Podcast appearances and mentions of jeff rohrs

CEO Jonathan Gandolf sits down with Jeff Rohrs, VP of Brand Marketing at Active Campaign, one of the best marketers in the world, and a recovering attorney and former radio DJ. The two discuss the evolution of B2B marketing and executing on crazy ideas. Jeff's latest ambitious venture is a 29-hour digital event. Learn to be a more efficient marketer by registering for free for The Active Campaign Leap Day Extravaganza. Link below!0:00 Introducing Jeff and Active Campaign7:00 The Active Campaign Leap Day Extravaganza11:08 Executing on crazy ideas20:00 Past life as DJ22:25 Evolution of B2B marketing29:50 Register for free and get connectedShow Links:Register for the ActiveCampaign Leap Day ExtravaganzaConnect with JeffLearn more about ActiveCampaignAudience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans, and FollowersConnect with JonathanLearn more about The Juice

Wondering how to spend an extra day in February? "Make time for what matters" This is the inspiration behind ActiveCampaign's Leap Day Extravaganza Event scheduled to run on the 29th of February over 29 hours! On the Leap Day Extravaganza Virtual Event, the aim is to assist small business owners and marketers in saving time and increasing productivity through the use of technology, strategy, and process. It will run for 29 hours on February 29th, starting at 8 a.m. Sydney time and ending at 6 p.m. Los Angeles time. It's been a while since we had an event like this - I hope to see you there! Tune into Spotify Father Time's Leap Day Mixtape Here Timestamp: 00:00:24 - Leap Year: An Extra Day in February00:01:56 - The Quirkiness of Leap Years and Making Time00:03:30 - Utilizing Time Zones for a 29-Hour Event00:09:49 - Rand Fishkin's Chill Work Philosophy00:11:25 - Four-Day Work Week Discussion00:13:49 - Fractional CMOs and Time Management Research00:14:53 - Agency and Client Relationship Dynamics00:17:09 - Finding Work-Life Balance00:23:50 - Music and Time-Themed Spotify Mixtape00:25:15 - Beekeeping and Marketing Here's where you can learn more about this event: https://leapday.activecampaign.com/ #makemoretime Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/activecampaign/  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/activecampaign/ LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/activecampaign Threads: https://www.threads.net/@activecampaign TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@activecampaign X(Twitter): https://twitter.com/ActiveCampaign YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ActiveCampaign

Kerry Gray was the program director at 97X in the late 80s/early 90s, and a radio "lifer." He was a real live wire - super-energetic, enthusiastic, funny as heck... and also completely into the music. In fact, Kerry and Phil Manning teamed up to expand the back catalogue of the station, and they also launched the first ever "Modern Rock 500" in 1989.  In this episode, Julie Maxwell, Julie Maxwell, Jeff Rohrs, Mike Taylor and Steve Baker join Dave and Damian to share their remembrances, and the episode wraps up with some archival audio of Kerry and Brett Heartz on-air at 97X back in October of 1989.

Here's Part 2 of our interview with Jeff "DJ Sloth" Rohrs, where he talks about the community of music lovers at 97X, the great program directors during his tenure, his scary sighting on the Party Patio, his side hustles (DJ... and grocery bagger), and "Balogh University." 

Jeff Rorhs was hooked on 97X from the very first song he heard on the station. In fact, he attended Miami University mostly because of 97X, and he was so determined to work at the station that he played polka music at his hometown radio station just to get on-air experience. All that polka-playing paid off - he wound up working weekends and fill-in shifts at 97X for his entire college career, from 1987 through 1991. In this episode, we talk to Jeff about that first song he heard, how he scored the weekend gig, his unfortunate mispronunciation of an artist's name, how he pissed off Doug Balogh, the longest song in the 97X library, the bands he championed both at 97X and on his music video show at Miami U., his MTV regrets, and the Violent Femmes concert at Bogart's when it started raining on the stage. 

We all swarmed to remote work and virtual meetings over the past 15 months and now are experiencing “Zoom fatigue” from the debilitating sameness of each meeting. We toggle between so many tools from slack to PowerPoint to calendars and are struggling to authentically collaborate. Meet the Bee Keeper, Filo CMO Jeff Rohrs, who is helping our virtual hives flow. Filo reduces the friction in remote collaboration, enabling distributed teams to work better, together. Born from a Sprint Week at Venture Studio High Alpha.

"And then the other piece of it was just the fear of losing a job increased dramatically... So the top line headline was one of anxiety in the marketplace." Jeff Rohrs, Jobvite In recent months things have turned upside down not just for many employers but for job seekers as well. In this episode Ben talks with Jeff Rohrs of Jobvite to discuss the company's annual Job Seeker Nation study and the key findings that HR and talent leaders need to know, from how job seekers feel right now to what place internal hiring and mobility practices have in the recruiting process (hint: they are the #1 thing candidates are looking for).  Learn more at: https://www.jobvite.com/lp/2020-job-seeker-nation-report/

CodeSignal Tech Screen: A better way to evaluate your candidate skills fairly and consistently.

Oscar Allain is Vice President of Cross-Cultural Strategy and Research at UM Worldwide. He focuses on reaching the rapidly changing multicultural audiences in the US. Oscar talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, about brands being part of the cultural conversation and doing it the right way.  Key Points - WAVE is UM’s annual study to gain a better understanding of the digital world. This year they decided to quantify the Remix cultures.  - Remix Culture studies the movements within cultures that are being influenced by ethic or minorities such as Hispanics, Asians and LGBT communities. They want to understand what the implications are for certain businesses.   - ReMix’s four cultural pillars - Resist, Retrograde, Re-globallize, Recreate - Latinos have changed over past 20 years from need to assimilate to amping up on sense of identity.  - Ethnic Cultures are part of movement/generations that speak up against things that don’t align with values, ability to retro-culturate, have a cultural mindset that impacts mainstream culture, and maintains an entrepreneurial spirit.  - Quantify Remix mindset - Not generational. In Nigeria it’s 16-24 year olds, in China it’s 25-34 year olds, and in US it’s 16-44 year olds. These are groups leading the conversation and are the agents of change.  - How do brands play in conversation? - eg - Nike (Resist), Netflix (Retrograde), Uniqlo (Reglo), Starbucks (Recreate) - Brands are encouraged to be a part of the cultural conversation and doing it the right way.  - Best Brands are true and authentic to the brand and consumer. Need to recognize new movements like LantinX and keep focused on changing cultures.  For More Information For more information on Oscar, Remix Culture, and UM Worldwide check out umww.com For similar podcasts, check out: Ep. 134 – Paramount Pictures’ Futurist Ted Schilowitz on VR, AR & Mixed Reality Ep. 130 – Canopy Insight’s Victoria Gerstman on Culture’s Influence on Brands & Semiotics Ep. 122 – Jeff Rohrs, Yext CEO and Author of Audience: Marketing in the age of subscribers, fans and followers Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.   FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Oscar Allain is Vice President of Cross-Cultural Strategy and Research at UM Worldwide. He focuses on reaching the rapidly changing multicultural audiences in the US. Oscar talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, about brands being part of the cultural conversation and doing it the right way.  Key Points - WAVE is UM’s annual study to gain a better understanding of the digital world. This year they decided to quantify the Remix cultures.  - Remix Culture studies the movements within cultures that are being influenced by ethic or minorities such as Hispanics, Asians and LGBT communities. They want to understand what the implications are for certain businesses.   - ReMix’s four cultural pillars - Resist, Retrograde, Re-globallize, Recreate - Latinos have changed over past 20 years from need to assimilate to amping up on sense of identity.  - Ethnic Cultures are part of movement/generations that speak up against things that don’t align with values, ability to retro-culturate, have a cultural mindset that impacts mainstream culture, and maintains an entrepreneurial spirit.  - Quantify Remix mindset - Not generational. In Nigeria it’s 16-24 year olds, in China it’s 25-34 year olds, and in US it’s 16-44 year olds. These are groups leading the conversation and are the agents of change.  - How do brands play in conversation? - eg - Nike (Resist), Netflix (Retrograde), Uniqlo (Reglo), Starbucks (Recreate) - Brands are encouraged to be a part of the cultural conversation and doing it the right way.  - Best Brands are true and authentic to the brand and consumer. Need to recognize new movements like LantinX and keep focused on changing cultures.  For More Information For more information on Oscar, Remix Culture, and UM Worldwide check out umww.com For similar podcasts, check out: Ep. 134 – Paramount Pictures’ Futurist Ted Schilowitz on VR, AR & Mixed Reality Ep. 130 – Canopy Insight’s Victoria Gerstman on Culture’s Influence on Brands & Semiotics Ep. 122 – Jeff Rohrs, Yext CEO and Author of Audience: Marketing in the age of subscribers, fans and followers Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.   FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

James Gill is founder and CEO of GoSquared, a simple, live analytics platform for websites. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, spoke with James about product trends, design, getting close to the customer and growing a company outside the Valley. Based in London, James started GoSquared with friends, while still in school. They found success in building websites, but soon were asked how the sites were performing. Very few tools existed at the time, to answer these questions. Since then, GoSquared has created simple analytics software, on a subscription basis, for small businesses around the world. What trends are allowing you to build new things? - No code applications. - Real-time and live response.  - Everyone today wants to have an online presence or small businesses. - We always wanted to work with small businesses and integrate into similar products like Go Daddy, Wordpress, Shopify, etc - Make it as easy as possible.  How do you decide what you develop? - Everyone has a different process depending on what works for each company. Some use tons of Data. Data creates lots of confidence in decisions. - We use our insights and engage with our customers. E.g., Onboarding - Do a lot of user testing. Make it fun. We show the visitors to your website instantly. Gamification. How do you introduce new products and services? - Software is being adopted from bottom up, before senior management even knows about it.  - Solving problems wins. Trend in B to B software. See small business/startups as early adopters. - Use new tools for Corporates that don’t need IT support. Cheaper and faster.  Ability to get close to the customer. - GoSquared changed dynamics to get immediate feedback from customers.  - Test out ideas immediately. E.g., Landing pages and Payments - Zapier and Airtable. What was it like to build a tech company outside of the Valley? - We didn’t make a choice. Left school and stayed in London. Thirty-seven signals/BaseCamp inspired us.  - We build great products and tell our story and what we’ve been learning. We don’t spend much on Marketing. We share what we learn. Building trust. Sharing what we learned on our Blog.  https://www.gosquared.com/blog/ What’s Next? - Training for the London Marathon in April - Introducing Free Tier soon - More new product improvement to help customers grow. For More Information For more information on James Gill or GoSquared see gosquared.com, @GoSquared or @Jamesjgill on Twitter.  If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy:  Ep. 130 – Canopy Insight’s Victoria Gerstman on Culture’s Influence on Brands & Semiotics; Ep. 129 – Paul Jarrett of Bulu on New Trends in Collaborative Marketing; Ep. 122 – Jeff Rohrs, Yext CEO and Author of Audience: Marketing in the age of subscribers, fans and followers; Ep. 114 – Canva’s Cameron Adams on Democratization of Design; and Ep. 113 – ProfitWell founder Patrick Campbell on Growth, Pricing and SaaS Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.   FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

James Gill is founder and CEO of GoSquared, a simple, live analytics platform for websites. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, spoke with James about product trends, design, getting close to the customer and growing a company outside the Valley. Based in London, James started GoSquared with friends, while still in school. They found success in building websites, but soon were asked how the sites were performing. Very few tools existed at the time, to answer these questions. Since then, GoSquared has created simple analytics software, on a subscription basis, for small businesses around the world. What trends are allowing you to build new things? - No code applications. - Real-time and live response.  - Everyone today wants to have an online presence or small businesses. - We always wanted to work with small businesses and integrate into similar products like Go Daddy, Wordpress, Shopify, etc - Make it as easy as possible.  How do you decide what you develop? - Everyone has a different process depending on what works for each company. Some use tons of Data. Data creates lots of confidence in decisions. - We use our insights and engage with our customers. E.g., Onboarding - Do a lot of user testing. Make it fun. We show the visitors to your website instantly. Gamification. How do you introduce new products and services? - Software is being adopted from bottom up, before senior management even knows about it.  - Solving problems wins. Trend in B to B software. See small business/startups as early adopters. - Use new tools for Corporates that don’t need IT support. Cheaper and faster.  Ability to get close to the customer. - GoSquared changed dynamics to get immediate feedback from customers.  - Test out ideas immediately. E.g., Landing pages and Payments - Zapier and Airtable. What was it like to build a tech company outside of the Valley? - We didn’t make a choice. Left school and stayed in London. Thirty-seven signals/BaseCamp inspired us.  - We build great products and tell our story and what we’ve been learning. We don’t spend much on Marketing. We share what we learn. Building trust. Sharing what we learned on our Blog.  https://www.gosquared.com/blog/ What’s Next? - Training for the London Marathon in April - Introducing Free Tier soon - More new product improvement to help customers grow. For More Information For more information on James Gill or GoSquared see gosquared.com, @GoSquared or @Jamesjgill on Twitter.  If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy:  Ep. 130 – Canopy Insight’s Victoria Gerstman on Culture’s Influence on Brands & Semiotics; Ep. 129 – Paul Jarrett of Bulu on New Trends in Collaborative Marketing; Ep. 122 – Jeff Rohrs, Yext CEO and Author of Audience: Marketing in the age of subscribers, fans and followers; Ep. 114 – Canva’s Cameron Adams on Democratization of Design; and Ep. 113 – ProfitWell founder Patrick Campbell on Growth, Pricing and SaaS Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.   FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

How can a small business dominate digital lead gen in the most competitive industry when it comes to online marketing? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, entrepreneur and author Brian J. Greenberg shares the digital marketing formula he used to take on the giants of the life insurance industry and drive growth for his small insurance startup.  Brian has documented his process in his book, "The Salesman Who Doesn't Sell," but you can learn all about them in today's episode. Special Offer for Inbound Success Podcast Listeners: Click here to get your free audio copy of "The Salesman Who Doesn't Sell" Some highlights from our discussion include:  The life insurance industry is one of the top four most competitive industries to rank for in Google, but Brian has successfully grown traffic and leads to his website, often outranking major brand name competitors. Inspired by a talk given by Will Reynolds of Seer Interactive, Brian focuses on doing "really company stuff" in his internet marketing (basically, he doesn't try and game the system). He starts by building his website's link profile through high quality back links. Using freelancers he finds through Upwork.com, Brian writes keyword-rich articles that he gets placed on third party websites through his online PR efforts. He then shares those articles by linking to them on his website press page. Brian doesn't mind paying outsourced writers or PR experts because he knows the value of a high quality backlink (which he measures using SEMRush). He has a very thorough process for vetting outsourced writers that he uses to help with content creation. Brian is a contributor to online publications like Entrepreneur and Forbes and those sites have given him very high quality backlinks. He also writes long form answers on Quora and has found that these gain the attention of publications that then request to republish them. Brian uses cash incentives to encourage his staff to solicit online reviews and testimonials as a way of establishing site authority and boosting lead conversions. Brian measures ROI by determining the exact dollar value of a new backlink or online review. His marketing system has resulted in True Blue Life Insurance having a lead to customer conversion rate that is 10x that of its competitors. Listen to the podcast to learn, step-by-step, how to get killer inbound marketing results just like Brian has. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host):Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. My name's Kathleen Booth and I am your host and today my guest is Brian Greenberg, who is the CEO and founder at True Blue Life Insurance and the author of, "The Salesman Who Doesn't Sell." Welcome, Brian. Brian Greenberg (Guest): Hey, thanks for having me, Kathleen. Brian and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: Yeah, my pleasure. I got a little tongue tied there around saying True Blue. I think if I said it six times fast it would be a big jumble. Brian, I was excited to have you because I've been an agency owner for many years prior to joining Impact, and in that time I've worked with a number of insurance agencies and brokerages. I really came to appreciate that from an Inbound marketing and even just a broader digital marketing standpoint, it's one of, if not the most competitive industries. Because so much money is poured into digital marketing in insurance. There's so many 800 pound gorillas in the industry, and especially for independent brokerages, it can be very, very difficult to rank and to succeed with digital. You're somebody whose kind of figured it out, so much so that you've now written a book about what you're doing. So, before we dive too far into that, let's start by having you tell our audience a little bit about yourself and your background and what brought you here today. About Brian Greenberg Brian: Sure. I started in the internet marketing business back in 2003, so I'd kind of seen a lot of the evolution. Now I've always earned my money, been a business owner and passive income, by bringing in traffic through Google and Yahoo and MSN. I've always been able to rank real well in any of the main key words I've been able to do in the past. I have owned an organic internet marketing agency. I've owned several e-commerce agencies, there was one point where I owned about 8 different businesses at the same time. Kind of cut down on that, Kathleen. Kathleen: I was going to say Brian: Right now, I went into... Kathleen: You had eight businesses at once? I had one and that was enough to keep me up at night. About True Blue Life Insurance Brian: Yeah. Then I decided to go into True Blue life insurance - the life insurance industry, which is very profitable. It's one of the top four most competitive industries on the internet and it was a big challenge. I started a website a long time ago that had success and now I focus on it 100%. I am competing against a lot of big guys with a lot of deep pockets and knock on wood, I've been able to it very successfully for a long time now. Kathleen: That's amazing. You know, I think what's interesting to me is there are so many other business owners out there. I have a lot of listeners who are business owners. Who are naturally interested in marketing, either because they have to be, or because their businesses are a size where they can't afford not to be. There's a lot of marketing folks who are helping to grow smaller businesses. So, for somebody who's in a competitive industry, and looking at trying to get found online and to carve out a niche in the digital world, where do you start these days? You did it in life insurance, but again if you can do it there, I feel like you can do it anywhere. So walk me through what your approach is. Brian's Approach to Inbound Marketing Brian: Sure. The first thing I want to say you know, it was back in 2012 when Google came out with this penguin update and it kind of wiped out so many people that were doing too much organic SEO marketing. So Will Reynolds, he's the owner of Seer Interactive, he did this beautiful presentation, where he said from now on you have to do real company stuff. He had the abbreviation RCS. He had a profanity at the end of it, but it's RCS and what it means is that you should only be doing things that a real company would do. So, if you get offered somebody who is just going to do excessive log commenting or they're going to be spinning articles or they're going to put you in a private log network. You have to think, is that something a real company would do? So that's the first thing. Kathleen: Its seems like an obvious one right but it's surprising how many people don't get that one. Brian: Because people are contacted so often by SEO agencies that don't do things white hat. These days if you do things wrong you could actually end up hurting yourself, which is a terrible thing that I don't want people to do. So what I like to do is kind of build a website's link profile. Alright, so you're kind of building a foundation. You know, obviously you have content but below that I believe you have links and I'm trying to build up an authority website. So the first thing you should do is, you should go after all the easy links, all the directories in your markets, try to hit all the competitors. I don't know, get a listing on the better business bureau. Hit all the local directories and start getting known. And start getting those basic links and I think that's the good beginning of a link profile. Kathleen: Yeah, you know I had the CMO of Yext, Jeff Rohrs on the podcast a few months back. They're such a great service for doing exactly what you just described, which is getting started, getting your directory links set up, doing it right, making sure they're clean and all the information is consistent across them. And it's so reasonable. So, easy way to get started. So, let's say you've tackled that stage in the process, then what? Building Site Authority Through Back Links Brian: You want to start going after more authority links. High quality links. Now these days you don't need that many. So, you want to pose yourself as an expert. I am a big fan of doing online PR these days. Now online PR, you kind of gotta put yourself out there a little bit, but what I like doing is writing articles. Articles that I basically have a PR person, or I got on to Upwork and I have them release it to all the blogs, all the media outlets, and do my best to get those published. Now, there's a couple tricks on how to write these articles, to make them attractive to a lot of editors. Number one, you should always use a number in them if you can. It's definitely very helpful. "The Seven Ways This,"... "The Eight Ways This." I'm writing an article right now, "The Five Life Insurance Game Changers for 2019." I also recommend you use a catchy headline. I use a site called headlines.sharethrough.com. It is a free website, I have no idea why it's free, Kathleen. It's that good. You just kind of put your headline in there and it will give you a score, and it will also make suggestions on how to make it better. I've had great success with that. But if you give that to a PR person who has a good Rolodex, they have a good list, and you shop the around, it's wonderful to see it get picked up. And sometimes you'll get some interviews coming in as well. That's a great basis to put yourself out there. But you do as a business owner have to put yourself out there. It takes a little Chutzpah, to go after these types of links. Using Online PR to Get Back Links Kathleen: Now, you're writing these articles, do you have to already have published on your own site? Do you need to have examples of your work or are you really getting these articles published based purely on the merit of the article itself? Brian: Primarily based on the merit of the article to start. You know, once you start getting these published, you start building up a press page. I think that's a very important thing. I see so many people they'll get a great listing on Entrepreneur, or they'll do an interview at their local news station, but they won't put it on their website, which is a huge mistake. Those things are worth a lot of money. Because look, people see that on your website, it builds credibility and it lasts for such a long time. Especially if you can get it in some sort of interview on video, it's nice.  I just want to stress the importance of putting up a press page and listing all the placements you've got. It is not a form of bragging, it is an absolute must, to make it easier to get more pick ups. Kathleen: Yeah. You mentioned using either a PR firm or even going on Upwork and finding somebody who can distribute this kind of thing for you. I think for some small businesses, certainly working with PR firms can seem intimidating or it might seem too expensive. Can you tell us a little bit about how you've done it, what has the cost been to get placements? What should someone expect to spend and are there reasonably priced ways to go about doing this? Brian: The answer is yes. I think so many people who go to a big PR firm and people will charge you know at least $10,000.00 a month to take you on. You don't have to do that. There's so many people on free lancer websites, and that's a great way to find people. A lot of these people do have their own kind of websites that they do PR. Although, I can do a release for about $2,000.00. But more importantly, I get the people to guarantee me a certain amount of pick ups. So, I'll do a release, I use a company that's really good but I pay them $5,000.00, but they guarantee me at least 15 pickups, from authority websites that are real links back. Not just pickups that are a copy of a press release. They're real pickups. So, if you do that you can value how much those links are. Now in my book, a good link from a press release from an authority place is worth about $1,000.00 dollars to me. So I know how much I'm willing to pay for the links, and if you can get a PR firm to guarantee you a certain amount of links and they'll keep going until they get them, it's very hard to lose on that Kathleen. Kathleen: Now, how are you measuring authority of these links? Measuring Link Authority Brian: I'm not too strict on them. I like to use SEMrush. I have one of the toolbars that I keep open. As long as the website has basically organic traffic cost. I love this statistic. I use SEMrush and you know what they do? They take the keywords that you rank for and they convert it to if you were to pay for it on paper click, how much it's worth. So I know if the website is getting some traffic, if they're indexed, it's a valuable link. But more importantly Kathleen, it's an organic link, okay? So, even if it's not on that great of a website or that much of an authority of a website, it's a natural link and starts building up that link profile and it's worth actually a lot. Even these podcasts that I'm doing, Kathleen, is a way to build links. So you know a lot of people that run podcasts, they post the article and they'll link to my websites. Those are extremely valuable links that real companies do. Kathleen: Alright, I'm so glad you brought that up because, it's interesting, the push back that I often hear from business owners, when you say things like you need to write an article and get it published out there, a lot of times what I hear is, but I'm not a great writer. Or I don't like to write, or I can't write. And you know, I think it's great to know that there are options. Using Outsourced Writers Kathleen: You don't have to always write. You could go on podcasts and be a guest, if you find the right podcast with the right fit. And that's another way of doing this, so. Good point that you made there. Brian: I also want to say this. As a business owner you maybe a great writer, you may not. You don't have to write all your own articles. You know I have to have a knowledge of how to write articles. I read some books on writing and I practiced it. I love the book by Stephen King on writing well. Great book. But I hire free lancers to write articles. I do. Alright. You know it's very hard to keep generating these articles and run a business. I like to find freelancers. I do it on Upwork.com. You hire these people very similar to hiring normal employees. I like to get them on the phone. I interview them. When I give them an article, I'll actually have a phone call with them, for about a half an hour or an hour, and I'll go over all the content, and they'll provide it back to me. We'll massage it and make sure it's great, and then release it, because they're writing in your voice. You have to make sure you can edit it. But yes, you don't have to write them yourself, Kathleen. You can hire free lancers. There's a lot of firms that do so. So I definitely encourage people to do that. Kathleen: I'm glad you brought that up as well, because I think there's different ways of outsourcing article creation, and I've certainly had my experience with most of them. What I've seen is that where business owners outsource and they say, for example your article, Seven Insurance Game Changers for 2019. You know, if you just put something on Upwork and said I want somebody to write something on this, and you said go and write it, what you would get back would probably be, forgive my language, but total crap. Whereas, if you're outsourcing writing and you're willing to either write an outline with your key points, you are after all the subject matter expert, or if you're willing to be interviewed and find a writer who has a journalism background, often they can tease it out of you. I think taking a completely hands off approach is a tremendous, tremendous mistake. Brian: Yeah. You know it's about quality, not quantity. Absolutely. And yeah, I've made those mistakes too, Kathleen. I've hired people on a lot of these platforms iwriter, I don't know a bunch of them. You can't really just give somebody a topic and let them run with it. It's just not a good practice. What I've learned is that you want to find somebody you have a rapport with. And absolutely speak with them. If you're not going to be speaking with them verbally over the telephone, it's not really worth doing. You have to treat them almost like they're an employee. I like to find people that are quality writers, and I stick with them. Right. All these freelancers want long term relationships, and I find a couple and I stick with them. And absolutely keep having phone calls, get them on video, get them on zoom, and build a relationship with a writer because its so important if they write in your voice. And again, it's not about quantity. You don't want to pump these out. They have to be quality. Not little short blog posts, either. I like to write actual pages between 800 words and 1500 words. Kathleen: Yeah. Amen, on sticking with the writers, because it's like hiring anybody. Having that ramp up period can be painful and expensive and once you've gotten somebody to the point where they're doing the job you need them to do, hold on to them. So, alright. You're working on your back links, you're producing these articles, you're getting somebody to help distribute them out, so that you can get published elsewhere. What comes next? Contributing Guest Articles as a Back Linking Strategy Brian: Once you start building up that press page, there's a few different things you can do. I like to apply to become an editor, or a contributor. So right now I'm a contributor at Entrepeneur.com. And I am also on Forbes.com. There's a couple industry magazines that kind of come to me as well. I like to join organizations. If you can qualify for an organization, do it. I'm a member of the Million Dollar Roundtable of Insurance. Top 1% of financial advisors in the world. They keep coming to me and I write articles for them or they interview me for articles. I'm a member of the Young Entrepreneurship Council. They also have the Forbes Council. On those they have questions you can answer and you can get them published all over the web. So join organizations. I think sponsoring people is another great thing that you can do. You can just do a Google search for sponsors and find something locally, but make sure that they give you a link. One of the main things is I want to see if they're giving me a back link. I'll write testimonials for all the companies I do business with and I'll value them higher if they'll give me a link. I'm always after them. Now, some people say, “Oh, don't go after no follow links.” I'm kind of from the thinking of that I'm fine with no follow links. Do they help? I think they do. I think they build up your overall link profile. If you don't have a certain amount of no follow links, you're going to stand out in the Google algorithm as an unnatural link profile. No follow, follow, doesn't matter. Redirects, you'll want redirects. If you hover over that link, you want it to go to your website not a redirect. But every link that you build, everything you do, all I can say is everything I do, I'm looking for those link backs. Participating in Contributor Programs Kathleen: So let's go back to the beginning of what you just said, which was that you apply to be a contributor. And you talked about Entrepreneur and Forbes and those are two very well known, well regarded publications. I would imagine most business owners would be really excited to be able to contribute articles there. How hard is that to do? What's involved in that process? Brian: You have to have a little body of work. Again, it's so much as the press page. All these places they actually have a forum you'd be so surprised that you can apply to become a contributor. They don't hide it. You can say what your expertise is if you have an expertise in a certain niche, all the better. And if you have a body of work, these people want content. The other thing they're looking for Kathleen is what kind of following do you have? If you write an article they want people to come to the website. So if I'm building up a social media profile or my email list, I have 30,000 Twitter followers and 4,000 Facebook followers and I have an email list of 40,000, let these guys know then in the application. Huge. So those are the kinds of things that they're looking for to become a contributor. I do want to say, well a couple of other things, but I just want to make sure that I give you a chance in case you have questions. Kathleen: I'm curious about this because I've looked into these contributor programs before and what has stopped me from digging further is, well number one, I'm not sure that I could generate enough articles with enough frequency on top of doing my podcast. So I'm curious is there an expectation for how often you contribute? Is it however often you want to? How does the program work once you're in? And is it different from publication? Brian: I think they do want to a regular contributor, I would definitely say you're willing to do it for a month to begin. Use a freelancer to get started. What I found is though they don't really hold you to it. So if you give them a couple of articles, you can take a break for three months. Once you're in, you're in. They give you access to their admin console and you can submit articles whenever you want. So let them know that you want to do it for a month to begin. I just want to let people know that I've never had anyone holds me to it. Kathleen: That's good to know. So you said you had a few more things you wanted to add and I kind of interrupted you there. Let's go with what you were going to say. Other Back Linking Shortcuts  Brian: All right. There's a couple of shortcuts that I've been using lately. One is Quora. Quora is becoming a wonderful place to submit and contribute content. If you can write a really nice answer and format it a certain way, it actually gets picked up. I've had pick ups across the board on Forbes and sometimes you get picked up on Time, you get picked up on AOL. It's amazing how many people pick up Quora articles. You could also publish them on Medium and then you can build up a profile that way. So you don't really necessarily have to be a contributor to build up your kind of portfolio of work. When you're going on Quora, it's worth learning and you can see the people that are getting picked up, see the format that they're using and you put a link in those and you put a link back to your website and they let you have that. So I've gotten so many articles also published using Quora. Huge. I think it's kind of a secret that not many people talk about, but I'd like to share it with your listeners. The other is, I know it's kind of an old thing, but Help A Reporter Out (HARO), you can get a lot of pickups from that. It's such a pain to keep up with it. Although if you outsource it to a freelancer that really speaks in your voice and at least let them run with it, you can get pickups that way. Kathleen: Yeah, I get those HARO emails several times a day and they are gold mines and I have definitely gotten written up in some pretty big publications, but man, is it like drinking from the firehose? So now we can't keep going without stopping for a minute and I got to ask you to go into a little bit more detail on this Quora stuff because you are actually the first person who's talked about this on my podcast and I am always a sucker for these new channels and new strategies. So when you say you got to look at the way they format it, can you get detailed for a minute there and talk through that? Brian: Yeah, you have to format it. It's coming from you, so it has to be I and pose yourself as the expert. Those are huge. So right when the beginning you can say, look I've been doing this for 15 years. I've earned $50 million in revenue. Pose yourself as the expert and then organize it like a very good article. Now, there's a limit. You never want to go over a thousand words. The sweet spot is about 800 words. You want to give specifics, you want to organize it kind of with the headings on there and then they have kind of like internal blogs on Quora and you can submit it there as well. So that's the secondary thing you should do. They kind of have industry specific blogs in core that you can post your stuff. And then I just got to tell you, you'd be so surprised of how many editors and online publications are just monitoring Quora. It's so surprising, but go through some of these people that are contributing quite a bit and you can look in their profile and you can see what articles were picked up. They let you see it. And not only that Kathleen, I mean the traffic they can come from it is immense. It is kind of a lot of people may answer a question and you may not get the top spot but sometimes you will and when you do it it's so worth it. Yeah, go through there, find a question that you could answer, do your best. Have a freelancer help you with it and it's a great way to get those very elusive links without having to become a contributor. Now, you're not going to get published every time, but I'd say for me it's been about 50% of the time. Kathleen: Wow. Now, are you always creating original content for Quora or are you ever taking content you've published on your own website, for example, and repurposing it? Brian: I like to do original content and what I'll also do is I'll edit the article a little bit and also post it on Medium and that seems to be the formula. There's a few internet marketing firms, SEO firms that are kind of doing this under the radar and this is the ingredients to do so. Quora, then Medium, and then you also publish on your LinkedIn. All right, that's another group I think. Connect with all the editors. It's a simple thing. Very few people turn people down on LinkedIn and then you post it on your LinkedIn and that's a good thing. Also post it on your Twitter and Facebook and boom, let it run from there. Kathleen: Yeah, that's just so interesting. I'm going to have to test this out now because I have answered questions on Quora, but I've never really written them up like an article, so I'm curious to see what's going to happen if I try that. All right, what's the next step? We got our guest posts, we got our our back links, our press page. What comes next? Brian: You're starting to build up an authority website and most people are not in that competitive industry like I am. So just a few of those links and you're going to be way ahead of your competitors. You put a little bit of work and then you hired some writers, maybe hired some PR people to distribute. The next thing is working on your website and conversion rate optimization. I like building up reviews, that's my thing. I'm in the insurance industry and people stereotypically have a terrible reputation. Using Online Reviews to Drive Conversions Brian: I want to be the good guy in the industry. So I've always gone after reviews and the more I get the better. I value a review that on my own website at about $100 a piece and once I get a good review on my website I give them that exact same comment and I ask them to put it on Google Business or the Better Business Bureau. Those are my two, sometimes Facebook. Same comment, just give it to them and overwhelmingly people will give me additional reviews. Kathleen: Now you've mentioned about Better Business Bureau twice and I have to ask you, why the BBB? And I think I might know the answer, but I'm curious to see what you say. Brian: Well people have done studies and I've actually done a study myself. I paid 1500 people to do a survey and I asked them what is the most credible source that you would go to? Which one has the most weight? And I did Yelp, then I did a Google Business, the Better Business Bureau, Facebook. Better Business Bureau wins overwhelmingly. Not only that, it's inexpensive to get in. It's like $550 to get a membership, although they give you a seal. A beautiful seal on your website and that seal is one of the best seals you can get to increase conversion rates. So it's a double pop there. And then if you can start getting reviews on the Better Business Bureau and an A plus rating, which you kind of get automatically at start, when people look your business up and overwhelmingly people will, they'll still look up your name followed by reviews or complaints. I've done studies on this and they do do that and the Better Business Bureau comes up number one and two and they'll also display the stars. And usually that's the tipping point. They'll read your website, they'll read your services, they'll look you up. And then boom, Better Business Bureau wonderful. I trust this company. Kathleen: Yeah, it's interesting. There's been a lot of chatter in search engine optimization forums lately about whether Google is factoring in particularly Better Business Bureau reviews into its ranking algorithm. And I just read recently that they said they're not, but then there's all these SEOs who are saying, well, they might say that, but the data shows that they are. And so it's something that's been on my radar of, Oh, I kind of need to keep watching this because it's an interesting area that not a lot of companies focus, which if it is a ranking factor, it could be a major opportunity. Brian: I don't want to speculate on that Kathleen. I do believe so. I know the Better Business Bureau gives a link back and I do believe that that link back is very valuable. I'd be surprised if they didn't look at the ratings and I'd be surprised if they didn't look at the report, whether it's an A, B or C company and how many complaints. It'd be smart for them to do so. I also have the beliefs that Google actually ranks websites higher on the website statistics of how many people come to your website and stay on your website and how many page views and whether they go back and do another search for another company. Back in the day and Google I think it was called In The Plex, where they Google would measure what is a successful search? A successful search is when people type something into Google, go to a website and don't do another search. They found what they were looking for. And I've had pages on my website that I've had great statistics on into how many pages and time and those pages for me rank the best, they just do. Kathleen: Yeah. I always like to say that Google's in the business of delivering the best answer the fastest and that's why page load times and quality of information, which you spoke to and that they measure quality of information, exactly by what you said, which is how many people bounce, how long do they spend on the page, that sort of thing. Those are really key metrics for them because they're in a competitive business just like we are even though they're completely killing it, but that's the reason they're killing it, is that they look at that stuff. Brian: I agree. I think in the past so many people were thinking about technical SEO and in this one bothers me to do technical SEO, although I think Google keeps moving away from it a little bit. They're looking more at those statistics and how it serves the user. So I like to do a link profile and then the quality content that I want to answer the user's question, I want them to stay on my website. And the more I do that, the higher rank. I'm ranking against big companies, MetLife and State Farm and then also companies that have been getting funding, getting $180 million in funding, one of my competitors got. The other one got $50 million and I'm able to compete with them. So it's an even playing field on the internet and you could have a lot of fun if you put a little bit of work in it. Kathleen: Yeah, and I think time and time again, the data shows and the results show that if you solve for the user, you get better results than if you try and solve for the search engine. Because search engines change their rules all the time. You talked about testimonials. Do you have a process for getting testimonials because I know lots of companies like the idea of getting them, but then they freeze and sort of fall into paralysis at the thought of how they're going to get them. Brian: I touched on them a little bit. I value a review that comes into my website at $100 and these are reviews that I control. If someone gives me a bad review, I can fix it. I can contact the customer or I can choose not to display it on my website. I think that's something that everyone should do. I think so many people are scared to go out and ask them to review on my Google Business, to the Better Business Bureau because the fear of getting a bad review. Now, I also want to say I value a review on the Better Business Bureau or Google or any of these third party websites at $250 a piece plus maybe $50 each additional year because they stay on there. So I like to incentivize my team, my employees. I bonus them on the reviews that they get. I do believe that if you have a business that you focus on getting reviews, you're almost kind of like required to do a great ethical, honest and transparent business focused on customer service and I love that. So I like it when the more people that focus on reviews. I let my customers ask for the reviews. I have an automated process, but it comes from my sales team. I use ActiveCampaign. After I've delivered the service, I send them an email on the fourth, the eighth, and the twelfth day, and I make it very easy in the email. I have little stars, and if they click a star, they go to the review page. Alright? I have them enter in a comment. I like the stars and the comment, that way on my website I can include schema, or rich snippets, that show up in the search engines. And if they give me a five star review, I give them that exact comment in another email from the agent, automated, Kathleen. And it has the exact link for them enter in the review. Don't send them to your main Better Business Bureau page or just do a Google search. There's particular URLs that you can give so it gives them the pop-up right then and there, so they can put the star and the comment. Don't make people click around. The easier it is, the better. And if you deliver great service, it invokes the theory of reciprocity and people want to help you. And especially if it comes from the person that helped them, and it's a personal thing, and they built a relationship, they're worth so much, Kathleen. I have seen my conversion rates, and I have seen so many customers call me and say they chose me, they chose our company, because of all the great reviews. Measuring ROI Kathleen: Now, one thing that I find really interesting is that a couple of times now, you've referenced whether it's what a review is worth to you, or what an article or a backlink is worth to you. How important is it to your process, to understand the value of those things? Brian: It's so important. I think it's hard to measure ROI on these things, right? There's a lot of studies. Let's say you get a few five star reviews on Yelp, it'll increase the reservations of a restaurant by 10%. Look at Amazon, people are just scurrying to get reviews for their products to increase their sales. I like putting a value in there so people know the value of it. For me, look, if I'm getting a hundred dollars for each review, and 250 dollars for another review, I measure on the increased conversion rate, but I also know how much I can bonus my employees for it. I'll run a special for my employees that equates to about 50 dollars per review that they get from their clients. Normally, it's 25 dollars. But it's a great bonus for my team, and I track it, and I let people know who's winning. It's definitely an initiative and a main thing in my business. And if you know the value, I think that you can encourage your team to do so and make it more of an initiative for your company. Kathleen: Yeah. I see, very often, companies that offer customers some sort of bonus, whether it's a gift card or what have you, for leaving a review. But I really like the approach of offering that to your employees. Because ultimately if your customer is giving the review and not getting paid, it certainly is more authentic. You're going to probably get better reviews because they'll be from people who actually really care about your business, and it's great to have your team really invested. Brian: Absolutely. Look, I've tried the incentives, and it's a tricky path. I'll offer the incentives for an honest review, but I'll only do it for the review on my own website. But yeah, you're exactly right. I found so much more value in bonusing my team, rather than incentivizing the customer. I don't know the logic behind it, I think has to do a lot with the reciprocity principle. But yeah, boy, it's a great way to do it. And also, you want to bonus your team so they have the focus of giving great customer service, and that's what builds the relationship, and it builds lifetime value to the customers, and it starts building and growing your business for the longterm. Brian's Results Kathleen: You've talked about so many different and really interesting ways that you've built up your website's authority, and that's really how you get the traffic to the site, and then building up your credibility through reviews and testimonials. Can you talk a little bit about the results you've gotten from this? When did you start doing this for True Blue? How long did it take for you to start to see results in, and what do those results look like today in your very competitive industry? Brian: Look, I've seen growth every year, right? I think a few years ago, I was doing a million dollars in revenue. Now I'm doing five, six million dollars in revenue, and it's very profitable. Every time it goes up. Now one of the ways to keep it going up is increased conversion rates. Kathleen, my conversion rate compared to my competitor's is about 10 times more. Kathleen: Wow. Brian: A lot of my competitors are lead generators, and they'll just collect someone's name, email, and phone, to run an insurance quote and those leads aren't worth very much. They'll close maybe 7% of those. In my business, I collect application requests. I let people run a quote, I give them all the information, I let them view all the reviews. Not only from the customers, but I have people review the actual insurance companies that they buy from. They're able to do a lot of the research, similar to how they would do it on Amazon when picking a product. So when I get somebody apply, I'm closing about 25 to 30% of them. Kathleen: You're talking about, now, lead to customer conversion? Brian: Lead to customer, yes. Exactly. While my competitors are closing seven, I'm closing close to 30, which means I don't have to have that many salespeople. My competitors need to have four or five times more salespeople just to handle that volume. I got happier employees, my employees love working for us. We're dealing with customers that want to buy from us, too. We're not chasing down customers. They're happy with us, and they've chosen us. So it's a great way to do business. Kathleen: Now, you've got this really high lead to customer conversion rate, and it sounds like a good part of what's contributing to that is the way you've built out your site and the fact that you've really turned it into a resource center for them to do their research, and you're keeping them on your site while they're doing it which is always a great thing. How much of that conversion rate is being influenced by any sort of automated lead nurturing you're doing, and how much is being influenced by direct sales with your team? Brian: It's a little cyclical in my company. Sometimes they have insurance products that are agent-less. Those are great, Kathleen. People go online and they'll do it. It's an easy sale. You don't really have to pay commissions to anybody, you get them all. Most of the leads that come in, I have one of my sales team collect all the information, just because there's private information that we collect; social security number, and drivers license, and health histories, certain things we don't really want to ask online. As far as nurturing, yeah, look, we're asking for a lot of personal information for insurance so we let people save their quotes. We'll have them enter their email but not their phone. We want to be the good guys, and we'll send them a series of emails. We have a series of emails that goes out to everybody, even the people that applied that we couldn't contact. The more emails, the better. The more honest they are, the better. The more personable they are, the better. I like to assign an agent to somebody, I like to give them a picture of the agent. I like to give them the agent's LinkedIn profile. I like to let them see all the reviews that that agent has gotten, and I'll also include links to the Better Business Bureau and Google. But yeah, you have to have an automated system to chase down those customers. I'm constantly surprised at how many people respond to the tenth email or the eighth call. Kathleen: Yeah, persistence pays off, as long as it's done in a way that's not really annoying. Well, fascinating. And you've actually written about a lot of what you're talking about now in your book, correct? The Salesman Who Doesn't Sell Brian: Absolutely. I've leveraged the book to do a lot of marketing for my businesses. My goal necessarily wasn't to make a lot of money selling the book. I just wanted to give out the information. I've been very generous and liberal in giving out all the secrets. I don't want people to say, "Oh, he was too general." So I've given away as much as I can. I want to give your listeners a free copy of the audiobook, my website brianjgreenberg.com/inboundsuccess. Kathleen: Awesome. Brian: For anybody that wants to go in there, download the book, I hope they find value from it. Kathleen: Well, I'll download it because I love audiobooks. I listen to everything on Audible at 2x speeds. I'll hear what you sound like talking very fast. The book is The Salesman Who Doesn't Sell. So if anybody is really curious about an actionable way to do some of what Brian's doing, that's a great thing to check out, and I will put the link that you just mentioned in the show notes. Get your free audio copy of "The Salesman Who Doesn't Sell" at brianjgreenberg.com/inboundsuccess Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Before we wrap up, I've got two questions for you that I always ask everyone I interview. And I'm interested to hear what you have to say as somebody who's come from an insurance background, even though it sounds like you're a better marketer than a lot of marketers. The first one is, a company or individual, who do you think is doing, in non-marketing, really well right now? Brian: In my business, there's a company called NerdWallet, and they started doing commercials right now. They're giving away such customer-friendly content. I love it when people give tables, and graphs, and they give recommendations. And they've been doing such a good job with it and building up so much of a link profile, and they get picked up so often from great publications, and they're ranking so well. It's almost bothersome to me. They've got a great team of content writers, and I have a lot of respect for them. Kathleen: So check out NerdWallet if you want to see a really good example. And then the next question is ... And this one's going to be really interesting, for me at least. The thing that I've observed is that the world of digital marketing just changes so fast. As soon as you figure out how to do SEO, the rules of the game change, et cetera. And I'm in marketing, so it's my job to be on top of it all day every day, and I still find it challenging. So for a guy whose business is not in marketing, although you certainly have mastered it, how do you make sure that you stay up to date and on top of all the latest thinking in the world of digital marketing? Brian: Good question. I watch Barry Schwartz's weekly video recaps on Fridays. I think he does a great job. I like seeing everything that's coming out, and I get most of my news that way, Kathleen. What I like to do is, I like to do everything per Google's guidelines and do everything on the up and up. That way, every time Google comes out with an algorithm update ... knock on wood ... The majority of time, I'll see my website go up. I don't want the stress of having these Google updates and having myself be penalized. I don't want it. So I play the longterm game, and I think as long as you're doing everything that real companies do, real company stuff, you're going to be alright. I don't follow too many people, I'm not on everything all the time. But I like to do a general swipe of it, and I get most of it from Barry Schwartz. Kathleen: Yeah. I follow Barry Schwartz as well, and he is with, if I'm remembering correctly ... Is it Search Engine Roundtable? Brian: Yeah, Search Engine Roundtable. Kathleen: He has a phenomenal email newsletter, and I definitely follow him on Twitter. Because if you want the breaking SEO news, that guy manages to somehow be everywhere at once, and he knows everything that's going on with Google, at least it feels like. Brian: Yeah, he knows everybody there. Kathleen: He does, he does. He also posts some really cool pictures of different Google offices around the world, which I always think are fun to see. Brian: I think Moz's Whiteboard Friday is really good. I've kind of stopped watching those since Rand left, a little bit. Kathleen: I know. But do you follow him at his new website, SparkToro? Brian: I do. Yeah, he has some great posts. I definitely am on his newsletter, and I don't miss those. He's such an honest guy. Kathleen: Oh, he is. Brian: Such inside info. Kathleen: He's writing some of the best thought leadership on no-click searches right now, or what he likes to call usurp SEO. It's so good. Brian: Interesting. Kathleen: I could geek-out over this for hours, but we must wrap up. How to Reach Brian Kathleen: So if someone wants to talk to you, learn more about what you've done, you've shared the URL. I'm going to ask you to say it again, and then any other information you want to share about the best way for people to find you online. Brian: Sure, brianjgreenberg.com/inboundsuccess and my main website, truebluelifeinsurance.com. You can see what we're doing over there and how we're leveraging the reviews and putting people in the sales funnel. Kathleen: Thank you, that's great, and this has been a lot of fun. I've definitely learned a few new things that I'm going to try out, including Quora for sure. I appreciate it, Brian. Kathleen: If you're listening, and you found this valuable, you know what to do. Please leave the podcast a review on Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice. And as always, if you know someone else doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, Tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thanks, Brian. Brian: Thank you.

“Consumers deserve perfect information everywhere.” Jeff Rohrs is a creative, strategic, and experienced marketing leader with a passion for collaboration, innovation, and building dynamic brands in today's fragmented media landscape. He is the chief marketing officer for Yext and the author of Audience: Marketing In The Age Of Subscribers, Fans & Followers, in which he establishes "proprietary audience development," explores the flip-side of content marketing, and sets forth a modern marketing imperative. The Social Content Marketing Blog named Audience the number one social media marketing book for Academia. Jeff loves nothing more than helping companies navigate the evolving landscape of consumer needs, preferences, expectations across locations, channels, and devices.    Listen And Learn: How brands can control the factual information available about their service. Ways companies can take control over the digital knowledge about their locations, their people, and their services. About the strategy behind branded and discovery search terms. Ways brands can prepare themselves for the voice-driven and AI-driven future. How Conversational and Text AI is revolutionizing customer service and make it far more human. Why it’s important to think about content marketing in its most narrow, most factual way.   TO LEARN MORE ABOUT YEXT, CLICK HERE. TO FIND JEFF ROHRS ON LINKEDIN, CLICK HERE.

Jeff Rohrs is the CMO of Yext and Author of Audience: Marketing in the age of subscribers, fans and followers, and The Everywhere Brand ebook. He’s also a former VP at Salesforce and ExactTarget. In this episode, Brian Ardinger and Jeff talk about managing content and brands across the web and how hard it is to put perfect information into consumer’s hands everywhere. Yext uses a digital knowledge management (dkm) platform to automate this process.   With consumer behavior changing, 73% of a business’s traffic is now taking place off their website. The smallest content is becoming the most important, such as updating store hours and phone numbers. Companies need to update all the customer endpoints that matter, which is different from SEO.  Jeff's book, The Everywhere Brand, with co-author Jay Baer (also the author of Talk Triggers), discusses how brands are going to have to be everywhere. The challenge is how they will control their appearance around the web. You can download The Everywhere Brand ebook or watch a YouTube video on The Everywhere Brand with Jay Baer and Jeff Rohrs (31 min) As for future trends, Jeff is watching the use of voice. Voice refers to voice commands or voice as discovery. AI is also growing, such as in visual search with Google Lens and Google Photo. More than 85% of Americans are using AI in services like Uber and Google. Jeff believes you can’t control UI and AI, but you can manage the info it has about your company. Additional knowledge resources include Smart Brief and EMarketer. To find out more about Yext, see yext.com or connect with Jeff on Twitter at @jkrohrs If you liked this podcast, you might also enjoy our interview with Patrick Campbell with ProfitWell on Growth, Pricing and SaaS or Justin Mares, Co-Author of Traction GET THE LATEST RESOURCES Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Jeff Rohrs is the CMO of Yext and Author of Audience: Marketing in the age of subscribers, fans and followers, and The Everywhere Brand ebook. He’s also a former VP at Salesforce and ExactTarget. In this episode, Brian Ardinger and Jeff talk about managing content and brands across the web and how hard it is to put perfect information into consumer’s hands everywhere. Yext uses a digital knowledge management (dkm) platform to automate this process.   With consumer behavior changing, 73% of a business’s traffic is now taking place off their website. The smallest content is becoming the most important, such as updating store hours and phone numbers. Companies need to update all the customer endpoints that matter, which is different from SEO.  Jeff's book, The Everywhere Brand, with co-author Jay Baer (also the author of Talk Triggers), discusses how brands are going to have to be everywhere. The challenge is how they will control their appearance around the web. You can download The Everywhere Brand ebook or watch a YouTube video on The Everywhere Brand with Jay Baer and Jeff Rohrs (31 min) As for future trends, Jeff is watching the use of voice. Voice refers to voice commands or voice as discovery. AI is also growing, such as in visual search with Google Lens and Google Photo. More than 85% of Americans are using AI in services like Uber and Google. Jeff believes you can’t control UI and AI, but you can manage the info it has about your company. Additional knowledge resources include Smart Brief and EMarketer. To find out more about Yext, see yext.com or connect with Jeff on Twitter at @jkrohrs If you liked this podcast, you might also enjoy our interview with Patrick Campbell with ProfitWell on Growth, Pricing and SaaS or Justin Mares, Co-Author of Traction GET THE LATEST RESOURCES Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

"Consumers deserve perfect info about businesses everywhere. We can all agree on that." Going out of the gate, Jeff Rohrs reminded us of what's at stake with all of the information about businesses online. As Chief Marketing Officer at Yext, Rohrs is on the leading edge as brands work to manage all of the digital knowledge that's available today. Chances are, what you've thought about already is just the tip of the iceberg. We discussed what data, voice, AI, and AR mean for "everywhere brands" this week on the On Brand podcast. About Jeff Rohrs Jeff Rohrs serves as Chief Marketing Officer for Yext, the Digital Knowledge Management platform that gives companies control over their customer-critical facts across today’s ever-expanding universe of intelligent services. Jeff co-authored The Everywhere Brand (Yext 2017), and his first book, AUDIENCE: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans & Followers (Wiley 2014), has been lauded by marketers and executives alike as a must-read. Prior to joining Yext, Jeff served as Vice President of Marketing Insights for Salesforce and ExactTarget. Episode Highlights So what is Yext? "Brand's need to be in control of their information." Yext provides a digital knowledge management platform to do just that. "We work on the rest of the iceberg under the surface. Most are just looking at the tip — website and search. The lion's share includes places like Alexa, Siri, and Uber." Brands today have to be everywhere. In an ebook co-authored with Jay Baer, Jeff outlines the concept of brands being everywhere today. He shared the basic tenants of what this means including being customer centric, granular, and committed to actively managing. How can brands be ready for a voice-first environment? "First, you have to separate voice commands from voice search and discovery. You can't optimize. That's been debunked. You need to think about the facts first. That's how you future proof your brand." What brand has made Jeff smile recently? Jeff provided not one, not two, but three brands that have made him smile. First, Nike with their "gutsy" Colin Kaepernick ads. He's also a big fan of how DonorsChoose closes the loop by sharing updates from funded projects with donors via email. And finally, we recorded this after a big win for the Cleveland Browns, which brought a smile to Jeff's face as well. To learn more, follow Jeff on Twitter and check out the Yext website including their upcoming event Onward 2018. As We Wrap … Did you hear something you liked on this episode or another? Do you have a question you’d like our guests to answer? Let me know on Twitter using the hashtag #OnBrandPodcast and you may just hear your thoughts here on the show. On Brand is sponsored by my new book Brand Now. Discover the seven dynamics to help your brand stand out in our crowded, distracted world. Order now and get special digital extras. Learn more. Subscribe to the podcast – You can subscribe to the show via iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, and RSS. Rate and review the show – If you like what you’re hearing, head over to iTunes and click that 5-star button to rate the show. And if you have a few extra seconds, write a couple of sentences and submit a review. This helps others find the podcast. OK. How do you rate and review a podcast? Need a quick tutorial on leaving a rating/review in iTunes? Check this out. Until next week, I’ll see you on the Internet!

Voice search is getting a lot of buzz these days, but what types of companies is it right for and how should you use it as part of your marketing mix? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Yext CMO Jeff Rohrs breaks down the subject of voice-first search and explains what types of companies it is particularly well suited for. He also shares specific examples of how small and medium sized businesses can quickly and easily get set up to be found on voice search and translate that into more business. Listen to the podcast to hear Jeff's insights on the current - and future - potential of voice search and what your business should be doing right now to capitalize on it. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. I'm Kathleen Booth, and I'm your host. Today my guest is Jeff Rohrs, the CMO of Yext. Jeff Rohrs (Guest): Thanks Kathleen. I'm excited to be here, thanks a lot. Kathleen: Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you because, as people have been listening to this podcast for the last several episodes, they now know that in the last month or so I was able to launch a new voice skill for Alexa that allows people to listen to the podcast on their smart home device. I'm not yet on Google Home but maybe that will be next. So voice is top of mind for me and you are someone who has done a lot of thinking around what it means to market in a voice-first world and what businesses need to do to get ready for this, so I am excited to pick your brain today. Meet Jeff Rohrs Kathleen: Before we start on that, can you tell our audience a little bit more about yourself and your background and what you do at Yext? Jeff: Sure. I'm Chief Marketing Officer of Yext. I run the global marketing department and we've got folks in the States, over in London and Berlin and Paris and Tokyo and support all of our sales, product marketing, and customer success teams with what we do. I joined Yext a little over three years ago after having been with Salesforce by way of their acquisition of ExactTarget. I had joined ExactTarget in the middle of 2007 and got to ride that wave as they went public, helped build the content marketing, thought leadership teams, their connections events, did a lot of programming and a lot of creative work around that before the acquisition by Salesforce in the middle of 2013, which also happened to be when I was writing my book, "Audience," so they kept me around because I was the guy who was publishing a book just in time for DreamForce that year and it was quite an education and quite an opportunity to join Salesforce as they were expanding. At that point, I think ExactTarget was their biggest acquisition to date and I got to see Mark Benioff in action at a couple of executive off-sites and really see why that company is so successful, just because of his leadership and just the overall teams' contribution to their success and their customers' success. Kathleen: Wow. I feel like we could do a whole other podcast episode just on how the world of content and inbound marketing has evolved over the last 10 or so years, because you've really been in this arena for that time span, as have I, but in a completely different way, and boy has it changed a lot. Jeff: It sure has. I was fortunate to be doing content marketing before it was called content marketing and in a small world story, Joe Pulizzi, the founder of the Content Marketing Institute, and I led kind of parallel lives in Cleveland for a while. We both lived in Cleveland. I've since moved to the New Jersey area, but it took Ann Handley of Marketing Profs to email us, I think back in 2008 or 2009, and say, "You guys really should get together." I vividly remember sitting down with Joe at a now-defunct Caribou Coffee for our first meeting and we were peas in a pod believing what that medium could do and he obviously built Content Marketing Institute into a great resource and then Content Marketing World into a tremendous event, which I'm honored to come back and speak at in a couple of weeks here. Kathleen: Oh, great. Yeah, those are two really key figures in this world, too. Joe Pulizzi has been a real source of inspiration for me personally and for IMPACT as a company, and we just had Ann Handley keynote our conference a few weeks ago. Jeff: Awesome. Kathleen: I love her. Jeff: Good people. Kathleen: She's fantastic. Jeff: She is. Kathleen: She's a ball of energy. Jeff: Indeed. Voice-First Marketing Kathleen: Well I could go on and on about all those people, but I think what we're here to talk about and what I'm so interested to learn about is voice-first. It's amazing how quickly it seems we've come to rely on voice searches and it's been fascinating to me ... it feels like the Wild West ... to observe all the different ways that brands and companies are starting to try and experiment with it. I feel like it's a massively untapped opportunity and I would just love to get your take on it. Where do you see it going? What do you think the opportunity is for the average company out there that isn't Pizza Hut or Coca-Cola? How do you think the small and medium sized business market is going to use voice search in the future? Jeff: Voice search is a UI so it is a user interface, a way that a human being is going to interact with some sort of intelligent service. When you put it into that perspective, you can begin to understand how it impacts your world. If you are in a space where perhaps taking customer questions and a lot of repeatable questions and you're already looking at chatbots and things like that, voice is just gonna be a natural evolution and way that people will interface with that chatbot expertise that you might be building up. Or, as you indicated, it could be skills-based and then there would be an app. I have an app on my phone. What is a skill? It's an app on a voice assistant to do something, add value in some way. Jeff: Voice-first as a hashtag is very catchy and is spreading like a virus, but in a good way, because it's getting people to think about, "Okay. Let me look at my day and let me look at the value I offer to my customers, and how is voice going to play into that?" If you are a company that is developing software products, SaaS products, things like that, you need to look at the product itself and say, "How am I going to develop a ... ", or "How is voice gonna impact it, to create greater usability, less friction, less experiences, and an overall better customer experience?" If you're more on the services side, you might take a different look, and as you have, go down a skills-based path or come up with other ideas that are marketing ideas to get your ... the value of your services out in the marketplace. I think voice is as varied as any user interface. It's just that it has been in our consciousness because of sci-fi for a very long time. I would encourage people to let their minds wander creatively, just like the authors of science fiction did a long time ago about how this applies, because we're in the very early innings of the applications here. But when you hear ... and you should absolutely follow Dave Isbitski of Amazon. He tweets a lot of great stuff and one of them ... he tweets some pretty inspirational things because people send them his way, but like the father with the child who's having spelling difficulties, and he's able to use the skill that is his kid's spelling list, and the child interacts with the voice assistant like a teacher and it gains confidence from that because it's less intimidating to interact with a speaker than with a human being. There are a lot of things like that that I think we'll see come to fruition and it's gonna take your creativity to figure out how it best applies to your business. Kathleen: Yeah. It's really interesting. One of the things that I've been thinking a lot about is, being a content marketer and being so focused on creating great content that's going to rank, what's interesting to me about voice search is it fundamentally changes the game because most content marketers historically have been focused on getting into the top of the search engine results pages. Jeff: Right. Kathleen: That objective assumes that there are going to be multiple results and you want to be in the top or at the top or near the top but when we talk about voice search, we're often talking about screenless search, and all of a sudden when you talk about screenless search, you're talking about one result. So it's almost like a zero sum game, you're either in the results or you're not. It's not only getting there, it's how your information is formatted to lend itself well to those kind of results. I guess it's kind of similar with where Google is going with featured snippets and all of that, but that's something that I've been thinking about so much. Like, how does the fundamental structure and format of our content need to change to lend itself well to being the one result, and not only to getting into that position but to delivering some value when somebody gets it? Jeff: Well, it's a great question and it's actually the very thing I'm sort of addressing at Content Marketing World in a couple of weeks. It requires you to shift your paradigm, because as you have rightfully noted, if you are in a voice-first world without a second screen or without a screen connected, you're getting an answer. You're not getting a multitude of results. I think we also need to acknowledge that as effective as SEO is and as much of a believer as I am in it, when you have a multitude of competition that's relevant, you're beholden to whatever the intelligent service is to dictate who's gonna be shown first. The constant chase to try and reverse engineer the black box that decides that can be a fool's errand. It can be mind-numbing. So when I say paradigm shift, what I believe you need to think about is your smallest content first. What are the facts about your business that you are the primary source of truth for? This is what Yext's entire business is built upon. It's a philosophy that consumers deserve perfect information everywhere and that businesses should be in control of the objective facts that appear on those services everywhere, because they have the greatest motivation to ensure that they are true. So if it is subjective, if it is reviews, well then you certainly want to be listening, responding, and then generating first party reviews from customers you know came through, but you're not gonna control what they say. However, if it is name, address, phone numbers, store hours, does this doctor have these certifications, does this marketer have these certifications, do you take this type of insurance? If you're an insurance agent, what insurance do you represent? If you're in food service, what is your menu? What's your special of the month? What are your prices? All of these are objective facts and because we've grown up with the Internet around a notion of search engine indexing, therefore based on search engine spidering, we have a paradigm that the world should work, that I should put my content out on a website that I own, and this spider should come along and grab that, pull it back and apply algorithms to it, it's intelligence, to then output a result in whatever the UI is the consumer is asking. I would challenge the audience to think about that and say, "Well, if the Internet started today and Google had the market cap it had, do you think it would begin by indexing?" My guess is it would not. My guess is it would begin by going to businesses, opening up APIs, just like it has, just like what we've integrated into our knowledge network and say, "Hey businesses, we want you to provide this information directly because we know you're the best source. The only reason we relied on third party data or indexing in the past is that was the only thing that was available to us." This is something we've seen as we have evolved is as those services open up the APIs and begin to recognize, "Gosh, when businesses are controlling that information through Yext, it's really, really reliable." It seems so self-evident, but it takes that recognition for the paradigm shift. Voice demands that paradigm shift, because you're not gonna be the answer on a lot of unbranded searches. You are going to be one of many and so what are you gonna be the answer for? Well, if somebody's asking for your hours of operation or if you're taking new clients or things that you should be objectively in control of, you better be in control of those. That's why we believe that we're shifting to a world of digital knowledge management, where you're controlling the facts in a centralized way and then outputting them to all of the endpoints where the consumer can engage with them. That is, I think, the fundamental underpinning of voice search as we see it today, and the effort to kind of reverse engineer how your white paper or your ebook is gonna be number one on an esoteric kind of question, I think is chasing your tail until and if such time, that there is greater clarity about how that portion of the brain behind the index is creating. Not to totally prolong the answer, but I'm gonna give you one more thought. As of right now, none of the voice assistants accept advertising. At the point at which they try and begin to do advertising, then there are gonna be people, just as in paid search, that buy their way to the top. Now whether the user will accept that remains to be seen. I remember when paid search ads came out, everybody said, "Oh, nobody's gonna click on these," and Google laughed their way all the way to the bank. So early stages, it's a new medium, but what I can tell you is that fundamentally your facts should be things you control, and if you focus your effort there, flip the paradigm, you're gonna be in the places when consumers are asking about you specifically. Kathleen: Yeah, I really love the approach that you took there, because I was actually talking with somebody about this yesterday. I'm involved in an accelerator program where I teach marketing to start ups and the person who was organizing it and I were talking about the marketing curriculum, and we were talking about how companies can get so wrapped up in certain tactics or channels, like pay-per-click marketing for example. They'll be like, "That's what I need to do. It's just gonna deliver my leads to me." The problem with that is that not only are there diminishing returns to scale at certain points, but you're not in control of that channel. If you put all of your eggs in a basket that you don't control, inevitably the rules of the game will change and the basket will fall apart, will crumble. I believe that it is important to make sure that everything that is within your control you have really got buttoned up and done well, and then if you've done that, sure, there's times you experiment with trying to optimize with other things, trying to use these platforms in new ways, and seeing what happens, but if you don't have the foundation built strongly, the house is gonna crumble. Jeff: Absolutely. In fact, that's kind of the premise of my book from a couple years back, "Audience, Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans, and Followers." It's the idea that you should be building direct, proprietary audiences across a number of different platforms so that you are able to reduce or better optimize your paid media, because what is paid media? You are just buying eyeballs, you're renting them actually, you're not even buying them. So the price will fluctuate and your ability to reach a market becomes very, very compromised. One only needs to look at what has happened to Blue Apron's stock over ... as they went public and just got hammered because their cost of acquisition and retention is higher because they're so dependent on paid media. But if you focus on, "Okay, how do I build a Facebook audience, Twitter following, email?" If you analogize that as you were then to voice, your facts about your business are the things that are ... They're not immutable, because your store hours can change, you can move locations. There's a lot of things like that that can happen. But you are the best source of truth for them. Now, we have to take this sense of ownership, and to your listeners who perhaps are sole proprietors or only have a couple of business locations, this might not seem like a big deal. But the law of big numbers is as you increase locations, it gets exponentially more difficult to manage this at scale accurately. We will often have customers come in and dump 10 different sources of "truth" on the table about their various facts about the business. We've had retailers come to us and give us databases that they say are the current database of stores and 20-25% of the locations are closed, never existed or moved. The factual management of the things that consumers are engaging with is fundamental just as I still believe that proprietary audience development is fundamental to long-term success. Kathleen: Oh, absolutely. I think your audience is one of those things that you can own if you do it correctly. If you're building your audience on a platform that you control, whether that's collecting emails or starting a private Slack group or what have you. Your audience is not necessarily the people that follow you on social media. We've all seen what happens. Five, ten years ago you had a Facebook page. It was all about "I want to get likes for my page, so people will see my updates," and now, Facebook pages are like a ghost town, so nobody sees anything. Building it where you have that control is essential. You started talking about smaller businesses, and there's obviously this sliding scale of businesses that start small. They start to grow, they get more locations, but for some of these smaller businesses, when they hear voice search, it seems just like, "I don't even want to think about that. That's not something I can tackle or that's within the realm of possibility for me because I'm just a local restaurant." Or, "I'm just a local law firm." Or just a dentist office. Can you talk a little bit about what should a small business like that be trying to accomplish with voice? What is realistic given their time, their budget, and their level of expertise? How Small Businesses Can Take Advantage of Voice Search Jeff: I don't want to get commercial, but I want to tell you one of the reasons that I'm here at Yext that ties to that. I was contacted by a head hunter coming back from a speaking gig in Frankfurt that was frankly really depressing because I'd been given the bait and switch. Supposed to be a keynote, ended up being a breakout. I'm speaking english. The one against me is speaking german. Kathleen: Oh boy. Jeff: Spent time away from the family and not a lot of return. I get this call from a head hunter, talking about this exciting company in New York. He's building it up, building it up, and he does the big reveal that it's Yext. At the very moment I was pulling out a tin of mints from my bag, as I was cleaning my bag from the trip that said, "Yext, keep your geo data fresh," which was their motto at the time, and I had just happened and didn't even connect it that I had been given that at an SMX show that I had spoken at. I'm like, "That's funny. That must be a sign." Well then the next sign was when I pinged my friend, Jay Baer, and I said, "Hey, Jay. Do you have some time to talk?" He said, "Sure." I said, "Well, I've been approached about this opportunity with this company called Yext." He goes, "God, that's weird." I'm like, "Why?" He said, "Because I'm writing the portion of the chapter of my new book at the time, Hug Your Haters, in which this lawyer in San Diego discovered that there was this zero star rating on Yelp for his law firm, and he discovered it because he was a customer of Yext. It alerted him. He reached out to the individual, discovered it was a misunderstanding, was able to turn that hater into a fan and reverse it to a five star rating." Kathleen: Wow. Jeff: And it was such serendipity. He's a single attorney, but he was using a platform for review listing management or response. We obviously want folks to work with us, look at us, whatever. But whatever you do, and we hope you do think about working with us, but pick something that you're going to use to manage that base location information because you want to be found on search accurately. Let's set that aside. That's the fundamental of voice search -- discovery of your business in branded or informational ways. Jeff: Let's keep in mind "near me" search because near me search is up exponentially in part because Google now just assumes you have a near me search if you're on a mobile device. Kathleen: Yeah. Jeff: If you're not accurate and found on Google, and the other thing I've been waiting for, I've mentioned this in a couple places, a few years ago or a number of years ago now because I'm getting older as the gray in my goatee attests. I remember when the big thing that hit everybody's PowerPoints for a while was "Do You Know What the Second Biggest Search Engine is?" The answer was YouTube, and everybody's like, "Wow. That's amazing." I have this sneaking suspicion now because people are putting in searches into the map. They're using that as not just point A to point B, but navigation. If you look at all the rich information that Google and others are putting in their maps, it's transformed it. So get that right. That's the voice search piece. Then you've gotta make sure the rest of your website has got appropriate schema that'll work markups so that the information can be found, assessed, that is less factual or subjective or expertise or what have you. Then I think you have to do as you did. Really look at who your customers are, and this is true for any marketing. This isn't just a voice conversation. Who are your customers and where do they live? If they are interacting with voice assistance, in greater numbers in certain circumstance, I would focus on those circumstances to see if you can add value in that environment. If not, just doing a voice application or something, a skill to do it and say you did, might have a slight PR bump. It might have a first mover kind of bump, but it won't have the long, contributory value to your bottom line that you would like. Then look at other ways that you can get into "voice." Right? I don't have a podcast, but today I'm a guest on your podcast. This is voice in a way, right? I look at news and PR and other ways that you can be getting into that voice assist in interesting ways, but don't feel obligated that you have to have some sort of profound strategy out of the gate. I think especially as a small business you're worried about keeping the lights on and people's paychecks coming. Continue to focus on where your customers are and how you optimize for them, and what you're going to see is technologies that kind of help you future proof. One of the things that we do is we try to expand our knowledge network. Our customers didn't have to lift a finger when three weeks ago we announced we're integrated with Amazon Alexa. They're now in Amazon Alexa. They didn't have to do a thing. You need to be looking at the technologies that allow for distribution or access of voice audiences as just part of the way they evolve and help you. For SMBs, I think, right now, I don't want to say wait and see. I think it's more read and listen and participate in your own life, but listen to your customers first. They'll help you see where they can be value added. Kathleen: Yeah. So if I'm hearing you correctly, and tell me if I have this wrong, it sounds like what you're saying is if you are a small or medium sized business and if your market is somehow geographically specific or if you have multiple geographically specific markets, multiple locations, et cetera, that it is not only possible, but it is incredibly accessible to make sure that you're doing at least the basic things you need to do to enable the customers that are looking for you and trying to get information about you in your local market to find that via voice. Jeff: Yeah, we've got a great customer, Romeo's Pizza, in my old haunt of Cleveland and Medina, Ohio. Their CEO, Ryan Rose, is one of the smartest minds in any kind of business that I've run into. They're growing. They're, I think, at about, I don't know, 55 locations now with a pretty big growth plan. They came onboard earlier this year, or maybe it was last year, at a smaller base. What they see, once they got their digital knowledge management right and they began to not just get listings and local pages and reviews correct, they began to understand that they could operationalize this because the reviews were telling them where franchises were falling short of their customer experience. They could address that before it became a fire. The listings and the pages and the increased local discovery helped them see who was benefiting, where did they perhaps need to take a look at expansion, what kind of contributions from the franchises community should they be looking for? Because they were essentially ensuring accuracy at that local level like never before. What sort of excited me about joining Yext is there was a shoe for every foot. It didn't matter the size of your business. We also have great partners that we integrate with like DexYP and Hibu and others who integrate us into their solutions for super small business, single locations, et cetera. That's, I think, important in those situations where you're truly one or two location kind of business, and you don't want multiple logins and everything else. You want a solution. We always are looking for partners that we can work with, we can integrate with, or we also have reseller and preferred partner programs so that we can reach customers where they have preexisting relationships, let's say with agencies or digital marketers. For small businesses, like I said, you're worried about keeping the lights on. There's no CMO. There's usually an owner and owner's sibling, spouse or son or daughter. It's a family affair, and you're wearing 20 different hats. Kathleen: You're the chief cook and bottle washer, right? Jeff: You got it. You need some things that are going to work for you in that way, and that's certainly how we try to approach the business. Kathleen: Yeah, that's actually how I first came across Yext when I had my digital marketing agency. Especially in our earlier years, we worked a lot with smaller, more local clients, and it was exactly that point. They were like, "I know I need to be on all these platforms. I need to be on Yelp and Google Maps and yellowpages.com and what have you." Managing that was such a nightmare. For us, it was a great solution.  Jeff: Mm-hmm (affirmative). How Yext Is Using the Move To Voice-First to Grow Kathleen: You are producing a lot of thought leadership content around digital knowledge management, voice search. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you're tackling that and what that's doing for you as a company? Jeff: The way that we're tackling it is we're expanding internationally. We're expanding vertically. We have really defined the values that we provide. I look at our content marketing strategy as how does it align with that, and then also how does it align with our product roadmap. We just came out with Yext for Events, so the very thing we did with listings back in the day and creating this then called power listings network. It's now called our knowledge network because there's a lot of non-search partners in that, but when we created that it was that update once, publish everywhere mentality. Well events has the exact same problem. If I want to promote an event, how the heck do I promote an event? Ben and Jerry's has free ice cream cone day. They've had it since their founding, but it was taking them hundreds of hours to promote that. They were in our beta, and that hundreds of hours went down to two. They could apply that time savings elsewhere. So applying it back to your content plan, now our team is focused on, "Okay, how do we tell this story? What content do we need to produce?" We're not going whole hog with like a white paper or ebook because we're learning the space, we're talking to the practitioners, we're seeing how it works, so that then we can create really relevant content that helps our customers and prospects better understand and utilize that particular product. Now, on the other end of the spectrum, let's look at the five values. We believe that our platform offers brand control, local discoverability (which positively impacts the bottom line), customer experience (making sure it's consistent on your website, your app and all the third party systems), organizational efficiency (like in that Ben and Jerry's story), and then future proofing the business. When we produce content, I want my team to look at that, and say, "Okay, what content are we producing for which values?" Sometimes it can be two or three or four. But we just came out with something called To Rebrand or Refresh, That is the Question. One of my favorite conversations that I've moderated, spoken about, read about over the years is that conversation about when should you rebrand. Because I will tell you what, I don't know. I look at Taco Bell and Doritos, and they're constantly refreshing their brands every few years, and I know the cost that takes in terms of signage and packaging and everything else. That is a bold bag. Then you've got some companies that completely rebrand. We wanted to dig into that, but why? Because we discovered through seeing how our customers used us that they were using us a lot when they would rebrand because it wasn't just about physical rebranding, it was about making sure the digital universe was correct. Aha! Okay, so now I get it. You've got customers that rebrand like a Best Buy or a Crabtree & Evelyn or any of these types of customers. We're a part of that story, and I think that's important to recognize. We're not the whole story. Great content marketing on behalf of B2B businesses isn't just writing a sales pitch. It is telling a very relevant and hopefully evergreen story with context where you add value in that final chapter. That's kind of the punch line so that if anybody picked that up who was in marketing, it would be of value to them. So that's kind of the approach that we've taken. Then some things, like I co-authored an ebook called "The Everywhere Brand" with Jay Baer that was truly inspired, like literally that one is a funny story where we found a little bit of extra money in a quarter. I've worked with Jay many times before. We called him up on the phone. I said, "Jay, hey, I want to co-author something with you. We're just trying to figure out what it would be." Because at the time we were really trying to establish a better sense of who we are, the messaging, et cetera. As we were brainstorming, I said, "What if we wrote something called "The Everywhere Brand"?" Then from there Jay and I just riffed and it came together very, very quickly. The notion that your brand now needs to be correct everywhere, and there are these seven tenants of a great everywhere brand. Inspiration can sometimes strike, but often times it's that good planning and understanding who you are, what your customers value from you, and how your products fit into that, and then regionalizing, localizing it as appropriate. Kathleen: Yeah, something you just said really resonated with me because, I think I was just telling you, I've published my 52nd podcast recently- Jeff: That's awesome, congrats. Kathleen: Thank you. I've been seeing certain themes emerge over the course of the last year because I'm always trying to surface what are the things that really make certain content or inbound marketers effective. One of the most prominent themes that has come out of a large number of the interviews I've done has to do with being audience centric rather than product centric. So many marketers like to create content that does revolve around specifically what their product does, or how it works. Some of the most incredible stories I've heard where marketers have gotten the best results have occurred when those marketers have created content that has nothing to do with what they're selling, but everything to do with the pain point their audience is feeling. And really it's about just opening the conversation. And the conversation doesn't have to be around what you're selling, it's just establishing a line of communication with the audience. I think it was my third or fourth episode, I interviewed Stephanie Casstevens, who actually now works with me. She was not one of my coworkers at the time, she was at a different company, and she was working at a company that was marketing medical waste disposal, which, you know, it's not super sexy stuff. Jeff: Glamorous. Kathleen: Yeah. And they were really kind of thumping their heads up against the wall in their efforts to get traction, and it wasn't until they realized, "Well, we're selling this to doctor's offices, and the gatekeeper in the office is the office manager, and they already have this solution, to taking about medical waste disposal isn't going to get us anywhere." They actually found out that the biggest pain points that person had was no-shows, patient no-shows. That has nothing to do with medical waste. Jeff: Yeah. Kathleen: And they created all this content around how to reduce patient no-shows, and all of a sudden, their marketing took off, and then they could, later on down the line, talk about medical waste, but they had to establish that bond and that line of communication first. So that was all a very long way of saying- Jeff: I completely agree. Kathleen: What you talk about really hits home. Jeff: I completely agree. When you can strike upon that, it's magic. And isn't it funny that the content part of our conversation tied back to finding out what is your customer's pain, listening to your customers. Same thing with how should you approach voice, and how should you approach audience building, and how should you ... You can't go wrong by coming back and understanding where your customers live, and I think we fail to because we're so caught up in a checklist of, "Oh, we've got to launch this. I've got to do this, I've got to do this." And we get very me-centric about ourselves, the brand, the product, and magic can happen when you put yourself in the shoes of that customer. Kathleen: Yeah, I've always heard people say, and I think it's so true, that we as marketers are our own worst enemies because we know all this as customers, but as soon as we put our marketer hat on, we immediately forget all of it, right? Jeff: Yeah. Kathleen: And we do the opposite of what we should do. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: So I feel like we could talk all day about voice search. There's so much interesting stuff here, and I'm fascinated to see where Yext is going. I'm definitely going to watch that more closely now, especially given some of the recent releases you had with Amazon Alexa integration, et cetera. Before we wrap up, though, two questions that I always ask everyone that I interview, I'm really curious to hear what you have to say. The first, and this one I'm really interested in because you have been in this world of content marketing for quite some time and you've seen a lot and you've worked for a lot of the companies that have been in the middle of all this. Company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Jeff: So as I thought about my answer to this question, I realized that I am no longer the consumer of a lot of inbound marketing, even though I'm the CMO. Let me explain, and this is I think important for those of your audience who are trying to reach a CMO. We are of a scale that I have a great marketing core team of lieutenants who own marketing operations and demand, who own brand and marketing strategy, who own revenue marketing, including field, owned and sponsored events, creative, international, et cetera. So my inbox is inundated with all sorts of efforts to attract my attention, dangling on the end of the fishing pole, a piece of content that I could download. The best you can hope for from me, and I could be an anomaly, is I will just forward that along to one of my lieutenants and say, "For your consideration." I know they are busy, and I do not expect anything back from them, but if it piques their interest and they dig into it, they know to come back and say, "Hey, there could be an interesting solution here." So perhaps rather than answer who is the best at inbound, how do you perhaps penetrate the wall? And inevitably, the things that get through are the things that are able to succinctly and quickly convey value. So provocative research that's on point with what we're doing, people who are able to lead with the lead as opposed to burying the lead about ROI, around certain solutions. And also ... whatever ... who aren't guilt tripping you that you haven't responded to them, or you haven't done x, y, or z, and they've sent you ten emails. If you tell me you've sent me ten emails, I know I've ignored you nine times. Kathleen: Yeah. Jeff: I'm not going to respond to the tenth. So I know this ... I'm explaining an outbound marketing aspect, but those same resources are the same ones that are going on the inbound sites, this is just the outbound activity of that. I'm just not in a search and find part of my career because it's up to those lieutenants to say, "Oh, we've got this pain point. We need to go find a solution." They're going to be the ones that are looking for that inbound solution, unless it is something so big and so pressing that I'm going to enter into that conversation. Kathleen: What was the last company that was able to penetrate the wall for you? Jeff: Oh, how exciting. Let me go into the forwarded mail. Actually, I know right off hand, I don't know the company name, but I know there is a company that manages field events that had sent us something. I know that PFL, which is a printing and resource company, sent a really nice mail piece to me with several pieces of content in it as well as a mug and some caramels, and it was very funny because the BDR who had sent it emailed me and said, "Oh, I hope you got my gif," et cetera. "I'd love to schedule a follow-up call." I didn't respond to him because I didn't know what he was talking about, I hadn't gotten it yet. His email had beaten the package. So then, all of a sudden, literally five minutes later the package arrives, I'm like, "Oh, oh, this is really interesting." I had a good conversation with him at an event recently. I didn't respond, but I forwarded it along to the person who runs campaigns for us and gave him the package and the caramels and the coffee mug, I will note. I didn't hold onto it. Kathleen: Oh, you're so nice, you didn't eat the caramels. Jeff: I didn't eat the caramels. But that is how it can work, and it was because ... they didn't know that was a particularly good time to hit us. We were the ones who decided it was, and now there's an ongoing conversation because we're talking with multiple players, and assessing pricing and value and everything else. In an inbox, if I were to just let my inbox run today, I bet you I would get probably a hundred unsolicited emails. That's just untenable to respond to. Kathleen: Yeah. Jeff: So going back to your question, inbound marketing remains strong because it's my lieutenants who are going to go out and search, and that's where you want to be found for the types of solutions and speaking to the pain points that they're looking for. Kathleen: Yeah. Makes sense. So you've got to not only know your ultimate target audience, but you've got to know who the influencers are as well. Sometimes, they're the ones that you have to get first. Second question. The world of digital marketing is changing so quickly. Voice search is a great example of that. How do you personally stay educated and up to date on all these changes? Jeff: So my entire marketing career grew up around the internet. I've shared this on other podcasts, but I do not have a business class to my name. I've never taken a marketing class. I was a Mass Communication undergrad BS, an appropriate abbreviation for the degree, I guess. And I got a Master's as well, a law degree. I practiced law for a couple years before I wove my way back towards technology in the mid '90s as the internet was exploding. So one of the things I did is I just started going down what I call the rabbit hole, was following the links to stories that were of interest, and I discovered very early on that they were linking to sources that I liked, so then I'd subscribe to that source, and then I'd subscribe to that source, then unsubscribe to things as they became less and less valuable. What I can tell you today, is that one of the ones that I still subscribe to that I know were very early on, is SmartBrief. So for your audience, if they aren't aware, SmartBrief is a company that actually manages and produces I think over 200 newsletters for different industry associations or topical areas, and I love their synopsis. It is actually the model upon which, arguably, The Skimm and Inside are based. They have been summarizing the news around particular topics. So they have a leadership SmartBrief, they have a social media SmartBrief, they have a mobile SmartBrief, they have a franchise association SmartBrief. That is such a great summation because just skimming the headlines and skipping through can be a powerful way, especially on the train or commuting or what have you, to quickly digest. I also remain a big fan and loyal subscriber to eMarketer. So loyal, as I've told them in the past, that I remember their charts before they were black and red. And they rebranded them in ... that is one of the great untold branding stories, about how they branded the color of their charts. Kathleen: Yeah. Jeff: And now, you see red and black, you know it's eMarketer. Kathleen: So true. Jeff: And what I love there, it's always provocative to understand trends and how consumer behavior or other behaviors are working. So I really like that. I could go on and on with the subscriptions, but it really is about finding the ones you like and going down the rabbit hole to find others. Kathleen: I love those all. Those are all new ones, nobody has mentioned them before, so I'm going to definitely be checking them out. So much good stuff here. I learned a tremendous amount, and I'm sure that there are listeners who ... and also who are now realizing that they need to gain greater control over their own presence online. How to Reach Jeff Kathleen: So if someone listening has a question, wants to learn more, wants to check out Yext, what is the best way for them to find information about Yext online and also to find you online? Jeff: Sure. So Yext.com, Y-E-X-T.com has all the information about the company. You can sign up to get a demo if you are a small business. You can even go through the process and actually sign up and subscribe. We are on all the social channels, so you'll find us there. My personal Twitter is @JKRohrs, and if you ... you can DM me there with a question, always happy to ping you back and answer. But those are probably the two primary ways and the best ways to get ahold of me. Kathleen: Great. Thank you so much. Thanks for all the great information and the wonderful sources to check out for digital marketing knowledge. It's been fascinating to me. If you're listening and you liked what you heard, I would really appreciate it if you would give the podcast a review on iTunes or Stitcher, the platform of your choice, and if you're listening and you know somebody who is doing kick ass inbound marketing, like Jeff is, tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. Thank you so much, Jeff. Jeff: Thank you. 

Jeff Rohrs serves as chief marketing officer for Yext, the leading Digital Knowledge Management platform that gives companies control over their customer-critical facts across the digital universe. His first book, “Audience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans and Followers”, has been lauded by marketers and executives as a must-read. Prior to joining Yext, Jeff served as Vice President of Marketing Insights for Salesforce and ExactTarget. What you'll learn about in this episode: How Jeffrey’s vision for digital research coincided with—and was enhanced by—Morgan Stewart, founder and CEO of Trendline Interactive Why audiences can be built as a proprietary marketing asset, as well as the responsibilities of growing them from such a foundation How today’s social media channels, like Instagram, are constantly shifting How to target your most loyal advocates and amplifiers as these shifts happen, assuring you’re never too far from your most valuable customers Why audience management, now, is a core marketing responsibility, as well as the impact of public relations in our socially connected digital landscape Why email is the “secret sauce” of any digital marketing campaign, and why Jeffrey uses it as a home base to re-acquire consumers lost in the ever-shifting digital world Jeffrey’s “helpfulness” mindset when creating a content marketing strategy How voice search has changed the marketing world, and how Jeffrey’s approach to voice search is critically important to organizations How to build an enterprise straight from the talent pipeline, as well as how to scale globally without losing previous talent The importance of developing mentor relationships within your network, as well as the importance of staying flexible as your business evolves Ways to contact Jeff: Website: www.yext.com Website: www.geomarketing.com Conference: www.onward18.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jkrohrs Twitter: @jkrohrs

Over the last year or so, we've all seen a big shift in the search and with the growth of devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, it has become even more important that your organization has a way to manage its digital knowledge. So, what is digital knowledge? Jeff Rohrs, the CMO of Yext, and his team have coined this term digital knowledge management and have a great list of resources for you to check out! All this and more, today on the EDGE! Sponsor EDGE of the Web is brought to you by Site Strategics and they are offering to help you find out your digital marketing ROI. The Digital Marketing ROI Report will examine your existing SEO, content, social media, and PPC to help you discover your TRUE ROI. Visit https://edgeofthewebradio.com/roi/ to get 30% off your comprehensive review of your digital assets! --   Edge of the Web Radio is brought to you by Site Strategics. Site Strategics is a web design and marketing services company that not only helps business owners look good on the internet but helps ensure you come to the top positions on major search engines. Are you looking for a professional SEO firm? Site Strategics curtails its business to Indianapolis, Indiana -- but also works nationwide and globally. To learn more, visit our website at http://www.sitestrategics.com/ or http://www.edgemedia.studio

In this episode the Jeff Rohrs, CMO of Yext, a Digital knowledge management platform talk about the content marketing strategy of Yext and his views on content gating.

Writing a marketing book? Are you sure you're doing it right? In this episode of CMO Confessions, Joe Hyland, CMO of ON24, chats with Yext's CMO, Jeff Rohrs. Tune in to learn Rohrs' secrets to book-writing, why you need to consider establishing "un-goals," and just how one moves from the legal field into the tech marketing field.Follow Jeffrey on Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jkrohrs Learn more about Yext: https://www.yext.com/ Buy Jeffrey's book, "Audience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans, and Followers": https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GIUTQQU/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 Get the eBook by Jeffrey and Jay Baer, "The Everywhere Brand": https://www.yext.com/blog/2017/05/the-everywhere-brand/CMO VC Blog: http://cmovc.com ExactTarget series, "Subscribers, Fans, and Followers": http://pages.exacttarget.com/sff Learn more about ON24 here: https://www.on24.com/ Follow ON24 on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ON24 

In the next 5 years, smart mobile devices are set to more than double from 1.75 to 4 billion. Mobility is driving most of the change today in the way that people interact with the World. Yet a whopping 93% of all transactions still take place in brick and mortar stores. For all the ways that daily life and consumer behavior are changing, it could be argued that physical location is becoming more, not less relevant. To adapt to this trend, says Jeff Rohrs, CMO of digital global location management leader Yext, marketers need to think about “connecting people in the real world to contextually relevant information.” Jeff joins Moneyball for Marketing in this edition to talk about how businesses can build digital marketing solutions into their real world engagement, while getting the context right.

Minter Dialogue Episode #165 — This interview is with Jeff Rohrs, CMO of Yext, the leader in Digital Presence Management (DPM). It’s an extremely interesting space for any business with a physical presence, linking the store with the internet and smartphone. In this interview, Jeff tells us about Yext and the opportunities for business to enhance the link between mobile and retail. We also discuss company’s own digital transformation. Meanwhile, you can comment and find the show notes on myndset.com where you can also sign up for my weekly newsletter. Or you can follow me on Twitter on @mdial. And, if you liked the podcast, please take a moment of your precious time to go over to iTunes to rate the podcast.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/minterdial)

Jorgen Sundberg speaks to Jeff Rohrs, VP, Marketing Insights at Salesforce and author of Audience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans & Followers. Questions that Jeff answers in this episode: 1. What is the value of a social audience and how can you measure it? 2. What are some of the challenges companies face in terms of audiences? 3. How do you segment audiences and how do you attract each segment? 4. What are your top 3 tips for companies to build an audience on social media? 5. Can you recommend any further resources and how can people connect with you? Read the full article: http://linkhumans.com/blog/build-audience-social-media Subscribe on iTunes: http://bit.ly/smknowhow

Minter Dialogue Episode #134 — This interview is with Jeffrey K Rohrs, VP of marketing and insights at Salesforce, as well as author the book Audience, Marketing in the age of subscribers, fans & followers. In this podcast, we talk about digital marketing and transformation, how important it is to consider the broader audience of your brand, the challenges of creating a social strategy for brands that are part of a larger corporation and what role the C-suite can be playing in digital transformation. Meanwhile, you can comment and find the show notes on myndset.com where you can also sign up for my weekly newsletter. Or you can follow me on Twitter on @mdial. And, if you liked the podcast, please take a moment of your precious time to go over to iTunes to rate the podcast.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/minterdial)

News flash: There is no secret sauce when it comes to gaining customers. And you can't always convince people to pay for your products and services - that's not the way modern business works. Instead, you have to give away everything you know. This requires both patience and courage to make sure you're doing things the right way. Today's Sprout Social shout out goes out to Jeff Rohrs of ExactTarget and co-host of Social Pros. We're so proud of him because his book, Audience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans, and Followers, was named one of the 25 books that marketers and CMOs are reading this year.  Jay Today is sponsored and produced by Candidio, a simple and affordable video production company, and Sprout Social, a social media management and analytics company that Jay uses for much of his social media every day.

Interview with Jeff Rohrs who in his first book, AUDIENCE: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans & Folllowers, looks into how to create what he calls “Proprietary Audience”.

Jeffrey Rohrs, Vice President for Marketing Research & Education at ExactTarget The Society for New Communications Research (SNCR)podcast series profiling the winners of its 2011 Excellence in New Communications Awards continues. In this program, we present a conversation with Jeff Rohrs, Vice President for Marketing Research & Education at ExactTarget. The company won an award in the Corporate category for its SUBSCRIBERS, FANS & FOLLOWERS research series. A “recovering attorney” and Cleveland sports fan/victim, Jeff serves as Vice President for Marketing Research & Education at ExactTarget.  In this capacity, Jeff spearheads the SUBSCRIBERS, FANS & FOLLOWERS research series, ExactTarget's SUBSCRIBERS RULE! philosophy, the company's annual Connections User Conference  programming.  Over the years, Jeff has presented at a wide variety of industry events including ad:tech, The CMO Club Summit, IAB MIXX, SXSW, Wired's Social Media Summit, and WOM Supergenius.  Before joining ExactTarget, Jeff was President and Chief Interactive Strategist for Optiem, a digital marketing agency based in Cleveland, Ohio, where his clients included Sherwin-Williams, Calphalon, and Insurance.com.  Jeff received his J.D. and Masters in Mass Communication from Boston University, and he holds his B.S. in Mass Communications from Miami University where he serves on the Advisory Board for the school's Armstrong Center for Interactive Media Studies. You can read more about the winning ExactTarget entry on the SNCR website. The podcasts are being produced by Steve Lubetkin of Lubetkin Global Communications LLC, a Senior Fellow of SNCR and a member of the SNCR Advisory Board. The podcast series appears weekly on Thursdays over the next several months. Subscribe to the RSS feed for the SNCR podcast. Subscribe to these podcasts in the Apple iTunes Music Store.

The Society for New Communications Research (SNCR)podcast series profiling the winners of its 2011 Excellence in New Communications Awards continues. In this program, we present a conversation with Jeff Rohrs, Vice President for Marketing Research & Education at ExactTarget. The company won an award in the Corporate category for its SUBSCRIBERS, FANS & FOLLOWERS research…