom on the retail floor.  LinkedIn -https://www.linkedin.com/in/hayley-brucker-1945bb229/   Huge thanks to Cytrus our show theme music “Office Party” available wherever you get your music. Check them out here: Facebook https://www.facebook.com/cytrusmusic Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cytrusmusic/ Twitter https://twitter.com/cytrusmusic SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6VrNLN6Thj1iUMsiL4Yt5q?si=MeRsjqYfQiafl0f021kHwg APPLE MUSIC https://music.apple.com/us/artist/cytrus/1462321449   “Always Off Brand” is part of the Quickfire Podcast Network and produced by Quickfire LLC.

Kathleen Booth is the VP of marketing at clean.io. She is a serial entrepreneur, marketing leader, and host of the long-running podcast Inbound Success. She was named by TopRank as one of the 50 Top B2B Marketing Influencers of 2019. In today's episode, we're going to discuss how coupon extensions can erode our profit margins, and how we can protect against coupon extensions and use coupons effectively. We'll also discuss Kathleen's journey and the impact COVID-19 has had on buying behaviors. Read more at - https://monetizationnation.com/blog/how-to-use-coupons-in-your-business/

How does the marketing team at Bigtincan use intent data to influence and close deals? This week on the Inbound Success podcast, Bigtincan CMO Rusty Bishop breaks down the mechanics behind the company's account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns, including the tech stack they're using, and the nitty gritty details behind their intent data. Rusty says most companies look to intent platforms to solve their ABM challenges, but wind up spending a lot of money for poor results. In this episode, he gets into detail on the advanced keyword strategies Bigtincan is using to build an intent data set that they can then use to target in-market buyers. The results have been impressive. For every dollar Rusty's team spends on display, they influence more than $107,000 in pipeline, and more than $27,000 in closed won deals. Check out the full episode to learn how they do it. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.) Resources from this episode: Check out the Bigtincan website Connect with Rusty on LinkedIn Transcript Kathleen (00:02): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I am your host, Kathleen Booth. And today my guest is Rusty Bishop, who is the CMO of Bigtincan. Welcome to the podcast, Rusty. I am dying to know the story behind the company name. So let's start with having you make a quick introduction of yourself because I also, I'm going to scoop you a little bit and just say for my guests who are listening, this is going to be fascinating because Rusty has the software company, but he has been a biochemist. He's a guitar player. He's got a fascinating background. So stay tuned to hear about it. Rusty, tell us more about yourself and then also what Bigtincan is and how it got that name. Rusty (01:01): You got it. So my background, so yeah, after undergrad, I did get a PhD in biochemistry and molecular genetics studying infectious disease research for a big part of my research came out here to Southern California, to the university of California, San Diego, to do post-doctoral research and ended up being on the faculty and staff here in San Diego for about 12 years. So I did about 15 years of biomedical research in my past life. I am no longer consider myself a scientist, although I think it does probably color everything I do for certain. After that I did, I started a company with a guy named Mark Walker, who is the head of sales at a company called Invitrogen which went on to become Thermo Fisher, one of the largest life sciences companies in the world. And then we started a company based on the idea that when, when I was in the lab, when I was a researcher salespeople would come into our lab. Rusty (01:55): And that was back in the days where you could actually walk in the labs. You can't do that in more, they're all locked down, but they could literally just walk in and they'd be like, Hey, I'm from this company and I want to sell you some stuff. And they would literally break out a paper catalog and try to sell us stuff. And I, you know, at that point iPad was coming out, iPhone was coming out and we just thought, there's gotta be a better way. Mark and I created a company called FatStax which was geared and focused towards sellers, mostly in the life sciences space, those people who were coming to me and as a scientist and trying to sell me things that, that went very well. We had a great exit to Bigtincan in 2018, and I've been there ever since. And I became the CMO less than a week and a half ago. Rusty (02:41): I worked under our previous CMO who is still here as the president of the company and kind of fought my way up to being the CMO. So marketing is relatively new for me. All of that, totally new. I've been doing it for years as a founder. And of course, you know, here at Bigtincan running marketing for about two years. Kathleen (02:58): Love it. Rusty (02:59): Yeah. Lots of weird science stuff in my background. And as you did note, I was a professional musician for about two years before all of that. So it's been a wild ride I'm multitalented guy. I like that. I like to do lots of things. Kathleen (03:14): So tell me how the company got its name. Rusty (05:24): Great question. Everyone asks that. So it reminds me that that's actually a pretty memorable name. So the company was found in Australia. And the original concept behind the company was, was when iPad applications were something that people actually wanted. So that the idea was that I'd take all of your content and put it into an iPad application and the original founders, David King, who's our current CEO always talked about how people have this thing where they're communicate through string cans and how that you lose the communication. So they had the idea that if you put everything into the big team can, then you could communicate effectively across your company. So that was the original origin story. Now, of course, that was in Australia with two guys standing and above a coffee shop in Sydney. So what the real name is, I really don't know. So we'll, we'll leave it at that for now. That's how I got his name. And it's been his name for ever since then, publicly traded on the Australian stock exchange. If you want to go learn more about us as a company, there's everything you could ever want to know is right there. I love Kathleen (06:21): That story. And I definitely, when I was little, definitely connected to tin cans with a string and tried to talk through it, it was a terrible communication method. I will say it doesn't work. It's sort of like a myth, right? Like whoever did that successfully, I don't know. Right. So switching, switching gears, you you've, you know, I love that you bring this sort of brain of a scientist to the way you're doing marketing and you and I talked a little bit before we did the interview about some of the things you're working on. And I was really fascinated hearing you talk about what you guys are doing with intent data and how you're taking this very scientific approach to figuring out, you know, what, what you're going to search for within your intent data platforms to turn up results that are actually going to be meaningful. So let's back up and start with tell me what you're using intent data for in the first place. Rusty (07:18): Okay. Yeah. Good question. So I'll start with one thing which I want to clarify. I'm sure that everyone that listens to your podcast knows this already, but intent software is not ABM. Everyone seems to get that a little backwards here, especially in our company. They're like, yeah, we're just doing ABM and no, you're not. You're using an ad platform to detect intent out there in the world. So, so what do we, what do we use it for? So we are attempting to detect in market accounts at various stages, we have three different product lines that we can either sell together here on Bigtincan, or we can sell them separately. We also go to market in various verticals and the reason we needed an intent tool was because the amount of keywords that someone could enter into Google to find what we do or to solve their problems more accurately was astronomical. So the chances of us, you know, properly making our website SEO for all those keywords was approaching zero. And so in order to detect all those accounts out there in market, we we do 6Sense and we chose 6Sense. I don't know if that matters, not to the users. I think they all do very similar things. So our methodology from day one was can we detect virtually every account in market using this type of software and is in combination with other things like G2 and other intent data. Kathleen (08:45): So just out of curiosity, you mentioned you chose 6Sense. Why that platform over any other ones? Rusty (08:53): You know, it's funny, I had a feeling you were going to ask me that and I tried to go back and look, and that's a year and remember why we chose 6Sense. I think at the end of the day, it was the combination of ease of use for us as well as the second part of 6Sense, which is the ability to do predictive. And that is, you know, once we know and we detected these accounts are in market and they're searching for certain things, and they're also making certain choices with you guys, Bigtincan, there might be opening emails or 15 people that account are doing certain actions. We can now begin to predict how well those accounts are going to move through the funnel and if they are going to close and should we be working them or not? Rusty (09:32): We're about a year into building our predictive model. I will not say it's a quick process, but it's something I really wanted to get to core science brain. You know, how can we build something that would predict whether we should work these accounts or not, and you know, where we should put more activities from a marketing side. And so that was the ultimate reason we chose 6 cents. You know, in hindsight, I don't know if there's any real reason to choose one over the other, they all except for go and listen to, and really think about what it is that your company needs to achieve with these platforms. That's the key. All the sales people are really good by the way. Oh my gosh. Like, and that space, it must be really intense because the salespeople are all excellent and they will show you stuff that will blow your mind. And you'll absolutely think that this is the greatest thing ever. And you're going to look like a rockstar when you get demo these platforms. And to me, that's sort of like, it triggers one of my middle models, which when I start thinking software is going to make me look like a rockstar, I should probably stop and back up and realize it's not true. Kathleen (10:32): Yeah. The tool is almost never the solution. Exactly. Yeah. So, so you're, you're using a platform to collect intent data, to look for in market accounts. And then before we dive into exactly how you're setting your platform up, I just want to talk through, like, once you get that data back and it flags these accounts, how are you, how are you adding that into your marketing workflow? Speaker 3 (10:57): The Rusty (10:57): Variety of different weights. It depends on where we detect them in the, in the funnel. You know, if we detect them high in the funnel, like they're just coming into awareness that they have a problem. We're mostly just doing marketing. We're mostly doing, you know, ads, LinkedIn ads and those types of things. If we're detecting them far down the funnel based on our predictive model and what they're searching for, I mean, we're going to be doing seriously active outreach. We might have salespeople going after them. We'll be using things like Alice to send them gifts, to make, have them have a conversation with us. We're reaching out to our partners. We partnered with apple, which is a great go to market model for us and seeing if they're working with them. So it really just depends on where they are in the funnel when we, you know, realize that, you know, sometimes they come into funnel really fast. You'll just see a flurry of activity. And so we can, you know, we have a person, I have a person on that team, Tyler who full time monitors, what's going on in six sense. And then, you know, we do a lot of things automated, but some of it's still manual like, oh my gosh, these guys are hot, get, get, break the process and let's go. Right. So it really just depends on where we detect them. Kathleen (12:00): Nice. All right. So, so let's dig into it. So you've got, you make the decision to get one, get an intent platform and, and you're right. I do think there is a tendency for marketers to look at these platforms and think that they're going to be some sort of a magic bullet. Like I'm going to put it in, I'm going to login my account and the leads are gonna rain down on me. Right. so from, based on my conversations with you, I understand that that is not the case. So walk me through the process that you use to figure out how to get the right data out. Yeah, Rusty (12:34): No problem. So the first thing I'll point out is that, so when you demo these platforms, the most of the time, they're going to ask you for a keyword list so that they can show you what your data looks like in their platform. And this it's really powerful, actually the way that I would demo it the same way now. So there's a mistake there that it will, I will caution all, anybody who's listening on, which is this, your keywords from your website is probably what you're going to give them. Right? You have all of us have like a data dump of SEO keywords we're going after. You're already ranking for a lot of those terms. You already detecting a lot of people that are searching for those terms. So you're not going to find people far off in the market or far down in market. Rusty (13:10): You're not going to be able to segment a buyer, a group of buyers with your SEO keyless. But that is when you typically turn these things on, it's already in there for you. And so you think right out of the gate, wow, we're already doing great. We're detecting all of these companies all these types of things. So, you know, for us, it took us maybe like two or three months before we realized this is not showing us in mark. It's showing us some in-market accounts, but it was nowhere near the universe. So my first recommendation is figure out a way to get a baseline. So, you know, but coming from my science background, you always need something that is, you know, zero, you need something that, am I going to get an improvement, or am I going to get a negative out of this? Rusty (13:49): Right. And that's the way that baseline is. I don't know what baseline might be for your listeners scaffolding. Right? So for us, we get something like G2 where you say, okay, G2, tell us how many people you think are in market. Right? And we might go to Forrester or to another analyst and say, how many, what is the total Tam of, for our market? And then we kind of do some back of the hand envelope kind of math and say, well, we think this many companies should be in market today. Now, if you're a giant company that could be, you know, a hundred of thousands of buyers, if you're very focused company, that might be only 150, 200 people. So knowing a baseline to me is critical because the is going to spit out numbers a hundred percent a good rule of thumb. I like to think about this. If your Tam is a billion dollars over the next five years, right. I seriously doubt $200 million worth as in market. Yeah. Unless Kathleen (14:40): There's a ton of churn for every solution out there. Rusty (14:42): Yeah. This is like massive. Like there's always outliers, but like, so just, you know, do some, some real back of the envelope, like, you know, smell, test kind of thing, where you say is this, like, could this many people possibly be out there trying to buy what we sell? So that helps first. And then the next phase, I would say segmentation. So for us, we took the very simple segmentation, which was, you know, on the top level, the buying stages for us that's awareness, which we defined as aware they have a problem. Okay. The second one is consideration, which means they're figuring out they have a problem. And the thinking that what we sell might be one of the things they could solve it with. The next one is decision pretty obvious, right? They've already decided this thing can solve my problem. You know, now I'm looking at the various offerings that are out there and of course the last one is purchased. Rusty (15:28): So for each one of those what we did is we built a spreadsheet and that's when she had a list of modifiers and then a list of keywords. So let me unpack that for you first, give me some examples and understand what you mean. Here's an example. So I I don't give anything away. I love Peloton. I'm all about it. I ride every day. I could be their marketer tomorrow, if you're hiring, let me know. But so let's just use like a Peloton as an example. Right. So if I'm coming into awareness, okay. I might be searching for things like exercise programs. I might be searching for gyms near me. I might be searching for home gyms. Right. So I might not be actually searching for Peloton. Right. And so the things that I would add as modifiers there, especially for companies that generally sell things that people were trying to solve a problem, or have a pain they'll be searching for modifiers, like solve, troubleshoot, decrease, increase you know, and you build a full list of those modifiers. Okay. So with them, you're going to have all of your, you know, your actual terms that someone could be solving the pain for. So let's say the pain is right. Like I'm, I need to exercise more. Right. So like increase my exercise. You could, and now you just cross reference those two lists into your total list for your world of awareness. Kathleen (16:45): Yeah. That's interesting. So it sounds like if I understand you correctly, it sounds like when you first start out, you're probably going to want to upload all of what I would term your highest intent keywords. And those are the ones that are going to create the greatest amount of overlap with the prospects you already have in your database. Speaker 3 (17:09): Okay. Good. Accurate. Okay. So then Kathleen (17:13): It's the modifiers or another words like making the search strings a little bit more long tail that produce the best results. Do you do any research behind like search volume or anything like that when you do that? Or is it really just intuitive? Rusty (17:28): So we took a different tack. So we, we tried to do some search volume research long tail, just doesn't it just doesn't register enough in SCM rush or a Google analytics or any other things that are out there. So we were trying to, as I told you, our goal was to detect as many in-market accounts as possible. It was not to detect the companies that are hottest today. Right. So, you know, therefore what we decided to do, which could be completely different for you or for anyone else who's doing. This is effectively, you know, we want to increase the world so that we cash long tail, right. In LA by long tail. We mean that one person out there who's searching for that one thing, which we solve for. But when you have lots of different offerings, like Bigtincan has, there's a lot of things that we solve for, right. Rusty (18:11): So there's probably a hundred different pain points that we can go in and work with on a customer. So the modifiers give you, if you could imagine, you have to put yourself in your buyer's shoes, I'm sitting down at my computer, I'm going to put something in the magic, Google search bar. I have no idea what I'm looking for, but I know that I want to get more exercise. Right. And somehow I've got to get from getting more exercise to Peloton Peloton marketer. Right. So then in each, so that's that's where the modifier thing, this gives you the world of possible, right? Cause you're going to be running this platform me around just because someone's not searching for it today. Doesn't mean they won't search for it tomorrow or the next day or the next day. So Kathleen (18:49): You put, so you put your keywords in then with the modifiers and then what it comes Rusty (18:56): A segment. Right. So we might have an awareness segment. Okay. Let's just take that one, for example. And then, which has a giant list of keywords and their modifiers. So we're trying to find people that are searched. So when someone let's say they're searching for, you know, increase daily exercise, I'll go back to the Peloton example. Immediately we know if we get information from them down the line, they come to our website, et cetera, they were searching for that originally. So their original pain was that. So that gives us the basis for all of that. But then that becomes a segment, right? So then the next step is the further, make it take your segments out. So you might have verticals, you might have geographies, you might have. Well, however it is that you go to market. So now I might have a segment that say, you know, people in, you know, California that are looking to increase their daily exercise. So you just keep taking your segments out further and further until your segments make sense for the way that your team goes to market. Speaker 3 (19:54): Interesting. Yeah. And, Kathleen (19:56): And how did that manifest in terms of the flow of leads coming into your go to market strategy? How long did it take also? Oh, that's a great question. That's, that's a very deep, that's a multi-part question, tackle it in whatever order makes sense. How about that? Rusty (20:14): How long did it take? So you will literally begin to detect things almost instantaneously. Right. But especially if you have a broad enough net, okay. Now what will scare you, right. Is when one of the, some of the things that happened immediately, once we did this, right, was we had salespeople having the mind blown moment, which is like, oh my God, my biggest account is about to buy our competitor. You know, if we went in, because we of course put all those types of terms in there. Right. So our biggest competitor plus pricing. And so that is instant. Like you can, you will literally get instant data, right. So if people are searching for it and how do you, that's, Kathleen (20:51): That's super interesting. So how do you tackle that? Rusty (20:54): It's by priority, right? So if, I think, I think we all know if someone is already in purchase phase, you're probably not going to knock them off your competitor. Right. if someone is, you know, up and maybe just coming into decision, or they're just into consideration phase, then it's, you know, you, you prioritize those over the other ones for outreach, everything else you tackle with marketing, with ads or emails and those types of things. So as, Kathleen (21:18): As the head of marketing, when you have these different leads and some of them are very top of the funnel, as you pointed out their awareness stage, some are more middle and bottom of the funnel, how you parse it, like, are you parsing them all to your sales team? Or are you putting some of them into marketing nurturing? Like, how are you tackling that? Okay. So Rusty (21:38): Two things here. So w you do not, you do not detect leads, you detect accounts really important. I thought, I thought this too. I thought I was going to get a ton of leads. You do get a ton of leads, but you got to know how to go look for them, right. So you gotta build a step. And we actually built this up. So when when account reaches a certain threshold for us, you know, on our predictability scale they immediately go out to a third party that we've hired. That's, LeadGenius probably shouldn't give that away, but whatever. And then they go and pull the names of the leads based on criteria that we give them an advance that comes back into Salesforce, and then we start our outreach. So that's the way we get an actual lead from it. And back up there, I forgot the first part of your question. I apologize, Kathleen (22:23): Really a long, how are you parsing it out to your sales team or are you putting them into marketing, nurturing flows? Exactly. So Rusty (22:30): Parsing out to the sales team is when they come down into the later phases, like bottom, bottom end of our predicting their consideration or decision phase, those would actually so we actually took 6 cents to the next level and bought the piece that goes into Salesforce so that our sellers have access at the account level and they have a 6Sense dashboard so that they can choose accounts to go after and we actually encourage them to do so. Our SDRs also have been trained on how to, you know, when they run out of inbound, which is very rare, but when they run up inbound to go and look for, you know, in market accounts to go out and do outcome for so very everything at the top end, we're using display ads through 6Sense or through other platforms to, again, try to, to move them down. The funnel is a way that I would look at it, right. So how do we engage these people that we've detected, who've hit the awareness phase and give them things that they might be interested in so that they come down into consideration and begin to see Bigtincan as a, as a viable solution for their problems. Kathleen (23:35): And what specifically needs to happen for somebody to cross the line from, or somebody, some company to cross the line from an account that is in your ad, nurturing to an account that you think is really ready for sales outreach. Like what indicators are you looking at? Rusty (23:52): I'm looking for multiple people, which you can detect in these platforms by IP address across the organization, searching for the right types of terms. That could be into very, you know, let's say there's multiple in consideration, there's several in decision. You know, that are hitting our search terms that we've specified you know, visiting our website is using indicator that they have at least figured out that we have something that could solve their problem. So the trigger generally, it, it I'm being vague because it's all set in our predictive model and it immediately notifies us when someone has tripped a certain number of the triggers that we've given it to say, all right, you know, there's X number of people at this company doing this there, you know, three people have come to the website, they've gone past the homepage. You know, one of them hit the pricing page at that point. You know, if someone hasn't reached out, I'm probably getting upset. Yeah. Kathleen (24:44): So tell me about results. Like, we talked a little bit about how this isn't a really super fast thing to get stood up. You've been, and you've been setting this up for how long and, and using it for how long? Rusty (24:56): It's a great question. So I'd say we did not use it properly for about a year, which is why, hopefully this is helpful to people so that getting this right out of the gate could save you a lot of time. But once I, once I feel like we had a good up and running, we probably had a completely running inside of Salesforce, entire system. Like we want it since January. Okay. Let's call it eight months, seven, eight months at this point right now as, as a simple measure, right? So for the first time ever, we're, we've detected more in market accounts, then G2 tells us are in account in market. So that was, that was a signal that I wanted to get to. So I wanted to say, all right, if people are going to G2 and things like that, right. I realize that you have marketers may not use YouTube. Rusty (25:44): It's the review side for software, if you don't. So the people that go there are looking for specific things, right? I realized that once we went over that, that we hit a threshold of in-market, that was, was bigger than what we could get from other sources. So then we look at like results. So right now for about every dollar that we spend on display we're influencing $107,000 of pipeline. Wow. In our upper part. And for every dollar we display, we're closing one about 27,000. Wait, say that last part again, we're closing one close won. For every dollar we spend on display 27,000. 27,000 influenced by our platform. Kathleen (26:34): For every dollar you spend on display, you are- Rusty (26:39): Influencing a $107,000 of pipeline, and we're influencing $27,000 closed won over the last six months, per month. Kathleen (26:49): Got it. Got it. Sorry. It took a minute there. Wow. That's great. That's great. Rusty (26:55): Those are, you know, that's our average right now. So for me, I, I gotta be really happy with that. Kathleen (27:02): Has it reduced the amount of outbound prospecting that you needed to do? Rusty (27:09): Not at all. In fact it increases your outbound. Kathleen (27:13): Just because you have a larger kind of target list to work? Rusty (27:17): Yeah. You have a larger target list. The level of complexity that adds is you also have to train your outreach teams where their SDRs are salespeople to how to do outreach by looking at what people are searching for. So it, it does add a level of complexity, but what I like about it is one of the things that truly hate is when people try to personalize things for me and they just go out and say like, Hey man, you play guitar. That's cool. Like you want to buy our stuff? And that's not cool. Rusty (27:48): That's not good outreach. Right. What good outreach is, you know, I've noticed that people at your company are searching for these types of things. These types of problems generally indicate this, you know, would you be interested in talking about a possible solution? That's good outreach, right? So training your teams, how to do good outreach is harder. But so does it, you asked me, did it decrease the amount of outbound, the answers? No. it, it effectively increases it. Right? Cause you're detecting more accounts than market. Kathleen (28:16): What impact did it have on inbound pipeline? Rusty (28:19): That's a good, I don't know. I don't know the answer. Kathleen (28:22): I mean, I would think it would increase it because if you're targeting ads at those people and at least presumably it would, it would result in more inbounds. Rusty (28:30): Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't have that. I don't have that on my dashboard. I'm looking at currently, but I will definitely go look at it. Cause it does make sense that logically if, you know, you were, they were getting, becoming engaged with your brand, that they would eventually comment and be an inbound in some way. Yeah. Kathleen (28:46): So if somebody is starting down this path now, like let's say they purchase an intent platform, kind of like you did. What would be your top three pieces of advice for somebody who's starting today? Rusty (29:01): Top three. Wow. That's a good question. I love it. I think the first one is make sure that your customer facing teams know what to do with the intent data. And that means you, you probably actually need to go and build actual messaging for them. Rusty (29:25): Because they it's, we as marketers know, I think we sort of, if you're running a campaign or you're doing detection and you're developing these keywords lists, you kind of intuitively know what, how people should be out doing outreach, but your customer facing teams don't so that's, that was a big one, right? Because they'll go, yeah, they're in market and they'll just reach out with, Hey, do you want to buy herself? You've ruined your chance. Right. You blew it. So I think that's probably number one. Number two is what we talked about with the whole segmentation stuff is don't failing to take into account the long tail is probably one of the bigger mistakes that I think that you could make. Now, look, if you're one of these companies or just as magic product product that you can sell it, you can go to tech then 10 and go to town. Rusty (30:09): Right. But if you're not, if you're a person out there working for a company that solves problems for people that they don't necessarily know that your solution can solve it, then that long tail is really going to help you. Yeah. Final piece, not refining regularly. I mean, you have to constantly refine. I'll give you an example of that. So when we first turned it on our platform on pre COVID one of our SEO terms was remote learning. So as you can imagine, that's sitting there in our 6sense platform, right. So what happened with COVID? Do you know how many people search for remote learning and how can we distinguish that from someone who was looking for learning software, right. A much better modifier you know, sales, learning software, and even much better modifier. Right. Then everyone who was sitting there trying to figure it out at work, how I'm going to train the kids, get them in school. Right. So you'll, you'll get these without we're finding constantly you, you run to a ton of false positives and the false positives are really bad. Right? Cause they'll make you reach out to people who are in market. And you know, I don't, I don't see any reason to blind, like email people. It's not something I do or we do. I guess it works for some people, but it doesn't work for me. Kathleen (31:22): So how often are you refining? Oh, we never stop. We take a look at it weekly, monthly. Rusty (31:29): I mean, we have a person who's about half of his job is to run that platform and to do account based marketing on top of it. Right. Not just run the platform, but so the reason I say that is we go to market vertically and the words that various verticals use to describe things are dramatically different. And our sales people will hear those words right. On a demo or on a sales call. And they might come back and say, Hey, you know, so-and-so was talking about this thing called e-detailing. And I'm like, I don't even know what that is. Well, it's the same thing as what we're doing right now, except for it's what happens when a salesperson talks to a doctor. Right. But then there might be another 50 terms that are associated with e-detailing, for example, that you also need to add that, or you're going to hear about and you know, analysts are changing the way they talk about things all the time, easy solution right there. The way that your competitors, right? What are they writing in their books? What are they saying? All of a sudden they change their messaging. I mean, you gotta be constantly refining it. I mean, I'd love to say we have a process where every week we're refining. Rusty (32:33): One of our mantras around here is if you see something, say something and people are very good about it because we're all remote, like everybody else. And just, yeah. And you got to yeah, basically. Yeah. These days yeah, yeah. Bigtincan's all over the world and everyone's mostly remote. So slack is a great tool and training your people, right? If you see something, say something and that refines your keyword list and these tools. So you said for three, you know. Kathleen (33:03): You got me three, I love it. And I put you on the spot with that one. Rusty (33:07): One more, which I'll go for it. The fourth one which is don't just blindly measure intent around your competitors. You will get really freaked out, like really fast. What do you mean by that? So let's say you just, you just entered a competitor's name as one of your search terms, which you're going to do. Like, I promise you if you installed DemandBase or 6Sense, that's the first thing you would put in there, like how many people are searching for my competitor. But you have to realize that when people enter your competitor's name in the search bar, like 80% of those are their users are there. People who've already bought their stuff. So you got to get just blindly getting freaked out about competitors. Names and intent is, is not good business practice. But once you use your modifiers, now you can start to get, now you start breaking those competitors down. Right. And figuring out what people are actually doing. Right? Kathleen (33:54): Yeah. I could definitely see where people would start to get spun up by that. Rusty (33:57): Or for the fourth one. But that one actually, that's a good one. Kathleen (34:03): All right. So we're going to switch gears and there's two questions. I always ask my guests. So I'd love to hear your answers. The first being, of course, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or an individual that you think is really studying the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer these days? Rusty (34:19): Wow. You know, I knew you were going to ask me this question and I went and listened to some of your podcasts and I thought about it. So I want to give you somebody that's unusual that you might not have gotten. So one of my favorite people in the world is Tim Ferris, Tim gets so many inbound requests that he has an automatic responder that denies them all okay. On everything he publishes. He says, don't contact me because I won't contact you back. So if you had to set a gold standard for inbound, I think that's probably it, you know? So what does that let's unpack that, right. So what I'm not saying is you got to be famous to be a great inbound marketer. What I'm saying is you've got to create something that's so valuable that you had so much inbound that you're fighting it away. I think that's that to me is kind of an interesting bar to set. Now, the other side of that bar is like, that's Kathleen (35:11): Such a, it's a very high bar to hit though. Rusty (35:15): It is. But I think that we all get caught up into, I need to create this stuff so that people will click on it and download it. And it's not valuable. At Bigtincan we talk about valuable buying experiences every day? It's one of our reasons to be it's written on everything we do. We tell everyone about it. And I don't think it's very viable to send, you know, email. One, have you heard of this email. Two didn't you respond email. Three let's break up. You know, so I set the standard up there. Like we should be creating content that's so valuable that people are breaking down the door to get it now, are we doing it yet? No, but we're sure going to track. So that comes example, that example I've been studying a lot lately is Qualtrics. And the reason I've been studying them is I think that their Play Bigger move. I'll put that in air quotes to move from surveys to XM as a category is fascinating. And the way that they became a category and did inbound around that, it was just amazing. If you ever get a chance to read their 10K that they put out when they went public, it's just absolute messaging clinic. It really is there anything to read their 10K, but it is a message clinic. I mean, it's just awesome. Kathleen (36:24): Now I'm super curious. I got to go hunt that down. Rusty (36:26): Yeah. So a couple of unusual things. There's so many people doing great inbound. I mean, you interview them every day. So I think those are two unusual ones. Kathleen (36:39): Yeah. Those are some good ones. And I'm dying now to read the Qualtrics 10K. You've piqued my interest with that one. Rusty (36:45): Well, when you make a decision to be a category, you gotta, man, you gotta do it. Kathleen (36:52): A lot of people give big lip service to it and very few are able to really make it happen. So those are always interesting case studies to look at. Second question is, you know, marketers tend to tell me that their biggest challenge is just staying on top of everything. That's changing all the time in the world of marketing, particularly with digital. So are there particular sources that you rely on to keep yourself educated on the cutting edge, et cetera? Rusty (37:18): Yeah. I am not a cutting edge guy. I don't know about that. Just in time person, which means, you know and I don't mean that in a way to like give you a flippant answer, but like, you know, if we need to figure out why our segments aren't working in 6Sense, right. I'll go and search like crazy and find the blog on their website, which talks about that as opposed to staying on top of the most modern stuff. I mean that being that, so my mental mode is more to read books. And I read absolutely voraciously, take notes. My, I tell my wife all the time, if I died, just sell the Evernote, it's going to be, it's worth more than we are. But so, but there's like a couple of things that constantly refer back to so one, four hour workweek by Tim Ferriss. Rusty (38:04): I'll just say it again. I love him to death. I think it's the way it should work. I love Designing Brand Identity by Lena Wheeler. I go back to it. I feel like every day when we're doing brand here at Bigtincan. Monetizing Innovation. I get asked about pricing all the time and segmentation of products. That book is the Bible. I probably have, I feel like a broken my Kindle reader, trying to go back and forth to it back in time. And the last one is On Writing Well by William Zinter. Probably my most favorite book on how to write. My team all the time, writing things and creating content. And they're always saying, how do I get better? And I say, this is the Bible effectively. So those four books I realized that's not how to stay on top of modern marketing. Kathleen (38:44): No, that's a great answer. And I love, yeah, I love there were some books in there I've never heard of. And I too, I'm a big book reader, as you can see, I'm sure if you're listening, you can't see this, but I, I always, in my interviews, I'm always sitting in front of my bookshelf that has all the books that I love in it. And they're actually stacked two deep in the shelves that have books. Cause I don't have room for them all. So yeah, no, I love books. And thank you for being specific and mentioning titles and authors. That's great. Yeah. All right. Well, if somebody is listening and they want to reach out and ask you a question or learn more about what you talked about, what is the best way for them to connect with you online? Rusty (39:22): The best way is through Linkedin. It's, it's Rusty Bishop, I'm on LinkedIn. It's pretty obvious who I am. I do react to LinkedIn probably better than anything else. That like most CMOs, I probably get a thousand emails a day. I, I may or may not respond, but yeah, LinkedIn is great. That's the best way. Kathleen (39:39): Fantastic. And if you're listening and you liked this episode, I would love it. If you would head to apple podcasts and leave the podcast a review, and if you know somebody else, who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I'd love to make them my next guest. Thank you so much for joining me Rusty. Rusty (39:56): Thank you. I enjoyed it. I did too. Thanks.  

How do top e-commerce companies leverage customer referrals to increase sales by 20% or more? This week on the Inbound Success podcast, ReferralCandy Chief Advocate Raul Galera breaks down the best practices behind top performing customer referral programs. From when to launch a program, to how to ask for referrals, and how to reward customers who make them, Raul gets into the details that you'll need to design, build, launch and execute your own successful referral program. And he includes specific examples of companies that are doing it right now. Check out the full episode to get the details. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.) Resources from this episode: Check out the ReferralCandy website Email Raul at raulg@referralcandy.com  Transcript Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I am your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Raul Galera who is the chief advocate for ReferralCandy. Welcome to the podcast Raul. Raul (00:27): Thanks for having me. Kathleen (00:28): Yeah, this is a great topic. Selfishly, I'm working on developing a customer referral program right now for my business. And so I am excited to pick your brain and I'm sure there are others listening as well, who want to learn about this before we dig into it. Can you talk a little bit about yourself and your story and how you came to be doing what you're doing now with ReferralCandy and then also what ReferralCandy is? Raul (00:51): Yeah, absolutely. So actually the reason why I found ReferallCandy, it's kind of related to, to remote work which is a pretty kind of hot topic these days. So just to give you like the short version. So after I finished college, I started working remotely for a consulting firm from Spain, that consulting firm was based in, in Poland, which is where I had studied abroad a few years before that. And after working remotely for a few years, I wanted to work from an office and I also wanted to, to move abroad. So I moved from Spain to Chile and I worked for a startup company in, in San Diego for a couple of years. And then after that, I, I made a couple of decisions. The first one was that I wanted to work for a software company. Raul (01:37): I wanted to sell software. It was something I wanted to learn about. And I also wanted to work remotely again. So after my, my office experience, I had decided that yeah, remote work was a better, better fit for me. And it's like I was looking for a remote sales jobs and, and I, I came across ReferralCandy on Angel List. I think it was they had a kind of like a remote friendly sales position. And so instead of applying directly through Angel List, I decided to email the CEO directly and tell him why I thought it was a, I was a good fit for, for the company. And he replied to the email, we had a couple of interviews and I guess the rest is history. Kathleen (02:18): I love that story. I love that you reached out directly to him. I just think so few people do that. Everybody is kind of used to like hitting the submit button on LinkedIn or whatever. And it definitely makes a difference too, to go that extra mile. And I feel like the rest of the world is now starting to catch up with you with these remote positions. I, I also have worked remotely for some time and love it. But that's been interesting to me to see what COVID has done in terms of the perceptions of workplaces and, and, and people who run companies and, and their appetite for allowing remote work. It seems like it's really grown, which is I think a very good thing. Raul (02:54): Yeah. I mean, I remember a few years ago I had to I mean, I've felt kind of weird explaining that I was working from my living room or my home office instead of from an office. And I would always get these like, weird looks about it, but where, where were you based? And where's the company based and, you know, like you're working from an office, you know, that's yeah, I'm kind of happy that that's how it could have more natural these days and worlds. Kathleen (03:16): Yeah. There was a time when you had to hide the fact that you were at home and I would be really embarrassed if my dogs barked, which you might hear my dogs bark in this interview because I am still at home and I have two dogs and they bark, but no, it is, it is a good thing for all of us. So, so talk a little bit about ReferralCandy. What is, what, what is that? Raul (03:35): ReferralCandy is an app that allows e-commerce brands to set up and run customer referral programs. So we, as a company we started working in, in 2010. I joined the company in 2016 and from, from day one with I mean, we've, we've pretty much grown alongside the e-commerce world. We were one of the first referral marketing partners for, for Shopify. And so we kind of like experienced growth as a company alongside all these like big, you know e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Big Commerce, WooCommerce, Magento, et cetera. And so basically what we do is that we allow brands to run these referral programs on autopilot in the way that we do this is by inviting customers to automatically join the, the referral program, the referral program, by giving them a unique referral link. Raul (04:25): They can share these referral links with their friends on social media, on texts or whatever it is. The friend clicks on the link. And then from that moment on whenever they finish the purchase we're able to track the whole referral process from the moment that they clicked on the link until they completed the purchase. And we send the rewards to the customer that made the recommendation in the first place. So it's all so automated whether it's a coupon payout or, or an actual cash payout, we automate the reward process on our end. So the merchants don't really have to worry about that. Kathleen (04:58): So customer referral programs, let's talk about this because I do feel like, you know, you guys are doing it particularly for e-commerce, it sounds like, but I would imagine that there are certain fundamental elements of customer full programs that apply to all companies. And so I guess I feel like everybody out there knows that customer referrals are a great way to get new business. Right? You have your, your happiest customers kind of talking about you, almost selling, selling for you, but I think the stumbling block that everybody runs into is how to ask for the referral. And, and so maybe you could address that, like who to ask and how to ask and when to ask Raul (05:41): Those are all really good questions. I would say so, and I honestly, I have different answers or like I have different sets of answers for each one of them based on what I've seen. I don't think there's like one particular like rule of thumb that works for all businesses. They're all pretty different and the way their customers interact with, with these brands kind like make those interactions a little bit different in terms of when to ask and how to ask the, the main thing that in terms of how to ask I would say that there's, there's two main strategies on this. One of them is to kind of put the emphasis on what you as a customer are are going to get for every friend that you, that you were first. Raul (06:30): So kind of like putting the emphasis on, you know, refer a friend and you will get $10 in cash or refer a friend and you will get a $10 coupon on your next purchase. On the the other side, it's to put more emphasis on what you can give to your friends. So we've seen referral programs that have worked really well because they've been able to kind of tell customers, look, you're going to look really good in front of your friends, because they're going to be able to give them this really special coupon or this really special offer and both of them work. So it, I guess it really depends on, on maybe how word of mouth friendly your product is in the sense that if you're selling something, that's, that's going to spark a conversation. And you know, that your customers are naturally going to talk about your products, just, just because of the nature of it. Raul (07:19): Then you can put more emphasis on the friend reward because you know, that your customers are just naturally going to recommend you to their friends and family. But again both of them, both of them work, and I've seen both of them work in, in, in, in in, in different companies, in different industries. Now in terms of when to ask there's two main theories here. So the, the, the two of them are either ask your customers once you have their attention. So that could be like right after a purchase. So, you know, while, while the purchase still fresh, and they're still thinking about your brand because they just bought something from you it's going feel natural to get an email from the brand asking you to join the referral program. Cause you just became, you just became a customer. Raul (08:02): The other theory is to ask customers to join the referral program after they have received the product. So wait a few days, let him get your product and use it and then hit them with email that asks for a referral. Once again, both of them work, I've seen both of those strategies work, and I guess also depends on the nature of the, of the business. And then in terms of how to ask one particular, how, excuse me, one particular way of asking that I like it's one brands when brands are transparent in terms of why they're asking for a referral. There's one particular example that I, I always like to share. Whenever I get questions about how to ask for, for referrals since it's, it's a company that's called Baronfig and they actually, so they have a page on their website about the referral program. Raul (08:58): And one of the things that they say in, in this, they have to have kind of like a note from the team explaining why they have a referral program. And the reason that they give is that they want to they're rather spend money on their customers that on Facebook advertising or online advertising, like, you know, we, we, we know you love our product so much that we would just rather give the money to you instead of giving it to all these big corporations. You don't have to follow that particular example. You don't have to you know, like you make it either or, but showing your customers that, the fact that they're going to go out and spread the word about your brand, it's actually going to matter to you and it's going to matter to your business. I think that's really smart. And if you, and again, if you're, if you have honest marketing and your customers know that, that you care about them and you care about the products you're developing that way of kind of asking for other, for the referrals, it's going to come out very naturally. Kathleen (09:52): I love that example about the Facebook ads, because it's true. Like if you're spending a ton of money on Facebook ads, would you rather give the money to Facebook or would you rather give it to your customers? I know what my answer would be. What do you say to people who push back and say, well, we shouldn't have to pay our customers to refer us. I don't know. I've definitely heard people express opinions indicating that they feel like the transactional nature of that somehow cheapens the referral. Do you have any response to that? Raul (10:24): Yeah, I mean, I can, I can totally see that. And, and it's all, it's not really about it doesn't have to be a monetary transaction. You can there's, I mean, you can get creative and, and offered things that are going to their customers. Aren't going to appreciate without again, I can see that offering a coupon or offering cash can, you know, raise some eyebrows for some brands and say, Hey, maybe this is going to, to affect the way that we're positioning our brand. We we've seen that with a more kind of like luxury items or brands are they're in that type of business that there sometimes are a little you know, they kind of question the whole, the whole thing, but the reality is that at the end of the day, their customers are going to refer their friends and family anyway. Raul (11:08): And so, you know, why not, first of all tracking it. And then second, like if you can add something on top of that too, to do have them continue doing so then, you know, it's going to be a win-win for everybody. So, but again, it doesn't have to be doesn't have to be, I'm going to try to turn a section and you can offer a free product. You can offer some like free accessory or you can even like offer them a spot on a new release. If you're going to release a product in the next few months, and you want to have a closer to, to kind of like a VIP group, you can offer that instead. And again, also for, for the customer, if you don't want to offer a coupon, you can, you can offer an additional product or something that's not available. Raul (11:50): To, to, like I said to, to most people, you can maybe some sort of like a hidden product that's added to your cart if you make a purchase referred by, by an existing customer. So it's all, it's all a matter of making it a little bit special. And also you know, if, if your, if your customers your customers are going to be happy that they're sharing something, that's going to be useful for their friends anyway, which is it's honestly, the bottom line of, of referral programs is that referral programs at the end of the day, what they do is that they incentivize something that's already happened or happening organically, which is word of mouth. So if you can incentivize that even more than your customers are going have be able to add that little pitch at the end, after they sh they shunned the product, and they explained their friends and family, why the product is so good, they're going to be like, and by the way, if you buy using this link that you get a little, a little something, or we both get a little something. Raul (12:42): So, Kathleen (12:43): So when it comes to offering a coupon or a gift card, or some sort of monetary compensation, do you have any data that, that would point to how much that should be? Because I feel like, I feel like there has to be a sweet spot, right? Like too low, and it's not going to motivate the desired behavior too high, and it's going to be very expensive. And I don't know B it might just seem egregious, but yeah. What, what's your take on that? I mean, Raul (13:12): It really depends on the company and kind of like what they can offer just from looking at a, from a financial perspective, like, what are their margins and what are they able to offer? What I would do, what I would suggest is to make sure that it's kind of a unique offer. We have customers that are offering, let's say 10% to, to their, to their customers and their friends for every referral. But at the same time, that's what they're offering to anybody that signs up for the newsletter. So, you know what, when you, when you put it on the same level and you make it a referral, it takes a lot more effort than signing up for a newsletter. And so if you're given that incentive it might not seem too attractive to customers because they can get that discount. Raul (13:53): And by, by doing something else, that's honestly a lot, a lot easier to do. So what I would do is it's to yeah, like offer something, offer something that you're not already offering hopefully something a lot higher, make sure that it's also not clashing with other type of promotions that you might have in we, we noticed we had a, a client that we would notice that every weekend, their referral sales would go, we'll go down. And we couldn't really figure it out. Why, because the rest of the week, Monday through Friday, you would see kind of like normal sales and then they will drop in during the weekend, which w which was the opposite of what their customers were doing. Their customers were buying more from them over that weekend. W what was happening is that every weekend they had kinda like a a store sale with the same discount had a referral program. Raul (14:40): And so people were, were just rather use that coupon code and then offer them that using the one that they that we're getting from, from making referrals. So, you know, those little things, like, just making sure that you have kind of like a clear picture of what your, your coupon situation is, and then makes something a little bit more special at the end of the day, making a referral for the customer. It's not, it's not something that's going to happen automatically, just because they're sharing it on their social media, or just because they're sharing the referral link on a, on a, on a group chat doesn't mean that they're, their friends are going to make a purchase right away. So you need to reward them for that. Kathleen (15:13): That makes sense. So make your referral discount higher than the other discounts you're advertising. Can you talk a little bit about tracking, because you've mentioned a few things that point to that, and I imagine that's key to all of this, because if you're gonna, if you're going to offer these rewards, you have to be able to track whether the action happened and attributed back to the right person and then distribute that reward. So how, how, what's the best practice for handling that? Well, Raul (15:38): I mean, it's out of ReferralCandy. We do it automatically. So depending on the platform, we have several different ways that we can identify who was the friend and who made the referral. For some platforms we use coupon codes that are specific for, for advocates. And so if we see a transaction with a specific coupon code, we're able to say, okay, this was the advocate, and this is the person that needs to get rewarded for other platforms. We rely more on the referral link and, and kind of like, you know, kind of like the, the, the tracking after they click on it we're able to basically to cookie the friend and then see what's, you know, what's the referral looking like. But what, what I was mentioning earlier about being able to track referrals it's more about kind of like the, the, the, the moment in which brands tend to decide that they need a referral program. Raul (16:27): They know that they start to getting these early signs that they're getting referrals either because you know, a customer, my, my, mention it to a customer support rep or, or, you know, you might like see referrals happening on social media, just from people that have bought the product, and they're just sharing it or somebody unboxing your product on YouTube. And then maybe people asking them what they can get it, all that kind of stuff. So, like, those aren't kinda like early signs, but unless you have a referral program software on your store it's pretty difficult to, to, to track who are the customers that are, that are coming to you from referrals versus any other channel, because those, all of those referrals are happening organically in a way. And it's, it's kind of more like a, just like a natural conversation so that they might hear from, again, from a friend or my, my look at a video on YouTube, and then just go to the website and make the purchase. And you'll never be able to attribute that purchase to kind of like a referral source. So yeah, so instead of ReferralCandy, we were able to track that with with the referral links and coupon codes. But, but yeah, I mean, th those are kind of like the early signs that brands typically look at in order to decide that, okay, it's time to have something formal in place so we can see where this is going. Kathleen (17:44): So what are the top three mistakes that you see companies make with referral programs? Raul (17:52): So I would say that the main mistakes are either going to early so referral programs I mean, it's, it's a, it's an easy way for brands to retain existing customers and acquire new ones. So it's basically, you're turning your customer base into, into your marketing team. But it's a numbers game. And the, the number of advocates that you're going to have in your referral program depends a lot on, on your total number of customers. So how many new orders are you having per day or per week or per month? And then those are, the customers are eventually going to get added to the program. They're going to get the referral link, and then they're going to go out and refer. So it's a, it's a numbers game, really. So you need to have a good number of customers in the referral program in order to be able to see results in the short term. Raul (18:38): So whenever we have a brand joining joining ReferralCandy and launching a referral program if it's a brand that has, let's say like 10 or 20,000 orders per month, they take off immediately. Because they're, they're getting you know, almost thousands of orders every day. So those are thousands of customers that are being added to the referral program right away. Now, if you're a brand that it's, it's making, let's say a hundred, 200 orders per month, and it's going to take a lot longer. And so it's, it's not that it's a mistake joining the referral program, but what is the mistake in my opinion, is to expect results in, in the short term. And I'll be number one. Another mistake that I typically see is not, not promoting it enough. So like I said, you depend on your customers to perform an action. Raul (19:23): So you need to remind people about the, the, the existing of the referral program, because there's a lot of things that are happening in our daily lives. And, and, and if we're a, if we're not, if brands are not staying top of mind, then it's difficult for customers to think about it and kinda like generate those referrals. So promotion is key. And then the third mistake, probably the most important one. This is an actual mistake, in my opinion it's not, not being ready or not having a company that's ready for our referral program in the sense that either your products it's not good enough yet, or your customers are not loving your product yet, or maybe your kind of like purchase process, it's, it's complicated and messy, and your customers are not kind of enjoying the whole process. And then or maybe you don't have a customer support team in place. Raul (20:18): That's like, you know, practically solving problems and your customers are not, not happy overall. So if your customers are not happy and referral program is not gonna be able to solve that. And that's something that I actually see quite often but you know, it, it, at least it's it's kinda like a, it's a way of figuring out if there's something that's wrong with, with the company or with the product. And then, you know, you can think of the company and kind of focus on fixing that. And then I mean, if our referral program is not working, honestly, any other marketing action that you might develop, it's not going to work either if your product is not, it's not Kathleen (20:53): There. Yeah. That's so true. There's no substitute for a poor product. And you can't market your way out of that either. Exactly. so I'd love for you to give some examples, because I feel like in principle, this sounds like a no brainer if you have a good product and if you're ready for it. So can you maybe talk about the impact that it can have on companies? Like, do you have any real-world examples of companies that implemented a referral program and what that did to the business? Raul (21:24): Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, I brought a few examples of companies in kind of different industries so we can, we can kind of go over it together, but I would say that that one thing that they all have in common is that they obviously have a great product, that their customers are, are loving. They, by the time they launch a referral program, they, they realized that they were already getting kind of organic referrals. And that's what it was just kind of implementing something on top of that, that it was going to be able to streamline the whole referral process. So one of my favorite examples it's a company called Branch Basics. They are based in the US and they are offering a subscription business for cleaning products, which, you know, it's not, you know, initially it's not like, you know, a very attractive product. Raul (22:11): They're, they're in a very competitive industry. And so it's something that sometimes we just buy kind of automatically you put it on your shopping list and you go to the store and you get it. But that kind of like the twist they, they being able to add to the product that made it so attractive for customers is that they, they realize that most of the ingredients that you buy when you buy cleaning products are plastic and water, so you're, you're buying a container and then you buy a product that's mostly made of water. And so what they, what they've done is that they, they, when you, when you subscribed to brunch basics, they send you a box with different spray bottles and, and, and basically the containers for your cleaning supplies. And then they send you a subscription of different concentrates that you can use to, you know, buy to clean different parts of your house. And all you need to do is just put that the, the, those concentrates inside of the bottles and fill them with water and you're ready to go. Kathleen (23:06): By the way, I agree. Totally genius. That makes all the sense in the world, especially in terms of lowering shipping costs. Raul (23:13): Exactly. And, and it's and yeah, it's something that when you think about it, you're like, wait a minute, that's true. I'm just, I'm buying water and plastic. Kathleen (23:20): Yeah. Yeah. And I'm paying to have it shipped to me. Exactly, exactly. Raul (23:24): So they, they, they were able to add a twist to this, like, you know, highly traditional industry. But at the same time they had an issue at the beginning, which is how do we break through the noise? I mean, there's, there's like cleaning supply companies are so big and they, they, they take over pretty much any marketing channel available to us that we need to find something else. And so they they realized that their customers were their best advocates, because they were really excited about telling their friends and family about the, the, the, the cleaning products that we're buying. So just to kind of give you some numbers. So right now pretty much since they launched the referral program they saw an increase in by 10% in their, in their total sales and that 10% came from the referral program. Raul (24:08): And, and ever since they've been able to get like one in every 10 purchases coming from the referral program, which if you, if you look at it from the financial perspective and how much it costs to acquire a customer through a referral compared to any other, you know acquisition method, like, you know, like Facebook ads or Google ads, it's a lot cheaper. And, and also customers aren't coming from a referral tend to stick around longer and spend more. So in the long run, it's, it's made a really big impact on the bottom line of their business, which is their, their revenue. Other examples that I particularly like because it's it's, it's brands that have being able to target a specific communities of customers. So there's, we have a couple of companies that are selling products for, for either babies or toddlers. Raul (25:01): And obviously the customer here is not the baby and the toddler. It's mothers. And so they're being able to target communities of mothers that, that we're going to be able to buy the products. And then, then we're going to talk about it to, to all their moms. And so in particular we have two companies, one called Momomee and the other one called Riff Raff. And they, they, they pretty much being able to see the same type of results pretty much from the beginning, they were able to increase their sales by 20 and 24% using referral marketing, which is a lot, I mean, it's one of the highest referral rates that I've seen in, in among our customers. And there were, they were able to do so because they, they were targeting a highly engaged community of people that were constantly looking for the best products. Raul (25:45): And so if you see if you're part of a, of a mother's community and you see a mom being super excited about it, but one particular product, it's very likely they're going to buy it, even if you don't personally know about that person. But, but just the fact that you're both in kinda like the same stage of, of life, it kinda like makes you agree. And, and those referrals typically happen very, very naturally. So those are two that particularly like, because of the, kind of like the, the, that the way that they being able to, to target these communities. And then I mean, and then I would say that those are kind of like the 20, 24% referral rates I mean, are achievable because we have several customers that are, that are being able to get those to get to those percentages. Raul (26:32): But then, you know, you see customers having anywhere between five and 15% referral rates that are, you know, kind of all over the board in terms of companies that are they're operating in the, in the clothing or apparel industry companies are selling gadgets or, or sporting sporting goods. And they all have a kind of different ways that they've been able to target themselves sorry, market themselves to their customers and their referral programs. But I would say that products that are, are word of mouth friendly are those that are either truly revolutionary in the sense that it's nothing that you've seen before, or their products from a traditional industry with the twist, kind of like the example of Branch Basics. They, they, they're not in a very traditional industry, but they being able to add something that you know, all of a sudden it makes it look like a, like a no-brainer. But if we look at the, kind of like the traditional or the kinda like the most famous classic referral programs, Dropbox, Uber PayPal, those were truly new products. And so when you were talking to your friends and family about those products, you were, you were sharing something that was brand new, something that anybody had never heard of before. So that's, that's what makes, in my opinion company's word of mouth friendly when, when the person that's talking about your brands, truly excited about what, what they're about, what they're saying. Kathleen (27:58): So that makes all the sense in the world. And, and I think that that also makes it easier to onboard people into the customer referral program if they're excited. But I guess the other thing that I wonder about is activation because like, with anything, it's one thing to get the person to join the program, and it's another to then get them actually spreading the word and doing it consistently. So do you have any best practices or examples you've seen of companies that have done a really good job with activation? Raul (28:27): Yeah, so I would say that the most the most common examples of this are companies that are, that have a pretty consistent promotion schedule for the referral program. And so they are either reminding customers, let's say sending me an email every couple of weeks to their customers to remind them about the program, they're sharing it on social media or even like giving incentives that they get people excited about sharing. One particular example that I, that I really like talking about it's a company called Thread Beast and they are subscription box for just apparel basically. And so whenever you buy a box, you get maybe like a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and a hat and a belt, and maybe a pair of shoes as well. And the way that they've marketed the referral program is that instead of giving so it's, this it's a subscription, right? Raul (29:18): So instead of giving a coupon code on your future subscription or in your feature invoice what you get is every time you refer a friend, you get an additional box. So if you refer three friends, you're going to get your box plus three other boxes, full of clothes. And then your friend, the friends, I think they get like, like like 50% off or something like that. So it's pretty easy for the friends to to get started as well. And so when you are basically not capping the type of the, the, the type of rewards that they can earn it gets people really excited about sharing the referral link. So and actually, if you go on YouTube and you search for Thread Beasts, you're going to see tons of videos, a lot of them from, for the past few days, because people just keep renewing their videos unboxing, what they got from, from Thread Beast then. Raul (30:07): So they, they do like a, maybe 10 minute video explaining all the different products they've, they've gone. And then they also shared the referral link and to tell people how to get started on Thread Beast as well. So those type of rewards in which you're not necessarily capping it that works really well. Also companies that offer cash instead of coupon codes. So if you're, if you're selling a product that, you know, your customers are not going to buy from you anytime soon, and I always give the same example mattresses. Kathleen (30:34): Oh yeah. That's so true. Raul (30:36): If you're selling mattresses. I mean, that, that's kinda like the iconic example of a product that you're not going to buy a, you buy once, and then you're not going to buy it anytime soon. So if you're, if you run a referral program, and you're a mattress company, you can either maybe offer up, offer free product, which might be some sort of accessory that you can use under your bed. Kathleen (30:54): Or something. Yeah, exactly. Raul (30:55): Or you can offer cash and people are going to be happy to share and get cash because, you know, nobody's going to say no to that. So again, promotion and then being a little creative with the rewards typically helps with activation. And then something that we've also seen with with customers is that they they they're being able to add a little bit of a gamification to the process. So Riff Raff, the example that I was mentioning before they, they offer, they have like, kinda like a limited set of products. I think they only have like five or six items that they sell, but you can collect them in a way. And so instead of giving cash or giving a coupon to their customers, to give them a free product, every time they refer, I think it's five friends. And so if you end up referring, you know, 15, 20, 25 friends, you might end up getting all the different items of the collection. So you can, you can kind of collect all these, all these different products. So yeah, it's like I said, I mean, they're all I can't really give like one particular you know strategy that would work for all businesses, but it's all about getting a little bit creative and also knowing what truly get your customers excited. Kathleen (32:05): Yeah. And I think hearing some of those examples is helpful, cause it's just stipulates that the ideation, all right, we're going to switch gears because we're coming towards the end of our time. And I want to make sure I have time to ask the two questions that I always ask. First one being you know, the, the world of inbound marketing and digital in particular is changing really, really quickly. Some of it fueled by technology, some fuel by regulatory things around privacy. You know, there's just so much platform changes. There's so much happening. How do you personally stay educated and on top of all that, are there certain sources of information that you really rely on? Raul (32:44): Yeah, so I so I don't have like one particular news outlet that I follow for, you know, for anything related to marketing or e-commerce but instead I rely on community. So I'm part of several Slack communities. And from, you know, people that have worked in, in either in, in, in direct to consumer or people that work in, in e-commerce technology. And they, I tend to rely on those communities to get information that's going to be relevant. I think that when not necessarily a cause I used to be really active on Twitter. And I used to get a lot of my news from Twitter, but, you know, Twitter is just a little bit out of hand. I mean, I got out of hand in, in my opinion. And so I decided to kinda focus on kind of like smaller communities, more niche communities, and, and that, I think the quality you might not get as many articles to check every day, but the quality in my opinion has improved a lot. And there is. And then there's also an interesting conversation whenever somebody shares something, if it's, if it's truly interesting, there's going to be people that are going to like, you know, go back and forth about it. And that's also, my opinion is super valuable because allows me to learn from people that I've, you know, they're like, that are really way smarter than me. And and that that's always good. Kathleen (34:00): Any particular Slack communities that you really love? Raul (34:02): Yeah. So I'm my favorite one it's called Partner League. And it's a community for Shopify partners. It's, it's not run by Shopify it's, it's kind of like a, it was organized by by several Shopify partners. It's, it's a little bit independent and I think that's what makes it interesting, in my opinion, there's like really, really interesting conversations that happened there. And then also whenever somebody shares anything, anything that affects the industry, there are some really interesting conversations about this. So, so yeah, Partner League, if you're in Shopify I totally recommend Kathleen (34:33): It. I am in that one as well, and I think it's good. So now we know we can Slack each other. Great. And then the second question is, of course, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Are there particular companies or individuals that you think are really setting a great standard for what it means to be a really good inbound marketer these days? Raul (34:57): Yeah. So whenever I look for, for example, so people, companies doing good marketing, I like to look at my inbox. I, I unsubscribe whenever I make a purchase, I end up subscribing from like, I don't know, 75, 80% of the brands that I, that I buy from. Cause I, you know, I ended up just not enjoying the content they send me, but those that remain in my inbox type. Those are the ones that I particularly like, and there's one company that's called Back Market. They sell a refurbished products so, you know refurbish technology. So, you know, iPhones, some computers you know, whatever, actually my, my last two iPhones are from, from them. So I a I'm a really good really with customer of them, but I like the way to do marketing because, well, first of all, they've been able to educate people on you know, kinda like all the electronic waste that we're producing. Raul (35:49): And that they've been able to kind of like remove the, the, the stigma that most, a lot of people had on, on buying refurbished products for products that are not brand new. And so I think they've done a really good job educating what refurbish means and what's the impact that you can make for, for the environment. And then also I like the tone. So they I mean, I get, so I'm based in Spain, so I get their content from their Spanish site, but I don't know if the US site will be a little bit different, but they're pretty funny. They use humor a lot in the way that they that they interact with with customers. And I think that's key to be honest, like whenever, whenever I see their emails, even if I'm clearly not going to buy another iPhone in the next year or two, but I still look at their emails and I read every single one of them, because I think they're really smart. And that any time that I don't have a referral program, by the way. So from here, if anybody from Back Market is listening to me, we should, we should talk. But anytime that I hear somebody that wants to buy some sort of electronic site typically think of them because of how exposed I am. Kathleen (36:50): Well now I definitely want to go and subscribe to their emails because I love collecting just emails that are, that are well-written. And I love email, and I love corporate marketing. That's done with humor. So a hard thing to pull off and to do it like to hit the right tone. And then right note, like it can go wrong pretty easily, but for the companies that pull it off, it's incredibly powerful. Raul (37:12): One thing that they do that I think helps a lot, and that's something that pretty much every single brand can, can copy is that they these emails are not sent from black market. It's sent from somebody inside of Back Market. So you get it, you get a first name and in the email. So you can always kind of like, think about who's the person that's writing, the, the email that you're reading. And so it feels a lot more personal rather than getting an email from kind of like a faceless corporation. And so, and that's actually something I copied myself. So I have a newsletter for, for my agency partners had ReferralCandy that I write myself, but I also make sure that it's not sent from ReferralCandy's sending from, from my name. I think it, I think it helps to, to get your message across and, and we tend to put a voice on what we're reading. So if I can get people to read it with my voice, that's even better. Kathleen (38:03): Totally agree. And I do the same thing, my newsletters and all my emails, excuse me, come from people who nobody forms a, an emotional relationship with contact at or info at. It just doesn't happen. So I totally agree. All right. Well, we have reached the top of our time. So if somebody is interested in learning more about ReferralCandy, or just wants to connect with you and has a question what's the best way for them to to connect with you online? Raul (38:32): So ReferralCandy.com for anything related to ReferralCandy, and then they can just email me directly. So my email is raulg@referralcandy.com. So raulg@referralcandy.com and I'm always happy to continue the conversation there. Kathleen (38:48): Great. And I'll put that link in the show notes. So head there, if you want to get in touch with Raul and if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, consider heading to apple podcasts and leaving the podcast a review. That's how other people find us. And we would very much appreciate it. And in the meantime, if you know another marketer who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much for joining me Raul. Raul (39:18): Thank you so much.

What's the quickest way to build and execute a content strategy that will deliver big inbound lead gen results in a short amount of time? This week on the Inbound Success podcast, Trimble Director of Demand Generation Lindsay Kelley breaks down how she and her team grew inbound deals from 22% to 66% of the company's pipeline in just six months with a content-driven strategy. As Lindsay says, the company's website was "skinny" when it came to content. Upon joining, she immediately set about creating "cornerstone" content and then repurposing that into other assets. Her name for it is the "Thanksgiving Turkey" approach - meaning you break up big content pieces and make lots of other things out of them, just like you do with a Thanksgiving turkey after the big day.  She also explains how she worked with her internal team to encourage cross-departmental collaboration on content and other marketing efforts. Check out the full episode to get the details. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.) Resources from this episode: Check out the Trimble website Connect with Lindsay on LinkedIn Transcript Kathleen (00:03): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is my good friend, Lindsay Kelley, who is the director of demand generation at Trimble. Welcome to the podcast, Lindsay. Lindsay (00:45): Hi, Kathleen. So excited to see you so excited to be here. And I love your podcast so much. And it's like a dream pinching myself to be on the podcast. Kathleen (00:56): Okay. True story. I was thinking about who should be my next guest and I was thinking about people. I know. And I thought of you because I've known you for a really long time, and I'll say in a minute how we know each other. And honestly, when I first thought of this, I was like, oh, I already interviewed her. And this has happened to me a couple of times recently where I'm like, oh, I already interviewed that person. But then when I looked, I was like, wait, no, I haven't. So this has been a long time in coming. I met Lindsay. I don't even remember what year it was. It was at HubSpot's inbound conference. Lindsay (01:29): 2013. Kathleen (01:31): Holy cow. We just happened to sit next to each other, like during a big keynote. And the rest is history. We became fast friends, even though we were at competing agencies, but we never, I don't think ever thought of each other as competitors. And it's just been a wonderful professional relationship and personal friendship over the years. And man, I will, I I'll stop going on and on about it, but it's, I'm just so happy we finally did this. Lindsay (01:55): I know me too. And you did ask me six months ago and I said, give me six more months because as I was new, newer to my role and I was still in building phase, I may say I don't have anything great to share yet. So you came to me at the perfect time six months later, almost exactly. Kathleen (02:13): Yeah, I know coincidentally. Right. and now you do have some great stuff to share and, and it's no surprise to me because just for those listening, like Lindsay is she, is she used to be from the agency world, like I did, and now she's, in-house like I am. And I just have, I have a lot of respect for you as a marketer and how you think about marketing and your execution and everything. And so let's start by having you just tell folks who are listening a little bit about yourself, your background and where you are now and what Trimble is. Lindsay (02:42): Absolutely. So I started my career in Baltimore in the late nineties. And I started an ad agency, which was a really great experience learned a lot. I was on the B2B side and so that kind of set the stage for my career. I spent my entire career in the B2B of the house. But fast forward a couple of years after some in-house, you know, marketing coordinator marketing specialist working your way up. I finally landed at a place in Baltimore where I met John Shea, who, you know, and John Shea and I went out and started our own agency and it was a sales and marketing alignment agency, and really learned a lot. There, had a great time wanted to grow a little more of the marketing side. So ended up he went sales side. Lindsay (03:29): I went marketing agency side, joined up with another dear friend Darrell Amy. And I think you've had Darrell on the podcast too. And so Darrell and I were partners for about three years and we built an agency that was focused on the copier industry. So we would go in, we would help them build websites. We put the inbound methodology in place and, you know, we were HubSpot gold partners. So we were a little smaller. But it was a really, really great time. And you just learned so much when you start your own agency. Kathleen (04:02): Oh my gosh. Yes. Lindsay (04:06): I think one of my favorite stories was calling a friend one day and it was a Thursday and I said, it just hit me that I haven't showered since Monday. And if you're doing nothing but working and I'm like, and I can't remember the last time I had lunch, you know, it's ruling, but yeah, it really does teach you a lot. So when I when I eventually decided to go back into the corporate world, it was because my daughter was really having a hard time with me traveling. I traveled so much giving the inbound marketing workshops, traveling to clients since she was eight. So I said, I'm going to go agencies. I'm going to go out of the agency world and into corporate America, joined up with an organization called Telit. Had a great time there for about three years. Lindsay (04:48): And then I was actually recruited away in the middle of COVID. So what an experience to interview and and go through that process during COVID, it was a very unique experience. And so the, the companies was originally called e-Builder. It still is e-Builder. It's a product. And so we have a SaaS tool that's designed specifically for construction owners. So we really kind of sit in the, in the arena of the guys that sit in the office and go, okay, I need to build 10 hospitals this year. I need a, a tool to manage that. So, so that's really the software that, that I focus on today and that's part of Trimble. And, you know, Trimble's made a lot of acquisitions over the years to really be able to build this connected construction strategy. And so we're kind of in the middle of it now, and we're, we're working on the connected scale. Lindsay (05:40): So by 20, 25, we'll all be together. But I will say, like, I have had such a ball meeting all of these amazing marketing folks across the different sectors. So I feel really lucky that I found this and you know, my my team is I absolutely adore working with them every day. And so we've done some really fun stuff and they've all said, wow, this is, this is different than what we've done in the past and we're enjoying it and it's fun. So I think for them, it was a little bit of a new adventure. And they're, they're enjoying it. It's, you know, there's always going to be a little rough road, but we we're just, we're loving it and we're killing it. Kathleen (06:20): That's great. I love that story. And I mean, your background is so similar to mine in that sense. Like I owned an agency for 11 years and then my kids reached a certain age where I was like, I need to be more present for them and left and went in-house. And so we've had really oddly parallel career journeys. Although I would say I've been at smaller companies, more series a startups, and you've been at some slightly larger companies. And so it's kind of cool to be able to trade those experiences. You know, you came into tremble and this is an established company. So this, like, I tend to come in and there isn't marketing. And so I build it out and I get to like do it out of whole cloth, right? I'm like, not, I'm not undoing anyone else's stuff or changing anything. Kathleen (07:01): You have a different situation. You came in to a plane that was already flying. And so you have to like, you know, there's, there's always challenges you have where you maybe want to do some things a different way, or you need to tweak things, but you need to do it so that it doesn't take the plane down. Right. Like you've got the plane in the air, how do we keep it in the air, but maybe make it perform better. And so talk a little bit about like, when you first joined the company, how was it doing its marketing and what did it go to market strategy look like? Lindsay (07:29): Yeah. And, you know, for, for a long time, e-Builder has been such a well-respected and known brand amongst all the owners that we serve. So really for a long time, it was just, you know, name recognition and, you know, people could pick up the phone and have a conversation. Oh, we build there. Okay. No, I've heard of you guys. This is great. And you know, how it goes said, competition comes into the marketplace and becomes a little more challenging. And the ways that you did it before, aren't quite as successful. Not that they're not still successful in a way, but they're not as successful as, as they could be in this new environment. And so, you know, with buyers changing the way that their buying habits are doing a lot more research learning online it was something that when I first came in, they were doing a lot of email marketing. Lindsay (08:18): It was to an existing database. So they had, you know, a really solid, good, a number of contexts that they were able to reach out to that they had built up over the years. And, and so, you know, we had, you know, the customer marketing department, we had the demand generation and we had inbound and they all kind of worked on their own. And, you know, they were great friends. They had a really good chemistry, but when it came to the, the business side of it, they were pretty siloed. And so we spent a lot of time breaking through that to figure out, you know, how we could take it from, you know, the, the top of the funnel all the way through to the customer customer marketing. So that's been a lot of fun. The, the team has really enjoyed getting to do more brainstorming together and understanding more about, you know, the power of strategizing together and, you know, people coming up with different ideas and pulling them together and saying, actually, you know, what if we did this this way? Lindsay (09:14): So I think for them, it's been a lot of fun. But they, they really were very heavily relying on email marketing some paid sponsorships and events. The events person had just left right before COVID hit and they hadn't rehired the position. So we actually just recently rehired the position because we really, you know, we were trying to figure out what it was going to look like when there were no events. So so heavy, heavy reliance on email had a couple of pieces of content that were, that were very well put together. Product marketing was solely responsible for all of that. So when I came in, I said, well, what goodness? And like, be like product marketing has so much to do. They really you know, really should have some, some assistance for them. So what we did was we said, all right, sales, foot sales, friends, how do you sell what does it look like? Lindsay (10:08): What does that journey look like for you guys from start to finish? And so, you know, a couple of the guys had some really nice well put together slides that really showed, you know, the, the biggest challenges that these guys were going through. And I'm realizing this really isn't represented on the website. The website was, was I call it skinny. It was skinny content. So it really didn't say enough about the benefits of, you know, bringing in a product like e-Builder, because they really hadn't had to in the past, everybody just kind of knew who they were. So, you know, we really kind of, for the first six months, it was just fast and furious let's build content. So we, we had started a blog. We were able to put at least one piece out a week, if not two, we had white papers that we produced. Lindsay (10:57): And really the biggest reason that I did this dirty little secret is they hadn't spent the money in the first six, six months of the year. And it's one of those use it or lose it. So I'm like I got all this money, let's hurry up and get some, some really nice pieces of content put together. So we kind of changed the process of how content was created and started bringing in some expert writers. Some that I've used in the past others that, you know, they had used in the past as well. And so we have a nice little mini arsenal of freelancers. So all we do is we put these freelancers together with the product marketing team, because they're the ones with the message, the go-to-market strategy, but years and years of construction experience. And we were able to come up with some really nice pieces of content. And it was funny cause we did a very poor job for the first six months of really putting it out there in any real form or fashion that was valuable to anyone aside from just putting it on the blog. So we were in go, go, go mode. So we created as much as we could. And then at the end of Q4, we started saying, okay, what are we going to do with this stuff? Yeah. Okay. Kathleen (12:01): Before you go down that path, hold on. I'm going to stop you. Cause I know you're getting to the good part. Okay. So, okay. So table setting, you came in, the website was skinny with content. You had this opportunity because of the budget to go out and all of this and quickly create more, which I love. And, and you, you sort of alluded to this, but this, this was a different way of marketing for your team. Like before you joined, there was a lot of email marketing, et cetera. There wasn't a lot of content creation and you, you are a part of a large enough team that, again, it's the flying, it's the, it's the flying building the plane while you're flying it. Right. So when you come into a company like this and you have product marketing, you have you know, events or you don't have events or, but you have all these different people on the team who are used to doing things a certain way. It can, I know from experience, it can be very disruptive and sometimes like you can really shoot yourself in the foot by trying to like change it too fast if you don't manage that process. Well, so can you just talk a little bit about how you manage that? Cause it sounds like it went really smoothly with your team and they were really happy with what you came up with, but I'm curious to know how you, how you ushered that change in. Lindsay (13:17): So the team today looks a little different than it did when I first came in. So, you know, we, we did have a couple of folks leave. And we did, I had a great opportunity to bring my team together to interview for filling these roles because culture is such a big part of, you know, not only the e-Builder culture, but you know, the Trimble greater culture. They were very, very well aligned, which is why the owners were happy, you know, when, when the acquisition happened, cause it very similar cultural values. Part of what we had to do was really just start breaking down the why, so why are we going to do this? Okay. Because we've always done it this way is a very standard answer. Lindsay (14:01): And I'm like, well, let's challenge that. So little by little, over the weeks when we had our team meetings, you know, I would start a conversation with them whether they really knew what I was doing or not, I'm not sure I'm giving it all away now. Now they're all going to go back and listen to like, oh, that's how she did that. But just kind of saying, okay, so, so, you know, you have this project coming on. So what, you know, what's another way that we could do that. What's another way you could engage the audience or utilize some of these materials or be here in customer marketing, so you don't have to recreate the wheel. And so we started having brainstorming sessions and they would get really excited because they really hadn't done that before. And having that kind of collaboration, I think helped excite them. Lindsay (14:45): And they started doing it on their own without me, which was really the goal. And so you know, the team as a whole really came together and I think some of the, some of the new folks we were able to bring in as well have really helped with that cohesiveness. A lot of times, you know, it's a lot of times it's finding the right people that fit with the team that really helped the team come together. And so I had you know, a critical hire that came in who's my, my graphics and web guy that I brought with me from my last, my last company. And it's just, he's one of those people that has like a collaboration, it's his middle name. He loves doing that kind of stuff. And so it was a really great person to bring in so easy to work with. Lindsay (15:30): And I think that honestly was a very nice glue that wasn't just me sitting there saying, Hey guys, why don't we do this? Why don't we do that? So I think that was a big part of it. I also had, you know, two really strong senior managers on the demand gen side and on the customer marketing side and they just wanted to succeed. And they saw how much we were doing with content. And you know, it was, it was a little challenging cause it, it went from, you know, demand gen and email, email, email, and demand gen is getting all the leads too, but all the exciting stuff that's happening on the content side. Yes. But take that. And now what can you do with it on the email side, on the paid side, what can we do with it? Give me some ideas. So it was kind of helping them get there on their own. And to be honest, like they, they did this themselves, they just, they just needed a little, a little bit of guidance. Kathleen (16:24): And the raw materials, the content, you know, you got it. Yeah. You've got to have that there to work with it. Otherwise you can't, you can't, you know, multiple if you don't have any clay. Lindsay (16:33): Exactly, exactly. And I think part of the, the really, really instrumental piece of this for me was my, my VP of marketing is so supportive. I mean, he, he very admittedly he's like, you know, demand gen isn't my, isn't my strong suit. So I had his support every step, every turn. He's been an amazing mentor and he's just one of those guys that you love coming to work and working with. And the whole team loves him as well. But you know, this team had been really without a leader for a year. And my, my manager, my boss was, was doing his best to, to keep them all together and keep the wheels on the bus. And he did a great job of doing that, considering all of the other things that he's responsible for. So I was given a lot of flexibility and freedom to bring these new ideas to the table and he supported me. And that really makes all the difference. And the fact that the leadership team was willing to listen, let me present ideas, you know, show them things that have worked for me in the past. And then given me that opportunity. So that's why I always get that. Kathleen (17:40): Yeah. It sounds like an amazing place to work which is, is so wonderful. And I think coming into an environment where you have the confidence of the people above you to your job, you know, to just do your job the way, you know, it needs to be done. That is huge. So we were about to get into the part of this conversation that I love. Cause I got a little preview before we started talking. So to recap, you came in, you started immediately creating a lot of content. But let me ask you one question about that. Did you have any kind of like particular strategy or framework behind that content? Like what is it that you were creating? Lindsay (18:18): Absolutely. And you know, I come from a HubSpot background you know, partners, you are a HubSpot partner. I was a HubSpot partner, you know, and one thing they do really well is they help you build the foundation of inbound and they, they teach you that methodology. So I brought that methodology with me. Even though we're not on HubSpot now, so they have that pillar content strategy. So that's, we sat down with sales and said, Hey, this is what we're trying to create. You help us feel like in your journey that you take the prospects through, we now have to digitize that because COVID is here and you can't get on a commune anymore. So help me help you. And we had a really instrumental sales guy being Mike who had a great slide. And it was literally like, like plucked from the pages of inbound. And he's like, it's kind of like this. And I'm like, nah, that's what we need. So that was really the framework for building these, these pillar pages, we call them cornerstone pages internally. And so, you know, they really, Kathleen (19:18): These are like exhaustive really in-depth guides on a particular topic. Right? Lindsay (19:25): Exactly. They're like, call them meaty. They're the meaty ones, the skinny website that was there before coming from the vegetarian Kathleen (19:35): Steak house now. Lindsay (19:38): So so yeah, so that's really what we started from. And so the person who was in the role at the time, who since has gone on and I'm very happy for her, she got an amazing opportunity in a very similar startup world that you're in now constantly. But really, you know, she, she helped build the foundation of of this, this content strategy. And she went out and worked with all of our subject matter experts. She knew the, the framework and we, we worked very hard together on what that framework looked like and, you know, we were able to build and just build, build, build, build, build. So that's, that was really what we started with. And we got those on the website made sure that they were properly linked. We had an amazing SEO company called Amps Digital in Manhattan, and I've been working with them for years. And so they were instrumental in helping us from an SEO perspective make sure we are properly optimized going after the right terms and attracting the right type of the right type of folks to the website. Kathleen (20:42): Got it. So you created some cornerstone content as you called it so that you would have some meaty pieces of content on the site. And then, and then what, so like you, you, you fattened up the website a little bit. What did you do from there? Lindsay (20:57): Okay. So from there, we went into a strategy. I affectionately liked to call it Thanksgiving Turkey. Kathleen (21:02): I'm seeing a theme emerging, by the way, were you hungry when you developed the strategy? Lindsay (21:09): I'm a vegetarian, I don't even eat Turkey. But, but we call it Thanksgiving Turkey. And the premise behind it is after Thanksgiving, obviously how many different dishes can you make from this one Turkey with this massive amount of leftover meat that you have? So we take almost every piece of content and we chunk it into as many different pieces of content forms of content as we possibly can. So an example may be we'll have a webinar and it will be a 45 minute webinar in depth talking about, let's say document management and we'll, we'll have a client on and we'll have this, you know, amazing turnout of all these people coming well afterwards we'll take, and we'll transcribe that webinar. Then we bring in some freelancers, we bring those subject matter experts back and we say, okay what kind of a blog post can we get out of this one blog post two blog posts. Lindsay (22:05): So we'll get two really great blog posts that fit. And then we'll publish those on the website. Then we'll go back and we'll say, okay, we have 45 minutes worth of footage here. So we'll Chuck it out into what we call snackables. And the snackables are really 90 seconds to two minute clips of a client answering a question. So it'll be a nice little video with the question that's been asked. So that's your thumbnail. And you put those on social media and it kind of attracts people in and then you can drive people to that webinar on demand. Then we'll, we'll also take these snackables, we'll create a web page, we'll put all the snackables on one webpage and each one has their little phone. Now the question and we put just a little bit of content on it, cause we don't want to compete with ourselves on the big meaty blog. So we'll take all of those pieces and put them on there really great asset for sales to have as well. So that sales is able to share that with their prospects and say, oh, well, here are some of the questions that you might, you know, might see in one of these webinars. And so they'll, they'll take and use that to hopefully they're using it a lot. Lindsay (23:14): So little things like that, we'll, we'll do that all day long. We'll take the cornerstone pieces of content that we have and we'll we'll create web webinars from those. So we can either bring in a customer or we can have all of our internal experts and sit down and just talk about it, have another webinar there. We, we took one of our big long webinars and we chunked it into 15 minute, 15 minutes segments. And this was for our other product that's geared towards general contractors. We call it project site in a flash. Same thing, push it out on social. Did YouTube live every week? It's the same content, just repurposed in multiple different ways. And then one of the, one of the greatest things that we have so far, that's been a really nice lead generator for us is we took those six cornerstones and we created them as PDF white papers. So we repurposed them, laid them out sent them out individually, marketed them individually. Then we took them, we put them all on one page and call it the ultimate guide. And it's all six and you can download all six. And it's all in one page and it has a little tiny synopsis on each one. So we've Thanksgiving Turkey'd everything we possibly can. Kathleen (24:32): So I'm just going to stop and say, I love the theme here from skinny website to meaty content, to Thanksgiving, Turkey to snackables. So I love the whole food theme. We, I think we need to come up with an overarching name for this, like the culinary approach to inbound marketing or no, I think it's great. I think it's great. And I love how much you repurpose your content because that's that whole theme of doing more with less is really important for marketers in general. So tell me a little bit more than about what this did for you because you came into, as I said, a plane that was flying and it was flying pretty well. Like this is a company that was successful and getting good leads and had a steady stream of business. So, so what, what impact did this have? Lindsay (25:24): So, so what we did was in the very end of Q4 in 2020, we started strategizing all of this, this content and we started building it out and optimizing it, making sure it was in the right place. So from a lead generation perspective, when I'm looking at our opportunities the opportunity value in January of the website and the conversions from the website was 22.43%. And last month in July. Kathleen (25:54): So inbound represented 22.43% of your overall lead volume? Lindsay (25:57): Yes. Kathleen (25:57): Pipeline Lindsay (25:58): Yes. Of our pipeline. And then in July it accounted for 66.67%. Kathleen (26:07): Hold on, pause. Kathleen (26:08): Okay. If you're listening that's in six months, you tripled basically the, you tripled the percentage of inbound leads as a percentage of the total pipeline. Like that's massive. From 20 something to 60 something percent in six months. Lindsay (26:31): Yes. Kathleen (26:33): Wow. Lindsay (26:34): Yes. And that, and that allows us to also try to make better decisions as to, you know, we want to be good stewards of the money. So, you know, we're, we're utilizing money to, to drive really high quality content and you know, taking from other areas, you know, like we were talking about before, there's no events anymore, so I could take that budget and move it. You know, we're, we're still spending on media brand is so important. You know, being out there in the marketplace is so important. But you know, at the end of the day, if I have a question or if one of our owners has a question, they're gonna ask the magical Google search bar and we want to make sure that we're there, that we're coming up both organically, you know, and in, in PPC. Kathleen (27:17): You mentioned when we were talking earlier that when you first joined almost all of the inbound traffic to the website was coming through branded search, correct? Lindsay (27:25): Yeah. 95% of our inbound, our, of our website traffic was branded search. So somebody's physically typing in the word e-Builder, Kathleen (27:36): An incredible testament to the value of your brand. Lindsay (27:41): When we look at our search appearances let's see, July is up 66%. Non-branded. Kathleen (27:53): That's amazing. Yeah. That's amazing. I mean, kudos to you. My hat goes off to you. Lindsay (27:59): It's not me. It's, it's such a huge team effort. And, you know, if we didn't have product marketing and the, the rock stars that we have on that team, helping us drive the message the right way you know, demand gen needs that we, you know, we're not the stewards of all of the information and knowledge like these guys are so good at helping us craft the right message, put the right thing out in market and just knowing what to do with it, watching the numbers and, you know, working from there. Kathleen (28:26): So what do you think if you had to narrow it down to three or fewer key things that were the drivers of your success with, since you've joined the company, like in, in, in achieving what we just talked about, what do you think those three things would be? Lindsay (28:41): Oh, well, the first, the very first thing is, I mean, it might be a standard answer a lot of people give, but it's, it's teamwork. You can't do this by yourself. You need all of these people to, to be bought into the process. So I would say that I would also say another key success metric is vulnerability. You know, you really have to be vulnerable with with some of the folks who you're, you're working with to help them understand, you know, this should work. I'm not going to promise you that it will. This has worked for us in, in different industries that we worked in. But I had to be really vulnerable with them to, to say this, this industry is new for me, that we could go in on this and it could flop. And they were like, okay, well, let's take the ride. So I think that was, was another, another big one. And I think trust, you know, I mean really like my manager, me and my team trusted me. And if they didn't, if they, if they weren't along for the ride, if they weren't bought in it, it would not have been so successful. You can't push a boulder up hill for that long. Kathleen (29:54): The other thing I'd want to ask is you talked about collaboration and teamwork, and I feel like people use that word sometimes and everybody kind of tunes it out cause it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, teamwork. But I mean, I live this all the time, you know, we're, and we're not as big a company as you are, but having to collaborate between products and engineering and customer success and sales and marketing everybody, I think, does it differently, I'm curious, like how do you achieve that collaboration? And like, if you could be specific, like, is there a certain cadence of meetings or, you know, cause I think when it comes to teamwork and collaboration, it's very easy to err on the side of like death by meetings and talking too much and not getting stuff done. But then it's also easy to air on the other side of just like, screw it. I'm going to go do it all in my son, my own and I'm going to get it done, but then you're not, you know, you're not being collaborative. So what is your, how do you balance that? Lindsay (30:48): That's a really great question, Kathleen. I have a cadence where I have a, a full hour team meeting every week and beginning of the week. I have one-on-ones religiously with every person every week for 30 minutes. And they, and I've encouraged some of my leaders to go out and I'm like, well, collaborate with so-and-so or collaborate here, see what you guys can figure out. Now they do it all the time. So I'm not in a million meetings anymore because they take it and they come back with a strategy. They work together. So that was a big part of it. I think the other really big part is just across all of Trimble. Different groups are starting to come together. We have like a little brain trust. That's all content people. We have a little brain trust. It's all demand gen people and we share and we share and we get ideas. And then my team gets excited because they learn something or they share something and there's so much positive feedback. So those are really big values. You know, for not only myself, but for the whole company is to foster that kind of collaboration as, as far and wide as we possibly can. And I love it. Oh my God. I love it. Kathleen (32:02): Do you have any like set recurring meetings with other teams within the company? Like, do you have a meeting with your sales team or your customer success team or anything like that? Lindsay (32:14): Right now I'm, I'm, we're working on getting better. Cause you know, as marketers, we, we do death by meeting. I'm getting better at meeting more with my BDRs meeting with the BDR leader. And so next quarter I've made a promise. I stayed there like they just promised two days ago. I said, next quarter, I'm going to make sure that every month both of our teams are sitting down and we're talking through this it's kind of like, you know, you're, I'm trying to chunk it out cause it doesn't get that. Kathleen (32:41): I feel like I'm a professional meeting, goer. All I do is go to meetings. Lindsay (32:45): It is, it's like, oh, it's back to back and back to back. And you know, and I often laugh because sometimes I have to take the laptop I'm in my shed, which is, you know, across the way from my house. And I see if had a bathroom in here, it'd be much more convenient. But you know, my husband will see me on the ring, the ring system, walking across the yard on a call with my laptop. Cause I just don't have time in between meetings. And I'm like, if this meeting's about to end then I'll have 30 seconds. Kathleen (33:12): Yeah. It's, it's hard. It's hard. I mean, I love your story. I love that you have been able to affect the results you have in the amount of time you have that's so, so impressive, especially cause it's easy to do something like that. If you come in to a startup like I'm in, because you're nobody nobody's been doing marketing before, but it's, it's really especially impressive to come into a company like yours, where you have an existing marketing team and to achieve that level of results in a short amount of time. So again, kudos. All right. We're going to shift gears because otherwise we're going to run out of time and we could talk forever. I, I know we could. But I always ask my guests two questions and, and I want to make sure we squeezed them in here. The first being you know, the challenge I hear from most marketers is that it's what we've been talking about. Like doing, doing it all. How do you do it all? And one of the things that often falls by the wayside is like continuous education and staying on top of everything that's happening in the world of marketing. So I'm curious, how do you do that? How do you continue to educate yourself? And do you have certain sources of information that you rely on to keep yourself up? Lindsay (34:18): Oh yeah. No, there's so many, first of all my team and I were about to do a, an exercise in values and one of my core values that I shared with them was education. We do a quick 10 minutes of what did you learn last week? Every single meeting. But I love digesting Chris Penn's Almost Timely News. Kathleen (34:40): I love him. Lindsay (34:42): Love him. And he's a, he's a Baltimore guys and Maryland guy like us. But I, his stuff is absolutely phenomenal. So I, I do a lot of that. And then I do a lot of books on tape, like just listening to things. I mean, in right now I'm trying to focus a lot on, you know, leadership qualities and capabilities. Cause I'm now leading leaders. So, you know, I'm trying to make them the best leaders that they can be. So I'm really digesting a lot of Brenee Brown right now. It's just, there's, there's so many different sources that, that I love. Chief MarTech. Scott, Brinker. Love his stuff. Keeping up with the technologies that are out there and the processes that you put in place for those. So those are some of my top ones right there. Kathleen (35:28): Those are some good ones. And I love the Christopher Penn shout out. He was a guest at one point. He was my last interview of the year, I want to say two years ago. He closed out, maybe it was 2019. I'll have to look but great guy. Great guy and super smart. All right. Second question. Along these lines. Of course this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual right now that you think is really knocking it out of the park when it comes to setting the bar for being a great inbound marketer? Lindsay (35:59): Oh my gosh. I always go back to this and I can't help myself, but myself and my team, we just read and we just devour everything that HubSpot puts out. And you know, even though we don't use HubSpot internally, their methodology and you know, what they're doing is just spot on. But lately one that's been taking over HubSpot for me is Drift. Nick Sal has really done a lot for that company along the lines of education, certification teachings and trainings that he's putting into place there. And I'm loving them. I'm digesting them like candy. It's amazing. Kathleen (36:40): Because people who are listening probably don't know, but Nick Sal is a former colleague of mine. We worked together for two years, one of my favorite human beings on the planet other than Lindsay Kelley. Of course. So now I'm gonna, I, it's funny, I don't know if I've interviewed Nick Sal, so maybe he's going to be my next guy, but you're right. He's amazing. He was in HubSpot for many years was like one of their leading HubSpot Academy professors, you know, and now he's back in, in a role that really allows him to show his incredible skills at Drift and another amazing Boston-based company. So love that name. Lindsay (37:19): Yeah. Yeah. Really, really great stuff. I highly recommend checking it out. It's not just like conversational marketing sales. They have events certification for virtual events and it's, there's just so many nuggets of wisdom in their Insider's club. It's absolutely phenomenal and it's free to join the insiders club. Kathleen (37:37): That's so great. Okay. I'm definitely gonna gonna go do that after this. Lindsay, if somebody wants to learn more about what you've talked about and connect with you online, or ask you a question, what is the best way for them to do that? Lindsay (37:50): Definitely LinkedIn. And I am the super easy one, linkedin.com/Lindsay Kelley. So I'm there. I'm listed as a Trimble employee and I would love to love to connect. Kathleen (38:06): Great. And I will put a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. So had there, if you want to connect with Lindsay and if you're listening to this episode and you liked it or you'll learn something new, which I hope you did, I certainly did. Please take a moment and go to apple podcasts and leave the podcast or review. That's how people find us. That's how we acquire new listeners. It would mean so much, especially if you're a loyal listener. Who's been listening to the podcast for a long time. So head there and leave a review. And if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork and I would love to have them be my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you so much, Lindsay. Lindsay (38:49): This was a ton of fun. Thanks for having me.

Pricing a new product or service is one of the biggest challenges you may take on as a marketer. What do you need to know before embarking on a pricing exercise? This week on the Inbound Success podcast, podcast host and clean.io CMO Kathleen Booth talks about pricing. From who should be involved in determining pricing, to what type of research you'll need to do, choosing a pricing survey methodology, and evaluating different pricing structures, she goes into detail on how to conduct a pricing exercise and what you should expect once you nail down initial pricing. There's plenty of actionable advice included in this episode, but if you want access to Kathleen's full swipe file on pricing (including sample presentation decks for customer research calls), all you need to do is Tweet her or send a LinkedIn DM and she'll give you full access. Check out the full episode to get the details. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.) Resources from this episode: Check out the clean.io website Connect with Kathleen on LinkedIn Follow Kathleen on Twitter Transcript Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, it's a little bit of a special episode because I don't have a guest. We are over 200 episodes into the podcast and I generally try to really shine the spotlight on other marketers who are doing, you know, outstanding marketing work and learn from them. I mean, I learned so much when I interview them and I figure if I'm learning then, so are you well, this week it occurred to me that there's something I've been working on, that when I set out to do it, I really didn't know anything about, and I didn't have any good resources that told me how to do it. And so I thought today I could be my own guest and share with you the experience I had specifically with pricing. So some of you may or may not have been responsible for pricing in your career. Kathleen (01:08): It's one of those things as a marketer, that when you are given ownership of it, it can be very intimidating because pricing is something that goes out to the world. It has a direct and immediate impact on the attractiveness of the product, the likelihood of people to convert, how you're positioned competitively, as well as how much revenue you bring in. So knowing how to price is such a valuable tool to have in your marketing tool set. And yes, marketers are, you know, people who should have some responsibility for pricing. Very often though, I will start by saying that, you know, very often in companies pricing is a committee exercise. It's something that more than one person within the company does. And so I would suggest that whether you're given ownership for pricing or your company's talking about pricing, step number one is to form a pricing committee and who, who is on that will depend on how your company is structured. Kathleen (02:07): But certainly if you have anyone that owns product marketing, they should definitely be involved if not be in the lead position, but you would want to have somebody from, you know, product slash engineering, somebody from sales, certainly. And you know, you can, you can add other people to that committee as need be perhaps customer success, if you have people in those roles. But the whole idea is to get cross-functional people on the committee so that you get all of the different perspectives on how pricing could impact not only customer acquisition, but retention and also the sales perspective as to how it affects your ability to position yourself competitively. So the first thing is to form a pricing committee. And once that committee is formed, really the next step in a pricing exercise is research. And that really starts with what I guess would call economic value analysis. Kathleen (03:03): That's sort of a fancy term, but the bottom line is you want to study the economic impact that your product has on the customer. You know, are they saving money with it? Are they saving time? And does that translate into money? How does it affect their sales velocity, et cetera. Now, some products won't have a direct financial impact, but the whole idea of this exercise economic value analysis is to begin to quantify whether there's any sort of an economic impact that the product has on the end customer. And there are a variety of ways to do that. You know, if you do, in my case, I was pricing out a SaaS product that actually did have a direct economic impact. So it, it held the potential to save money by reducing the incidents of sales that were affected by discounts or promotions. Kathleen (03:58): And so we had a variety of market research tools we use to figure out like, what percentage of sales would this affect, how large are those sales? If we're able to prevent promotions from being activated in this case at checkout, what, what size of promotion are we talking about? Like, is this a 5% off, a 10% off, et cetera. So these dynamics are going to be different for every company, but really understanding what that impact might be is, is crucial. And then looking at industry benchmarks for pricing. So in our, in my case, as I said, this was SaaS pricing. In some industries it's easier to find competitor pricing than others. You know, if I used to own a marketing agency and at that time, so many agencies were posting their pricing on their websites. So it was very easy to, to benchmark and to figure out like what the market was willing to tolerate for SaaS. Kathleen (04:56): So I turned to open view partners and their mastering SaaS pricing research to understand industry benchmarks around average revenue per customer, by customer target segment. And that was really helpful for me, as I began to think about how I might segment our customers. And then, you know, I also looked at a competitive analysis. So what were other companies in our space charging? What, not just how much were they charging, but what was the structure of their actual pricing? So this is where you definitely need to, as a marketer have already done your research. And usually let's face it usually with pricing, you're talking about a new product. So at this point you have to have already done your research and really settled on who is the audience that we're targeting, who is the, and what other, in this case, software products are they buying? Kathleen (05:51): So whether you have a direct competitor or not, you know, what are the other players in the space and are they structuring their pricing? So that would be what I would call a peer cohort, right? You identify your peer cohort of SaaS solutions and then figure out what they're charging. So in my case, I looked at a number of different companies that sell products that affect checkout for e-commerce stores, because that was what we were really selling into and looked at the structure of their pricing. So in some cases, these companies were charging a fixed monthly fee plus a variable fee. For example, it might be a percentage of the customer's revenue. So like if you are selling something into checkout, presumably your product affects e-commerce revenue. So the, a lot of these companies had a variable amount that would scale as customer revenue scaled. Kathleen (06:46): In other cases, there was a fixed fee plus a fee that had to do with the number of orders processed. So there's a lot of different ways to do it. Some companies only charged a fixed fee, some only charged a variable fee, but the more I dug dug into it, the more you started to get a sense for the actual pricing structures that these companies were using, how they were developing different customer segments, how that pricing scaled whether it was annual or monthly, et cetera. So there's a lot in there that's really important to understand so that you can figure out, first of all, why is pricing structured that way? Is it because that's what, you know, the customer set is used to seeing is that what they're comfortable buying because if that's the case, then having a pricing structure that's dramatically different than what they're comfortable with is going to introduce friction in the process, which is not to say that you can't do it, but it's something that you need to factor in when you're thinking about your pricing structure. Kathleen (07:45): The other thing you have to look at once you've done that competitive analysis is really how do we want to structure our pricing? And so there are a variety of common pricing structures, there's usage based pricing, which aligns really closely to the value that a customer receives from the product and enables you to fully monetize customers who use the product more. So, you know, there are, there are plenty of examples out there on usage based pricing you know, everything from I do rent the runway and the more I do a monthly subscription and the more items I want to include in my monthly shipments, the more I'm going to pay, right? That's an example of something that I guess you could call it SaaS, but it's really sort of a, more of a subscription model. Volume pricing is a little different that gives one defined price for all items purchased with the price per item, determined by the total quantity purchased, meaning put simply quantity discounts, volume discounts. Kathleen (08:52): So the more you're getting the less you're paying very common when you're buying hard goods, especially if you're buying them wholesale. For example you see that in a lot of different in a lot of different industries, then there's tiered pricing, which allows companies to offer multiple packages with different combinations of featured features offered at different price points. That's really common in SaaS. We see that all the time, you know, there's your silver, your gold, or your platinum package, or, you know, it used to be a HubSpot partner and they had basic professional and enterprise and the feature sets differed pretty dramatically based on what was included. And then there is value based pricing, which uses the perceived value of the product as a benchmark for price setting. And based on the rule of thumb that I saw generally, you want the value that the product provides to be at least 10 X the price. Kathleen (09:52): So, you know, and I mentioned, I had a marketing agency earlier. That's an industry where I think you do sometimes find value based pricing, for example when you hire agencies to do rebrands or big strategy projects those are not often like time and materials contracts. There's a perceived value for brand work for strategy work that is very high compared to more commodity type services. Like for example, Hey, we'll write your blog for you. There's usually a fixed price for that. And it is somewhat commoditized and, and therefore you can charge as high of a margin. So usage based pricing, volume pricing, tiered pricing, and value based pricing. You really need to start to narrow down from your research, what pricing structure you want to go with before you can get to the next stage in the pricing process. So everything I've described so far, just to recap, it's all background research, it's all information that's publicly available, whether that's what competitors are charging based on information from their websites, or whether that is research into, you know, what buyers can tolerate as far as pricing or whether that is you know, economic value analysis and what you think you'll be able to state as claims to your customer, that the product will have as an impact on their life. Kathleen (11:18): All of this research goes into then helping you narrow down, what do I think my price structure should be? And what incentives or disincentives will that provide the customer once you get there, once you are at the point where, you know, what you think you want that structure to be? In my case, it was a fixed monthly fee plus a variable fee that was based on the number of orders, the customer processed every month, because we were present at checkout. And so we felt that that would enable our pricing to scale with the customer, larger customers that processed a high volume of orders could pay more than customers who processed a lower volume of orders, but it would also allow us to peg that fee in a way that as the pricing scaled, it would, can keep a degree of consistency in terms of how it affected their revenue and their margins. Kathleen (12:14): So they could budget really easily for it. So that's what we settled on in my case, once you think you have your pricing structure and your pricing committee is all in agreement about this, because let's be honest, if you have a committee, that's really what it's about at this stage is consensus building. Then you want to enter into the next phase of market research, which is actually speaking to potential customers. And in our case, we decided to onboard free beta customers before we did our pricing research, so that we would have at least 10 to 15 users who were experiencing our product and could speak to the value it was delivering. And so we did our customer research with our beta users. I got an, they weren't paying anything prior to this and these customer research interviews, they take 30 minutes or less. Kathleen (13:10): They're really pretty quick. And I had, I got some great feedback from other SaaS marketing leaders. I know who shared with me really fantastic examples of presentation decks to use for these calls. And if you're somebody out there who's going to be charged with doing pricing, and you want an example of a deck like this, tweet me at work, mommy work, and I can DM you and get you a link to a template for this. It saved me a ton of time. And let me just tell you, it worked incredibly well, but the basic structure that we used for these 30 minute customer conversations was the following. So I would let them know in advance that I was going to be asking them questions about the product and about pricing. And I made sure I had the right people on the phone. So people involved in, in making decisions about purchasing the product and about using the product. Kathleen (14:03): And then I had my deck ready. And I started out with just a quick overview of the, kind of the rules of the conversation. So like, I really want your feedback. I need you to be honest, there are no wrong answers, et cetera. It's really important to do that table settings so that people aren't trying to be polite. If they have negative feedback, you need to really encourage them to be completely candid. Then I would go into a recap of what the product did. And I'm sorry, before that, then I would actually ask everybody on the phone, what their role was with the product. So are you involved in making purchasing decisions? Are you involved in using it? Who else that's not on this call is involved or would need to be consulted just so that I could get a sense of, you know, who the players were on their side and what that customer journey might be like leading to a purchase. Kathleen (14:53): Then I went into background description on the, on the product, even though they're already using it, everybody uses it differently within a company. And so I wanted to level set and go in with a shared definition of what the product was just in terms of functionality. Then I made a list of, from all of the conversations I had had prior to this and all of my research, as well as all of my assumptions, I made a list of what I thought the pain points were that the customer might be experiencing, that our product could address. And in my case, I kind of was able to sum those up into six distinct pain points. And I, I framed those as first person statements. So an example would be I feel like I can't trust my attribution reporting for my affiliate marketing program. And I put those in quotes. Kathleen (15:47): So it's like, it's like a statement coming out of a customer's mouth. I had six of them, each of those six hit on very different pain points. And then with the group on the phone, I had those pain points listed out in a table on a slide. So I had a slide deck that I took everybody through. And the first the first slide I showed them on the pain points, had the list of the pain points. And then it had a second column. And I asked everybody on the phone to force rank the pain points, one through five, one being the most painful five being the least and just put them in order. And they all had to agree. So they went through a conversation, they agreed, I made notes on the screen so they could see it as they were talking. And we came up with a rank choice, a list of pain points. Kathleen (16:35): And in order from worst least, you know, at least effecting, okay, then this is where it got really interesting that tells you like, w you know, in what order do they prioritize the pain points, but it doesn't tell you like how much more painful is one of those things than the next. So the next slide was the exact same list of pain points. But this time, instead of saying rank them one through five, I said, okay, I'm going to give you a hundred dollars to spend to solve the pain. And I want you to tell me based on how painful each of these five things is, how would you allocate that $100 across these five pain points in order to solve them? And what was fascinating about that is in many cases, like the pain point that they had previously ranked number one, they would say, you know, we want to put $95 on that. Kathleen (17:31): And then $1 on each of the other ones, like that's how much more painful it is. That's so, so, so telling in terms of, you know, giving you the information you'll need later to hit on in your marketing, but also to understanding that when you do your pricing, your pricing needs to speak to how, how the price correlates with the value the product will deliver and solving that pain that they're saying they really want to get rid of. And so, in my case, what I learned when I, when I summed up all of these kind of dollar based questions, like the, the more qualitative questions around pain, I learned that there were two themes that really emerged that our customers felt very keenly. The first is the need to take back control over something that they weren't able to control previously. And the second was to increase their profit margins. Kathleen (18:28): And so immediately we knew those were the two themes we had to hit on in our pricing and in our marketing messaging then, so still on the same call, we did the exact same exercise, but we did it for product benefits. So it's kind of the other side of the same coin. Like I listed out the pain points. And then on the other, this new slide I listed out here are the benefits that I think our product will deliver. So examples of those were re retain more revenue from your sales, in other words, increase your profit margins. Now one was, get better insights into how customers are using your coupon codes. Another one was improve the accuracy of your attribution reporting. So there were five or six different benefits that we listed out. And I went through the same exercise. So the first slide where I asked them to rank to force rank one through five, the benefits, one being the one that was most important to them, five being the least, and then the same exercise where I asked them to put the dollars behind getting those benefits and the same thing, funny enough happened again, there was one benefit that like leaped out far and away above the others, and it had to do with revenue retention or incremental gains in profit margins. Kathleen (19:39): So that was really interesting. And it was a really fun exercise to go through. The, what I would say is that at, at the after that, then in that conversation in those customer interviews, I went into, this is going to be a bunch of big words, a simulated van Westendorp price, sensitivity analysis. So I'm going to pause here and explain what I mean by that. There are a lot of, not a lot. There are a few various, very common well-known methodologies, very scientific methodologies that you can use to conduct a pricing survey. And at some point, if you're doing pricing, particularly if it's SaaS pricing, you're probably going to need to do a survey. And I knew that, that we were going to eventually get there. We happened to wind up using Qualtrics for this because they were able to supply us with a really good audience. Kathleen (20:34): And after all the research I did, I settled on this methodology called van Westendorp. And I liked this methodology because it's really simple and straightforward and quick in the sense that it gives you a very clear picture of exactly what your price should be. So the reason for that, and the way van Westendorp works is this, it is really just four questions. The first question is at what price would you consider the product or service to be priced so low that you feel that the quality can't be very good. That's the question. Number one, and effectively that sets the absolute rock bottom floor for pricing question, number two is at what price would you consider the product or service to be a bargain, a great buy for the money. So still kind of honing in on the lower end of the pricing scale, but like in a way where it becomes very attractive and would incentivize someone to buy it because they're thinking I'm getting a deal question. Kathleen (21:36): Number three is at what price would you say this product or service is starting to get expensive? It's not out of the question, but you'd have to give some thought to buying it. So this starts to get into the upper end of the pricing band, where if you do price something at this level, it, it would begin to introduce some friction. People might question whether something was worth it. Question number four, the last question is at what price would you consider the product or service to be so expensive that you would not consider buying it? So questions one and four are the absolute lowest and the absolute highest you could possibly ever charge and questions. Two and three are the ones that are meant to really hone in, in that middle area, which puts simply as like your pricing sweet spot. So I knew I was going to do this survey through Qualtrics. Kathleen (22:29): But I decided to verbally ask these questions in my customer research interviews. And the reason is that when you do an actual survey, you need to have a sense for like, what scale are you giving, letting people answer on your, it's not an infinite scale. You're not saying like on a scale of zero to 3 trillion, right? Like you need to know we're talking about between a hundred and a thousand dollars a month, or, you know, 5,000 and $20,000 a month, whatever whatever's appropriate for you, but you need to know where to set the floor and the ceiling. And that's where I think questions, number one and four can really help. If you ask them verbally in customer interviews, they will help you understand where to set that scale so that when you develop your survey, whether you're using Qualtrics or some other product like survey monkey, you'll have a good starting point for that. Kathleen (23:20): So I did ask those questions, got some really great answers. And I was able to kind of like put that together into an analysis in order to come up with like, Hey, we need to be within this range. We know that based on these conversations and the other great thing about the customer interviews is you can ask why. So I had some people say a certain, you know, upper limit for pricing. And then they explained like, Hey, the reason I said this upper limit is that that's similar to what we pay for this other tool. And every single person in our company uses this other tool, but with your tool, we think only one department would use it. And so paying more for a tool that only one department would use would be much harder, you know, in comparison. So that was just fascinating. Kathleen (24:05): It was really interesting to understand the why behind some of the answers. And so if you do these customer research interviews and you get some of these pricing answers, I encourage you to dig in and ask why that's where the gold is. So then lastly, I also, in these interviews showed customers a loose product roadmap. I, I shared with them over the next nine months. You know, these are 10 to 12 features that we're thinking of introducing to the product. If you could choose only three of them as being most important to you, which three would you choose. And that was also a really interesting exercise. It helped me understand, like, you know, what really do customers want out of this product? Where do they want to see it go? And then even more importantly, I asked, what's not on here. That should be so interesting. Kathleen (24:54): You know, not on here in terms of product features, product roadmap items. It was so interesting because almost everybody answered the same thing. Like we had missed. We had missed a thing that in hindsight seems so glaringly obvious, but we never would have caught it where it not for that question. And so that was incredibly valuable, even just on top of the pricing insight we got. So that really kind of sums up the pricing interviews with customers. I think the last thing you do in those meetings is you give them an open forum. Hey, any other feedback you have for me? Any questions you have, anything you think I should know, it's just a wonderful opportunity for some back and forth for you to understand, you know, what's happening with your customers, how they're experiencing your product, what their pain points are, what they love, what they hate, et cetera. Kathleen (25:41): I did I think it was between five and 10 of those 30 minute interviews. And that gave me a really nice small data set, but a consistent data set. The feedback I got was consistent, which was really helpful going into structuring the actual van Westendorp survey. So in this case we settled on what was called a sort of a three part tariff, which is like a combination of a fixed fee plus a variable fee every month. But it also included a base amount of let's call it usage in the fixed fee. So if they exceeded that there might be an overage charge and there are a variety of reasons for that. Partly, you know, we felt that the fixed fee component should be value-based because we wanted it to convey the premium nature of our product. We wanted the variable fee to be based on a volume metric so that it would scale with customers and, and they would as though it was worth it to continue paying for the product as they grew. Kathleen (26:49): And we wanted pricing to incorporate elements of a tiered approach by providing customers and higher price brackets with premium feature sets. So it could be more support or other value added features like enhanced reporting, things like that. That was, that was what we went in thinking three-part tariff. So then, then we needed to segment our customers. And you know, we, again, this is where your competitive research can really come in handy. But we, we decided to segment them based on order volume, you know, the number of orders they process every month, which was sort of a proxy for revenue, which is also kind of a proxy for, you know, stage of growth, if you will. And we, we did a lot of research using, you know, publicly available kind of database information on how many companies in our addressable market fell into each of those price buckets so that we could see like do these pricing segment sizes make sense. Kathleen (27:53): And a lot of that information you'll find whatever industry you're in. It's very publicly available with all of that. Then we went out and did the survey, and of course the survey was those four basic van Westendorp questions that I explained earlier, but then it also had other questions I threw in because I simply wanted to know the answers to them. So I wanted to be able to segment people's answers based on their company size and some other demographic criteria. So I asked them for how many orders they processed every month, that would give me a sense of which of our customer segments they would fall into. I asked what their job title was, what their job function was, or are they marketing? Are they finance? Are they sales, et cetera. And all of those questions super helpful. Then I asked them a few other questions that had to do with whether they were a good fit for our product, but in any case, we got the results back. Kathleen (28:49): And I think we, I want to say it was, it was, you know, thousands of answers which was really helpful and we processed it and what's great is on the internet. There are actually Excel spreadsheet templates that you can download that do van Westendorp analysis for you, and they will show you where your pricing sweet spot is. So as a result of this, we literally knew exactly where we needed to land with pricing. And then it was just a matter of assigning that pricing based on customer tier and coming up with our feature sets for each customer tier so that they felt differentiated. Sort of the last question we had to answer was, should this be a monthly subscription or an annual one? And we started out with it as a monthly subscription, because that seemed to be what was most in our marketplace. Kathleen (29:43): I'll get in a minute to why we've changed that in what we're playing with, but we felt like monthly would help to, you know, help us focus on new customer acquisition, which is what we were optimizing for at that moment. Versus, you know, later down the line, when maybe you're optimizing for reduced churn, when annual contracts can be really attractive. So there are a lot of different considerations there, but I think you need to look at what is your competitive set doing? What is the customer going to expect? And you know, honestly, like what can you get away with? Like, I know a lot of VCs like to see annual contracts because there's more revenue predictability. And especially if you're going out to raise another round of venture capital funding, that might be really important to your business. So sometimes it has nothing to do with the customer. Kathleen (30:30): And it has a lot to do with like positioning yourself as an investment target. Now that has to be balanced with customer needs because you can't, you can't structure pricing fully in favor of investors in a way that would harm your ability to acquire customers, but they're, they're all things to consider. So we made that decision and then honestly, you know, when you, once you've kind of quote unquote, settled on pricing, the most important thing to understand is it's going to change, right? You will have gone through this massive exercise and feel like you've accomplished so much. And you know, you pat yourself on the back and you go to market with pricing, and then you're immediately going to start to get impact from the market, right? As soon as you start to try to sell, and you begin talking about pricing with people, they're either going to love it, or they're not. Kathleen (31:15): In our case, we went, you know, we knew we were going to need to change it, but we wound up changing it much more quickly than we thought we started getting immediate feedback that people either didn't understand the pricing or it wasn't exactly what they would prefer. And so we did adjust not so much the amount of the pricing, but how we were determining our variable fee. I think it started out as a percentage of revenue, the customers revenue, and we switched it to being a percentage of their monthly orders or based on a percentage of their monthly orders. It just was a metric that they could wrap their head around more easily. So, you know, your feedback could be different. Somebody might say that's too expensive or that's, you know, that seems really cheap. Is it really worth it? Is it good? Kathleen (31:56): Is it any good? You, that's why a pricing committee is so important and that's why it's so important to have multidisciplinary people on your pricing committee so that you start in the beginning, you meet once a week after you launch your pricing, you meet once a week and you get sales feedback immediately. What are you hearing in the market? What are people saying on your sales calls? And as soon as you start to see consistent patterns, a feedback, that's when you can test different variations to pricing. This was one reason we did not publish our pricing on our website in the very beginning, because we wanted to retain the ability to test different pricing models in our sales conversations. In general, I'm a huge fan of published pricing, but this is a great reason why in certain cases you might not want to do it. Kathleen (32:43): So in the beginning, test those different pricing levels, structures, et cetera, get it to the point where you're really happy with it and you feel comfortable with it, and then you can always publish it and, and then you can still adjust it once it's published. It's still easy to do. It's just that you can do it much more quickly and nimbly in the beginning if it's not published. So that is a, a very quick overview of how I approached pricing. I have a huge swipe file on this, including, like I said, sample customer, interview decks and links to articles on van Westendorp, pricing methodologies. I'm happy to share all of it. You know, when I first started this podcast, it was all about helping people learn how to get better results from their marketing in a way that was really actionable. Nothing drove me nuts. Kathleen (33:35): Drive drives me nuts more than going to a conference, sitting through a session that's supposed to be educational and coming out and feeling like somebody talked all about why to do something like in this case, it would have been like why to do pricing. Or why do you use the van Westendorp method and not how to do it? Like how is so important? We're all under tremendous time pressure. We all need to produce results. So we all need to know how to do things. So I hope that this was helpful to you. And if you do think that my swipe file could be valuable, like I said, tweet tweet me at work, mommy work. Or if you're not on Twitter, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. And I will share all of my resources with you. And hopefully then if, and or when you are made responsible for pricing, you'll have an easier time of it than I did when I first set out to learn how to do this. Kathleen (34:26): But it was a great exercise to go through and, and I'm grateful I had the opportunity to do it, and it made me understand so much more about our customers than I otherwise would have those customer interviews were invaluable. So with that I will just segue and say that, you know, the podcast is slightly over 200 episodes. Now it's been going for four years, which I can hardly believe when I really think about it. And we're at the point where I need your feedback. I want to keep going. I learned so much from my guests, but I want to do it in a way that provides value to you. So whether you're a longtime listener or somebody listening for the first time, I would really be grateful if you would just take a moment. And again, either tweet me or DM me on LinkedIn or email me if you have my email address and do two things. Kathleen (35:21): Number one, tell me what it is you love. And don't love about the podcast in its current format. And to send me the name of somebody you think would make a great gas too. I have not yet interviewed let's figure out who the next kind of chapter of great marketers are in the history of the inbound success podcast, and let's do it together. So with that, thank you so much for listening. I, you, the fact that you dedicate, you know, 30 to 60 minutes of your week listening to this podcast, it means so much to me and I truly hope I'm delivering value to you. Have a great week. Thanks for listening. Leave a review. If you haven't done so already and tweet me at work, mommy, work. If you know somebody else who's doing kick marketing, cause I would love to make them my next guest. Thanks for joining me.

What happens when you take on a new role as CMO and develop a new marketing strategy, only to have a pandemic hit just months later? This week on the Inbound Success podcast, Planful CMO Rowan Tonkin talks about his experience since taking on the role of head of marketing at Planful. It all started with a complete rebrand (including a company name change) that was rolled out at a company meeting in January 2020, just prior to the onset of COVID. Rowan explains how a focus on the customer, and their needs and pain points, helped his team determine how and when to shift their marketing strategy, and he talks about what it means to create a new category (including why it's so important that your competitors embrace it).  Planful's ability to remain nimble and adapt to their customers' changing needs helped fuel significant increases in pipeline and revenue, much of which was driven by organic and branded search. Check out the full episode to get the details. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.) Resources from this episode: Check out the Planful website Connect with Rowan on LinkedIn Follow Rowan on Twitter Transcript Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Rowan Tonkin, who is the CMO or chief marketing officer at Planful. Welcome to the podcast, Rowan. Rowan (00:27): Thanks Kathleen for having me. Really excited to be here. I've listened to lots of episodes of inbound, and I'm really glad that I can, I can actually be on the show. Kathleen (00:35): I'm really excited to have you here. I think you have such an interesting story, especially in the last few years, and I can't wait to dig into it for listeners. Before we do that, maybe take a moment, introduce yourself, tell us who you are and your background, and also what Planful is. Rowan (00:52): So firstly, you may notice from my accent, I'm not American. I grew up in Australia in a little place called Woolongong, which is about an hour south of Sydney. And I actually started my career in, in technology in Australia, working in customer support for a marketing company back then we would provide services to agencies and white goods and brown goods manufacturers to basically get the best images for, for, for catalogs, right, for, for the things that we all receive in our, in our letterbox. And and that turned into a MRM space where I worked in pre-sales. So for those that are familiar with MRM, it's kind of like the old Asana and Monday.com and helping marketers do all that project management, budget management, things like that. I moved to London for 10 years selling MRM software, working with lots of marketers over there. Rowan (01:44): My role was increased sales and customer success and doing actually implementation work as well. And I managed to convince myself that product marketing was actually where I had most fun. So I joined product marketing and and have been in the marketing space ever since. I'm now at, at Planful. Planful is a financial planning and analysis platform for finance and accounting professionals. We basically help finance professionals basically become super agile in the way that they work by getting them out of spreadsheets and getting them into a connected and collaborative platform. And you know, my background in marketing planning, if you will, helping marketers manage their budgets has kind of translated into me telling the stories of, of those finance professionals and how they do their work for, for all of us. Right. If you think about the team of finance you know, there's the accounting team that are recording everything that happened and there's fantastic FP and A teams that are kind of helping us trying to figure out what will happen in future. Kathleen (02:47): Yeah. And speaking of what has happened and what will happen, you joined the company, was it in 2019? Is that right? Rowan (02:54): In September of 2019. Yeah. Kathleen (02:56): Yeah. So, you know, at interesting time and I know that you came on board and there was a lot of change already happening in the company. And you proceeded to, to make some really significant changes on the marketing side, and this is all happening, like on the eve of COVID, it's crazy. I say 2019 and that feels like a really long time ago, but, but it really wasn't and a lot has happened since then. So let's actually rewind the clock and start when you came in and, and what was, what were you setting out to do and what was the scenario when you joined? Rowan (03:31): Yeah, sure. So Planful had been actually called Host Analytics before that. And many of your listeners may know of Host Analytics. And we were acquired by a private equity firm in December of 2018 and they went on the search to to find a new CEO and they found someone that I'd worked with before. Grant Halloran. And Grant joined as CEO, I believe like 1st of July or something like that. And in 2019, 3 months later, he brings me in and had devised a lot of the strategy. And the strategy that we were going to to execute upon was to really focus on segments specific segments. So what we call the lower mid-market and the upper mid market and selectively play in the enterprise, right. And, and traditionally, you know, Host played across all of those segments. So we really wanted to focus. Rowan (04:24): The second thing that we wanted to do was reposition the company. The world of FP and A, and the space that we play in has a category definition called enterprise performance management or, or corporate performance management. The funny thing is only analysts talk about that. Buyers don't call it. They call it FP and A software or planning, budgeting, and forecasting. They don't, they don't call it CPM or EPM. And so and then unfortunately for Host Analytics created by Jim Eblen back in 2001, the word Host and Analytics has changed a lot in that time. Right. And so really important to us that as we repositioned, we decided to change the company name. And when you think about doing that, that's a really intense exercise. So we decided to just put the guard rail of let's do it in 12 weeks. Kathleen (05:17): Ripping the bandaid off. Rowan (05:20): Correct. Yeah. And, and so actually we did that at our company kickoff. We everyone walked into the company kickoff in January at San Diego all of the swag. Yeah. And, and everything was branded Host Analytics. Everyone got their gifts as Host Analytics in the keynote, we dropped the big reveal, switched to Planful and all the signage and everything had been changed outside the room. And everyone had new swag bags and everything like that. And at the time we, we repositioned the company to, from, from enterprise performance management to what we continuous planning. And that's now the kind of category that we, we have tried to define if you will. Now as you do that, you want to create new campaigns and new things to go to market with. And we did a lot of that and continuous planning sounds great now, after everyone's been planning for the last 18 months, but back then it was a new concept. Rowan (06:20): And we were trying to evangelize that concept and created lots of great top of funnel campaigns, ready to launch posts. That event had them live for six weeks and then the pandemic hits. And we're sitting there with this fantastic campaign that was beautiful for the moment. Beautiful for the time, very positive, very uplifting, very empowering for our audience. But as soon as the pandemic hit, that's not what they want to hear. Then like they're in, we call it the ambush they're in the ambush mode. If you think about what your finance team may have been doing in the middle of March, it was trying to figure out, are we going to thrive, survive cashflow. Kathleen (07:03): It went from, I imagine, continuous planning to crisis planning. Rowan (07:06): Effectively. Yeah. Cashflow forecasting became, you know, scenario planning. What if analysis became the, the top use cases, if you will, or the top things that finance professionals wanted to care about. Right. And capital management, liquidity, all of those things. And and so we're sitting there with this fantastic campaign that we've spent lots of money and worked with some amazing agencies on. And and the, the other thing is our audience. We're just in a bunker trying to figure out what's going on. They didn't want to talk to us. So we went very like many companies, we went very much into support mode, right? How can we help our audience through this? What can we do? And did a lot of those things, built communities, hold weekly meetings, you know, how can we support? You tried to educate them on, you know, different ways that they could use the platform. Rowan (07:59): And and, and internally I, I, I converted my product marketing team to a research analyst firm, you know, who will survive, who will thrive and, and how can we go and target those people and educate them on what we do, but the message just wasn't right. You know, selling and telling the story about continuous planning in the middle of that environment, wasn't what people wanted to hear. And so we spent you know, we spent probably too long trying to continue to evangelize that, you know, the, the commitment and consistency of like, oh, we put this great thing together. Let's just keep doing our work. Kathleen (08:39): Gosh darn it, we planted our flag in the sand. Rowan (08:42): Exactly. And so you know, I had a conversation with Grant one day and I said, I just don't think like, this is the time to, or this is the place to be pushing this message. And and, and we thought back to kind of core marketing principles, and many of your audience will know about, you know, the five stages of awareness from, from sports. Right. And so we looked at that and we said, well, where is where is continuous planning fit here? Right. Well, it fits for the most aware people are customers or people that have bought this technology before, and they really understand it. So we can keep pushing it to that audience for the completely unaware per person. It makes, it actually makes sense as a thought leadership play as a play around storytelling and, and actually evangelizing that. Rowan (09:30): But for the people in the middle, right, the people that we're actually trying to get to buy or get you know, get into our final or convince them to buy versus a competitor, it didn't work because they were trying to figure out, well, actually my pain point is not continuous planning. I kind of, you haven't really even explained what that means, what that is, how that works, you know, where am I on that journey? They want to know, how can I do scenario management? How can I do cashflow forecasting? Can I do direct method, cash flow, forecasting, or indirect method? Where are we with our, what if scenario analysis and, and those types of things. So what we did was we stepped right back and said, all right, let's create a use case strategy. Very tactical, very much at the pain point level of, of what our audience is going through. Rowan (10:22): And so, you know, as, as all businesses where, you know, we're going through, what's going to happen for us. And, and actually coming out in the back of you know, that first initial ambush, we were hitting record pipeline numbers in kind of Q3, right? Amazingly everything was going well, we had this use case campaign. It was going well, what we did tactically for that campaign was create landing pages all around. Those specific use cases, I actually used the pandemic. One of my strategies as I was planning to come to, to plan for we we'd been very much a lead acquisition company. And I wanted to use the reposition and that mode to, to move the market into demand creation mode, as opposed to lead acquisition mode. Now it was kind of good because everyone was just so focused on, you know, how many opportunities are we getting every day into our, into our funnel. Rowan (11:23): And so effectively, I was able to turn off every MQL report that we ever had which is great. And now no one really asks me about MQL. They're always asking me about, you know, opportunities. And so I was able to use that time to transition away from, you know, classic sales and marketing, talking about MQL calls. Well, now we're talking about pipeline creation and, and what we call, you know, stage one opportunities, S ones. And so during that period, I was also trying to shift our strategy away from very much, you know, purchase nurture leads, right? And, and then hopefully that they convert over time. I wanted us to move to a, build a brand, build awareness in the market and, and, you know, bring them to us. And and, and over that time, that sort of started to happen which was great. Rowan (12:18): And, and we saw the results of that in Q3. And then as the second wave of the pandemic came again in Q4 and Q4, for those that don't know, every finance professional is about to enter their either favorite or their worst time of the year planning season. And so again, you know, these people had been planning for so long Q3 was pent up demand, and then Q4 became a really hard time for us as well, because, you know, you're starting to see people get back into their planning season. And and, and, and now we're back into that mode of just really accelerated growth. I mean, we've, we've hit all of the kind of records that we would want to be hitting as a software company this year, so far growing like crazy, which is, which is really fun. And a lot of that is off the back of the fact that we really just stepped back to basics and created these use case use case plays. And so, as I was saying before, it's a landing page. It's a, an ungated demo on that landing page. It's having case studies on each of those landing pages. It's, it's the social proof inside of that. It's telling a story about how you go from use case to use case and the value chain that is associated with that for someone when they buy a platform, right? Because like most technology, we're a platform. You can do lots of things with it. Kathleen (13:40): So I have so many questions for you. Going back to the beginning, you talked about coming in and the company being founded in the early two thousands and being called Host Analytics. And what had changed in the time from when it was founded to when the PE firm bought the company. And it was funny, you, you said something along the lines of like the meaning of Host had changed. And the first thing that popped into my head was, was it that Airbnb happened and everybody thought, you know, is your company about analytics for like hosts who rent their houses out? Or like, what were you alluding to there? Rowan (14:18): Yeah, actually we'll say, let, let me start. So Host Analytics and the name was, so Jim Eblen founded the company, created the name. Back then we were taking a box into someone's office and hosting their financial analytics for it. Right. So very literal and, and Host actually means army of angels. And so that was another reason for the name, you know, the army of angels are coming to help you with your finance department. Now, you know, fast forward to 20 where hosting is now all about service providers, right. Or in your, in your mind, Airbnb? Kathleen (14:59): Well, certainly not on-prem software. Rowan (15:01): Yeah. Yeah. Correct. And actually host was the first FP and A platform, EPM platform to move to the cloud. So I think we did that in, in 2011, 2012. And and then there was a race for, for cloud financial planning platforms you know, Anaplan and, and Adaptive Insights and some other other companies came along. Rowan (15:25): And so there was this, you know, a big race for, for people to, to move to the cloud from the on-prem world. And and so Host was a big part of that, that, that race and that shift from on-prem to the cloud. And unfortunately though, like, you know, if you sit back in the middle of 2019, and you're calling someone in finance, and you say I'm from Host Analytics, the first thing that I think of is maybe Airbnb analytics, depending on their industry, or most of the time it was what you're going to analyze my cloud service usage or something like that. Like, they, they kind of be like, actually there was this cognitive dissonance that people would have, and ultimately they wanted us to like, they're like, oh, you should speak to it. This is, this is not for me, I'm in finance. Why, why are you trying to talk to me about hosting and analytics? Like so that was the major trigger there. In terms of what had changed is frankly, just cloud, on premise, all of that had changed and, and the term hosting had become synonymous with, with cloud cloud platforms, cloud software, cloud. Kathleen (16:38): Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. When I hear you talk about this, you know, the CEO was new, you came in, you were new, the company had just been acquired. And the it's the first big meeting of everyone. And you introduce a new brand and you start, like I said, earlier, you rip the bandaid off. Right. I feel like that could go in two directions as, as somebody who's been a head of marketing has navigated rebrands being the new people. If you don't play it right. It can definitely, I think exacerbate like friction, fear frustration, et cetera, amongst people who've been around for awhile. If they think, oh, this new person's coming in and they're changing everything and they haven't taken the time to like really understand us and, you know, kind of build consensus, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. Or it could, or if you navigate it correctly, it could really engender a lot of excitement and breathe new life and et cetera. So I'm curious, how did you navigate that in a way that it built excitement and trust and momentum and didn't cause friction? Rowan (17:45): I don't think you can do a rebrand without causing friction. This is my second one that I've led. And you're going to have naysayers. I think, you know, for anyone listening, that's contemplating a rebrand. You're going to have those people that basically say, I don't like the new name. I don't like why you're changing it, what's wrong with the current name, you're going to get all of that. And, but most importantly, you've really got to focus on you know, what's the intention and why are we changing it? We weren't changing the name for, for our employees. We were changing it for our audience, for our customers. Like they, they deserve a name that is more befitting of, of what they actually do. And so for us, when I think a couple of things helped us. Rowan (18:40): So firstly Grant and myself had come from this space before and we had created, Grant,was the CMO at one of our competitors and had created a category over there. And that company is doing very well and had gone public. And so there was a perception that, okay this new CEO is coming and he knows what he's doing. I'd also led rebrands before. So, you know, able to sit there and say, Hey, I, I also know what I'm doing as part of this process. So we were able to create some trust because it wasn't, you know, the first time it wasn't a first time category creating it. Wasn't the first time rebranding. Secondly we anchored the rebrand very intentionally on our customer. And at the same time we were going through things like a rebrand at a culture level, we had a new chief people officer and she's out building a new company values, right. Rowan (19:40): For the new new company and our number one value is customers. So as you think about that, we're able to anchor on, okay, well, we now have our new values and isn't it befitting for our customers to have a name that recognizes them. And if we think about financial planning and analysis folks, they are Planful. It's a real word. It means to be rich and methodical and full of plans. And that's what our buyers and our audience and our customers are. They espouse that every day. So that was really the way that we tried to overcome a lot of that by, by making it or intentionally making it about other people, other than us, it wasn't us trying to rebrand the company. Cause we, we like rebranding companies. It's very expensive to do. It's very hard to do, and it creates lots of friction and you know, lots of people, you know, people believe and perceive that there's lots of brand equity as well. Rowan (20:40): Right. And so lots of people had those questions. Well, what about, you know, we're an 18 year old company, what about all the brand equity that we've built up? And those types of questions are really important that you have answers, which is okay, that's, that is true. Yes. but actually psychologically people move on for a rebrand really quickly. They adapt we humans, we adapt really well to things and, and also we wanted to espouse the new vision for the company. Right. And, and having a name that fits that new vision was also really important. Kathleen (21:15): Now you have mentioned a phrase a couple of times that I want to ask you about, because it's a phrase that gets thrown about a lot these days in the world of marketing and that is category creation. And I feel like it's, it's almost become this very generic term that people use for a lot of different things. So can you just explain a little bit about when you think about category creation, how do you think about it? Why did you think it made sense to do that? Because, I mean, it's something I've looked at, and I know it's, it's, it's quite an undertaking and you have to go in with your eyes open and be realistic about what you're going to be able to achieve. And then, can you just talk a little bit about your strategy for doing that in this case? Rowan (21:59): Yeah, so, I mean, I may be quite simplistic in my view of category creation, but I think you need to just think of it from your audience's perspective, your audience needs to quickly recognize what do you do and where do you play in the ecosystem? And your definition of that category, if you will, whether that's creating a sub category, if you, if you've you know, read those books from the 22 immutable laws, right. If you can't create a category, create a sub category. The that's the simple way I look at it, right? And, and we had been playing in the enterprise performance management category, and when buyers are searching for for products, they're not looking for that they're looking for planning software. So the first thing that we wanted to do as we were going through this category creation and reposition, rebranding, the company, reinvigorating you know, changing the way that the company operated new segmentation, things like that, where it's to make sure that people could find us really easily. Rowan (23:08): And so if you think about that, it's okay, well, what do you do? Well, we're in the planning space. And you know, we also have capabilities, you know, you know, in our platform for, for accountancies and things like that. But the majority of people are looking for a planning platform. So we wanted to create a category inside the planning space that play to our strengths. And so when you think about planning, what we have is some capability in our product that allows us to do that more frequently than other competitors. So that's continuous, right. And, and that had already been coined by other analysts. So we were able to basically co-opted from them and, and then use it as our position. And, and so when I think of category creation, I think we just simply think of it as, how do I want my buyer to perceive me, what ecosystem do they want to think about me in? And and then can they find our USP inside of my category description of that? Kathleen (24:11): I like it. So it's funny that you, you, you phrased it that way, because one of my questions was going to be, when you set out to do this, were you hoping that, that, you know, analyst firms would build a quadrant around you, but I really didn't hear you say that. I mean, I heard you say analysts have used the term, but it sounds like success for you. Is, are customers using the term not so much is like Gartner using the term, is that accurate? Rowan (24:34): Yeah, that's accurate. I mean Gartner have changed in our category, right. So they have gone from FP and A to what's called XP and A, and they're going to have now two quadrants for us. Other analyst firms call it the enterprise performance management category still. Now we want them to change away from that whole term because that's, that's pretty old. Now it's about 30 years old as a category. And our perception is buyers just don't use it. Consultants use it you know, us in the industry. We use it, that buyers don't use it. They don't know what it means. So we'd rather, they yes, we want them to change it, but I don't necessarily mind what they call it. And yes. Do we, do we care about being in those those quadrants, those waves, those, yes, absolutely. Rowan (25:28): But it's not about naming, like trying to define the category for an analyst. I think the, you know, this is a it's a more mature market as well. So the analysts already have their perspectives of, of what's in the market. And so our positioning was, should never really have been about trying to do that for us, like at our stage, at our maturity of market. I think if, if I was at an early stage company where there was no quadrant, yeah. You'd absolutely be trying to get them to, to redefine or create a quadrant around you having been there before you, the other thing you have to do though, is you have to go and get your competition to also call it the same thing. So that becomes interesting. Kathleen (26:13): There's no such thing as a category of one. Rowan (26:16): Yeah, correct. Kathleen (26:17): Yeah. So, so one of the other things I wanted to dig into you, you talked about you joined shortly before COVID hit, you did the rebrand, you had all these plans, then the pandemic hits and the customer's priorities started to change, and their immediate pain points started to change. Talk a little bit about how that changed, how you approached your strategy. Rowan (26:43): So the first thing I think it's really important to recognize is prior to that, you know, customers had gone through their annual planning cycle, right. And they were in the midst of rolling out and trying to operationalize their 2020 plans, you know, finance teams or like, okay, well, we've just, you know, some of them hadn't even closed Q1 yet. And normally we all joke, you know, every, every annual plan is, is dead on arrival. Well, that is even more true of 2020. Everyone's plans had been thrown out the window for a finance team's perspective though. Their first thought was, how do we make it through like firstly, a lot of customers just delay payments, right? Cashflow becomes super important. So rather than have a net 15 on invoices, my new standard is net 60 net 90, and you're trying to hold all the cash inside of your business. Rowan (27:45): Everyone's doing it to each other. And so, you know, cash becomes king. And so one of the use cases that we can operationalize with our customers is cashflow forecasting. So firstly, we wanted to make sure that customers of ours that had an implemented that use case realized that they could do that. And the other thing that became really important was speed became super important. You know customers and prospects, aren't going to want to go through a big finance transformation in the middle of a situation like that. They want things to happen fast. So we created a package of implementation services. We call Planful now, right. Get up and running in less than 30 days, make it make the, the folks that do want to buy or can buy, make them realize that it's not a, it's not a 12 month ERP implementation or CRM transformation or anything like that. Rowan (28:43): So very much focused on, okay, what can we do for people? What can we do for them right now, if it's if it's an existing customer, how can we help them with, with those key priority use cases which were cashflow forecasting for them and scenario on what if analysis, you can imagine the, what if analysis that folks needed to do in in kind of March and April of last year, that's all many companies were doing was trying to figure out what if, what if, what if, and looking at it from all sorts of lenses. Kathleen (29:14): Yeah. And then I also loved the thing that really stood out from what you said to me. Cause I really believe this so strongly is about really focusing on brand and knowing that if you, it, it, it is very much a kind of a longer play. But knowing that if you build a really strong brand, the demand is going to follow, right. People love working with brands that they love and it fo it, it functions like a magnet to pull in the right leads. A lot of times though, and I, and I've talked to other marketers, who've experienced this you can, as the head of marketing strongly believe in the power of brand but unless you work for a CEO and and you are a part of a leadership team that also believes in the power of brand, you can get a lot of pushback because it can be very tempting for those people to say, no, we just need, you know, keep the MQL flow going. And sometimes during that pivot, when you're like really shifting your focus, sometimes things can slow down as you do that, but you have to kind of like do it, knowing that you're slowing down to speed up if you will. So I'd love to hear just what your experience was with that. Rowan (30:32): Yeah. So, so firstly, I think your key point there was having a CEO that understands the power of, of brand. And I'm thankful that Grant was a CMO that is a blessing and a curse for those that ever want to go work for a CEO who has been a CMO. They can get right into the weeds as well. And that can be, you know, not as enjoyable as you want it to be. But it does mean that they understand the power of the marketing machine and you know, Grant has very similar philosophies to me on, on that. Like he's done rebrands before. He's done brand refreshes. Really cares about the power of brand. And that's a lot of what we talk about. You know, position brand, narrative, things like that. We talk about that a lot. Rowan (31:23): And so as I think about going through that exercise, it was much easier, right? I didn't have you know, it was part of why I came was I knew that we were going to get to build a brand and rebrand the company. So that was part of the excitement of joining the company was, oh, wow, we're going to do this. This is going to be fun. Now I wish, you know, I wish the timing had been different because as I said, we had a great campaign ready to go. It was really fun. And we had, you know, all this spend that we wanted to put behind it, well, in the middle of a pandemic, you know, you're not going to get the same return for that dollar. Right. As I said, our, our audience was ambushed. So we pared back a little bit responsible thing to do, make sure that we hit our growth goals in an economical way. Rowan (32:14): The, I think the second part about brand that you mentioned is the leadership team actually also valuing that. And I think that's something that I was lucky to have. Here was people that understood that this is a transformation and to do the transformation we needed the power of a brand behind it, as well as the flexibility to to really go through that change. Now, the I guess the, the benefit of doing that through the middle of the year, like 2020 is, no one knows what the numbers would have been like before. Right. Like, you know, we talk about this a lot internally, like never compare to 2020 cause who knows what those numbers should have been or could have looked like. So we always do a lot of, you know, a year over year, but year over 2019 as well. Right. Rowan (33:07): Because that was a more normalized year. Yeah. So I did get the, the lock or the the challenge of doing that through a pandemic. And that meant that no one knew what the numbers would have been anyway. So I was able to focus on what we wanted to do, right. The intentionality of, you know, the power of that brand. And so there was no, well, we're expecting this many MQL this week, this month, and you're not getting them because we weren't expecting a normal period at that time. So that was actually I won't say luxury. Kathleen (33:44): It sounds like take advantage of those black Swan events when they happen. Rowan (33:49): Take advantage of a crisis. And so frankly, that's what we were able to do. And actually, that's, that's also, when you think about how you want to build that brand, we want to do it in the most economical way possible, right? Like when I worked for a PE company, I don't just have billions and billions of dollars to spend on, on brand. So we're able to focus on the places where building a brand actually makes sense. So I have a podcast like you have a podcast, right? We very much focused on organic social and doing that in a way that is, is really powerful for us. We focused on being more creative than our competition. So as you look at our advertising, you look at our color scheme, it's very different to what's out there and that's all intentional to, to kind of be a pattern interrupt for our audience. And so those things allowed us to, I believe, build faster. You know, a lot of our competition do you use blue, right? What's a safe, trusted finance finance colors, right? Blue, everything's good, no red. We're able to use color and creativity in a way that our competitors aren't using. And so that's how we're trying to stand out to our audience. Kathleen (35:03): I love all of that. I'm a huge fan of the pattern interrupt. And it's funny because I've always, I've always worked in B2B tech and my dream has been to work for a company where I can have the primary color and our brand be purple just because nobody ever picks it. And I'm like, the fact that no one picks it is why we need to do it. Like let's pick crazy colors and go with that. But I, you know, still working on that, the dream of purple someday. Rowan (35:29): Well, I'm getting to live the dream of purple and for those that ever want to know why, why purple. Well purple actually has association with royalty, rich and richness, and wealth. So it's actually a great color for a finance company. Kathleen (35:43): Yeah. And sometimes, honestly there doesn't need to be a reason, like just the fact that it's different is great reason. Right? well, we're coming close to the end of our time. And so I want to sort of wrap up this segment of the interview by just asking, can you, are there any like results that you can speak to? Like we talked about the journey coming in and changing things up and then having to grapple with the pandemic hitting and your customer's priorities suddenly shifting, like what's, what's been the outcome of all of this so far? Rowan (36:18): Well, so I think in, in a couple of key things, so firstly right now in 2021, we our, our pipeline creation to one ratio has increased by 5%. And, and well, not by 5%, it's probably by like 150% or something silly like that, but it's a five percentage point increase if you, if you compare the two numbers. And so that means we're getting high intent buyers coming to us. And that means our deal velocity is much faster. So, so that cycle of what we're trying to create with a brand, people come to us, giving us that momentum has absolutely worked. Our website traffic is up you know and it was 180% year over year, and it's like 140% year over 2019. And, and that is all organic. So not the paid stuff, it's not paid, that's driving all the website visits. Rowan (37:16): That's, that's organic traffic. Branded search terms are up, right. So people are looking for the words like continuous planning or Planful. And, and so that's really important to us. Ultimately for me, it's about it's about revenue and, and that's up, you know, we're we're about to have a press release soon. And, you know, our, our revenue numbers, sales, bookings numbers are drastically up like year over year, but also again, you're over 2019. And so that changes significantly that marketing shift, that, that fundamental shift is starting to have the realization now. And a funny blessing is that now also lots of other organizations are using continuous planning. And I, I suspect that's because everyone planned continuously last year. So we were lucky in the fact that we kind of coined it and owned it prior to everyone realizing that that's actually, it's the new, it's the new normal. Rowan (38:19): So everyone is planning all the time and it's going to be an interesting for us planning season, because for those folks listening in marketing, go and give you a finance professional, a hug, please, because they have been going through a really, really tough time, consistently planning, planning, planning, re-planning. And now they're about to go into planning season again, which means sleepless nights for them. And we really want to make sure that we can alleviate that. And I think burnout and finance teams is something that's going to really appear soon. And we're hoping to alleviate that for, for organizations. Kathleen (38:56): Amen to that, because I work with an amazing CFO, Josh Shenker at my company clean.io, and he has been continuously planning for, since I've met him and we are already in planning for next year. So everything you just said is absolutely spot on. So shout out to Josh. All right. Shifting gears. I have two questions that I always ask my guests at the end of every interview, and I'd love to hear your answers to them the first being I, you know, and you just really gave me the perfect segue, which is that things change so quickly in every industry, marketing certainly being one of them. You know, in marketing, we have the added elements of, you know platform changes, algorithm changes, regulatory changes, et cetera, all of which affect how we do our jobs. And I think most of the marketers I talk to say that staying on top of all that is one of their biggest challenges. And so I'm curious how you do that. How do you keep yourself educated and are there certain sources you turn to, to stay on the cutting edge? Rowan (40:00): I would actually counter that and say, I, you know, you've heard me talk today. It's been a lot about brand. It's been a lot about fundamentals. And so you know, I started my career very much in the tech side, always being like, you know, very big fan of Scott Brinker's MarTech slide, and always priding myself on knowing who was what and who was who and how it was all going. And then I couldn't keep up. You know, I don't think even Scott could probably keep up. And so what I found myself gravitating back to is actually more of the fundamentals, more of the psychology, more of behavioral, you know, behavioral understanding of buyers, psychology of things like color and words, and, and coming back to basics of things like copywriting. Now I have a great team, thankfully that stay on top of all of the technology aspects, but I also see the trends going away from more relying on that technology now, you know, with all of the Apple's privacy changes and impending, Google, privacy changes and things like that. I actually think coming back to basics is, is what more of us should be doing. And so I've been doing a lot more of that, like rereading the classics and you know, going in you know, a lot of kind of persuasion and reading a lot of psychology books which has been interesting, but that's what I've been doing. Kathleen (41:20): Well, I think that's, that's so smart and I agree with that. You know, if you solve for people, you will always win. If you try to solve for machines, the machines are trying to solve for people. So you'll just be one step behind the machines, right. So solve for the people. It works every time. Second question is the, in terms of this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular person or company that you think is really setting the bar for what it means to be a great inbound marketer these days? Rowan (41:56): So I work with Eddie Schreiner at Very Good Copy. And I think Eddie, like it, I look forward to Eddie's email every week, right. So if I think about inbound marketing, right? Yeah. That's outbound, but I'm excited to get his email all the time. And so, you know, I think someone like Eddie is out there creating demand for his services, but doing it in a way where he's consistently educating me and my team and I'm sure his audience the other folks that I really admire right now is the team at Metadata. Some of their advertising captures my attention. We talked about pattern disrupts, you know, they're doing things that other companies aren't doing. And, and even though it's, you know, it's, it's MarTech and it's one of the things that I'm not keeping up to date with. They're using more of the core principles to actually get my attention. And so I would say, you know, the, the folks there at Metadata are doing really good. Kathleen (42:55): Awesome, well, we'll have to check those out. And I also love Very Good Copy. I get that newsletter and I'm a huge fan of it. So check that out if you haven't done that already. And if you are listening and you want to get in touch with Rowan, Rowan, what is the best way for somebody to do that? Where can they find you online? Rowan (43:15): Yeah, so definitely my LinkedIn is the best for business chat. My, my Twitter, which is @RowanTonkin is mostly golf and rugby. So unless you're, unless you're in that golf, rugby and marketing cohort, I would go to my LinkedIn and simply just Rowan Tonkin. You'll, you'll find a picture of a man behind a purpose. Kathleen (43:34): All right, fantastic. Well, I'll put those links in the show notes and if you are listening and you enjoyed this episode, please consider heading to Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice and leaving the podcast a review. And if you know somebody else, who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork, because I would love for them to be my next guest. That is it for this week. Thanks so much for joining me Rowan. This was a ton of fun. Rowan (43:57): Well, my pleasure. Thanks so much, Kathleen.

This episode is a playback from Chris's appearance on Kathleen Booth's Inbound Success Podcast. Kathleen started the conversation off by asking Chris about how he created such a buzz in the marketing industry in 2 short years. Their conversation then flowed into covering topics such as using data to shift away from the lead gen mindset, tactics vs. strategies, and optimizing for brand top of funnel. “Marketing is about finding something that works well, and then being incredibly consistent at delivering it while also innovating on a micro level,” says Chris when asked about which channels to focus on to avoid being spread too thin. It's about dominating and mastering a few channels before delving into new ones. Chris also shared an interesting take on influencer marketing when he says "everyone is doing influencer marketing, whether or not they know it." Thanks to our friends at Hatch for producing this episode. Get unlimited podcast editing at usehatch.fm. Chris is presenting a keynote about LinkedIn organic at Demand Gen Live on 6/15, 12pm EDT. Register here to sign up for one or all of the Demand Gen Live Keynote Series.

In the hyper-competitive world of e-commerce, how to the top performing brands drive continuous improvements in conversions and revenue? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Dexter Agency CEO Joris Bryon talks about the importance of A/B testing, and why small improvements to your website can drive big increases in revenue. From the process he uses to identify which website pages need to be optimized, to how he determines what aspects of the page are underperforming and the nitty gritty details of setting up and running tests and user surveys, Joris lays out, step-by-step, a process anyone can use on any type of website to improve conversions and pipeline. Check out the full episode to get the details. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.) Resources from this episode: Check out the Dexter Agency website Connect with Joris on LinkedIn Check out Joris's book Kill Your Conversion Killers Transcript Kathleen: Welcome back to the Inbound Success podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. Today, My guest is Joris Byron, who is the founder and CEO of Dexter Agency and the author of Kill Your Conversion Killers. Welcome to the podcast, Joris. Joris: Thanks, Kathleen. Great to be here, actually. Yeah. Kathleen: I am so excited to talk to you, but I have to start with a question. Kill Your Conversion Killers, is that kill or be killed, conversion rate optimization style? Joris: Actually, it came from the baseline we had when we started the agency. So it was Dexter Agency. And Dexter, the serial killer who kills... Kathleen: Oh, yeah. I didn't even think about that [crosstalk 00:00:55]. Joris: ... serial killers. Yeah. And that's where it came from. And conversion killers is a thing, actually. So we kill conversion killers, and it's a bit of a play on words. And that's where the title came from and the baseline for the company as well. Yeah. Kathleen: I love it. So speaking of the company, maybe you could just briefly introduce yourself to the listeners and talk a little bit about your background and what Dexter Agency does. Joris: Sure. So I've been in marketing for 20 years now, and I started my career in traditional advertising agencies and actually did that for about 10 years. But I got fed up with the typical discussions you have with clients, like make this blue, make this red, put this on the left, put this on the right, that kind of stuff based on nothing. Well, I discovered online marketing, and I started learning about SEO, PPC. I went working for an agency as well. I had to stop in between where the company, it had failed. And then I went into digital marketing. But anyway, in that visual marketing agency, I learned a lot about digital marketing. And at one point, I fell in love with conversion optimization. And that's how it all started. And I ventured out on my own. I learned everything I could about conversion optimization. And first, I tried to implement that in the agency where I was working. And it was a great agency, but back at the day, conversion optimization was still pretty new. And there weren't any clients prepared to start doing that, so I had to venture out on my own and started out as a freelance CRO consultant, and that grew into an agency. And yeah, here we are now doing this for six years already. Kathleen: And I saw in my notes that you have done over 1,500 A/B tests. So you have a ton of data that you bring to this conversation, which I love. Conversion optimization obviously is a broad topic. We're going to focus specifically on e-commerce, which is an area that historically we haven't talked about a ton on the podcast. Although, I've started talking about it more lately because selfishly I'm working in the e-commerce area. And so I'm really interested in learning more, and so I'm excited to dig into this with you. Let's just start with a background on conversion optimization because I don't know that everybody fully really understands what it is, why you should be doing it, how it works. Give me just a really quick summary on that. Joris: Yeah. I'd say conversion optimization for me is trying to make more from what you already have. You already have visitors; try to make more out of the visitors you already have. They already buy from you, so why don't you try to increase the average order value? And you have them as customers, so why don't you try to sell to them again? For me, that's conversion optimization. It's basically working with what you already have. I know there's definitions out there that focus entirely on conversion rate optimization, but I think that's too narrow. It creates wrong expectations. I don't think conversion rate optimization is a great name for the discipline as such. So if I have to say something about it, I usually say conversion optimization as you do rather than conversion rate optimization because that creates false expectations. Kathleen: Yeah. I spent a little over a decade as the owner of an agency, and I used to always talk about this and frame it as if you want to double your revenue and you look at a traditional marketing funnel, there's two ways to think about it. You could say, "Well, I have these conversion rates and this number of visitors and this number of leads. If I want to double the number of visitors who ultimately turn into customers, I can double my traffic, and if the conversion rates all stay the same..." And I'm going back to conversion rates right now, so I'm deviating a little from what we just said. But I think it's a helpful rubric. You can either try to double your traffic and just stuff twice as many people in the top of your funnel, hoping that it produces the same outcome, or you can work on converting more of the people that are already coming into your funnel. And in a perfect world, you're probably doing a little bit of both, but the reality is that the fastest path to more revenue is the second thing that you focus on. It's much harder and longer term effort to double your traffic than it is to double the number of leads you're getting that ultimately turned into customers. And I'm sure the same is true of repeat purchasing and things like that. Kathleen: When you talk about ultimate impact on the business, trying to squeeze more juice out of the orange you already have is always a better approach in the short term, certainly, than trying to grow more oranges. Joris: No, absolutely. And I think a lot of business owners, they're so focused on traffic that they forget there's other ways to double their revenue. And I get it. In the beginning, the fastest way to grow is adding more traffic, and especially PPC. If you pay for that traffic, it's going to get you quick growth. But at some point, you'll hit a plateau, and it's going to get harder and harder to attract relevant traffic because you can dump the traffic on our site. But if it's not relevant traffic, why bother, and why pay for it? And what I feel is by then, most business owners are so stuck in a traffic mindset that they look for ways to still make it work. Maybe I try something new, some new campaign or some new channel or fire their agency, work with another agency, whereas they miss out on the opportunity of working with what they already have and try to improve that instead. I think one question that helps is, do you want more traffic, or do we want more revenue? And when you put it like that- Kathleen: That's a pretty easy question to answer I would hope. Joris: Yeah, yeah. Right. And that's a bit of an eye-opener, but most business owners are so stuck in traffic mindset, whereas there's a lot of potential in increasing the order levers. I think for e-commerce, the formula that I always use is revenue equals your traffic times your conversion rate times your average order value times your purchase frequency. There's only four levers that you can grow your e-commerce. There's nothing else. If we're talking about your own life story, you can start selling on marketplaces. That's a different story. But if we're working on your online store, it's still those four levers. Yet, most companies focus only on traffic, and they miss out on the other three levers, whereas if you look at that formula and you can increase these three other levers by 30% each, which is pretty doable, then you double your revenue. And doubling your traffic sometimes it's going to be very, very hard. For me, it's sometimes a mystery why people get so stuck in a traffic mindset when there's auto levers that you can pull. Kathleen: Well, and I think everything you just said honestly applies to, really, almost any type of business. And in fact, I just had this conversation last week. I have a weekly marketing meeting with my team, and we had been tracking traffic and conversion rates and all that stuff. But we're also tracking marketing source, pipeline and revenue. And it was really interesting meeting because I've been feeling lately like I'm beating my head against the wall trying to increase traffic. And it isn't working as quickly as I would like it to, but my marketing source revenue is really good. And so I finally said, "You know what? I'm not even going to report on traffic anymore," because, clearly, it's not a good leading indicator for what really matters. And I don't want to keep pouring a lot of time and energy into changing a number that isn't going to get us necessarily where we need to go. It's not that I'm not going to ever work on traffic anymore, but I do feel like as a marketer, I could let it really eat away at me when it doesn't need to. So I think your point is really well taken. Kathleen: But what I want to start with on this topic is, how do you know if your conversion rates aren't good? How do you know if you're functioning in a way that there's real low-hanging fruit from conversion optimization? Because I think a lot of the marketers I've talked to in principle are fans of it. Everybody says, "Sure. We should all optimize our conversions to the greatest extent possible." But I do feel like there's this feeling out there that, well, I already have a pretty well running system, so why should I invest in that? So how do you look at your existing funnel, your existing business, and identify whether that is the right thing to invest in and when it is the right time to invest? Joris: Yeah. That's an excellent question. I think, first of all, I've never seen a site that cannot be improved. So we've always made our clients a lot of money. You can always improve. So never assume that you're at the top of your game and you cannot improve anymore. The second thing is always look at, for me, it's Google Analytics. So look at the data and try to figure out where you're losing money. So it's really about finding those areas on your site. Maybe there's a huge drop off in a certain page. Look at bounce rates as well. If you drive a lot of traffic to a certain page with very high bounce rates, start there. So look at those numbers in Google Analytics, and that'll tell you where you have opportunities. And whenever you can, try to also put a number to it in terms of dollar value. Joris: Let's say you have on a cart page on an e-commerce site. So you have a 50% drop off. So people reach the cart page and 50% drops off. There's always going to be drop off. But what you try to do there is, what if we can get it up to 60% going through to the checkout, so only 40% drop off? What would that represent in terms of annual revenue? Then you can look at, let's say, checkout pages and see what the drop off is there and what would be a more normal level and try to put a number to it or a dollar value to it on a yearly basis. And then you know where you have to start because if one page represents a problem that could, basically, if it's fixed, maybe you can get a $200,000 a year extra. And the other one is $1 million a year extra, you know where to start and start digging further to understand why that is happening. So we always start with where it's happening, and then you try to figure out why that is happening and try to solve that problem, basically. Kathleen: I like how you frame this. If I look at my Google Analytics and I find a page that has a really high bounce rate, in this case, maybe it's my cart page, I've identified where. And then how do I go about identifying why? What's that process look like? Joris: So there's different research methods that you can apply here. What I find is one of the most effective ones is user testing. So basically, you give a couple of assignments to regular people who they have to do those assignments. They have to comment out loud what they're doing. And if you're doing that remotely, you'll get a screen recording of it as well. And you see them moving through your site trying to do the assignments that you gave them, and they have to comment out loud. And it's going to give you a lot of insights. It doesn't always have to be that kind of setup. You could just ask someone random, I don't know, in a Starbucks or something and pay them for a coffee and say, "Hey, do you want to take five minutes and go over to my site and say what you think," something like that. Just try to get feedback from people who actually use the site. And that's usually going to be one of the most valuable things. Joris: Obviously, we look at it ourselves as well. We are conversion experts, so we know what might be issues. But you always have to test it and never assume that you're right because as an expert, we sometimes get it wrong because what works on one site doesn't necessarily work on another site. And I know a lot of people don't grasp that idea. They think, oh, it should work on every site, but that's not the case. So you can look at click maps and scroll maps. You can record visitor recordings so that you see people moving through the site. So there's a bunch of research methods that you can use to get some qualitative feedback. You can also, which is very good one, is on the checkout. So basically, on a thank-you page, you can trigger a survey, ask a couple of open-ended questions so that you get valuable, qualitative feedback because that's the thing. It's not always about percentages and the hard data that you find in analytics. You have to understand the why. So the qualitative feedback is going to get you so much further than trying to look at the hard data. And you really have to try and step into the minds of your consumers. That's where tools like user testing and surveys come in and can give you very valuable insights. Kathleen: I love those little surveys. And I know there's a lot of tools out there from Hotjar to Lucky Orange and platforms like that that you can use to create them. But I've tried using them before, and I don't get many submissions. And so I'm wondering, what is a typical survey response rate? And are there any ways to increase the odds of getting somebody to actually fill it out? Joris: So there's two ways to do it. You can set it up before someone checks out, so before they buy. So it's visitors, not consumers, and that's different. Your response rate is going to be lower than when you do it after the checkout, for instance, or you send them an email with a questionnaire. In that case, you're going to get a lot of responses. If you trigger that Hotjar pop-up to any visitors, it's really going to depend on the quality of your traffic as well, the timing of the pop-up because I often see those pop-ups really being [inaudible 00:15:05] after five seconds. And I don't even know what you do yet, And you already asked me what your experience is on the site. Kathleen: How long do you think it should be? Or should it be on exit? Joris: Well, it could be an exit, for instance. If you look at the average time on site in Google Analytics, that's when you know it's probably going to be somewhat qualified visitor already. They've spent some time on the site. And I would start there and trigger it there, and then you can start playing around. Another thing that helps- Kathleen: Wait, I just want to make sure I understand what you just said. Do you look at Google Analytics for that specific page and see how long people spend on that page or the overall session length? Joris: Yeah, session length. So basically if you see a session length is on average one minute 27 seconds, then you trigger it at one minute 27 seconds to start with. And you'll see what happens. You'll get much better feedback also because people that bounce usually are not interested anyway. It might be a mismatch, so it's not only about the amount of responses that you get but also quality of feedback that you get. So you've got to play around with those things. And there's no one formula for that, but it's just a couple of criteria that you can use and play around with it. Another thing that you can do is ask two questions, and the first one is a yes or no question. And then the second one, you expand on that and have an open-ended question because what happens is people want to be consistent. So if they've clicked on yes or no and then you ask them a follow-up question, you'll get better feedback. More people will fill that out. So that's a good way or another way to test. Joris: Never make it longer than that if it's one of those pop-ups before someone buys. If it's after the checkout, you can ask more questions. People will be more involved already. So I don't have a hard answer there. It should be this percentage, but you just have to try and improve what you already have. I think that's the main message here because it can vary wildly. Also, if you have a site with a lot of diehard fans and you have a good, interesting brand and a lot of brand fans, you're going to get much more response. Yeah. It's [crosstalk 00:17:19]. Kathleen: No, that's good feedback. I like the idea of looking at session length. That certainly is a little bit more scientific than just randomly picking a number of seconds. So I have a bunch of questions on this topic. So I've been in the situation before where I know I have a page that has issues, and it's that feeling of like, oh my God, where do I start? And you can certainly go to user testing, and there are other things like that. But I also know there's some gold to be mined within Google Analytics. And sometimes the issues you have have to do with devices or browsers. So how do you approach sussing out whether the issue is something that's on the page or whether it's more of a device or browser issue? Joris: Yeah, that's an excellent question. And I think it's a matter of keep asking the right question. So when you see a number that looks off, then you have to think, oh, okay, is this only on mobile? This is on desktop as well. Is this on a specific browser? So you start checking all those reports. There's no one way to go about it. You start very high level to see if there's some numbers that seem a little bit off, and then you start digging and look at segments and apply other reports and that kind of stuff. And it's a matter of asking the right questions and being curious and really trying to figure it out. And you can spend a lot of time in Google Analytics before you find something that is off and find a reason for it. Joris: It could be bot traffic for instance as well. If you see very high bounce rates, then you might want to look into, is it a specific browser or even a browser version causing this? Is it only on the homepage? Is all the traffic going to the home page? Do you see 98% bounce rate or 99% bounce rate? It's probably a bot. If that then comes all from one location, it's very likely it is a bot, and you have to exclude that traffic and it's just skewing your data. So you really have to keep asking questions to find the answer. And I start at high level and then dig deeper. Kathleen: So wait, the bot traffic thing is fascinating to me. What do you do about it? How do you fix that? Joris: Yeah. You can exclude some of the bot traffic if it's really clear. If, let's say, it's all from one particular location, you could [crosstalk 00:19:46]- Kathleen: Meaning one IP address? Joris: ... for instance. Yeah. You could just exclude that. Or it could be, let's say, even on an old Internet Explorer browser version, sometimes you see that it's sending bot traffic. And if you're like, oh, the only traffic that's coming in is from that bot, you could exclude that particular browser version as well. You try to find a unique identifier for that bot, and then you exclude it. Sometimes it's just impossible to do, but at least you give it a try and see if you can find one unique identifier that you can filter out. Kathleen: And then, I've always been taught with any conversion optimization or any A/B test you only change one thing at a time. So walk me through when you're trying to really optimize a specific page. You pick one thing, and how long do you let that experiment run? Is it a matter of time? Is it a matter of volume of page visits? How do you know when that experiment is up and it's time to move to the next thing? Because I'm assuming these all layer on top of each other. You're testing multiple things sequentially, correct? Joris: Yeah. So typically, we test on several pages at the same time. So you could have a test running on all product pages. So we don't test on one product page, but on all product pages at the same time, when I'm collections pages or category pages, one on the cart, one on checkout pages. So you could have those running simultaneously. Well, you have to have enough data before you call it. And usually, what we look for is, to make it simple, It's more complex than that, but is at least 300, 400 transactions per variation. So you need quite a bit of traffic to pull it off. And I like to or I prefer to say the number of transactions rather than in traffic because, ultimately, that's the main conversion that you're tracking. So you need at least 300, 400 transactions per variation, and you always have to let it run in increments of seven days. The reason for that is you can see a big difference. On a Thursday night conversion rate, could be totally different than on a Sunday morning. And a variation on a Thursday night could work better because it triggers something in your consumer that is relevant at that point, but it could work not so well on a Sunday morning or the other way around. Kathleen: Right. The type of person who shops on Thursday night might be completely different behaviorally than the type of person who's shopping Sunday morning. Joris: Absolutely. Yeah. Especially if, for instance, you're going to buy something you need on Saturday, so you need it to be delivered on Friday. Then you're going to decide a lot quicker than on Sunday morning. So there's different times of the day, different days of the week that have different conversion rates and different behavior from your consumers. So always run a test in increments of seven days. So if you have enough data after five days, sit it out. Wait until you have full seven days. If you have enough data after eight or nine days, too bad, you have to wait 14 days. We had one client where we joked about it because on Friday nights, it was always like, oh, this variation seems to be winning, and on Monday morning, it was totally flipped. So the behavior- Kathleen: Interesting. Joris: ... on the weekends was usually completely different there. So it's really something to do to be very strict about. And if you do this for clients and you look over your shoulder and you look in the A/B testing tool, you have to educate them on that because they're going to be like, "Yeah, but we have enough data. This version wins. Let's implement it." No. Just be calm. Let's give it some time because you don't want to implement something that ultimately ends up being a loser because then it's going to cost you money. Kathleen: Yeah. So this is interesting to me. And I started thinking about this as you were talking because you mentioned doing something on a category page or product page, a cart page. Any given customer, and I'm not telling you anything you don't know, goes through a journey. And when they're on their path to purchase, even in an individual session, they're going to visit a lot of different pages on your site. And so I already mentioned once changing only one thing. So if you're doing an experiment on your cart page, you pick one thing to change and you test it. But how does that reconcile with the fact that a customer has this journey, they're visiting all these different pages on your site, if you have experiments running on your category page, your product page, there is a chance that that person in their single journey to purchase could encounter three different experiments at once on three different pages. It's one thing to say we're testing a change on the cart page, but if there are experiments going on three, how do you know what really led to that purchase? I feel like that's where it starts to get complicated. How many things can you have going at one time on different pages? Joris: That's a very good question. And it's something that a lot of people struggle with. Just the easy version is as long as you equally divide the traffic for every test, there's no issue because let's say you have two tests running, one on a product page and one on a cart page. Now, 50% of your traffic is going to see the one on the cart page. No, sorry, 25% version A on the cart page. 25% is going to see version A on the product, version B on the cart. And 25% is going to see version B on the product and version A on the cart. And 25% is going to see version B and version B. So it's hard to follow and very hard to explain without a visual, but bottom line is if you divide the traffic equally, there's no issue. Kathleen: So it basically allows you to create cohorts, and each cohort has one single experiment running for them. Joris: Yeah. You could also double check all of that in Analytics, for instance, by making a segment. So anyone who's seen version A here, if you suspect some influence from one to the other, then you can basically make those segments in Analytics and see if there's a different behavior and a different outcome. So you could double check that. Apart from that, there's also something like a multi-page experiments. So let's say you want to test something that is on several pages at the same time. A typical one would be the navigation or the footer or a benefits bar with all those USPs you typically see on an e-commerce store. That's something that is across pages. That's not an issue either because it's very consistent across all those pages. So sometimes you want to set up a multi-page experiment as well. If someone does something on the product page and this needs to happen on the cart page, that could be an option as well. But I'm making it a bit complicated. So it really depends on what you're testing, but if it's two separate tests and you split the traffic evenly, there's no issue. Kathleen: So as I listen to you talk about this, I'm fascinated because this is not my primary area of expertise. But I'm also a little intimidated because it's starting to sound like you, A, could potentially need to be really, really well-trained in this, and B, it sounds like it could be a complex tech stack to support this, having these multiple experiments running with different cohorts going through your site. Can you talk me through really what does it take to pull this off? Joris: Yeah. So I think in terms of tech, if you have Google Optimize, it works perfectly fine as perfect tool to get started. It's free. We still use it a lot for a lot of our clients. There's other tools out there as well, but don't spend any money if you can do it with Google Optimize. So that's the tech side of things. For the rest, it's a matter of understanding a couple of best practices as well in terms of how to set up a test, like let them run in seven days, let them run long enough, how you need to analyze those tests. I describe all of that step-by-step in my book without making it needlessly complex because what I find myself is the whole CRO community likes to make things complicated and sound very high level and a lot of statistical stuff in there as well to make them look smart. Kathleen: Yes. And it makes me feel really dumb. Joris: Absolutely. Kathleen: [crosstalk 00:28:43]. Joris: No, no. Absolutely. I think that's a mistake from CRO community because we alienate people we do this for because they don't understand it. And it is complex. There's a lot going on when you do a conversion optimization. At the end of the day, you need to know a lot about design, about copywriting, psychology. This takes research, all that kind of stuff. So it is a hard discipline to grasp, and there's a lot of misconceptions about it. And clients don't always understand it. And then on top of that, as a CRO community tend to make it look much harder than it actually is. That was one of the reasons I wanted to write my book, is make it as pragmatic as possible without... My objective was not to make me look smart but really to help people out. And usually, people in CRO community want to look smart. I had a discussion about that the other day on LinkedIn, where someone was attacking me because I didn't share all the statistical stuff behind an A/B test. And it was like, I think that's not always needed. It's about inspiration, about opening their eyes. [inaudible 00:29:55]. Obviously, that's our duty as well. But if we use all that statistical stuff around it, we scare people off. And as you said, they, they feel dumb themselves. Kathleen: Yeah, and then they check out. Joris: Yeah, absolutely. And we're marketeers. We say it to our clients. Hey, you have to understand your clients and speak their language, and then we don't do it ourselves. So there's a big gap there, I think, in the CRO community and a big responsibility in the CRO community as well. But most of the CROs, they just want to look smart, and that's a mistake, I think. Kathleen: Well, I appreciate that, that you are focused on making it accessible, because I will be the first to admit that sometimes I read this stuff, and I think I just must not be smart enough to fully understand it. So I want to do a few rapid fire questions for you on this theme of debunking myths and making it more accessible to people. The first one is, and you alluded to this earlier, why should people be running A/B tests? Why can't they just read a best practice somewhere and do it on their site or look at what their competitor's doing and do it on their site? Joris: Yeah. We see that all the time. So there's something called best practices. I prefer to call them prototypical principles or common practices because what we see is when you test the best practice on a site, it may fail and cost you money. We've seen that many, many times. So there's just no way of predicting it. Those are great way to start. If you're just starting out, use those best practices by all means. But then at some point, you'll have to start questioning is this actually working for me. And if you have the volume to the test, then you definitely should start testing it. So the word best practices is very misleading. Joris: The second part of your question, following what anyone else is doing, that's also thinking, first of all, they know what they're doing. Kathleen: They're right, exactly. Joris: So you assume that. That's not true. Or you think like, oh, I know they're [inaudible 00:32:00], but then you're assuming that they've already beat us at that, which may not be the case. If it's, let's say, a call to action, maybe they haven't even tested it yet, so it may not be working. It may be a problem for them. And then you're maybe implementing problems on your site. You don't know their data. You don't know anything, and you just assume that they are doing a good job. And you just implement it. And it's very dangerous to just follow what your competitors are doing. The only situation in which you can do it for me is when you see you have a problem and there's an issue and you're looking for inspiration on how do other people solve it or go about that problem and maybe work around it, and then you start testing different solutions. So you can go out there and look for some inspiration, but don't just follow it and implement it. Kathleen: That makes sense. Use it as the basis to inspire your tests as opposed to assuming that the test has been successful. Joris: Absolutely. Kathleen: So if somebody is listening and they're in e-commerce and they're thinking, okay, I'm willing to give this a shot, what are three things that you think they should start out doing A/B tests on? Joris: Yeah. First of all, start doing the research. You'll know where your problems are. But where we often see a lot of opportunities is anything around value proposition on the homepage. If you don't have that yet, that's usually a good area to start. Then anything else that underlines your USPs, basically, and that gives people a reason to buy from you, and especially if those reasons are unique. We see a lot of value around that as well. And then what I think is usually a good place to start as well, product pages, anywhere in what I call the decision area. So anything near the picture and the button, anything you can improve there is usually also a good place to start. But product page in general usually is a place where you can make a lot of improvements. Joris: But do the research first, and try to understand where your biggest problems are because I remember one time where working for client, and we were testing on the product pages. We just looked in Google Analytics, and we saw they had a huge drop off in one of the steps in their checkout. So they were losing millions of euros, a Dutch client, of euros a year in that step in a checkout, but didn't even know it. And they were testing a product page, which was acceptable at every product page at the time. So look at the data first. That's the best place to start. Kathleen: So on that note, look at the data first, and you mentioned Google Analytics. We've all got it. It's the one tool I think all marketers use. At least all marketers that listen to this podcast I'm sure use it. What do you think? If we're going to rely on the data there, we better be looking at it correctly. Are there certain mistakes that you find that marketers make when looking through Google Analytics that somebody should be aware of if they're listening? Joris: Yeah. I think a lot of people focus on the wrong data. So focus on those data that are actionable and [inaudible 00:35:06] metrics. What I would say as some test if you're looking at the right data, always ask yourself, how can I use this to improve my site or my marketing? How can I use this number to improve it? If it's time on site, for instance, you can use that to trigger a Hotjar pop-up, but that's about it. If time on site increases, it could be that people have a harder time to find what they're looking for. So you can not really use that metric. Yet, some people look at that metric. So ask yourself that question. I think that helps because what I find is that most people don't have a lack of data. There's not a lack of data but lack of insights. And they get overwhelmed by the amount of data and analytics, and they don't really know where to look. And so we always ask the question, how can I use that? And if you don't have an answer, then don't use those data. Kathleen: Yeah. Your point is so good about session length and time on site. It seems like it would be good to increase it, but it's true. If somebody is frustrated and not finding what they want, they could have a long time on site or, what I find often happens, if they're a job seeker and they're reading all of your content. I'm in B2B SaaS, and the DIYers, the ones who are never going to buy from you, but they're like, I'm going to read all the educational content so that I know how to do this myself, those are the people that spend a lot of time on site, whereas somebody who comes in knowing they want to buy often has a very short time on site because they're high intent, going right to your contact us page and filling it out. Kathleen: And it's funny because I used to look at this too when I had my agency. We would try to look at patterns of people who bought from you, how many pieces of content did they consume, thinking, gosh, is there some rule where if somebody consumes more than 30 pieces of content, then they're a good lead? And I found actually it was almost like the inverse was true, that the customers that were converting consume very little content on site because they came in ready to buy. So it's really interesting, And I do think you have to question the assumptions that you have as a marketer before you go and try to implement changes. Well, last question on conversion because I am just curious. What is a good conversion rate? And I guess we'll talk about e-commerce because that's where your expertise is. Joris: Yeah. Absolutely. And it's a question I get a lot. And the only right question is a good conversion rate is one that's better than last month's. Just look at yourself because there's I know there's benchmarks out there, and people always want to look at benchmarks. But that doesn't really help you. Benchmarks usually you mention it's 2%, 2.2%, but it depends on so many variables. Kathleen: And is that for a visitor to purchase conversion? Joris: Yeah, yeah. Kathleen: Okay. Joris: Yeah. But it doesn't mean anything. If your average order value is $20 and you have a 3% conversion rate, you might think based on a benchmark that you're doing all right. But I would say your site probably sucks because it's only $20 average order value. You could probably get it up to six, eight or maybe even higher. And so you could be complacent about it. Whatever. It's 3%. I'm doing good. Whereas if your average order value is $1,000 and you're a 2%, yes, then you're probably doing pretty good. Or you might be at 1% and thinking, oh, I should be improving a lot. I can easily go to 2%, maybe more. [inaudible 00:38:46] a little bit difficult to get to 2%, but you could probably get it to 1.2%, 1.5%, and it could be a lot of money as well. So there's a whole bunch of factors out there, also the quality of the traffic that you drive to your site. So I would suggest don't pay too much attention to benchmarks. And I get it. People want to have an idea. Am I doing all right or not? But basically, just look at your conversion rate from the past and try to improve that. The only good conversion rate is one that's better than last month's. Kathleen: That's great advice. All right. We're going to shift gears because I can talk with you about this forever, and I feel like I'm getting a masterclass here. But I have two questions I always ask my guests. And I'm just curious about your viewpoints on this. The first is, of course, this podcast is focused on inbound marketing, and the definition of inbound has evolved quite a bit. And so I really look at it as anything you're doing to attract the right type of customer to your business. So when you think of it that way, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really raising the bar or setting a great standard for what it means to be an inbound marketer today? Joris: Yeah. I think there's a couple of marketers that I follow and I look at. I tend to follow people more than brands. And you could say they're brands, so all their personal brands. I think when it comes to anything B2B on LinkedIn Marketing, I very much follow Matthew Hunt. He's doing a great job in anything small business marketing and startup marketing related. I really look up to Noah Kagan from AppSumo. Makes great YouTube stuff and great videos, and you just keep binge watching them. And he has a great style but also great advice. And when it comes to e-commerce, there's two people. I tend to follow Ryan Daniel Moran and Ezra Firestone. I think Ezra Firestone, he does a lot of inbound marketing the right way. And he experiments a lot and invests a lot of money in trying new techniques and then sharing those findings with his audience. I think Ryan Daniel Moran is really good in terms of building e-commerce brands and making it less complex because we tend to over-complicate things, and he makes it less complex and helps you focus on what really matters. Kathleen: Oh, interesting. I'll have to check those out. Those are some new ones for me. All right, second question. The marketers I've talked to consistently say that one of their biggest pain points is just keeping up with everything that's changing in the world of digital marketing. How do you personally stay educated? Are there certain sources of information that you really rely on to stay on top of your game? Joris: Yeah, it's hard to stay on top of the game. Fortunately, in conversion optimization, it's pretty evergreen. New things emerge, new tools, for instance. And obviously, you want to follow all of that. But if you look at a global digital marketing game, it changes every single day. And there's a lot of marketeers that suffer from shiny object syndrome, I guess. And you see something, you want to try it out, whereas I believe that you got to be consistent and try to find what works and give it a real shot because don't try it just today and then give up tomorrow. Sometimes you have to make a choice and stick with it for a while. So I suffer from that myself, shiny object syndrome. So I try to stay away from too many things that distract me from the real path that I want to walk on. Joris: I think in terms of getting new trends, LinkedIn is my source of information. If my network shares, it's probably going to be worth reading. So that's where I spend most of my time, is on LinkedIn. And that's where I discover. And then when I see there's a topic that really is important to go deeper, I just buy a course or read a book. So I stay away from too many blog posts because it's so fragmented. You don't know who wrote it. You don't know if they know what they're doing. And when it comes to courses, I think CXL Institute is a really good source of high quality courses. So that's where I look first as really... Yeah, CXL for me is benchmark when it comes to marketing courses. Kathleen: Well, I am a huge fan of Peep Laja, so I definitely agree with that. He was an early guest on the podcast too, and he's doing great work and, in fact, when it comes to message testing has a really neat new platform called Winter, W-I-N-T-E-R, that if you're listening and you haven't checked it out, you should, for sure. Joris: Yeah, absolutely. For B2B, it's a great tool. Kathleen: Yeah. I found it really useful in my experiments. Actually, it's funny. I recently interviewed Chris Walker from Refine Labs, and he talked about how at a certain point in your career, you really can't rely on outside educational materials to stay on top of your game. At some point, it has to be about doing your own experiments and doing the work and testing. And so I feel like as somebody in the field of conversion optimization, you have a leg up because that's literally what you do for a living. So that's great. Well, if somebody is listening and they're interested in connecting with you or learning more, what's the best way for them to find you online? Joris: Yeah. So on LinkedIn, I'm pretty active there. So just to add me on LinkedIn. And then you can also email me, joris@dexter.agency. And if you want to learn about this yourself, you can download the free PDF version of my... You could buy it on Amazon, but you can download a free PDF version on dexter.agency/free-book. And there, you can get a free PDF version of the book. If you want to get started yourself, just check a few things, like what are best practices about A/B testing, what we talked about. So that's all in there. Kathleen: That's great. And I will put those links in the show notes. So if you're listening and you're interested in connecting with Joris or getting a copy of the book, just head there, and you can hit the links and get all of that information. And if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, you learned something new, please consider heading to Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice and leaving a review. That's how other folks find us. And, of course, if you know somebody doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @WorkMommyWork because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you for joining me, Joris. This was so interesting. Joris: Thanks for having me. It was great to be here.

It’s the age-old question: Which should be built out first — product or audience? As marketers, we’re used to being handed a product and told to find the audience. However, Kathleen Booth, VP of Marketing at clean.io and host of Inbound Success, makes an argument for an audience-first approach in today’s episode. Plus, she talks about… Advice for new companies that want to build an audience but also need revenue How to future-proof your content against new privacy regulations The important differences between subscribers and members Building vs. buying an audience Resources mentioned: Content Inc. by Joe Pulizzi Killing Marketing by Joe Pulizzi & Robert Rose kathleen-booth.com Never miss an episode by subscribing to B2B Growth on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

How can any company - large or small - own their competitive market, charge more, and at the same time, build a customer base that absolutely loves it? This week on the Inbound Success podcast, Theresa Lina, author of the book "Be the Go-To: How to Own Your Competitive Market, Charge More, and Have Customers Love You For It," talks about the Apollo method - the system that she says is the secret to standing out as a brand. Theresa's method is simple and actionable, and something that any company can apply, and in this episode, she breaks down the details and talks about why so many companies get it wrong. Resources from this episode: Connect with Theresa on LinkedIn Buy the book Visit the Apollo Method website Check out some of the other resources Theresa mentioned: Visit ecorner.standford.edu Stu McLaren's website Salesforce's Trailblazers community Transcript Kathleen (00:15): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Theresa Lina, who is the author of the number one Amazon bestseller "Be the Go-To: How to Own Your Competitive Market, Charge More and Have Customers Love You For It." Welcome to the podcast Theresa. Theresa (00:35): Thank you, Kathleen. I'm so happy to be here. Kathleen (00:37): Yeah, I'm really interested to speak with you. First of all, I love the topic of the book. I mean, who does not want to be the GoTo and also have their customers love them and be able to charge more and all the things that you mentioned in the title? But also you have a really interesting background and mix of things that you do. You're not only a book author, you're a consultant. You are a teacher. You're involved in Stanford university and educating people about marketing. I wonder if maybe you could take a minute and talk a little bit about your background, how you got to where you are today and all of the different things that you're involved in today. Theresa (01:13): Okay. Yes. So yeah, my, my primary emphasis throughout my career has been strategy and marketing in the tech and mostly in the technology space and primarily B2B. So I've studied marketing and information technology at university. And then I got a job with Accenture coming out of college and spent many years with them and was in both the client on the client side. And then later helped start the industry marketing program there. And I had a global industry marketing role for one of the business units that I helped start with the partner in charge at the time. And we grew that to be over $850 million in a very short period of time with all organic growth, which was really incredible. It was an incredible ride. And now that business unit is a multibillion dollar business unit. Theresa (02:14): It's massive inside the company. And then I went off on my own. I, part of me, I had, I sort of wore two hats. I had one company that was an educational entertainment company for children, which was a personal project. And then I started a strategy and marketing consulting firm and worked with Accenture and other clients with that. And then over time, there were various times when I went back inside to become chief marketing officer and chief strategy officer for a couple of different companies, which kept me grounded because as a consultant, it's so easy to think you have all the answers and, Oh, everything's straight forward, just do this and you'll succeed. And of course we all know, any of us who've spent time on the inside, life is very different when you're, you know, dodging the bullets every day inside a company. Theresa (03:08): And one of those stints was during the dot com rise and fall. And so I lived through all of the dot com bust and the 9-11 and all of that. And then another stint was through the great recession. So you know, I definitely know what it's like to go through these hard times as somebody on the inside. And then I also have been involved at Stanford for a little over 15 years now in various capacities, both in helping with their own outreach to their alumni and their communities and stakeholders. And then also I help I'm on the teaching team for some courses and one of their executive ed programs at the business school. So I wear quite a few hats and then I have, I still have my consulting firm. Kathleen (03:59): Now let's talk a little bit about the book. Be the go-to. What does that mean? Theresa (04:03): Yeah, so, you know, one of the, the, the big problem that I was running into with my own business and that I was running into with companies that I was working for and with clients is that customers or clients started putting pricing pressure on us because they weren't seeing what made us unique and different from anybody else they could work with. And it was really frustrating because this was happening like say in my case with clients that I had had for a very long time who knew me, who knew our work, they, they had they knew we were a pretty different and the way we could execute and that we brought a lot of value. And yet they still would say, yeah, yeah, but, you know, we could go over here and get the same work for less money. Theresa (04:51): And it was really frustrating. And meanwhile, I knew that there were companies out there, Accenture, the one I, the organization I have have helped start within Accenture. We were a very high margin business getting paid very well for what we were doing. And I was on the phone with one of my subcontractors one day who told me about a friend of hers who was charging $50,000 a day for what she was doing. And she had less experience than we did. And we, you know, it was, it was incredible. And so I really became fascinated by this. What is it that makes some companies able to charge so much more than everybody else? And they can command these premium prices. They hardly ever have to compete for work. They are there the first name that comes to mind when somebody has a particular issue or problem. Theresa (05:41): And so I really wanted to understand what the recipe was. And a lot of the typical answers weren't in themselves enough having the best product, not enough having great PR or great market visibility, not enough you know, the, the list just went. So I did a, I did a lot of research and interviewed a lot of clients and executives and other people out there in the marketplace. And I came up with what seemed to me to be the recipe for my own business. And then as I wrote it down on a plane, on to Chicago, one day, literally I was jotting it down and I realized, Oh my God, all of my clients need this. This is, this is it. This is what you do. And that became what I ended up dubbing as the Apollo method for market dominance. Because later I came to realize that the parallels between what the Apollo space program had done to put a man on the moon actually were very striking compared to what a company needed to do to achieve sustainable differentiation and market leadership in, you know, a given market. Theresa (06:54): So that was the genesis of all of this. And the essence of what the book is about. I basically wrote down the methodology. I've said, I want this to be something anybody can go off and do. It's very step by step and actionable so that you don't need me to do it. And it's not a big pitch piece to get to the upsell. It's you can go off, read the book, and if you do what it says, you can, you can have a, make a remarkable difference in your profit margins and your longterm sustainability in a, even in a very competitive space. Kathleen (07:33): I'm sure everybody who's listening is thinking the same thing I am, which is, tell me more about this Apollo framework. What exactly does it entail? Theresa (07:45): On the surface it's so simple, and it almost sounds insulting because it's, it's very straight. It's very simple, but of course, when you dive into the details, it gets a little richer with some of the nuance of what you need to do. But a lot of it is bringing together pieces that a lot of companies do go out and do. There are some things that I, I see missing, which is why I did feel compelled to write the book, because I just was not seeing it discussed out in the market. So there are four phases or four pieces, and I present them in a chronological order in the book, but you can do bits and pieces. You can pull from different parts depending on where you are with your business. So the four stages at the high level are launch, ignite, navigate, and accelerate. So launch is where you decide what it is you're going to be known for. Theresa (08:35): You decide not just what product or offering are we going to put out into the market, but what, what do we want to own? What problem do we want to take full ownership for in the market where we are really the, the thought leaders around that problem. And we are the ones advancing progress in that area for the market. We have a vision for what the market needs to do and what will solve this problem. And we are in it for the long haul to to guide the market along. So that's, so during that phase, you decide what markets, what market or markets you're going to focus on, what you want to be known for. And then you develop your point of view on that problem. So what's why is it a problem? Why is it a pressing problem and what needs to be done about it? Theresa (09:24): And then you define, or you hypothesize or define your unique, what your unique approach to solving that problem is going to be. And then you put your stake in the ground and say, by golly, we own this. You might do it with a big launch event. You might do it with a press release, with a, with an ebook, whatever it may be. So that's your launch. Then ignite is where you take that point of view and you go out and your, your goal is to lead a movement in the marketplace around that issue, around that point of view, around that problem and what needs to be done about it. And of course your approach, but on a, at a higher level, it's really more about taking the market forward. So you see Tesla doing this with electric cars, you know. They have their, they have their higher purposes. Theresa (10:16): We want to accelerate the adoption of electric car technology in the marketplace. We really believe deeply that the world needs to move to electric car technology. And so when they talk about themselves, a lot of what they talk about is electric car technology, what we need to do to take the industry forward. You know, they, they talk about their cars to an extent, but it's really that, that bigger message and a key in the ignite phase is that you're getting other power brokers in the market to embrace your, your your point of view and your purpose. And so they become evangelists on behalf of you as well, out in the marketplace on your behalf. So the goal is to get that momentum going and really lead the market forward. We saw Mark Benioff do this with salesforce.com. Anybody who's watched that story unfold over the last 20 years saw him take a point of view, which said, we have got to get the world off of this expensive installed software that takes months, or if not, years, to install and millions of dollars, you know? We need to kill software. Theresa (11:24): He literally had a a logo, the Ghostbuster style logo that said, you know, get rid of software. And so when he would go out to conferences, he would not talk about the Salesforce technology. He talked about the need to put the world in the cloud. And at that time, this was incredibly controversial. And a lot of people didn't think it was going to be ever embraced. Because at that time you didn't dare put customer, your, your most precious corporate data in the cloud, no way would anybody do that. So he was an example of somebody who really went out and started a whole new movement in the marketplace. So that's the goal with ignite. The third phase is navigate, and this is where you have to walk the talk you have to deliver on your promises. So this is where you actually take your offering to market. Theresa (12:19): You sell and market your offering, you get your people on board. This is what people normally associate with the business. But the big difference is that you have a unique offering that is more than just a product. It's a true solution, so that you're, you're delivering a result. You're not just selling functions or features. You're delivering outcomes for the customer that really change their business and actually solve their problem. And we can talk about more, talk more about that later, if you want, because it's an important distinction between what, what a lot of companies need to be doing to truly be of high value and justify those higher prices versus the way they do it today. And then the fourth phase is accelerate. You have to invariably, even no matter how unique you are in the beginning, people are going to come out and start copying you, especially as you become successful. And the market is going to change. The world is going to change around you. So accelerate is all about staying ahead of the market and changing and adapting with the market. So those are the four key, the four phases. Kathleen (13:29): So I have a bunch of questions. You mentioned at the, well, let me back up. The first one is, in the world of marketing, I feel like there's a lot of buzz right now about the concept that people refer to as category creation. And and there's, you know, the book "Play Bigger", which is on that. And there's, there's a whole host of other books in that space that this sounds a lot like that. Can you talk about like, is, is that really what this is? Are there differences? Theresa (14:01): There are differences. There are differences. Yeah, I actually don't, I know, Christopher and I have had a conversation. He's a colleague in Silicon Valley and we have a lot of mutual friends. And I know that, that I know that they have a very strong, the authors of that book have a very strong point of view around category creation. And a lot of people talk about it. I personally don't believe that you have to go out and create a new category. In many ways, Salesforce did not create a new category. They, they did it differently. They did the same thing that Siebel and other salesforce automation companies were doing. They, they did the same thing, but in a different, unique way that solved a very particular problem. So my, my perspective is that the key is focusing on the problem. What, what problem are you solving for customers? Theresa (15:00): What, so it's, and it's more around coming up with a unique approach that solves that problem in a very, very high value way. So you do, I don't believe you have to go. There are many, many companies that have tremendous success that don't go out and create an entirely new category, and some analysts would even counsel you against trying to do that because it's extremely expensive and you're trying to really change, fundamentally change the market. And yes, it's doable. And I know Blue Ocean talks about those as well, to some extent, but it's, it's not necessary. The one big difference with my book is that you can apply this to any business, no matter what phase they're in. It could a solopreneur could go out and implement this for themselves, and a person trying to figure out their career could, who could apply this, or any product organization within a big company, or the company across the board. You know, it can really be applied at various layers. So it's not about category creation. Kathleen (16:10): I'm glad you've explained that because, and I'll just share, it's interesting. I have a point of view on this because, you know, I'm in a lot of different groups of CMOs and heads of marketing. And I feel like every single person I talk to says, they're creating a new category. Kathleen (16:27): And at the risk of violating my clean content rating on Apple podcasts. I just think that's bullshit. Every single company can not be creating a new category because then every single company would be in a category of one. Like, it's just, it's almost gotten ridiculous how common it is. Kathleen (16:46): And I do think there are companies that are genuinely doing it, and I think there's a lot of excitement behind that, but that, you know, I sort of like teed this up. I didn't tell you I was going to ask you that question, but, but I wanted to have that conversation because I just, I really do think it's become almost ridiculous that it's like, if you're today's marketer, you have to create a category, right? Theresa (17:07): Yeah. It also kind of depends, you know, you can define the word category and I guess in a lot of different ways you know, I think with Play Bigger, they have a great perspective and you can do that and have tremendous success. And with enough capital and enough support and resources behind you you can definitely implement their strategy. They talk about some great stuff in that book. I'm by no means denigrating what they talk about, or it's just that I don't feel that's the only way to go out and have tremendous success and and have a tremendous impact. And, you know, my focus is more on how do you go and have you know, deliver outcomes to a set of customers that are going to view you as, you know, the thought leader and the torchbearer in their, in their world. Kathleen (18:04): Yeah. So I like that. I like that you have a focus on making this accessible, accessible, I should say, because I think that that's one of the issues when people talk about category creation is it feels like you need to be VC backed and, you know, it's, it's a whole different play. Theresa (18:21): It's expensive. Kathleen (18:21): It is. It's very expensive. It's a long game, Theresa (18:24): Right? Kathleen (18:26): You mentioned at the beginning that it's, that this might seem like a big duh, but the reality is most companies are not doing these things. And so can you just take a minute and speak to why you think that is? Theresa (18:38): Yeah. You know, it really confounds me. I developed this 20 years ago and I I'm stunned that nobody has already come out and come up with it. To me, it was, you know, it's almost like writing down the chocolate chip recipe, chocolate chip cookie recipe that grandmothers have been making for eons. But so when I first came up with it, I actually found some resistance in the market. I think I was a little early and talking to people about this because it was pre-internet and they couldn't see how similar they were to other companies. As a consultant, I'm traveling around, I'm talking to lots of different people. It's like Gartner, you know, all day long. They talk to companies and every company that walks in and sounds like the last one, but to the company themselves, they, you know, they didn't see each other. Theresa (19:29): So they couldn't tell. Now that, now that digital marketing in particular has sort of put everything online companies, I think executives even now more see, they used to be very insulated from how much they looked and sounded like everybody else. And that's no longer the case. So I actually realized even last year, cause I've been trying to talk myself out of having to write this book for years, I've started and stopped thinking, Oh, well, I don't think we needed it. You know, I've heard about Play Bigger coming out. And with the way they talked about that book before it was published, I thought, I had a conversation with Christopher on the phone and after hearing him, I thought, well, I think their book might be the same as mine. Maybe I don't need to write this. And it came out and I realized, no, it's still not quite the same. Theresa (20:18): And last year I thought, Oh my God, you know, we, we need it now more than ever. And so because companies, they're there, there are a lot of, they do some of the pieces, but they don't quite put the pieces together properly. And then they're really missing the boat completely in other areas like, like a point of view, you know? Very few companies have an overarching, true thought leadership point of view about the market and where the market needs to go. They have a point of view about themselves and their product and, and their, how their product operates and why. But you should be able to take your product out of it completely and talk just about where the market is going, what the problem is and what they need to be doing about it, independent of your company. That's true thought leadership. So that's one of many examples of things that companies are, are missing the boat on. Kathleen (21:19): Yeah, I think that's, to me that's so important because I feel like it's that first step where probably 90% of the problems are. And I think you hit the nail on the head, which is that everybody thinks they are differentiated. Like, honestly, I mean, if you talk to any marketer, they're not going to say I'm doing a terrible job and I'm copying everyone else. Like they're going to give you their pitch and their value prop, and they're going to feel like they've done that. Kathleen (21:43): So I think maybe it would be helpful if you spoke a little bit more about really what it means to have that point of view, because I'm not sure that people listening are going to understand, like, what does that look like when it comes to life? Theresa (22:02): Okay. Yeah. So in the book, I have a very prescribed message framework that I believe companies should be using, especially if you are a solution to a problem. And what most technology companies, most B2B your audience has more of a B2B focus. Kathleen (22:19): No, it's, it's not, it is kind of all over the place, but I tend to talk a lot about B2B just because that's where my focus is. Theresa (22:28): And a lot of, I think a lot of it, it used to be interesting. It was so consumer and B2B were such completely different animals in the past and they still are somewhat different, but it's interesting how much more similar they are now than they, than they ever know, or in terms of how you do your marketing, but the point of view. So the message framework is this. It's three pieces. That's why there's a problem, what needs to be done about it and how you've uniquely solved the problem. So why, what, how. So the point of view is the first two. It's why there's a problem in the market. So it's not just that there's a problem. It's why is it a problem? What's the fallout from the problem? So for example, with me, I would say, you know, the problem is most companies don't adequately differentiate themselves in a way that's going to be sustainable over time. Theresa (23:20): And this was a problem because it leads to declining margins over time. It leads to price based competition. When your customers can't see what makes you different. And over time, companies have to compete on price. They have to lower their prices. Margins fall. They have fewer and fewer dollars to invest back into the business and back into their future and in marketing. And eventually they go out of business. I mean, we say, see with agencies all the time. I mean, there's some of the worst offenders and failing to differentiate. So, so what should they be doing about it? They need to come up, you know, they need to be, have a unique approach to a problem that they're, that they own in the marketplace. So that would be for me, my what. So I can talk all day long about those issues and all, all what companies are facing and what they need to be doing, et cetera, and never once talk about me or my, my company's services or, or even my book. You know, I can go all day long just on that point of view about what needs to be happening. So every company ought to have that for themselves. They ought to have that very strong perspective. Kathleen (24:38): You mentioned Salesforce earlier, which is a great example, and I love that story of Mark Benioff staging a mock protest with his sign. And are, are there any companies, maybe some more recent examples of companies that you think are doing that really well, that, that first step in your four step process? Theresa (24:57): Well, I think for sure you know, I like to use Tesla because I think again, they're kind of a textbook because they have taken such a unique approach to solving a problem that people have been talking about for a long time, which is how do you get electric car technology to be embraced? I don't think people realize that I have the year in my book, but electric car technology has been around since like the beginning of the 20th century. I mean, we're talking over a hundred years of electric car and the, and you know, gas and electric were sort of developed at the same time. And then gas took off and electric got left in the dust. So but you know, Tesla has this, this very you know, Elon Musk. I mean, he's a great example for all of his businesses. Theresa (25:42): You know, his businesses start with a higher purpose. You know, SpaceX, you know, wants to make space, travel more accessible and more practical. The Boring Company, you know, he wants to solve the traffic problem. You know, he, we need easier, better ways to get cars off, you know, to get across town. So, you know, those are examples. You know, REI, well, that's not a recent example that these, you know, I, I tended in the book, I tended to study companies that have been around for awhile. The whole point is being sustainable. You know, I think, you know, I know you talk, talk about HubSpot a lot in your podcast and, you know, I think they're a good one. The, the challenge with that company is that it's a little broad the way they talk about what needs to be done, but if they just were to focus on the, and they talk, you know, of course emphasis is on inbound, but you know, with them, I'd love to see a more focused message around, you know, what's wrong with the way most companies approach their inbound marketing and what needs to be done about it. Theresa (26:58): That would be an example of an opportunity, you know, for them to get more clear about leading the charge, even though they have done a great job of leading the charge in elevating the approach to digital marketing, getting people to be more integrated in how they do it and being more sophisticated and make it, making it more accessible to more companies. Kathleen (27:22): Yeah. Now I think it's interesting that you have your second step as ignite because it is, you know, it's one thing to have your point of view, but if nobody knows about it, it's the tree that fell in the forest. Right? Kathleen (27:35): So talk me through what that ignite step looks like or should look like, or how a company should approach it. Theresa (27:45): Yeah. So a key thing is is, is understanding the role of power brokers in an industry. So a lot of companies, a lot of marketers, I think don't quite appreciate this, and they certainly don't leverage this to their full advantage. So every single industry or every market has literally a handful of people who know everybody, are respected by everybody in that market. They, their tentacles reach, I, I nicknamed them tree trunks with vast root systems, because that's how you can think of it. You just see one person standing there, but underground unbeknownst, you know, because a lot of times you don't even know how far reaching their network is, but there's this vast network and they all talk to each other and interact with each other. So one of the keys to getting traction is getting those powerbrokers converted over to your point of view and to the point where they actually start evangelizing on your behalf and they help get the word out. Theresa (28:48): So it amplifies your message. So instead of having to reach 500 people, one person at a time, you can, with one power broker can just because they have so much power and such a voice in the market, they can immediately convert thousands on your behalf. You know, relative, let's say your market is, you have 10 or 20,000 people you're trying to reach. They can literally reach a giant chunk of it all at once. A good example of this in the technology space is Gartner. You know, if you get Gartner on board and behind what you're doing, they start writing about you in their reports. They start talking about you even informally in conversations. So and you know, the, the media can play that role, but there are also individuals just, you know, most industries have maybe a dozen who they know everybody, and they have the tipping point. Theresa (29:50): Malcolm Gladwell talks about personality types, and one is the connector. And so these power brokers are connectors. They just proactively spread the word about other people and other companies they know and put people in touch with each other. So you're looking for those types of people and that can propel you very quickly into a market in a highly credible way that you won't be able to do on your own. So this is something that a lot of companies don't fully leverage. They do go after media. And you know, of course there are social media influencers and some, some social media influencers fall into this a lot. Don't, you know, a lot of them just have their 50,000 followers and they put out a tweet or whatever. That's a flash in the pan that might give you some quick response, but you're trying to get enduring influence in the market. You're trying to become one of the powerbrokers yourself. And so you need these power brokers to help take you in that direction, but they can also make it happen a lot more quickly. Kathleen (30:55): So I think that sounds great in principle, but in my experience, a lot of the power brokers in any given market have a lot of people clamoring for their attention. And when we, you know, we started out by talking about how this approach is a very accessible one. So it's one thing if you're Elon Musk going to try and like get in front of power brokers, and of course, they're going to take your call. It's entirely another. If you are, you know, a first time founder who doesn't have a big reputation or VC backers, or, you know, that, that super powered network. So how does one go about brokering those relationships? Theresa (31:35): This is where the power of the point of view comes in because when you have a very powerful, provocative point of view on a really critical problem, and you have a perspective on what needs to be done about it, that's truly fresh and innovative. People will listen. They're, they're hungry to know to understand what's going on out there. You know, I think of, I mean, not everybody may be able to relate to this example, but I think of Jamie Oliver who is the chef out of the UK, who caught, captured a lot of attention with a Ted talk he gave about nutrition and how it, how the typical person's nutrition is literally killing them. And he gave this powerful Ted talk. He was, he was a nobody at the time, just some chef, but he had this very powerful point of view and a very passionate devotion to his point of view. Theresa (32:27): And he got the ear of lots of people and got onto the Ted stage. And eventually he got a TV show and, you know, he got a lot of notoriety, but it was because he had that point of view and Ted talks are actually a great example of points of view. They're not up there to sell anything. They have very powerful perspectives that are interesting enough for the rest of the world to listen. It's what's their slogan. Oh now I'm, now I'm drawing a blank on what it is. I'm sure somebody can put it in the show notes for us. Ideas worth sharing. So your point of view needs to be an idea worth sharing, because if it's provocative, I have four criteria, actionable, bold, controversial, and distinctive. And so the ABCD that's in the book, so you can have a reminder. But it needs to be provocative to get other people wanting to talk about it. Kathleen (33:28): I love it. So we're probably not going to go into detail on the, the last two stages because I think those are probably the ones that my audience is much more familiar with, which is having to do with going to market and really how you execute. I think, I think at least the first two stages are the ones that, that really trip people up. And let's be honest, you have to get through those to get to the second two. So I'm wondering if you, just, for people who are listening, who are thinking, I'm interested in maybe doing this, other than going out and buying the book, which they should absolutely do and we'll talk about how they can find it. What are some things like if they just want to get started, if they want to listen to this podcast and then go back to work, what are, what are one or two things that they can immediately start doing that can set them down on the path to get started with this? Theresa (34:14): Yeah, I think one thing is, first of all, it's just like any, anything else acknowledge the problem. Acknowledge that you have a problem. What I have found even as a chief marketing officer is sometimes having such a hard time getting the rest of the executive team to acknowledge that we have a problem. And marketers know how often do you feel like you're putting lipstick on a pig? You know, you inside, you know, know this company really isn't different. You know, I have to make it, I have to make it sound different, but in all honesty, it's not different. So if there's any way to get the rest of the full team to acknowledge that there's a strategic issue and that the company, this is not a marketing problem, this is a fundamental strategic issue for a company that the marketer and others in the company need to play a role in solving. Theresa (35:07): So I'd say that's one thing. It's get the team. And even, even if you're a product team or a unit within the company, just to agree that this is an issue and that you need to do something. And then the next thing is really get clear on what problem are we devoting ourselves to? What problem do we want to be known for in the market? What problem are we devoting ourselves to eradicating in the marketplace? And then, what is point of view about what it will take to solve that problem? And then figuring out how to make your approach. If you already have a product, how do we make it more unique or how do we turn it into a more comprehensive solution? And instead of just some SaaS offering with our three levels of purchase option, you know, a silver, gold platinum, or whatever you want to call it, you know, how do we turn this into a full solution? Theresa (36:05): I am, I, I have a support website out for the book Apollomethod.com. And there are some tools that I have in the book that you can also get. Just go to the website to get that. It will also help you start taking action on some of these areas right away. For example, an offering blueprint form can, it's sort of similar to the business model canvas, but it's an offering blueprint that will help you just define components of your offering. And you may see where some of your holes are right now that, that keep it from being a, a complete solution. Kathleen (36:44): Awesome. Well, those are really good tips to get started. And I think, you know, that's, that's the first step as we said. So for somebody who does want to really see this through you, you mentioned the URL for the book website. Can you say that one more time? Theresa (36:59): Yes. It's www.apollomethod.com. Kathleen (37:02): And is that where they can get the book or will that take them to it? Theresa (37:05): They can, yeah, there's a link to get the book, but they can also just go to Amazon and do a search on, on Be the Go-To and put my name in if they want, if they have trouble finding it. So Theresa Lina. And they can get the book on Amazon. It's also available on other platforms both in hard cover and hard cover paperback and ebook on Barnes and Noble and some others, I think. Kathleen (37:31): Great. All right. Now shifting gears, I have two questions that I always ask my guests. So now it's your turn. The first one is, of course this podcast is all about inbound marketing and we've talked about a lot of companies in this conversation, but opening it up, you know, when you think about inbound marketing is there a particular company or individual person that you think is really kind of setting the gold standard for what it means to do that right? Theresa (37:58): Well, right now, well, I've heard a lot of really good ones mentioned on your podcast. I listened to your podcast religiously. And so I won't, I don't think I'll duplicate that maybe they've been mentioned, but I really think salesforce.com still does. They're huge, but they do a phenomenal job of inbound strategies. Their trailblazer program is really phenomenal. It goes beyond just typical lead generation where they're really trying to, this is part of a strategy and the book, they, they, I did not work with salesforce.com, but they are a textbook implementer of the Apollo method for market dominance across the board. So they have so many great programs that are all about generating, you know, getting people to start using the product and then making the product more and more a part of their business. So I think they do a phenomenal job with all of their, the blogs and all their various blogs and materials and their free trials and the trailblazer program, the Dreamforce conference, et cetera. Theresa (39:09): And you can do everything they do. You can do it on a small scale. You can, you know, Harley Davidson started the Harley owners group with 50 people back in the eighties, and now they have, I think, hundreds of thousands. But they started with just 50 people. So you can you can start these programs with, you know, on, at a very small scale and still experience a lot of success. And then, you know, it's interesting. I don't know if you've ever heard of Stu McLaren, but he, he's a, he's one of these internet creator, you know, in the internet creator space. And he specializes in building member-based communities. And I really think he's doing some neat things around helping people and companies start membership programs, membership, or community based, or member based communities, paying members. And for example, he has this wonderful founding member strategy, which I think is really brilliant that he talks about. If you Google him and listen to some of his podcast interviews, you'll, you'll learn some interesting things from him, I think. Kathleen (40:23): Oh, I'm so interested to check that one out. Theresa (40:25): Yeah. He's one that's caught my attention lately. Kathleen (40:28): Well, funny enough. Yeah, you're right. I don't think anybody has mentioned Salesforce, even though it seems like it's obvious. Theresa (40:34): Is that right? Kathleen (40:35): But I also don't think anyone's mentioned Stu McLaren, so that's awesome. I like to get new ones. Second question, and you know the drill cause you listen, marketers always talk about how hard it is to keep up with everything. It's all changing so quickly. How do I do it? So how do you do it? How do you keep up? Theresa (40:50): Well, I definitely listen to a lot of podcasts. One of the things I love about your podcast is you get into the mechanics of things with people, especially when you're talking to people who have specific tools. You know, I just love that you dive right into exactly how did you do this? So I love listening to podcasts and reading articles and blog posts. And then I do monitor academic research because especially when it comes to analytics, because I find it useful to show me where things are going. One of the departments I'm involved with at Stanford is the management science and engineering department, which has a big analytics orientation. And so I try to pay attention to what our faculty are doing in that space. And then there's a great resource called ecorner.stanford.edu, which has lectures by different thought leaders in Silicon Valley. Theresa (41:50): And while not all of it relates to marketing, it is another, a lot of these are up and coming, for example. It's also part of put on by one of the groups in our department. And we had Mark Zuckerberg back when Facebook was just getting started. We had the Google founders when Google was just getting started. So they have a real knack for seeing what's coming down the pike. So I, again, I like to listen to that and look at what companies seem to be coming along and what they're talking about, because they're often on the front edge of things. Kathleen (42:25): That is a great suggestion. And yeah, and when I have not heard about before. Theresa (42:29): And then, you know, actually one more is political campaigns because they are, the stakes are so high. I like paying attention to what they're doing and what tactics they're using because a lot of times they borrow heavily from marketing, but they can also be borrowed from. And then my students in the Stanford marketing group are often at the front edge of what's going on out there. So I, I I like to watch what they're doing as well. Kathleen (42:55): I love that. Well, that sounds like a lot of really good suggestions. And of course, as always, I will put the links to all of those, into the show notes. So head there, if you're interested in checking any of those out this has been a lot of fun and really interesting. Theresa, thank you so much. Theresa (43:11): Thank you. This has been fun for me too. Kathleen (43:15): Yeah. Now of course you're going to want to go out and get the book. So I'll put the link to the website in there as well. And if you're listening and you enjoyed this week's episode, please consider going to Apple Podcasts and I would love it if you would leave the podcast a five star review so that others can find it as well. And in the meantime, if you think of somebody who would be a great guest, tweet me at @workmommywork. I really do check out those recommendations. And a lot of people who come on the podcast come by word of mouth. So let me know if you think that there's somebody who would make a good guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Theresa. Theresa (43:53): Thank you. Thank you. This was really great. Thanks.

ow did GeoFli help Onyx Maps almost double its website conversion rates? This week on the Inbound Success podcast, GeoFli founder Kyle Pucko talks about the benefits of website personalization and shares examples of companies that have used geotargeted website content to significantly increase website conversion rates. Check out the full episode to learn more about geotargeted website content and how implementing it on your own website can help improve conversion rates. Resources from this episode: Connect with Kyle on LinkedIn Check out the GeoFli website Transcript Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Kyle Pucko, who is the founder and CEO of GeoFli.com. Welcome Kyle. Kyle (00:21): Thank you, Kathleen. Great to be here. Kathleen (00:23): Yeah, I'm excited to have you here. Maybe you could start off by talking a little bit about your story, who you are, what GeoFli is and how you got to where you are today. Kyle (00:32): Yeah, absolutely happy to do it. So like you said, my name is Kyle Pucko, founder GeoFli. We are based out here in Missoula, Montana, so big sky country for those who haven't made it out here. It's a beautiful place to visit even this time of year, which sounds a little funny to say. And so my story Kathleen really starts in marketing with higher education. So I spent almost a decade in higher education marketing. So colleges and universities. Worked at a small liberal arts school outside of Chicago and then made my way West to the university of Montana. And really during that time, you know, when we talk about inbound marketing and all the tactics that you've talked with your guests about over a hundred plus episodes not many of those existed when I started in, in higher ed. Kyle (01:20): So it was a lot of traditional marketing. It was a lot of trade shows. It was a lot of sending packets and it was a lot of in person meetings and talking with students about just why they should go to this university. So, you know, fast forward and of course I'd be at these trade shows and I would see a lot of students holed in the corner looking at their phones, right? So the question became well where are these students spending a lot of time and attention? And I just started to really focus on, you know, if we are going to spend 10 hours a week marketing, where can we work? Can we have the best results? And so I, that, that transitioned into a more traditional marketing role into a, into a digital marketing role. And I was, at least according to LinkedIn, the first and only digital marketing manager at any university across the country. Kyle (02:10): And I think this was in 2013. So really cut my teeth and, and learning things like Google ads, Facebook ads. And now, now we're getting into a lot of the topics that you cover with your guests. And then in 2015 you know, I started GeoFli and I, and I left the university full time to go full time entrepreneur. And what GeoFli does is it allows anybody to easily change and replace website content based on physical location. So somebody visiting a university website from California would see different content than somebody visiting that same website from New York. This was, this was a product at the university. We have students from all over the world visiting our homepage and getting the same one size fits all content. And so it was a problem. I looked for a solution, couldn't find it. And when I couldn't find it decided to do it myself. Kathleen (03:04): Interesting. So, I mean, I think that the concept behind it makes total sense and I feel like that's the direction that the world of marketing is going generally is personalization and the ability to hyper personalize. You said you looked out there at the market and you couldn't find a solution. I would imagine when you think about building a solution for delivering personalized content on websites, it's not as simple as it may sound just because websites are all built so differently from each other. You know, there's different CMS's, different kinds of code behind them. Let's, maybe we can start just by talking about how GeoFli works. Like, does it work with every website? Kyle (03:46): Yeah, so that's a, that's a really good question. And the first thing that, so I, I co founded the company with somebody that I worked with for five years at the university of Montana. He was the web manager there. And so he was really the, the, the technical side of building this out. And the first question we had to answer was is this even possible to do? And the way that we figure that out is we you know, we created this simple website and somebody would click on a link and a dot would appear on a map. And it would say, does this dot represent where you are located? And I think we posted on Facebook had a hundred people click on the link, had a hundred dots on a map and our accuracy was really great. So yep. There or somebody like, Oh, you're like a couple of miles off. Kyle (04:32): So the way that GeoFIi works is we use IP address and then combine that information with latitude and longitude. So, you know, 99% of the time it will work really great. Somebody is using a VPN, that's going to be a little tricky. But you know, we've been able to mitigate those problems, you know, anytime they've, they've come up. And then, you know, from a technical side early on, like any like any early startup our product was clunky. It was difficult to use our, our value proposition was that anybody could do this, but that promise wasn't resonating when somebody would log in. So we ended up doing a lot of the work for our clients very early on. Today, GeoFli allows anyone regardless of technical background to log in. So there's a, a dashboard. You simply add your URL, select the element that you want to change, and then you can make that change depending on what region you want to do it for. And your question about kind of, does this work on any website? It does. It works on Wix. It works on WordPress. It works on custom content management systems. So as long as you can add the GeoFli script onto the back end of your website, GeoFli can personalize your site. Kathleen (05:49): That's pretty cool. So, so the notion of personalization, I think it can sound really appealing to a lot of businesses. When you think about who is this right for how do you, how do you talk about that? Kyle (06:04): Well, you know, I, I sort of alluded to our, my experience in higher ed and it might help to think about where the idea to do this sort of originated from, and it, and it started with Google display advertising. I was a counselor based here in Missoula working for the university of Montana. And occasionally I would get sent to college fairs on the East coast. So there was a college fair in Boston. Well, I was also managing the digital marketing. So, you know, in between traveling to Boston, I was setting up Google display ads and Facebook ads and purchasing keywords on search. So I launched a display campaign and I did a simple 50, 50 split, simple AB test. And I targeted the Boston area. So a 50 mile radius of any student in Boston that had any interest in Montana. Kyle (06:54): They, there were retargeting audiences. There were interest based audiences, demographic based audiences, high school, students and parents. So one of the ads read, learn more about why UM is right for you and the other ad read Montana visits Boston meetup, and that's the button. The call to action is meetup. So the click through rate for the learn more kind of the generic message to New Englanders was 0.18% click through rate. The click through rate when I used personalized language was 0.3, 3%. So almost double click through rates still low and that's to be expected on display ads, but that, that happened before any idea or any code was written for GeoFli. So it, it became really clear that when people hear their local, their local region, or when it's personalized in some way based on location, there's there was a result at least in display ads. Kyle (07:53): And so if you're out there and you're thinking, you know, all of my customers are exactly the same wherever they're located, then GeoFli probably isn't a great option for you. Personalization, you know, might be not the best use of your time. Most people though will, will say that, you know, they're when they start breaking down their personas, I'm sure there's demographic personas. You know, we're going to communicate. We want to communicate differently to 18 year olds than we do to 28 year olds. The same is true for location. If you have customers all over they're going to behave very differently. I mean, I think about an auto dealer that is based sort of on the outskirts of a city. You know, you may even want to communicate differently to folks that are living in a dense metropolitan area versus somebody that's visiting your dealership from a more rural or the outskirts of the city. Kyle (08:44): You know, they might be interested in more compact cars if they have to parallel park every day, versus if they're coming in from out of town or from, they might be able look at the full size or the, or the SUV. So that's just one example. And I'm sure if you're listening, you can think about many more, but colleges is where we started, but today we work in e-commerce, we work in tourism, you know, if you were in Missoula. So it's a, we like to say, Montana is not on the way to anything. And so if you are looking to travel to Montana, you might be thinking, well, it's really hard to get to, you know, instead maybe if somebody from, where are you based out of Kathleen? Kathleen (09:27): In Maryland. Kyle (09:28): In Maryland? So Maryland to Montana is going to be a tough trip, but maybe if somebody from Maryland visits, you know, destination Montana or visit Montana, there could be a quick message that says something like, Hey, we're actually not that difficult to get to. Like, check it out. There's this direct flight from Chicago. If you can get to Chicago, you can get to Missoula. So just meeting people where they're at and you know, maybe it's a road trip for people from Washington state. Hey, have you ever thought about a road trip to Montana? So if you saw that message in Maryland, you'd be like, no, I have not thought of a road trip. Kathleen (10:02): Well, I can totally see it too with like weather related content. Like if you're trying to say beat the heat and somebody's not in someplace that's hot or, you know, things along those lines, I could see a lot of applications for that. Not only in tourism, but in, you know, any companies that sell products that have to do with climactic changes. There, there's a whole host of things I think that you could use it for. Kyle (10:31): Totally, totally. Kathleen (10:33): Now is this, you know, I think the other side of this is there's the possibility of who could use personalization, but I've run into this as a marketer. I think personalization sounds so great to a lot of people, but then they, and they might even get a tool that lets them do it, but then there's the actual execution of personalizing. And, and I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit, because I feel like, I feel like it's the kind of thing where you could put all of your time into simply creating personalized messages. Like you could, you could go crazy, but I don't know. I don't know the extent to which the value would be there. Like what's, what's the right way to approach your strategy for personalizing because there has to be an element of bang for your buck involved. Kyle (11:22): Absolutely. and anybody in marketing has probably tested or downloaded a software that they quickly think to themselves. There are so many features in here that I will never, ever use. And they might've heard the analogy of, you know, you're, you're driving a Ferrari, like you never drive a Ferrari over 20 miles per hour because just need the fire to get to point a to point B, you don't need to race it. You don't need so with GeoFli, you know, we want it to be the best in the world at geo personalization, at changing content based on location. And so when we, when we do onboard new clients, you hit the nail on the head, Kathleen that they, they immediately get excited. Like I can change the footer link. I can change this. You know, I have 127 pages on my website. I can change every word on every page. Kyle (12:12): We, we usually pull back the reigns if you don't love to do, but we do that early. And we say, let's focus on, we call it three, three, three. So let's focus on three pieces of content on your website that you, that you want to change. What we usually recommend is anything above the fold on the homepage is a good place to start. You know, we don't really need to look at in depth, like, like scroll depth charts to understand the most eyeballs are going to be on these few sections. And that can be, we can change your homepage hero image. We could change videos. So video is a great, is one that we usually go to and say, do you have different videos of maybe your sales team for regions? Or just like we talked about some of these examples before. So we picked three pieces of content on, on on your website. Kyle (13:05): Then we pick the three regions that you want to personalize content for. So I'll use a university as an example, the university of Oregon, you know, when, when they started working with us we chose Oregon. So the local audience, we chose California because that was the, they had the most amount of students come into the university of Oregon from the most amount of, out of state students coming from the state of California. And then we chose an international country. So Japan. So students coming from Japan to the university of Oregon, what is their website experience like? And that was really the first, the first two threes. And then the third three is we, we picked two more pages. So you have three pages total. So maybe your homepage, your contact us page and your about us page are the, are the three personalized pages. Kyle (13:51): And that's where we stop. We set you up with the analytics, we integrate directly with Google Analytics. So if you're using Google Analytics, you will GeoFli analytics will work just fine. And then we wait 30 days and we see what were the results. And then based on those results, we make additional changes. So that's really how we start with folks. And we're right there with you. I think that's one of the differences you mentioned. Yeah. You get this tool and then it sort of collects dust. Virtual dust, right. I'm doing air quotes. It collects virtual dust. Charges, your credit card. And you're like, Oh, I gotta cancel that. Like that, that made no sense for me. We really make an effort to make sure that GeoFli does have a positive impact on your website. And if it doesn't, which has happened, then we'll cancel. But most of the time the results show that you know, things like bounce rate decreases, time on site improves, and conversion rates, if you're tracking that or any event type conversion, improves as well. So that's our strategy. Kathleen (14:52): I like the three, three, three approach because that really does make it manageable. Can you give me, like, walk me through some examples of, of where you've implemented this either for yourself or for a client and what the results have been? Kyle (15:08): Certainly. So we worked when we first got started here with a company named Onyx Maps. They're hunting software. So stereotypically there there's some things that are stereotypical Montana. For example, the first Uber I ever took in Montana was like a three 50 diesel. Sometimes stereotypes do turn out to be true. So we're working with a hunting application company based here in Montana and hunting for those that aren't in the world of hunting. You know, it's very state specific. Somebody in South Dakota is going to get it. Most hunters in South Dakota, or at least on a percentage basis are gonna hunt for pheasants versus somebody in New York are going to hunt for like white tail deer. So it's very state specific Onyx maps wanted to use GeoFli to showcase and to surface different images based on where people were visiting from. Kyle (16:01): If someone's visiting from Florida to get a hunting permit, they're going to be a little dismayed when they see a giant elk. They're like, well, I can't hunt that elk in Florida. Like that makes no sense for me. So they personalize imagery and then what they also did was personalize testimonials. And so wherever you were visiting the website from, and this was specific to a landing page, you would see a state based testimonial. So if I'm visiting from Texas, I'm going to see somebody else from Texas that has purchased the app, download the app and have had success with the application in Texas. And basically what the application does is it tells you where the public and private land that you can hunt on is where those boundaries are. And so we ran a really statistically significant test where we would drive people to a specific page using Google search. Kyle (16:51): So, you know, all the, all the ads were set up like hunting applications, hunting permit. And what we found was before using GeoFli or any of the non GoeFli'd pages that we, that we sent them to. So the default page the conversion rate for app download was right around 3% with. GeoFli'd pages, it was 5% across the board. And so that might not sound like a huge lift, but, you know, at a percentage base, it's, it's tremendous. And when you're spending a lot of money on those paid search ads it really made a positive impact. And so that was a really simple way. I think we changed an image and a quote, and it probably took for each state, you know, maybe five minutes to set up in a, in a really clean way. And that had a tremendous impact on, on the business and on the effectiveness of those, of that advertising campaign. Kathleen (17:44): That's really interesting. And I definitely would agree. From three to 5% is a big, it is a big shift. Have you ever seen situations where it hasn't worked? I'm curious and, and like why, why would it not? Kyle (17:56): Yeah, good question. You know, typically what will happen is the analysts on the analytics side, it can be difficult to prove that, that GeoFli is working if you haven't set up a conversion. And we help people do that. For example, tourism might be, might be one. So we worked with an economic development company that wanted to showcase different tax advantages to people in state versus out of state. Well, we set this campaign up and we felt like it was really strong, but at the end of the year, you know, when, when we asked the question, well, what impact did GeoFIi have on total businesses? Kind of moving or moving the needle on getting businesses to move to this specific city. It was just, it was difficult to prove, you know, we could show an increase in time on site. We could show an increase in pages per session to GeoFli versus non GeoFli visitors. Kyle (18:51): But it's hard to say, trust us, it's, you know, it's, it's having, it's having a positive impact on your, on your ultimate conversion. But for those really long tail conversions in digital marketing, and I'm sure your audience can, can attest that it can be difficult. And the same is true of higher ed, really that a sophomore visiting your website from California you know, and they see a personalized message and alumni in their area. It's hard to tie that back to because of GeoFli that student three years later attended the university, the university of Texas. Kathleen (19:30): Yeah. it, I think that's a great point. So what can you talk me through? How do you need to set things up so that it is trackable? So that, cause I think this is a mistake. Marketers make a lot, they jump in, they do these things, but they haven't put in place those fundamental building blocks, either the analytics or setting up the tech correctly and they might get further down the road only to find out they can't prove what they think is true, which is so frustrating. Cause you, you know, you have data, you just don't have data. That's usable. So what does somebody need to know before they start a process like this? Kyle (20:09): I would refer to a book and I forget the author, but it's titled How to Measure Anything. And it talks a lot about removing layers of uncertainty. And so when we start with a new client, whether, you know, regardless of the size of that client, we want to meet them right where they are from an analytics standpoint. So if we ask them, you know, what is your, how many page visitors does your website currently get? And they sort of scratch their head and I'm like, well, that's a really good question. Like that's where we start. Okay. Let's set up analytics so that we can figure out how many page visitors you actually get from these different regions. Like, does it make sense to personalize for Texas if you only get a hundred visitors a year or a month? And then, you know, we, we then look at what we call third column metric. Kyle (20:53): The first column metric is always impressions. And that's just how many people visit your page. The second column metric is sort of how many people actually, well, this is more based on an ad side, but how many people will click on your advertising? And then the third metric is how many people take the action that you want them to take on your page? And that to me, Kathleen is really the key. If you can get a third column metric and the key is metric, not dozens of metrics like, Oh, we want to know how many people watch this video. We want to know how many people clicked on this phone number. We want let's split, let's focus on, does your one, does your homepage have one goal or one action that you want people to take? And then what we do is we, we set up a Google data studio report for them. Kyle (21:34): So we will actually go in and build you a custom dashboard. And we can help you do this. You become the owner of this dashboard. We set up all of the GeoFli regions. So again, three, three, three, usually it's three regions. So maybe you're targeting California, Texas, and Japan. So we show all the traffic from California, Texas in Japan. And then that third column metric actually becomes the second column next to the location and visitors from Japan. What is their conversion rate visitors from Texas? What is their conversion rate? And that can be purchase if you're e-commerce. That can be forms, submissions, if you're B2B, or it could honestly be like time on site, if you're if you're, you know, if you just want people to spend longer on your website. So that's our third column metric becoming the second column. I know this is kind of difficult. Maybe I can send you our template to put in the show notes. Kathleen (22:28): Yeah, no, that's, I mean, it sounds like you have a pretty good format though. Kyle (22:32): Yeah. And then the last piece is all other content, excluding the regions that you're GeoFliing so that you can compare okay. For non-GeoFli'd regions, the conversion rate is 2%. For GeoFli'd regions, it's 2.5%. And then you have to ask yourself, does that make, is that a big enough lift for me to keep GeoFli and continue to grow GeoFli? Or do I want to just stay where I'm at or do I want to cancel? And usually it's much greater than 0.5% difference and we will help figure out like, okay, now, now that we know this is working for these regions, let's pick three more regions. Kathleen (23:08): I want to go back for a second and talk about data integrity, because you touched on this at the beginning, but I just want to dig a little deeper. And you mentioned that you're able to target geographically based on IP address and then longitude and latitude. And IP address targeting is, is interesting to me because in some cases it can be very accurate. You know, you're coming through a company IP, and it's very clearly denoted who it is. But in other cases, you know, you have people using Amazon web services or, you know, some kind of an aggregator for an IP, whether they're working from home or, you know, traveling, et cetera. And then, and then there's the whole topic of VPN, which that's a whole different ball of wax, but like to what degree is the data really accurate? Kyle (24:00): We, we say that, you know, GeoFli is 95% accurate at the city level. So if you're targeting Chicago, you're going to have 95% of visitors that visit your website between 95 and 99% of your visitors are going to see the Chicago content. The other 1%, if you're targeting Chicago. It's important to remember that that 1% that maybe their IP addresses pinging from Denver well, they're outside of your targeted area. So they're going to see your default website, the same website as it exists today. So, you know, the question is, is it better for 95% of visitors to see personalized web personalized content and 5% of visitors to just see your website as it exists today? Or is it better to have a hundred percent accuracy wherever everybody's sees your, just your default site? And we believe that it's a, it's a better experience if 95% of your visitors are getting from Chicago are getting a personalized experience. Kyle (25:04): Even if 5% of them are sort of, you know, left out of the personalization party. We also think we're, we're kind of ahead of, you know, we're early in this and the technology continues to improve. The accuracy continues to improve. You know, we're, it's something that we're constantly looking to get better at. Even at 95% though, we do feel like we are the most accurate tool out there when it comes to geo personalizing. You know, you'll find this feature in tools like Optimizely, but it's sort of buried under their enterprise plan and you have to pay thousands of dollars more to get access to it. And even then it's sort of an afterthought for them. This is what we study. This is what we look at. We, you know, we look at it every day. So the data integrity piece, and then if you're targeting at the state level or even at the country level, you're actually is going to be of course much, much higher. Kathleen (25:59): And is there any variation in terms of desktop versus mobile users and how that renders data? Kyle (26:06): There is. Yeah, mobile is usually a hundred, closer to a hundred percent accurate. So, you know, we, we've added a feature where on desktop, you can, you've probably seen it before, allow, allow this website to use your location. If you add that prompt, then we are of course, a hundred percent accurate. Without that prompt, that's when it drops you closer to 95%. So you can opt into asking your website visitors if they want to do that. So that's an option that you have. Kathleen (26:33): And then I guess there's the data integrity thing can, can work both directions, right? As you mentioned, you can have people who are in your targeted area, who don't your targeted content, because they're not recognized as being there, but how often do you have cases where somebody is not in your targeted area or they might have, for example, I might be from Maryland, but I happen to be on a work trip in Los Angeles. I go to a website. It, it recognizes me as being from Los Angeles. It might even cookie me and then think every single time I come that I'm from Los Angeles. Like, how do you deal with that? Or do you? Kyle (27:13): Totally. We, we call that the airplane problem, you know, and somebody lands at a different location. Of course their IP addresses is going to change. We've run into that the most in New York city when people are trying to target boroughs. So they, they treat Brooklyn as a city and they treat Manhattan as a city as they should. But those two are separate by a river. And so somebody in Brooklyn will see occasionally Manhattan content and, you know, that's, that's one of the issues that we run into is, is New York city being those boroughs, being so close together. But outside of that, you know, if somebody really, if that's if that's a real concern for folks and they, and maybe that surfaces, then we really recommend they prompt for location. Users have gotten used to it. My guess is that listeners out there have seen GeoFli'd content. Kyle (28:01): They just don't quite know it. That's the other piece is we want GeoFli to feel like we don't want it to be an interruption, an intrusion, a popup, a GeoFli exists on your site. It's elegant. And so we want that experience. You know, we don't love asking people for location prompts because it's another click or it's just sort of an intrusion and it kind of goes against our vision right now while the technology is still advancing. And the IP address targeting is still, you know, we're still honing that in to be a hundred percent accurate. We would recommend you use the location prompt and just avoid that. Kathleen (28:39): And then I guess one of my last questions before we shift gears is really with things like GDPR. I imagine that could be a plus and a minus. It could be a plus for you because you could theoretically use GeoFli to determine who is in a GDPR covered region. And then, and from that, maybe, you know how you need to treat them on the website. But I also imagine that on the flip side, if you're using it on your site, you're collecting geographic location based information, like is that somehow subjected to GDPR requirements? Like talk to me a little bit about GDPR and GeoFli. Kyle (29:19): Yeah. GDPR and GeoFli. When, when every company in the world was sending the GDPR emails to us we, you know, we were, we were in that bandwagon also, or that, that boat also. We thought, okay, what, what impact is this going to have? Because it was so specific to location. And, you know, we sort of default to if you, if you have a GDPR notification and you're running and you're collecting cookies and you're collecting data on your website, visitors, like you, you just need to have it. We don't police our clients to make sure our customers to make sure that they do have it. You know, that liability is on them to make sure they do that. In our case though, you know, we've had some folks ask you. Yeah. So I could show this to, so I could surface GDPR to these countries and not these? And we don't love those conversations. We, we don't recommend people do that. Kathleen (30:15): Can I ask about that? Because I would think there would be people who'd say couldn't I use GeoFli to determine with whom I needed to make sure I was being GDPR compliant. Kyle (30:26): You certainly could. And, and you're spot on that people have inquired about that. And we usually deflect those and say, yeah, just, that's not what this tool is designed to do. Yeah. Kathleen (30:37): Yeah. I don't blame you. All right. Well, switching gears there's two questions that I always ask everybody who comes on. The first being, we talk a lot about inbound marketing on the podcast. Is there a particular company or individual you think is really doing it right these days? Kyle (30:56): Yeah, I, in, in preparation for this for this question, I was thinking, you know, I always like, as most marketers do to think about what marketing has worked on them and like gotten me to conversion or purchase. And it's funny, I recently purchased a GoPro. I never thought I would say that, but GoPro, that, that was my company that I came up with. I had been following along with GoPro for, Oh, probably the better part of seven years. Just kind of following them on Facebook and I'm looking at their images because I always thought they were really cool, but I always thought to myself, like, I, I don't do really cool things like that. I have no need for GoPro, but they've really done a good job of expanding their customer base and showing just how GoPro can be used in a day to day. Kyle (31:40): And you know, us as a, as a marketing team and as a software company, I think there's a lot of use cases for it. We use it as a second camera when we're doing any sort of interviews or just capturing moments around the office. And so GoPro, you know, they are masters at sort of the jab jab, right hook strategy from Gary Vaynerchuk, which is like, we're going to show you seven awesome images of in that, you know, none, none of them are going to have a call to action. Oh. And then we're going to take 50 bucks off of our recent GoPro hero eight. So, so that's what ended up getting me and maybe it had something to do with quarantine and just like a retail therapy, but I purchased a GoPro recently, so well done GoPro. Kathleen (32:23): Nice. All right. That's a good one. Second question, everybody in marketing seems to always complain that things change so quickly and it's really hard to keep up and, you know, there's so much information to absorb. So how do you personally stay educated and up to date on, in the world of digital marketing? Kyle (32:42): Well, you mean aside from this podcast, I definitely, that's a really good question cause it does change so fast. And if you tried to keep up with everything you would, you could spend 40 hours a week just keeping up whatever with everything. Our team has a meeting every Friday, we call it just a strategy meeting where we actually bring something to the table that each of us has learned. So, you know, this week I'm really excited to talk about like Hulu's new self-serve ad platform which is a big one. So maybe we're not going to go in and design and build an ad campaign today. But just knowing that, Hey, they've opened this up to small businesses or maybe it's a beta version. I actually don't know, but I saw some headlines on it on SearchEngineJournal.com. And that's just something that I want to talk about. Kyle (33:27): Is it something that we could use? Do we have some video footage we could put on there and test this? So you know, becoming a thought leader as you alluded to is so huge in, in the marketing space and, and it's funny because you don't actually need to spend that much time to know more than 99% of marketers into what's going on. It seems like that bar is kind of low. So I bet if we pulled a hundred marketers, maybe five of them would know that Hulu came out with a new ads self-serve platform. But so it allows you to just be keep on that cutting edge and reduce that crappy click through rate syndrome that can happen with, are you guys do using Facebook, newsfeed ads are pretty powerful. Like they're, you know, that's, that's been fatigued, so you have to, Kathleen (34:15): Yeah. I love the idea of having a meeting with your team and everybody having to bring something to the table. I think the best marketers I know are the ones who are just insatiably hungry to learn and, you know, make institutionalizing that as part of the process is a really smart way to go. Yeah. So, great idea. So if somebody wants to learn more about the stuff you're working on or connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that? Kyle (34:41): Yeah. GeoFli.com, and then Kyle Pucko, you can find me on LinkedIn. So I don't, I don't know if there's too many other Kyle Puckos out there. Shoot me a message. Happy to, happy to get in touch. Kathleen (34:57): Awesome. I will put those links in the show notes. So head to the show notes, if you want to connect with Kyle or learn more about GeoFli and of course, if you're listening and you liked this episode, please take a minute to head to Apple podcasts and leave a five star review. It makes a huge difference. And of course, if you know someone who is doing kick ass, inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next interview. Thanks so much, Kyle. This was a lot of fun.  

Kathleen Booth is the VP Marketing for Attila Security. Her Mission - To help clients bolster inbound marketing utilizing fundamental tactics. By creating compelling content and cultivating community, brands are able to successfully grow. Her podcast Inbound Success helps marketers adjust their strategy and find the key niche for their development.

Most marketers consider a decrease in MQLs to be a bad thing, but for Lessonly CMO Kyle Lacy, cutting MQLs in half led to a 10X increase in marketing ROI. This week on the Inbound Success podcast, Lessonly CMO Kyle Lacy explains how his team achieved a 10X increase in marketing ROI by redesigning the company's website, redefining what constituted a marketing qualified lead, and refocusing the efforts of the sales team.  It's a case study that holds lessons (no pun intended!) for anyone who is using inbound marketing to drive organic growth. Check out the full episode to learn what Kyle and his team did, and how you too can apply this approach to get better results with your own marketing. Resources from this episode: Connect with Kyle on LinkedIn Follow Kyle on Twitter Visit Kyle's personal website Check out the Lessonly website Check out some of the resources Kyle mentioned: Listen to the Inbound Success Podcast interview with Dave Gerhardt Learn more about Anthony Kennada of Front and Kathryn Loheide of Formstack Learn more about The Revenue Collective Transcript Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And my guest this week is Kyle Lacy, who is the chief marketing officer at Lessonly. Welcome to the podcast, Kyle. Kyle (00:27): Thanks for having me. Kathleen (00:28): Yeah, it is a, it is a funny time to be, to be doing these podcasts with everybody stuck at home and, and interesting stories of trying to work with, with dogs and children and spouses and construction noise and all the things that happen when you're stuck working from home. I will say I have two dogs in my office, so they may bark while we're talking. Kyle (00:49): I also have a dog who may bark. Kathleen (00:52): Yup. We're just going to roll with it. I'm sure everybody who's listening is dealing with the same thing. No, I was really looking forward to talking with you. I I've been following, I think your career for a while now, since I became part of a group online that you're in. And I'm really fascinated by the work you're doing with Lessonly. So maybe before we jump into that, you could take a minute and tell my listeners a little bit more about who you are, what Lessonly is and how you came to be doing what you're doing. Kyle (01:21): Yeah, sure. I'll spare the early career comments mainly just because I worked at an agency, I started an agency and then I failed miserably. So I think that's another podcast for another time. Kathleen (01:35): Had I, I had an agency for 11 years. Yes! Kyle (01:39): Mine was five and it, we did okay and then it started going downhill. But because of that agency, I had the opportunity to go work for a software company in Indianapolis called ExactTarget. And at the time ExactTarget was the largest email service provider in the world, email marketing platform. I was, I was one of, I think 600 people hired that year in 2012, but it was my first foray into software. And it's where I fell in love with software. So I spent three years at ExactTarget where we ran, I ran content marketing as well as the thought leadership team there. And we IPO'd, bought by Salesforce. Spent a year at Salesforce. Realized that the large corporate company was not for me even though, to be very clear, Salesforce, Salesforce is large. Corporate culture is not what you would expect. Kyle (02:32): It's actually really cool. I just could not, I could not work in a, in a company of 20,000 people. I realized that I wanted to be a marketing leader. I definitely wanted to be a CMO sometime in my future. So the best bet for me, I believed, was to go work for a venture capital firm. And they recruited, a company called O-, firm called OpenView Boston, which is, they have a little over a billion under management and they invest in series B, series C in B2B software companies. Spent two years there. Basically got my MBA in software. I mean, it's the best learning you can possibly do is to be on the other side of the table, especially with the venture capital firm. And Lessonly was looking for a market leader. And Lessonly is based in Indianapolis. My wife and I wanted to move back from Boston. And it just made sense. Lessonly was a portfolio company of OpenView and everybody that was important to my network was involved at Lessonly. So I've been at Lessonly now for three and a half years and started as the VP of Marketing and now Chief Marketing Officer. Kathleen (03:39): That's great. And tell me a little bit more about what Lessonly does. Kyle (03:43): Lessonly is training software for sales and customer service teams. So everybody from large telecom companies to small software companies. Kathleen (03:51): Great. And, and you had an interesting year. One of the reasons I was fascinated to talk with you is that you were telling me last year, you guys actually cut the number of marketing qualified leads you were bringing in, intentionally. I feel like when you talk to marketers, that's not normally something they set out to do, but you set out to do that. And that resulted in actually a big jump in revenue for the company. So I want to pick this apart and, and I guess start with like, why, why did you set out to reduce your number of MQLs? Kyle (04:25): It was kind of haphazard, to be honest with you. We, we knew that we had to blow up and redesign our website from the ground up in August of 2018, because we started seeing a drop in organic traffic because our site load time was just pathetic. And so Google was starting to ding us on load times on the pages of our site. So when we overhauled it, we were looking at our marketing qualified lead definitions and realized that, I realized something that I hope most marketers realize in the near future, is that it was pretty much BS, right? Like we were sending, we were working thousands of MQLs, and you could be breathing and becoming a marketing qualified lead for Lessonly. Right? And so what we basically said was, we're going to get rid of all of our forms, all of our content downloads, except for a few. Kyle (05:16): And then our demo form is going to be the main form on the site. So if you fill out a form and you use a work email for a demo, you become a marketing qualified lead. So you can imagine that we cut them, I mean, it was over 80%, I think, of our SQLs. And the one thing that that did was that it highly qualified the people we were sending to the inbound team, the inbound SDR team. It also allowed us to spend more time working those deals. And it, it created a closer alignment between sales and marketing because sales actually started trusting the inbound opportunities that were being sent over. So for us, what happened was we cut MQLs over half and we, we, I mean, we significantly for, I think we, I think that over a year we four to five X'd inbound revenue that was direct sourced from our website. Kyle (06:17): And it was pretty much the, the idea that, hey, marketing marketing should own a revenue number and all this crap about, hey, we influenced revenue, which most marketers talk about. I think it was just complete BS. It's like, yeah, you should influence a hundred percent of closed revenue. Like you're marketing. Yeah. I don't care if it's expansion. I don't care if it's net new revenue. Right. So for us it was, it was, it was the opportunity to control our destiny when it came to what we were direct sourcing. And we significantly improved revenue just because we've cut down. Kathleen (06:53): So this topic is particularly interesting to me because it may or may not be hitting home. It's just something I'm dealing with at the moment. I've always been a big believer in ungating stuff, by the way. Like I always, every time I've done it, I've, I've seen actually conversion rates have, if anything, gone up because people like to see the content and they're like, Oh, now it's totally worth getting, you know, giving you my email address. So I, I've never had a problem with ungating content and removing a lot of forms and things like that. What I think is interesting is that, and I'm dealing with something similar to what you described right now with the company I'm at, where historically the sales team, you know, has, has been handed every single person that converts on anything on the website, as a lead, which in my book is not your, it's not a lead. Kathleen (07:43): As you say, if they have a pulse, they're a lead in that scenario. And, and I'm working towards doing something kind of similar to what you described. But what I think is interesting, being in the middle of it is, you know, there's the whole notion of buy-in that needs to happen at that early stage. Because it's one thing as a marketing leader to be like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to like remove all these forms and, or I might have forums, but I'm not going to pass the names of the people who fill them out over to sales. Like for me, it's a contact us or a request a quote form for you. It was a demo form. You know, when that first happens, I don't have to tell you your conversions go down. Your sheer number of people converting goes down and on paper that can look really bad. And I know, you know, I've gotten comments like why have our leads decreased, what's happening, what's wrong with our marketing. And so I'm curious when you guys decided to do this, how did you navigate in that early stage, the communication around, and did you, I don't know, did you like, did you start out by saying this is what's going to happen? And here's why, and here's why it's okay. Like how did that work? Kyle (08:51): Yeah, what we tried to do is we had a lot of conversations with the sales team, especially myself and the directors of sales and our president who basically is our chief revenue officer and, and our CEO. We had a CRO at the time as well, actually, if I remember correctly and we just had long conversations around that, like, here's, what's happening now, everyone, your conversion, I don't care what the lead to MQL conversion rate is. I care about what the MQL to opportunity created conversion rate is, and it is terrible right now. So what we want to do is while we decrease MQL is what we did was we just forecast it out. We said, all right, if we take our best qualified MQL, here's what the conversion rate could potentially be over the course of the fiscal year. And here based off of our average contract value and our conversion rates, here's what we can expect and would still like, it still was rough. Kyle (09:50): The first three months, the first couple quarters, three to six months after we did it. But what happened was once we got through our sales cycle and found that more revenue was converting, more, a more reps were getting to quota. It's, it, it became more aligned. We also move the BDR and SDR teams under marketing. So we were forcing alignment because marketing was controlling 70% of meetings for the sales reps outside of there, outside of the channel and partnerships and like referrals and self source, like those other, those other channels. The one thing I will say, which, which we can put a pin in and talk about later, if it's not, if it's not contributing to this conversation, but we have found that, that at a certain point of scale, it's really important that you're building a database, even if you're not handing the people off to sales. Kyle (10:51): And I think that's a mistake that I don't know if it was a mistake necessarily. But we are now is trying to figure out, all right, now we need, we've got to scale pretty significantly outside of our scope. And because we let all these people just read content and didn't download it, then we don't have a place for them to, we don't have, we don't have a database for us to park it to. Now, the other side of the coin was say, well, you influence them. They're going to come back when they're ready. It's just really hard to play it around that. Kathleen (11:27): Yeah, no, I think it's totally germane to this conversation because it really speaks to the whole, like the whole construct of how we think about the people that are in our sphere of influence, right? Like I think as marketers, we're trained to use the word lead to refer to anybody who converts, but really there's, to me, there's like a lead and then there's just a contact, you know? Kyle (11:54): And I think that, I think the difference is, what I'm finding is that in the first, especially for SaaS companies in the first between one, and let's say 10 to 20 million, 10 to 15 million in revenue to be very surgical in your go to market, you have a very specific group of people. And I think after that, when you're trying to grow it 70 to a hundred percent off of 20 million revenue, you've got to build a community of people. So it's like a, it's, it's, it's, it's moving more thought leadership oriented into the market, instead of it being very, very tactical and surgical. I think those are the two that's the transition that we're making. Kathleen (12:36): Yeah. And I guess the question becomes like, how is there a way for you to lay the groundwork for that scale in the early stage, without compromising what you're doing? Kyle (12:46): Yeah. I think gong, gong, gong.io is a great example of a company that's done that they, they did not send over an MQL or whatever, a contact that filled out a form for an ebook. They never sent it to anybody. It was, it was just a newsletter, right? They were telling them about their webinars. Like it was never sent to sales until it hit, you know, till they hit it. I'm assuming they had a specific score and then it's sent over to sales and then if they need a demo or something. Kathleen (13:18): The other thing I guess, that I, that I wonder about as you decided to make this change is is the whole culture of sales within the company. And it's interesting that you mentioned you moved BDRs under marketing, because when I think about, you know, the experience I'm having right now of a sales team, that culturally is used to getting these leads that are really just, as you say, like they converted on an ebook or they downloaded a case study. You know, how you follow up on that kind of a lead is, is culturally. Like it builds a culture that's very different than the type of culture you need to be successful in an organization where you're only working. People who've declared their intent. And so maybe, maybe that was solved by moving BDRs over. I don't know, but how did you handle that? Kyle (14:06): Well, it's the difference between volume and, you know, working, being tactical with deals that actually matter, right? So, you know, our inbound SDRs, they handle all the inbound, inbound demo requests and chat on the website. That's definitely a volume play. Our BDRs are more surgical, right? They are they're outbound. And they they have specific accounts that they're were reaching out to based off of our ICP. So it's, it's mostly around the outbound sales effort that then hands these opportunities over to the account executives, they know exactly the accounts they need to hit. We give them lists, there's re like we have ads going out like that. It's a very account based marketing approach. They're inbound, it's organic, it's Google ads. So it's more volume. So an account executive that has to deal with everything from an ebook download, which is what shows no intent whatsoever, other than, Hey, I'm interested in whatever you wrote about to somebody that is, is working demos. It's a very different account executive and account executives in my mind, other than their ability to self source, which they should is there. They need to move a demo through the sales funnel to close one, not try to figure out if these 500 ebook downloads are actually worth anything, because that's why we have Marketo. That's why we have HubSpot. That's why marketers are good at personalization and working deals that and, and, and pushing them through the pre sales motion before they're ready for a demo. Kathleen (15:48): Yeah. I think though it can also create a terrible prospect experience. If you just like you're on the website for the first time you convert on an ebook and all of a sudden you have somebody trying to hard sell you. It's not, it's not a great experience. Kyle (16:00): Yeah. Imagine, imagine being well, we're all consumers, right? Imagine going to Wayfair and like down like reading a guide on how to clean the certain couch that you want. And you've got a sales rep, like emailing you, asking you like, Hey, do you want to come see the couch? Do you want to come see the couch store? I could see the couch. Like, it'd be terrible. So the way that we think about it as let's try to, let's try to be as consumer marketing oriented as possible, right. Let's make the buying experience as easy as we possibly can and try not to force the people because people, I don't know why we, we thought that was a good idea to begin with. Kathleen (16:38): So I always like to say that, like, as you say, we're all, we're all people, we're all buyers in our lives, but for some reason we come to work and we put this marketing hat on and we forget everything that it is to be a human being. We do the opposite, right. Kyle (16:52): Experience is all that matters experiences that either have a good experience or a bad experience. And you're going to choose to buy based off of that. Kathleen (16:59): Yeah. So you, you, this was prompted by the need to redo the website and that gave you a window of opportunity to change your approach. And you were removing a lot of your forms and really then kind of relying on the people that filled out a demo request for your MQL. I would assume that there, that you did some things on the website to try and really ease the path for people to get to that demo request a motion. So can you talk a little bit about that? How did you optimize for that? Kyle (17:32): Yeah. The biggest thing we did was a product tour. We built a product tour. If you go to Lessonly.com/tour, or I think, or you can go to the main page where it has the tour button it, you pick which use case you are, are you a customer service? Are you sales, are you talent and then walks you through the product and then you can sign up for a demo. Kathleen (17:53): So is that product tour different based on the use case? So you're speaking to - okay. Kyle (17:58): Like a business outcome oriented basically. Right. So, you know, a sales, sales and customer service use cases are going to be somewhat some of the different, right. So that was the main thing other than just rebuilding the site. So it loaded correctly all the time. Right. Like, and, and redoing the brand and cleaning it up and just things that we had wanted to do. But that was the main thing was that products who were, and we created a demo video. It was a two minute demo video that you watch after you fill out the form. Kathleen (18:29): So this is an interesting question. And I get this sometimes from people like um, the role of having an on demand mini demo video versus like an actual guided demo over the phone or zoom, or what have you from a sales rep, how do you think about, like, what, what place, what role do all of those individual things fill and how do they fit together? Kyle (18:52): I mean, we just, I don't, honestly, I don't really know. I do know that we wanted to give somebody something after they filled out the form to kind of wet their appetite before they had a call with an AA. And I think that there's, there's, we definitely could do click rate optimization tests and say, and tests like whether or not the demo video should be included after the forms filled out. Right. But for us, it is you go through products or you fill out a form, you have the opportunity to watch the video if you want. But then the goal is, is that our inbound SDR is going to try to get at you on a call with an account executive. And sometimes they do a demo walkthrough. Like sometimes they do a software walkthrough on the first call. Sometimes it's a second call. It depends on the discovery that happens on that first call with the account executive. Kathleen (19:42): Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about numbers. You started from where you started to where you got to with these changes, what was the impact and how did it, how did it evolve? Kyle (19:55): I mean, we, we saw, we saw, I mean, it took about three months. So moving our, you know, we redesigned the site, we were done in September. We launched it end of September. And we started seeing revenue impact by January, February. Cause our, well, yeah, January, February, cause our sales cycle is 30, 60, 90 days. And it's over the holiday as well, which, you know, impacts all sales. But so by, by the end of last year, 2019, I mean, we had, we had went with four to five X to inbound revenue, closed won revenue because of, and it was because of that change. And it was because we just decided that, Hey, inbound reps are going to focus on the things that matter. And the rest of it's going to be automated. Kathleen (20:48): And your MQLs were cut by half. Is that right? Kyle (20:50): Yeah. If not more than that. Kathleen (20:52): Okay. I'm trying to do the math now. And I'm definitely not a big math person, four to five X increase in inbound revenue, 50% decrease in MQL. So that's like a 10 X ROI. Kyle (21:04): Yeah. Yup. Kathleen (21:07): In three to four months. Kyle (21:09): Well, no, I'm sorry. We, it, it was over the year, but we saw, we saw like we were doing five X, the revenue in Q four of 2019. They, what we were doing in Q4 of 2018. Kathleen (21:23): Wow. Kyle (21:24): So it's actually, it's actually more than that. You could tell on my, my, my teammates would tell me that I am not the math wizard. Kathleen (21:34): Yeah. This is why we all went into marketing, which sadly now has become a math game. Kyle (21:39): If we were doing 200 grand in Q4, we were doing our Q4 2018. We were doing a million in Q4 of 2019 as an example to dumb down the math, but it was, it was significant and it was a step. It was a stair-step right. It was a stair-step Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, to do that in 2019. But it was because of the website overall. Kathleen (22:04): Now, did you put in place anything new to nurture the folks that were downloading the eBooks, but that you now are no longer passing over to sales? Kyle (22:16): No, because we didn't, we didn't have any ebook downloads. And then we start, what we have been doing though, is starting to build nurture tracks and using, I think we moved over to Marketo beginning of last year. I don't know. It's all new. It's all Kathleen (22:33): Right. 2020 is it feels like 10 years long. So of course, Kyle (22:38): So it's, so yeah, we have nurture tracks running and, and we're, we're kind of evolving our marketing playbook now to say, we need to introduce webinars series. We need to introduce some things that are more database building, where we can just hit people randomly with content, because we have really good content, right. We spend tons of time and energy on this content. So we might as well start sending it out on a regular basis because before that we weren't, which is why my point before on the surgical go to market compared to the community building side. So we're lucky that we had thought leadership going on for the past two years with a book that our CEO wrote. So now it's, now it's up to us to say, all right, let's continue growing this community and, and 10 X that community instead of the revenue, it, but we hope that both of them happen. Right. I mean, that's yeah. Kathleen (23:29): Yeah. I would love to talk about that for a minute. So as you make that mental shift, you know, you've done the website, you've, you've narrowed down your definition of an MQL, and now you're focused on community building and, and getting a larger audience really to get your content in front of how are you thinking about tackling that? Kyle (23:49): Oh man, it's it's testing. I mean, it's testing for our, for my team on the demand side is like bread and butter. I mean, as we do it constantly, so it's testing, it's, it's introducing a webinar series, it's introducing webinars series with paid ads behind them to make, you know, to drive signups it's testing on what a monthly or weekly email newsletter would do. It's testing. Like, should we sponsor sponsor more virtual events where we're not necessarily working those leads, but building more of a database, what do we do with all the contacts that are already in our Salesforce instance? Right. So I think, I think the, for the next six months for us, it is testing. It's trying to, like we did, we sponsored morning brew the newsletter at the beginning of the year, and that went really well. And that was great. We loved it. So it's like doing those types of things to say, all right, let's dip our toe in the water. What should we do with analysts? Right. Which should we do with analysts firms, with the Gartners, with the Forresters of the world. And that's something that we had discussed in the past, but we're really putting pen to paper now and implementing it. Kathleen (25:00): And do you have an actual, like, formal community in the sense that, okay, and where is it? Kyle (25:07): Yeah, we do. It's called Llama Nation and it's actually a customer community. We have not opened it up externally. And as of right now, we have no plans to do that at the moment. And it lives on a, it's a mobile app. Kathleen (25:22): So now you just gave me the perfect segue, because one of the things I wanted to talk about in this podcast interview was the llama. Because I, I love what you've done with it. And there are, I'm sure are people listening who are like, what the heck are they talking about with a llama? So maybe you could explain why llamas are significant when we talk about Lessonly. Kyle (25:46): Well, I mean, it was, it was before my time that Ali llama showed up at Lessonly, but it was basically a chalkboard drawing that just kept showing up and the cofounders were like, we're not going to have llamas as a mascot. They kept putting it off. They kept putting it off and all, he just kept showing up. Ali's the name of our llama. And so eventually it just became part of the culture. And that led to a cus, a employee award called the golden llama that we give out quarterly to an employee the best best lives our values as a company. And then it turned out, and then when I came to Lessonly, we decided just to double down on it in all of our marketing, our 404 pages, our direct mail, it all includes Ali the llama. Kyle (26:38): And it has worked extremely well for a lot of reasons. I think one of them was just llamas became cool in 2019. Target released a llama line. Like you could go find little, little gold figurines at Target of llamas. Like it just became pop culture. Right. It was. And so we, we just doubled down on it. And the one thing that we did that worked extremely well was that we took the golden llama and scaled it and said, we want to send gold llamas out to prospects. Right. And our director marketing, Ben Bataglia had that idea one day. It's like, why don't we just send golden llamas prospects? And so we bought, there's this company up in Northern Michigan that produces these three inch llama figurines that I think we've probably kept them in business for like two years. But we bought, we bought 500 of them. I spray painted 500 llamas, golden llamas, and I'm pr-, I'm probably going to die young just because I inhaled it. Kathleen (27:38): So many gold spray paint fumes. Kyle (27:40): So we, and we started sending them out and all it was, was a box of the golden llama. And it had a card in it that said that, Hey, we get, it told the story of, of what we do with the golden llama at Lessonly. Lessonly gives this to a teammate that exhibits the values of your company. Had nothing to do with the product, have nothing to do about Lessonly. It was just recognize a teammate for great work. And we've sent out three to 4,000 of these llamas since 2018. And it is, it's just a fun way to, to tell the Lessonly story. So we use it in direct mail where we will dress up plush llamas with racing gear, for reaching out to a racing company, or we'll put them in a Ford truck and direct mail. And for trying to, if we're trying to get into Ford motor company, so we involve the llama in everything, everything we do. Kathleen (28:34): I love that. What is the response then? Kyle (28:37): Oh, it's been great. I mean, it's cute. Number one, I have a very talented group of designers, right? I mean, we do, we do some great stuff. It's not corny. It's just cute. It, it's not overwhelming. I think there's a lot of times people use mascots where you show up on the homepage and it's like the mascots right in your face. And you know, it's subtle, but it works because it, it makes sense. I don't know how best to explain it other than we did a very good job implementing it. And we have right now, not sure when, when we're going to publish this, but at this, at this moment, we're recording. We have Better Work Week, which is an entire week at Lessonly, that's devoted to celebrating people that do great work. And we had a zoom call on Monday where all the actual Ali llama showed up to the zoom call. Kathleen (29:31): That's awesome. Kyle (29:32): Ali llama lives in a farm out in New York state, upstate New York. Kathleen (29:38): So what advice would you give to somebody who was thinking they wanted to incorporate a brand mascot? Kyle (29:48): Man, I, I, I was very lucky that I inherited Ali when I got to Lessonly and my, at ExactTarget, we had a color, it was orange. We didn't have a mascot. So I think that the only the thing that I know works out of those two instances is make sure that your internal community, your stakeholders, your teammates, and your customers get involved first, it's gotta be cultural. And it has to be loved by employees and by customers before you could ever bring it to market to say, Hey, this llama was part of our culture. So the goal, like the llama at Lessonly for the first three or four years, it was just an award. And it took that long. And then we said, all right, let's, let's, let's introduce it to everybody else. And it worked because the employees believed in it. And the same thing went with the orange culture at ExactTarget. Kyle (30:51): You went through an orange onboarding, right, as an employee. And it didn't matter if we were 2000 employees, everybody understood what orange meant and because of that, it seeped into the customer base. And because the employees loved it, the customers loved it. The customer's peers loved it. And it created a community outside of just our, our first degree network of employees and customers. So I would say if you're going to do it, make sure that you include people around what the mascot is, what the color is, what the mission is, right. Get a committee of people that are involved and then start introducing it into the internal culture of the company. And if it hits and it works, then you can talk about introducing it outside of it. Kathleen (31:34): That's good advice. Yeah. We we have, the Attila's logo has always been a gorilla who's named Attila the gorilla. So that's one of the things that I've been like, trying to figure out is what do we do with Attila? So there may or may not have been a little selfish inspiration behind that. Kyle (31:52): Well, you got, I mean, you can, you can introduce a ton of stuff like plush gorillas, like just things stickers that people can put on there. Like there's just a lot that, that you could do with that to see if, and as long as you're not forcing it, then, you know, people should like it. Kathleen (32:09): Yeah. Well, fascinating story again. I love, I love what you're doing and there's so much creativity behind it. And I can't wait to kind of see where you take it with Lessonly. Especially as you look to build your audience. I'm gonna just shift gears for a second. There are two questions I ask all of my guests. And I'm curious to hear what you have to say, especially because you've had this interesting combination of like agency, VC and operator background. This podcast is all about inbound marketing. And is there a particular company or individual that you think is really like setting the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer right now? Kyle (32:48): Man, I, I I've been, there are two that I respect a lot, but they're there, they're usually the ones that people say, which I, so, so I'll give you three. Kathleen (33:03): Alright deal. Kyle (33:04): So Dave Gerhardt at Privy is probably the best inbound marketer that I know hands down. I steal things from him all the freaking time. And my team steals things from Privy's team all the time. Anthony Kennada, who was the COO of Gainsight and is now a COO at Front, he, he is extremely good at category creation that then drives the inbound for sure. And the other one's Kathyrn Loheide, who was VP of marketing at Formstack and Formstack is a local company in Indie, the remote, like a remote culture. But she is, she is the, one of the better demand gen leaders. Well, Mar I mean, marketing, I'm not even gonna, I'm not gonna say she's, she's a marketing leader. Like she has all the facets, but she's very good at the demand gen side of it. Very good at the process and the science side of it. I just can't get her to get on a podcast with me. She's too busy working, right? Kathleen (34:06): Yeah. Well, that's always the challenge with the good ones and that's, those are really good ones actually. So I have interviewed Dave Gerhart and I totally agree with you. And funny enough, his is the name that comes up the most for a reason, obviously. But I didn't, I haven't heard of the other two. So I love when I get those answers. Cause now I have two new ones to go check out as does everyone who's listening and maybe I could convince them to come on podcast. Although it sounds like Kathryn, probably not. Cause you're gonna hear. Kyle (34:32): Yeah, I can. I can, I can, I can try to set that up. But I would say like the, the marketers that have the ability to scale companies are the great marketers. Anthony is an example of somebody that was early in his career and helped Gainsight scale to a hundred million dollars in six years. And there are very few people that can do that. And it, it shows a lot of rigor, a lot of process and a lot of creativity and those people should be continuously celebrated because there are very few that will stick with a company that long to see it through most of the time you see people jumping every one or two years, but the great marketers in my opinion, will stick around and try to try to push people past their comfort zones to grow revenue Kathleen (35:18): Well, and I agree with you because it's also a very special person who is able to be successful as the company scales, because I have found, and you talked about like liking to work for a smaller company versus a bigger company. You know, some, sometimes it's just people, people don't like to be in those, like you get bigger and by definition, they're not happy in that environment. So somebody who is able to like chameleon-like shift and be successful in all of those situations, that's really unique. Kyle (35:47): Absolutely. As long as long as you know that the time to leave, if you force it and the company struggles because you're forcing it then you need to make the decision it's fine to move companies. Every two or three years, sophomore is not an easy job, right? It's very stressful. It's very fast paced and it's okay, but you need to know like, Hey actually, somebody I'm a shareholder, you know, and Anthony said this on a conversation I just had with him on he's he's a shareholder of a company. He wants the best person in that role to grow the company bigger than what he did, but he had the, he had the wherewithal and the personal insight and integrity to say, it's my time to move on and do this again at front from Gainsight, because he knew that somebody would be better at this next stage of the company's growth. Kathleen (36:45): That's great. I love that story. All right. Second question. The biggest pain point I hear from marketers is that digital marketing is changing so quickly that trying to keep up as like drinking from a fire hose. So how do you personally keep yourself educated and, and stay on the cutting edge? Kyle (37:04): I actually disagree with that comment. I don't think that it's changing that dramatically. I think that marketers who try to figure out how Tik Tok and drive leads are just looking at the next shining object. There is nothing has changed since I've been, I joined ExactTarget and I've been doing digital marketing for 15 years. Nothing's really changed. Email ads, direct mail events. So maybe, maybe social is more of a communications play, right? Like it's not changed that much organic. So, you know, I think that, that I think you have to get, you have to truly, we spend way too much time chasing these new things. And we don't try to understand how customers are buying our prospects and want to buy, right. And it might be that you just need a great email newsletter to drive our business. And you don't need to try to figure out how to build an AI artificial intelligence engine on the front of your website to change content based off of who's visiting, which I think is really cool, but you know, maybe you don't need that and you don't need to chase the shiny objects and you you're, you aren't selling, you know, a product to a bunch of tweens, right. Kyle (38:24): And if that's the case, then you need to understand how tweens buy right now. Right. So that, sorry, I'm on a soap box. But that being said, if I, the way that I stay in front of things is through the group that you and I are in, which is Revenue Collective. I mean, if you could find a community of people that are, that are the best at what they do that are constantly sharing content with each other, that's where, that's where I learned about things to test. Kathleen (38:49): Yeah, I totally agree. That's been an amazing group for me as well and well worth it. So check out revenuecollective.com if you want to learn more. Kyle (38:59): 2010 people were saying email marketing is dead. Kathleen (39:03): People have been saying email marketing is dead since email started, let's be honest. And I think marketers also like to say things are dead because they know people will read whatever they're about to say. Kyle (39:13): I mean, I have a, I have a slide deck on my LinkedIn page that says marketing is dead. Kathleen (39:18): Yes. Everything has died many times, you know? Well this has been so much fun. If somebody wants to learn more about you or connect with you online or learn more about Lessonly, what's the best way for them to do that. Kyle (39:34): Kylelacy.com. Lessonly.com. I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter, Kyle P Lacey. And that's the best places to find me. Kathleen (39:43): All right. Well, I will put all those links in the show notes. So if you're interested in connecting with Kyle head over there to check that out. And if you're listening and you learned something new, of course I would love it if you would head to Apple podcasts and leave the podcast a five star review, because that's how other people find us. And if you know somebody else doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Kyle. Kyle (40:11): Thank you for having me.

Lots of marketers talk about "big data" and its promise for improving the way marketing decisions are made, but few have truly explored the full potential that data holds. This week on the Inbound Success podcast, MDT Director of Digital Marketing Don Seaberry talks about how he is using R programming language, SQL, and Python to create advanced models for extracting insights from large volumes of marketing data. Don is a self taught data scientist, and explains how he learned to code, and why and how any marketer can do the same. Check out the episode to get the details on how Don is using data models, hear examples of the ways that it has changed how he approaches marketing, and what it takes to level up your game as a data scientist. Resources from this episode: Connect with Don on LinkedIn Visit the MDT Marketing website Check out some of the resources Don mentioned: The Measure School YouTube Channel Think With Google Search Engine Watch Follow Fernando Machado on Twitter Check out Cory Henke's interview on The Inbound Success Podcast Visit Joe Martinez's website Transcript Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Don Seaberry, who is the director of digital marketing for MDT marketing. Welcome Don. Don (00:22): Thank you. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. Kathleen (00:24): Yeah. Welcome to the podcast. I would love it if you could tell my listeners a little bit about yourself, who are you, how did you wind up doing what you do, and what does MDG marketing do? Don (00:37): MDT marketing is a marketing agency primarily focused on digital, but we also do print marketing. Based in South Florida. We've been in business, this is our 25th year anniversary. And we work primarily with higher education clients. Colleges, universities career schools, that type thing. I've been with them somewhere between four to five years. So, so you know, I'm getting a little long in the tooth with them, but I actually have one of the shorter changes 10 years, cause we probably average 10 to 11 years as far as just tenure with the company. People come and they stay. Kathleen (01:18): Wow, that's impressive. Don (01:20): Yeah. I've been in marketing about 15 years. I actually started, I was in sales and a law firm hired me to do inbound business business development. Had no idea that also meant manage, they had a raging out of control, $40,000 a month Google ads campaign. I didn't even know what PPC was. So I learned on the job. I had a knack for it. I liked it. And it was a really good way to do something online. And you get out of the rat race that was sales. Because I did that for a long time before this. So I basically fell into it, which I'm sure most people were at that time probably were falling into it. Kathleen (02:00): Yeah. And what do you do at MDT today? Don (02:05): So I basically manage digital strategy for our clients. You could say all digital with the exception of social. I kind of stay out of that world a little bit. We have a specific name for that, but if you're talking Google ads, Yahoo Search, Bing ads, Quora ads, your Reddit, anywhere else, you can do Hulu, Pandora, anywhere that you can, you can do any type of digital marketing, I pretty much drive strategy for that. Kathleen (02:33): Great. And one of the reasons I was really excited to talk with you is that you are highly analytical at what you do. And that has really helped you to be able to leverage data more, I would say, than, than the average person, certainly more than I do in my day to day. Analytics is I, I mean, I can, I I'm decent at it, but I'm certainly not on your level. And specifically, like, doing some custom programming to extract data and really use that in decision making. So maybe you could talk a little bit about what you're doing and what you're working on. Don (03:12): Sure. obviously probably like most, I came from Excel work, and Excel is a great free tool. It has this one limitation with stuff. And one is one limitation is the ability to handle large data sets and large amounts of data. One of the things that I wanted to do when I initially got to MDT just as a senior analyst before my current role was just be able to go back and look at years of data and be able to just try and determine correlations between different pieces of data. Is there really a correlation between, you know, cost per conversion and when I run in this area of the country at this time of day? But I wanted to be able to see that across all the clients, kind of get a snapshot of it, then be able to break it down and just, you know, determine trends. So we started, I had a little bit of SQL background. I took the SQL courses in college. So I started in SQL, a little bit clunkier because you have that database piece of it where you have to pull the data in first and then you can write queries to do the analysis that you want. So I had a, a genius of a mentor named Travis Sari, who his masters I think is actually in statistics or data science. Kathleen (04:28): Oh my God. I feel like that's my worst nightmare. Those are the classes that were the hardest for me. Don (04:35): I hated them. Fortunately, I had a friend who was a professor of mathematics at Spelman university who helped me survive statistics class. One on one tutoring was awesome with Travis. You know, he kind of turned me on to Python obviously. And I, I was a little bit more comfortable with the programming language just because I just felt like it's a little bit more intuitive. So we're using that a lot to really just kind of get through large data sets right now and do analysis on them. And with the eventual goal, there are machine learning applications, artificial intelligence applications. Is there a way that we can take all of the data that our sources do give us, as we know the Googles, the Bings, they only so much data, but there's a mountain of data that is there. So is there a way that we can take those and start to do predictive analytics to kind of return if we do this, what can we expect as a result of that? So that's the direction that we're heading right now. We're really more focused on using it for just data analysis, looking at trending and using it to inform, you know, not only day to day how we manage but now, we're starting to look at it to inform how we actually build things from the ground up. Kathleen (05:47): Now I am sort of blown away by this. And I guess my first question is really, you know, given that these platforms do provide us with so much data, right? You mentioned Google and Yahoo and Bing. And they have some built in like native tools to look at that data and, and extract insights. And then of course, they're, you know, as you mentioned, there's Excel, there are plenty of third party platforms that are built to help you crunch these numbers and figure things out. What, why is it that those platforms are, do, won't do what you need to have done? And instead you've gone the custom programming route. Don (06:29): They have their limitations, right? You know, I actually like Google Data Studio. There are things that I had built in Google Data Studio. Like if someone comes to us and they say, we want to do a PPC audit, we have a built in PPC audit that as long as they give us access to the Google ad words, account. Kathleen (06:51): Just press a button and spin it up, right? Don (06:54): Just connect the data and boom. And instead of it taking, you know, it used to take hours, you know, sometimes days to do that same you know, to do the analysis required to come up with the results or to give them feedback. You know, now we do that in like five to 10 minutes. So it was a definite time saver, but it has its limitations. I'm a huge proponent of granularity. I wouldn't get as granular as I can't get as deep into it as I can. And when you start talking about the type of data sets that we're looking at, the potential, you know, millions and millions of rows of data you know, you want a program that's robust enough that can look at everything and just spit it back out. And you don't want to start your application and step away and come back to it two days later because it'll take us that long to finish the work, if it finishes at all without just throwing up all over itself. So I like the granularity. I also can like to understand how things work. So it's one thing for you to spit the data out for me. It's another thing for me to understand the code that was behind. I feel like I understand a little bit better when I understand what actually caused that analysis to take place, if that makes sense. Kathleen (08:07): Hmm. That does. So give me an example of like something that you would want to know that you would need to create a custom coded solution to figure out the answer to that question. Don (08:19): Well, I'll tell you one thing, one of the things that we're working on, you know, a big time suck for any agency is campaign set up. So if either you bring in a new client very often, you have to build out campaigns for them. So one of the things that we're looking at, especially with Google, for example, Google ads, PPC, is we went back and we're going program by program. So, you know, a lot of our schools have the same type of programs where there's surgical techs and medical sonography, that type thing. So we're going in, we recently went in, we looked at six years of data at program level and things like we're trying to develop what we call it. So are there keywords that have proven to be successful year over year, over year, over year, as far as the cost per conversion and number of conversions, what ad copy, what combinations of ad copy have proven to be successful? Don (09:19): When you talk about a Google where you can do a responsive search ad with, you know, 15 headlines and four descriptions, and then you multiply that over different programs, over different schools over time, that's a mountain of data to get through, right? That's not something you want to pull into Data Studio, or that you want to pull into Excel and spend hours and days trying to figure out. So what we did is we, we downloaded it at the program level across the entire MCC, six years of data, let's say for keyboards. And then we went in, we trimmed that too, by conversion type, we sorted it back in version, count, trimmed that by year and match type, top 20 performing keywords by match type by year. And then we merged all of those into one data set, spit it out to a CSV. Now we have a keyword bank that we can use. Don (10:14): For example, if we need to build a surgical tech campaign. And we also sped out, we gave ourselves an idea of you know, what the average cost per click was just to kind of get a sense of maybe where we need to start as far as bidding, or when we set it up. We did the same thing with ad copy. The ad copy was really interesting. Cause there was just thousands on top of thousands on top of thousands of pieces of data. Once we got the custom coding written and R spit it out, like nothing. Kathleen (10:43): Like what did you learn about ad copy? Give me some examples of takeaways. Don (10:47): The big thing that we're looking for, really a couple of things. Number one, what combination of ad copy tends to work the best and what resonates with students the most? So one of the things that we found is I would have expected things like online. Don (11:07): You know, you, you start to get a sense of the things that now I can address in my landing page content based on what they interact with. We started to find that people, students wanted to know what was in it for them. Can you help me with job placement? That was really successful. Can you help me with financial aid? They wanted it to be easy. They wanted it to be simple. They wanted to know that they weren't going to have to go into the poor house. Well, you know, right off the bat, that there'd be a way for us to actually be able to go to school. And we started to see that combination of those types of things. And students really love the hands on piece of it. So we started to see what they reacted to. And it was typically always coupled with, is the school accredited? Cool. Is my degree going to mean something or my certification going to mean something? And they want it. Don (11:56): They, in most cases they had some sense of what the brand was and that helped as well. So we started to get a sense of what's actually important to the students. So we know going forward, I need to continue to leverage that, but I need to also make sure that I take that in the other content, not just ad copy, but landing pages. If we're doing direct mail to them, which we often do now, we make sure we bake that type of information into direct mail because it's important to them. And the end result is, you know, we see greater engagement on the front end and it helps us to improve return on investment on the backend once they actually engage with the school and they're trying to get them to start. Kathleen (12:36): So that sounds amazing. And it sounds like information that any marketer would want to have. Can you speak to, how hard is it to set this up? How long does it take? Like is, is the juice worth the squeeze, I guess, is what I'm getting at? Don (12:53): I'll answer that this way. Yes. The juice is definitely worth the squeeze. One of the things that we have actually used it for, we don't always get to connect to the client's CRM and see the final disposition of a lead, you know, does that person become a student? Do they graduate? You know, we don't always get to see that, but we do have a couple of clients that we get pretty good visibility where we can be, you know, they'll typically maybe once a week or once a month, something to that effect, they'll actually send us back enrollment data. So because of how we tag things on the front end, we actually know what channel that came through. So we've been able to use R to determine, okay, is this a channel that actually drives return on investment? You know, we market to return on investment first. Don (13:45): Then we back into efficiency, things like cost per lead and then cost per click. That type of thing. The most important thing is did it make the client money, period. You know, return on investment. So because we have the ability to dump it into a script and us, they send us that information back. We have a script that we can dump it into. It will match it up based on the source that it came from. So we have, let's say, for example, Google ads, then we have a lead management tool that goes into first and it had this lead ID in this information. So we have a script that takes that lead management tool data, and the data that the client sends us. It matches it up. And then we start to see, okay, is this something that we need to continue to run for this client? Don (14:28): Do we need to reduce budget or just cut it out? We actually had one client. Well, we stopped the channel that was actually driving conversions on the front end, but over a year, the return on investment just didn't make sense. So in that case if I'm talking about, you know, kind of being Hippocratic in my approach, you know, do no harm to my client, then the juice is definitely worth the squeeze. The biggest piece of it really is just the patience. You have to have the patience to do the work, to get comfortable with the scripting. But honestly, you know, R programming, Python, any of that. There's so many places you can go online that are giving you a jumpstart and it's not, you know, it won't be an issue of, I have no, I don't know where to start. I don't know where to begin. If you go on YouTube and you put R for data science, you're gonna find a mountain of information on that. And a lot of, a lot of times, same thing with just internet searches, you will find the information that you need. And a lot of times what you're looking for, you'll find that someone else has already done it and put it out there. Kathleen (15:30): So, okay. Real talk for a minute. Like, I know I can find these things on YouTube, but for somebody like me, who's intimidated by statistics, who, you know, I mean, I get basic analytics, but the notion of learning to code scares me. And you know, is it realistic to think that somebody like me could go online and really learn this? And, and how long does it take to learn something like this? Is this like a week, a month, a year? Don (15:59): Okay. I'll tell you what I did. If you have, if you have some comfortability with, you know, custom functions in Excel, for example, you're gonna probably be a little bit more comfortable when you get into the SQLs and the Rs of the world, because you just kind of understand the way the architecture, if you will, works. I understand how a database is set up. I understand what I'm trying to query. That kind of carries over to R. You understand a little bit more of what you're trying to query and the information that that you're trying to get at? I think any reasonably intelligent person can do it. You have to have one, really the will to do it. And just the time. You might spend a week, if you just kind of pick and poke around and find the pieces that you need, you might spend a week figuring that out. Don (16:53): But the beauty of it is, kind of, once I figured it out, a lot of times once you've done it, like these two scripts, we've written, the one where we dealt with return on investment, I can just pop the information in now. Boom, once it's done, it's done. The asset database, it probably took me, I'd say a day, right? Each one of those scripts, one for the ads, one for the keywords. But now that I've got them, all I have to do is drop in whatever data I'd want. There might be a couple of changes that I make to it. That might take me 15 minutes and boom, it does the work. So once you get past that piece of it, you go. Kathleen (17:31): So why don't you think there are more off the shelf tools that can do this for you? Cause it seems like from what you've said, it seems like the insights you're able to extract are pretty darn useful in terms of making decisions about your campaigns and optimizing your ROI and even optimizing other campaigns that have nothing to do with PPC. I'm sort of surprised that there isn't a commercialized like, software product out there that that makes it easy for people like me. Don (18:01): You know, there probably is. Because we have a genius of a guy in our marketing tech department who develops all of our like reporting products. And he primarily Power BI to do that. Genius. I mean the stuff he can drill down to, absolutely genius. Obviously there is a learning curve about a power BI, or you're talking about a Tableau or something like that. I kind of take the approach, again, I like granularity. So the more granular I can get, the better. The more cause you know, the more, you know, any solution or any analysis is only as good as the data that you put into it. So the more points that we can pull together and we can give that algorithm time to kind of work through, the better. So you probably, you probably have some, I'm just kind of, I kind of nerd out on that stuff. I like that stuff. And again, I kind of like to understand how it works and I have an idea in my brain most of the time of really where I'm trying to go. And I'm just, I'd rather just have control of where the levers are a little bit more than necessarily on the box, but I'm sure there are some that will do it. But I'm sure there's, there's probably ways. Kathleen (19:17): So who do you think should, should think, can seriously consider doing something like this or learning how to do this? Because I have to imagine that it's not really right for every marketer, you know, you have to be dealing with, I would guess, certain volumes of data. And, and you obviously need to have the ability to like put what you learn into some form of action otherwise, who cares, you know? So like talk me through, if you were talking to other marketers, which you sort of are through this podcast, like who should really think about something like this? Don (19:55): Definitely a person, like if you live in the numbers every day and by living the number, I mean, you're actually pulling the levers on campaigns every day. A lot of platforms are pretty much forcing us more and more towards automation. So, you know, some of those day in day out practices that we would have really been engaged in you know, keyword bid management, you know, average position, Google and tools like it can sunset. So you can't even, you know, that that's not even a metric you can get to anymore. But a lot of those, those day to day things that we used to do, those things are going to go away, what it won't do. And actually it will actually write ad copy for you if you want it to the places you can do that. Don (20:48): This is going to give you the ability to focus on what's important. Ad copy and creative and your keyword less than blah, blah, blah, and all and all of this stuff. So if you, if you're living in the weeds every day you definitely should be learning some of these data science tricks. Absolutely. No question about it. You should get comfortable with it because if we're doing less day to day management, that means we have more time for analysis and we can start to dig deeper and do a bit. And I would say if you're director level, you know, kind of the level I'm at, I still think there's value in it because one of the things that you want to start to consider is, okay, is there any way that I can use you know, data science to understand what are the things we're talking about? Don (21:39): Is, is there a way to use it to figure out what combination of channels works the best together? So if the person comes in through Google ads and doesn't convert, do you know, do I see conversion rates go up if I send them email or if I do direct mail or not just through Google ads, remarketing, are, am I seeing better numbers of ads, Google ads, YouTube then being remarketing, you know, is there a way to determine what channels work better using data science? Those are some of the things and that one's a little trickier because you have to be able to track that lead all the way through so that, you know, there's something to think about there. But I would say anyone probably at least from director level and down that lives in this world, especially in agency world, you should be learning this. Kathleen (22:28): So earlier you mentioned that you're now using this for some predictive things. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you mean by that and how you're using it? Don (22:39): Right. So, so one of the things that we're trying to figure out and, and the coding is kind of still out there. We have to, we have to figure this piece of that out. But let's say for example, we're in Google ads, we're in Google ads. And, you know, if you have, you know, 20, 25 accounts you live in every day, you're constantly making changes and you're constantly trying to track those changes. One of the things that we're trying to determine is, is there a way that we can start to pull change history and to, to, you know, master spreadsheets. Pop it into R, use Python and then say, okay, here's what I'm going to determine. This type of program. When I made this type of change across the MCC, historically, what have we there's as far as maybe if I change the bid strategy, and if I switch from this particular bid strategy that, that particular bid strategy, what did I, what have I seen historically? Is there a trend that I can see across accounts that says switching from this to this, I tend to get better results. So kind of trying to predict future performance based on what we've seen in the past, just on that body of data. Kathleen (23:56): And it sounds like really trying to extract some best practices. Don (24:01): Absolutely. Yeah. Kathleen (24:03): And as you mentioned in an agency setting, I can really see where that would be useful because having owned an agency myself for about 11 years, you know, one of the big challenges is always, how do you disseminate information about what works and what doesn't across different people in teams. And so I could see where that would be really valuable. Don (24:22): Definitely Kathleen (24:22): So interesting I'm, I'm like intimidated and intrigued all the same time as I imagine, many people are. Don (24:32): But you have to start somewhere. Kathleen (24:33): So, yeah, and I would say the other thing I was going to say is if this is something that interests you, if you're listening, I actually shared this with Don, a great community for conversations around analytics is Christopher Penn's Analytics for Marketers Slack group. You can probably Google it and find it, but I will put the link in the show notes to it. Kathleen (24:53): And Christopher is also another amazingly accomplished brilliant data scientist. And he started this community just for other people, interested in analytics and you don't have to be as experienced as Don. I'm in the community. And I am a complete amateur. But it's great. It's a great resource. And you can ask questions and learn a lot there. Shifting gears, Don, I have two questions I always ask all my guests and I'd love to hear what you have to say. The first of which is really we talk a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really kind of setting the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer these days? Don (25:37): There's, there's, there's a couple of people in digital world. One person that immediately comes to mind and I think, you know, him is Cory Henke. Especially because video is so important. And if there is a video Yoda, there is probably Corey Henke. Incredibly, incredibly intelligent guy. There's another gentleman that I follow quite a bit. I actually met him at Pubcon. He presented and he presents quite often. His name is Joe Martinez. He really lives in digital world, especially on the PPC. And he has just, you know, stuck his toe in everything where there's Google ads being as Apple ads, Quora. He's a Quora evangelist of sorts at this point because that platform, he really believes in it and they have definitely improved that product. I can tell you that. So I follow Joe. His company has a, they have a blog that they typically put out. Don (26:45): So if you connect to Joe, he'll, and he'll normally like you know, let you know when a new blog comes out and this year, another young lady that works with him as well, I believe her name is Michelle Martinez, is also really, really smart. My, my hidden little gem, just really more so for the way that they think, is Fernando Machado and the team at Restaurant Brands International. They own like, Popeye's. They own Burger King. There's all these chains that they own. And they're just, it's just genius to just, you know, stalk their LinkedIn feeds and just see how they think and the difference in the way that they think, especially as it relates to driving social engagement. And you know, if you think about the craze over the Popeye's chicken sandwich and the way that went bananas, and then the way Popeye's leveraged that, that was Fernando's team behind that. And they've done the same thing with some things I've seen. They put out the moldy Whopper, where they were showing that that is organic, that it will mold over time. That it wasn't like the McDonald's cheeseburger that three years later looked the same. Fernando Machado was behind that. I just loved the way that they thought. Kathleen (28:06): That's cool. I had not heard of them. So I'm going to have to check them out. And I love learning about new people to follow. So that's great. And also now I have a craving for a Popeye's chicken sandwich, which I have not had yet. I keep hearing about how great it is. So I'll have to add that into my rotation this week. Second question is that the biggest pain point I hear from marketers is always that it's so much to keep up with so much changes, and it's really hard to stay educated on best practices. So how do you personally stay up to date and educated? Don (28:41): I'd definitely start since, I mean, we all have to be on, it was an 800 pound gorilla in the room, right. Especially as it relates to digital. So obviously, subscribe to the Think with Google blog if for no other reason than to just try to stay out in front of what Google is doing. I'm a huge fan obviously of Search Engine Watch. Well, most people probably think of that just in the context of PPC, but it's actually a tremendous amount of information. You can actually go on there and find articles on what we've talked about today. R programming, machine learning. There's even an article that actually shows you how to write a machine learning algorithm for your campaigns based on weather patterns. Kathleen (29:30): Wow. Don (29:31): So there is so much information on those three sites. Love those sites for just pure data science and learning. There's a channel that I particularly like on YouTube. The gentleman's name is Ken Yee. And he just, he just breaks it down to basics, and there's a lot of good how to's and information that you can learn from him. And then tracking and tagging, conversion tracking, it's all about Measure School for me. Measure School YouTube channel. Kathleen (30:06): Oh, I will definitely put links to this in the show notes for all of that. Very cool. Well, if somebody wants to learn more about you or reach out and ask you a question or connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that? Don (30:18): Probably LinkedIn you know, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. That's how we connected was on LinkedIn. You know, just look me up. Don Seaberry. I'm there. I'll probably accept the invitation. I connect with as many people as I can. So feel free to reach out Kathleen (30:37): True story. That is how we connected and how Don wound up on the podcast. So check him out on LinkedIn, Don Seaberry. And if you're listening and you liked this episode, or you learned something new, please head to Apple Podcasts and leave the podcast a five star review. That is how we get found. I would love it if you would do that. And of course, if you know somebody else doing kick ass inbound marketing work the best way to get them on this podcast as the next guest is to tweet me at @workmommywork, because I do find my guests through word of mouth. So reach out to me and let me know who you think I should interview. That is it for this week. Thank you so much, Don. It was great talking to you. Don (31:15): Thank you for having me. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

What goes into planning a world class product launch marketing strategy? This week on the Inbound Success podcast, Foursquare Senior Product Marketing Manager Naike Romain shares the process she has used at companies like Wistia, Localytics, HubSpot and Foursquare to successfully pull off major new product launches. From why so many marketing conferences lack diverse audiences, to the lack of diverse options when it comes to stock photography, the importance of precision in how language is used, and how the way we write job descriptions can inhibit our ability to recruit diverse teams, Chere and Kathleen cover a variety of topics that influence diversity not only in the people who work in marketing, but in the marketing campaigns and assets they develop. Check out the full episode to hear more about Naike's process and learn how you can apply it to the development of your own product launch marketing strategy. Resources from this episode: Connect with Naike Romain on LinkedIn Transcript Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Naike Romain, who is the senior product marketing manager at Foursquare. Welcome Naike. Naike (00:29): Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited. Kathleen (00:32): I am really excited to have you here because first of all, you have such an interesting career as a marketer. You've worked at a lot of different companies that that are, you know, from, from HubSpot to Foursquare. And you've really kind of dug deep into product management and, or marketing rather, I should say. And we're going to talk about something that I am really interested in at the moment. So selfishly as the host, I get to do these things and steer the topics in a direction that, that helps me with some things I'm working on and that topic is product launches. But before we get into that, can you tell a little bit about yourself and your career and how you wound up where you are now? And then of course, I think most people know Foursquare, but just in case they don't, maybe you could give a quick update on that. Naike (01:18): Sure. So I'm going to give you the really abbreviated version of how I got here, because it's a long story as my LinkedIn page will tell you. But essentially I started off working in tech support and little by little figured out that my niche or the things that I, what I've liked a lot about working at software companies had to do with understanding how products got developed, but also being able to flex them creative strengths and ability and product marketing seem like they're really a really good fit for those skills or those passions. And so from, I went from tech support to account management and then really decided to make a swing at becoming a product marketer. And so I got my first product marketing role at Wistia where I was the first product marketer they'd ever hired. And it was my first product marketing job.  Kathleen (02:12): Wow. Yeah, no pressure there. Naike (02:14): Yeah. it was a steep learning curve on all around, and I'm excited to talk a little bit about that. And then made my way from there to Localytics. And then HubSpot and now Foursquare, and for folks who are unfamiliar or forgot Foursquare, it started out as like they invented the check-in. So if you remember, a couple years ago, like 10 years ago, when everybody was checking in to different locations, lots of restaurants and places it was like sort of a social app where folks would engage with their friends a little bit, know where they were and sort of keep track of their comings and goings and all these really interesting places. I work on the B2B side of the business where we focus on we've focused on business use cases for location data. So for the folks who are interested in supporting their marketing with another layer of context, like they use location information to do so. So that can go into measuring the effective effectiveness of your ads on, on people coming to in store visits, or if you want to develop applications that are, that require location context. So if somebody is calling for an Uber and they type in the name of a venue, that's calling on Foursquare's API to support that. Kathleen (03:34): Oh, that's so interesting. I will confess, I did not know that that is the space that Foursquare was in these days. Because I was a huge Foursquare user back when it was the check in tool. And I can't remember what they called it, but like I was the, what was it? The King or... Naike (03:53): The mayor. Kathleen (03:55): Thank you. I was the mayor of several locations and my house, fun fact, to this day I live on a road called state street and we I have four kids and we also sponsor a midshipman from the U S Naval Academy, which for people who aren't familiar with the service Academy is basically that just means that you sort of like unofficially adopt these kids who are going to school there for the four years, they're there and you give them a place to go and crash when they have free time. Kathleen (04:20): Cause they don't have a lot of it. And so on any given weekend, we have like eight people laying around our house, watching movies, eating food, playing video games. What have you. So it's totally, and we have two dogs and eight chickens. So it's crazy here. It's very chaotic. And so we live on state street, we have this chaotic situation. And so our, our location on Foursquare was called state of chaos. And to this day, that, to this day, that term like has lived on in, in other ways that, that we use in all started with Foursquare. So fantastic. I love that. That is my, my little four square story. So, so we, you and I talked and, and I know, you know, I was really excited to chat with you because you have been involved in so many different product launches and that's something that I am deeply involved in planning for at the moment. And you know, I, I've always done demand gen marketing, but not necessarily like, like traditional product marketing. And so I would love it if you could just maybe walk me through when you know, you're going to have a new release. How do you think about product launches and how do you kind of mentally organize yourself and plan out a strategy for those things? Big question. I know, start wherever you want. Naike (05:43): Sure. I mean, I think that one of the early things that I figured out needed to be done with sort of work for myself was organizing launches in terms of expected outcome or impact. So I would be thinking about launches in terms of, is it an awareness launch. Is this a revenue launch? Is this a retention launch? And sometimes it's a combination of all those things and you just need to prioritize them. But I try to at best court categorize is this is this for awareness retention or revenue. From there, I would then try to think about what, what strategies or what tactics we needed to do to support these overarching awareness goals. So, I'd start by just drafting out a list of like, what awareness things do we need or what retention things do we need, or what revenue goals do we need to hit for this launch. Naike (06:28): And then I would go about identifying what tactics we need to work on to get there. The key to this though before taking, before I say anything else is, is really alignment. And so my best, my best guess at what these goals were means nothing if it's not in line with what the product leadership or executive stakeholders think about the launch, and I've made the mistake of launching ahead with a plan to be told, Hey, I thought we were going to be going much bigger than this, or that's not exactly what I had in mind. And so I think before we even say like, Hey, this is how I was start get, I do start with those buckets and then start to try to come up with goals. But alignment is critical, especially at the very beginning. Kathleen (07:14): I love that you brought that up. I agree with that. And, and, and I would love it if you could maybe talk me through how you get that alignment and who needs to be involved in those conversations. Naike (07:27): That's, it's really hard. I think that the more folks you invite in the more likely you are to be making decisions driven by consensus, and that's a hard thing to try to resist, but it's important that you do it. So getting folks to make decisions. I personally think that if it's a big launch, you need all the way up to the CEO. But I'll say that the, if there's an executive sponsor for your launch, like a product leader somebody on the C level, those are the folks that you need to agree that the launch is going to take, you know, it's going to be aligned on budget and aligned on goals. And then typically they'll let you decide on tactics yourself, but making sure that, you know, we, we hope to reach X many people or we expect to see X percent increase in growth in this product or adoption to increase by this much. Naike (08:21): Like those are the things that you really need to get get executive visibility on. It makes sure that they agree. And then before moving forward, and for me, what that's look like is a series of feedback loops. So essentially I would go so far in a plan and say, okay, let me start with your schools. And then come back and say, are these goals like what you were thinking? Let's talk about this. Okay. Now I'm going to go a little bit farther. And all right, now I don't think I want to do a video shoot. I want to have some blog posts I want to do press, are, are these the tactics that you thought you were thinking, or should we have an, should we go bigger with this and, and go back and get that feedback? And then I can then go rally internally and present the plan to folks and get inputs and start working. Naike (09:05): But the other, the other thing that I learned is that you shouldn't go all the way to the end of all of that, and then try to get, and then try to get executive or stakeholder feedback one, because it's hard to get their attention for that long. It's easier if you can do it in small bites and say, okay, we've already committed to this. Now I'm just going to take it a step further and get some more input and then work, which feels like it feels like a roundabout way of doing things, but it's really, it's in my opinion, the most effective way. If you can to like, say, I'm going to just go so far, get this feedback and then take it a little further. Because I have done the thing where I've developed an entire plan and sent it out, it's going to ask for feedback and people have been like, sure. Naike (09:43): Yeah. Okay. And then didn't really fully read the document or weren't fully present in a meeting and didn't really catch on to everything. And so this is another product marketing thing. You can fall victim to the executive swoop and poop easily. This is something that that it's not a knock on executives. Of course, it's just, it's more to say that they have a ton on their plates. Their attention is limited. You really need to be the owner of these outcomes. And so making sure that you're actually getting engagement and you're, they're engaged in what you're telling them and that they understood what you said and are onboard do that. If you can, if doing it in smaller bites is easier than that's the best, just the best way to go. Kathleen (10:27): Now I have a bunch of questions about this, I guess the first one is let's, let's actually rewind to what I would think of as sort of the beginning, which is some of the strategic decisions that need to be made in order for you to even begin to do things like set goals. And I was having a conversation about this with somebody recently, like how do you, where does ownership for strategic decisions around things like we have this new product? Are we going to keep it under the same brand name? Are we going to totally spin it off? Are we going to keep it on our website or create another microsite? You know, like those strategic decisions, is it going to be, is it going to be freemium or is it, are we going to go out right away and try to sell it? You know, where do those decisions get made? Naike (11:19): I think it's a little bit of a gray area. A lot of, I think that it usually comes from the top, but with the input of marketing leaders, product marketing and product to help sort out where, how we'll be best positioned in the market. So a product marketer might have some input there for sure. And should feel comfortable. I would hope to make some recommendations in terms of how does this set us up in the market? What are our competitors look like in this space and how can we best position ourselves? Is that as a new brand or does it hurt us to start something fresh? Yeah. so I say that that starts with like operations and execs and with the input of marketing leaders, product leaders product marketing. Kathleen (12:00): That makes sense. And then you talked about goal setting, so you have your three categories of launches and you identify what bucket it falls into and then you work on setting goals. I imagine that once you've been in a product marketing role for a while at a particular company, that gets easier because you have some historical data, but talk me through how you go about goal setting. If you're either new to a role, or like you talked about at Wistia, you were the first product marketer. So like, what do you do in those cases where you're kind of creating this out of whole cloth? Naike (12:36): You guess there's not really a science to it, essentially. I would be, I would take whatever data we had about the product and look at the things that we're trying to influence and make a best guess. So if this is a product, if we were looking at a product update that was for retention, for instance, and we know that this is addressing a problem that our customers have had for a little while, the number I would look at is like support tickets and say, okay, we've had, you know, six complaints about this every single month for the last six months. I want to see that there's a market decrease in complaints about this issue once you've released this product and just go from there. So I'm, you know, you, sometimes you have to get unconventional. That's not like customer support. Tickets is not a typical marketing metric, but you have to, you have to measure what you can otherwise. Naike (13:28): It'll be hard to say what you've actually accomplished. And so making sure it's a, it's a sig-, the support tickets is a signal that folks actually learned about the update that they've leveraged it, it tells it, it tells you a lot. And so you make your best guess and say, okay, I'm going to assume that this is going to lead to a reduction in support tickets, or we, our blog sees X amount of traffic per month. I'm going to make an assumption that we're going to see maybe a 10 to 15% increase and just aim for it. If you don't, if you fall shy, that's okay. Measure it and continue to grow on it for the next one. Kathleen (14:01): Yeah. And, and do you have any kind of personal rule of thumb for how many different goals you set? Naike (14:08): I try to, I try to limit them, but I think that they're, I try to, I don't have like a, I don't have a rule of them. I look at the bucket and then I put a couple of metrics under them, maybe, maybe four or five, just things to keep an eye out for at the beginning. It's not a disaster if you don't hit them, it's just a way to keep track of like, okay, this is where we started. Let's see where we can get, let's try to do some benchmarking while we're at it. Kathleen (14:36): And talk to me about timelines. Like, you know, how much time is enough time to plan a launch. And I'm sure the answer is, it depends, but I would love to know like what it depends on and Naike (14:47): Sure. Yeah, I you're Def you're right. It totally, I think that being embedded with the product team and working really closely with them helps a lot with that. So if you're sitting, if you're, you don't ever want to be in a position where our product team is sort of tossing a finished product over to you, and then you have to start, ideally you're aligned really closely with them. So you can start to see the formation of the product. You can start to envision and learn a little bit about timelines from being close from, from that point, that's when you should start to develop things like you shouldn't be developing positioning after the thing is built, you should be in the room thinking about it, figuring out how it fits into the market and contributing those perspectives along the way. So as you approach launch, and you need to get consensus on goals and you need to rally the rest of the cross functional marketing team to support by creating content or developing assets, things like that. You need to, then that part in it's honest own, like getting the message out takes a couple of weeks, like a week or so, and then you need to stay on top of it to through completion. So I think, you know, the optimal time is like six weeks, six weeks from, we have consensus on goals. We have we're all on board with the positioning and the narrative, and now we have time to execute and test everything before we release. That would be my ideal if I could always get six weeks. Kathleen (16:11): Yeah. And and how much time do you generally need for like, what happens before that six weeks that planning that, that, you know, coming up with the goals? Naike (16:23): Well it takes me probably like a couple of days. It takes the team, probably it probably takes maybe two weeks with all the back and forth. And it, and it also depends on the size of the launch. If it's just like a feature release, you don't need to go through all of this. You're not necessarily repositioning or introducing anything, ground shaking. But for something big two weeks or more to hire it out, all the kinks about what this about how this changes the positioning of the company, or do we need to make sure that we're in alignment with the rest of our brands and the goals for the business for the year? Kathleen (16:58): Yeah, that makes sense. So you, you go through that planning process, you get your consensus on the goals, and then it's time to really start rolling up your sleeves. Can you talk me through, do you have any kind of a framework, a planning framework or, or taxonomy of like the types of assets that you generally create for product launches? How do you approach that? Naike (17:21): What I, what I have is sort of like a menu there's just like a list of all different types of things that we could potentially create. And the list gets shorter depending on the tier of the launch. So for a tier one, you have lists of like maybe 50 things and you don't have to do every single one, but there's a lot that goes into that. And so you want to make sure that you have all your bases covered and as a way to make sure that you're not inventing to do you have an easy, easily referenceable list of things. So obviously with a tier one launch they're going to want a webpage. You're going to want maybe swag or you're going to want to do internal comms, a really strong internal comms campaign and make sure the entire company is ready to support it for like a tier three where you're just, you know, you're announcing something to customers. You want to make sure that you have your docs updated. You send an email, you maybe have some messaging, and that could be the extent of it. So I use this list to sort of just as like a, as a, as a reference to say, okay, did we do all that we could to get the word out? Are we supporting this to the best of our ability? Kathleen (18:34): And then one of the things I I'm always interested in is how do you time things when it really comes down to like, this product is ready to go? What is your thinking around, you know, when do you publicly let people know something's available? Because I feel like there's this tension between wanting to drive anticipation and excitement and interest ahead of the launch, but then also this, you know, the, the fear, especially in the tech or the software world of like, well, we don't want to let the cat out of the bag too soon cause somebody could scoop us. So how do you, how do you approach that? Naike (19:13): I think that that two things one is that it's really important internally that we separate product readiness from launch readiness. They're not the same thing. They don't need to perfectly match each other. You shouldn't be, you know, holding a bag, waiting for product to say this is ready and then running off to tell the market about it. It's OK to let something be ready. Use the time between that. You can use the gap between product readiness and launch readiness for betas, for feedback. There's a lot that can be done in that time. We don't have to immediately run to let's go tell the market. And the way, the way that I think about it is making sure that we're ready when everybody and ready, everybody internally is ready to support. So if the support team's not ready, then the marketing is not ready. If the sales team's not ready, then the marketing's not ready. We haven't done all the things that we need to do internally to make sure that we're aligned. And you don't want to see the launch fail because you invite hundreds of thousands of people to try something and then you're not ready to support it. And that falls on product marketing's plate as well. Kathleen (20:22): Yeah. so tell me a little bit about some of the more successful product launches that you've been involved in. I'd love to just hear examples of times when you felt like it really went well. Naike (20:36): Sure. so one of my all time favorite launches that I got to work on was for a 360 video product at Wistia. So we did, we developed this proprietary way to support hosting 360 videos and measuring where folks interact with the video, if they look left or right, or, or scroll, you can track that. And so this was this really unique thing that I'd never in a one, it's something that I'd never seen before myself, but also the market I'm sure had, was not ready for something like a lot of people were not using 360 video yet. So it was an opportunity to do something really unique. And in thinking about this launch, we were developing this demo so that folks could try it out on the webpage. We did a number of really unique things. Naike (21:28): So one would be was this demo. So anybody could go to the webpage and test out to play a video, look at it and then watch as the tracking developed alongside your movement. That was really cool. Separately, I in trying to understand the subject better joined, joined a friend at a 360 video and VR a meetup. And so I went to the meetup to see, like, what are people in this space like talking about? Is it, are they thinking about it as video? Like where do we fit into this landscape? And I ended up meeting the organizers and I was like, you know, what, if we hosted an, a meetup, what if that, like, could that be cool? And they were like, huh, well maybe we typically already have our venues, but I convinced them. And so we got to host ahead of the launch. Naike (22:12): We hosted the VR meetup at our office and we got to bring the community into the space and got to see all the really awesome things people were doing with, I mean, beyond just like the demos of all the cool VR stuff we did, we did some presentations, we presented our product with, to them and got some really cool feedback on to see what folks in the space for doing. And then at launch, it felt like we were really well primed. So we had, we invited, we invited the community in, we had been developing this really interesting demos. So folks who, who wouldn't necessarily be in the loop, got it. When you interact with the demo, you immediately at the sense of like, Oh, I see what they're doing here because it's novel. And then we released the regular launch assets and that was really cool. We also partnered really well with our customers who are doing 360 video. So we had a lot of follow on content about how folks were leveraging it to give folks context. And that was really, that was really awesome and really special. Kathleen (23:10): Yeah, no, that, that brings me to another question, which is around content. I mean, I think there's a delicate dance of, you know, you, you want to, when you have these launches ready to go, you want to have enough content, all ready, ready, so that not only can you support people who are interested in the product, but you can generate interest like almost this full funnel strategy. But then I would think you also want to kind of tee some content in advance. Maybe that doesn't mention the product, but that talks to the pain points that it's solving that begins to build an audience for it. So can you talk me through how you think about that? Naike (23:46): Sure. I think that it's part of the planning when I do a big cross-functional meeting and I say, okay, this is the thing that we're releasing. I invite the cross functional teams, the content teams. So the folks who are working on content currently. So talk to me about what they think makes sense. So I try not to lead with, we need six blog posts and we need a webpage and please just like deliver all this stuff. I try to invite conversation about what they think would work best. What's already on their schedule. How can we tailor some of the things that they were thinking about to support the launch? And so we look at the calendar together, we talk about what the dependencies might be for developing content related to this launch. And then I dig in with them. So if they're like, okay, I think we can fit in three posts before launch, and then we can slot in these others. Naike (24:35): I'm like, great. What do I, how do I help deliver on that? And sort of take a production role I'm like doing, do you need time with an engineer? Do you need time with product, like doing me to like bring in some other domain experts so that you have what you need to create this. And that's typically how it's worked really well. I think that if you, if I were to come in top down and say like, Hey, I, what I see is like over the course of six weeks, we need six blog posts. So deliberate. You're not gonna make any friends and people weren't hugging to be excited about the launch. And that's not what you want. So inviting folks to share their expertise with you and let them and let you know, like, Hey, I've seen other companies do this really cool thing. Do you think we could try it this way? I'm all ears. I want to hear that because I can't pretend to be the, you know, the master of blog content or other types of interactive ways we could, we could get in touch with our prospects and customers. Kathleen (25:25): Yeah. I feel like that's a lesson for marketers in general and not even just product product marketers is, is the attitude that you go in with. You're so much more well-served if you think about the other parts of the company as your customer as opposed to, you know, them needing to give you things like, I need a blog, I need this, I need that. You know, I, it's more like, how can I help you? How can I make this easier for you? That is such an important little mind shift, a mindset shift that makes a massive difference anywhere in marketing that you work. Naike (25:59): Totally, totally agree. Kathleen (26:01): So what are some things that you wish you knew when you started out in product marketing? Naike (26:07): Woo. Everything, all the things I feel like if there is a product marketing mistake I've made it. But I think really, I wish I wish somebody had told me that the, I think the key of being a good product marketer is being curious about the product. I think I knew that inherently, but when you get busy when you get sales asking for things and you have launches on your plate, it's easy to sort of distance yourself from what's going on and focus on making sure that you're delivering. And because you're a marketer, there are actual tangible assets that people expect from you. But your job is to really remain curious and remain close to the product don't ever get too far away from it. And what are some ways you do that that means like going to standups and asking questions and asking people to explain things to you. Naike (27:01): I'm fairly new in my role in Foursquare. And after I do the regular, one-on-ones where I meet everybody on the marketing team and I meet sort of execs. I do the same with a CS and engineers. And I'm like, can you explain this to me? Like, how does this, how did these things work together? How does this make us different? What would you change? I want to know those things from the people who interact with the product every day. I want to know why the thing that they're working on, like, why is it important? Not just like what they're doing, but like, why does it matter? And continue to, that's how you build those relationships. That's how you continue to stay close and understand that, you know, it's hard to predict product work. It's really hard to, it's hard to predict when something's going to be ready, but when you have those relationships, you can go in and say, okay, so we thought this would be ready two weeks ago, what's changed. Naike (27:50): And you, and you don't have to have that conversation from like, I'm coming down on you, places like you're my friend. We, I understand how, what it takes to build this product. I want to understand what we need to do to help you to launch it. So having those relations and trips and remaining curious and remaining close is like critical. And I think that there have been times in my career where I've just been like, I have to get this, this one pager out. I need to develop this specific, this pitch deck, blah, blah, blah. And well, that stuff's important. It's not going to be as good if you don't have those close, you don't have that closeness and that curiosity. Kathleen (28:07): Yeah, absolutely. Any advice for product marketers out there when it comes to product launches, anythings that you think are really critical for them to do or keep in mind? Naike (28:35): This is probably more of like a personal thing than like a task thing, but I think keeping a cool head things are going to go wrong. Things are going to slip. That's normal and it should not be taken super personally. It should not be taken really hard. The reality is, like I mentioned before, it's really hard to predict product stuff. And so you may find yourself already on launch day and something happens and you're not able to like, there's a bug that prevents you from going from everything, from being shipping out. Or you have folks waiting for your, you have, you have press, that's waiting to be published and you have to tell everybody to wait, it's worth it to do that. Calmly. It's worth it to not freak out for your own wellbeing, but also for everyone else. It's your job as the person in the middle to clear the fog to make, to make sure that things are being communicated well, but also keep a cool head. I think you'll be better for it. And the, and everybody else around you will be too, cause I've definitely made the mistake of freaking out and setting things off in the wrong setting, off, sending out the wrong tone. And so keep a cool head because are going to go wrong and that's okay. You'll make them better. You'll communicate clearly and you'll get the launch out. Kathleen (29:47): You just actually raised another question in my head, which is communication cadence. Cause you talked about communication. So do you have a certain cadence that you maintain of like, how often do you give updates? Who do they go to? You know, are those updates by email, by video, do you hold a meeting? What does that look like for you while while preparing for launch? Naike (30:06): I typically do a biweekly depending on how much lead time there is. So if we are, you know, we're way ahead of lodge, maybe like every two weeks I touched base with the cross functional group, that's working on it to talk to them about where things are and how we're like, if there are contingencies, if you know, design is waiting on copy, what's happening with copy so we can support getting things, you know, through the pipeline. And then as we get closer, we'll do a one week meeting with that same cross functional team, just more of a status update. I know those are the worst kinds of meetings, but they actually really do help as a forcing function to make sure that everybody is getting the things that they need and catch any red flags if things are falling behind. Naike (30:52): So I'll do a weekly meeting and then day of launch, I like to do an internal only company meeting that says, Hey, these are the things that we're releasing today. This is why they're so important or so excited. And these are all the people who worked on it to give a big kudos to the folks who supported it and have been putting in long hours for the last six weeks or so, trying to get these assets out the door and then obviously including tweet, copy, or social copy for folks internally to support the launch in that email. Kathleen (31:22): That's a great point. You know, how do you, how do you mobilize the team to do its part in gaining momentum around the launch? I feel like Wistia is like the masters at this because I remember, I can't remember what it was they did, but there were there just their use of video throughout the whole team was unbelievable. But how do you approach that? I mean, you've worked at a couple of different companies, not everybody's Wistia, so Naike (31:46): Right. I mean, yeah. So I think the easiest thing to do is just make it easy. So in those emails I would send out like copy that folks could remix on their own and images that they could include and people would happily take exactly what I wrote or change it up and they would heed the call it's asked. So it's one important to just ask them to do that. A lot of companies don't and then it just, you don't get that sort of surround sound effect when the company launches and there's like 20 people all talking about it, you get that from your employees being engaged and sharing. So you want to encourage them to do that and you can tell them, Oh, I mean, that suggests nicely. And then beyond that other companies that I've worked at do like internal contests that's for the most social clicks and shares or tools that actually support these types of internal campaigns. So like what tools for example, Oh my goodness. I'm going to forget the name.  Kathleen (32:40): Sorry. I know I totally put you on the spot there. Naike (32:42): There is, there are tools that do the sort of internal like, I don't want to call it gamification, but essentially it like contests inside your company. So you, they like share the posts that they've posted. And then in the tool keeps track of the volume of visits or shares or clicks, and then you could reward the person or people who got the most, so it encourages those types. And so if you offer something cool, people will be more likely to engage lots of teams that I've worked on, have a little celebration there's in the office. So the entire company is invited to like celebrate the release of this thing. You get to celebrate your coworkers. And also just again, bringing that awareness. And at that time you can also encourage folks to participate by sharing on social or other places. Kathleen (33:29): That's great. I love that idea and getting the whole company involved and excited and kind of building momentum for that. Well, all right. We're going to change gears here. And I'm in very interested to know what you're going to say in response to my first of my two questions I ask everybody the first one is, and I'm going to give you a little bit of a twist. So the first question is I always ask people, is there a particular company or individual that's really like setting the standard for what it means to do inbound marketing? Well, right now, and the twist I'm going to give you is you cannot answer with any company that you've ever worked for because it's too easy to say, HubSpot or Wistia or any of these. So you have to pick a company you have not been employed by. Naike (34:14): Okay. Then my answer is, and I've been thinking about this, is Zendesk. I think they do really great inbound marketing. They have these really beautiful blogs it's you can tell that it's really well cared for, curated, and they almost have like a lifestyle brand for like, for folks who work in support. So it's not just like, these are our products and these are the ongoings of our company, but they also really care about they also really care about the community and they create content specific for that community. And it's really fantastic. So I really love if you go to their blog, it's really multiple blogs. They're fantastic. And they look great. And I can imagine being, if I were to support that this would be the place that I want to hang out for sure. Kathleen (35:01): Oh, I definitely need to go look at that. We're a Zendesk customer, but I haven't looked really closely at their blog. So I will be looking at it as soon as I get off with you. Question number two is that most marketers I talk to say their biggest pain point is just keeping up with everything that's changing in the world of digital marketing. It's so much. So how do you stay educated? How do you keep up with all the changes? Naike (35:29): Goodness, I think what I, what I, I really rely on LinkedIn surprisingly have a lot of connections that are super, super active. I'm not super active there, but I do have a lot of connection that are super active and talk a lot about what they're what they're finding interesting and what their resources are. And I follow a lot of that. I also, with regards to product marketing in particular, I like Pragmatic. Pragmatic Marketing is obviously, like the they're, they're really experts in the space. So I look at them. I also follow April Dunford really closely. Kathleen (35:53): I have to get her on this podcast. Naike (36:01): Oh my goodness. I would love that. She's fantastic. And I read her book and I think I saw her at a conference in Toronto a couple of years ago and I was just stunned. I was like, this woman just gets it. She knows. She just, she's just on top of it for sure. And really impressive to like hear her speak, but also just like really smart. And I, so I follow her really closely when she has something to say, I like definitely pay attention and listen. Kathleen (36:35): Yeah. I heard her speak at HubSpot's inbound conference and was blown away and she talked about positioning and it was, it was amazing talk. And then since then I've followed her really closely on Twitter, because like you say, every time she proverbially opens her mouth, like great stuff comes out. So April, if you're listening, come on and be a guest. And I would be remiss if I did not give a shout out right now to Mark Amigone and Nick Salvatoriello, who both suggested Naike as a guest because they had worked with her at HubSpot. And so if you're listening, I always end the podcast by saying, let me know if you know, any other kick ass inbound marketers. And I really mean it because this is how I find guests. So it's a lot of it is word of mouth. So if you, so thank you, Nick and Mark for the recommendation so much. And thank you Naike for coming on. Naike (37:20): This was great. Kathleen (37:22): If you are listening and you learn something new, which I mean, I definitely did. Please consider heading to Apple podcasts and leaving the podcast a five star review. I would love it and it would help us get found by other listeners. And as I said, if you know somebody else doing great inbound marketing work, please really do tweet me at @workmommywork, because I really would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Naike. Naike (38:04): Thank you. Have a great day.

Why is it important to have diversity in the world of marketing? This week on the Inbound Success podcast, HammerTech VP of Marketing Chere Lucett joins host Kathleen Booth for a candid conversation about diversity in marketing. From why so many marketing conferences lack diverse audiences, to the lack of diverse options when it comes to stock photography, the importance of precision in how language is used, and how the way we write job descriptions can inhibit our ability to recruit diverse teams, Chere and Kathleen cover a variety of topics that influence diversity not only in the people who work in marketing, but in the marketing campaigns and assets they develop. Check out the full episode to hear what they had to say about diversity in marketing, and why it is so important for every organization to consider. Resources from this episode: Connect with Virginia on LinkedIn   Chere and Kathleen recording this episode Transcript Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Virginia Chere Lucett, who is the VP of revenue for HammerTech. Welcome. Chere (00:22): Thank you. Thank you for having me. This is exciting. Kathleen (00:25): I am really looking forward to talking to you because you know, we are having this conversation at an interesting moment in our world and lots of conversations happening around diversity and all of the different aspects of that. And, you know, I think diversity in marketing is a fascinating topic and I thought you brought a really interesting perspective to it because of your particular situation. And, you know, you're, you're a woman working in a very male dominated industry. There, there's all different dimensions to this. So maybe to kick off this conversation you could tell us more about yourself and your story and how you got to where you are today. And then also what HammerTech is. Chere (01:13): Perfect. So I will, I will say that I am a Latina who got to this position through, I would say probably blood, sweat, and a lot of tears sometimes. And I've, I've been in marketing. I started in marketing 20 plus years ago and all the different avenues that sort of surround marketing or that are directly related to marketing. And then, you know, as marketing has evolved, you know, all the different niches I've, so I've been able to kind of see the change in our industry over a long, a long period of time. So that that's been helpful. And I, you know, I graduated with a degree in English and which was really sort of, it's, it's, I think one of the best degrees you could have, but at the time, the question is, what are you gonna do with a degree you're either going to go into, you're going to go into something that's going to be like, you're going to go into a legal career, or maybe you're going to go to be a teacher. Chere (02:14): And I really found myself in, in marketing, on accident and it came through content and writing and, and being able to have that skill that was able to help drive me through. And it opened a lot of doors for me. So that's how I sort of ended up in marketing. It was never my, my first focus, but, you know, as many of us do and working, we, we tumble into the, into the career and then, and then we're lifelong marketers, and now it seems like we're going to be moving maybe more into revenue as, as you know, what I do. And so I've seen again, that evolution is interesting. So that's a little bit about me. HammerTech is a construction safety SaaS platform. Obviously the focus within the construction industry is to help keep people safe. And with construction being one of the most dangerous occupations in the world, it's something that is very near and dear to our heart. And we're a very purpose driven company. And the purpose is just to help people, keep people alive, save lives. And so that's a little bit about, about HammerTech as well. Kathleen (03:21): And I will say, spoken as someone who was a political science major and now a marketer, amen about the story and how we sort of fall into it. Yeah. And funny enough, and with political science too, it was like, what am I going to do with this degree? And everybody I knew went to law school, except for me. So I think we could have a completely other conversation about that, probably. So you, you have this really interesting kind of mix of factors that, that are playing into, you know, who you are as you show up in your role every day. You are a Latina, as you said. And you're a woman. You're in a male dominated industry. Although, interestingly, I feel like marketing is by and large female dominated. Construction is male dominated. Chere (04:12): Construction is male dominated. So when looking statistically, while it may seem that women still sort of are, you know, kind of we're the majority. It's, we're still showing that we've reached parity. Like we may be at 45% to their, to their 55%, funny enough, but we aren't, we aren't anywhere near 75 or 80%. Not saying that that's what I want. I'm not saying we should take over the world, but yeah. I mean, we seem that way, but we're still sort of, we're still sort of getting to that 50% when it comes to just being a female. And then when you talk about being a female, being in higher leadership position, its false. Kathleen (04:55): You still see a lot of male CMOs. Yeah, yeah. Chere (04:59): Construction. Yes. It is a very male dominated industry. And I've been in mostly male dominated industries throughout my career, which has been really interesting for me. Because it's, it's just, it's sometimes difficult to be taken seriously to have your voice heard. But you offer a very different perspective than your male counterpart, counterparts often do. So, and then yes, being a Latina within construction is also really interesting because when you look across the board, when you look at some of the larger contractors, even some of the smaller contractors, you're talking about mostly white male founders, board members, company owners, VPs, C levels. You're starting to see more women rise to the, rise through the ranks and take on those positions, but very, very rarely are you seeing anyone of color in those positions. Kathleen (06:04): Yeah, that's interesting. You know, and, and there's so many things running through my head right now, you know, and I think the first question somebody might have as they listen to this episode is, well, why are we talking about diversity on this podcast? Because the podcast is usually about, you know, people doing successful marketing campaigns or, you know, who are experts in certain strategies or tactics. And you and I talked a lot about this, and, and I mean, I have certain opinions about this, which I'll share. And by the way, if you're listening, we, Virginia and I both agreed that, that we're, we're going to go there. We're going to talk about things that are uncomfortable and tough because there's really no point in having this conversation if you don't. We, otherwise we might as well just talk about, you know, pay per click ads or something like that. Kathleen (06:53): But you know, my, my I've been asked many times in my career, why is it important to have diversity in marketing? Meaning if you have a marketing team of 10 people, why is it important that that team be diverse? So I had a similar conversation with somebody about marketing conferences. You know, speaking only for myself, I go to a lot of marketing conferences and, and my anecdotal observation is that I walk around and it is a sea of white faces. Now, maybe I'm just going to the wrong marketing conferences, which is entirely possible. But you know, while, while at least anecdotally again, I see a lot of women, I don't see a lot of racial diversity in marketing, at least in the places that I've been. And, and so that question has come up several times to me. And my response has always been that I do feel like it's important and, and I have certain reasons why, but I'd love to hear your take on this. Why do you think it's important to have diversity in marketing? Chere (07:56): Here's, you know, I am a very, like, I have a strong creative side, but I have a very logical side. So I like to break it down by numbers. If you're a performance marketer and you look at the population at large, right? So Hispanics, Latinos make up, Latinos, sorry, all of us make up about 18% of the population. Blacks, African-Americans 13% Asians, 9%. We'll just take those three minority groups, right? So you add that all up and you're looking at a pretty hefty percent of the population. Now you look at media spend and how much dollars are spent towards those populations. And you're looking at like, you know, for Hispanics, less than 4% for blacks, African-Americans, you're a little above 1%, a percent of media spent and Asians, I believe are around maybe 5%. So let's just talk about numbers. Let's talk about performance and how your media is performing against those cultural groups, right? If you don't have enough spend towards them right now, you're not going to see as great of results. And you're talking about almost what, what does that almost 40% of the population that is not Caucasian and they have different socio, socioeconomic differences. They have different cultural norms. If we want to be better marketers, we have to be more diverse. You will see better performance of the money, of the dollars that you're spending, when you can be more empathetic towards the individuals you're marketing to. Kathleen (09:40): Yeah. That's a great point. And you know, it's interesting. I think this goes back to that notion of unconscious bias. Like I think a lot of marketers would say that they're, they're not biased. You know, they don't, that they feel that they can, can create marketing campaigns that are for everyone. But I think there's so much that we don't realize we do. You know, for example, when we're designing our websites and we go to stock photography sites and we pick images, you know? By and large, a lot of the images you see on many sites are white people, or they're the Benetton ad, which just looks, you know, I don't know. Sometimes it looks very forced to me. But the reality is in some cases it's because we choose those things. In other cases, it's because there isn't a supply of good diverse photography. Kathleen (10:29): You know, I was involved for, for several years in planning a large marketing conference, and we had this conversation about our speakers and why is it important to have diverse speakers? And, you know, there was some pushback. Somebody said, well, shouldn't we just have the best marketers and the best speakers? And yes, of course I would like to believe that we can find a diverse group of amazing marketing speakers. But beyond that, you know, I remember I worked with somebody who was a person of color and she said you know, we're not going to attract a diverse audience if the audience can't see themselves in, in our speakers. And that affects, you know, how you sell tickets. So I think there's a lot of that. It's very unconscious in many cases. It's, it doesn't have to be this deliberate thing, but deliberate or not, it is equally as impactful in terms of the results to me. Chere (11:18): Right. So what, what, it somewhat amuses me when it comes to marketing is, is a good part of our job is to understand psychology, right? We need to understand sociology. We need to understand anthropology. And if you're a really great marketer, you're constantly trying to put yourself into the shoes of the individual that you want to have a conversation with or that you want to attract, right? And when you, when, and when that's a big makeup of what you do is in marketing, it's almost sometimes, I wonder, why are we not thinking that way then? So if, if somebody is trying to market to me, that has no true understanding of what it's like to be a Hispanic in the United States, it, it can become very stereotypical and offensive. And that's never what any marketer wants to do. I think when you start stepping back and, and, and, and doing the human to human marketing and putting yourself in other people's shoes, you start to become very aware of how ill-equipped you might be to truly talk to different multicultural, diverse groups, without having some intimate knowledge of what they might be going through. Chere (12:34): You'll be more effective when you can have more voices in the conversation that allow you, and they give you the deep insight that make what you do more impactful. Kathleen (12:44): So what would be like an example of that? Because I think for a lot of people, this is such an abstract conversation. They need, almost need to have like concrete examples to be able to understand how this plays out. Chere (12:56): So, I mean, even right now, and I think you see it a lot, the sensitivities of, of advertising, it's a very difficult position to advertise to multicultural groups right now, if you are not someone who has had in depth conversations. Like not understanding what, what gaslighting is. Not understanding the value of, of like what, what of knowing moreso the emotional impacts of how, of different scenarios. And I'll speak from the Hispanic side. If you don't understand the deep family connections with Hispanics and that, you know, it is a very, that just culturally, how, how women are. How women have worked through, you know, the cultural Hispanic, like way of thinking of what women do and what women don't do. If you don't understand a lot of the dynamics of being a first generation American and an immigrant family, those are very difficult things to speak to., And they can come off very surface uncomfortable, very I guess, what's the word? Kathleen (14:09): Glib? Chere (14:09): Yes. Almost like you're, it's almost like you're, you're making fun, right? Stereotypes exist because there's some truth to them, but mostly they can be very painful because they're trying to pick at something that somebody just does, culturally feels very natural for them. And so if you're creating an advertising campaign and you don't understand some of these deep rooted socio cultural norms, you can make huge missteps. Right. So please don't, you know, assume, like, I think I told you that I've walked into a building for, for a job interview. And, and, you know, I was asked if I was part of the cleaning crew. And I had to say, no. Although you know it, because there's a stereotype to that. Right. There's a, and there's, there's nothing wrong with that. I cleaned houses to get my way through college, but you know, that's not what somebody, when I'm going into a job interview wants to, wants to feel like, right. So when people make inferences about a culture that aren't necessarily true, that's where the danger lies. Kathleen (15:14): So how else have you seen that play out? Like, what are, what are some common mistakes that you see marketers make? Chere (15:23): The, I, and this goes back to kind of what you're talking with, the Benetton ad, the token, the token pictures of people of color being placed in scenarios where there's like, there'll be three white people. There'll be one Mexican, one Asian and one black person. And you're okay. That's yes, that's great. But that's not what we're really, that's not what it's like, right? It feels really unnatural. It feels unnatural to just try to straight translate Spanish to English when the connotations are very different, the meanings are different. You can't just, you just can't just take one language and translate it to another and think that's okay. You know, there's, there are so many of those little intricacies when it comes to understanding culture that are so, so important, that could be so offensive to people. And so I would say like straight translations without really thinking through what it might mean in different cultures. I don't know if you remember long ago, the Chevy Nova. Kathleen (16:31): Oh, yes. I even know this story. I know this story, but you're going to tell it, you tell it. Chere (16:38): No. Perfect. That's a perfect example, right, too? If you're going to try to advertise a car that translates, and translate in Spanish "no go," don't expect us to be the first people lining up to buy your vehicle. Kathleen (16:52): Right. It's, I used to teach a class on, on this kind of stuff. And, and I, I would tell the story and I'd be like, it seemed like a great idea, right? Because when you have a product name that you're going to sell globally, you want something that's easy for everybody to say, no matter where they are. So simple words that, that work in any language and Nova is something that's pretty easy to pronounce, right? And it's like a star. It seems such a cool idea, but yeah, it does mean no go. So basically like your car is a lemon. Chere (17:21): Those are the things that you have to be careful of. And I'm, I am actually very sensitive to to pictures and to what I see. And, and you're exactly right. If I, if I see somebody marketing and I see the majority of their marketing imagery does not reflect me or a very diverse cultural base, then, then that's also, that's very difficult for me. Because then I think, how do you know me, if you, if you don't have anyone sort of, you know, you're not showcasing that you'd know about me and about, you know, the way we interact and the way we like to, the way we culturally, you know, network and, and, and work together. Kathleen (18:05): Yeah. You know, I've, and I've for sure been guilty of this because, you know, I look as a white person, it's not something you have had historically to spend a lot of time thinking about. And definitely something that I, I feel I need to work on more. I know there was one company I worked for where I was head of marketing and we were posting pictures of a conference that we had put on and we were marketing the next year's event. And we had just, honestly, it was like candid photos of the crowd at one of the happy hours for the past year's event. And they were great shots and we put them up on, I think it was Facebook, and some Facebook ads, and somebody commented like "nice sea of white faces". And it's true. You know, like I didn't look at it through that lens. I didn't look at it and think, what does this represent? It was just like, Oh, here's a great picture of a bunch of people at happy hour. But then as soon as somebody pointed it out, I was like, Oh yeah, that is all white people. How about that? Chere (19:03): That's such an uncomfortable conversation. I can, I can, from both sides, right? It's difficult for someone like me to point it out because also being sensitive, I want, I, it's not maybe something that you, that you all understand the differences. The lack of, there's a lack of real talk, a lack of real education, right? Between us. Why does it matter so much to us? It's a difficult conversation for you to have on the other side, because also I don't think, and I could be very wrong again, it's that unconscious bias? I don't think there's a good majority of people that don't intentionally, they're not intentionally trying to hurt, right? I don't feel that way. I might be the minority of minorities. I feel like it's a matter of sitting together and having people, and there is some positive discrimination that I think has to happen to allow people to open some doors, for people to step in to some of the, to some of the positions, to step into marketing, to have these opportunities. Chere (20:07): But it really is just a lack of, of, of conversation and really being open to understand each other. Why is it important to us to feel reflected in, in the conversation within the imagery we see? To have our voices in there. What are, what are our, what are our true differences? It's okay to be different. And we should talk about what our differences are so that you can understand the next time that you have this, this marketing group and it's, it is all white. Like, it's not for you to feel bad. It's just to understand that we want in too. Maybe it's not been as easy to get in, and we really need your help also to help pull us in, into something. And we, to be a little bit more intentional. Kathleen (20:49): Well, and I think the most, the greatest thing that came out of that particular instance was that it got us thinking, well, why is this a picture of all white people? Number one. And the answer is, well that's because 98% of the people who came to the event were white. And then the next question was, well, why is that? Why does it seem to attract that, that crowd? And you know, that, that was where that conversation started about, well, when you look at who's speaking, that's really what that looks like. It's a lot of white people, you know, and, and then it became a question of, well, how can we make us a more diverse event from top to bottom? And does it need to start with the people that we invite in as speakers? Does it need to start with how we do our outreach to the business groups that we promote it to? That sort of thing. You know, and I think it just goes back to that, the point I made earlier that like, some of it is like ,where you sit is where you stand. Kathleen (21:45): You know, you notice the things that first, you first, you notice the things that affect you the most. And so I've always been highly aware of like situations where it's all men, because I'm a woman. And so I, I see that. It's just something I see more readily. But I think that's, that's why going back to the, the first kind of point I was making, like, that is why it is important to have diversity in marketing. Because if you have a team of diverse individuals, where they sit is where they stand and they are going to see different things that not all of us can see, you know? And I, I think it was actually you and me, correct me if I'm wrong, but when we first spoke, was it you who, who alerted me to the Twitter account Manels and Wanels? Chere (22:29): No. Kathleen (22:29): Oh my gosh, this is great. Okay. So I don't know who I was talking to, but somebody pointed this out to me. There are these Twitter accounts, Manels and Wanels, I think they're called. And Manels calls out on Twitter, panels, panel discussions, or conferences or events or webinars where all the speakers are men. And Wanels calls out the same types of events, where all the speakers are white. And somebody pointed this out to me, and I was like, okay, this is really interesting. I have to go check this out. And then as soon as I did it, I, I have a big event I'm planning for my job next week. It's a three day virtual summit. And I went back and I looked at my lineup of speakers. And I was like, okay, it's not all white, but it is all men. And I mean, I'm surprised I didn't even see that at first as a woman. Right. But I didn't. I was just sort of going along my merry way and picking people I thought would be great speakers. And then I thought, well, this is ridiculous. I'm sure there are great women speakers in this case on IOT security. It's not like there's no women experts in this domain, you know? And so, and so it is, it is that awareness that I think is sometimes lacking if you're not sitting in and walking in those shoes all the time, seeing that. Chere (23:46): Absolutely. And I guess this whole thing for me now that we have our eyes more open to it, and we're willing to have the conversation and to be willing to have the conversation is a huge step because you can see that a lot of people are taking it personally. Like, like they're getting defensive. Like it's not my fault. I didn't, you know, I didn't, there's that sort of defensiveness in some people and other people are going, wow, I never really realized, right. Because like everyone else, you go about your day. You live in your bubble, you, you, you don't have the same experiences or challenges. And so you often take for granted that those challenges or experiences exist. And now it's not only this openness to say, okay, there's a problem. There's an openness now. Okay. Have a conversation. Now, there has an open, there has to be an openness to be intentional about making sure that we are, we're providing room for all the voices to join the conversation. Chere (24:43): And it's been, it's been interesting. So I will say that my husband is, my husband is white. He's, he's Irish and Irish American. And we've been together for 20 years. And over 20 years, I've, we've gone through different difficulties being a mixed race couple. Even being Hispanic and white, it's more common. But there, there have been subtle differences. And after this has all kind of come forward and we've had hours of really in depth conversations, because I used to say to him, I feel very uncomfortable in here. I don't feel like I belong, or I'm being watched or followed in a high end store. And it feels very uncomfortable to me. And he's never really understood what it felt like. Well, this week, just a couple of weeks ago, while all this was happening, we'd had a lot of these instances before, couple of weeks ago, when this was happening, we were sitting at a table at a nice wine bar and it was in California. Chere (25:47): And in the central coast and we were having a lovely afternoon and there was a couple who was an, unfortunately, you know, it was a white couple who came from an area, and they were complaining how the area had gone, had, had been turned over and had gone really bad and became a crime ridden area. And they started talking about how all of the minorities had moved in and taken their nice neighborhood and really turned it. And people are steeling now and people like, right? And then all of a sudden I looked at my husband and they started whispering because they saw me. And then they started whispering and it was like this people, right. And I said to my husband, it's not the overt issues that bother me as much as it is these, these, the, the micro racisms that happen. And that's kind of how I about like, the imagery. Chere (26:45): That's how I feel about, it's, it's subtle, but it's, it's death by a thousand paper cuts. And that's kind of the things that I, I think that we can look at and we can, we can change, right? And sometimes you just can't help people, but those are the things that really kind of get under your skin when you're a multicultural person trying to exist in an environment that you're not overly represented in. We can look at some of those little, those micro things and we can make those changes that make us feel more comfortable in different surroundings. Kathleen (27:19): So one of the things that I think people tend to question when they hear something like this is you know, how do, how, how do I go about making that change? And what does that really mean? Because, you know, look, I've hired a ton of marketers over the year, and over the years, and I've seen hundreds and hundreds of applications. I would say the vast majority, 75% have been white, white people. You know, and so I think, I know I've heard some people say, well, do I just, you know, do I have to hire somebody who's not qualified? Or, you know, how do you respond to that? Because that's interesting. It's such an interesting conversation that people then get into where they feel like they have to sacrifice something in order to get to that level of diversity. Chere (28:15): That's such a great, I mean, that's such a great question because it, it's not easy. Well, first of all, hiring is never easy, right? We've, same thing. I've hired a number of people. When you look at a resume, you really have to understand what exactly it is you're looking for. But at the same time, you have to read between the lines, right? Not everybody had the same educational capabilities. Not everybody had the same opportunities in different companies. So when you're looking to be more diverse, diverse, and more inclusive, and you're intentional about it, when you're going to hire, there is a lot of talent out there that may just didn't have, they didn't have the guidance, they didn't have the opportunity, but they're driven. And the, one of the most difficult things about, you know, hiring off of resumes is you really just don't know what you're getting until, until you, until you change the resume process, where you allow people to do some video resumes, where you ask some different types of questions that get to the foundation of the person. Chere (29:15): Because if you're just looking at opportunity and you're looking at career, they're not, it's not going to be one to one. We don't have the same opportunities all the time to go to school. We don't have all the opportunities to get the same experience, to get the same internships, to work under the same bright people. So the resumes aren't going to be as glossy, but the people probably are. And they're probably just looking for, to come in and say, nope, you may not have the same experience, but do you have the same ability? That's something that really, if you just, even if you looked at my resume, the ability would outshine the work that you've done, that, that you can list on a sheet. And I would hope that anybody would look at, would look to talk to me to get a sense of what I know and what I can do and not be judged about whether or not I had all the chances that everyone else did. Because I certainly didn't, you know, I had to work really hard to get through school. And I had to fight my way into every position. Kathleen (30:20): Yeah, this is, this is a really interesting topic to me, you know, and I come at this as, as a woman who probably spent too much on her education. I literally just paid my student loans off a few weeks ago and I am, I'm not going to say how old I am, but it's, it's way too many years. I did two graduate degrees. You know, I have no regrets. But, but that's you know, that is one end of the spectrum. But then I really think back, because somebody said this to me. Somebody was like, we should stop requiring college degrees on applications. And, and you know, I don't have anything against that in general. And then I really started thinking about like, who are the best marketers I've ever hired? And three particular people came to mind. Two of the three didn't have college degrees when I hired them. Kathleen (31:12): Interestingly, one of them I hired and I barely looked at her resume. I just, I knew her writing work and it was outstanding. And I just thought, I need this person on my team. And then I found out after I hired her that she didn't have her college degree. And I was like, well, it doesn't matter because you're amazing. You know, and she wound up earning it like on the side over time or whatever. But it wouldn't have made a difference to me. And the other one, and this goes back to your point about like grit and determination, the other one didn't have it. And I knew she didn't have it. And I actually ruled her out. This was for a lower level marketing position, kind of more entry level marketing manager. And I ruled her out initially because she didn't have any degree, let alone a marketing degree and she didn't have any relevant marketing experience. Kathleen (32:00): And I was like, you don't, you don't have the qualifications. I had a lot of other applicants who were more qualified and she came back and she was like, okay, but I really want to work there. Is there, do you have anything? I don't care if it's a marketing job, do you have any role in the company? I'll take it. I want a foot in the door. And I did. I had like a project manager position for something that had nothing to do with our marketing work. And she came in, she took the job and she was unbelievable. And within something like, I don't even know, six months, we had moved her into the job that she originally applied for and she wound up being one of the best people to ever hold that position, you know? And, and eventually she too got her college degree like over time at night or something. I don't even know, but again, it wouldn't have mattered. And so that really opened my eyes between the two of them. I was like, maybe I'm thinking about this all wrong. You know, and, and and, and she, she actually was funny. The second girl posted something, when she finally got her degree, she was like, no looking back. Salaries over sororities, you know? And I was like, man, you're smart. I don't know it was, it was eye opening. Chere (33:11): I think it's a, that's a, I mean, it's a fantastic conversation. When you look at just some of the socioeconomics of, I'll just say the Latin population, of the Hispanic population, the ability to go to college isn't always there. However you have just as like, just as any percentage of the population, statistically, you're going to have brilliant people within that, but just don't have the finances. Don't have the capabilities or, you know, can't leverage their parents or, or savings to really go. And maybe they'll go to junior college, you know, and be able to get an AA, which is a more affordable opportunity. But then when you have these requirements on your, on the job application, or excuse me, on the, the job posting, it automatically tells people, you know, I'm probably not good enough for that position, when the truth of the matter is they, they re very much could be. Chere (34:07): And I often, I don't, I don't hire based on the bucket, based on whether or not they have a degree or not. Or if they have a degree that fits with marketing, because we're both living evidence that that doesn't matter. It doesn't, you just learn a one to one thing. But when you, when you do have that, it limits them. I like not having that because I want to see who who's going to come with the most creative minds, who's going to bring the most diverse experience and ideas. And it doesn't even have to be multicultural diversity. It's just diversity in a way they go about things. I mean, that, that makes you a really great marketing team is when you have people that don't always think alike, but you get them into a room and you start to get them to collaborate. Just like the great, best advertisements come from just these great minds working together, who come from different perspectives. Some people are driving or some people are just great writers, some people are visual thinkers. You put them all together, they share their experiences and you come up with something fantastic. Kathleen (35:06): Yeah, I agree with that. And I also think it's really interesting. Sometimes hiring for the degree can backfire on you. And the example I'm going to give, and maybe this is maybe this is prejudiced thinking in and of itself, but I'll say it because we're going there today. You know, I think there are definitely cases where you hire somebody who has the marquee degree from the amazing university and who has worked at like a big name company. And in reality, what happened was, you know, they had, they came from money, they had family connections. They were able to get into a good college because, you know, either have a family legacy or a donation was made. I mean, we're coming off of a year of college entry scandals. So they got, they got into, you know, the Harvard or the Brown or whatever. Kathleen (35:51): And once you're there, you are in a network of other kids who come from those backgrounds, very powerful, very privileged. The network in and of itself is one of the values of a, of a degree from a place like that. And so that gains you entry into, you know, early career jobs that, that have also got marquee names. And you get those because you came from the great university, you have the power network. So you wind up with this really strong resume earlier in your career, but is it because you were the best person for the job? Is it because you're the smartest? Is it because you're the pluckies and the hardest worker, or is it because you were in circumstances that that made it easier for you to, to, to be in those places? And so I think sometimes you hire those people and, and they haven't had to work as hard. They haven't had to hustle as much. And let me just tell you these days, especially at a time like this with COVID, great marketers have major hustle. You know, they don't follow a playbook. They do whatever it takes to get the job done and to bring in the results. And that requires some hard work and some grit. Chere (37:03): Absolutely. Also, you know what I, and where I come from, you know, I didn't come from a lot, but street smarts when it comes to marketing, man, there is something I give in sales to street smarts will get you a lot farther in my thought than a textbook education on marketing techniques or sales techniques. What I like about you know, about individuals who've had to, to your point, they've had to hustle, they've had to find another way, is they're not afraid. And when you don't have fear, because you haven't been sort of, the pedagogy has informed you, you have to believe this way. You have to do it this way. They're the ones who are really expanding the industry. We're coming up with cool ideas. We're bringing things to the table that are changing the way we market, the way we look at things. Chere (37:56): They're, they're really, really shaking things up. I love that about, you know, that scrappiness, because then you don't have to have these big million dollar budgets. We've seen great things happen with budgets of like a thousand bucks and its viral because somebody just knew they were at the pulse of something. They understood how to follow that pulse. They understood how to do something that could step outside the norm. They weren't afraid to fail. And then you have this now, this new phenomenon, right. That we all end up going as marketers, Oh, that's really cool. Somebody came up with that. We're going to start doing that too. So I do think they're the ones that are really pushing the envelope that are making us all better. Kathleen (38:36): This is awesome. I've loved this conversation. I feel like I could go on and on forever, but we are going to run out of time. So if somebody is listening and they are in a position where they feel they need to go to their boss or the leadership of their company and say, it's really important that we have more diversity in our marketing. Like, how do you suggest they approach that conversation? Chere (39:02): Well, like any, any time I approach my C level or even the board, I always go back to data. If you want us to be higher performers, if you want to see more out of your marketing dollars, then just look at the numbers. And I'll go back to the start. You can't, you can't you can't put out 40% of the population. You cannot just, Oh, like you have to be very specific with what you're doing with them. If you want your marketing dollars to, to help advance, if you want a good ROI. I've just, that to me is always looking at the numbers. If you have 18% of the population, that's Hispanic, we should be really looking at what can we be doing here to make sure that we are, we are absolutely hitting that 18% where they, where they're gonna feel like they want to be a part of what we're doing and whatever industry you're in. Chere (39:55): You're going to have a certain percentage of individuals that are within that industry always looking to see how can we be the best marketers for that subset always is, that's a performance objective. And that's one way to go about it, right? The best way to go about it would be just from the moral standpoint. I mean, it, it doesn't from a moral and ethical standpoint, it doesn't make sense to not have a diverse group of individuals in your company. It just, you know, we're not doing well by each other and creating a truly collaborative, open, you know, environment. So I mean, those are two ways. I, I always go back to numbers because I am a numbers person, but at the same time, when you go to the C suite, when you go to the board, they're numbers people too. Kathleen (40:41): Yeah. I think that's really smart. I mean, it's because the message you send is this is not a rubber stamp thing. This is not a check the box thing. We're not just doing this so that we said we did it, or because we have to, we're doing it because we literally cannot afford to not do it. Chere (40:55): Yes. We can do better. We can. And talk about just, just from when you go back to the numbers and you say, look at the opportunity we have in front of us to really gain mind share, to really grow as a company. Just look at the numbers. If we did it the right way, imagine what we could do as a company from growth and scaling. It's yeah. It's phenomenal for every company. It's the opportunity every company has right now.. Kathleen (41:21): Yeah. Well, I'm fascinated to know what people who are listening think about this. And I think this is one of those episodes that really lends itself well to a conversation. And so, you know, I would just encourage you, if you are listening. And if you have a question or if you have a different viewpoint on this, or if you totally disagree with us you know, let us know. You can certainly tweet me at @workmommywork. And I would love to see those comments and get a discussion going. Because I think, you know, Virginia, as you said, we have to have these conversations. That's the starting point, you know, for any changes, just talking about it and, and acknowledging it. Shifting gears, we can't end without doing my usual ending segment, which is two questions. I always ask every guest, the first being, the podcast is about inbound marketing. Even though today, we talked all about diversity, which I think is very important to inbound marketing. Do you think there's a particular company or individual that's really killing it when it comes to inbound marketing these days? Chere (42:28): So this is always a tough question for me because you never really know if, if they're killing it or if it just looks like they're killing it. Okay. Because we don't know their data. We don't know what's coming in. We don't know if this is the right inbound. Right. So I will say though, I'll say two companies that I just love. Because I think that they're, they're really doing well to gather mind share and bring in, bring in the right eyeballs. And I will say Drift and Outreach. Those are two companies. And funny enough, I don't use their technology, but I love them so much because they have really relevant conversations at what feels like, just like to the right people in the right way. And I think that the content they put out there, really understanding like who they're talking to. So to me, I feel like they're killing it. I don't, you know, I don't know the numbers, so I'm not for sure, like I said, I'm a numbers person, so you never know, but I really like what they're doing. Kathleen (43:22): That's awesome. And I think that's the truest testament to the, to the effectiveness of what they're doing is that you are not a customer. Doesn't sound like you plan to be really soon, but you know, you're just a fan and that's awesome. Chere (43:35): Yes. And I'll think twice. I mean, we, we have, we've looked at both technologies. We're not at a place where we're there yet, but when we are, I'm going to be the first one calling in and saying, don't bother showing me the system. I already know everything you guys do. Just sign me up. Kathleen (43:48): Yeah, that's great. I love that. Well, second question. Most marketers that I talk to, their biggest pain point is just how quickly the world of digital marketing changes and how hard it is to keep up with everything. So how do you personally keep yourself educated? Chere (44:02): Well, I, in like you are a part of the Revenue Collective, I think that's, that's huge. That group of individuals is so important to me because you get such fast and engaged marketers who share a lot of information. Women in Revenue. I demand, demand or excuse me, Digital Marketer. Saastr. I have a lot of different places that I go read. A lot of books, podcasts. I love what you're doing. I like that you're functional and very specific so that I can go I'm, we're having a problem scaling like, like the one you had, I want to move from 1 million to 10 million, what's the best growth team to have. I mean, I think it's fantastic. And then Sales Hacker is always really good for me. I think in marketing, the more you can know your brethren over in sales and really incorporate and integrate into what you're doing, the better marketer you'll be. And so I, you know, I tell my team that come in, get very familiar with learning all about sales and take take some calls, do some, do some outbound prospecting, because you're going to be much better marketers. So I always advise them, to give them the get some education around, around sales. And so that's a lot of the stuff that, that I go to. Kathleen (45:21): That's such great advice. I could not agree more. I, I have spent six months working in just a sales role. I mean, I've always done sales because I used to own my own business. And when you're a small business, you're, you're the CEO and the, you know, dishwasher and the chief sales person. But I did spend six months after that working in a purely sales role. And it was the best thing I ever did for my marketing career because it gave me so much more empathy for salespeople and such a better understanding of what they need in order to be set up for success. So totally spot on with that. Chere (45:53): Yeah, no, I love it. Kathleen (45:56): So before we wrap up, if somebody wants to learn more about you or connect with you online or check out HammerTech, what's the best way for them to do that? Chere (46:08): Well, please connect with me on LinkedIn. I, I don't always post as much as everyone else in the world. And I read all the time, like, you know, from Kevin Dorsey and Justin Walsh and everybody, you know, you build your brand and yes, I'm going to be doing that. But please connect with me on LinkedIn. I love having good conversations and that's Virginia Chere Lucett. So LinkedIn is the best, best place. And if you want to check out the company, it's, it's HammerTechglobal.com. Kathleen (46:35): Awesome. Well, I will put those links in the show notes. And again, if you're listening and you're interested in this conversation and you want to take it offline or well off, off podcast, I guess you know, tweet me, send Virginia a LinkedIn message. You know, I think it would be really interesting to keep this conversation going and to kind of start, start a broader dialogue within the marketing industry about diversity. It's so important. But having said that, that is it for this week. If you are listening and you found value in this episode, or if you're a regular listener and you regularly find value, I would love it if you would head to Apple Podcasts and leave the podcast a five star review because that's how other people find us. And if you're listening and you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, definitely send me a tweet at @workmommywork because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Virginia. Chere (47:31): Thank you for having me.

What's the secret to getting big results from YouTube ad campaigns? This week on the Inbound Success podcast, Variable Media founder and CEO Cory Henke covers everything you need to know about YouTube advertising, from who it's right for, to what types of ads are available, how to create impactful ads, how to choose your bidding format and budget, and much, much more.  Cory has an impressive career, having helped brands like Purple Mattresses scale through the use of integrated digital ad campaigns, and he is arguably one of the top YouTube ads experts out there.  Check out the full episode to learn everything you need to know to get started - and get big results from - YouTube advertising. Resources from this episode: Check out the Variable Media website Connect with Cory on LinkedIn Follow Cory on Twitter @coryhenke Email Cory at cory[at]variable.media Transcript Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Cory Henke, who is the founder and CEO of Variable Media. Welcome Cory. Cory (00:22): Hi, thank you. Thank you for having me, Kathleen. And it's a, it's an honor to be here. Kathleen (00:26): I am really excited to have you here. You have such an interesting background and I love what we're going to talk about today, but without spoiling it first, can you tell my audience a little bit about yourself and also Variable Media? Cory (00:42): Sure, sure, sure. You know, Los Angeles native, but now live in Utah. And so, you know, got started right out of college, working at agencies and then found an awesome opportunity to work at Yahoo, you know, and that home page and that and that, and they were doing really well. I think in, you know, the mid, mid, the mid thousands of the two thousands. And then from there really, you know, stuck with small companies and so getting a chance to work at a small agency in Utah. And then, you know, when coming out to Utah and working at a small agency, I decided, you know, it's time to develop my own and I'm in developing, you know, our own and working really hard the past, you know, three or four years, we've been able to have some success. And so, you know, it's a, it's a real big confidence builder and I'm, you know, I enjoy what I do every single day. And you know, we wouldn't be, we wouldn't be here without, you know, so many, so much of the the experience to the jobs and the advertisers that we got to work with along the way. Kathleen (01:35): I love it. And as somebody who used to own an agency for 11 years, I know firsthand how hard it is to build an agency. And so I really, you know, kudos to you for doing it. Side note, if you're listening and it sounds like there's, you know, a freight train in the background, that is a massive thunderstorm that is choosing to hit right as we're recording. So we have this really interesting, like if you, if you're into white noise and rain sounds on your sound maker, careful, this podcast might put you to sleep. But we're going to roll with it. So, so Variable Media, does - you guys do a lot of different things, but one of the things that you're really good at that I am just interested in, because I'm not an expert in it, and I always love to use my podcasts as an excuse to learn more, it's YouTube advertising. And you know, I think it's one of the reasons I'm so interested in it is, obviously YouTube is just this massive search engine. You know, it's getting used more and more. I have a 13 year old. I think it's like the place, maybe aside from Reddit, where he spends, spends the most time. And I think that that's only going to be more true with younger generations. And so, beginning to understand that platform better, I, I feel is very important for any marketer. So you know, I'd love to just hear what you guys are working on. I mean, this is a big topic. So maybe we start with who is YouTube advertising right for? Cory (03:03): Got it. YouTube advertising is right for every single advertiser. There is not an advertiser that it is wrong for. It is very similar to search, you know, like you mentioned, right? Like if you want somebody to experience their product or service, right? If you want a chance to get in front of them as they're searching for something, whereas they might be in, you know, an in market segment you know, YouTube or Google is the, Google search is the place to do it. I just think YouTube has the advantage because of our short attention spans. The cell phone, video content and the speed of delivery, like you know, we can search for anything and solve something, but to watch somebody do it is very different. And that is the, you know, the majority of, from a search perspective, if somebody's trying to solve a problem. But in my, in my experience, people come to the platform of YouTube for three things, either for entertainment, education, or inspiration, right. And personally, I use it mostly for education. And when you talk about your son, you know, I wonder, you know, which one his would be, right? Kathleen (04:06): It's 100% entertainment because I can tell you it's either he's watching a gamer play a game while he plays a game or, or he's watching like old episodes of, of, you know, animated TV shows. Cory (04:22): Yeah. Kathleen (04:24): I wish it was for education. Maybe we'll get there. Cory (04:28): I think it will be. It's my, it's my primary source for where I learned so much, you know, as YouTube is learning from peers, learning from conferences. And so I think YouTube will be the democratization of education because, you know, when you can learn from somebody else, you know, through YouTube, it's a, it's a really valuable experience. Because, you know, what did you have to give up for that? You know, potentially five seconds before you hit a skip button. Kathleen (04:52): Yeah. And especially, I think now with, when we, when we think about COVID driving, you know, kids home from school, they can't be in person, parents trying to homeschool. I've been there. It's not easy. And also just companies, you know, I, it was really interesting. I'm a member of several like Slack groups of people from all different industries and overwhelmingly the feedback I'm hearing is that companies are just not going to go back to what they were before this. And a lot of, a lot of companies were saying, they're going to go 100% remote. And training takes on a different format when that happens. And so I, I couldn't agree more with you that I think that it's only going to grow. Cory (05:31): Yeah. And if it wasn't important to advertisers before, imagine how important it is now, when somebody can't walk down the street. It's like, how do I get in front of them now? Well, you know, pay a cent, you know, pay six bucks, you know, to reach a thousand people in your neighborhood, you know, via YouTube video, you know, YouTube advertising. So I think, I think it, I think it only grows based on the current climate that we're in. Kathleen (05:53): So what do you say to someone? I'm putting back on my agency owner hat, cause this is the type of thing I would have heard all the time. What do you say to somebody who says, but my audience isn't on YouTube? I'm trying to reach, you know, an executive level B2B audience and they're not on there. Cory (06:09): Sure. I think that's when we, you know, get into the strategy of your audience. Right. And as you mentioned, it's a very small audience, it's a CEO. And so my first question is, have you tried, have you tried LinkedIn advertising? Right. And the response could be, yes, I've tried it. And I'm saying like, okay, so, you know, you see the CPMs at $30, you see the CPMs at $6. Right. And that's what it takes to attract them. So once they click through to your website, why don't you set up, you know, every targeting via YouTube and pay a $6 CPM and maybe a dollar click. And then there, you can run your 20 minute, you know, really sales pitch or your 32nd, you know, come back sooner. Right. There's so much opportunity there, you know, to capture, even if it's still, you know, a small audience. So I think there's, you know, again, opportunity for every advertiser. It's just about, you know, how you use it. But I believe every audience, you know, is on, is on YouTube, but I don't believe every person is on YouTube. Kathleen (07:03): So when somebody comes to you, or a company comes to you, and they're looking for help strategizing their, their paid media program, obviously, as you just pointed out, YouTube, you know, you don't necessarily do it in isolation as part of a broader strategy. But if somebody comes to you and says, I want to advertise on YouTube, how do you, like, what's your thought process? How do you go through kind of conceptualizing what it, what campaigns would look like, how you're going to target audiences and also how YouTube fits within the broader landscape? Cory (07:33): Sure. I think you know, the big thing that they, for me and my experience working with eCommerce and B2B is that like, it's a lot of direct response. So they're looking at that conversion, right. Sometimes as you mentioned, that conversion can, can can be small, right. I'm only dealing with a couple of purchases right. Versus thousands of purchases. And so then you take it a layer back and go, okay, how is search performing? What are the CPMs on search? How did those CPCs compare? How does Facebook compare? How does LinkedIn compare? It's more of a comparison type of platform where you're trying to find the value in it. Does it work better for retargeting? Am I reaching an in market segment? Because I'm able to leverage Google's search data, right? Maybe you're looking for somebody who's having a life event, you know, graduating college, they're about to get married, right? Cory (08:19): So you leverage that Google search engine data, but you're using it from a YouTube standpoint, you know, to reach them. And so it would really depend on the audience, the right strategy that I would give them, but I would look at the creative. I would say, what do you have? You know? And talking to founders, it's like, are you willing to get in front of camera, you know, and sell something? That is an important piece of it. If you can do that, man, does that put you in a better place in terms of building multi variation creative to begin to test, and then it's like, you know, how much emphasis do we want to put on this? And what I mean by emphasis is that I work with a lot of baby brands that are female 25 to 34, right. Much better to find them on Instagram. And so it's like, how much energy do you want to put towards YouTube if you are finding more value in those other areas. And so it's really going to depend on client audience spend and just how bad you want that place to perform. And we usually see more advertisers move there when they're trying to scale, Hey, Cory, I've maxed out Facebook brand search, maxed out. How do I get YouTube to work? Okay. Let's take these strategies, let's implement this. Let's implement that. Kathleen (09:21): And talk me through what are the different formats of YouTube advertising? Cory (09:25): Sure, sure, sure. There's so many and it's growing, it's on. I, I'm going to miss a few, so no YouTube expert get on here and give me crap for it. But I think the two main ones are in-stream skippable and non skippable. So your non-, your skippable is going to be the ads that, you know, allow you to skip. And those are probably the most popular. And then they recently released the ability to do non skippable. And so they insert those in between ads as well as before them. But they can only be 15 seconds. You usually see higher CPCs cause nobody really clicks there. They want to see their content, but you get a hundred percent completion rate. It's kind of the advantage of the non skippable. So you also have a bumper ad, which would be a five second ad. And so it's not great from an introduction to a brand, but if you're trying to retarget somebody, right. Usually comes about one third the cost of something that is like skippable or non-scalable, but that's only a five second ad. And then Kathleen (10:24): Skippable and non skippable, always at the beginning. Cory (10:27): No, you could have a non skippable be in in between and then your skippable is always in the beginning. Kathleen (10:34): And what about the bumpers? Cory (10:36): The bumpers will always be in the beginning. Kathleen (10:38): And what's the difference between a bumper and the other formats? I'm going to ask a lot of dumb questions. Cory (10:42): No, you asked all the necessary questions. So a bumper is only five seconds. And so it's very quick, you know? So you're looking at like more of a $3 CPM versus like a nine. And so you can reach a larger audience with that, but with five seconds they better already know who your brand is. So you usually find like a, like a tier one, like a Coca Cola or like a Nissan using something like that to really stretch the region and apply that impression. Almost like a billboard. Right. Kathleen (11:10): So is it a bumper, is it distinguished as a bumper only, just because of the length of time that you're going to? Okay. And then just from listening to you talk about skippable and non skippable, it sounds to me, and I could be making the wrong conclusion here, that if that I would do a non skippable ad, if, if my goal was to like tell a very specific story or expand my brand reach, whereas I would do a skippable if I wanted the click through, if I wanted the conversion. Cory (11:41): Yes, yes, yes, exactly. There's a lot of advantages to skippable, like and put the bumper. And with non skippable, you're kind of finite, right? Five, 15 beginning or middle with the, with the skippable you have unlimited LinkedIn video. I've run a video for DenTek. That was 20 minutes long where you went into, where you went into like a Vinyasa yoga after like, you know, doing like a little skit. It was, it was a, it was a great creative. We did it, the first agency that I moved out to Utah with. Molio. And what that did is, you saw that wow, 10% of people completed that. You got people calling corporate and saying, wow, thank you so much for creating this app. And it was just the fact that we were able to do it. You could run a 20 minute ad there. You could take your podcast, upload it to YouTube and just run it as an app. Cory (12:28): That's literally the possibility from a skippable standpoint. And then the great thing about the skip is that you only pay for the user after 30 seconds. And so if they decided to cut out in between five or 30, you'd never paid for the user. Only after 30 seconds, you're charged on a cost per view and that's somebody getting past 30 seconds. And so we've always said zero to 30 seconds. You have such an amazing opportunity. So really brand educate, tell a story, solve a problem, reintroduce the brand again, and then see if they want to continue. Kathleen (13:02): Certainly speaks to the importance of like coming out strong from the gate. So we have skippable non skippable bumper. Cory (13:09): Yup. Kathleen (13:11): Anything else? Cory (13:11): We have, I'm blanking on the name and it makes me want to open up Google ads. Cory (13:19): This this feature allows you to place a video based on what video, what, what interaction they had with the video before. So if you run a skippable ad and somebody skips, you can choose what video that person sees next. Or if that person stays tops 30 seconds and becomes a view, they might get a different video. And then based on that video, they could get one video or a different video. And so sequential messaging, that's what it's called. And so you can do sequential messaging, which I think is really great for B2B. We use it a lot for B2B, which is just like, okay, they stayed through this video. This is great. Okay. They skip that video. Let's show them something funny again and see if they can read, they get back and engage with our brand. Okay. Cory (13:59): Let's take it down this funnel. Very, very, very cool tactic. I think one of the more newer you know, features, and again, this isn't like it's a, you know, YouTube is very unique in terms of their placements, but they just came out with the lead form. So you can add a lead form to your video now, so you can fill out that lead. Right. As you know, you're watching the video and this has been game changing for B2B brands that we've been working with. I think a new one is that they used to have like shopping cards, like on the video and they would show products. But now you can drop down that feature and it'll carousel the products. And so you can see more. And so you can see YouTube advancing. Some of the other ad units that are on YouTube is you have like a small bar that goes kind of like a cross in the video. Cory (14:51): And you would usually buy that in like more of the display area, but it comes in on YouTube. You have the, or you used to, they don't really have that placement anymore, but there used to be a square placement on the top right. I don't think they do it anymore. Kathleen (15:06): I remember that. Cory (15:07): And then before you had to call Google to place those 15 seconds, you know? I always get confused. Non skippable, right? You used to have to call Google. Now you call Google to place that hero ad when you go to the YouTube homepage. And so that's one that you can, that you can pay, you know, half a million. Kathleen (15:27): That's like the Superbowl ad of YouTube. Cory (15:29): I have to call my friends in Los Angeles. We work on big brands, you know, to really get the insight on what those cost. But that would be, you know, the collection of them. Oh, and then there's a new one, which I am super excited about because I've always felt that YouTube has a lean back format, very similar to TV. I go there for video, everything in feed. Like Instagram and Facebook to me is more like a slot machine. Right. I'm leaned forward. I don't know what's going to come next. And so I'm just scrolling, right? And so when you take YouTube from a lean back and move it into lean forward, because you have a feed in YouTube, you have your own feed of your subscriptions and you have like the home theater and you have the trending feed. You're now able to put ads in there. And so it's interesting how you can take somebody from lean forward. Right? I just want the slot machine. I just want content. Like, I get the algorithm. You know what I'm watching. Give me something I want. And then you stick an ad in there where it's one click to a long form video. I don't think that's been done yet. You know? And so that's one teacher that we're really focusing on is how to really maximize that discovery feed and drive them either to a video or take them potentially offsite off platform. Kathleen (16:36): There's different formats. How does the cost differ between these formats? Are there certain that have dramatically higher CPCs or CPMs? Cory (16:48): Sure. I think in focusing just on like view metrics, like cost per view, which is what you're going to pay on when buying YouTube and like CPM, your most expensive is going to be your non skippable 15. That is probably going to be your most expensive, and you're not going to get a lot of engagement. You're not going to get a lot of clicks. And so, you know, you're really using that as a brand tool. I think after that, you know, you're probably looking at a skippable being the next most expensive. But again, there's so much inventory that you can make that pretty cheap. But you'll never get that as cheap as probably bumpers will be at five seconds, you know? And that's really good. Kathleen (17:22): How does the cost on YouTube compare to other platforms? Like, is it less or more? Cause, I mean, I'm assuming LinkedIn is the most expense. Cory (17:29): The problem is, you know, Kathleen, is that there's no fair comparison and that is the sucky part about it is that like when you're in the feed and you get hit with the video on Facebook, you're in a lean forward environment. So you're going to engage for a smaller amount of time. Like, you know, you go to, you go to YouTube strictly for video, you know, your mind is just to spend time there. And so it's hard to compare like that 30 second skippable versus like a 30, somebody watching 30 seconds on Facebook. I would say the person watching 30 seconds on Facebook, far more engaged, you know? To get them to stay for 30 seconds, it's much harder, you know, than I think that it is on YouTube. And so I hate that it's a, that you'd have to compare these two, but I would say if you want somebody to stay with your video longer, if you want somebody to engage with your brand and watch your video, you would put that on YouTube. Cory (18:17): If you want somebody to see your video and then click through, you would more likely put it into the feed. But you can make each of their rates comparable based on what tactic you take because before YouTube and YouTube, well, Google specifically would only really give you one way to buy things. You can buy things on a cost per view, but now you can do target cost per action. You can do maximize conversions, a lot of different bid types, which can affect the cost of things. And so it works the same way on Facebook video views versus conversion campaigns versus traffic campaigns. And so you can manipulate them to get them really low, but ultimately it's going to depend on the advertiser's goals. And you've worked in agencies enough to know that in the great words of any advertiser, well, it depends. Right? Kathleen (19:02): Right. I mean, that was gonna be my next question is, how do you know which bid format to use? Cory (19:09): You know, testing. And that's the big thing that we do nowadays is really test different bid types. And it's been one of the keys to driving better performance. I think in my consulting relationships, the past six months have been optimizing the bid types and learning from just the statistics that YouTube can give you. Kathleen (19:29): And how many, like when you're starting, I guess it's, again, it depends on budget, I'm assuming, but when you start a campaign, how many different tests are you generally running in parallel in the beginning? Cory (19:42): Sure. I think we take, like, we look at like first level and second level variables when we start. Now first level, now the variables really depend on like what's most important. And so my first level of variables that I'm going to look at are type, device, age and maybe household income or another one that made sense specific to the brand. And then second level variables would be more like, you know, the, the the audiences, right? Like I can, I got thousands of audiences that I can choose from, you know, unless something is particular. So, and market versus customer affinity versus search audience versus going placement specific. Those are kind of second level. And so at the first level, I'm really trying to say, okay, can I meet my advertisers' performance? Can I exceed it by just maybe going desktop or mobile only, or mobile, California, Texas, New York. They're better in big States and with household income above 10%. Right. I take the first level of variables that really drive the best performance. And then we move onto the second level. Once we have that, like really buttoned up, bid type would be the first one that you would want to look at. Kathleen (20:48): Have you seen any drop in mobile viewing with people stuck at home more with COVID? Cory (20:57): No, I haven't seen a drop in mobile, you know, viewing. I think the thing that I've seen probably over the years is it, is an improvement in mobile conversion. We used to see the desktop used to convert a lot and now they convert about the same. And so we can see that there's more people that have I think advanced their understanding of how to purchase online via a mobile device. Yeah. Kathleen (21:20): Yeah. That's interesting. So somebody, somebody comes to you, they're all bought in. They're ready to go. Obviously this is YouTube. So you're advertising with video. Are there any best practices that you talk with people about in terms of when they are creating their video assets for advertising? Cory (21:41): Yeah, there is absolutely a number one best practice. There's a number one best practice, and I don't want anybody who listens to this to miss this if they decide to do YouTube advertising, and that is variation testing. If you're going to build for you to at least build two versions, but this is the most important part, make sure that there's variation in the beginning of the video. Okay. Do not give me a variation at the end of the video, there's a fraction of people that are going to end it. Everybody starts it and don't make that variation, you know, something similar, make it a little bit different. So you see the difference. You want one of the D rates to be at 15% and you want the other one to be at 35%. You know, you want to see that variation. So make sure they're a little different. Wildly different. Cory (22:22): Maybe you might say because you want to see that difference, but that is the number one thing that you want to do because not only are you going to improve performance because there's going to be a winner between those two, right? If there's a difference, I'm going to say, okay, that one, it's a higher view rates, cheaper costs. Let's go with that one. But you learn more about your YouTube audience. That is the key is that the money's going to pay for the impressions, the clicks and whatever performance you get out of it. What, in addition, you get from YouTube versus any other, you know, search let's say, right, because there's no visual, there is that you'll learn what your audience gravitates towards. Right. Is it you speaking face to camera? Is it this type of intro? Is it this music in the beginning? Is it, you know, you being funny with this opener? Was it that opener, right? That is, I think is the goldmine of YouTube is the consumer research that you're able to attain by going after different audiences, these very variables and the data that you get back. So when you find that 54 plus, 10% household income watches completes your video at 19% at age and 18 to 24 completes our video at 7%, it really shows you a different interest level. And when the audiences are so different in terms of their time in life, it's like, okay, I know a little bit more now. Right. Kathleen (23:38): That's so interesting. And is there any target that you tend to shoot for with video completion rates or is it just completely like a metric? Cory (23:47): You're obviously going to get higher completion rates, you know, with 45 second videos or minute videos. And the longer the video, the lower, I think it's really gonna depend on the content, but I think what you'll want to look at for a barometer is view rate. And so that's people making it past 30 seconds. And so if your view rate is below 25%, you can work on that. You know, like that can get better. You can convince somebody to stay a little bit longer if you have your rates at 25% or below. But if it's above 35%, that's about average. If you're reaching your rates around 45%, 50% of people are making it past 30 seconds. What are you doing? Give me a call. You know? So no, it's it's exciting. And I, I encourage people to focus, focus on the view rate because that is what I think affects your pricing, is that the higher your view rate YouTube looks at like, okay, this is a good ad. We want to keep this on the platform. People are staying with this ad past 30 seconds. When people say less than 30 seconds, I feel like YouTube goes, okay, let's charge them a little bit more, you know, this isn't that great. You know, people aren't staying past let's, let's, let's do that. Kathleen (24:49): And how should people think about managing their YouTube ads? Like how closely do they need to watch them? How often should they be checking in and changing things, et cetera? Cory (24:56): You know, I mean, Google would probably tell me not to do this, but you know, we optimize all the time. You know, we look at it, you know, daily, you know, like every few days, if we're managing the accounts. Some of the accounts I consult for, you know, I jump in once a week and I give them feedback. And you know, I think you should at least be looking at it once a week at the least. But I think, you know, every few days I think it's important to get in there because there's learning attached to it. You know, you'll learn about your audience. And, you know, I think making tweaks that are important, although from the, from the clients that I talked to you they're upset, you know, leave things on, don't touch them. You know, I don't know. Maybe I'm the optimizing guy who just likes to get in there and make a bunch of changes, but you know, things work out well for us. So I don't think there's one right way or another, and that's why we base everything on the data that we analyze. Kathleen (25:42): So what about budget? Is there a minimum amount that you think an advertiser needs to be able to commit in order to just have enough data to come to any? Cory (25:52): I don't $5, $1 tomorrow. Yeah. You have a YouTube video. You have a YouTube channel get started, you know, because what you're going to do is you're going to be surprised is you're going to say, wow, I didn't know somebody would stay that long. This was an ad happens every single time. And it's just, I think we put a lot of hurdles in front of ourselves. I think every human does, you know? Myself included, you know? Instead of just trying, instead of just throwing it out there and saying, Hey, what can happen? But I've seen it every single time somebody does it. There's, they're wildly surprised that like, wow, I didn't think somebody would listen to it. Well, you know, Google's targeted. We searched for everything. They know so much about us. They're going to find the right people. So I encourage anybody, you know, even if you spend $5 a day, a dollar a day, it's not a problem. You know, there's a platform there where you can do it. Kathleen (26:35): And anything that, that advertisers should not do on YouTube? Cory (26:43): Yes. Okay. So here's what, here's what not to do. If you're an advertiser and you are developing an ad and you're trying to sell a product where somebody needs to watch the video, then I don't want you to target any music channels. Okay. Do not target any music channels, because if the music is a part of your collection of who you're targeting, they could not be watching it. They could only be listening to it. And so we found that in an app that we were running, you know, is that, wow, you know, we're getting such high view rates on music, but they're not converting. And it's like, Oh, the high view rates, it's because they're just letting the 15 second play through, you know, they're not even seeing it or like anything. And so that's where you can sometimes find, you know, losses, you know. And sometimes it turns you away where like, Oh, this thing doesn't work. And it's just, you know, you gotta look at it. And so I would tell every time every advertiser thinks about music advertising because there's a lot of that on YouTube and they will sneak that in, you know, if you choose a broad audience. And so you know, make sure you exclude those music channels if you want somebody to see your ad. Kathleen (27:49): It's a great point. Just thinking about how people on YouTube are interacting with the content that they're watching, where your ad is going to be placed, or watching or not watching, I guess I should say. That's a really good point. Now you've worked with companies in a variety of industries. Can you share any examples of clients or campaigns that you've worked on that have, that have done successful YouTube advertising? Cory (28:14): Yeah. I mean you know, the reason, you know, why I'm here today? I think talking about YouTube is for, is because of Purple, you know, the Purple mattress brand. When I was working at my previous agency, you know, month, one, 50 K they're spending on YouTube. Month, three, half a million, you know? And so it kind of grew them, but it was a combination of efforts. You know, it was a great creative developed by the Harmon brothers. And then, you know, them coming to Molio for the data and analytics, we were able to put it together and make it happen. And after that, you know, starting my own company, I went to go consult for them for a bit and help them, you know, continue to excel in that area. So that would be one, I think, you know, one of the more unique ones was trying to get YouTube to work for a female baby brand. Cory (28:57): You know, this was a unique one where I just couldn't get it to work. I couldn't get it towork. And then I started to see the conversions come in and I'm like, Oh, this is great. Right. And so, you know, when you start seeing the conversions come in, you're like, okay, I'm getting this to work, but it's still not great, but it's working a little bit. So what you do is you analyze a placement report. So what the placement report shows you is the contents that they converted on. Right. They converted on your ad, but the content that they were going to watch. Right. yeah. So just trying to learn more about like, why are they converting? Like, let me take these conversions and see what they were going to watch before I converted. Before they converted. And what I've found for this baby brand was the fact that all the women were in front of like hurricanes, CNN content. Yeah. And it kind of threw me for a loop. It was just like all this disaster content they're converting in front of. And so what it showed me was that the fear, Kathleen (29:54): It was like trigger, triggering their, their mothering, like I need to prepare for the end of days stuff. Cory (29:59): Exactly, exactly. And so that's why I said, there's so much consumer research tied into, you know, YouTube campaigns, but it's what helped so many other areas of their business. Like that was a thing, is that like, yes, Cory appreciate the insight. And while we couldn't get YouTube to work, I now know the messaging that I need for X, Y, Z platform in this path though. You know, there's case studies like that. I think you know, more recently we have a B2B brand that is spending, you know, a lot each month, and you know, they're in the education space and we've been able to take their CPA down. I think we cut it in half by just switching to, you know, a better bid strategy focusing on audiences and really looking at this stuff day over day. I think YouTube is one of the platforms that you can really optimize, you know, and I don't think anybody is you know, has made it kind of like their expertise yet. Like, I don't think like Facebook, everybody's a Facebook expert, right? It was in our feed all the time. And it's just, you know, I don't think anybody's talked through this this YouTube thing, but I think there's, there, there's opportunity there. So, you know, in the B2B space, eCommerce space, I think it's, I think it's good. Kathleen (31:09): So one of the things I'm really curious about, with so many options, is I work with a lot of startups and they're, they're, you know, high growth companies that are, they want to be high growth companies. When you are, you know, when you're small and nobody's heard of you, maybe you have a great product and you go to advertise, how do you think about like correlating that with the format of advertising? And what I mean by that is, do you generally take an approach where you recommend they invest in like raising brand awareness first and then follow more with lead gen or the reverse? Or is it just always kind of a complete mix of both? Like, how does that make sense in terms of calibrating, the, the goals and the format of their advertising to the trajectory of their growth path? Cory (32:00): Difficult question. But I mean, I would say, you know, to start with a multi-platform approach, you know? I think there's enough tutorials and there's enough stuff out here. I think for any founder or CEO, very smart people, you know, if they can build, you know a platform and app, you know, a company, I think they can do well enough to launch, you know, a Google ads account as well as a Facebook ads account. And so when you launch those two platforms, you get Instagram, Facebook, Google discovery, Google display, which stretches across so many different websites, premium, you get YouTube and you get Google search. That is six, you know, you put between like tier one and tier two platforms depending on the product or service that you have. And so I would say with those two platforms and Google analytics, how much can you possibly learn about your audience? Cory (32:57): Even just spending five grand, you know, spending 500 per platform. But that's what I would put a startup. That's where I would put their growth if they did that for three months, you know? And again, the more money they have to start with the advertising. Again, the more they're going to learn. If you did that for three months, like how much more would, you know, right. You take that information, you go back, you retool and then you go at it again. And so I think it's kind of like a sprint and learn. Let's sprint, let's learn, let's sprint, let's learn. And then, okay, what do we know? I think a lot gets lost in the data. I think a lot gets lost of, Oh, let's throw in these campaigns. Oh, what did we learn? Oh, I don't know. We switched agencies. Oh, you know, so, and so is here. Cory (33:33): We hired him as an intern. And so it makes, it makes us industry very elusive. But I still think that any founder, you know, I'm challenging those founders out there, you know, there's Facebook, UI, Google UI, Google analytics, three platforms, you learn those things. Even at a basic level. You can, you can learn so much about a brand because what I continue to hear more is that the marketing and advertising is the most important piece. Now it used to be the technology. And now it's like, no, you can have great technology, but if you can't market it, you know, this stuff. So that's what I would say is I would say minimal spend those two platforms. You can learn an extreme amount, you know, about an audience and you can reach as many people as you want. And small audiences, big audiences. Kathleen (34:18): And how long do you, how long do you go before you abandon it? Meaning like, if you're trying YouTube advertising, you know, you're doing different experiments, but you're just not seeing results. I was just talking with a marketer the other day about exactly this, where he's like, pay-per-click is just not working for us. I've tried, I've tried, I've tried different messaging, different images, different platforms, different channels. How long do you let it go? Cory (34:43): I don't know. You know, I don't know. I think you know, I, when I, when I think about marketing and what I've always told our advertisers, like personally, is that I can't guarantee results. I can't double your business. I might do it, but I, I can't guarantee that. What I can guarantee you though, is that advertising is an amplification. So what do you have to amplify, sir? You know, what am I going to amplify? And the brands that I see do the best, do their piece, you know? Like I can't solve the world. And so when I think about like, Hey, you know, when do you give it up? It's like, I don't think you ever give it up. You slow it down and you figure out how to make it work, you know, in my opinion. But you know, there was a LinkedIn post that came out the other day that said, you know, is there a brand that has succeeded without advertising? Brands or brand that have succeeded without doing paid ads? And I immediately responded. I said, absolutely not. Kathleen (35:38): Well, there wasoOne in the beginning. I know Spanx. They didn't advertise at all in the beginning, but now they do. I mean, like at some point you can't avoid it forever. Right? Cory (35:52): Absolutely. And they go through the whole list and there's really only one today that doesn't do it and that's Tesla, but Costco is another one back in the day that never did it, you know. And they do it now and everybody does it now. And because it's important. So I wouldn't tell a brand, you know, to give it up. I tell it to more. I tell them more to slow it down and then, you know, retool the product. How can we cut the product in half? How can we get more people to use it? Because I think the more conversions you see in the beginning, the more that you can eat it in the beginning. And see the conversions, the more you know about your audience, you know, for the next that's, what I've seen work well, is that like the brands that really know how to eat it in the beginning, take the lower conversion rate, take the lower return on ad spend, really take that one to one and not make the best amount of money, learn the most about their audience. And what a lot of advertisers fail to think about is that just because that impression didn't convert that day or that 30 days of just cause that clicked in convert that day, that 30 days you still branded them, they still saw it and they could come back one day. Cory (36:47): So we failed to believe in those impressions and clicks and really focus on the conversions. But that's what I would say, you know, because I wouldn't give up on the advertising. It's, it's the one way to reach people. It's the one way to put your brand in front of people. We were having this argument the other day. We would call them. You want to call them. Kathleen (37:07): Without advertising it's definitely winning ugly. That's for sure. Well shifting gears, because we will run out of time if I keep going on this and I could forever. There's so much to learn about YouTube. You know, on this podcast we're all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you can think of that that's really killing it with inbound right now? Cory (37:32): I don't know. I'd say Joe Martinez and then Michelle I, you know, they've got their Paid Media Pros, you know, YouTube channel and you know, in my opinion, that's the best inbound marketing, you know? I remember, you know, recently I came across a guy that was doing, you know, just a live stream of him talking about, you know, mortgage rates. And I ended up calling him the next day or texting with him and it's like, this is, this is new. This is for it. Like, how did this happen? And so you know, I follow their channel, I watch a lot of this stuff. And I think if I was going to run any sort of media, you know, like that would be who I would go to if it wasn't somebody on my team. And so I don't think they're reaching out, but I think it's a very passive way, you know, to show education expertise. And the fact that I can get face to camera and tell you about my business. Kathleen (38:21): Oh, that's great. I'll definitely put a link to that in the show notes. Second question is, all the marketers I talk to, their biggest pain point is keeping up with all the changes in digital marketing. You know, even YouTube is a great example. It's changing so fast. On this podcast, you mentioned like new ad formats and, and things that are changing. So how do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated? Cory (38:45): I think you know, if you have a rep, you know, stay very close to your rep at these platforms. Ask them to send you, you know, new things. Ask to be a part of, you know, alphas and betas. I think when it comes to those, a lot of different YouTube channels, I think are talking about paid media in the right way. It is hard to filter through it in our industry because you have a lot of, you know, pay me for this course, pay for that course. But I think I find the most, most value in some of the you know, presentations that are posted to YouTube. Some of the podcasts, you know, out there that like, like your own. But the YouTube, I think, presentations for like media posts, you know, some of the European ones that I watch I think are just really good, you know, education sources for me. Kathleen (39:34): Great. All right. Well, this has been so interesting. Cory, if somebody is listening and they want to learn more about Variable Media or they want to connect with you, what is the best way for them to reach out and connect with you on that? Cory (39:49): It would be @Coryhanke on Twitter, and then Cory[at]variable.media, you know, if they want to reach out. But yeah, open book. Should be some questions. Kathleen (39:57): And that's C O R Y for anybody listening. H E N K E. Again, I'll put those links in the show notes. So head there to check that out if you want to reach out to Cory. And if you're listening and you learned something new today, of course, I would love it if you would leave the podcast a five star review on Apple podcasts. That's how we get found by more listeners. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because you never know, they could be the next person I interview. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Cory. This was really interesting. Cory (40:30): Thank you, Kathleen. It's been awesome. Thank you so much for the opportunity.

How would you change your digital marketing spend if you knew with 100% certainty what was driving results? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Joel Maldonado of Path Interactive talks about the attribution modeling work that won Path Interactive the first ever Google Display Innovation Award.  Joel and the team at Path Interactive were working with their client iCIMS to improve the company's ability to understand the performance of its marketing channels, and as part of the project, they built a custom attribution model that tied various software programs iCIMS was using to Google. Using the model, they were able to determine that Google display advertising was actually driving 7x more results than they originally thought. Based on this data, the company increased its spend on Google ads and in conjunction with that, its marketing results. In this episode, Joel breaks down exactly how Path Interactive was able to construct an attribution model that gave iCIMS complete clarity ab out what was driving its marketing results, and showcases why it's so important to get attribution right. Check out the full episode to learn more. Resources from this episode: Check out the Path Interactive website Connect with Joel on LinkedIn Transcript Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Joel Maldonado, who is the Acquisition and Growth Lead for Digital Media at Path Interactive. Welcome Joel, how are you? Joel (00:25): Doing well? How are you? Kathleen (00:26): I'm great. I'm really excited to chat with you. And before we get started, could you tell my listeners a little bit about yourself? What's your background? What do you do at Path and what does the company do? Joel (00:41): Sure. So I'm Joel. My background is I, I I've, I've been in the industry since 2011. So nearly a decade, which makes me feel old. But I went to school at Villanova University. So out of Philly, and kind of moved to New York immediately after, and I've been in the marketing industry ever since. I started working my career in a couple, a couple of startups, Target Spot and My Supermarket. And since 2013, I've been lucky enough to be at Path Interactive for the past seven years. And really, what we do is we're a full service digital agency. So we manage paid media campaigns. We have an SEO service channel. We also have an analytics team that does a lot of like pixel implementation, reporting infrastructure, custom integrations, which we might get into some of that today, as well as conversion rate optimizations. Joel (01:38): We have a creative team that kind of does a couple of functions. They design and build websites, and they also really work as our in house creative to support any media campaigns or social engagements that we have going on. So its really just kind of across the board, a full service digital agency. We also do video production. So kind of covering all of our bases there at Path Interactive. I kind of wear a couple hats. So I am on the paid media team or service channel at Path. So I kind of lead my own team and have my own book of business and clients that I manage and those relationships and those budgets on a monthly basis. But I'm also, I also sit on the leadership team at Path, which really for us, that's more about really guiding the strategic vision of the company over the next couple of years, as well as trying to make sure that we continue to make Path Interactive a better place to work for our employees. So that's something that we do on an ongoing basis every two weeks to really hammer home those two goals. Kathleen (02:49): That's great. And, and I got connected with you because you were doing paid media work for a friend of mine who's head of marketing for a company down in Florida, and she was just so impressed by the work you had done. So immediately I thought, I've got to talk to this guy. That's how I find a lot of my guests, is just hearing about the great work that they're doing, you know, and it's interesting. So you're on the paid media side and within paid media, there's obviously so many different channels. But then the company also does, as you said, all kinds of different things like websites and video and lead generation campaigns, et cetera. You know, one of the, I feel like one of the holy grails for marketers is attribution. At the end of the day, being able to report to the rest of the company, you know, how the dollars they're spending and how the activities they're engaged in are translating into revenue, but it's such a hard problem to solve, especially when you've got activities in all these different areas. And so I know you've done some work around figuring out attribution and you guys have actually won some awards for the work you've done in that area. Is that right? Joel (03:59): Yeah, absolutely. So, and I think it was back 2017 or 2018, we won the very first Google Display Innovation Award for work we've done with iCIMS which is basically, they're a talent acquisition SaaS software company based out of New Jersey. And it's been a company that's grown a lot over the years. And they, they, they handle kind of a few different things within the talent acquisition space. Most of what they do is recruiting, but they also do what's called kind of recruitment marketing. And they, they had some acquisitions along the way. So, so now they have kind of extensions of, of some of their recruiting and talent acquisition products and services. So it's, it's definitely an interesting company that's, you know, they're based in technology. So they kind of understand the need for using technology to not just grow your company, but also improve your products. So I think it was, it made sense that we're able to work closely with them to kind of grow their, their customer base and their marketing budgets. Kathleen (05:04): So can you tell me a little bit about kind of the challenge they came to you with and, and what was the work that you did for them? Joel (05:12): Yeah, so the challenge with iCIMS, what we've been working with them for, I want to say six to seven years now. So they have been a long time client. When we started with them, they, they wanted to kind of grow their overall customer base but they were very focused in, on kind of last click attribution and, and really judging everything that they do based on last click attribution. And at the time they did have a sizeable display budget and based on kind of the current metrics that they were dealing with they, they kind of saw that display was, was almost this kind of wasteful spend. It didn't really lead to opportunities, which is really the way they grow their businesses is through opportunities. And based on their technology and their measurement capabilities at the time, what their numbers were, what they were telling them was that their display spend was, was unprofitable or, or was. So the challenge for us was to, to really understand what was happening with their display spend and, and understand if any of it was impactful and, and how it was impacting some of their search budget or some of their other marketing channels. Joel (06:32): So we knew that we needed to really get better measurement tools in place and better attribution in place to understand how to tweak their display budgets and tactics to really grow their business. Does that make sense? Kathleen (06:46): How did you go about doing that? And, and I mean, what, I guess, if you could get into also the tech stack behind it and let's get into all the gory details. Joel (06:56): Absolutely. Yeah. So we started by building out our own custom integrations. So we have a few tools that we use depending on kind of what our client's needs are. So one of those is Marin software, which is a bid management tool. So we were able to build an integration from the client's CRM, which is Salesforce in this case, to Marin software, which was our bid management tool. So what we did there, was we essentially created a framework where anyone that gets to the client's website is given sort of this unique identifier. It's something that's not PII or personal information, its just, you know, an alpha numeric code or a number that's on there. And what we do with that is, when someone is assigned that number, as soon as they get to the site, when they fill out a lead capture form, we have some hidden fields and some technology behind the lead capture form that will essentially record that number. Joel (08:01): And what that does is, you know, let's say they have Pardot or a HubSpot which, which is what powers their forms, that number will kind of follow them along the sales cycle at all of the different stages. And when it gets to any particular milestone that's important to us, such as opportunity stage, that information is sent from Salesforce back to our Marin software so that we can see from, you know, whether it's a channel level all the way down to the creative and keyword level, what types of creatives, keywords or tactics are really driving opportunities. And that, that was kind of like a phase one of, of how we really started to, to fine tune and grow their customer base. Now, the challenges with this piece was that you know, at, at that time, everything was still a click based model, right? Joel (08:57): So you know, Marin's pixels and things like that, they, they really record all activity on the website, but it's all click based activity. So from there, once we were able to really fine tune their, their search budgets and their display budgets a little bit better from a last click standpoint, but more so less on what drives front end leads or lead captures and really emphasize on what drives opportunities. Then we really start to get an understanding of, of kind of what works on a last click basis. But we knew that, you know, display was still something that, that we needed to tackle and get underneath. And we knew that display is not just going to have an impact on your advertising from a click based standpoint. It's also going to have value from an impression based standpoint where people are seeing those ads and, you know, they visit the website you have through paid search, organic search or even direct. Joel (09:53): And so display really wasn't getting credit for, for some of that. So we still had to find a way to, to understand more of the display side. And, and, you know, the limitations of that first integration weren't gonna allow us to do that. So we started looking elsewhere and we landed on using Google analytics to be able to, to try to tie back impressions to all of that, all that performance. So we kind of use the same methodology in terms of assigning this alphanumeric number to anyone that visits the website and, and using Salesforce to communicate that back to another system. And when we integrated that process with Google analytics, with Google Analytics 360, you are able to see not just click based interactions, but also impression based interactions and how that influences other channels throughout the entire conversion funnel. So, you know, we, we basically essentially created a second custom integration where we upload a, what we call offline data, which is just data that comes from Salesforce, and what happens to someone who reaches a critical milestone or, or stage such as opportunity. And we would load that back into Google analytics, again, marrying the marketing data with the CRM data. And that's when we really started to understand how our displacement was influencing our search span and even organic channels, email, and all the other channels. Yeah. Kathleen (11:28): I have so many questions. I guess the first one is, all of this starts with this unique identifier, from what I understand. So I get the concept of, like, for example, I use HubSpot, and if somebody comes to the site, they fill out a form. I understand the concept of having a hidden field that they don't see, but that you've prepopulated if you will. So when they submit the form, that goes into their contact record. But how are you generating that random number for that field? Joel (12:03): Yeah. So in the past, you know, we kind of just created our own using some, some code and logic. Most recently we've found it's been more efficient to use, what's called a GA Client ID or Client ID. So Google analytics essentially does the same, same thing. You know, when someone gets to the website, they actually try to assign an alpha numeric number so that they can you know, tie back all of these sessions and user behavior through analytics. So we just started to take you back off of, off of that and really use that as a form of tying everything back together. Kathleen (12:40): So is, is the only way to connect those two things like let's say HubSpot and that Google Analytics unique identifier, the only way to do that through a custom integration, or are there any out of the box tools? Joel (12:53): I did, I don't believe there's any out of the box tools that, that I know of. You know, if you think about Google ads that Google ads has like auto tagging, which they use a what's called a GCLID or a Google Click ID, and essentially the very similar alphanumeric number that Google Analytics knows how to kind of decode that and translate that into campaign creatives and keywords and things like that. But our integrations don't just work in the Google universe. They, they work outside of that which, which I think is very beneficial. Kathleen (13:29): So basically anybody coming through from Safari or Firefox or any of any of the different browsers would, you'd be able to accomplish this. Joel (13:42): Yeah, so we, we have the same information for Google as we do Bing, which, most of what we do for iCIMS is, is in Google and Microsoft ads interfaces. But essentially, you can adapt this to Facebook or LinkedIn and other things. And we also get data on their organic search behavior and what they're doing with email and things like that. Kathleen (14:05): So you assign the unique identifier, which basically tells you from the first conversion you're able to identify, okay, this is, this is that particular unique visitor. And then that identifier, if you have a good Google Analytics set up and marketing automation set up that can carry through to all their different activities on the site. So you mentioned click and impression, and I want to make sure I'm understanding this correctly, because this is not my area of expertise. So I may ask some dumb questions. Like, as a HubSpot user, I know that HubSpot will cookie, as soon as they fill out the form, they're going to get cookied. And so HubSpot will, will follow everything they do on the site. But when you say you're tracking impressions, does that mean you're, you're tracking impressions of the ads and marrying that with impression data from the website? Joel (14:59): So it's not more, it's that impression data, well, I guess more so you're talking about like the visit visitation data from the website. So what with the Google Analytics 360, if you're running Google Display Network and, you know, your display budget through that interface, because the Google ecosystem that will communicate to Google Analytics, if those products are linked together. So if Google ads is linked up with Google Analytics and so even before someone visits the website, you're getting that, that impression data right now, when someone actually visit the website, we're getting that client ID and passing it through. And then marrying that back into Marin in Google Analytics so that we can see okay, this, these opportunities began within with a display impression. They may have converted somewhere else, like direct or paid search, even branded paid search. But it all started with a display impression. Kathleen (16:02): Wow. And so is the only reason that you're able to tie this together in a completely holistic way that is, is it because you're using that Google Analytics identifier and carrying that through all the way, and that's why you can marry everything they do before they get to the site with what they do on the site, as well as what they do after they leave the site. Joel (16:25): Yeah. The, the identifier is definitely the key piece. And even if it's not, you know, within the Google interface you should you'll with that identifier, you'll be able to tie back probably the extra piece where if you're running your display advertising through Google, then you'll also get the impression data, which is going to be helpful. Kathleen (16:49): Wow. So this is like crazy amazing for marketers, because it sounds like you're able to really see every single touch that you have with this person. But I imagine for somebody who's listening, it would might be kind of creepy for a customer to know that a company can see all of that. Joel (17:15): Yeah, definitely the, the kind of the age that we're living in. But it's, it's critical for marketers to, to and advertisers to understand particularly around their, their display budgets and how that is influencing other things. I forget, I think it was Brad Wanamaker who said, you know, like 50% of my ad budget is wasted. I just don't know which half. So this is something that really allows us to understand what half or whatever the percentage is, is wasteful, so that we can really move that budget and reallocate to things that we know are working and driving opportunity value. Kathleen (17:56): So you set this all up, you have all the data coming in. I'm really curious to know what you learned. Like, were there any big surprises that came out of the data? Joel (18:07): Hmm. Yeah, absolutely. So if you look at only a click based model about only 4% of opportunities are given credit to display but with, with this revamped attribution model, we actually saw that about a third, a third, really 33% of opportunities contained display impression, somewhere along that conversion path. And, and at least a quarter of those, 25% actually began with a display impression. So we understood that display has incredible value, and that's kind of how we were able to, to grow their budgets and bring in more leads, bring in more opportunities and essentially help them grow their business. Kathleen (18:56): So am I right? That, that display actually accounted for somewhere between four and six times, the opportunities that you were originally thinking it accounted for based on the initial dataset? Joel (19:11): Right? It's like seven and a half. Kathleen (19:14): Wow. Joel (19:14): A five X increase from what we thought and sort of a, a good cycle. And you get some momentum from that because once you understand the parts of display that are driving those opportunities, you can continue to reinvest and re funnel, kind of hitting on all gears there. Kathleen (19:39): So did that cause them to change their budgets? I would. I mean, if it were me, I would think I'd want to increase my budgets Joel (19:50): Kathleen, we'll see increases of anywhere from 25 to 35% year over year in terms of, you know, from where we started to three, four years later. Kathleen (20:03): Wow. That's amazing. So that, that's the project correct? That you won the award from Google for? Joel (20:13): Yeah, absolutely. Kathleen (20:17): So is that, that obviously required a certain amount of custom coding in order to put in place. And, and somebody who has the, either the internal resources to be able to do that, or, you know, can work with an agency, could replicate that kind of of a setup. But do you have any advice for somebody that maybe doesn't have access to that, like as, are there other ways of improving attribution that are, that maybe are a little bit simpler or more DIY? Joel (20:49): Yeah. So with iCIMS, we actually use three different integrations. Two are custom built. One was the first one that I talked about, which was Marin. So Google ads has had a Salesforce integration for probably maybe two to three years now. And, and it's definitely evolved over that time period. So it is a lot easier nowadays to integrate your, your Google ads in a way that doesn't take a ton of development work. Probably just, you know, five to 10 new hours of, of development work as far as like coding and things like that, to take your Google click ID and make sure that gets assigned in a hidden field to all the contacts and things like that. And to be communicated back to Google ads. And so, you know, if your main, if your main, a driver of performance or your main source of budget is Google ads that's kind of a no brainer to do well. If you're, if you know, CRM, Salesforce is your CRM and you want to get some milestone data based on kind of what you're seeing now, that is still a last click model or, or I should say a click based model. So you're not necessarily going to get the impression value, but at least you'll, you'll understand pretty easily what the opportunity value is of whatever you're, you're managing and Google ads Kathleen (22:39): That is so fascinating. You know, and how, if somebody was to come to you guys and say, I want to set this up for myself for my own marketing, is that, you know, how long does that take to get set up? Is it, I, and I, I won't say how much does it cost, but like, can you give me an order of magnitude? Is this something that's accessible to most companies or is it crazy expensive to do? Joel (23:02): Yeah, I think it is accessible to most companies. What we typically do is a lot of these integrations have just so many different factors based on what your tech stack is and your sales cycle and how everything works. So we typically start with, you know, what kind of technology do you use? How does your sales process work? We want to find out as much information as possible about sort of, you know, how your business operates and what your, your, your sales funnel looks like. And then we start to put the pieces together of, all right, you know, maybe you don't need this level of sophistication. You just need something that's a little bit more standard and XYZ is going to work for you. So there's going to be things that, that you don't need. There's going to be things that, that you might need, or maybe you, you kind of build it into a three year plan of our, I need this level of sophisticated laid out. So that in year three, I have you know, more insight into what could be more innovative tactics that we'll be able to do. But I just can't tackle that right now. So it definitely you want to understand kind of what your situation is and plan around that. Kathleen (24:28): That's so interesting. All right, switching gears. I have two questions I always ask my audience or my guests. And I'm curious to know what you have to say. The first one is, we're all about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you have seen, that's really killing it with inbound marketing right now? Joel (24:54): Yeah actually, I mean, to me, the first one when that comes to mind is iCIMs. I think they, they've been a great client and partner for us and in terms of the things that we've wanted to, to implement it and integrate and kind of what our vision was. So they've always, they've always been kind of willing to, to innovate and even outside of what we do, they have a good sales process and having good measurement and things like that. Mmm. And their, their level of sophistication has definitely evolved over the years. So with these integrations, we actually get down to some of the different company size segments that are important to them. So they have kind of company or sometimes different industries. And with all this technology, we've been able to not just look at this one big bucket and say, all right we're driving X amount of overall opportunities, but now we're to the level of looking at opportunities based on company size and industry and all these different factors that impact the growth of their business. So for, for them to kind of really understand that and, and work with us to, to implement those mechanisms, to be able to see that on all of that information on such a granular level to really plan out, you know, what their growth, that's kind of why I would think iCIMS is pretty much the first company that comes to mind. Kathleen (26:29): I'll definitely have to check them out. And then the second question is, digital marketing is changing so quickly. And marketers, whenever I talk to them, they're always saying I can't keep up. There's so much new stuff. So how do you personally keep yourself educated and kind of on the cutting edge of all of this? Joel (26:48): Yeah. I mean, there's a few publications that I read such as like Search Engine Land, PPC Hero, things like that. I'm also interested in SEO, you know, which is not my expertise, but I'm curious. So just learning about it in general. So at Path, we have a pretty great SEO lead, her name is Lily Ray. She's always out there speaking. She's very active on Twitter, speaks at a lot of conferences and things like that. So I kind of look to her for, for a lot of SEO specific information. But I think at the end of the day you know, we best learn by, by doing so if, if you're in the platforms every day and really trying to understand how they work, I think over time you get a better understanding of how, how you can innovate from what you have available to you. Joel (27:49): And I always think it's important, especially in today's world, like 2020 has been the craziest time. If you're a company that is innovating and, and testing new things they're, they're, they're not going to be wasted and that will soften the impact of, of something like a pandemic or you know, all of the, the sort of like the racial justice protests and things that are going on in the world. Like, there's, there's going to be ways that like no one, no one can plan or prepare for something this crazy to happen. But I think if you always are testing and innovating you'll be able to, to find these, these little trinkets of, of areas that are gonna work well for you, because what we've found as marketers is things are always going to change what you've relied on as your bread and butter in the past, historically, who knows if that's going to be available next year. So why not test now and, and really future-proof and build that infrastructure for something that you might need to pivot to before you actually need to do it. Kathleen (29:00): Yeah, that's a great point. And it has been just an insane year, from wildfires in Australia to pandemics all over the world, to racial you know, protesting, to murder hornets. It's just crazy. So you can't plan for any of that. Joel (29:19): Right. And even now, you know, it was this July, Facebook boycott, that's going to impact potentially a lot of businesses, especially if the majority of your, your marketing spend is on Facebook. So it's going to be really tough, challenging if, if you know, a lot of advertisers boycott, where do you put budget and how do you continue to grow your business without a source of, of inventory that potentially was one of your biggest sources? Kathleen (29:52): Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is so fascinating. If somebody wants to learn more about what you're talking about, or check out some information on the campaign that led you to the award, or connect with you and ask a question, what's the best way for them to connect with you online? Joel (30:09): Yeah. So I'm on LinkedIn. The Path Interactive website does have a case study kind of detailing and really streamlining the conversation that we had today about iCIMS. So that's kind of on our website you know, but feel free to visit pathinteractive.com and go fill out a lead form and get in touch with one of our salespeople. So we can talk about how to partner and improve your business. Kathleen (30:37): Awesome. Well, I will put all those links in the show notes, and if you're listening and you learned something new, or like what you heard, I would love it if you would head to Apple Podcasts and leave the podcast a five star review so that other people can find us and hear great content, like the stuff that Joel is sharing. And of course, if you know somebody else doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Joel. Joel (31:07): Absolutely. Appreciate it.

We wanted to do something a little different at LOVE INBOUND this year. Rather than just telling you that inbound works, we thought we’d give you some insider information. Who better to talk about the wonders of inbound than some of our clients that have experienced the initial hesitation, the challenges and the successes first-hand? Our Founder and Director at Digital 22, Rikki, welcomed Jude Browne (Marketing Director at Newcastle University), Tom Larkin (Marketing Controller at Shoes For Crews Europe) and Claire Bradley (Marketing Manager at WiFi SPARK) to the stage.

What kind of marketing team is needed to take a business from $1M to $10M in ARR? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Fleetio Director of Marketing Lori Sullivan shares her journey from Fleetio's first marketing hire to head of the company's growing marketing team, and how she built a team that drove 10X revenue growth - most through inbound marketing - for Fleetio. Listen to the episode to get Lori's thoughts on what you should look for in your first head of marketing, what roles should be your second and third hire, and transitioning fro specialty roles to what she calls "scale roles." Highlights from my conversation with Lori include: Fleetio is a fleet management company with a SaaS product and customers in over 80 countries. The company was founded in 2012 and Lori joined Fleetio in 2015. At the time, she was employee number 6 and the company had just $600,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR).  Fleetio is a marketing-driven company and more than half of its website visitors and conversions come from its inbound marketing efforts. Most of that growth can be attributed to organic. Lori says that in small companies, the first marketing hire really needs to be like a swiss army knife - capable of doing many different tasks. Because so much of the company's strategy revolved around SEO, Lori put in place a tech stack that enabled her to get the data necessary to build an effective SEO strategy. She relied heavily on Google Analytics and the Google keyword tool, as well as Drip for marketing automation. Now that the company has grown, she has moved from Drip to Marketo. Lori's first two hires on her marketing team were a content marketer and product marketer. She believes strongly in insourcing as much of your marketing talent as possible.  She also believes that a manager should step in and do a role first before hiring someone to fill it, so she managed the company's paid media strategy for some time before hiring a growth marketer to take that on. She strategically outsourced design work and video production until she was able to add full time specialists in those two roles. In the early days, her content marketing manager handled the company's social media marketing until she was able to hire an events and PR person who took it on.  As Lori has gone about filling all of these roles, she has placed great importance on culture fit, and has other members of her team interview new candidates. She also has every candidate that reaches the final stages of the hiring process do some sort of hands on skills assessment. While she wishes there was some sort of formula that could tell you when to hire new marketers, Lori says you really need to pay attention to the work you're doing and how that is contributing to growth. Resources from this episode: Visit the Fleetio website Connect with Lori on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to learn how Lori built a marketing team designed to help Fleetio 10X its ARR - and get Lori's advice on building your own marketing organization. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and today my guest is Lori Sullivan who's the director of marketing at Fleetio. Welcome Lori. Lori Sullivan (Guest): Hi Kathleen. How's it going? Kathleen: Great. How are you? Lori: Doing pretty well. Wrapping up the year strong over here at Fleetio. Kathleen: I know, I was going to say by the time this gets published it's going to be 2020 but we are recording it the week before Christmas and so I'm just grateful that you found time in your schedule to come on because I think... I'm sure like any marketer, you probably have a ton of things to do at your end. Lori: Yeah, well, like any growing SaaS business, we're trying to hit our annual goal and end the year strong and get a good a launching point for 2020. About Lori Sullivan and Fleetio Kathleen: Absolutely. Now before we jump into this conversation, and we are going to talk about growing SaaS businesses, maybe you could tell my audience a little bit about yourself and who you are and what led you to the position you're in today as well as what Fleetio is? Lori: Absolutely. So I am a seasoned B2B marketer. I spent a number of years in marketing agencies and specializing on the B2B lead gen side. I worked with a ton of different types of clients from startup businesses to large corporations running and executing lead gen programs for them, digging into the data and analytics around those as well. And in 2015, I got the opportunity to come over to Fleetio. So we are a fleet management software company. So we help our customers track, analyze and improve their fleet operations. We have customers in now over 80 countries, which is pretty wild, and we've really helped our fleet customers keep track of things like maintenance, fuel parts and inventory. So any business out there that has a fleet of mobile assets, whether that's vehicles, equipment, drones, any thing that moves, Fleetio can manage it. So we help people keep track of fleet operations and really improve the efficiency and productivity of the fleet so at the end of the day they can achieve their own businesses' mission. So we were founded in 2012, and I came on the team in 2015 when we were at about around $600,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR). I was employee number six, so a really small team and I was marketer number one. So it was a really exciting opportunity for me to use my B2B lead generation skills to come in and build an inbound lead gen engine. Kathleen: I love that. And it's so interesting for me to hear you talk about the fleets, right? Because you said a few things, you said drones and bikes and I hadn't really thought about it until you just said it, but yeah, the definition of what constitutes a fleet is really changing these days. You even have autonomous vehicles and things. It's so fascinating how that industry is evolving. Lori: Yeah, absolutely. The transportation space in general is just a really interesting area right now, especially with the rise of electric and autonomous vehicles. And the transportation market in general is just growing tremendously. It's changing. We're really trying to stay on the leading edge of what's going on and really anticipate what the market is going to need and what fleets are going to need - not just next year but in 5 years, 10 years, so we can really be that modern solution among our competitors to offer what's really necessary as technology and vehicles and assets change as the years go by. Kathleen: Now you joined the company at a very early stage and this is a topic that I'm so fascinated by because I'm drawn to early stage companies and I love coming in as the first head of marketing and building a team and all that, and you have been very successful at driving leads for the company and quite a bit of it is inbound, correct? Lori: Absolutely. Most of the revenue to date here at Fleetio has been driven by inbound. So we've been a marketing-led organization and honestly that's one of the reasons that this opportunity, coming in early stage was really interesting to me. I've kind of carved out that specialty for myself and I thought okay, "My background can really help to build this at this company." So yeah, we've been fully inbound driven. How Fleetio grew through inbound marketing Kathleen: That's great. And that's a real feather in your cap as the person who came in to kind of build that marketing engine. One of the things that you and I talked about, which I was excited to dig into today, is some of the mechanics that happen behind the scenes to support that kind of growth. And maybe before we get too deeply into that, just if you could talk for a few minutes about what has driven your inbound results. Because when you talked with me it was very content oriented and that sort of thing. So if you could provide an overview of that because I think that'll be great table setting for the conversation we're going to have. Lori: Absolutely. So I think anyone who is in the early stages of a SaaS business and then know they're going to focus on inbound first, one of the first things that most people invest in is content marketing. So in 2015, none of our competitors were really focused on inbound. So there was a low barrier to entry when it came to some of the categories, specific keywords that are usually really high competition in a space. We found that we could compete for those even with limited resources back in the day through content marketing and focusing on keyword, focusing on keyword specific blog posts, content on our site, technical SEO as well, making sure that our site was well optimized, to not only register for and rank high for high competition keywords and category keywords, but also long tail keywords. And with limited resources back in 2015 and 16, we knew that we could crank out really interesting and engaging blog posts. Again, not a lot of our competitors were doing that at that point so we could get the leg up on the content marketing side and really position ourselves as a thought leader in this space. So we started with blogging. We then moved into a lot of video content, white papers, eBooks, webinars. We do webinars really frequently and they're definitely popular among our customers and prospects. So content marketing really was what led the charge. It ended up equating for a little over half of all of our website traffic and half of conversions in the early days and it is still a really large piece of the pie when it comes to site traffic, lead generation and even revenue. Organic specifically still leads to most of the ARR that we see today. So it was a really great, I think strategy back in the day to start there to start building that. And as we've built our team, we specifically hired around those content roles so that we can continue to invest there and continue to double down on something that has been proven to work for us. How Fleetio staffed and grew its marketing team Kathleen: I love this topic because you really have done the block and tackle work of creating a very strong inbound content engine. And I can have tons of guests come on this podcast and talk about all kinds of sexy strategies, but at the end of the day that strong foundation of really just good content marketing, is what needs to underpin all of it. I mean, it's The Inbound Success podcast, that is what inbound marketing is all about. So I love that. And like I said, I was really interested maybe to focus on the things you did behind the scenes to support that. Because I think most of my listeners understand what it means to do good inbound marketing. It's funny, not everyone will do it, but everyone understands it conceptually. So as the first marketer coming in, I've been in that position and I sometimes feel like it's a little bit of a chicken and egg situation because you know what needs to get done for a business, but you also have the realities of resource constraints and revenue, et cetera. So talk me through what that looked like in terms of how soon did you hire someone, what was that role and what did you do in the interim? How did you do it all in the beginning? Lori: Absolutely. So I think it's important when a SaaS business is hiring its first marketer, if the hope is to have that person come in, be a marketing team of one for a short time, and then build a team, which was the case with me and Fleetio, that person does need to be a little bit of a Swiss army knife because you are going to be, like you said, blocking and tackling. There's a lot of things that need to get done, but especially if you're going to focus on inbound and content in general, the person also needs to be a strong writer. Now when I stepped into work at Fleetio, I didn't have a fleet background, probably not surprising. I didn't have a fleet background and so I sourced a lot of external resources to do Q and A's and calls and interviews and would cite these people in our blog posts. I looked externally to get that expertise that we were building at the time. I also looked to see what competitors were doing in adjacent markets. So like I mentioned, a lot of our competitors weren't really doing content marketing as we were and as we were hoping to. But there was a lot of that going on in adjacent markets. And so I looked at what other people were doing and tried to replicate that with our own flare and then also looked at where our actual competitors were ranking for certain keywords where we were not. So we did a lot of keyword gap analysis to see what topics we needed to talk about. A lot of people, when they start out kind of building a content marketing presence, building blogging presence, they start to develop content themes just around what they think is interesting or what they think their market thinks is interesting. And it really should be grounded in data. And so we adopted the tools early on to do that keyword research, to invest in analytics tools to see how we were performing and really tried to understand what would be the most valuable keywords or themes to talk about on our blog, in our white papers, instead of just kind of deciding for our market what they thought was interesting. So we've really tried to rely on data as much as we could. Even in the early days. We'd do that even more today with different tools and technologies that we've adopted to give us that visibility. But we've really tried to listen to the data to do that. Kathleen: That's a great analogy about being a Swiss army knife and it's really true. There's so much that needs to get done at that early stage and I completely agree with you about writing skills. That's one of those tough things that you can't... those are a lot of things you can Google and learn how to do as a marketer. If you can't write at that point, you can't Google and become a better writer. I mean I suppose you could, but it would take way too long. So totally agree on that. Fleetio's marketing tech stack Kathleen: Now you mentioned technology. What tech stack did you put in place back in those early days? Lori: Absolutely. So technology was really important to us. We like to think we're good consumers and technology since we're a SaaS company and we build tech. In the early days we didn't have a lot of monetary resources to invest in tools, so we used a lot within the Google suite, so we use Google analytics. We used Google's keyword tool to do a lot of keyword research. We quickly adopted a marketing automation software. We use a tool called Drip, which was kind of a lightweight version of a HubSpot or Marketo, though their platform has grown tremendously over the last few years. We've since moved off that to something a little more powerful, we use Marketo today. But that tool set early on allowed us to have the visibility that we needed. We've since grown that to look into kind of more areas and have more data around the full customer journey. But in the early days especially trying to figure out what keywords to focus on, it was helpful with Google analytics, their keyword tool and our marketing automation software. Making the first marketing hire Kathleen: Got it. Now how long were you at the company before you hired someone else to join your team? Lori: About a year. Kathleen: Wow. Lori: So I was a marketer of one for close to a year and we really tried to be strategic around creating a marketing team. We didn't want to bring on anyone that wasn't absolutely necessary and super critical at the time because in the early days we were of course investing a lot in content marketing. Our first two marketing hires were a content marketing manager and a product marketing manager. And really both of those were very content focused. The way we split up those roles and responsibilities was, our content marketing manager really owned blogging, white papers, webinars, anything under the lead generation umbrella. And then on the product marketing side, our product marketing manager really owned value-based content around our product features, creating a walk through videos or demo videos of the product. There's a lot of video happening on the product marketing side. So those two areas were really important to us to fill early on, and then we've grown them from that point. But we hired both of those roles about a year in to my tenure here at Fleetio. Insourcing v. outsourcing Kathleen: Now were you also outsourcing at the same time for some things? Lori: We did a little bit in the early days. We keep almost everything on the marketing side in house today, which I think is really exciting. I mean, we know our brand better than anyone else, but in the early days, especially design work was really necessary to outsource. And we would get creative in the ways that we found people to do that. We outsourced a lot through Upwork and would find some really solid designers on Upwork that we could give repeat projects. And Upwork's a great way to find different freelancers for different types of things. But we we did outsource a good bit of design work that we could not do in house. Kathleen: And how about the video, because you mentioned that video was a key part of your strategy? Did you have a team in house for that or did you outsource that as well? Lori: In the early days we outsourced our video work, especially animation, animated explainer videos and things like that. We would outsource that work. Our original product marketing manager and people we've added to that team got really great at doing screen shares, screen share videos to walk through the product and do different feature tours and things like that. So we tried to develop that expertise in house, but we would outsource the more heavy design or heavy animation type videos. Today we do have someone on the content team that is fully focused on video because it is a key part of our strategy. We were able to bring that role on board this year in 2019, and that was a really exciting one for us. Kathleen: That's great. I love that you're going in that direction. I believe so strongly in video as well. And there's plenty to keep a good videographer busy as you grow. Lori: Absolutely. Yeah. Whenever we hired our multimedia specialists, that's our videographer role, I quickly learned that we could have two. It's such a powerful medium, especially when it comes to our market. Telling the story of all the different things Fleetio can do to help a company's fleet operations, it's become a very robust product. And so video is a very powerful tool and one of the best communication tools that we have to really communicate our product's value. So was very excited to invest in that role this year. What to delegate Kathleen: That's great. Now you mentioned after a year you added the product marketing person and the content manager. You mentioned how they were splitting responsibilities, but how were they splitting things with you? Like what did you hold onto at that point? Lori: Absolutely. So at that point I was helping on both ends, still developing some content, helping kind of strategize around where we wanted to take content marketing, where we wanted to take product marketing, the roles we were going to add in the future to support both of those areas, we have multiple people on both of those teams now, also focusing still on kind of adding more to our marketing mix. So at that point we were dipping our toe into paid media through Google Adwords and we were using AdRoll for retargeting at the time. We were starting to figure out what a paid strategy looks like for us, and so that was one of the big responsibilities to start developing what that looks like. When it came to building a team, my philosophy and our CEO's philosophy, it was always let's have our director step in, start to build the area, kind of do the job for a month or two and prove a solid case for the next hire. So we really got hands on with, especially in the early days, we got really hands on with that area of the business before we made a hire. So just to really prove that it was a crucial need, a critical need at that time and it was the right time for making that hire. Pay-per-click marketing Kathleen: You mentioned pay per click marketing, where you actually doing the paper click at that time or? Lori: I was. I was and in 2018, so a few years of years later, we hired a growth marketing manager, which he has really two roles here at Fleetio. One is to run our pay per click advertising, he is an expert in that, much better than I was trying to really string that together. But the other area that he focuses in is true growth marketing. So he does a lot of experimentation alongside engineers and product designers within our signup flow, within the onboarding flow for new customers, really trying to improve things like trial to paid activation. And so we've really, within the last couple of years, started to dig in to true growth marketing. And so that's an element of his job as well but he also focuses and has wonderful expertise on the pay per click side. Who manages social media? Kathleen: Great. Now I'm curious, back in those early days when there was just three of you who handled social media? Lori: It was on the content side. So our content marketing manager at the time handled social media. Now we actually have a media and event specialist on our team and social media, PR, communications, things like that fall under her responsibilities along with events. So events and trade shows are still really big in our industry, in the transportation and fleet space. People are still heavy going to trade shows each year and so we definitely want to have a presence there. So that's part of that role. But she also focuses on social media now. Hiring a designer Kathleen: Okay, great. All right, so you had three people - you, your product marketing manager, your content marketing manager. Who was your next hire after that? Lori: After the content marketing manager and growth marketing manager, our next hire was actually a designer. We had been outsourcing our design work for a while and we had a couple of freelancers that we worked with regularly on the content production and video production side, but we really wanted to bring that expertise in house. And like I said today, most of almost all design work that we do happens in house. So we hired a brand or visual designer to come in and really work with people on both the content and product marketing sides to develop assets for our website, which is really our most important marketing assets as inbound marketers, develop sales collateral, really everything under the marketing umbrella here at Fleetio. So we brought on a designer, we've since brought on web designers, so someone's specific to our website, again, it's an incredibly important resource for us when it comes to lead generation. So adding that design talent was really critical as well. Kathleen: Yeah, and you guys have a really nice cohesive visual brand, so if you're listening you should check it out. It's Fleetio, F.L.E.E.T.I.O.com. The website is very tight visually. So that really shows that you have that resource focused on it. It looks like you've got custom icons and really good consistent imagery, et cetera. Lori: Yeah, design is really important to us here, both on the marketing side and the product design side. We believe that design flows through every single thing we do, whether it is through visual design or the way that we design our professional services offerings for customers. So design is a huge focus here. In the early days we also had a designer come on board around the same time I did. He was more focused on the product design side, but did play a huge role in kind of architecting the initial kind of brand of Fleetio, laid some of the foundation there, which was really, really wonderful to have that asset early on. Adding specialized and "scale roles" Kathleen: Yeah, that's great. So talk me through from there, what happened, like how did the rest of the team growth occur? Lori: Absolutely. So the way I thought about building a team, a couple of years into my time at Fleetio, it was really about filling the specialized roles, the areas of expertise that I needed to build. And then once those were filled, it was about hiring what I call scale roles. So I may have two or three content marketing specialists developing blog posts and white papers, I may have multiple designers to support a lot of the content marketing and product marketing work, the web design work that's happening on a regular basis. So first we finished filling those specialty roles. I mentioned bringing on a web designer, that was really key for us. I mentioned bringing on a media and events specialist that was also very important hire. We also brought on a partnership marketing manager. So integrations and partnerships are really important to us here at Fleetio. We have a number of integration partners, different telematics programs, fuel cards, maintenance shops. We integrate with a lot of different types of products and have a lot of integration partners that we can collaborate with, co-brand different marketing efforts. And so we brought someone on to really facilitate and grow, not only those relationships, but the revenue that we're getting from our channel partners as well. And then we started to look at the scale roles. Like I mentioned, we brought on a couple more product marketers to further drive home the value of Fleetio in our sales collateral and on our website to really own the customer communication that we were sending out, whether that was through email or in-app messages. And then we also started to double down on the content marketing side. We hired a videographer. We hired another content marketing specialist who focuses on written content. So it was all about laying the foundation with those areas of expertise and what I call specialty roles, and then stepping into kind of hiring for what I would call scale roles. Managing a growing marketing team Kathleen: Now, at what point in the evolution of the team did you introduce kind of layered management? Lori: Yeah, that's a great question. So we just started kind of having that layered or middle management layer really in early 2018. So it's newer to our team and it really happened first on the content marketing side and then on the product marketing side and it has definitely, I feel made the team more efficient. It gives really talented people even more ownership of their areas and the ability to teach and coach and even learn from their direct reports. So that was a really exciting thing to kind of build out more of a structure on the team. We'll continue to build that out, especially in 2020. But 2018 was the first time that we really saw that middle management layer established. And I was really excited by that. That to me felt like, "Oh okay, this team is really growing. We're really becoming this powerful force." So that was a really exciting milestone. Kathleen: That really also fundamentally changes your job and your day to day as well, doesn't it? Lori: Absolutely. Yeah. So whenever I am having kind of a one-on-ones and during the week with my direct reports, I always want to make sure and check in with people that don't report to me. For instance on the content marketing side, have a dotted line to our content specialists or to our videographer. It's definitely important to me to have the strategic conversations with them and that one on one relationship, even though I'm not the person who they technically report to. We have a pretty close knit team. So we're a team of nine right now and we have a really close knit team. I think we get a lot done for just being nine people and every single person on the team teaches me something weekly. I'm incredibly proud of the caliber of people, both personally and professionally that we've brought on. I think at Fleetio we do a really killer job at hiring and the marketing team is definitely true to that. Lori's approach to hiring marketers Kathleen: Now any specific tips or secrets to hiring that you think have worked really well for you? Lori: That's a great question. We really... I would say picky is a bad word, but really I am picky in the hiring process. I think really having those deep conversations with people in the hiring process, try to envision not just yourself working with them but different members of your team working with them. We have a pretty stringent hiring process as well. I'll start the conversations and then I'll always loop in at least one or more members of my team to interview them as well, kind of in the later stages. I think that's really important. And to get the feedback from those team members. How do you feel about working with this person? Do you feel that they're a good culture fit? We really drive home the idea of culture fit here at Fleetio in the hiring process and it's really paid off. We also typically for most roles do some sort of quick hands on assessment in the later stages of the hiring process. Just because, I mean you can have a wonderful interview with someone, you can get along with them great, you can visualize yourself working with them being very productive. But just seeing their hands on work really makes a huge difference. And so that's something we leaned on in most roles here in the hiring process and I think that's a great and very impactful part of of the process in general. Kathleen: I just want to stop for a second and underscore what you just said about having a hands on activity as part of the hiring process. Because I have done that as well, and the quality of candidates that make it past that stage differs dramatically from the quality of candidate that sort of makes it to that stage, and then it is revealed in that activity that either they're great or they're not as great as you seem to think they were. And I've had phenomenal results with that. So I love that you guys do that too. But that's actually kind of controversial, I have discovered. I'm a member of a bunch of groups online and there've been several conversations about this with a lot of people saying that they don't think it's right to have activities. I personally disagree, but I think it's interesting the different outlooks on it. Lori: Yeah, I've seen that as well. And I also personally disagree. I think as long as you limit it to a certain amount of time, for instance, any project or hands on assessment that I give someone in the hiring process, we usually say, "Dedicate an hour or less to this." You don't want to get people into those too early on in the process or take up too much of their time, but I truly believe in them. And it's also not just to prove their hard skills, you also get an idea of how much effort they put into getting this job, right? Kathleen: Yeah. How much do they want it. Lori: Absolutely. So I think you can just, you can learn a lot. We also use it as a talking point in final hiring conversations. "Tell me about your experience doing the assessment? How did that experience go? How did you start? What were the steps that you went through?" I think you can get a lot from someone asking those questions about something that they literally did hands on and really understand how they work, how they think about their work, their intensity. I personally disagree with anyone online that would say that it's not a great thing. I think it's been really valuable to us. Kathleen: Same. And I like what you said, it does show you how someone thinks, which is almost as important as the quality of work that comes out on the other end, really- Lori: Sure. Kathleen: -from an alignment standpoint and et cetera. So that's so fascinating. How to know when its time to hire another member of the marketing team Kathleen: Well, one thing I wanted to ask you is, you've built this team, you've been successful in growing revenue and leads for the company, do you have any benchmarks that you personally use, financial benchmarks, to determine when it's worth adding another member of the team? And I asked this because it's fascinating to me in sales it can be very cut and dry. If when you add X amount of revenue, you need X numbers more of salespeople, or if you add X number of customers, you need X more sales people. In marketing it is definitely not as cut and dry. So I'm just curious and the answer may be "no", I'm curious if you have any benchmarks that you use? Lori: Yeah, that's a wonderful question. I've read a few articles online about this topic as well. It's so interesting in marketing because there's not an exact formula. So I think the short answer to your question is there's not an exact formula. However, I do believe in... we build projection models every year. I think about how much lead generation, the velocity at which lead generation is going to grow month over month to really get us to that revenue goal for the year. So we build these projection models and I do use those to kind of pace hiring. But I think intuitively based on the team's capacity, what areas are really leading to the most revenue? I mentioned organic is a huge generator of revenue for us, so we want to continue to scale that team. I think intuitively I know the roles that we'll need for the next quarter or the next year, but the pacing that we lay out for ourselves, the goal setting that we do, it kind of helps me determine the timing. So I would say not an exact formula, but if you build a good prediction model or projection model, it can help you on the pacing and the timing around your hiring. Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. And I just recorded yesterday a great interview with Peter Schroeder from Onna about growth modeling. So if you're listening to this, by the time this airs, I think the previous episode, the one immediately prior will be on growth modeling. So check that out because then you can learn how to build your prediction model. Lori: Nice. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Well I could talk all day about this because it's not the sexy stuff, but it's the really important stuff about how you build a team and what that growth engine looks like. Shifting gears. I have two questions I always ask my guests and I'm curious to hear what you think about this. The first is when you think about inbound marketing, is there a particular company or individual that's really killing it these days? Lori: Absolutely. There are a ton. I constantly am looking to other growing B2B SaaS organizations for inspiration from an inbound perspective. I think Intercom always kills it and they've just grown so fast, mostly driven through content SEO. I really respect their efforts. Another one that's really interesting to me is Autopilot. I think what they did is pretty interesting, just their tremendous growth. I think it was zero to over 2,000 customers in just two years and most of that was really focusing on inbound and nurturing across the full customer journey. I think their model is really interesting. One smaller company that I always look out for is called FullStory. We actually use their products here at Fleetio and it's a wonderful product. I think they're an Atlanta based company and they did a big raise earlier this year, but I just think they've really differentiated themselves amongst their competitors, like Mixpanel and Amplitude and I continue to watch them grow and I think just their strategy and what they continue to do is pretty impressive. So those stand out to me for sure. And then of course anyone that's created a category for themselves, Drift, Outreach. I'm always looking for any content that they publish around their growth strategy and kind of how they continue to grow then double down on their efforts. Those always are really interesting stories to me. Kathleen: Yes, I am obsessed with the topic of category design. It's really interesting. Absolutely. Well those are great. Now marketing is changing so quickly. How do you personally stay educated and up to date? Lori: That's a great question. I think there's a million ways to answer that, a million places to look for that type of information these days luckily. I'm glad there's a lot out there. I'm a huge podcast person, so as I know you are. And so I love again a plug for Intercom, but I love Inside Intercom. I think their podcast is great. They did a growth series recently. I think it was around seven or eight episodes that I found really interesting, both from a sales and marketing perspective. And then, let's see, I like HubSpot's Growth Show a lot. I think that's a great one. And then just kind of under the SaaS umbrella and not necessarily marketing, I like Scale or Die and then SaaStr, an oldie but a goodie. Kathleen: Those are all good ones. And I will put links to all of those in the show notes. So if you're listening and you want to check them out, head over to the show notes and you can click right through and listen. Great stuff. How to connect with Lori Kathleen: So interesting. Lori, if somebody wants to reach out and ask a question or learn more about you or Fleetio, what's the best way for them to connect with you online? Lori: Absolutely. I would love that. The best place to reach out to me is LinkedIn. It's Lori Sullivan and I'm sure you can post a link as well. Definitely check out Fleetio at fleetio.com F. L. E. E. T. I. O. We are constantly updating our website. Great thought leadership content. Again, a wonderful team producing that content and really kind of shaking things up in our space that we're super proud of. Kathleen: It is a great site, like I said earlier, not just from a visual branding standpoint, but from a content standpoint, with lots of good examples on the blog of types of articles, you've got video case studies, there's so much good stuff here. So definitely check that out if you want to see an example of a company that's doing inbound really well. You know what to do next... Kathleen: And if you're listening and you liked what you heard today or you learned something new, I would be incredibly grateful if you would take a minute and head over to Apple podcasts and leave the podcast a five star review. That really helps us to get found and find new listeners. And if you know someone else who is doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because they could be my next interview. That's it for today. Thanks so much, Lori. Lori: Thanks so much for having me, Kathleen.

Living an empowered life starts with the way you think, which is influenced by the people you surround yourself with and your attitude. Our guest on today’s show is driven to empower others by elevating their attitudes and doing the most good for the universe. That guest is HubSpot’s Executive Director of Sales, Dan Tyre. Dan is one of the foremost authorities on Inbound Success, but he also coaches, speaks and writes about motivating millennials, accountability, and his personal favorite – attitude.

The inbound method is changing the way business and customers interact, and there are countless success stories from brands that have made the switch. Today we’ll be talking to the founder and owner of HLC Media Group, Lisa Cavalli. HLC Media Link BeLatina Link Follow Inbound Academy on Social Media! Follow on Facebook Follow on Instagram Follow on Twitter Follow on LinkedIn Grow Your Brand With Rizen! We're an inbound marketing agency based in Miami, FL. Visit us at gorizen.com or contact us today. We'd love to hear from you! Thanks to Kevin MacLeod for our episode's music. Episode Transcript --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/inbound-academy/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/inbound-academy/support

Why does adding captions increase video views by 300%? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Splasheo Founder Gideon Shalwick talks about the power of video captions. Splasheo provides video creators with a simple and affordable captioning solutions, and the company's clients have seen incredible results - in terms of increased video views and engagement - from adding captions to their videos. In this interview, Gideon talks about why captioning is so critical, how to create captions, what captioning costs, and the results you can expect. Some highlights from my conversation with Gideon include: Splasheo is a service that captions videos for publication on social media channels. Videos with captions get more engagement, views and comments. Adding captions also reduces the need to edit videos because the captions themselves promote engagement (whereas uncaptioned videos need more professional editing to drive engagement). Approximately 85% of videos are viewed on silent mode, presenting an incredible opportunity for video creators who add captions. In addition, on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, videos are set to autoplay, so captions dramatically increase the likelihood that viewers who see autoplayed videos in their feeds will interact with them. As humans, we are programmed to notice movement, so we are naturally drawn to captions. Captions help improve a viewer's understanding of the content in a video by forming a mental "movie" in their head. Captions are essential for videos posted to Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. They are not as necessary on YouTube, where viewers go expecting to have an audio experience. Captioning has the added benefit of enhancing the accessibility of videos for individuals who are hearing impaired. Many people who don't caption videos choose not to do so due to the perceived complexity as well as the time and "hassle factor." The accuracy of the transcription used for captioning is essential because if a viewer notices an error, it breaks their attention and increases the odds that they will fail to view the entire video. Gideon says that for platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, it is essential to burn the captions directly onto the video, whereas on YouTube, it makes more sense to separately upload an SRT file with captions (this provides added SEO benefits). When it comes to captioning, font size, color and contrast with the background are all important factors in ensuring that captions are effective. Gideon's clients see a 200% to 300% increase in video views when they add captions to their videos. Using Splasheo to caption videos comes out to about $20 per video. Resources from this episode: Visit the Splasheo website Get a free trial of Splasheo, including four video credits, at https://members.splasheo.com/inboundsuccess/ Connect with Gideon on LinkedIn Subscribe to Gideon's YouTube channel Listen to the podcast to learn more about captioning your videos and hear about the impact that captioning has on marketing results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. This week, my guest is Gideon Shalwick, who is the founder of Splasheo. Welcome, Gideon. Gideon Shalwick (Guest): Hey, Kathleen. Great to be here. Looking forward to this. Gideon and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: Thanks for getting up early. Gideon is all the way around the other side of the world, and it is 7:00 AM his time, 5:00 PM my time. You can have coffee while I have a cocktail. Gideon: That's the one. We'll have it after the show, maybe. Kathleen: Exactly. Well, tell my guests... my "guests." My listeners. See, there you go. That's me. I need a cocktail. Tell my listeners a little bit more about yourself and about Splasheo and what you do. About Gideon Shalwick and Splasheo Gideon: All right. My name is Gideon, as you know. I've been an online entrepreneur, I guess you could say, for the last 14 years. It all started way back when I was stuck in a job back in New Zealand and didn't quite enjoy what I was doing. I thought, "Hey, I need a change." So, I told my wife, "Hey, let's emigrate Australia," where we live now, "and start a new business there, start a new life." So, I started applying for jobs. I couldn't get a job in Australia, because that's going to get our ticket to get into Australia, right? So, after about three months I just gave up. I wasn't employable. So, my wife started applying for jobs. She got three job offers, in fact, within a week. Kathleen: Wow. Gideon: So, within a month, we were in Australia and I was starting my business, or at least figuring out how to start a business or what the heck it is that I wanted to do. My wife, she was working and basically paying the bills. I remember saying to her, "Look, if I can't make back the money within the first year of what my salary was, then I really don't deserve to be making that." It wasn't even much. I mean, it was $54,000, was my salary back then. First year I think I made 10,000 and I spent 11. So, I made negative 1,000. Second year, not too much different; I had a negative year again. It really wasn't until about two and a half years later that we finally figured it out, but before that point, we were this close to just giving up. I remember having this conversation with my wife and I said, "Look, it's just not working out. I've given it a good shot. We said about two or three years, and it just wasn't working." I can't remember, but it seemed like a week or a month after that point, we got this opportunity to work on a new business. We launched that, and it was a content-based business, was called Become a Blogger. This is back in 2008, I think, right about there. We launched a program that taught businesses how to use blogging for growing their businesses. It was really a content marketing sort of a business. We helped people use content marketing to grow their businesses. That was life-changing. Within a month, the business was making about $23,000 a month, which was fantastic going from zero or negative per month to 23K a month, which is great. I think within about two weeks of launch, we had about 10,000 people on our email database, which is great. This is something I often forget, but before we even launched, we created this series of 10 little videos, content pieces, that we just put out there on the Internet. Now, this was back in the day when YouTube was just getting started, I think. In fact, their video quality was so terrible back then, we used another service called Blip.tv. I'm not sure if you remember- Kathleen: No. Gideon: So, I'm not even sure if they're around anymore. But anyway, on that platform, we had over 300,000 downloads of our 10 little videos before we even launched. Kathleen: Wow. Gideon: I think even back then it was such an eye-opener to see how good it can be to create really useful content for an audience and to have that to help grow your business. So, that was my first little bit of a success. Since then, I've just building it, been setting up different companies. Built our own personal brand back in the day. I got to about 40,000 YouTube subscribers until I thought, "Hey, I better start building brands here that can run independently of me and my personal brand." I created the company called Splasheo and then spent about a year on it but then got distracted in a way to set up another company called Veeroll, which was a software company. We automated the production of video ads for YouTube and Facebook and Instagram. Earlier this year, I exited that company and back onto Splasheo again after four or five years of just ignoring that business. So, with Splasheo now, we caption people's videos and turn it into a really effective video for social media for our clients. Kathleen: Yeah, that's great. Gideon: So, that's what I'm busy with right now. Kathleen: I love what you're doing with Splasheo, because I've been experimenting with a lot of LinkedIn video just for myself. It's not something that I'm doing through work; it's a little test outside of work, a passion project. I'm not highly technical in terms of my ability to edit video or anything like that. We have a video team at IMPACT, but I'm not using them for this. So, doing this on my own, I've realized how burdensome it can be on the individual video creator to try and manage that process of producing really nice-looking videos with captions. But what a big difference it makes if you do it, and then when I saw what Splasheo does, I was like, "I should have just used that. It seems so much easier." The Benefits of Captioning Videos Gideon: Well, that's exactly it. I mean, there's a couple reasons why I got excited about captioning videos. The first one is like you're saying; it makes such a big difference to the effectiveness of the videos and especially the attention and engagement that you can get from your videos just by adding the captions. We've seen this time and time again with our own videos but also from our clients. As soon as they start using captions, they get more views, they get more engagement, they get more comments. They just get a much better result just by adding captions. It's so powerful. The other benefit that was a surprise to me, that I could only discover once I started doing it, was that when you start adding captions... I mention how it improves your engagement for your videos, right? But when you look at the reason why you normally edit videos, especially content videos, it's often and probably in most cases it's because you want to increase the engagement of your videos. You think about adding jump cuts or B rolls or special music or animations or what have you, and all for the purpose of trying to keep the engagement of your viewer. When we started using captions, we realized that just by adding captions it does all those things automatically just by default. So, what that means then is that you don't really need to edit your videos anymore, especially these content type of videos where you're using content to grow your influence online. We're not talking about creating a Hollywood production here or a very fancy video ad, for example. We're talking about creating engaging content where people can engage with you or with your brand. When you start adding captions, I mean, yes, you can still do editing if you want to, but you don't need to anymore because you get that benefit of what you used to be able to get with just editing. So, that was really powerful insight when I started using it. How Video Fits In Today's Marketing Mix Kathleen: That is. That's so interesting. Now, taking a step back, I was fascinated to hear you talk about what led up to Splasheo and just how you've always been somebody who's been involved in video in some way or another. You had this tremendous YouTube following. How video is being used in marketing, seems to me at least, has changed considerably in the last several years. I wonder if you could speak to, today, where you see the opportunity and what's getting the biggest results with video. Gideon: Well, I think in some ways it's changed and in some ways it hasn't. I think in terms of how you connect with people hasn't changed. Perhaps what people are doing now and the strategies and tactics they're using, maybe that's changed. Some of the platforms have changed. For example, back in the day with YouTube, at the beginning, you got rewarded for getting more views and that's what they looked at. They looked at the number of views you'd get, and then if you got a lot of views, the algorithm was favorable towards your videos. Then a few years back, so many people started playing the system and getting fake views and just all sorts of naughty things people were doing and so YouTube said, "Okay, let's change this. How can we make this so that we reward people who create good content?" Then they started looking at watch time and session time, right? So, watch time is where they look at how long people watch your video for. Session time is how long they stay on YouTube as a result of watching your video, right? So, they started looking at those two factors. If you weren't keeping people's attention, if you weren't keeping people engaged, then you'd lose out. Your videos just wouldn't... they'd just stop ranking. That was a good thing, because it got rid of all those people who were just creating really bad content but somehow getting the views, tricking the system. So, ever since then, I think it's been really good for us as content creators to create really useful content. Now the challenge now has become that everyone has upped their game, and now there's a lot of good content out there. So, now the question's how do you stand out. I think what really has been very interesting, especially in the last... well, it's actually been around for a while, but especially in the last year or two I think business folks have started picking up on this a bit more, and that's where the massive increase in silent play of videos. So, when you watch videos on your phone, for example, or even... it's not even on your phone. It's even on desktop as well. In general, people watch it on silent. The videos autoplay, right? Since autoplay came in, the sound is off. So, the thing starts playing on autoplay. You're sitting there scrolling, and if the video is not captioned, most people just keep scrolling by. I mean, it's something like 85% of people who videos on silent at the moment. So, that's a huge number. If you're not doing something special to stand out for those people, you're really losing out on a big part of your audience. You've got to do something to grab their attention. A lot of people do visual things with their hands or some special effects with the editing to try and grab people's attention, but there's nothing that engages better with actual text moving on the screen of what the video's about. That's what captions bring to the mix. So, I think that's been a big change, and I think if you're creating videos today and not captioning them, then that's a big problem. Again, it comes back to the key objective for creating videos, and that is to create a connection with your viewer. That hasn't changed. Since day one, that hasn't change. You've got to create that connection with your viewer, and you do that by, first of all, making sure you're talking to the right people and secondly by creating video content or a message that really resonates with them. In other words, creating a message or content that they actually want to watch and consume and share. So, that hasn't changed, which is brilliant. From a marketing perspective, the principles are still the same. Make sure you're targeting the right people, make sure you're creating the right message for them, and then use these different strategies, like for example the captioning, to help get their attention better and engage them a lot more inside your video content as well. How (And Where) To Use Captioned Videos Kathleen: Now, is it fair to say that the captioned videos for the most part are being used in the feed on social channels? Gideon: Sorry, is most of them getting captioned? Is that the question? Kathleen: Are most of the videos that are being captioned, is it fair to say that they're intended for use in the feed on social channels or in ads on social channels? Gideon: Yeah. Well, I think they add benefit no matter where they are. I mean, this is interesting. Even if you're watching a video and you've got the sound on, when there's captions, people tend to read them. I don't know about you, but certainly when... I haven't done a test on this, but my guess is that a lot of people are similar to me in the sense that if you're watching a video and there's captions on the video, you tend to read them anyway. The reason is because it's moving, so your eye gets drawn to it, and we can't help ourselves but read text when it's coming on the screen. It's just how we're programmed. We're programmed to notice movement. So, when we do that, it helps us absorb and consume the information a lot better and remember it a lot better, too. So, it's not just those autoplay videos on silent. It has a benefit for this, also, and additional benefit where people can actually consume the message a lot better. So, I think, yes, the feed, that's the obvious place where it works very well and perhaps why companies add captions in the first place, but I think there's other benefits, too, for having those captions in the videos, even if people are not watching it on the autoplay. Certainly, that's where they work really well. So, the three big ones for me are, when it comes to captions, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Those three. YouTube, yes, captions work there, but it's a different kind of a beast. I think people there still prefer hitting the play button and actually watching- Kathleen: Yeah, I think they go there expecting to have an audio experience on YouTube. Gideon: Right. So, that's a different beast, but even with YouTube... I mean, if you go to YouTube now on your phone and you're on your home screen, the videos there are autoplaying now, too, which is a relatively recent thing. But I mean certainly on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn, if you go to the feed, the videos autoplay by default. Those are excellent places for using captions for. Video Captioning and Website Accessibility Kathleen: I would think, too, though, it's interesting, what not a lot of people talk about but I feel like it's becoming a huge deal is just accessibility. I'm hearing more and more about lawsuits that are being levied against companies that have websites that are not completely accessible to all differently-abled people. If you have a ton of video on your website, not captioning it is really a problem when it comes to accessibility. So, I think that's sort of an interesting angle that is not given enough attention. Gideon: Yeah, that's right. We were actually helping someone who... she is deaf, right? So, she can't hear anything. She is really very focused on captioning. She actually captions all her videos. Her speech is good enough to still be captioned, and, of course, for someone like her and other people like her, having captions on the video is extremely useful. For example, when you watch her videos and you've got the sound on, it's quite difficult to understand it. I guess you can get used to it, but when there's captions as well, obviously that makes it a lot easier to understand. But then also people who are obviously deaf, they want to see the words. Again, if you don't have the captions on... and especially the way we do it. We burn the captions into the video, so we have control over where they get shown and how they get shown and how clear they are and how readable they are, et cetera. All this sort of stuff. If you don't have those, again, you miss out on the autoplay or the silent viewers, I guess, but then also on those people who can't hear the video if there's no captions, right? So, absolutely. You might as well add them. Why More Marketers Don't Caption Video Kathleen: Yeah. Now, having said this, there are tremendous benefits to captioning, but it's interesting to me just how many videos are not captioned. I'm curious why you think that's the case. I would imagine it would be one of a few options: either people don't know how to do it, or they feel like it's too difficult or time-consuming or expensive or they don't for some reason realize it's necessary. Or, in some cases, I imagine, there are times when people make a conscious choice not to caption it. In your experience, what are the more common barriers? Gideon: I think you've pretty much summarized that. I think definitely probably the main one stopping people if they are interested in doing it is the difficult of doing it. I mean, it's not that difficult, right? There's software out there that can automate the process somewhat, but where it becomes troublesome is the time-consuming nature of it. So what we do, for example, is when we get our clients uploading their videos, the first thing we do is we transcribe their video. It's a human being that does the transcription. We've tested automatic versions and, yeah, they work. I mean, you can get the automatic version of the transcript of a caption file back very quickly, within minutes. They often promise something like 98% accuracy, but you know what? The extra 2%, to fix that, it takes you like 98% of your time to fix that up. So, a very frustrating process to get it done really well, and it's important to get it done really well. We promise 100% accuracy, because we know how important it is that when people watch your video and they read your video, if there's a mistake in where a full stop is or a wrong word or a wrong name or something like that, it breaks their attention and it reduces their engagement. When you break their attention, it just creates an opportunity for people to click away, because there's so much other competition and stuff competing for people's attention. So, you've got to get it perfect, and that's one of the key things we do. The first thing: we transcribe it, and then we've got a person that reviews the transcript as well. So, we always have a different person reviewing the transcript to make sure it's really, really well. The third person then actually burns the captions into the videos using our specialized video editing software, and then a fourth person does the final review. So, there's really four people looking at each video. We've got four people doing that. Now, most companies don't have that sort of capacity to be able to... I mean, yes, you can build a team to do that and manage that, but it's a pain to set up. So, you can do that, but, I mean, there's easier ways of course. Some people like doing it themselves, but then they often get stuck on the doing-it-yourself nature of it, because it takes time away from actually creating content. When you spend time editing and fixing up typos and trying to figure out how the caption thing works and all that sort of stuff, it takes time away from getting your message out there to the world. So, definitely there's a technical barrier. The cost is not so much an issue, unless you look at time. I think if you're building your own team and they're spending time... they're not specialized at this and every time they do it, they take more time than necessary. It introduces extra cost into it and, of course, extra time as well. I think the interesting one you mentioned where there might be some reasons why people don't want to caption, and the only one that I can think of is perhaps for YouTube where maybe you still want to do the captioning. There's some SEO benefits when you upload the captioned part onto YouTube natively, but there's not as much benefit of burning the captions into the video, whereas for the other platforms like I mentioned, with Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, I think it's essential to burn the captions into the videos. Just uploading the SRT file, for example, to the platform, it doesn't quite cut it, because the thing is, when people watch the videos, sometimes they might have captions automatically turned off. Or what I often see is the captions are not very readable, especially on mobile devices. They're so tiny. You can't even read the words. So, I think for those, especially for LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, you've got to burn it in and that gives you much more control over what it looks like and how people can actually consume that content. So, yeah, it's either going to be technical or cost/time. The other reason, I guess, would be if they're ignorant to the value of captioning. They just haven't realized how important it is. But as I said, I think it's essential. Video Captioning Best Practices Kathleen: I want to dig a little bit deeper into something you started to touch on, which is the really fine points of best practices for captioning. You mentioned uploading an SRT file, it might result in captions that are too tiny to see. So, can you talk a little bit more about what makes for a good caption to video experience? I want to touch on everything from font size, to do you have a background behind those captions, do you put them in one word at a time as the person says it, do you put it one line at a time? I've seen in a lot of different programs with different options, and I'm just very curious as a company that's build around this what you see as the best practices. Gideon: Well, there's one word that drives everything we do for the captions in particular, and that is readability. It's got to be readable. That's the most important thing, especially on smaller devices like your mobile phone. So, that's the litmus test, I suppose. If it's not easily readable, then it's a problem. From there we look at size. So, we have a certain size that's big enough to work really well on especially mobile devices. We look at color. So, often times we'd either have a colored background with white text, say, or if it's a light background we use darker text. There has to be some really good contrast. Kathleen: Contrast, yeah. Gideon: Yes. Absolutely. If you don't use a background, because what often looks really good as well... TED does this really well. The TED Talks, they often have little snippets of. They don't have an actual background necessarily for the captions, but they either have a darker... the video's darker by nature, because with the TED Talks it's in a darker area and down at the bottom it's quite dark. So, white text on a dark background works really well. But sometimes the background from the video might not be that dark. If you're using white text, it can blend in with the background. Again, the readability goes down. So for them, you've got to use either a drop shadow on the text itself or introduce a transparent darker layer below the text so that, again, you create that contrast so it's easier to read. Very, very important. What else do we look at? For some things, what works really well as well is, for podcasters, people who create a lot of audio content, we take those... people submit little snippets of their podcast. Pat Flynn, for example, he would submit a between one and three-minute audio clip to us. He'd select either a color background or an image background. What we do, then, is we superimpose really nice big and bold text on top of that and that works really well, because then you've got then, again, that nice contrast. But then we often increase the size even more. So, you'd have maybe a square video and the main thing you see, really, is the big text right in the middle of it. You can't miss it. If people are scrolling and there's this big, fat text in the middle of the video and it's engaging text, people read and they go, "Wow. Yeah, this is interesting," it pulls them in. It's really, really effective. Part of that also is not just what the text looks like, but like I said before, the accuracy of the text is really important. Also, how long the text is, how many letters there are in each text segment. It's interesting, because there's a bit of a science there between how many letters get used and also trying to fit that in with an idea segment. Sometimes you might want to have slightly more words, but it's all keeping the same idea in one shot, so to speak. Otherwise, if you break it halfway, again, it breaks their attention. So, a lot of little things we look at like that to make sure that it's readable, once again, so that people don't feel like they're getting interrupted while they're reading or watching your video content. Those are some of the things we look at for the caption part of it as well. There's this other- Kathleen: What about in terms of the words... for example, I've seen on one platform that I've looked at that does captioning, they give you the option of adding the caption one line at a time, so the line of words will appear, or one word at a time. Is one better than the other? Gideon: I haven't done specific tests on this, but certainly from looking at this myself and also... this is interesting. I had this conversation with the deaf lady that I was talking about before. She studied this a lot in a lot more detail than I have, because it's a lot more important for her. Kathleen: I bet. Gideon: So, what I've noticed is that there's probably three levels here, and they go from one extreme to the other. The one extreme is where it's just one word at a time. Boom, boom, boom. Now, I know that there's some technology where you can actually speed read with just one word at a time. You can increase the speed with some software to help you read faster- Kathleen: I feel like that would give me a massive headache. Gideon: Well, your brain is surprisingly fast, and you can actually read a lot and very quickly like that. Now, the trouble is we read faster than we can talk. So, when this is used as captions, often times it's too slow for our brain. Our brain wants it faster. That's one thing. But also the other thing is it's kind of distracting, because for that to work you have to only look at the words. You know how with reading you can read ahead a bit and then sort of absorb the content. So, when it's just one word at a time, I think it's not as effective and, like you say, it can be quite bothersome and tiresome to watch a video like that. While it might draw the attention in, does it help with engagement? I don't know. That's questionable in my view. So, the next step up from that, which is better but I think is still not as good, is when they just have one line and sometimes they use all caps. Kathleen: Oh, that's not good. Gideon: Right. Again, is it readable? I think when it's just one line, the trouble with that is that there's often not enough time for you to read it, because when it's one line, depending on how fast a person's speaking, there's less time for people to actually read that little one line. Then you might not even be finished yet with reading it and it flicks on to the next line already. So, you miss what's been said. Kathleen: I imagine that would be so frustrating. Gideon: Right. Exactly. You tend to stop reading and click away and move onto the next thing. So, I think certainly the best mix we've found is where, again, we have enough text space available to group together the... there's a word for it. I can't remember what. It's like an idea snippet, I guess, or concepts go together within the text so that you don't break that train of thought. Also, when you have the text often in two lines or slightly more, it gives the viewer more time to actually read and consume and absorb that content, which I think is important. So, I think, yes, they all work, but there's different grades of how well they work. I think the best one is where they give people a bit more time. It's so interesting; I think a lot of people are trying to use fancy ways of trying to stand out with the captions, and I think that is actually a mistake. You're not trying to be fancy with your captions. You're trying to make it readable. That's the number one goal. If there's anything that you add to it that makes it look fancy and reduces the readability, then I would say it's a no. Rather go for something that looks simpler and more traditional but increases the readability, because ultimately it comes down to how well people can consume your message. What Impact Does Video Captioning Have On Marketing Results? Kathleen: So, you work with a lot of different clients that are captioning their videos. Do you have any examples you can share of people that have added captions in and seen really great results? Gideon: Absolutely. I mean, a common friend of ours, Marcus Sheridan, he was one of our first users. He'd been using it for... basically, he was one of our first users, which is amazing. He got back to us after a few weeks after using the service and he said he got a between 200% and 300% increase in his viewers. He didn't mention the number, but he said he had a massive increase in click-through rates as well for videos, which any time I see it, it always takes me by surprise how big the difference is just by adding captions. I mean, goodness. We're seeing this time and time again from our clients. There's one of our users, Tim Sanders. He started using the services. Well, he would normally just get... he'd get a good number of views and a decent number of comments on his videos on LinkedIn in particular, and then he submitted one of these videos that we captioned for him. One thing we haven't touched on is that we don't just caption the videos; we also burn them into your videos, right? We burn it into a really engaging-looking or designed for engagement frame. We add a headline, for example, as well at the top of the video and then the captions go down at the bottom. So, that's really important. Why Burning Captions Into Videos Is So Effective Kathleen: Can you talk about why that distinction's important and what that really means? Gideon: Yeah. So, the two key things you want to do with creating video content is you want to grab people's attention and you want to engage them. You can add a third one, maybe, where you call people to action, you want to get them to take some sort of an action. But in terms of the content itself, you want to grab their attention and engage them. There's two things we to make that happen specifically. The first thing is we use... the frame that we create the videos in is created in such a way that it grabs attention. So, our most common frame is the square one. It's called the fancy square, where you have the option to add a headline on the video, a static headline. It stays there when the video starts autoplaying, and then below that is your actual video. Then below that is room for the captions. So, the bit that grabs attention is actually two things. It's the headline. I mean, if you've got any piece of content... I mean, often when you talk with copywriters, they'll say that 80% of your work and 80% of the importance of your content goes into a headline. That's the most important thing, because that's what grabs people's attention and that's the number one thing that helps people decide whether they want to consume the rest of the content, unless there's little- Kathleen: Right, it's worth my time. Gideon: Exactly right. I can't remember who said this. Some famous copywriter talked about the purpose of the headline, and the purpose of the headline is to get people to read the next line. That's all it is. And then the purpose of the next line is to get people to read the following line. So, it's really interesting. With a headline, you're not trying to get people to necessarily watch the whole video, but you want them to just stop and go, "Hey, this is interesting. Maybe I should pay attention." That's what the headline does. It's so important. So, there's a bit of an art to writing those headlines as well, writing them in such a way that really draws people in. When you see captions moving on the screen, that draws people's attention in as well, because we're programed just to notice movement. Then the second thing, which is engagement, happens really through the captions and the actual content. What's really interesting about this that I don't think a lot of people realize is that when people read words they don't actually see the words. They see the images behind the words. They see the images that the words invoke. When you read a book, you don't look at... I mean, you read the words, but as you're reading it, in your mind, it creates all these images. Kathleen: Totally. I've always said it's like playing a movie in your head. Gideon: I was just going to that. It's like you've created this movie theater and put inside people's heads. Words are powerful, because not only is there an image that gets created but it's a visual image that gets created by the viewer themselves. So, they own that image through your content, which means it's much more powerful than just visual content. When you can get people to use their own imaginations to help consume your content, that's really, really powerful. Kathleen: Although I feel like it's a double-edged sword, because that's the problem that happens when you read a book that you love and you've played the movie in your head. Then somebody goes and makes an actual movie and it's not the same movie you had in your head. All of the sudden, you're disappointed. Gideon: Definitely. I definitely know what you're saying. It's so powerful, because, I mean, if I tell you to not see the thing I'm going to tell you about next... for example, please don't imagine and seeing in your mind's eye a pink elephant with wings flying in the air. You just can't- Kathleen: Impossible. Gideon: Impossible. I didn't show you; I just said the words. So, the same thing happens when you start adding captions. Those two things is what we have that's super important. I mean, we do have a third thing as well where you can add a call to action and getting people to actually do something. I think those are the three kings of any video: attention, engagement, and action. You get those three things right, then you've got a beautiful combination. Now, I forget the original question that we were talking about but- "Those are the three kings of any video: attention, engagement, and action. You get those three things right, then you've got a beautiful combination." - Gideon Shalwick Click to Tweet What Does It Cost to Caption Videos? Kathleen: No, you did a great job of answering it. We were talking about the technical details. We were talking about the results. I feel like if somebody's listening and they're making videos, really, it's a no-brainer to add captions. So, if somebody is interested, can you give a sense for what does this cost? Because that's always the next question, right? "This sounds great, but can I afford it? Is this too good to be true?" Gideon: Right. So, it comes down to basically how much you value your time. Obviously, you can do this yourself, like individually a do-it-yourself. There's a lot of solutions out there that allows you to do that, but, again, you've got to do it yourself and use the software yourself, et cetera. Next option is to get someone else to do it for you. So, either build your own team or outsource it. Again, there's a time commitment there. When you train people up and they leave, that's quite a painful thing. But, I mean, that is certainly an option as well. The third option is where you just get someone who's a specialist at it. So, that's what we're doing at Splasheo, for example, where we specialize in it. We do it every day. We eat captions for breakfast and morning tea and lunch and afternoon tea and dinner. And then dessert as well. So, we've been able to systemize it quite well. We've got different plans. At the higher price, it works out to about $20 per video, and that's for up to five minutes long for a video. So, 20 bucks and you've got yourself a video. We'll take about 24 hours to send it back. Kathleen: That's really reasonable, because I have tried to caption my own videos. Let me just tell you; even with these super simple programs, I'm spending more than 20 minutes, and I feel like the time value of money is huge. Gideon: Right. I mean, it takes 20 seconds. Once you've got the video, it takes about 20 seconds to submit your video. I mean, it might be even less. Once you've got your video customization set so you can save those in another folder area, once you've got the set and you've got the video, you just put the link in there and press go. I mean, 20 seconds is a long time to do that, and then you're done. When you think about removing obstacles for you to get your message out there to the world, I mean, this is great. It just means you can be in front of the camera, and once you're done with that, you submit it and you go and do whatever else you need to do in your business without letting other things take your time away from what you're supposed to be doing. A Special Offer For Inbound Success Podcast Listeners Kathleen: I love it. Well, I have a feeling there are going to be people listening who have questions or want to learn more about Splasheo, want to check out more of the pricing packages. If they want to do that, what's the best way for them to learn more? Gideon: Well, we've actually set up a special page for you guys at Inbound Success. So, let me just make sure I get that right address. We set up a free trial for you guys where you can get up to four video credits. Each video credit gets you up to five minutes' worth of video. So, that's about $100 worth of video credits that you can get for free as part of this trial. It's a seven-day trial. You don't have to use it within the first seven days, but after seven days, the first payment kicks in. So, that's on the growth plan, which is 99 a month. But you can sign up and get the first four credits 100% free, and then after seven days when the payment kicks in, you get another four. You can cancel any time, of course. You can get access to that at Splasheo.com/InboundSuccess. So, that's Splasheo, which is just splash E-O dot com. Splasheo.com/InboundSuccess. Special for Inbound Success Podcast listeners: Get a free trial, including four video credits, from Splasheo at https://members.splasheo.com/inboundsuccess/ Kathleen: All right. I will put that link in the show notes. Thank you. That is a fantastic offer. So, if you're listening, you've got no excuse now. You can get four videos captioned at zero dollars by Splasheo. So, check that out. Again, links will be in the show notes for that landing page. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Before we wrap up, I have two questions for you that I ask all of my guests. The first is, we talk a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast obviously, so is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound? Gideon: Yeah, absolutely. It's one of my friends, Nathan Chan, from Foundr.com. They're also a user of our Splasheo service. I mean, they just absolutely love it, because, again, it helps them just get the content out there without being held back. But, I mean, sure, that's the caption side, but aside from they also do this whole inbound marketing really well. So, they're a great example if you go to Foundr.com to check out. One thing that I learned from Nathan is that... he talks about the way they've done it. What they would do is they would just focus on one channel at a time or one platform at a time or one traffic generator or content strategy at a time. They wouldn't try and do a bunch of things at the same time. Just do that one thing and do it until they've completely mastered it. I've seen them do this. I think they started with Instagram and totally killed it. I think they're sitting on 1.7 million subscribers there now. Incredible. Kathleen: Wow. Gideon: Then they did this podcasting and interviewing people. Well, they didn't do it at the same time. He did the Instagram thing first and then the podcasting. Totally smashed that. I don't know how big... I mean, he's got one of the biggest podcasts in the world, I'd imagine. I don't know the numbers, but I would imagine it's pretty big. Now, he's doing it with YouTube. It's been so interesting, because I remember watching at the beginning and him working with Instagram and podcasting and I'm not sure what else they were doing, but I said, "Guys, you need to look at YouTube. There's a big opportunity there for you guys." He said, "Yep, we will, but not yet." I don't know how long they've been at it, but it hasn't been that long. Maybe since the start of the year that they've been focusing on YouTube now. Again, they are just crushing it. I think the reason is because they have such big focus on just one channel at a time. It just gives you the ability to be like a superhero. You can just hone in with laser focus, laser eyes to make that thing work really, really well. Kathleen: I love that example, because I just this past week published my 100th podcast episode and what I did for it was I went back and looked at the previous 99 episodes. I extracted as many commonalities as I could from those interviews about what made those particular marketers really successful. One of the things I specifically talked about was they pick one thing and they do it really well. Now, it doesn't have to mean they only ever do one thing, but they tend to, exactly as you said, master one thing before they start to move on. What I think is so interesting about that is that marketers tend to really be distractible. We love our tools and our new platforms, and we have a lot of shiny penny syndrome. It takes a phenomenal amount of discipline to say, "No, I'm not going to try that hot new thing. I'm going to do this one thing until I have nailed it, and then I'll move on." So, that's a great example. Second question- Gideon: Yeah, just- Kathleen: Go ahead. Sorry. Gideon: The thing is, as soon as you add something else, like if you're just starting out... I mean, it depends a bit on your resources as well, but I think this goes whether you're a small company or a bigger company. It's the same thing. As soon as you introduce another channel, it dilutes your efforts. Not only does it dilute your efforts, it also increases complexity. As soon as you introduce complexity, it becomes harder to grow. I think that's the key thing; you want to keep it as simple as possible and you make it as easy as possible for you to succeed. Give yourself the best possible chance to succeed in a big way. You can only really do that with focus. Kathleen: Love that. The second question I have for you is... the other thing I hear from a lot of marketers is that it's really hard to keep up with everything, because there is so much new stuff that is constantly coming down the pike, whether that's new technologies or new strategies or new algorithm changes. How do you personally keep yourself educated and on top of all of this digital marketing stuff? Gideon: I might have a bit of a different answer here. I think the way it happens for me is probably through osmosis. In a way, that's the short answer. But the other part of it is that I don't actually specifically stay up to date with any specific group or organization or thought leaders or what have you. I do that on purpose. The reason I do that is because, for me, I just find that when I do that, it's easy to get blindsided by certain people's opinions about certain things. Also, it could become restrictive in a way, because if I were to follow just a few number of people, I would start thinking that's how the world works and that's the only way it might work. It might discourage me from thinking for myself and coming up with creative solutions. So, where I draw a lot of my inspiration from now is not actually from existing thought leaders or organizations who are leading. I try and go back to, I guess, just myself and look for that inspiration actually away from what's happening. Because often times you look at the truly innovative companies, and they're the ones who they actually do something different. They're not doing the same as everyone else. I think to be different, you've got to think differently. You've actually got to be careful not to get too conditioned with what everyone else is doing and saying. So, I think that's always been a good recipe for us to come back just to... it actually comes back to what it is that we love doing and how we love serving. Sometimes, it's not the same as what's happening in the world right now. When we focus on that and we go back to what it is that we're truly passionate about, because of that passion, that gives us the fuel for the creativity. Then, these ideas just come from out of nowhere. When we focus on it, not always but often times they come out. When they do come out, it's something that's totally unique but also useful at the same time that really gets people's attention. Kathleen: Well, I feel like there's such a valuable lesson in what you just said that applies way beyond marketing in the world we live in today, not putting yourself into an echo chamber and just blindly following certain people. I'll leave it at that and not say more. But I love that. How To Connect With Gideon Kathleen: So, we talked about how people could learn more about Splasheo. If somebody wants to get in touch with you or connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that? Gideon: Well, I'm actually a newbie on LinkedIn. For 13 of my 14 years, or maybe 13 and a half of my 14 years as a business owner, I've ignored LinkedIn. It's only really been since the start of this year that I really started looking at it. So, if people want to connect with me there, I'd be more than happy to. My following's still very small there. I think I'm just approaching about 1,000 connections there now, which is also interesting. My very first video on LinkedIn got 27,000 views. Kathleen: Wow. Gideon: Well, I had 500 connections at the time. I think it just says something about LinkedIn. If people want to connect with me there, just search for Gideon Shalwick and say you've listened to this interview. I'll be more than happy to make a connection and have a chat. So, that'll be very exciting for sure. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: That's great. Thank you so much, Gideon. Now, if you're listening and you've learned something new, you've liked what you've heard, you're now passionate about captioning, I would very much appreciate it if you would leave a five star review of the podcast on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge difference. If you know somebody else who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, Tweet me at WorkMommyWork, because I would love to make them my next interview. Thanks so much, Gideon. This was a lot of fun. Gideon: Thank you, too. It's been great fun.

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.

How does a small agency regularly pull in $100,000+ from small, 20 to 40 person events? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Oli Billson shares how he has brought in over $1 million dollars in new business revenue from a series of just five small, workshop-style events.  Oli is the Founder of Oliver Billson Marketing and a popular marketing speaker featured in conferences around the world. His small educational events for entrepreneurs have become a significant driver of revenue (both one time and recurring) for his business, and in this week's episode, he shares the exact process he uses to plan, promote, and monetize these events. 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 Oli include: Oli speaks at a lot of marketing conferences around the world, and uses that as an opportunity to hold local events in the conference cities for area entrepreneurs and business owners. In the past year, he has run 5 of these small events around the US and Canada. Oli's events are two-day workshops designed to help businesses go "from inspiration to implementation." At the event, attendees get the "Automation Playbook," a pre-built, pre-packaged, well-engineered marketing that they could go and put to work immediately in their business. Every attendee is also given a free, 30 day trial of Oli's monthly membership program called "Player's Club." After the initial 30 days, membership continues at $400 per month. The average attendee stays in the membership program for 9.5 months. Attendees are also given the option to upgrade and join Oli's mastermind group at $15,000 a year. In most of the cities where Oli has held events, he does not have a lot of local contacts, so he relies on a two-step direct mail campaign targeted at a list he purchases from InfoUSA. The response rate for this campaign was 60%. This is coupled with a text and ringless voicemail campaign aimed at driving registrations. The key to monetizing events like Oli does, is to have offers that you can use to upsell attendees. In this case, Oli's offers were structured in a way to deliver recurring revenue to his business. Once someone registers for an event, Oli sends them what he calls a "shock and awe" box with event swag and a "stick letter" reaffirming their decision to register. This has contributed to a 90% attendance rate. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the Oliver Billson Marketing website Connect with Oli on LinkedIn Follow Oli on Facebook Follow Oli on Twitter Listen to the podcast to learn the exact marketing plan that Oli uses to generate six-figure revenue from small, workshop-style events. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and this week my guest is Oliver Billson, who is the owner and founder of Oliver Billson Marketing, and a serial entrepreneur with a fascinating background, welcome Oliver. Oli Billson (Guest): Hey, thanks for having me on. I'm looking forward to it. Oli and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: I'm looking forward to it too. So for my audience, I first met Oliver at a Digital Marketer's agency training day about a month ago, and he gave a fantastic talk on how he's driven traffic to these local events that he's been holding, and then the impact that that's had on his business and revenue growth. And so I was, as soon as I heard it I was like, "Ooh, I need to share this with my listeners!" About Oliver Billson Kathleen: But before we jump into that, can you talk a little bit about yourself, because you have a fascinating background, and I was interested to read on your site the evolution of you as a businessperson and how you wound up doing what you do now. Oli: Yes, sure, so it is a bit of an interesting story, I guess. I've never actually worked for anybody, I started my first business when I was 15 years old, building computers out of my mom and dad's back room, and that was my first foray, really, into entrepreneurship. And I, as well as having a passion for computing and building computers at that age, I also had a passion for cars, I absolutely love cars, still do to this day, and so what I did was I started an automated after-market business, and really kind of understood at that point, building that service-based business, the importance really, the lifeblood of every business, which is getting and keeping customers. And I was really lucky to be exposed to direct response marketing at a fairly young age, I was only about 19 years old, actually, when I read my first book on direct response marketing, immediately applied it, and really had some profound results from implementing that type of marketing. And it kind of defied conventional wisdom and popular belief, in terms of my circles at that time, the people that I knew that were building businesses. And they were quite amazed at the growth and the catalyst that that had had on my business, and so we grew those businesses and I kind of became known, now I suppose, for building businesses inside of businesses. So we started out as a service-based business, then we started helping other people in my niche at that time, start, grow and scale their own businesses, then we'd create another business inside of that business, which was our exclusive franchise, which we took from zero to 170 franchisees internationally in just less than four years, so very quick growth there. And then inside of that business I built another business which was a marketing agency out of the capabilities I built around marketing inside of that business, and then we transcended that into membership, and selling information and knowledge and expertise online through our memberships, and then into where we are today, which is nextlevelbusiness.com, which is an e-learning business where we help, obviously, service-based businesses, client-based businesses scale. Kathleen: Wow, it is so clear that entrepreneurship runs in your blood, very strongly. I love hearing stories like that, because there's an interesting pattern I've noticed in, I've now like 90-some-odd episodes into this podcast, and I interview different people every week, and they're all people who are getting phenomenal results with some kind of marketing. And what I've started to notice is that a lot of them, probably the majority of them, are not trained as marketers. They are people who have that very entrepreneurial spirit, they're very naturally curious, they're the kind of people who jump in and want to know the answers to things and figure things out, and they love a problem and figuring out how to solve it, and I feel like that is so what I'm hearing from you. It's great, it's- Oli: Yeah, absolutely. It's all about solving the problems for people, you know? Kathleen: Yeah, well, [crosstalk] and I think that's what makes you a great entrepreneur, is figuring it out and taking your business to the next step, because let's be honest, as an entrepreneur you're constantly going to be faced with, somebody once said to me, "As your company gets bigger, you don't have fewer problems, you have maybe the same number of problems but they tend to be bigger problems." And so there's only more things to figure out, so you've got to love that. Oli: Absolutely, yes. Yeah, totally agree with that. How Oli Grew His Business Through Events Kathleen: So let's talk a little bit about what I heard you talk about at Digital Marketer, which is these events. And this started out as something very small, that you quickly saw you were getting results from and then it expanded. Can you kind of rewind the clock and maybe share with the listeners what your original objective and idea was when you first began? Oli: Yeah, sure. Probably like a lot of people, I love attending events, and for those who know me well, I'm fortunate enough now to be asked to speak at events pretty much all around the world, so I love speaking at them, I love attending them. I think there's something special that comes with events in terms of the bond that you can create with people, potential customers, with the proximity that they bring. And there's lots of benefits to running events, from a sales, customer acquisition standpoint, of course, and they're often used as a vehicle, and over the years I've helped lots of other people actually put on their own events, and put butts in seats, and monetize them and have the whole strategy behind it. But although I knew all the benefits of running an event, I was actually a little bit shy to actually do my own events, for a number of different reasons, and probably those reasons were many of the reasons why people don't ultimately do it. Perhaps they're worried about attracting enough people to actually attend the event, they're thinking, "Well maybe I don't have a large enough list of potential people to attend the event," or maybe, "What happens if I can't get people to register for the event, what happens if I can't get them to show up to the event, and what happens or if it was a failure, how would I be perceived in the market if it was a failure?" And so, all of these are the common fears, really, that were running through my mind, and probably run through a lot of minds of the people that may even be listening to this. And really what happened was I was speaking at an event in San Diego, and a good friend of mine said to me, "Look, Oli, you're missing a huge opportunity here to really share your knowledge, expertise, wisdom, experience, with people when you come and speak at these other marketing events," and that's really how this initially evolved was, why not leverage my time in putting on a small workshop ahead or bookending it, really, to somewhere where I was already going to be? And for those of you who can't tell, this isn't an Australian accent, I'm from the UK, so I spend a lot of time over in the States, and most of our clients' customers are in the States. So I wanted to use this as an opportunity to run these events. But I was kind of, really what had stopped me before was all these falsehoods, really, that come with running events. And I thought, okay I'm going to do this, and the first one that I, at this point to just kind of just zoom out, we, over the past 12 months we ran five of these small events in the format that we'll go ahead and talk about here. And the first one that I ran was actually in San Diego. I was going to be back there again in a few months, almost a year from the day, actually, that we're doing this interview, now. And what I guess I didn't quite imagine would happen was exactly how well they would go, and whether it was just by luck or by some level of judgment and strategic thinking, we really did things quite differently to the way that most would go about this, and it really really had a very big impact. I think right now, just to, not brag, but just to kind of say as it is, we went from really going, I think one point, about $1.2 million in revenue from doing these small, big money, from these small events, really. In the format that we're going to hear. So it really does work, and it was done in a way that was very different. And what I mean by that is, I'm sure we've all attended the events where there's a, people have to make sales, right? They just have to make sales, they bring in other speakers, there's lots of pitching, and it creates sometimes not the best experience for the people that are attending. What I knew I wanted to do was stay true to our values and our business, which was really to provide lots of value, to provide a great experience for people who were there. And if they wanted to continue the journey with us, they could. So we all, we were kind of very clear on those principles before we started putting this together, which I think really helped us to stay grounded towards what we actually wanted to try and create, really. Kathleen: All right. That's great, I love hearing those specific revenue numbers, it's definitely not bragging and I think, the feedback I've gotten from my listeners is the more specific the data, the better, because, [crosstalk] it's one thing to come on and say, "I'm getting great results," it's another to be like, "This is how much money we're making off of it," so keep that coming. Oli: Good. The Event Format Kathleen: Let's talk about the event format, because I think that's really the next thing here is, exactly what do these events look like, where were they held, what was the cost structure, how many people did you target, et cetera? Oli: Sure. So we can run through them in detail. So the first event that we ran was in San Diego, and it was a two-day workshop. And it was sharply focused on people being able to go from information to implementation. So rather than just going to the event and getting information, that they would take home and hopefully execute themselves, we would largely be able to give them pre-built, pre-packaged, well-engineered marketing that they could go and put to work immediately in their business. So we could almost do a lot of the work for them, and create these marketing campaigns that they could deploy themselves, but take away a lot of the strain and the struggle that comes with doing it themselves. And so we called the event The Automation Playbook, because really it was largely about creating this predictable lead to customer journey, and having these playbooks, these campaigns, put into their business. And so what we decided to do was run these events so they were very, they were easy for people to be able to make the decision to come. So the price point was only $97.00 to attend the workshop. But because of- Kathleen: That's a no-brainer. Upselling Event Registrants Oli: Absolutely, no-brainer, right? But in order to make this a different, you know we're not going to get rich, and you could also argue how much value can you really also give for $97.00? And so what we did was, something that really goes against what most people will tell you about these events. And so what we did was, we actually got people to take a free trial of our membership at the time, of Player's Club, which was a inner-circle, my inner-circle, which was $400.00 a month. So what it meant was, just so you understand how it looked, they came and registered for the workshop for $97.00, but they also took a 30 day test drive of Player's Club. And it so happened the things that we would talk about at the workshop were the things that they'd get as part of membership. So they actually get these campaigns, these playbooks as part of membership anyway. So we obviously wanted them to continue the journey with us beyond this. But that meant then, we were really converting the workshop from a sales mechanism, to actually being more of a membership event. So it was a very different feeling. We actually spent most of our time at the event engendering them, indoctrinating them to the value of membership, and really getting the results for them that they wanted with the time that we had together. So it meant that after the 30 days, they would then hopefully continue as a member. And that's really where our revenue was going to be based in the back end, rather than in the front. And so it was on us to perform, and we did that, we did that very well. Oli's Event Marketing Plan Oli: What we ended up doing, to give you the exact numbers, and how we got people to the event, was, we have a little advantage, maybe, over some because I have a name in the industry, I suppose, speaking at different events. But, so we have a small list, in California, we had about, and a little wider than that, we had a list about five and a half thousand people, which is not insignificant, but they were people that were on our list. But we also knew that we wanted to go out to the market and meet them where they were, so we actually procured a list of 1200 businesses in the local area. So a very targeted list that we purchased from InfoUSA, to be able to target people with direct mail. Now a lot of you might be thinking, "Well in a digital age, why, why would we do that? Can we find other ways of doing this?" Well, we did a two-step direct mail campaign to these people, which actually prevailed to be the most expensive people to actually put into the event, but have subsequently, now we know all the numbers on the back end, actually prevailed to be the best long-term members and customers for us. And that worked extremely well. So we did email to our house list, to our targeted list of people that we'd already got, we also did some internal lead generation with text messaging, so asking people on our list, "Text the words San Diego," or "Diego," whatever it was, back, and then we would send them the information and invitation to then event, and then we also did ringless voicemail as well. So we did a recorded message that would show on their phone. And we got them then to text us back from that ringless voicemail, for us to then send the information about the event. So all in all, the net result was we ended up having, we ended up doing, what was it now, let me have a quick look here, I had to make a note of it for you. We sold 32 tickets to the event. Measuring Event ROI Oli: Now again, on high-level you may look at that and think, "Gosh Oli, 32 people? It doesn't sound like a lot of people in the room, how'd you make that work?" Well least we forget, they paid $97, which liquidated the cost of running the event for the two dates. You know, to get the hotel, and refreshments and that kind of thing, liquidated the cost for us. But also, because we promoted this in a four-week window, remember they were taking the 30 day trial of membership, they weren't actually charged their $400 for the membership, until after the event. Well what that meant was, only 10 people out of the 32 actually canceled membership, because they loved the event, they loved what we delivered, and they wanted to continue being a member. And that was fantastic because now we've got reoccurring revenue, obviously, from those people. And we also took the opportunity at the event to offer them an opportunity to apply for our Mastermind. So what it meant was 10 people out of the 32, they applied to become a Mastermind member at $15,000 a year, and six of those people actually bought. They didn't buy to pay over the year, they actually paid in full. So it looked like out of those 32 people it's a massive number per delegate that were there, of course. $93,000 in revenue, up front revenue, was generated from the event. And then, $8,000 of recurring revenue on the back end! And what I can tell you is, that model and that run rate, the stick rate, the attrition, was a nine, ended up to be a nine and a half month stick rate at $400.00 a month. Kathleen: Wow. Oli: So, fantastic lifetime value for using an event as a way to acquire members as well, and get them to stick. They actually ended up to be very, very good members, because not all lead sources are obviously the same, and what I'm trying to say here, if you get my point, is if we'd have acquired members through Facebook advertising, for example, then the cost of acquisition might have been less, than running an event, but the stick rate might not have been the same. It could have been three months, two months, as it has been in some circumstances. So, worked extremely well. Kathleen: Yeah, I have so many questions for you. But the first thing I think that really jumps out at me from listening to you talk, is that events, one of the reasons that events probably have a terrible reputation, is that I think too many businesses hold events thinking the event itself is going to be the money-maker. And what I'm hearing you say is really, the event is just essentially the gateway drug or the tripwire, to what is really a bigger offer that you have, and so if I'm listening to this, I think the first thing that I would be thinking is, "What is it that I'm really trying to sell?" It's not the ticket to the event, that's just the promise that the person's going to show up and the way to cover the cost. I need something bigger, longer term, perhaps recurring, that I'm really looking to sell to them, is that right? Oli: Yeah, absolutely. I think you've always got to start with the end in mind, and if you think really about this, the journey that you want to take people on, and the experience, on that journey, that you want them to have. I think what I really like about events is, and I'm totally sold on this now of course, but what I really like about these types of events is really the proximity and the bond that you can have with people, because you find out so much more about people's fears, frustrations, challenges, objections, and that then allows you to be able to iterate and change your offers and the way that you talk about things, in a much more accurate way to mirror and match those problems that you're solving for people, because of the time that you're spending with each other. Using Events for Audience Research Oli: And of course, you can also, I found out, find out very succinctly why people are also taking advantage of these offers, why they're continuing in membership, what they really thought about the experience, because they're going to give you that feedback. You're going to get it a lot quicker than you perhaps would in terms of some level of delay from a webinar, for example, or a post, you know, an NPS follow-up. Which are all great by the way, but there's nothing quite like events to be able to have that interaction with people. Kathleen: That's a really good point, because there's a big difference. You know marketers talk a good game about doing persona research and audience research, and there's a difference between setting an appointment and saying, "I'm going to call you and ask you 10 questions for my audience research," and sitting and having a cup of coffee with somebody before a workshop presentation. I think in the latter case, you get a much less guarded, more candid set of feedback than you do when you're in a structured interview setting. So that's an interesting point that you make there. Oli: Yeah, I think we also really embodied that feedback loop, because when you do an event like this, you get to know very, very quickly whether or not something works or it doesn't work or it resonates or it doesn't. And I remember listening to, I actually asked the question at the event, "Is there any reason why you wouldn't continue the journey in membership beyond this point? Is there any reason why you would cancel, I'd love to find out." Not to, if not for any other reason than I don't feel that we will have done our job, and it's my duty to find out how we can best serve you, and so I'd love to know your candid feedback, so please give that to me. And I think because I was just very authentic with that as well, that helped. But because it was different, you're face-to-face, toe-to-toe with these people, it really, you don't need to be something that you're not, right? You're engineering something for their benefit. I think people could tell that and see that, that you actually cared. And I think... You've got to go into these things in the right way, and I think the thing that we did that, somebody's looking at adding information, education, training, mentorship, whatever to their business, and they were thinking about doing this kind of model with a ticket and then a trial of membership, I think it really gave people the opportunity to find out whether or not we were right for them. It gave them a taste of, so rather than doing a lot of indoctrinating, a lot of reselling, a lot of reaffirming when they onboarded as a member, now we could do that in the confines of an event. That's probably the reason why it worked so well long term. Using Direct Mail for Event Promotion Kathleen: Yeah. All right, I'm going to shift gears, and I want to ask you some more kind of nitty-gritty questions. You talked about some interesting things in terms of how you acquired registrants, or put butts in seats, as we like to say. You talked about direct mail, and you mentioned you got your list from Info USA, which is definitely a source that I'm familiar with, and to clarify, you really purchased that list to do direct mail, not to do email campaigns, correct? Oli: Yeah, that's right. Kathleen: Yeah. So how many different direct mail pieces did you do, like for one individual recipient? Oli: So we did a two-step direct mail campaign, so sent an eight page sales letter to begin with, to all of those people, and then we followed that up with, anybody that didn't respond, with a postcard, a typical postcard, to again take people to, the actual call to action was one, to go to a vanity URL just so we could track the traffic and then obviously the opt-ins, and then secondly, to text a keyword. Because pretty much when people receive direct mail these days, they're not far away from their mobile phones, let alone going online and keying something in. You'd actually be surprised that the majority of people actually text in to receive the information for us, and then we have an automated text conversation, to then get them to the point where they had the opportunity to purchase a ticket. Kathleen: Now, if my memory serves, I seem to recall you mentioning that having two steps in that direct mail sequence was really important, because, even though you had the eight page sales letter, which would seem like, boy if anything was going to convince them it would be those eight pages, and then you followed it with a very simple postcard. Am I right in remembering that on that second step you actually had a really good response rate? Oli: It was almost double. Kathleen: Wow. Oli: It was almost double. In fact I think for this first event that we're just talking about here, it was like 60%. Kathleen: Wow. Oli: So, it was a lot, lot better response than just taking the first step. So we would have basically not, we would have got a whole lot less registrants from the direct mail. It would've almost meant that it wasn't profitable almost to run the first step.It would have just been one step. So actually by investing into two it actually paid dividends. And to be honest, multi-step, multi-media follow-up works every single day. So having this mix really works, and of course once they were in the funnel, once we'd actually lead-generated them, then they weren't just getting, they were getting all sorts of media as well to get them to convert. And the thing that we should also talk about, really is, and you're probably coming on to it, is how we got people to actually show up, because one of the big things with events is, and you'll hear this a lot in the industry is, they'll be like, "Yeah, we can get registrants, we just can't get them to actually show up," Kathleen: Yeah. Oli: And our show up rate across five events now, is 90-odd percent- Kathleen: That's huge! Oli: I can't remember the exact number. Kathleen: That's so huge! I run a HubSpot user group where I'm located in Maryland, and my rule of thumb is to expect about 50% of the people to show up. Now I don't charge for it, which probably if I charged money, I'm not allowed to do that, but if I could? It would probably make a little bit of a difference, but that's huge. Oli: Yeah, yeah. It's so big, because, and you have to invest into that, it's a little bit like the lead generation on the front end, you know that it's going to be a higher cost of registrant, for example, but arguably a higher quality. It could be the least cost of, it could be the lowest cost of acquiring a customer, as well, so that is a consideration. We did direct mail when people bought a ticket, we actually sent a box in the mail. So you can imagine, you buy a $97.00 ticket to a workshop, you're not getting any direct mail from that. Because we knew our numbers on the back end, we knew the value of the membership, we know how we can really help people, it meant that we could invest in that relationship. So we did a shock and awe box in the mail. We even did a customized tee-shirt, as well, that was sent to them. We had a whole welcome package that was sent over, a whole bunch of, it was like a box of goodies, really, that they got before they even got to the event. Because really what we're doing is, we're not just welcoming them to buying a ticket, but now we're reselling them on the benefits immediately of becoming a member, which clearly works well. Kathleen: All right. So you did these two direct mail pieces, how far apart were they sent? Oli: So we did, it was about five days, there or thereabouts. You could send them in slightly closer succession, the thing with direct mail is that there's a little bit of latency, where there's kind of the factor that they hang around, a little bit. See the funny thing is with it, is people that didn't respond to the first direct mail piece, they got the second, but sometimes that we actually found that they actually came back and actually responded from the first, because we used a way to track the difference, to discern the difference between the two direct mail pieces that we used. This is actually interesting numbers, that they got the second piece but didn't respond, but did from the first, even though they got the second. Kathleen: Yeah, it just gave them that nudge that they needed. Oli: Nudge, yeah. Just like an eight page sounds like, it doesn't really kind of go away, like it hangs around a bit, you know? Text Campaigns for Event Promotion Kathleen: Yeah. Now, you mentioned you directed them to a vanity URL so that you could track, and you also mentioned getting people to text. What was the platform that you used for the texting campaign? Oli: So we used Fix Your Funnel for the text campaign, but if you wanted to use something that was more HubSpot centric, then Yeti Text is a great alternative. It's made by the same people but just more focused into HubSpot. And that would be something to consider. Kathleen: And did the same platform also provide you with the ringless voicemail? Oli: Yep, they do ringless from there as well, but we didn't actually use them, we used a company called Slybroadcast which actually, funnily enough they actually use on the back end of their service anyway, so truly integrated. Yeah, and that's what we used for the ringless voicemail. I was very intentional with the ringless voicemail, was to say, "Hey it's Oli Billson here, I just wanted to reach out to you, obviously I've got your voicemail, but I just wanted to leave a quick note just to say I'd love for you to attend the Automation Playbook Live in San Diego, which is coming up in a few weeks. And right now is a great time to lock in your spot because we've got a few spaces left. Just text me back on this number, and I'll make sure that we will send you a link to find out more information." So what I did very intentionally was, the number that I called from doing the ringless voicemail, is actually the unified number for two-way texting, so I knew that when they picked it up, they could just text their number back that actually gave them the voicemail in the first place and that match really worked well. Kathleen: Now this is a really nitty-gritty question, but I need to ask it, because I've played around with texting and ringless voicemail campaigns, and a lot of the providers that I've worked with, they don't necessarily give you a full phone number, they give you a separate, special number for texting that doesn't look like a phone number? But I feel like, with ringless voicemail it doesn't seem like that would work as well, because it wouldn't look like a real person's number. So in your case, what did that look like? Oli: Yeah, so what we do is we buy, we bought a local number, that was local to where the event was. So when we did this in Toronto, we bought a Toronto number, and when we ran it in Austin, I bought an Austin number. And so, what that meant was, yes it was a local landline number, but we were just telling them that they could text back on that number. And it worked, it worked insanely well. I guess somebody's thought process wouldn't be, "This is obviously not a mobile number," but they do know that it's the local number, and they're tying in, "He said San Diego, this is a San Diego area code, I am in San Diego, okay." Kathleen: Yeah. Oli: Regardless of whatever he said I could text in, and you know there's a match there in some way. Kathleen: Yeah, thanks for clarifying that, because I think it's like those little details that really matter when you're doing these things, and they're the things that are the easiest to screw up if you haven't done them before. So you got people to come to the landing page, they engaged with the text campaign, they got the ringless voicemail, if they signed up you then sent them the box? What was in the box? The "Shock and Awe" Box Oli: Yeah, so, a bunch of, a bunch of things. I think most people wouldn't have expected to see everything that we put in there. So we had a branded tee-shirt. So we had a tee-shirt that was printed by us from, I think it was Custom Ink, was the website. And it was a lovely like, a really nice tee-shirt, it wasn't just like a crappy Fruit of the Loom thing, it was a nice branded tee-shirt. And then we had an agenda, for the event, a printed agenda for the event. It also had a stick letter, which is a letter, really that they'd read that we know that they would get, congratulating them on the decision that they'd made, and again in kind of reselling the benefit of the event. And then we put a bunch of testimonials, like a whole brochure, a 32-page brochure of testimonials from people that, if they're marketers, they would probably know who they are. So if somebody was like an Infusionsoft user, then they would know the CEO of Infusionsoft, we have a testimonial from them. If there was, just all sorts of different people who are like celebrities I suppose, in the marketing space, I have testimonials from them because they paid me for consulting or whatever it may be so I've got testimonials. And then also a bunch of transformative testimonials as well, from just normal people that they can relate to in lots of different industries, service-based businesses, client-based businesses as well and that I've helped over the years as well. So I sent them that for proof, and that really helped as well. And then we sent them a couple of of gimmicky things, like a little bookmark that they could use that was branded. We were going to do, like usually when we do this stuff we usually like to appeal to people's taste, so you could send some cookies or something like that in the box. We didn't do that in this particular case, but it's something that you could do in the future and you could tie them eating that to something in the letter, like you could reference it. Kathleen: Like "Take a bite out of your competition" or? Oli: Yeah, exactly. Yeah yeah yeah. So we just tried to create a situation that, all of the different pieces are paid for and everything in there, they all feel like, it's only a little thing, but they all feel different, that's more of a tactile thing. So people wanted to go through it and keep seeing what was in the box, and it had pink shredded paper- Kathleen: Oh, crinkle? Oli: Underneath it, they all sat on top of that. Yeah, that's it. So it didn't, they weren't rattling around in the box, you know what I mean? Kathleen: Yeah. Oli: And the box itself, I was on a podcast a couple of weeks ago with my friend Bill Glazer, and Bill was like, "I've still got the box!" Like, he's actually got it there, right? Because it was a high-quality, printed, branded box that we had. And, yeah. And we sent it FedEx as well, so again, all of those things kind of matter, because you know that it's like Christmas when somebody is opening it. Kathleen: It's so funny, I used to own an agency and we did a lot of, we called it dimensional mail, but it's essentially direct mail in a three dimensional package, with stuff in it, right? And it's amazing, the difference in response rates and reactions to people who get a box, than from people who get flat mail. I mean we used to have response rates of like 15 to 20%, and direct mail as you know, it's usually like 1 to 2%. Because everybody likes getting a box, they think it's like, "I might be getting a present," right? Oli: Exactly, yeah. Kathleen: And boxes get past gatekeepers, which is also a great thing. Oli: Absolutely. Measuring the Results of Oli's Events Kathleen: Well I love this, so I want to just circle back and recap, and let's talk again about what it cost you to put the event on, and then what your results were because I want to just drive that point home, of what this meant in terms of ROI. Oli: Sure thing. So the first event that we ran as I mentioned, $93,000 in front-end revenue and just under $8,000 in monthly recurring revenue. So then what we did was, I replicated exactly the same model in Toronto so I looked at another area, like another hub that would work, and I wanted to try Canada, so I did exactly the same thing. And in this case we generate 53 ticket sales, not 32, and it meant that we had 35 people out of the 53 continue in membership, so that was like $13,800 in recurring revenue, that we had from that event, right, because there was a lot more tickets that we sold, and $80,000 in front end revenue because nine people applied for Mastermind and five people became members at 15 grand each. So again, another 80 grand plus another nearly 14 grand a month in recurring revenue, which was great, okay? So those are the two results that we had, and I was like, "Don't stop now!" You know, don't stop doing this. So I was speaking at the ManyChat conference in Austin at the end of last year, and I thought, well I'm speaking at this conference, it was super last minute, super last minute, but I decided to put on another event. And I only had two weeks to promote it, so I knew that I wasn't going to sell like 50-dd tickets, 35 tickets, but because of how good the back end was on doing it, I thought, "What the Hell, I'll do it anyway." So I ran it in Austin and we only sold 17 tickets, which again, might sound like, ugh! That's not great- Kathleen: Well you're already there, anyway. Yeah. Oli: I'm already there anyway, right? But from that, 12 people that continued their memberships, out of 17, that was like $4,700 a month of recurring revenue, which was great. And six people applied to become Mastermind members, and five actually became members. So it was a little over $75,000 there from what was, and that was a one-day event because it was all very much last minute, I couldn't do my usual two-day event, so that's like $75,000 for one day, and then also then of course we've got $5,000 coming in from the recurring, from one day, so it made sense like, this is great, keep doing it. Kathleen: Yeah. It sounds like it's about $100,000 or more in revenue, per event. Can you, have you ever quantified fully what it costs you to put in on, not just the hotel and the catering, but the cost of acquisition? Oli: Yeah, sure. So for a two-day event, the first one that we ever ran, we ran on a real shoestring budget. So we didn't do catering. We put it in a really nice hotel, we did it at the Andaz Hotel in San Diego, which is downtown, it's a lovely place, great experience for a place, but we just didn't do lunch and we didn't do coffee and we didn't do that type of thing. We actually went to Starbuck's and bought the coffee ourselves, it was like, that kind of ghetto. But our cost for running the event was like, three and a half thousand dollars, that was it. That included room hire, we didn't do food and beverage with the hotel, we managed to negotiate it all, so that was really light. $3500 is negligible, right? What it worked out to in Toronto and Austin for those events, Austin was a bit different, we ran it at the Fairmont for one day, so it was a little bit more that what you'd expect to be half of that cost, and we started to put lunches on them. So what we found was, some people that wanted to consider joining Mastermind, we actually used that as a vehicle to then bring them into a lunch, so that I could actually get to know them better, not just what was on paper. We actually wanted to buy them lunch, because I wanted to find out more about them and whether or not we could really help them, and a great way to do that is to get to know people over lunch, after they've made their application. So there were some other costs, but I think on average, for a two-day event, it was under $5,000, for sure. Kathleen: Wow, that's insane ROI, so, there you go. That seems like a no-brainer! And you've been pretty generous in sharing, I know online and in different places, some examples of some of the things you've sent out, and so maybe I'll try and see if I can dig up some of that and include it in the show notes. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Before we wrap though, I have two questions that I always ask my guests, and I'd love to know what you have to say. I talk a lot of people doing inbound marketing on this podcast, when you think about inbound marketing today, company or individual, is there a certain person or company that stands out as doing it really well right now? Oli: I think from an inbound perspective, I think that you can really learn a lot from the education that, obviously HubSpot is such a big player, and you're so involved in their ecosystem, they're doing great stuff. But people like Marcus Sheridan, people like that, great people to follow, great people to model, and there's no, we're not short of great examples of inbound from those guys at all really. And some of the things, I was just on your website actually, earlier today, and you were, what was I searching? Oh, I was searching some definitions, this is how powerful inbound can be, I was searching some definitions for sales teams stages. And I was just setting up a new pipeline, and you were like the first result. IMPACT was the first result for discerning MQLs, SQL, and so I was like, "That's just the power of that." We're on a podcast together now, which is great, but that's amazing, isn't it, you know? Kathleen: It's cool when this stuff actually works. Oli: Absolutely, yeah. Absolutely. Kathleen: No, it is. Well the other question I have, and I always love, I love asking this because selfishly I want to know the answer, is digital marketing is just changing so quickly, there's so much happening. It's like drinking from a fire hose, and the biggest complaint I hear from marketers is just, "How do I stay up-to-date?" And so, how do you personally stay up-to-date? Do you have any go-to sources of information that you rely on so that you're always current on what's happening in the world of digital marketing? Oli: I think that people can really get hung up on doing a lot of learning, and not enough implementing. I would say again, none of us are short of resources and advice that we can go and get for free, or paid, whether it's programs or courses or groups or whatever. Or podcasts we could listen to, but really the learning comes from doing. And what I'd say, my advice to somebody is, really you don't have to spend too much time in this field to figure out what you could do, you just need to figure out what you should focus on, and go and do it. And make your own distinctions as you go, on what's working based on the numbers and the data to guide you on where the deficiencies are, so that you can plug those gaps and get help and support where you need them. And then hire in help for people to help you who have those specialist skills, to be able to do it. So I think I'm really big on implementation, and information's great, but there's nothing better than actually doing it. Kathleen: Yeah, that's great advice because I do think that it would be very easy to spend, as you say, spend all your time trying to learn and then really falling victim to shiny object syndrome, and thinking, "Oh, I just learned this, I need to try that," like you've got to kind of pick a few things and test them, and then if they work stick with them. So, great advice. Well Oliver I have learned so much, I learned so much when I listened to you speak at Digital Marketer, but it was, I'm actually really glad I got to hear it a second time around, because there were some new details that you shared that were so interesting, and we do a lot of events, so hopefully you feel like imitation is the sincerest form of flattery [crosstalk] because we may try some of those things. How Connect With Oli Billson Kathleen: But if somebody is listening and wants to learn more about this or about what you're doing or check out information on your events or your company, what's the nest way for them to connect with you online? Oli: Sure, so they should go to nextlevelbusiness.com/learn, and I actually put together a free resource for people that are there, who may want to learn about how to drive qualified leads into sales appointments, to actually have good quality sales conversations and that's using our framework called the Funnel Framework. So I've prepared a bit of training to give to your listeners, which it was previously a paid-for premium training, but you can go and get access to it, get a 24-hour pass to it at least to go and watch it, at nextlevelbusiness.com/learn, and you can go there and go and check it out. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: Perfect, I will definitely put the link to that in the show notes. Thank you so much, this was really fun, and great to dig in on all the details. If you're listening and you enjoyed what you heard or you learned something new, of course I would appreciate it if you would leave a five star review on Apple podcasts for the Inbound Success podcast, and if you know someone doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. Kathleen: Thanks again, Oli! Oli: Thank you, cheers.

The inbound method is changing the way business and customers interact, and there are countless success stories from brands that have made the switch. On a regular basis, we’ll be inviting business owners to discuss why they converted to inbound, how it impacted their business, and what advice they have for other companies. Today we’ll be talking to the owner of Alco Windows and Doors, Luis Alvarez. That’s next on Rizen Academy. Follow on Facebook Follow on Instagram Follow on Twitter Follow on LinkedIn To partner with Rizen Inbound for your marketing needs, contact us. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more about our company, come visit us at gorizen.com. Episode Transcript --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/inbound-academy/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/inbound-academy/support

How can you increase your sales by 15% in one year just by communicating more with current customers? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, I'm joined by Todd Hockenberry, who is the CEO of Top Line Results and co-author of the book Inbound Organization: How to Build and Strengthen Your Company's Future Using Inbound.  Todd is an expert in helping companies increase revenue and sales by improving the customer experience, and in this week's episode, he shares why simply improving communication with your current customers can increase sales by, on average, 15% - all within just one year. 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 Todd include: Top Line Results helps B2B, and particularly industrial and manufacturing, companies adopt inbound principles. Customer experience is a discipline of marketing applied after the sale, and very few marketers or businesses get it right. Great customer experience starts by getting in the heads of your customers and understanding how they view your company, product or service. Harvard Business Review did a study and asked customers how long they wanted customer service people to be empathetic, and the answer was seven seconds. They want to hear "I'm sorry" within the first seven seconds, and after that, they don't want you to apologize anymore.  Customer service can actually increase customer loyalty in the long run by fixing problems. If you've got good systems, CRM, and a good centralized view of the customer, along with people that are focused on that, that are paying attention to the customers after the sale, you can drive a lot more revenue just by being there and by being helpful and extending that thinking of inbound all the way through the lifecycle. One company that does customer experience very well is Fatt Merchant. They do it by building a customer-first culture in which someone from marketing participates in every single meeting that the company has and serves as the voice of the customer. One reason that many companies fail to deliver exceptional customer experience is that their marketing departments are measured solely by the number of leads they generate and not by any metrics relating to the post-sale experience. Todd says that over the ten years he's worked with clients on customer experience he sees, on average, a 15% increase in sales just by focusing on improving the experience of current customers. One of the keys to delivering great customer experience is having someone who owns it. You also need a good tech stack, including a CRM and marketing automation platform, that can provide your team with a "centralized view of the customer." Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the Top Line Results website Connect with Todd on LinkedIn Follow Todd on Twitter Get Todd's book Inbound Organization: How to Build and Strengthen Your Company's Future Using Inbound Listen to the podcast to learn what you need to do to ensure your company is delivering a top-notch customer experience. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Todd Hockenberry who is the owner of Top Line Results and the coauthor of Inbound Organization: How to Build and Strengthen Your Company's Future Using Inbound. That's available in just about every book store I've been to as well as on Amazon. Welcome, Todd. Todd Hockenberry (Guest): Thanks for having me, Kathleen. It is definitely my privilege to be on the Inbound Success show, and anything I do with IMPACT is always a lot of fun. Todd and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: Oh, well we love working with you too. It's a love fest today on the podcast. Todd: Oh yeah. Kathleen: You know, I've obviously had an opportunity to get to know you, but I would love for you to talk a little bit more about yourself, your background, your company, and your book so that my listeners can learn a little bit more about who you are and what you do. About Todd Hockenberry and Top Line Results Todd: Sure. Top Line Results was founded almost 10 years ago. A couple weeks it'll be 10 years. My wife and I founded Top Line Results because I got fired, I lost my job, and I decided I was sick of working for other people and I was going to go do it myself. So what we focused on for really the last 10 years is helping B2B and particularly industrial and manufacturing companies adopt what we're talking about as inbound principles. And I had come across inbound principles probably about early 2000s, actually I was working at a turnaround. A company was dead and buried and we were trying to turn it around, but I didn't have a big budget, so I was doing early SEO content creation in vertical niche industrial markets when nobody else was doing it, and we saw tons of success. So I kind of started doing inbound before it was called inbound, so when I saw it and I ran across HubSpot, it just was natural to jump in. So when we started our business, that's what we started to do. We started to teach industrial and manufacturing and B2B companies how to use content, how to optimize it, how to create campaigns around content, how to connect with modern buyers using digital platforms. And that's really what we've built our business on. So we've been very focused on our target persona, which is kind of the, I would say the 15 to $100 million industrial manufacturing companies. We've gone a little bigger than that lately, but we really are consultants now and advisors and coaches on these issues. We're small. It's my wife and I and my daughter, and so we're not a delivery agency as much anymore. We just don't have the bandwidth to do it, so we really focus on teaching, and coaching, advising, and consulting with people on how to do these things. Kathleen: Oh, I feel like you and I could do an entire separate podcast on family businesses- Todd: Oh yeah. Kathleen: Because I had an agency for 11 years before I joined IMPACT and I started it with my husband, so we worked together for 11 years, and we actually got married when we started the company, so we had never been married and not worked together, and I, to this day, always say to people that my proudest accomplishment in life is that I didn't get divorced in the 11 years that I worked with my husband. Todd: Congratulations. I would say the question I get asked a lot is, people look at me and say, "How can you work with your wife?" And I say, "Really, it's the other way around. How could she work with me?" But the answer is that we are different in terms of the skillset we bring. We have different personalities, and when we're in her world, which is more technical and detailed, she's the boss, and when we're in my world, which is more kind of the strategy and sales and marketing side, then I'm the boss, so it works. We don't play in each other's sandbox, so that's what keeps us going. Kathleen: You know what? That's exactly what worked for my husband and I. That and also our offices were never right next to each other. When we had our office space, we had about 13 people in the agency, so we were in an office suite. His was on the opposite end of the suite from mine, so we tried to be as physically far apart as possible and also not have any overlapping responsibilities. Todd: Got you. Kathleen: So there's something to that. Todd: My wife and I share an office, but I'm out of it a lot, so I think I give her some quiet time she needs. Kathleen: That is a good thing. Interesting. Well as I said, that could be an entirely other episode, but for this episode, I was actually really excited to talk with you because, like you, I've been in this digital marketing, inbound marketing space for a long time, and one of the things I've noticed is that it's definitely an echo chamber, and a lot of us spend the bulk of our time if not all of our time focusing on how are we going to turn strangers into customers? And many of us started as HubSpot partners, and there's that whole "attract, convert, close" cycle, and we're so focused on that that we forget that a big piece of marketing is customer marketing, and that you really have to look at the whole lifecycle of the customer experience and the whole business because most businesses do have repeat business. They have customers that come back. Or they're SaaS, where you want them to just stay with you and prevent churn. And I think as marketers, we do ourselves a really big disservice by ignoring the post-sale period, so I am so excited because I get to pick your brain on this topic of what happens after you make the sale, because this is very much what you covered partially in your book and you've talked about a lot. So I don't even know where to start. Customer Experience & Inbound Marketing Todd: Well first of all, I think you're absolutely right. I think you nailed it. Inbound clearly started out as a way to attract, right? That was the beginning. And while that's still important, it's gotten a lot harder. There's a lot more content out there. It's more difficult to just throw a whole bunch of content out there and see the kind of success you're looking for. There were two ways I discovered inbound success, and I love the name of your show because I think there are two ways to think about that. It's about using inbound marketing or inbound tools to be successful, but inbound success to me is about what happens after the sale. And you'll see a lot more books and a lot more talk about customer success being a job, and you see these functions, it really came out of the SaaS world, and I learned this from HubSpot. When I was working with Dan Tyre to write the book, we interviewed a bunch of HubSpot people, and one of the sharpest people I met was Mike Redbord who ran customer success for HubSpot. And they talked me through the process where they would understand essentially everything that was going on with that client well before renewal time came up. So this was a complex ... because it's software, they had a lot of data and they could automate a lot of this. But the reality is what I discovered was that it was a discipline of marketing applied after the sale, which most people didn't think of. I go to client where they're, say, an industrial company, and I'll ask them, "Well, how do you communicate with your customers?" And I'm not kidding, I've actually had customers tell me this. They'll say, "We don't know where all of our equipment is. We don't even know who they are." So how could you possibly market to them if you don't know who they are? So the gap, I think in a lot of companies, between what they could be doing and what they should be doing is huge, and I think it's a huge opportunity to grow your business. And if you go back to the old cliches, it costs seven times more to get a new customer than it does to keep one. This is what we're talking about. Use everything you know about marketing inbound and apply it to your customers after the sale. So you asked me where to start, you said you didn't know where to start. I think I know where to start. This is where I would have started and what I teach my clients to do to start. Start with your mindset. You've got to get your mind right around this and realize that the way you're viewed is not the way ... The way you think you're viewed or the way you want to be viewed, your positioning, right? That's in the mind of your customer. It's not in the mind of your marketing team or in the mind of your sales team. It's in the mind of your customer. So you've got to get out of your house, get out of your company, and go there, talk to your customers and understand how you're perceived. I'm an old sales manager. I used to run sales teams, and I used to just lose my mind when I would hear from a customer and they would say, "Oh, we just bought one of those. We didn't know you did that." Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: Oh, I hated that because that's just being lazy. And I would say to most companies that I run across that other than the SaaS companies who seem to really get this because they want to produce churn, and that's a natural, right? You've got to get that recurring revenue. Or anybody that's in that recurring revenue model, they kind of get this. But if you're selling, say, capital equipment like a lot of my clients do, their next sale may be three years down the road, right? And that's important, but it's an easy sale to get if you just do your marketing between the sale and the next one. And it starts with that mindset where you've got to put yourself outside of your own world and put yourself in their world and understand what's going on from their perspective. And ultimately, this is all about adding value all the way through the life of the company or the life of the relationship. Everybody has customer service departments, right? But I still see a lot of people, and I think a lot of customer service companies and leaders think of their customer service as, "Well, if something's broken, then help them fix it." And it's the opposite. That's a reactive mode. It's really about today, it's like, "Keep me happy as your customer. Keep me satisfied. Keep me on track. Make sure I achieve my goals. Make sure the promises you made to me in your marketing and sales process I actually achieve those goals. Hit that ROI." And I've been reading about this and studying it a lot, and it's interesting because we hear a lot about empathy and we hear a lot about customer service and after the sale being about empathy, but Harvard Business Review did a study and they asked customers how long they wanted customer service people to be empathetic, and the answer was seven seconds. So after seven seconds, they don't want to hear, "I'm sorry." They don't want you to apologize anymore. They want you to do what? Kathleen: Fix it. Todd: They want you to fix the problem. Solve the problem. Exactly. That's all they care about. And if you look at other studies, you can see that customer service can actually increase loyalty in the long run by fixing problems, not shuffling them around to seven people, not getting an answering machine, getting a real person, being able to get connected via email or chat or after hours, right? These things, you build a system. And those are all inbound things, right? They're all ways to communicate and connect and share content and be helpful, and if you really absorb this mentally, that this is what you're there for after the sale, then you can build a system that'll take care of those customers in a way that's just fundamentally different than they're going to see most other places. And we all have to realize that everybody's expectations today are like Facebook or Amazon. Amazon's probably a better example. You want that kind of level of service. Or Zappos or these retail companies. And if you don't give that to them as a B2B company or an agency, whatever you are, I think you're going to be at a big disadvantage. And again, the goal is to be in front of them being helpful with the right information at the right time. And again, if you've got good systems, CRM, a good centralized view of the customer, you've got people that are focused on that, that are paying attention to the customers after the sale, again, you can drive a lot more revenue just by being there and by being helpful and extending that thinking of inbound all the way through the lifecycle. Kathleen: I love that you talked about it being a mindset or a culture, and you mentioned the name of the podcast, which is interesting. So it's called the Inbound Success Podcast. It's not called the Inbound Marketing Success Podcast, and there's a reason for that, and that is that to me, inbound is not really about marketing. It's a mindset. We actually have ... at IMPACT, we wrote the Inbound Manifesto last year, which, if you tweet me and ask for a copy, maybe I'll send it to you. But we describe it as being a mindset and a culture and an attitude, and it doesn't have anything to do with marketing. It has to do with a belief that if you are helpful and authentic and trustworthy and honest, that that will come back to you in spades in the form of business, in the form of other good things. It's sort of a "pay it forward" mentality, and you can apply that to marketing, you can apply that to customer service, you can apply it to really anything. But what I think is interesting is that you touched on something that I really believe, which is that yes, we as marketers tend to neglect this stage in the customer lifecycle. I think it's because in many cases, the way we're measured by the organizations in which we work is fundamentally flawed. A lot of marketers are measured based on how many leads are you delivering to the sales team? So if you're just going to measure your marketing team on the number of leads they're delivering, why would they care about what happens after the sale? There's no incentive there. Now, I say that. I mean, a really great marketer will advocate to have a role post-sale, but I think the incentive system is off. So I know I have people who listen to this podcast who are marketers, but I also have people who are business owners, and I think for business owners almost even more so than the marketers, it's important for it to start at the top with the belief that marketing isn't just to deliver leads. Yes, that is an important part of the job, but you've got to measure success on more than that. It has to factor in what happens after the close. Todd: I couldn't agree with everything you said more. You're absolutely spot on as far as I can tell and in what I believe. And a couple things. One, how many of your business owners out there have their marketing sales and service people sitting in a room together working on anything together ever? Most of them are separate departments with ... I've got one client that has those three different departments and they all have three different systems to manage the data with the customers. They don't talk to one another. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: They don't have any idea what's going on. And it's a big, successful company. So it's pretty common. So that goes back to that mindset and that belief, these people. That it's all a continuum. It's one connected thing and they're not separate departments because as far as your customers are concerned, they could care less about your departments, your bureaucracy, your processes, your rules. They don't care. They don't care. They want help. They want problems solved, they want to move forward, they're busy just like you are, and they don't care. They don't want to deal with your nonsense if that's what you're giving them. But let's go back to the beginning. That's why we wrote the book, what you talked about, your Inbound Manifesto, which is great by the way. I've seen it, and the idea that these are beliefs and principles, that the idea that modern buyers want to be helped first. That doing the right thing is helping them regardless of the short term economic interest in front of you. Treating people like human beings, right? You're not marketing to a demographic. You're talking to another person. I tell business owners all the time, I say, "Shop yourself. Look at your own marketing. Would you want that to be the way you're treated?" Kathleen: Right, and oh, by the way, all the things you just said about being helpful, treating people like humans, that will never go out of style. There's never going to be a technological advancement or a trend that makes us say, "Well, we shouldn't be helpful and we certainly shouldn't treat these people like humans." Todd: It's not new. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: It's not new. My daughter's in college and she's reading Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's the same stuff. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: That was from the '30s. It's not new. It's just the way human beings want to react to each other. But we've been throwing all this technology and all these tools at ourselves and we think that's the answer, and it's not. Success is us. It's being human and connecting with other people and helping them solve their problems. If your technology amplifies that, helps it, great. But it's not a substitute. It just is not. Now, if you're talking about transactional sales, I would say that Amazon is a real thing and in terms of, say, basic shopping, if I never step foot in a store again for the rest of my life, I'm happy. But if I'm buying, say, I was going to say a car, but that's not even good because my wife would buy a car online. But for a lot of sales, for professional service, any kind of complex sale, you're still talking about people and that's not going to go away. Kathleen: Well and even if you take Amazon, there are elements there that speak to what you're talking about. Helpfulness. This is why Amazon created Prime and eliminated shipping for a lot of things if you became a Prime member because they realized that that was a pain point for people, and there are elements in Amazon's business model that are purely about helping people and having a better experience as the customer. Todd: Sure. And the personalization and the specific recommendations are awesome. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: But this is why we wrote the book. This is why Dan and I wrote Inbound Organization, it's because we wanted to take these ideas of inbound, and Dan's a senior HubSpot guy, I think he was the sixth employee, he's been around forever, so I've been doing this for 10 plus years, so we've been around this idea for a long time and have a lot of experience with companies that have done it well and not done it well. And we want to take these ideas and tell people essentially that these ideas aren't marketing anymore, and they're not even sales anymore. It's just your business, and we need to get back to these foundational principles and apply them across your entire business. We talk about legal departments being inbound and we talk about accounting and finance being inbound, think about every time you work with a potential ... somebody you bought from, and they made it hard to pay you, right? Kathleen: Ugh. The worst. Todd: How crazy is that? Making it hard to pay you. Or legal departments that just, if you go through this complex sales process and the legal departments throw up a bunch of red flags. Everybody sees them as like the terms of use. You just click the button. Nobody reads them. How bad is that? I mean, come on, lawyers. Can't you do better than that? Can't you somehow boil that down into a paragraph of real stuff that you've surfaced the garbage and don't try to feel like you're putting on over on me? That's starting to apply inbound to your entire business. And don't even get me started on IT departments and how bad they are being inbound. Don't even get me started. Kathleen: Yeah. You know, one little anecdote. When you were talking earlier about how customers don't care about your processes and all that stuff, they just want things to be fixed, all I could think about was actually IT, and I worked at this job about 15 years ago, and I'll never forget. We had this IT guy who was just the nicest guy as a person, but every time there was an IT problem and I would go to him and be like, "There's this problem." He would launch into a five minute long diatribe about why Microsoft, their business model made it so that these things happened, and I just remember sitting there, in my head I'm going, "La, la, la, la, la. I don't care. Fix it for me." And that's exactly I think what's happening most of the time. What Does Best In Class Customer Experience Look Like? Kathleen: So assuming that I'm a business and I have this mindset and I believe, but I really want to do this right and tackle the post-sale stage and give my customers a great experience, can you talk a little bit about what that looks like? And let's zoom in from the hundred thousand foot view way, way down to, like, what are some companies actually doing to nail this? Todd: That's a great question, Kathleen. There's a great story in our book about something called Fatt Merchant, F-A-T-T Merchant, and that's their website, fattmerchant.com. If you're into payment processing, they're digital, online, amazing company. It's a startup here in Orlando. The lady who runs it, Suneera Madhani is an amazing person and just building a great company that has a culture that's just ... and you would recognize it, right? You walked into their office, it would feel like being in the IMPACT offices. Just totally absorbed in inbound. Their motto is 'The best damn experience', and it's on their walls, it's in every room. And everybody in the company's goal is to create the best experience for their customers possible. Their competition, there are some online competitors, but there's a lot of old line financial firms, so they're competing with these big, old time firms. And they're doing this by ... the way they do it culturally is they have a marketing person in every meeting in the company. It doesn't matter what department it is, there's a marketing person in there and they represent the customer. And they advocate and make sure that the best interests of the customer are being accounted for and that everybody in that room is solving for the customer regardless of what it is, whether it's a financial meeting, a product development meeting. Doesn't matter. They're bringing the customer in there and making it a real thing. Again, that gets the mindset and saying that, "This experience is our promise and that our practice internally and culture is we're going to live by that and nobody's going to be exempt from making sure that every decision we make is going to be in the best interest of the customer." Kathleen: That's really interesting, but I have to admit that the prospect of having ... I have a marketing team. I have seven people on my team, and the prospect of having to put one of them in every single meeting in the company is terrifying because then I would think, "When will we ever get our work done?" So I'm curious, operationally, how do you make that happen? You need to have [crosstalk] marketing team. Todd: You need to have less meetings. Well, again, I'm not sure that's exactly how everybody should do it. Certainly the point is ... I think a couple other things. I think business owners need to elevate the marketing function to a higher level in most organizations. I mean, again, in my world, we're dealing with traditional companies, marketing is kind of a back water, all those guys to the trade shows, or they outsource the website stuff to people like Impact, right? It's back water. They are not looked at as production, or engineering, or design as kind of running the show. And a lot of business owners come from that background. What I see, and it's going to take time, I see more and more business owners are going to come out of the marketing disciplines and the sales side and they're going to just know this stuff in their bones because I think the reason that'll happen is that the idea of this customer experience, and the customer journey, and customer success, being a competitive advantage and really one of the few ways companies are going to be able to differentiate moving forward, that will necessitate more leadership in companies coming from that discipline, whereas in a lot of technical fields, product superiority was what won the day. So engineers, designers, developers ran the companies. Today, I mean, tell me you can't find an alternative to anything. Tell me you can't find 15 alternatives to anything in five seconds. Ask Siri, ask Echo, whatever. Look on your phone, do a search. You're going to find a million alternatives. So product isn't the winner anymore as much as it used to be, and in many cases ... and again, if you think about overseas competition, again, product doesn't win anymore, so the experience and the relationships, these marketing and sales-related things become more and more important all the time to basically build differentiation. And companies won't be able to win on product features anymore. So I think the shift in leadership which will bring the mindset will help, but for you old time, you engineers and you product folks who have been around and done this and you're going to becoming from a technical side, I think it's a mindset, it's eating some humble pie and saying, "I don't necessarily know what's best for our customer all the time." Sometimes our marketing people who are out in the field talking to those customers, and watching their behavior, and seeing what works and what doesn't work, they have something to say too. So leaders need to elevate those people that really understand the experience and are seeing your customers to a higher level and to a more prominent place in the organization because again, engineering can engineer something awesome, you can build it wonderfully, but if the customer service people or the after the sale process ruins the experience, they're not coming back. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: They don't care. They'll go find somebody else. Kathleen: Yeah. So what are some specific things that you've seen companies do, marketers do within companies to improve that customer experience? Todd: Yeah. It starts with understanding the persona and really digging in and doing basic blocking and tackling, interviewing to understand the persona, map the buyer journey, and then do your thing. Build content that matches that journey. Think of your customer in terms of persona. Again, you can connect the dots. If they had this problem and they bought this solution, then they have these commonalities with other customers. Create great content for them. When's the last time an inbound marketer sat down and said, "I'm going to create an amazing video for my customers."? Or, "I'm going to create an amazing Ebook or an amazing tool for my customers."? Kathleen: Now, when you say content for customers, are you thinking content that helps them use the product? Because when I hear that, I think, "Oh, there's plenty of companies that have ongoing tutorials and things that help you get better use of their product." Or are you thinking about content that addresses other pain points? Todd: Yeah, I think you've got to think like a business owner. Think in business problems. The people that are buying your products or services, you should know their range of business problems that they have, and you should know how to extend the solution you sold into the next ones, the next sale. Think about the next sale. So create content that helps position you as the person or the company to come back to to solve that problem and extend the trust they gave you. They're basically buying from you, so they're saying, "I trust you." So therefore, you need to extend that. Again, I think things like training and product usage things are table stakes when it comes to this. You've got to have that. I'm talking about basically saying ... I'll give you a great example. The example we're talking about right now is a good one. How many inbound marketing agencies out there today offer a customer success program for their customers? Do you go to the leaders and the owners of your customers and say, "I can help you keep, retain, upsell, cross-sell, and extend your relationships with existing customers, and here's how I'm going to do it."? I haven't seen too many that do it. Most of them are still, "Hey, generate some leads. Get me more people to my website. Get me some top of the funnel stuff. Convert people so I've got more sales qualified leads." But how many walk in and say, "We can do all this stuff and we can help you grow your business with your existing customer base."? I do. I do. But I don't think a lot of other people do. Kathleen: So when you work with clients to do that, can you talk a little bit about some of the strategies that you advise them to use or give some examples of ... I would actually be really interested in, do you have any examples of where you've put that kind of a program in place and it's really generated measurable results? Todd: Yeah, I've got one client that we've worked with for a number of years, and they had a series of dealers where they sold some direct, but they also sold a lot through this dealer network, essentially just think of it as a distribution network. Well, they were frustrated because they had some dealers that were doing well and some dealers that weren't. It's kind of, you get a normal distribution of dealers, right? So what we did is we created a dealer health check system for them where we went through and we talked to the dealers and we looked at the behavior and the characteristics of the dealers that were successful. We created basically a check, they could create a score for these dealers so they could see which ones were successful and which ones weren't. Todd: Some of the obvious things were how much are they selling, how often are they buying, basic numbers like that. But we also included things like are they following the blog? Do they open emails? Are they consuming the content that we're creating that should be educating them about the opportunities and products and the customers? And then we also dug into CRM. How many communications were going back and forth between the sales people and these distributors and dealers? So we created this, basically we took all this data that we had and all the information and we created this health check system so it would show our client salespeople which ones were doing great, so then they wanted to keep pushing them and extend that, which ones were at risk, and which ones were really failing. So instead of guessing or wasting time, they were able to come up with a plan to use, again, some automated content as well as personal outreach to help those ones that were kind of in the middle, that's what we focused on. Getting the ones that were kind of in the middle that were doing okay but had some issues, move them up. And they've seen probably ... the latest I heard was probably about 15 to 20% increase in sales for that channel since they've started this, and it was about a year ago. So that is kind of combining things like CRM, content, sales teams. Putting it all together in a way that can give you a picture of what's going on, again, after the sale. So that was just one example. I've got lots of examples where companies have gone in and really, they don't do any marketing to their customers. Their after the sale marketing is basically, "Well, when the phone rings, we'll answer it." And I saw story after story where people just started a basic email campaign, just a really basic email campaign, like, "Here's what we're doing. Here's our new products." And all of a sudden, the phone rings, they get new orders. That's very common. I would say on average when we do that, we would see 10 to 15% improvement in sales just working with your existing customers. Not adding new ones, just applying these ideas to an existing customer base. I would say on average over the last 10 years of doing this that it would be 10 to 15% average increase of sales in the first year. Kathleen: Wow. Just by starting to reach out more. Todd: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Just paying attention to your customers, being intentional about it, using what you know about them to create content that would be interesting. If they bought this, then they might be interested in this. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: If they bought this to solve this problem, then they also have this problem, so therefore, let's talk about that. I don't think it's all that complicated, I think it's just taking what you already knew about inbound marketing and inbound sales and just moving to the after the sale piece. Kathleen: It very much reminds me of how a lot of SaaS companies, software companies, have the concept of a product qualified lead. You talked about looking at engagement data and stuff, and I interviewed somebody several episodes ago about this, and in the SaaS world, they have, as you've pointed out with HubSpot, they have this wealth of data on how much people are in the product, how they're using it, and they can surface areas where maybe things aren't going so smoothly. But the best SaaS companies, especially the ones that are going from premium or free trial to paid versions, look really closely at that during that period to then try to upsell their customers, and I think that other industries and companies don't do nearly as good of a job at that, and I think we can all learn a lot from the concept of a product qualified lead. So we have people that are "already engaging with our product", and that product could be something that they purchased from us, like a thing, an actual tangible thing, or it could be a service. Like IMPACT, we're a marketing agency, how are people interacting with our service? What are the telltale signs that they're product qualified? Meaning they might be qualified to purchase something additional or to engage at a different level with us? Most companies fail abjectly at doing that. Todd: Sure. And if you're in the software business, a product qualified lead, if you have a popup that says, "We have this ad on." Right? And if you click it to get more information, there's some automated things, and if you sell equipment or even if you sell professional services, things like that, you don't have that kind of built in thing, so you have to create that. You have to create that product qualification, and you may know that if somebody's asking for accessories or follow on parts or upsells, you may have a good sense of it, but you should also know. You should know pathways for people. I had an example where a client has a piece of equipment, it was a pump. Really basic stuff, it was a pump. But they were selling it to contractors, and very quickly we found that by buying this one product to do this one job, it allowed them to do another job that they could also do. So instead of just pitching the pump on the special occasions, it was a business development opportunity. So anybody that bought that pump, we started to create content to share with their customers about how they could grow their business. If you have this to do this job, you can also do this job, so here's a way you can help grow your business. And again, that's adding value with, again, content, what you know. You have to kind of create that product qualified lead and it's out there. And I've seen it in every product I've ever been around in terms of selling. From very high end capital equipment to working with my clients with software. Metal roofs. You name it. It doesn't matter. There's always something new and there's always something down the road you can help somebody with. If nothing else, create raving fans. Get them talking about you. Get reviews and ratings, get them to give you referrals. If nothing else, you can get that. Structuring Your Company For Customer Experience Kathleen: I imagine that this has some implications for organizational structure because if you are bringing a new customer onboard, and if it's not a totally transactional business. In other words, if you have some kind of an ongoing business relationship with that customer, then I imagine if all of a sudden your marketing department is getting involved in marketing to that customer post-sale, you have to make sure that from the customer's standpoint it feels like the right hand is talking to the left, and they don't have this disjointed experience. So for example, if they have ... in our company, you'll have an account representative who deals with you on a day-to-day basis for your marketing, but then we have a sales team, and we have a customer satisfaction person, and then we have our marketing team. So how do you structure the company internally so that from the customer's standpoint it feels like a seamless experience and everybody understands what the touch points are and you're not competing with 10 different emails from different departments in the company? Todd: I would say obviously there's a range of answers for that depending on where our companies are today. So let's take a company that's not really doing this right now, and then we'll come back to your example of IMPACT. If you aren't really focused on ... if you have that traditional customer service department and that's your after sale focus, look at your expense reports. How much are you spending on sales? How much are you spending on marketing? Compare that to how much you're spending on customer service and after the sale work. Look at your hours, or if you can do it, figure out the resources you're applying across the buyer journey. The whole customer lifetime. Look at where your resources are going. And I bet you a significant portion if not 10 times more of your money is spent on generating new business than it is to keep old business or existing business. And everybody knows the cliché, I've said it once already. Seven times more to get a new customer than it is to keep another one. So if you're smart, you would flip that around. You would spend more on after sale managing your customers than you sell on front end stuff. Now, I'm not naïve enough to think that's going to happen any time soon, but the reality is, you should be moving resources towards keeping your customers happy, customer success after the sale. So if you're not doing this well, you need to look at that and start allocating resources that direction. I think if you've already got a structure like the one you just described there, Kathleen, about IMPACT is not an uncommon one. I think the key I've seen there is that somebody owns the process. Somebody owns that customer and is responsible for making sure all those pieces are connected. So if you've got an account manager, their job is to work day-to-day with that client and deliver what you've promised, right? So it's hard for them necessarily to step back and think about the next step in the future. That's probably your sales team or it could be your customer satisfaction team. And again, I don't know how you're coordinated, but somebody has to own that customer for the life of that customer. Somebody has to be looking at the entire thing and saying, "Okay, here's what's next." And I see chief revenue officers, which may fit that bill. I see more titles around that that are showing up, and I would hope that that's the goal, to get to a place where somebody internally owns that relationship top to bottom or owns all of the relationships top to bottom and then is coordinating elements to deliver the right value at the right time at the right place. They can't be walled off from one another, whatever that looks like. You've got to have communication back and forth. And a lot of people that have worked with HubSpot, you'll see this, you use HubSpot, right? You'll see emails coming out six months before your renewal is due and you'll get a phone call from an internal person that's asked about how you're doing. They may stutter, they're going to see if you're doing well or not, right? And if you're a partner, you're going to hear the same thing. "How's it going with these accounts? The renewals are coming up. What do you want to do? Let's work together." Somebody's owning that. I think that's the key thing. If somebody owns that outcome, the outcome being the ongoing relationship, then I think you're going to win. Kathleen: It certainly seems also that you would need to have the right tech stack in place because you can have somebody own it, but unless all of your different players have really good visibility into what have the communications and the touch points been, then it could get very messy, very quickly. Todd: It's actually impossible if you don't. Kathleen: Yeah. So having a good CRM, and then I would think, I'm sure you and I would preach the same thing, having a marketing system, a marketing automation system that is fully integrated with your CRM so that the sales people can see what marketing is doing, the marketing people can see what sales is doing, and your customer success people obviously bridge all of it. Todd: Exactly. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: We would call that a "centralized view of the customer," where everybody can see it and know what's going on. And again, it sounds so basic, it sounds easy. The problem is a lot of companies I deal with have been around a while so they've got a lot of legacy systems. Those IT guys have been there since the '90s and they're used to servers and buy in software and they don't like the cloud. They've got all kind of biases, right? And they don't want ... they want these walls and they don't want information to get out and get shared because they're afraid of getting hacked, or losing it, or all these concerns. And they're legitimate, but there's answers. And if you don't have that centralized view of the customer, I would say, talking to the leaders of companies, I would put that right there at the top of your strategic initiatives. And if you don't have it, it makes it that much harder to deliver a great experience, which is the ultimate differentiation moving forward. Kathleen: Yeah. If you don't have a good customer list. I love that you said that at the beginning because it's true. It is so true. It sounds crazy, but I'm not going to name names, but I know a lot of companies that people might be very surprised to hear can't produce a list of their customers. Todd: I had a client a couple years ago that sold equipment that started at $250 thousand and went to well over a million dollars, and when I asked that question, "How good is your customer list?" They said, "We're not sure where all of our equipment is." Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: They didn't know where it was. I guess I was stunned. It's common, so again, that centralized view of the customer, it needs to be at the top of the list for leaders and owners. It sounds so basic and so rudimentary, but it's not. It's the beginning. You talk about the tech stack, that database is your business, and if you don't have it, then you can't build on it, then you can't build that experience. Or if you do, it's all over the map. One person may do it well, and over here it's not done well. Or this department does it well and this department doesn't because there's no connectivity. What's The Impact On The Bottom Line? Kathleen: Absolutely. So it's interesting as we're talking and I'm thinking about this whole conversation, the biggest takeaway to me seems to be that if all you do is get a good handle on who your customers are and start initiating regular contact with them, you have a good chance at increasing your sales by 10 to 15% within a year. Todd: Yeah. I mean, we would tell people follow up on your quotes, make sure you stay in front ... the basics. It's just, don't neglect those things. Those are relatively easy to do and just do those basic blocking and tackling. You're not going to go backwards if you do that. Number one, you're going to surface issues if you're talking to people and you're communicating with them, you're going to surface potential issues earlier and you're going to be able to deal with those. You're going to find new opportunities. If your sales team and marketing team are using content well, you're going to open up new opportunities and you're going to do something most companies aren't doing. So you're going to create differentiation right there in the after sale experience. So again, I think it's one of the easiest ways to grow your business without upsetting the apple cart or making a gigantic investment. Kathleen: Yeah. Agreed. So interesting. We could talk for hours about this. Todd: Sure could. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: But we don't have hours. So a couple of questions before we wind things up. My regular listeners know I always like to ask people, company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Todd: Well, there's a bunch. I mentioned FattMerchant. FattMerchant.com, it's a shameless plug for them if you need financial, payment processing services, they're awesome. Another company that was in our book is called Cerasis, C-E-R-A-S-I-S, and that's Cerasis.com. They're in the fleet management and shipping world. They compete with people like FedEx and UPS and they're amazing. They've created this amazing ecosystem and community around their business in a very traditional world where they're connecting people that are trucking companies with people who need to ship things. They are a wonderful example of it. And there's lots of individuals out there that are doing it well. On my podcast, it's called The Industrial Executive, I just interviewed Justin Champion, who is one of the inbound guys who runs the academy. In terms of a practitioner and teacher of inbound and inbound marketing, he's right up there at the top of the list. He wrote a book called Inbound Content, and he's just come out with a new blog strategy class and a video marketing class that I think are amazing. Kathleen: I love him. He's been a guest on one of our podcasts here at IMPACT. He's great. Todd: Yeah, big fan of Justin. And of course, IMPACT. You guys are at the top of the heap when it comes to agencies in the inbound world. You've been around it for a long time and I still read your blog all the time, and all the vlogs, so I'm still paying attention to what you guys are saying because I'm always learning from you. Kathleen: Well that is high praise coming from you, so thank you for that. If somebody is listening and they want to learn more about this whole topic or get in touch with you or if they want to buy your book, can you rattle off a few different ways that folks can get in touch with you online? How To Connect With Todd Todd: Sure. I'm easy to find. Todd Hockenberry. @ToddHockenberry is Twitter, LinkedIn. Happy to connect with people on LinkedIn, just search for my name. The book, InboundOrganization.com is our website for the book. Tons of info there, you can connect with all of our social accounts there. We've got a really cool thing on that website. It's InboundOrganization.com, no spaces. It's an assessment. You can take a 33-question assessment to see where you are in terms of your adoption of the inbound ideas across your entire organization. So it's free, you just fill it out and we'll send you the results, and it's been very interesting seeing the hundreds of people that have done it to kind of see where people are doing well and where they aren't. The answers are pretty insightful and a lot of the people that we know do it really get a lot of good feedback, so check that out. You can find me just Top Line Results or Todd Hockenberry, I'm all over the internet, and I would love to connect with you and answer questions and help you in any way I can. Kathleen: Love it. And I will put all those links in the show notes. And I'm assuming if they want your book, they can just go onto Amazon and get it there. Todd: Yeah. Amazon's great and a lot of Barnes & Nobles carry it, and a variety of other places you buy books. Inbound Organization. Check it out. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: Great. Well thank you so much, Todd. This has been fun, and I'm now inspired to take a closer look at how we're communicating with our customers at IMPACT. If you're listening and you enjoyed what you heard today or you learned something, take a minute, go to Apple Podcasts, and leave a review. It makes a big difference for a podcast like this one. It helps us get in front of more people, and I would be so personally grateful if you could do that today. And if you know somebody who is doing really great inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love for them to be my next guest. Thanks again, Todd. It was great chatting with you. Todd: Thanks for having me. It was my pleasure to be on Inbound Success, Kathleen, and I wish you lots of inbound success. Kathleen: Thanks.

How can a simple change in your keyword research approach dramatically increase traffic, leads and revenue? This week onThe Inbound Success Podcast I spoke with Emily Maxie, VP of Marketing at software development company Very, and Stacy Willis, Emily's strategist at IMPACT, about the incredible results they got by focusing on pillar content and topic clusters.  The two of them shared how they worked together to revamp Very's SEO strategy and why the new approach they used for keyword research at Very has inspired Stacy to change how she carries out keyword research for all of IMPACT's clients. The results of this work are impressive - an 88% quarter over quarter increase, and 1100% year over year increase, in website traffic, along with notable improvements in the quality of the company's leads. 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 keynote speakers 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 Emily and Stacy include: Very is a software development company that focuses on IoT and machine learning. The company was doing digital marketing and while it was successful in driving traffic to its site, it was the wrong kind of traffic and the leads were unqualified. Working with her strategist, Stacy Willis of IMPACT, Emily identified three key topic areas that all fit within service offerings that would be the right fit for Very, and developed a pillar content and topic cluster strategy aimed at building credibility in those areas.  For those three main topic areas, Stacy and Emily used SEMRush to identify the related keywords that had the highest search volume and lowest competition. Pillar content needs to be at least 4,000 words long and to gain immediate traction while her team worked on creating that long form content, Emily started by publishing blogs that were focused on her subtopic keywords. Emily makes it easy for her team to produce content on highly technical subject matter by interviewing her company's subject matter experts and then writing the blogs herself, but giving them an opportunity to review the articles for accuracy before they are published. Her big tip? Don't "write past what you understand." Emily began posting the subtopic blogs at a pace of three articles per week in June of 2018 and before she could even publish her pillar content, the company saw an 88% quarter over quarter increase in website traffic. As of this January, the company's year over year traffic increase has been 1100%. Very is now also ranking number one for "IoT application development" and for "IoT app development" - two of its target keywords. Stacy shared that the experience with Very has been so positive that it has inspired her and the team at IMPACT to change the way we approach keyword research, and now they focus exclusively on keywords that are related to their pillar content topics. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit verypossible.com Check out the Very blog and resource center Connect with Emily Maxie on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter Connect with Stacy Willis on LinkedIn Check out two of Stacy's favorite keyword research tools: SEMRush and Answer the Public IMPACT's pillar content on website redesign For great examples of companies and people doing inbound marketing really well, check out Emily's recommendations, Women Who Code and Harvard Business Review, and Stacy's recommendation, Invision. To stay on top of the latest changes and trends in the startup world, check out Emily's recommendation, the Reboot Podcast. Listen to the podcast to learn more about the changes that Emily and Stacy made, and get the specifics of their new keyword research and SEO strategy. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host):Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. This week on the Inbound Success podcast, I have two guests. One is Stacy Willis, who is a strategist with IMPACT. And the other is Emily Maxie, who's the VP of marketing with Very. Welcome to the podcast. Emily Maxie (Guest): Thanks. It's great to be here. Emily, Kathleen and Stacy recording this episode Kathleen: Stacy's been on the podcast before. She's a familiar name. You haven't been on before. Tell my listeners a little bit about yourself, your background, and also about Very. About Emily Maxie and Very Emily: Yeah, absolutely. So, my long ago background, I went to school thinking I was going to be a journalist, and graduated the year that the iPad came out. And all newspapers were laying people off. And so I worked at a newspaper for about a year, but ended up pivoting into marketing pretty quickly. And landed doing marketing at a technology company, and just really love doing marketing at tech companies because it's kind of the fact based very analytical side of journalism that I love. But it's also an ability to be creative, and it's much more in demand than print journalism is. And yeah, it's just kind of my niche, and it's something I love. And then Very is a software development company that focuses on IoT and machine learning. And we have been around for about seven years. I've been with them for about a year and a half. Kathleen: And IoT, for anyone listening, is the Internet of Things. Which I feel like I want to ask you to define that, but I also know that that's an incredibly hard thing to define. So I don't know, are up for it? Emily: That's like the Pandora's box right there, right? Yeah. I can give kind of ... I'm sure this isn't the official definition and it might make our technologists cringe, but for the marketers out there, any devices that you have that are connected to the internet is the Internet of things. So we've seen the refrigerators that are connected to the internet and you can see inside of them from your cell phone or things like that. We recently created a connected fish tank where you could turn the lights on and off, and check the water temperature from your phone. So all of those interactions between our physical world and the internet is what Internet of Things is. Kathleen: That's so cool. Well good definition. All I could think as I was listening to you say that is the last thing I want to be able to do is see inside my refrigerator, unless I absolutely have to because it's gross. Emily: Yeah, yeah. Stacy: And that refrigerator that can tell you when something's gone bad. That's great. Yeah, or if you're out of milk. Kathleen: I saw something in People Magazine the other day and it was Ryan Seacrest's refrigerator, and I'm not kidding, it looked ... There's no way they cook in that house. And he had baskets with ribbons on them inside of his refrigerator. And I think the only food in there was like spirulina shots. If I had that fridge I would be fine looking at it all day. Stacy: Of course. A Keyword Strategy for Very Kathleen: So interesting. So the reason that I was excited to talk to you guys, the two of you, is that you worked together on a really interesting effort to revisit the keyword strategy for Very, and it had some really impactful results. So let's rewind the clock and start with really what ... First of all, obviously Very is doing digital marketing. That's what you're focused on. What are your goals? What type of clients are you looking to bring in? And what types of keywords were you targeting? Emily: Yeah. So really our goals ... I came in a year and a half ago being the first marketer that Very had ever had. They'd been in business for seven years and never had any marketing. And it all had just been the partners out there hustling and using their personal network, some things like that. And the first time that we had someone reach out to us through the website, it was like magic to them. They were just like, "What? This is so much easier." After that happened I was really able to kind of not only grow the marketing budget, but I think elevate marketing within the company as more than just fixing the website or making things look pretty, stuff like that. So really, our goal with marketing this year is to drive millions of dollars of revenue for the company. Last year marketing drove 2.2 million for the company, and that was our first year actually doing marketing. So I'm really excited about 2019, and the keywords that we were focused on. Well, we spent about a year focusing on the wrong target segment. So we now rank really highly for a lot of blockchain related keywords, which is not a segment that we're going after anymore. So it might be something that we go after in the future, but we just really found that ... You think Internet of things is hard to explain, try explaining blockchain. And also just there was a lot of immaturity in the market. People didn't really know what they were buying or what they wanted. There was this gold rush with initial coin offerings where people got money overnight and then they were spending it very recklessly and it was just not the type of client that we wanted to work with for now. But that was really what we were focused on, with kind of a secondary focus on IoT and machine learning, which are now the core tenants of our business. Kathleen: So if I'm hearing you correctly, it sounds like what you're saying is that you understood that they were the wrong keywords mostly because the type of client you were getting was a poor fit. Is that accurate? Emily: Yes. We understand now that they were the wrong keywords because we ... And SEO and AdWords were not the only things we were doing, we're also sponsoring conferences. And so we were doing huge push across the board for these types of clients. And we kept getting people raising their hands and saying, "I have a project." And then they would move through the sales cycle and then, "Oh, I don't actually have funding." Or they'd get to the end of the sale cycle and then we'd just never hear from them again. We should have pivoted faster away from it, we should have seen it faster, but we have a pretty long sales cycle so it took us awhile to identify. Yes, we're getting tons of interest from this, but it's not the right fit for our business. Kathleen: Yeah, that's really interesting. I think that's definitely a situation I see a lot. And I've seen it with a lot of clients we've had at IMPACT and when I had my own agency, we saw it too. Inbound marketing can work really well, and you can be getting lots of leads and still not feeling like it's right. And that's a familiar refrain to me. So you recognized that you were driving leads but they were not the right kinds of leads. And at the time you were working with Stacy, correct? Emily: Yep. Kathleen: So you guys sat down, and how did you approach the challenge of determining what is the best way to attract the right kind of lead? Emily: Go ahead, Stacy. Kathleen: I'll let you start. Or you want me? Okay. You want me to jump right in? Emily: Yeah. Go for it. Stacy: What we wanted to do when we were looking to put together a holistic keyword strategy was to not isolate ourselves so far down one path, but to make sure that we were building credibility on a number of topics that all fit within service offerings that would be the right fit for Very. So full disclosure, at the time that we created this, we still weren't 100% sure that blockchain was the wrong one. So it is one of the three topic areas we did cover. But what we did was we created a bit more breadth, and made sure that we had three major topic areas we were going after. And organize these into a topic cluster kind of keyword strategy. So I'm sure that most people hearing this will probably be familiar with what pillar content is. But if you're not, it's the organization around a high level topic area, and then you'll have subtopics that are highly related. So the example that we always use from our own website is website redesign. And separately, a subtopic from that might be how much does the website redesign cost? It's a really specific area of that main topic. And so we wanted to go ahead and create a wholistic strategy for Very. That worked to give us coverage over three topic areas instead of just a single one. Kathleen: And what were those three topic areas? Stacy: So at the time that we created it, it was blockchain, IoT, and machine learning, were the three. Kathleen: And how did you ... And knowing the situation you had previously with that wrong type of client, how did you approach this in a way that you felt would eliminate that same issue from happening? Emily: So just to clarify, we realized that maybe two months ago and we did this keyword strategy probably five or six months ago. So it was after we did this keyword strategy, we got a ton of volume in the door, and then we were able to see, okay, two hits, one miss. And we're able to kind of eliminate blockchain from the bunch. But at the time of developing this, we were still very focused on blockchain. And in fact, it was the one that we're most focused on. Kathleen: Wow. That is so interesting to me because that, what it says to me is that the new strategy worked really quickly if you were able to see that fast. Emily: Definitely. Kathleen: And it worked in the sense that it did deliver leads, but they were the wrong leads and you realized it. So that's so interesting. All right, so let's go back to before you knew that you didn't want to target those. Stacy: Naive little Emily. Kathleen: Yeah. And no, I mean I don't think if there's anything naive about it, I mean I think this is just the reality in marketing is you have to try things and you have to watch them, and recognize quickly when they're not working and pivot. And so kudos to you for doing that. Pillar Content and Topic Clusters Kathleen: So going back, you identified these three big topics that you wanted to build clusters around that Stacy described. Walk me through the process that the two of you used to determine what those subtopics would be. Stacy: So I was lucky. Emily just gave them to me. She knew what her team was really, really good at, which I think is really important. So I'll let her speak to that. Emily: Yeah, I basically went to the team because we are a services company, we are very dependent on what our team's capabilities are. And because we're technical services company, it's not just, okay, we do blockchain, which we no longer do, but it's, we do blockchain, we build smart contracts. We don't work on this framework or that framework, we do work on these. And so it got down in the very specific nitty gritty and the technical. And so I kind of gave Stacy a list of here's what I think, I have no idea what the search volume is. And then she curated that list, and said, "Okay, here are some of the keywords related to these that we should be going for." Kathleen: Okay. And Stacy, so Emily delivered this list to you. How did you go about evaluating that and coming back with those recommendations? Stacy: Well, I'm a giant nerd. So I enjoy diving into really, really specific data. So not everybody may get as super excited about this as I do, but- Emily: No, we must both be giant nerds then, 'cause this is what I like to talk about every week. So- Stacy: Oh, that's good, that's good. Emily: Yeah. Stacy: So then nobody's gonna hold it against me as I talk about it at length right now. Excuse me. Apologies, I'm fighting a little bit of a cold so I might cough throughout this. Kathleen: Oh, there is something going around. Stacy: Especially if I get more excited. Yeah. Kathleen: There's something going around and these were the times when I'm happy that I can podcast over zoom so that I don't get your cold. Stacy: Darn, I wanted to give it to you. But what we did internally is we went and dove into a tool called SEMrush, which is possibly one of my favorite tools of all time because it gives you access to the greatest level of data on keywords that's out there. What we did is took the areas in which we knew that the team was really good at delivering, so those three topic areas, and said, "What are the combination of the terms that have the highest search volume?" So that's the most number of people out there looking for those terms. And the lowest competition. Essentially not that many other websites are competing with you trying to rank for the same term. And what bubbled to the top throughout all this research of keywords that were related to these areas, keywords that were maybe variations of ways to say this. The example that I can put there is machine learning and artificial intelligence, kind of ended up being synonymous terms. But they're very different terms when you're thinking about search, right? They have no words in common, but they're highly related. So it really helps to know which way people are referring to it to find you, right? And so what we did is we looked at all of those kinds of related terms and bubbled up to the top those that had the best potential based on that search volume and competition crossover. And we organized them into a structure that looked like we talked about what these topic clusters were. There was a high level keyword which is our big very general topic area that had a very high search volume. And then we connected all of the smaller subtopics that we found that were the best crossover of that high search volume, low competition, that are more specific. And some of the tools that we use when we're trying to get a little more specific with our keywords or things like Answer the Public. Kathleen: I love that one. Stacy: That's one of my favorite. Yeah. It- Kathleen: They also have the best website home page experience with that grumpy- Stacy: Oh my gosh. I sometimes will sit there and watch his face for about 30 seconds because I'm like ... Kathleen: Same. Stacy: I just need someone to be mad at me for about 5 seconds. Kathleen: He's mesmerizing. So if you're listening and you've never gone to answer the public, check it out and there's this super grumpy older man on the home page, and it's awesome. Stacy: Yeah. It's great. He's judging you for how fast you're typing in your keyword. It's hilarious. Kathleen: Okay, so you used to answer the public. Stacy: Yeah. So we pulled the data out of SEMrush, we bubbled up the best opportunities, and then we go to answer the public to say, "What questions are people asking about these terms that we want to be answering?" And so what we did was we actually started building out all of our subtopic blogs before we even started on our pillars. So pillar content is typically 4,000 words and above. So we're talking pretty hefty material that takes a little while to get all of the content put together that get maybe the subject matter experts you need on board and get something out the door. So we didn't want to hold that up. So we put together the full editorial calendar of all the subtopic blogs and started diving into those first. And I can let Emily share how she worked with her team to get those moving and forward because I think that's probably her journalism career coming out. I've never had a client that's been so great at getting content out the door. Creating Content for a Highly Technical Industry Kathleen: Ooh, Emily, I need to hear about this because this is the universal challenge that all marketers face. So talk to us. Emily: Yeah. Well, first of all, I've never been at a company where I have had such a responsive team of experts. We're small company and we are completely remote, which means we all have to be really good communicators. And so everyone in the company is just great at getting back to me. And so that is one thing that really helps. Another secret weapon thing of mine too is I'll interview them for a blog post on a topic. I'll write it up and then I'll tell them, "Hey, here it is. You can preview it. It's going live on this date. Please get your feedback to me before then." And so it's not leaving it to them of a question like, do you have any edits? Is this approved? It's just saying, "This is happening." And I always give them their respectful amount of time. I'm always very respectful of the fact that they have a job to do. And there's been times where someone has been like, "Oh, I had edits, and it went live." And I'm like, "That's okay, it's the internet. You can go and you can make edits." So that's kind of my sneaking enjoy of getting things out the door. The other thing I'll say is just having a writing background. I write a lot of it myself. And then just get them to sign off. So for a lot of the topics I would just go and become a subject matter expert on whatever it was by doing research and things like that. And then running it by our internal subject matter expert. And they'd say, "Here, this wording isn't quite right. But other than that it's good to go." And that's- Kathleen: I am impressed because it's ... I , it's one thing ... I've had lots of clients from lots of different industries over the years, so it's very funny and random, but I mean I know a weird amount about commercial landscaping and insurance. It's one thing to become an expert on commercial landscaping, it is entirely another to do research and make yourself into a subject matter expert on IoT machine learning and natural language processing. So I mean how do you do that? How much time does that take? And- Emily: It's very time consuming. Yeah. So it is very time consuming, but again, the journalism background, really they taught me. I mean I had classes where they would say, "Go attend this event and deliver us an article about it within the hour." Because that's the type of thing you have to do if you're a journalist. And so it's really kind of like going in, understanding as much as you can, not writing past where you understand. Don't go beyond what your understanding is. But just doing a ton of research and not getting hung up on, is this perfect? And I think that's one thing that is really difficult for a lot of people. It's difficult for me. You want everything that goes out to be perfect and the best that it can be, but sometimes just getting something out, especially if it's a timely topic or something that is a new term that no one's ranking for, is getting something out is better than getting nothing out. And then you can go back and refine it in the future. But at that point I was doing a lot more of that. Now I've moved into ... So I was director of marketing then, I'm VP of marketing now. And since being promoted I've been doing a lot more strategic work. And so I've offloaded a lot of that copywriting to IMPACT. And they're working with our internal subject matter experts on blog posts. But yeah, at the time I was writing a lot myself. And in fact, this morning, I spent about an hour writing a blog post about something that the fun thing about being able to be a marketer and a writer is we can have a client who has a question, and I can just write something about it, and get it on the blog post that day, and have our sales team send it over to the client. And potentially win that deal because I'm just able to be very responsive and nimble. Kathleen: That's fantastic. We have one of the partners at IMPACT is Marcus Sheridan, who's fairly well known in the marketing world. And he is adamant when he works with companies that they have an in house content manager. And he specifically tells them to hire journalism students. And I think it's for the reasons that you outlined, which is that they tend to be well trained in how to get the story out. And I loved what you said about not writing past what you know, because I think that that definitely is a trap that marketers fall into. And sometimes it's because you want to sound smart. And there's lots of reasons for it, but I think understanding your limitations and sticking within the guard rails you have is a really good lesson. And I love that you give people those deadlines and say, "I'm putting it up. If I don't hear from you, it's going up regardless." Very smart. Emily: Yeah. We also have just a great working culture at Very. And a very much a fail fast culture, and an agile, nimble, get out the MVP type culture. And so there are other companies that I've been at where there was a lot more bureaucracy around what goes out the door and who sees it, and the checks and balances and all of that. And here it's really just me, and I love that. I really find that interesting and engaging. Kathleen: Yeah, the startup world is not for every marketer. Some absolutely love it and wouldn't have it any other way. And some don't need a ton of resources. So I'm curious. Alright, you identified all these subtopics, you built out the themes you wanted for the articles. It sounds like you started writing as the pillar was being developed. Can you talk me through, how much content was this? And in what amount of time? How many articles did you put up? Emily: That's a really good question. Stacy: You guys were on pace for at least three a week for an entire quarter, is what the cadence is that we'd look like in terms of blogs. Yeah. Kathleen: Okay. Go ahead. Emily: We're not still at that cadence. But that's what we were for a while. Kathleen: Okay. And this started when? Emily: This would be, we were looking at the launch of this strategy around June of 2018. Kathleen: Okay. So that's when the articles started going up, or that's when you finished the strategy? Emily: So that's when the articles started going up. So the really interesting thing about this is we built this strategy knowing that the capstone is the pillar, right? The pillar pages was gonna tie everything together. But what we found is because over the course of the quarter is when we were going to even get the first pillar out. So we were like, "We'll just tackle the subtopic blogs first, then they'll all be there ready for our pillar when the pillow goes live," right? The Results of Very's Pillar Content Strategy Emily: Well, before the pillar even went live, our traffic went through the roof. So it was really telling in terms of how we should overall be structuring keyword strategies going forward. Stacy: And the results of this which had originally been, let's just put together three pillar content strategies, was now let's change the way we do keyword strategies as a whole for our clients at IMPACT. So that was what came out of this. Kathleen: So when you say the traffic went through the roof, put some numbers behind that for me. What was it at and what did it go to? Emily: So we saw an 88% quarter over quarter increase in traffic. Kathleen: 88? Emily: 88%, yeah. It went from 8,800 range of organic businesses, just organic, to 16,600 for the quarter. Kathleen: In one quarter. Emily: Yeah. So that's quarter two compared to quarter three. Kathleen: Wow. Emily: And the crazy thing about that is that in May of 2017 this was a brand new domain with zero SEO juice. When I came in, it was a 100 percent brand new domain. Kathleen: Wow. Emily: So our year over year growth this past year, January nine to January nine, compared to the previous period was 1100 percent gross. Kathleen: Oh my gosh. And do you have any numbers around what happened to your lead generation? What was the growth there? And I know some of it is growth, but some of it is also just the quality of the leads. I'd be curious to know more about what you saw. Emily: Yeah. So the really interesting thing is, obviously we dabbled in and in blockchain for a while, but we were also working on building up the topics around machine learning in IoT, and we have started to get in really, really high caliber clients. I wish that I could mention their names because they're names that you would recognize, but they're still in our pipeline and I definitely shouldn't. But we have gotten through organic really high quality leads coming to us and saying, "You are obviously the experts in facial recognition." Or, "You're obviously the experts in building internet connected products." And the content speaking for itself, we're ranking number one for IoT application development and for IoT app development. Several of those key words that if you'd asked us a year ago, it would've just been, no, that's not a thing that's possible. Maybe in five years or something like that. So yeah, we're definitely seeing the results in terms of business as well. Kathleen: And how long is the typical article that you're producing? Are these 800 words, 1600 words? Do you have any kind of guideline around that? Emily: I don't have any guidelines. I like to say right until the topic tells you to stop. Because again, it's kind of like getting too far out in front of your skis or getting to a point where you feel like you're just saying things just to say them. So I don't have any guidelines. If I had to guess, I would guess it's between 800 and 1600 words for the ones we're producing. Stacy: And I'd say on average the ones that you've outsourced to IMPACT, probably run around the 1,200 range. Emily: Yeah, that makes sense. Kathleen: Now when did you wind up getting the actual pillar content up? Stacy: That's a good question because it wasn't even in the quarter. No, where we grabbed all these results from, which is why it was so exciting. And we're like, "okay, all keyword strategies have to be done differently from now on." The blockchain one, I believe, Emily, was the first one to go up? Emily: It was, and it was created in September. Kathleen: And when that went live, did you see, again, any sort of a boost? I know that you wind up kind of shifting the focus away from that, so I don't know if that's the best one to use as an example. But I'm curious to know if that had an impact on the traffic as well. Emily: Yeah. But not as much as I kind of thought. So we got about 300 views to that pillar page. But compared to the blog posts, it's nothing. And so I think really the thing that shines about this or thing that stands out about this strategy is the strategy itself. And I think the ... At least, I don't know what you've experienced with other clients, but for us the pillar page is kind of like an afterthought, and it's more of the strategy behind it. Yeah. Kathleen: Well, it makes sense because if you have the more niche topics covered in the blogs, I think that tends to be what people are searching. So that does seem logical. Emily: Yeah. And quite honestly with every pillar strategy, it's the combination of all of the pieces is what really drives the traffic. There's not really any one piece that you'd say, "Hey, this is the only thing that matters." It's really the fact that all of them are connected together. Stacy: And Kathleen, we've seen this on the IMPACT website with our website redesign pillar. The traffic boost that it's given all of the blogs that it's been connected to has been far greater than the traffic boost to the actual pillar itself. Kathleen: Yeah, that's absolutely right. Interesting. So now at this point, fast forward to today, do you have all three pillars and clusters completely up? Or are you still working on some of 'em? Emily: No, we're still working on the content for IoT and for machine learning. And really it's not because we've been slow on the marketing side, but our business has been figuring out exactly where we want to play. And within, we say we do IoT and machine learning, well both of those are huge umbrellas. That's like saying we're a marketing agency. Well for who? And what do you do? And what technologies do you use? And so I'm still in the process of a couple of things. So first is working really closely with our sales team to do customer interviews and prospect interviews to figure out service market theft. And then the other thing is just publishing a lot of blog posts that could be potential pillar content reference material and seeing how they perform before going too deep into one. A New Approach to Keyword Research Kathleen: Interesting. And what would you say ... Stacy, I'll throw this one out to you. You talked about how this experience kind of inspired you to say we really have to change the way we do keyword research now and content strategies. If you had to distill this down into what was the biggest change that you made, the before versus the after, how would you describe that? Stacy: Yeah. So the way that we use to deliver keyword strategies was, here's a list of keywords that are completely ... We're not even considering how they're related to each other. We're looking at each keyword on an individual basis and its own performance, which is still important. But what this has done is now involved a layer deeper where we're actually grouping our keywords that we're recommending clients target into groups of related clusters. So if we ever are presenting a keyword strategy to a client and there's a single keyword, they're saying, "Go after this keyword," and there's nothing else related to it, that's not gonna happen anymore, essentially. So that was kind of the old way, that you know, it's been the way since inbound became a thing. It's get your long tail keywords and write a blog. And you just think about that one keyword at one time for one page, as opposed to thinking of it more holistically across your website, of how many keywords do I have in this group that can all lead up to the same topic area? And so now we're making sure that if we are putting together a keyword strategy or an editorial calendar that we are grouping topics together into groups like that. Because when we saw that even before we had all of the pillar built up together, that was a signal to Google that we were a topic area expert. And they rewarded us greatly for it. Kathleen: That's interesting. Now have you seen that ... What is the pace of growth look like since that first big jump? Has it been fairly steady, or? Emily: Yeah. Yeah, it's been pretty steady. I would say that we have some months that it looks like, "Oh, it's not growing quite as fast" and part of that is just we have backed off on the content creation to focus really hard on the business strategy. So that then we can go back and go hard, and know that we're making the right bet so that we don't make the same mistake again that we made with focusing on blockchain. Kathleen: It is so interesting how literally as you scale up and scale back content publication, it's like turning the faucet on and off. You can really see a direct correlation to traffic and leads- Stacy: Definitely. Kathleen: And that's fascinating. Interesting. So if somebody wants to check out your site and see some of this content that you're talking about and get a sense for what you guys are doing, where can they find it online? Emily: Yeah. Our URL is verypossible.com. And you can go to our blog or you can go to /resources, which is the place where we have a lot of videos and white papers and things like that. And you can find the pillar page there as well. Kathleen: By the way, I love your domain name. Emily: Oh, thank you. Kathleen: Yeah. Emily: Yeah, talk about SEO Challenge when your brand name is Very, forget about branding traffic. Kathleen: Yeah, that's tough. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Well before we wind up, I do have two questions I always ask my audience. And I'll start with you, Emily. Company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Emily: So I'm going to be a terrible marketer and just let you know that I don't keep up with other marketers because I'm really occupied keeping up with technology so that I can be really good at my job where I'm at. And that's one reason I work with Impact is because I need people to help me who are keeping up with the latest trends and things like pillar content and stuff like that. Kathleen: So my question for you is - and I love that answer because I actually am more fascinated to hear about your experience as a consumer of content - so you just said you try to keep up with technology. Is there a technology website or blog that you think is doing a really great job? Emily: Yeah. Kathleen: Who do you like to read? Emily: I love Women Who Code. I love reading HBR, Harvard Business Review. Yeah, Women Who Code is really my favorite newsletter because they keep up with both women and tech stuff, but also just trends in the industry and things like that. And we're also ... Another thing that I'm just passionate about is women in tech, and we're really trying to recruit female developers. And so I'm looking at not just how are other tech marketing themselves, but how are they marketing themselves as an employer brand. And so figuring that out and kind of seeing what other people are doing. Kathleen: Ooh, I'll have to check that out because I'm kind of curating my own list of really good email newsletters. So that sounds like a good one to add to it. Emily: Yeah. Kathleen: And I love examples from outside of the marketing world. Emily: I also love the Reboot podcast, which is just a very grounded and thoughtful podcast about being in a startup and kind of keeping your head on straight while you're at a startup. So that's a really good one too. Kathleen: Ooh, that sounds like a good one. And it sounds like I already got my answer to my second question from you, which is, with digital marketing changing so quickly, how do you stay up to date? And it sounds like what you said is for you at least it's relying on an agency to kind of keep you up to date. Emily: Absolutely. Kathleen: Yeah. Emily: Yeah. I'm a one person marketing team, and I do events and the website content. I'm now an interim head of sales for a little bit and covering for someone while they're on leave. And so I have a thousand hats. And being able to stay up on marketing is something that is so important, but I just don't have the time to do. And so that's the biggest reason that I work with IMPACT. Kathleen: Great. And Stacy, I interviewed you recently and I got your answers. Any new tidbits to add to what we talked about last time? Stacy: Yeah. Um, I'll just throw out that I've also very recently been super impressed with Invision. Their content production engine is amazing. Not only to people who aren't users, but their community for designers and the way in which they engage people to use their tools successfully. So they have great examples of how you can use this part of their program or things like that I think probably go a whole heck of a long way in keeping their users satisfied and more engaged with their product over time, which is still a function of marketing, although we don't always think of it as such when we're really focused on bringing in new leads. But I've been really, really impressed with what they do. Kathleen: Oh, that's a good one. I'll definitely check that one out. Well, thank you both. This was so interesting. How to Reach Emily Emily: Emily, if somebody wants to find you personally online, what's the best way for them to connect with you? Emily: You can find me on Twitter @EmilyMaxie, M-A-X-I-E. Or on LinkedIn. The awesome thing about having a super weird last name is I'm the only Emily Maxie. So- Kathleen: Perfect. Emily: Just Google Emily Maxie and come find me. Yeah, I would love to connect and geek out about marketing or technology or whatever it may be. Kathleen: I love it, and Stacy, what's the best way for somebody to connect with you? Stacy: So directly through IMPACT's website is the easiest way to get to me, or on LinkedIn. And you can find my LinkedIn profile through the Impact website, which is probably easier 'cause Stacy willis is not a very unique name. Kathleen: Well and I'll include links in the show notes to all of your various profiles. Stacy: Awesome. Kathleen: Thank you both. It's been fascinating. I'm really excited to check out some of the content, Emily, and just get a sense for what you guys did to get these great results. But I appreciate you joining me. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: If you are listening and you learned something new or you enjoyed this episode, you know what to do. I would love it if you would give us a review on Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice. And if you know someone doing kick ass inbound marketing, tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. Thank you, Stacy, and thank you, Emily. Stacy: Thank you. Emily: Thanks. Stacy: Have a good one.

The thought of combining two very successful websites into one would make most marketers quake in their boots. How did David Meerman Scott do it without interruption to his business AND see improvements in traffic and search engine rankings? This week onThe Inbound Success Podcast I'm joined by famed marketing expert, best-selling author, entrepreneur and internationally-renowned keynote speaker David Meerman Scott, along with IMPACT's own principal strategist Stacy Willis.  The two recently worked together on a project to merge two of David's websites into one. Both sites attracted a significant volume of traffic and were important drivers of business for David - something that made the notion of combining them very scary. In our conversation, David and Stacy talk about why they combined the sites, how they did it, and the results they saw. 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 keynote speakers 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 David and Stacy include: David's primary website is DavidMeermanScott.com. He had several other sites including webinknow, which had over 1,500 blog posts and a considerable number of valuable backlinks. When David and Stacy worked together to design his main website, they made the decision to merge all of the content from webinknow into the main site.  One of the main reasons they decided to combine the two sites was they were cannibalizing each other when it came to keyword rankings and traffic. Stacy used tools like Screaming Frog and SEMRush to analyze how David's sites ranked and for which keywords, and that is how she was able to determine that these two particular sites should be merged (while some of David's other sites should not be folded into the main site). Having a plan for putting 301 redirects in place for all of the pages that were going to be merged was essential to the success of the project. Stacy also evaluated David's website traffic to determine which blogs were getting the most traffic and used this as an opportunity to improve the way they were optimized. Central to this process was the development of a topic cluster strategy for David's news site. Within weeks of launching the new site, Stacy was able to determine that all of David's traffic and keyword rankings from the two separate sites were preserved with the move to the new site. In the weeks that followed, they also saw that many of his keyword rankings actually improved further, and he has begun to see an increase in lead flow to the site. David's advice to anyone considering combining multiple websites is to take the project in stages. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" David Meerman Scott's website David's books Newsjacking.com Stacy's article on The SEO Implications of Changing Domains During a Website Redesign (& a Successful Example) "Is SEO Dead in 2019?" (pillar content collaboration between Liz Murphy and Franco Valentino) Listen to the podcast to get details of the exact process David and Stacy went through to merge David's two websites and increase his search engine rankings. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host):Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm Kathleen Booth, and I'm your host. Today we have a special episode of the Inbound Success podcast. I have two guests. The first is my colleague, Stacy Willis, who is a strategist here at IMPACT. The second is David Meerman Scott, who is the famed author, keynote speaker, entrepreneur, 10 books... I'm sure I'm missing so much in how I'm describing you, David. For those people who've been living a rock for the last decade, can you tell my audience a little bit about you, who you are, and the kind of work you do? David Meerman Scott (Guest): Sure, and thanks for having me on. This is so much fun. I really appreciate it. David, Kathleen and Stacy recording this episode   About David Meerman Scott David: I was a corporate marketing guy for many years. I worked in Asia for 10 years. I was the vice president of marketing of two different publicly traded technology companies. I got fired in 2002, had to figure out what the heck I was going to do, so started to work with a few clients. Then I started to write, and had a book called The New Rules of Marketing and PR. It hit the international bestseller list. It went crazy, and just has sold to date over 400,000 copies. It's in 29 different languages. I've written nine other books besides that, and I also serve on advisory boards of companies, including HubSpot. I was the first Advisor to HubSpot when they had less than 10 people and no revenue. Kathleen: Wow. David: I've been with them ever since. I wrote a book with HubSpot CEO, Brian Halligan, called Marketing Lessons From the Grateful Dead. I invented the concept of newsjacking that I know IMPACTers talked about a lot. It was my invention and it is now in the Oxford English Dictionary, which is an awesome thing. I've been working with IMPACT now for a couple of years. As you well know, you've done my marketing work. You've built out four different websites for me, so I really appreciate the effort and work that you've done on my behalf. I can work with anyone on the planet - bestselling marketing author - but I choose to work with you, so I really appreciate that, and I'm really happy that we can have this discussion. Kathleen: That is really very kind of you to say. We are very fortunate that we get to work with you. I think this is such a fascinating conversation to me because you are clearly a man who has a lot going on. I don't think the moss grows under you very often. David: Yeah, when I start to get a little bored I book a speaking gig in a crazy country. I've actually spoken in 46 different countries, most recently last month in Romania. Yeah, the moss doesn't grow because I jump on an airplane so it doesn't. Kathleen: I love it. One of the things that's so fascinating to me about your situation as you describe is you've published many books. You have all these very diverse initiatives you undertake as an entrepreneur, and that could become, as some marketers I know like to say, a "Frankenmonster" of a marketing undertaking. If you have a ton of websites, a lot of different marketing channels, that can quickly become very unmanageable. I know one of the things that we've been working on recently with you - and I shouldn't say "we" because I've had nothing to do with it, it's really Stacy and her team - is looking at how do we maybe combine some of those disparate marketing efforts into a more unified web presence. You obviously have a unique situation, but there are a lot of companies out there that have different brands or different divisions that might have multiple web presences. One thing I do have a lot of experience with is talking to those companies and hearing the anxiety in their voice when they think about, "Oh my god, I'm afraid to touch it because I might break the internet," right? David: Hey, I have that fear too, right, Stacy? That was freaking me out. It was breaking my website. I think I probably said to Stacy and the team 30 or 40 times, "This is not going to break this, right? I'm going to be okay. I don't have to sweat it." We'll get into the details shortly, but I had a blog I started in 2004. There were over 1,500 blog posts. It's so important to my business, and I'm like, "We're not going to break it. We can't break it." But you're right, I do have a bit of that Frankenmonster that you described for a couple of reasons. I've tried to build out a basic website for some of the books that I've written because I try to choose a unique title for books. For example, World Wide Rave, there's a website around World Wide Rave. There's a website for a book I wrote called Marketing the Moon. I've got some other websites out there. I have DMScott.tv. I got some junk out there too, but there's some that are important. Part of that is like I'm like a venture capitalist where I say, "Gee, I've got a new project coming up, and I think that it's got some potential to perhaps be something that's worth a standalone presence, so let's create one." That might be a new book for me or it might be a new concept. In the case of a couple of my books, it wasn't really that beneficial, and in fact now those sites are basically orphans. In some cases, I take the site down and redirect it somewhere else, typically to the book page on my main website, which is David Meerman Scott, but in other cases, it's been incredibly powerful, for example, in the case of newsjacking. Newsjacking is a concept that I pioneered. It must be about six or eight years ago now. When I first started to talk about newsjacking, nobody else was talking about it. It's basically the idea that if you understand the news cycle, you can inject your ideas into that news cycle and generate tons of media attention and grow your business, get sales leads. It's a fabulous concept, and I bought the URL newsjacking as soon as I knew that I was going to be talking about this concept. Man, was that a smart move because every single day there are people who are writing about newsjacking. Every single day there are people who are using social networks with the hashtag newsjacking. All of that points back to me now because I have Newsjacking.com. I have that URL. I am the pioneer of newsjacking, but it's made official because I have that URL. Then when the Oxford English Dictionary listed newsjacking in the dictionary, they wrote about me as the person who founded it, and that drove even more traffic to the site. On one hand, I've got sites that are orphans and maybe they end up just being redirects. In other cases, they become standalone properties in their own right. The Frankenmonster thing is like a VC. Sometimes it's going to take off and do great; sometimes it's not, and I never know which one is going to be which. Combining Multiple Websites   Stacy Willis (Guest): It really made for an interesting challenge for your website. Kathleen: Yeah. David: Especially with one of the sites that we combined, I've had, gosh, 12 years, something like that, the other one since 2004. What's that? 15 years. It's a combined almost 30 years of those two websites with thousands and thousands of keywords, so you're right. It was a challenge. Kathleen: I think that's what's really interesting about this, because you have this very disparate set of sites - things like newsjacking, that have taken on a life of their own. Yeah, you wouldn't want to touch that because, gosh, there's no bigger holy grail for a search engine marketer than a back link from the Oxford English Dictionary. Talk about authority, right? But then you have these little sites that were trial balloons you sent out that maybe didn't go anywhere. It's an easy thing to say, "Well, let's take the trial balloon and merge it into the mothership," but you were talking in this case about taking a site that had a substantial amount of content that was delivering results for you and merging it into another big one. There's the potential to break both essentially. So coming into this, David, can you talk a little bit about what your goals were for this whole undertaking? David: Yeah, sure, of course. So I had two sites that your team - actually, Stacy and the team - recommended that we merge. It wasn't my initial plan because frankly it scared the hell out of me to do it. But the two sites are DavidMeermanScott.com, which is my basic front page to the world. That's the site where I typically will have people who are interested in having me speak will go to that website and learn about my speaking. There's a bunch of videos on that site. That's also where people will go to learn about my coaching services and my advisory work. When people want to quote me in a news article or story, that's the place they'll go. It's basically the home base of David Meerman Scott. Oh, and by the way, I just might add, my middle name is Meerman. I chose to use that 20 years ago when I built my first website because I'm the only David Meerman Scott on the entire planet. There's a whole boatload of David Scotts, but there's only one David Meerman Scott. There's a David Scott that walked on the moon as the commander of Apollo 15. There's a David Scott who's a multiple time Iron Man world triathlon champion. There's a David Scott who's a member of Congress from Georgia. That's just a few of us.  Kathleen: Very good company. David: It's good company, but when I first started my first website 20 years ago, I wasn't going to be able to get any traction against those more famous David Scotts, but putting my middle name in, I was the only one. That was actually a very clever search engine marketing tactic I did a long time ago that I figured out myself. But anyway, getting back to DavidMeermanScott.com, that's my home base on the web. That's where people go to learn about me, maybe to book me to speak, to ask for a quote in an article, to pitch me something, to learn about my coaching services and to learn about my online learning programs and whatnot. My other main web property is the horrifically named webinknow. Don't ask me about that, but when I started it back in 2004, I was trying to come up with a name for my blog. Why I didn't just call it David Meerman Scott's blog I have no idea, but I didn't. I called it webinknow, W-E-B I-N-K N-O-W, which a lot of people didn't know what it meant, so they said, "web in know," which is actually spelled the same way, which makes no sense either. I was trying to imply with webinknow, it's web ink. It's like you're writing. It was a long time ago granted in the beginning of the internet, so it made sense at the time I suppose, but it was a very important property for me because that's where I blogged at least once a week for 15 years. It was a lot of content there. David: There are some blog posts that had millions of views, so there are some blog posts that had hundreds of inbound links. It is a very important property to me. I'd love to have Stacy jump in, but as we were looking at these two properties that were so important to me, we realized that there might be benefit in combining them, which totally freaked me out, but I was talked down from the cliff, and we decided that, yes, this does make sense. I don't know, Stacy, do you want to jump in or do you have another question, Kathleen? Kathleen: I'm going to frame the question for you, Stacy, because this is really interesting to me. As somebody who is a strategist who works with clients, I know you've had multiple situations where there have been companies that have said, "Should we or should we not combine these two web properties?" From your standpoint as the outside strategist looking at this, when would you say, "Yes, you should combine these two," versus when would you say, "These should stay separate"? Stacy: This is actually a really interesting case because we said both to David, right? We said, "Don't combine your newsjacking but do combine webinknow," right? Essentially what we looked at first and foremost was how much cannibalization was happening. Were we ranking for some of the same keywords? Was one site taking traffic away from the other site when it might make more sense to combine forces essentially and get even better rankings and drive all of the traffic to the same place? Most importantly, David, for your site is, were we cannibalizing traffic that might ultimately want to hire us to speak? To look to us for coaching and sending it to the wrong website that doesn't convert people down the right path for that? Stacy: When we looked at the data, we found that it made sense for webinknow to come on to the David Meerman Scott domain, and it didn't necessarily make sense for a newsjacking. Newsjacking had its own really specific topic area. That even made for another layer of interesting keyword strategy because we wanted to be really careful about talking about the newsjacking book. We definitely want that on your website, right? It's really great credibility. It's important to show the world what you've done, but if we talk about it too much, do we start cannibalizing traffic from the newsjacking site and bringing it over to yours? That put a lot of interesting thought process into this strategy that we put together for the book pages. But really the big reason for combining webinknow was that big cannibalization factor, and the fact that we really wanted to drive up the domain credibility for the David Meerman Scott domain. Kathleen: I want to make sure I understand. Let's just focus for a second on webinknow and the David Meerman Scott main site. You were looking specifically at the various keyword sets that each was ranking for. Were you looking at where there was overlap or were you looking simply at like with webinknow, here are the keywords that rank really well, but we would very much like these to be what the David Meerman Scott site ranks for? Stacy: It was a bit of both. The biggest thing that we really looked at was where there was overlap. If we have two websites that are ranking well for the same term, that means one of them is getting the traffic at the expense of the other, right? We wanted to find ways to stop that if we saw too many overlaps, and that was the case with this. We saw enough overlap, and there wasn't a strong enough reason from our perspective when we talked through it with David to keep webinknow separate, aside from that, because there's always things that you can't necessarily just look at data and have an answer to. From a branding perspective, it may have still made sense to keep a website separate even if data tells you to do it. We looked up both sides, and it, just from both ends of the spectrum, made sense to move them together. Kathleen: Stacy made this recommendation. You immediately, David, thought what? David: The biggest thing was I was really worried about doing it because it's such a big part of not just my business but my life because I actually go to my own blog and search on stories to remember things. I'll say to myself, "When was I in Russia?" I'll go to my blog and search "Russia" to see if I wrote a blog post about being in Russia because I can't remember when I was there, that kind of thing, or I'll remember that I did a post about a particular topic. As I'm doing work on, say, another book or whatever it is, I want to get information, so it's not just even the business aspect. It's the personal aspect of how important that blog was for me. I was really, really worried that number one, something disastrous would happen, and it would disappear. I guess that's human nature. I was assured many times that there's multiple backups of this and we can download it locally and we could do all this other stuff, so, okay, fine. Then I was worried because I'm not an expert in this stuff. I'm a marketing strategist, yes, but I'm not an under-the-covers SEO person. I was worried that all of those fantastic inbound links - and I don't know, Stacy, if you know how many we have, but it's certainly thousands of inbounds link - would somehow break. I was worried about that and my credibility would go down, so those things I needed to be reassured or under control, but I was really happy about losing the horrible name, webinknow, because even from the first year, it just didn't make a whole lot of sense. It would have been a very different discussion however if my blog name was really interesting. For example, if I had called it "The Marketing Blog," or something like that, that had SEO in its own right, I'm not sure that combining them would have made as much sense. But when you have a URL for a blog and a name for a blog that's so confusing, people don't even know what it is, then that's a good reason to combine. The Process of Combining Two Websites Kathleen: That's a good point. You all took the decision to do this. Can you walk me through what the next steps were? Did you have to start by cataloging the content? How did you prepare for this undertaking? Stacy: Yeah, so the biggest thing that we went through is the webinknow domain, since that was going to be the one that was going away and moving over the David Meerman Scott domain. Internally, we used a tool called Screaming Frog for this. We went and did an audit of literally every single URL that existed over there to make sure that we weren't going to miss anything when we moved everything over. We migrated all of the blogs in draft form first, so nothing actually changed on the live site. Everything still looked the same to the outside world. We got everything set up and ready, and then we had to create this massive 301 redirect file essentially where we start pulling what were all of the old URLs that we need to make sure, redirect and move to new URLs on the new website. David: There were over 1500 of them. Stacy: Yeah. Kathleen: I imagine that most of our listeners know what a 301 redirect is, but just for anyone who doesn't, fair to say it's like a change of address form for Google basically? Stacy: Yes. It's when you go to the post office and you give them your new address and do mail forwarding essentially. Kathleen: Yeah. Stacy: It moves everything over from your old URL to your new URL. 301 redirects tend to be less scary when they're within a domain. They tend to get a lot scarier, and this is when you get people who get very nervous about moving from a completely different domain to another one. That's when there's a little bit more at stake and it's a little bit easier for Google to get confused, and for traffic to get lost in that forwarding process. We wanted to make sure that we were being really very careful about it. We made sure all those redirects were set up. In addition to that, we took the opportunity to say, "Do we have ways that we could adjust some of the URLs that used to exist and keyword optimize them as we move them to the new website?" We're going to be changing the URL anyway. Can we find ways to actually improve the keyword optimization of any of our existing content? We looked at that, and then we also keyword optimized all of the new pages that we were creating as part of the redesign, so that they fit with the content and the structure and all of the topics that were coming across from webinknow. We took the opportunity to say, "We have all this old stuff that, oh my god, if we lose it, the world will end, but how can we take that and make it fresh and new and still combine it with an updated strategy for today?" Kathleen: Now, for somebody outside of this, that sounds like a massive undertaking. How do you do this in a way that isn't going to take months? This is 15 years' worth of content. David: Let me add a little bit of clarification that might help first, and then I'll let Stacy talk about some of the details. When I first started working with IMPACT, I'm going to guess it was about two years ago or maybe even three years ago. I can't remember. We did two projects together that were essentially setting this up to make this process easier. The first thing that we did was we moved my DavidMeermanScott.come website from a WordPress site to a HubSpot site. That happened, again, I don't remember the exact date, call it three years ago. The second thing that we did was we created webinknow, which was in Typepad, and moved that over also to HubSpot. Again, I don't know, let's call it two or threes years ago that was done. Those two projects were pretty significant undertakings in their own right that happened several years ago, so that now we're sitting with both DavidMeermanScott.com and webinknow.com under the same HubSpot account, which in my mind makes things easier. I'm putting words in Stacy's mouth, but in my mind makes things easier. I personally wasn't as worried as if we had been moving from WordPress to HubSpot with DavidMeermanScott.com and moving from Typepad to HubSpot with my blog, and then combining them all at the same time, which would have given me more sleepless nights. Kathleen: Yeah, I can imagine. Stacy: Yeah, and I'm definitely okay with people putting words in my mouth if they're the right words, so I totally agree with that. I would say the best way to help make this process more manageable, there's going to be parts of the process that you can say, "Let's focus on the best performing content," and there's going to be parts of this process that you would say, "Well, this is going to be tedious. I'm just going to have to put my big girl pants on and do it." The 301 redirects, there's no shortcuts; there's no turnarounds; there's nothing. You have to make sure that you are moving things over appropriately. When you're doing a blog migration this tends to be pretty easy because you can really move things over if you're keeping the same URLs. Everything that's after the slash, so it's moving from domain.com to domain.com/blog/whatever. Everything after the slash tends to stay the same if you're a straight blog migration, so you can do those more simplified where you create a rule for your redirect where everything of this type of the structure, so everything that's got the "/blog" in front of it all redirects to the same thing on the other website. They can be made easier in that way, but anything where you're changing the URL completely- Kathleen: Which you did. Stacy: We did on a few cases, so we didn't do it on all of them. This is where we focus on our highest performing content or the content that needs it the most. What you would do is if you're looking to improve your optimization, you might select the top 5% of converting blog posts, for example. Hey, these top 10% of our posts convert the most visitors. I want to make sure that we're super extra keyword optimizing them to get the most out of them. You might really say if you're going to put in extra effort in any place, just focus on the ones that are going to drive you the most results, right? For the most part, we moved everything over with that same URL structure to keep it simple and safe and less scary. But - we also at the same time that we did this - we put together a topic cluster keyword strategy, and made sure that anything that we could pull into that cluster that was fitting in terms of topic area or already talking about a similar keyword, and we pulled those pieces in and did things like update URLs or update the keywords on the page that we're moving over in order to fit that new strategy. We took the opportunity to do a hybrid, keep what was old and find a way to utilize and make new what we could improve. Kathleen: I like that strategy of prioritization. I want to make sure I understand what you said. You cherry picked, as you call them, the top performing posts. Was it based on conversion rate or based on traffic or was it a mix of the two? Stacy: In this case, we really focused on the pieces that would fit within our topic cluster strategy. If you were doing this and you weren't doing it at the same time as the topic cluster strategy, you may pick the top converting posts as an example, but we really focused on those that fit with the topic cluster. The Results Kathleen: Okay, great. I'd love to jump forward and talk about what happened. You undertook this process. You merged the two sites, and then what? Did everything break? Did David's worst fears come true? Stacy: It was very, very smooth. There's always an expectation when you do something like this, when you move from one domain to another, that Google's going to take a few weeks to catch up. What we do when we launch is we always make sure as soon as everything's up running and looks good, we resubmit our site map to Google to make sure that they are starting to index it immediately, so shorten that process and have them understand those new redirects as fast as we can. Kathleen: You're doing that through Google Search Console? Stacy: Correct, yes, my favorite tool. It's basically like, "Let me talk to you, Google, directly about what you know about me instead of guessing." After that, we kept a really close eye on what was happening. Was traffic moving over? Within the first two weeks after the site was launched, we were at the place where, if you looked at the traffic numbers for each individual domain before and you added them together, they now equaled on your traffic. We were getting almost all of the traffic across. The only difference would be that the traffic that we were cannibalizing now is all coming to one site, which is great. We weren't splitting between the two. Then the keywords that we were ranking for immediately rebounded as well. Each site, if you look individually at the number of keywords, that it had ranking in the top 20, the top 30, the top 50, whatever number or range you're looking at and added those two numbers together. Within two weeks, we were summing up to that total on the new domain. We had everything move over and continue to keep the same ranking level through that move. The exciting part was we actually even saw our rankings improve or new rankings appear for some of the pieces that we deemed appropriate and put as part of our cluster strategy. Lessons Learned Kathleen: Wow, that's great. Any particular lessons learned or things that you would do differently or things that you would advise somebody listening who's considering doing this to really watch out for if they want to undertake this for themselves? Stacy: The most important thing I can say is make sure you understand if you are considering either changing a domain or combining multiple domains together. Make sure you understand everything about how each of those domains is working today before you start making the decision about whether you should even undertake something like this because if you don't actually know how things are working or if you don't know if you're cannibalizing traffic, you may make the wrong decision and go through this process needlessly or make it a little bit harder on yourself. Just making sure that you know what your domain is doing, what keywords you're ranking for, what kind of traffic you're driving from search, and then use that to inform your decision, as opposed to waiting until you've already made the decision. Must-Have Tools Kathleen: You mentioned Screaming Frog, but you used that to catalog the URLs on the one site. Any other particular tools that you think are must-haves for this kind of a process? Stacy: Absolutely, so in order to find out if we're cannibalizing traffic, the tool that we use internally to do that is called SEMrush or S-E-Mrush. I think I've heard it pronounced both ways. But that one, it's great. It actually gives you a really easy visual of how big your overlap is, so it actually visualizes it as a Venn diagram. If you put like, "Here's the keyword universe of site A and here's the keyword universe of site B, and here's how much they overlap," you can really start to understand how that cannibalization is happening or if it's even happening. If there's no overlap, then you're fine. The sites are probably not really causing problems for each other, but if you're within the same topic area, there's usually going to be a decent amount of overlap. That's what we used to decide if it made sense to combine the URLs or not. The Owner's Perspective Kathleen: Great, and David, from your standpoint, obviously there was a lot of trepidation going into this process. Stacy has explained what happened from the technical side, the ranking side, but as the business owner, can you speak to your experience through the launch and post-launch? Was there an interruption to the business? How did that all play out? David: For me, I think what was absolutely critical and made it happen really smoothly was that it was done in stages. As I mentioned a couple of moments ago, the first stage, which happened several years ago, was to move the website from WordPress over to HubSpot and then we moved the blog from Typepad over to HubSpot. Those happened several years ago at two different times. Then we did a redesign of the website, followed by a redesign of the blog, and finally the last step was combining them. For me, it wasn't a massive "tear down the house and rebuild it." It was more like what we did was we were still living in the old house, but we built a new foundation and then we built the new house, and then we painted the new house. Then we built a wall between homes and we tried out the new house for size and it seemed to fit. Then we moved in and we knocked down the old house. It was a really, really staged process. For me, I found that to be a really thoughtful way to go through it that I was able to manage given all the other things that I'm doing. There's many times that we'd be communicating and I'd be in some other country about to jump onto a stage to give a speech, for example. I really appreciated that it was done in those stages. For that reason, it wasn't like, "Oh my god, we just did a redesign and combined everything, and I've got to learn a new tool and how to use it," all at the same time, which would have been a problem. From my perspective, it went really smoothly. I was really excited to see that for certain search terms, instead of being position five and position eight, we'd jump up to position two for the same keyword, things like that. That was a real major part of the strategy, so it ended up working, although, I don't have enough data yet to be able to say. Ultimately the main goal is that I want to generate more leads particularly for my speaking business. I think it was just within the time that this project was finished I had quite a few more leads than I had been getting. It looks like tomorrow I'm going to close a nice speaking gig for an organization in Canada, which I'm excited about, who found me through search. That was the ultimate goal, and it looks like that's playing out. This is not easy. Stacy and the team did the work, but even as the business owner who is involved in the process start to finish, it's not an easy process. But once it's done, it's like moving into that new house. It's all worth it because you live better and happier and healthier and with more prosperity, so it's all worth it. Kathleen: I think that's really fascinating what you said about the stages. A lot of times I talk to companies who are sitting in that situation of, "Oh my god, I have these three websites, or these two websites that I need to combine or I'm thinking I might want to combine." It can seem overwhelming. What I'm hearing is that maybe the first thing isn't to try to, as they say, eat the elephant all in one bite. It's to say, "How can I get myself on a surer footing and maybe put these two websites on the same platform?" It was funny. You used the analogy of the house renovation. In my head, what I was thinking is there's some types of surgery, I feel like ACL replacement, where they tell you you have to get in shape in order to have the surgery. I feel like this is like that. We're going to get in shape before we go into surgery. David: No, and I think that's right. I use the house metaphor because we actually did a massive renovation project on our house that finished up about two years ago. That's exactly how we did it. We not only renovated the original house, but we also created an addition to the house. It was a long three year process to do that, and we decided we wanted to live in the house during the process. That's the same as this project. The website cannot go away. The blog cannot go away, yet we're trying to renovate it and combine it all while it's still running. I think that's the best metaphor is that renovation and addition project that we did it while still living in the house. That's what we did with this project, and I think it worked great. It is hard, but I think so far it's only been a couple of months since we've been completed, but so far it's been totally worth it. We haven't talked about the design at all, but the design of the new combined website / blog is fabulous. It does a way better job at showcasing who I am than what we had originally, which was old and dusty. It was built quite a few years ago. A different company, not IMPACT, worked on it. It was adequate at the time. I wasn't embarrassed by it, but what I've got now, I'm really proud of, so it's really big, great change. Kathleen: Stacy, do we have any before and after pictures of the site? Stacy: We could definitely get some. Kathleen: Yeah, I would love to put those in the show notes, so we could see the transformation. That's always so much fun. Stacy: Yeah. DavidMeermanScott.com Before and After This is David's current website homepage (designed by Stacy and the team at IMPACT): This was David's homepage prior to the redesign (courtesy of the Wayback Machine): Kathleen: Really interesting to hear about this process. I know, Stacy, you're writing an article on this that, by the time this interview goes live. It's going to be up on our site, so I will link to that. Click here to read Stacy's article Kathleen: David, I think you're going to be posting some things on this from your perspective, so I'll link to that as well. If you're listening and you want to learn more or dig in, get more details, head to the show notes on the IMPACT website, and you'll find a link to David's article, Stacy's article, and some cool before and after pictures as well as some screen shots of the results that David got (check out his organic keyword rankings below!). Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Changing subjects for a minute, there are two questions I always like to ask my guests. I'm going to ask both of you. I'm going to start with David. David, I'm really interested in this one because you were an advisor to HubSpot from way back in the beginning. I always like to ask every guest I have, company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? David: That's a very, very interesting question. One of my favorite companies to talk about is a little tiny company in York, Maine, called Grain Surfboards. They make sustainable wooden surfboards. They're a little company. I think there's four or five people there. They run out of a barn in York, Maine. They just do a fabulous job at their inbound marketing. They're not marketers. They're people who make surfboards for a living. I ran across them because I did a search on Google for wooden surfboards. I found them. Wow, they have a really cool website. This is really interesting. Then I found that not only can you buy a wooden surfboard, but you can actually go through a wooden surfboard course where you can make your own wooden surfboard, so I signed up. I did that, then I went back and I did it a second time. Kathleen: That's so cool. David: Through one Google search, I think I've spent $4,000 to go through two wooden surfboard building courses at Grain Surfboards. I'm a really big fan of organizations like that that have either zero marketing dollars in their marketing budget or maybe there's $150 and somebody's brother-in-law, but they can still do a fabulous job. Kathleen: I love that example, and I know a lot of my listeners are companies just like that. It's great to hear an example of somebody successful doing this with a shortage of resources. Stacy, how about you? Who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Stacy: This answer's going to sound totally self-serving, but especially for the topic area as we've talked about, there's two resources that I've relied on super heavily to learn about all of the pieces that built the way that we do keyword strategies, and then all of the technical SEO knowledge to make sure that we could pull something off like this without breaking David's site. That's Liz Murphy internally at IMPACT is an incredible resource for understanding how to build topic clusters and pillar strategies. Then Franco Valentino from Narrative SEO, which is a partner of IMPACT's - those are my two go-to sources of information. They have put out such great content. We just released a pillar page that was a collaboration between the two of them. If you really want the best of the best information on SEO. Exactly, but those the places that I've been going for, especially in this topic area. Kathleen: Great. Yeah, I have to say I couldn't do my job without the two of them, so I would agree with that. Alright, for the second question, I'm going to start with Stacy and end with David. We'll change up the order. Second question I always ask is with the world of digital marketing changing at, it would sometimes can seem like, a lightning fast pace, how do you stay educated and up to date? Stacy, let's start with you. Stacy: I try and find a balance because you could really easily get just swept up in the tons and tons and tons of information that is out there and being produced day in and day out. It's almost impossible to keep up and say you know everything about everything. I've picked some topic areas that I try to make sure that I am constantly up to date on. I'll tend to return back to really specific sources for those areas. For example, the SEMrush blog for SEO stuff specifically is topnotch. It's where I learn a lot of what I do. Then I try to, on occasion, google terms that fit with the topic area as well and find new sources that are maybe outside of what I know already because it's really easy to get stuck in that little bubble of people who think and talk and act just like you, instead of looking out at people who are looking at things a different way. Kathleen: Great. David, how do you stay current? David: I do have some blog and other sources that I read on a regular basis. I get the IMPACT content, which I love, of course. I read Seth Godin. I read a guy called Bob Lefsetz, who's absolutely not a marketer. He writes about music, but he has a fascinating take on the music business, which I think, because I'm such a huge music fan, that I apply those ideas to marketing in general. But the vast majority of the way I keep current is when I speak at conferences all over the world on a regular basis. I don't just go do my speech and leave. I go, I listen to the other sessions. I meet people at lunch. I go out to the dinners or the cocktail receptions and find out what people are up to. I serve on about a dozen advisory boards. I don't do traditional consulting. I'm not a consultant. I'm not a marketing agency or anything like that, but I do serve as an advisor to about a dozen different companies, including HubSpot, who I've been with since 2007. I try in every case, when I'm working with those advisory clients, to learn how they do their marketing. What's working? What's not working? How can we make this better? That's really great because it's almost like I'm not an employee of those companies, but I am essentially an insider, so I'm able to see what's going on in their real world situation. That combination keeps me to the point where I'm feeling like I'm current for what works for me, although there's plenty of people who are way more on the cutting edge than I am. Kathleen: I think it sounds like the common theme between both of you is knowing what you want your area of focus to be, and not trying to be an expert in all things. That's a good take away. David: Yeah, and in my case, working with IMPACT and working with Stacy and the team, it's been great because I consider myself a marketing strategist. I love the strategy aspect. I am decidedly not an SEO expert, not a designer. I don't know what's going on. I know what a 301 redirect is, but that was about the extent of my knowledge of most of what Stacy just said over the last 45 minutes. I'm fortunate to be able to be partnered with you guys on the project because I had a vision for what I wanted to accomplish, but I had no clue whatsoever how to get there. Kathleen: It's been really interesting for me to hear you guys talk about this experience because in my many years of first being an agency owner and then I was on the sales team at IMPACT, I've talked to so many different companies, and this kind of thing comes up a lot. The stress and worry and tension that always bubbles under the surface is really palpable. It's interesting to hear a real example of this process having been carried through to its end and having gone well. Thank you for sharing that. David: Oh yeah, and thank you for having me on, and thank you, Stacy, for all the hard work. Stacy: Awesome. Thanks for letting us tinker with your site even though it was scary. How to Reach David and Stacy Kathleen: I know that you can find Stacy at IMPACTbnd.com. David, if somebody wants to get in touch with you, learn more about what you do, maybe talk with you about coming to speak, can you tell them the best way to find you online? David: The fabulously redesigned DavidMeermanScott is a great place. If you google my name as we spoke about earlier, David Meerman Scott, it will only pop me up, which is neat. On most social networks, including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, I am DMScott, D-M-S-C-O-T-T. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: Great. Thank you both for being here today. If you're listening and you enjoyed what you heard or you learned something new, of course, as always, I would love it if you would give the podcast a review on Apple Podcast or the platform of your choice. If you know someone who is doing kick ass inbound marketing work, please tweet me at Workmommywork because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thanks.

Can you realistically expect to get great results from inbound marketing if you have a shoestring budget and no dedicated marketer? Just about every marketer I've ever spoken with has cited "lack of time" as their biggest challenge, followed closely by lack of budget. That's why I was so excited to interview Conor Malloy of Chi City Legal for this week's The Inbound Success Podcast.  Conor and his business partner operate a two person law firm in Chicago and in addition to his full time job as an attorney and partner in the firm, Conor serves as the firm's marketer. With almost no budget, and with very little time or marketing experience, Conor has managed to generate extraordinary results for his law practice. Want to learn how he does it? Listen to the podcast to learn exactly how Conor has set up Chi City Legal's marketing systems and get helpful insights on building a lead generation machine that requires minimal time and budget to deliver big results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. My name is Kathleen Booth, and I'm your host. Today my guest is Conor Malloy with Chi City Legal. Welcome, Conor. Conor Malloy (Guest): Thank you for having me. Conor and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: Yeah, I'm excited to have you. As people who listen I'm sure know, the objective of the podcast is really to talk with practicing marketers who are getting great results from their inbound marketing, and surface actionable takeaways - the actionable part being the most important. I've definitely interviewed a wide variety of people in the past, all the way from CMOs of large global brands, huge teams, and six figure budgets, down to agency owners and people with small teams. You are, I think, my first one man marketing team, if you will, and probably one of the smallest businesses that I've spoken to. I'm particularly excited about this because it's a huge testimony to the fact that you don't need a giant budget, a giant team, a ton of resources to do this well. All that being said, tell our audience a little bit about yourself, and your company, as well as what you do. About Conor and Chi City Legal Conor: Sure. As you said before, I'm a partner at Chi City Legal, so we're a Chicago law firm that dedicates our time to representing landlords in eviction litigation. A lot of these landlords, we have some clients that are larger property management groups, but the vast majority of our clients are people would probably otherwise go self represented to court. So we're trying to provide them with either legal solutions or legal representation. After I passed the bar exam, I ended up in the incubator with the Chicago Bar Foundation. The incubator was designed to be able to help people develop law firms and practice models that would meet what I would refer to as the justice gap. So it's people that are either priced out of your regular legal services, or they're essentially too rich for legal aid. Surprisingly enough, even though people own property, a lot of them fall within that. That's the background from a legal standpoint. Kathleen: That's real interesting. I didn't realize that. I mean you and I have obviously spoken before, and I know a little bit about company, but I love that idea. Let me back up, I don't love the idea there's this gap in representation, but I love the idea that there are programs in place to try and shore that gap up, and that's where your company kind of sprang from. That's really neat. Conor: Yeah, it's a great initiative that the Chicago Bar Foundation put through with the Justice Entrepreneurs Project. Kathleen: So how large is your law firm? Conor: We are two attorneys, essentially no support staff except for we have an artificial intelligence that does some of our call routing and scheduling. My partner and I each have an artificial intelligence that schedules those. Then we use SmithAI as our virtual receptionist. Other than my kids coming in from time to time and doing a little bit of work, that's it. Want to check out Smith.ai? Smith.ai is a superior call answering and intake service for small businesses. Live, U.S.-based receptionists answer, transfer and return calls; qualify leads; intake clients; book appointments, and accept payments. The company's calendar and CRM integrations keep your systems in sync and your workflows efficient. Plans start at just $60/month and include free spam blocking.  Inbound Success listeners get $50 off their first month with code INBOUNDSUCCESS, which can be combined with the 30-day/10-call free trial for $110 total savings. Learn more and sign up at https://smith.ai. Kathleen: That's awesome. For everyone listening, that is a two person company in which both of the two people in the company are full-time doing something that is not marketing. In your case, you're practicing law. Marketing is their thing that they do on top of all that. You've been very successful in building and growing your business with the marketing that you've undertaken, just the two of you. Could you talk a little bit about exactly what you've done, what you've put in place in terms of your marketing? Inbound Marketing on a Shoestring Budget Conor: Sure. I would say the more traditional route, we have a Facebook page, we have a Twitter account, we have Google Ad Words and things like that. But with the type of people that we're targeting, and it's a very targeted marketing, it's landlords that are going through the eviction process, or about to go through the eviction process, or just fresh out of the eviction process. So there's a life cycle that we had to unpack and do which we're best at. In doing so with those three segments, we have a mixed bag of direct mail with solicitation. Otherwise, email and then a newsletter. Each one of those is targeted to specific stages in the eviction life cycle. For example, one of the things that you're able to do on our website is create an eviction notice, which is the foundational document to start an eviction matter. You go on our website, generate that document for free. Within a few seconds, that document then gets sent, after filling out a form, that document then gets sent to your email with a little bit of instructions on what to do with it next. Once we get you on our website, and being able to get involved and essentially getting data, we can turn that around and do something a little more actionable on our side. Kathleen: I'm not sure how big your geographic reach is, and are most of your landlord clients, what percentage of them are finding you through an organic search because they're looking for a way to create an eviction notice versus how many are coming because you have reached out and contacted them? Conor: Here is what I can say. Ever since I put in the ability to create that notice, which was towards the end of last year, I can say that off of our website, people have generated 934 eviction notices. Kathleen: Wow. Conor: That's people that for one reason or another, they're not getting paid, or they otherwise don't want somebody to be their tenant anymore, generating something. Some of those are repeat performers, but the data that I gave you is largely cutting some of those few repeat visits. Kathleen: Yeah, and that's interesting because you do have a very specific clientele you're going after. Clearly, you know that by the nature of what you do, eviction is central to the pain or the need that they're feeling and the notice document is required by law. What made you realize that creating that tool on your website would be a great marketing opportunity. Did you stumble into it, or was this a part of the plan? Conor: A little bit from Column A, a little bit from Column B. The big thing is being able to get something out there on our website that was very easy to use, and then when somebody goes on and they create it, they get something of value. They can do it for free if they want to. We also have some additional services that we offer where if you want somebody to serve on your behalf, you can plug in your credit card information and send that off, and so there are some premium services involved. But the big thing is you're putting data from visitors onto our database, and onto our marketing database, and there's also a consent to people to have us follow up with you. Once I get your information and I know that if it's a five day notice well, guess what? Most times I'll be reaching out to you within about five days to see what happened with that, and being able to help you out with the next steps, whether you use our services, or we also offer document generation and things that for some people are a little more budget oriented. That's the big thing for us is to provide some sort of value because we need to build trust with our potential clients and also because if you do a legal search for eviction notices, they're all not created equal and a lot of them we've noticed from self represented landlords, that they're deficient. You're going out there, you're downloading something that is intended to do something, but it's very deficient under the law, and it jeopardizes your case. Kathleen: So you have this tool on your site. It's getting you great results. As a two man law firm, neither of you I'm assuming is a web developer. How did you get the forms set up on your site? Do you have a company you work with that does your web work, or did one of you figure out how to build it? Was there a tool or a service you used to create this self-completable eviction notice form? Conor: As you said earlier in the podcast, we have to lawyer for a fair portion of our day or we don't get paid. I do have a bit of a tech background, mostly self-taught. I've done web development, I've done database development and things like that. But what I need to be able to find are very accessible, off the shelf tools that I can implement into our WordPress site, and reduce the friction. I visualize the endgame, and I just need to get there in a very, very accessible way. Like I said a second ago, we use WordPress. It's a very easy platform to work with, and then we use a service called Gravity Forms. There's a bunch of online forms that you can use, and then those Gravity Forms connect with a service called Zapier, which takes data from point A to point B to C to D, and those documents get pumped out through another service called WebMerge, which is an online-document assembly service. Kathleen: Zapier is the most amazing thing ever. I'm sure some people listening know about it, but if you don't, it is incredible. It lets somebody with a completely non-technical background, like myself, essentially integrate two completely different software platforms that do not have out-of-the-box integration. It's awesome. Conor: Yeah, I can say that we use it in marketing, we use it for our day-to-day functions in our law firm, and I'm looking at my analytics from Zapier right now, and it's saying that three weeks into my billing cycle, we automated 13,245 tasks within those three weeks. Kathleen: Wow. Conor: Yeah, so- Kathleen: That's incredible. Conor: Yeah, and it's not just little tasks that you don't want to do, but it's also tasks that might breed error, so it makes life a whole lot easier. Kathleen: You said something really important that I just want to underscore. What you said was even though you have a lot of technical skills and you could easily go down the rabbit hole of trying to build this all yourself, because you have to do your day job, what you do is you look for out-of-the-box tools that are somewhat plug-and-play and let them, essentially, do the work for you? I love that and I feel like some of the best, scrappiest marketers that I know are the ones who go out and find ... so, there are so many tools out there. There are tools for everything, and if you can identify the right solution, it really can take a lot of the work out of building things like this, so that's great. So, you got WordPress for your website, you've got Gravity Forms to collect the information from the landlord, you then send that information via Zapier to, did you call it, WebMerge? Conor: WebMerge, mm-hmm (affirmative). Kathleen: Okay, and then that produces the final form, correct? Conor: Correct. Yep. Kathleen: That's great. Now, do you have any sense of how many people are landing on that page of your website? How are they finding that landlord form? Conor: A lot of them. They're either calling us because they find an ad for us or word of mouth seems to be a lot more common now based on that we've been doing this ... at least I've been doing Chi-City Legal stuff for about two years now. The word of mouth is definitely growing a little more organically, but when I run Google Analytics or the AdWords, I could either see where people are directly hitting that page because we do have a forms-generation ad that sits out there. Kathleen: Okay. That's also I think a great point, which is a lot of people think about email marketing and they think they have to just somehow get found organically, but what I've noticed in the course of all these interviews is that inbound marketers are combining the content of the tools they've created like your eviction notice generator, and they're combining that with a boost from paid advertising, whether that's paid social or Google Pay-Per-Click or what have you, to help it get found. It sounds like that's really worked well for you. How do you determine what kind of a budget you put towards your pay-per-click? Conor: Well, as far as the pay-per-click, when it comes to doing the online forms, we're looking at something that isn't very popular out there because we're competing with online legal forms, and the pay-per-click is not very high. We're just generally looking for exposure. One of the things that's really helpful, especially with Google now, is they love having these advisors contact you and help you be able to develop your AdWords and your keywords, your other words that you don't want people to connect with. I probably speak with them at least every couple months to keep refining and keep tweaking our site. I just have an idea of what we want to spend on it because I do have some information based upon what our return on investment is, and there's a lot of wiggle room to throw money at it because it definitely pays dividends. Kathleen: Yeah, so you're doing all of your pay-per-click yourself, correct? Conor: Yeah. Kathleen: And that's another thing I want to just emphasize because a lot of times when I interview people they talk about having an agency do it or sometimes I interview people who are agencies, and all they do is paid advertising, but this is something that is accessible to anyone, to any company of any size and of any budget because you can start with a tiny, tiny budget. I love what you said about really taking advantage of Google's advisory services. That's something they don't charge for, correct? Conor: That's right. Yeah, because there's ... you can read certain articles out there because they save a nice chunk of the money that Google makes off of the ads is their stupid tax, because it's people that just think, "Oh, I'll create a whatever ad, put it out there," and then they'll give a few hundred dollars as credit to be able to start up your ads. You will burn through that so fast if you have no idea what you're doing out there. It's best to start small, incremental change, consult with these guys, and they'll at least put you in a better spot than when you started. Kathleen: Yeah, so take advantage of that if you're thinking about playing around with your own pay-per-click. Be the squeaky wheel with Google. Conor: Yeah, it'll get the grease. Kathleen: Yeah, that's great. Now, when you look at your pay-per-click spend, are you evaluating it as, "I don't want to spend more than X overall in terms of a budget," or are you looking at it as, "I want to keep my cost per lead acquisition under a certain amount"? There's different ways you can come at this whole budgeting question. Conor: I believe on the forms we generally sit around 20 to $25 a day for our budget. Usually, we come in fairly low because, again, even for the clicks that we're getting on there, you're looking at less than a dollar per click. Kathleen: Wow, and you've 900-some-odd conversions on the forms since you put them up late last year? Conor: Yeah. Kathleen: And what percentage of the landlords that fill out the form wind up becoming any kind of a paying client for you? Conor: Something else that I ended up starting, because we started to notice where a lot of them were creating these notices, and then the notices were just ... the data was just sitting there as this ... just sitting out there alone, and we were re-keying the data from the notices into our content management system for active cases. So in late January I developed a new system to be able to convert that data. Then that way I could track it. So since January we've had right on the dot, up until about maybe about a week ago this was accurate, 100 cases that went from the notice creation to filing. Kathleen: Wow. That's great. So, that's what? About just slightly over 10%? Conor: Yep. Kathleen: That's a great conversion rate by any standard. That's a great conversion rate. Are you doing any kind of lead nurturing in between when they fill the form out and then when they hire you, or is there any sort of like automated email or any other touch points that you have with them? Conor: The other thing that happens - and it's not exactly automated at the point that I don't see a need for it yet, I don't want to over-program a solution - but when they create that notice, the creation of the notice also sends data to a Trello card that sits on my marketing board, and I'm able- Kathleen: Through Zapier? Conor: Through Zapier, yeah. So, I have a couple columns, whether it's a five-day notice, so I know ... assuming that they serve the five-day notice within a day of getting it, I know what the due date is on it, and I'll follow-up about then, and I have formatted email. I just click on a thing in Zapier, and it essentially does a canned email. Then for the 30-day notices, I know when those are coming up, so I can send out a canned email to see if they need any assistance because sometimes they get it and they have a hard time serving the person, and then maybe they need the more premium services off our site to be able to take it to the next step, or they're ready to go. Kathleen: That's great. Trello is a great project management platform. If you're listening and you haven't checked it out, essentially, it's what they call in Agile terms a Kanban Board, but it's a got a great interface. You basically just move these cards. They're structured like cards and you move them across the workflow. It's actually a very simple, streamlined, really elegant project-management tool if you don't have a very complex business, and it's very low cost, so great solution. Conor: The other part of it is too, so I use that for the marketing, and Trello, it's free, so we actually use it as our practice management system. All of our active cases are handled through it because it can be very robust. It can run everything from a household project to our firm that has nearly 100 active cases at any given time, so it's - Kathleen: Oh, that's great. Yeah, so you don't need to overcomplicate things and buy enterprise software to run your projects. It's amazing what you can do with Trello. We have a lot of different software at my agency, but we still use Trello just for tracking our blog-editorial process because it's so easy and user-friendly and people love it. Conor: Oh yeah. If you like Post-it Notes, Trello, yeah, it's just moving digital Post-it Notes through. Kathleen: So true. It is exactly the concept behind it. Well, that's neat, so you said you can go in and just click something in Trello, and it generates a canned email? Conor: Yeah. Kathleen: Another is the Zapier connection? Conor: Yep, so when it creates that card based upon a notice, it's going to create a list of potential canned emails. It's going to be everything from the initial follow-up to, "Hey," you're just reaching out again. Then, just for ethical purposes because I have reached out to people, I want to be able to also send non-engagement warnings. So, because sometimes people think just because this happened or that happened then I'm their lawyer, and so it's nice to be able to have some sort of a built-in system that makes that very easy to do. Yeah, Trello creates these checklists. I just check off the list on the cards, and that queues Zapier to create a draft email in my inbox. If I need to tweak it at all I can tweak it, and then otherwise it sends out. Kathleen: You are the master of scrappy automation. It's so cool. I love hearing this because it really is such a great example of what you can do as just one person who isn't even a marketer. Like, you've figured it out, and you've kind of hacked this system together, and it sounds incredibly low cost because you're using your regular email inbox, you're using Zapier, which certainly has a paid version, but yeah, it's not expensive. You're using Trello, which also has a paid version, but you don't even ... it sounds like you're not even up to the paid version? Conor: No. Kathleen: You're just using the free version. Conor: Yep. Kathleen: I mean, I love it. This is amazing. Conor: As far as what you just mentioned, Zapier, I'm using the highest-end plan, because it's the backbone of our company anyway, so I could also use it for sort of other stuff. That's $115 a month. Webmerge costs us now, because we've risen up to do the plans, costs us a couple hundred bucks a month, but again, it's generating other documents that we need in our practice. So we're already eating that. Kathleen: And if there's ROI there, that spend is totally worth it, though. That's great. So a little over 10% of the people that fill the form out become your clients. You mentioned when we first started talking that you use an artificial intelligence program to serve as your virtual receptionist. I'm intrigued by this. Can you talk a little big about how that works? Conor: Sure. A little while back ago, I just follow certain legal blogs or tech blogs, just general things like that and I found out about something called x.ai. At the point I saw them, they were still inviting people on a case by case basis to be able to test out the software and I was just one of the early invites. What's great about it is it already sits on something that you're using. It's not a different calendering software, things like that. Amy (the x.ai virtual assistant), she's sitting out there in the ether and any time I need to schedule something, all I have to do is cc her, reference her and then give her a ballpark based upon some sort of back end instructions on when to schedule something. So you can go on our website and click, I Want a Consultation. It's going to say, hey how do you want to do this? Do you want to be emailed for a follow-up time? Or do you want somebody to call you? And if you want to schedule your own time, Zapier is going to send out an automated email with Amy cc'd and then she's going to schedule something so I'm not involved in that process. If you want a call back, again Zapier is going to kick something off and it's going to email our virtual receptionist and say, hey, reach out to so and so and it's got all that data plugged in there to schedule for a consultation. Maybe even give some information about our practice. Kathleen: Wow. That's really cool. And you said the original program was called x.ai? Conor: Yeah, that's right. Kathleen: And is that what you're still using today? Conor: That's right. Kathleen: That's great. And that routes calls to you and your business partner, correct? As well? Conor: I do all the onboarding for potential clients. Kathleen: Okay. Conor: When we have active cases, Amy comes into play ... There's Amy and there's Andrew Ingram - "AI" - so when there's an active case, if somebody ... We'll give you case updates and if you want to schedule a follow-up to flesh out something that we talked about in the case update, those get routed to my partner because he manages the day to day case loads. Kathleen: Got it. So you have this incredibly well-oiled, automated machine going in the background that's fueling your lead generation, your follow-up, your call and appointment setting. Anything you're looking at adding into the mix? You've been doing this a little while. You seem very plugged into how the tools work. Do you have anything on your wishlist that you want to do next? Conor: I did up until this morning. Because we're so intimately connected with active cases and things like that, we're constantly plugged into the data. So when you file a case, certain things need to happen along the course of your case in order to advance it. So one of the milestones is somebody has handed your tenant a piece of paper to say come to court on a certain day. One of the things we're listening for is for that event to happen and then essentially an automated email goes out at that point where we can offer you the court forms you'll need in court that day. And that's free for people to be able to download. If you want a consultation along with it, that will be an additional sum, but capturing the pre-litigation, you're in the midst of litigation, whether you want an attorney or not, it could help. Conor: And then after the litigation, people are added to our newsletter by accepting the terms of service so when it comes to post eviction compliance issues or it might happen again, we're always on people's radar. Kathleen: What do you put in the newsletter? What kind of content? Conor: It's a mixed bag, obviously. There's self-promotion there, but sometimes there is a pending bill that might affect our clients. We're letting people know about something that's actually going to pass in about three days now, concerning notary stamps in Illinois. It might not be necessary for a lot of the court forms that they need. And then just being able to sign up with our services and different coupons, I guess you could say, to try us out. But a lot of it is just legal information that we're passing along. We just give people value and we hear from people and we see them sometimes that they love our newsletter. We have opposing counsel that subscribe to our newsletter. Kathleen: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, right? Conor: Yep, but over time, what we're looking at is a market of between 20 and 25,000 evictions are filed in Cook County every year. Out of those evictions, between about 80 and 120 are from self-represented landlords, and we are soliciting nearly every one of those self-represented landlords. Kathleen: Wow, I love your whole system because I think a lot of what you're doing really embraces the true spirit of what inbound marketing is. It's about giving away information and helping people and using that to naturally attract that person who needs what you're selling at the right time. And the fact that you're giving away the eviction notice, you're giving away some of these other court forms, it sounds like it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, which is it's bubbling up those people who naturally need your service at the time that they need it. That's fantastic. Conor: Sometimes with lawyers, these eviction notices, these aren't works of art. They're forms and we're automating them and you don't have to lock this stuff up. And you're actually doing people a favor by putting something out there that's actually compliant with the law. So the service that we provide is standing next to you in a courtroom, not creating some sort of document that's a dime a dozen. Kathleen: Yeah, that's great. Well that is the attitude, I think, that some of the more successful marketers I've interviewed have. And it's surprising how many people do not have that attitude. So kudos to you. Conor: Thank you. Kathleen: And I love hearing these stories from somebody who isn't a marketer by trade. I think those are the most exciting stories. You're an attorney and you just figured this out because it's what makes sense. That's one of the coolest parts about this. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: So, I have two questions that I always ask all of my guests and I'm curious, you come from outside of the marketing world, company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Conor: What I see ... From the company where we don't use their software or anything else like that and I've never used their software or anything ... I like the stuff that I get from Rocket Matter. It's a content practice management system. Some of the stuff that they're pumping out, a lot of the contributors that are creating content for them, it's really neat. It's helpful and it spurs things with me, too, to be able to think, "Oh wait, people are hitting at that angle. That's really cool." So that's big for me right now. Those are one of the few emails that come in that I actually open when I see it in my inbox. Kathleen: All right so everyone check out Rocket Matter. Second question, with the world of digital marketing changing so quickly, how do you as a non-digital marketer who has kind of been forced to become a marketer through this business, how do you stay up to date and educate yourself and keep abreast of all this? Conor: A lot of times, and it's just an aggregation, I have the Feedly app on my phone and one of the things that you can select to come through on your Feedly is marketing stuff. You have your legal things, law.com and Above the Law and Lawyerist and things. Lawyerist is a good one for the marketing stuff as well. But then I checked off marketing and I'm starting to develop a vocabulary and just a way of getting at that's non-traditional because I'm just piecing this stuff together. At first, you're treading water, but I feel like I'm doing some laps. I'm no Michael Phelps or anything else like that, but I'm moving along with it and that's really, really helpful to just be able to go through my Feedly in the morning and some of the stuff is just going to catch your eye. Kathleen: Yeah, that's great. Feedly is really ... It certainly makes it easier to consume all your different content in one place. How to Reach Conor Alright, well this was so interesting. I'm sure that lots of the listening audience will be either having questions about some of the specific tools you mentioned or might want to see your stuff in action on your website. If somebody is looking to contact you or find more information online, what's the best way for them to find you? Conor: They can go on our website. They can hit up Amy. She'll set something up regardless. Or they can contact me directly conor@chicitylegal.com or I'm actually setting something up right now. It's not out yet, but a Zapier consulting arm to help people to be able to connect the dots with it. So the website is sort of up. It's saoi.io. It's a little bit Irish for the Irish speaking audience, but yeah that's something that I think could help small firms to be able to connect these dots and make it a little bit easier on themselves. Kathleen: That is very cool. I love that you're going be on Zapier. Zay-pier, Zap-pier I never know how to say it. But it's an amazing tool. I love that you're going to be a consultant. Conor: I think that it will be fun. Kathleen: That's awesome. Alright. Well, I will put those links in the show notes so that everyone can find them. But thank you so much. This has been so much fun. If you are listening and you got some value out of this, please consider giving the podcast a review on iTunes or Stitcher or the platform of your choice. And if you know somebody doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to interview them. Thank you, Conor. Conor: Thank you.

Lots of brands have podcasts, but very few podcasts succeed in delivering business results. Why? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Unthinkable Media Founder Jay Acunzo breaks down his formula to creating wildly successful podcasts for businesses like Drift, Divvy, Wistia, Flipboard, The Content Marketing Institute and Social Media Examiner.  Listen to the podcast to hear Jay describe the exact steps in his podcast development process and learn who podcasting is - and is not - right for. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. I'm Kathleen Booth, and I'm your host. Before we get started this week, I want to do a quick PSA. If you are somebody who has an Amazon Echo, I have an Alexa skill. Big news! So, if you want to hear me in your living room every week, not sure why you would, but if you do, you can go into your Alexa, hit skills, and search Inbound Success, and it should pop right up. With that, I just want to make a quick introduction of my guest. Jay Acunzo has a really long and interesting resume. He's the founder of Unthinkable Media, which helps start-ups and challenger brands establish B2B podcasts. But he's done so much more than that. He spent time at Google, at HubSpot, and he was involved with Next View Ventures. Jay, you've got a long resume. Actually, I think I'd love for you to tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself. Jay and Kathleen recording this episode Jay Acunzo (Guest): I'd be happy to. Thanks for having me on the program. So, the what is fine. Like you said, you summed it up nicely. The why, I think is where everything comes from, and the reason I do what I do is I like to make people feel stuff with the work I create. So, I like to create stuff, and I like to hand it over to other people to feel the same things I was feeling while making that stuff. It just so happens that the Venn Diagram overlap of that is a great and driving career in marketing today. It's not just media companies that need that skill. Whether it's launching dozens of side projects throughout my career, or one of the things I'm most proud of is the genesis of Unthinkable Media, my podcasting business, was my own show, which is called Unthinkable, and that's a very highly produced narrative style podcast, and I know we're going to get into podcasting today. But, that is my digital baby. The most fun I've ever had producing anything is to tinker and figure out how to tell stories that make people feel stuff about their work, because I just think too much B2B content doesn't actually match how we feel about our work day-to-day. The content is boring and dry and commodity stuff, but we don't want boring and dry commodity careers, and I'd argue we rarely experience our work like that. So, I'm trying to bridge that gap, and bring more emotion and entertainment value to great B2B content, because quite frankly, that also drives results. It's good for the audience, it's amazing for the audience, and it's just as good for the business. Kathleen: Amen. I totally agree with you. And I love that the thread that has sort of bound your career together is content. Whether that's acting as Vice President of Brand and Community at Next View, or being Head of Content at HubSpot, or working in digital marketing at Google, you've had such an interesting path to get where you are, and for me it's fascinating, because when I look at your history, so much in the world of digital marketing, and specifically content marketing has changed in the time since you've been doing this. The State of Content Marketing Before we dive into what we're going to talk about today, I just would love to get your take on kind of where you see content marketing now, because man, there's a lot there. Jay: Yeah. It's funny, we like to talk about the, I think the symptoms of any sort of market changes - or better than market changes, world changes - the way humans act and the changes therein. Now, paying attention to the people is far more important than paying attention to the industry for example, but we like to talk about the symptoms or the industry's reaction to the fundamentals instead of the fundamentals themselves. I like to focus on the latter. I think the fundamental shift we're living through, and the symptoms are things called content, and inbound, and influencers, and ABM, etc. but, the fundamental shift we're living through is that it used to be the case that marketers had to acquire attention, a few different channels existed, and you would jump out seven to eight times and hope that that added up to a purchase moment. But, you would mostly interrupt people, and mostly say, "Look at me" and then describe the value you could provide those people, but it was about acquisition of someone's attention. That was the marketing mandate. I think the big shift is that today, you have to hold attention. I think great marketers care more about subscribers than impressions. They talk in terms of minutes or even hours of a consumer's month, every month, instead of seconds. So, we're seeing this shift towards holding attention. What I do just happens to be great vehicles for holding attentions, which is creating shows, delivering speeches, writing books, but there's myriad ways to do that. I think that's where we're at. We're at this moment in time where we can continue glomming onto all these trends, and tactics and techniques, or we can look the shift in the eye and be like, "Okay, if that's what's happening in the world today, if that is the backdrop of everything we're doing in marketing, how do we actually address it more directly and build back up more original thinking, instead of trying to shoehorn old tactics into a new world?" It used to be that we had to acquire attention. I think the new mandate today, as a marketer, is you have to hold it. Do that and the rest of the job gets a lot easier. Kathleen: That's a really interesting observation. I have done a couple of podcasts recently where the subject of what constitutes really magnetic content has come up, and a lot of times, the people I speak to talk about having a point of view, or sometimes it's being funny, sometimes it's being controversial. Often, when you say that, the response from the person asked to create the content is, "I'm not comfortable." Or, "It's scary." I think there's a level of complacency in creating that kind of 'check the box' content that's really dry and factual and informative, but when you ask people to start to make it more interesting and emotional... On your website, it talks about getting people to feel emotions, and I think a lot of content creators are really nervous about that, either because they're afraid to be vulnerable, or because they're afraid that in having a point of view, for example, they're going to turn some people off. You work with a lot of B2B brands. I'd love to hear what your experience has been when you start working with these content creators and getting them to get more engaged? Working With B2B Content Creators Jay: Sure, and I think when you address the fundamentals instead of the incremental, or the superficial, or the conventional, it starts to sound a lot less scary, because all the sudden it doesn't feel like a leap.  You're like, "Okay, if that is the starting point, then logically, in my world, let's create a show, versus pieces of content." Because we know the first principal insight here, we understand where we're all starting, which is to hold attention. Okay. Now, if I reason from that, every step I take is one step at a time. I'm no longer taking this mental leap between publishing articles that rank on search, and creating an amazing podcast or video series. That seems like a giant leap, so it's all about, like when I work with brands, I'm like, "This is the backdrop. If you do not accept that, we should not speak. If you're just interested in acquiring a bunch of people, if you're just interested in giant download numbers, for example on your podcast, we're not going to talk, because podcasts, quite frankly, aren't really great for growth. They don't rank on search that well. They don't actually get shared on social. The surrounding content that you create as a result of the show is what actually does that stuff. So if you just want empty reach, or if you want reach, which is important, if you want productive reach, create other types of content." I'd lay out what I feel is the reality, and then I'm like, "Let's walk step-by-step to where I'm already at mentally." Which is make a podcast. Why Brands Should be Podcasting Jay: To make it less scary, I don't just get on a stage and say "Make a podcast." I don't just talk to a prospect and say "Make a show." I say, "This is where we're at today. Now let's talk about all the myriad ways that this matters to you, and if we're still on the same page, let's talk about all the myriad ways to execute on that, to capture those benefits, and then let's pluck out one that I am saying I can offer to you, which is make a podcast, right? And if you're with me the whole way, it's logical the whole way." I think that's the first thing I'd say in response to that question, is if it feels scary, you haven't actually taken the time to think through all the points, all the logic you need to get from where you're at to where you're trying to go. I don't think people take risks. I don't think these entrepreneurs that we laud - being in venture capital, I was around dozens and dozens of entrepreneurs - they're masters at seeing the world for the way it is today, not peering around corners, and they're masters at understanding how to mitigate the risk. But the media dialogue paints innovators, creators, entrepreneurs, as people who take risks, and then we disassociate ourselves, saying we can't do that. I actually think if you want to make something not seem scary, you have to come up with the logic in your mind for why it's not. That's the only way anybody's going to act. Kathleen: Yeah. That makes sense. So, I feel like there's two different pieces to this, because one piece is the actual format of your content. In this case, we're talking about podcasting, as opposed to maybe blogging or creating videos, although you can have a video podcast. That's another subject. When you look at the format for content, you work with a brand, you're obviously a big believer in podcasting. That's what you've really built your business around, at Unthinkable Media. Is there any type of business for which podcasting is not a good format? Jay: Type of business? No. But, if you dig into the business, and they give you the right reasons why they shouldn't launch a show, sure. Most people who are selling something like podcasts are going to be like, "No, every business should launch a podcast. By the way, I sell services to help you create a podcast." Sorry, that's a load of crap. All of these things, whether we talk about blogging, or social, or podcasts, whether we talk about strategies or approaches rather content or ABM, all of these things are tools. To say to somebody, "Hey, you shouldn't use a hammer," period, blanket statement, is not true. You don't have enough context, unless you really deeply get to know that person and what they're trying to build, you can't say with certainty this tool makes no sense for you, or this tool is absolutely for you. So you can't make these blanket statements. What I start to do is think about where are you at in your embrace of content marketing? Do you have, I think there's some criteria up front. On my website, I very clearly articulate the three reasons why we are good fits to work together. Because I want to qualify out people that make no sense to work with me. The first is, you've already found some success through content, but you've already built up a little bit of an email list, or a little bit of a social following, or you have some traffic on your website, or you have an event series that's doing pretty well. Because into that flow, into that audience, you can insert a show, because I don't think a show is good for net new audience. Like I mentioned before, all the other types of content out there are. Everybody interested in this topic should to read a piece by Ben Thompson. He writes a blog called Stratechery. It's a terrible name, but he's one of the smartest tech analysts out there. Kathleen: Is that like the technical version of strategery? Jay: Strategy and technology. So it's like the strategy of technology. Stratechery. But, he's got a wonderful piece, it's a little bit old, called Grantland. Grantland, one word, and the Surprising Future of Publishing. He delineates why certain types of content are great for reach, and discovery, and net new audience, and a show or a podcast is great for residence and depth, and holding attention. It's very smart the way he lays it out. But, that's the reality. It's like if you haven't had success with content marketing already, if you have zero audience, do not start with a podcast, because it's going to be just such an uphill battle. Start with a blog, start with social, events, whatever. The second thing I say is, if you're ready to basically create an unassailable asset with compounding return, instead of yet another podcast. This is a big epidemic, especially in B2B. People are - every podcast in B2B, I'm kind of going to paint with broad strokes here, but let's go on attack mode for a moment - they all sound the same. They're all talking topics with the experts. You know, brought to you by, insert competitor here. So, if your show, this is a good example. You talk topics with experts. Kathleen: I do. Jay: What if you had this concept over the top of the show, that delineated why it was different than everybody else? Right? So, if somebody said it out loud, and it was white labeled, they'd be like, "Oh, I know exactly whose show that is." And if a competitor tried to copy it, it would be like you can call them out. Everybody who sells marketing software can write 10 tips and tricks for lead gen on Twitter and not get called out, but your show has this elevated IP to it, or a hook that gets people excited to listen now and subscribe over time. So, that's the big first piece of a show, which is a show level concept. The second piece is an episode level structure. So, you can kind of break up these component parts of Q and A, Q and A, Q and A, and then ending with a lightning round, and instead try to think about, "Well, how can I better create an experience to hold attention?" The third piece is talent. How do I improve my ability to hold attention? How do I improve my ability to be on a microphone? Because that's what podcasting is in the end. So, that's it. Those are the three pieces. If you want to create an unassailable, original version of those three pieces, you'll also work with me. The last thing is the hold attention thing again. I say, if that's your goal with a podcast, not reach, we can talk. So, I don't have to go out there and say, "This is a podcast. It's bad for FinTech." Or, "It's bad for B2C." I can't make those blanket statements. What I can do, is try to dig into those businesses I'm talking to, and also articulate up front where I tend to thrive as a service provider. Kathleen: Great. I love it. And I will confess that it's funny, I jumped on the podcasting bandwagon a few years ago. This is not my first one. I had a podcast before this, and it was fine, I mean, it was okay. It was not great. It was way too general, and we sort of just did the podcast to do a podcast. We didn't think a lot about it, because we were like, "We've just got to get in there and do it." Right? Jay: Right. Kathleen: It was like a podcasting land grab at the time. I learned a lot from that, because it didn't have - it's funny the way you talked about it - it didn't have a really clear structure. There was not any consistency from episode to episode. It wasn't specific and focused enough. It's very interesting to see what works. I certainly wouldn't say I'm an expert at this point. I think I still have a lot to learn, but it's been a fascinating journey, just even from there to here. Jay: Well, I'd also add that sometimes it's fine to just self-express. It's amazing. It's amazing that we can self-express. You want a podcast. You don't want to think through all these different parts and pieces. Great. Just launch one. Just have fun with it. Or, you have existing fans, and you want to serve them through a different medium. Great. Just launch a podcast. You don't have to think through it as much, because they already give you the benefit of the doubt. So, I argue that all these things I'm talking about would help in both of those cases, but they're not requirements. But, then I talk to my clients, and it's like they want actual results from their show. Kathleen: Yes. Jay: Too often, what happens is, it's a pet project for a marketer or worse, an executive who asks for it. And then, I kind of point this out, I'm like, "You don't have a show-level concept. You sound like every other competitor. You don't have an episode structure. There's no IP here, and you can't repeat them with high quality and more efficiency and speed. The talent is lacking, because you haven't worked on the skillset, so who is this for?" And it's, "Oh, it's for our customers. It's for our prospects." "Well, every action that you're talking to me about maps to it being just for you, right? Because you haven't figured out if they want a podcast. You haven't figured out what concept they want, or what problem you're solving, or journey you're taking them on, etc, etc, etc." And at the end of it, it's like, "So, why did you want to launch a podcast?" "Oh, I guess it looked like fun." I'm like, "That's wonderful. That's amazing. I love this era we live in. So many side projects have been helpful to my career. Launch something for fun. But, you're telling me this is for work, and then when I dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, you have no real strategy. It's just a tactic that you glommed onto, right?" You have no real strategy. It's just a tactic that you glommed onto, which is only okay in a certain number of scenarios, so make sure it just maps to the goal you have. Kathleen: I think that's spot on, because it all depends on what your goal is, right? I'm somebody who learns by doing, so I always look at my first podcast as my podcasting 101 class. Jay: Nice. Kathleen: It was messy, people will find it online at some point and be like, "What was she thinking?" I kind of had to do that. Now though, what is interesting to me is when I started this one I really wanted it to be very much for the longterm and I took it a lot more seriously, and what I have learned is that even just doing it at the level that I am, it's time consuming. I think you're right. For a company to make an investment of people's time, especially the audience you work with - high growth startups, challenger brands - these are companies that the time value of money is quite large. If you're going to have people working on these things, you have to make it worth it. There has to be some measurable ROI. Even just with my podcast, I probably spend four to six hours a week between production and show notes, a half to a full day. Jay: I think about it like if you're going to go for a run, I'm going through this right now, I'm trying to get in shape, I have my first kid on the way, and I'm like, "Oh my god, I better get my ass in gear 'cause eventually it's going to drop off, so I'd better be in shape." So I'm going for runs in the morning. Now if I wanted to be, I don't know, if I wanted to be more in shape, but I still only have 30 minutes, I think my reaction, my brain, is usually, "I wish I had 60 minutes." But I could do more or do different or more variable things within the 30 minutes I do have, right? I could run in a different way. I could up more hills. I could do speed bursts or whatever. There's other ways I can use the time I have. When I talk to most clients, they have similar things. They're like, "Well, I'd like to make this better, but I only have so much time." I think about, okay, if that's the case and it's the Inbound Success Podcast, so it's like, why is that important? 'Cause we want our listeners to have success with inbound, great. Do any other shows do that? Sure. Kathleen: A lot. Jay: Right, so is there a different name you can put on the top of it or a different tagline that just articulates how we're different? Or could you even save time on the execution of it and say we're going to give you five minute tips and no one else does that? What is it that makes you thinking only game in town instead of yet another? I think about it not how do I get more resources to do that, I think about if I only have 30 minutes to run or I only have four hours to produce a show every week, what could I do, how could I rearrange the use of that four-hour period? Or how could I rearrange the structure of the show that I'm doing and not add any time to my plate? It doesn't have to be talking to bigger experts, and on the other end of the spectrum, it doesn't have to be creating a show like NPR with field reporting, music, and narration. I think there's just a lot of different ways to come at it. I've seen that opportunity, and I'm like, okay, this is something I should get out there and start teaching because I've been thinking about it so much in a marketing context and exclusively so. It's not a side project for me. It is now my business in addition to public speaking. It's like there's so many mental processes and frameworks you can use to use the time you have to still make a better show. That, to me, is a really exciting opportunity. Kathleen: I have so many questions for you. Jay: Hit me, let's do it. Kathleen: Okay, I'm going to try to mentally arrange this in order. I want to start at the beginning. You work with these clients and the first hurdle that you need to get over is convincing them that podcasting is the right format and that there's value in it for their business. Or maybe the first hurdle is creating content in and of itself, although you did say, I thought I heard you say, that if they're not already seeing success with content, they're not a good fit. Jay: Bingo. The first thing for me is figuring out where I fit in their journey. I never want to get into the conversation of why a podcast, ever. I want to find my true believers, because I'm a solo practitioner with some great freelance talent that I work with. I'm not building a scaling agency with a million dollar marketing budget and trying to get whatever, a hundred million dollar revenue every year. That sounds nice, but that's not what I'm building. I don't have to go and win over skeptics. I have to rally my true believers. So I can talk about things, like the new marketing mandate or why shows are great, and do a little hashtag, "Make shows, not pieces," and just start getting out in the marketplace and talking about this and win over those people that already believe what I believe, that, hey, we need to do a better job of this stuff, feeling emotion, creating entertainment value, holding attention, all that. The people that are already thinking it but lack the words or the services or the home base for that, they'll come my way. What I never want to do is be like, here's why a podcast matters, and have somebody be like, "Well, I don't know, we have a blog." Kathleen: That would be terrible client for you. Jay: That's the first hurdle. That's the first hurdle. Developing Your Podcast Concept Kathleen: Once you start working with these clients, they are your true believers, they've recognized that podcasting holds an opportunity for them. I assume, maybe wrongly, I don't know, but I assume that the next step would be to try and figure out what is this podcast going to be about, what's the concept? Walk me through how you work with clients on that? Jay: It's about distilling their brand values into the show level concept. The analogy I always use is like if you are most B2B marketers, you're like Tony Stark who becomes Ironman in the Marvel universe. Tony Stark is a billionaire, genius, philanthropist, clever guy. If you put a microphone in front of him, he's probably going to be really good as a host, and you need nothing else on your show. But if you send Tony Stark alone, no skills, out into battle, he's going to get crushed against the competition because he has no real superpowers. That's like putting a microphone in front of you and talking. There's no real superpowers. You're going to get crushed by the competition. But when he steps into the Ironman suit, now he's a literal superhero. What I do is I try to say to them, "I'm going to build you your version of an Ironman suit, and you as the host are going to step into this vehicle that I've constructed for you, and you're going to have superpowers." Sometimes I play Tony Stark and I'm the host; oftentimes, I'm coaching the host on the other end. I construct, given what I know about the brand and the competitive landscape and, most importantly, their customers, I construct the show level concept, the name, the tagline, the hook, how it's different. I create something called an empathy statement, which is a brief description of writing from the customer point of view, a description of the journey they're going on and why they would want to subscribe.  I also do something called a show cross, which is like if this show meets that show meets that show. It's very TV pilot approach. Kathleen: Kind of like it's Airbnb meets Tinder. Jay: Yeah, it's very common in tech. For a while in venture capital, when we were hearing pitches, it was we're the Uber for X. Kathleen: It's a great way to explain your concept to an audience that might not have any basis from which to understand the market. Jay: It's shorthand, exactly right. Or if you don't know the inspirational sources on the receiving end if you're my prospect, I can say it's this show meets this show meets this show, which means this trait and this trait and this trait combined. That's really what it is. I have this document, what they call a show bible. Those are some of the component pieces of the show bible that I then create, and it contains things like the show level concept and the description they're in, and then the episode level structure. Those are the two pieces. Those are the sort of Ironman suit-esque pieces that I then use to insert either myself or my client because they're going to host into an actual show construct. That's like the first step is we want to document what the hell this is and who it's for and how it will sound before we actually create a single thing. We want a strategy. Kathleen: You mentioned having an empathy statement, and I love the name of that. Do you have an example of what that might sound like or is there one that you could provide that I could include in the show notes? Jay: My own show, I don't want to give away too many of the client shows, like behind the scenes. That's something that's for them. I'll give you my show Unthinkable. Let's see if I can remember it. It's a lot longer than what I'm about to give you. It's like three paragraphs, and I don't want to give you that. It's something like, "In our world today, we are drowning in best practices, conventional thinking, and trendy new tactics. It's like every single one of these things is a spoke on a wheel, and this wheel just keeps spinning endlessly. It leads straight to the one place we don't want our careers or companies to be, which is average or commodity work. In order to escape conventional thinking and think for yourself, we need to learn how to think for ourselves. We need to learn how to vet all the advice out there and question it in order to hone our intuition and do better work." "In Unthinkable, show host, former Google brand builder, public speaker, Jay Acunzo, takes you on a journey to the far reaches of the business world to dig up stories you've never heard and ideas you've never considered. We're going to showcase examples of work that seems crazy until you hear their side of the story. It's all in an attempt to help us all do what we want to do, which is bridge that gap between average work we're doing today and it's something exceptional in the future. It only seems unthinkable until you hear their side of the story." That's like an empathy statement. The whole goal is to get you nodding, which you were so that's great, you're a potential listener, and if you agree or you're excited and amped up, maybe you'll go and click subscribe. Now, I may put that nowhere publicly, and I kind of butchered it 'cause I'm doing it off the top of my head, but I may never publish that. But it informs everything else that I create as a North Star, and that's why it's so useful for clients I work with, upfront in the documented IP, because it is the North Star, it's from the perspective of the customer what we're trying to do. Kathleen: I am so impressed that you just reeled that all off the top of your head. Even if it wasn't verbatim, it was pretty good and it was kind of long. That's good. Jay: I was not joking when I say I obsess over this stuff. This is my world. Kathleen: Damn, A plus. Jay: Thank you. Kathleen: No, that's really good. I like it a lot. Am I correct that you phrase it as a we statement or as a first-person statement? Jay: We're going on a journey together, absolutely. That's the other thing, too. Whether or not you write "we" or "I" in your articles, social, whatever - I think you should, but it's one man's opinion and doesn't apply everywhere - voice is undeniably a person speaking to you. Not every article has a byline. Not every social post comes from a face. Sometimes it's a logo. But every voice is unmistakably "this is a person speaking to me," so you're going to name yourself on the show. You're going to have a relationship. I like to say that podcasting, or voice and audio, it's intimacy that scales. Everybody feels like they have friends in their pocket when they listen to podcasts or that they're in the VIP section. But like I said, everybody feels that way, right? So it feels one-to-one, it feels intimate, but it scales better than one-to-one coffee meetings or one-to-one relationships, and the benefits are similar. You feel like you've gotten to know this person to the point where if they ask me to do something next, I'm more likely to do that because I know I can trust them than if I were to say read an article or get a popup served to me or an ad alongside content I actually want. To me, that's the beauty of this medium. It's this powerful first-person voice that you get to know. Kathleen: It's been fascinating to me. I listen to a lot of podcasts, but obviously I have my own. Even though I know there are listeners out there, I still get a kick every time some stranger says, "I listen to your podcast." Or even sometimes friends of mine that don't work in marketing, because I have a podcast about marketing, but sometimes people I know just in my regular world say things like, "Oh, I listened to that episode you did," and I'm always thinking, "Oh, wow, that's so cool that somebody sat there and listened to a half an hour or 45 minutes of a conversation I had." It is, there's a level of intimacy I think in both directions because I feel so much closer to those people that listen than I might to somebody else I just met. Jay: Exactly, and that to me hints at how you should measure shows, especially early on. Measuring the Success of Your Podcast Jay: I can talk your ear off about how to plug a show into a marketing strategy and then measure the subsequent strategy. What I can't tell you is how many leads did this show generate? I know ways you could try and track that, but they're ineffective, like tracking links. However, I do know that in this world of crazy endless noise and worse sameness from everybody in your niche, if you have human beings coming up to you saying, with passion, "I love your show" or "I have a question for you," and then they talk to you like they've known you for years, or paragraphs of email, or an original thought shared on social or in the comments about what you're doing, I know for sure that is a project worth pursuing more.  I can't tell you the exact ROI, I can just tell you that that's a reaction you don't get from other people you're trying to serve anywhere else, and so you should keep going. What I tell my clients we're going to measure early on is something I made up, 'cause if you don't have an acronym it doesn't exist in marketing. The acronym is URR, unsolicited response rate. If you're putting out these episodes and you're getting absolutely no qualitative and more importantly visceral response from what you put out, you need to rearrange or rethink what you're putting out, because that's the whole point of the show, is to get somebody passionately involved in you and your brand over time. You're holding a lot of time today, but hopefully that persists over time. That's the point of a show versus a piece. If you're not getting any reactions, that a signal that what you're doing isn't landing. I like to test this stuff to ensure that the idea that I'm putting in a show works. I'll send a tweet and look for a response, write an article, maybe put it in long form fashion versus a tweet on LinkedIn or Facebook, but I'll post a bunch of stuff, strongly worded ideas, and I'm testing. Does anybody care about this concept? Then I pluck the concept or the idea or the value from the medium, and I'm like "I'm going to up level this into an episode, because look at this visceral response." I do this with my newsletter a lot. When I get replies, I'm like "I'm going to save this, mark it in a Gmail folder, 'cause this could be an episode or a chapter of a book or a bit in my speeches." I'm looking for unsolicited responses to what I put out the door as a sign I'm on the right path and that's going to cause me to lean in with more confidence. Kathleen: That makes sense. Now let's say somebody has started doing their podcast, they're getting some URR. Do you have any strategies or insights into the best way to do what you just said, which is to level up, to get the podcast in front of more people? Does it have to do with how you promote it? Does it have to do with the format of your show notes? What have you observed works really well? Jay: Historically, when we're in acquire mode, the medium is the delivery vehicle and you stop there. It's like the marketing channel is the blog, and so I write an article, and that's me doing the marketing. Now I think really smart marketers realize, well, when we publish the article, yeah, some people are going to find it organically on the site or visit the site, but really we need to now go out organically on the site, or visit the site. But really, we need to now go out where they live and we're going to post it on social networks, we're going to take little quotes from it, we're going to maybe create versions of this for the right social networks so it's endemic or more native to those networks, with a link back to the original. We know now, I think most of us anyway, that you can't just put it through the channel and your job is done, even though there is discovery to be had on that channel itself. It's the same with podcasting. It's like, yes, there's going to be some people that maybe discover you through their podcast player of choice like Apple Podcast or Spotify, but you have to market it. It's a new product, you're marketing a show, and so, you have to atomize it.  I think this is where a lot of marketers are falling flat. The podcast works really well when it's central to your content marketing. It's very poor if it's a sidecar. So when it's central, you're like a journalist doing a recording of an interview. You have endless content bottled up in this recording that you can excerpt and publish into text, put on social networks as quotes or little audio-grams. You need to take tangents. I want you to learn or string together multiple episodes and talk about the lessons, or write a big new piece and instead of doing original interviews, you're quoting past interviews from your podcast. Basically, endless amounts of content should cascade down from your show. What most people are doing, instead of that visual of cascading down, they're sticking it on the side of their strategy, like this is an appendage, this is a side project for us, and they're not rating it for endless amount of content. So there's wonderful benefits to be had for marketing efficiencies if you make your show more of a centerfold, or centerpiece rather, than your little sidecar, side project. How to Do Podcast Show Notes Kathleen: Yeah. I'm interested to get your take specifically on the topic of show notes because I've seen them done so many different ways. I see some podcasts that do very short, almost like outlines, that are bulleted, of here's what we talked about, here's the key links. Boom, here's the player, go listen. There are some like mine where I have the full transcript, and feel free to tear my approach apart by the way, I'm totally open to it. There's others that write a truly original article that synthesizes everything that was discussed, and I'm sure there are hybrids of all of those. Is there anything in particular that you believe works really well, or doesn't work really well? Jay: I think of two of the most popular shows in the Apple Podcast charts. Bill Simmons, who's a sports columnist and CEO of theringer.com, and Reply All, which is the most popular show made by Gimlet Media in New York. They're a private company that makes narrative style podcasts. So Bill Simmons show is Q&A, interview style, very lightly edited, with sponsors. He uses a paragraph form show notes section. It has some links at the very bottom for stuff they talked about or sponsors, but then the actual paragraphs above are timestamped pieces of the interview. So you can kind of scroll to the thing that you maybe want to hear, and I find that very useful. Kathleen: So it's not the full transcript, just- Jay: Not the transcript, just a summary, yeah. Now, that's me as a consumer judging, subjectively, that that's very useful for me. Right? But then there's Reply All, which I listen to just as much as Bill Simmons' show and that I rarely miss an episode. Unlike Bill Simmons, instead of a Q&A, it's highly narrative. It's still very chapter, just like Bill Simmons, very broken up, so you can consume bits and pieces. But you probably want to consume the whole thing to know what's going on, right? There's context at the beginning that maybe makes the end make more sense because it's one story. Their show notes are like two lines and any links that they mention. Right? So is there a right or a wrong way? It depends on the style of show you have. That's what they think. It depends on the time you have, it depends on what you find your audience wants. So I'm telling you right now that the complete opposite of Bill Simmons' approach, in that I get almost no information from Reply All, I find just as useful because for them, I'm like, do I want to listen? Let me get two more lines of context to whet my appetite, to tease me to see if there's a good story. With Bill Simmons, I'm like, do I want to listen? Let me get some of the chapter breakdowns and timestamps, see if I want to go through this long interview or not, what do they talk about? So it's really about self-awareness here. You need to know your show, what kind of show is it, what's inside, and know your audience and how they actually want to interact with your show. So I think there's ... Again, they're all tools, you can use them in any different way you want and I can't give you the answer because you have to go investigate. Kathleen: Yeah, man, I wish I believed that two lines and a couple of links would do it because that would save me about three or four hours a night. Jay: Well, here's something that could help. Every month, the most transformative thing I've ever done for my shows is every month, I do five to six one-on-one video calls with my listeners. I ask them a bunch of questions. The first half, first 15 minutes are me asking them questions. Second 15 is me trying to add value, talk about anything they want, even if it's just catching up socially. The first 15 minutes, I change what I ask based on what I'm trying to learn, or what I learned prior. So I'll ask things like, okay so how often do you listen? Once I understand they listen frequently, I might then focus those questions, if I were you, on like do you ever read the show notes? Why or why not? Do you read the show notes for any shows? Why or why not? Which are the ones that you do read? What kind of show is that? It's like I'm going to start to have these one-to-one interactions that will compound in value the more I have them, so that I know with certainty, hey it's actually this kind of list that I need to, bulleted list of links, or I need to write paragraphs, or I need the full transcript right in the show notes. The only way you're going to be able to tell, I think, is to ask the people you're trying to serve. Kathleen: All right, done. If you're listening to this podcast, you can tweet me @WorkMommyWork or you can email me at kbooth@impactbnd.com and we will setup a 15-minute call. Jay: Yes, love it. Kathleen: The first five people will talk in the next two weeks. Jay: That's awesome. Kathleen: Done. Yeah, no, it's something I'm really curious about. I mean, honestly, that's why I do this podcast. I always say even if nobody ever listens, which I hope is not the case, but even if nobody ever listened, I learn so much every week. So selfishly, I love talking to people like you who have insights that I can use to help me do this podcast better, or be a better marketer. I love it, it's so interesting to me. Jay: Awesome, awesome. Kathleen: All right, so we've talked a lot about what makes podcasting work, both from the macro level, and we've dived into some details. I want to shift gears for a minute and zoom out again. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: You've been involved in the world of inbound marketing and content marketing for quite some time, and there are a lot more players now than there used to be. There's a lot of companies creating content, a lot of individuals creating content. Company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound really well right now? Jay: I love what InVision is doing. They sell prototyping tools for product designers, so the people who develop the front-end websites for Airbnb, and the experience that you have on mobile for Netflix, and apps that you use like Instagram. People that are designing the experiences of the most important screens in our lives use InVision. Most companies would just go out and start bragging about that. Number one market leader and you know, they'd create a bunch of case studies. And InVision does do some of that, but a few years ago, they noticed that every one of their customers were asking, or responding, to the questions that their case study interviews gave them in the same way. So they talk about InVision's tools, they talk about how great it was and how, you know, all the usual case study stuff of like InVision transformed my business, and yaddi yaddi yadda. Same thing that every one of the customers on their competitor websites were saying about competitor tools. So not differentiated, in other words. But then, they asked these product designers where does product design fit in the business world? Why is this an important business function, as your brand or in your niche? And everybody, to a man or a woman, got defensive about the place that the product design profession held in technology. They started defending why they mattered and why they needed a bigger seat at the table and all these things. The team at InVision sort of realized, like, oh okay, we're not and the business of selling tools and empowering product designers to do their jobs better. We're in the business, at InVision, of giving these people, that clearly need it, an identity. We're going to give product design a community and an identity because if we do that, now, businesses will think more highly of product design, give them a seat at the table, let them do better work and be more strategic, and also probably budget for what they're doing more, or hire for it more. And then, we can sell them tools, right? It's a lot easier to sell companies who believe in product design tools if they first believe in product design, right? So they created a full feature, hour long, film called Design Disruptors. Kathleen: Wow. Jay: Yeah, and it seems like such a leap from a case study to a film, until you hear that logic behind the scenes. This was an episode of my show and it's called The Pike and the Minnow, if anybody wants to listen to it, on Unthinkable. The Pike and the Minnow. We go into the making of this project and why it was strategic and safe, not this giant leap, not risky or scary. That's just one small example of how they've transformed how they do marketing based not on a trend, or a best practice, or a precedent, but based on getting more fundamental insights about their audience. Like they need an identity, and no one else is addressing that insight we have. If we start there, we'll rally thousands of people around us, and lo and behold, I think they had something like a thousand live screenings and in 450 locations worldwide throughout a year. They doubled their user base and I think to date, I want to get the number right, I think to date they've raised $155 million in VC- Kathleen: What? Jay: So they're the best funded company in their space and they have a lot of competition. And it had nothing to do with having some clever new hack, growth hack, it had nothing to do with new technology or best practice that's been around for decades. It had everything to do with the fact that they just informed all of their work with this more fundamental insight of what the customer was actually going through, and they addressed that instead of the kind of conventional layer that everyone else around them was trying to address. Kathleen: That's so fascinating. I cannot wait to check that out. Yeah, some of the most forward-thinking brands that I've kind of observed seems to have also a real focus on building community. I mean, there's just something so lasting there. But InVision, I mean, wow. That's a product we use and I didn't know about the movie, it's something I definitely have to check it out. But what a interesting approach to demand generation. Jay: A hundred percent. Kathleen: Talk about way down the line, seeing dividends. Jay: Well, the thing is, they saw dividends that month. The month they would have ... So they made the film, then they would do these offline screenings, and in the room where these high-value prospects, like NBC, who you can't cold call necessarily, and they invited them into their office to show the film, and demo their products, and talk about design and where it was heading. In that room was NBC and all these other people, companies around NBC's office that were invited in. So if you're going to go check out the story, you can check out the story I did on my show, but you will not be able to find this film anywhere on the internet. You can find a bunch of little bits and pieces like teasers they made, but the film was only ever debuted offline, in full, because they wanted to build community. Because they were building on that first principle insight of giving product design an identity, so they didn't want to share it publicly with the world. This is only for the product design world. Kathleen: Wow. Jay: Imagine that, right? You invest all that time and energy into building a film. A film, not a case study, not a cool video, not an interview series. A film with real production value and tons of work and time and budget, and then you never release it publicly, or online. Kathleen: That is so fascinating. All right, I'm going to put the link to- Jay: It doubled their business. Kathleen: ... your episode in my show notes because I'm sure people are going to want to hear that.  Jay: Sounds great. Kathleen: All right, second question, and that was a really good answer by the way. Second question is, digital marketing is changing so quickly, it's so technologically driven these days too, how do you stay up to date? Jay: I spend a lot more time than probably seems healthy, at first glance to other people, talking to the people I'm trying to serve. A way I have an advantage is that most of my business is public speaking, so I'm on stages, at events, networking, talking to people ahead of time, and afterwards ... But then I do try to have a process to it. I have my newsletter, it goes out once a week. I tell a new story every Monday morning and I call it Damn the Best Practices, is the name of the newsletter. I get responses to that and I try to engage and keep those people in mind. I have those one-on-one calls that I try to do at least a couple times a month. I spend very little time in the marketing echo chamber and I find that if you spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on the consumer you're trying to reach, the people you're trying to resonate with, the ones you're trying to serve. Back to the beginning of the entire episode here, when you asked me what I'm all about, the people I'm trying to make feel something when they consume content from me, if I just focus 100% of my time on that, and that tends to give me the answers that I need. Right? So if I have to be on Instagram instead of Snapchat, I'm going to learn it from talking to people that I'm trying to serve. If I need to shorten my podcast episodes, I'm not going to read an article how long should a podcast be. I'm going to talk to the people who are actually listening to my podcast, or I'm going to build an audience so I can ask them next. So I think we spend too much time obsessing over the echo chamber, which is fine, but that's just a starting spot, it's a starting place. It's a proxy for what all of this is really for, which is serving your customers. So why not just spend more time talking to them? Kathleen: Well, fingers crossed, a few people will email me or tweet me, and say they're willing to talk to me about the podcast because I love that idea and I'm really excited about it. So yes, if you're out there, remember, you can tweet me @WorkMommyWork, or email me at kbooth@impactbnd.com. Jay, if somebody has a question for you, what is the best way for my listeners to find you online? Jay: Jay@unthinkablemedia.com, or any social network. I answer every tweet, Instagram DM, everything. But email is always a way to cut through it all, so it's jay@unthinkablemedia.com. Kathleen: Great. Well, this has been really fun and interesting. Thank you for joining me. If you are listening and you liked what you heard, please consider giving the podcast a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or your podcast listening platform of choice. And if you know someone doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thanks Jay. Jay: Thanks for having me.

How did SaaS startup Woopra increase lead to customer conversion rates while also shortening their sales cycle and improving the efficiency of the sales team? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Woopra Head of Partnerships Elle Morgan shares the company's product qualified lead model and breaks down specifically what a PQL is, how it differs from an MQL, and the specific behavioral indicators that Woopra evaluates to determine whether its leads qualify as PQLs.  Listen to the podcast to learn more about building a product qualified lead model, nurturing PQLs, and how this approach can improve sales and marketing alignment. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And today I am happy to say, my guest is Elle Morgan, who is the Head of Partnerships at Woopra. Welcome, Elle. Elle: Thank you for having me, Kathleen. Kathleen: Tell our audience a little bit about yourself. What do you do? What's your background? And what does Woopra do? Elle: Yeah, absolutely. I lead our Partnerships Team here at Woopra. I have, you know, been in some fashion of marketing for almost 10 years now, and have had my hands in really every aspect of marketing. So I've done a little of mid-management, corporate communications, to growth, some digital, and everything in between, primarily with start-ups, at least for the last seven years. I realized I really thrive in that build versus manage stage of an organization. You know, in a small startup company, every single thing that you do makes an immediate and measurable impact. Even though there are no certainties or things to fall back on, there's the ability to really constantly iterate and try new new things without the red tape that you might have to fight through in a bigger organization. About 10 months ago, I took on a Partnerships role here at Woopra, partially because of this PQL model that we're gonna speak about today. But in my position now, Partnerships has really, for me, been a combination of marketing, while creating content designed around customer use cases, integration, best practices, and how to successfully combine different technologies to yield greater results, along with a taste of sales and the relationship-building aspects that kind of keep me challenged, and let's me learn from our customers in a way that really inspires my writing by their questions and the stories that I hear from them. Kathleen: It's interesting that you say you really love the start-up environment because, you know, I was looking through your background on LinkedIn, and I noticed you've spent a lot of time in the San Francisco Bay area, and I feel like wow, that's ... What a great place for somebody who likes the start-up world to be. It's kind of like being a kid in a candy store. Elle: It is. I, you know, started in the start-up scene in LA, in the little Silicon Beach area. I'd always been at bigger companies and that passed, but when I got my first taste, I realized that, okay, if I really wanna do start-ups the way that I'd like to, I have to be up here in the Bay Area to really feel like I've given it my all. Kathleen: That's great. And what a great city to live in, even just aside from the start-up world. Elle: No, I can't complain. Kathleen: Yeah. It's such a neat place. So Woopra to me is really interesting. And, you know, so many of our listeners are marketers, and I looked at the website and the platform, and was so intrigued because it's all about understanding the customer journey. And I want you to talk a little bit more about that, but you know, that's the thing I think that more than potentially anything else, we as marketers talk a good game about customer journey mapping, but I don't think we really do it. Some people don't do it at all. And if most of us are doing it, we're not doing it really well and there's a variety of reasons for that. You know, it could be the amount of effort that has to go into it. It could be trying to get your head around all of the data. In any case, tell us a little bit about Woopra and what it does, and then we can kind of get into some of the other goodies that we're gonna talk about. About Woopra Elle: Yeah. So Woopra is a customer journey analytics platform. Essentially what that means is we have our own tracking technology to understand who is on your website, where they came from, the pages they're browsing, the usual things like that. We also track product engagement data. So from the minute they come to your site, sign up for your product, what different types of features are they engaging with? Where do they go from there? How many people become customers? And then, after that point, are they engaged or not? What does a healthy customer look like? But another big piece to that puzzle is bringing in data from other touchpoints in the customer journey. So if we think about the journey outside of like the silos of MQL, are they opening your emails? Are they engaging with you in LiveChat? How many support tickets does a person answer? Woopra has this, you know, integrations layer. The idea is that you can bring in data from essentially any touchpoint in the customer journey to build up these reports that show whether or not people who take these certain combinations of actions are more or less likely to both convert, become a healthy customer, that right customer fit. Also being able to leverage that data to drive more personalized interactions and communications, and campaigns throughout all of those different touchpoints. Kathleen: Neat. And from what I saw on the site, it looks like you also provide a very visual interface. You know, you're able to deliver information on that customer journey in a way that that is super visual, and therefore very easy to digest and understand, which I think is just- Elle: Yeah. Kathleen: ... amazing. Elle: Funny for me. Before joining Woopra, I'd never gone outside Google analytics for my insights, and the data that was at my disposal and like my marketing tool. So I knew clicks, conversions, like maybe who was opening my emails. But I wasn't able to say, "Okay, are people engaging with this product?" And then opening my emails, "And do those two have an impact on one another?" So, for the first time, I'm certainly not a data analyst, but I feel like the platform makes it easier for me to go in and essentially ask any question, or have access to that little data to drive what I do. Kathleen: Now, there's a clear use case for SaaS companies to use Woopra because you are able to provide in-app usage analytics, in the sense of like the customer's adopting the product to this extent, and here's how that influences the degree to which they, you know, maybe go from freemium to paid customer, et cetera. What about outside of the SaaS world? I mean, are there applications there as well? Elle: Yeah, absolutely. I would say like 50% of our client base is SaaS. Another, probably, 40% is E-commerce, and the rest is scattered. So it's really anybody who has a strong digital presence, who's looking to understand on the, you know, E-commerce side, what products are they purchasing? Where did they come from? Did they come back and make another purchase? You've got, you know, the on-demand companies like Uber who wanna understand are people making repeat rides? Are they canceling? What is the distance traveled? Any time you're running your business with a strong digital presence, I think there's 100% an application to leverage data across the board to design a better, or more connected, customer experience. Kathleen: Yeah, and the cool thing is there is so much data available to us as marketers. It's just making sense of it all, you know? Like I have all of that data in my various systems. I mean, we use HubSpot, Google Analytics, SEMrush, Lucky Orange. We have so many different platforms, and it's all out there. But it's just tying all those various pieces together, and kind of extracting insights that I think is the real challenge. So that's really neat. Elle: Absolutely. Great. Nurturing Product Qualified Leads Kathleen: Well, we were gonna talk a little bit about nurturing product-qualified leads, because you know, when you and I first talked, I was asking you with Woopra's marketing, what's really contributing to your success as a team? So I'd love to just hear a little bit more about that from you. Elle: Yeah, absolutely. So before I took over Partnerships, when I first joined the company, I was leading our Marketing Team, and because Woopra runs on a freemium model, where essentially people can sign up for the platform and play around with it as long as they like up until they have the need for some more advanced analytics features, we realized that we were having tons of signups, organically, which is great. We had about, you know, 1500 signups a month to the product, primarily coming organically through word of mouth, SEO, and a very small amount through some Adwords brand-name campaigns that we are running. But we also only had two salespeople. And for two salespeople, 1500 leads, they didn't know where to start, they didn't know who was an actual qualified sales opportunity of those people who were signing up, and then testing out the product. But we were tracking essential customer engagement metrics. So we knew where people came from, the content they engaged with, if they chatted with us on LiveChat, and I was trying to look at those top-level MQL metrics. Were they reading blog posts? Were they browsing our appraising page? But we felt like even with that, combined with the 1500 leads, was not enough to qualify these sales opportunities. And even worse, when we ran the numbers, we found that just because somebody read six blog posts did not necessarily make them more or less likely to be qualified as a paying customer. We had a lot of students using the platform, a lot of small-time bloggers, who just were never gonna reach that point where they actually wanted for a full-blown paid analytic solution. Kathleen: I'm so glad you just said that, because I used to own a marketing agency, and now I head up marketing for IMPACT. And in both cases, when I've dug into the data, actually the people that wind up converting and becoming customers tend to look at less content prior to their conversion than the people who don't convert. And it's so counter-intuitive but it is the story that only good data can tell.  Elle: Absolutely. Kathleen: If you didn't dig deeper and really glean that insight, you could waste a whole lot of time on leads that were not likely to convert in the first place. Elle: Yeah. And it's like an honest mistake. I mean, I was trained in marketing to look at those things and then to say, "Okay, they've read this much, they came in from this ad. Pass it along to Sales." But when you finally start to look at the data, you realize that content consumption is not indicative, necessarily, of what makes the right customer type for you. Kathleen: Yeah. 100%. They could be job applicants. As you said, they could be students. They could be what I like to call DIYers, you know, people who are gonna consume everything voraciously and then figure out a way to do it by themselves. There's a lot of reasons for that. Sometimes, if you're practicing ABM, they can be from a company that's a good fit, but they might not be the right decision maker, so there's a lot that plays into that. But that's neat. Did you use Woopra itself to figure out- Elle: Yeah. Kathleen: ... behavior that led to conversions? Elle: Yeah. So I was really lucky, coming into Woopra and having all this data already tracked. So I was able to look inside the product and build up these customer journey reports to see the series of steps that people took, and what made them a qualified, or potentially qualified, customer. So we saw that, in our case at least, when they sign up with a product, added a new organization, added a tracking snippet and built their first report, they were 30% more likely to convert into a paying customer. So the question that I had from this was, how can I accelerate this process? How can we combine marketing and sales efforts to help new users navigate through these steps to really see the full value of the product faster? And this is where, essentially what's called PQL, or the Product Qualified Lead model, was born for us. Kathleen: So how does a PQL differ from an MQL? PQL v. MQL Elle: Yeah, so the PQL model essentially flips the traditional lead funnel upside down, starting instead with product adoption. It doesn't ignore content consumption or other tradition MQL metrics but incorporates them into a larger narrative that indicates not only for us prospective interest, but whether or not this user would truly be a good fit for your product. Using that data we were able to test new methods in PQL and learn really what combination of behaviors and company attributes were indicative of a true new potential customer opportunity for our sales team. Kathleen: So you're using that data to bubble up the most important indicators of likelihood for customer conversion. Do you then feed that into a lead scoring model and have some kind of a trigger? Is there a numerical value when that Product Qualified Lead exceeds it that's then passed on to sales? How does that work? Elle: Yeah, so we did a couple of different things. We used a tool called Clearbit, integrated with our own platform for data enrichment. So even people who are potentially anonymous on our site, we could identify what company they were with, the vertical, the company size and pass that information along to our sales team so that when that person identified themselves, we'd have a little bit more information in terms of who they are before we even got to product engagement. But my initial campaign was super simple, and I just wanted to test and see what would work. So we would send an email introducing a feature when we recognized that the user hadn't used it yet during their initial first week in the product. Very simple, right? And the email open rates on that campaign were around 50%- Kathleen: Oh that's really high. Elle: 50% opened. Impressive, right? I was so excited.  Of those who opened, 25% of those went on to try that new product feature and after using that feature, we would then use a trigger within our own analytics systems to simply notify our sales team via Slack that we had this new, qualified, engaged user. So for the first campaign that really helped narrow down that pool of leads, but we still found that wasn't enough to truly qualify these 1500 leads. So the next phase of this was combining that with additional data points that were at our disposal. So we knew through Clearbit's company sized vertical, that combining that with companies that scored well on the company set level and product engagement level would be the first to push to our sales team. So combining all of the information we had from Clearbit with "Are they using these product features? How often are they logging into the platform? Have they added their tracking snippet?" and all of these other key indicators was our way of bubbling those up to the sales team and either sending them through Slack, or just creating really nice reports for them in Woopra so they could go in every day and see, "Okay, here are my hot leads for the day." Kathleen: Now, it sounds like you have a combination of behavioral data as well as demographic data, because you've got Clearbit there to enrich. Are you using any of that, particularly on the behavioral side, to do negative lead scoring? Are there certain behaviors that are red flags that you know, this person might meet the threshold but it's a tell that they're not a good fit or is it really mostly just positive? Elle: Yeah, it's a little hard with a company like Woopra, and especially in San Francisco, you could have a 10 person company that's a start up, just got around to finding funding and they are very intuitive with their data. They know they need a full fledged analytic solution. So were we to simply look at something like employee headcount, we would have no idea which customers might actually be a true fit for Enterprise. So we have probably at least 15 to 20 Enterprise accounts where the company sizes are 10 to 20 people. Very small, very agile, but they know that they need access to this level of data. So we do look at that. But again, combining that with what are they doing when they sign up, which different features are they using -- for us there's no really negative lead score, it's just an indicator of whether or not the sales team should be reaching out immediately, or if we should wait longer and hope that this person pre-qualifies themselves through further usage. And in those cases we are still adding those people to different Drift campaigns to help nurture those leads. But it is a great way for our sales team to instantly log in every day and know, "Here are the hot leads I should reach out to immediately." Kathleen: Now, going back to the email that you said, your first pass at trying to use that data to improve conversions, you did that email which has the goal of trying to get the user to adopt a certain product feature that they have not adopted yet. To what do you attribute the really high open rates that you got on that? Elle: I think, you know, consumers today expect a much higher level of personalization and any time you can take something that they've done or who they are and better personalize that campaign, then you're going to hopefully get higher open rates. I think it was relevant for them. It was recent because it was something they'd just signed up for and hadn't quite used yet. So all of those aspects certainly helped. We've tried to do a lot more since then. But for us, I think it's easy, maybe not easy, but, people can find something small like that to test out. A small campaign, just to see if it makes an impact or not and then expand from there. Adopting PQL does not have to be this six to nine month program, it's something that for the most part marketers can start testing today with different elements of product engagement data that they're collecting to see what might stick and what might not. Kathleen: Now, if I understood you correctly, you have this premium model and there's no time limit on how long somebody can use the premium version. There might be a volumetric limit as far as the number of records that it will process. Given that there's no expiration date on premium usage, how far into somebody's adoption of your premium product do you hit them and nurture them? Elle: It really depends on what we're learning about the customer initially. We on Friday released a much more full fledged PQL system. We're calling it a "pressure point." Not only are we collecting the company size, company fit vertical information like that when they sign up, but we have strategically placed pressure points throughout the platform where if people are trying to use a feature that's maybe an advanced analytics feature, it's something that only is included in a paid subscription, that pressure point will pop open it'll say, "Okay it's time to upgrade to use this feature." Now we're counting every time somebody hits those blockers and on what feature they hit those blockers and how often over the course of the week. And what's funny is, like on Friday we launched it, I came in on Monday, I ran a report and I said, "Okay, show me everyone who's hit at least five of those blockers." And I was blown away to see that there were people over the weekend who had hit it at least 200 times. So for me, that's a really great indicator of these are the people who are 100% fit for a paid subscription or more advanced version of our product. And now that we're collecting this level of data, not only can I see what features or integrations they were most interested in to feed that to the sales team so they have a good basis for that conversation, but we can also use that to personalize email campaigns going forward and tell them off the bat, you know, this person was really, really interested, it's time to tackle them and get on it. Kathleen: Have you found that there's a certain degree of frequency with what you can reach out to your users and is there any limit to that? In other words, do you need to limit it to once every three days, once a week? I mean, I imagine you could potentially wind up in a situation of email overload. Elle: Absolutely. We are definitely still learning a lot in terms of how often to email and the types of content we should send. Right now, we're basically sending two emails in the first week, two emails in the second week for nurturing. And then based on that, it'll either be sent to the sales team, or we'll follow back up with something like a product update. For me personally, I would like to see if we can find a way to either expand the number of emails that we're sending or leverage this new pressure point data that we're collecting to better personalize those emails and see what happens, but I would 100% say if you're trying to send at least the marketing emails more than two to three times a week, it could be overwhelming. Kathleen: Yeah, I would agree with that. Now, a key part of this whole process for you is to hand off to sales. Can you talk a little bit about how you're working with your sales team? Not just through that hand off, but are you communicating with them well in advance of that around customer fit and the data you're finding and how that feeds into the leads they're getting. And then what kind of data do you pass them when they eventually do get that lead? I would love to know more about your sales and marketing alignment. Woopra's Sales and Marketing Alignment Model Elle: Yeah, so we're lucky in that we're all kind of leveraging the same platform to learn about our customers, to run reports to ask questions. During the onboarding process, we introduce our sales team to the companies that we believe are a good fit for Woopra based on those that have been with us for years. So they have a good understanding that people who are in SaaS who have these types of integrations will probably fair well in this company size. From there, we do build a certain number of reports for them. So things like if they're running in a different territory, here are the top leads in your territory, here are some other important engagement metrics that we're gonna incorporate from you. There's definitely a lot more that we could do, but we do have weekly alignment calls where we're walking through those reports with them and making sure that the data that we're sending them is actually driving results, that they're not drowning in unqualified leads, that we didn't get something wrong. It's all iterative and testing like, yes we might think that somebody installing an integration makes her more likely to convert him and maybe the numbers show that today, but that doesn't mean that's going to continue in the long run. So it is a constant iteration and evolution and the way that we work with this team to ensure that everything that we're doing in the marketing side is bringing, not the right opportunities today, but the right customer types in the long term. Because it doesn't do anybody any good if they're signing on people today who are going to churn three months later. Kathleen: Now who's on that weekly call? Is that the whole sales team and you? Or do you have additional people from your team? Elle: Yeah, so we bring myself, the sales team, we have a sales engineer there, and that's the gist of it. We pass along some of the information to our CFO, we're a smaller team, a little more agile. It is nice to have both the marketer's perspective in those meetings to help drive the content for them and help them look at the data, but also having that engineer in the room. So if perhaps they're doing a demo and something's not quite right, or they're customer requests that come up during the POC phase that aren't quite in the product, we can help to build those into the product roadmap and keep everyone aligned. Woopra's Marketing Results Kathleen: That's great. So tell me a little bit about the results you've seen from implementing this product qualified nurturing. Elle: Yeah, so through the initial email phase and then a couple other PQL campaigns that we ran, one of which was using Drift's live chat feature to incorporate the data that we had about that customer and then automatically, for example, pop up when a Drift live chat message when somebody had installed integration and we wanted to share a piece of content. So we've tried a bunch of different things over really the last year. Since then we have found that 50% of the leads now coming through the PQL model -- so these high qualified ones that the sales team are reaching out to -- make it through the demo request phase. And of those, 25% of them are at least getting to the POC phase before closing. So that in and of itself, for me, out of the 1500 leads, being able to allow them to hone in and really target on those that are going to make it through that phase has been great. Kathleen: That's especially important if you have a smaller team, just not to be wasting the limited bandwidth you have on poorly qualified leads. Elle: Exactly. And you would think it would matter even more for a bigger team, but I think it's probably harder to test and integrate different types of campaigns like this when you do have hundreds of sales team members to work with. Kathleen: Yeah. Now has your freemium to paid customer conversion rate increased? Elle: It has. So it was 30% before, freemium to paid, and we're at 35% now. My hope is that with this pressure point system we'll be able to jump that up to closer to 40% or 45%. But even then, I'm pretty happy with the results overall. Kathleen: Yeah, that's great. And do you find that the length of time from adoption of the freemium product to conversion and to a paid customer is speeding up? Elle: It definitely is because our sales team isn't wading through as much in the pool to identify who to reach out to. I think when I first started at the company it was about six months to close from a new sign up, from the day they signed up to an actual enterprise deal. As of our last all-hands, we're down to three or four months now. Kathleen: Wow, that's great. Elle: So it's ... yeah, doesn't seem huge, but it really is a significant difference when you're a startup, in the long run to be able to accelerate that process. And for me, that was kind of "proof is in the pudding." It showed me that something that we're doing is working and that we just need to, maybe not double down on it, but try to find better ways to improve this existing model that we have. Kathleen: Absolutely. Those are impressive numbers. Well all good stuff. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: As somebody who's been in marketing for a while and who's, especially in the startup world, which I think is so interesting and so fast moving, I'm curious to get your answers to the two questions I love to ask all of my guests. The first is, company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Elle: Let's see. HubSpot obviously leads the forefront in terms of really setting the stage for what inbound can be and validating it's use through numerous different types of campaigns from different free offering features as teasers to powerful content to having a very lightweight version of their product that different teams can use for free. But I was researching this question and going through my emails and every time I get a really good email or a very personalized campaign when I sign up for a new product, I add them to a folder called "Good Emails." And one that stuck out in my mind was Appcues. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that company. Kathleen: Yep. Elle: Yeah, they do in-app onboarding software and I guess you would expect them to be really good at this since they're collecting all of that PQL data that we just talked about. But what I noticed was that all of the campaigns that I received from them for my first two weeks of signing up were based on both the company that I was in, so my vertical, they targeted SaaS. They knew the integration tools that I was using that integrated with theirs and they spoke to those. And they also based those emails around the different features that I was using. So it felt personal, it was relevant, and the emails were light enough that they caught my attention without drowning me in sales calls or overwhelming me with too much content. Kathleen: Well, that tracks very well with what you said earlier about recency, relevance, and personalization. Elle: Yeah. Kathleen: That makes a lot of sense. The other question is, digital marketing changes so quickly and I'm always fascinated to learn how people like yourself stay up to date and educate themselves on all of those changes that are happening. Elle: Isn't your podcast the only thing people listen to? Kathleen: Well I know we're definitely one of them, that's for sure. Elle: I like Neil Patel's blog. I'm not sure if you've read "Open View Partners." They have a blog called "Open View Labs," which is really great content for all things startups from fundraising to success stories. There's also a venture capitalist from Red Point called Tomasz Tunguz, who writes content from product strategy to compensation to startup culture development. But yeah, I've noticed that personally I prefer bloggers who provide insight into every aspect of running a startup because I've found the more that you can learn about how different departments run and should collaborate and integrate with one another, the more you're able to design marketing campaigns that are really harnessing that collective knowledge of the organization to deliver more personalized or long-term results. Kathleen: Yeah, those are great suggestions. One of the reasons I like to ask this question is I feel, myself, that there is this bubble that we as marketers live in and it's very easy to stay within the bubble and we're all listening to the same podcasts and reading the same blogs and it's dangerous because if you do what everyone else is doing, you're going to get results that everyone else is going to get. And really what you want are better results than everybody else. So I like those suggestions a lot and I'm going to have to check those out. So if people have questions about product qualified lead nurturing or about Woopra or anything else that we've talked about today, what is the best way for them to find you online? How to Contact Elle Elle: Yeah, so you can either find me on LinkedIn at Elle Morgan, that's E-L-L-E. Free feel to email me at Elle@woopra.com or hop over to Woopra.com, it's W-O-O-P-R-A.com. Kathleen: Fantastic. I will put all of those links in the show notes. Before we close out for today, I have an ask for anybody who's listening. If you listened to today's episode and you like what you heard or you've been listening and you've gotten value out of the podcast, it would mean a lot to me if you would just take a few minutes and go into iTunes or Stitcher or whatever platform you listen on and leave a review. It makes a huge difference in terms of getting us in terms of more interested marketers. So take five minutes out of your week and leave a review for the Inbound Success podcast. And if you know somebody else doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week, thank you so much, Elle, it was a lot of fun. Elle: Thank you, Kathleen. Have a good one. Kathleen: You too.

What do Bono, Nev Schulman, Ne-Yo, TED and SXSW have in common? They all rely on visual storytelling using Prezi to deliver impactful presentations. On this week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, Prezi Head of Creative Services and Chief Evangelist David Hooker shares his process for taking a presentation topic and building a narrative and visual story around it. In addition, he goes into detail about the science behind effective presentations, and how that influences the ways in which the best public speakers deliver their talks. Listen to the podcast to learn more about David's approach to visual storytelling, and learn how to apply these lessons to your own presentations. Transcript Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. My name's Kathleen Booth and I'm your host. Before we get started today, just one quick announcement. As you may have heard if you've listened to the last few episodes, the podcast now has an Alexa skill. So if you have any desire to hear me in your Alexa speaking once a week about inbound marketing and talking to really interesting practicing marketers, simply go to your Alexa app, under skills search "Inbound Success," and you'll find us there. With that, I'd like to introduce my guest for this week who is David Hooker, is the Head of Creative Services and Evangelism at Prezi. Welcome, David. David Hooker (guest): Hi, Kathleen. Congrats on being Alexa compatible. Kathleen: Thank you. I'm not sure anybody actually wants to hear me talk for an hour every week on Alexa, but it's there for those who want it, right? David: Yeah. Slowly Alexa's starting to do everything around my house, so I can see myself saying, "Alexa, play that podcast." Kathleen: Yeah. It's pretty neat. It's fun to play around with. Well, for those who don't know who David is, or don't know what Prezi is, David is with Prezi which is a cloud based presentation platform. And in addition to being their Head of Creative Services, he also is the cohost of Prezi's podcast which is called The Narrative.  One of the reasons I'm so excited to talk to you, David, is that you have such an interesting background. You've worked with some really interesting individuals and brands to convert their stories into a more visual format, and you've given a TEDx talk. So I feel like we have a lot of ground to cover. Before we jump into it, can you tell our audience a little bit more about yourself, your background, and maybe a little bit about Prezi? About Prezi David: Thank you very much, Kathleen. I'll be more than happy to. As you mentioned, I am the Head of Creative Services and Evangelism at Prezi. And what that means on a day-to-day basis, what I do on a day-to-day basis, is that I'm making presentations. So, I'm making them obviously sometimes for myself, like you mentioned the TEDx talk, but more commonly I'm making them for the speakers that we work with. The wonderful thing about being a marketer for a product like Prezi is that Prezi has this inbuilt plurality, right? It's a presentation tool. Most of the time you do a presentation, you are presenting to people other than yourself. There aren't many mirror-based presentations. There's usually two or three people in the audience. So, we work with some really great, fantastic speakers. We've done around 30 talks with TED. We've worked with people like SXSW. I've been lucky enough to work with likes of Bono and Nev Schulman on MTV. We know that Ne-Yo is a big Prezi fan, that's the singer who's still pretty popular but was really popular in the 90s when I was growing up. And so yeah, I'm working with them to take the narrative or the story they want to tell and build the visuals that go with that presentation. The creative services part of my title means that I'm doing that exact same thing but with our top clients which are many of the Fortune 500 companies who have a message, a story, a product to sell. And we do do this same activity with SMBs -- smaller companies who come to us who have a message, story, or product that they want to sell, that they want to get out there. And we work with them on the narrative of that. In particular, we work with them on the visuals that accompany and tell their story. And of course we do that with Prezi. So, the unique thing about Prezi is that rather than taking the slides "A, B, C, D, E, this happened, then that happened, then that happened, then that happened, then that happened, then that happened" approach to presentations -- that very linear based way of thinking -- Prezi uses an entire canvas, and you can lay out all of your information on one canvas and then move around it in a way that makes sense. That really helps your audience remember. You don't have to take my word for that. We actually were lucky enough to be on the receiving end of a study from Harvard which shows that when you take a Prezi presentation and compare it to no presentation or a PowerPoint presentation, we actually came out on top as more than 25% more engaging, which I think everybody wants to be more engaging, so that's super cool. And so yeah, that's me and that's what I do, and that's a little bit about Prezi. Kathleen: Prezi is fascinating to me because I've done a lot of public speaking in my time, and it does get really, really boring after a while to do PowerPoints, and you sort of feel like the creative life is getting sucked out of you. I've used Prezi, and I remember looking at examples. I don't remember if I saw them on SlideShare -- I'm not sure exactly where they were at the time. But what fascinated me about Prezi, at least in the way that I was looking at using it, was that when you zoom out, you can create one larger picture or image if you will. In my case, I think I wound up using the image of somebody hitting a baseball out of a baseball park. And then when you zoom in, you can take each element in that bigger image and turn each element into almost like the equivalent of a slide, like it's own individual message or thought. And I just thought it was so interesting how it's almost like these layers. I think of it almost like the Russian dolls that come one out of the other. And the way that I had seen Prezi used and that I really loved was in particular those presentations that had the big image where you zoom out, and then every time you zoom in, it revealed something new, which I thought was so interesting. But I'm sure there a million of other ways that people have used it. David: It's wonderful that you should think of it in that way because what you've done is you've associated Prezi with a metaphor. In your case, it's the Russian dolls. I'm sure there's proper word for that but I honestly can't remember it at the moment. The dolls that come out of each other, you've associated it with a metaphor. That's one of the great things about Prezi is that you can build that visual metaphor. On a really simple level, that can be, "I want to talk to you about this product that we made, and here's the journey that we went on to make it." Or, "I want to talk to you as a customer and establish empathy with you and here's the journey that I see you on." The journey, if we're gonna relate a visual metaphor to it, the most common one that we would do with that is something like a mountain. You start at the bottom of the mountain, you get to the top of the mountain. But by showing everybody the whole, and then like you said, zooming to certain parts of it in a way that makes sense to the story you're telling, it helps people remember because they associate the visual with where you were at the time, and they're like, "Oh yeah, I remember this because I was at this point in the mountain, and I've gone up this far but I still have this far to go." It's a technique that memory champions ... I'm sure everyone's heard of techniques like the memory palettes or the method of loci. Memory champions don't just associate a visual with something they have to memorize, they associate a series of visuals in a space. Commonly it's their house or their front room, it can be their kitchen, whatever it may be. And it's the fact that you remember where one thing is helps you remember the thing next to it. Kathleen: That's so interesting. I think about the types of conversations we have on this podcast, and I'm always interviewing marketers. And sometimes they are dealing with challenges like we're going to have somebody speaking at a conference, how do we make an impact? How do we generate leads? How do we take away value from this talk that someone's giving? And then other times, I've done plenty of interviews with people who themselves are thought leaders and they're building personal brands and going out and speaking, and they want to be different and they want to stand out from the usual boring crowd of PowerPoint, the sea of PowerPoint lameness. I think that this topic is gonna resonate with a lot of people listening because there's a massive chasm between throwing up a PowerPoint template with five bullets and going to what you're talking about. And I think what fills in that chasm is an understanding of how to tell a story. You kind of touched on that. It's not just about changing what something looks like visually, it's about weaving a narrative. How to Build Visual Stories Maybe you could just start by talking about when you work with some of the clients that Prezi has. The people like Bono that you've helped, how do you start? I assume they come to you with, "I need to give a presentation on X." Where do you go from there? David: Yeah. Commonly, and I think probably the people listening to this podcast are in a little bit of a different life situation from Bono ... Kathleen: Maybe not. David: Maybe not. Rock stars of the world, if you are listening, hello. But I'm gonna make that jump and say that they probably are. So, someone like Bono would probably come at it in quite a different way. Another common question I receive a lot is "What's the one thing that you've attained about presentations?" And for me, it's the apathy with which people approach their presentations generally speaking. It's getting a little bit better, but there are still so many people who approach a presentation with, "If I can just get through this without embarrassing myself, that will be enough." And the problem is when you set the bar there, where you set the bar at acceptable or okay or not so bad, then you're never gonna get above that. I understand why people do do that. Presentations and public speaking, they're scary things to do. We've done a lot of research into phobias because we know that people find public speaking scary. And I've seen studies where public speaking has been listed as a phobia on the list above death, which when you think about it is really silly, because the worst thing that can happen to you on stage is that you die. So it doesn't make sense to be more afraid of public speaking than death. But somehow, irrationally, that is what happens to us. So, that's what leads to the apathy. So to make that comparison back to someone like Bono, Bono is approaching his presentation with ... and it was TED presentation, with TED obviously having a huge platform, but he was approaching it with, "This is my opportunity to make that ... my opportunity to have that impact." If we were to approach every presentation with, "The reason I'm doing this is so that I can make an impact. This is an opportunity. I have to stand out." As marketers, so much of what we do is about telling stories and it's about standing out, but we don't always take that same approach to our presentations. So the very first thing that I try to work with with any client is, "Why are you doing this? What's your motivation for doing this?" And some people really commonly come to us with, "Well, I kind of have to and I just wanna get through it." And we try and get rid of that. That's the first place we get rid of. "Why are you doing it? What impact do you want to make? What do you want the audience to walk away with? Let's just focus on that." The other common kind of secondary mistake that people make is they think a presentation is all about them. "This is my time to shine. This is my time to stand out." That's better than being apathetic and just wanting to get off stage, but the best presentations are about the audience. You can be a really super engaging speaker, you can be funny, but if you don't achieve the thing that your audience want to get out of this presentation ... I can walk into a sales pitch, be super funny, engaging, people think I'm cool, but if I haven't talked about my product at all it's a waste of their time and my time. So, always start there as well. What do you want the audience to get out of this presentation? What do you think that they're coming into the room wanting to hear and how are you gonna change their mind or influence them or any of that stuff? You start with that, build your presentation from that point of view, always come back to that. And you'll find that you'll end up shining because you've put them at the center. Kathleen: And how do you shift from presenting to storytelling? David: Well, I think there's this kind of ... I don't know the right word, there's this mystique now that's being increasingly attached to storytelling. I see lots of storytelling as a title, we're seeing more and more chief storyteller or storyteller-in-residence. It's a skill linked on LinkedIn. Everybody is a storyteller. It's a democratized thing that everybody does on some level, except for maybe teenagers who are going through that phase that we all went through where you don't really talk to anyone. My point is when you come home at the end of the day at work and you talk to your significant other, family member, child, brother, sister -- whoever it is, and they say to you, "How was your day?" -- that's an opportunity to tell a story. Unless you just go with, "It was okay ..." Kathleen: Which a lot of people do. David: Which a lot of people do. The moment you do more than that, you're a storyteller. The moment you meet up with a friend and you tell them about what happened last week, you're a storyteller. What I would encourage people to do is those moments where you're having a great conversation or someone is reacting really positively to what you said, what is it that you're doing there and taking that and translating and putting it into your presentation. That's what people want. They want stories. They want anecdotes. People love stories. There's this common misconception that we have that our attention span is shrinking. You've probably seen that stat that our attention span is now down to eight seconds. A goldfish's is nine seconds. All millennials are, therefore, worse than goldfish. Kathleen: Yeah. David: I don't think this is really true. I had a goldfish when I was younger, and I never really had that much of a great conversation with it, despite some trying late night. Kathleen: Yeah. I wonder how they get the data on how long the goldfish is paying attention. Really how are they measuring that? David: Yeah. The point of that stat is that you've got eight to nine seconds to make an impact. The amount of time that you have at the beginning of a presentation to really capture people's attention is shrinking. At the same time, I mean do you have a subscription to something like Netflix or Hulu? One of those. Kathleen: Oh yeah. Yeah. David: Yeah? What's your favorite show? Kathleen: I'm going to answer that a little differently and tell you what my husband's favorite show is, because he's so obsessed that he's taken over our television. Currently, he is binging on Vikings. David: Okay. How many episodes of Vikings does he watch in a night? Kathleen: I mean three or four, depending upon how early he starts. David: Okay. I'm saying probably he's spending about four hours of his undivided attention on Vikings, right? Kathleen: Yeah. David: That's not an eight second goldfish amount of attention. Four hours is a long period of time. I bet if you watched something like Vikings -- I've never seen it, but the things that I'm binge hooked on -- what they're really great is that first eight to nine seconds will be fantastic, will be captivating, will hook you in and keep you there. We are really, really looking for great quality content. We want to be engaged. We want to hear these stories. The thing that we're up against is that there's more competition than ever before. Your phone in your pocket right now, people listening to us speaking right now, if we're not interesting enough, they can take out their phone -- don't do this people listening -- you can take out your phone and start looking through Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, news app, whatever it maybe, for something more interesting than what we're doing now. It means that we have to raise our level and be more engaging. Don't blame the lack of attention on phones and the way it's trending. You need to up your game and really come at it. Storytelling is one great way of doing that. You story tell all the time. Think of those times when you're storytelling and watch what you do and watch what other great people who tell stories do, and learn from it. Nick Hornby is one of my favorite writers. I was once at a recording of a podcast in London and Nick was reading from his new book. People had the opportunity to ask him questions. Inevitably, the first question was, "Nick. How do I become a better writer?" The first thing he said, "You need to read more." Kathleen: Yeah. Becoming a Better Storyteller David: That's the first thing you need to do, you need to read more. If you feel that you're not a great storyteller, it's not something that you do often, start by consuming. Yeah, you can watch things like Netflix and movies and -- Kathleen: TED Talks. David: TED Talks. Screenwriting books are very good places as well to look at techniques for things. I would also encourage you that when you're out with your friends and you notice that one of your friend's stories are better than other people's stories, what is it about that friend that's engaging? How are they structuring their story? I bet you that that story that they're telling, it's not the first time they've told it. It might not even be the first time you've heard it, but you love hearing it. What is it about it? How are they structuring it? Which elements do they bring in when? Are they using comedy? Are they building up drama? Are they using juxtaposition between one thing and another? Just analyze it a little bit. You don't have to do it openly. Please don't do it openly, you'll just ruin the story for everyone. Think about it yourself. Kathleen: I wonder if people don't spend more time on this because they get intimidated. What I mean by that is that, for example, I've seen so many articles on storytelling and talks on storytelling and, a lot of the time, what it focuses on is you need to create these story arcs. You have to understand the construct of the hero's journey and apply it to what you're talking about. These can be fairly abstract concepts. I think sometimes people hear that and they think, I don't have the time to learn all that. I'm just not even going to start. Whereas what you're saying, it sounds like it's really more about, think about what's happening and working in your real-life and just start to test some of those strategies out. Would you say that's accurate? David: Yeah. That's definitely a way you can look at it if you do find something like that intimidating. I would also say that things like that are not quite as intimidating as you think they are. If you actually get into them and read them, you'll see that they're telling you to do things that you've seen before, like you've seen that in a movie or you've heard it in a bar conversation. Just because they've got technical language attached to them doesn't mean that you should find them frightening or difficult. Try and look at them as a way of enlightening yourself. This is getting back to that point about apathy, that people try and approach their presentation as "this is something I just want to get done." If you just want to get it done, then don't bother doing it. Put time and effort into it. It always amazes me. I've worked at, for example, startup pitch competitions, some of which have had huge prize money available to get pitching. I've seen people walk in and they haven't got their slides ready and they present the next day. You're like, "This could change your life." They're like, "Yeah, but I just kind of want to get it done." You're like, "How? Just how about taking the time to think it through and put a real conscious effort into it? This is really, genuinely the moment that could change your life." Kathleen: I would 100% second that. A few years back, I participated in a program through Goldman Sachs, because I had a startup at the time. They ran us through pitch coaching for a three slide, three minute rocket pitch. Not only did we go through pitch coaching, but then we had to do successive rounds of almost competitively pitching leading up to the big event. What I started with, in terms of my presentation and my verbal delivery, was so dramatically different than what I ended with. It was like, unrecognizable. I couldn't agree more. It's amazing what advance preparation and vetting things in front of other people and getting feedback etc, what that can do for refining your delivery. David: Most things we do in life benefit from putting hard work into them. Books go through endless iterations and rewrites and edits on them. Movies, the same. They go through focus groups and all of that stuff. I think what happens is that we see some of our favorite speakers speaking on stage and they have this magnetism or charisma, and we mistake that for thinking that they just have that. It's just that mystical X factor that they just have. If I don't have it, then there's nothing I can do. It's not true in any way, shape or form. I think one of the big favorites of business pitching and product pitching is, of course, Steve Jobs. If you look, even do the smallest modicum of research into how he put his pitches together, they were rehearsed within an inch of their life. They were done again and again and again. He insisted on doing them in the space. He would get part of the way into his pitch presentation, do something he didn't like and do it again from the beginning until he did like it, again and again and again and again. He put a lot of work and effort into it. Like you did with your three minute thing, when I did my TEDx presentation, I wrote 14 versions of the script. I did one general pitch. I then practiced in front of people on Skype calls and in person. On the day, I was pacing around the venue practicing again and again and again. If you want to be good and if you want to do it well, you've got to put the work in, and don't think that other people who look effortless got there because they didn't work. That's not true. There are very, very few people who can get up on stage and just wing it. Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. Turning Stories Into Visuals Kathleen: Now, shifting gears for a second, one aspect of this is preparation and the work that goes into creating a great presentation and being able to deliver it verbally in a way that is flawless and that is tight. I would love to talk a little bit more about the visual aspects of this. One of the things that you do so well is help people take what's inside of their head and instead of vomiting out 10 slides full of bullets, you help them turn it into a more visual story. Can you talk a little bit about how that process works? How do you start to transform these concepts into visuals? David: We always start with narrative or story. We start with the scope of the content, like, how many things do you have to say within this talk? I've got three things, I've got four things, I've got five things... We always start with knowing what that is and what the milestones you want to hit along your journey are. I want to talk about the product, I want to talk about how it's going to help you live a better life, and I want to talk to you about the pricing. Then, I want to talk to you about the timeline should you choose to go for it. Okay, I've got my four things. Then, when you know the scope of content, you start thinking about the hierarchy of content. This is more important than this. That's more important than the other. Even my graphic visual designers, people who spend their entire lives in visuals, start that way. There's different ways to plan. I follow like an essay plan kind of thing. I spent a lot of my time in university writing English and history papers. I'm used to planning my content that way. My designers use Post-it notes and put things up on a board. Some of them do really rudimentary sketches. Don't think to be a great visual designer or a person who is really great with visuals you have to know how to draw. I can tell you, I have some designers on my team whose drawings are really laughably bad. That's not really about it. Don't think that you need to be an artist to be a good designer or a good visual person. Then, once you know the scope of the content and the hierarchy of the content, then you can start looking for visuals that fit that. If you start with a visual that you like and then try and make your content fit that visual, you're going to end up in a world of trouble and it won't work. My point here is that visuals supplement narrative. They don't dictate it. Then, when it comes to choosing, that's the part of the process that we invest the most amount of time into. We look at an incredible amount. It's getting back to that Nick Hornby part about consumption, we look at a lot. We make mood boards. We scroll through Google Images, through things like Getty and Shutterstock and Unsplash and all of these wonderful resources. We look and look and look and look and look. Then, we try and match it with the scope and the hierarchy, this fit, the mood of this is the same. Almost every company has a mood that they want to hit. You'll be surprised what you can do with typing an adjective into Google Images and seeing what you find and seeing what other people are doing. You're not going to really change the world with graphic design. It's a wonderful place to be a non-designer designer, like someone who hasn't been to school, because there's so many resources open to you. So many of them are free. Something like Unsplash is just free photography that anyone can go use, and it's just beautiful. We spend hours just looking through, just seeing what there is and becoming inspired and using what you like. There's so much out there that you don't need to go back to 1980s clip art. The world has moved on from there. Things like The Noun Project do icons and iconography on a much better scale than anyone has ever done them before. Kathleen: Yeah. There is so much available these days, it's really true. Between icons and illustrations and photos and clip art, what have you -- I mean, there's almost no excuse not to have great visuals because there is so much out there to pick from. There is a lot of free stuff, but there's also a lot of very low priced imagery. David: Yeah, absolutely, and there's so many great libraries of content. For example, if you're an email marketer and you want to make a really nice looking email, there's a website called Really Good Emails, and it's free to use, and you can just look through what other people have done. Imitation is the highest form of flattery. Everything is stolen from something else somewhere along the line, more or less. Usually, it's very difficult to be truly original. It kind of doesn't matter. I mean, not copy it like pixel for pixel, but be inspired, for sure. Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would think it's in some ways the same as telling stories. Don't they say there is no original story? David: Absolutely. Kathleen: Every story follows some kind of a pattern that's been used before. David: Yeah, absolutely. Kathleen: Yeah. I was talking with somebody the other day about this. It's somebody who's a mentor of mine. I have an idea for something I may want to pursue as far as writing and speaking about, and I said to him, "But I feel like people have talked about this before," and he's like, "Let me just tell you. There is nothing new that anybody is talking about." He was like, "It is all about the delivery. It is all about how engaging you are, and if you can tell the story better than anybody else, then it feels like it's the first time it's ever been told." I do think there is definitely something to that. David: Yeah and some people like to hear stories more than once. I think it's that's why people who watch Game of Thrones also love Lord of the Rings. Right? Kathleen: Yeah. David: There's not a huge difference between them. Lord of the Rings and Game of Throne fans are probably throwing stuff at walls right now. Those are very common themes in there, like of feeling and mood. That's why people say, "I'm a sci-fi fan," because they enjoy that kind of thing. So you can tell the same story again if you just put your slight tweak on it, for sure. Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. Well, one of the things that I think would be really interesting for people listening is if they could see examples of what you think are some of the better presentations or some of the better Prezis they have been done. Is that something that we can include in the show notes, some links to some great presentations? David: Absolutely. How could I turn down such an invitation? Kathleen: I mean, I want to see them. I'm sure other people do as well. David: Sure. Sure. I'll definitely send those over. It's as simple as going to prezi.com/gallery. That has a "greatest and best." Some of our most famous ones are on there and that would be a great place for anyone to start. Kathleen: That's great. IMPACT has a big conference coming up in August, and I'm going to be doing some talks there, and so your timing is really good because I have a feeling I'm going to spend a lot of time in the gallery getting inspiration for my own talk, so that's great and I can't wait to check those out. David Answers Kathleen's Two Questions Now, before we close, two questions I want to make sure to ask you that I ask all of my guests. First is -- and you work with lots of marketers and brands doing marketing -- company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? David: For that I think I'm probably going to have to kind of go with something that has had an effect on me personally. The world has changed. There's a lot of new apps and things out there, and we do things very differently, but I think the one that's had the kind of most profound effect on me is Airbnb. It's really changed the way I travel. I don't think I've stayed in a hotel for quite a while, and I travel a lot for my job because I love travel. I've lived in Asia. I've obviously lived in Europe and, now, I live in the U.S. A really great travel experience for me is one where you feel at home. Right? It's almost like cheating. I'm here in Italy now, and I'm kind of Italian because I live in a flat above there. I live here. I'm not a tourist, right? People hate to feel like a tourist, and I hate to stand out as a tourist. Airbnb has really helped me achieve that feeling. What I love about their inbound marketing is they realize this. Right? They know what it is that I love about being there, their campaigns, their hashtags, their recommendations that come to me, not just for homes, but for experiences as well. It's all done very timely, very well, and very accurately. Whatever they're doing is really working. Kathleen: Yeah. You know, it's very interesting because that notion of the recommendations, and these brands that are able to feed things to you that they can tell that you love. One of the things that I've really begun to notice more is just what a game changer the use of artificial intelligence is, and having a great recommendation and it's the same thing you mentioned, Netflix earlier or Hulu, or I see it on Spotify. These platforms that are able to watch your behavior and then feed you things that are great matches to what you're already consuming. They develop such an innate virality, and they're so sticky because you can't help yourself, and I think there is an opportunity there for marketers who are not maybe in that same kind of an entertainment world to apply that same principle. I think Airbnb is a great example of a company that's gone that really well. David: Yeah. It's another thing that people put a lot of effort into. You mentioned Netflix. Netflix have the fantastic blog on Medium where you can read what their growth department are doing with thumbnail images, geo locations, all of that stuff, and they can have a dramatic effect on how much of the series you're going to consume just by that first thumbnail image that they show you, and they're spotting patterns and things like that, and that put a lot of time and effort into that. So that doesn't happen by mistake. Kathleen: Well, now, I'm going to have to dig up the link to their Medium blog and put that in as well because you have me intrigued. I haven't read that. David: It's fantastic reading, and they're very transparent about what they can do. It's honestly quite frightening about what influence it has. Everything from whether it's a man's face, a woman's face, certain series. I can't remember the specifics, but there are certain series which do better in certain locations with a woman's face versus a man's face. It's really impactful to read that and see our inherent biases at play. Kathleen: Fascinating. Yeah. It's fascinating. That's a rabbit hole that we could go down for an entire other podcast. David: Yeah. We should probably get someone from Netflix on to do that. Kathleen: Yeah. I would love that. Netflix, if you're listening, I would like to talk to your growth hacker. So the second question I want to ask you, and this is the perfect segue because, I mean, things are changing so quickly in the world of digital marketing, and it's so technologically driven in terms of the data that's available. How do you stay up to date? How do you keep abreast of all of that? David: I'm going to have to admit to being a little bit lazy. I'm not the only one, though, to say I really do wait for content to find me, and I think that goes back to the point we were making before about recommendations engines and stuff. I'll open up my feed, and trust that the right thing comes in, but I do consume those feeds a lot, especially my LinkedIn feed is something that I spend more time on than I ever used to. I think they're getting better and better at feeding me the right stuff. I spend a lot of time there and Facebook, and wherever it is, news apps and that stuff, waiting for things to come in. Personal recommendations that come in from colleagues play a big role in what I get, but I know that they're consuming content in the same way. We did a study recently into the way people get their content, and that percentage of people who wait for it to come to them is growing, and growing, and growing. I think that marks an opportunity for us as marketers that the people are almost sitting back and saying, "Okay. Give me what you got." Kathleen: Yeah. It's interesting that you mentioned LinkedIn and I'm a big LinkedIn fan, but I'm also a big Twitter fan. When it comes to feeds, one of the things that I've observed is, regardless of where you are, there's a lot of people out there who will say things like, "LinkedIn doesn't give me any value" or "Twitter doesn't give me any value." I think the other element to how much value you derive out of those feeds is like the quality of what you're putting into it. If you're somebody who's going out and just following everybody and anybody, then your feed is going to be cluttered up with all the information from anybody and everybody, whereas, if you're more selective, if you curate the people that you follow, et cetera, I think you can really construct a very high quality feed of information. David: Yeah, absolutely. If I think about it, when I'm looking for things on Twitter for that, I will commonly go to the Prezi feed because we curate that and we see what's coming in. My own personal feed probably has more of my own personal interests, so things like the World Cup, which is going on at the moment. If I were to read that, it's just endless amounts of that. The point you make about being selective over who you follow I think is a very valid one. Kathleen: Yeah and I've seen LinkedIn making a big resurgence lately. You're one of many people recently who's been mentioning that more when I ask that question, so there's definitely a lot of good buzz going on with LinkedIn these days. David: Yay! I'm not alone. How to Get In Touch With David Kathleen: Yeah. Well, this has been so interesting. I can't wait to check out the gallery on the Prezi website. If somebody wants to learn more about any of this or get in touch, tell us the best way to find you online. David: So you can start with LinkedIn. I respond to everybody who writes to me, so it's David Hooker Prezi on LinkedIn. I'm the only David Hooker here. I checked again this morning. It's just me. At Twitter, I'm @HookerDavidJ, and then if you want to check out Prezi, you just go to the Prezi.com website. Kathleen: Great! I should also mention before we go that David does have a podcast himself. He and a cohost are the faces behind The Narrative, which is all about storytelling and narrative strategy, and data visualization, et cetera. So some really good stuff there. If that's a topic you want to dive more into, check out his podcast. If you liked this podcast and learned something, I would really appreciate if you would consider giving it a review on iTunes or Stitcher, or the platform of your choice. And, finally, if you know somebody doing kick ass inbound marketing work, please Tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. Thanks, David. David: Thanks, Kathleen.

What's the quickest and easiest way to turn your sales people and subject matter experts into content creators? On this week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, marketing agency coach Max Traylor talks about "The Rockstar Creative Method" - the process he's used to make reluctant sales people and subject matter experts into rockstar content creators by having them interview clients and then turning that into a video show. Listen to the podcast to learn more about Max's process and how he's used this approach to grow his own business. Transcript Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. My name's Kathleen Booth and I'm your host. Before we get started today, just one quick announcement. I'm excited to let everyone know that the podcast now has an Alexa skill. So if for some crazy reason you want to hear my voice talking at you for one hour a week out of your Alexa, now you can. All you have to do is go into your Alexa app to the skills and search "Inbound Success" and you should find it. With that, I want to introduce my guest today who is Max Traylor. Max is an inbound agency coach, a marketing strategist and a product strategist. Welcome to the podcast Max. Max Traylor (guest): Hello Kathleen. Max and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: It's great to have you here. Max: It's great to be here and I'm already learning things based on your Alexa ... Kathleen: My Alexa skill. I'm not convinced there's anyone that actually wants to hear me talking for an hour every week in their Alexa, but should there be, we have provided that option. I'm interested to have you here because every week, this podcast is me talking to somebody who's a practicing marketer, who's doing something really well, and we try and pick apart what they're doing well. Many of those guests have been inbound agency owners and a lot of people think, "Oh, if you run an agency, you must really be an expert" and many of those people really are. What I think is interesting about this particular interview is, I'm interviewing somebody who helps the agency owner. So this is like "the expert behind the expert." So for agency owners that are struggling to take their business to the next level, you're a great resource, but you also yourself are directly somebody who advises on marketing strategy and the product positioning of services, which is an area that I think is just ripe for discussion. So that's enough of me tooting your horn. Tell our audience a little bit about yourself and what you do. About Max Traylor Max: Well, your introduction sounded really good. I'll probably borrow from that.  Kathleen: You can pay me later. Max: Yes, thank you. I ran an agency for about five years...very traditional, what everybody says to do. And during that time I really, I really fell in love with the strategy part, which was when clients paid me for my knowledge and not necessarily doing the work, but advising them on what was most important, creating plans that could be executed by other project managers. So I fell in love with strategy and somewhere along the line, I accidentally productized what was in my head. We took our process for delivering a content strategy ... we took our process for delivering content marketing services and we turned that into a strategy that we called the Content Marketer's Blueprint. After that, I was exposed to this world of licensing intellectual property, of creating online classes, these residual business models. And I always grew up with that with my dad working from home and he'd always say, "Digital, scalable, residual Max", and I had no idea what he was talking about until that day that I accidentally created a product. So I like working with experts in their field that are really knowledgeable on a particular topic and have created processes of their own. For those people, I help them productize what's in their head. For agency owners, I help them do more strategy work because for the people with the most knowledge and the most experience, I think that concentrating on delivering strategy and playing the role of the strategist is really the way they can provide the most value. And then over the years, I've experimented with a lot of alternative marketing methods for myself and I like to package those up and work with marketing and sales software companies when I'm doing my marketing strategy work. So definitely a problem with shiny object syndrome, but I've limited it to three. So that's nice. Kathleen: I want to go back to what you said about "digital, scalable, residual" because as soon as he said that in my head, what popped up was my father. My father who was in real estate, unlike your father, and he always said it was "location, location, location." I feel like digital, scalable, residual is the location, location, location of marketing. So I love that. Max: Yeah. Well, I always wondered why he was at home everyday and taking me to Disney World and now I'm able to provide value to clients by sitting next to my pool. So I feel like I've gotten at least a piece of it, but it's sort of a mentality that I've always had looking at the opportunity for marketing entrepreneurs and more broadly the opportunity for sales consultants and marketing consultants alike. The current state of content marketing Kathleen: You've been in this inbound marketing space for a while and you've been in it as an agency owner, as a strategist, as a consultant. You've worn different hats and I'm sure if you're anything like me, over the course of those years, you've seen inbound marketing evolve quite a bit. When I first got into this business it was like all you had to do was throw up a 500 word blog once a week, and it was that old field of dreams "if you build it, they will come?" model and you didn't have to work that hard because not everybody was doing it. Now the landscape has changed so dramatically and I'm curious -- as somebody who advises both companies on their actual marketing strategy, but also agencies on how to grow, I would love to hear your take on how that landscape is changing and what you see as the key drivers going forward. Max: Well, in the beginning it was a land grab. Google changed a couple of their rules to where people actually had to provide value and the way most people interpreted that was, "I create a bunch of blog articles and I really increase my traffic, and then I put some little buttons on my website that gets people to fill out forms and I can call those people and generate some new business." In the early days, that's what it was because it was the early adopters that really had all the opportunity in the world, and they didn't have to work too hard. It was very easy to provide more value than the black hat SEO folks of the past that were using trickery to increase their traffic. It was very similar to in the early U.S. when we were all moving west and the government would literally give you land grants. All you had to do was go out there and that's kinda what the early days of inbound were like. All you had to do was create some content people would show up at your front door. But now we live in a very saturated market and every industry is becoming saturated. I talk to a lot of people in the manufacturing space that say, "Well, not a lot of people in our industry are creating content and all the other people are focused on inbound in our industry." That's just not true. I mean google inbound marketing for manufacturers, google anything that a potential customer of a large industrial manufacturer would be googling. There's pages and pages and pages of content. So we're forced to get more creative, we're forced to provide more value. In my opinion, what we're shifting from is organizations trying to make themselves attractive via content and we're shifting to an era of personal brands where it's real people that are creating the content. It's not some marketer in a dark room somewhere trying to repeat what you've said. It's actually the subject matter expert that's creating content and generating conversations with their target audience. Kathleen: Yeah, I would agree with that. It's funny, I always ... People talk about setting a high bar or a low bar, and when I'm thinking of the evolution of inbound marketing, I always in my head think of it like a game of limbo. So it's almost like the opposite, where we started out with a really high bar and everybody could just slightly bend backwards and limbo right through it with their short little blogs. And the bar has gotten progressively lower over the years and now you have to bend a lot farther backwards. It's a lot harder to do it and there's far fewer people/companies or brands that are putting in the work needed to make it through that bar and get to the other side and really see success. I don't know why in my head I kind of reversed the bar analogy, but yeah, it's harder work. Max: No, that's an appropriate analogy. Not to be confused with, like you said, setting the bar high or setting the bar low. Kathleen: We're setting a really low bar. Max: Exactly. Obviously that's a broad suggestion to say, "Be more creative, create better content." "Great, okay. How do I do that?" The simple answer is focus more. The more focused you are at providing value to a specific industry, or even a sub industry in a lot of cases, because of how saturated these markets have gotten, but also a horizontal practice area. And I see that the companies that are creating content for a specific type of target buyer with a very specific problem, are the ones having the most success. And the more you can dedicate yourself to that focus, it's almost like taking that bar and raising it up a little bit more, so it's just a little bit easier to get under it. Kathleen: Now what do you say to people who hear that and say, "But if I get super specific, I'll be alienating all those other people out there." Max: So you just described 99% of people out there. Kathleen: Yeah. Max: And I'm kind of thankful for it because that's what keeps the 1% having fun. The 1% ... You just have to do it. I mean, if you've ever invested for a year in content trying to generate opportunities and you haven't focused on a particular industry area, let me know how that worked for you. Kathleen: Yeah. I work with Marcus Sheridan, a man who lots of folks listening probably know, and he is famous for saying "the riches are in the niches." Max: Yeah. Kathleen: And it's true. Max: He's a smart guy. Kathleen: Yeah. Max: Why 99% of people don't listen to you, don't listen to him, don't listen to me? It's fear. It's fear that they are limiting their opportunity, when in fact the exact opposite is happening. You cannot be everything to everyone, and I try to interview experts all the time in sales and marketing and startup consulting. No one has ever, ever, ever said, that I respect as a consultant, "Oh, you should go more broad." Kathleen: Right. Max: Never. Not once.  Kathleen: I would be willing to bet that inbound agency owners are some of the biggest violators of this because the agency space has gotten very crowded and there's lots of general, "full service inbound agencies" out there. So I'm sure that they are not necessarily practicing what they preach all the time either. Max: So that's the weirdest thing about agency owners. Most people can sit there and bask in the fear and say, "No, I'm not going to go that specific because I'm afraid that I'm giving up all these opportunities." But agency owners are the only ones that day in, day out tell their clients that they need to focus without focusing ourselves. Kathleen: Yeah. I would agree with that. So one thing is getting specific in your content. How important it is it also to have a strong point of view? Max: I mean, when have you ever enjoyed a conversation when somebody didn't have a strong point of view? Like I said, this is becoming more about individual conversations. It's becoming more about a personal brand and somebody's actually enjoying listening to somebody. Regardless of if your opinion is met with a rejection or if it pisses people off or if people are really refreshed by your point of view, you have to have an opinion. And if you don't have an opinion, it's just boring. Kathleen: I think I know the answer to this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Do you also find that 99% of people come back to you with the same response on that as they do on getting specific? That they're afraid that if they take a strong stance, they're going to alienate a lot of people. Max: A hundred percent, which again is ... It's sort of a natural market defense for the people that are willing to take those risks and be specific and have a specific opinion. If everybody was doing it well, then it'd be much harder to stand out. Luckily, there still exists a land grab today. We haven't gotten all the way to the Pacific Ocean. We've reached like, California, and California is still reserved for those that will focus and have a clear opinion as they provide value for that specific marketplace. Kathleen: Excellent. All right. I'm taking over San Francisco. Max: Yeah, right. I'll meet you on the beach. The Rockstar Creative Method Kathleen: So when you work with folks these days, obviously you're evangelizing the need to continue to produce content, but to do it in a way that is very focused, that it has some sort of point of view. If I were your client and I said, "Okay, I'm ready to go." How would you generally advise me to get started? What's the best way to produce that content? Max: Well, the content is about answering questions and there's a lot of very smart people that have written books about that. That's what inbound marketing content is. It's taking the most burning questions, the most valuable questions when answered, and projecting that out into the marketplace to attract people with those problems. I've found that over the years the best content -- if you think about content in a broad sense, not just what we sit down and write on our blog -- the best content being created is between the actual buyer and a subject matter expert. And we spend thousands of dollars and years trying to recreate that magic. And I've come to the point where I've stopped trying to recreate that magic and instead encourage more of those conversations. My advice to somebody getting started with inbound marketing, is do not pay someone to blog for you. Reach out and have a conversation with your target buyer. Call it research, call it an interview, call it you're writing a blog and you want their opinion. But if you're creating content and you aren't speaking with your target buyer, you're doing it wrong. That is what inbound is all about, is answering people's questions. Why not start a new relationship, get someone's real question and provide value right then and there? Capture it on video. Capture it on Zoom. You get an audio automatically, just like this podcast that we're doing on Zoom today, and there's transcription services at ten cents a minute that gets you 80% accuracy. There is a blog right there. You do an hour long interview. I never do hour long interviews, but if you do a 20 minute interview at ten cents a minute, that's $2.00. Kathleen: Yeah. Max: It's going to take you $2.00 and a little bit of elbow grease and putting your fear aside to reach out, interview someone in your target market and get a video resource, audio resource and text. Post that on your blog. And the only- Kathleen: And that's funny that you say that because that's basically the process I follow for this podcast. Like Max said, we're on Zoom right now. I don't actually use the video. It's something that maybe we'll evolve into at some point, but I sometimes use stills from it. But I send it off, it gets transcribed by Rev.com and it's amazing the accuracy and yeah, that's how the show notes come about. It's super easy, fast and inexpensive. Totally worth it. Max: Doing it video is probably the most difficult thing that you can do. I happen to love doing video, and I really like the relationships that get created as part of these interviews, so I choose to do it on video, but the concept is including your ideal customers in the content creation process. You could get on the phone and interview them and write down what they're saying. I don't know why you would do that because there's ... You just shouldn't be doing that, but regardless of how you do it, creating a new relationship in the beginning of the content creation process, it's taking inbound -- the typical process for creating content, where you put in all the work, hopefully to get paid off at the end -- and it's turning it on its head and saying, "Wait a minute, I'm trying to generate relationships with my ideal customers. Why don't I do that first and let the content creation come as a natural byproduct?" Kathleen: Yeah. I love that. And just to be clear, I don't have anything against video. In fact, we're big fans of video at IMPACT, but I selfishly don't use video for my podcasts because then, every time I recorded one, I would have to put a lot more effort into looking good, and I personally feel like I have a face for audio. We have a lot of really great webinar guests at IMPACT, and we did a webinar recently with Mari Smith, who, if folks haven't heard of her, she's this amazing Facebook marketing expert, and she did the webinar in a way that you could see her via a live feed through her DSLR camera, and everybody on my team was just like, "Wow, she has set a new bar," in this case, a high bar, "for how to look phenomenally camera ready." And after that I was like, "I can't be on video ever again until I get a stylist and a wardrobe consultant," so... But I think there's something to that. When it comes to creating content, I've always said go with what you're most comfortable with, because if you try to put yourself in a position you're not comfortable, you're not going to do it and you're not going to stick with it. So for me, in this case, I really love the audio format. I'm comfortable with it. It's easy for me. I don't have to blow dry my hair and put on makeup for an hour before every podcast interview. I can just show up and have a great conversation, you know what I mean? At the end of the day, the most important thing is that you get great content out there, and if that means video, great. If that means audio, great. Whatever you're going to really love doing, I think is the best format. Max: Kathleen, that is so important. I hadn't really thought of that before you were mentioning it, but the most important thing with content is that you're consistent with it. And people will say, "Well, it's not about writing 10,000 blogs a week. It's about getting great content." Yes, but in some respects you do have to be consistent. That's the nature of the personal brand. That's how you're going to continue to grow your audience, continue to provide value. You do need to be consistent, and the one thing that prevents people from being consistent is they hate doing it. So here's a tip. Write down all the things you hate about creating content, and simply don't do those things anymore. If I had created a list back when I was writing blogs, it would be speaking with an editor, trying to write what was in my head. So what did I do? I removed that. I no longer write articles. I do video interviews, and I don't need to try and write down what's in my head because of these great transcription services. So the number one thing, to your point, is it's got to be fun. Kathleen: Absolutely. Max: Boy, what a cool rule to follow. Kathleen: You said earlier, "Don't ever hire anybody to write blogs for you," and I would just caveat that and say that I have seen that work, but really it only works well where the person or the company that's writing the blog for you is phone interviewing you. So if you were my client, and you just said you don't love to write, and if I was like, "Max, we need to get written blogs on your site," the only way that can work in an outsourced scenario is if you and I do a 30 minute phone call and I record it, just like you're talking about doing, and I give that recording to a writer, because then what they're really doing is just massaging your own words and turning them into a written format. If you're not doing that, it's really, really difficult to get an authentic sounding, detailed, meaty piece of content that works really well. Max: Yeah. And maybe that's the opinionated me having an opinion on it that isn't always going to be right. I think there's definitely a place for professional writers that have developed knowledge and expertise in certain areas. That's my caveat to it. If you're going to hire somebody to do your blogging and actually be the one contributing the expertise, they have to be experts. If you, yourself, are the subject matter expert, and it's your expertise, then the more you can make it easy for your writer to not have to reinvent, to not have to make up, to not have to sound like an expert, to literally take the words out of your mouth and provide the flow, provide the organization. But the words, the insights need to come from the subject matter expert, and we have the technology to very easily capture those words exactly. Kathleen: One hundred percent. So, all right, let's go back for a second. You started talking about how everybody should start by talking with their actual customers, or somebody who's a representative of their customer. Walk me through that. Give me examples of where you've done it or where somebody that you've advised has done it, and what does that look like when that content is produced and published? Max: Yeah, so I actually did this by accident. When I went out on my own as a consultant, I knew that I wanted to have fun, and I knew that having beers with people that were truly experts in their space was something that I did during marketing events in Boston once a year, and it was a great time. So I said why not do that like all the time?  I created this show, this video show, called Beers With Max, and all I knew is I wanted to interview people that were experts in their industry and that had a business model that was more than delivering a service one-to-one, they had some type of productized intellectual property, because I wanted to motivate and give confidence to people that were stuck in a traditional one-to-one services model. That's how it started, and what I realized is that, by reaching out to people with that genuine message and saying, "Look, I want to have a beer with you online, and we'll ask some questions, and here's the people that I'm trying to motivate. What do you think?" I just kept getting more yeses, and so I started raising the bar in the traditional sense of the analogy, and I started to reach out to established authors and speakers and CEOs. And it turns out, people are very willing to have an open conversation sharing their challenges, sharing what they've done to be successful in their own right. Good people are sort of naturally motivated to give back, and that's what I'm trying to do with my show, is get people to talk about what they've done to try and inspire others. And what happened by accident is a lot of those relationships turned into new business, because I wasn't trying to sell people things. I was actually talking to my grandfather last night, having dinner, 93 years old, and he goes, "You know, I was never ..." He made a lot of money, put it that way. He said, "You know, I was never able to sell things, but people bought from me," because he never tried to sell them anything. He just created a relationship, and I think that's what naturally happens when you're including people in your process of educating the marketplace. So, that's how I get all of my clients today for product development. That's what I use Beers With Max for. And then I started to say, "You know what? Maybe I'm not the only one." I had a client that was a marketing agency focused specifically in providing services to the publishing space. So we created a show happy hour, and we reached out to distributors who we knew had relationships with hundreds of publishers, and we said, "Great, we're going to have a cocktail and we're going to interview you about the biggest challenge in publishing companies." And magically, every time we interview a distributor, that distributor sends out a message saying, "Hey, check out this interview that I did," to the hundreds of publishers that they work with. Bam, new business created. I've got a technology client who is a differentiator, and their opinion is that people that are investing in sales enablement and sales coaching are being failed by technology. They don't feel that the current sales technology landscape is supporting sales enablement and sales coaching. So that's what his show Technical Difficulties is about, and he reaches out to CEOs of his target audience, interviews them, and the magical part is, anyone that says yes to that interview is, by default, his ideal ideal customer. They have to be investing in those things or else they wouldn't agree to an interview about investing in those things. Social Mixers is a show by an agency I work with that specializes in social media. Again, I always try to have an alcohol theme because I think it says "no prep required." It's going to be fun. Kathleen: You know what it reminds me of? Have you ever seen Jerry Seinfeld's show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee? Max: Someone made that reference when they heard about Beers With Max. I haven't seen it myself, but yes, I've- Kathleen: It's awesome. He has these other comedians, and they literally ... Every episode is him driving a different car. I don't know where he gets all these cars, but he matches the car to the person that he's with. And so one week it'll be ... It was like, I think he did one with Garry Shandling. He's done one with Sarah Silverman. They just literally film him in the car, getting coffee, and talking about, as Jerry Seinfeld does, random things. So it sort of reminds me of that, but I love it. I love the concept. Max: Well, I wonder how much a collaborative ... I'm sure Jerry Seinfeld makes his money through relationships and through different gigs that he's interested in, so I'm sure he's got a very similar payoff of interviewing different comedians. Kathleen: Yeah. And every comedian he interviews is pretty high profile, and as you say, they share it, and that just amplifies the audience that much more for him. So that's neat. Now, they've got all these different shows. Are these all video shows? Max: They're really whatever. In the beginning I was like, "Wow, you need to do video because video automatically makes everything more productive." Google likes video more in email -- higher click rates and such. But what it comes down to is what people enjoy and what they're comfortable with. I can force a client to do a video interview and it's awkward and it's weird, and that's just not sustainable. So sometimes it takes the form of research, and it's not a video conversation. Sometimes people are writing books and they want to gather opinions. It's whatever they're comfortable with, and it's whatever they want to naturally produce. I want to produce a show because I'm charismatic and I just love getting on video. Other people like writing books, they're serial authors. Great. You've got another book coming out, go interview people that you want to feature their insights in your book. So whatever makes you tick, include your customers in the ticking. Kathleen: And I imagine that there's so much you learn in the process. As marketers, we always come back to one of the cornerstones of any good marketing strategy is your audience persona -- understanding that target audience. I imagine even if you never got any new leads from doing this, you would still reap so many benefits from learning more and more about your target audience and that would make you better in other ways. Max: Yeah. You know, my grandfather said one other thing last night that really resonated with me. He said, "Nobody's going to buy from you unless you know what you're talking about." If I was ever asked, "Max, what gives you the right to charge me money, to charge money for what you think we should do?" I would say, "Hey, you're not getting it from me." I spend every day thinking about new leaders in the market to interview, and that's what I do. That's the only way I can have some relevance in this fast changing world. So unless you've got somebody having the amount of conversations with different experts, unless you've got somebody that's that dedicated to learning, maybe we should listen to me. Kathleen: What makes any consultant qualified, right? When you first start consulting, you've got to start somewhere, and it's about, I think, innately being able to connect dots. I used to be a management consultant, so most management consultants I know don't come from a deep level of technical expertise in the industry to which they're providing their consulting. They are people who know how to connect dots and who know how to research and learn quickly and package that information in a way that's useful for their client. Max: Yeah. Well- Kathleen: Not saying that you're not an expert, just saying that I think that's an interesting element of pushback that you got. Max: Well, you know, that's an interesting thing, the concept of an expert. I look at a strategist as a dot connector. A strategist will help a client identify what the most important opportunities are and come up with a plan to pursue those opportunities, but then you've got a very different type of expert, and that is an expert that has focused their lives and their learning on a particular practice area or a particular industry, and those experts are the tools that a strategist has available to them. So like in my strategy work, for example, I pitch it in three ways, but one of the ways is I am going to help you build your A-team, because if somebody is a Linkedin expert, but is also an SEO expert, but also knows how to do Facebook advertising, guess what? They know how to do a bunch of things relatively well. It's like a bed of nails. If you'd lay down on a bed of nails, you're not going to get pricked. It's dull. It's nullified. Kathleen: Jack of all trades, master of none. Max: That's so much more prominent today, as you've got thousands of technologies, and the different practices in marketing are just ... The complexity is skyrocketing, so what we need is a group of people that have focused in particular areas, and as a strategist we can identify when it's the most appropriate time to bring in those experts. And again, creating focus is the best thing you can do in this increasingly complex marketing landscape. Kathleen: Yeah. So you've had your show Beers With Max for how long now? Max: A little over two years. Kathleen: Okay. And you've already mentioned that that has resulted in new business opportunities for you. Max: All of the business opportunities. Kathleen: And how have those come about? Like if somebody is listening to this and thinking, "Okay, I'm going to test this approach," is it that old "Field of Dreams" thing, like "If you build it they will come," or are there certain things that you advise people do in order to maximize the likelihood that listeners will turn into leads? Max: I'll use the Field of Dreams analogy. It's kind of like going out into the cornfield, finding somebody, and dragging them by the hand back to your house and going, "Look, here he is." I don't have to build the shit. He's right here. And excuse me, I don't know if you're- Kathleen: No, you can say that on here. Max: I won't say it too many times, but I got excited. Yeah, it's, what is the downside of having a conversation with your ideal customers? I think the thing that holds people back from trying it, is the fear of reaching out. It's the same reason they do in marketing and wait for leads to show up. We have to combine reaching out with the noble idea of.inbound marketing -- educating the marketplace and actually providing value. So it's a combination of reaching out and actually having a conversation with the people you want to work with, but as my 93 year old grandfather would say, "Don't try and sell to them." This is about learning. This is about educating the marketplace. And people that are willing to collaborate with you on that and share that vision oftentimes are your best customers and they're a joy to work with. So it comes about, again, this was an accident, and it was probably the best accident that ever happened to me, but I'd reach out and I'd start off with a 15 minute conversation before the show about what they were up to, what challenges they'd seen in the marketplace, what they've done that's unique, and then they would ask me that and now we're introduced. Now we know who each other are, and then when do an interview, and we have a beer, and it's fun and people show up. Maybe some relationships are created. But we're having an interesting conversation, and what happened was nine times out of ten people would say, "Hey, I'm interested to learn more about what you're doing. That was a fun conversation. I'd have fun having another conversation." And that never happens when you're trying to sell something to them or to somebody. So create as many accidental conversations, but just have faith that creating value and speaking with people that you might eventually want to work with is gonna build some lasting relationships. I'll never forget the conversation I had with my grandfather. Literally last night, he was like, "I built really incredible relationships with people I happen to do business with." And that's how he was able to be so successful whilst being a terrible salesperson. Kathleen: One of my favorite things about this interview is that I have gotten so many little knowledge bombs secondhand from your dad and your grandfather. Max: Well they certainly don't come from me, so - Kathleen: It's great, I love it! There was a famous twitter account a few years back called Shit My Dad Says. So there you go, I'm saying the word, too. And I feel like you have a "Shit My Grandpa Says" opportunity, because there's so many great little tidbits of advice there. Max: Well, if I had to learn from people, it would be people in their 90's. They tend to have a lot of experiences. Kathleen: Yeah. That's great. So you have a great name for this approach to creating content. Can you share that with everybody? Max: Well it's really if you take the approach of doing a video interview and then you get the audio as a natural byproduct and you get the text as a natural byproduct, I look at that as the pinnacle of what you can do in creating content and it's worked so well for me. I call it the "Rockstar Creative Method," because you kind of have to have that rockstar mentality to do a video show. You don't have to be a rockstar, but that's sort of the persona you take on is that you're going to host a show and it's about the person you're interviewing and there are other ways to do it but rarely do you get all three consumption formats. You get video, you get audio and you get text. So if you want to be a rockstar, there you go! Kathleen: I like the Rockstar Creative method. You heard it here first. Kathleen's Two Questions So changing gears for a minute here, I always ask my guests the same two questions and as somebody who's been in this industry for a long time, I'm very curious to hear what your responses are going to be. The first question is, company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Max: Well, you know, I knew you were going to ask that and I was hesitant at first, but you guys are probably -- and when I say you guys I mean IMPACT Branding -- probably one of my best examples of doing this. Because Kathleen, you don't just have your show. If you look at all the shows and podcasts that IMPACT is doing, you're taking all of the most valuable personal brands within your organization and you're applying this method. From everything we've talked about about personal brands and creating content and including folks in the content creation process, I mean you guys are doing it perfectly. Once you understand what you're looking for, you could do content marketing really well without this. It's that traditional way of creating content and hoping for people to show up. If you got in early enough, if you're one of the early movers west, congratulations! Because you probably have a lot of traffic and you generate a lot of opportunities, but for individual entrepreneurs that are just getting into this or companies that were a little late to the game, they need a golden ticket. They need something different. You look at new companies that just started out that are so successful like DataBox, pretty much overnight they've created an incredible blog and the whole strategy was to use their partners to generate content. And guess what? That's exactly what HubSpot did. They took their content team and expanded their efforts by using their partners and their ideal customers collaboratively to generate content. And now that you're looking at it through this lens, you look at all the most popular blogs, and the blogs and the content isn't being created by one person or faceless marketers. It's being created by real subject matter experts in collaboration with the people that would potentially buy their products or services. Kathleen: Well thank you for the very kind words about IMPACT's content. I mean, I will say that we're very fortunate, because we're an agency full of marketers, that we have so many people on our team who are very comfortable creating content, and so with almost 60- employees, we have a very deep well from which to draw that content out. Pretty much everyone in the company contributes once a month to our blog, but we also do -- as you noticed -- we have a lot of people that are even more prolific and have decided to start podcasts. It's kind of funny, because we didn't set out to have whatever it is, five or six podcasts that we have now. It's just that we had a lot of people who said, "You know what? I'm just gonna do this." And the company said, "Great, go ahead and do it!" And we wound up with almost our own channel of podcasts, if you will. Max: It's a collection of personal brands which I love to see because I think people are buying from people, and people are attracted to people. Is it the IMPACT brand that's so attractive or is the cumulative of the six personal brands that are doing shows all the time and the other 60 personal brands that are experts in their own right creating content as well? I'd tend to say the latter. Kathleen: Yeah and what you said about DataBox is very true. I had Pete Caputa who is the CEO on as one of my earlier guests and I think the title of that episode was How to 6X Your Organic Traffic In Six Months, and exactly how he did it is what you said. He used all of his network, his audience, his ideal customers as contributors and it made it much easier for him to create content. It made it easier for him to go faster with a small staff, and now his staff is getting much bigger because they've been successful and it's been like this kind of cumulative effect. So it absolutely does work. Max: Well it was actually Pete that made me realize what I was doing, what I was accidentally doing. It was a webinar that he was on, and he said, "If you're not creating content with your target audience you're doling it wrong." Kathleen: Yeah. Max: A light bulb went off and I was lik, "Oh, yeah. That's what I'm doing. That's why this is so great." Kathleen: Well, and the funny thing about Pete -- I think he said this when I interviewed him -- he was like, "I talk about this all the time, about how people should be doing this and how it's worked for us." And he's like, "You would be amazed at how almost nobody actually does it. They hear me say it. They know it works, but they just don't go do it." So he's like, "I want to see who's going to be the first one to listen to this episode and do it themselves." That's why. I think you have the opportunity for that last number of people to get to California as you were saying earlier. They know what it takes to get to California. Somebody has told them where the path is and how to get there. They're just not doing it. Max: All you gotta do is follow directions. The directions are right there. Kathleen: Yeah. Max: Yeah, no, he's very right. That's been my experience as well. Even when people pay for this advice and strategies to lay out exactly how they should be doing it, the resistance is a lot more than you'd expect. Kathleen: Absolutely. Well, you talked earlier about how you advise companies and what they're buying is not only your expertise, it's the cumulative expertise of you plus all the people that you're regularly talking to. And so that leads me to my last question for you which is, with the world of digital marketing changing so quickly, how do you stay up to date? Max: Talk with experts all the time. My favorite book right now is by David C. Baker, it's always on my desk. It's not today. The name of the book is Business of Expertise. He sort of addresses this question in that an expert won't know everything. An expert will know what he's not an expert in. That's what defines an expert. But he will have an opinion on everything. So it's this process of, how do you consistently build your opinions on different things out there in the marketplace? And for me, the best way that I've found to do that is to actually speak with the experts. They tend to be pretty willing to share their experiences and the biggest insights that they've gained over the years. So I would say get out and talk to the people. You can subscribe to their blogs and this and that, but nothing beats actually speaking with somebody that's dedicated their life to a particular practice area or industry segment and just listening to them. And having no preconceived agenda on what you're going to talk about. Just, "Hey, learn me something! What are you up to? What's going on in LinkedIn these days?" You'd be surprised at what you'd hear and those conversations make that bag of knowledge, that list of opinions that you have so valuable for somebody that doesn't know where to start. Kathleen: Absolutely, that's exactly why I do my podcast. For me, it's all about learning. I learn something new every single time I talk to somebody, without fail. Max: Yeah, like when I was paying for a college education, why didn't I have a different professor every day? Kathleen: That's a great point. Max: That would have been amazing. Want to get in touch with Max? Kathleen: Yeah. Certainly would make it less boring sometimes. Well, this has been so great, and if somebody wants to get in touch with you and ask a question about what you've discussed here or wants to talk to you about helping them with some coaching, what's the best way for them to reach you online? Max: Maxtraylor.com, it's very easy to find the little button that says "Book a time," and there's some videos on me if you haven't gotten enough of my opinions. It would be a fun conversation and given the nature of my learning, I'm really interested in talking to anybody that's got something on their mind because I typically learn from it and sometimes create some content out of it. Kathleen: All right. Well I'll put a link to your site in the show notes and so if you're interested in reaching out to Max, make sure to check those out. Have you reviewed the podcast yet? If you listened to this podcast interview and liked what you heard or learned something from it, I would really appreciate it if you would consider giving the podcast a review on Stitcher, iTunes, SoundCloud wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you know somebody who is doing really kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at workmommywork because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thanks, Max. Max: Thank you, Kathleen. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate the invite. Kathleen: For me as well.

It's tough making decisions as an agency owner! From your first hire to knowing when it's time to sell. Here's advice from an 11-year agency owner veteran on some of the key attributes to look for in your agency's first hire as well as some simple considerations to help you know if it's time to sell your agency. In this episode, we'll cover: The #1 thing to look for in a first hire. Is it time to sell your agency? Today I chatted up Kathleen Booth, VP of Marketing at Impact, a resource for inbound marketers, and host of the Inbound Success podcast. After growing her own digital marketing agency for 11 years, from startup to a HubSpot platinum level partner, Kathleen read the signs that it was time to move on and sold her agency in a merger. She shares with us how she made big agency leadership decisions, from her first hire to selling the agency. The #1 Thing To Look For In a First Hire A burning, insatiable desire to learn and figure things out! The digital marketing landscape is ever-evolving and your agency needs people who will evolve with it. Your agency wants people with a good marketing presence. Remember, this could be a person with any number of marketing-type backgrounds, so don't limit your interview process by job title. Kathleen suggests hiring someone who can take tasks off your plate. (In most cases, I advise hiring a Project Manager - here's why.) As an owner, you need to be able to focus on strategy and building your agency, not on tedious tasks that could be handed off. Be sure your candidate can manage a client, so you don't have to. It's time for you to step away from managing agency clients and details. Clients value that to which they don't have easy access. Meaning, if you're accessible all the time, clients won't value your time and they won't pay as much for it. Keep your interactions consistent, but spread out. Time To Consider Selling Your Digital Agency? Are you still having fun? You need to love what you're doing. Kathleen was having fun for the first 10 years, but the 11th year was draining. Is your agency scalable to the level you want to be? In Kathleen's case her agency's growth was tied to being an early Hubspot partner. But as their program grew her agency's lead generation suffered. If you answer "no" to either of these questions it might be time to consider selling. Kathleen was faced with either pushing ahead, doubling down to grow and scale OR selling her agency and moving on. If you're thinking of selling, use your network and start putting out feelers. It was easier for Kathleen to make her decision, because she found an interested party. Be self aware. Don't let money and ego get in the way of making the right decisions for you and your agency. The best entrepreneurs know when it's time to walk away and can do so fast. Ready to Discover the Best Agency Strategies Working Today? [Invitation-Only Group for Digital Agency Owners] Most agency owners struggle to scale. We’ve developed a process that will guide you through the journey of implementing the right systems so you can scale your agency — instead of feeling overwhelmed by it. We do this by bringing together agency thought leaders to share strategies, offer advice, and reveal what’s working (and what’s not working) in their agency. The truth is, whatever you want to accomplish in life, nothing will help you go further, faster than getting the right advisor in the context of motivated peers. If you want to GROW fast and smart, here's how Agency University™ Mastermind will HELP. Request your personal invite here.

On this episode of AMPUP Your Digital Marketing we continue our series that explores the benefits of marketing via podcasting with Kathleen booth. Kathleen is the Vice President of Marketing at IMPACT and host of the podcast InBound Success where she explores what the most successful inbound marketers do to get results. InBound Success isn’t Kathleen’s first podcast but since launching it she has discovered the power of a niche podcast in generating leads, engaging with an audience and building community.