Podcasts about kathleen oh

Our Chief Korea and Taiwan Economist Kathleen Oh discusses Korea's recent pension reform and its implications for the country's rapidly aging population.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Kathleen Oh, Morgan Stanley's Chief Korea and Taiwan Economist. Today I'll revisit Korea's demographic emergency and how the recent pension reform is trying to address it.It's Thursday, May 1st, at 4pm in Hong Kong.Some of you may remember that I came on the show last fall to talk about the crisis-level demographic challenges in Korea. Korea officially became a super-aged society at the end of 2024. This means that more than 20 per cent of the population is 65 or older.In the face of its rapidly aging population and a fertility rate that has hit rock bottom, Korea is taking decisive action finally. The national assembly recently passed a landmark pension reform bill to amend the National Pension Act. This measure marks the first major change to its pension system in 18 years. And it's supposed to improve the pension fund's financial sustainability to prepare for a rapidly aging population that will only accelerate from here.The amendments include raising pension contribution rates and adjusting the income replacement ratio to 43 per cent. These changes aim to delay the depletion of the fund to 2064 to 2071, in an upside scenario. Without this reform, the fund would have been depleted by 2055, just 30 years later.This reform avoids having to sell the fund's financial assets by delaying depletion. It also assures pension-holders of the stability of future pension assets. And, last but not least, it increases the pension fund's capacity for financial investments, which could lead to higher returns.This is the first step towards making legislative, and therefore more structural changes to respond to the reality of a super-aged society. Moreover, it kicks off a sweeping reform agenda that includes the pension program, labor market, education system, and capital markets.It's also notable because the center-left Democratic Party of Korea and the conservative People Power Party were able to show bipartisan support and a public consensus to reach a deal, especially during the recent tumultuous political events that took place in Korea.That said, the reform also has some potentially negative economic impacts. Higher pension contributions could squeeze households' disposable income, putting mild but additional downward pressure on aggregate consumption and savings. Especially considering that as people age, they tend to consume less – and this can lead to a structural slowdown in private consumption.Despite Korea's challenges with an aging population, we're cautiously optimistic about its future – especially because [of] the recent rebound in the country's fertility rate. After marking a drop every year since 2015, it rebounded to 0.75 in 2024. While still far below the ideal replacement ratio of 2.1, this rebound is a small but certainly a positive sign.Looking ahead, Korea's working population is expected to decrease by 50 per cent in the next 40 years unless the country ensures a dramatic rebound in the fertility rate to 1.0 or higher by 2030. In the meantime, we expect further adjustments to the pension reform bill, we expect further discussions around lifting of retirement age, along with the labor market reform next in line on the economic front. The Korean government will continue to execute on its demographic policy agenda.Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.

Our Chief Korea and Taiwan Economist discusses the reforms needed to overcome Korea's urgent demographic crisis.----- Transcript -----Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Kathleen Oh, Morgan Stanley's Chief Korea and Taiwan Economist. Today I'll discuss what's needed to overcome Korea's aging population crisis.It's Tuesday, Oct 15th, at 4 PM in Hong Kong. South Korea faces some of the world's most challenging demographics and will officially become a super-aged society next year – that's more than 20 percent of the population 65 or older. The implications of this are so significant that the Korean government recently declared a national emergency, and we don't think this is overstating the case. Korea's low fertility rate is the primary culprit. In 2023 it plummeted to the lowest level globally and currently sits at 0.72. For reference, the total fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman is what's necessary to maintain a stable population in general. By next year, Korea's population will start declining and is projected to shrink by a third over the next 40 years as the working population halves. At this pace, the Bank of Korea forecasts that Korea's potential growth could enter negative territory by 2040, down from 2 per cent in [20]24-25. So why does Korea have such a record-low fertility rate? In the short term, there are two key drivers: First, the declining number of marriages during the pandemic drove a rapid drop in births; having children out of wedlock is taboo in Korea. Once weddings resumed in 2022, Korea saw a slight but insufficient rebound in births. Second, housing prices have gone up 80 per cent in the past decade, which has discouraged young couples from having families. Families with first children feeling extra financial burdens to have [a] second child. Beyond the short term, structural factors have also played a role. After a compressed period of rapid economic growth, Koreans feel uncertain about the employment conditions and housing outlook. Tackling the low fertility rate has been on Korean policymakers' agenda for the past 20 years. The government has invested more than $320 billion into solving the demographic challenge. And while these efforts have certainly raised awareness, they have yet to overcome the crisis. And why? Because Korea has not addressed the root causes of the problem -- income uncertainty, high childcare and education costs. It's clear what's needed here are structural reforms and Korea is clearly taking important steps towards overcoming the issue by tackling the fundamental problems now. Policymakers are working to reshape the pension system for the first time in 15 years. They are focusing on measures around improving work-life balance, reducing the gender wage gap, and increasing support for working parents. They are also considering lowering barriers to immigration, which could help alleviate talent shortages. They are also working on reducing the cost of private education. And finally, the government is also focused on improving the country's capital market infrastructure. They are aiming to attract foreign investment, as well as to help households secure [a] source of asset accumulation, and lower borrowing costs for domestic players. Of course, it's impossible to quickly reverse the downtrend and positive change will require multiple years - even decades. Korea's government has set a medium-term goal of returning the fertility rate to 1.0 by 2030, which would delay working population decline by five years. And if the fertility rate reaches 2.1, that would delay the decline in the workforce by 20 years. Conversely, if Korea's fertility rate remains at the current rate of 0.72, the population will halve by 2065 and the economy will start contracting in 2040, a worst-case scenario that the government is determined to avoid.Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.

I'm diving into the evolving world of social media with three incredible guests who are making waves on Substack. Kathleen Oh, Becky Mollenkamp, and Tara McMullin share their unique journeys and insights into why they left traditional social media platforms behind and found success on Substack. In this episode, Kathleen discusses her journey from being banned on Instagram to thriving on Substack by discussing safe psychedelic use. Becky shares how she transitioned from traditional email marketing to Substack, finding a sense of relief and community. Tara talks about her experience in leaving ConvertKit and focusing on Substack to explore the future of work and online business. This episode is packed with valuable insights for anyone looking to redefine their online presence and build authentic connections. In this episode of the podcast, we talk about: Using Substack to foster a genuine community Ways to monetize content on Substack How to leverage Substack's features for better engagement Key tips for maintaining authenticity in your online presence Rebuilding your audience after being banned The collaborative writing community that lives on Substack Concerns about the future of Substack …And More!   This Episode Was Made Possible By: Riverside All-in-One Podcast & Video Platform Visit Riverside and use the code DREA to get 15% off any Riverside individual plan. We use it to record all our podcast interviews: https://onlinedrea.com/riverside  Social Media Day Summit Social media is not dead. It is simply evolving. And that's what we're exploring at the Social Media Day Summit. Join me and my fellow experts on June 30th as we dive into innovative strategies and timeless tactics designed to empower social media marketers, freelancers, agency owners, and anyone else ready to take their social media strategy to the next level. Grab your ticket today for $10: https://onlinedrea.com/smd/   About the Guests: Becky Mollenkamp is a business accountability coach who guides entrepreneurs through the transition from small business owner to agency CEO (without selling their soul). Website: https://feministfounders.co/   Feminist Founders Podcast: https://feministfounders.co/episodes/   Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beckymollenkamp/   Tara McMullin is a writer, podcaster, and critic. She's the creator of What Works, a podcast and newsletter that rethinks work, business, and leadership for the 21st-century economy. Tara uses critical theory, philosophy, and economics to make sense of both systemic challenges and everyday practice. She's also the co-founder of YellowHouse.Media, a boutique audio and video production agency that helps changemakers create remarkable media. Her work has been featured in Fast Company, Quartz, and The Muse. Website: http://yellowhouse.media/   What Works Podcast: http://whatworkspodcast.com/  Newsletter: http://whatworks.fyi/   Kathleen Oh (she/her) is an Integration Coach, writer, and advocate for safe drug use, specializing in psychedelics. With over 25 years of experience in mental health, she's been in private practice since 2007. Kathleen's coaching services are tailored to support individuals navigating high-stress, high-performance careers, prioritizing their personal growth and well-being. Website: http://coachkathleenoh.com/  Substack: http://ohmyheart.substack.com/    Go to the show notes for all the resources mentioned in this episode: https://onlinedrea.com/311

If you have watched the series “9 Perfect Strangers,” then you have been introduced to the concept of micro-dosing. While it wasn't legitimized in this series, the concept was at least introduced so that viewers had an initiation into the thought process.  We are not here to tell you that should or should not try it. But today we have the chance to introduce you to Kathleen Oh, and she answers some our questions so that you have an idea what a psilocybin is. It's important to also remember that mushrooms are really good for you. And current research is linking the use of them with more and more efficacy in certain cases, for certain people, with certain mental health concerns.  You can learn more about Kathleen by visiting her website: www.coachkathleenoh.com or her Substack: https://ohmyheart.substack.com boobs, bods & brains is the pairing of the work and interests of hosts Laurel Crossley and Sam Leeson-McCoy. You can learn more about the podcast, its origins and how to become a sponsor by visiting the website: https://boobsbodsandbrains.wixsite.com/my-site

Are you ready to embrace your “you-ness” and let your unique brilliance shine in your entrepreneurial journey? Today we are joined by returning guests Annie P Ruggles & Deanna Seymour, two of the most creative fun, and original entrepreneurs I know to talk about finding inspiration in unexpected places, converting your quirks into cash, and why being you is the best business strategy. Annie P Ruggles is the beauty and brains behind Quirk Works Consulting, the Non-Sleazy Sales Academy, and mistress of The Too Legitimate to Quit Podcast. Deanna (aka DD) Seymour is a creative unicorn whose Branding, Content Strategy & wildly colorful Graphic Design have captured the hearts of countless cool people. I promise not to spoil it, but here are a couple of sneak peeks: Discover how being authentically you, regardless of how unconventional it may seem, attracts the exact right audience for your business.Deanna shares her vibrant journey of finding her brand's voice through color and fun, proving that personality is key to resonating with your clientele.Annie dishes on how she evolved beyond restrictive brand identities to embrace a more inclusive business model that still aligns with her core values.Are you harnessing your uniqueness in your business? This episode is not just a conversation but a call to action to step into your authenticity to make your business a true reflection of you.Connect with Annie: https://www.anniepruggles.com/ Connect with Deanna: https://deannaseymour.com/ Mentioned during our convo:Liz Wilcox: https://lizwilcox.com/Kathleen Oh: https://coachkathleenoh.com/Marie Forleo: https://www.marieforleo.com/Voxer: https://www.voxer.com/Hey, you can't stand out from the crowd if your business looks and feels like everybody else, but it's pretty hard to figure out what to double down on and what to let go of all by yourself. What would your business look like if you were working in your zone of genius and creating offers that are magnetic to the people you'd love to work with? Want to know more? Schedule a free consultation here by clicking here.

Are you ready to embrace your “you-ness” and let your unique brilliance shine in your entrepreneurial journey? Today we are joined by returning guests Annie P Ruggles & Deanna Seymour, two of the most creative fun, and original entrepreneurs I know to talk about finding inspiration in unexpected places, converting your quirks into cash, and why being you is the best business strategy. Annie P Ruggles is the beauty and brains behind Quirk Works Consulting, the Non-Sleazy Sales Academy, and mistress of The Too Legitimate to Quit Podcast. Deanna (aka DD) Seymour is a creative unicorn whose Branding, Content Strategy & wildly colorful Graphic Design have captured the hearts of countless cool people. I promise not to spoil it, but here are a couple of sneak peeks: Discover how being authentically you, regardless of how unconventional it may seem, attracts the exact right audience for your business.Deanna shares her vibrant journey of finding her brand's voice through color and fun, proving that personality is key to resonating with your clientele.Annie dishes on how she evolved beyond restrictive brand identities to embrace a more inclusive business model that still aligns with her core values.Are you harnessing your uniqueness in your business? This episode is not just a conversation but a call to action to step into your authenticity to make your business a true reflection of you.Connect with Annie: https://www.anniepruggles.com/ Connect with Deanna: https://deannaseymour.com/ Mentioned during our convo:Liz Wilcox: https://lizwilcox.com/Kathleen Oh: https://coachkathleenoh.com/Marie Forleo: https://www.marieforleo.com/Voxer: https://www.voxer.com/Hey, you can't stand out from the crowd if your business looks and feels like everybody else, but it's pretty hard to figure out what to double down on and what to let go of all by yourself. What would your business look like if you were working in your zone of genius and creating offers that are magnetic to the people you'd love to work with? Want to know more? Schedule a free consultation here by clicking here.

What would you do if you woke up one day and your social media accounts were *poof* gone? What would happen to your business? When Kathleen Oh was deleted from Instagram, with no customer service to call, and no one to help her recover the account, she was scared and hurt. As creators, we often think that it is a mutualistic relationship between us and algorithms, but the truth is everyone on social media can disappear from the platform in a second, and if you have built your business on these platforms that can be a scary thing! (Just think of the great March 2024 social media outage that had influencers shaking for a few hours

In this episode, we're exploring the world of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and its use in the online business and coaching world, with a focus on what you, as a consumer, need to be aware of.  I'm joined by Kathleen Oh, a coach trained as a Master Practitioner in NLP, to get her perspective on its problems and the potential for harm.  Learn more at bsfreebusiness.com/neuro-linguistic-programming

Kathleen Oh is a Coach, writer, and safe drug use advocate and educator specializing in psychedelic integration. Her primary focus has become understanding her responsibility in anti-racist, capitalist, and colonial systems of oppression, especially in New Age Spirituality, Self-Help, and Wellness Coaching. She has been in and around areas of mental health work for 25 years, working in private practice since 2007. Her niche clients are online business owners, entrepreneurs, and medical and legal professionals. She has lost close friends and relationships with her community members to controversial conspiracy groups. In this very honest and forthright conversation, Kathleen shares about her experience in the coaching industry explaining how she came to notice the lack of guardrails in the training and practices of this unregulated trade. Kathleen opens up about her personal beliefs and relationships and how they related to her work as a coach and ultimately led her to make changes to become a safer practitioner. Before You Go: Rachel offers a few examples from her personal experiences that highlight the importance of safeguards and transparency in any type of counseling industry. You can find out more about Kathleen and her work at: https://coachkathleenoh.com/ You can request an appointment with Kathleen by sending an email to: info@lalichcenter.org All of Rachel's video lectures are available for purchase here: rachelbernsteintherapy.com/webinar.html To help support the show monthly and get bonus episodes, shirts, and tote bags, please visit: www.patreon.com/indoctrination Prefer to support the IndoctriNation show with a one-time donation? Use this link: www.paypal.me/indoctrination Connect with us on Social Media: Twitter: twitter.com/_indoctrination Facebook: www.facebook.com/indoctrinationpodcast Tik Tok: www.tiktok.com/@indoctrinationpodcast Instagram: www.instagram.com/indoctrinationpodcast/ YouTube: www.youtube.com/rachelbernsteinlmft You can always help the show for free by leaving a rating on Spotify or a review on Apple/ iTunes. It really helps the visibility of the show!

Ever wondered if it was possible to grow your coaching business outside of social media? On this episode of Your Sparkly Brand, our guest, Kathleen Oh, shares the story of how she was able to grow her coaching business while off the grid. She shares strategies and tips that are helpful to building a business outside of social media. Kathleen Oh is a coach, writer, and safe drug use advocate and educator specializing in psychedelic integration. She offers coaching services focusing on the continued care and well-being of clients from high-stress, high-performance careers as the center of their work. Despite the challenge of unpopular conversations writing and truth-telling just won't let go. Speaking up about the brutal truth and psychedelic use ultimately got her micro-influencer account on Instagram banned. Kathleen stretches healing into deceptively simple places with unapologetic words, now sharing openly and honestly on Substack. How to connect with Kathleen… Website: www.coachkathleenoh.com Deets: https://ohmyheart.substack.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therealcoachoh/ Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@coachkathleenoh Key points in this episode… Meet Kathleen Oh! Meg's sparkly moment of the week. Lauren's sparkly moment. Kathleen's sparkly moment. Kathleen's business building journey. How Kathleen identified her target audience. Challenges Kathleen faced when she started speaking up about psychedelic use. Taking a leap from breathwork to psychedelic. Decision to quit Instagram. Experience with Substack and the performance compared to some other social platforms. Tips for building a business outside of social media. Kathleen's golden nugget to her younger self. Kathleen's upcoming projects. Where to find Kathleen online… Website: www.coachkathleenoh.com Deets: https://ohmyheart.substack.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therealcoachoh/ Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@coachkathleenoh Are you subscribed to the pod? If not, what are you waiting for!?! Subscribe now so you never miss an episode. LET'S CONNECT Find Lauren at laurentassiagency.com or on Instagram Connect with Megan at megangersch.com, on TikTok, and Instagram

Links from our conversation! Dra. Rocio Rosales Meza Ph.D., Unlearning The White Colonial Mind, ​​Membership Community The Decolonial Healing Space for Decolonial AccomplicesDr. Frantonia Pollins The Evil Behind Your Love & Light: Candid Conversations, How to Create an UncompromisingAnti-racism Action Plan for New Age Spirituality and Women's Empowerment SpacesIntroduction to Ancestor Reverence and review of bio-cultural identity. Yeye Luisah Teish is an American author of African and African-diaspora spiritual cultures. Yeye holds an honorary Ph.D. from the International Institute of Integral Human Sciences.Reckoning with Remembrance: On Memoir and Memory with Sheree Greer.Dr Janja Lalich is a world-renowned expert in cultic studies who offers resources to help survivors of coercive groups and courses for therapists and social workers to improve their counselling services.Kathleen Oh is a Coach, writer, and safe drug use advocate and educator specializing in psychedelic integration. Her primary focus has become understanding her responsibility in anti-racist, capitalist and colonial systems of oppression, especially in New Age Spirituality, Self-Help, and Wellness Coaching. She has been a mental health professional for 25 years, working in private practice since 2007Integration Coachwww.coachkathleenoh.comohmyheart.substack.comInsta @therealcoachohTiktok @coachkathleenohNICOLE & The Soulful HumanThe Soulful Human was created by Nicole as a way to share stories on important and relevant topics to our world today, to give an opportunity for those to share their own journeys but also for those listening to connect and see they are not alone in the struggles and joys they face on their own journeys. It is a place of connection and community. More will be coming with opportunities to be in the business and organization directory, to sponsor/advertise and to share YOUR story on upcoming topic. You can support the show by subscribing and giving a review as well as visiting the etsy shop. This is to cover expenses and eventually to use a portion of the profits to donate to some great causes such as The Trevor Project, Everytown for Gun Safety, The Loveland Foundation, Girls Inc and Planned Parenthood along with more.https://www.etsy.com/shop/thesoulfulhumanFollow Nicole and The Soulful Humanhttps://www.instagram.com/thesoulfulhumanpod/TT: @thesoulfulhumanhttps://www.instagram.com/nicoleoneilphotography/

In the final episode before a self-care break, Candice is thrilled to sit down with Kathleen Oh, a fellow writer, coach, and new-age wellness survivor. Kathleen lays the foundation for her cult-like experiences, sharing how she was born into high-control environments. She opens up about how the resulting black&white thinking shaped her choices at home as a young mother, and as in her work as a coach. Kathleen expresses her regret and speaks openly about how she is still coming to terms with the ways in which she spread misinformation and unknowingly used coercive sales tactics. She and Candice trade stories about the love&light ‘cult'ures they occupied, underscoring just how much the lies they learned - and helped to perpetuate through their work - are really just a byproduct of capitalist-cult, supremacist self-help rhetoric. Kathleen breaks down the real differences between therapy and coaching and shares how she learned (the hard way) what can happen when coaches are not, in fact, trauma-informed. Candice shares about the boss-babe business training she invested in, and Kathleen has an even more humbling story to share when it comes to predatory sales practices. The episode wraps with a variety of resources for folks who want to learn more about a small-yet-growing counterculture of coaches who are calling themselves, and one another, ‘out'… with the hope of mitigating the culty and harmful business practices that run rampant in the coaching industry.Kathleen Oh (she/her) is a Coach, writer, and safe drug use advocate and educator specializing in psychedelic integration. She offers coaching services focusing on the continued care and well-being of clients from high-stress, high-performance careers as the center of their work. She practices trauma-informed and integrative, positive psychology, solution-focused coaching and Internal Family Systems Informed approaches informed by an anti-oppressive framework. Kathleen openly practices as a learner and student of cultic studies. She is continuing to decondition and recover from systems of cultic indoctrination. This combination of skills is uncommon in coaching communities. She has lost close friends and relationships with her community members to controversial conspiracy groups. ohmyheart.substack.com | coachkathleenoh.com | IG: @therealcoachohReferenced In This Episode:Lalich Center on Cults & Coercion >> https://lalichcenter.org/Gerette Buglion, Writing to Reckon >> https://www.gerettebuglion.com/Maggie Patterson on IG @smallbusiness bossTarzan Kay on IG @tarzan_kayThe stories and opinions shared in this episode are based on personal experience and are not intended to malign any individual, group, or organization.Join The Deeper Pulse at Patreon for weekly bonus episodes + other exclusive bonus content. >> https://www.patreon.com/thedeeperpulseFollow The Deeper Pulse on IG @thedeeperpulse + @candiceschutter for more regular updates.

Kathleen Oh is a rare breed: a wellness coach who is cynical about wellness and the coaching industry. She works with clients across integration and psychedelics education. Kathleen is trained in Internal Family Systems (also known as IFS Informed or IFSCA), which is a trauma-informed approach, and comes from a background of trauma herself. Kathleen was once an anti-vaxxer, and her community embraced all kinds of magical thinking and conspiracy theories. Over time, she realised that her own coaching may have involved undue influence, and through the words of a dear friend she recognised that a lot of her perspectives were rooted in white privilege.You can support us on Patreon or Acast+, with a one-off donation, or grab some merch. Sarah Steel's debut book Do As I Say is available on audiobook now. With thanks to Audio-Technica, presenting partner for season 5 of Let's Talk About Sects. Use promo code LTAS10 for 10% off their Australian store, and to support the show. Links:Coach Kathleen Oh — Kathleen's websiteOh My Heart — Kathleen's Substack (we spoke about her Psychedelics, Cults and Predators article in particular, from 13 July 2022)The Real Coach Oh — Kathleen's InstagramPsychedelics, Politics and Predators with Kathleen Oh — Free Your Inner Guru podcast episode, 28 March 2022Cover Story: Power Trip — New York Magazine podcast series from Lily Kay Ross and David Nickles about the psychedelic underground, November 2021Dr Janja Lalich's websiteTake Back Your Life Recovery — Dr Janja Lalich's courses that Kathleen mentionedGerette Buglion's website#igotout — Gerette Buglion and Lisa (anonymous activist)'s movement for cult survivorsLaura Tucker's website — host of the Free Your Inner Guru podcast Subscribe and support the production of this independent podcast, and you can access early + ad-free episodes at https://plus.acast.com/s/lets-talk-about-sects. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kathleen Oh, Korea Economist at BofA Securities, discusses today's BOK decision. She spoke with hosts Doug Krizner and Juliette Saly on Bloomberg Radio.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Just imagine a high school art teacher, wife, and mom trying to start an online business.  She loves her students and teaching itself but all the rules of the profession are sucking the joy right out of her.  In spite of her boundless enthusiasm and endless creativity, plus years of side hustle experience, like the rest of us, this wantrepreneur turns to the alleged “experts” in the field, the high priestesses of online marketing.  The ones who make 'the rules". These celebrity coaches and online marketing gurus have made multi-million dollars selling their courses and coaching programs, and they have pages and pages of testimonials gushing over them, so it had to be “The Way”, and they had a right to make The Rules, only it wasn't and they don't.  Several courses later, this teacher, whom we will call Deanna (because that's actually her name) is not only not getting anywhere closer to the promised land of the laptop lifestyle, but she is starting to feel just as disillusioned with this whole online entrepreneur thing as she was as a teacher.  See the real problem? Is poor Deanna doing something wrong or did she simply get caught up in the “results, not typical” marketing hype that has made celebrity coaches fabulously wealthy while leaving most of their students blaming themselves for not being one of the success stories they bring on stage at their high ticket sales events?   Well, as you might have guessed, Deanna is today's guest on The Driven Woman Podcast and she is also the graphic designer and coach that I recently hired and will start working with in June, to help me write MY own rules when it comes to Instagram.   Here is what you'll learn in today's episode: How Deanna and I met:  In Angie Trueblood's Podwize membership Why she broke up with social media for 6 weeks and what it taught her Why Deanna no longer considers the $$$ she spent on courses to be a total waste What she thinks is the key to dealing with the fear of being vulnerable onlineWant more Deanna Seymour? Waitlist for “Eff That!” Instagram Community: https://deannaseymour.com/shop/Website: https://deannaseymour.com/“Eff That! Podcast: https://deannaseymour.com/blog/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thedeannaseymour/Ethical leaders that Deanna mentioned and recommends:Maggie Patterson_small business strategy: https://smallbusinessboss.co/Kathleen Oh_business coaching: https://coachkathleenoh.com/Kelly Diels_ethical marketing: https://www.kellydiels.com/Liz Wilcox_email marketing: https://lizwilcox.com/Brene Brown_Atlas of the Heart_ vulnerability: https://brenebrown.com/So, are you where you want to be in your online business?  Do you even know what is getting in your way? Take the quiz and get your personalized result, (and what to do about it! )What's Holding You Back?https://bit.ly/obstaclesquizThinking about working with Diann? If you need the focused attention on your business & life that is only available through 1:1 coaching, click here to schedule a free 30-minute consultation with Diann to see if her 12-week private coaching program is right for you. Free Consultation for 1:1 Coaching 

Just imagine a high school art teacher, wife, and mom trying to start an online business. She loves her students and teaching itself but all the rules of the profession are sucking the joy right out of her. In spite of her boundless enthusiasm and endless creativity, plus years of side hustle experience, like the rest of us, this wantrepreneur turns to the alleged “experts” in the field, the high priestesses of online marketing. The ones who make 'the rules". These celebrity coaches and online marketing gurus have made multi-million dollars selling their courses and coaching programs, and they have pages and pages of testimonials gushing over them, so it had to be “The Way”, and they had a right to make The Rules, only it wasn't and they don't. Several courses later, this teacher, whom we will call Deanna (because that's actually her name) is not only not getting anywhere closer to the promised land of the laptop lifestyle, but she is starting to feel just as disillusioned with this whole online entrepreneur thing as she was as a teacher. See the real problem? Is poor Deanna doing something wrong or did she simply get caught up in the “results, not typical” marketing hype that has made celebrity coaches fabulously wealthy while leaving most of their students blaming themselves for not being one of the success stories they bring on stage at their high ticket sales events? Well, as you might have guessed, Deanna is today's guest on The Driven Woman Podcast and she is also the graphic designer and coach that I recently hired and will start working with in June, to help me write MY own rules when it comes to Instagram. Here is what you'll learn in today's episode: How Deanna and I met: In Angie Trueblood's Podwize membership Why she broke up with social media for 6 weeks and what it taught her Why Deanna no longer considers the $$$ she spent on courses to be a total waste What she thinks is the key to dealing with the fear of being vulnerable onlineWant more Deanna Seymour? Waitlist for “Eff That!” Instagram Community: https://deannaseymour.com/shop/Website: https://deannaseymour.com/“Eff That! Podcast: https://deannaseymour.com/blog/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thedeannaseymour/Ethical leaders that Deanna mentioned and recommends:Maggie Patterson_small business strategy: https://smallbusinessboss.co/Kathleen Oh_business coaching: https://coachkathleenoh.com/Kelly Diels_ethical marketing: https://www.kellydiels.com/Liz Wilcox_email marketing: https://lizwilcox.com/Brene Brown_Atlas of the Heart_ vulnerability: https://brenebrown.com/So, are you where you want to be in your online business? Do you even know what is getting in your way? Take the quiz and get your personalized result, (and what to do about it! )What's Holding You Back?

Prior to 2020, Kathleen Oh believed anti-vaccination was the best way she could protect her children. In this compelling conversation, Kathleen shares how a courageous and empathetic friend led her to understand the deep-seated racism and white privilege underlying her beliefs. Kathleen shares how stepping away from her former community put her on a path of healing and awareness of cult dynamics in her midst. In this first episode of 2022, Kathleen Oh and Laura take a deep dive into psychedelics, altered states, politics and predators in the world of personal transformation. And why it's necessary for all coaches to critically evaluate the training and bigwigs in their coaching lineage. Kathleen Oh is an integration coach helping people on their self-exploration journeys. She educates and guides curious explorers through microdosing psychedelics & breathwork, and most importantly, heal and expand into all that's possible. She is sought after for her authentic, soft-but-confident approach. Personally, Kathleen has overcome childhood trauma, depression and addiction. Offline, Kathleen lives in Niagara, Ontario, loves to hike with her dogs. She feels most connected when in nature. Her favourite moments are in the darkness and the deep cold of a Canadian winter. Mentioned in this episode: Dr Janja Lalich - janjalalich.com Take Back Your Life Recovery Workshops Past episodes: Dr Janja Lalich, Nathanael Garrett Novosel, AdaPia D'Errico Connect with Kathleen online: Website - coachkathleenoh.comInstagram - @therealcoachoh Support Free Your Inner Guru: Become a Patreon Supporter – patreon.com/freeyourinnerguruRate and review on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser or CastboxShop the merchandise – freeyourinnerguru.com/shop Stay in touch: Subscribe to the Free Your Inner Guru newsletterInstagram – @freeyourinnnerguru and @thatlauratucker

The lady you loved that talked about Dragons is back to talk breath work and mushrooms!! So glad to have Kathleen Oh again! https://coachkathleenoh.com/ Don't forget to check out my patreon www.patreon.com/rontowski   Also my psychic standup show https://youtu.be/GzJwaK5G4Hk         Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Rontowski Contact Karen: karenrontowski@gmail.com https://www.karenrontowski.com Produced by Mike Flinn https://twitter.com/Unorisingmedia

Did you know you can use your breath to LITERALLY rewire your brain? Today on the JFJ podcast, we're talking to Kathleen Oh, transformational coach + breathwork badass, on how to use the breath to connect with your intuition, heal yourself, and even make the big changes you've struggled to make in the past. We talked all about how breathwork can help us break through, from healing trauma to dropping habits or addictions to unlocking your creativity (especially as a business owner!). THE GOODS Breath work 101: How to do it, where to start, and how to get allll the cool benefits Kathleen's story of transformation through breath work  Why breathing is so good for releasing habits and addictions How it rewires your brain (it's INSANELY COOL) Breathing and business owners: how a breath practice can help you come up with your best ideas  And so much more! Plus, cosmic boobs, imaginary classmates, and why Kathleen *might* be kind of a divorce-causer (but like! In a good way!). “The breath is the guide… That's all we have. We're breathing ourselves into our future. We don't have anything more than the breath.” “You have to stir shit up to get through the stuff you're getting though, and get to the good stuff.”   RESOURCES: CONNECT WITH KATHLEEN! (WEBSITE) GET KATHLEEN'S *FREE* BREATHWORK CLASS -- CONNECT WITH ME! >> GET A 1:1 READING >> GET YOUR FREE ENERGY TYPE MINI GUIDE >> CHECK OUT HUMAN DESIGN 101 (ALSO FREE)   [SONG CREDIT: SCOTT HOLMES]

“What people do find is that they find themselves… who they are and how they show up.”— Kathleen OhWe're raised to believe that happiness is like an equation — if you achieve X, Y, and Z, you're going to live happily ever after.But if you're living in the real world, you already know that it doesn't work that way. Integration coach, breathwork facilitator, and psychedelic guide Kathleen has worked with financially thriving six- and seven-figure entrepreneurs — people who seem from the outside to have their sh*t together.But as Kathleen says, having the car, the house, and the investments doesn't mean that they're happy or feel connected to their inner truths — or even their own authentic wants and needs.“I think what microdosing does is really turns it around and acts as a mirror,” Kathleen says. “Those things that you want, you can be and become and create from the inside out.”This is the second of a two-part interview series. In Part 1, we talked about Kathleen's background, how microdosing actually works, and the political history of psychedelics. In this episode, we dig into the juicy outcomes Kathleen's entrepreneur clients experience — and why we need to rethink what “success” means to us.Hit play and find a new way to work! In this episode, you'll learn:Why so many people become disillusioned after reaching a level of “success”The outcomes that entrepreneurs like Tarzan Kay have reported after working with Kathleen Why having fewer choices might actually be more satisfying than having manyNOTE: this podcast episode is for educational purposes only.  Subscribe now and never miss a single episode!About Kathleen Oh: Kathleen Oh is an internal family systems informed integration coach, breathwork facilitator, and psychedelic educator and guide. She helps her clients peel away the layers that keep their inner landscapes unfamiliar and strange.Highlights:‌ ‌  00:34  Intro03:19  Kathleen's clients08:06  What is success?09:13  White colonial patriarchy + capitalism12:00  Client outcomes15:10  Less fear + more consistency17:55  Richness + time19:42  The Christy QuestionsPlease remember to subscribe, rate, and review!  ---------------------------Kathleen Ohhttps://coachkathleenoh.com Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@coachkathleenoh Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/user/4quyosivqob8qhr9cqqhj657w (@CoachKathleenOh)Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therealcoachohDr. Rosales Mezahttps://www.drrosalesmeza.com---------------------------  HOW MUCH CAN YOU GET DONE-IN-A-DAY? You might be surprised! Work with me for a Done-In-a-Day session + walk away with a brand new, optimized email sequence or landing page! Let's take your copy from ho-hum to HELL YES!https://christycegelski.com/hire-me   CONNECT WITH CHRISTY ON INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/christycegelski

“With psilocybin slowing down the thought to allow for the feeling, it gives more choice around the action.”—  Kathleen OhThis episode of Captivate + Convert is going to take you on a journey.Or should I say “trip?”My guest is Kathleen Oh, an integration coach, breathwork facilitator, and psychedelic guide. Full disclosure: I've been working with her for a while now and she is PHENOMENAL at what she does!And part of what she does is help her clients unpack their limiting beliefs, connect with their inner landscape, and develop greater clarity... through microdosing psilocybin mushrooms.“What psilocybin does is it works on receptors in the brain that are the emotional receptors, the serotonin receptors, similar to what an antidepressant is,” Kathleen explains. “But an antidepressant is actually capping those receptors so that the emotion doesn't become too out of unbalance. What psilocybin is doing is pushing into new space, new thought, and new experience.”Why am I talking about microdosing on a podcast about entrepreneurship? Because when it comes to the stressful reality of running your own business, conversations about self care, mental health, and emotional wellbeing are just as legit as conversations about social selling and marketing strategy.So hop into the episode, keep an open mind, and get ready to learn everything you ever wanted to know about magic mushrooms!Hit play and find a new way to work! In this episode, you'll learn:Why psychedelics have such a bad rep despite their amazing healing potentialThe lowdown on microdosing and how it can be used for mental and emotional wellness Where to find free support, guidance, and education for microdosing NOTE: this podcast episode is for educational purposes only.  Subscribe now and never miss a single episode!About Kathleen Oh: Kathleen Oh is an internal family systems informed integration coach, breathwork facilitator, and psychedelic educator and guide. She helps her clients peel away the layers that keep their inner landscapes unfamiliar and strange.Highlights:‌ ‌  00:33  Intro02:43  Meet Kathleen Oh05:24  Trauma, near death + awakenings08:37  History + politics behind psychedelic messaging15:27  How microdosing works19:25  Trauma in the body22:20  Microdosing + guidance29:18  It's an ongoing process31:36  About Part 2Please remember to subscribe, rate, and review!---------------------------Kathleen Ohhttps://coachkathleenoh.com Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@coachkathleenoh Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/user/4quyosivqob8qhr9cqqhj657w (@CoachKathleenOh)Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therealcoachoh ---------------------------  HOW MUCH CAN YOU GET DONE-IN-A-DAY? You might be surprised! Work with me for a Done-In-a-Day session + walk away with a brand new, optimized email sequence or landing page! Let's take your copy from ho-hum to HELL YES!https://christycegelski.com/hire-me CONNECT WITH CHRISTY ON INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/christycegelski

Karla has Kathleen Oh on this episode to discuss psychedelics and why they truly are magic. What exactly is psilocybin? Have you ever had a bad trip and been nervous to try again? Have you thought about trying psychedelics but you're unsure what kind of feelings will come up? Have you thought about micro-dosing but you don't know where to start? Then you need to listen to this episode with the expert, Coach Kathleen! If you enjoyed this episode of The Woo Woo Experience please rate, subscribed and share with a friend.Music by Zara LarrsonFollow @thewoowooexperienceFollow @coachkathleenoh (Instagram, Spotify, TikTok)www.coachkathleenoh.comProduced by @stayweirddesigncoSupport the show (https://thewoowooexperience.com/subscribe/)

Outside of emails, landing page copy and offers, what are the levers that marketers can pull to get better results from their conversion funnels? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, DropFunnels Founder and CEO Jordan Mederich explains the importance of what he calls "building your house on rock as opposed to building it on sand" — or why it's so critical to nail certain fundamentals on your website in order to drive big results from your conversion optimization and lead generation strategies. In this episode, Jordan discusses how things like page load speed, social proof, and landing page design can all play big parts in boosting traffic to your site and ensuring that the visitors you attract stay and convert. Check out the full episode to get the details. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.) Resources from this episode: Check out the DropFunnels website Email Jordan at jordan@dropfunnels.com Transcript Kathleen: Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and this week, my guest is Jordan Mederich, who goes by Jordo, so that's what I'm going to be calling you after this. He is the founder and CEO of DropFunnels. Welcome to the podcast, Jordo. Jordan: Really glad to be here, I appreciate you having me. Kathleen: Yeah, I'm excited to talk with you. I love getting into deep technical levels of marketing nerdiness, and I think that's what we're going to do here today. So let's start out by having you just do a brief overview of who you are, what you do, and what DropFunnels is. Jordan: Yeah, sure. And anyone who's here, hopefully we can give value and new insights, regardless of anyone who's just starting out, or you've been doing it for a really long time. So I've been in the marketing game for, I'd say about a decade, actually I came from the filmmakers' perspective and training, I was in very much the creative space. And I make commercials for a long time and had films produced on Amazon Prime, and we've been seen on all the big networks and whatnot. And I realized that there was this big switch that I kind of had to make from kind of the mass market branding, corporate level of marketing, and realizing that I was blown away and shocked by the amount of waste that occurred specifically in marketing, corporate level businesses. I did work for Sony and Verizon, I was like, "Wow, there's so much money, billions of dollars being spent on advertising with no attributable results from most of those marketing efforts." Jordan: And so I dove deep into the direct response marketing world, and I was building sites and whatnot on WordPress. So WordPress powers 34% of the internet, it's Google's number one favorite platform to rank. But it's also extremely technical. It's very powerful, in that sense, it can do a lot. But you better have a marketing or development team, a designing team, you better know what you're doing, you better have great servers and all those things. And so I was building new marketing funnels on WordPress, and building new sites in businesses on WordPress. But about six years ago, there's this resurgence, and it kind of started with ClickFunnels, and Kartra, and Kajabi. It's the sales funnel builders, hard coded platforms that made it more simple, I would say, easier to build your business on a platform and they had the psychology of sales. Jordan: So we know that sales funnels blow away as far as conversion rates are concerned any corporate website and can really help you to get new leads and sales. And so they had this psychology but not the technology. And I look back and I realized as I was making the switch from corporate marketing into more direct response marketing, WordPress really has the technology, but not so much the psychology, it's really difficult to build on. So a couple years ago, I was looking back and I said, "Why don't I just combine these two worlds? Why don't I bring them together and make it easy to have the psychology and the technology at the same time? Make an entirely drag and drop, remove the code and the difficulty," and so we're the first platform ever to combine these two worlds. And to give you unlimited sales funnels, your websites, your blog, all of your courses into a WordPress based infrastructure, so that your sales funnels can rank, you build true domain brand authority, your pages load at around two seconds, which is really powerful for both paid and organic traffic. Jordan: And it gives you the absolute strongest foundation to be building your marketing on outside of having a massive team of servers and devs and all of that if you're going to go build it on your own, DropFunnels is really the all in one platform to help make that happen. So since we launched in early 2020, we've seen unbelievable tremendous and very rapid growth, and we're breaking things all the time and re-innovating and reinventing what we want to see the marketing world to be like, and we're seeing some amazing growth there. So that's kind of the history of DropFunnels and where we are. Kathleen: Well, the first thing that stands out to me that you said is that you launched your business in early 2020, what a time? It's a lot to do business, wow. I mean, granted now what you're doing is mostly online thing, but I'm just curious, how were you affected by COVID? Jordan: So being online was a huge blessing for sure at the time and everyone who was already established in the online space pretty much won, everyone won through with that whole thing. Zoom obviously exploded, all these online companies did, and what I saw was a lot of people who were doing physical business or brick and mortar business wanting to move online and really struggling to learn how to do that, to make that happen. So for us, it made us step up our training and our onboarding processes, because we had to make it not twice as simple, but probably four or five times simpler to help them to get moving, because it's such a foreign game for most people. Jordan: I think this morning, actually, I had a call with a client who is very brick and mortar, physical business, and just even using the verbiage, the vernacular of sales funnels in direct response marketing is so foreign that it's more of an education play than it is a service or marketing play. It's like we have to help the world understand how to reach people online instead of physical business. But I think it was a wake up call. Kathleen, I think for a lot of people running physical businesses and having no digital presence at all, it's like, "Wow, this kind of stuff can happen like that, and when it does, if you're not prepared, it can sink the ship." Kathleen: Yeah. It's really interesting the way you describe that, because in my day job, I am head of marketing for a company that sells software into e-commerce. And we saw something really similar where, at least in the retail industry the data that I've read indicates that COVID sped up the shift to e-commerce by something like 10 years within the span of a year. So it was this massive acceleration, and you're right, a lot of people weren't really ready for it, but they were sort of forced to make themselves ready. And so it was an interesting time for sure, just to see the people who would normally not be the early adopters or the technology adoption curves sort of being forced into a place of discomfort and having to do things sooner than they otherwise might. Jordan: Yeah. And I'm super well clearly thankful for it, but in a universal sense, it's like we needed some kick in the butt. The industry, the marketing world, the business world needed a kick in the butt to say, "Hey, it's not 1992 anymore, you have to adopt these methods or you're no longer competing against the guy down the street from you, you're competing against guys like me who live and die marketing." And so when you move into the space, it's this new world of early adopters, right? It's now a new phase of people who have never done it and never had an incentive to do what they have to do it. Kathleen: Yeah, it's funny because I was going to say I said early adopter, or innovator, but those are actually the wrong terms, Because those people have already converted to digital. So this is the... I don't remember what the term is, the laggards, the laggards are now being forced to move more quickly than they otherwise might have. Jordan: Yeah, I'm glad. Yeah, because I think it serves them better, too. Kathleen: Yeah, agreed. Well, one of the things that I was really excited to talk with you about is just, obviously with all direct response the goal is conversion and there are a lot of ways to get there. And one of the things that you've talked a lot about is getting to better conversions by improving traffic. And I wanted to sort of open that up to you and hear your perspective on that and then maybe we can dig in and get a little bit more nerdy on it. Jordan: Yeah. So I think there are two audiences to speak to as it relates to conversions in the online space. So for people who are doing really high volume traffic to specific offers, it's really the small hinges that swing big doors and identifying where the key measurements to really make a big move and dial-in processes. So what we see for example, in every single study on the planet that's ever been done, you find that your page load speed is one of the biggest movers as it relates to your conversion. Amazon found that in their own individual test, every 100 milliseconds of latency could cause a 1% decrease in conversion. Obviously, their mass traffic mass, mass appeal, and I think a lot of people realize, "Oh well, maybe one second isn't going to make that big of a difference, because I'm not that big yet." Jordan: But you have to realize that if you ever have that desire to be big the time to fix it is right now. And as we spoke before in our previous conversations, that it's really the comparison of building your house on the rock instead of on the sand. Building it on the rock means starting from day one on a strong infrastructure where you have the best chance to win versus the house on the sand, which is like, "Hey, I can just get this going, it'll be fine for now, and eventually, we'll go solve this," or "Eventually we'll go make this." And I kind of liken it to, if I were to get married to someone and say, "Well, it's not that great right now but it's going to get better later." We don't know if things and everything will be better, right? It's just not the case and it makes it harder to solve a problem down the line. Jordan: Whereas building it on a strong, firm foundation, where it's fast from the get go... I always wondered, I asked the question, "How many sales are you willing to sacrifice because of one thing that you could control from day one?" So high volume, page speed is important, social proof is important. And actually, this is something to kind of nerd out on, which is probably good for both high volume, but also people just starting to get into the game, we find that in our marketing, specifically direct response, so direct Facebook ads or YouTube ads directly to the landing page, we find about 30... This is going to blow your mind, about 20 to 30% of our traffic who go to a funnel, we're directing them to a funnel not to a home site, they're leaving the funnel and often on mobile or desktop, they're leaving it and going to the root domain to go get more information. Jordan: So we're seeing that even if we have an offer, maybe it's a coaching offer, or a course or whatever that is, and we send them to that funnel, they leave and go to the home site and then they'll go back to buy again, or they'll go buy a different product. So we realize that for marketers who are just relying on a sales funnel, or that infrastructure, and you have no home base authority there's nothing there to go back to go learn more to establish some of that trust, you're losing between 20 and 30% of your buyers, potential buyers there, and only about three to 5% obviously, depending on the funnel are ready to buy right now, right? And so we're losing so much of this and I feel like a lot of the general answer to marketing is you need to go spend more on traffic, you need to go spend more, spend more, get more traffic, more traffic. Jordan: And I say, you're not maximizing the value of the traffic you have right now, you are hemorrhaging traffic, because they're leaving for whatever reason, to get their design, or the offer doesn't really make sense to them on the page so you have to retarget them. And we know it's true, that's why retargeting is so valuable and follow-up sequences is so valuable, because just expecting them to go to a page to buy right away, it's the smallest percentage of the people most problem and solution and product aware audiences who can actually take an action on that right there. So it's all these pieces, I would bet that anyone listening to this year, you could literally double your sales by not increasing your traffic at all but by maximizing the traffic you have available to you right now. Kathleen: So Alright, I have a ton of questions. First, and we're going to kind of try to break this down. The first thing you talked about was page load speeds. So obviously, everybody's got their websites built on different platforms and we can't control that. I mean, of course, people can change, but assuming everybody is where they are, are there certain low hanging fruit things that you usually see that somebody can do to immediately improve page load speeds? Jordan: The first thing you want to do... There's lots of tools out there, our favorite is gtmetrix.com, and you can run it directly through there to find out where you're at. And here's the benchmark, if you're over four seconds in total page load time, you're losing conversions, period. It's undeniable, every study on the planet from Harvard to Stanford to Google and Amazon, they've all done the studies, you're losing money, period. So when that happens it's time to take some radical action. Inside of that page load report you'll see a waterfall breakdown, and it'll tell you what's slowing down your speed. If you have some developers who can help you and your more advanced in that way, you can defer some of your scripts to load later, that can help, crushing down images to be a small file size as possible is one of the biggest movers, or eliminating images at all, if you can. Jordan: Backgrounds, don't have images in backgrounds, embedded videos can slow things down quite a bit as well. Kathleen: By the way, is there a certain image size that you want to target to be under? Jordan: Yeah. I don't think that there's a universal answer as it relates to what that would be. If you had one image on the page that could be larger than if you had 20 images and they all need to be under a certain benchmark. But generally pages that are over 123 megabytes in size, they're really going to start to load slowly, especially on mobile. And mobile is what you want to optimize for first. So I always say build with mobile in mind and then move into desktop, where it could be a slower loading experience because desktops can handle that. So images and embeds of videos and those types of things can can really make a big difference. And you'll really want to watch out for any external tool that you're depending on their servers, right? So here's an example. Jordan: If someone was on DropFunnels right now we're extremely fast, the average is about 800 milliseconds in load time, but everything you add to the page slows it down beyond that. So if you added a hot jar traffic recording tool script on there, that's going to depend on their servers. A Wistia embed is going to do the same thing, a social proof widget pop-up, a chat icon that you can click to chat. Now each one of these things you want to keep in mind can really help you with your tracking and your overall conversions. But again, you want to start as the baseline and say, "Okay, a page with nothing else on it, how fast can we get that to load?" And your goal is under three seconds, for sure. As of today it needs to be under two seconds. Kathleen: I was going to say, I feel like even three is too long, for sure. Jordan: It can be, for sure. Especially if there's no other tools on top of it, right? So your base page you want to shoot for under two seconds, and then when you add a tool on top of that what's the impact going to be in that regard. Kathleen: So say the name of that tool that you mentioned again that's a good way to test. Jordan: Yep. So gt, the letters G-T, metrix, M-E-T-R-I-X.com. Is a great place, throw in your URL, you can test from different data centers depending on where you are. And to get a complete breakdown... And actually, they've just optimized to be kind of based on the lighthouse code base, so it's more recognized by Google as to how they see page speed. Kathleen: Got it, that's interesting. Okay, so that was the first thing you mentioned. So definitely run your site through gtmetrix, and dig in and see what's slowing it down and where the biggest issues are, and that's step one it sounds like in squeezing the most juice out of the orange you already have, meaning the traffic that's already coming to your website. The second thing you mentioned, if I remember correctly, was social proof. Is that right? Jordan: So I think that's one of the easiest things you can do immediately. I think we're in this third era of marketing, where now that consumers are more knowledgeable, they have information at their fingertips that we've never seen before. So it's like the used car dealer type of comparison back in the 80s and 90s, you'd go to a car dealer, and you hope he doesn't swindle you because he's the one with the information. He's like, "Hey, this car does this, and this, and this." Now, you don't even go to a car dealer with not an idea of what you're going to... You know the car, the color, the mileage on it, you've done a Carfax report on, you have all the information and it's the powers in your hands. Jordan: So when you show to the dealership, they're not trying to get you into a different car, they're saying, "I want you in this car, because I know this is what you want and you've researched." So with that what we find is, you can't over educate someone to buy, it's much more a trust and a relational play. And so we see that testimonials, quotes, any videos or text that you can do actually will have a bigger conversion rate change than adding more copy to the page to try to convince them to buy something. Kathleen: So a question on this, and I'm 100% with you, I am a strong believer that you've got to have social proof. One of the things that I hear though a lot, and I used to work in cyber from some companies is like, "I work in an industry where my customers don't want anybody knowing that they're using my product," either cyber or I don't know, my husband is VP of a company that makes competitive intelligence software, and so you don't tell your competitors what software you're using to track them, right? So what's your opinion on how to handle that? Is it still valuable to have a testimonial, where it's a little anonymized where you say like, "Head of marketing for this type of company," and you don't name the company or the person or do people just see that as BS? Jordan: Well, such a great question. It's like the overall question is, is social proof if you don't know who the person is? Is that even social proof? Kathleen: Yeah. Jordan: So like a tree falling in- Kathleen: And sometimes I feel like... I don't know, I wonder can it hurt you if people think you're making it up? I don't really know the answer to that. Jordan: Yeah. It would be tough for them to know whether or not you are making it up, I hope people are more integrous than that but I know that there are those cases. I would say that if it's not a reputable name, it's tough to have social proof that really carries any weight, so that can be tough. I think asking the right way can generate testimonials to say, instead of saying, "Hey, would you give us a quote about us using your service?" You could say, "Hey, we'd like to feature your company as one of our cases, would you be open to us featuring you?" And it becomes more of a marketing play in that sense. Jordan: Again, I think for most companies they'd be fine to scratch backs in that way, but in more specific niches where it's kind of guarded and confidential. Yeah, that's a tough one. I haven't thought about some ways to kind of get around that other than just asking whether or not, maybe even just a logo could be fine. Kathleen: Yeah. I mean, I think there's still definitely people who are going to say no across the board. It's so funny, because I actually saw a conversation about this recently, where somebody said that the best way around it is to give your customers awards. And because everybody to brag that they got an award, and so it was like, if you can figure out a way to make it about an award and not about your product, they'll consent to mentioning it effectively in that's sort of a backdoor way. Jordan: Yeah, that's a great play. I think, recognizing them or even doing a case study on their business specifically, you'd be like, "Hey, here's how these guys got this x result." And again, it feels like it's more of an ego play then, really. Kathleen: All right. So that was social proof, we already talked about page load speeds. And the third thing was- Jordan: Yeah. I think the overall concept is about optimization of the funnel flow. So it doesn't matter what you're selling, I can't tell you how many websites we see that are just... It's a hose with holes all over it, you put in leads and are going to go all over the place. There is no benefit to linking to Facebook from your primary corporate page or your funnel, there is no benefit. No one is sharing it enough to make any quantitative or qualitative impact on your business. So I say for almost all offers, strip away everything that doesn't serve you. Jordan: And frankly, we only build sites like they were in the '90s in that same way today because it's what's always been done, not because it's- Kathleen: Right. And I feel like some of those features come out of the box also, and so people are like, "Well, it's there, so it must be a good thing." Jordan: Yeah, exactly. It's the De Beers Corporation kind of invented wedding rings and we still do that till today, but for the longest part of history that never existed. It's like we do what's been done because it's been done and that's what I should do. So I say just be a little bit adventurous, in the sense that you have permission to not do what everyone else is doing. And if someone goes to DropFunnels.com, for example, there's only one call to action on the entire page, every button really for all intents and purposes, almost every button is called an anchor link and it drags people down the page to more information, instead of moving them to About Us, no one cares About Us. No one cares about me or what we're doing, they care about themselves. Jordan: So I think they want to know, is this end result going to help them? So we really try to focus all marketing efforts towards a single call to action. So and I think it's important that companies get clear on that strategy. What is the main thing that you want them to do? Is it driving them to a lead magnet or an ecosystem offer? Is it booking a consultation call or strategy call? Is it adding them to a Facebook group, because that can be advantageous as well, but push them into the main ecosystem, push them where you want them to go. And it's easier to optimize around one point, around one metric point instead of 30 and hoping, "Hey, I don't even know where these people are going, they're clicking here and going there." And even in Google Analytics, you can track where people are going, but the more links you have you'll find the more erratic people are, because they don't have a plan, it's your job to point the plan for them and to give them that path. Jordan: So for us, I think optimizing around clarity and simplicity in all of your digital assets, even like, "Hey, let's kill some sacred cows here." Is the fact that you have a blog is it actually serving you? Linking to your blog and your homepage, does it actually give you any output? I mean, you can track those things. Is having any social share buttons or any links to social or a billion things for people to do, does it actually serve you? And I think those are the tough questions we should have. Kathleen: So you mentioned something interesting when you were talking about this earlier, which is that, even if you have, say a landing page where you've got your offer, a lot of the time somebody will actually jump from that landing page and go back to your homepage, whether that's to research something or just learn more about you or to find some other information. Knowing that's the case, it's funny to me because the traditional kind of thing that you're taught as a marketer is don't put navigation on your landing pages, right? To your point like, "Let's not distract anybody with links that aren't absolutely necessary." Kathleen: So they find a way to get back to your homepage despite your best efforts to not lead them there, what does that imply for what you should do to the design of your homepage to make sure that they don't drop out of your funnel? So that they stay engaged and ultimately convert? Jordan: Yes, and that's exactly what I was just mentioning about being so clear about that call to action, that for us it's very circular and it feeds itself. So if someone goes to a funnel and we're recommending a software or a trial, or whatever that happens to be, if they leave that and go back to our homepage, they're going to end up right back to the funnel, because our homepage will push them back into that way. So I would say that there are a lot of great companies do this well. One of my favorite funnels of all time, it's through this company called Get Sunday, and they're a lawn care company. Kathleen: Oh, I used them. Jordan: Yeah. We probably bought through the exact same funnel, it was genius. And hopefully, people are buying things even just on propulsion of seeing an ad and going to buy just to study what they're kind of doing- Kathleen: That's 100% I was targeted with an ad. Jordan: Yep. And I met with them for two years, I don't know anything about lawn care, but I was so entranced by their funnel. But it was a perfect example of the experience of going through that funnel is really in synergy with what their homepage is doing. And I'd recommend anyone go to their site to take a look. I think Basecamp does some interesting things, they're very an analytical company, but their page is, I think, very well done. But generally speaking, if you have a landing page, I promise you people are leaving your landing page and your funnels to go check you out on your homepage. If you don't have a home site with that domain and that brand reputation there, you're losing sales, period. Jordan: And on that, instead, again, eliminate what doesn't serve you and focus everything on to getting them back to that funnel, either with a complimentary or identical offer, so that because when they do that you don't want to lose them when they finally land on your page and suddenly it's some rabbit trail that takes them off somewhere else. Kathleen: So for those who haven't experienced it, can you just describe a little bit about the Sunday funnel and what you liked about it? Granted, you're going to have to do this from memory, so it won't be exact, but what stands out in your head as what worked so well? Jordan: Yeah. I have this kind of rule when it comes to marketing and when we're consulting with people as well, the best words that you can think about it's two words, it's for you, for you. So even in sales calls or any of that, it's the best phrase, I think that you can use. Is that people when they have high amounts of information, especially in competitive markets, and there's lots of people to compare to, personalization is absolutely key. My buddy, George Bryant, he actually coined the phrase, "Relationships beat algorithms." And it's not always the best offer gets their wallet, it's whoever gets to their heart gets to their wallet. Jordan: So what Get Sunday does that I think is so unique and I think a lot of brands are tapping into this as well, is the for you experience, the personalization. So you literally type in, I think it's your address, I did it a year and a half ago, I still remember it. It's your address, and they show you a satellite image of your house. And then you draw these lines or whatever around your lawn about what's... They're, "Okay, based on this, hey we're going to send you this soil kit." And it's just free kit or whatever it was part of it, I don't recall it exactly. They sent out this thing, it came the next day, it scooped out some soil, and actually my kids got into it too, it was kind of a fun science experiment. Jordan: Gave them that and then they sent back this custom report, "Okay hey, this is the acidity, the phosphorus, all the chemical things, this is the for you experience. Hey, we've also looked at the weather patterns for the past 12 years, here's how much rain you're going to get this year, here's how much sunlight based on the geography of your land," and I was like, "Holy cow, they know more about me than I do, right?" Which is so critical. And through that process, I ended up taking every upsell, everything there is because I felt like it was so personalized. And they said, "Hey, Jordan, for you, this is what is going to be a good fit." Jordan: And to put a cap on that, one of my favorite phrases is that a prescription without diagnosis is malpractice. Prescription without a diagnosis is malpractice. And so when you get a diagnosis and you're given the prescription to not take that is insanity, right? So they're telling me, they know my lawn better than me, they know the geography, they know the weather, they know the soil better than I do, if I have any desire for the end result, which is they have a beautiful lawn, what else am I going to do? Am I going to go figure that out on my own? No, I'm going to go give them my money and they're going to tell me exactly what to do, and ship it right to my doorstep. Jordan: And so some of these home kit companies have really tapped into this as well, "Based on your diet, based on your preferences, what is it that you like?" So I think all of us, all these kind of technical aspects are sometimes almost a moot point if you're not delivering to someone some for you experience, some way to make them feel like they're not a number, that they're a person and that they've been diagnosed as a specific prescription to what's going on. If we can tap into that psychology more often, I think, you could have a 12 second loading website and you could have a personalized experience, you'd probably be fine. Kathleen: Yeah. It's so funny to hear you talk about Get Sunday, because that's the exact same experience I had. And I went through it, and I was like, "Wow, clearly they've tapped into, I don't know, Google Earth, or whatever it is, and they're measuring my lawn and checking my weather and the whole thing," and I was so enamored of it. So I definitely became a customer based on that funnel, I have a feeling they're doing pretty well off of it. Jordan: And as anyone will experience if they go through it as well, you get a phone number to your person, your consultant, which I mean, it was a heart check for me too like, "Man, what are we missing out on the support aspect?" I think I've utilized it once in two years, so it's not like I'm using it, but knowing that it's there will probably keep me on for a very long time. Kathleen: Yeah, definitely. They've nailed it. I love that example and how specific it is. Anything else that you want to add beyond? So we started with three things, we started the page load speed, social proof, and then shoring up the leaks in the bucket, if you will. I mean, and the last category really encompasses a lot. So I just wanted to make sure we didn't miss anything before I move on. Jordan: No, I think that's like drinking through a fire hose probably for most people. So it's- Kathleen: Yeah no, that's great. So you obviously have worked with a lot of different companies, you've got a lot of different brands using your platform, any examples from the DropFunnels world that you think are notable to share in terms of before and after results from doing some of these things, even if it's just your own marketing? Jordan: So, this is less technical on maybe slightly more mindset. I would say, for most people, and again, we're a more advanced platform than many, so people are looking for click button done type of thing, it's not really a good fit. It's meant for those who really want to dive in and- Kathleen: You don't need to be a developer though, do you? Jordan: No, there's no code at all. Kathleen: That's what I thought, yeah. Jordan: But just things are in different locations. It's like you move your house, they say the two most stressful things in life is divorce and moving. So moving your business is no different, sometimes it... Well, we've got migrators that can help people in that regard. But I think the mindset for most people is that, we're all duct taping so many tools together between autoresponders, and CRMs, and call floors, and dialers, and website, and funnels, and courses, and all those things depending on your business model. And for us, I think the biggest thing that people fall in love with is how many tools they can subtract, so getting more by doing less. Jordan: Here's an example. We have this tool and I actually built it in, we might be one of the first ever to build this, I'm not sure. But I added a feature that allows you to collect a legally binding signature on a checkout form directly through mobile. So when someone's going to go in and purchase your product, there's actually Terms and Conditions box that normally you would check, but I instituted a finger scribble sandbox that generates a PDF that would help you against refunds and chargebacks to ensure that you're collecting those terms specifically. So for some people they'll cancel like DocuSign through that because they can use that as an actual legally binding contract generator. Jordan: So I think it's an example of that, of having fewer tools, fewer monthly subscriptions. And again, I don't want this to just be in advertising for DropFunnels, more a mindset about get more by doing less and simplify as much as possible so that you have less mental real estate being lost, right? Kathleen: No, I think tool sprawl is a real problem. And it's not just a problem from a psychological standpoint of like, "Where is my information? Where is my data? How is it all talking to each other?" It's a huge financial problem. I mean, as somebody who owns a marketing budget for a company, by far the biggest line item for me is my tech stack. And so if you can eliminate things that frees up money to do other things in marketing, which can have a big impact, potentially. So I definitely think that's important. Kathleen: All right, we're going to shift gears because I've got two questions I always ask all my guests before we wrap up, and I want to make sure I know what your answers are. First one is, the biggest pain point I hear all the time from marketers is that it's like drinking from a fire hose trying to keep up with everything. And so are there particular sources you rely on to stay up to date and educated? Jordan: I'm probably the worst person to ask that, because I kind of live in a cave for most of the time. But I stay connected with a couple people in different industries, so I think masterminding is really important, networking is important. And I listen to a lot of audio books as well, so that's helpful. I just finished actually, for the first time, The Richest Man in Babylon, which was a great short listen, for most people a great mindset book there. And doing a lot of that, I also have this remarkable tablet, I'm holding up for those on the podcast, the- Kathleen: My husband has one of those and he loves it. Jordan: Yeah, it's super cool for doing some deep work and writing without any connection to the internet. So I guess my answer is, I tend to feel escape when I get off of the internet and consume a little bit less, because there's so much kind of noise going on there. So I find that my relaxation and escape comes from disconnecting, but I'd say audiobooks are big, I actually really like going on YouTube and listening to some TED Talks, and they're quick bite size- Kathleen: Any particular favorites? Jordan: Everyone says it start with why, but there's actually some really... I mean, it's fine. Simon Sinek is great. I like Malcolm Gladwell stuff, and there is actually one on... I don't know the name of the guy, but it's about addiction. And he lays out this thesis for I think it's called The Hidden Truth Behind Sobriety or Addiction or that kind of thing. But he lays out this incredible thesis that, the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection, its like this perfect theorem of why we get addicted to things, and the recourse from that, etc. So I couldn't recommend that more, it's one of the most watched ones on there. So TED talks have been a really good way to stay. Kathleen: I love that, and I've seen that Ted Talk, it's very good. Jordan: Yeah, very good. Kathleen: All right, second question. Of course, this podcast is all about inbound marketing, and is there a particular company or individual that you think is really knocking it out of the park and doing inbound marketing well these days? Jordan: I think most companies doing really well or really maximizing both and turning... There's a guy named Cole Gordon, who is in the high ticket closing space and is a master at, I think both inbound and outbound. And so he maximizes all of his inbound with additional outbound outreach, and whatnot. And so he's just so masterful at that, so that's Cole Gordon, I think it's Gordon Advertising, people could probably Google him. I also see Gary Vee and some of those influencers, they're doing a lot of like, "Hey, text me, get out this number," and getting people onto your list with a more relational SMS. Which by the way, I'm fairly convinced is the future of marketing is going to be SMS. Jordan: Email rates are deplorable, Facebook, the algorithm is getting harder all the time, and I think SMS has about a 99% open rate. Kathleen: It's very generational. I mean, I have kids, when you look at how our kids communicate, it's so different than how we do, it's crazy. Jordan: Yeah. And I think it's probably going to change as new... Man, it's probably eventually going to be TikTok, and- Kathleen: Or I was just going to say Discord. I have a 14 year old and they're all on Discord playing their video games and talking to each other. And I think that's already starting to happen, the number of private communities that are cropping up. I just attended, Shopify had its Annual Developers Conference, and all of the chatter around it, all the conversations, they set it up in Discord. And they created a room, I don't even know if that's the right word, because I'm not a big Discord user but I did do it. But yeah, I was like, "This is really interesting." I see my 14 year old on it, I see Shopify having official conversations with its audience on it, I definitely think there's a move in that direction too. Jordan: Yeah. And actually I'm to the point, we just did it this week, that we're pretty much eliminating our post purchase Facebook support groups and moving even into Slack to do- Kathleen: Yeah, Slack is huge. Jordan: Slack is good, and people say Discord's like Slack on steroids, I haven't done much on Discord. Kathleen: Well, I just used it for the first time, I was a little intimidated, but it is. If you are a Slack user, it will feel very familiar to you. Jordan: Right on, yeah. But I think the social channels and social media and whatnot, they're going to start to kind of wane. And people are wanting to go into more private servers, and Telegram groups, and eventually, it'll all be on the blockchain and everything will be completely anonymized and encrypted, it seems like that's where the world is going. Kathleen: Yeah, for sure. All right, well, we've come to the end of our time, and so before we finish, importantly, I need to ask if somebody has a question about any of this or wants to learn more about you or DropFunnels, what is the best way for them to do that? Jordan: Yeah. I'd be happy to give my personal email, it's jordan@dropfunnels.com. If anyone has any questions, or if I can encourage you in some way, J-O-R-D-A-N, and it's my personal email, so it'll go straight to me and would be happy to respond with any insight that I can. And then dropfunnels.com is the main place if you want to check it out and kind of see even as an example of how we turn standard sites, or how we utilize standard sites into a sales funnel type psychology. But I'd encourage anyone to no matter what platform you're on, or whatever you choose to use, to just remember that those principles are true, a confused mind will do nothing. Jordan: And so simplifying, make things faster, think about your strategy, what do you want people to really do? And in any infrastructure that you're on right now, push more people into that way and eliminate the things that don't serve you, and I really think that that's a way to grow very quickly. Kathleen: That's great advice. All right. Well, that is it for this week. If you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, please head to Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a review. And of course, if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week, thank you so much, Jordo. Jordan: My pleasure, thank you.

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

Darshan Hey, everyone. So we, as you guys know, on this podcast, we land up talking a lot about the life sciences. And we talk about things that impact on life sciences, including clinical trials. today's podcast is going to be talking about what is what are clinical trials, like, from the perspective of a site, who is doing oncology? It's a multi multi location site, if you will. And we have with us, Kathleen ritardo. Kathy, I believe I know you're a pharmacist, but is it PharmD or is it RPh? Kathleen RPh. Darshan Okay. So we have Kathleen with us and Kathleen is unusually a pharmacist, which I know for me at least that for something when I was going to pharmacy school, I always wanted to ask to talk to people who've done the goi ng down that pathway of being a pharmacist and clinical research. I've never found one. And the ones that I did find really ended up being more people who mix up the drugs as opposed to people who actually administer the site. So a Kathleen is what I think of as a unicorn. So welcome, thank you. And this is my name is Darshan Kulkarni, this is Darshan talks. This is Kathleen Hurtado. Happy to introduce yourself, please. Kathleen So thank you, Darshan. Really nice to be here with you today. So you kind of already did it. My name is Kathleen Hurtado, and I am the VP of research administration for Cancer Treatment Centers of America. And I've had a very, you know, blessed career very varied career, but started started out as a oncology pharmacist at MD Anderson, my first job out of pharmacy school. So, and I've had lots of different things all the way around and kind of ended up serendipitously here. So Darshan I'm not gonna let you go that or that easily. Okay, go from pharmacy school to run your clinical research site. Because, personally, like I said, You're the unicorn. How did you even think, did you think you'd land up here? Kathleen Oh, no, never. I love being a pharmacist and thought that's what you know, I would, I would, you know, do for the rest of my life, but it was just very serendipitous. So I am working at MD Anderson, we, I was worked in pediatrics, and we had a lot of, you know, sales reps come and call on us. And so one of them was we I got to be, you know, friends with her. And she kept saying, Oh, you should come into sales, you should come to sales. And I was like, no way. So I'm, I'm really pretty much an introvert by nature. And so it was something I could just never see myself doing. And so at the time, they were starting, that company was starting in oncology, Salesforce. And so they were looking for people that knew oncology, oncology, pharmacist, psychology nurses, because they knew that to go out to doctors, you had to be able to speak the science speak to the science. So I thought, Well, you know what, I'm going to go interview because what's the worst possible thing that can happen? The worst possible thing that can happen is I go, I tried to do it. I don't like it. I go back to being a pharmacist. You know, I knew I could I love that. I could always go back and do that. And as it turns out, I was actually good at it. Yeah, I wish I would never ever, ever have expected. And I think I was I started out as a surprise, I started out carrying the bag. So yeah, in fact, I had a five state territory. So I had Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, North and South Dakota and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. And so yeah, and so for somebody who had never driven in snow in their entire life, it was kind of a rude awakening. And I used to scare my district manager half to death. Because I was a little bit crazy, it was like, as a company car, let's, you know, spin it and see what happens. So but, um, but it was great, because it got me out of my comfort zone. So what I learned from that was that, you know, sometimes you have to, you know, you take a risk and do something different. And I always encourage people to, you know, try try something new, like, you know,

Kathleen Oh, Korea economist, Bank of America Global Research explains the potential and challenges behind South Korea's push to be a frontrunner in the global shift towards renewable energy, as it tries to reposition itself with the demise of key traditional industries. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Actor Kathleen Turner talks about not bringing characters home. Neil wonders if he himself created COVID. ABOUT THE GUEST Among Kathleen Turner’s numerous accolades are Golden Globes for Romancing The Stone and Prizzi’s Honor, an Academy Award nomination for Peggy Sue Got Married, Tony Award nominations for Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. Most recently she guest starred on The Kominsky Method, Mom and Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings. Her film credits include The Man With Two Brains, Jewel Of The Nile, The Accidental Tourist, The Virgin Suicides, among many others. On Broadway, she has starred in High, The Graduate and Indiscretions. Also a best-selling author, she wrote the books Send Yourself Roses: Thoughts On My Life, Love, and Leading Roles and Kathleen Turner On Acting. ABOUT THE HOST Neil Goldberg is an artist in NYC who makes work that The New York Times has described as “tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny.” His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, he’s a Guggenheim Fellow, and teaches at the Yale School of Art. More information at neilgoldberg.com. ABOUT THE TITLE SHE’S A TALKER was the name of Neil’s first video project. “One night in the early 90s I was combing my roommate’s cat and found myself saying the words ‘She’s a talker.’ I wondered how many other gay men in NYC might be doing the exact same thing at that very moment. With that, I set out on a project in which I videotaped over 80 gay men in their living room all over NYC, combing their cats and saying ‘She’s a talker.’” A similar spirit of NYC-centric curiosity and absurdity animates the podcast. CREDITS This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund. Producer: Devon Guinn Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue Mixer: Andrew Litton Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor & Jesse Kimotho Social Media: Lourdes Rohan Digital Strategy: Ziv Steinberg Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Larry Krone, Tod Lippy, Sue Simon, Jonathan Taylor TRANSCRIPTION NEIL: Kathleen Turner, thank you so much for being on SHE'S A TALKER. KATHLEEN: I think this is going to be a pleasure. NEIL: Oh. Let's check in at the end and see. What's something that you find yourself thinking about today, May 16th? KATHLEEN: Oh my. I'll tell you, being able to tolerate this isolation. Because I live alone. I have a wonderful cat, thank you very much, but this really means that I ... I don't have a spouse or a kid or something with me. And I've had a women's poker group for about ... some of them have played together for over 30 years. NEIL: Wow. KATHLEEN: And we get together at least once a month and play poker and eat and have a silly time. And so, we are Zooming together every Sunday evening, but they almost ... well all of them have spouses or people that they are isolating with, but it's hard. It's really hard right now. NEIL: I can totally imagine. Are you finding outside comfort in having your cat there? KATHLEEN: Yes, I do. He's this beautiful black. A little black cat. He can seemingly pretty much sense when I need him. NEIL: This podcast, the mascot of this podcast, is my black cat, Beverly. What's your cat's name and what color are his eyes? KATHLEEN: His name is Simon and his eyes are mostly yellow, sometimes into green. But when I went to get another rescue, I'd had one that died, I've been told that black cats are hard to get adopted out of superstition, or I have found out, being difficult to see in the middle of the night, especially if you have a dark rug. NEIL: Yes. Yeah. Often, if I wake up in the middle of the night, I will mistake certain things for the cat. Let's say I've left my backpack on the floor, and the tender way I touch my backpack makes me kind of think about the backpack differently. If only I touched everything as tenderly as the things I thought are my cat. I know you were born here, but you seem like such a quintessential New Yorker to me. Do you feel that way? KATHLEEN: Oh yeah. I do. I always knew I was coming to New York. I never thought of settling in Los Angeles. And even the time I've spent there working, which is the only reason I go, I'm not comfortable. I'm just not comfortable there at all. Never have been. Never lived there, never invested, which people tell me makes a difference. But no, all I ever wanted was New York, which I consider to be as close to the rest of the world as possible. NEIL: Can you identify what it is about Los Angeles that made you know it wasn't for you? KATHLEEN: Oh, heavens. There's no communication, there's no commune, there's no colony. People get to know each other's cars better than they do the people. They go, "Oh yeah, you're the black BMW 550," or something. You go, "Well, yeah." And it's so isolating. It's so lonely. I don't know how people survive. NEIL: The experience you're describing I connect to in my own way powerfully. My work has always been about New York, and I question everything about my life, but I never question New York, even now. KATHLEEN: Right. NEIL: But this is the first time in my whole time in New York where I'm finding it unpleasant to be on the street. And how are- KATHLEEN: It's hard. NEIL: Yeah. KATHLEEN: It's hard to go out and not being able to see people's faces. NEIL: Yeah. KATHLEEN: I miss that because I love looking at people's faces and seeing how they use them, and it might give me ideas for a character or something. So now this seeing just part of people, and then the shock of seeing somebody with no precautions, without a mask, without anything. NEIL: Yeah. I know. It does bring up a whole level of, for me, among other things, a type of not crankiness, but a like, "What the hell are you doing?" KATHLEEN: Yeah. NEIL: In New York, I can often feel pre-COVID, sort of, I appreciate generally how New York relative to other cities, there's a kind of sense of your body and space. That's something I noticed in LA, for instance, going into a supermarket. The way people occupied space there suggested that they didn't fully take in, "Hey, you know what? We're all sharing this space, so we have to be attuned to the fact that- KATHLEEN: Oh, I agree with that. Yeah, no, I like the unspoken treaties we have. NEIL: Thinking about what you're saying about the masks and not being able to read people's faces, it makes me realize how much I use ... One of my cards is I love mouthing, "Sorry." KATHLEEN: Yeah. Mouthing, "I'm sorry." Yes, I know it. The way somebody moves, holds their lips, you can immediately get a grasp of that person's personality. Does their mouth turn down at the corners in rest, or does it turn up? When they're not thinking about it, when they're not doing anything, what are the signs that their personality is left on their face? I like that stuff. NEIL: First of all, when you're wearing a mask and you want to kind of communicate, I don't know, acknowledgement to someone, do you find you're kind of making a lot of extra use from the nose up or something? KATHLEEN: Well, yeah. I think you kind of see when someone's smiling just from the eyes. I don't know. Yeah, it turns into a kind of sign language, but you use your body for that too. It's its own challenge, but I do miss seeing people's faces. NEIL: Let's just launch right into some of these cards. First card is, "I could see when I get toward the end of my life thinking, 'I'm done with this particular personality, I've worn it out.'" KATHLEEN: It seems to me that I've already had several lives. And I expect that this is the beginning of another. I kind of accept that easily, actually. I like change and having to adapt, it's not frightening to me. NEIL: Where do you think that comes from? KATHLEEN: I think I'm a pretty down to earth person, pretty practical, and some of my experiences fighting rheumatoid arthritis for years and other injuries have just made me more accepting. NEIL: It also seemed like your childhood involved a lot of the need to adapt. KATHLEEN: Oh yeah. A lot of change. NEIL: Yeah. KATHLEEN: Yeah. Yeah. I was the only one of the siblings born in the States, but then we moved to Canada by the time I was three months, and then from there, to Cuba. From Cuba, we had a year or so in Washington, and then Caracas, Venezuela for five years. And then we transferred from Venezuela to London, which was a marvelous thing because it was my high school years, and that's where I was so sure. I became so sure that this was the career I wanted. Many, many actors have had a kind of transitory background, either in the service, or with their parents being high-level executives, or in the military. And I think it kind of makes for good actors, I guess. NEIL: Could you break that down? What about that, do you think? KATHLEEN: Well, I can remember vividly when I went from Venezuela to London thinking, "Well, I can be anybody now. I can be anybody I want to be because nobody there knows me, nobody has any history with me. So how I present myself when I start school or something is completely up to me." And I thought that was rather exhilarating. NEIL: That's interesting. You also in your book talk a lot about the role of empathy in acting. KATHLEEN: Yeah. NEIL: I wonder if having to move around a lot develops empathy. KATHLEEN: Well, I'll tell you one thing it does is it takes away some of your sense of control. These things are out of your control, and that's kind of how I've approached the dealing with the rheumatoid arthritis and other things. I don't control this. Now, if you give up the idea that you control everything around about your life, then you are open to thinking about others and their choices and their needs because you're kind of advocated here. NEIL: So as long as we're talking about thinking about others and empathy, I'd love to talk about this card, which simply says, "Empathy poisoning." And that comes from a place in me where I found myself often as a kid overwhelmed by the empathy I felt for my parents who were going through some tough stuff, and I found that past a certain point, empathy can almost feel toxic. KATHLEEN: Empathy poisoning. If anything, I might get that more from the characters that I play than other people. You play Martha in Virginia Woolf for 500 performances and there's no way you're going to keep yourself completely separate from her. So I would say that that's more empathy poisoning to me than other people. NEIL: So in other words, your empathy with the character can kind of embody itself in you. KATHLEEN: Yeah. Yeah. Oh yes. It's like when you're creating a character, take Martha. At first when you really start to study her, you think, "What is wrong with this woman? She's sitting around drinking endlessly and ruining the one friendship relationship in her life, what the hell?" And then you go a little deeper and you think, "All right, this is 1962, and no women held any tenured position in any university. All their energies and praise came from the status of their husbands." KATHLEEN: She has a husband who has assiduously worked to remain an associate professor for 17 years. She's ambitious, she's intelligent, she has energy, and absolutely no way to use it. What's she going to do? Just host faculty wives teas? And then you start to understand, "Okay, wait a minute now. If I had these endless barriers in my life, how would I fight?" Anyway, you can understand how you would start to really, really feel something for this woman and with her. The rage, I think more than anything. Yeah. NEIL: At the end of a performance, is there a process by which that empathic connection is released, or is it over the course of a run? KATHLEEN: Well, I used to believe that I did not bring any characters home. My ex-husband and my daughter have made it clear that that's not entirely true. Anyway, part of it's the energy at the end of a performance, say. Maybe you just had a standing ovation of 1100 people. It's thrilling, it's fantastic, and you can't just say, "Okay. Well that's all right, now I'm going to go home and have a different life." I have to work it off. I've been known to go up and down the stairs in my building just to get rid of some of this energy that keeps me going. I try to just, I don't know, tire myself a bit, I guess. NEIL: Since we're talking about acting, which I'd love to keep talking with you about, next card would be acting. Pretending to notice something when you walk into a room. I could never do that. That, to me, seems like a monumental challenge. KATHLEEN: But if you wanted to talk about what acting is, I'll tell you that acting is a very carefully chosen series of communications, both physically and through the text. It is incredibly deliberate and detailed, and never really spontaneous. I don't do ... what do you call it when you get thrown something and the- NEIL: Improvisation? KATHLEEN: Yes. I'm not good at improv, no. NEIL: But how does one perform surprise? KATHLEEN: Oh. Well, it isn't just performing. You allow yourself to be surprised. This stuff is half physical, half in the body, and half in your mind making the choices, but then you feel them in the body. NEIL: You teach acting, correct? KATHLEEN: I do. I coach, and now I'm starting to teach online a bit, which is very difficult, really, because I can really work on the text. I can really work with them on the meanings and the basic, but I cannot get them on their feet and have them move. Because then I really wouldn't be able to see them well. And so that, I really miss. I miss being in the room with somebody and looking at them from their feet to their head and going, "Okay, wait a minute. You just said, 'I hate you,' and your legs are crossed." It doesn't work like that. The body is not saying the same thing your mouth is. So I miss not being able to be in the room with them, but still, we can do good work. NEIL: Do you feel effective as a teacher? Yeah. Do you feel- KATHLEEN: Yes. Yeah. I find it very fulfilling. I really enjoy it. NEIL: See, I teach art, visual art, and I also find it super fulfilling, and I also feel effective, but sometimes when I step back, and I'm curious how this is for you, recommending references and theory. I do believe it works, but I don't know. I don't know, I sometimes feel like an effective quack or something like that. KATHLEEN: Well, heavens to Betsy. I'm not sure that's our responsibility. We give them what tools we think they can use, but we're not responsible for what they actually do with them. NEIL: I love that you're able to comfortably ... to own that. And it may be a difference between teaching acting and teaching visual art in that I wonder if there's something less mediated, more direct, I wonder, about teaching acting. KATHLEEN: Well in acting, we have a specific text. Chosen words to work with, which is a structure, and I don't know that you have that in art. NEIL: Not really, no. And I think so much of the teaching of art involves almost manufacturing parameters to contain the ideas. The worst thing you can do for a student is to say like, "Make a video," versus, "Make a video that has to be two minutes long and that doesn't use sound and that involves some aspect of memory." Whereas I guess, as an actor, that's such a great point. You always have the text as a kind of infrastructure for your teaching, correct? KATHLEEN: Yes. Yes. NEIL: I love it. Next card. Actors and animals. They're both about commitment. I feel like my cat is never fully other than 100% in what she's doing, and that could just be a question of I don't know if I'm interpreting her correctly. But it seems to me that actors, to be effective, kind of have to have something akin to that. Do you sense a connection? KATHLEEN: I do. I do. I believe very strongly in getting commitment. Again, you make your choices, and then you have to fill them. You have to fill them physically, vocally, mentally. I can tell when an actor hasn't committed to the role they're playing. It's very clear to me. NEIL: And when you look at Simon, are you ever inspired as an actor? KATHLEEN: I look at Simon and I see just a cat boy. He walks around with this swagger with his ass kind of swinging around and you go, "Oh, you're a real Butch, aren't you, cat?" No, I enjoy him that way, yes. NEIL: Oh, I love their embodied presence. I love the way they walk. KATHLEEN: Yeah. NEIL: You mentioned you can tell when actors aren't committed. Next card would be actors who are bad at acting, even in the posters. KATHLEEN: Oh. Wow. Well, that's very poor photography or choice then. I find still photography very difficult because I feel so fake. I feel staged- NEIL: Interesting. KATHLEEN: ... as opposed to the actual doing of the character, which feels quite natural to me. So then I really have to say, "All right. The PR people, the photographer they choose, I'll listen to them." NEIL: That's interesting. So it's sort of that fact that your character, when you're performing, unfolds in time. KATHLEEN: Yeah. He's moving. NEIL: Right. KATHLEEN: And it's stopped in a poster, in a photograph. NEIL: So do you have any tricks for that? Are you trying to kind of- KATHLEEN: No, I've never been very good at it. I don't like being photographed. Just still photography. It makes me uncomfortable to be just still. NEIL: What's your relationship to a fear of failing? KATHLEEN: Oh, I'm going to. I have to. If I don't risk failure, then I'm not going far enough. If you don't, and I say this to all my students as well, look, you go to the point of failure, you will have to risk to the point of failure. Now, sometimes that means, uh-huh (affirmative), yeah, you will go over the edge. But at the other times it means that have pushed yourself further and found more than you had previously, and I think that's our job. NEIL: Do you feel like in acting, is there the notion of having succeeded? KATHLEEN: Yes, I think so. I know when I've done a good performance when I've hit all the marks that I set up for myself. I know when I have done what I hoped and wanted, what I set out to do. I will never forget opening night on Broadway. Well, any opening night on Broadway, but Virginia Woolf, and there were four of us in that play. And when the curtain came down, I was holding onto two of my co-stars, and I said, "Do not ever forget this moment. Don't ever allow yourself to forget this because they are few and far between." NEIL: As a visual artist, you rarely get that experience. KATHLEEN: Yes. NEIL: It's always mediated. I always say I love attention, but I like it kind of bounced off a wall. But what you're describing sounds so powerful, for lack of a better word. KATHLEEN: It is. It's astounding. There's such an extraordinary phenomena in theater where people sit so close, or they used to sit so close to each other. Total strangers. Closer than they sit in their own homes to people and they start to breathe together and they start to hold their breath at the same time and they laugh at the same time. So in a way, they become one body, one person, and it works for them in that they leave the theater feeling that they were part of something. They weren't just the individual that walked in that door to begin with. That it was something more than that. And as they become more attuned to each other and more one, they're easier in a way for me to work with. NEIL: Is there work that has to be front-loaded in a performance to kind of help create that feeling of coalescent? KATHLEEN: A lot of it has to do with the actor's confidence. Because if they see that you feel confident and good about what you're doing, then they'll trust more easily. NEIL: Do you always go out feeling confident, or do you perform confidence? KATHLEEN: I always think that I'm so much more confident in my working self than in my private self that I'm quite sure the decisions I make as an actor are right. But then take me off the stage and give me a decision to make about whether you want to see these people or not and I'm like, "I don't know. I don't know." Yeah. And so it's very difficult sometimes. NEIL: I'd love to do sort of a quick lightning round of a couple of quick cards. First card would be gratuitous eye work in movies. I notice certain actors sort of try and telegraph a type of subtlety or something by way of a whole lot of stuff going on in the eyes that doesn't need to happen. KATHLEEN: That's interesting. Yeah, I can see that. I don't know, I guess. To me, for example, it will be too much smiling also. It's hiding. It's hiding yourself. It's feeling like you're keeping busy and you're doing something, but in fact, you're just dodging. NEIL: One of the cards here says, "Friendships that are tenured." KATHLEEN: That are what? NEIL: Tenured. KATHLEEN: Oh, yes. Well, to me, and this is something that I learned from my mother, for me, women friends. Really strong, interesting women friends are essential. And out of this poker group, we have an investment banker, a gynecologist, a film editor, a retired lawyer. I don't think any of the businesses are repeated, necessarily. And these are women I've met over the years through some reason or another and wanted in my life and said, "Come on. I want you in my life." I will actually say that. KATHLEEN: Anyway, my mom, when she got older, she had three or four very, very important friends in her life, and they would check on each other, and they would celebrate birthdays together, and they'd go to concerts together, and they'd volunteer at the library together. And so there was a constant. She didn't end up feeling that she was that alone. NEIL: People are less surprised by my age as they used to be. It used to be I would tell people, especially students, I'd say, let's say 10 years ago, I'd say, "I'm 45," and there'd be a, "What?" Now, when I tell them I'm 56, they're like, "That's about right." That's what the look says. KATHLEEN: No. For years and years, I always played characters older than I was, and it started with Body Heat, that once I was cast, only then did the director, Larry Kasdan, say, "By the way, how old are you?" And I said, "Well, I'm going to be 26." "No, you're not. No, you're not. You're 29." It was wrong for a woman to be that powerful that young is what he said. So then for years I played women who were older. I was not 42 when I did Peggy Sue Got Married, for God's sake. I don't think it was until Virginia Woolf, where the character is 50, that I actually got to be 50 playing 50. KATHLEEN: And now, I tell you, the thing that I find most extraordinary, I'm turning 66 next month, and I find it fascinating how the looks have changed over the years. How time and everything that contributes to your life has affected how you look or if you care. NEIL: What is your relationship to caring? KATHLEEN: Yeah. I don't. I certainly don't care as much as I know I used to. I still like to look nice as it were, but no, I don't set out to knock somebody out, you know what I mean? NEIL: I'd love to end, if you don't mind, with two questions I like to ask. First question is, fill in the blank for X and Y. What is a bad X you would take over a good Y? KATHLEEN: What is a bad ... Oh. Hell, why would you? Well, I suppose a bad meal but with good company would be doable. NEIL: I love it. And what's something you're looking forward to when this crisis, as it were, is over? KATHLEEN: Oh, getting back on stage. Theater is just shut down. I was booked for the fall at the Guthrie in Minneapolis and looking forward to that, and they've closed their whole fall season. There's to lot of figure out how you can get an audience again. And if you can only sell half the seats, how do you survive? Because these companies need full houses. So there's a lot of figuring out that's going to be there, and whether we survive or not. And I miss it. I miss being on stage. NEIL: What's something that keeps you going? KATHLEEN: Oh, I suppose a kind of a belief. I'm thinking that there will be something after this and there will be changes to be made and understood, and that keeps me going. NEIL: That seems like such a wonderful place to end it. Kathleen Turner, huge, huge, thank you for being on SHE'S A TALKER. I so appreciate it. KATHLEEN: Well, it was good, Neil. You said I'd know at the end. NEIL: Oh, right. KATHLEEN: Yes. It was good. NEIL: Thank you. I really, really appreciate it. KATHLEEN: You're most welcome. NEIL: All right. Have a great rest of your day. KATHLEEN: I'm leaving the meeting. NEIL: All right, bye-bye. KATHLEEN: Bye-bye.  

With 54% of product searches taking place on Amazon, it is now the world's largest ecommerce platform. What types of brands is Amazon right for, and what do you need to know to succeed on the platform? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, ROI Swift founder Carolyn Lowe shares her advice for brands considering selling products on Amazon. Carolyn has a long track record of success developing marketing and advertising strategies for companies selling on Amazon, both as an in-house marketer who helped 5X revenues for a baby brand, and now as the owner of an Amazon agency. In this conversation, she covers everything from who Amazon is right for, how to set up your product listings, and how to develop and manage your advertising strategy. Highlights from my conversation with Carolyn include: ROI Swift is a digital agency that focuses on three to $50 million companies. They are a Facebook agency partner, Google agency partner, Amazon advertising partner and Klaviyo email marketing partner. Amazon is a good place for brands that sell products beyond their website (ie. in stores), and are not direct to consumers. The exception to this is brands that sell things that are "heavy and cheap." Unless you have complete control over your product distribution channels, odds are that your product will end of up being sold on Amazon by someone else, whether you choose to list them there or not. So it's better to sell them there yourself and take control of the channel. One of the risks of selling on Amazon is that they can see all the data about how much product you're selling, and who is buying it. In some cases, this has led Amazon to create and sell its own private label versions of successful products. Another risk is that you become dependent upon Amazon for the bulk of your sales and something happens that causes Amazon to delist your product. Amazon isn't just for B2C brands. The platform has a growing number of B2B brands, particularly in the office products space, that are selling successfully on it. Due to the fees that Amazon charges and the cost of shipping, Amazon is not a great place to sell products that retail for under $15. You can either fulfill your products yourself and just pay Amazon a referral fee of eight to 17% depending on your category. Or you can pay the referral fee plus pay the FBA fee, fulfilled by Amazon. That will get you Prime shipping which in some cases, gets you same day or next day shipping if you have enough inventory with Amazon around the country. Amazon actually has a calculator that sellers can use to determine the profitability of their products based on their price and weight. Before you get started on Amazon, you should begin by doing keyword, market and competitive research, just as you would if you were advertising on Google.  69% of the searches that take place on Amazon are not branded, meaning people are searching for a product type, not a specific brand name. This offers brands a great opportunity to gain market share if they have a solid strategy. If you have a US PTO trademark for your product or brand, you can get access to Amazon Brand Registry, which unlocks a host of tools and analytics. When you list a product on Amazon, you get a 2,000 word description and 7 images, one of which can be a video. Carolyn advises brands to use that opportunity to include a 20 second product or unboxing video in their listing. Amazon's algorithm is based on the relevancy of your search and velocity of your product, which means that the more product you sell, the higher you will get listed. That's where Amazon advertising comes in. Amazon now earns more than $4 billion in advertising every year through on-Amazon and off-Amazon ads. Sponsoring your product can help ensure it gets seen when someone is searching by including it in the three sponsored product spots at the top of search results. Cost per click on Amazon can vary dramatically, from 30 cents to $11 depending upon the product category, but Carolyn generally sees ROI on Amazon at 5X what it is on Facebook. Sponsored brand, sponsored product and product targeting are three common ad formats on Amazon. Amazon DSP allows you to retarget customers off of the Amazon platform. Amazon is now launching local news podcasts which will provide advertisers with new options for geotargeted ads. The first 30 days of a product listing on Amazon are critical, and building momentum through sales is important, so advertisers should consider strategies like using Facebook ads to drive traffic to their listings, or sending out email blasts.  Reviews are also vital, and Amazon offers a variety of options for getting reviews in ways that comply with its terms of service. One of the biggest mistakes that companies make when they sell on Amazon is they structure their pricing in a way that is not profitable. Resources from this episode: Visit the ROI Swift website Contact Carolyn or the team at ROI Swift by emailing hello@roiswift.com.  Listen to the podcast to learn which business Amazon is right for, and how to create a marketing and advertising strategy that will drive results on the platform. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week, my guest is Carolyn Lowe, who is the co founder and CEO of ROI Swift. Welcome Carolyn. Carolyn Lowe (Guest): Thanks for having me, Kathleen. Carolyn and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I’m excited to have you here for a couple of reasons, one of which is, we're going to talk about something that we really haven't covered on this podcast yet. And I'll tell you, in almost 150 episodes, it's hard to find those topics. So I'm really excited to talk about it, but also for the fact that, you know, you're someone who has been in marketing roles, but you've also been in roles where you've really grown companies. And I think that's such an awesome combination. About Carolyn Lowe and ROI Swift Kathleen: So really looking forward to picking your brain, but in the meantime could you please tell my audience a little bit about who you are and what ROI Swift is? Carolyn: Sure. Thanks Kathleen. Happy to. So I started my career in marketing many, many years ago, but I'll just go back 20 years to Dell computers. Dell technologies, in 1999, moved me down here from Boston to Austin to help run the consumer marketing division. People were buying their first computers and it was all done through direct mail and catalogs and phone, believe it or not. So I really loved that small and emerging part of Dell. We were last in market share. We were behind a company called Gateway that's now out of business. So going from virtually nothing to number one, I really enjoyed growing that part of the business. And then I went on to run other divisions. And after that I worked for a global market research company and then I had two kids, and it's hard to do global travel with little ones. So I took some time off and just consulted while my kids were young. And then I went back to work for a mom and baby company in 2014 and really loved helping them grow. I ran their e-commerce and their Amazon business. After a year of doing that, I decided I wanted to do that for more companies because it just felt so good. So I started ROI Swift about five years ago with a focus on three to $50 million companies really working on their Amazon. We're a Facebook agency partner, we're a Google agency partner, we're an Amazon advertising partner and we're Klaviyo email marketing partners. So that's what I've been doing for the past five years. And we've helped over 102 companies grow. Our goal is to help a thousand. So I have 898 to go until retirement. Kathleen: I love that and I think you have dramatically undersold yourself because when I read about you, the mom and baby company that you worked on, you grew that dramatically in just 18 months, correct? What was the actual revenue growth in that time? Carolyn: They are a private company and they did get acquired by Reckitt Benckiser so I don't know if that number is public, but I can say we were 5X from the time that I started until the time that I stopped working. It was considerable. Which businesses should sell on Amazon? Kathleen: I saw that and I sort of sat up and said, "Oh, I need to talk to her." So Amazon, that's really what drew me to having this conversation because we haven't talked about it much on the podcast. In fact, I think the only real conversation I've had with anyone in the past 150 episodes about Amazon has been about publishing content through Amazon direct publishing and Kindle eBooks and that sort of thing, which is awesome also, but really here, we're talking about marketing your products on Amazon. So to kind of lay the groundwork for this conversation, let's start by talking about who is right for Amazon, and who should be looking at selling on Amazon. Carolyn: That is a great question because Amazon isn't the right platform for everyone. It's definitely for brands that are sold beyond just their website. So if you're carried in Target or Walmart or REI or any of the other big retailers, someone's going to put your product on Amazon. I'm mentoring, pro bono, a beauty brand right now - an emerging beauty brand. And even though they don't sell on Amazon, they only sell on their website, their products have made it to Amazon. So we highly encourage folks to own that. And then the folks that shouldn't are the folks that are 100% DTC and control their channel and they can own that customer. There's no reason you need to give up margin or, or give up the customer to Amazon. So those are, I think, the two, and then the products that don't work well on Amazon are a lot of times what we call heavy and cheap. So, think about a case of sparkling water. It's harder to make money on than, say, a $40 blouse. Controlling your brand presence on Amazon Kathleen: Absolutely. Now I have a couple questions on that. You peaked my interest. One is, you mentioned companies finding their products on Amazon. I think for a lot of people, you know, who might be heavy Amazon consumers, but not experienced Amazon sellers, that might sound a little confusing. So how does your product wind up on Amazon if you're not selling it there? Carolyn: Good question. So Amazon, as you know, is a marketplace and their goal is to bring the best value to the customer. So as long as it's legally the same product, it has the same UPC code, Amazon doesn't care. They want the lowest price for you, the customer, because they are all about customer trust and customer value. So we see people all the time in like CVS or target with these little scanners, and they don't work for CVS or Target. They're scanning real time. They're called retail arbitrage. And they're trying to find what's the lowest price, or they'll find products on Target and they'll buy them all up and then resell them. So many times that I've worked with folks and asked, when I sent the seller an email as a representative of a brand and said, "how did you legally acquire our products? We have no record of selling to you" and they'll send me, nine times out of 10, a Target receipt that shows that they bought stuff on clearance at target and threw it up on Amazon. Kathleen: Wow. It reminds me so much of the early days of eBay. Carolyn: Yes! Is Amazon right for B2B brands? Kathleen: It's interesting. So the other thing that I wanted to ask you about this is, what about B2B? Because you said really anything where you have, let's say, over a $15 transaction value and that's not D2C I always think of Amazon as being a B2C play. Is it a good place for B2B companies who have products to sell? Carolyn: It is, especially in the office space. So about six years ago, I was invited to Amazon headquarters. There were 250 women. They invited the top 250 Amazon women's sellers in the country. And so it was a whole day with the leadership team at Amazon's headquarters. We met with the heads of global marketplace, the head of B2B, the head of launchpad for emerging brands. And so B2B was just getting going, and you used to have to have an invite. Like, six years ago, you needed an invite to be in the B2B part. And now, as you can imagine, I've worked for Dell as a public company. When you're as big as Amazon, finding new revenue streams, you've got to think big. And so obviously, now international expansion is big for them and the B2B side is big for them. You know, they want to overtake OfficeMax and Staples and all of those things. And so Amazon now does have a great B2B offering and a lot of folks can give discounts for bulk quantity. So I worked with a company that sold compostable coffee cups and they did a great B2B business on Amazon. What's the risk fo selling on Amazon? Kathleen: Interesting. Now the other thing I've heard from people who have sold on Amazon, or have thought about it, is that they get really nervous. It's like a double edged sword. They're like, I want to go and sell on Amazon because I can reach a huge audience and it's great exposure, but I kind of don't want to go and sell on Amazon because as soon as products are successful, Amazon starts to sell it. And you can't compete against the platform itself. So what's the story there? Carolyn: That is definitely a concern. Amazon has launched a whole bunch of private label brands in the supplement category. In the wellness category, they have Solimo, which is their own brand. They also have a competitive advantage because they know what everybody's buying and they know where the holes are. They know what everybody's searching for and what they're not finding. So they have the best product market research out there because they have all your data. And so that is a concern, but I also warn brands, don't just put all your eggs in the Amazon basket. Definitely build your brand outside of Amazon. There's plenty of folks that have built seven figure businesses on Amazon and just are on Amazon and that's fine. But then you're beholden to Amazon. We've had clients who do eight, 9 million a month on Amazon and they get a shutdown by mistake. Amazon makes a mistake and closes their listing and they're out millions of dollars. That's why Amazon is a double edged sword. It's a great place -- way, way cheaper than going out through radio and TV and digital and spending a bunch of money. But there are some risks if you are just on Amazon or more than 50% of your revenue is on Amazon. What to know if you plan to sell your product on Amazon Kathleen: Now I know we need to get into how to market on Amazon, but I do have one other question, and I don't even know if this is one that you can answer. I don't know if this is within your area of expertise, but I advise one company that made a product for children and families. It was like an actual hardware product that was geared towards positive parenting, and I learned a lot from the CEO and the founder of that company. He talked about how, when you're going to sell on Amazon, there are ways, if you want to make it super easy, you have to have your packaging a certain way so that it can be Prime shipped. Are there other things that companies who are saying, "Hey, I think I might want to sell on Amazon" should know that go beyond how you market, how you package or how you actually create your product to kind of optimize it for sale on Amazon? Does that make sense? Carolyn: Yes, that does make sense. So I had a very interesting and similar experience. I advised a friend who had a product for toddlers. And what we found was that he wanted to sell them and they were $5 each. And I said, "You're never going to make any money. So you have to do a three-pack, put them all in one package, do this packaging." There's all these different tiers of fulfilled by Amazon. So you can either fulfill it yourself and just pay Amazon a referral fee of eight to 17% depending on your category. Or you can pay the referral fee plus pay the FBA fee, fulfilled by Amazon. That gets you Prime shipping. In some cases, it gets you same day or next day shipping if you have enough inventory with Amazon around the country. And so I said, "Well, your products do need to be $15 at least to make money when you're done with all these fees. So let's do this." And then I've also worked with another company in the natural cleaning space where those fees are based on weight. So you want to get the highest price you can for the lowest weight. So we said, you know, you're paying more for a two pound something when, if it's four pounds, you're only paying 30 or 40 cents more for those extra two pounds. So there's that sort of sweet spot. And I always advise people, before they launch something, to go into the Amazon calculator and it'll spit out and tell you exactly what all your fees are. So before you launch, we like to have clients do a P&L and say, "Okay, can you make money based on your margins, based on all the Amazon fees? Does it make sense before you jump in?" Getting started on Amazon Kathleen: That makes a lot of sense. So it seems like there's some real homework to do on the front end before you make the decision to wade in. So assuming someone has done that and decides that Amazon is a really good platform for them, where do you start when it comes to thinking about how to market your product and how does that even work on Amazon? Carolyn: That is why we exist, because Amazon doesn't make it easy. Sometimes I think you doing your taxes yourself is easier than selling on Amazon. Kathleen: Oh, that sounds terrible. Carolyn: That's why we exist - to help them out. And so I think the first place to start is to do keyword research and marketplace research, just like you would if you were going to launch a product. You want to look at the competitive landscape. You want to look at how many people are even searching for this on Amazon. Do I have any searches for my brand? 69% of searches on Amazon are non-brand. So the good news is, only a third of the folks are looking for products by name. So that's really helpful. A lot of folks will just look for, like if you're pregnant, a pregnancy test or something like that, and they're not looking for branded ones. Kathleen: Is there a keyword research tool baked into Amazon? How do you know if somebody is searching for your brand? Is there a way to know that? Carolyn: There are some third party tools we use, and then we also have access as an Amazon agency partner to some beta tools that a lot of sellers don't have access to. So a lot of this, you can get if you have a brand registered. So Amazon is really helping brands now by this brand registry process. So if you have a US PTO trademark that's live, you can get access to some additional tools. And then we have access to third party tools and then some additional beta tools as a partner. So we'll do that keyword research. Just like you go on Google and you do keyword research, it's the same thing on Amazon. There's a couple of good tools. And so we'll do that. And then we'll also inspect the competitors. There's other third party tools where you can inspect what they are ranking for and what terms they are ranking for and how should I write my copy and how should I write my description? So that's usually the first thing we'll do is assess the market, and find out what people are searching for. We also will skim reviews to see what people like about competitive products or don't like about competitive products and really sort of weave that into the product description. You get seven images and those seven images are key, so use a killer image playbook for those seven images. There was someone who was a little too small for us to work with. They only had a few products, so I told her what to do with her listing and she came back two weeks later. She said "My conversion rate doubled from 15% to 30%." Kathleen: Wow. Carolyn: That is just so rewarding to hear that the actual data and science, and there's probably seven or eight other companies that we can easily point to and say, these are the changes we made on their listing, and their conversion rate went up 30, 50, a hundred percent. Kathleen: So let's get into this a little bit deeper. It sounds like, from what you're saying, the first thing that a company needs to do, if they want to sell on Amazon, as they start to take the steps of getting their brand presence set up, is register their brand. Is that right? Carolyn: Yes. Through Amazon brand registry. You don't have to do it first, but it's probably easier to set up your seller account first and then, go ahead and do your brand registry. After that, selling on Amazon, you can do a professional account for $40 a month. So you set up your seller account and then they have a separate tool that you just go in, you put in your information, you put in your trademark number and it's really great because it allows you to have more control over your listings. Carolyn: If you are the registered brand owner, Amazon gives you more leeway with who controls, since there's so many people that could sell your product. It used to be whoever the best seller is versus, as a brand owner, somebody else could be making changes to your listing. And it's really nice that over the last three to four years, Amazon has given brand owners more control. Kathleen: So when you set up that brand registry, what are the things that you need to have ready so that you can set up a really great presence on Amazon? Carolyn: So the brand registry itself is pretty easy. You just need to go out to US PTO and grab your serial number and your registration number and have all your information. Where do you sell your products? And usually then they go ahead and they'll send an email, like a verification code, to the lawyer on file with the trademark. So you just have to get that verification code from your trademark attorney and input that into Amazon and boom. All of a sudden you'll have brand registry, which means you can add much better content to your listings. So at the bottom, there's a description. And usually you just get 2,000 characters. That's it. Like, a paragraph. With a brand registry you can do enhanced brand content. So you can go in and it can be about the company, there can be more videos, there can be comparison charts. So you get a ton more access to that. You get access to sponsored brand videos and you get access to some of those tools where you can do market research. You can put in your product code and see all the competitors. And you could see click through rates and conversion rates on search terms. Best practices for building out your product listing Kathleen: Wow. That does sound useful. Now, in terms of videos and photos and things like that, how do you advise companies? When they're thinking about starting to create those assets, what should they be doing to optimize their presence? Carolyn: That is a terrific question. We see this all the time because people will come to us and they'll have maybe four or five photos, and they'll just be different shots of the product. And really, you want call outs, you know, you can have six, and then if you're a brand owner, your seventh image can be a video. So we highly suggest a 20 second product usage or unboxing video. The other great thing too, is that a lot of times people will be searching when they're in their office, so they have their sound off. And so we always advise folks, when you do video, make sure you have that text over so that when people do have their sound off, they can still watch the video and get the content. So those are some key things to winning on the images and the videos. Kathleen: So that's the brand listing itself, but what about for product listings? Are there any best practices or things that you see people trip up on when they set them up? Carolyn: Okay. Yes. I'm sorry. And I was talking about that for the product. Kathleen: I'm sorry. Carolyn: That's okay. It's videos across Amazon. Amazon has also launched video in search results. So instead of just having products in search results, you can now have a video and we've seen great success with that for some of our clients where it stops them and you get more than just a listing. It's a video. And we know that folks are clicking more and more on those videos. So we're seeing better return on ad spend on those videos. As you're scrolling down, say you're searching for a picture frame and you scroll down. And instead of just a bunch of listings, you see an actual video? And you can put a video and say why your picture frame is so much better? You know, it's white, it stands up on its own, the clips don't fall off, whatever, those things that drive people crazy about most picture frames - you can put all those in your listing. Developing your Amazon marketing strategy Kathleen: Great. So how does marketing work once you have your listings set up? Where do you go from there? Carolyn: It's a lot like Google, so you don't just put a listing up and show up on page one the first day, right? As you know, that organic listing takes time and the way Amazon's algorithm works is, it's based largely on relevancy of your search and velocity of your product. So it's a vicious cycle where you need to sell more to show up on page one, but you can't show up on page one until you sell more. Kathleen: So it's "the rich get richer." Carolyn: So that's where Amazon advertising comes in. Amazon has now surpassed Microsoft in terms of advertising revenue. They recently announced that they had over 4 billion in advertising revenue. So again, when you're a company as big as Amazon, you need to find big revenue streams and advertising is a big revenue stream. So there's on Amazon and off Amazon advertising. For folks that are selling on Amazon the best way, and the most efficient way, is to run those sponsored products. So when someone searches for picture frame, there's two to three results that show up first above the organic listings. And that's how you do it, just like Google paid search ads. Kathleen: And how do prices compare to Google ads for example? Carolyn: Well, it's interesting. We've seen cost per click as low as 30 cents, and we've seen it as high as $11, so it's really category dependent. What we know is that the return on ad spend is so much better. Typically, your return on ad spend on Amazon is four to five X for most products in a 40 or $50 price point. So that's really good. We usually see that advertising cost of sale around 20% is pretty good. So, you're paying 20% of the revenue to get the sale, but that also helps increase your organic because more people are finding you, more people are buying you. We've also seen the reverse happen where if you run really inefficient advertising, it actually hurts your organic results because you send a whole bunch of people through that don't buy. Amazon does not want to send anybody to a listing where the customer doesn't purchase, just like Google. Amazon advertising formats Kathleen: Yeah. So what are the different advertising formats on Amazon? You mentioned a sponsored product. Are there other ways that you can advertise on the platform itself or is it really just getting the product higher on the listings? Carolyn: So there are a few different ways. The first one at the very top is what we call a sponsored brand. So there's typically only one of those and it'll highlight two or three products depending on whether you're on mobile or desktop. And then that can send you through to your brand storefront. And that's where you can showcase all of your products. It's almost like your own mini website. There's some great ones out there. Prana sports product clothing has a terrific storefront. A couple of our clients have fabulous storefronts that we really love. So that's one. The other one is the sponsored products where you can buy search terms or you can run an auto campaign and Amazon will match and show your product in the search results when it looks relevant or it's in the same category as another one. Another one we really like is product targeting. So a lot of times we will find the competitors in the space that are rated below in terms of ratings and maybe priced at or higher. And so those are ones. So when you go to, say, the product page for your competitors' picture frame, yours will show up and you have maybe four stars. They have three and a half stars and yours is priced maybe two to $3 below. So we can do this really honed in targeting by individual product, which is really, really nice. Managing your Amazon advertising account Kathleen: That's so fascinating. So when you look at managing an Amazon advertising account, what percentage of your time is spent setting it up versus the ongoing tweaking? Because from everything you're saying, there could be an incredible amount of setup just to get those granular targeting options in place. But then it also sounds like when you set it up that way, it sets the stage for a lot of ongoing management. Carolyn: Yes, it is. It's not like a set and forget. It's like Google, right? You can't just throw a Google AdWords campaign up there and leave it and forget it. We've seen so many people do that, both with Google and Amazon. We actually just had a call yesterday with a client. We said, "You know, you wasted about 30% of your spend." On-Amazon vs. off-Amazon advertising Kathleen: Wow. So you mentioned that there's on Amazon advertising and off Amazon advertising. What is off Amazon advertising? I don't even know if I was aware of that. Carolyn: So Amazon has had it for a while. It's gone through many different names. It used to be Amazon marketing group, AMG, and now its Amazon DSP, so display. And so Amazon will help you do two things. If you want to retarget off of Amazon, you can do that as well. So someone goes to your product listing and they don't buy, and then Amazon will serve up your ad around other properties around the web and follow them around. So just like you would do retargeting on your own website, you can do that with Amazon as well. And then they also have display prospecting, so you can set up your product and they know everything about everybody who's bought your product. They know everything else. They know all of their interests. So you can also do display prospecting through Amazon. Those are typically not as profitable as on Amazon where the people are searching. But it's definitely better. We've had some clients do tests with off Amazon advertising through DSP, and then also through the trade desk. Amazon doesn't have quite the reach of trade desk, but the targeting is so much better because they know so much more about the person. Kathleen: Wow. It's just awesome. But also so creepy to think about how much they know about us. Carolyn: So scary. The latest is the Amazon podcast launch. Amazon is going to be launching local news type podcasts. And I think the really interesting thing about this is, as you know, Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. And Amazon knows everything about you. So from an advertiser standpoint, when you buy podcast advertising, you may only know, here are the types of people that listen to Snacks Daily, which is one of the podcasts I listen to, and here are the people that listen to this podcast. But now Amazon knows who are the people that listen to this podcast and they buy children's snack food. So if you are a children's snack food brand, you can just advertise to those people on that podcast who are listening to, who buy children's snack foods. Kathleen: And if you're local to a certain geography, all of a sudden it opens up the possibility for brands that are geo-targeting to get even that much more specific. Carolyn: Geo-targeting is perfect because you might be a brand that's only sold in certain regions and your demographic might be different in the South versus the East, et cetera. So I just think that Amazon has probably so much data on you that you're going to start to see Amazon go beyond just a marketplace. Retargeting with Amazon Kathleen: Well, it's inevitable. They're going to take over the world. It's a good thing that you're an Amazon agency. You're well poised to ride that with them. Is there any way, like with Google, you can put pixels on your website and you can then retarget from your website off to Google? Is there any way, with Amazon, to link someone's visit to your website, to the way you advertise to them on Amazon? Carolyn: There's a couple of different ways. Amazon recently launched attribution and so you can tag outbound links and you can get reporting on that. Depending on your category, it's cheaper to actually run Facebook ads to Amazon than it is to run on Amazon advertising. It typically doesn't convert as well as sponsored products, where people are actively searching, but it is great to drive. And then those first 30 days are really critical for Amazon in terms of how your product ranks. So what we have found is that when we run Facebook ads, the nice thing is, we can tag them now and Amazon will report on that attribution. Gaining momentum in your first 30 days on Amazon Kathleen: Oh, that's nice. It sounds like, from what you're saying, in your first 30 days of listing a product, it's really important to think of your marketing slash advertising strategy holistically and not just as "what I'm doing on the Amazon platform." Like, so I'm here at a new site, you're driving traffic to it from Facebook. Are there other methods that you use to get that momentum going in the first 30 days? Carolyn: So for our brands that do have good sized email lists, we will suggest that they go ahead and send out an email campaign with maybe like a 20% off coupon for an introductory offer for their folks. A lot of our brands will do that. What role do reviews play in your Amazon marketing strategy? Kathleen: That's great. And then this is the other question I've been dying to ask you, which is, what role do reviews play in your Amazon marketing strategy? Carolyn: Well, that is a good question, Kathleen. So when was the last time you bought a two star product on Amazon? Kathleen: Never. Carolyn: Right. So I think you just answered your question. Reviews are critical. The magic number is between 21 and 26. That's about where people start to say, "Okay." When you only see a few reviews, you're like, "Is this a new product, or is it a lousy product, or is nobody buying this product?" Right? So if you only see a few reviews, you try to figure out why there's only a few reviews. So I think reviews are critical. One of the board members I know for a natural products company, she worked with one of the women from Oxo. They make everything for your home and they had a great mantra, which was, if your product is not four stars or above, take it off. Go make it four stars and bring it back. A lot of brands just don't do that. Reviews will kill you. You can live for so long at three, three and a half stars, but longterm, you're not going to make it because people are going to find out and do the research and say, "Oh, you know, this is a three and a half star product." I can make a better product and people will come out with a better product. So unfortunately, we've had a couple of brands who had product quality issues. And so they had a three and a half star product. And for years they never fixed them. And then, you know, competitors came on and made it better and cheaper. So reviews are critically important and there's legal ways to get reviews and there's illegal ways. So we want to warn people, do not mess with Amazon. When it comes to reviews, don't do fake reviews. Don't pay people for reviews. You will eventually get caught. You may not get caught today, but they will suspend you. Kathleen: So I feel like this is a chicken and egg situation though, because you need reviews. It's kind of like you were saying before with the rich get richer, your velocity of your product sales are going to drive getting seen more. If you have more reviews, you're going to sell more, but until you sell more, how do you get more reviews? So how do you advise sellers to get those reviews? And, hearkening back again to the company I advised, I recall there is a strategy for getting those reviews before you do your big push or your launch. How do you handle that? Carolyn: So there's a few legal ways to get reviews. One is Amazon's early reviewer program. So for each SKU, they charge you $60 and they will go out to the customers who have bought your product in the early days, like in the beginning, and solicit reviews. It's up to five reviews or up to a year, they will try to get five reviews for you. So that's always been helpful. Most of the reviews we've seen from early reviewers are four or five stars. They're legitimate reviewers or people who've tried the product and Amazon has vetted them. There's also Amazon Vine, where you can now only do 30. That used to only be available to people who sold directly to Amazon. But now you can do it through seller central and you can have up to 30 of your products sent out to Amazon's vetted product reviewers. So they will say, "Okay, great. We have this new product. It's a picture frame." People will sign up for it, they'll get a complimentary one. And you know, Amazon will just ship it from your fulfillment inventory at their warehouses. If you have a four or five star product, those reviews tend to be four or five stars. And then there's also some third party review services that plug into your Amazon where you're allowed to send one product review email. So, we like feedback. We like the HTML format where you can put a picture of the owner and the founder of the company in it. You have to ask as if you're asking as Amazon. So it has to be objective. You can't say, "If you didn't like the product, don't write a review," but we we've had a client get slapped for saying, "Just respond to this email instead of writing a review." And they got slapped on the wrist for that. So like I said, it's not worth it if you get caught, but those are the three legal ways that we use to get reviews. Nurturing your Amazon customers Kathleen: And then correct me if I'm wrong, but when you sell on Amazon, you have people who buy your product. What is your level of access to their information? Normally, if you're selling on your own site, you get people's contact information, and you can nurture them for follow on sales, for reviews, for all kinds of things. Are you able to email these people? Can you export their information? What are the rules around that? Carolyn: Legally, Amazon owns the customer. We've seen folks put stuff in the boxes. Not our clients, but I've ordered from Amazon. I got some energy gels for running, and I got a QR code in the box. And it said, if you'd like three free gels, sign up for email and you scan the QR code and sign up for their email list. So that's how they did it. Not quite within Amazon terms of service. You're not supposed to market to Amazon customers, but this was inside the box. And so there's sort of gray lines that people use to get some information or learn more about those customers. Kathleen: So if you don't have anything like that, are you then sort of making a deal with the devil, when you advertise on Amazon, that you're not going to be able to reach out to your customers at all? Or is there some limited ability through Amazon, or that's it? Carolyn: Yes. It's Amazon's customer. So yeah, they really don't like you to put marketing materials or anything that drives them off Amazon into the box. You can put it on the packaging though, you know? Top mistakes companies make when they sell on Amazon Kathleen: Yeah. Interesting. So, what would you say are the top three mistakes you see companies make when they sell on Amazon? Carolyn: The first one is definitely, people sell unprofitable products. So again, we worked with a natural cleaning company. We've grown them about 10x in two years on a month to month basis. And they were selling $8 products that were heavy, that didn't make money. So we went through and we said, okay, stop selling all these products. Let's bundle these together, make a profitable product, and go from there. So they're off to the races. So one of the first mistakes we see is that people sell unprofitable products. One of the other mistakes we see is that people don't get a hold of their advertising. So we'll do a free audit for any brand that's doing like 20,000 or more a month on Amazon. Usually there's enough there to audit. If they're doing less than 20,000, we can't really audit because there's not a lot of data, but if they're doing more than that, we'll do a complimentary audit. And more times than not, we'll see a whole bunch of wasted spend on Amazon, in advertising. So that's the other big mistake we see. And then the last one we see is just the listings themselves. We'll see people put good products with bad listings and they won't even know what numbers matter. So to us, the two things that really matter are sessions and conversions, how much traffic is coming to your page and how many of those people are buying. It's just like your website, right? How much traffic and what's your conversion rate? And those are really the two levers that you can use on Amazon. Carolyn's advice for companies thinking of advertising on Amazon Kathleen: Interesting. So any advice to companies that are thinking about going forward with this, who don't have experience with Amazon advertising? Carolyn: I would say definitely talk to someone. Talk to someone like us, or like our agency, or an individual that knows what they're doing, and ask them those questions. Ask them how big is my market share? What are my competitors doing? If they can't answer those questions for you, you probably shouldn't be working with them. So if you're going to work with an agency or you're thinking about talking to an individual, ask them how many searches are there for my product a month? Are there any branded searches? What are my competitors doing? How competitive is the market? And, how big is this and how much do you think that I could potentially make? We don't have a crystal ball. We can't say "You're going to make X," but we can say "There's this many non-branded searches. And yes, this is a good category." If we see non-branded searches of less than 10,000 a month or less than 5,000 a month, it's a really small category and it probably doesn't make sense. You can do it, but you're not going to make a million dollars a month in this category. Brands that are successfully selling on Amazon Kathleen: Got it. Now, I feel like it's easy to go on Amazon and see examples of big brands with big budgets doing an amazing job. Are there any smaller brands that you can think of that are great examples of companies who have awesome Amazon strategies that somebody could go and search Amazon and see what they're doing? Carolyn: Yes. When I was with UpSpring as an employee and then as their agency they didn't have a big budget. And the nice thing about Amazon is, it's all pay to play. It's cost per click. It's not cost per thousand. So, you know, you could really scale. I mean, we were doing low, low, low five figures, barely five figures, and on Amazon, and now they're a seven figure Amazon store. I would go and look at what the folks in your space are doing, pull up some of those competitor listings and read their reviews and see what people like and don't like. But as a small brand, it's easy to get on. But it's also easy to make a bunch of mistakes. So a lot of times we'll see that people have set up their products all wrong or set up their account all wrong. And so, a lot of times it'll take two to three months to unwind the messages that were made. It's a little bit better now with brand registry, but that's why we like to work with brands from the onset or from the early days. So before things get too out of control. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Yeah. That makes sense. You don't have to clean up somebody else's mess. Shifting gears for a minute, on this podcast we're all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it with inbound marketing? Carolyn: Right now, there are a few that I can think of. And there's a few that I think are doing what you're doing, which is terrific, which is having podcasts. I think that a lot of folks that I've seen do it and do it well, are doing what you're doing with podcasts and really delivering value to folks. So I really love your podcast. And in terms of other companies, there's Austin Brawner who has an eCommerce podcast, which I think is pretty good too. And from what I hear, he does pretty good with inbound on that. Kathleen: Oh, well, I'll have to check that out. Now. The other question is, most marketers I know suffer from the same challenge, which is that digital changes so quickly and it's completely overwhelming and they often feel like they're drinking from a fire hose. So how do you personally keep yourself up to date and educated? Carolyn: Good question. We have a paid search team, paid social and Amazon team, and all of those folks listen to podcasts. You would be amazed what you can learn. And they follow Reddits. And then we also, because we're a Google and a Facebook and an Amazon agency partner, we get access to a lot more insights and what's going on and what's coming and betas and things like that. So I think it's, it's a little bit of a little bit of folks staying on top of the industry. And also, we're blessed and lucky that we have agency partner status with a lot of the partners, so we know what's going on from the inside. How to connect with Carolyn Kathleen: That's great. All right. Well, if somebody is listening and wants to get in touch with you and learn more about what ROI Swift does or ask you a question about something that you talked about today, what's the best way for them to connect with you online? Carolyn: Well, you can go to our website, and don't judge us because we are the cobbler with no shoes. The best way to get ahold of us is go to our website and fill out a form. We'd love to talk to you. You could just reach out to us at hello@roiswift.com.  You know what to do next... Kathleen: All right. I'll put that link in the show notes. So head over there if you want to check that out. And in the meantime, if you are listening and you did learn something new, which, I mean, I learned a ton, please consider heading to Apple Podcasts and leaving the podcast a five star review. Just like on Amazon, podcasts need reviews too. So I would love it if you would do that. And of course, if you know someone else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. Thank you so much, Carolyn. This was a ton of fun. I learned a lot today. Carolyn: I enjoyed it immensely. Thanks Kathleen.  

With COVID-19 upending our work and home lives, how does user experience need to change to reflect the "new normal"? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, I dig into this question with guest Bob Berry, a virtual operations and user experience expert who is a principal at AnswerLab and founder of ItsTheUsers. Bob has helped some of the world's largest companies, including Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and others, to create new, optimal online experiences in the age of Coronavirus and in this interview, he explains why companies must relearn what their customers and prospects ant and expect as their lives are transformed by the pandemic.  Bob says that to not only survive, but compete and win in the future, businesses need to create optimal online experiences now. Check out the podcast to get his advance on how to go about doing that. Highlights from my conversation with Bob include: The sudden shift to working from home during the Coronavirus has put digital, virtual and online experiences front and center in a way that they have not been before. This makes it imperative that companies develop a deep understanding of what their customers' lives look like now in this new normal so that they can craft experiences that match that.  Bob believes that virtually everything that happens in business is a set of individual choices or decisions by real people and the sum total of those choices is what drives the global economy. This is why user experience design is so critical. Because of changes related to the pandemic, we're going to have to determine, as marketers, whether the assumptions we've made about how people buy are still valid. And if they're not, we're going to have to learn what the new patterns are. One area that Bob believes will change is how people think about data and privacy. He predicts we'll have a quicker movement to more stringent privacy rules, prompted in part by the need to do more contact tracing related to Coronavirus. Changing user experience require that you look holistically at a business. Bob gave the example of his work with Deluxe Corporation, where he undertook an omnichannel business assessment that looked at the entire lifecycle of a customer's experience with the company. The result of that assessment and the changes the company made drove an additional $3 million to the company's bottom line. Bob says the best way to get started is by doing an inventory of every touchpoint that a customer has with your business. From there, you can use that data to develop a new narrative around what the buying journey looks like today. Understanding customer buying journeys is not an event, according to Bob, but rather a process that must be undertaken on an ongoing basis. One way to accomplish this is through survey tools and diaries that require your customers to document their interactions with your business. Bob has used a tool called dscout to do this in the past. For now, the two things that businesses can focus on are how they will stay in touch with and maintain relationships with their customers in the future, and what their products/services need to look like going forward. Resources from this episode: Visit the ItsTheUsers website Visit the AnswerLab website Connect with Bob on LinkedIn Follow Bob on Twitter Listen to the podcast to learn how the keys to business success have shifted, and what companies need to know -- and do -- right now to create user experiences that will position them for success in the future. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is Bob Barry who is the founder and principal of it's the users. Welcome to the podcast, Bob. Bob Berry (Guest): Thanks Kathleen. Glad to be here. Looking forward to this. Bob and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I am really looking forward to this because this is an interesting time and as we're recording this we're I don't even know how many weeks -- seven, eight weeks, what have you -- into pandemic quarantine. I guess it depends on where you live and et cetera, but it feels like forever and the world has undeniably changed quite a bit in that time. I think many people are just starting to kind of find their footing in what may or may not become the new normal. So we're going to talk a little bit about that and what that means for user experience. About Bob Berry and ItsTheUsers Kathleen: But before we do that, could you please tell my audience a little bit about what ItsTheUsers is and your background, and how you came to be doing what you're doing today? Bob: Certainly. So, my history goes actually back quite a ways. I originally got my degree in computer science and out of college, I actually worked for Hewlett Packard back in the day when bill and Dave were still alive. It was a very different company back then and I was one of their early eCommerce business managers when the internet and the web came along. And that's where I first started getting involved in this whole idea of experience and how experiences can really influence what we do in business. Back in those days, we developed some of the early social media, online learning, e-commerce and cloud based services before a lot of those terms even existed. I actually left HP to get involved in a number of startups during the dot com boom, and started a company that did a lot of training and learning and curriculum for youth. We actually embedded some pretty interesting experiences for young people to help them get ready for life. We were pretty far into that as we approached the great recession when a lot of the spending was starting to dry up and entrepreneurs like myself were struggling. My wife sat me down. We had five kids, four cats, and a dog at that time. And we were surviving on her teacher, principal income. She worked in public education. She sat me down and said, Hey, this isn't working. We need to find a way to have my income be more stable and more predictable. So I actually made a big shift at that point, that was around 2007, 2008 and actually became full time involved in user experience and really understanding what impact that has on business, what impact that has on people. And I've been doing user experience in one form or another since then, both as an independent and working in a corporate environment. Now I'm working for a company called AnswerLab. I do that in addition to ItsTheUsers.com. AnswerLab is really focused on working with a lot of major companies. We work with Google, Facebook, Amazon, and doing projects for all of those companies right now around user experience and helping them to figure out how to adapt what they're doing and shift their online presence and their digital strategies into this new world we're about to enter. ItsTheUsers.com is focused on bringing new people into the world of user experience and really understanding how to do that. So it's focused on a lot of people that may not have a tremendous amount of money to spend who can't pay the big ticket research studies that some of those big brands can. So it's a really interesting mix. I get to work with those big companies, you know, they invent a lot of cool new stuff and I get to work with them and put those out in the public and learn how real people react to things that those companies are inventing. And then with ItsTheUsers.com I get to work with a lot of small businesses, professionals, entrepreneurs and help introduce them to this whole world as well. And of course now we're entering this whole new phase. Like you say, we've only been a few weeks into this and we're all very interested to see how this is going to unfold and what's going to happen as we try to go back to work as we try to get our businesses restarted. I think we all have a lot to learn about how this new world is going to function. Kathleen: Absolutely. Boy, listening to you tell your story, I just have to share that it really hit close to home because when that recession hit in 2008/9, my husband and I owned a digital marketing agency together and we had four kids and two dogs. I'm listening to you tell the story and we looked at each other and we were like, Oh God, we're in the same company. We're totally in this boat together. It's either gonna sink or it's gonna float. You know, it was, those were some crazy times. I guess for that reason, my heart goes out to people who own businesses right now because I've been through that experience and I just remember so clearly the stress that that put us under at the time. So that could be a whole other podcast that we talk about, but we won't, it would probably be very stressful. It could be several podcasts, but you know, focusing on the situation that the world is in right now, it's such a unique situation, but it's also, in some very interesting ways, at least to me, it's presenting us with a unique, once in a lifetime opportunity because it's really speeding up some things that I think were going to happen anyway as far as movements to remote work and the acceleration of companies really doing more business online and all of these things that we were sort of creeping towards over time. But that process has accelerated dramatically as a result of what's happened, and I know a lot of companies are kind of scrambling to figure out what it means for them. So in terms of user experience, I'm just going to hand it over to you and I would love to hear what you're seeing as far as the changes and what you've seen done well and where companies need to improve. It's a big topic. So, you know, where do we start with this? How is COVID-19 changing user experience? Bob: Yeah, it's a big question and there are a lot of challenges wrapped up in this. I think one of the major effects that's happening right now is because of the need to quarantine, the social distance, all the lockdowns that are happening, you know, not just here in this country, but really all over the world. It's putting digital, virtual, online in the center of what we're all going to need to adapt to in a much bigger way. Fortunately, we've been working on this for a long time with the internet and the web and a lot of these virtual tools and platforms have been around long enough that all of us, or most of us, are pretty familiar with them. But as we drive that massive shift to digital and virtual, if you look at all the industries out there -- look at education, finance, entertainment, sports -- the ways we interact socially, you know? Medicine, commerce... So many things now are being transformed by this and digital and virtual really becomes the centerpiece of how we're going to have to conduct business and interact with one another. In the midst of that, there are going to be a lot of new innovations. Things are gonna change. So some of the old ways of doing things are going to go away and there are going to be a lot of new technologies. We're already seeing some of these now. A lot of new innovations are coming out just dealing with the virus. We're coming out with a lot of new technologies and new ways and of course people, as they're working remotely or as they're living and socializing remotely, we're inventing a lot of new ways to apply this technology. So to cope with all of that and deal with all of this change, the experience really is the centerpiece of all that. And so Kathleen, I kind of have this crazy idea that I promote, you know, both in my role with ItsTheUsers.com and then in my research role with AnswerLab, and the premise is that virtually everything that happens in business is a set of individual choices or decisions by real people. So certainly in inbound marketing, if somebody is going to respond to some content marketing, if they're going to react to a paid ad, if they're going to click on anything online, it's all about individual people making individual choices and decisions. And all of those decisions happen within whatever experience we put out there for them to encounter. And in fact, the other part of this theory for me is that the sum total of all of those choices is really what drives the global economy. So if that's really true, if experience is that centerpiece, if that's truly what happens, then all of it is being transformed right now. When I talk about user experience, it's more than just sort of the traditional usability. It's really about understanding people. Who are they? What are their lives like? What are their challenges? What's their personal narrative? So understanding that whole journey that they're on and therefore how do they accomplish what they need to -- that's a key part of the experience as well. So, those trends that the personal and business people that were going through this massive pivot to digital and all of the new innovations that are going to occur as a result of this, they all intersect in the experience. So we have to figure out how to invent better and new experiences so people can function, so business can function, so we can continue to run and do what we do. And we're going to have to find new ways of building, deploying and verifying all that, because now we have to do it all remotely. Kathleen: Yeah, it's so true. It's very interesting as I listen to you talk about it, I thought of a personal thing that happened in the last couple of days that I think for me at least illustrates part of what's changed. Everybody's talking about how the whole world is all of a sudden using Zoom. I've used them for years. I've worked remotely for a long time and sometimes I feel like I spend more time with Zoom than I do with my husband. So for me, Zoom has always felt very easy to use and very intuitive. I think it was designed for a person like me who is relatively, you know, technologically fluent, spends a lot of time on their computer, working remotely, et cetera. But in the last two months, the number of users of zoom has mushroomed and it includes a lot of people who are not as technologically fluent, who don't spend as much time on computers. And for me, the way this has really come to light is, I joke that my unpaid second job is that I'm now a Zoom tutor and I have taught my sister in law, my parents and my mother-in-law all how to use Zoom so that we could do these family calls. My mother in law in particular just is really reticent about it and you know, she's a little older. It was really interesting because I got her to the point where she could get on and join a call. But the other day she called me and said, I want to be able to start a call. And we went onto that little, the Zoom screen. I'm sure most people are familiar with it by now, where it says like, join, start, schedule, et cetera. And she didn't understand the difference between schedule and start and join. So I was listening to you talk. It got me thinking that Zoom is a great example, it has this new audience that doesn't just intuitively understand the differences in those meanings and it's almost like they need to change that little screen. Just say I want to start a meeting, schedule one for later, join someone else's meeting. It needs to be even more explicit now for those people who aren't as much digital natives as maybe it's prior user base wise. So I just wanted to share that story because it's so fresh in my mind and it's nothing that I ever would have thought of. To me, the interface of zoom just seems so easy and simple. But then when I was walking through it with her, I was able to see it through a different lens. Bob: Yeah. I have to laugh because I'm sure you've heard the Zoom story yesterday with the Supreme court. So the Supreme court is trying to hear cases and make decisions using Zoom and similar kind of situation, there are probably a lot of them in the same age group as your mom. Well, apparently somebody used the bathroom and there was the sound of a flushing toilet. That's now referred to as the flush heard round the world. And I haven't heard yet who exactly was. So here's these most distinguished members of our society and they're struggling with something as simple as remembering to hit mute when they do something personal or they're on zoom. So that's a really good example. Another really important dimension of this that I wanted to bring up and kind of get your perspective on as well, because we're so early in this process, speaking of inbound and I've been, you know, been around the internet and the web since the very beginning and I've seen so many changes and one of the major changes that of course has occurred is our access to data. In such a big way, data drives what so many inbound programs and capabilities do. I think we're in the beginning of a major shift in data. I've also done a lot of research around data privacy and personal data on how individuals deal with this. As we try to deal with this pandemic, I think one of the things that's coming is we have to increase our ability to test, trace and track who's got the virus, who's had the virus, et cetera. We're in the middle of this big experiment where big parts of the country are trying to go back to work, but we don't have that capability yet. Google and Apple have announced that their devices can communicate, and we hear about new apps now being launched that are supposed to provide this capability. Well, I suspect that people, in order to trust this process of gathering all this data to manage the virus, are going to have to be very confident that that data is protected in a whole different kind of way. If that happens, does that mean new regulations are going to come into effect, new practices, new principles around how we gather and use data and are those practices and principles now and probably going to be a lot more strict, are they going to apply to the data that we acquire for marketing purposes, for inbound marketing purposes? And so what does that future look like? And so it's really difficult to predict where that's going to go, but that's something I'm really keeping a close eye on to see what kind of data requirements are going to be needed. What influence is it going to have on all the other data that we have out there right now? And, you know, then I think it also begs the question of is the data that we have now on our customers that we use so widely in inbound marketing, is that data still valid? Is the world changing enough that we're going to have to relearn some of that because people's buying patterns or their preferences or their economics have changed? So there's some big issues at work that we're looking at. Kathleen: Oh, I, I totally agree with you. I think there's absolutely a heightened awareness around data now, especially health data as you pointed out. Interestingly, I think businesses and marketers in particular are having to rethink the whole notion of personalization and tracking because so much of it was done based on IP addresses, corporate IP addresses, which, with everybody working from home, you lose the ability to track that way. Not to mention then the whole topic of accessibility. You know, when you have people who are visually or hearing impaired, who might have been able to physically come into a business in the past more easily now really can't. There's always been this requirement that websites be built in a way that's accessible. But so few businesses have really done it. I just think it's going to happen on so many fronts that we have no idea the tidal wave of change that's going to hit us. Bob: Yeah, I agree. And I think one of the key aspects of this that we're trying to implement and that's really a lot of what we're trying to stay on the forefront of is to figure out ways to track all of this, to stay in touch with these people, to learn, you know, individuals in businesses. There are so many ways that individual businesses are trying to adapt. Now businesses are coming up with some very creative ways of reacting to this. And then, you know, how our individual lives are changing and you know, how are we going to keep our fingers on the pulse of everything that's going on. And there's, again, so many dimensions to this. So from a research standpoint, there's a lot that we need to pay attention to, and a lot of new tools and methods and approaches that we have to put in place in order to continue this relearning process. And again, it's what kind of new experiences are going to be required to help people that maybe have never used Zoom before that are now going to have to deal with new apps on their phones because they're going to be tracking health data or you know, they're not working in an office anymore. They're working at home and what does that mean about their whole set of digital experiences that they have to deal with? So being able to relearn it, retrack it, gather all the data that's required, create all the new experiences -- that's what we're trying to stay in front of and trying to help other companies and individuals figure out how to do that as well. How are companies changing user experience in response to the Coronavirus? Kathleen: Well, there's no doubt that the changes, it's not just coming, it's already started. So I'm curious to dive into some specifics. What are some, some specific things that you have seen or worked with? I know you probably can't talk about specific clients and what you're doing for them, but, in generalized terms, can you share any specific examples of things that have had to change already in order to adjust user experiences to the new environment? Bob: Yeah, so there's a lot going on out there right now. So again, being able to understand, first of all, who is your audience and how is that changing? So who are these individuals? What kind of things are they dealing with? I think it's important to make the distinction between whether you're talking to B2B or B2C, because those are different types of dynamics. There's a lot of business and instructional and operational changes that organizations have to deal with as far as how to go remote. So in this process of staying in touch with your customers and learning what they're up to, how are you going to manage your workforce? How are you going to manage whoever your teams are as you go through that process? I think there's also a tendency to want to stay in touch with the larger trends out there. So what's happening, you know, socially and politically, economically? There's money available from the government and how are you going to get access to that and how are your customers and your clients getting access to that and how does that change what you might be doing with them? An example that I can name, where we actually did a pretty massive business transformation process, maybe it's helpful in this context to give you an example of the kinds of things that we've done that will need to evolve but that are still very sound practices. So a few years ago I did a study for Deluxe Corporation.This was actually in the midst of the great recession. So they were in the process of doing a pretty major business transformation and their business is very much about financial documents and checks and related types of products. We did what was called an omni-channel business assessment, and this was something that took place over a couple of years. We looked at a number of different touch points. The reason it's called Omni channel is because we look at a variety of different ways that they interact with customers. So we looked at email, we looked at web, we looked at their call center, we looked at all of their print programs and we also assessed their direct sales force. This was a combination of both B2B and B2C. The problem with just looking at any one of those is, any one customer can touch multiple aspects of their business. Somebody can pick up a catalog and interact with that and then they may find a phone number and then dial the number and talk to somebody in the call center. They may get an email message with that, which then sends them to a website. So there's all sorts of aspects of inbound marketing involved with this. There's probably a few outbound aspects as well. And so long story short, over a couple of years, we assessed all of those different touch points and made sure that the overall experience was effective, that people could find their way around that, the pathways from one aspect of it to another were smooth, that the messaging was consistent, and that the people that different aspects of that you could hand a customer off effectively from one, one part to another. At the end of the day we were able to drive over $3 million of new business to their top line by optimizing all that. And this was in the midst of the great recession when things were financially very challenging. So that type of approach I think is going to be a really important, that sort of omni-channel, multi touchpoint approach is going to be really useful, really important as we enter this new world. Because in a lot of ways, all of those different touch points are going to be changing and evolving for businesses. And if you don't pay attention to all of them, you won't have the big picture of what's really going on and the different journeys and pathways that customers might be taking in interacting with your business. How to get started Kathleen: So where can companies get started? How do they begin? You know, if somebody is listening to this right now and they're thinking, okay, things are going to need to change. We don't maybe know how much permanent change that it's going to be, but obviously things need to change. How do they begin to wrap their heads around this and, and begin to figure out what's the right approach? Bob: I think you have to start, I think a lot of cases with where you are. So what do you know now about who your buyers, your prospects, your customers, your users? You have to start with them. If you haven't already, it's important to begin to develop some sense of their story, their narrative, and again, who they are, what they're challenged with, where do they live and work? Are they still in an office? Are they still in their store? Is that whole work environment now changing? How they make buying decisions -- is that still the same or how is that evolving? So you have to start by understanding what are those stories, those narratives, those journeys that people are going through. And there's a variety of ways to do that. There are a lot of a very effective tools out there right now because the demand for doing a lot of this remotely is increasing pretty rapidly as you can imagine. So you know, if you go out there and look, there's a lot of different ways that you can interact with these customers and gather a lot of information and survey them or really understand who they are and what type of interactions that they're dealing with. So once you have a sense of who they are, those journeys, those personas, those narratives about who they are, then it's a process of understanding. Again, what experiences do you need to put in front of them? Are those web experiences or those phone experiences? Are they mobile? Are they on an app? What are all the ways that you need to interact with them so that they can understand your business and what you offer? Do an inventory of all of your touch points, and certainly inbound marketing is a key part of that as well, and begin to measure how much business you're getting through those different channels and begin to put in place ways to actually understand and observe how they interact with those experiences. You're going to want to do this on an ongoing basis. This is a process and not an event. You want to make sure that over time you can start to identify what are some trends that are going on and begin to track those trends. Again, there are a lot of different ways and approaches to evaluate mobile experiences and a lot of different ways to evaluate in person or desktop or web based experiences. So there's a lot of different approaches and tools that are available to do that. Tools for doing audience research Kathleen: So you mentioned starting by learning more about your audience and your customers. Are there any particular tools that you've worked with that are favorites of yours? I imagine there are some that probably are better for larger companies with bigger budgets and some that are better for smaller guys with smaller budgets. Any, you know, sort of list of your favorite tools? Bob: Yeah, so there are various tools out there that can do a variety of what we consider like diaries. So we actually have tools that allow people to keep track over time of how different apps or devices or interfaces work within their lives. So, understanding a day in the life or a week in the life of somebody based on having them create a diary of how they interact with your business or your apps or your website gives you a good sense of putting those things into context of who they are and what they're dealing with. So diary tools are really important. One that we use is called Dscout and we have some of our own internal tools that we use as well.  Kathleen: How do you get somebody to follow through on it though? Because obviously you're asking them to spend time for you documenting how they interact with your business or your product. And I know just from experience myself and from working with other marketers that very often even just getting customers to agree to doing a 15 minute phone call or filling out a survey can sometimes be a battle. How have you found is the best way to get people to comply and follow through on keeping those kinds of records? Bob: We usually provide some kind of incentive. So in many cases we, they get paid for their time. Some companies, when they do this kind of research, they may provide some kind of in kind reward. So if it's a restaurant chain that's doing this kind of study, they might offer vouchers for food or something like that. It might include something simple like an Amazon gift card. And so usually we try and incent people, give them some kind of reward for whatever time they invest. And that can vary based on how much time you want them to participate, and how involved you want them to be. But that seems to be the best way. Kathleen: Any particular approaches that work well for B2B companies? Bob: We put quite a bit of effort into locating and recruiting the right people. So a lot of times in the recruiting phase, we have questionnaires that we put together, and we ask people about what they do and you can kind of gauge their level of interest or their level of willingness to participate in something like this. We have a lot of third party companies that we've worked with that have databases of people and companies that they've worked with. So we also have individuals that might be more inclined to want to be involved, make a contribution there and are willing to follow through on this kind of thing. How are companies adapting to the new normal? Kathleen: Got it. So I'm curious if you have any examples of specific changes that you've seen companies need to make as a result of Coronavirus and this new environment that we're living in? Bob: Yeah, so it varies a lot. So just in my own neighborhood here, I'm seeing companies become very creative. We have what used to be a cafe down the street. Because people can't go in and congregate there anymore, they've made the shift to providing produce. They obviously had suppliers that they used for doing whatever they were doing to serve their cafe. And so now they've evolved to actually using those food suppliers to providing fresh meat and cheese and produce to people in the neighborhood. And they restrict how many people can be in the store. So being able to adapt, looking at your available resources, supply chains, customer base, and being able to think of new ways, and doing a lot of this online. So now if you want something, you go online, you can order everything that you need. And the only time you need to spend physically in the store is just to go in and pick up your bag and leave. So all the ordering and payment and everything happens online. Another example is a local construction company. I have a videographer partner that I work with and he's doing work with them to take everything that they do and turn it into video. So if you want to do a remodel or if you want to do various types of home improvements, then you can go online and you can look at a lot of examples of things that they do with video. You can also take your phone and do a video walkthrough of your house and show the areas that you want to have remodeled. And then they will take that and turn it around and they'll provide another video that will describe to the homeowner exactly the steps that they're going to take and where they're going to be in the house or what they're going to do. And so the amount of time that they have to spend face to face is really minimal. There's so many examples of this, of companies figuring out how to adapt, and how to do things better, how to do things differently. Kathleen: That's really smart. Having now spent so much time in my house for the last several weeks, I would love to just have them come in and tell me what I should change in my house. Because I have found that being stuck at home through the Coronavirus, you start to see like every little maintenance project that you've ignored for so long becomes that much more in your face and annoying because you're spending so much time with it. So I imagine they're getting a lot of traction with that offer. Bob: Yeah, they are. And they'll even give you a video of when the work is actually going to occur. They'll kind of stage it out for you and say, you know, we need to be in your home on these days to do these steps. And obviously all the products and all the materials and colors and all that kind of stuff, they provide all that to make that available as well. So those are just a couple of examples of figuring out how to adapt and certainly digital and online creating those new kinds of experiences again, are going to be a critical part of how companies can do this. You know, at AnswerLab, we have offices in New York and San Francisco and in early March, like a lot of companies, we had to turn on a dime and figure out how to be remote. And so that's another aspect of this too. Depending on what your business is, you're going to have to get creative in building and managing and maintaining a remote workforce. Now obviously for some companies, this is going to be easy. Other companies, this is going to be a lot more challenging. So it varies a lot in how you might approach this and how you might go about doing that. If it would be helpful, I can share with you what we went through in this whole process of making our whole operation remote. And it's actually going quite well right now. And fortunately a lot of the companies that we work with have gone remote as well. So we've created a whole virtual culture and whole virtual operation that, right now is, is running quite smoothly. Kathleen: Oh, that's great. I think there are a lot of companies struggling with that, that weren't used to working remotely before. I've worked in places that have been almost entirely remote and there are definitely playbooks out there for how to do this and how to do it well. You just have to be willing to embrace them. It's things like being on video when you talk to other people and not everybody's ready for that, but, but it can really make a difference. Bob: Yeah. And we have what I like to say is a MacGyver kind of culture, which is, there's all these technical challenges and everybody's willing to jump in and just figure things out, trying out new tools, trying to figure out new ways of interacting with our clients. How do we share information? How do we conduct research? How do we do a lot of in person workshops and brainstorming sessions and, you know, how do you replicate that kind of team spirit and that kind collaboration interaction when you have to do it all through a computer screen? There are actually a lot of really creative ways to do it. So figuring it out, just jumping in with both feet, getting everybody involved, creating a culture of making it happen, is really important. Kathleen: Yeah. I think the same challenge is really facing the events industry. I've been parts of lots of calls with people who've been talking about how they used to hold in person events, conferences, et cetera, and now we're going to try to do them virtually. Let's not just make it into one long webinar. Let's try and capture some of that same feeling you get when you're there in person in a new way online. It's a similar challenge Bob: Yeah. And that's, that's another example of it. Entirely new excited experiences that we're going to have to figure out. I mean, there's so many large events. You know, before I got into podcasting, I used to do a lot of teaching and speaking at conferences and, you know, we have to completely rethink that now. And those are a whole new set of experiences that we're all going to have to figure out how to create. How to validate that they work and people are getting what they want out of them? And then we're gonna have to figure out how to participate in them and, and make them successful. What are some things you can do now to prepare your business for the future? Kathleen: Yeah. Well if there's a marketer or a business owner listening and they're thinking, okay, I need to focus on this for myself. Do you have like two or three key pieces of advice for them that they should really focus on in the next couple of weeks? Bob: So are you thinking about the whole process of going remote or the whole process of figuring out what this new digital world is gonna look like? Kathleen: The latter. Bob: I think a couple of things that people need to do is they need to figure out what are the ways that they're going to stay in touch with their customers. Who are your buyers, your purchasers, your prospects? How are you going to develop longterm connections with them as they evolve, as they adapt to what their new world is going to look like? And then to figure out how to put your business, whatever product or service you're offering, how are you going to evolve that along with them to stay relevant, to make sure that you're still something that they're going to need and be willing to pay for? Whatever those businesses and those individuals are going through, whatever is changing in their lives, that's going to determine how your business needs to evolve to stay with them. So number one, you need to figure out how you're going to maintain those connections and do that relearning that's necessary. And then the second part of it is, what kinds of experiences are going to be required? And of course a lot of those experiences are going to be virtual, digital, online. Does that mean you're going to need a new kind of app in order to communicate with them? Does that mean you're going to have to now, like with the example of the construction company or you're going to have to start developing new types of media, like video or audio, are you going to have to create new ways of selecting and ordering your products? Does that mean a new eCommerce system? So figure out who they are, where they're going, what they're up to, what they're experiencing, and then decide how you're going to create the right kind of virtual digital experiences that are going to be relevant and important to them and how you're going to make sure all that plays together. That's probably the most important thing right now because it's changing rapidly and now's the time to start relearning. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Good advice. Well, shifting gears, I have two questions I ask all of my guests and I'm curious to know your thoughts on these. The first is, is there a particular company or individual that you think sets the standard for inbound marketing? Bob: Yeah, I actually, I thought about that quite a while. As I mentioned, we work with a lot of the big brands, you know, Facebook and Amazon and Google and FedEx and they have obviously some great examples there. But another company that I worked with for a long time is actually a fairly small operation. They're based here in Colorado, and the leader is called Jeff Walker and he's in charge of something called Product Launch Formula and years ago, he developed an inbound system that allows you to go out and find a target audience and interact with them and provide them a lot of valuable content and draw them into your product or service through really effective content marketing. He does a lot of books and courses and affiliate programs and video and email and stuff like that. He does a lot of the things that work well. I think the number one thing that stands out for me though is so many organizations and companies that I see online are using his system, which to me is the greatest testimony. So you can tell your story through PR or marketing programs, but nothing speaks like success and the number of organizations and people and platforms out there that have adopted his model. I think if you look at a lot of the inbound programs now, they actually use a lot of the principles that he developed probably decades ago. So he's one that I pointed to it because he's had such, such a big influence on the whole digital and virtual marketing world. Kathleen: That's a great example. I'll definitely have to check that one out. Second question, marketers always talk about how difficult it is to stay abreast of the rapidly changing digital landscape. I think the conversation we just had is a perfect example of that. How do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated? Bob: Well, podcasts is certainly a big one. I listened to a lot of them. I listen to them pretty constantly. I do a lot of reading. LinkedIn is a big source for me as well. I do a lot in networking, so I learn from people and I get a lot of great information off of LinkedIn just from what's posted there in the form of learning and articles and also, another way is just really through my colleagues. I work with a lot of very talented people and they're constantly presenting new challenges and new technical things to solve. And so that, to me, is probably one of the best ways I learn is just sort of on the ground, you know, with my fingers in it and trying to figure out how to make it all work. That's probably a big one for me. Kathleen: Any particular podcasts that you really love? Bob: So I actually listen to a lot of historical podcasts. I'm also a big fan of Sam Harris. Right now I've been listening to a lot of podcasts on LinkedIn about LinkedIn to figure out how to do better as we now have to do a lot more things virtually. And we don't have to do as much face to face and really trying to get geared up for LinkedIn. I actually listened to a very interesting historical podcast yesterday about pandemics and putting all of this into context. It was very interesting to kind of see the big picture over history. Probably one of the big takeaways there is that there are a lot of people who hope we can get back to normal and I think they're thinking of the old normal, but we have to let go of the old normal because it's gone. We're looking at a new one and we have to figure out what that means. Kathleen: Yeah. It's amazing how quickly things can change, isn't it? How to connect with Bob Kathleen: Well this has been so fascinating and I think you're doing really interesting work with a lot of really interesting companies. If somebody is listening to this and they want to connect with you online or learn more, ask a question, what's the best way for them to do that? Bob: Certainly LinkedIn. So look up Bob Barry. That's B E R R Y on LinkedIn. And again, I'm associated with AnswerLab and with ItsTheUsers also. You can go to my homepage at inbound.itstheusers.com. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Awesome. All right. I'll put that link in the show notes. If you're listening and you liked what you heard today or you learn something new, I would really appreciate it if you would go to Apple podcasts and leave the podcast a five star review. That helps us get found by new listeners. And if you know someone who's doing great inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommwork, because I would love to make them my next guest. Thank you so much for joining me this week, Bob. Bob: Kathleen, thank you very much. Good luck, so they say.  

What's the best way to develop a content strategy that reflects the reality of today's buyer journey? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Ashley Faus, who is the Content Strategy Lead for Software Teams at Atlassian, shares why she thinks a playground provides a better analogy than a funnel for marketers looking to develop their content strategy, and how to use the concept of a content playground to provide your customers and prospects with a better buying experience. Highlights from my conversation with Ashley include: Many marketers use the concepts of the linear funnel and the looping decision journey to develop their content strategies, but Ashley says that those don't reflect the reality of how people buy. Much like in a playground, where there isn't a singular goal (get to the top of the jungle gym!), your prospects aren't always ready to buy and may have other interests. For this reason, a playground offers a better analogy. Rather than forcing prospects to follow a specific journey that we as marketers have determined is ideal, Ashley recommends focusing on creating strong content depth that allows your prospects to follow their own journey, wherever it takes them. For smaller teams that are just getting started, Ashley recommends identifying your "hedgehog principle" - that one thing you do better than everyone else - and creating a very in-depth piece of content on that. Then, you can use that content to repurpose into a variety of assets that can be used on social media, for your trade shows, in the sales process, etc. The key is to find a topic that is substantive enough to support the development of this amount of content.  In terms of how this content gets presented on your website, Ashley recommends ungating it, and then being very explicit with your CTAs so that your website visitors know exactly what they will get if they click a button.  She also suggests adding a related content module on your site to encourage visitors to browse through your content. The best way to begin measuring the impact of your strategy is to use simple tools like Google Analytics in combination with UTMs. As you grow, you can use more sophisticated marketing automation software like HubSpot or Marketo. Resources from this episode: Visit the Atlassian website Connect with Ashley on LinkedIn Follow Ashley on Twitter Check out Atlassian's Team Playbook and Agile Microsite Listen to the podcast to learn why envisioning your buyer's journey -- and their interactions with your content -- as a playground is a more effective way to approach the development of a content strategy. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is Ashley FOSS, who is the content strategy lead for software teams at Atlassian. Welcome Ashley. Ashley Faus (Guest): Nice to be here. Thanks so much for having me. I'm so happy to have you here. Ashley and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: And, and for those who are listening, you can't see it. But Ashley has an awesome virtual Zoom background of the golden gate bridge. That's one of my favorite things about the pandemic is that it is revealing people's personalities through the Zoom backgrounds that they choose.  Ashley: It's been interesting. I actually think didn't have the latest version of Zoom. I got scared that if I upgraded and something went wrong, I wouldn't have access to it. So for a long time I was the lame person that didn't have a background and it was just my kitchen the whole time. So yes, I finally upgraded. Tell any of the listeners that are hesitant, you can upgrade. And it's not going to ruin your computer. And you, too, can have a nice virtual backgrounds. Kathleen: Oh yeah. For our all hands meetings at my office. We've been having so much fun with just seeing the backgrounds that people come to these meetings with. It's, it's awesome. It reveals so much about their personalities. About Ashley and Atlassian Kathleen: But so we have so much to talk about. And the first thing I want to talk about is really have you explain to my listeners what Atlassian is, and then also your background and what led you to your current role as Content Strategy Lead. Ashley: Sure. So Atlassian is a collaboration software maker. A lot of people are very familiar with JIRA, Confluence, Trello, Bitbucket, Status Page. We have a number of different products that people use all the time. JIRA especially is a staple for software teams. So I actually started at Atlassian two and a half years ago and I moved among a couple of different teams. My background is primarily marketing, but I actually started on the corporate communications team, moved over to editorial, doing a mix of content strategy, social media, thought leadership for the corporate side, and then just recently made the move over onto software teams. One thing that's kind of interesting and great is having that diverse background has given me that ability to move across different areas and go where my skills can be most useful. So I'm excited to dive in. I'm fairly new to the role, so it's been an interesting transition to try to onboard from home and then also start to get up to speed both from a content standpoint and a strategy standpoint, and then also from a tactical standpoint of where are all the different boards, where's the JIRA tickets? Like what's the process, what are the meetings? So, um, it's been fun. It's been fun. Kathleen: I will definitely say as far as Atlassian is concerned, I've been a user of so many of the company's products. I've used Confluence and JIRA. I'm currently using Trello. I know our dev team uses a number of products as well. It's a great company and a great suite of products, especially for anybody who's practicing agile, which I have done a few times. And so that was another reason I was excited to talk to you. But one of the things I think is really interesting is, you know, you mentioned you're relatively new in the role and we were just talking before we came on and you were explaining how your fiscal year, it's going to change over pretty soon. And so not only are you relatively new in the role, but you're being thrust into the situation of having to plan and strategize for a whole new year in the middle of the pandemic, no less all of these things happening at once. Your current focus is on content and I was really fascinated by how you think about content and content strategy planning and this concept of the content playground. So could you talk a little bit about that and what do you mean when you say a content playground?  What is a content playground? Ashley: I started thinking about it because I needed a new metaphor. Everybody that I talked to was talking about primarily the linear funnel. And you know, you've got your three phases with your editorial calendar and you say, "I need three content, three pieces of content per phase. I'm going to do one per month. Cool. Now I have nine months of content strategy, if my math works out". Most of your listeners are probably sitting there going, "That's not how you do content strategy. You can't just say one piece of content per phase and then call it". Kathleen: Wouldn't it be nice if you could though?  Ashley: You bought a calendar, write three articles and you're done. Then, you know, I know a lot of people have moved on to the looping decision journey where you basically add a fourth phase in there. And you're kind of almost recycling these people, but now there's a cross sell or upsell, but somehow you're dumping them back into that awareness phase from the linear funnel. If you look at the Google results for both the linear funnel and the looping decision funnel, it's kind of terrifying. It's very confusing. It basically just shows that we all agree that humans don't work this way. Nobody just goes politely down our little funnel. The 10-3-1 conversion was kind of the standard for a long time. You get 10 people in awareness. A certain amount of drops. So you get three into consideration to be able to get one to that kind of purchase decision. I was really wrestling with this because I was like, how do you create content in a way that allows people to do what they actually do, which is enter and exit and go sideways and all of that? So I had originally come up with this idea of a jungle gym. But there's two problems with that -- mainly that there's only one objective. It's either to get to the top or, if you're my three year old nephew, it's to go across without touching the lava below that. It's still me as a marketer forcing you into what I want you to do and it's taking all these touch points and saying, what's the fewest number of touch points that I can use to get you to a purchase? And yes, ultimately we need to sell products. Ultimately we have to make money as businesses, but it feels bad to everybody to just constantly be like, are you just trying to sell me something? Like what's the catch? I don't really trust you because I know you're trying to sell me. So if you look at an actual playground though, what's the point of the playground? Is the person who's sitting on the bench just enjoying the sunshine? Are they enjoying the playground the wrong way? No, actually perfectly acceptable. Sit on the bench. Again, you know, thinking about what the right way is to play on the playground for the adults and the playground designers, going down the slide is the right way. Three year old nephew, every time wants to go up the slide. If you translate that to content strategy, I recently had an example of this where in the traditional funnel, pricing is considered a very bottom of funnel action. If I'm asking you about price, man, I'm ready to buy. Well, in my case, I needed to go ask for budget before I could even do the RFP and I had no idea what that budget should be for. It was going to be a SaaS product. So understanding, you know, the subscription, SLA, the licensing tiers, all of that. And so I started reaching out to some vendors in the space asking them for just ballpark pricing so I could go get budget. And so many of them were like, well, allow me to send you a white paper about why this matters a lot and you know, Oh, you need to do a demo. And I'm like, Nope, I don't want to waste my time going through your traditional funnel when I don't even know if I have a budget yet. Kathleen: I have to just interject there and say amen because this has been a frustration of mine for so long. I had this recently with a marketing software product. It was exactly what you're talking about. It was last November and I was working on my budget and I knew that I was not going to purchase this product until halfway through 2020. And that was even before all this craziness with the pandemic hit. But I needed a placeholder number for it in my budget. So there's no chance I was going to engage in, like multi meetings and demos and hours long calls with people to pitch me what I know I'm not ready to buy yet. I just needed a price. There's nothing more frustrating than companies that make it that hard and it wasn't a one time thing. I just found myself doing this yesterday. Somebody started talking about email signature software and they mentioned the name of a new company, and I literally Googled the company name and pricing because I was like, I don't even want to waste my time looking at everything else and getting excited about it if I can't afford it. Ashley: Yeah, well, and it's interesting too because once I got the budget approved, I was already completely sold that this problem needed to be solved. I just needed to get management on board that yes, we are committed to solving this problem. So then I actually got into the sales process and you know, I started kind of at the top of that and I just said, look, I'm bought in, draw me all the way down to the bottom of the funnel and I want you to just pitch me. Kathleen: Yeah.  Ashley: It blew the sales people's minds. And they're like, well, let me just go through the deck. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. I don't know how many slides you have, but I'm telling you I'm bought in, I agree with you. This has impact. It solves a problem that I have. I have money, here's what my budget is. I'm BANT qualified. I need you to drop me all the way in and I need you to sell me. A majority of them just froze because they didn't know how to go through there. They only know how to do this step by step. And that's where I think the content playground comes in. Obviously there's a sales component to this too. When you do get people who just want to jump right in, I wouldn't send them to play on the swings. That's what we're doing right now. We're spending all our time on the swings. Let's just do it. Quit trying to force them to go down the slide. It's so funny because people have this idea that there's a specific way that you're supposed to build the relationship and you're supposed to, you know, okay, let's get you through the marketing funnel and get you through MQL and then SQL and then a sale. And it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes you meet somebody and they come at you and they're like, no, I'm literally ready to sign on the dotted line, whether it's you or one of your competitors. So why should it be you? Kathleen: Yeah. And not only is that an issue, but it's like I'm going to sign and it's going to be fast. So if you can't meet my fast timeline, just get out of my way. Exactly. That's so interesting. I love that concept. How to use the concept of a content playground to develop your content strategy Kathleen: So give me an example of, conceptually, how does that play out in terms of developing and executing your strategy? Ashley: I've done this at a number of different companies and then we also, you know, do this similar type of thing, whether you see whether you recognize it and call it a content playground or not. When you start to recognize companies that do it because you go through and there's a nice experience to say, Oh, I've kind of landed in this problem space or solution space and now I have the ability to go explore. So we've done that quite a bit in it last year and moving into this content strategy role on software teams, I'm getting exposed to some great ways that they've done it. So for example, we have this agile microsite and then we paired that last year with this agile coach series. This is all work that has been done that I'm excited to come in and kind of optimize and see how can we replicate this across other content types. And it basically says, you know, yes, JIRA helps you run in an agile way, but if you don't have the right practices set up and you don't have that mindset in those processes, a tool is not the thing that's going to fix it for you. And so sure we can sell you JIRA, but if we don't show you the right way to set up the workflows, if we don't help you have acceptable standups, if we don't help you improve your retros, having these things on a board is not going to solve, you know, your agility problems. And so putting that together, if you look at it from a content depth standpoint, instead of organizing around specific phases of the funnel, organizing it around content depth. So from a conceptual standpoint, what the heck is agile? Why does it matter? What kinds of success, you know, have people seen with it, what are the problems from a strategy standpoint, what are the practices and rituals? So that's where you get into some of the standups. That's where you get into some of the retros. And then from a tactic standpoint, how do you actually do those things? And so we have a number of things from the agile coach series, from the agile microsite and also our team playbook, which talks about things like my user manual. So how do you work together as a team? Um, putting together project coasters for kickoffs. And then yes, there's some product demos in there. There's some guides in there, there's some tutorials, there's here workflows that you can set up to do that in JIRA or to do that in Trello. But it's really that full content experienced to say, I just need help figuring out how to run my standups or my retros. And then, cool that I can do that in JIRA as well. So I previously worked at Duarte, if you're familiar with Nancy Duarte's work. Um, she wrote Resonate, which was, you know, a big game changer for a lot of people. They do workshops, they do presentation design for tons of big names and Fortune 500 companies. So we did this in a number of ways. When we launched her slide decks book for example, we put that as a free, ungated version on SlideShare. And then we linked over to this kind of more traditional inbound strategy page where you've got a landing page with a form, you give away a free piece of content, show good faith that this is good quality, and then you've got a form fill out to download some templates that people could use that would then drop people into a drip campaign where we would showcase more templates, we would showcase some use cases that we had built and give them more content to ultimately lead them to say, "Hey, if you want to buy a workshop to learn how to do this at a pro level, here's how you can do that." Getting started with your content playground Kathleen: So if I love the whole concept here, and I love the notion of content depth because I do think that there are so many marketers that almost try to cover too much and they skim the surface on everything and it doesn't work. I think the thing that could be challenging about this is hearing that, like, where do you start and how do you, how do you get there? Because you can't snap your fingers and have a lot of depth in all these topics right away. And also, how do you know what those top level topics are? If you were teaching this to somebody, how would you walk them through that? Ashley: So there's a couple of ways that, uh, we've been able to do it at Atlassian. Obviously we're fortunate we have a large team and a ton of experts that have complimentary skills. So for example, we have done a ton of keyword research to understand both search intent and the specific wording of that. From a market standpoint, agile came in and changed the game, and it turns out that JIRA was actually a really good fit to run agile. So we already kind of were keeping a pulse on the market and we started to see that agile is becoming this very mainstream thing, that our tool and our technology is really useful in helping people run. So let's focus on agile. Okay, where do we focus? And that's where things like SEO and keyword research, that's where focus groups, that's where digging through the feedback that your customers are giving you and asking like, what are the top questions in terms of workflows? How do those map to things like running scrum teams or running Kanban boards? How does that now map to workflows and guides and onboarding tutorials that we would share with somebody who starts with your product or working with Trello products, for example? So I would say I'm doing a listening exercise and there's a number of tools. You could do it on social media as well, particularly for software devs, which is one of our core audiences. They hang out on Hacker News, they hang out on Reddit. And so go look there. That's, that's another core tenant I think as marketers is loving the whole human and not just who are you as a buyer? I only care about you as a buyer or user. How do I get you to engage in the product every day or buy more of the service? Okay, these people have lives. And so if you can figure out what do they love, what are they passionate about outside of the one thing you're trying to sell them, that also gives you an entire new space to explore for thinking about what topics could you engage in. And so, when you think about engineers, efficiency, optimization, clean and concise process is something that's very important to them. Well what are some of the frameworks or what are some of the topics that deal with optimization that could potentially lead you to lead you to something like Six Sigma or manufacturing for example, right? There's a lot of ways that you could think about it if you just know what do engineers generally like? And it's like, they really like efficiency. They like optimization, they like tight, elegant solutions and just jump off from there to see, okay, what are the specific topic areas that would coincide with your product offering? And with the things that they generally care about, what does that mean? Kathleen: And if you don't have an enormous team and you want to take this approach, how do you do it? Because I imagine you'd have a choice of like, okay, I've identified 10 areas that I want to go deep on, you know, and I could either take area number one and fully play it out and develop all the content. Or I could do one article for each of the 10 areas and then go back and do the second article. Like how would you tackle it? Ashley: Yeah. So one of the things that Nancy Duarte actually talks about a ton, from Jim Collins book Good to Great is this concept of the hedgehog principle. And that's if you can do one thing and be the best at it, just do that one thing. So instead of trying to spread yourself too thin across all of those 10 topics, I would be ruthless initially in what is the thing that we actually have the ability to talk about without having to spend a ton of time and energy going and finding that expertise? What's the thing that leads most to the product market fit, or the service market fit, whichever of those that you're selling? And then what's the thing that has depth? This is something that I see a lot, is people start throwing topics on the board and you're like, okay, but how many words can you actually say about that thing? And for the most part, people were like, "Whoa". And it's like you can't even say one sentence about it. How are you going to write a full article? And then that also gets into, it's not just one article, it's okay, how do we also turn that into a video? How do we turn that into an infographic? How do we turn that into a social media post? Because this thing has to live for a lot of time. Nobody has time to keep creating net new content all the time. And so if this piece can't be repurposed or broken apart, it probably doesn't have enough depth to chase. So I would say if you're very first, starting from scratch, to limit it to probably two, maybe three topics that are related to each other and that you know, have depth. And I would say especially if you're dealing with a small team, like you're at a start up and the founder is kind of the only person who could talk about this, I'm definitely limiting that to two topics that you know you have in house expertise and then doing a good job to capture that from a conceptual, strategic and tactical standpoint the first time. And then go with the repurposing strategy. So instead of saying, "Oh my gosh, we have to cover it, a thousand words or a 20 minute video every single time", think about it as, no, nobody wants to read that, nobody's going to scroll through all of that. So let them pick their journey of how deep they want to go. Repurposing your content Kathleen: So can you dig in a little bit more to that repurposing topic because I was interested to hear you discuss all the different ways that the content can manifest, because I think a lot of people might hear this and think it's a bunch of blogs, but it's, it's really not. Ashley: One of my favorite campaigns that was super successful, there was a startup that I worked at that got acquired by Oracle called Palerra. Palerra was a cloud access security broker, which, you know, doesn't matter as much to the majority of the audience if they're not in tech, but, basically they're kind of a complimentary security product to a lot of cloud offerings. We were primarily an enterprise solution. Technology is a really heavy topic. And so what we did, when I came in, there was this raw word doc of just random customer interviews, and problems that they had faced. And so for example, we all know on a personal level we should update our passwords regularly. A lot of companies have that installed where it's like 72 days time to change your password. So at an enterprise security level, there's a similar concept for your keys to your different cloud services. And so we had a scenario where there was a customer that hadn't rotated their keys in like two years. It blew our minds. So our product actually found that. So we actually were talking about cautionary tales and focusing specifically on AWS because that cloud offering is quite ubiquitous among our customers and these are a lot of common pitfalls that our products can help solve. So we called it a cautionary tale. We turned it into an ebook first that then became the basis for our booth graphics at AWS Reinvent. And then we had a booth giveaway. We put an Amazon Tap in a clear box and then we had a bowl of keys sitting next to it and they looked identical. And so you drew a key and if it unlocked the box, you won the Tap. And so that was able to lead us into, "Have you rotated your keys? How are you doing password management?" But not just those basic tactical issues, but also like how do you know there's even a working key in the bowl? How do you know that Kathleen is supposed to have the key and not Ashley? What happens to the keys after the show? So let's say Kathleen and Ashley both leave and the bowls just sitting there. Now what happens to the keys? Right? And our product can help with that. And from a security standpoint, those are a lot of blind spots that at the time people were missing. And then the nice thing about that being at a security conference, people were very skeptical that there were any working keys in the bowl. Right? There's no keys. Yeah. So every time someone won, we took a picture and then we put it on the company Twitter feed. And then if they had a Twitter handle, we tagged them and ask them to retweet. And so there were people, and I mean we had people, well, again, they're very methodical about this. They're like, okay, it looks like roughly once an hour people are winning. So the last time somebody won, they just won. Okay, well I'm going to come back and try again later. Kathleen: Like people play slots.  Ashley: Yeah. It's like slots. But that was a great way. And then we were also able to share that ebook on Twitter as well to say, "Hey, if you're curious why we're taking pictures of the food, you can read this ebook." And then we were able to send that as well with some deeper case studies to anybody that we had scanned at the booth. So it was a really nice integrated online, offline and social media experience. That's another one of my pet peeves is people who are just like, come to booth 123. I'm not at the conference so you're just going to spam me for three days. So making sure that you have content that tells a story to your social media audience, whether they're attending the conference or not. Kathleen: That's great. That's a really good point about the shows too. Because yeah, you do so much marketing. And if somebody is not going, it's just annoying. How to share your content on your website Kathleen: So if you've created all this content, what does that look like on the website from an experience standpoint? Are there content hubs? Is it a resource center? How do you organize this all for presentation to your audience? Ashley: I think it really depends on the audience. I think HubSpot, obviously from the hub and spoke model that they've done, is amazing so that you can kind of see, you can dive in deep per topic, you could dive in deep from an integrative marketing standpoint, you can dive in deep from a tech stack standpoint and obviously they have solutions for that. So the way that they've organized it is actually really great because it allows people to kind of slice and dice how they want. One of the things that we've done that I think is really great and it lasts and is, for example, on the work-life blog, which is like a corporate level, so deals with things like teamwork, practices, leadership, et cetera. We've got a related articles function. And so when you get to the bottom of the article, yes, there's a CTA. If you want to sign up for the newsletter, you want to um, go talk in the community. Or in some cases where we're doing product focused content, it's go to the product tour or something like that. But then at the bottom there's related content. And so we have a mix of collections, a mix of tags, and then those get fed into the related content. And so there's always a next step for people to take. I think that's the biggest thing, whether you organize it as a hub, whether you organize it as a resource center that's done by topic filtering or content tagging, that ability for somebody to always take the next step and to, to only force that next step to be a buying action if they're in a head space for buying action. So if you're on a product tour, the request a demo or the sign up for free, or the do an evaluation for seven days or 30 days, whatever it is, that makes perfect sense. But if you've just read an article about productivity, it's a really hard landing to talk about five tips to manage your time and then all of a sudden be dropped into, you know, by the way, you need to buy Trello. It's like, why would I do that? So making sure that there's always a next logical action that either takes them deeper toward a purchase or deeper tool, words and practices that will help them or allow them to say, I don't know how I landed here. How do I get back to the first thing that I clicked so that I can get back on the path where I think I should be? Kathleen: Yeah. How do you execute that? Because you just gave the example of somebody who's just poking around and then they're all of a sudden getting pushed to buy. You know, being that it's a playground and people can go in any number of directions, how do you craft those next steps so that they make sense? Ashley: I think the biggest thing is, there's obviously an ideal customer journey and that does include some post-sale engagement. That could be things like documentation. It could be a support community. But really, I mean even from like, um, practically accessibility, labeling your buttons with what it is you're doing. Are you downloading this? Are you reading this? Are you clicking to do an evaluation? Are you starting a trial for free? What is that? And then that way people are very clear whenever they get down there, they know what they're clicking on. I know I've had this experience a few times where it's like, see more. And I'm like, yes, I wish to do that. And it automatically takes me into this form where it's like put in a credit card. And I'm like, you didn't tell me that's what I was doing. That's not, I didn't agree to that. So having really clear navs and in the resource center, not having buy CTAs all over the resources. For example, Intercom does a great job with this. They're a messaging, communication growth platform. You can go over to their journal section or their resource center and it's all thought leadership. It's all very high level and they state at the top, "This is free content. It's educational, no sales." And so, you know, when you're that part of the website, you're not going to get sold to and there's a nice handy button at the top. It's like go back to home. And that's where, you know, you could either be directed down an education path or sales path and you can kind of choose. So I think just being really explicit. We're past the point of I'm going to trick you into sales. It might've been on LinkedIn. I saw a discussion that maybe you and somebody else were having about, "Oh, I got a thousand leads from this form. And the question is, are they qualified?" Jay Acunzo actually has a whole rant about this. Stop gating your best content and then pretending whoever fills out that form is a lead sales lead. That's not what they agreed to. And so don't try and trick your audience. If they want to buy, they'll let you know. If they want to be educated and they want to form a relationship with you, they'll do that. And so giving them a clear path to let them either do sales or build a relationship makes them feel empowered. It gives everybody good feelings and it doesn't clutter up your sales process with people that are junk, that are not qualified or that are not actually interested in buying. Kathleen: So true. I find it's counterintuitive because, I started a few years ago ungating as much content as I possibly could and just putting it on the page and then adding like a little field just for email saying, "Want to get the PDF? Put your email in." And that was it.  What was fascinating to me is that not only did conversion rates not go down, in many cases, they went up. It's really psychology if you think about it. There's so much crappy gated content out there and the problem with gating it, first of all, is people are very jaded and a lot of them will think, I'm not giving up my email only to find out that this is junk. And so then they don't convert at all. Whereas, if you give the content away and then give them the option of downloading, you're basically allowing them to try before they buy. You're proving that what you're giving them is really good and if they do think it's really good, they are going to convert because they're like, "Well, it's no skin off my back. This is great content. I don't mind giving up my email address for it." And so the people that wind up converting on the ungated content are more qualified because they've self qualified. The other thing I've found, it goes back to your thing about being explicit, is especially when you don't have things gated, like on the page before or in the marketing you're doing for it, just coming right out and saying, "No need to fill out a form to get it." Ashley: Yeah. Kathleen: You don't have to give us your email address. People are so naturally almost defensive or they're like, Oh, Nope, Nope, Nope. They're going to ask for something. And if you can just come out and say, I'm not going to ask you for anything, that goes a long way. Ashley: Well, and I think what's interesting in this, in this thought about building relationships and giving that content away, a great example, there's a company that I worked with, they were an agency for us. We were a startup. We were using, you know, a lot of agencies and freelancers and they host these dinners and it's basically, you know, just get five, six, seven people together, have dinner, nerd out about marketing topics. And yes, we all know full well some of us are current customers of this company. Some people are prospects of the company. But I don't have budget or need to work with them anymore. But every single time I meet somebody that says that they have the need that this company services, I refer them and I refer probably three or four clients to them. I would continue to do that and we have a great relationship. They still invite me to the dinners. I sent one of my colleagues to a dinner to basically make a connection to say this might be relevant for you to meet some people that we might want to put spokespeople on panels with in the future. And so that willingness to connect with each other. I'm loyal to that company even though I have no budget and no need to buy from them right now. But I'm referring, I'm still giving them revenue because again, it's, it's fine for, for me, when I meet somebody at a conference and they're like, how would you do this? I'm like, actually this is a great company. Would you like an intro? And so a buying action may not necessarily be the person who downloaded the content buys. It may be, I mean, again, I talk about Intercom. I love the content that IDEO puts out. Again, I have no need to buy their services at this point, but I tell everybody, go look at HubSpot's content or go look at Intercom's content. And so there's no way for them to measure that. I'm just another random name on their list that hasn't converted, but I'm a brand champion for them and they don't even know it, you know? Measuring the ROI of your content playground Kathleen: That's awesome. So speaking of measuring, you get this all set up. You deploy it. How do you track and measure whether it's working, how it's working, et cetera? Ashley: So I've done this in a number of different ways depending on the company and the strategy and the bandwidth and all of that kind of stuff. If you're just starting out in your tiny little team, and you don't have the ability to do, you know, Tableau or Databricks or kind of all of these fancy data pipelines, at minimum just start out with your Google tracking. Google has free stuff that you can put on. Use your UTM codes to understand if these things are getting tracked from a social media standpoint, what's the referrals, if you are using any pages with forms from any of the marketing automation providers. Again, I'm pretty partial to HubSpot just because I think they do amazing content. The platform is great. We've used Marketo in the past, and other companies. So any of those are great to really understand what are the trends. I think that's the biggest thing. Making sure that you're looking at a correct trend level. I've worked a lot on the social media side and people get freaked out per post. "Oh my gosh, we did 10 posts last week and this one did, you know, half a percent better than this one." And it's like, let's zoom out and look monthly. How are things trending? Let's do some testing to see if we post more. Does our engagement rate go down if we, um, the other big thing is optimizing the CTA is for what you want to happen. So it's going to be really impossible for you to get somebody to like, comment, retweet, follow, and click through all in the same posts. Like there's not enough words for that post. And so making sure that each CTA belongs where it should be. So if you're asking for a poll on Twitter or Facebook, that's the goal. Responses in feed is the goal versus explicitly asking someone to click through. Make that explicit and you need to make sure that you're putting in some sort of hook or benefit. I see this a lot with people who are just starting in social media, for example, that they just give the title of the article or they just say, read these five tips. Well, what are they? On the opposite extreme, they give it away and they say, here's the five tips. And then they laid them out. And I'm like, well, now why do I need to read the article? You already gave me the tips. Give me the first tip that you think is the most interesting and then say, click through to read the next four tips. Kathleen: Right? Ashley: So, from a measurement standpoint, being very clear on a per post basis about what your goals are, if you're looking at click through rate or engagement rates and what type of engagement. So that's kind of more from a social media standpoint. If you're doing YouTube, if the answer is subscribe to the channel, if the answer is watch the next video, if the answer is go visit the page, those are very different actions. And so making sure you're optimizing those. And then obviously looking at things like organic traffic is always great. Looking at whether you have emails or product tours. From an email standpoint, looking at the open rates and the click to open ratio. So a lot of people look at the CTR, but that's a little bit out of whack. If there's a thousand people that opened it, but you sent it to 5,000, it's not very fair to say what's the CTR on the 5,000? Use it on the thousand. In some cases we've gotten really granular to look at which pieces of content get the most clicks. And so that helps us to understand, it's great that you want to put 10 pieces of content in the newsletter, but if only the first five ever get clicked, you need to find something else to do because you're not amplifying those things. Kathleen: How do you get people down further? Ashley: Yeah, exactly. What kinds of results can you expect? Kathleen: So any examples of like, what kinds of results does taking this approach yield in terms of pipeline or engagement or revenue or any of the above? Ashley: Yeah. From a scale standpoint, it depends. It's not very fair to say like, Oh, you'll get a thousand leads. It's like, okay, well if your revenue goal is 10,000, that's a struggle. Or if you're a billion dollar company, a thousand leads doesn't do you any good, right? So, we've done content pairing for example, where we've done a mix of gated content and ungated content. When we did that at Duarte, the ungated piece has over 300,000 views. Now it's been up for a couple of years, but it's got over 300,000 views. We were getting roughly 10 to 15% download rates of people going and getting that content. And so that's something where you're still getting the benefit of the people looking at it for free and ungated, but then you're starting to see higher engagement, you know, 10, 15% on that. Whenever I've done newsletter sends that have been more thought leadership focused with very light touch sales, we've been able to see 20, 30% open rates, 15 to 25% CTOR rates. Again, because we're serving that content that they've requested, not trying to shoehorn in sales. Whenever we've done sales, as a piece of content, like, "Hey, get a trial" or "Use this code" or "Refer" or "Here's an eCourse and then we'll give you one module for free because you've signed up for this newsletter" or something like that, those do have a much higher conversion rate for whatever the next buying action is. Again, it depends on the scale. So like the Palerra one at the time, you know, that ebook and we were a tiny little company. I mean we only had, I think when we got acquired, we had maybe 60 employees total. So very small company, 10 by 20 booth at AWS Reinvent, which is a massive conference. And we got, you know, almost 2000 views on that small ungated ebook. And then we got substantially higher open rates, and then our lead scans at that booth, I mean it was ridiculous. I want to say we scanned like 500 people and at most shows we were only scanning probably a hundred to 112 and so it was huge because it all tied in. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: That's awesome. Well shifting gears because we're gonna run out of time. I have two questions that I like to ask all my guests and I'm really curious to hear your answers because you've worked with some really interesting companies who are very good at this. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it with inbound marketing right now? Ashley: So I will do the shameless plug for Atlassian, A, because I work there so of course I think we're doing a good job. But truly, I think one of the biggest examples of this, we have our team playbook and this is something again where we connected our work futurist Don Price, has done a number of different keynotes around the world and always promotes the team playbook and that has led to this health monitor -- the team health check, understanding where your blockers are. That led to a large engagement with ANZ bank, which is a huge bank in Australia and they have now done a case study with us. They're huge champions that come for our conferences and speak about how this one tiny little interaction with this health monitor has led to this entire agile transformation across their business. It's a mix of the tools, the people, the practices, it all came together perfectly. So, yes, that had a revenue result for us, but it started with that ungated content at a conceptual level about how do you do your team work better and that's what Atlassian really tries to empower. I mentioned Intercom as well. They have a ton of great content. They've got sales manuals, they got marketing manuals that talk about a variety of different ways to think about content marketing, sales, the interaction between sales and marketing. Highly recommend their content for both sales and marketing practitioners. And then, IDEO, just like if you want to elevate your creativity and you want to kind of think outside of a traditional business or products. I work in tech, so of course I'm in this little bubble that everything is SaaS and everything is ARR. IDEO has none of that. And so every time I go to IDEO and just like, this is fascinating, how does the world work when you're not in your little bubble? And so I would say, no matter what bubble you're in, IDEO will help you get out of it. That would be three that are a mix of marketing focused, tech and then a design consultancy that's just completely out of my wheel house.  Kathleen: I can't wait to check some of those out -- particularly IDEO. It sounds really interesting. Well, second question is, the biggest pain point I was here from marketers is that digital is changing so quickly and they feel like it's drinking from a fire hose to try and keep up with everything and stay educated and on the cutting edge. So how do you personally do that? Ashley: Yeah, so from a broader view, kind of outside of marketing or just business chops, which I think is really important, it's how do we fit in and especially as you move up in your career and you become COO or something like that, understanding that business acumen is really key. I love MIT Sloan review for that content and they've been killing it lately. Every single thing that's come out from them over the last probably six or seven months, I'm like, "Yes, one hundred percent fascinating". So I love MIT Sloan from a business standpoint. There's a couple of marketers that I think are a little bit contrarian and I joked about going on rants about things and I'm like, "Yes, ranting. I love it." Katie Martell is somebody that I've been loving her content lately. Jay Acunzo I think is great. He's really honing in on podcasting and show running over the last year or so. But just in general, his thoughts on content marketing and strategy are great. I love Scott Berkun. He is primarily a designer, and more on that design thinking. He has a new book out that I need to get because it looks amazing. It's like How Design Makes the World, I think is what it's called. And it's looking at how all of these interactions and everyday things influence our path, our actions, et cetera. So Scott Berkun is great. And then I would say just like a book that I always come back to is this book called The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson. It's primarily about intersectional thinking and divergent thinking. And so yes, there's an element of understanding the tactical nitty gritty from a digital standpoint. I think there's a number of, you know, Marketing Profs, CMI, HubSpot, all of those do a really great job of that. But how do you think about change? How do you think about a problem space? How do you think about a solution space? The Medici Effect is just every, it's like I come back to it kind of annually. It's like, okay, somewhere in there I'm missing something. I should probably just reread the The Medici Effect. In fact, I should probably just to think about the concepts and The Medici Effect to jolt myself out of being so focused on, okay, what does this button on Twitter do or what does this ads do? Like are we doing AB testing? We're doing multivariate testing, what's our competence interval, whatever. We're pulling those things down. Like I don't know what the best practice is. It's like I'm clearly thinking about it in the wrong way. If I'm so twitchy about such a small detail, you get lost in the weeds pretty easily. Kathleen: Those sound like some really good resources. I will put links to all of them in the show notes. How to connect with Ashley Kathleen: If somebody is listening and they want to connect with you online or follow you or learn more about this topic, what's the best way for them to do that? Ashley: I would love to connect on LinkedIn. I'm Ashley Faus. For the most part, I think I'm the first search result for that. And you can also follow me on Twitter also @AshleyFaus. Kathleen: Great. I will put Ashley's links to her social accounts in the show notes. So head there if you want to find them. You know what to do next... Kathleen: And if you are listening and you liked what you heard today or you learned something new, and how could you not because Ashley shared so many good ideas, head to Apple podcasts and please leave the podcast a five star review. That helps us get found by more people. And if you know somebody who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next interview. Thanks so much for joining me this week, Ashley. Ashley: Yeah, thank you for having me. It's always fun to nerd out about marketing. Kathleen: Yes!

What do high growth companies with savvy marketing teams do to drive traffic growth? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Directive Consulting founder Garrett Mehrguth shares what his team does to help companies like Allstate and Cisco boost traffic even after all of the low hanging marketing and SEO fruit has been picked. TL;DR, It all starts with product marketing, SEO and a focus on bottom of the funnel, high intent leads. Garrett shares the specific strategies his team at Directive uses to get results for their clients, as well as his advice for startups that want to do it right from the beginning. Highlights from my conversation with Garrett include: Garrett says that everything Directive does is based on the belief that your brand is more important than your website. What that means is that when someone with high purchase intent is searching online for a solution, you need to make sure you're discoverable. He says that sometimes your marketing metrics have an inverse correlation with your financial metrics, meaning that if you focus on the top of the funnel, you might generate a lot of traffic, but you won't get as many high intent leads as you would if you focus on the bottom of the funnel (which generally results in less traffic). Garrett's advice is to track CAC (cost to acquire a customer) and LTV (lifetime value) and use that to determine whether you are paying a reasonable cost per demo, opportunity or proposal -- NOT cost per lead. For many companies, the best place to focus their initial marketing efforts is on ranking on review sites. Done well, this can allow a lesser known, newer market entrant to unseat an incumbent player very quickly. You can pay review sites to conduct review generation campaigns on your behalf, and Garrett says it is absolutely worth it to spend that money. Another strategy that works well is to use LinkedIn ads for awareness raising. Garrett says that leads that come through LinkedIn are not high intent, so you shouldn't spend a lot on a cost per impression basis. Instead, he and his team "trick" LinkedIn by advertising on a cost per click basis. Not many people click the ads, so LinkedIn accelerates their placement in the feed and they get seen by a lot of people. In terms of content, Garrett believes the traditional approach to pillar content and topic clusters promoted by HubSpot is wrong. Instead, he uses that same content and creates product pages as pillars, which he then uses to link to from blogs that address bottom of the funnel topics. Garrett builds authority for product pages by guest blogging (where he can control anchor text and backlinks) and doing podcast guest interviews. He says that where its tough to get your subject matter experts to create written content, you should invest more heavily in podcast guest interviews. Garrett's advice for companies right now is to double down on online advertising. Because so many companies have shut down or pulled their online ads back, prices are down and it is easier to get found. Resources from this episode: Check out the Directive Consulting website Follow Garrett on Twitter at @gmehrguth Connect with Garrett on LinkedIn Email garrett at gmehrguth[at]directiveconsulting[dot]com Listen to the podcast to get specific strategies for combining product marketing and SEO to generate more qualified bottom of the funnel leads.   Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is Garrett Mehrguth from Directive. Welcome Garrett. Garrett Mehrguth (Guest): Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. And yeah, excited to chat about search. Garrett and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah, I love, I love getting into nerdy marketing topics, so I'm really excited about this. Before we dive in though, can you please tell my audience a little bit about yourself and your story and also Directive? About Garrett and Directive Garrett: I'd love to. I did my degree in three years in economics and I wanted to do my masters in a year. I was playing soccer. I thought I was going to go pro, be like a pro soccer player. I hurt my knee, and that kind of reset a lot of that stuff. And so I said, "Hey, you know, maybe I could try this consulting thing." I applied to Boston, Bain and McKinsey. I'm not sure about Deloitte, but kind of the big ones and instantly got this auto-response. In the application process, I knew I was doomed because you go to their portal and the university I attended was not one of the options. I was like, "They do not tell you that before they take your money." So from there I was like, "You know what? I'll just build my own agency and they'll have to acquire me." I don't know why. That's how I thought, and was just like where I went. I had no tangible skills, so there was that problem. I have this belief system that perception is reality and I knew that people perceived I knew the internet and so I figured I should learn it. So I started to try to learn how to do WordPress sites. And then I got this little shwarma shop in East LA. I was on my little moped. I had a 78 Peugeot 103. I was going around town on that thing and I essentially got the client. It was really, really small. I don't even remember because I was so bad at this point that I didn't put the amount in the contract. I still have the contract, but I don't remember the amount. It's probably like 200 bucks. I did that for 30 days, came back on the 30th day to get the check. He said come back tomorrow. The whole place was boarded up. So that was our first client. I was selling $5 social media calendars on Fiverr and I was just hustling and doing all this stuff. And then I got a hookah shop and the hookah shop asked me to build them a website and then I did that. It was okay. Looking back at, it wasn't the best website. And then he wanted to rank number one for hookah shop and all that stuff. I said, "All right, I'll try." I've never done it before. So I went online, read everything on Search Engine Land, Moz, WordStream, Search Engine Journal, teaching myself kind of SEO and PPC. I ranked him number one and all of a sudden you got all these people in a shop and it was completely dead before. I was like, "This is kind of cool." So, one of my best friends who's my roommate said, "Hey, don't go to law school. You know, come join this company with me. We'll be millionaires" or whatever he said. I was paying him $3 an hour at this point. So we kind of just started from there and now we get to work with really large enterprise accounts and mid market companies, mostly SaaS, doing SEO and PPC still. So pretty fun. Kathleen: Great. Now one of the things that I think is interesting about the perspective that you bring -- and we've had lots of people on the podcast talk about SEO and PPC,  I was interested to chat with you because you do have these bigger clients and I think there are pros and cons to that, right? The pro -- having owned an agency myself -- the pro of having big clients is they've got big budgets. They've got teams to support getting work done. They are generally very savvy. One of the -- I don't know if I would call it a con -- but the tough thing about accounts like that is very often, they've already done all of the basic things that they should be doing. They're sharp, they know their stuff, they have their act together, so being able to really show results and traction requires taking things to a much more advanced level. As I think you were saying when we first started talking, you've already squeezed most of the juice out of that orange. So how are you finding those opportunities for the last few drops? You had some interesting thoughts on that and I'm really interested to hear what you have to say and to get into that technical level of detail with you. What do top SEOs do to prevent traffic from plateauing? Garrett: Let's do it Kathleen. So first and foremost, it's such a blessing because I got lucky. Everyone gets lucky, I think, in business to get somewhere. I had no capital. I started this thing with 20 bucks. We have no debt. We have no anything, right? I think we got Allstate when I was like 23 to 25 years old. And we've had them ever since. Right? So there's little moments like that. Or, we did the global SEO for Cisco when I was 26, I think. So like, you get these little moments and they really help you. And obviously you have to deliver, right? And then you can scale that. But one of the things that I think allowed us to be successful regardless of who we were working with, whether it was a Series A startup who was trying to go to the moon, or a mid-market SaaS firm that was trying to go after the market leader, or the market leader, right? You have these kind of three groups to work with and they all need to slow down and reframe how they approach the idea of search. And that's what I think Directive is really special at, is taking a moment to say, how does your customer discover the products or services you sell, and how can we rethink our approach? So here's what we do. We have two kinds of fundamental beliefs. First and foremost, if you can eat enough humility as an SEO and say that my brand is more important than my website, you become an incredibly powerful and creative marketer. So our first fundamental belief at Directive is your brand is more important than your website. What that means tactically is that when someone searches at the bottom of the funnel and has the strongest purchase intent, you need to make sure you're discoverable. Now, the old adage was, you need your website to rank, but see something has changed in consumer behavior. I call this the Yelp and the Amazon effect. See, consumers got trained at the transactional level that even before we spend $3 on a lollipop or on a breakfast burrito, we're going to look on Yelp to see the reviews. Well, guess what? Before we buy quarter million dollar software, we definitely look at reviews. See, Google caught onto this and they started to change the types of websites that they were showing when there was bottom of funnel purchase intent for SaaS. That's G2, Capterra, Software Advice, PC Mag. It goes down for days and hours, right? There's all these review sites. Well if you search your primary keyword, let's say "ERP software", and you layer it with "top", "best" or "reviews" or "comparisons", you have purchase intent. Also your most expensive cost per click and Google ads, all the sites are review sites. That's because Microsoft Dynamics has no SEO. That's not because Oracle has no authority or content. That's because Google is choosing to show these types of websites. So if we take that fundamental approach that our brand is more important than our website, we can be hyper successful. Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. And I've noticed that, too, with reviews. Over the years I've spoken with some other review sites that you mentioned. They've pitched me when I've been at different places and it's really fascinating to just do those searches. And you're right, if you do it -- if you search those terms -- those are the sites that will absolutely come up first. So when you consider that you need to appear on review sites, how do you go about tackling that? Because it's not as simple as just claiming your presence and setting up your profile. You can still get lost in the sea of companies that have done that. How to leverage review sites to drive traffic Garrett: The first step we want to do is we want to take another fundamental hypothesis and understand it, which is that sometimes your marketing metrics have an inverse correlation to your financial metrics. And it becomes very, very, very dangerous for SaaS firms. So here's what I mean. Most agencies have this belief that in order to generate more MQLs for the demand gen team at a SaaS organization, they need to essentially increase the amount of keywords they rank for. They need to start going to top of funnel and they need to generate more leads. So what happens when organizations pursue what I call a "breadth approach" is they start to experience what's called in economics diminishing marginal returns. In other words, their marketing KPIs improve. So let's say you're trying to go for "top ERP software", but you just have a Google ad running. Instead of saying, "How can I show up more often when there's purchase intent?" and going with depth -- and so essentially expanding search impression share in Google ads for your primary terms that have purchase intent and then ranking on individual review sites through their cost per click models, and then evaluating all of that at a cost per demo level, not cost per lead level, and then doing financial allocation, right? That's what we do here. We focus first on demand capturing before pivoting to demand generation. So we go to the bottom of the funnel and say, "Cool. When there's purchase intent, we're going to show up as often as possible and as many places as possible before we try to show up for more terms." So this allows us to experience increasing marginal returns for our clients in the first two quarters and get buy-in. See, what most people do, is they start to go with their Gartner report and they start to leverage that, which isn't an intrinsically a bad idea. But when they start to essentially go after informational intent and go to the top of funnel, they start to lower their cost per lead, they start to increase conversion rate and they think they're winning. But if you're a savvy growth operator in SaaS, you know, like for example, I convert at 60% on lead gen ads on LinkedIn. Okay, target market giving me their information -- 60%. I get that all the way down to $17 a week. Yet that is 17 X more expensive than buying that same lead from ZoomInfo, and I have no greater purchase intent than someone essentially downloading an asset or me buying them from ZoomInfo. So now I'm paying 17 X on a cost per lead. And so that's the diminishing part where your marketing numbers look better, but your revenue doesn't increase because you have horrible CAC-LTV on top of funnel versus bottom of funnel. And so that's kind of the other approach, is putting everything through an LTV-CAC model and then focusing on bottom of funnel first. Start at the bottom of the funnel and capture high intent leads Kathleen: So let's, let's dig into that a little bit. So you talked about starting at the bottom of the funnel and going really deep to capture high intent leads for very specific terms. If I came to you and I said, "All right, let's go. I want to do that," can you walk me through what that looks like? You mentioned showing up as often as possible for that one, high intent term. Garrett: Yeah. So first we're going to do what's called category defining. So we need to find your category. One of the most difficult problems in SaaS, as most people approach it, is they want to create their own category or they exist as a subset of an existing category. You have a lot of experience in cybersecurity, correct? Kathleen: Yep. Garrett: We do a lot there as well. So like we've been working with SentinelOne for a long time and other large players in that space. Now that's endpoint protection, right? People know they need a security solution, they don't always intrinsically know they need an endpoint solution. Right? So how do you generate demand and increase MQLs if you're in a new category? Okay, so first we do what's called category definement. And what we'd like to do is not only position you in endpoint, but position you in the security software category and then do hyper product differentiation through like product naming conventions and positioning, so that your CTO or whoever that person is who's your audience, they're searching and when they go to security software, we want them to show up above the fold with your brand as endpoint protection and then essentially drive awareness from the greater category to our subset or our pain solving product. So that's kind of first step is define that category. Then we ask ourselves, are we above the fold? So on Capterra, when you land on that, do you have to scroll for a couple hours to find you? How many reviews do the top five have versus you? That gives us a review target. Then we'll help you and say, "Here's how we've seen other clients go about getting reviews and here's the strategy you could pursue." Now we have a competitive amount of reviews on all of our categories. Kathleen: Let me ask you a question about that real quick. Most of those review sites have, uh, call them packages that you can purchase where they will, you know, you give them your list of clients, they'll email them, offer them an Amazon gift card or something along those lines to get reviews. And so essentially there's a cost per acquisition model that you can use. Do you find in most cases that that's worth doing, or do you work with your clients to develop their own outreach and review generation campaigns? Garrett: That's totally worth doing. I think there's nothing more important than other people advocating for your product, especially with how consumer behavior has changed at the B2B and B2C level. So no, that's critically important. Now, what we need to be able to do here though, is we need to be able to measure everything on a cost per opportunity, cost per demo, cost per proposal -- whatever you want to call it -- level, not a cost per lead. What we've found across over 350 SaaS companies that we've worked with over the last five years is that the cost per lead between Google Ads, Capterra, G2, Software Advice, et cetera, has a really, like it's not that different, maybe 15 to 30% range between each. But then I found that third party review sites have a 230% lower cost per opportunity. And so what we do, like, we got hired a couple of years ago by a publicly traded sales compensation software company and within one quarter we increased their demos by over 300% by only pivoting budget. That's the craziest part of all this, is most people are still evaluating their demand generation at an MQL level, not at an opportunity level. And so the biggest, easiest thing you can do is go one step further and look at opportunity. And then the furthest step that we've now actually evolved to as an agency is putting all our clients in LTV-CAC models, and then looking at activation rate. So not cost per trial but trial activations, right? So how well people are going from trial to demo, or demo to close rate, and then we're evaluating channels by close rate or by trial activation rate. And when we start to do that, that's hugely powerful for for financial allocation. How can you use intent data to drive traffic and revenue? Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. Now one of the other questions I had as I was listening to you talk about this, you talked about intent and bottom of the funnel and a lot of those platforms that you mentioned, in addition to being able to purchase a package and drive reviews, now they're selling their own intent data. Are you also working with intent data and taking it and creating ABM or audience match campaigns around that for your clients? Garrett: Yeah, so you can do a lot of that stuff. I think we, like most people, are using that engagement data or enriching stuff with Bombora for sales dev. Right now, if you do traditional ABM with account based advertising, so let's say Radius, Terminus, DemandBase, Madison Logic, Listen Loop, I mean we use Terminus personally internally. Now the reason is, is we need to be able to do cookie-based targeting, not IP-based targeting. Because, for example, right now, if you're trying to run IP-based targeting campaigns during COVID, you're not reaching any of your audience. Kathleen: Oh, you are preaching to the choir, because the product that we sell incorporates IP obfuscation. So anybody using our products, you couldn't target them by IP. I think it's going to happen more and more, and more people are going to use tools like that. Garrett: Yeah. I think to answer your question, yes, we are doing bi-directional syncs from HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot or Salesforce into our ad platforms. But you still have a really poor match rate because people are using personal emails on social because they don't want to get fired from their company and their LinkedIn goes down. So, essentially what happens is, your match rate is really poor on social because the only one who still has firmographics after the whole Cambridge analytical debacle, -- because you've got Axiom data in Facebook and you can be really powerful there. Twitter has always been crap, but essentially GDN is terrible right now unless you're doing managed placements, you're actually going in a search engine results page and then searching keywords and then finding every site that ranks in the top five for your keyword that uses GDN and then doing targeted URL placements That works because it comes off as a native ad. But then other than LinkedIn, it's not working. But then LinkedIn fails because there's no purchase intent and the CPA is too high. And so what we're finding is the way we're doing LinkedIn is awareness, with text ads and spotlight ads. And that's actually working. But there's a lot of nuance in all that for sure. How to use LinkedIn ads to raise brand awareness Kathleen: So then you're generating awareness on LinkedIn and are you hoping effectively that that'll get somebody to go to the client's website? Then, you can retarget them on other platforms? Garrett: We're actually being a little bit humbler than that because I don't think I can control my user. And what I mean by that is, the click through rate is crap on LinkedIn. In fact, it's so bad for spotlight and text ads and we've tricked it and we've figured out a game. So we run brand campaigns for our clients and for ourselves based on what I call "clarity." It's this concept of saying what you do and who you do it for, and being humble enough to know that you have to get your message across without the click. So what we do is we actually do it on a cost per click level on LinkedIn and we're able to deliver because nobody clicks. What happens is LinkedIn accelerates our impressions and gives us a much lower CPM when I do CPC, than when I do CPM on LinkedIn. And then we personify everything. This is the biggest trick to LinkedIn. So you take your primary asset, let's say "The Ultimate Guide to Demand Generation", and then you turn it into "The VP's Guide to Demand Generation", "The CMO's Guide to Demand Generation", and "The Marketing Manager's Guide to Demand Generation." All you have to do is change the cover page and then run lead gen ads and we're converting at over 50% across the board. So there's that route. And then the awareness campaigns and the text ads and spotlight ads, you're on a CPC level and then you focus on what you do and who you do it for, and then you personify that. You put that all together and you have really, really cool awareness campaigns. And then I say, spend as much money as you're willing to never stop losing. And if you take that approach and you say, "Look, are you willing to spend $5,000 a month until you die and not know what it does for you?" Because I'll tell you right now, I can target your exact audience to perfection and deliver your message to them till you've decided you're done with this organization. "Are you okay 'wasting' five grand a month so that every person in your audience on LinkedIn knows who you are?" Yeah. The trick is to not get results. Because what happens is, people go into it thinking they'll get results and they pause before they ever could have gotten results through a brand campaign. And so when you take the other approach, it works really well. Kathleen: Yeah. That's a really interesting way to think about it. I would love to be a fly on the wall as you have those conversations with clients to be like, you know, "You're going to spend all this money and I'm not going to show you any quantifiable results from it, but you're going to have to believe that the results are there." It's like playing the long game and having faith. Garrett: Yeah. Do you believe that this is your exact persona on LinkedIn? Here's your exact title, firmographic, industry, size of account, revenue...do you believe that? Yes. Do you believe that your message is valuable enough to communicate it to them on a consistent basis? Yes. Cool. How much does your company spend on snacks? Kathleen: Give up the jelly beans and advertise on LinkedIn! Garrett: Yeah. Honestly, it's the frappuccino a day is the kind of the joke I make. What's your coffee budget? Cool. Could you spend that on this and never stop it? And it usually gets some pretty good buy-in. How to optimize your website for traffic Kathleen: That's a really interesting way to think about it. Do you do anything with your clients in terms of what they should be doing on their own site to support all of this? You talked about how it's not necessarily about everybody getting to your website, and how the brand is more important, but I would think that there are still some things they need to be doing on the site to provide supportive content and other assets that you can then use to go out and have success on these other platforms. Garrett: Yeah, that's a relative statement to shock people to think differently. It's not that your website's not important. It's that your brand truly is more important than your website. You really have to understand your brand is more important than it was. Now your website is obviously critical, so what you need to be able to do is communicate who you are and who you're for and what you do for them. We do custom landing pages here. We have a really strong conversion rate optimization team. And so all that review site stuff I'm telling you about, we're split testing two custom landing pages with messaging, calls to action and what I like to call psychological friction tests. So the biggest issue right now in all of SaaS that they could change if they listened to this, is changing their call to action. Almost universally it's "request a demo." There is nothing more psychologically friction than "request a demo." Every time I speak to an audience, and I get to speak about 30 to 40 times a year at conferences, I love to ask, who here likes to do a demo? Who here likes to have a day of demos? Nobody raises their hand. Kathleen: That's like saying, "Who here likes to sit through an hour long webinar?" Garrett: Yeah, and so when I ask them, I said, what if you did something really simple? What if you change it from request a demo to watch demo video? You still gated it. You still sent that lead to sales development or your account executives, but you are asking yourself, can I give my visitor something of equal or greater value to what they're giving me? That's the number one question with calls to action and demand generation is, am I giving someone something of greater value than they're giving me? When someone requests a demo, they fill out a form and nothing happens and it says "Someone from our team will contact you in 24 hours." You're not doing it. So what we always do, and we can take clients universally from around 2 to 3%, to over 10% conversion rates by simply doing watch demo video. And then all we do is have a form that says "Fill this out and we're going to give you a five minute demo video so that you can have a better educated sales conversation when we follow up." Close rates go up, activation goes up, sales development teams are begging for these leads because they're having product conversations, not like "who we are and these lame 30 minute intro slides" to finally get to price. It works universally, exceptionally well. So that's what we do on the website level. But when it comes to content, and I think that's kind of where you're headed with this, is like what do you do with that content engine? Are you familiar with HubSpot's pillar content approach that everybody's following? I think it's a bad approach, financially. The reason I believe it's a bad approach financially, it's due to what I was communicating earlier. HubSpot's approach is you take a really, really beautiful strong asset, and then you lead to that asset with other types of content clusters that support that and you essentially do lead generation through that asset. I say, do that same thing but with features. Here's an example. We do our own SaaS products at Directive to make sure that we're not just full of crap. Not enough people do that. We rank in the top five for all our keywords. We actually spend a ton of money on PPC and we try to actually test everything and our hypotheses on ourselves. What we're doing right now is, we have an educational product called Institute. This teaches our clients and we give to our clients free of charge because we believe that education drives adoption. As consultants, you don't need to only make recommendations, you need clients to adopt them, right? And so we need to educate them as to why. So we educate them on SEO, PPC, et cetera. We sell it to the market for $39 a month. It teaches people how we do what we do, all our templates, our approach, et cetera. We have 40 lessons. So I'm asking myself, at a $39 a month product, my CPA, my cost per lead is too high to do a ton of paid acquisition. So how can I drive organic leads from my product? So here's my strategy and I'll share with your audience because hopefully it can help them. I'm taking the top five to 10 keywords for every one of my lesson pages. So, "how to do Google ads" or "how to do keyword research for PPC", okay? So then I put "keyword research for PPC" into a keyword research tool. Now I take the top five questions people ask around that. Now I'm going to use entity tools like Clearscope or Content Harmony or something like that to really understand what I need to write here to rank. So then I write five articles all around that one lesson. Then, above the fold on all five articles, I link to that lesson and say "Want to learn how to do it with video?" and come up with an offer that resonates with where they're at in intent. In other words, they intend to learn this. That's why they're searching it. I can satisfy that intent with my product feature, AKA my lesson. And now I also create a content cluster. So all of these content pieces around this topic are internally linking back to my lesson page, which I'm trying to rank at the bottom of the funnel. And so I'm using middle and top of funnel content with lead gen assets all internally linking and with magnets essentially generating leads for my product. So instead of trying to generate informational intent leads, I'm trying to generate purchase intent leads. So their hypothesis of what they want to do with content clusters works for HubSpot. The issue is that getting someone from informational intent to purchase intent is incredibly long and most marketing people won't survive their tenure if they're only focused on driving informational intent leads. So we try to pivot everything to purchase intent. Does that make sense? Kathleen: Yeah. So it sounds like what you're saying, if I understand correctly, is basically the product page on your site effectively as the pillar. Garrett: Yup. Turning product pages into content pillars Kathleen: The same exact approach applies only you're not writing a 4,000 word guide. You're creating the product page. Garrett: Yeah. You just audit all the competitors in the industry to say, "Okay, how many words do I need on my product page to rank? How many internal links do I need? How many referring domains do I need?" And then you say, "Cool, now I'm going to create the entity, the topical understanding to Google that we're the best answer to the questions people have related to the product we sell." And then when you do that whole approach, you're amazing at what you can do when driving MQLs and demos at the bottom of funnel. What should your SEO strategy look like if you're just getting started? Kathleen: So one of the things we talked about when when you and I first chatted about this was that, you work with a lot of big companies and they're coming to you and saying, "We're already doing a lot right. How can you take us to the next level?" But then there is this other school of thought that, if you have, let's say a startup or a new company or a company launching a new product, they have this opportunity to do it right from the beginning -- to greenfield it. Paint a picture for me of what that looks like. You're starting a new company and you want to really ace it out of the gates. Garrett: First and foremost, I'm going to look at all the review sites and ask myself how many reviews I need to be perceived as a market leader. It's the coolest thing in the world, right? Because someone searches now "top whatever software" you sell, and a review site shows up. You don't actually have to be the best! You might not be because you've only been in the game for a couple of months. But if you can get the reviews there, you look like you're the best and that's 99.9% of marketing. So first and foremost, we're going to position ourselves to be discoverable. When there's purchase intent, we're going to focus on demand capture, okay? Because to rank our website as a new organization, we don't have the authority, link profile or content, and investing in all those things takes a large financial upfront investment and has a long runway -- probably two years to build that organic engine. So if you have a 24 month runway to build your organic engine and you need MQLs now, the easiest thing to do is paid SEO. Now with that being said, we don't want to wait two years to try to rank because now we have another two years to get there, right? So we need to start from the beginning to try to position ourselves organically, to lower our cost per acquisition and have a better CAC-LTV ratio. So what do we do? We are going to say, when someone searches for your product or your features, we're going to try to create as much bottom of funnel content as possible. So not only a product page, but a feature page and solution pages. These are saying when someone has pain that your product solves and they go to discover that, can we show up? Perfect. Next what we're going to do is, we're going to start with our link building. So one of the things I had to do at Directive is, before we niched into SaaS, we were niched into just B2B. We had a lot of like manufacturers like Pelican Cases and stuff like that. So we had a lot of B2B players as well. So I couldn't rank for the keyword "B2B SEO", but I wanted to. I didn't have enough authority. My site wasn't large enough. It just wasn't going to happen. So what I did is I went on Search Engine Journal and I wrote, or Search Engine Land, I think it was, a fresh perspective on B2B SEO. In other words, I used someone else's site to rank for my keyword and they control the narrative. So with a startup, what you're gonna want to do is, you're going to go on CIO or Tech Crunch and instead of just bragging about how much money you raised, you're going to want to actually try to position yourself for what your buyer journey is like. We're going to leverage these other third party sites to do what's called guest posting to then rank exceptionally well for these top of funnel queries while internally linking from those guest posts back to our bottom of funnel pages we already built so that we can once again increase our rankings for purchase intent. So you can actually win at the bottom of funnel faster than people realize because nobody's product pages naturally build links. So if you do a really aggressive link building strategy early, using guest posting where you can control the anchor text and the destination URL to point to bottom of funnel pages, you can grow. And so then from that guest posting for bottom of funnel, now we'll focus on those products, kind of clusters we were talking about and our blog strategy, as well as Google ads review sites. And next thing you know, you're 24 months later, you might have one of the best imagine engines in the whole entire industry because you did it right. How to get executives and subject matter experts to create content Kathleen: Love it. One of the pieces of pushback I hear often, especially when you're a startup and you don't have a huge team where often your CEO or your CTO are the primary thought leaders and they're busy, I hear a lot of "Oh, we don't have the time to do all that writing." Any tips for how you can get the goods out of their heads and onto paper in a way that's efficient and scalable? Garrett: Yeah, the most scalable, best link building and PR you can possibly do is exactly what I'm doing right now. Podcasts. There's zero preparation for the thought leader. It takes exponentially less time and you have a much more engaged audience than an article. The best part is, when you guest post and you pitch a guest post, your success rate isn't always as high because not everybody accepts guest posts. Not everybody cares what you have to say. Sometimes editors are busy. On the flip side, the entire podcast content medium is guest dependent. So Kathleen's job is to secure interesting, engaging hosts for her audience. And so when you pitch Kathleen, you're going to have a much higher success rate than if you pitched Kathleen blog articles because now Kathleen has to edit your blog. She might not agree with your opinions because blogs aren't intrinsically the same format as podcasts. They're not op-ed like podcasts are. And so the best thing SaaS companies can do right now is link-building via podcast, hands down highest success rate, most scalable, easiest ended up. Kathleen: I totally agree, but I will say please, for the love of all that is Holy, take two minutes and learn something about the podcast and what it's about and tailor your pitch. I get pitched a lot, by a lot of podcast booking agents. Generally they're pretty good at doing their homework. But I can't tell you how often I get pitched from people who are like, "So-and-so built his real estate empire and can talk about earning money and like changing your life." And I write back and I'm like, "What does this have to do with inbound marketing? This person sounds like an amazing entrepreneur, but that's not what my podcast is about." Garrett: I'd say we have over a 75% success rate. So I'd give your audience some tips on how they can pitch. Get their name right. I know it sounds simple. Write a subject line that doesn't stink. Everything should be about how you make the podcast host's life easier and better for their audience. What I mean by that is there's a really important word when you do outbound or pitching. You say, "I am emailing you because", and that quickly allows someone to know why. And then you hit them with why the audience cares, not about yourself. So a lot of people like to say, "Hey, you know, my client, uh, built his agency from one to $10 million, you know, would love to be a guest on your show. He's been featured by Forbes, Tech Crunch, in the Inc 5,000." And then the podcast host goes, "Who cares?" Right? Compared to saying, "I'm emailing you because I'd love to talk with your audience about a topic that I know they care about, that I happen to be an expert in. Here's three different topics I think your audience might be interested in. Do any of these resonate with you?" Ideally, you want your podcast host to just say "Yes, this one". And then that's all the preparation required and you're good to go and it works. Kathleen: Yeah, I totally agree. At the last two companies I've been in, it's been a part of my strategy to get my CEO as a guest on podcasts. It's so much easier than trying to get them to write blogs. I think there's a human connection element of, you hear the person's voice, you get to know their personality, that that draws you in so much more than written content can do. So there's that aspect of it too. Garrett's advice Kathleen: Well, any other last words of advice that you think my listeners should know about related to this topic? Garrett: I guess one of the blessings we have with our portfolio is we have a lot of first party data. So I guess some encouragement. Since March 1st I wanted to look at what happened across our portfolio. Spend is down 24%, but conversions are down only 18% because click through rates are up, CPCs are down and conversion rates are up. So here's the really cool part about cost per click advertising is that it scales with demand and doesn't create waste. In fact, at a unit economic level, your advertising is actually more efficient now than it was before. Is volume down? Yes. But also auction competitiveness is down. See, all CPC advertising and all channels is based on an auction. It's based on inventory. It's like an economic model. Supply and demand. Well, because fewer advertisers are advertising right now, you're actually able to satisfy the existing demand that does still exist for whatever product or service you sell at a lower rate and you will have better efficiency and effectiveness in your advertising right now than you did before. That's just at the ad level. It's not necessarily the close rate level or at the volume level. But just at the actual cost per click and cost per acquisition level, it's actually much more efficient right now to advertise, which is kind of cool. That's across over $1 million in spend. Kathleen: That makes sense. So don't give up your ad budget altogether. Garrett: Just to meet demand. But remember your ad budget will do that intrinsically. So as long as you're not spending a ton on display and CPM type stuff, you're going to find a ton of efficiency on CPC because fewer people are advertising, thus lowering your cost per click, and there are some people out there buying and you want to make sure you're discoverable to those people. So it's a kind of a cool way to still win right now. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Absolutely. All right, well switching gears, I have two questions I always ask all of my guests and I'd love to hear what you have to say about these. The first is, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound who my listeners could go check out as an example? Garrett: I mean, HubSpot's a monster at this. They still are. I know. And everybody knows that. Kathleen: I'm going to make you tell me someone besides HubSpot though. Garrett: I know, I know, I know. The thing is, it's a lot harder now to move somebody out of a top 10 ranking. And so you see a lot of people pivoting away from that old school, gated content theory of inbound. And so that's why off the top of my head, I can't think of someone who's like doing that part of it exceptionally well because the game's kinda changed.  Kathleen: Who do you think is killing it with marketing right now in general? Garrett: I always like what is Zoom is doing? Because I liked what they did with like offline advertising and I think that's so cool. I think they're really creative in the sense of thinking about how to position themselves. I love the organizations that are investing heavily in podcast ads. For myself, that's one of my highest performing channels is niche-based podcast ads. I advertise on almost all the SEO or PPC podcasts that I can find because it works exceptionally well at a low CPM. I like the D2C stuff. I think the D2C people are kicking B2B butt. Like Baboon to the Moon. I love their branding. I think if B2B had a little bit more boldness like this... Kathleen: Yeah. What did they, I've never heard of them. I'll have to check them out. Garrett: So yeah, if you want to see somebody who I think is brilliant and actually has a brand opinion and stance and is hyper creative and out there -- Baboon to the Moon. Drift gets way too much credit for it because I don't actually think they're that good at it from a branding standpoint. They just have a free product so it's a lot easier to act like you're doing really good at it. They like try to take the human side of positioning. I think Baboon is doing something really cool because they're taking a hyper creative approach and it's like they're on acid. It's like a goldfish on a human's body using their product, but it's brilliant because they are so consistent with it in their messaging, copy, and creative that it actually creates a brand theme that I don't recognize in B2B. I think B2B organizations need to do a better job creating a brand theme. Like for us at Directive, we're trying to do a lot of people in our branding, but instead of just doing people in our branding, we're also like labeling them with their titles and their names so that it's so people know it's not a stock photo. So we're trying to bring it to life. We can obviously do it a lot better. We're not nearly as creative as that, but I think if B2B looks at the direct to consumer brands that are doing so well right now, at the end of the day it's very similar if you have a self onboarding SaaS company to a D2C product. It's very still transactional. And so if you can take your self onboarding, your trial-based SaaS company, and do that, and take that DDC stuff, and build that brand guide and just be really bold and crazy and ambitious with it, I think it'll pay off. Kathleen: Yeah, that's, and you need to have leaders within the company that are willing to take a risk and be different. There's a lot of sameness in general in marketing and I think when everybody else is going right and you go left, there's a lot of opportunity there. Garrett: Oh, a trillion percent. It's hard to get that buy in. I mean, I don't know anyone in my portfolio is actually doing it. That's why I'm in my head trying to think. It just starts at the top. You just need a CEO and a board that supports a bold new direction, not just verbally, but actually, and really actually sees it all the way through, especially when they get that first negative feedback or whatever from someone who doesn't like it. Kathleen: Yeah. There are going to be people who don't like it, that's for sure. Garrett: B2B is terrified of making anyone feel anything. That's truth, right? They're terrified of if someone doesn't like something. And the point is, the worst marketing is marketing for everybody. And so if you can be bold enough to have people hate you or like you, that's when you actually have marketing. Kathleen: I totally agree with you. All right. Second question. The biggest pain point I hear from marketers is that trying to stay on top of the changing landscape of digital marketing is like drinking from a fire hose. And so I'm curious how you personally stay up to date and educate yourself on all of that. Garrett: I think it's actually less important to stay up to date with things than people think, and here's why. Most marketers don't have a fundamental belief and a hypothesis of how they approach generating revenue for an organization. What's allowed myself and my organization to be successful is we have a fundamental belief that you need to make a brand discoverable at the bottom of the funnel regardless of channel. Now, the beauty of that is that it doesn't matter if digital marketing changes. See in 1997 when Google first came out, what was the whole point? People came to people and said, "Hey, I want to show up on this new search engine. How do I do it?" And the answer was, "Well, you need a website." See, the new answer is, "Well, you need reviews for your brand and you need to be positioned." As long as you don't get married to Capterra and G2, but get married to the idea of showing up when someone has purchase intent for what you sell, everything can change without changing anything because your fundamental belief is that you need to be discoverable when there's purchase intent. And so my encouragement to people is ground yourself in a fundamental belief of what you actually believe. It's such a critical part of marketing. If you want to make a ton of money in marketing, you need to actually have opinions. And you actually have to have beliefs and a hypothesis. You have to also be willing to adjust those, but you need to have them. And so I think if people have a real belief system and fundamental approach and then say we want to be essentially discoverable when there's purchase intent, that allows you to just naturally adjust whatever happens in the market because all you're doing is maintaining your belief. And that's, I think, what's so important for marketers, is to get away from this idea of, "Oh, what could I try? What new trick or hack can I try in a channel?" to say, "How can I essentially take my belief of discoverability and apply it to all my chanels?" When you do that, it allows you to stay really even keeled and focus on your customers. Kathleen: Yeah, and I would add to that, the best marketers I know in many cases are not actually marketers. You're a great example. You studied economics. The best marketers I know tend to be the most avid students of human behavior. People who understand people make great marketers because they're focused on the things that are timeless. It really doesn't matter what Google does with an algorithm because, honestly, Google is just trying to solve for people, right? So if you're focused on people and how they behave and how they buy, none of the bells and whistles matter. Garrett: Take that same person and then they learn financial modeling. Now you have the best CMOs in the world. People who have a really authentic, true belief of understanding of people and how they buy, and then they also understand financials? You put those two people together -- those are the CMOs of the Fortune 500. How to connect with Garrett Kathleen: Amen. I could go on and on about that. If somebody is listening and wants to learn more about some of this or has a question and wants to get in touch with y ou, what is the best way for them to connect with you online? Garrett: I'm active on Twitter. I'm @gmehrguth. So first initial, last name. I'm active on LinkedIn. Shoot me an email, it's just initial last name at Directive consulting. I'd love the chat and help anyone who has questions around demand gen. I'm pretty active on there trying to share all of our data and different tactics and things that we're doing. Almost daily I shared a new tactic or approach and a thread for essentially how SaaS markers can generate revenue. So if you're interested in that, feel free to follow and engage. Kathleen: Great. And I'll put all those links to Garett's social profiles and his email in the show notes. So head there to check that out if you want to connect with him. You know what to do next... Kathleen: If you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learn something new, I would greatly appreciate it if you would head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a five star review. We talked a lot about reviews in this interview and we know how important they are, and they are equally as important for podcasts as they are for products. So take a minute and do that. That would mean a lot. And if you know somebody who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next interview. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Garrett. Garrett: Well, thank you Kathleen. Glad to be here.

What can startup founders learn from the marketing strategies of high growth, silicon valley tech companies? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Traction Hero founder Kate Walling talks about her experience helping VC-backed tech startups develop marketing and business strategies, and the specific things she recommends they focus on to achieve exponential growth. Highlights from my conversation with Kate include: Kate advises early stage tech companies on their marketing and business growth strategies. When she starts working with a new company, the first thing Kate looks at is the product and business model to determine whether there are opportunities to use product-led growth. After that, she evaluates the company's brand and positioning within the industry, and then focused on the sales team. One strategy that Kate has seen several companies use successfully to drive growth is community, and specifically building a community of their customers, users and fans and allowing that community to mostly self-moderate. To be successful, Kate says marketers need to be a part of the larger corporate strategy conversations around what the product is, how it will be positioned, what the tech stack is, and how sales will go to market. Another effective way to raise your brand profile is to work with industry influencers. Kate says that these do not always have to be paid relationships, and that its important for your marketing team to be aggressive in building relationships. If you have a small budget, one of the best ways to gain early traction as a founder is through a personal email newsletter. This is a strategy employed by many of the accelerators. Send it to friends, family, former colleagues, etc., but NOT clients, and share your journey as a startup founder. You can also use this to ask your audience for help and introductions. PR is another good way to get the word out at a low cost. While you can always hire a PR agency, there are plenty of opportunities for you to directly pitch yourself to local media, and you can subscribe to HARO and respond to those pitches at no cost. Tools like Canva are handy for making marketing collateral that looks like it was created by a designer but really uses templates to look professionally made. Kate's advice to founders is not to try and take on too many things. Find a few channels and platforms that are a good fit with your audience, do them well, test and iterate. Resources from this episode: Visit Kate's personal website Check out the Traction Hero site Email kate at kate[at]katewalling.com Following Kate on Twitter @katewalling Listen to the podcast to get specific strategies you can use as a startup founder (whether you have a big budget or a small one) to hit your growth goals. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and today my guest is Kate Walling, who's the founder and CEO of traction hero. Welcome Kate. Kate Walling (Guest): Hello Kathleen. I love your podcast. Kate and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Thank you. I'm excited to have you here. I am going to do a little bit of an announcement for my listeners before we dig in. Um, if you have listened to my last few episodes, you might've heard this, but it's late March, the coronavirus pandemic is happening. We are recording on Zoom and Zoom is having some bandwidth issues. So just saying, if you're listening, be patient with us. If the audio gets a little funky from time to time, we're going to do our best and hope that Zoom holds up for us as we go. But, these are interesting times we're living in. Lots of people working remotely, lots of people using video conferencing software. So it is what it is. But with that said, welcome Kate. Can you please tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and Traction Hero? About Kate Walling and Traction Hero Kate: Absolutely. So let me try to make this the short version of the story. I've been an entrepreneur since a really young age. I started my first startup at 23, which was a consumer facing startup. I've kind of been an entrepreneur since then, although I've had a corporate stint. I'm in the middle because at one point I realized that being an entrepreneur from a young age means that you don't understand corporate structure and you just hit some walls because you have a lack of understanding. So I've also worked in a public tech company here in Silicon Valley and now I'm back with Traction Hero, which is a marketing agency for startup companies where right now we provide a lot of tech companies with on demand services just as they need it. So basically they can email with a quick project they need done and we turn it around in a couple of hours. So it's really good for companies that have large budgets, but not enough team. Basically there's a lot of those. And then we're also slowly building out services that are really focused on the deliverable so that startups can say, "I need a market research study done" or "I need a new identity." Everything is focused toward what needs to happen to get that done. So as you know, when you're doing a lot of projects, you've got to have a writer, a designer, a printer, all these different people, and it's very stressful for marketers. There's not really been a solution so far where they can just cross that thing off the list and know that the whole thing is getting done. So that's what we're working toward, is really solutions that help marketers get stuff done as they need it.  Kathleen: I love that you personally have been a startup founder and that you've done a lot of work with startup founders because I'm personally passionate about that. I have been a business owner. I've started a couple of different businesses. Having walked in the shoes of the founder, I think you described it so well where there's so many things that need to get done. And that's just from a marketing standpoint, right? You're wearing all the hats when you're in a startup. You could be the owner, the chief salesperson and the marketer as well as other things. And in those early days it can be really hard to zero in on, what are the most important things I should be doing in order to gain traction? That is one of the reasons, FYI, that I love your company name. You stay focused without falling victim to shiny object syndrome or you know, working so much in the business and not on the business, et cetera. It's a challenging, challenging time. Kate: It is. And I think, you know, marketing's been already challenging for a number of years because the MarTech stack keeps getting larger and, and Silicon Valley, the budgets keep getting larger, but your team size doesn't. But marketing is getting more and more responsibility for profit and loss. So there's a lot of pressure and I think what I hear from clients is, what you're saying, is that this was a different style with Traction Hero. And that's because I've personally been through the technology accelerator programs. I am on my fourth startup. I really know what it's like. The interesting thing is that I started this agency model in Seattle. I built an agency in Seattle before I came down to Mountainview California and the model works so well, so it's called scrappy face and it was scrappy, right? And we just went in and we helped these funded tech companies and we just moved as fast as we could. And we had a great team. I closed the agency because I went through a divorce and growing a company really quickly in the middle of a divorce in a city that was always raining is brutal to say the least. But the model was so interesting and when I went into corporate tech, what I realized is that I kind of thought their needs would be different. What I saw was just maybe limited, but it really wasn't, it was pretty much the same concerns of "I've got money, I don't have enough people to spend it." You know, "I don't have enough hands." And then marketing has gotten so specialized that you can't possibly hire enough people to do all these things well, like they can't be experts at everything. So, you know, I'm a big proponent now of having smaller marketing teams, but knowing how to get more done quickly and having whatever workforce you need, that's really fluid. Kathleen: I love that.  should take a step back because this topic, when you talk about startups, I feel like it's a Rorschach test because the word "startup" can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. And for some people, they hear "startup" and they think little, you know, two or three person company. And yes, of course every startup has to start somewhere. But then there are startups that are incredibly well funded, VC funded, that go from being one or two people to 20 to 30 people within a span of a month. When I think the conversation we're having, it's more around that high growth startup, not that little company that's gonna slog along for five years. We're talking about, you know, startups that have a lot of potential that need to move fast. I think that's really key here. That's the experience I've had working in startups, is that it's all about speed, especially if you're looking for investment. Because as soon as you bring on investors, there are high expectations. There are benchmarks you have to hit. There are thresholds that you need to get to. And all of that needs to happen really quickly. And you're right, you know, you couldn't possibly hire enough people to do that and you can't have a team that includes the world's best in everything, right? Because you'd need to segment out each little thing you do and hire a different person for it. So what's the best way to move ahead? And the other element of that that, I think, is so interesting is this need to balance brand with demand generation because those are two really important components. And especially if you're in a high growth startup, you absolutely need demand generation. There is no company that doesn't, but brand is really important these days. How early stage startups can quickly gain traction Kate: So like, yeah, how do you do all the things? It's so hard and I mean, you bring up a great point first. Defining "startup" is important. I think right now I do tend to concentrate on the tech startups that are scaling and have money. I also tend to help entrepreneurs that are somehow very well resourced and there's an opportunity that needs to move quickly. Those were the fun ones. That can be anywhere. It's like there's been a regulatory or legal change and so it's presented this opportunity and you've got to go fast to take advantage of that opportunity. So that looks different different ways, but it's typically those two categories in terms of entrepreneurs who are working on a smaller project or evolving it. There's so many tools now that they can use that would save them so much money that I think just having that right tool stack is a better situation. But back to your question about balancing brand and demand gen. It's super hard and I think what I used to do is go month by month, quarter by quarter in my corporate role and say "What are the business objectives here? And so what does what makes the most sense?" So if all of a sudden the sales team is growing from 40 to 90, right? I've got to get the demand gen up and going. I've got to get tools in place to deal with that. And that evolves into other things like what type of sellers are they? How are these tools going to work together? Whereas if the brand is newer or there's been a change in the industry or there's some kind of potential in terms of content or positioning, you go on the brand side. I think you just have to kind of reevaluate it every several weeks when you're, when you're at scale, when you're trying to work with scale. Kathleen: Yeah. It's funny that you say that because I think the last month or two have been the best example of why it's important to reevaluate every few weeks because I can speak for myself. I had a beautiful 90 day marketing strategy that I finished at the end of January. I'm a big believer in planning in quarters and adjusting in months. And so I had the strategy put together and I was starting along my merry way, implementing my strategy and then coronavirus hit and blew it all up. I feel like I, I, you know, I want to do air quotes, "go into work every week." You know, I'm not going anywhere. I'm working out of my house right now. And the priority is constantly changing based on the current fire. And I say that not meaning that like, the house is on fire and the company's in jeopardy. That's not our case. In fact, oddly we have an increase in demand because of what our product does. But, it's about pivoting and shifting and recognizing now it's all about remote work and you know, that sort of thing. And that's different than what I had planned out, but when things are moving fast, you gotta be able to go with it. Kate: You do. And I think, you know, in terms of the virus, it's the emotional roller coaster for us personally. It's the same with business. And I think it's that way with most parts of businesses, right? It's like, "Oh, I don't know if I have enough toilet paper. I don't know if I have enough this or the National Guard is moving in," you know? So it's like, every day, assessing where things are and what your needs are. And I'm seeing that with my clients. The first week was about "What should we be doing? Should we do a campaign?" So we do an email and alert people of what services we're changing. Now it's moved to, "Okay, competitively, what do we need to do? What's going on in the industry? What's the overall campaign, you know, with our overall strategy here?" And that strategy ends up being not just marketing, that's the whole business offering. We need to move products. But marketing from my observation right now, which is, you know, limited in the grand scheme of things, marketing is driving some of those business questions, right? Because you can't go to a marketer right now and say, "I need you to do something about this virus." The marketer has to say, "Well wait, what are we, what are we offering here?" You can't just throw together some kind of campaign or ad without meaning. I mean, this is not a, um, you know, "throw a graphic on it" type of problem. How do VC-backed startups approach marketing? Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. So let's put the pandemic aside for a minute because I feel like we could have an entire episode on that and I may need to do that at some point soon. My curiosity has been peaked by what you said about how you tend to work with these well-resourced, need-to-move quickly, but potentially bandwidth-constrained companies. I think what is really interesting about that is that a lot of marketers see those kinds of companies that do grow really fast and they think, "What are they doing? What is the secret sauce? What's happening behind the scenes that's enabling them to go so quickly?" Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect it's not that they're just throwing money at the problem. It has to be more of, yes, you need money, but what are you going to do with that money that supports a really high growth kind of scenario? So maybe you could talk a little bit about that and pull back the curtain on, if somebody does come to you and say, you know, we just got VC funding, we've got to triple the size of this company in a year. We've got the budget to do it. As a marketer, what kinds of things are you doing and looking at for them? Kate: The first thing I look at is, is there anything in their model that should be evaluated overall for marketing in terms of distribution or influence? For scalability, like you said, it's demand gen and brand. However, for a lot of things it's, is there something that needs to be built into the product from a marketing positioning standpoint or differentiation to make sure that that scale can happen with the brand and demand gen tools? That's one of my favorite parts and that's where your puzzles come in. So if you're a SaaS company, do you need to be offering some kind of certification program because you need more people using the software? What are the different channels? How is that working? I think getting a grasp on, is there something from a business model perspective that needs to happen? The other thing is, a lot of companies at that point have some juggernauts, right? Like, we're seeing churn is hitting here and it's too high, or we're seeing these little scenarios happen with customers, or our lifetime value is off. So we start trying to troubleshoot some of those things so that, that first step is really about marketing and the product and the operations of the business, and then also what needs to be worked out before you scale. There are usually some major learnings there. Once those kinks have been ironed out, we start looking at where are we positioned in the industry? Where is brand awareness? And then what is the plan with the sales team? So if you've got two sellers and you're going to hire maybe one more, that's a pretty basic stack because you don't want to build anything too complicated until you understand, are these relationship-based sellers, are these more tech savvy sellers? There's a difference in the tools required. So you can do something more basic in the meantime, just getting them basic collateral, making sure they have that stuff on the brand side. You start wanting to do more PR, more on positioning and really claiming your spot in the industry landscape. Then, as your sales team picks up, so when you start getting to like 20, 40, 50 up and up sellers, you're looking at a lot more sophisticated systems. You're usually looking at a change of how sales works. So if you have inside sales reps, how are they working, how are they using your marketing software? You get into really complex software decisions, and that's usually driven by marketing. How can startups use product-led growth? Kathleen: There's so much there. I have so many questions I want to ask you. Let's go back to one of the first things you said, which is that you actually begin in many cases by looking at product. So it sounds like what you're talking about is product led growth, and really going in and looking at what are the opportunities to bake something in -- the product that we have that can itself be a growth driver. I would love it if you could just talk a little bit more about that. Kate: It's both from a positioning standpoint, and distribution comes up. That comes up with SaaS companies a lot. And positioning can come up with B2C, right, of like what is this particular opportunity here? With direct to consumer you see it because you'll see, like, consumer products that are extremely well designed or they're really hip or something like that. So that's where you'll see that brand move play in really big. And, and usually with D2C, that's part of the initial product development. But sometimes that can come in as like, how do we do that? Sometimes it can be, with B2C, how do we build a community around the product, right? So some companies are doing a really good job of using Facebook groups. I think Facebook groups are amazing for marketers right now of, we're going to liberate our whole community and let them build with one another. But what are the rules of that? So I think there's just a lot there in terms of B2C, it depends. If it's a commodity-based business, it's harder. A lot harder, right? You're looking at, how do we feel different to the buyer? How do we provide a different experience? If we're not really offering something different, can we deliver it different? Is there really strong brand value that can go throughout the whole company and how would that be protected? So it really has a lot of different shapes. Think of channel partners or technology partners who are taking our API and installing it. But is there something more? Is there a way to even scale it bigger than that? Right? Like get like a whole group of individuals selling this thing for you. So I think it's really out of the box type thinking. And generally at this point, you know, the startup's been going for awhile, they've had some success, they're ready to, you know, commit, and they're ready to scale. They're leaning that way. So it's a really good time to do this work. How marketers can play a role in the broader business strategy? Kathleen: You're coming in as a marketing advisor. At the same time though, it goes to the core of the business strategy. It's not just a marketing strategy. If you're talking about putting an evangelist program in place or changing elements of the product or building a certification program, some of these are business strategies. So how do you navigate that conversation? Because I think often marketers are really challenged with, we're really comfortable staying in our marketing lane. But a lot of the times, when we get out of that lane -- and sometimes it manifests as, you know, we're starting to make recommendations about sales software, other times it's like the things you're talking about that can get rocky if you don't do it right -- how do you approach that? Kate: Yeah, that's a great statement. It's so true with this early stage stuff that I'm talking about. It's typically before a startup has hired a CFO or a senior level marketer. And so you're working directly with the CEO and they have some marketing resources. They'll have a small agency, they'll have a couple freelancers, right? Part of their problem is that they don't know who to hire. And most of the time what I tell them is you can't make that hiring decision yet. We don't know what the marketing is, so we don't know what type of marketer to hire, you know? So I'm a huge proponent of fractional CMOs because I think it's just too early and you don't want to get the wrong person. There's a lot at stake. And I think a lot of startups at that base, they've got revenue coming in, hire a CMO to come in four hours a week and figure this out slowly. And who realizes that you're going to hire for that position when you know what the direction is? So that's more early stage. And the company usually has maybe five to 10 employees, but marketing's not built out yet at all. Later on is where you get really more tricky. You've got someone in charge of sales and they have a particular way that they're hiring. Then as a marketer, you're supposed to bring in demand gen, right? And the demand gen you need to bring in is a different skillset than the sellers have. And the sellers were not aware of the software that you have to do. In my corporate role, it was a rollout plan. I started with HubSpot and got people used to this idea, this is what's going on and why. Then I moved into Marketo, which is super hard. Kathleen: I just went in the opposite direction. I went from a company with Marketo to a company with HubSpot and I'm like, "Thank God. It's so much easier." Kate: And then with Marketo, the sales team was growing. We had to do much more sophisticated type rules and stuff too, because all of a sudden you can have a sales team and you start bringing in all these leads and a sales team does not care. They don't care. And they're not gonna answer them. And you've got a cultural problem of you have to educate them toward how do you deal with these leads, what it means, their job and that it is, and you have to have support from the management team that this is going to be required. There's a whole lot and it just really depends on who you're working with and what their background is. You have to take it one step, one day at a time. So I think it just depends on the team. It depends on where people are. You have to be pretty fluid marketer. You have to be able to say, "This is what I need and it's going to be a process and I'm going to have to get buy in. And so how do I do that?" So you have to be patient. Kathleen: I think you raised something really important, which is, when you're coming into the job, you're at an advantage because you're working with a CEO. But just one thing I've learned is that when you, when you're in those hiring conversations, you have to, you have to have a conversation about that. I might be making some recommendations that are outside of what you might think of as marketing. How are you going to feel about that? Are you open to it? Are you willing to keep an open mind? You know, really, really figuring out that the personality type of the founder, the CEO, and whether they're willing to listen and, and consider other things I think is so important at that stage of a company. Kate: Critical. Specific strategies that startups can use to drive exponential growth Kathleen: Moving onto something else. You said you started talking about community and I love that topic. I could talk about it forever. And I guess this is, this is part of a bigger question I have, which is, I'd love it if you could share some examples of what you have seen work really well to fuel fast growth in some of the companies you've worked with. And maybe we could start with community because I came from a company a few jobs ago where we built a very large community and it was huge for us and it was a Facebook community. Through that experience I became really passionate about that. So that's just one example but, but there may be others. So, specific things that you have seen really deliver for the companies you've worked with. Kate: It's different for B2B and B2C. So I'll start with B2C because it's the easy, fun one. What I'm seeing right now that I love are these Facebook groups around certain products. This is not a client of mine, but it's actually a product I use. There was, what's it called, the meal delivery company that I was using for awhile when I had really busy days. It was all plant-based food and then they had this Facebook group and you could join it and people were just sitting there and they let people post whatever they want. They can sit there and post like "I really hate this smoothie. How am I going to get through this or am I supposed to do this later or not?" And it's super interesting to watch how that worked because the community moderated the community members for the brand. Brilliant. People will say, you know, "I did lose weight, I did not lose weight. This is really more about health." And so you start seeing these advocates come up and then they would use those advocates for their Instagram stories and other things. So that organic way of building a community that moderates itself is really interesting. Now initially, you have those questions about when do we step in and when do we not, and how do we moderate? I think if you can get by with moderating lightly, but you know, the feel of the brand is so positive, right? So that's a brand value that you have less of those issues but they're going to come up. But I think you have to have a very careful strategy about how to moderate that. The other thing that people are using a lot on B2B is obviously these micro influencers. There's some startups paying a lot of money for this and it's all over the place. Traction on that sort of slowed down the end of last year and now I'm starting to see clients pick back up on interest in that because everybody's at home and online, right? So we're starting to feel like there's opportunity there. I'd say if you can build your own organic community, that would be ideal, right? If you can't, you can use these micro influencers and that's great content as well. I talked to someone last week and their product's working and they're sold out, and they've gotten all this influencer marketing and that helped. But then all of a sudden years later, they don't have brand values. And so when you're needing to do more, you're needing to build content, you're needing to build demand and you're needing to build, you know, other parts of marketing, if you don't have those brand values built out, then all of a sudden you're like, well, who are we? We were using everyone else for the voice. So you'll run into that for B2B. It's true here. I think some of this comes to hiring. So what I've seen work really well is that you become friends with all the influencers in the industry and you sponsor their podcast and you appear on their podcasts and you go to their events and you just kind of make sure the team knows who the influencers are. And then you do everything you can to get involved with people at every level. You'll have local events and you'll bring the people in that you know, in that city and have them share their stories. And so it's a constant kind of industry networking. I've seen that work really, really well on the B2B side. But it's definitely different. Kathleen: It's so interesting that you say that because I've seen that work really well too, where people have formed strategic relationships with industry influencers and sometimes, not paid as you say. It doesn't always have to be paid. It could just be really showering them with love in the form of, you know, having them on your podcast or going on theirs or commenting and sharing and making introductions. I worked for a marketing agency for awhile and they did this exact thing and their way of forming those relationships was by offering to make personal branding websites for influencers. That was a great way to get to know them. Then you've done them a favor. So there are a lot of different ways that that that can be done. I think that's really smart. How to hit big growth goals on a small budget Kathleen: You work with well-resourced companies that are able to do a lot of these things. Any lessons learned or suggestions for companies that don't have those giant budgets? What are some things they can do in the early days? Kate: Oh yeah. I love the scrappy brands and helping startup founders. So I advise a lot of startup companies. I love this part of the work cause I obviously identify with it a lot. Being an entrepreneur for so long, I think, you know, when founders are trying to grow a brand unlimited budget, one thing I always bring up is never forget about email, because if you create an email list of your friends and family and colleagues and anyone that you meet with, those people become very loyal to your process. If you share with them where you are and what you're going through and what you need help with, they will help. It will absolutely help. I've seen that be really successful. Now your tone has to be right because nobody owes you anything and you want to be entertaining and kind of make them feel a part of it. And that's part of the email structure, right? Of like, "Here's what's happening and you know, these exciting things are happening, these challenges are happening. Here's how you can help." That is the basic format that does incredibly well. And that is one of the main marketing tricks that comes out of the Silicon Valley tech accelerators. They have all their founders do a weekly email and it works. I, on my own, I've had open rates of like 90% or higher, very high. Kathleen: I want to talk about that for a second because I'm fascinated by this. I also believe strongly in email. I also think that people think of email as this old, tired, dead strategy, but there's some really interesting things being done in the world of email right now. So you're talking about founders doing a weekly email. Can you peel the layers of that back a little bit for me? What does that look like? Who does it go to? Kate: Sure. So this is not client facing or customer facing. My personal list is maybe 200 people and it's my closest friends, my family members, colleagues I've worked with for years, people that I've met with on this journey. So it's people that know what you're up to and what you're striving for basically. But not clients. Clients and customers would get something different. They don't need to understand the process. So that email list is specific for friends and family colleagues. And what you do is, every time you send, you add more people that you've met along the way. I usually start it with like "Hi friends" or something like that. And then I usually say something seasonal about what's happening in the world and that I'm thinking about them because I am. All these people, they're cheering you on. And then I'll typically say, if you're new to the list, here's a link to the previous email, right? So that there's some sort of context in there drawn into the story correctly. And then I'll put some kind of update about where I am or what challenges are happening. And it's usually interesting stuff because when you're building a business, you hit all kinds of things in the world that are happening. So for example, with Traction Hero, there've been changes in California privacy law, changes in California employment law that have really changed the model. And that stuff is interesting. If you're not in it all day long, it's pretty interesting. So share the challenges you have. And then I usually say, "Here's the ways you can help. So if you just open your social accounts, we're now on Instagram. Would love if you would follow," and people will, they'll do it. Or "If you happen to know a friend who knows anything about X, Y, or Z, would you mind connecting me?" They will. This technique is straight from accelerator programs and it is a good one. Kathleen: Do you add these people to the list or do you ask them if they want to opt in? How does that work? Kate: I add them. I often will mention it to them. Like, "I'm going to add you to my newsletter. Let me know if it's okay." You're not doing it for a business so the rules are different. This is actually a question I'm curious to know. I mean I still send, so my recommendation is, I send it through MailChimp, their most basic template. And the reason why is people can unsubscribe. It does hurt your feelings a little bit more when someone does that you know. It's also interesting because if sometimes there'll be like a vendor or somebody and if they offer, I've actually had this happen, someone unsubscribed and I was like, then you're not interested enough in my story for me to pay you. Kathleen: Yeah. Right. Kate: Like, if you're not interested enough in this email because this is just basically what's happening with my business, if you're not interested in that, then I mean, I don't think that we'd be a good fit in terms of working together. I mean, I'm not bothering you. It's like once every six months, I mean slow, but I used to try to do them once a month. MailChimp's most basic template is perfect. And just text. I mean I throw in, maybe, you know, if I done a new logo design or something, throw it in. But keep it pretty simple. And that way people can unsubscribe. Kathleen: I'm a big fan of not overly designing emails. I mean these days, most people have the images in their emails turned off by default. And so if you've got a lot of design in there, it just doesn't get seen half the time anyway. And it looks crappy to have a lot of those image boxes. Like, "Turn your image on," you know, it just doesn't look good. So simpler is better all around with email in my opinion. Kate: Yeah, I know, I totally agree. And that MailChimp basic template's nice. The fonts big, it works well on mobile. It's, it's a nice one. These emails still take, I'm going to say it like if I'm fast, two hours. They still take time. You don't want to bother anybody and you want it to be entertaining and you want it to be, you know, uplifting, even if you're talking about your challenges. The most important thing is tone. I've seen some of these founder emails and if you use the wrong tone, people are like, "No thanks." Kathleen: So what is the right tone? Kate: I think it's friendly and I think it's engaging. You know, I don't think it's like, "Hi friends, hope you're enjoying this day. Please like my Facebook page, please sign up, please send me people who should be customers." It's not about a million asks. People have a lot going on in their lives. It's more of like, "Here's what's going on with building this startup right now. Here's what I'm trying to do. Here are the challenges I'm having. And that's interesting to people, because a lot of people haven't gone through it or want to go through it. And you know, entrepreneurship is never a straight line at all.  Kathleen: I love that idea. I mean, that's something that really any founder in any industry can do. I think for some it's going to put them in a place of discomfort because a lot of the founders I've met don't like talking about themselves that much, which is kind of funny because you're going to have to at some point as a founder.  But I think that's neat because that's something you can do that doesn't take really any money, that just takes your time. Kate: I'd say founders who have marketing backgrounds definitely have a hand up on this one. In tech accelerators, what would happen is I would send in mine first and then whoever in my batch would typically take mine and copy it. So people need examples of this. Email me and I'll send you one of my past ones because it does help to see some kind of, you know, formula that's worked for people and it's so much easier for marketers. Kathleen: I love that. So maybe we'll put Kate's email in the show notes and you can email her and say, Hey, I need your newsletter so you can see what it looks like. So you had, you said you had some other things to be on that and I took you on a tangent with that one.  Kate: So other things on my list. Definitely write industry articles on LinkedIn so that you're showing industry expertise and what you're learning. I think that's very important just to start showing industry expertise and that you're connected to the industry. The other thing I'll say is look for media stories where you might fit in and ping the journalists. So a quick side story, do we have time for that? Kathleen: Yeah, go for it. Kate: When I started my Seattle agency, I had just been through this issue of what's called domain front running, which is when you go in and you're buying a domain and before you can hit checkout, someone takes it from you. So they're capturing it on the domain register thing. Well, King Five, the big news station in Seattle ran a story about how these guys were making all this money on domain names and how it was such an innovative business. Well, I got the journalist name and I sent them an email and I said, "I totally disagree with you. This is really bad for entrepreneurs. It's, you know, it's not right. There's some negative things happening that are just unfair." So they came to the office and filmed me talking about the story about how someone stole my domain name and then sold it back to me for a lot more money than if I'd just been able to push the button. And that was a great opportunity. I've had a lot of luck. You know, my first startup was around printing cookbooks and I had a lot of luck just calling local news stations and cooking on air. Free PR. I've gotten a lot of clients placed, um, if you have a consumer based business, there are a lot of news stations that their lunchtime, they'll have like a third hour, they have a third hour. It's usually lifestyle and you can get pretty easily placed on it if you have some sort of presence and something to talk about. They need people for that lifestyle hour. So always look for PR and media opportunities. Kathleen: Yeah. And I would say a great resource for that also is help a reporter out -- HARO. I mean that's a no brainer. It doesn't cost anything. You subscribe to it, you get an email, however many times a day with reporters looking for sources for stories. It can be overwhelming, but it also is full of opportunity. Kate: Yeah, if you have gmail, you can put on a label and then go in and look when you have time. But yeah, that's an awesome recommendation. Podcast interviews are great. You find people like yourself and you have similar topics and interests. There are websites like Canva that make building marketing collateral so easy and you look like you know what you're doing design-wise and it doesn't cost you extra money. So by all means, make your decks, make your one pagers, make collateral for all these different use cases. Think about collateral. Kathleen: Oh my God, I have to stop you and just say, I am the biggest Canva fan girl on the planet. I am not a designer. I do not know how to use the Adobe suite to design anything. That's the one thing I've just realized. I'm not, I don't have the aptitude for it, but I can go into Canva and make the most beautiful things and I do it probably four times a day. I love it. Yes. It's amazing. Kate: Yeah. Canva, huge. When you get later on in your startup and you have to have brand differentiation and you know, you don't want to use simple stuff, that's different. Early on, use Canva, print this stuff, have leave behinds for customers. It doesn't cost that much money to just really work on your marketing collateral. I think also when you're on the topic of press, look at your local press opportunities, where can you talk at local events, whatever works locally. We'll end up working in different geographies and at larger scale. So learn locally first and that stuff is free. It just takes time. And also work on your industry. So look, so look at this stuff in terms of, are you being, are you B2B or B2C? So where does that fall in? Then look at your media, look at it local and look at an industry as well. And then you want to start growing your community in terms of media. I see entrepreneurs, it's kind of painful to see that they're trying to do all the platforms and it's terrible on all of them. Just choose the ones that are most relevant and a couple to start and just start figuring it out. There's some great tools. A lot of people are saying, "Well, I don't want Twitter because it's not working." Okay. But the thing about it, the people who are on Twitter right now are really passionate and they stay on it. They're a very, very, very passionate bunch. My favorite Twitter tool for growing a Twitter audience is called Jooicer, which is J. O. O. I. C. E. R. Have you seen it? It's awesome. It's like 30, 40 bucks and will grow your Twitter audience for you beautifully. So you know, find tools like that. And again, like we were saying with Canva, you can make beautiful social media posts in Canva since you now have to have more designed content. Use Canva for that.  Kathleen: Yeah, I love this and I will tell you right now as the head of marketing at a startup, I use Canva, I use helper a reporter out. I totally, totally agree with you on those suggestions. Those are great. Kate's advice for startup founders Kathleen: Well we are running low on time. So any last words of advice for startup founders out there who really want to take that fast path to growth? Kate: Yeah, I think the important thing is to try to not get overwhelmed. And so what I recommend doing is, do a list of 10 to 15 different things. You can try figure out a small test for that, that's feasible. Like, if it's an ad unit, put enough money so it's actually worth the test and go through and test them and concentrate on one thing, like one thing a week, step by step by step. If you try to do it all at one time, you get really overwhelmed and it ends up not diluting the quality of it. So, one foot in front of the other is what I always tell people. Kathleen: Yeah. That's good. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Now changing gears because I have two questions I always ask all of my guests. We're all about inbound marketing on this podcast. So when you think about inbound, is there a particular company or individual that you can point to that you think is really doing it well? Kate: The first thing that popped in my mind was not what you asked. It was a company that helps people do it well. I really like Unbounce for landing pages. I think you can get a very beautiful landing page up quickly. I would have to think on that. I think, sorry, I was not prepared for this one. Kathleen: That's okay. Unbounce is a good suggestion actually. I can just keep that. Kate: Okay. I'm a huge proponent of Unbounce. There are other cheaper tools, but I really like the quality of Unbounce. Kathleen: Yeah, they're a great company. Second question, the biggest pain point I hear from marketers is that they can't keep pace with all of the different ways that digital marketing is changing. So how do you personally stay up to date with all of it? Kate: Being an agency owner, I've spent a lot of time and resources going through MarTech tools and organizing them. If anybody wants these reports, just please email me. And that helped organize my brain a lot and help me understand if I was doing the right thing or not. So we've done reports where we analyze CRM tools. There's one on website development tools. We've got one on email marketing and one on marketing automation. What those reports did, because in my head I just couldn't keep it all straight, was say here are the solutions, here are all the features that they all have comparatively. And then here are the integrations they have. Because I think what's so hard about MarTech right now is it's not only like I like this product, so I've got 20 products I have to put together. And when you're going out to buy, it's, it's not a great way for marketers to have to spend time of like, which tool, and having to analyze this themselves. So one of my goals to help marketers is to say, here's some reports. Go through everything that you need to know and hopefully you can pick a tool or at least narrow it down to two or three that you should get a free trial on before you commit to it. So I think any website like that, save yourself time on evaluating tools. Find people who've done the research for you. I think that that is really overwhelming. Kathleen: That's so true. It is. It's a lot. There's so many MarTech tools now. How to connect with Kate Kathleen: All right, well we're just about out of time. So Kate, if somebody's listening and they want to learn more about you or traction hero or they want to reach out and ask a question, what's the best way for them to connect with you? Kate: Katewalling.com is my personal website and Tractionhero.com is for the agency. It's a very landing page type website. Right now we're kind of building, um, by doing the work first. You can always reach out to me on my email, which is kate[at]katewalling.com or Twitter, which my handle is @Katewalling. You know what to do next... Kathleen: All right, fantastic. If you're listening and you liked what you've heard or you learned something new, please head to Apple podcasts and leave the podcasts a five star review so we can get in front of some more folks just like you. And of course, if you know anybody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Kate. Stay healthy. Kate: Thank you so much for having me.

How does Charles Alexander generate anywhere from 100% to 1200% ROI for his customers using animated explainer videos? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, small business advisor and video creator Charles Alexander explains how he helps customers create animated explainer videos, and how those videos are quickly generating huge returns on investment. From why and when to use an animated explainer, to how the video production process works and how companies can use animated explainer videos in their marketing and sales process, Charles shares a wealth of knowledge on these types of videos, along with how you can create them yourself if you don't want to outsource. Highlights from my conversation with Charles include: Charles is a small business coach who also has a business creating 90 second explainer videos. He specializes in working with people in an advisory role (ex. real estate agents, insurance agents, financial advisors, etc.) and helping them more clearly explain how they stand out from the competition. Charles says that 80% of online traffic today is video, and whether people like to admit or not, video is one of the main ways we all consume information. Unfortunately, many people are either very uncomfortable being on camera or very awkward when they are, and an animated video is an inexpensive way of reaping the rewards of video without having to put a subject matter expert on camera. The main reason to create video of any kind is to build what Charles calls a "know, like and trust factor" with your audience. Many people are uncomfortable or awkward being on video, and creating animated videos is one way to move quickly with video even where the subject matter expert either cannot or will not appear on video themselves. Charles's process for creating videos begins with his customer filling out a six question form that is all about their end client. He asks about the people they work with, the problem they solve, how they solve the problem, why they're different, what the steps are, and what the end result is. From that, he writes a 250 word script, which equates roughly to a 90 second finished video. 90 seconds is the sweet spot because anything shorter makes it hard to get a point across, and with anything longer, it can be tough to hold the attention of your audience. This also forces his customer to strip away all of the jargon and useless information that they might typically include on their websites and boil everything down to a simple story that is customer-focused. From there, Charles sends the finished script to a professional voice over artist, marries the audio with video that he creates, and produces a finished product. Charles has created a 12 point checklist that walks his clients through how they can use their animated explainer videos in their marketing and sales. It includes advice on using it for social media, on your website homepage, and in follow up emails to customers and prospects. The cost to create an animated explainer video can range anywhere from $300 to $20,000. Charles charges $999 for one video, but also offers packages with volume discounts. For many of Charles's customers, the payback period on this investment is very quick. He's had customers who have used his videos in their marketing and sales process and almost immediately closed new deals. For one client, landing one new customer meant 100% ROI, and for another, one new customer from a video translated to 1200% ROI. Charles is very transparent and shared that he uses software called VYOND to create his videos. He says anyone can do it, but it makes sense financially to outsource because of the learning curve and the amount of time you would need to spend. Resources from this episode: Check out Charles' website at www.yourcharlesalexander.com Connect with Charles on LinkedIn Follow Charles on Facebook Check out some examples of videos that Charles has created for business owners, financial management companies, and insurance agencies. Listen to the podcast to learn when to use animated explainers, and how they can help grow your business. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is Charles Alexander, who is an expert in making story-based animated explainer videos. Welcome Charles. Alessio and Kathleen recording this episode. Charles Alexander (Guest): Thank you so much Kathleen. I appreciate you guys having me on. About Charles Alexander Charles: Just real quick about me. I have a couple of things that I do. I am a full time, small business coach and right now I am as about as busy as I have ever been working with small business owners in a trying time. But also I have started, probably three years ago, creating 90 second explainer videos for people in an advisory role. A lot of financial advisors, insurance agents and other people that consider themselves advisers on what they're doing to stand out in the corral, work with their potential clients and really tell the story of how they help them Kathleen: Love it. That's the perfect segue into me saying, if you're listening, this is the first inbound success podcast interview I have done now that the world, or at least the United States, is kind of quarantined and, and we're all working out of our homes. And so I'm gonna preface this with, we're probably going to have audio issues on this interview because I'm using Zoom to record and I don't know how many of you out there listening have been using Zoom, but the world has definitely discovered it as a tool for video conferencing. And so it is great for zoom. But they're having some bandwidth issues. If I had a crystal ball, I'd say that there are going to be some audio glitches as we talk today. So if you're listening, please have patience. Bear with us. We're going to do the best we can to get through it as I know everyone is doing during this time, but you know, it's important to keep things going. So with that, Charles, how did you get into making animated explainer videos? How Charles got started making animated explainer videos Charles: So, as I said, I am also a small business coach for a small business development center. And about four or five years ago, I decided I needed to probably eat some of my own dog food so to speak. And I thought, "Oh, there's a variety of things that I'm capable of doing." I always write, create content, training material. So I started out by doing some website content and email marketing for CPAs and banks. And one of the very first CPAs I made a pitch to, I had basically three tiered pricing -- anchor pricing, same as the rest of us. And one of the pitches was the high highest price item was that I would take the written content and create videos out of it. Well at the time, I really didn't know how to create videos. I was using that to get them to pick the middle pricing. The only videos I had made at that point were home videos. So I had to quickly learn on the fly. And the first few I made were pretty bad. They were actually a bunch of still images of me doing the voiceover. And for you guys listening out there, this is a very Southern accent. You know it's cute for about five minutes and then it wears on you. Either way. I made videos. Even though the videos were bad, they still beat the written content and I realized I was quickly on to something. So from there I'll fast forward to where I am today. I learned a variety of different softwares, finally settled in on one that really works, have a formula that works for creating a story for my clients that helps them stand out and be set apart. So this is, you know, the part time gig is basically the equivalent now we're bigger than the full time gig and I work exclusively with a bunch of fine folks that are out there trying to create some kind of content that ties everything else together. And that's what an explainer video really does. And I like animated because you know, people can relate to it, it lowers their guard a little bit. You can have a lot of fun with it and still be professional. Why animated videos? Kathleen: Yeah. So that's, that's interesting that you just said that because that was going to be my next question was I feel like within the marketing world at least, it's been incredible for me to watch in the last few years how companies have begun to embrace video and to recognize that it's really becoming a necessary part of the marketing mix just because of the way -- and this is at least my theory -- the way people consume content. I mean when you look at younger generations and how YouTube has supplanted television and most other forms of content, you know, you can see the tide has turned and people want to consume information via video. So I'm curious though, knowing that that's the case, when when a marketer or a business owner is thinking about having to use video to market their business, when is the right time to use animated versus talking head or some other form of video? Charles: That's a question I often get. And going back to what you were saying just a second ago about video becoming more popular, we're close to about 80% of online traffic being video. And that's not decreasing. That's increasing. That trend will not reverse anytime soon or even at all. And it's not just millennials, it's gen Xers, it's baby boomers. People that say "Well, I'd really rather read something than watch it" because it sounds more sophisticated -- they're not telling the truth. The data doesn't lie on that. So when somebody says to me, well, should we do a talking head video or should I have an animated video? I tell folks that if they're trying to build a know, like, and trust factor and they think that their face on camera can do it and they can speak through it clearly enough and they can tell an interesting enough story, you know, maybe you should go for it. But what I have found, especially a lot of the professional advisers that I work with, they are awesome in a workshop. They do well in a one-on-one presentation, but something about the red light on that camera takes them from Zig Ziglar to Elmer Fudd and they aren't suddenly so clean and easy. There's a lot of bad talking head videos out there. I'm heavy in the LinkedIn. Same with Facebook. Same with Instagram. There's a lot of, as you scroll through, somebody awkwardly adjusting the camera and looking into it, and then the first 30 seconds is, "Hey um, hey guys, well here again, so I wanted to share my thoughts, blah, blah, blah." And then they ramble for five minutes and never really come to a point. Or if they come to a point, it's generic. So I learned that a lot of these folks can save time, effort and energy, spend a couple of bucks, but use that time -- I mean, the money they spend is well invested because they'll have a video that they can use forever. An evergreen a piece of content as I like to call it, and it ties in all of their other marketing and it will make them way more money than they ever spent on it, versus the bad talking head video that convinces them that video doesn't work. I kind of equate that to exercise. People will tell me, "Well, I tried video once and it didn't work" is the equivalent of saying, you know, "I bought an elliptical or the Peloton bike. I rode it for a week and I'm still, you know, I'm not in the shape I want. What's wrong with it?" What's the process for creating a 90 second animated explainer video? Kathleen: I wish it worked that way. I wish I could just do it for a weekend. I would buy lots of Pelotons. It's interesting because there are a lot of people that are uncomfortable on camera for sure. And so this does seem like it could be a good way to, for them at least, you know, unless and until they're able to get comfortable or to be trained to the point where they're good on camera too, to not let that be a thing that stands in their way. So, if somebody wants to do this, talk me through the steps. Like, if somebody comes to you and says, "Hey, I want to do it. I want to do a video. What's your process?" Charles: I high five them first. But then after that, my process, and this is my process, anybody can use their own. I have them fill out a simple six question form that allows me to write their script. The simple six question form is really focusing on their client. And I think that's where a lot of people miss the boat when they create any kind of script. They generally make it all about themselves. But the client really doesn't care that much about you. I mean, only in the fact that you can help them in some way, shape, form, or fashion. But they're, they're there to hear more about them. So, you know, if I'm creating it for Kathleen, you fill out this simple six question form about the people you work with and the problem you solve. And then a couple of questions are about how you solve the problem and why you're different, and then what the steps are and then what the end result is. And from there I'll write a 250 word script. And to me, 250 words is important because that keeps it at about a 90 second range. Anything shorter than 90 seconds makes it very difficult for you to get your message across. But then anything longer than 90 seconds gosh, almost has to be Oscar nominated worthy in order to hold our attention. Kathleen: That's interesting because 250 words is not a lot. So you gotta be tight. You gotta be really careful with how you say things. Charles: And that's where you know, I think that's where we have a big benefit beyond just the video because I've had to force people through an uncomfortable exercise they really haven't done before. So if you take, let's say, I'll use financial advisors as an example. You go to the average financial advisor website and it is filled with words, all of them, lots of text, lots of jargon. "Customer service", "best in class", blah, blah, blah -- same thing that everyone else says. When you want to put that into a video, it takes away from a quicker and a finer point that you can make where you're focusing on your customer. Telling them all that stuff is basically telling them nothing cause everybody else is the same thing. So it doesn't matter. You not saying it doesn't make them say "Well they must have crappy customer service because they never told me how world-class they were." So we really scale all that back, take all of that out and make it really fine tuned to make it story based, to make a focus on the customer. And at about 250 words we can do that. And then, you know, from there the process is really simple. I'll take the a script, I send it off to a professional voiceover artists. And when I say I take the script, I let the customer review and edit, tweak it, but the professional voiceover artists does it, gets it back to me and then I create the video and then my client has unlimited revisions of the video until they're happy with it. Once they're happy with it, I lock it in and send it to them. How to use animated explainer videos in your marketing and sales Kathleen: All right. Now do you have any guidance for your clients when you work with them about what should they do with the video once they get it? Charles: I sure do. I actually created a 12 point checklist that they can follow step by step. And I don't tell them to use all 12 examples of how to use video -- find three or four that really work for you. And that goes back to figuring out who's your best customer in the begin with. And where are they? Social media is always kind of the layup answer, but that's not the only answer. As a matter of fact, where I have found this thing really works best is on the home page of your website. When people come to you, most likely, even though you have a variety of marketing methods, they're coming to you through referral and word of mouth. That is still the preferred method. And that's still the way a lot of people will find you. But if they find out about you, and they probably also asked somebody else, and a friend referred, you know, to this insurance agent and that insurance agent, what's the first thing they do? They don't necessarily pick up the phone and call anymore. They do what? They visit your website. So if you had that nice little video above the fold, so to speak, what's the first thing they see? They will watch it. The competitors' website? Don't worry, it'll have some bad stock images they see on all the other websites with a bunch of jargon. But they'll watch your video and if the video they watch is about themselves, the story opens and it's got the average person that's in the same situation they are and it goes through this hero's journey, so to speak, over they have the issue, they find the helpful guide. In this case, that insurance agent finds the right policy at the right price and then they kind of go back to their life as normal. That's gonna resonate and mean something to them. And then also when they contact you, you should have an email followup unless you just close them right away. Well, the email followup does not need to be, again, a bunch of texts, a bunch of jargon or a boring PDF. Send them a different video, a follow up video or that, you know, again, kind of tells their story that those two things are almost, well, not almost, those two things are worth it in itself if you never use the video in any other way. But yes, I give them extra instructions on how to use it on Facebook or LinkedIn. More importantly on those tools, where it really works is in the inbox or in the messenger apps. If you're sending somebody a one on one message and chatting back and forth with them, that animated video will make you stand out very quickly versus just anything else you could possibly send them. But then on top of that, you know, regular email marketing, during your presentations, there's just a ton of ways to use an animate a video like that. What does it cost to create animated explainer videos? Kathleen: You talked in the beginning about how you work with small businesses and I really love that because I do feel like it's easy to talk about best practice marketing for big companies with big budgets and lots of experts on their teams. But I've been a small business owner and I've walked in the shoes of that person who's like, "I don't have the money and I only have, you know, three employees" or, or "It's just me. I'm a solopreneur. I'm the owner, the salesperson, the dishwasher, the vacuumer and the marketer." So I love exploring ways that small businesses can get better marketing results. Putting that hat back on right now, the question that that person is always going to have when they hear something like this is, can I afford it? So can you talk a little bit about what it costs to do this kind of video? Charles: I'll give you what the investment is that I ask for from my clients, and in kind of a generic way, what is it all the way across the board? It's still a wide variance. There's a lot of folks that will create something truly custom made that, you know, 15, 20 grand that you know, is unlike anything you've seen. And then you have few out there that will do it for three or 400 bucks, but they're probably overseas. You won't be able to talk to him or you ever get an update on it ever. And it might not be the quality you want. So I kind of tell folks where I'm at is the loaded Camry, so to speak. Kathleen: I love it. Charles: I'm not the Yugo that's falling apart in the driveway. Kathleen: I drove a Camry for a long time and you know what? Those cars last forever. Charles: Boom. Great example I made. But yeah, they're great. So I have three video packages -- a single video, two videos, or three or more videos. The single video is only $999. I take care of everything from beginning to end and the only work my clients do is fill out a six question form. And from there I, I do all of the work. They just have to approve it and then they'll get a video 17 days or less from script approval. The most popular one I have though is the three or more videos at only $797 each. And those are even invoiced out monthly through PayPal. So it fits within somebody's marketing budget. And what I see quite a bit is that somebody will have an an idea of what they want for their homepage video that's a kind of not just about their customer but explains who they are, why they're different. But then past that, people will have different targets or different niches. And I know you probably say niche, but I'm right here in middle Tennessee. We say niche. Kathleen: Potato, Patato, nish, neesh.  Charles: They have different things they offer. They have one or two other products or services that they really want to advertise and make sure that people are aware of or they may have different customer bases that, you know, if it's, let's say it's business to business, maybe you target healthcare, but then you also target CPA firms. Listen, you know, if it's direct to consumer, you might have a product that targets women ages 30 to 40, but you also have a product that targets men 55 to 65 that are soon to retire, needs a golf lessons, whatever it is. You can create additional videos for that. And the investment piece is simple because in most cases you need a client literally to probably pay for it. And then you know, you're, you're ahead of the game and then you've got the evergreen content you can use forever and will continue to help you close those clients. The ROI of animated explainer videos Kathleen: That's great. Now you've done this for plenty of small businesses. Can you talk a little bit about what impact it has had for them in their marketing? Because of course on this podcast, we're all about results and how that translates into results. So what has this done for your clients? Charles: So just a couple of quick examples. I remember I had a pest control client that wanted one for termite damage. They created a fun and engaging video that explained how termite damage affected the client's home in this video. They sent it out in one of their email marketing newsletters and closed, I forget how many, she said several clients immediately. They watched the video and then right away after, after watching, called them and quoted what the video had told him. He said, "Hey, we need you guys come out and check right away." One of the best ones I had was for a real estate agent. She had a series of six videos where she would, you know, upon initially meeting a client, she had a followup video and then it was a, she had them about buying, selling, pricing, negotiating. She said there was a particular client that, well, somebody that became a client, but as they were going through the process, you know, they were still kind of feeling around, shopping around, and you know, that's a very personal process -- finding somebody that can help you with your biggest investment. But she said toward the end, right before they became a client, the husband and wife were sitting there and the husband started saying something that was a little negative and the wife said, "Hey honey, we're not going to be like those people in that video that are, you know, being negative about selling a house." She quoted a line from the video. They all laughed and then immediately signed Sandy to become their real estate agent. Kathleen: Oh, that's funny. I love it. So have any of them been able to, I mean it sounds like they have real, concrete stories of like these people became, my client. Have any of them been able to share, like I, you know, I made this much more money because of my video or translate any of that into dollars? Charles: I'd love to give you these great stories about how they told me all about their ROI. And what I've discovered is that even though I'm creating these videos, they have to already have in place a way to truly measure great return on investment. Do you know how many people out there are really measuring return on investment for marketing dollar? Kathleen: Yeah. Especially in a small business community. That's, that's tough. Charles: It's well, they, they do it by the number of clients. And in this particular case, you know, Sandy, for that one client alone, that was a $400,000 plus dollar house or whatever, you know, 6% of that was, but that was just that one client only or the termite, you know, that's a, they were doing Sentricon not the board paper with details, but that's $2,000. Kathleen: So let's actually do the math on that. A $400,000 house, and I'm really bad at math, so I might get this wrong. Four times, you know, let's say you get half the commission because you're only the buyer agent or the seller agent. So $12,000 on a $1,000 spend. So that's a 1200% ROI. Charles: Awesome. See, that's what I need to be out there. I have some content written on ROI. And I've got 40 plus testimonials on my page, but when I come back to ask people to help me calculate it, they kind of, they're on to their next thing. It exists. It works. But you know... Kathleen: No, but that's, those are great stories because like, even the termite thing, if it's a $2,000 sale, you know, that's double. Right? Right, right. So I love that. So it definitely points to, you know, this can be a really quick way to, to see some increased sales quickly. I love that story. And, and I would love to include links to example videos in the show notes. So send me some links, Charles. We will put all the links in. So if you're listening and you want to see examples of these kinds of videos, head to the show notes. Getting started with animated explainer videos Kathleen: So what advice do you have for somebody who's listening and thinking that they might be interested in doing this? Charles: So first and foremost you can actually go to my site and you can find that six question form there at yourcharlesalexander.com. So the first question is if you should do it, you know, there's, I've already, I felt like I've already made the case. You need a video in some way, shape, form, or fashion. You probably need three or six. So the next thing is, do I want to do it? And I don't tell folks not to do it. And I know if they're in a real startup phase and they're trying to wear all the hats, maybe that, maybe that's a scenario where you need to start and try to create your own. There are some tools out there you can use. I'll even tell you the software I use is Vyond -- V Y O N D. And it's got a ton of competition out there. Toonly, VideoScribe, Moovly anything it ends in L Y, obviously. Powtoons. But the point is you can create your own, but in most cases it looks like you created your own. I tell folks, where's your time better spent? This goes back to my small business coaching hat. Are you better off working on the business or in the business, or are you going to be the one that is doing the $10 or $15 an hour activity? Are you the $150 to $200 an hour person now? And you need to outsource that to somebody else and figure out where the true return on investment is. And that's when you decide if you should outsource it or not. Kathleen: Amen to that because I have played around with some of those tools in the past and I'm not a video person. Yeah. Charles: Like anything else, once you start digging into it, you find there's a lot of nuances with it. Kathleen: Right. Let me just tell you, I could lose days trying to create a 90 second video. No, it would not be good. So that's, that's interesting. I appreciate you sharing the names of those platforms because it's good to, to, you know, and it's not smoke and mirrors. I like that you're, you're really transparent about that and that you shared your prices. That is very inboundy of you. That's awesome. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Cool. Well, let's shift gears. I have two questions I always ask all my guests, and I'd love to hear your answers to them. The first one is, you know, we are all about inbound marketing on this podcast. And I'm curious, when you think of inbound marketing, is there a particular company or individual that you think is doing it really well? Right now? Charles: John Nemo from LinkedIn Riches, and he has a variety of online content that he creates, but it's all about inbound marketing and one-on-one messaging. So I'm a heavy LinkedIn user and he talks quite a bit about, you know, especially if you're doing B2B or you're using other businesses to help you create a center of influence to get clients, Linkedin is a fantastic platform, but a lot of people still don't know how it works. I hear comment time and time again, "Man, you know, I created one a few years back. But I check it now and again, I really don't understand it. It's just like somewhere where I post my resume or people tried to poach me to go work at a different job or do something, do something else or sell me something." John has created a really good business for himself. And he has his own podcast Nemo radio. But if you ever get a chance to interview somebody that really understands how that works, how to create evergreen content, how to bring in inbound clients over and over, he's your man. Kathleen: And is that Nemo? N? E M. O? Charles: That is, just like the fish. Kathleen: All right, I'll check that out. And then the second question is, you know, the, the most common pain point I hear from just about every marketer I talk to is that they feel overwhelmed with how quickly the world of digital marketing is changing and how hard it is to stay up to date with all of that. So how do you personally stay up to date with all of those changes? Charles: So what I do is I have found three or four things that really work for me. Not every single thing on planet earth, not every social media platform, not every email marketing tool, not every CRM. Find the three or four that really work for me and stick with those. It doesn't mean you can't be aware of other tools that might be better, that you might need to change. But like you just said, they're changing all of the time. So one of the big questions I always get is "Charles, since this is video, you must know everything there is about SEO, Facebook ads, Google pay per click." And I tell them, actually no. There's a ton of other video folks that do that. They're knee deep in it and it changes every minute of every day. I don't do that. What I have really works for me. Again, I've already mentioned his LinkedIn, so I stay on top of that. You know, I've got John and I stay connected with him and keep up with his content. So I figured out what the changes are through him.  For email marketing, that's something I read up on and stay up on. But quite frankly it has stayed the same throughout all of this, which is crazy. People will tell me from time to time, they don't feel like it works. But I can tell you right now, email marketing in terms of social media has about three times the number of accounts that social media does all put together and it has stayed the same. So there's not a lot to stay on with it other than creating something that's compelling. Just think about it simply. What would you want to watch or read? If it's a bunch of jargon and a boring stuff, don't do it. It's that simple. It's a litmus test. And you know, those are the primary things. I hope this is a still fits within an inbound marketing, but I still do some old school stuff. My best clients and my centers of influence, I write them notes. I send them stuff in the mail. Even just this last week I had created basketball cards. It was supposed to be for the NCAA tournament. So I told them, you know, I had some downtime from not watching the NCAA tournament. So I create these silly little basketball cards with their cartoon picture on it, instant stats and send it all to them. And I got tons of feedback from how much they enjoyed this. So to answer your original question, find your lane, find two or three influencers so to speak, and then just stay on top of it. Don't get overwhelmed and try to be all things all people Kathleen: Amen. And you know, it's, it's funny that you say that about the cards and March madness. I had a lot of plans in my marketing strategy to do some direct mail that was kind of account based marketing and that's gone out the window because nobody's at their office to receive it. So we all have to shift gears right now. Right? Charles: The word, the word "pivot" hasn't been overused at all, has it? How to connect with Charles Kathleen: No, no, no, definitely. Well, thank you so much Charles. This has been so interesting. If somebody wants to learn more about the videos or get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that? Charles: It's super easy. Go to my website. I got really creative with the name -- yourcharlesalexander.com. You know what to do next... Kathleen: All right, I'll put that link in the show notes and thank you Zoom for mostly not glitching out on us in this conversation. Charles: I think we did pretty good. Kathleen: So yeah, so hopefully this, this'll be a bellwether of things to come for future future podcast interview recordings. But if you're listening and you enjoyed this, like what you heard, I would really appreciate it if you would head to Apple podcasts and leave the podcast a five star review. That is how we get found by more listeners. And of course, if you know someone who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy and we'll see you next time. Thanks, Charles. Charles: Thank you.

How did 16-year old online learning company Mindvalley double the size of its user base in a year? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Mindvalley head of marketing Alessio Pieroni talks about the company's internationalizing strategy, and how entering new markets fueled dramatic growth. From translating versus dubbing content, to what international expansion means for hiring, how your social media strategy needs to change, and what to consider when localizing your product, Alessio talks about all of the different dimensions of internationalization. Check out the episode to hear more about the impact that internationalizing has had on Mindvalley's business, and the advice that Alessio has for anyone thinking of entering new markets. Highlights from my conversation with Alessio include: Mindvalley is an online learning company that focuses on teaching people the things they can't learn in school. The company has been around for 16 years and has historically focused on english speaking markets. In 2011, Mindvalley first attempted to enter international markets but was not successful because they tried to recruit employees to star in their online course videos, rather than the company's founder Vishen, who had always been the face of the brand. After that experience, they refocused on english markets again, but then a year ago, they were approached by someone who wanted to translate their course material into Spanish and market it in Mexico. They did it as an experiment and put some advertising dollars behind it, and were able to realize ROI in 5 days. After that early success, the company copied that same formula and now has course materials in Spanish, Portuguese, French and German. In just the Spanish speaking market, Mindvalley was able to add 1.2 million new users in 10 months, and now the company's Spanish customer base is larger than its English speaking customer base. This year, Mindvalley plans to add courses in Italian, Arabic, Japanese, and Indian to its offerings. Alessio says that the keys to the company's success are the quality of its courses and years of data, which it has leveraged to develop pay-per-click advertising programs that have allowed it to quickly scale growth. The company's cost to acquire a new customer in the US is between $8 and $10, whereas in Spanish speaking markets it is between $1 and $2. Going international is more complicated than it might seem and it's important to get details like language right. For example, with Spanish language material, they had to determine whether to use a South American accent or a Spanish one, and whether to dub the course material or subtitle it. There are other challenges as well, such as different payment processors and cultural attitudes towards credit cards versus cash. As the company has entered new markets, it has relied on contractors to help create course material. In some markets, it has had to outsource social media and paid advertising. Mindvalley has not yet localized the UI of its product as that would require a significant investment in technology. Alessio says that these efforts have resulted in the company doubling and nearly tripling its business in a year. Resources from this episode: Visit the Mindvalley website Connect with Alessio on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to learn how Mindvalley experienced its strongest growth ever by internationalizing its marketing -- and what you need to know if you're considering marketing to an international audience. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is Alessio Pieroni, who's the head of marketing for Mindvalley. Welcome Alessio. Alessio Pieroni (Guest): Thank you so much for having me. So excited to be in this podcast. Kathleen: Yeah, I'm excited to have you here. And fun fact, I am sitting here at 8.00 a.m on a Friday in my office and you are sitting there at what time? Alessio: That's 9.00 p.m Kuala Lumpur time. Kathleen: 9.00 p.m, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia time in the hot weather, whereas I am sitting here and it is cold and rainy and dark. So I think you win this one because it's not even happy hour, it's Friday night party time in the beautiful tropical Malaysia. About Alession Pieroni and Mindvalley Kathleen: Thank you for joining me and maybe we could just start by having you tell my audience a little bit about yourself and who you are and what Mindvalley is. Alessio: Yeah, absolutely. I like to define myself as a full stack marketer. Because in my experience in the past six or seven years I've been working different areas of marketing. So I started out around email marketing and funnel marketing, went on then going deeper into organic traffic and SEO. And then from there I moved into Product Marketing and conversion rate optimization till the last one took about two years ago where I'm managing an entire marketing division for Mindvalley, where I kind of need to be a generalist. To speak a bit about Mindvalley, Mindvalley is the biggest personal grow the education platform in the world. And what we like to say that we do is that we take all the kind of education that traditional education doesn't teach you, and we bring it to you. So education, for example, teaches you accounting, but doesn't teach you how to be rich. It teaches you science, but doesn't teach you nutrition, or does not teach you fitness. It teaches you a lot of things but doesn't teach you memory, doesn't teach mindfulness, doesn't teach you to be a great parent and lover, or how to be happy. And that's kind of our mission to the world -- to bring that great education to the life of everyone so that everyone can improve their own life and live a happy life. And we'e been doing that since about 16 years ago now. And now privy to about 10 million people reach across our social media. We have about four million users on our platform and hundreds of thousands of customers every year. So it's an exciting company to work for definitely. Kathleen: The world's largest personal growth and learning platform. And it's interesting to me that your focus is on that gap between like what you can learn from a book or a class, a normal school versus what you really need to know for life. I feel like that's actually kind of what we do on the podcast. It's like, you can take marketing classes in school but what are the things they never teach you? Alessio: Absolutely. I just had this discussion few weeks ago with some marketing students that came to our office and they were asking me some questions about how they could actually nurture their careers and I was like -- I speak frankly -- like, university will never teach you Facebook ads. It is too new for you to learn something like that in university. Take university for what it is, but once you're out of university you learn so much more. And there is so much non formal education. And I believe that podcasts are changing the world for that. It's so beautiful, so much free and amazing education is out there and I love to market it every day. Kathleen: Absolutely. I learn so much just from hosting this podcast and talking to people like yourself. And that's one of the reasons I was looking forward to talking with you because you bring, I think, a different experience than a lot of the other guests I've had. Specifically, Mindvalley is headquartered in Malaysia. It's grown considerably in the last few years. I mean, it was already experiencing a very healthy pace of growth. But then in the last couple of years, the company really made this decision to go more international. And that has just fueled this tremendous uptick in the company's growth. So, we've talked a lot about many different aspects of marketing on this podcast, but one of the things we really haven't covered much is international marketing and what it means when you want to start selling into different markets around the world from a geographic standpoint, from language, cultural standpoint, etcetera. So I am so excited to dig into this with you. But let's start. Mindvalley's international growth Kathleen: And can you talk a little bit about what that journey has been? And when did the company start thinking about going international? What was it doing before that? What was the pre international phase? And that sort of thing? Alessio: Absolutely. So Mindvalley has been very focused on the English language and on covering all the markets that are English speaking. And we're pretty big on that. And with it, with the wave of internationalization that we have been trying to do in 2011 - 2012, we like to say that that was a bit of a failure as a company. What happened exactly in this case is that, Mindvalley, for the ones that are not familiar with our business model, we have a host, which is our CEO and founder Vishen, and he's the one basically hosting the personal growth and learning from all over the world. And what we were doing 2011 and 2012 is that we tried to recruit some great employee and make them host in their own languages. So Vishen wasn't any more the face of Mindvalley, but that employee was the face of Mindvalley in that language. And it was okay for maybe a couple of years. But then it definitely wasn't the right way to scale up. And all these kind of businesses that we were starting around the world kind of faded away and we kind of stopped them. So for the next few years, we focused completely on English. Last year, we actually got a call from a guy that's in the marketing space from Mexico. And he was simply telling us, "guys, I really believe so much in Mindvalley, I really believe so much of what you guys do, can I translate your content in Spanish?". And we were just like, you know what, that just such a small bag that we can play Just give him a product will pay him very little amount of money just to test out and see what will happen. And what seemed to happen is that in this time we simply translated the program, keeping Vishen as our host. And after translating the program, we simply tried to say, "What would happen, now that we have this program, if we just put some advertising budget on that? What will happen?" And the results were shocking. We're this very small firm, and we have been having such a big growth for a new market, which we weren't in, given the little investment that we made in the beginning. We literally paid it back in about five days. When we looked at that, we were like, "Wow! Really, like, that's incredible." And, so that simple little experiment that we did in a very random way, from that we said, "Okay, maybe this is something that is so much bigger", and that's when we started to actually assemble a team around that, and we started looking into the different languages that we can actually work on, which is the prioritization of languages. And how we can actually scale up this entire system. So one year and a half later, we are now in four different languages -- Spanish, Portuguese, French and German. We added, just in the Spanish speaking market, 1.2 million users in 10 months. And right now, the Spanish list -- actually the internationalization list overall -- it's bigger than the English speaking list. So we have so many more users from all over the world. And for now, this year, we're looking into a lot of different languages -- Italian, Arabic, Japanese, and Indian. And so yeah, it's becoming global. And its so beautiful to see the impact that we're able to make in a lot of, I would say, underserved markets, because a lot of these markets are very hungry and very willing to actually get the learning that we're giving at Mindvalley. What's the secret behind Mindvalley's international success? Kathleen: Now, you kind of, I don't want to say stumbled into going international but it wasn't this grand plan that you know, you worked up to it for two years. It was you, you were opportunistic, you had somebody come to you. The company jumped on this opportunity and went and it was successful. Why do you think it worked so well? For you? Alessio: Well, I would say that there are definitely a couple of things that were very interesting, and some feedback we got from our customers as well as why they love us so much. So number one is definitely the quality of the product. In the last couple of years, we need to level up so much because the English speaking market ,the American market, its so competitive. I truly believe that the average customer of Mindvalley every day will kind of think, "Should I watch Netflix? Should watch MasterClass.com or should I watch Mindvalley?" The level of quality that we need to match for the English speaking market is so difficult that we really need to push ourselves so much more. And the reality is that when we went to the Spanish speaking market, so many of our competitors are just not there. And the quality that that market is used to is so much lower that we as English speaking people are actually used to. And so when we went out there we just found ourselves being so much better than everyone else. And that's actually a big advantage for us and it's definitely been a super great thing. On the other side, I will say also that another big advantage we have had is that we've had tons of years of data. And having data -- even on English speaking customers, but also that you have maybe some English speaking customers from Mexico, from Spain, from Latin America -- learning which kind of customers we were still able to capture from those countries gave us a lot of ideas on how we could capture more of them. So the data was especially amazing when we needed to actually just run advertising to that and let the Google and Facebook algorithms help us find customers that were similar to the ones that were already following us from that region. And it worked really magically in a very scalable way that allowed us to grow exponentially. What does it really mean to go international? Kathleen: So I want to dig in a little bit to really what it means to go international because I think someone listen it would be easy to feel like, "I just need to translate my marketing materials into another language and, blast it out there and people will buy." That's not really what we're talking about here. I mean, you have a product, which is an online product. So it's not just advertising that needs to be localized. It's the product itself, correct? Alessio: Absolutely. And what I like to say is that when we took this approach, there have always been two phases of localizing. The first phase is to kind of bring the best of Mindvalley in that language. And the second phase is to bring that language and that culture into Mindvalley. Because obviously, it's really easy to take a program, translate it and put it out there. But the first thing is that you start to get tons and tons of feedback. And the reality is also that every different culture, every different language, and sometimes different countries in that specific language, will give you very different feedback. So just to give you some examples, in the Spanish speaking language, there is a very big debate of, should you actually translate with a Spanish accent? Or should you translate it with the Mexican or the Colombian one? And it's very interesting to see this debate and understanding. So a lot of time what we needed to do is simply test it out a bit, and we've seen, okay, if we translate one program with a Spanish accent, what happens? If we translate another one with a Mexican accent, what about that? So it's very important to check it out and actually get different feedback from different people. Another important debate that you always need to face and understand is should you dub your content or do you actually want just to subtitle your content? We are having this problem and debating in the Portuguese market, especially because what's happening in that case is that apparently, like some years ago, some companies went into the Brazilian market, they translated and dubbed their content. But they did it in such a bad way and the program was done in such a skanky way that they kind of destroyed the whole dubbing industry. So there are so many people that just don't want to consume a program that is dubbed. But then there are so many other people that don't want to just read the subtitles for every everything. So it's very difficult, even in the same market, to satisfy everyone. So we're trying different approaches and we are trying to understand exactly which approach will work better in which country. But a lot of that, frankly is really trying look for what the customers says and improve our progress day by day. Kathleen: This is such a fascinating topic to me because I actually lived in Spain for a year after I finished college, and I happen to live in Barcelona, which has, it's not the same accent as even like the regular Spanish accent it's a little bit I guess you would say cleaner. But, it's interesting too. It's not just accents, it's like between Spain and South America, there are different levels of formality in the way they speak. Like, if you're a Spanish speaker, it's the difference between using "tu" and "usted" and "ustedes" and vosotros" and things like that. I guess, for somebody, you don't have to speak Spanish to understand this. It's like the difference between British English and American English. They're very different. And in fact, it's so funny because I used to do a lot of work in India, where they have call centers, and somebody once told me this funny story which I have to relate. This is a little bit of a tangent. But they told me that in Karnataka, which is the state where I was working there... Alessio: By the way, I lived in Karnataka, in Bangalore for a year. Kathleen: So well, so you might even know this already. So they said there are two different schools. Like, if you're Indian and you're going to go work in a call center, you either go to the school where they teach you British English or the school where they teach you American English, and they jokingly call the American school the "duh duh duh school" and the British school the "tuh tuh tuh school." And the reason is, think about how people say the word "butter." I'm American, and so I say butter, which is duh, duh, duh butter versus the Brits who say butter, which is tuh, tuh, tuh. So you know, it's fascinating, like, these nuances of language that I think we really take for granted. But then the other half of the story -- and sorry, I'm totally going on but you've made me recall all these memories -- is when I was living in Spain this issue of dubbing is so fascinating because Spain actually has like, I think it's like the world's preeminent dubbing school / industry. And I'll never forget this is going to totally date me but I moved to Spain when the show Melrose Place came out in the United States, which was a really huge hit, but I happen to be living there when it started. And so, I only ever saw it dubbed and listened to it in Spanish with the dubbed voices and there was this character played by the actor Andrew Shue, who in Spain, he had this very manly dubbed voice, you know, and he would be like, "Hola, Carolina". And then I came back to the United States and he has this more, like, high pitched voice. He's like" hey Caroline", and it totally ruined the show for me. Sounds like so anyway, total tangent, but it is super fascinating to me. Just the impact that those choices can make on your effectiveness and communicating and the way that your audience absorbs and forms an opinion about your product. Like, I formed an opinion about Melrose Place the product because of this voice that was different the voice that actually was, etcetera. So, anyway, that's my whole two cents on the dubbing and the language thing, but it's really interesting, and I think most people probably don't think about this. So I'm curious to hear from you, as you did these tests. What did you learn? Like, what were the winners from the tests that you conducted? Alessio: Absolutely. So definitely for the Spanish speaking markets, having a cleaner accent, so having a Latin American accent, has been working much better for us. The program that we actually tried in the Spanish accent from Spain, we needed to retranslate it into Spanish from Latin America, because we got so many complaints from our customers that now we're in the process of retranslating and recording that. And that's actually a very interesting point. I guess about 65 to 70% of our users from Latin America are from Mexico. So a lot of time its simply about understanding the customer that you want to serve more, and understanding where your interest is going, where you're actually growing. And interestingly enough, what we've been seeing now is that in terms of users, Spain is just number six among the Latin American market, but in terms of customers it's a close number two to Mexico. So obviously, the conversion is much better than when it comes to Spain, but then in terms of depth of the market and width of the market, it's definitely not the biggest one we could find there. So for the Spanish market, we definitely decided to set them work. The standard for the Portuguese market, frankly, is something that we are still trying to figure out. Probably between all the markets we've been going for, Portuguese was one with the highest expectations we had, but we still weren't able to go into that. For example, another very big problem that we found in the Portuguese market is the fact that having a localized checkout makes the entire difference. So for some interesting reason, people from Brazil can't really buy products that we normally buy. They need a very specific checkout that is normally in a very specific way that allows the Brazillian credit card to work. Kathleen: Is it just that they need the currency to be in reals? Or is it just the credit card processor? Alessio: It's the credit card processors and 80% of Brazilians cannot buy with a normal process that is normally used for a normal website, or at least with our current websites. So one of the major things that we're doing -- and this obviously, it's a tech change that you need to do -- is changing over checkout in order to be able to serve more markets. So that's something that we're in the process of doing, but as you can imagine, it's such a big project because to better serve one county, you kind of need to start to change your entire process for the entire company. So now we're working on that and ideally, in a couple of months, we should be able to have a solution that should allow us to serve these customers better. Kathleen: Well, it isn't that really like, the classic conundrum of the product marketer, which is that, you know, there's this very natural tension between, you have a customer who could be a great customer, and they have this really specific need that might suck a ton of resources out of the organization versus, like, the population of the rest of the potential customer base who might need smaller changes in order for them to buy. It's like, which one is more valuable, the bird the hand or, the bird that could potentially fly in the next week? I think that's a conversation product marketers everywhere can really relate to. Alessio: Absolutely. I completely agree with that, it's something so crazy. And it's funny, because the more you actually learn about other languages, the more there are certain things that are kind of very interesting. Like, an example of that is in the Russian market, which is actually the only market that's from the previous kind of internationalization that is still alive in Mindvalley. They have 20% of their sales that happen offline. So what that means is that that people buy, but instead of buying, they actually take a screenshot of something that you put on your website. And then they go to the local shop, they show them the screenshot printed, and then they say "I want to pay in cash, and then they pay in cash to the shop, and the shop make sales for you." And it's just like it... Kathleen: So interesting. I know. Alessio: You're like "Why?", but a lot of people don't trust credit cards in our local countries. And a lot of people simply don't trust banks or don't trust anything. They believe much more in cash. So that is very normal, and they expect, when they actually need to make a sale or to buy something, they want to pay in cash, simply because that's how the culture is. Probably in few years, also in other countries, things will change. But at the moment, if you want to properly serve that kind of customer, you need to adopt your business a bit. Localizing the product in addition to the language Kathleen: That is fascinating. You talked about having to create a localized checkout experience for people in Brazil. When you talk about internationalization, or localization really, is what it is, for these different markets -- you've got four now, Spanish speaking German, French, Portuguese. I guess the question I have is, you're obviously translating and subtitling or dubbing the course materials, but are you really presenting a completely localized UX as well within the Mindvalley web experience? Alessio: So we definitely translated the entire UI of our app, and our website and everything. Let's say that, in terms of you UX, there is definitely a lot more that we could do. Especially like, there are certain countries that we're looking at that present these kind of challenges. So just as an example, right now we're entering Arabic. Now one of the biggest questions is, do we write everything left to right or right to left? Like, what do we do? And actually, for us, writing in the Arabic way, so right to left, we would need to make so many changes, tech wise, that if we want to do that we would probably be internationalizing the country two years from now, not today. So sometimes you might need to make some compromises. And also, for me, being a non English speaker, natively, when when I was a kid, and I was playing games, I grew up basically with playing games that their UI was completely in english. It was actually my way to start learning English a lot of time. Sometimes there are certain things that people are way more forgiving. And maybe even if the UI is not translated, it's still good. And the UX is definitely a very advanced level that you might want to adapt, just maybe in a second space. So answering the question, in terms of UX, we have not done that yet. But it's something that we're definitely looking for. But for that, also, it would acquire our platform to become much more flexible than what it is right now. So it is a lot of tech work involved. What kind of a team do you need to support internationalization? Kathleen: Now, what about your team? Because this obviously has implications for the people behind the scenes, both those who are involved in creating the content and adapting it for new languages. Do you have any kind of, like, support functionality that needs to be internationalized? Like, what has that done to the structure of the company itself? Alessio: That's a very interesting one. Because the team, the simplest way to do it, is to do it with flexible contractors. Okay? So what we did for every country is that we have some very strong project managers, and those are the main hires that we did. And these project managers are the ones that actually coordinate all the different contractors of the different areas. So we have some contractors that are in customer support, some contractors that are doing the entire voiceover, scripting, and copywriting in that specific language. We have some contractors doing the learning part. And then slowly, as demand for work is becoming bigger, the more we're starting to hire those people. So we started to hire, for example, social media managers in all those different languages because obviously we want to go bigger in terms of social media. And the next one will be hiring people to take care of the learning, because one of the next steps in terms of our localization is actually to start creating programs that are specific in that language. So that's very interesting, because studying these markets, we've come to understand that there are specific needs that that market has that maybe the English market doesn't have. And so there are these possibilities that we can create specific programs just for that market. And that's something that we are exploring at the moment. Mindvalley's international marketing strategy Kathleen: Fascinating. I mean, I could talk to you for hours about this stuff. But I want to make sure that we build in some time to talk about, like, some of the marketing activities you did to really fuel the growth. So you mentioned advertising. Is it fair to say that that was the primary channel that really drove customer acquisition in these new markets? Alessio: Absolutely. In our industry, online education, advertising is always one of the major channels. But what was incredible for us was that the cost per acquisition in that market was incredibly low. So while in the US we may need to spend about $8 to $10 to acquire a lead, in the Spanish speaking market, we spend between $1 and $2. So literally, we can acquire four or five people per every English user. So, it's very interesting from this point of view, which is why we were able to grow so much in terms of users in the year. Then what's been interesting is that the more users you acquire and the more programs you launch, the more you can actually monetize this fan base and user base that you've been creating. So definitely, email marketing was the other part that was incredibly important to keep those people engaged and to make sure that we could serve them with the best content, with the new classes, with the new programs, and create this kind of fan base. That was incredibly important.  Kathleen: To what do you -- you mentioned the lower cost of acquisition in some of these new markets through ads -- to what do you attribute that that big difference between what you're paying to acquire customer in the US versus, for example, say Mexico? Alessio: Well, two different things. So number one, the competition, having a much lower competition in the Spanish speaking market means that the cost is much lower. And we see very clearly obviously, acquiring a new user in India is much cheaper than acquiring a user in the U.S. And the other side is also that, obviously, we need to take care of our markets, as marketers, is not just about how much does it cost us to acquire users, but also what is the return that we can get from that? And that's also a very, important one. So we've been looking into that. And obviously, it's very clear that the conversion rate that you will get in U.S market, it's very different than the conversion rate that you will get in a Spanish speaking market. So you know that if in U.S you have 5% of users buying in the Spanish speaking market, might be only 2% or maybe 1% sometime. So that's something that you always need to take into account and always pay attention to how you're scaling up and how this affects profitability. So it's been actually a very good lesson for us because, in certain moments we were just so bullish, and we're like, "Okay, let's spend more and it just grow it." And then for a couple of more, if you look back and are like, "Okay, cool. Let's just make sure the profitability is there are we're able to do this sustainably" because that's one of the most important to you ought to do. Kathleen: I feel like in the U.S, when we talk about pay per click and online advertising, 95% of the time we're talking about Facebook, Google and Google remarketing. Maybe some LinkedIn, but that's more B2B. Maybe some Twitter. But it's really mostly Facebook and Google. So I'm curious, did you find that to be the same when you went internationally? Or were there other platforms or channels that performed really well for you? Alessio: We definitely found that to be the same. Specifically, what actually has been working really well for us is YouTube. YouTube has been an incredible channel for us. And we've had a few reviews, especially in the Spanish market, where we've had about 35 million views on a specific video that was part of our advertising mix. And that started to go very viral in the market. So definitely, that's what we've been seeing now. But when we actually internationalize in a new market, what we're looking for in the future is definitely we're seeing that there are some other opportunities out there. So in the Russian speaking market, Yandex is a big one. They have Yandex, they have VK -- they have a lot of different social media. Telegram is a big thing there. So definitely, that would require a different mix that we're exploring much more at the moment. Or, for example, in Japan, they have LINE, which is a sort of a Whatsapp, let's say, for the Japanese market and is much stronger than Facebook, for example. So going in these markets really means changing your marketing mix. But let's say that in the four languages that we've been internationalizing until now, we don't have these needs at the moment. Kathleen: Yeah, I feel like that's a whole nother kind of scary area for marketers, when they think about going internationally. They're like, "Hey, it's taken me a long time, but I finally understand how to do Facebook and Google. Now you're telling me I need to learn Yandex and WhatsApp and all these other platforms that can be really intimidating." How did you handle that? Did you guys really just like, learn it yourselves? Or did you find somebody who's really good at it and pull them in to help? Alessio: So let's say that's for Yandex, we would definitely work with external agencies. And we are literally, one year announced that we are studying China, because China is probably the ultimate internationalization that you want to do. And if we want to announce that we are studying the market, we understand what's really there because it's a complete different ecosystem from every single point of view. And we're slowly approaching that big box because it's really the biggest opportunity out there for internationalization. But we want to make sure that once we go there, we go that properly and with the right instrument to make sure that we will be able to actually do it effectively. And in that case, obviously, WeChat, Weibo, Youku, and all the different platforms they have -- so it's really a different system. But as of now, I would say that 80-20 is really what matters. And we're really trying to be able to understand what the best is that we can do with what we have right now. And then slowly, the more these get successful, and also give us enough profit to invest more, understanding how can we go deeper and deeper into the different channels, the different markets and doing understand though, can we do even better? Mindvalley's international growth Kathleen: Yeah, that sounds like it's so complicated. It's fascinating. So before we run out of time, I want to make sure that we really highlight the results you've gotten. So before you did this -- before that person came to you and said, "Hey, can you turn this program into another language?" -- how big was the user base for Mindvalley? Alessio: Our user base was about 1.7 million at that time. Kathleen: Okay. And that was when? Alessio: That was December 2018. Kathleen: Okay. Wow. So, a little over a year ago. Alessio: Yeah, a little over a year ago. And now, our user base is about 3.8 million. We also had a very good growth in English because we've been growing also there. But we've been adding at least, in total, 1.5 million/1.6 million users, just from the internationalization effort. Kathleen: So okay, I want to make sure I'm recapping this correctly. So the company is about 16 years old. And from years zero to 15, let's call it you grew to 1.2 million? Alessio: 1.7 Kathleen: 1.7, sorry. Okay. Thank you. And then in the last little over a year, you've almost tripled that, correct? Or doubled to tripled it? Alessio: You would say double to triple. Yeah, 2.5 million. Kathleen: Wow. That is amazing. Alessio: It's been a really, really exciting year from this point of view. Kathleen: That's amazing. Well, kudos to you and the team for what you've done. This is not easy. But it definitely highlights what a game changer it can be from a growth standpoint, if you're able to do it and navigate it correctly. Alessio: I personally think, after one year and a half of working on this, that it's probably one of the biggest opportunities out there that a lot of marketers have not been taking. Alessio's advice for marketers thinking of internationalizing Kathleen: So, if you had to start over again and talk to yourself two years ago, what advice would you give yourself? Is there anything you wish you would have done differently or you had known before you started? Alessio: So what I would say is that I would have probably, from the first moment, I would have approached it, I would have tried to over hire probably, and to hire a bit more people because it really requires some good HR to make sure that you're actually been able to go that deep into the market. We've been stretching our resources a lot to launch as much as possible. But I think that if we would have had two to three hires per languages versus just one we would have been able to do a better job, and been more profitable and growing more. These are probably the only few things that I would say to myself because for the rest, like, the team, even if it was the very simple payment stuff, has been able to deliver amazing things. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Wow. That's incredible. Well, we have just a few minutes left so I want to make sure I ask you the questions that I asked everybody who comes on this podcast. The first one being, you know, this, the show is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound marketing? Alessio: So my actual favorite guy in inbound marketing is Patrick Campbell from ProfitWell. I'm a big geek, in terms of revenue, subscription terminology, growing revenues and listening, and he's incredible in terms of looking into pricing, hosting a show that's fun, but speak about things that for the probably 99.9% of the people are very boring. But he's able to do it in such a great way. Such a great quality, having some great guests as well. And I'm really incredibly surprised the content he's able to put out there. Kathleen: That's a good one. I'll definitely check that out. And you know, the biggest complaint I hear from marketers is that things are changing so quickly. It's really hard to stay on top of all the new developments in the world of digital marketing. How do you personally do that? Alessio: I would say that one of the habits I've implemented is that I always keep one hour and a half a day to learn. That to me is just a huge part of my job. Like, you can't be a great marketer if you don't learn. Digital marketing in 2020 is different than digital marketing in 2017. And if you don't have enough time to learn it, you just won't get it. In terms of sources of learning, I definitely have a couple of Chrome extensions that that helped me out a lot. So number one is Zest.is, which is a fantastic Chrome extension that gives me the best marketing articles every single day. That is followed by growthhackers.com, which has a fantastic newsletter. And then I follow a couple of podcasts, a couple of different things in the startup, entrepreneurship, marketing, business space that helps me to think outside of the box. Kathleen: So what are some of your favorite podcasts? Alessio: Actually the podcasts that I like the most are more around growth hacking and how companies have been scaling and growing. So Reid Hoffman Masters of Scale and Andrew Chen from Andreessen Horowitz. That's really incredible for me and something that I'm always trying to be on top of and, and to learn as much as possible from them. How to connect with Alessio or Mindvalley Kathleen: Great. Well, this has been so much fun and so interesting. And I feel like we've barely even scratched the surface. But that's all the time we have. So if someone wants to learn more about Mindvalley, or if they want to reach out to you and ask a question about this experience you've had with internationalization, what's the best way for them to do that? Alessio: Absolutely. So if you want to learn more about Mindvalley, just go to Mindvalley.com, and you can learn a bit more about that all our classes, our courses, and all the opportunities you have to improve your personal growth and education. If you want to reach out to me, find me on LinkedIn, that's my favorite platform. I'm always putting out a lot of interesting content on marketing there, and just follow me -- Alessio Perioni. And I try to catch up with all the messages I get, and I'll be happy to answer every single question. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Oh, fantastic. I will put the links to both the Mindvalley website and Alessio, his LinkedIn profile, in the show notes. So definitely head over there. And check that out if you want to get in touch with him. And if you're listening and you found this episode valuable or you learn something new, please consider heading to Apple podcasts and leaving the podcast a five star review. That's how we get in front of new people and we get to share all this great information from folks like Alessio. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next interview. That's it for this week. Thank you so much Alessio. Alessio: It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. It was such a fun conversation.

What is buyer intent data and how are marketers using content-level buyer intent data to get incredible inbound marketing results? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Intentdata.io Chief Revenue Officer Ed Marsh breaks down the topic of buyer intent data, and specifically talks about how contact-level buyer intent data works, and how marketers can use it to get better marketing and sales results. Highlights from my conversation with Ed include: Ed defines intent data as "the collection of signals that indicate that somebody may be in market ready to buy your product or service." While it is a relatively new term, we all have intent data available to us. There are three kinds of intent data. First party data is what we have through the analytics software we use (ex. HubSpot). Second party comes from companies that sell data they gather through their own platforms. Third party data is collected from throughout the internet. Most intent data providers give you company-level data. Intentdata.io provides contact-level data which specifies exactly which individuals are taking high intent actions and what their contact information is. Company-level data can be used by sales teams to determine which accounts to target, whereas contact-level data can be used to create highly targeted marketing campaigns. With Google banning third party cookies, many intent data providers (particularly those who offer second-party data, will no longer be able to offer their data. One way to use intent data is in paid ad campaigns, and specifically for the creation of custom audiences. Another way is to trigger targeted email marketing drip campaigns or sales outreach sequences. Regardless of how you're using the data, the key is to have a way to unify all of that information and clean it up so it can be used correctly in your campaigns. That is where having some sort of customer data platform (CDP) can be useful. Ed says that the best way to get started with intent data is to focus on existing customers (for upsells and cross sells) and then on opportunities already in the pipeline, to see if you can close them faster.  Resources from this episode: Visit the intentdata.io website Email Ed at ed@intentdata.io Listen to the podcast to learn more about contact-level buyer intent data and how you can begin to use it now to get better marketing and sales results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and this week my guest is Ed Marsh who is the chief revenue officer of intentdata.io. Welcome, Ed. Ed Marsh (Guest): Thank you very much, Kathleen. Great to be back with you. Kathleen: You’re one of the very, very few people who has been on this podcast twice. Ed: Well, it's a pleasure and an honor. Kathleen: It's less than five. I don't know the exact number, but it's definitely less than five. It's a small and exclusive club. Ed: As successful as your podcast has been, you're north of 100 episodes now, right? Kathleen: Oh yeah, it's like ... I think I'm around 130+ episodes. Ed: That's really neat. Kathleen: I have surprised myself. Yeah, it's great. I feel like now I'm one of those people who's competitive enough with my own self that now I can't stop. Ed: Both ... Kathleen: It's great. No, I'm excited to have to back, and you are back here really representing a completely different company, intentdata.io, which I don't think existed. Either that or it was like the kernel of a company when we first spoke, the first time I interviewed you. Ed: Right. About Ed Marsh and Intentdata.io Kathleen: Let's start with kind of a re-introduction to my audience. For those who either didn't hear you the first time around or heard you the first time around but aren't familiar with what you're working on now, could you talk a little bit about who you are, what you do, and what intentdata.io is? Ed: Sure, absolutely. We know each other, obviously, from the HubSpot community, the Inbound community, and have been kind of colleagues as agencies in that world for a number of years. In the context that we originally spoke, I was really working in that agency role but not as an agency consulting for middle market industrial manufacturers. But of course in the context of all of this inbound marketing work, inbound has evolved. It's not a binary world where outbound is evil like they used to say. No, the marketing takes all of these pieces. It takes inbound, it takes outbound, it takes paid, it takes great sales enablement, it takes all this stuff rolled together. And one of the pieces that I began to roll into it several years ago was intent data, and it was very immature at the time. It's evolved quite a bit, but it's really through the realization that marketing needs to be approached holistically for most businesses in this hyper-competitive, hyper-content saturated world that we're in, every company needs every tool, and they need to use it really effectively and intelligently both strategically and tactically. So against that background, I began working with a classmate of mine, actually from our mutual alma mater from Johns Hopkins that had worked on substantially developing and improving an algorithm for a very different approach to intent data than much of what was out there. Through that work I then began selling it and experimenting with it, and it's been substantially refined over the last several years. That algorithm is at the core of the intentdata.io business, and we've also incorporated some other elements like platform CDP in order to help companies fully exploit their full data stack and other stuff. That's kind of how I got to where I am today and why we're talking in this role. What is buyer intent data? Kathleen: That's so cool. I suspect that while most listeners of the podcast are pretty advanced, intent data's still a pretty new topic. I don't want to assume anything, and therefore can you just start by two to three sentences, I know this is going to be tough, can you explain what intent data is? Not necessarily what you guys do but what intent data is. Ed: Sure. So what's really interesting about intent data is that most companies already have it and they don't realize it. Because there's this new term that we've put on it. Intent data is the collection of signals that indicate that somebody may be in market ready to buy your product or service. So that could be visiting with you at an event or a trade show. It could be agreeing to have a meeting with you. In the common lexicon or parlance, it often is online activities like engaging with content, engaging with a competitor, social follows, and stuff like that. How intentdata.io is different Kathleen: Great. And there are a whole host of companies that have sprung up really in the last, I would say, two years that are calling themselves intent data companies. You mentioned that your algorithm and your approach is a little bit different. Can you explain what you mean by that? Ed: Sure. There's a broad spectrum of companies that say intent data, some of which are really static databases. Some are visitor identification. So if an unknown visitor comes to your site, you can use reverse IP lookup to figure out what the company is. Some are selling account level data that's sourced through different means including DSP or bid stream data from programmatic advertising. Some through publishing co-ops. There's first party data which is what companies have themselves that you collect through HubSpot. Second party data is like TechTarget sell which is based on their own publishing platform. And third party data, which is collected, supposedly or theoretically, everywhere else on the internet, although it's often from a small collection of sites. Kathleen: Now, I have a lot of questions. So in your case, what makes intentdata.io special, different, unique? Ed: So intentdata.io intent data is contact level intent data which is quite unique. There's a lot of companies out there that sell account level data. In other words, we can't tell you who the person is. We just can tell you there's been a bunch of people from IBM that are taking such-and-such a kind of action. There are companies that take account level data and then append to it their best guess of who the contacts might be based on who you tell them you'd love to talk to. You know, if you want to sell to CMOs and they see somebody that meets your ideal customer profile from a firmographic perspective taking action, then guess what? They're going to append the CMO's name, and you're going to get all excited, and you're going to think, "This is exactly what I want." What we do is we actually tell you who the person was that was taking action, and we give you their contact details, and we give you contextual information around the action they took. So not just engagement with some kind of an opaque topic, the taxonomy of which is completely mysterious, but rather we say, "They took action with an article online that had, at its core, this key term that we know is important to you." And because of that, then you can gauge where people are in the buying journey, the problem they're trying to solve, the outcome they're trying to achieve that competitors are talking to. You pair that with the information embedded in the job title like seniority and function with the firmographic details, and suddenly you have this really rich understanding of what's going on for the individual. And then of course when there's multiple people from the same company for the account and for that 10.2 person buying team that challenger talks about. Kathleen: Yeah, you're hitting on something that I think is really interesting. Because I started really looking at intent data probably a year and a half ago, and that's the kind of cool thing about the podcast is I get to talk to a lot of different people, I learn about a lot of different vendors, and specifically marketing technology vendors. Now I'm in a role as VP of marketing at Attila Security where I'm looking at, "What should my tech stack be?" And I've done this in a couple of different places now, looked at, reviewed intent data vendors. And I would say my perception, coming at this as an outsider, is that the big names that you hear most often are the ones that supply the account level data, as you described. I'm not going to name names, but that's basically what it is. Company x, lots of activity, they're looking at things. But you don't really know who in company x it is, and they market it as an account based marketing tool. So you're already doing account based marketing, you're already targeting companies. We are going to tell you which companies are showing the most interest. Which I can see the value of, but I'm actually really interested in this contact level stuff. Because yes, I think ABM has a lot of value, and it's something that I'm going to be working on, but I just can't help but think nothing beats knowing who the exact person is. You know, because at the end of the day that's the person who's either going to champion you or make the decision to buy. So, it's interesting to me that more companies haven't gone contact level data, and I'm curious if you can comment onto why that is. Why most intent data providers don't offer content-level buyer intent data Ed: Yeah, so there's a bunch of different reasons. Some of the big name companies started out unable to deliver contact level data and explained that as a technical impossibility or an illegality. And so there's some perception in the market that that's the case, neither of which are correct. A lot of the large name data is now sold just as an embed in other software, like with ABM software and/or with a contact database. And so it's just really easy for somebody to pay an extra 30 or 40 or 60 grand a year and get the data that just kind of flows. Of course- Kathleen: It's a lot of money, too, like, some of those add ons that you're talking about. Ed: Right. I think the other issue with intent data, of course if we have contact level intent data, it's easy to look, just on a pivot table for instance, at how many contacts from the same company are taking action. So you still get the account level insight, but it's a twofer. Not only are you getting that, but you're also getting the contact level insight. I think that one of the places that some companies have struggled with it is to just say, "Okay, I want to take this list of contacts, and I want to start blasting emails at them using, you know, SalesLoft or Outreach sequences”. And that's not all that effective. The companies that are really effective with it are the ones that take a more thoughtful approach whether it's in marketing, in sales, or both. So when you look at account level data, the reason that often succeeds with a sales team is because the sales team says, "Wow, there's something happening. I got to figure it out," and they start working contacts until they figure out where it is. And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whether they created the project through their diligence or uncovered it, nevertheless it's associated with intent data. On the other hand, marketing departments can take that contact level intent data, create custom audiences with it, for instance, and then do really remarkably focused and tailored paid ads to very specific audiences, again drawing on all of the contextual detail of stage and buying, journey, problem to be solved, etc. with a really tight sort of a messaging matrix. So to answer your question, from a marketing perspective, contact level data can mean more work. It's not as easy as just having Triblio tell you, "Okay, focus on these accounts." I mean, it takes additional work, particularly if you're going to use it for other use cases like event marketing in addition to demand gen. Market research is a great application for it. So you know, I think part of its awareness. Part of it is the initial perception that there was some impediment to using it, and part of it is the fact that there's more work to make it effective. How will Google's ban of third party cookies impact intent data? Kathleen: Now, I'm going to ask what might be a dumb question, but I've been reading in the news lately about how Google is going to ban and/or phase out the ability for people to use third party cookies. And I'm still trying to wrap my head around what that means. But it seems to me, this is where it might be a dumb question, that it's going to affect some of these intent data providers, particularly the ones that are looking at leveraging data coming in through ad platforms. Is that correct? Ed: Yeah, I think it's not a dumb question at all, and it's very perceptive of you. That's precisely correct. If you look at one of the very common methods of collection of intent data, it's based on programmatic advertising platforms. It's bid stream data, it's collected through a DSP, and what's interest is that- Kathleen: What's a DSP? Ed: Honestly, I don't even know what the acronym stands for. I'm going to embarrass myself. Kathleen: No, I mean I have no idea either. I was like, "Oh my god, am I just the only one who doesn't know?" Ed: What's interesting is that many of these providers have actually, going to set up a DSP without the intention of brokering and placing ads. But so they have the insight into what's happening into the market. Kathleen: Interesting. Ed: Who has space available, what kinds of topics, and who wants to put ads onto those pages. So it gives them some insight they've been able to build their intent data collection on, but that's predicated, to a large extent, on third party cookies, which of course Apple and Firefox did away with a while ago, but Google has announced a couple weeks ago they'll do on Chrome as well. Kathleen: Ah oh, by the way, I'm going to confess I did just Google DSP. It's a demand side platform. Ed: There you go. Kathleen: "Buyers of digital advertising use to manage multiple ad exchange and data exchange accounts." I had to look that one up, so you learn something new every day. Ed: Perfect. There are some alternative methods that companies in that space use. They try to call it fingerprinting and some other things, but they're just not effective. And so you're absolutely right. Although the sunset deadline I think is two years off, there are, in this crazy intent industry, there are companies demanding three year contracts right now including some that are selling DSPs. So how'd you like to be a company that signed a three year contact for that about a month ago? Kathleen: Yeah, and your provider's going to basically become obsolete, or they're going to have to figure out a different way to do it. So okay. Well, thank you for clarifying that. I didn't want to take us on too much of a tangent, but it's been on my mind. Understanding third party cookies is ... it's complicated. Ed: It is, for sure. Kathleen: So I probably need to do a whole separate episode just on that so that people can understand it, including myself. But in the meantime, so we're talking about contact level intent data, which in your case is not going to be affected if I understand correctly by Google's ban of third party cookies. Ed: That's correct. How are marketers using content-level buyer intent data? Kathleen: So now I'd like to shift gears and really talk about, "What does this look like in action?" Like, how are marketers using this information to improve their inbound marketing results? Do you have some examples you can talk us through? Ed: Sure, absolutely. I think that there's really three phases. One is building a full data stack. The second is doing proper analysis and segmentation, and then the third is doing orchestration. And if you look at kind of the maturity of the market right now, there's very few that are at the orchestration stage. There's not all that many that are doing the analysis and segmentation correctly, just because the limits of the existing martech stack that they have. But let's kind of, if you're up for it, let's work through those three kind of quickly. Kathleen: Let's do it. Ed: Chunk each one out. All right, so first you've got to have ... I shouldn't say it that way. It is beneficial, and as the process matures more companies will have a full data stack. So that means first party data, not just what you're observing of known users on your site, you know people that convert forms and come back and look at the pages, but anonymous first party data, who from companies is visiting your site that you don't know who they are, and then first party data from elsewhere in the organization. For instance, information on in-app usage and transactional information. There's all kinds of first party data that companies just partition. They think, "Well, that's customer service," or, "That's operations," or whatever but really is important to understand that entire customer life cycle. I think it's also important for companies to think of intent data across the customer life cycle, not just as a prospecting and demand gen sort of tool. Because it's got use cases across. But also in that full data stack, you might want some second party data from a couple publishers that are particularly strong in your industry that own those relationships. They have opted in readers and subscribers that have some really important insights into what's happening on their platform in that space and that subject domain that's important to you. And then third party data. And typically a couple sources of third party data. A great example in the martech space is G2 Crowd which doesn't give you a lot of signal but certainly gives you some important signal. You mesh that with something like our intentdata.io data, and now you've got a really interesting perspective. Those then, you've got to roll them up, properly unify them, cleanse them, and then you start to enrich it. And you enrich perhaps the technographic information or firmographic information. Or you understand about parent companies, and child companies, and how all of that's fitting together, you do some validation: validate email addresses, validate physical addresses because there's more marketing being done B to B with direct mail again, now. So all of this stuff has to kind of be rolled up into a very accurate, single customer view. That's one of the places that current marketing technology tends to fall a little bit short. Although there's great synchronization in many cases, there's not a lot of great unification of the data, and so that becomes a barrier sometimes for companies. They've got a great stack with Salesforce and Marketo and Drift and all these important pieces that fit together, but they're just not quite able to get it all rolled up into one very accurate, properly enriched, properly unified view. So then that sometimes is a barrier to the second step which is the analysis and segmentation. So think about it, for instance, if you had ... You talk a lot about ABM so you probably know Kerry Cunningham from Sirius and now Forrester that talks about second lead disease. You know, Kerry makes the point that we all get really excited about the first lead from a new logo, and that's great. The second lead from that same logo comes in, and people say, "Oh, that's cool. That's interesting, but we already have one. We're already working it." His point is that second one is the one that ought to get people excited because now you know that there's something more going on. It's not just some person, a crackpot, doing research on their own, but there's some sort of organizational activity. Kathleen: Right. There's water cooler talk happening at that company. Ed: Exactly. So let's extend that. Let's say that you have one or two people that convert on your site, known people in your first party data. Let's say that one of them has a demo, you know gets the freemium version of it and uses a lot of it, and one of them gets the freemium version and doesn't use it much. Let's say that there's two or three people from the same company that hit your site a number of times but don't identify themselves. So you know there's additional activity in the company. Now, let's say in third party data you see some of those same people plus other members that you know would be part of that buying team, in other words the right roles and functions are in place so you know there's a project, and you see them engaging with competitors, engaging with industry news. You can see where each of them is in the buying journey. And so now you've got a really interesting understanding of what's happening across that whole company. You've kind of validated the fact there is a project. You understand the roles that you see engaged. You understand the roles that aren't engaged or that you don't see and what your sales people need to focus, etc. But if you think about it, if you try to do that in a lot of the marketing automation software, you can't do it. I mean, even stepping from the contact level to the account level in many cases is a little bit tricky. It's not really a relational database the way you need it to be with most of the marketing automation platforms in order to do that sort of thing. There's two pieces. One is the technology piece, and the other is kind of the intellectual rigor and curiosity that's necessary to go through and say, "Let's build scenarios that really would tell us it's likely, it's sure," however you want to chunk them — MQL, SQL, whatever the case may be, and that's that analysis and segmentation then that gets really, really interesting and where companies, I think, in general are not yet hitting that point. They're kind of taking the list and saying, "Let's see who's on our target account list, and let's follow up with them," as opposed to using that list as a way to inform the target account vessel. Then the third piece, once you've done that, if you've got it all properly segmented, including micro segmentation so that the messaging is appropriate for the function, the seniority, the stage in the buying journey, competitors they've talked to, pages they've been on your site, all of that kind of stuff. Then you want to orchestrate, and you want to pull in your entire martech stack. So you want to automatically launch sequences from Outreach if that's what you're doing. You want to automatically add people to the right custom audience for a social advertising. You want to automatically add people to the right segment and address so when they come, they have exactly the right customized chatbot experience when they come. And you want all this stuff to happen automatically and at scale. And then further, you also want the automation to push the dots close enough together for the sales team. You want to suggest to the BDR, "Here's what we've observed. Here's what we infer from that. Therefore here's the template we think you should use and the enablement content we think you should use." You want to let the sales person or the AE know if they're in the midst of an opportunity and you see engagement with a competitor, then you want to make sure that they're clear not only that it happened but give them some context of the role and whether that person is also part of their deal or a new person. Just help them understand how to react to it. Because there's so much information flowing at people, it's really important to give them that context so they can seize it and action it. So I've been rambling, but I think those are kind of the three key areas to fully put intent data to work. Who is having success using intent data? Kathleen: It's incredibly clear to me that this holds amazing potential for marketers from so many different standpoints, and you covered a lot of them. You know, in terms of ad targeting, in terms of key account selection, helping your sales team, your BDR, your SDR, etc. do their job better, but it also sounds really complicated. So is there anybody out there that you've seen in the wild who's really doing this well? Like, who's really using this information well and getting results with it? Ed: There are some companies that are doing it, and it's places where they've had one person that kind of really seized it, applied creative energy to it, saw the opportunity, and grew with it. I understand absolutely your point about it sounding complicated. On the other hand, if we were to talk about doing digital marketing really well, that's really complicated too. And so there's always layers. I mean, you can start easy and then gradually progress into it as the organizational maturity and resources satisfy that. Kathleen: Yeah. Have you seen any success stories like where somebody's really been able to point to intent data and say, "That was the thing that helped me double my results or land that key customer"? Ed: Yeah, so we're not at liberty to discuss any of our client data and success stories because of nondisclosures. There's a lady named Amanda Bone who spoke at the B2B Marketing Exchange in Boston actually in conjunction with TechTarget talking about what they've done with a very robust intent data program, and I think the story that she told really illustrates the way you have to move into it progressively, you have to be very clear that you've got these cascading goals that you want to achieve. You're not going to try to do everything immediately, but also she understood the importance of having some platform that would help to integrate the data from different sources so that it wasn't just, you know, I got to look here, and then look there, and then look there, and hope that I remember it but rather pulled it together into some sort of a single view that made it actionable both for marketing and for sales. Unifying your intent data for use in marketing campaigns Kathleen: And what kinds of platforms do that? Ed: A couple of the intent data companies have very limited platforms that they may integrate anonymous first party data. In other words put some sort of an IP address lookup tool on your site in conjunction with third party data and provide a roll up of that, but the right answer I believe, and the direction that we're headed with clients, is to use a full blown CDP, to have the full capability of unification and the full capability of orchestration. Getting started with contact-level buyer intent data Kathleen: And so if you were somebody listening and you're thinking, "This sounds really cool. I would love to dip my toe in the water," but they're maybe intimidated by the full blown picture of, "Here's what it takes to really knock it out of the park," how would you suggest a marketer get started with this? What are some smaller things they could do to maybe have some initial wins and demonstrate success to, of course, as every marketer needs to think about like get that organizational buy in. Ed: Sure, absolutely. One of the really cool things about intent data is if marketers use it well, they can foster the alignment that seems so elusive between departments. So I look for quick wins with your partners on the success team, and that means feeding them signal from current customers and providing some training so that they understand how to interpret that signal. But if you see a current customer that's taking action with competitors or researching stuff, it's also a good upsell cross sell opportunity. So turn reduction, upsell, cross sell. So you can win with a success team pretty easily that way. With the sales team, I would discourage you from trying to start pushing them a bunch of new leads. I would focus on pending opportunities and target accounts and push them that signal. Now, you're going to have to provide a little bit more coaching and training in that case. And so you might want to phase it in gradually because nothing would be worse than a clumsy salesperson calling up and saying, "I thought you said you were going to buy from us. Why are you talking to the competitor?" That's not the way to use the data. So you want to make sure you train to avoid that. In terms of the marketing function itself, two easy places to start. If you're running pay ads, then develop some parallel paid ad programs with custom audiences, very tailored messaging. That's a relatively easy lift if you already have a paid ads program in place. If you're not doing any paid ads then that's going to feel like a project. So that's a judgment call. The second is to monitor events. If you're in an industry where a competitor of yours sponsors an event, what a fabulous opportunity to understand who the people are engaging with that event and target them with outbound sales. If you have industry wide events then do the same sort of a thing, but it's not specifically for targeting customers. It's obviously to create a base of leads for paid ads, for salespeople outreach, and maybe even in some cases if you're going to have a salesperson at an event and you're not investing a ton of money in exhibiting there. Use that to help them schedule appointments before they go. So those are a couple easy marketing use cases as well as a couple easy ways to incorporate it with sales, and success, and build alignment and buy in. Kathleen: Yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned events because I've thought about that. Even if you are exhibiting, if you're going to spend the money to have a booth at an event, most events these days don't give out their attendee lists. Ed: Right. Kathleen: And so, you know, marketers are left kind of scrambling with, "Well, how are we going to drive people to the booth?" Because you can send out a big blast, but you don't know that the people getting it are actually planning on attending, but if you can use intent data to narrow down your marketings to people who are going to be going to the event, then you can use a combination of advertising. You could ... there's all kinds of things you can do to really get in front of them before that event. Ed: Absolutely. For sure. And that investment is huge. That's where a lot of companies' marketing investment is going, but there's applications for the intent data before the event, during, and after. And of course there's also applications for event organizers for companies th at are organizing their own event and then opening it up to kind of parallel players. That intent data gives you ability as an event organizer to monetize for your other exhibitors. Because you can then say, "Hey, look. You're in such a such a space. We will, as part of the event package if you buy this add on, we will provide informational people that we see engaging that we believe are going to be attending the event that are particularly interested in what you're doing." So there's additional value as an organizer to monetize when you're exhibiting. Is buyer intent data GDPR compliant? Kathleen: Now, I'm sure that there are some marketers who are listening, and one of the questions that they'll have is, "What implications does GDPR have for all of this?" Because we're talking about contact level data, both data that you might be harvesting as the marketer using intent data, but you also just mentioned like event organizers sharing that data with others. So can you just talk about that for a moment? Ed: Show me two attorneys that will give you the same answer about any GDPR topic. I mean, we can certainly talk about it. There is no definitive answer. Every company has to have its own philosophy. I can tell you that we have clients in the EU that run our data the way we normally provide it. We also have clients in the EU and in the US that request that we mask certain fields in the data. So they get the job title, for instance, from which they can discern a lot of information, but they don't get the name and email address, and they still get most of the value out of it. So those are things that each company has to decide. The bottom line, we believe based on our understanding, is the data is entirely GDPR compliant as it. And because of how we harvest, what we're doing is we're watching people take action publicly online. So it's very much akin if you saw somebody comment on a blog post, on an article on Forbes or on a conversation on LinkedIn and you're a salesperson in the EU, there's nothing that prohibits you from figuring out who that person is, and reaching out, and contacting them saying, "It looks to me like this is of interest to you." So I mean, that's the closest analogy to commonly accepted sales practice that describes the data and why it's acceptable. Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. You're right, it's a total gray area, but I appreciate you trying to clarify that. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: So shifting gears, I have two questions I ask all of my guests. You've been down this road before, but we're going to do it again because some time has passed. So we'll see if your answers have changed. Who do you think, either company or individual, is really kind of setting the example for what it means to do great inbound marketing these days? Ed: And I can guarantee you my answer isn't changed because I don't remember what my answers were. So I would say to that, a company called Mosquito Squad. I don't know if you've ever heard of them. Kathleen: Oh, yeah. Ed: Where I live in New England, the mosquitoes are horrible in the summer, and I get tired of ... Basically, you can't go outside for part of the year. So I got really fed up in hunting around, and they popped up, kind of typical inbound playbook, but then they have so fully integrated a helpful, and informative, and consultative approach throughout the process that made it easy to understand why to use them or what was involved and we ought to select them. Then it made it really easy to understand once we did what the process was going to be. Then they're really good about letting you know, "Okay, we're going to be there in 20 minutes. Okay, we're done. Here's what we did. Here's the invoice." I mean, it's so well integrated that not only did it make it easy to find them and learn about the service, but it makes working with them really easy too. Kathleen: Yeah, you're right about those mosquitoes in New England because I grew up in New Hampshire, and my mother used to go out to do yard work, and she literally would wear a hat that had a net that came down and like tucked into her shirt. It'd be like 90 degrees, and she'd be in long sleeves and long pants, and the pants would be tucked into her socks. It was just crazy. Ed: Right. Kathleen: So second question, getting off the mosquito topic, things change so quickly. This is a great example of that. Intent data, DSPs, most marketers really have trouble keeping up with all of it. So how do you personally keep up with everything that's changing in the world of digital marketing? Ed: Well, what I do specifically is not focus on inbound and digital marketing. I try to watch business more broadly. With general business resources, about trends in the economy, I mean there's certainly some kind of advertising and marketing related blogs that I follow and newsletters that I get from Ad Age through some others. I use a lot of Google Alerts around very specific kinds of terms because that way I'm not limited in hearing from the sources that I know about, but I'm discovering new sources as information becomes, and different perspectives become, available. I think like most people, this is a pitch for yours, podcasts are a great way to just kind of parachute in, get some ideas, see where there's an interesting episode, listen to it. You can do it while you're doing other things. So those are a great tool. Then the other thing that I do is follow a couple people, not so much because I'm so excited about the ideas they talk about but because I really love watching the way they create content and practice their craft. So I learn from seeing how folks balance all the media, and produce a lot of content, and build social following, and I just appreciate the way they do it whether or not I agree with the message that they're espousing. Kathleen: Can you name some names? Ed: Well, having said that I may not agree with the message they're espousing I got to be careful, but I mean there's some prominent marketers in the Boston area that have very large followings, that have a loudly proclaimed opinion about a lot of different things, that I think sometimes it's a little bit superficial or vapid, but they do create a lot of great content across a lot of channels. Kathleen: All right. With that caveat, come on I'm going to keep plugging. Who you got? Who you got? Ed: I think Dave Gerhardt is really interesting to watch. Kathleen: Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, you agree or disagree with anything he says, it's you can't disagree with the fact that he has successfully built a tremendous audience. Ed: Right. Kathleen: There's no two ways about it. Ed: Right. Kathleen: He actually gets mentioned a lot as a response to that first question I asked you. Yeah. Cool. Well, that's all interesting, and any particular podcasts that you are really a fan of? Ed: More general business ones. I love Business Wars. I like listening to The Knowledge Project from Shane Parrish. I like listening to some of the same ones that other people talk about, Joe Rogan where you get interesting perspectives from people of in depth interviews, history things. You know, Bonsai and all kinds of stuff. There's a lot of great podcasts out there. Kathleen: Yeah. I always love hearing what other people are listening to because there are so many out there, and I wish I had 48 hours in every day to listen to podcasts. It's a great way to learn. Ed: Like the numbers, if you compare the number of blogs to the number of podcasts, I don't remember what the numbers are, but there's like 3% the number of podcasts. So people that say that podcasting is already over the hill, I don't think that's the case. Kathleen: No. Well, it better not be. Because I'm on episode 130+ and I plan to keep going, so. Ed: You've got many more to go. Perfect. How to connect with Ed Kathleen: But then again, maybe that makes me an OG. I have no idea. This has been fun, Ed. I appreciate it, and if somebody is listening and they want to reach out to you and ask a question about intent data, or they want to learn more about intentdata.io, what's the best way for them to do that? Ed: They can email me at ed@intentdata.io, or they can go to the website intentdata.io. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Awesome. All right, I'll put those links in the show notes. And if you are listening and you have not yet taken a moment and gone to Apple Podcasts and left the podcast a review, I'm going to ask you to do that today. It's how we get found by new people. We're 130+ episodes in as we talked about, and I would really appreciate it. So if you're a regular listener in particular, take a minute and leave a review, and if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because I'm always looking for new inbound marketers to interview. Kathleen: That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Ed. This has been a lot of fun having you back for a second time. Ed: Well thank you very much, Kathleen. I enjoyed it as well.

How did Morning Brew go from zero to 1.8 million email subscribers in just two years? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Morning Brew Senior Product Lead Tyler Denk shares the story of how he and and the small founding team at Morning Brew grew the scrappy email startup into the darling of the email newsletter world. Tyler shares details on Morning Brew's referral program, which was responsible for the bulk of the newsletter's early growth, as well as his thoughts on why quality content is the single most important factor driving the company's success. Learn what worked for Morning Brew in the past, what they're doing now, and what they plan to focus on in the future as they launch new newsletter products and continue to grow their flagship brand. Highlights from my conversation with Tyler include: Morning Brew launched two years ago as a daily business newsletter that had the goal of making business news engaging and enjoyable to read. Since then the business has expanded to include additional newsletters such as Emerging Tech Brew, Retail Brew and The Turnout, as well as the Business Casual podcast. The company is currently undergoing the transition from a single daily business newsletter to a media company. None of the company's founders came from a journalism or business background, so they intuitively took a very unconventional approach to the newsletter business. Morning Brew is 100% ad funded, but all ads are in the form of native content that is created by the Morning Brew team, not the advertisers. Morning Brew is very picky about the writers it hires. They look for people who understand business and finance but also have a strong sense of humor. When it comes to design, Morning Brew's goal is to have a newsletter that is aesthetically pleasing but that doesn't have design that takes away from the content. Like every email newsletter, Morning Brew relies upon tracking pixels to see if readers are opening the email newsletter, but because so many people have images turned off by default in their email clients, they need to incentivize them to turn images on in order to get those analytics. They do this by optimizing the image ALT text. One of the biggest things that has driven Morning Brew's growth is its referral program. Every Morning Brew newsletter has a sharing section at the bottom that tells the reader how many referrals they need to get before they qualify to receive an award, and provides the reader with a unique referral link. Readers are incentivized to share in a variety of ways, from SWAG to winning free trips, laptops and more. Morning Brew uses double opt ins to ensure that the new email addresses for subscribers are valid before awarding referral points to readers.  Recently, they've supplemented the referral program with paid advertising and the team tracks their cost per acquisition closely. Resources from this episode: Visit the Morning Brew website to subscribe Email Tyler at tyler[at]morningbrew[dot]com Follow Tyler on Twitter Check out Tyler's Medium article on How Morning Brew’s referral program built an audience of 1.5 million subscribers Listen to the podcast to learn how the team at Morning Brew grew the subscriber base for their email newsletter to 1.8 million -- and what you can do to get more email subscribers, too. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Tyler Denk, who is the Senior Product Lead at Morning Brew. Welcome, Tyler. Tyler Denk (Guest): Hey, thanks for having me. Tyler and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I am really excited to have you because I have spent quite a bit of time in the last couple of years studying what makes a great email newsletter, and a lot of that time was spent looking really closely at Morning Brew, which we can talk about in a minute. But before we jump into our topic for today, can you tell my audience a little bit about yourself, about Morning Brew and how you wound up doing what you do today? About Tyler Denk and Morning Brew Tyler: Yeah, sure. I don't know where to start when we... I might need to start with myself. Kathleen: Yes, that would be great. Tyler: Throughout being in Baltimore, Maryland, I was friendly with one of the co-founders of Morning Brew, so that alludes to how I got involved with Morning Brew. Eventually, I'll fast forward, went to the university of Maryland, did mechanical engineering. I taught myself how to code while in college and me and a few buddies came up with a concept for some web application startup company that we did in college. Essentially it was to help entrepreneurs and startups connect to other software developers. The problem we had was we couldn't code ourselves, ran into the problem getting to build the website. We needed to learn how to code. So that's what forced us into teaching ourselves how to code. We built that website, and running that company while in college was a tremendous experience and that's what got me involved in like the entrepreneurship startup software world. Fast forward a little bit from there, that we ended up eventually shutting down, but Alston, who is one of the co-founders from Morning Brew -- at the time there was just three people, they just graduated college -- were going full time with Morning Brew and they needed some tech help. They asked if I could freelance on the side before I started a full time job. Pretty much all summer spent building the website and working on Morning Brew and eventually that led to a full time offer. So I've been in Morning Brew pretty much from the beginning since when they went full time with it, two and a half, three years ago, and initially joined as a growth engineer and the first like, tech product growth hire essentially in that kind of world. Kathleen: I love so much about this story, but before I ask all these questions that I have in my head, I did not realize that we had the Maryland connection. Because I am in Annapolis right now, went to college in Baltimore. So we'll have a whole separate conversation about that after I turn off the recording so that we don't force everyone to listen to the Maryland conversation. And that's awesome. I love that you guys were basically a bunch of young guys who hadn't worked for years in the corporate world. The Morning Brew story Kathleen: Tell the audience a little bit about what Morning Brew is and what makes it different than other newsletters? Because I think that's important to this. Tyler: Yeah. So what Morning Brew started off as is a daily business newsletter that makes business news engaging and enjoyable to read. What the co-founders found at the time, they were both University of Michigan students in the business school there, that typically the resources that the students were using were The Wall Street Journal and a bunch of incumbent traditional media companies. They created a lot of content, but as far as our demographic goes, like a younger 18 to 34-year-old millennial, new in the workforce, it wasn't the most engaging content. So they started off by creating this daily email newsletter. Since then it has expanded beyond just a single daily newsletter. We have a few other verticals. We have Emerging Tech Brew, which is all of the emerging tech. Retail Brew covers the retail industry obviously, and then The Turnout, which is a politics and business intersection newsletter. And then from there we've also launched a podcast Business Casual, which is a weekly, interview-focused podcast of like CEOs, founders, et cetera. So we're currently undergoing the transition from single daily business newsletter to a media company, and that's been exciting to be a part of. Kathleen: I love that story so much because I think what's so fascinating to me is that email newsletters have been around for a really long time. And I think a lot of marketers when they think email newsletter, they think boring. And I've always believed that one of the reasons email newsletters became so boring is because they became a little bit too easy to do "well" from like a formatting standpoint. There's tools like MailChimp and Constant Contact and MyEmma that have given the average person templates and things that that made it really simple to send out a nicely formatted newsletter, but unfortunately what that resulted in was a lot of sameness and a lot of people just spitting out these newsletters that were, "Here's the latest four blogs we wrote." Really, really, really boring, check the box kind of stuff. And so I think when I hear you talk about you guys coming right out of school and creating this, in some ways it makes all the sense in the world to me because I think it almost takes a group of people who haven't been steeped in the way it's always been done to recognize that the way it's always been done sucks. Tyler: Yeah. Well, there's a few things there. I think email actually is very hard, in a lot of senses, especially aesthetically. So you mentioned how terrible email newsletters traditionally look. There's a lot of limitations to like what you can do in email. Like you can't have video, you can't make it look... I think Morning Brew does a good job of making it as good looking as an email can, but it is very difficult to play with and there are a lot of limitations there. So when people got used to digesting and consuming content online, the flexibility on the web is so much beyond what you can do in email. So I think that's one reason why at least aesthetically email doesn't live up to living content online. But then the other thing you hit on I think is really important, but a lot of these media companies monetize online through banner advertisements, and people display ads, and so their email newsletters were really just a drip of links to drive you back to their website, which if you are in your inbox and trying to consume content, that's not an ideal experience. That's an angle we took. We are very unconventional. I think you hit it pretty much on the head where when we started off there were two founders who did not have a media background. Our first writer was not a journalist by trade and so we never really did things how they were traditionally done. We were challenging the status quo from the get go. We didn't monetize. We still don't have internet on our website. Our website's not monetized at all. Right now, even though we are 100% ad-based, which we're looking to change, all of our advertisements are natively created in-house and put right within the newsletter. So that just flips the traditional media model on its head and we're just email first and have been hyper-focused on that. And I think that's just led to like a pretty interesting product. Morning Brew's growth Kathleen: Yeah, I have like a thousand questions I want to ask, but I want to make sure that we do some table setting for people listening, especially if they're not familiar with Morning Brew. So tell me when exactly did they start the newsletter? Tyler: So they started as two undergrad students at University of Michigan in 2015. One, Alex Lieberman, the CEO, he's a few years older than Austin, so he graduated and worked a full time job at a trading desk for two years while Austin was still at school. And then when Austin graduated, Alex quit, Austin moved to New York and they went full time with it, I would say March, 2017. Kathleen: Wow. So that was like what, two and a half years ago, not that long ago. And how many subscribers does Morning Brew have today? Tyler: Right now on our daily newsletter, we have 1.8 million subscribers. What makes Morning Brew special Kathleen: That's insane. So if you're listening and you have a newsletter, think about how many subscribers you've added in the last two and a half years. And I'm betting it's nowhere near almost 2 million. Like I said, I've been following you guys for a long time. You've published some really good content on how you grew Morning Brew, and the thing that I love about what you've said, and it's something I strongly believe, is that all of this growth, you can have the best growth hacks in the world, you can be an awesome marketer, but... and this applies really to marketing anything. If the product stinks, it's not going to work. Right? And so I'd love to just start out by talking about the product itself and what makes the Morning Brew email special and so appealing to the people who read it. Tyler: Yeah. I think it really starts and ends and all the credit goes to the content team. The writers that we have on staff here are incredible. They have a certain sense of like wit and humor where they can combine that aspect of writing and creativity with also like a deep understanding of what's important in the world, what is this news is actually relevant to our demographic and generation and so be able to fully understand the business landscape, take the top five, six, seven stories any given day and then throw some creative like whoever, what do you spin on the story to make it interesting and engaging for people to read? I think it's like the total package, and I know that's something that we focus on, so that's not my thing, my domain on the content side of things, but it has been a struggle to hire for, just given that there are a lot of very funny, clever people that don't have any sense of the business world and like economics, finance and everything in that realm. And then there's obviously the inverse of that of people who are super well-versed in finance and business but don't have the creativity to take these different stories and news topics and turn them into something extremely funny and engaging. So I think we've done a great job recruiting and hiring people who are extremely talented and smart. And the product itself shows when you read it. The importance of great content Kathleen: Yeah, it really does. There's a very distinct tone of voice and it's very consistent. And you touched on that earlier and I found this out because I actually reached out months back about advertising. And one of the things that I talked with, I don't remember who I spoke with, but whoever that was, we talked about how when you work with advertisers, you establish what the objective is. Is it brand awareness, is it lead gen, what have you. And then the advertiser supplies information, content, et cetera. But really your team in-house creates whatever is going in the newsletter. You're not like, copying and pasting stuff that an advertiser is giving you. And it seems like that allows you to really create native ads that are going to appeal to your audience. Because if they're subscribing, they already like that tone. So can you talk a little bit about that? Tyler: Yeah, for sure. So right now our ad and copywriting team is growing like wildfire. We have two in-house creative copywriters right now, hiring two more that are joining in the next few weeks. Essentially, that is one of our value props to advertisers and partners, that you give all of the key messaging points and initiatives that you want to be promoted and our internal creative team that works separately from the content team, so we do have a separation between content and the advertising and copywriting, but they're trained in the same manner to have that same type of wit and creativity on the copy with the advertisement. And so that's something even when I first started reading several years ago, that it was hard to differentiate just because it's written with the same tone, like the difference between a story and an advertisement, the wit and the creative thoughts put into the pieces are very similar. Obviously there are disclaimers. That one is an advertisement and the rest are stories, but outside of that if you were to read them blind, they do blend into each other pretty well, which is great for advertisements as they get incredible performance and engagement with all the ads that we create. And it also doesn't seem out of place in the newsletter itself, where we have this pretty consistent on invoice and then advertisement that's either like a disgusting banner ad or something that just seems very out of place. So it's all kind of one cohesive product. Kathleen: It really makes all the sense in the world just intuitively because you guys know your audience better than any advertiser ever could. So to think as an advertiser that you could do a better job of really resonating with that audiences is a pretty audacious thing. So it's pretty logical, but it's interesting to me how few companies do that, that really create the content for their advertisers. That seems like an interesting differentiator. Morning Brew's email newsletter design Kathleen: The other thing I wanted to ask you about before we get into like all the growth strategies, is just the aesthetics and you mentioned this also about how when you're creating content on the web you have a lot more in terms of options for how you aesthetically design something. But with email there are a lot of limitations. This something that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, again, because I think that there is a ton of sameness, especially with emails, where due to the proliferation of templates, a lot of them are like picture to the left top, each of the right link or something along those lines or picture, copy, link, picture, copy, link. And what I found is that a lot of email newsletters gratuitously include visuals that don't add any value like stock photography and things like that because either they think they have to or they somehow think that people want to see a more highly designed product. And what I've noticed, at least in my own case, is that when I open my email client and I use Outlook and Gmail, one personally, one for work, all of my email clients are set by default to not show images. So you open it up and all of those things people are adding in thinking this is going to make the experience better, they're not showing anyway. You have created a very minimalist experience that still has design elements but they seem to be more intentional. So what is the strategy behind that? Tyler: Yeah, I guess it starts with the template itself. So we don't use like the drag and drop that you see in most email service providers. We have like, a custom HTML template that we've like... You'd be surprised at how long it took to get to any final decision with the design of that. It went through like months of iteration of testing different colors, different themes, the different shadows which we have now. If you've been reading Morning Brew for several years, you've probably seen our newsletter template change significantly, like three different times. The most recent update that we did, I would say in the fall of 2019, so not too long ago, we went with like 3d card within the shadow type aesthetic. This is obviously all pending on what like email client you're using. Outlook is the laggard of the email world and so it's fairly ruminating. As limiting as email is, Outlook is like a decade behind every other email client, so that's very frustrating. Like we used gifs to give it in our emails as well and Outlook does not provide the functionality to play gifs, just as one example. But yeah, initially, we designed our website last summer and we had that card 3d aesthetic with the website and to build that consistency with email product as well, we mimic that in the newsletter. What's interesting actually about a template is email isn't really supposed to have those shadows. So that wasn't really, not to get too technical, but a very hacky way to achieve that, which I think is pretty unique in newsletters and not many other newsletters I follow have a style similar to that. Yeah. Ultimately what we want to do is provide various aesthetically pleasing experiences but not something that would take away from the content. So that's just a constant battle. We have two in-house designers that are tremendous and then we obviously have a content team and the design likes to flex their muscles and build the coolest looking email product or any product that we release. The design or the content team knows what's most important at the end of the day is being able to cohesively read the content and not let the design distract from what's actually being written. So it's a lot of just like finding the right balance there. But I am very confident in our current design. I'm a huge fan of it. It's really just making sure it looks good, and now looking at every other email client. Kathleen: Yeah, yeah. That is a tough balancing act, trying to get something that's going to work across email clients. Optimizing email images Kathleen: Although I have noticed a little hack that I think you guys have used and a few other newsletters I follow have used, which is the alt text for the images or the gifs that you're putting in the emails. You can be really strategic about what you put in those and instead of like describing the image, it could be like, "Turn your images on or click if you want to see this." It's almost like you can make your image alt text a call to action to get somebody to look at it. Tyler: Yeah. There's a few reasons we do that too. The way that I'm sure we'll get into this with the growth and everything, but the main metrics that email looks at because its fairly limiting, is how many unique opens you get from your reader base. And so the way that opens are calculated is like there's like a small, like one by one image pixel placed in every email, which isn't unique to us. This is like what every single email, whether it's an email newsletter or eCommerce like Amazon or jet.com or whatever, everyone just, they place these small pixels into an email and once that image loads it like fires essentially the pixel, which is how you can calculate whether or not someone opened their or never opened the email. So people who have their images disabled like you make it impossible for us to tell if you actually open the newsletter unless you click on a link. So that initially was like a growth hacking type way. We used to have the alt texts over and just say, "Please turn on your images." One, because we think it enhances the experience because our images are actually designed to enhance the experience and go along with the content that we're creating. But it also means if you turn on your images, we can track that you're opening the newsletter and thus to tell that you're engaged. We did get some negative feedback from I guess visually impaired readers who found it offensive to say, "Please turn on your images." So I think we've moved away from that, but that was the thought process, start finish with having that as the alt texts. Kathleen: Yeah, that's definitely a trade off because the visually impaired person doesn't get any value out of, "Please turn on your images." Tyler: Right. It's still a learning experience. Morning Brew's email subscriber growth Kathleen: Yeah. All right. So switching gears over to the growth, it's been unbelievable. So when you first came on there was like 100,000 subscribers, I think. Tyler: Yeah. Yes. Around that- Kathleen: And now it's almost 2 million. Tyler: Yeah, it's been fun. Kathleen: In under two years? It's pretty unbelievable. Can you maybe like... Let's start with big picture. What were some of the key leavers that drove growth for you in that time period? Tyler: Yeah. And I'll start off by saying since about a year ago we hired new people in the growth team and I've actually moved towards the product in tech. So I don't want to say that I have done everything for growth but when you specifically reached out in the referral program is something that we are pretty well known for, which is what the article is about. That is something that I built in the early days. I just wanted to make sure we gave the proper shout out to the growth team is doing an incredible job right now. Kathleen: Absolutely. Tyler: Yeah. When I first joined, we didn't turn on paid acquisition until early 2018, so the first six to eight months when I was on the team, it was all about taking our current audience of 100,000 subscribers and seeing how we can incentivize them to share with other people. We gave away lots of awards, which have gotten better over time, but initially it was really just, "We have this subset of 100,000 readers, what can we possibly do to encourage them to share it with other people?" We were partnering with like clubs on campuses, and what we'll get to as we created this like "share with friends" section within the newsletter and on the website, that has been unbelievably effective and it really just came out of necessity. That's one big thing that I think our founders did an incredible job with, didn't raise any large venture funding. So rather than saying, "Let's raise $5 million and put it all into acquisition and just burn through money to grow," what that forced us to do is we wanted to make the product as good as possible so people would only share the newsletter if it was inherently good. And so the content team did a tremendous job of making sure that our readers were engaged and then also, instead of focusing on just burning money on Facebook and Instagram and any other growth acquisition channel, it forced us to grow organically and focus on this referral program, understanding our readers, what incentivizes them and what are the different levers and triggers we can pull to have them go from a casual reader to someone who works with their entire network. Building a subscriber referral program Kathleen: Yeah. It's a great point about having to get creative if you're not taking venture capital. I've seen a lot of newsletters that have had referral programs. I think yours has stood out because of the comprehensiveness with which you promote it, how easy you make it to use. You've written an article on Medium about this that has a lot of detail that I thought was really interesting because I think the concept of creating a referral program for your newsletter is, it's appealing, but the actual execution can be pretty daunting. So can you talk about how you set that up? Tyler: Yeah, I'll skip over the technical details because those aren't too exciting to talk about. But at a very high level, every user has a unique referral. They are incentivized both in the newsletter and on the website. So we created two different hubs. The sharing and referral process is built into the product itself. So in every single day's newsletter, towards the bottom there's a Sharing section which has, and it's like customly created, depending on how many referrals you have to say you have point referrals, you are only X referrals away from the next reward, as sort of like a character and stick or whatnot to kind of incentivize you to continue to share. It then gives you a referral link which you can tap and share with your network or there's a button that says, "Click to share." And so that's really the action we want you to take. If you click on that button it takes you out of email and onto our website to your own like referral hub, is what we call it. And obviously, as we've discussed, the flexibility on web is a lot more advanced than within email. So once you get to that hub on our website, you have all of the rewards and their programs like listed out for you, and that's the incentive part. We have several levers in terms of you can share on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, SMS, whatever, and buttons to do all of that. And then it even has an invite people via email feature. So you can import your contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and then send emails just by tapping on your contacts, which we already have a pre-written blurb. You can customize that if you'd like. And all of those different levers include your referral link. And so really it's a combination of educating readers that the referral program exists, incentivizing them with the different rewards that we have, and then providing all the tools that people have asked for, whether it's Facebook or Twitter or email, and making it as streamlined and easy as possible to get their referral code out into the world. Kathleen: Yeah, I feel like there's like two halves of this. One half is if somebody decided to refer, making it super, super easy. And I love that you guys have so many options for like hitting a button and sharing it or importing your contacts or... You've basically given every possible option somebody could want, you have a solution for it. But the other half of that equation is getting somebody to want to do a referral in the first place, because most people with most newsletters you see a lot which is like forward to a friend or share with a friend but no one ever clicks those. The thing I've noticed about Morning Brew is really two-fold. One is you have done a great job of having that module at the end of the newsletter and that makes it really visual. You always can see like what are the things I'm going to get if I hit this button, which is very effective. And then you mentioned those periodic give-aways. True confession, that is totally what got me to refer for the first time. I think you had one, it was a while back. I think it was when you were doing the giveaway of a trip to Singapore and I was like, "What the hell? You never know." Tyler: We were still working that way with the guy who won that. They are going on a honeymoon I think in a few weeks. Kathleen: Oh that's amazing. Yeah. I never won anything but I was like, "I'm going to post this link to Facebook and have three people sign up. I'll get entered and can't hurt." Right? So I'm somebody who never ever does those things and it got me to do it. So it was definitely that. Tyler: There's a few things there. One, it starts to end with the product itself because we are content and we're written in a certain voice and tone, we are supposed to be your best friend in email. So something about what the content team does really well is making you feel as if we are like, we kind of know each and that brand affinity that we've created is probably our biggest asset. If you can have all these different types of rewards, but if you don't really align with the brand itself, I'm not incentivized to wear a shirt or have a coffee mug of a company I really don't care for. So it really starts with the content and just creating something that people can align with. So that is definitely first and foremost. Beyond that... Yeah, the goal is to get people to their first referral because 90% of people don't ever share. And I think that's just like the nature of most people aren't trying to be that annoying brand advocate that is posting in every group chat and on LinkedIn about this different service or product or whatever. And so I think it's hard to get someone to make that commitment to initially share the newsletter. So that is ultimately the hardest thing we do, is taking someone from zero to one. Once you get someone to a single referral, it confirms a lot of different things. It shows that they know that it verifies that they know it exists. So they are fully aware that you have a referral program, which before they ever shared, you don't know if they ever make it to the bottom of the newsletter or they're skipping over the different sections when you do reference that referral program. So the only way we are 100% positive you know it exists is after you have shared. It shows that they know how to share. So they have either copy and pasted it or posted on Facebook or shared on Twitter, but they have chosen their preferred action of how to share the newsletter and it confirms what they know how to, it shows that they are incentivized by the rewards because if they weren't incentivized, very few people do it out of the goodness of their heart unless they really think it would benefit a friend or family member. And then they've already received some sort of gratification. So after you share the newsletter, you receive an email saying like, "Thank you so much for sharing whatever, whatever," and acknowledging that they have taken that action. So because it confirms and verifies all of those things, the way that we can approach readers that have already shared a newsletter is entirely different than to people who have never shared. So that again is like the hardest thing that we do is just getting that very first referral and from there it becomes a lot easier to go downhill. Email nurturing for new subscribers Kathleen: Now, speaking of that first referral, I thought it was really interesting that you recognize that somebody is most likely to refer at the end of their first week of being a subscriber because that's when it's still new to them, they're excited, they're starting to see the value. So you guys introduced an email, I think it was like around day seven or eight, is that right? Tyler: Day seven. And I think we can do a better job of testing that. That was a hypothesis we'd had a while ago that two or three days seems too soon, after the novelty wears off, like two or three weeks, it seems like you may have missed the bright spot of where they're most likely to share the new newsletter. We've set upon seven days, we've done some tests around that and previously it has confirmed that seven worked best for us. But I think we can always go back and reevaluate that. We can also get a little bit more creative with it and rather than being set days on your first seven days, you may only open one newsletter, you may open all six newsletters, maybe we do it based on how many emails were opened rather than a set period of time. But yeah, we've been testing that one day email and there's just so many things you can do there. Where that is initially, we have a small section at the bottom of the newsletter that introduces the share off section and tries to encourage people to share. This email is the only, I guess, it's put spam email that we really send kind of unsolicited, but the value is clearly there because a lot of people do acknowledge it, take the action, start to share the newsletter. So the ROI of the email is 100% worth the 1% of people who get annoyed that it's a bit spammy, but it also is just a full email dedicated to our referral program, what they can get out of it and the different rewards, incentives and everything else. Kathleen: Now, one of the dangers of having a referral program, especially when you're trying to get new email addresses, is people can give you a lot of garbage. 123@abc.com, don't email me@stop.com. I've seen like every iteration of clever fake email, so how do you guys deal with that? Tyler: Yeah. Up until two years ago we didn't really do much with that. We just trusted that people were genuine, nice people, which is not always. Kathleen: Sadly the world is full of people who cheat. How Morning Brew approaches email list hygiene Tyler: Yeah. Once we started to put more investment into our rewards and they were actually like higher quality shirts and nice pull necks, et cetera, we put into place like a double opt-in type thing, which is pretty common. A lot of emails, whether you are signing up like an eCommerce platform or a newsletter, a lot of them require you to double authentic from your email. So basically if I were to share my referral with you, you sign up, you actually aren't on the email list and I don't receive credit until you check your email and confirm that that email does exist. Once you do that, then you're added to our normal daily lists where you'll receive the email regularly. I'll receive credit and that's how that process looks. There are still people who use like temporary emails or disposable emails. They'll play with the period with their email. There's a bunch of different tricks you can do, but me personally, I get email alerts every time someone hits a milestone and it lists out every email that they've referred. And so it's very easy to identify patterns of people trying to play with the system and we have a list of 700 fake emails that we check against before you put it in. And that list grows every day by every person who tries to hit the system. So our like defense mechanisms I guess are constantly getting better and no one gets through the system now, which is good. You might- Kathleen: That sounds good. Tyler: ... [crosstalk 00:32:37] momentarily but we'll catch you, bump your referral count back down to zero and we will add those fake emails to the list of forbidden emails. Kathleen: Yeah. I imagine that the double opt-in process results in some real people deciding not to follow through and so it probably like has lowered your conversion a little bit. But did that hit you took... was that made up for by the improvement in the quality of the subscribers you got? Tyler: Yeah. It was definitely a trade off. I think when I first joined we were just growing at all costs, especially when we started using paid acquisition and any bit of friction to joining the list was 100% against what we wanted to do at the time. So it was a trade off adding a double opt-in. What we've seen is the conversion rate is like over 85% I believe the last time I checked. So it is very high. And then one thing I actually wanted to bring up earlier in terms of consumers and subscribers or whatnot is the focus that we've placed on quality over just the vanity metric of total subscribers. We actually have over 4 million emails, but we've turned over 2 million, just because there's a lot of either competitors or companies that would boast about their top line subscriber number, which sounds great for a newsletter article or something online, but in actuality, if someone hasn't opened in six months, there's absolutely no value for them to be on your list and without completely nerding out on email, it actually makes your email harder to be delivered to the inbox because believe it or not, Gmail is very smart. And so when they know that you have a 50% open rate, they're going to send more of your mail directly to the primary inbox because it's something that people clearly want. If they see your open rate is 5%, they're going to send more of your mail to spam because obviously not many people want it. So it's like a virtuous cycle and it works against you if you have people on your list that aren't opening. So we have very strict turning practices. So that's a very long winded way of answering your question of, yes, it has lowered the absolute conversion rate but it does ensure higher quality and at the end of the day that's what we're looking for. Kathleen: Well, and I would imagine as a business that's really... the revenue model is from advertising. It's almost more important to have engaged subscribers than it is to have like a larger number of subscribers because as somebody who looks at advertising, I'm not just looking at how many subscribers you have, I'm looking at like what's your track record of clicks through to get a sense for what I can expect from a traffic perspective. So I could see where that would be really critical. What is your rule of thumb for how long you let somebody stay on the list inactive before you clean that up? Tyler: Yeah. We actually have like two different filters. One is on the... we call it like the filter, which is when you first joined the list, if you don't open in about three weeks, we send you a, "Hey, you signed up for this three weeks ago, you haven't opened any newsletters. Are you still interested?" And if you don't respond that you're interested, we will remove you within three or four days after those three weeks. And that's a little bit more uncommon I think. But we do have a fairly large paid acquisition budget, so that gets any garbage emails out really quickly if they don't start engaging from the get go. And then on the back end is what most companies, traditionally it was just like a reengagement campaign. And for us it's two months. So after 60 days, if you have not opened a newsletter or clicked anything in 60 days, we'll send an email checking-in on you. And if you don't engage with that checking-in email, then we will remove you. So we're getting rid of subscribers on the front end and in the backend. How referrals drove Morning Brew's growth Kathleen: Got it. All right. Well, I feel like we could talk about this like all day long, but I want to zero in now on what was the impact of that referral program? So you've grown considerably. You mentioned that you started including paid acquisition in the mix. What portion or percentage of your total subscriber growth can you attribute to referrals? Tyler: Yeah, a lot. I think to date we've had over 250,000 people refer at least one person, and so that is individual people. Many of those people have dozens if not hundreds of referrals. So it's definitely a good chunk of our growth and it comes at a very competitive price. So for paid acquisition, it varies channel by channel, but like a new email lead should be anywhere from like $3 to $6 or potentially more. Our referral program, like let's say stickers is the reward, you get five referrals. We pay for those five referrals less than 25 cents per acquisition. So if you were to compare the cost of the acquired users through a referral program versus any of our paid acquisition channels, it's a fraction of what we pay. Also, as I'm sure you would imagine, referred users are typically pretty highly engaged because they have been double opted-in because they came from someone, whether it's a friend or coworker or family member recommending the product. And so there's just a lot of alignment in terms ending up being a highly engaged reader and people who are referred are also more likely to refer other people. So it really is this virtuous cycle of higher quality, more likely to refer. The ROI is incredible and because people are sharing on social networks, even if it doesn't lead to a direct conversion, that exposure that we're getting in like your Twitter feed or Facebook or whatever else does add impressions to people who will hopefully eventually join us. Lessons learned from Morning Brew's experience Kathleen: So two follow-on questions. First is, knowing what you know now, is there anything you would've done differently in the referral program if you could rewind the clock? Tyler: Yeah, a few things. Two stand out. One is the rewards that we came up with. We came up with on our own initially, I think, and that was before we knew the success that would be, and obviously we can and have changed the different rewards, but I would recommend with starting by talking to your users and readers or whoever and really identifying what their pain points are, what their interests are and what would really incentivize them to share the newsletter. I think just people have a hard time talking directly to their users. It almost seems like too intuitive and too easy to do, but especially in email, you're always a reply away. So responding to a few different readers and just seeing what incentivizes them, I think it really boosts the effectiveness of a referral program. The second thing is while some of the rewards are like additional content, so at three referrals you have Light Roast, which is like our exclusive Sunday newsletter, which comes at no additional cost to us, which is great in regards to ROI. The management of the swag. So we also have a lot of physical swag and so that's something we didn't really plan for. And so at one point our office was half desk, half boxes of swag, and we got a bunch of interns from NYU to come in and help out with that. We actually outsource that now, but that was a huge headache and something that as we grew pretty quickly and the referral program grew in effectiveness, we didn't really have a plan to actually store, ship, manage and be on top of this entire swag operation, which became the biggest headache that wasn't initially a part of my job. So that's something to think about in advance. The future for Morning Brew Kathleen: Yeah, those are good pieces of advice. Second question is, looking to the future, and I know you've shifted in your roles, but I'm curious if you have any sense of, given where things stand now, what does the future look like in terms of the referral program and other acquisition channels? Again, you mentioned that you guys are doing some paid acquisition. Is the referral program going to still be a part of the plan and how is it going to evolve? Tyler: Yeah, I don't foresee the referral program going anywhere anytime soon. It's been so quarter growth and it really just assists with everything else. It's a huge boost in the business in general. It's pretty mixed. We have a fairly large paid acquisition budget, which consists of everything that you'd expect from Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, buying ads on Google, Gmail and other newsletters even. But the referral program has been a huge success and I think from there, it's really just focusing on how can we continue to optimize it. So for better or worse, it is a little hands off or it can be so we can go months without touching it and it really just operates on its own. Everything is set up with automated emails. It's built into the newsletter template itself. It really does run by itself, but there's so many different triggers and parts of the funnel that you can optimize. So that one week email that we check-in on that first week that you can change the subject line. You can change the days until you receive that email. The copy itself, you can incentivize Light Roasts or stickers or you can incentivize all of the rewards and just test the different copy there. You could also throw in like a second email somewhere down the journey and then at each milestone, like when you receive stickers, we send an email asking one, for your information so we can send the stickers to you, but then also incentivizing you to hit that next milestone, which is the bottle opener at 10. So it collects information but then hopefully shuts you down the funnel. We can test each one of those milestone emails at different ways in terms of what we're incentivizing you with, what's the language we're using, what's the subject line? So there's like an infinite amount of levers we can pull with that. It really just becomes an opportunity cost of just 1% here and 1% there add up to hundreds or thousands of new subscribers per day or per week or is it fairly maxed out under other levers that we can spend our time pulling? Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. All right, well we're going to shift gears now because if we don't, we're going to run out of time. So there's two questions that I always ask all my guests and I would love to get your answers to these. The first is really this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound? Tyler: Yeah, to be honest, I struggled with this question. Kathleen: Oh wait, why did you struggle? Because you don't think that anybody's doing it well or- Tyler: Not that, but I feel like it's such an integral strategy for so many different companies and the thing is like the better you are at it, the harder it is to tell that it's a part of like this larger ecosystem strategy, and so everything kind of blends together in terms of like a content strategy, but really it's a top of funnel inbound approach to have you go down funnel and make a purchase or join whatever it is. And I think most modern companies focus so much on doing both that it just becomes really hard to tell where you are in the funnel and what their actual true incentive is. Although usually it's always just to get into your wallet and have you pack your things. What helped me actually on our podcast, Business Casual, we just recently interviewed Gary Vaynerchuk or Gary Vee, how a lot of people refer to him. I personally am not a huge fan of the content, but in listening to the episode, I actually did think he made a lot of very creative, also in terms of he produces so much different content natively on all these different social platforms and explicitly does not plug his products or anything down funnel on purpose because his goal is to build an audience that trusts him and really engages with his content, knowing at some point you will make the leap if you really are aligned with what he's saying and his messaging, find the products down funnel, but he wants you to eventually get it to him. But I did think it was interesting when he was talking about how a lot of his friends and competitors in the space think that he's an idiot for not explicitly calling out his products and really using these channels that are getting millions of video views to promote products. Rather he refuses to promote his products. And it's kind of playing the long game and his inbound marketing strategy of just creating good content very consistently. So regardless of whether or not, I'm a fan of the content, I thought that his approach to that was pretty clever and pretty interesting and he seems to be doing very well. So I would find that to be pretty successful. And then another one that I just... I love Airbnb as a company and always have, but Instagram is great for a lot of brands. Airbnb is unique because everyone loves vacation, everyone loves getting away and the way that they create and post mostly on Instagram of all of these also houses and these destinations around the world. But really it incentivizes you to go onto Airbnb, look at those and then hopefully book them. I just thought that was an interesting inbound strategy. Kathleen: It's so funny that you call that out because I have totally gotten sucked in to going to the Airbnb website because I see like a picture of a tree house or something and I'm like, "Where is that tree house? That's so amazing. I want to stay there." But then I feel like I get to the site and I can never find those cool houses. It's like- Tyler: Yeah, so if you follow them on Instagram, I'm pretty sure that they tag the place or at least makes it a little easier to find. But yeah. Kathleen: Yeah, they have some awesome properties. Now, the Gary V example is great because you're right, like you don't have to be a fan of the content to appreciate the approach. And that's the thing. You talked about how Morning Brew's really becoming a media company and at some point there was a place I used to work that was making that transition to a media company. And we really looked at it as with media companies, you're building the audience first and then if you build a great audience you can worry about the product later. And there are so many examples of that done well. That's the whole business model that Gwyneth Paltrow built Goop on. It was just really a blog in the beginning and now she has a ton of products that she can charge an ungodly sum of money for and people are just eating them up because that trust is there. And so to me, that's one of the big differences between like traditional business marketing and media company marketing. Business marketing, you have the product first and then you try to build the audience. Media companies build the audience and then they introduce the product and that's like a really subtle but important difference. Tyler: Yeah. That's really great. Kathleen: Well, this has been so much fun. One last question for you. The biggest complaint I hear from digital marketers is that staying up with all the changes in the world of digital marketing is like drinking from a fire hose. So how do you stay up to date and educated for yourself? Tyler: Yeah. To be really transparent, I struggled with both these questions. I'm obviously in the newsletter space and I get a lot of information from different newsletters. Shameless plug, I think we are releasing a marketing group newsletter sometime in 2020 so that should be everyone's go-to resource when that launches. And- Kathleen: You've heard it here first. Tyler: I think I broke news here. But I'm pretty up-to-date on whether it's like different podcasts or different newsletters and there's not really just one that I stick to, my inbox gets 25, 30 different newsletters a day. Podcasts I'm way too ADHD where I just jump from anything that's recommended but a lot of them are from like the business startup culture and like founder story type podcast. And so through that I think it's just like I find like pure marketing material to be a little repetitive, where if you actually take a step back and see like some of these founders stories of how they grew their company to be very successful, a lot of the success comes from creativity and just being aware of the business environment and your surroundings. And so what I've seen, there was somewhere... Like in a random example, someone advertised in a fortune cookie at a restaurant that I was in and just something like that that I would never think about, but understanding that anything could be an advertisement. I really just think the more exposure you have very broadly to life, but like the different experiences and what different companies have done, I think you can almost turn anything into a way to share your message or to get your voice or brand in front of a select group of people. You just have to be aware of the different surroundings and what has worked for other people. So I'm not a huge fan of Facebook changed their algorithm and now marketers should shift X dollars to do this type of campaign. I'm more interested in what other companies have done in town, very successful, and something that actually makes you think to share your message. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a great point because I do think some of the marketing, educational content out there really contributes to group think. And if you're doing the same thing everybody else is doing, you might grow but you're not going to have exponential growth the way that you guys have. Tyler: [crosstalk 00:50:16] one thing that we have always been good at at Morning Brew is jumping on new platforms or new ad units when they become available. So specifically digital advertising. Anytime that a company like Facebook or LinkedIn or like for example TikTok would be the new example. Before that becomes absolutely flooded with every competitor trying ad placements there, you get a lot cheaper CPMs when you jump to it first. So rather than waiting for everyone and their mother to tell you that this has worked really well, if you hear that there's a new ad placement product or medium, being one of the first to test, it has its ups and downs, but if you're creative I think there's a lot of success to be had there. How to connect to Tyler and Morning Brew Kathleen: Love it. That's a great tip. All right. Well, we're at the top of our hour. So if somebody wants to learn more... First of all, how can somebody subscribe to Morning Brew? Because that's the most important thing. Tyler: That is the most important. So morningbrew.com, our landing page's optimized for conversion. You can't do anything but sign up. So go to morningbrew.com and sign up. Kathleen: And then refer your friends of course, because you can get really cool swag and maybe even win a trip to Singapore someday. And then if somebody has questions or wants to learn more, I will put the link to your Medium article where you go into a lot more detail on what we talked about today. I'll put that in the show notes. But if someone wants to reach out to you, is there a great way for them to connect with you online? Tyler: Yeah. So I'm also shamelessly trying to grow my Twitter audience. So I am @denk_tweets. It is my Twitter handle. So I respond to tweets. My email is easy to find. It's just tyler@morningbrew for your responses to the inbox as well. So either one of those, whichever you prefer, I'll be answering. Kathleen: And definitely head to the show notes for those links because if you try to Google Tyler, you might accidentally reach out and connect with Tyler Denk who was a model on The Amazing Race, which I found out when I first tried to Google you. Tyler: Yeah. I'm trying to beat him in SEO, so my name appears first, but I also talked to him funny enough from the SEO. Kathleen: Yeah, and so maybe you can connect with both, but if you want the Tyler Denk who's at Morning Brew, head to the show notes for the podcast and I'll have all those links in there. Follow him on Twitter, subscribe to the Morning Brew. You know what to do next... Kathleen: And if you liked what you heard or learned something new today on the podcast, please also head to Apple Podcasts and leave a five star review for the Inbound Success Podcast because that's how we get in front of new listeners. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Tyler. This was a lot of fun. Tyler: Yeah, this was great. Thanks for having me.

How do the world's best marketers and salespeople use LinkedIn? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, DigitalMarketer Head of Partnerships Marcus Murphy takes a deep dive on LinkedIn and shares his tips for using the platform to effectively connect and start conversations with your audience. In addition to his work at DigitalMarketer, Marcus also teaches the "Intro to Marketing on LinkedIn" course on LinkedIn Learning and is a member of LinkedIn's customer advisory board for LinkedIn sales solutions.  When it comes to LinkedIn, Marcus really knows what he's talking about, and he shares all of his tips in this episode. Highlights from my conversation with Marcus include: Marcus joined DigitalMarketer after helping companies like Yelp and InfusionSoft (now Keap) scale and build out partner programs. He is an avid user of LinkedIn and teaches a training course on how to get the most out of it. While most online LinkedIn trainings focus on how to optimize your profile, Marcus says the key to success on LinkedIn is all about the content you create. There are about 9 billion content impressions a week on LinkedIn and that content is driven by about 1% of LinkedIn's user base. Marcus recommends that you begin by using your profile summary to tell your story and start a conversation (check out his profile for a great example of this) rather than simply list the places you've worked. When it comes to creating content on LinkedIn, Marcus says not to wait until you have the perfect post. Share what you're thinking, ask a question, or ask for help. These are all great ways to start a conversation. You also don't need to come up with something new to say every time. Some of the biggest thought leaders on LinkedIn (think Gary Vaynerchuk) have been saying the same thing for years and it is their consistency that makes their message so powerful. Marcus says to find one tip that you think is useful, and go and implement it. Don't try and do everything at once. When it comes to posting things on LinkedIn, Marcus recommends using whatever format (text, video, pictures, etc.) makes the most sense given your content, but he did say that text-only posts seem to be performing particularly well right now. He doesn't think it hurts post performance to include links in the post itself, but he strongly advises against including more than one link as it can get very confusing. Marcus likes to use emojis to convey tone in his LinkedIn posts, but warns against their overuse. LinkedIn gives users the option of setting the button in their profile to say either "follow" or "connect." Marcus says you should have it say "connect" until you have a very strong following and then you can determine if it makes sense to switch it over. He does not advise connecting with every single person who sends a request - instead, he says you should look at the context of the connection request and engage with the people you want to have conversations with.  LinkedIn is introducing a number of new features, such as newsletters, and Marcus says to be on the lookout for more episodic content in the future. Resources from this episode: Visit the DigitalMarketer website Learn more about DigitalMarketer's event Traffic & Conversion Summit Subscribe to the DigitalMarketer blog Connect with Marcus on LinkedIn (tell him you heard him on The Inbound Success Podcast!) Listen to the podcast to learn how Marcus has mastered LinkedIn for sales and marketing - and how you can, too. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and this week my guest is Marcus Murphy who's the head of business development and partnerships at DigitalMarketer. Welcome, Marcus. Marcus Murphy (Guest): Hey. Thanks for having me. Marcus and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I am psyched to have you here. You are like my LinkedIn guru. I've been following you on with what you do on LinkedIn, and then I see that you're on LinkedIn's Customer Advisory Board. You're teaching classes. You are like Mister LinkedIn these days. Marcus:You know what's kind of funny? I fell into it, because honestly I loved the platform when I was way back in the day when it was kind of like just for your resume. I was like, "Wait a minute. I can start sharing stuff, connecting with people," and now it's my pipeline. So, it was way back in the day when I was a sales guy, and then now still a washed up sales guy, but I use it now for way more than that, like content distribution. Being on the board, I get to see some fun tools. So, yeah, I'm all in. I'm super in. About Marcus Murphy and DigitalMarketer Kathleen:That's so cool. I can't wait to just pick your brain about this topic. LinkedIn is my favorite platform as well. It's the one I'm the most active on. But before we do that, if there is anybody out there who's listening and maybe doesn't know who you are or isn't following you on LinkedIn or isn't familiar with DigitalMarketer, can you talk about your story, what you do, what DigitalMarketer is, and just how you got to where you are today? Marcus:Yeah, absolutely. It's a fun story. My wife and I got married in 2009, so we just celebrated 10 years of marriage, which was pretty cool. Kathleen:Happy anniversary. Marcus:Thank you. Went to Italy and literally I'm trying to get rid of all that weight we gained over there. But, yeah, basically we were like ... Man, we did something crazy. We got married. We started it a company, and we moved from New York to Phoenix, Arizona for no reason at all, didn't know anybody, but kind of ran that company for six years and then finally sold it, because my wife was like, "You know what? We want to start a family. Why don't you think about maybe joining another company? It'd be a little easier for us." So, we did that. I joined a little company, like a little startup called Yelp at the time, and I immediately kind of start to rise through there. I was in sales, account management. Then I became national trainer there and a bunch of different stuff. I left that go join another small company at the time called Infusionsoft and went through that growth period, which was cool, with them as their partner development manager, so to build out their channel sales. Then there, I met this guy who ... I was speaking somewhere, and I met this little guy. I saw him, and it was really funny. They were like, "That's Ryan Deiss," and I was like, "Yeah, whatever. I don't care." Kathleen: Who's that dude? Marcus: I don't care who that is. There was a huge crowd around him, and I didn't really want to meet him. I saw him speak on stage, and I was like, "Man." I went home that night. It was probably 2:00 in the morning back home. I was in London at the time. I remember telling my wife, "I think I found the guy I want to work for. I think I just saw him. He blew my mind." So, just so happened to be that Infusionsoft had a partnership with DigitalMarketer, and they put me in charge of that strategic partnership, which was really cool. So, I flew down here. Ryan and I became friends. We spoke together, did some initiatives together, did some deals together. Then when this idea of DigitalMarketer needs to build out a kind of customer-facing sales team, partner program, customer success care, they needed all of that, and they were looking for somebody to build it. I remember seeing that job description and texting Ryan. I was like, "What do you think?" He was like, "Absolutely not." I think he didn't want to ruin our friendship, but I also I was kind of like forbidden fruit, being that I worked for a company that was kind of a partner. He's like, "You'd have to get your C suite to say yes to that," so I literally got my C suite to say yes. I walked in, and this is actually to Clate's benefit, the CEO and founder of Infusionsoft, now Keap. Yeah, I said, "Hey, if there's an executive position here available where I could grow into this, let me know," and he said ... To their core values, he stuck. He said, "You know what? I want you to succeed. I think this is a huge opportunity." And I said, "Great. If I don't get the job, can I come back and work here?" He was just like ... He said, "Yeah. You're pushing it, but yes." I went and interviewed, and that was almost four years ago. I came in, and I built out all those teams for about two and a half years, and then transitioned. I hired my replacement. I stole a friend of mine from Tableau in Washington, DC, to come and be the head of sales, and he's doing a fantastic job about a year in. Since then, I've transitioned into partner development, business development, strategic partnerships. I speak a ton. Ryan and I and a couple of other people, we actually are more personality, forward-facing on stages and all that good stuff. Yeah. And here I am today, just finally getting on your podcast. I've actually made it. You know? Kathleen: Oh, I don't know about that. I think I've made it by getting you on as a guest. Marcus: No way. Yeah, that was a very abridged version of the story, but it's equally ... Sometimes it's kind of funny how you end up where you're at, and it was just a series of little, tiny decisions, and I'm just the most fortunate person on the planet to land where I did. Kathleen: That's awesome. As you were telling that story, there were so many things where I was like, "Ooh, I want to talk to him about that, and that, and that," the first one being I did not know that you owned a business with your wife for six years right after you got married. Marcus: Yeah. Kathleen: Here's what's interesting. I got married, within two months, started a business with my husband, which we had for 11 years. Marcus: And it was smooth sailing and you guys didn't fight at all. Kathleen: Oh. Oh, yeah. No, I still say til this day that my greatest accomplishment in life is that I am still married after owning a business with him for 11 years. Marcus: It's so true. Kathleen: We figured it out, but there did come that point, and that was part of why we actually exited our businesses. It was like we need to change gears. So, three years ago, for the first time in our marriage, we didn't work together. Marcus: Wow. Kathleen: Which was great, but also it was a little bittersweet, because we do work well together. Marcus: Yeah. Yeah, I think my- Kathleen: But that's okay. Marcus: My wife is the opposite of me in so many ways, which is great. I am just gregarious and out there and whatever, and Gina's a planner. She takes her time. She's all those things that where friction ... Friction can create a rub that's not great, or it can create fire, and a good kind of fire, and I think we really harnessed that for a bunch of years. We were traveling a ton. Then when we started to think about kids, it really just slowed down. We're like, "You know what? I think we should focus on our family," and that was great. That actually pushed me in the right direction to end up here, and so that was the coolest decision we made. Kathleen: That's awesome. I love it. I've seen you speak. You're really great, as is Ryan. You guys are like a power duo. Marcus: The best. Kathleen: No, really. Marcus: He's phenomenal. I always laugh, because he is ... We obviously have different styles. I think I'm so much more ... Ryan's a little irreverent. I maybe go way over that. I think we also kind of really lean on this edgy humor, kind of we think we're funny and so we need people to laugh and whatever. But we've sat in enough audiences over the last 10 years to really think, "Man, people are coming there to, one, learn, but they're really coming there to be entertained." I think there's an entertainment element that we lean on heavily in our camp and, just everywhere we go, we like to leave an impression. Hopefully somebody walks away being like, "Wow, I really enjoyed myself, and I learned something." That is the ultimate compliment. Kathleen: I can definitely say that's the experience I've had. So, mission accomplished. LinkedIn is making a comeback Kathleen: Now, with LinkedIn, it's been interesting to me, because I feel like in marketing it's sort of like ... Marketing's a little bit like fashion where, if you wait long enough, everything comes back, right? Marcus: True. Kathleen: If culottes can come back, then anything can come back. Marcus: Yes. Kathleen: In marketing, I think LinkedIn is really ... Not that it ever totally went away, but it's really having almost like a golden age. Marcus: A resurgence. It is. It was. It was. It was literally just a site that you'd put your resume, and why would you go on there unless you were trying to get a job or looking for someone to hire? I think when Jeff came in and really took over, he really started "Oh, well, why don't we add ..." The first acquisition they had was like, "Why don't we add an article component? Why don't we add ..." Then it turned into like a full newsfeed. Okay, people are coming here every day to consume content, to learn, to connect, and they're doing more than just using it as their online resume or CV, and that was like the major twist. But for a while there, it was just ... It wasn't going anywhere. It was completely stagnant for a really long time. Kathleen: Yeah. It was boring. Marcus: Yes, boring. Kathleen: I mean, I'll be honest. Almost every update you used to see, at least what I used to see, it just seemed like somebody was auto-posting their blogs. Marcus: Totally. Kathleen: There was not a lot of interaction. Marcus: Stuffy. It was like, "Oh, I'm on Facebook. My mom's on LinkedIn." You know what I mean? Kathleen: Yes. Marcus: And her coworkers are on there, and that's kind of how it felt. It's been around for a long time, so it's not like this is just some new, hot thing. They've got about 645 million people on the platform, but the majority of that came in this resurgence period. The last five years has been a major uptick when they started to add a bunch of things to make it sexier and more appealing for people to want to be there every day. That was a big, big difference. Kathleen: Yeah, no, I've had a lot of business owners, marketers, entrepreneurs say to me in the last year or so that one of their goals is to really invest more in LinkedIn and in their personal LinkedIn presence. It's easy to kind of cover the basics and be like, well, flesh out your profile and make sure you're following people and checking people you should follow and posting things, but there's so much ... As you say, there's so much more to it. How to get the most out of LinkedIn today Kathleen: So, if somebody came to you and said that to you today, with all the functionality that LinkedIn has and knowing how it works today, what would you say to them about how to really build a robust presence on the platform? Marcus: Yeah. You know, it's funny. People ask me to do a lot of things. I have a bunch of trainings out there for optimizing your profile and whatever. In fact, you can go do all of that stuff for free on Google. There is a million people talking about the 10 things, the 5 things, to optimize your profile. But what people aren't talking about and what's really helping people win on the platform is obviously ... It's not a secret. It's content. But it's not just content. People are putting things out in the world for sure. There's literally nine billion content impressions a week on LinkedIn, which blows people's minds. The other statistic that's staggering is the one that, of those nine billion content impressions, all of those are being driven by almost 1% of the population on there. So, it's about five million people pushing all the content. That literally equals viral, by the way, and the reason why it's viral is because, if you put out a piece of content to ... Let's say I have 15,000 followers on LinkedIn. If all of them see that I put out a piece of content, and they engage with it, so they comment or they like it, that'll show up in their activity feed. Then it just kind of trickles to a second and third connection. So, all these people, the 100,000 views that my post got ... I'll share some of the content strategies I have, but a lot of them go really far, hundreds of thousands of views because it's not about the ... It's the people who are engaging with it and who they're connected to, and then those people see it and consume it and pass it along. I just becomes this amazing thing. But the one thing I'll say that people aren't talking about with content is that it's not about content. It's not just about putting things out. It's about putting content out that creates the right types of conversations online. And what I mean by that is literally, if you're not putting out content that is starting a conversation, then it's literally just noise. It's just another thing that just clogs up our brain and our feed and whatever, but if you happen to leverage your content with the right audience and create a space for them to have a conversation or engage you or be able to engage one another, you are now a catalyst in that. You have a ton of power. People start to see you as an authority or a thought leader. That's where people are starting to take those online conversations off and do amazing things, partnerships, business, sales, et cetera, and they're moving that forward, because they've figured out that the real kind of equation is I need to find really good content that's relevant to a very specific avatar that I'm trying to target that will elicit a response that is a conversation. And you need to know what to do with that conversation in adding enough value and relevancy to get that to come offline and turn into an opportunity. That is what people are doing that are winning with huge followings, and they're doing it every day. So, it's not just about the content. It is about the conversation, for sure. Kathleen: What's really interesting about that, the way you describe it to me, is that it echoes some of what I say to people about their blogs as well. There are so many companies out there that are blogging, I feel like, unlike 10 years ago and you had to convince people to blog. Marcus: Everybody's got a blog. Kathleen: Now everyone has a blog, but there's a lot of "I'm just checking the box and phoning it in" kind of approach to it. I was saying this to somebody the other day. I'm like, "If people can go to your blog and find information that they can find anywhere else, why should they come back? Why should they subscribe? They can find it somewhere else." So, you have to be creating content that's somewhat unique, that is provocative in some way or another, but you have to give people a reason to return or engage. Marcus: Totally. Kathleen: It sounds like there is something there to that as well on LinkedIn, but I really like the way you're connecting this to a conversation, because it's one thing to provoke and to be unique. It's another to get a response. Marcus: Totally. And here's the thing. Be proactive enough to reach out and start conversations with people as well. It's one thing to get people who want to start a conversation. It's another thing to reply. Also, it's very interesting. There's a lot of missed opportunities with just wanting to have a conversation. I know that everybody ... This is very common knowledge for a lot of people, but on LinkedIn you can see who's viewed your profile. That's a really common thing. So-and-so viewed your profile. You had this many people who came to your profile. The only thing we don't do is we actually don't act human. We don't take humanity online with us, because in reality, if someone stopped and looked at you, they would probably look back and be like, "Can I help you with anything? What's going on?" Kathleen: Why are you staring at me? Marcus: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But in an online space, we don't really think that. So, when someone looks at your profile, they didn't just accidentally come to your profile. They were looking for something. They might have come there for a certain reason. They might have saw you in a feed somewhere. And that is the opportunity to engage people in a human way and be able to take advantage of the opportunity. The other last thing I'll say on it is that your profile, great, optimize it, but optimize it to start conversations as well. It's not just about the content you put out. It's your summary. It's your headline. People don't understand there's a lot of real estate that, when someone sees your photo and what you do, not your title but what you do, "I'm here to double the size of 10,000 businesses," or "I'm looking to connect with agencies that I want to help grow," those little lines are allowing people to quickly understand what you want to talk about, and it really helps target that conversation. So, I think it is about optimizing your profile, because you never want to have great content that points back to a really terrible ... I don't know. That's like having a really bad website with ads. Kathleen: Exactly. Yeah. Marcus: But it is an opportunity to not only optimize it but optimize it for the conversation, and don't be afraid to be human and follow up and really kind of push that. Kathleen: Well, you are definitely drinking your own champagne, as I like to say, because I'm not a fan of eating one's own dog food. Marcus: Yeah, I like that. Kathleen: Your summary is a really good example of that, because it's not the usual, "I worked here, and then I worked there. And now here's what I'm doing here." It's "I'm on a mission to overcome the stigma of selling," and I love that you end it with a question, because it goes back to what you said about starting a conversation. So, I'm curious how often do you get people who visit your profile, and then they reach out to you and say, "Hey, I saw your kind of manifesto and your summary, and I'm in." Marcus: It literally is a weekly occurrence, and it happens a lot. I use it when I speak, because I share that example, because people are like, "Well, I'm going to optimize this summary, but it's just there for SEO." No, people literally read them, and they want to kind of get on board. They won't get on board unless you tell them what to do. So, my summary is set up in a very narrative format. I wrote it to be a story. I wrote it to be engaging, to allow me to put some personality into it. So, yeah, I state my mission. This is what I'm here for. Then as you work your way down that summary, I also talk about how ... Because most people are salespeople who read my stuff, sales and marketers whatever, but I basically say in there that I didn't ask for a sales costume for Christmas. I didn't dress up as one as Halloween. I didn't ask for training for Christmas. Because we all kind of accidentally become salespeople, either by function or just necessity. It happens. If you own a business, you kind of have to. I realized that it comes with a stigma of just every single terrible salesperson that was thoughtless before me, and I need to overcome that in order for people to see, no, I'm a human being. I really want to connect with you, and I want this to be meaningful. At the end of it, I add a CTA that is like, "Hey, who wants to join me? Who's trying to join me on this journey?" And I just get people all the time that are just like, "Hey, I read your summary. It stuck out to me. I am on that journey as well," and those are the kinds of conversations that I want. I'm creating a summary with 2,000 characters, so that's a lot of real estate to elicit that type of response to have somebody who reaches out and goes, "I'm in. I'm all in. What do we do? Do you want to meet? Do you want to have coffee? Can we have a call?" I take them all the time, because they're my tribe. Those are my people. I can't do it alone. Most of those people really expedite this whole movement anyway, and many of them are business partners and friends forever and ever. Kathleen: That's awesome. It's a great example. So, if you're listening and you want to see how this is done in the wild, go search Marcus Murphy on LinkedIn and check out his about section, which is his summary. It's great. Marcus: Thank you. How to get started with creating content on LinkedIn Kathleen: Assuming somebody is listening, and they're thinking, "All right. I got you. I'm going to work on my summary, but then I need to start to post content," going back to what you talked about earlier, my guess is that a lot of the people that might be thinking that have been either not posting much, or they've been phoning it in and just posting links to their company blogs with minimal commenting or anything like that. How would you advise somebody like that to get started? Marcus: Yeah. It's interesting. It's a 1,300 character limit, meaning you've got to be somewhat concise, but you can definitely tell a story. I like using posts that ... My opening line is definitely somewhat provocative. This one I just did ... I wrote that the majority of people reading this are going to not hit their goals this year. That was my opening line. The reason why I said that is I went down, and I said, "We goal plan. We put a ton of time and energy and effort into doing that. We lock ourselves in rooms and make these big proclamations, but many people that I talk to, the one thing that's keeping them from their goals are the people they surround themselves with." I had an exercise that I put in there, saying, "Here's a list of three lists that you need to make." One of people that you need to go deeper on the relationship and show up more and go kind of obviously expand upon that relationship. Then there's a hard one, which is like here are the five people that are not helping you get there. These are the people that literally don't believe in you. They want you to fail, because misery loves company, and these people are just absolutely ... You're like one relationship away from succeeding and one relationship away from literally failing. I was trying to make that point, being like, "Plan all you want, but who you surround yourself with will literally affect that in massive ways," but I opened that and started to give people not only the provocative statement and the thought behind it, but I gave them the resource. I like to use the space to say, "Here is the thing that I want to catch your attention, which is for sure. Here's the little bit of stuff I've been thinking about that got me thinking about this question. And here's the resource. Here are the 3 things, 5 things, 12 things. Here's a link to et cetera." So that people understand, "Oh this is ..." That thing has ... There's just so many comments on there, because people are like, "Oh my gosh. Yes," or they'll tag other people and they'll start making that thing go. It's because they can relate to it, because it's a broad topic. So, I would say, if you're starting out, the only thing I would tell someone to do is be consistent and talk about something you actually care about. What you're going to realize is that you connect with a really amazing community of people that totally serve your purposes, or people that are either in your industry or people that you want to get in front of, but the interesting part is that, if you don't put out information that you're passionate about, you won't ever start a conversation. If you think that you want to put out every entrepreneur link or some Forbes article, cool, but you better have your own unique thoughts around it, and it should be something that you're passionate about, because people can tell. Kathleen: Yeah, it's interesting. The pushback that I hear the most on that ... It's actually the same pushback I get when I talk to people about why they should be doing more video. They say, "But I don't feel like I'm enough of an expert in topic X to put it out there." What would you say to do? Marcus: I don't think everybody's a thought leader. I'm going to say it. Everybody out there tells you ... You see it everywhere. It's like, "I'm a thought leader," and then this, "I want to share all this information and build a tribe and get a following and be an influencer." It's like, no you won't, and we don't need everybody to be one. What you can be is vulnerable. What works really well on this site ... My buddy David Gerhardt ... If you're not following him, you totally should. I think over the last year he gained almost 30,000 followers on LinkedIn, and one of the reasons is because he gets on there, and he shares his reality. He shares all kinds of things that are happening to him in his day-to-day. One of them he shared we like, "Here's my calendar, because I'm not willing to sacrifice my family for my job," and he was a really incredible job. He's a CMO. He talked about "I wake up here, and I dropped the kids off here. Here's my schedule." Oh, man. It got a million views, a million, that post. He was just sharing what he knows about. Here's the thing. You're saying, "Hey, I don't have anything. I'm not sure." Well, go ahead and tell people that. Ask for people's opinions to help you fill the void of what you don't know. There are so many people that are willing on this platform and in life to give advice. Some of the most viral posts that I've ever had are asking people, "Hey, you know what, I'm getting ready to go into a heavy interview season. I really want to hire quality candidates. What are some of those questions that you ask during your interview process?" There were 197 comments on that post. Everybody has an interview question, everything from what kind of Crayola crayon you'd be to more like, "Hey, what's your weaknesses? No, really, what's your weaknesses?" I think that if you don't have anything to share, ask good questions, because people want to engage, and they want to help you. So, helpful posts, you don't have to be the most creative. You don't have to be an expert or a thought leader. Not everybody is. It's funny. I'm the LinkedIn guy, but really what I love is when people ... When I have a need, I will go on there and ask and say, "Man, I feel completely ... I don't know the answer to this. Can someone help?" There's just an amazing response and flood of advice. Kathleen: Yeah. I also like to tell people, if you wait until the day where you feel like the world's foremost expert in a topic, that day is never going to come. The people that seem like experts are 99.9% of the time not the world's most foremost expert. You don't have to be. For everyone who feels like they have a certain skill, there is at least 10 other people who don't have that skill. And as long as you can impart your unique point of view about it, then somebody out there is going to find value in it. Marcus: I made fun of ... So, I was speaking at an event in New York City called Digital Agency Expo, and I was hosting it. Gary Vaynerchuk was there doing a keynote. We're backstage, and I'm like, "Gary ..." We've had a bunch of funny interactions. If you ever get the chance to meet him not online, like Gary, FU, go get hustle, or whatever, get some time with him. He's an incredibly genuine human being. But one thing that he said was ... I was like, "Gary, you've been saying the same stuff for like six years." He hasn't deviated. He says the same few things that are just ... He beats them to death, and he just continues to say them. When you find your thing and you see that it elicits a response from people, people are giving you feedback and they're saying, "Wow, you really understand this thing," you should just keep saying it, because there are so many people out there that want ... You'll think it's old hat, but it really is this new information to so many people, and you just kind of beat that drum. I really love that, because we'll all kind of wrestle with that, and be like, "Oh, I need something new and hot." When you're an influencer, a thought leader, in any way, you're like, "I just need a ... Maybe it's the next thing." No. You need to be an expert in that thing that everybody wants to seek you out as an expert in, and the only way you can start doing that is being consistent about the stuff that you were talking about and you're getting that really popular response. Then you just double, triple down on it. I think that was really cool. But, yeah, Gary ... We can't all be Gary either. Here's the word of advice for anybody that meets Gary offline. Just don't match his energy, or you'll look like an idiot. Don't do it. Don't try and just go with the ... Just be yourself. Kathleen: It's funny that you say that about sticking with the thing that works, because as you were talking about, who came to my mind was Marcus Sheridan, who I've gotten to know over the years and worked closely with. He started talking about They Ask, You Answer years ago. He just released the second edition of the book, and it's just as fresh as it ever was, not only because the principles haven't changed but the truth is, and I'm sure this is true about Gary V. too, you can tell people time and time and time again the way they should do things, and 99 out of 100 people still aren't going to do it. Marcus: 100%! It's never the content. It's never the problem. It's the implementation. Kathleen: Right. Totally. Marcus: People will never make the capacity or the space in their lives to do the things that they're hearing about. When you go to a conference ... We have Traffic & Conversion Summit coming up, and the number one thing I'm going to say when I walk out on stage, because I'm going to host it this year, and it's 10,000 people, by the way, which is pretty dope, but one of the things I say to everybody is like, "Hey, don't have a dusty ass notebook by the time we're done with this thing. Just don't." Find one or two things you can implement into your business, and just do it. Just go home and do it, because every idea and every big ... How many pictures of slides do you have on your ... Of every event that you've been to. You're not doing anything with those. They're just going to occupy space. You need to find the one thing and just implement, because 99% of people won't do it. They just get overwhelmed, or for whatever reason it just gets brushed by. And all that momentum and all the euphoric feeling, all that stuff just dissipates really quickly after you learn it. So, yeah, I think the one ... Man, find something you can just implement. Then you'll be better than half the population, which is crazy. Kathleen: A-freaking-men. With that, I'm going to actually just challenge everybody who's listening, because that's why I started this podcast. I used to go to marketing conferences, and I'd hear people talk. So much of the talks would be really exciting and inspirational, but I would leave feeling like, "I don't understand. I don't have enough tactical knowledge to be able to go and do stuff." So, whenever I interview people, I always like to cover the exciting, the inspirational, the strategic, but also leave people with some really concrete takeaways, which we are going to do before we're done here. So, my challenge to you as listeners is, as you are listening, find one thing in this conversation that you're going to leave and do today, because there will be some small things that you can do immediately, like make one new LinkedIn post that follows some of the things that Marcus is saying. One thing. Marcus: Love it. I'll like it. Tag me. I will comment. Kathleen: All right. Marcus: I'll make it go further. Kathleen: Awesome. So, with that, we're going to go from the ... We've talked about the why and the exciting stuff, and I want to start to get into a little bit of the nitty gritty- Marcus: Awesome. Kathleen: ... because there is a lot of nitty gritty that is really interesting about LinkedIn these days, at least to me, but I'm kind of a nerd about this stuff. Marcus: No, yeah. Let's nerd out. Text v. video posts on LinkedIn Kathleen: I've been playing around with LinkedIn also, and I'm nowhere near at your level. Some of the things that I've found really interesting is ... One is the difference between just plain text posts versus posts that have pictures, posts that have videos. Do you see any difference in performance between those three formats? Marcus: Yes, absolutely. You know what was really funny? When they added native video, it was like the hottest thing, and it was like a TV in a bar effect. You're going through your feed, and you see a video. You're like, "Oh, crap. A video. I didn't know they could do this." So, they got a ton of engagement. Now, videos are interesting. If you have good content, you're going to get eyeballs. If you don't have good content, it's not going to just be like because you've got a video on there you're going to get engagement. I always think it's really crazy. It's like have good content. Have good, relevant content, and you don't have to worry about what format. But, I'll tell you, I'm getting a huge response, a massive response from text, just straight text. It's working for everybody. It's 1,300 characters, and I space it accordingly. I usually have thought, space, thought, space, thought, space, because our brains work in a way of consuming data like it's a book. So, books have space between lines where, if you have a chunk of text, whew, it's just, unbelievable how fast people can scroll past that in the feed, because typically what happens on the actual text is that you start with your statement, what you're trying to catch someone's attention. Then if you continue to space it correctly, it'll have a see more button so somebody has to click that see more button to get down there. The video part, for me, I still use when it's man on the street interview. If I'm just going to pop open my phone, I've got a really important thing to say, and I just ... It's happening to me, and I want someone's help, or I share it. Those get a lot of engagement, because they're pretty authentic. That's the nice part. Some people like to see this. They love to see the "Oh, you're like a human being. Not just behind a keyboard. You have emotions, and I can relate with you." Even if it's the way you look. Most people, if they've never met me, they don't know I'm racially ambiguous looking, and I'm bearded and whatever. I think that sometimes that's really important to add the authenticity and that trust element is to leverage things for that: pictures, videos, and sometimes infographics and stuff like that. They're great, because infographics can tell the story of what you have, but you still have 1,300 characters, even when I put up a video. When I share our blog, like this actual podcast right now, I will put up my thoughts about it and the link to it, and that gets a lot of engagement because I'm giving people the big takeaways and what I really enjoyed about it. The one thing I'll tell you that's been detrimental, which is it's opposite of what we thought it was going to be. Probably a year and a half ago, I was sitting on an advisory board, and they were talking about live video. They were like, "Facebook has this live element. It's doing really well. Instagram's got obviously this live element. LinkedIn should have this live element." And it's only been ... Some people do really well, like Harvard or business pages. They're doing really well because of really important interviews and that kind of stuff. Most people it's just annoying. I realized I was losing followers when I was just popping up, because the notification that someone's going live is the most annoying thing on the planet. It's like, "Someone starts going live." It's like, "I don't care. I don't want ... That's not what I want to consume at the moment. It's not anything that's interesting." Now when you're connected to all these different people, it's anybody. It's like I don't want to know about how to sell brooms. That's the thing that I care about. Kathleen: It's not breaking news. Marcus: Yeah. So, until LinkedIn can modify that where it's like I'm following these specific people and the rest of it's noise, and I don't want to see these notifications but only from these people who produce this type of content, then it just becomes a thing that is annoying and disruptive. That's my feedback, by the way. I was just there about a month ago, and I told them these things, but I'll tell you nothing right now is beating written for that 1,300-character, no picture, no video. It's just doing really well, especially when you tag relevant people into it, you're using appropriate hashtags. Those things go bananas. I actually, every once in a while, which is pretty fun, it's a nice test, but I'll get notifications like, "You're trending in this hashtag," which is usually business or sales or sales leadership. Those are the three that I trend all the time in, and it doesn't take a lot. It's just the fact that most people are engaging with that post and it has a hashtag. If you don't have a hashtag, it won't trend. That's crazy, because it shows up in people's inboxes when it starts trending. It'll say, "Hey, Marcus Murphy is trending on this hashtag," and then you click on it. It takes you to the post. It's super. Yeah, writing. Writing is hands down ... Heavy word posts are what's winning on LinkedIn right now. I think that, yeah. Like I said before, the only caveat that I have is that good content wins. It just totally does, regardless of the format. In this case, we are seeing that there is a bigger life in just the good old text-heavy posts. Kathleen: There was a couple things that you said there that I just want to call out for people who are listening as far as takeaways. One is you have 1,300 character limit. Two is that it's going to cut off what you write, and there's going to be like a see more kind of a link. So, you need to put something that's going to catch people's attention right up front. It was interesting. I did an interview with Goldie Chan a few months ago, and she talked about- Marcus: Yay! My homie. I love Goldie. Kathleen: She's awesome. She was the one who got me started doing LinkedIn video, because I was so inspired by her. Marcus: Oh, that's awesome. She's the woman. Kathleen: Yeah, she talks about something similar where she puts a question in her first line, because you do need to have something right up front that hooks people, that draws them in. Marcus: Yep. Kathleen: Then I liked that you talked about breaking up and having spaces. I noticed that too, that it's much easier to follow. You gave the example of Dave Gerhardt. He definitely does that as well. If you're putting one sentence or maybe two at the most per paragraph- Marcus: Yep, that's right. Kathleen: Then hashtags. It's funny. You're so right about the trending thing, because I don't have ... I have like the fraction of the percentage of followers on LinkedIn that you do, and I still get, "Your post is trending," and I'm like, "That's so cool!" Marcus: Yes. It's awesome! It's so cool, because it also shows up that way for everyone else who you're connected to. So-and-so is trending right now, and you're like, "What are they ..." Because trending on Twitter means something completely, right? We use the same terminology, so it makes it important. There's an elevated sense of this thing is super important, and I love that. And you'll see it. I honestly believe ... That's the reason why I mentioned Dave Gerhardt specifically is because he posts constantly, and he goes against the status quo, which most people are like once or twice a day at max, but he posts everything that he's thinking about. Kathleen: Almost every single time I open up LinkedIn, probably 9 times out of 10, he is the first post, and it's a different post every time. Marcus: Yeah, that, but that's a part of it. He's posting things as he goes and he learns and he's reading, and he's doing a lot right now in terms of content. He even has a private, paid content, which is amazing. So, you can check that out too. I feel like I'm just plugging Dave, but what I want you to do though is actually pay attention to what he posts and how he posts, because he's figured out. If you look at people when things go viral or they get a response on LinkedIn, they have figured out what people want to read, what they want to consume, what's helpful, and we test things. I'm constantly testing content. I am trying to figure out what that perfect thing is for my audience. So, Dave has figured out for his audience. He speaks to marketers. He speaks to very specific people that he is dialed in and knows exactly what gets a response. I work through, and I get big responses, and then I'll have some that are okay. They just did okay. I'm like, "Okay, that's too specific or not broad enough," or "How do I bring people in?" I constantly kind of play with things, because there is going to be one post that you have ... Just hear me now. There's going to be one post that you have, and it's going to ... Something's going to happen where it's just like, "Oh my gosh. That got like 150 likes and all these different comments." All you have to do is pay attention and try to replicate that experience with all of your content and try to work backwards. Dissect that and think about it, or look at other people who are getting a big response and be like, "Man, how are they speaking to their audience? What kind of content are they? Would that work for my network?" Because it's so different from person to person. Yeah, and hashtags are just great. I think people don't use them enough. It's the one thing I keep telling everybody to do. It doesn't look bad at the end of your post. It's okay. You're just trying to connect with a bigger community, and that is where people find you. That is how you grow your following on LinkedIn. Should you use emojis in your LinkedIn posts? Kathleen: Totally agree. Now, I love that you raised do the thing that's right for your audience. That leads me to the next question I was going to ask, which is directly relevant to what is right for your audience, which is, what is your position on using emojis in your posts? Marcus: Ooh. I use emojis all the time. Super basic like that. No. I think emojis are fun. Okay, I'll tell you my first job out of college I worked at Syracuse University, and I was an admissions counselor, which is a glorified salesperson who goes out and gets applications and does those presentations where you want to take a pencil and stab yourself in the eye with your folks, when you go check out universities. I had someone give me terrible advice once. It was very bureaucratic, very stuffy, suit every day kind of job. The dean told me one time, "Hey, don't put smiley faces in your emails. Don't do that. That's not appropriate." I sat there for a long time, and I was like, "You know what? It's not appropriate. I've got to stop doing that. I can't believe it." Then as I started to get older, I'm like, "How the hell is anybody going to figure out how I feel and what my tone is?" I'll tell you that emojis, while they're still funny and some of them are wildly inappropriate, which I like to use in my personal life, not on LinkedIn, I do think that that tells a ... It adds texture to the post. So, I think they can be overdone. I don't like when people put it in their headline or near their name. I think that's totally tacky, and it doesn't help you. It just makes me think that you're wearing Hawaiian shirts at home or something. I think this is more about, hey, I need to add texture here so people can understand my tone, whether it's a fire symbol or whether it's whatever. I totally like that, because people will read through it, and they'll go ... But I do think that you can overdo it. You can put it where it's just a thing that you think is helping you get more eyeballs on your posts, or you're thinking that it just makes you more relevant. It needs to make sense for the post. Like I said, it's just appropriate when you're adding texture or you need someone to understand that you're being sarcastic. That's a really popular one. Like your face, or you say something that people would miss in context if you didn't have something that was emoting and sharing what you're trying to get across. So, yeah, I am for them. I use them, especially if I'm posting from my phone, because obviously it's way harder on your computer to do that. Then I also just think that I've seen them done poorly, and I've seen people do it where I'm like ... I'm very sensitive to overusing them, but I only use it when I'm trying to add context and make sure people know this is my tone, this is what I'm trying to get out there. Don't miss it. Kathleen: Yeah. I am for emojis as well. I'm team emoji. Marcus: Yes. Kathleen: What I've also found is that, because you can't format the text in your posts on LinkedIn ... You talked about it when you talked about leaving spaces between what you write. Visually, sometimes it can all just bleed together, and sometimes emojis are a nice proxy for text formatting. Marcus: Totally. Kathleen: If you bookend a really important line with emojis, it's almost as good as bolding it. Marcus: Oh, it's awesome. Kathleen: Things like that. Marcus: I wish they would let us bold. It's so funny. When you write it, when you actually write the post before you actually hit post, it'll allow you to bold everything, but then when you post it, it goes away. Kathleen: Yeah. They're faking us out. Marcus: Yeah. Oh my gosh. I do another thing that some people don't love, but I emphasize very specific words. I will capitalize a but. I will capitalize a you. I will make sure that I'm showing emphasis on the things that I want to elevate. And I do that, but I'm not yelling at people. It's not like all caps on. But I like to do that. Anything that you can add in, like I said the texture, or you can add in an element where you want someone to make sure that this is what you pay attention to, like you just said the bookend emojis, super popular. It makes sense, especially if it's like, "This is the thing." Like the sirens. I see people do that. It's like, "This is the thing! Don't miss this! If you don't read anything else, this is the thing right here that you can't miss." So, yeah, I'm super pro emoji. And I don't even care who knows that. Kathleen: Yes! Wear it with pride. Should you add links to your posts on LinkedIn? Kathleen: The other thing that I hear people asking a lot is should you or should you not put a link in your post, or should the link be in the comments. Marcus: Right. It depends. I put links in my post if I want that thing to show up with the image. So, there's a link image that goes underneath posts if you only put that one link in there. Sometimes I think that that's interesting that people don't want ... Because it breaks a bunch of classic rules, right? You want to link away from a post, or you want to link ... You take people away. A lot of people will put that link in the comments, which is an interesting move. I think if there's multiple links, I would absolutely not put those back to back, because you only get one shot at that image of what you want people to go to. I use this all the time, because I share ... I do a ton of podcasts, and I have a lot of content out there. I will share that thing that I want people to go look at. Or if it's an article, I'll put it right in there, and I'll even put emojis around it to make sure people click it because it's the most important part. I'm adding context to it. But I have no problem with putting the link in my post. It's funny, because you'll get someone equally as passionate about not doing it. I've just never seen it do something ... It's never taken people away. Engagement hasn't dropped. I think that it's only bad when you bifurcate it with two so that somebody's attention might not be in the right place. But if you've got the one thing and that really great thumbnail that comes up where it really catches someone's eye, or it's like you on a podcast so it's your still ... When I actually launched my first LinkedIn Learning course, the link brought up my LinkedIn author photo. It was the coolest thing to put that in the post, because obviously people could see "Oh, that's his profile on LinkedIn Learning. That's pretty dope." So, yeah, I'm pro link in post. I don't need to- Kathleen: All right. Marcus: I'm not going to apologize for it. Creating conversations on LinkedIn Kathleen: We're putting our stake in the ground here. Now you talked in the beginning about how you want to start a conversation, but then you mentioned something in passing, which I think was really important that we haven't talked about yet, which is you have to then know what to do with that conversation. Marcus: Right. Yes. Kathleen: So, I'm just going to lob that ball over to you and let you run with it. Marcus: Conversational frameworks are super important. It's funny, because I went and spoke somewhere, and I don't remember where it was, but I had these students come up to me afterwards who were at college somewhere, and they want to get into the workforce. They wanted to get into sales. They're like, "So, how do we start a conversation with ... How do we talk to people?" I'm just like, "How do you do it in real life?" Because I feel like we miss that. A conversational framework typically starts with somebody saying something and the other person responding, and then it actually should go through steps. The part that's really wild about online conversations is that we treat them so differently. We treat them in a way where it's almost like in a sales ... Let me ask you this, and this is going to be a funny question. People online, raise your hand in your brain here. But how many of you have gotten a terrible sales prospecting message on LinkedIn? Kathleen: Oh my god. Like a thousand of them. Marcus: So, why? You know why? Because no one is actually treating it like a human to human conversation. It's not B2C. It's not B2B. It's H2H. And people are forgetting that humans have a way of building basically intimacy. They build relationship in a very specific sequence. We are animals. Animals do it too. You can literally observe us and watch how that progresses to get to a place where somebody's like, "I know this person. I trust this person. We are in a relationship. This is us." I'm not talking about romantic, just I know this person enough. I think that we don't translate that well online. Most of us show up like those sales messages. They're basically like, "Hey, I'm Marcus. Let's go back to my place." That is what they feel like. Kathleen: Let's do it. Marcus: Yeah, let's go. I've got pizza. I don't know. It's just terrible. You've added no value. You've added no context. They don't know why they want to go back with you. You have built no trust in your communication. So, the first thing that people get wrong is that they literally get online and say, "Hi, I'm So-and-so. Here's all my crap. Do you want to buy it? Here's who we are." It's like, cool. Great. That has nothing to do with what I'm doing. You haven't identified any of my themes. You don't know what I care about. You have taken no time to think about how to start this conversation, because you don't know me at all. But based off of some assumptions, I can have a better conversation with you online if I start to look at all of the information that's out there for you. So, there's no excuse. There is zero excuse to have a thoughtless form of outreach because of how much information is out there, especially on LinkedIn. If somebody is replying to you or you are putting out content, you're already giving them an arsenal of things that they could be starting a conversation with you about. If somebody replies to your post, and they're like, "Man, this is ..." Let me just give an example. This the best post. I totally ascribe to this. Click on their profile, find out who they are. If it's relevant or if there's something in there where you really want to connect with them, go ahead and go connect with them. Then use this real estate, which is super popular and everyone does it wrong ... You get to add a custom note to any invitation that's 300 characters. Now, what you can do there to stand out from everyone is not talk about yourself. Don't talk about what you can do for them. Don't ask them who in their organization can help you. That also makes them feel bad, by the way. That's a belittling statement. Ask them, "Hey, I saw you comment on my post. I looked at your website. I love this thing about you. I have identified this thing that I think is interesting, and I would love to be connected with you." That is a very normal introduction, very first interaction, human conversation. Then you can start ... Guess what? You can start having more of a conversation that allows you to learn more about them, and they learn more about you, because typically what people don't understand is, if I talk ... If I was talking to you, Kathleen, and I was just talking to you about you about you about you the whole time, asking questions, eventually you're going to do something very human. You're going to go, "Hey, what do you do? Who are ..." Kathleen: Yeah, enough about me. Marcus: Yeah, it's like, what's going on with you? That's a very human thing, but people online typically don't follow the same cadence as in real life. If they could just take their normal how they would interact with people on a daily basis in a bar, on a plane, even though most of you need to stop talking to my on airplanes. Okay? If there are some plane-talkers listening to this, please stop it. It's like I put a blanket over my head. Kathleen: Yes. Big headphones. That's a signal. Marcus: Then somebody still leans over like, "What's your life story?" It's like, no. Stop it. I'm just literally trying to read my book. No, but I think the majority of us just don't take those interactions and make it an online kind of how ... What would the cadence of an offline conversation sound like, and how do I replicate it online? You are going to be a guru. You are going to stand out in a million ways if you can just get that little, tiny piece right and understand that ... To succeed in B2B, take a lesson from B2C Marcus: You know, it's funny. I'll say one last thing, because I talk a lot. But B2B, everyone's all super obsessed, because LinkedIn is like the B2B platform. It totally is. What's winning right now in any B2B kind of how you start a B2B conversation is to go super hard on B2C. If you understand that you're actually talking to people within the organization and you understand that you're a business and you're trying to get in touch with other businesses, but that business, that point of contact, is a human being, B2C the heck out of that B2B, all right? Figure out a way to continue to add that human element, and take that offline conversation to an online space. Everybody's going to want to talk to you, because you're going to be so different than everybody else and all those thousands of terrible prospecting messages that we get. By the way, Kathleen, I stop and I write them back all of the time. I give them advice, or I say, "Hey, does this really work for you? Do you understand that this is your reputation?" I try. Probably like 1% of them ever take me up on like, "Hey, go fix these things and prospect me again, and I'll give you a meeting." And like no one does it. Kathleen: Yeah. It's so true. Email marketers really have a similar trick they use called the rule of one, which is when you're writing an email, you picture one specific person, often a friend. When you're writing that email ... And I do this all the time. I have this particular friend named Jen, and she's in my head. Whenever I write any marketing email, I'm like, "Would I ever send an email to Jen with a subject line that's like brackets, webinar?" Marcus: Oh, that's so good. Kathleen: No. I'd be like, "Hey, thought this might be of interest to you," dot dot dot. And I may or may not capitalize like the first word. I don't know. But I think it's the same principle. I always tell people, if you're having trouble operationalizing this, pick a friend and pretend that you're conversing with them.  Marcus: Yeah. Or people want to write a novel in the first engagement, the first interaction with people. Our best performing sales email of all time was written by Ryan Deiss, and it literally said this. It said, "How can I make X business go faster?" Question mark. That was the highest performing, highest open rate, and most responses, because we weren't trying to get them to go to a website and pull out their credit card and buy something. We were trying to start a conversation. When you try and start a conversation, it sounds a hell of a lot like you would send a text to somebody or you would send an email to your friend. So, that's super important, man. We just miss it. It's just so missed, because we all want to ... I don't know. We overkill. We just... Kathleen: Yeah. I like to say we go to work, we put our marketing hats on, and we forget that we're human beings. Marcus: It's so crazy. Follow v. connect on LinkedIn Kathleen: Okay. We're running out of time. So, I have another question for you really quickly. Somebody raised this to my attention recently, and I'm sort of interested in it, which is that now you have the choice on your own profile to make the button follow or connect. The advice that somebody else gave to me was that, when you surpass a certain number of connections or you're reaching a certain level of activity on LinkedIn, you should change that button to say follow, because it's a lower bar and more people are likely to hit follow than connect. I would just love to know have you thought about this, what's your feeling about it? Marcus: So, they're kind of right and wrong. Basically, depending on what level of connectedness you are. So, if you're a second connection ... You'll see people, when they show up and you're not connected to them, it's like second, third. Usually if they're outside of those two, they won't even show up. You can't even connect with them, because you still get the follow button. It's still there. You hit the little dropdown on the right, and there's an opportunity to connect. Now, the follow is interesting. A lot of people, mine shows up as follow. I think that what I realized though is the amount of views I get to my page, or to my listing, my profile, is a direct correlation with how many people request to connect with me. Here's the deal. I don't connect with everybody. I think that's kind of foolish, because it's a quality over quantity game for me. If it's 15,000 followers, of those are half of the people that I really want to be connected to who I'm happy to be able to message and have them message me, because that really is the real significant difference between a non-connection and a connection. It's not like Instagram. It's not like Facebook. There is no way to have a private profile on LinkedIn. Your information is there. It's just the ability to engage with people, and you have to be connected to just send that message. So, I don't have a strategy for once you're getting going. It's funny, because Dave and I ... I don't have it. If you want to connect with me, send me a connection request. If you want to add a note in there, I'm going to- Kathleen: Tell him you heard him on the Inbound Success Podcast. Marcus: Yeah. Usually I totally connect with people, because I'm not afraid of those messages. It doesn't always mean that I'm going to respond to them. I get thousands of messages a month. I literally just showed somebody the other day. I was like, "Here is December." They were like, "How many do you get?" It was 568 by the time I was halfway through, the 17th. Kathleen: Wow. Marcus: But it's not like a bragging thing, by the way, because some of that's hard to keep up with. I have to have people in there, making sure that there's opportunity versus someone who's trying to solicit me, like all these different things. But the majority of them are pretty thoughtful, people that just want to say thanks and "Hey, I really enjoyed this," and "Hey, I'm connecting with you because we're pretty similar." I do think that I can tell the standard you copy paste that line that we're very similar networks, or "Hey, you look like a really great, ambitious person. I want to connect with you." Great. The next message after you connect with them is going to be "Here's my stuff. Do you want to buy it? Come back to my place." Kathleen: Totally. Marcus: So, I think that there's something in the fact that connections should mean more and have more weight. It used to be even a cap on it. LinkedIn used to cap it at 30,000 connections, and now that's kind of gone, because David actually just told me that a little while ago. That is not the case anymore. So, they're not actually ... They're not throttling that in any way. But I would be really cautious, because who you're connected to is important, because that shows up and shows other people who you are connected to as well. This is a personal thing, but we have people in my office who will go on, and they've just got tons of connections request. The only way they'll connect is if they see that Ryan, myself, or somebody else shares a connection. So, if I'm just out there connecting wit

How do handwritten notes help businesses improve outbound meeting books, increase customer retention and boost customer loyalty? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Handwrytten Founder David Wachs explains how combining handwritten notes with inbound marketing can yield incredible results, and how his company is helping customers automate and send handwritten notes at scale. Check out the episode to here exactly how Handwrytten works and how companies large and small are using it to increase sales and improve customer retention. Highlights from my conversation with David include: David is the Founder of Handwrytten, which enables companies to automate handwritten notes at scale. Handwrytten has a website and smartphone app interface, as well as integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot and Zapier. The notes that Handwrytten creates are generated using robots that hold real pilot G2 ballpoint pens, so they look incredibly authentic. Handwrytten is growing at about 300% a year. Companies use Handwrytten in three different ways: 1) sending thank you notes to customers; 2) ecommerce companies include notes in-box with new orders; and 3) outbound outreach. Handwrytten clients that use handwritten notes for outbound meeting booking requests get 3x to 4x more responses, which tracks with the fact that handwritten envelopes get opened three to four times more than typed ones do. One of the companies ecommerce clients has improved customer retention by 5 to 10% by including handwritten notes in their boxes. Several other clients have gotten valuable social proof when their customers post pictures of the handwritten notes they receive on their social media accounts, driving incredible brand loyalty. Handwrytten offers a number of options for customizing notes, from custom handwriting fonts, to inserting your business card or a gift card, etc Resources from this episode: Visit the Handwrytten website Follow David on Twitter Connect with David on LinkedIn Request samples from Handwrytten Follow Handwrytten on Instagram Follow Handwrytten on Pinterest Listen to the podcast to learn how companies are using automated handwritten notes to get better inbound marketing results at scale. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week my guest is David Wachs who is the founder of Handwrytten. Welcome David. David Wachs (Guest): Thank you very much Kathleen. I'm thrilled to be here. David and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I am really excited to have you here and I say that every week. I do really mean it, but I'm really excited for this one and I have to share this story with my listeners because how this happened I think is so serendipitous. Not that long ago, a few weeks ago, I was sitting around my dining room table with my husband on a Sunday morning and I subscribe to the Washington Post, which I get once a week, and I read this article in the Washington Post that mentioned this company called Handwrytten and talked about what it was doing and how it helps businesses send handwritten notes. I stopped him and I was like, "You have to read this. This is really interesting. We should check this out." Not more than one week later, David sends me a LinkedIn message saying, "Hey Kathleen, I've been listening to your podcast and I would love to come on." I was like, wait, what? This is the same person. How did that just happen? Anyway, that's my story of how David and I connected. David, can you tell my listeners a little bit about yourself, Handwrytten, and what led you to start this business because I think it's really cool? About David Wachs and Handwrytten David: Well thank you very much and it really is an honor to be here. I am a listener to the show and I've learned a lot and because of it I am now an Inc. contributor because I listened to one of your episodes where you talked about getting your own content out there in a number of ways as well as a lot of other stuff. Thank you for putting on this wonderful podcast. I've actually been doing Handwrytten - we are a six year old startup - I've been doing this for six years now and I have to apologize, there's some construction noise in the background that I have no control over, so hopefully ... Kathleen: I don't hear anything, but if we hear a beep, beep, beep, we'll hope that nobody's backing up into your office. David: I started this six years ago. Prior to Handwrytten, and this is important as to why I started Handwrytten, I had a company that did text messaging and in that business we'd send millions of text messages a day for large brands like Abercrombie and Fitch, ToysRUs, Chicago Tribune and others. What I realized from that, while all that marketing worked and people came out in droves to tropical smoothie cafe and Abercrombie and those types of things, when we sent the messages, they were quickly forgotten and deleted. I started looking around when it was time to exit Sell It - the name of the company was Sell It - when I was looking around for other opportunities and I walk into my sales people's offices and I'd see handwritten notes on display in their offices. Not only were they kept, but they were treasured. I think a lot of this is because the average office worker gets 147 or 150 emails a day. You typically get about 40 to 50 text messages a day, something crazy like that. In all that, and with new tools, and I know HubSpot's a great tool, but tools like HubSpot and all the rest, it's easier and easier to send all these emails and electronic forms of communication. After a while it all just becomes noise. When somebody takes the time to send you a handwritten note, it really stands out as something unique and thoughtful and cherish. I thought, gee, I'm too lazy to actually send handwritten notes. For my mom's birthday, I would go to the Walgreens, buy a greeting card, promised myself I'd mail it, stick it in my briefcase, and never get around to it because I wouldn't get a stamp, and I'd never sit down to write it. Kathleen: I may or may not have that problem in common with you. David: This happened over and over and in all my suitcases and briefcases, I find banged up birthday cards and stuff. I thought there has to be a way to automate this. That's what led us to start Handwrytten, was being able to take an offline form of communication and make it scale in the same way that emails and texts and tweets and all that does. We do that through technology in a few forms. On the front-end or what you use, we have a website where you can type in one handwritten note or upload a spreadsheet of 10,000. We've got iPhone apps and Android apps mostly for consumers, but they can be used for businesses as well. Then we have a salesforce.com integration. Directly from Salesforce, you can send notes and track them. HubSpot CRM integration, and then Zapier integration. All these methods are trying to turn our software really into a platform where you can send handwritten notes wherever you want and even better, hopefully automate that so you don't even have to think about it. Then on the other side, the way we fulfill your orders, is we have now about 85 robots that we build here in our facility in Phoenix, Arizona. Each robot holds a real pen. It's a pilot G2 ballpoint pen. You can buy them at Staples, and it writes your note out just like you would. In fact it's no faster, maybe a little bit slower than you are, but it doesn't take any breaks. We're constantly building robots to keep up with demand. We don't sell the robots or lease them out, we just keep building them and putting them on racks in our facility here. We've got about 85 of those. They're pretty cool. They're 3D printed and laser cut and there's all sorts of cool technologies that I've learned about throughout this process. When the notes come off the line, if I'm staring at some of the notes that might have the handwriting styles that I am not familiar with, perhaps it's a handwriting style of like a client and we've custom made it, I am flabbergasted because it looks so real. I see it coming off the machine and I can't tell the difference. Anyway, we're doing about a hundred thousand last month. December was a very busy month. We did about 115,000 of those notes. We've been growing at about 300% a year, so after six years we're finally hitting our stride. It was a long curve, but it's been a very interesting process because we have clients that range the gamut. They range from individual realtors and mortgage brokers all the way up to high-end Italian goods manufacturers that sends us with their quarterly catalog. I'm happy to talk about all those. In a nutshell, if I had to segment how clients use us, they really use us in three different ways. They use us for thank you notes or correspondence to existing clients. That is if you buy a home or if you buy a handbag or whatever, we will package up a handwritten note with a handwritten envelope and then mail it out to you. The second way is we do in-box. For large online mattress companies or meal box companies, when you open up that meal box or that mattress box, you might find a handwritten note sitting at the top of that package that says thank you so much for your purchase. We all really care about what you think. Review us on Amazon, Yelp, Trustpilot, or whatever that is, or refer us to your friends. We do a lot of that. Then the third is the outbound outreach, such as a jewelry store. They might be opening up in a new location. We'll do a database pull of all the homes in that area that meets certain revenue criteria and then send them all a handwritten note. Now that is very expensive because you're paying for a real forever stamp. Unlike a junk mail piece, which is just printed, we have to start at that level. We have to print something, print the stationary, and then we have to write on top of it. It's never going to be as cheap as a junk mail piece, but it also gets opened substantially more frequently and I can talk about that. Those are the three ways: inbox, send via the mail to existing clients and customers, and then outreach to new prospects, but the new prospects is rather small just because it is so expensive. Kathleen: I have so many questions I want to ask you. David: Go for it. How do handwritten notes fit in with digital marketing? Kathleen: I'm about to ask my question, but before I do, I want to let everyone who's listening know you're going to notice that it sounds a little different because David and I were talking and we heard a little echo on his end. We've switched gears and he's called in so that we can give you guys better audio. That's why, if things sound a little different, you're not going crazy. What I wanted to ask you, David, I think it's so fascinating what you're doing and I want to zoom out and start big picture, which is that, so much of, when we talk about inbound marketing these days, we're almost 99% of the time we're talking digital. You've almost, everyone else is going right you're going left. You've gone really back and you're investing in this very traditional form of, I don't even know if most people would call it marketing. Handwritten letters. It's a very old school approach. Talk a little bit about, if you would, how you see that fitting in with digital marketing or the future of marketing in general. David: Yeah, and I hope everybody can hear me. I think as everything's gone digital people are really craving human connection and they can't go to the store now and know that person that sold them the good in China on Amazon. They want to feel like there is a human on the other end of that Amazon shipping box. That's really where we step in. When I started this company six years ago, the tagline was and still is: quality cards, your words in pen and ink. Really we were quality cards first because we thought everybody wanted that tactile experience. That's certainly part of it, but how does this fit into digital marketing? Well we think marketing is marketing and sales is sales and you have to have a holistic cross channel approach. When you visit the Handwrytten website, and obviously this is a very specific example because it has to do with us, but when you visit the Handwrytten website and you request handwriting samples, that triggers a whole Zapier flow that obviously includes a handwritten note that gets sent out to you automatically. We do this a lot for insurance firms and other people as well. The same website form interaction flow. On top of that, you also get emails and you get phone calls from us. I don't see Handwrytten the company being any different than anybody else. If you're looking to reach out to your clients, whether they're inbound leads or outbound prospects, you want to have a multichannel approach. Not everybody quite frankly connects online. For example, we're working with some healthcare brands and they're trying to go after Medicare seniors and they're finding a lot of these patients aren't responding to emails. By sending them a handwritten note to get them to come into the doctor or sign up to their plan or whatever it is, it's able to appeal to a different demographic. David: Also, there is definitely a novelty factor. I think the average person receives between one and two actual handwritten notes, or we're an actual handwritten note too, handwritten notes a month. While you might get hundreds of junk mail pieces and tens of thousands of emails during that time, this is a very different piece of mail that you're going to receive. I think it can apply almost universally. People say, who are your clients? We say it's anybody that wants to use the mail. That's really what it is. I don't know if I'm answering your question, but I think whether it's an inbound campaign or an outbound communication process that you're trying to build, you have to think about voice and you have to think about obviously email and perhaps social, but you should also think about what's your mail strategy and does that mail strategy include handwritten notes. Kathleen: Yeah. It's interesting to me because I've been observing what's happening with marketing and with consumer behavior and there definitely is a little bit of a craving. I think I agree with you for things that harken back to a different time because we have gotten into this era of everything being so digital and so disconnected in terms of, you're not necessarily talking to a real person and everything's very automated. I think it's interesting that there's this resurrection of the handwritten letter at this time. I also think it's interesting as the parent of a 13-year-old that kids that age are not being taught cursive in school anymore and I can see where the prospect, especially for younger people coming into the workforce, the prospect of sitting down and having to spend time writing out notes, cards, letters, what have you, seems daunting because they're not really taught to write the way that perhaps somebody my age was when we went through school. Examples of companies using handwritten notes in their marketing David: Yeah, absolutely. This stuff does work. We know that handwritten envelopes, forget about the actual note itself, but the handwritten envelope gets opened three times as frequently as a printed envelope. We have clients that are doing outbound meeting booking requests, and they get about a three to four X response right there versus sending out email blasts. We've got Team Rubicon, which is one of the...Unfortunately most clients don't want us to mention who they are, but we have a few examples that do. Nobody wants to be known as sending notes through us, but Team Rubicon, it's a nonprofit organization and they've been able to improve their redonation rates substantially. A meal box subscription is able to increase its customer retention by 5% to 10%, which was moving the needle for them. Just the simple thing of including this little note in the box has had some really cool results. Another side effect is thanks to Instagram and pint-, I guess more Instagram and Twitter, people are tweeting and Instagram sharing the notes they receive. Another client that I'm allowed to mention is a VYNL, V. Y. N. L. They're a record subscription. They are perfect for us because they're old school records and we're old school handwritten notes and a lot of people will Instagram and tweet pictures of the handwritten notes they received from VYNL. What's so amazing about VYNL is each note is individually curated for the recipient. it's like, "Hey Kathleen, I saw on Spotify you listen to whomever, because you're listening to that band we sent you these two other records." Then that note gets written out by us and then every day we ship notes to VYNL and they insert them with records. It's pretty cool. There is that Instagramming, tweeting element, which gets back to your online marketing strategy. What's crazy is we work with one client that runs a huge, one of the most popular daily YouTube shows, and they were trying to create a fan club basically, and part of that $5 admission to the fan club, you get a handwritten note from the stars of the video. People were complaining if they didn't get their handwritten note fast enough, which was crazy. They'd see all these handwritten notes online and the YouTube group didn't change it up per person. Pretty much the same note everybody got, but they loved it so much that they would complain if they didn't get that note fast enough. Oftentimes, I mean the vast majority of the times it had nothing to do with us. It was just the post office or a bad address or whatever, but it was really interesting to see that. I think all of this just comes down to customer experience management and improving that process for the individual because they feel so genericized by everything else. We have one client that does snack boxes for offices. You could sign up and get a box of granola and chips and whatever else and they'll send it to you on a monthly basis. What they found was if they screwed up your order on your snack, and then they followed up with sending another free snack box with the handwritten note, now granted the free snacks play a huge part in this, they follow up with a free snack box and the handwritten note, your loyalty was much higher than if they never screwed up at all. Then they actually started screwing up on purpose. Kathleen: That's hysterical. David: Yeah, because they found that it added so much value to have that experience where you reprove yourself to the clients. That was super interesting to us as well. Kathleen:That's incredible. I don't know whether I feel like it's just sad or exciting that people are so thrilled to get a handwritten note that the tweet it. It's sad in the sense that it's become a lost art, truly. I still do force my kids to send handwritten thank you notes after Christmas. It's so funny because some of them resist and don't necessarily always do it. The younger ones I can stand over and force them and they're always like, why? Why do I have to do it? No one does this anymore. I'm like, you will do it. David: That's exactly why they should do it is because nobody does it anymore. Customizing the handwriting for your notes Kathleen: Exactly. Well, that's neat. Now I want to switch gears for a second and talk about, somebody listening and they're like, this sounds really interesting and I might want to do it. You said something earlier that really peaked my interest, which is that you can customize the handwriting. Talk to me about that because that I did not realize and that is a game changer. David: Yeah, so we have two options there. One, you can use any of our pre-canned fonts. I shouldn't call them fonts, handwriting styles. You can find them on Handwrytten.com and those, I think we're up to 18 currently, and they range from overly fancy Jenna, to compact Lulu, to very blocky, to everything in between. Most clients can get by with those. If you want to go and actually have your own handwriting style made, it is a process. It's really an art form. We have two people here. That's all they do is generate these handwriting styles. It's not cheap. Relatively, I guess it's cheap. It's about a thousand dollars one time fee, but it takes several days for us to perfect that style because it's not just writing out the alphabet and writing out capitals and lowercase, but it's writing six copies of each letter, and then writing a ligature combinations, which are like two O's together, two L's together, two T's, because the way you'd write two T's, would you cross them with one line. How do your double O's look? Do you loop those together? All that type of stuff gets taken to account and then the end result is something that looks pretty darn close to your own handwriting. For a much lower fee of a thousand, instead of that, for $250 we can just do your signature and then you could just insert that in any note. The thousand dollars does include the signature. You get it for "free" there. We do have about 60 to 65 clients that have done that. The vast majority of our clients just use one of our, I don't even have my own custom style, I just use one on the website. Kathleen: Right, the cobbler's child. Right? David: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We didn't even send out Christmas cards this year for the same reason. We were too busy sending everybody else's. That's how all that works. I will say, like I said earlier, they do look, overall the biggest question we got is, we get a few questions, but the number one question is, does it look real? I would say on some of those to me it fools me even, but if I were to hand you a handwritten note and I say, "Hey Kathleen, did you receive my handwritten note?" You'd say, "Absolutely. Looks great. Thank you so much for thinking about me." If I said to you, "Hey Kathleen, what did you think of that handwritten note? Could you tell it's written by a robot?" If I asked you that it's going to change your viewing of that handwritten note entirely. At that point maybe 50/50 you might determine, oh wow, at the bottom it looks like that. Oh, at the top or something like that. Kathleen: Right. The lines are very clean. That's the one thing I noticed. When I write, I'm all over the place, but that's the only tell to me is that it's very linear, I don't know if that's the word, but... David: Yeah. We're getting there. On that way we actually have two different types of what we call jitter. We have a left margin jitter so that the left margin moves in and out every line. It doesn't look like you started the characters at the same spot. Then we also have, and maybe some of these aren't showing up in the samples on the website, but we do jittering. Then the other type of jitter we do is interline jitter. One line to the next below it is going to have a different spacing than the line below that. We vary that on a line-by-line basis. We do not angle those lines because that would look overly done. That jitter amount is incredibly subtle because we find people aren't super close then super far then super close. It's within only a couple of points per line that we jitter both of those, but we do try to make it subtle enough where, it's not going to look too perfect with a hard edge on the left side of the screen. Kathleen: This is totally fascinating to me. It sounds like you guys have studied human behavior as regards how people write notes with an incredible level of detail. I will say that to me, $1,000 to have a custom font made for your handwriting seems incredibly reasonable if you're going to do any volume. That pays for itself very quickly. Having said that, it's really funny because I'm on your site right now looking at the handwriting samples and I've determined that I am somewhere in between messy Michael and darlin Darlene. David: Yeah. All the styles are actually, this is where we become a small company all of a sudden, all the styles are named after either me and my family. I am casual David, even though that's not my handwriting, or office workers. It's down to the point where even my dog, who's the office dog compact to Lulu because she's six pounds and compact, has her own handwriting style there. The real popular ones, or my favorites are, tenacious Nick, chill Charity, dapper Will. They all look really great and what's nice about if you choose one of these standard 18 handwriting styles, we're constantly refining those styles and just making sure they look better and better. For example, with the very formal cursive styles, they look wonderful, but then if somebody were to write something in all caps in that cursive, it looks weird. Now we're going back and refining all those ligature, they're not really ligature combinations, but combinations of all cap words written in a cursive style. You just go down a rabbit hole of things you want to improve on each of these things. Luckily we have ASU, Arizona State University, not too far away. We have the design students from there come in and they help us with all that because it's a lot. There's a lot to be done. Kathleen: That's so fascinating. I could talk for hours about these little details and I think it's really cool that you are paying attention to the details in that way because if you're going to do this, I think it would totally backfire if it wasn't done well. If it's an obvious robotic attempt at writing a card. David: Yeah. We actually have one client that their quality assurance person, who is in a quality assurance mindset, was rejecting our cards because each card looked different. We said to him, well, that's the whole point. Not each card is supposed to be identical because people are, I know for a fact, for their brand, people do Instagram and do Pinterest and all that stuff, pictures of their cards, and if two people see the exact same card with the exact same spacing and everything else, it's going to look terrible to them. I was able to get them over that hump. It was funny that that was...He came at it from sourcing or let's get this laser printed perspective, and we said, no, no, no, that's not how it's supposed to be. They are all supposed to have a little variation so it looks more realistic. What types of cards can you choose from? Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah. To that point, my understanding from looking at your site is you can do folded cards or flat cards, correct? David: Yes. Yep. Really we can write on pretty much any piece of paper. On our website, we've got an inventory of about a hundred folded cards to choose from. Most of those now are designed in-house by us under the Red Wagon label. Nothing ever says Handwrytten when it comes in the mail, because we don't want to be the ones to spoil that. Those will come with that on the back. Instead of saying Hallmark, it says Red Wagon. In addition to that, we've got a variety of either blanks or blank on one side, 5X7 flat cards. With those, if they're totally blank on both sides, you can put a big image on the back, or I think confusingly which is called the front in our system, and then on the other side you can put your logo at the top and maybe a footer at the bottom and then we'll write between that and it looks like a nice luxurious piece of stationary. That is a very popular option. If you're a larger client and you've got your own stationary like some of our luxury brands do or whatever, they can always obviously just send that to us and we'll use that instead. What's nice about the online card customizer is it's so simple. You can literally spend like, I'm doing demos for prospects and I'll go online and in three minutes with them on a Zoom call, I'll create a piece of stationary that looks totally legitimate for them to use and then we can write it on it and send them a sample on their own stationery. It looks really good. The reason it's a flat card and not a folded card is basically we're resource constrained at Handwrytten currently and we can't afford a huge digital press that we'd then have to cut everything down and all that so it's easier if we just stick to a 5X7 flat card and it allows us to offer these at a price point in quantity one where it still makes sense. Kathleen: Yeah. David: It's $3.25. Kathleen: You guys also do handwritten envelopes too, correct? David: Everything is handwritten. The note is handwritten. The envelope is handwritten. There's a real forever stamp put on that piece if we're mailing domestically or an international first class stamp, if we're mailing outside of the United States. In addition to sending cards, clients can send us their business cards and we can insert those. There is a small fee for that for the storage and handling all those business cards. How companies are using Handwrytten David: Then additionally we've got probably 15 different denominations of gift cards for you to choose from. Amazon, Starbucks, Target, Home Depot, Visa gift cards, that type of thing. You could choose any of those and include that with your order at checkout too. We do a lot of $5 Starbucks cards typically for, "Thank you for meeting with me - here's a coffee on me" type things. We also do quite a few Home Depot for realtors and mortgage brokers. Kathleen: Oh yeah, that's a good idea. David: Yeah. Then also quite frankly for lazy people sending birthdays to their friends wherever, we do a lot of visa cards for that. I would say by and large, our biggest seller is the $5 Starbucks. Kathleen: Yeah, I could see it being really useful for companies that are trying to get more online reviews for their products. Somebody reviews you, you send them a thank you with a little gift card as a token of your thanks. That seems like a complete no brainer. David: Yeah, and we do a lot of that for Amazon sellers. Amazon's changed up the rules a little bit, so now it's not allowed to go out and contact them outside of the channel. You can't just send them a note in the mail. Now we're just inserting those notes with the packages themselves prior to getting shipped to Amazon for fulfillment, but we do a lot of those types of notes for them. Then a thank you for your referral and then a ton of insurance renewal type. When your insurance is up for renewal, it automatically triggers through Zapier a handwritten note to you thanking you for your renewal. On the inbound side, quite frankly, I think a lot of it is automatic triggering on forms. When people fill out a form online, that rep might take a few days to get in touch with them and in that time, we send all notes within typically the next business day. Then the post office takes their snail mail time to get to you. It's a nice follow up to whenever the rep contacts you. Kathleen: Yeah, that's what I was thinking of is I could see a lot of applications in sales. I could also see, in one of my previous roles I had, my team did an annual conference and I could see sending it to people who've registered for the conference or sponsors or even follow ups after the conference. There's so many different ways to use it with events. David: Absolutely. We were able to get our hands on the attendee list for our conference luckily a few weeks before the conference started, and we were able to track down all the mailing addresses. I didn't even attend that conference quite frankly. I just sat in the lobby and it was by far the most successful conference we ever had because we had meetings booked. I had so many meetings booked. I had to cut meetings short to get to the next meeting. It was great. It was a great example that our service worked for ourselves. It is absolutely great for pre-conference meeting scheduling and post-conference followup. It certainly does break through the din. How to automate handwritten notes Kathleen: Going back to something that you started with. I wanted to just revisit the...You talked about really this evolving into a platform because you have these integrations, so for people who are listening, it sounds like you have the option of doing this in a very transactional way. Either sending you a CSV file with a bunch of names and addresses or you could literally connect this to your CRM and trigger actions from there, correct? David: Yeah, absolutely. Our deepest integration right now is with Salesforce and in Salesforce you can send a handwritten note from the account screen, from the contact, from the lead, or from the opportunity. Then we could also automate through Salesforce. There's automation play, which was called process builder. Quite frankly, I'm a much bigger fan of Zapier, so even if they know how to do process builder, I know nothing about it. I say just spend the $29 a month and do Zapier and send it out. That way it's much easier. Either through Salesforce or through Zapier, you can do it. What's nice about doing it in Zapier or through HubSpot's CRM is any time you send a Handwrytten note, it's recorded in the CRM systems - within Salesforce or within HubSpot's CRM timeline. Therefore, when you go into that record and you see, "Oh, I called Kathleen on Monday, I sent her an email on Tuesday, I sent her a Handwrytten note with a $5 Starbucks on Wednesday", all that's recorded in your CRM platform. Then depending on the CRM platform, I know Salesforce is really robust in this way, your manager can oversee you and see all the notes you sent. Track your spend. Maybe not allow you to send gift cards or not allow you to send too many notes a month or whatever it is. We are looking to expand on that more into HubSpot and into Shopify. Trying to get these small stores to automatically follow up upon certain thresholds. On Shopify, if I send somebody a third order or they've spent over $500 in their lifetime with me or whatever that is, that would automatically trigger a note. Currently, we do all that through Zapier, but we just want to make it more transparent by putting it directly in the Shopify store. Quite frankly, for Handwrytten, I just want to be everywhere and every touch point is better SEO and it's more availability, more people will know about us and that type of stuff. Even if they in the end, commonly uses us through Zapier or uploading a CSV into our website. Kathleen: The real power of this to me is just that it has the potential to eliminate the human error factor. As somebody who works with companies as a head of marketing, I think there's so much potential to, I was mentioning before, integrate this in the sales process. I'm a marketer who loves working closely with sales teams because obviously you can judge yourself based on the number of qualified leads you pass to a sales team, but really with marketing, at the end of the day, it all comes down to how many of those leads turn into customers. I like to look at what happens after that lead gets passed over. I think being able to say, okay, we did a demo for this person. When that's marked off in Salesforce or in HubSpot CRM, if I can go in and automatically trigger it so that handwritten note goes out, I don't then have to rely on the sales team. It also makes their life easier, which improves my relationship with them. Anything marketing can do to make sales life easier, is always a good thing. I know for sure that it's going to happen. To me that makes it incredibly appealing as a marketer. David: Yeah, and that's where we're really trying to get with all of our clients. We want to be the plumbing of the organization on the handwritten notes side. You have your email plumbing and your CRM plumbing, but we want to be the handwritten note plumbing that you don't even think about. You just know it's going to work. For instance, we work with a solar panel installation company in Louisiana and they're sending about 400 notes a day. All of these notes are simply triggered off of people setting up meetings. They don't do anything. These notes are automatically triggered. They don't even have to think about it. We have a major car manufacturer if you call into their main customer support number in Detroit, and I'm not sure why you'd call them versus your dealership, but whenever people still do call the car manufacturer, depending on if you were resolved or unresolved in the call center, it automatically triggers one of three different handwritten notes to that car buyer. That purchaser saying "I'm so happy we were able to help you" or "I'm so sorry we weren't able to resolve this" whatever. To your point, exactly, it's taking the compliance or the follow through aspect out of it. The last thing you want to do is sit down and you're trying to answer the phone and you don't want to have to sit down and remember to send 40 handwritten notes and have your hand cramp up and everything else. We work with a super premium luxury perfume company and we do all their online purchases. We send handwritten notes following an order. I was just walking through a department store with my wife and they had that premium brand and I pointed it out, and the store clerk came up and she was asking me why I was pointing it out and I said, oh, it's because we do the handwritten notes for you guys. She goes, "No, you don't." I have to write all my own handwritten notes and it takes all day to do it and that's a pain in the neck. I said, "Well, we do it for the online orders." She said, "Well, geez, you should do it for me too", because she's very busy. I'm sure she can't get around to sending all her handwritten notes. If she does, maybe they start looking terrible by the end of the day because her hands cramped or whatever. We're doing a lot of that trying to make the online experience just as good as the offline. Kathleen: That's awesome. I think this is a no brainer. I know I'm going to be using it in some capacity, but I've been fascinated by solutions like this for a while because the same pain point that you expressed when you started the company, I felt that a few years ago and I went and started Googling to try to find a solution and there wasn't really one that existed. There were some very, very high priced ones that if you're a company that's going to do tremendous volume, it might be worth investing in it, but there weren't any good solutions that supported a lower volume and a smaller budget. I love that you have a solution that spans all of that. I think that's great. It makes it so much more accessible. David: Right now for better or worse, I actually wrote a medium post about this, our big competitor who you probably saw, they are no more because they spent all their money on marketing and very little money on technology. I come from a technology background and I spent all our money on technology so that we could support the business and maximize throughput of messages so that you didn't have to have somebody sitting there placing each note individually on a handwriting robot like they did. They are no more, and right now we are pretty much the only game in the United States. I know of one in Germany doing it and the big problem we're coming across right now are companies claiming to be handwritten, but we've received their product and it's laser printed. There's a little bit of market confusion out there currently, but in the actual handwritten notes space in North America, we are in an interesting position to be the only game in town right now. You'd think we'd be bigger given that. We're getting there. We're definitely getting there. Kathleen: Oh, I have a feeling that in a few years everyone is going to be talking about you. Well not even a few years. I don't think it's going to take long because it's a really great product and it sells itself to me at least. David: Thank you. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Well, I want to make sure I save enough time to ask you my questions that I always ask all my guests. The first one is, we talk a ton about inbound marketing on this podcast. When you think about companies or individuals out there who are practicing inbound marketing, who do you think is really doing it well right now? David: This is actually not a client of ours, but I have some friends that do digital marketing and we've been talking about it. I actually ran this question by them because I knew you're going to ask it. There's a company called GhostBed based in Florida. They do online mattresses. They've been doing them quite a long time and they rely heavily on people writing video reviews or doing video reviews and putting them on Instagram or on Twitter and then they pull them off those social channels and actually put them on their website and then they tag you with that ad roll and everything else once you're there. They really got ya. I know they use a marketing influencer network. I think they're using one called Intellifluence, but they do a very good job. As far as our clients, I think VYNL does a very good job within their niche of building this huge branding presence on, for certain, very specific niche demographics. Those hipsters that want to receive old fashioned vinyl. They've done a great job of getting out there and getting in front with a lot of Instagram and a lot of Facebook marketing and then driving that back to their website and then just having everybody, at least when we started, there was a lot of excitement about these handwritten notes with them and there was a lot of taking pictures of those and posting them online. That worked really well. Then I got to say we've done a pretty good job of it just because of the cobbled together HubSpot-like platform we've built, which is a nine or 10 step Zapier zap that when you come in and you request, I will warn all your listeners, that if they request samples, they're going to get emails from members of my team and then a phone call and they're going to be put in our CRM system and all that. That whole process is totally automated. I'm pretty happy about the inbound processing machine we've created here based on creating an item of value, which is a handwritten note sample that people want to receive. I think GhostBed has done a really pretty incredible job. Kathleen: Oh, I can't wait to check that out. It's amazing what you can do with Zapier. It's pretty limitless. David: It really is. I should work for them. Kathleen: Yeah. I had a guy named Connor Malloy as one of my guests many episodes ago. He's from a company called Chi City Legal. I think it's him and one partner that have a law practice in Chicago and he runs his entire practice on Zapier on basically zero budget. It's amazing what he has done. That was one of my favorite episodes because he was like, "I don't know if you want to talk to me because it's just me and my partner and we don't have a big budget and we don't have any fancy software." I'm like, "No, that is why I want to talk to you because you've done all this incredible stuff on a shoe string with just you." David: I remember the episode. He had Zapier pre-filling his contracts and all that stuff. Kathleen: Yeah. It's amazing. That's really cool that you guys have an integration with Zapier because I've used it at many companies and it's really a game changer. Second question is, the digital marketing changes really quickly and the biggest complaint I get from marketers is they can't keep up with it. How do you personally keep up with it? How do you stay educated? David: Well, recently I have to admit I have become a Reddit addict and I don't know if you've gone on the Reddit bandwagon yet, but it's a never ending rabbit hole to go down for good and bad. I can go on certain channels and just dive in to silly videos for hours on end or I can look at the growth marketers subreddit and get some really great ideas. I find Reddit to be really good. The latest idea, and I almost hesitate to mention this on your show, is a little black hat idea for LinkedIn marketing called LemPod, L. E. M. P. O. D. I don't know if it's worth getting into because somebody...It was posted on Hacker Noon as well in other websites they talked about LemPod, but basically it's a way of preseeding your LinkedIn posts with engagements. You join a group of other digital marketers or people in your same vertical or what have you, and it automatically fills your post with comments from them, and because of that, the more engagements your posts have, the more visibility they have. My recent posts have all received 5,000 to 10,000 views because of LemPod. It's a little bit black hat, but I learned about that through Reddit as well. Also, I'm a huge fan of Flipboard and I'm part of the hashtag inbound marketing content on Flipboard, so I read that. Then finally I listen to you and I've heard all these episodes you've mentioned. Those are the three ways. LemPod is certainly interesting if you're looking for an interesting approach to massively increasing your views, even if it's a little funny at the beginning. Kathleen: Yeah, I'll definitely have to check that out. I am so humbled that you mentioned me in that mix and that you listened to the podcast and get some value out of it. That means a lot to hear that feedback. Thank you. David: No, absolutely. Like I said, during the preinterview for this and then again I write for Inc. magazine and I tried to create items of value on the website because of that gentleman that worked at HubSpot, then G2 Crowd. I really take what you're doing to heart and I think I cannot be the only one. There has to be other listeners out there doing the same. Thank you for doing this and I hope it's paying off for you because it's paying off for us. How to connect with David Kathleen: Oh, well thank you. That is why I love doing it. It makes me happy to hear that it's working for you. Well, I'm sure there are people who are listening to this and they're thinking this Handwrytten things sounds really cool. I want to check it out. How should they do that? What's the best way for them to learn more about Handwrytten and or connect with you online? David: Yeah, you can always connect with me online. I'm David B Wachs on Twitter, I think David B. Wachs On LinkedIn, but just search for David and Handwrytten on LinkedIn. The company is Handwrytten.com. That's Handwrytten with a Y, H. A. N. D. W. R. Y. T. T. E. N. I do recommend the samples requests. You can always say "stop emailing me" after you get your samples, because with the samples you get a whole bunch of material. You get custom cards, you'll get standard cards, you'll get a whole page of different writing styles and a nice little folder to hold it all in. People really do like our samples. You could just get that at Handwrytten.com/business. We are rolling out a new website in the next two months, which I'm super excited about. If you check us out now, please check this out in two months. That's it. We have a small presence on Instagram. I think our tag is Handwryttennotes on there, and we are on Pinterest because we do a lot of consumery style notes, but for the most part, just feel free to connect with me on Twitter. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Awesome. Well, I will put links to all of that in the show notes, so head over there if you're interested in connecting with David or learning more about Handwrytten. There's so much good stuff on the website, so I definitely do recommend people check that out. Of course, if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode or you'll learn something new, I would really appreciate it if you could head to Apple podcasts and leave the podcast a five star review. That would help us get in front of more listeners like you. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, David. This was a ton of fun. David: Thank you very much. It was an honor to be on your show.

How did Jostle more than double its traffic, revenue, and staff size almost entirely through inbound marketing? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Jostle VP of Marketing & Growth Dustin Tysick shares the company's approach to "co-creation," and why working closely with the sales and customer success teams has helped Jostle's marketing team create a strategy and content that consistently drives leads. Dustin gets into specifics around how to solicit feedback, and how to balance the input you're getting with the need to move fast and make decisions. This is actionable advice that can be applied by any marketer in any setting to get better results and secure buy in.    Highlights from my conversation with Dustin include: Jostle is an intranet company. Dustin joined the company five years ago and was the only marketing person. Today, he heads up a marketing team of six. Dustin defines co-creation as "getting people together who have different points of view at different angles in order to contribute to a problem and solve it in a better and faster way." Until a year and half ago, Jostle's inbound marketing growth was 100% fueled by inbound marketing. Jostle's top of the funnel growth came from creating content that answered their customers' and prospects' questions. In the past year, the company has doubled its organic traffic using a pillar content and topic cluster approach. At the heart of Jostle's strategy is co-creation - specifically, involving representatives of the sales and marketing teams in the early brainstorms around content. In addition, they had a deliberate strategy of using the exact words that customers use in their own marketing. Dustin has found that the best way to get meaningful feedback from the customer success and sales teams is to do it through one on one meetings. One successful campaign that Jostle ran that was the product of co-creation involved  the production of an explainer video. All marketing copy that Jostle creates must pass the "BS test" which involves reading the copy out loud to see if it sounds natural, and then determining whether someone with a completely non-technical background could understand it. One of the biggest challenges for the project owner is to balance listening to everyone's input with making decisions. At the end of the day, the process is not about reaching consensus. With the feedback collected, Dustin's team creates draft copy for the company's marketing campaigns and then meets with designers who sketch out, conceptually, what a design would look like. In the time since Dustin joined Jostle, the company has growth from 25 to 75 employees, and all of that growth has been driven by inbound. In the last year, Dustin and his team have shifted their focus from generating leads for sales to creating sales opportunities. As a result the percentage of marketing-influenced closed won revenue has increased considerably. Resources from this episode: Visit the Jostle website Listen to Jostle's People at Work podcast Connect with Dustin on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to learn how Dustin has grown Jostle by collaborating with the company's sales team on its marketing strategy and content. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and today my guest is Dustin Tysick who is the VP of Marketing and Growth at Jostle. Welcome Dustin. Dustin Tysick (Guest): Hey, thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Dustin and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah, thanks for traveling in through the driving snow to get here. You guys are in Vancouver and I know you had a rare snow storm. Dustin: Yeah, for sure. Yesterday I woke up and saw it was going to be a two hour delay and camped out from home. But I made the trek today to get to the microphone, and yeah, I'm looking forward to this. Kathleen: I have to admit, as old as I get, I still feel like a kid every time there's a snow day because I'm like, "Yes, I get to stay in my pajamas an hour longer." It's like that never gets old. Dustin: Yeah, no totally. I love the first day or two of snow and then I just hope for the rain. Kathleen: Yeah, then you get cabin fever. Dustin: Yeah, exactly. But no, it was actually awesome staying home. It was a nice little break. Went out, built a snowman with my son. It was a good time overall. Kathleen: That's great. Well, I am super excited to chat with you. For those who are listening and they may not be familiar with Jostle or with you, can you tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and your story, what Jostle is and how you came to be doing what you're doing today? About Dustin Tysick and Jostle Dustin: Cool. Yes. I'll start with Jostle. So we're in a space that people often don't love. We're in the intranet space, which is kind of like a "ugh" word sometimes and we want to change that. So basically what we do is old intranet, is you build a bunch of pages, you build a website essentially. We've decided to build a platform to solve that communication problem and organize that chaos in a nice way. We're based in Vancouver. There's about 75 of us here. Yeah, it's just a lot of fun tackling that giant communication problem. On my end, I often say I'm a converted sales guy who's in marketing now. So I worked in sales for six years actually selling educational technologies to universities across Canada. Quickly realized I was doing marketing stuff in my sales role. So this was like eight years ago when I was doing mail merges and that sort of stuff and automating some sequences. So decided to go switch career path, go back to marketing. So I went ahead and did that and made the jump and kind of been growing in that career ever since. Kathleen: I love how you describe yourself because I always talk about myself as a recovering entrepreneur because I owned a business for 11 years. I sort of came from that and got back into marketing. So we all make our way here somehow or another. Dustin: Yeah, exactly. There's very few people who come out of high school and they're like, "I want to go into marketing." So yeah, we all end up here. Kathleen: Yeah. Now you guys, so you're head of growth and the company is growing considerably. I had originally connected with you because I was out there looking for people who are getting great results from inbound marketing and one of the things you talked about when we first connected was this concept of co-creation and using co-creation for your strategy and your content, et cetera. So maybe you could just start by talking a little bit about Jostle's growth to kind of set the stage and then we could go into co-creation. Jostle's growth story Dustin: Yeah, no, definitely. So when I started at Jostle, it's almost five years ago, which is kind of crazy to say, especially working in tech. Kathleen: That's actually really impressive because I think the stat is the average tenure for marketing leaders is two years. It's pretty short. Dustin: Yeah, definitely. I had the benefit here of starting as ... At the time I started I was the only marketing person for a bit. So co-creation was limited then, right? It was me going out there, getting stuff done as quickly as I could often on my own kind of in a hacky way throwing things together because that's what you have to do at that stage, right? As we grow in teams, six people now on the marketing side, everyone has their own large projects, we've really had to develop a way to co-create and share ideas and work together and get feedback from people without just slowing down to a grinding halt. I think that's a struggle most companies get to when they grow, right? You need process, but how much process is too much process? Kathleen: Yeah. Administrative overload. There's definitely a big risk there. Dustin: Yeah, absolutely. Kathleen: So when you talk about co-creation, what do you mean? Can you kind of define that for me? Dustin: For sure. So the concept here at least, since we were more development heavy at the start and it was a smaller marketing and sales team, it kind of developed there and spawned there. So co-creation is getting people together who have different points of view at different angles in order to contribute to a problem and solve it in a better and faster way is kind of the easy way to explain it. "Co-creation is getting people together who have different points of view at different angles in order to contribute to a problem and solve it in a better and faster way" So the dev example is, you need a design person to look at usability. You need a backend person to look if it's possible and you need a front end person to kind of make it happen and give feedback. Without one of those you either get something that's really ugly and works well or something that looks great and doesn't work at all. So it kind of started from there. Kathleen: Awesome. How does that manifest in a marketing sense? Dustin: Yeah. On the marketing side it's quite a bit different. So take my marketing team for example. I have someone who runs product marketing, someone who runs customer marketing. I have an SDR on my team. So those people need to call from other people in the company to get feedback. So product marketing working on an island on their own coming up with their ideas is going to fail. They need to bring in development sales, customer success, bring them all together to get the concept down while also not making this into this never ending loop of feedback that we don't get anything done. Jostle's inbound marketing strategy Kathleen: Got it. So let's back up. Inbound marketing, you guys are getting really good results from that. Can you maybe talk broadly about what your strategy looks like and who you guys are targeting? Who's your audience? Dustin: Yeah, so we've, up until about a year and a half ago, we're actually entirely inbound. We just hired our first SDR last week. So we're kind of brand new to that space. The reason we've always been inbound is we don't sell to VPs of Marketing at tech companies, right? We don't have that tiny target market where outbound's great. So we've purposely kind of cast this wide net and relied on content and the problems we solve to draw people in to find us, right? So we've had a lot of success from general content marketing and showing up on Google for problems that people are looking for. Like how do I solve internal communications? What questions do I ask my CEO? Those aren't related to an intranet, but the people who are looking to solve that problem are the people we want to be aware of us. So that's been our approach to cast this giant net and bring people in. Kathleen: Did you identify those topics from audience research or where did that all come from? Dustin: Yeah, part of it was from audience research and seeing in those first few years who found us and who bought and breaking that out into different personas. So as I said, it's not like a VP of Marketing is the person who buys us. It could be them, it could be someone in HR, it could be a senior leader. So our approach was to actually map those out, figure out which problems they likely want to solve and what they're searching for in their day-to-day, and then write to those topics in a way that's easy to understand and relatable. Top of the funnel traffic growth Kathleen: Got it. So that's very top of the funnel. What did your top of the funnel growth look like from that? Dustin: Yeah, so take it to the very top, top of the funnel when it comes to views. In the past year, once we've really started ramping up the blog, we have managed to double our traffic there in the past year, and it really is taking that topic cluster approach to figure out what we write about. The days of keyword stuffing and just repeating it over and over, it's dead. It's been dead. So really trying to own three or four topics and write extensively of them has really helped us drive that, which in turn has driven more content downloads, more subscribers, more people following us. Kathleen: Got it. So you have your topic clusters, you've got the blog traffic increasing and then where does co-creation come into the development of that strategy? Dustin: Yeah, so on that strategy, a big part of it is just getting feedback from customer success and from sales on what those problems they're hearing day-to-day. So customer success is a big one there, right? Marketing is often one step removed from the customer. We sit in on calls sometimes, but in order to really understand what problems our platform's solving and what problems our customer needs help with, we have to talk to them. So that's kind of why we added a customer marketing person on my team is to bridge that gap so that we can work together and sort things out. How Jostle's marketing team gets feedback from sales and customer success Kathleen: Now how exactly do you get that feedback? I would love to get into the nitty gritty details. Do you have like a Slack channel or do they send you an email? What does that look like? Dustin: Yeah, so it depends a lot on the scope of a project. For a smaller one, it often is, so we use our own product for instant messaging. So we have our discussions where people can use and that's for a very simple thing. For a more in depth project, we like to take the "zoom in, zoom out" approach is what I call it. So at the concept creation stage of "Hey, what do we want this webpage to say or what is the purpose of this page and what is the result we want," we actually bring in a pretty large group with varied interests from different departments and seek feedback. So we do that. Then the project owner zooms in and works on their own, develops the copy because the last thing you want is 12 people in a Google Doc hammering away at copy. It just destroys the entire message. So for a large project we do take that approach where its "zoom in, zoom out," have a check in and get review with the larger group and keep doing that until you get to the point where we're ready to put it live. Kathleen: Now that's on a project-by-project basis. Do you have any continuous feedback loops where as these customer-facing folks are talking to people, I hear something in a conversation, do you have a way of capturing those things on the fly? Dustin: Yeah. So we use our own platform for a lot of that actually and we have different discussions set up for different things. So say we launch a new feature and we're figuring out how to promote it on the website and how we want to write about it. That will have its own discussion where success can pop in and say, "Hey, I just had this interesting call. They mentioned this. This is the language they used and that resonated with me." So then we would adapt that language and put it on the website. So it's not just our marketing speeds being thrown at them, right? We're trying to use the language of the customer. Kathleen: Great. So you guys are using Jostle for that obviously. You're drinking your own Kool-aid, but if somebody is listening and they don't have that, they could use their SharePoint or their Slack instance or their Microsoft Teams or what have you and do the same thing, correct? Dustin: Yeah, absolutely. Anything where it's a two-way dialogue and it's dynamic. I think those are the key. A static page that people update and add content to, probably not the best approach, but a searchable conversation like a Slack channel totally works as well. Sustaining buy-in from sales and customer success Kathleen: Now, I've worked in places where we have systems like that set up, but one of the biggest challenges I've run into in the past is for lack of a better way of putting it, declining returns. Meaning we all sit down in a room and we say, "This is what we're going to do." Then when people start actually having those conversations, they don't follow through or over time participation declines. Do you have any tips or tricks on how to keep that momentum going and getting that feedback happening on a regular basis? Dustin: Yeah, so one thing we've found, especially with slightly larger project that really helps is having one-off personal check-ins with people is often a better approach than those giant team meetings where people get distracted by their phone or they get distracted by a laptop or the introvert doesn't talk. So we really task our project owner with, yeah, you're going to have a kickoff, yeah, maybe you have a concept review, but take the time to go grab a coffee with someone on that team you want to talk to and get feedback. It's a bit more casual, but often that's when the nuggets you really want come out is in that one-to-one communication. Kathleen: And do you do the same thing with your sales team? Dustin: Yeah, absolutely. That's something we try to do, especially when we're writing for the core website, homepage, the product page, feature pages, that sort of stuff. It's something we really try to do with sales. It's one thing, everyone can search call reports in Salesforce or search notes, but it's not the same as having someone relay the story to you. It's an entirely different thing. Kathleen: Yeah. The way you engage with your sales team, is there any difference between how you work with them and how you work with your customer success people? Dustin: No, it's actually pretty similar how we would do that. We ideally want our website pages to speak to both customers and potential leads, right? Your customers are going to end up on your website. That's how they're going to decide if they want to buy or add something new, so you need to address that. But it's a balancing act. It's kind of tough. Examples of successful Jostle campaigns Kathleen: Yeah. So you've got this top of the funnel strategy and then you begin to build out campaigns around that for conversions. Can you share some examples of campaigns you've run that have been successful that have gone through this co-creation process and maybe the before and after? Were there any big "aha" moments that you had as a result of working this way with your team? Dustin: Yeah, so one that was pretty successful and we're actually redoing an updating right now was when we first started really adding video to our strategy, which was 2016-ish. We started focusing on that and we went through this giant project with sales, success, us, senior leadership here to figure out, okay, if someone doesn't want to browse through a bunch of pages on our website, how can we simplify that journey and how can we tell our story in a succinct way that ultimately leads to a demo or to a trial? So we went through that process and created an explainer video that then flowed into a product tour and hit on all the key points we wanted to hit and then had a CTA built into the video to book a demo or have a trial. That is the ideal journey I want every customer to go through on my website if they have the time. We were able to do that in video, and month over month that continues to bring in conversions for sales that turn into real customers. I think the reason it's successful is because we crafted that message using feedback from multiple people. Bringing an idea from concept to execution Kathleen: Great. So when you go into that, do you have draft messaging that you're proposing and then it gets adjusted or do you just start from scratch and is it really like a brainstorm? Dustin: Yeah, so often we do have that brainstorm. Frequently that is with marketing to start and then when we bring in the larger group it's at a concept stage. So I've made the mistake of bringing in the script or bringing in a finished page and it's a nightmare. People start tearing it apart, it goes off the rails. So we purposely keep it point form, why are we doing this, what do we want out of it and what are the three things we need to communicate and really keep it that simple at the initial stage and get that feedback from everyone then. Then whoever's in charge goes off and creates the script while doing check-ins and while keeping people along for the ride. Kathleen: Okay. I want to go back to that for a second because I think we just touched on something really important. So you have a meeting. Let's say it's your meeting with sales and customer success about campaign A. Number one, who gets invited to that meeting? Dustin: Yeah. So we will usually pull both someone who's kind of the leader of the team I guess, as well as someone on the team so you get both perspectives. Senior leadership often has one kind of looking from high above view, which is incredibly valuable, but you need someone who's actually on the ground talking to people every day. So we like to have a mix of both. Kathleen: Okay, and then what does the agenda look like? Dustin: Yeah, for sure. So often it is someone from our team or someone from design depending on what stage we're at really walking through the how and the why. So the approach I've actually taken is, when we're creating a page or creating a concept, you have the how, the why and kind of a "BS test," as in, when do we know this has turned into marketing gobbledy goop and won't resonate with customers? We hold ourselves to that and we review it as the meeting progresses and in future meetings. So the agenda often is going over that to set the context and then working through what is the purpose and what are the three key things we want to target. We try to keep it to that rather than let's come up with a list of 20 things this page needs to do because then you get in the weeds and it just fails miserably. Passing the BS test Kathleen: Yeah. All right, I have two questions on that. Number one is can you give me an example of the BS test cause I love that and I think marketers do that a lot. We get wrapped up in our own way of talking about things. So what would be an example of something that sounded BS-y and how do you identify that and call it out? Dustin: Yeah, so for a lot of web pages that can be as simple as "read this out loud and do you sound like a human" is a very simple test that we use with most of our copy even for blog articles and that sort of thing, right? People read a website or read a blog and they have the voice in their head reading it. If it sounds like a robot or an infomercial, it's not going to resonate. So that's one common test that we use for sure. The other one is just a simple note to remind ourselves to check for jargon. Would your sister who has no clue what you do actually understand what we're talking about here? So those are two nice easy ones that we use. Managing feedback meetings Kathleen: Those are great tests. I'm just picturing one of these meetings in my head and I think if it was not run well you still would run the risk of having all these people around the table, different ideas, different opinions. You have some people who are loud mouths. Dustin: Yeah, totally. Kathleen: Some who are quiet. How do you manage that and herd the cats and get something valuable out of it? Dustin: Yeah, I think the key to that is having an understanding that there's still a project owner, right? This person's not trying to get consensus and trying to ram every idea into what we're doing. So you need to make people feel heard and you need to actually listen to them. That's key number one. All feedback is valuable. Are you going to use it all? No. So part of it comes down to really training the project owner to take that approach and be comfortable with that. You brought up a really good point though with some people are going to dominate the conversation. It's how it is. So we often also have a discussion tied to it that where afterwards people can add their thoughts through instant message or if we notice someone's really quiet in the meeting, take that time after, just stop them in the kitchen and say, "Hey, what did you think?" Try to get feedback that way. Oftentimes that person has the best idea, they just didn't want to speak up. Kathleen: Yeah, definitely. Some of those introverts have great contributions to make. Dustin: Yeah. Absolutely. Kathleen: You can tease it out. So you have this meeting, you walk away, you go back and your team works on the copy for example for a webpage. Dustin: Yeah. Kathleen: Then does it then go back or what's next? Avoiding the "too many cooks" problem Dustin: Yeah. So at that point, so we've made the mistake there of then going back and walking through the copy either in-person or through Google doc. It was a mistake. We shouldn't have done that. We learned pretty quickly you get a bunch of people editing and suggesting words on the fly and that's not a good use of any time. We hire a content marketers so they can write cause they write better than a lot of us, so let them write. So what we often do then is we pair the marketer with a designer in the case of a webpage. They go ahead and basically do a mockup of, "Hey, here's the flow we're thinking." Then we actually go into a design review at that point of okay, this is what we wanted to get across quickly. Does this design do that? We don't tweak the copy at that point too much. Which comes first, copy or design? Kathleen: So you create your copy before you create the design? Dustin: Yeah, I know that's kind of backwards, right? Kathleen: Well, actually I don't have an opinion either way, but I ask because this is a debate that I've had with so many people and I don't really know what I think. I think sometimes it can work one way and sometimes it works another. I probably lean more towards having some design elements figured out, some global elements, but then having the copy so that you can understand what the design needs to reflect in it, if you will. It's very chicken and eggy. Dustin: No, it totally is. We've made the mistake of going too far in one direction and handing them all the copy. Writers are going to write. They're going to write too much and it's not going to translate on a webpage, so we end up with a wall of text. So the thing that's helped us a lot there actually is bringing the designer in at the concept review. So when we have the concepts and kind of rough ideas of maybe the headers we're going to use throughout the page, design then starts doing initial mockups there in conjunction with the content person. So they actually work back and forth and they're often okay with, "Hey, this isn't the final copy, but it's roughly going to be this length. Can we work on this?" And then we get both done in conjunction because the design's going to inspire the copy and vice versa, right? Kathleen: Yeah. I recently worked on a website redesign project, not for the company I'm with now, but for a previous one and I worked with somebody who's freelance, who's amazing. I've worked with her before and she has a great system. It's actually pretty rudimentary but effective where she creates these tables in Microsoft, it's Microsoft Word or Google Docs, whatever you use. The table's somewhat approximate the modules on the page. What I like about that, and you then plot the copy and the things in there. What I liked about that was you know you get these problems with copywriting for website pages. For example, if you have a three column grid and you're saying like, "we do this, this and this" and it goes left to right. If you write a lot more for column three than column one it looks funny. So even just spatially being able to see look, our stuff that we wrote is taking up the same amount of space, it's those little things that can really be the devil in the details later down the road if you don't approach it correctly. Dustin: Yeah, I 100% agree with that. The other benefit there is people read websites differently, right? I am absolutely a scanner. I will read the headlines and dive in if I care. Often we write assuming everyone's going to read every single word. Maybe not the best approach, so I think having that design constraint, like you said, can actually help to really map out the hierarchy so it's an easy way to read and then get the right amount of content. Jostle's most successful campaigns Kathleen: Yeah. So I'd love to hear just some examples of what are some of the assets or campaigns that are performing really well for you guys? Dustin: Yeah, so I mentioned the product tour is one that has worked really well. Another one that has worked, I wouldn't really call it a campaign, but we've had a lot of success with our podcast personally. It's not a lead gen channel, right? People look at it like that sometimes and you're going to be disappointed. It's not going to bring in as much as paid search. But we've had a lot of success there with just having conversations with people who probably wouldn't talk to us otherwise. Kathleen: That's why I'm talking to you because I have a podcast. It's exactly the same thing. Yeah. Dustin: Yeah. So we've got a ton of value out of that, right? We're getting senior HR leaders or authors who are thought leaders in this space. Part of it selfishly is, yeah, we get exposure to their audience and that part's great. The other part of it though, is just that's really interesting content for our people. It's not just us spewing out our worldview. It's bringing in outside views in an engaging way and kind of being along with them for their commute or when they're on a run. There's something personal about that that I think builds a really strong audience. Kathleen: Yeah, it is. The network that you build and the relationships that you got through podcasting is incredible if you have an interview style podcast. That's one of the things I've really come to appreciate in the last two years of doing mine is I always tell people like, yeah, I get to talk to people who would otherwise probably never take my call. Dustin: Yeah, 100%. Kathleen: So good advice. Dustin: Yeah, and it's just adding another medium. Not everyone's going to take the time to sit there and read, so we've really taken this approach of branching out and providing audio, video, written long form, short form options for people to digest and read. Whereas maybe back in the day you would just create a 20 page book and assume it would work for all of us, for everyone. So really pivoting away from that has helped. Jostle's growth Kathleen: Great. What does Jostle's growth look like over the last five years that you've been there? Dustin: Yeah, so when I started we were right around 30 people I want to say. Marketing was, well, there were a couple of people in marketing when I hired and then there was a bunch of transition. I was the only one here. So we were a very, very small team. Now we're about 75 people. In my time here, revenues went up many different multiples. It's grown quite fast, which is really nice and I'm quite proud of that because we're competing with some of the big guns like Microsoft and Facebook and those guys, which I personally love. It's a lot of fun. They have more fire power than me so I got to be a little scrappy and figure out how to do things. But yeah, that's what our growth has looked like. It has been driven by inbound, like I said, and for the most part it will continue to be. Kathleen: And can you talk at all about how your funnel has grown, like visitors, leads, et cetera? Dustin: Yeah, absolutely. So the way I look at our funnel, you have to pick where you're going to grow and kind of focus on that. Traditionally we've started at the lead perspective. We managed to grow leads a lot. Like in the first two years we tripled the amount of leads per month, which was great. But I'll admit, I focused on that metrics and I neglected, hey, are we actually converting these people? Are we getting them to book? Are we losing them? So this past year my goal has really been I don't care how many leads we get, I care how many opportunities we generate longterm for sales. And making that shift has helped us actually grow in that area and really up that conversion where we're not paying for things or not spending our time on things that aren't generating results longterm. Dustin's advice for other marketers Kathleen: That's great. That's great. Well, in terms of takeaways for somebody who's listening and they have, most organizations have folks in sales and customer success. Anything you would recommend as far as improving the way marketing works with those teams and any lessons you learned the hard way? Dustin: Yeah, I think one is you need a process but you need it to be flexible and you need to let your people own it. So everyone has checklist people on their team who they say, "I want a flow chart. I want to know exactly what to do at exactly what stage." So you need to provide that, but you also need to train them on it's okay to use your judgment. We trust you. Maybe you're going to screw this up the first couple of times. I definitely did. So learn as you go and kind of give them that leeway. The other one is you can really go off the rails with this co-creation approach if you don't have a rough idea of timeline at the end and a rough idea of what stage you're at and how quickly it's going to progress. I've made the mistake personally of we get stuck in refining the copy over and over and over and incrementally we're not gaining anything. We're tweaking words that won't have much of an impact. So yeah, I think figure out where you want to get, work backwards and map out the process and bring in the people you need and you'll get better quality stuff faster. Kathleen: Yeah, and that's sort of "done is better than perfect" because I feel like that's where I am with one website project I'm working on right now is it's taking way too long because I'm trying to get it perfect and I just need to launch it. I can always iterate. Dustin: Yeah, absolutely. So that's our number one rule with this actually, is if it's not broken and it's okay quality, it's good enough. Get it out there, learn from it and kind of keep going and tied to that like share early is another important concept. We've had new people who have done this, and I did this when I started, you spent days and days crafting this thing that you think is perfect and then it gets torn apart and you start from scratch and that's discouraging and a nightmare. So come up with your idea, get it out early and work iteratively. Kathleen: That's so great, and how do you guys share? Dustin: Yeah, so it often is through that initial meeting where we share the concept and then I personally get the most value out of those one-to-one check-ins where I will pull someone aside often out of the blue, not a scheduled meeting and just say, "Hey, I need 10 minutes. Can I get your feedback," and share that way as you go. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Got it. All right. Shifting gears, there's a couple of questions I always ask all my guests and I would love to know your thoughts on this. The first is we're all about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound? Dustin: Yeah, so there's actually two I want to mention if that's okay. Kathleen: Yeah, the more the better. Dustin: Yeah. So the first one who I thinks doing really well is Vidyard. They do a nice job of putting out content that's going to get shared. So their Christmas video, their personalized Christmas video. I don't know if people have seen that. Kathleen: It's so good. Dustin: Yeah, and that got a lot of traction. It got a ton of eyeballs because it's interesting and it's fun. So they do a great job of that. The other one is actually a person who's more on the sales side is Josh Braun who shares a lot of great content on LinkedIn. I signed up for a couple of things with him. His emails to move you down the funnel are better than most marketing emails I get. So definitely a sales guy, but from an inbound non-pushy perspective, he's excellent at the copy he writes. Kathleen: Oh, that's a good one to check out. And then Vidyard. So shout out to Tyler Lessard, who's the head of marketing there who does an amazing job. Definitely go look at those. I totally agree. I don't know Josh Braun, but I know Vidyard, so I'm definitely going to be checking Josh out. Second question, I always hear marketers saying that they're overwhelmed because things change so quickly in the world of digital marketing and they can barely keep up. So how do you personally stay educated up to date? Dustin: Yeah, so part of it, you probably get this response a lot, is from my network and having those conversations with people who are struggling with the same things I'm struggling with. But personally I have a long commute so I get a lot of value out of a variety of podcasts. It's kind of my go-to learning approach. It's just how my brain absorbs stuff. So the traditional ones that work well, our Marketing Over Coffee is a nice one. Copyblogger has a really good podcast on fundamental writing, but I find I get a ton of value out of non-marketing podcasts that make me think and then do things better. So A16Z by Andreessen Horowitz is great. I learn a ton from there, as well as How I Built This is another one that seeing how people have kind of grown things from nothing informs marketing because that's how they grew up. So I get a lot out of both of those. Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. Those are good ones. I love podcasts also, but I'm also biased because you know, clearly, clearly the podcasting medium is one that's comfortable to me. Dustin: Yeah, same here. I'm a little biased as well. How to connect with Dustin Kathleen: Now, and that actually brings me to my next question, which is if somebody has a question for you or wants to connect and learn more about either Jostle or how you're doing your marketing, what's the best way for them to connect with you online? Dustin: Yeah, definitely. So they can connect on LinkedIn. Send me a message there. If they want to learn more about Jostle, the website's jostle.me, so they can head over there and take a look. Since we're on a podcast, I'm going to plug my podcast if that's okay. Kathleen: No, I was going to ask you to say the name of it because that was at my segue was the podcast. Dustin: Yeah. So we have a podcast called People At Work that we do at Jostle and it's basically focusing on people who are solving work problems in an interesting and effective way and kind of getting their thoughts on it. It's quite conversational. So yeah, check that out. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Awesome. We will definitely check those out and I will put the links for Dustin's LinkedIn and the People At Work Podcast into the show notes. So head there to check that out if you want to look into any of those things. And if you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learned something new, I would love it if you would head to Apple Podcasts and leave the podcast a five star review. That's how we get in front of new listeners. If you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next interview. Thank you so much, Dustin. Dustin: Yeah, thank you, Kathleen. That was fun. Kathleen: This was fun.

What's the secret sauce that top growth marketers use to predict performance and develop their marketing plans and budgets? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Onna Head of Growth Peter Schroeder shares his process for building growth models, and how he uses them to predict future marketing and sales headcount needs, allocate budget, and more. Peter's approach to growth modeling can work for any type of company, from an early stage startup without a lot of marketing performance data, to a well established high growth company looking to take its performance to the next level.  Highlights from my conversation with Peter include: As head of growth for Onna, Peter focuses on the demand gen side of marketing (as opposed to the brand building side). Peter says that a focus on growth is particularly important at early stage companies where very often investors have high expectations regarding growth milestones. Onna is just this type of company. It is early stage, having just closed a Series A round of investment with funding from companies like Slack and Dropbox, and the growth goals are ambitious. When Peter thinks about growth modeling, he begins with the revenue number that the company is trying to hit, and then reverse engineers the funnel so that he can determine things like required budget and headcount. Peter's growth models are built as spreadsheets that reflect patterns in historical marketing data with regarding to channel performance, conversion rates and more. He says that while many startups say that they don't have enough data to build a growth model, he believes this is just an excuse and the small amount of data you do have coupled with anecdotal feedback from your sales team are enough to get started. Peter encourages marketers not to get too wrapped up in making the model perfect. He says to follow the 80/20 rule and spend no more than 20 percent of your time building the model and at least 80 percent of your time working on growth-oriented activities. Using his spreadsheet, Peter identifies the cost to acquire a customer by channel, and then he models out what the cost is at each stage of his funnel, by channel. While most marketers think that CAC will get lower over time, Peter says it is just the opposite and CAC will increase as your efforts saturate a particular channel. Peter says that the ket metric marketing should be measured on is marketing contributed revenue. He uses his growth model to report on that, and says that the model is a helpful tool to incorporate into leadership meetings and regular marketing checkins. Another way that Peter communicates about marketing success is by sharing his team's work internally. Resources from this episode: Visit the Onna website Follow Peter on Twitter Email Peter at peter@onna.com Listen to the podcast to learn more about Peter's approach to growth modeling, and how to build a growth model of your own. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Peter Schroeder, who is the head of growth at Onna. Welcome, Peter. Peter Schroeder (Guest): Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here. Kathleen: Yeah. I am excited to talk to you, because I speak with a lot of marketers, and your title is head of growth. So maybe you could start out by talking a little bit about yourself and kind of your background and what led you to where you are today, as well as what Onna is, and then we can talk a little bit about what it means to be a head of growth. About Peter and Onna Peter: Yeah, absolutely. So what head of growth really means is, it focuses on the demand gen side of marketing. It's not as involved in brand-building and any of those other activities that don't directly result in pipeline generation for a business. So what the head of growth really does is, like I said, just focuses on all areas that would drive the business forward from a revenue perspective. So that's like a little bit of the differentiator. And I think that we're starting to see it more and more at early stage companies where you really need to focus on that revenue growth as opposed to like brand-building. Kathleen: Yeah, definitely. Those results are kind of where the rubber meets the road. Peter: Yeah, exactly. Kathleen: What has your career path been? How did you become a head of growth? Peter: Yeah, absolutely. So I've been in the software world for about eight years. I was in marketing roles and digital marketing roles. And I think that ever since I started early on in my career, it's always been demand gen focus. Whether it's paid media events, webinars, it's always been about things that directly impact the revenue side of the business. I think that brand is very much so a luxury that early stage companies just can't afford to focus on exclusively. I think a lot of our demand gen activities residually affect that brand. Making sure that we're going to market with a unified message, consistent branding, that's something we want to do on the demand gen side. So I think that branding will come, but it's just not a luxury that most companies have. Most early stage SaaS companies have that runway. They have those numbers that they need to be held accountable for. So that's really focusing on the demand gen side. So being a marketer at early stage software companies, I feel like it's just kind of comes with the territory. Kathleen: Yeah. I would say amen to all of that, but especially if it's a company that's venture-backed or that's looking for investment, those numbers are critical, and usually investors are watching them really closely, so I can see where your kind of role would be important. What does it mean to be a growth marketer? Kathleen: Now, when you come into a role such as head of growth, how do you approach that? I know we were going to talk about growth modeling, and I love this concept, because especially at early stage companies, I've been at some, and the question is always like, what can we expect in terms of growth? And what's it going to take to get like if we want to grow by 2X? And a lot of times, I think, marketers come into these roles and they sort of feel like it's like putting their finger up in the air and measuring where the wind is blowing, and they pull a number out of the blue and sometimes feel nervous about it. But you've really dug into a little bit more of a scientific approach to figuring out growth. Peter: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I can give you an example of where I'm at right now. So I'm at a company called Onna, which is a platform that centralizes data from your favorite apps, so think Slack, G Suite, anywhere where you get work done, to deliver a connected enterprise. So we're gathering all that data and we're supercharging it with machine learning and unified search to give you all that data in one place. This last year, to give you like a stage for the size of our company, we closed our series A with investments from Slack and Dropbox. And with that investment, we have really aggressive growth goals on the sales and marketing end. When you're getting funding from companies at that level, we have really big goals for 2020. So what that means for me is coming into the business and thinking, how can we hit those aggressive growth goals? And starting at the revenue number, what's the revenue number we have to hit? And then sort of reverse engineering that funnel to make sure that we have the funnel covered at all stages from a budget perspective, from a headcount perspective, just overall coverage on all ends. And what that means, for example, is we don't want to generate more pipeline than we have the headcount to be able to close from a sales perspective. So this is where a sales and marketing alignment gets really close, so working with sales to make sure we know when they're hiring people. For the marketing side, we know when we need to bring in what amount of pipeline to make sure we're able to close at an effective rate. Otherwise, from a marketing perspective, if we're under-generating pipeline, that's going to impact the sales department. On the flip side, if we're over-generating pipeline, things are going to slip through the cracks, because we don't have enough coverage from a headcount perspective to be able to sort of reign all that pipeline in. So when we think for like planning for a whole year. So for example, we want to grow 2 to 3X next year, which is really aggressive growth goals. That comes with a lot of hiring, a lot of pipeline generating. So we just want to make sure that we're scaling in unison to be able to support each other effectively. Kathleen: I am loving this topic, because I think this is something that so many marketers have had to grapple with. And I love that you talked about almost starting with the end in mind. The investors want you to reach X amount of revenue, and how do you back out what's needed to get there? Right? And especially that you talked about sales and marketing alignment, because obviously those are both really important parts of the puzzle. So knowing that that's what you have to do, where do you start? How do you break this up into manageable pieces? How to get started with growth modeling Peter: Yeah, definitely. So I don't know if you can start with somewhere manageable, but you kind of have to think about all stages of growth modeling to make sure you have all your bases covered. A lot of people just want to say, "Okay, we're going to do everything in everything." And that's just not possible, especially when you're smaller stage. You need to focus. You need to understand where you have the biggest opportunity to have an impact. You have to understand historical trends. Where did your early customers come from? Recognize those patterns. Try to map out, if you invest more money to try to amplify those channels, how does that impact it? So it's really like a full scope sort of understanding of how you want to grow your business. And I know that people will hate to hear this answer, but it starts in the spreadsheets. You have to get into the spreadsheets. You have to start mapping out your numbers. I know that early stage companies like to say, "We don't have enough data to back that." But I think that early data is really good early indicators. And like I said, I think just as a really good place to start is to start with that revenue number. Then based on historical trends, you can reverse it up from closed won. Then you can go up to opportunities. Then you can go up to SQLs, MQLs, leads, traffic, and you can understand the whole funnel. And then that at least gives you a sense of what you need to bring in from a lead perspective, and that gives you a place to start. Then once you have that lead number, you can break it up by channel based on what you've seen by channel. How much does it cost for you to acquire a lead at each channel? And then you just start laying out the whole framework, and it shows you how much you need to invest in each channel, what headcount you need to support that investment. And it helps you go back down that funnel and give you that coverage. Kathleen: Okay, so there's a lot there. Peter: Yeah, there's a lot there. I have a slide that I can give to you that you can put it in the show notes, but it kind of articulates from a funnel perspective what you have to look at and where you have to identify conversion rates to get those numbers to be able to map out your channels. Kathleen: Now, you said something that really caught my ear, which is that a lot of people in startups are going to say, "We don't have enough data." And that was running through my head as you said it. So you talked about even the early numbers are good and kind of interesting numbers, but there is a certain amount of data that's needed because when you talk about things like looking at performance by channel, et cetera, some early stage companies coming out of stealth are going to have really basically nothing, or they might have a pipeline but it's entirely from having an SDR on the team and dialing for dollars and not any inbound. And so how much data do you really need in order to do this? Like do you have to have a basic inbound pipeline up and running? Peter: I mean, it's a good question. I guess it depends on where your company has seen growth and if it has seen growth yet. Like you said, if it's coming right out of stealth mode, that's when you lean on your early employees, their experience, historical trends, market research, and you put together some baseline numbers to at least have something to measure against. If you're early-stage, you pull together the data that you have, and you start mapping out against it. But everyone should be able to at least pull something together. And I think that the use of this data, I also don't want to over-advocate for it, because I think that we can get stuck in analysis paralysis too. And our primary function as marketers are people who create, people who drive demand. So I think that when we think about the balance between this growth modeling and actually acting upon it, I like to use a simple 80-20 rule. We shouldn't spend more than like 20% of our time planning and building out these frameworks and building these models. It's like, at a certain stage, especially when you're early, do the best that you can. Have something to model against. Have something to show that you have actually thought about your growth goals and you're not just spending money to spend money. But at the end of the day, like you said, you could only have so much data. We all only have access to so much data. And at the end of the day, we need to execute on it. We need to be able to put our plan into action and put our plan into motion, so at the end of the year we're not pointing back to our growth model and being like, "Well, we didn't do any of that." We need to actually execute on these things that we put together. Kathleen: So I want to make sure I'm understanding you correctly. You come in and you're looking at historical information around conversion rates and volume at each level from traffic to lead all the way through to closing a deal. And I assume you're also looking at the growth of those numbers over time, in other words, how the conversion rate has changed over time? Peter: Yep. So conversion rates also paired with like unit economics. So by channel, how much are we acquiring customers for? What's the lifetime value of those customers? What's our payback period? So being also very conscious of the economics by channel. How to build a growth model Kathleen: Okay. And so let's say your revenue is at $5 million a year, and your investors come in and they say, "We want you at 50 million by the end of next year." Walk me through. How do you take that model and use it to answer that question? Peter: Yeah, that's a really good question. So that'd be 10X in growth, so --- Kathleen: We can make it 2X, if that's easier for the purpose of this. Peter: Sure. Let's go five to 10. That might be easier. So what you have to do is, you have to sort of dissect the pipeline from this last year. So how much revenue in the last year have you gained? Based on that revenue, what was your closed won percentage? Where was the pipeline coming from? And you'd have to identify where's the best opportunity to amplify that pipeline. Like, do we dissect our pipe and dissect our deal flow and find out that like 90% of our deals came through channel partnerships? Well, that means that we might have the biggest opportunity to go into those channel partnerships and amplify it with resources and money and going to events. So it's really identifying historic trends and pattern recognizing, and then coming up with hypotheses by channel that support our growth goals, and then kind of filling in the numbers to help support that so you have something to measure against. Kathleen: Okay. So let's use the example you came up with, like channel for example. Let's say we decide channel is the biggest opportunity because we see that a large volume of our customers are closing from there. If the hypothesis is that that's where we need to put our resources... You talked a little bit about using growth modeling to determine plans and budgets and that sort of thing. How do you translate that hypothesis into a concrete plan and a budget? Turning growth models into marketing plans and budgets Peter: Yeah, definitely. So I think at a high level, it starts with your revenue number and what you need to get there. So you need that. You need your cost to acquire customer by that channel. And then you can basically, based on what you need to do from that channel, based on your projections, you can divide it by your cost to acquire a customer, and you can basically fill out your funnel and recognize the cost at every stage of the funnel. You can associate a dollar amount to an MQL, an SQL, an opportunity, and a closed one. And it helps you understand at each stage of the funnel what you need to acquire a customer for. So let's say in that example, you do your math, you look at your cost to acquire a customer, you look at the number you need to get to, and you recognize that you need to acquire an MQL at a price of $1,500. Well, it helps you know when you go to that channel partnership event... Let's say you spend $100,000 to promote that event. You need to be able to acquire X amount of MQLs at $1,500 to have that event back out and to continue to support your growth goals. Kathleen: Okay. So it's more about the cost of acquisition than setting an arbitrary budget, for example. Peter: Yeah, exactly. It all comes back to, what is that cost to acquire a customer? And then you can compare it to your funnel metrics to identify dollar amounts at every stage of the funnel. Kathleen: And to what degree, when you build this model, are you baking in assumptions about becoming more efficient over time? In other words, especially with earlier startups, they might be spending a lot to acquire leads and customers. But presumably that number should come down over time with the volume, with efficiencies, with lots of lessons learned. How do you account for that? Peter: Well, it's interesting, because I think the classic assumption is that you do get more efficient by channels as you kind of do it longer. But it's kind of my mindset and philosophy to assume that channels get worse as we grow, because we saturate them more. Kathleen: Oh really? Peter: Yeah. Our goals get bigger. We have to assume that we will run out of runway in certain channels. At a certain point, we will sort of maximize them. So I think it's really important to think about as we scale and as we grow, as we throw more resources at different channels, as we have to ramp people, there's a lot of factors that come into... Like we talked about in our example, going from like five to 10 million, there's a lot of factors that go into building a growth team during that period and doing it in such an aggressive time period that we have to assume that we won't figure out things as quickly as we want to. And what that helps us do is it helps us sort of like protect ourselves. We'd rather over-plan and plan for the worst and then outperform and then go from five to 10 million in eight months instead of 12 months. We would rather do that if best case scenario comes to fruition than actually plan for best case scenario. Kathleen: So do you pair your... Call it your analysis of the conversion rates, of volume, et cetera. Do you pair that with a demand waterfall, then, where you kind of lay out where those new leads are going to come from by channel, by event, et cetera? How does that work together? Peter: Yep. So ideally you would pair up and have... I know I keep going back to spreadsheets, but at early-stage companies you just have these big, ugly spreadsheets- Kathleen: I mean, every good marketing nerd worth their salt loves the spreadsheets, so you're preaching to the choir here. Peter: True. These big, ugly spreadsheets that all just feed into your number. And it helps you lay out month by month, and add it up to quarter by quarter, and then total into a year where every single lead is coming from by channel and how that lead ultimately impacts revenue. So you have this big spreadsheet all the way month by month, from lead all the way to revenue, that is marketing-contributed and pairs up as well with sales headcount to make sure that there's enough salespeople to support that pipeline and that revenue that you're bringing in. So I don't have a really pretty way to scrape that together. Based on your business, if you're doing more outbound, if you're doing more inbound, it's something you kind of just hack together in the spreadsheets. But that's the way that I've always done it, and it seems to work to a certain extent. Eventually you have to automate that, but early on it's definitely a good way to build this out. What role does sales play in growth modeling? Kathleen: What part of this are you leaning on the head of sales for? Because obviously a lot of this data has to come from them, correct? Peter: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So they're responsible for that revenue number, and I would say that revenue number alone. Marketing should own the funnel all the way to the pipeline. And then once it gets to the pipeline, there's that sales and marketing handoff. And then sales is responsible for winning that business that we put in the pipe for them. So what they're really doing is, they're letting us know what's that conversion rate from pipeline to closed won, and what do they need to like support their sales goals based on the reps that they're bringing on, the quotas that they're putting in place. And those are probably the big things. Kathleen: It sounds like this really would form a great basis for a service-level agreement between marketing and sales, because it gives you some pretty concrete numbers and expectations. Have you used it for that before? Peter: Yeah. Yeah, so for our SLA, we don't think like too concrete in place from these numbers perspective. It's more so like, we think of sales and marketing as like almost one department. So it's not like we're going to hold a gun to your head for this. Based on this, it's like we're one department working this together, like we are generating leads for you to close. So I've never found SLAs too crucial, unless there's like a war between sales and marketing, which thankfully I've never had to deal with. It's always been really close, viewed as one department. Using growth modeling to determine headcount Kathleen: Yeah. So you talked about how you can use this to model out sales headcount, but how do you use it, or can you use it, to model out marketing headcount? Peter: Yeah, that's a good question. It's a lot harder, because it's not one-to-one. What you need to do, though, is you need to recognize based on your strategy that you have in place... Let's use the channel partnership example for one. If 90% of our pipeline is coming from those channel partnerships and we don't have anyone on marketing dedicated to that channel, someone needs to own that. If there's that much of our business relying on it, we can't just leave it up in the air. So then we have to look at our org chart, and we have to understand who contributes to that channel, who owns that channel, where can marketing contribute. And it helps paint a more clear picture than kind of just arbitrarily structuring your marketing department. It helps you align your headcount to the numbers a lot better. Another example is like early on when people put a lot of money into paid. No one really owns paid. It's just a lot of sort of cooks in the kitchen. You can look at that paid number and you can say, "We're spending X amount of money. Definitely warrants someone." And that helps you go to your leadership team, helps you really advocate for that internally, to get someone to manage that budget. I think whenever you see a significant part of your budget going in this growth modeling, it helps you really paint a clear picture that you need people there to support that and you need to grow your headcount. Kathleen: Yeah, it's funny. I've never met anybody who has a really good formula for figuring out marketing headcount increases over time. It's definitely more of a black box than sales headcount is for sure. Peter: Yeah, absolutely. And I think based on this growth modeling, if any of your numbers are falling behind from the growth modeling perspective, it's also something you can point back to if no one's owning it and say like, "I have an assumption that we can be X more effective or X more efficient if we bring in someone to to manage this budget. Right now it feels like we're kind of just burning money to put it in this channel." So it helps you build those arguments a little bit more. But it's definitely not as like one-to-one to sales. Like if we spend X on this person, we should get X out. Growth modeling in action Kathleen: Yeah. Now let's talk about once you've built your growth model, because you... Like all these great spreadsheets, you build it, and then what? So what does your cadence look like in terms of how frequently you're going back to that model over time, adjusting it, checking assumptions, et cetera? Peter: Yeah, so this growth model should feed into your overall overall marketing strategy, and it should be something that your team is measured against as a marketing department as a whole. Like where do you kind of stick your pin in the map, and what do you point out and say, "This is what marketing is going to do. This is what we're going to be held accountable towards"? So for me it's always been marketing contributed revenue. Like what do we actually drive at the end of the day? And I know that some people don't like doing that, because there's multi-touch attribution and all these other things with actually tracking and stuff. But I think it's so important, and I think it gives marketing a seat at the table, per se, from a revenue perspective, where we're saying we're actually driving revenue at the end of the day through marketing activities that we do. So I think it's something that at least I've always measured against monthly, quarterly, even weekly sometimes once you're getting close to the end of the quarter and really needing to push your marketing team to be like, "Where are we at? What did we say that we're going to do? Are we falling short? Are we on target? Are we running ahead?" But at the end of the day, the whole marketing team should be aligned to to those numbers as well to make sure that we're all on the same page and to make sure that we're supporting revenue-driving activities. Kathleen: Yeah. It seems like it would be a really good management tool for a marketing leader to just pull out in team meetings and use as a pulse check. Peter: Yeah, yeah. It's brought out at marketing check-ins, and it's also brought out at leadership meetings too. Like what does leadership care about? What do they want to hear about when you sit down for your weekly or biweekly or monthly or whatever your leadership team does? Those are the numbers that they care about. They don't want to hear about like, "Oh, we held a webinar, and it was fun." They want to see like, okay, how many leads did we bring in? How many of them came to the pipeline? What did that mean from a revenue perspective? They care about those really hard numbers that marketing in 2020 needs to be ready to talk about, like the actual revenue driving impact that we have. Building a growth-oriented marketing tech stack Kathleen: You talked about multi-touch attribution and being able to say what marketing's contribution was towards top-line revenue. What kind of a tech stack do you think you need to have in place in order to enable that? Peter: Yeah, I think it really depends on the size of your organization, because at Onna, we're selling enterprise deals, so we're very much at the stage where we can just go in, dissect the deal, manage it in a spreadsheet, and it's really low-touch, minimal effort. As opposed to if you're selling SMB and you're selling annual contracts of $50, and it's very self-serve, you need to have a robust attribution system in place to be able to measure that. So it's not something that I've had a ton of experience with, but from the people that I've talked to that do have to build out that attribution system, people have recommended Bizible, that it's a really good multi-touch attribution tool for them to use. But again, I just haven't had to get into that too much thankfully, which I'm happy about. Kathleen: Now can I ask what kind of tech stack you guys have that you're using? Peter: Yeah, so we use Pardot and Salesforce, and we also have a sales ops person on our team already, so they're able to... Like I said, sales and marketing is kind of the same for us, so our sales ops person's able they both to run reports, slice data for us, pull any numbers or data that we really need. Kathleen: That's awesome. And now how long have you been at Onna? Peter: So I've been at Onna for a few months now. Setting expectations for your growth model Kathleen: Okay. And this isn't the first time you've held this kind of a role. So I'm curious to know, expectation-wise, someone tries this for the first time... I feel like it would be like setting KPIs overall or like setting your professional development goals. It seems like one of those things that you would get better at over time. So what has your experience been with the first one or two times you build a model like this? How accurate do you think someone should expect to be out of the gate? Peter: Yeah, I think there's a few things. I think that, like you first said, you definitely get better. You have to start somewhere though. It's going to be iterations on iterations, and hopefully it becomes like your own personal playbook that you can sort of bring wherever you go and adjust no matter where you're at. But it all starts with actually doing that, starting somewhere and actually improving on it. I think the second thing is, you need a team and a leadership team that's okay with challenging and pushing each other and being candid with each other. Because the first time I did this, no one asked me to do this. No one said this is something that we needed. It's something that I felt that I needed to be able to support the decisions that I was making. And so I went to the CEO of my former company. I said, "Hey, this is something I've been working on. It's an MVP. It's lightweight. Please tear it apart and give me feedback and go back to the drawing board with it." And one, he was so happy that I took the initiative to do it. It's not anything he asked for, but it painted such a clear picture of what marketing's doing and why marketing exists. And he did. He tore it apart. He told me from a CEO and founder perspective what he wanted to see, what our board cared about, and what I should be focusing on to help build out the bones of this growth modeling foundation. So I think you'd definitely want that from a leader and you want that from a team. And I also get that not everyone has that team in place. So then I think it's about having a network and being able to go to peers and be able to go to other people you know to help build that out, if you're not in as like a secure place, that you need to go to your team with something a little bit more buttoned up than that MVP version. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a really good point. And I appreciate that you brought that up, because I think there probably are some marketers out there who are thinking like, "We don't have enough information, or, "I don't have a tech stack that can give this to me." But it sounds like, to me, what you're saying is, don't let that be something that stops you. If you don't have the data internally, you either know someone who has comparable data or you can Google it and find out what industry averages are. But it sounds like it's just worth starting with something and then iterating, and as you build data you can refine. Peter: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's important, saying again, if you're at a company where no one asked you to do this and you go build this growth model and you present it to them, it will be a big deal in their eyes. These are the things they want to see. These are the numbers that they care about. This is how you paint marketing in a light that that leadership and investors and everyone really wants to see. So if no one's asking you for it, I'd encourage people to build out these models and show the nitty gritty of what marketing does. Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah, that's great advice. And I think... What is it? The average head of marketing lasts 18 months these days. And so that is something that I'm sure is top of mind with lots of people who are listening, which is, how do I set myself up for success so that I beat the odds and last longer than 18 months? It's a depressing number. Peter: It is. And I think people fall into this trap of marketers not getting the credit they deserve for a few reasons. It's like marketers need to show what they do internally. If you don't showcase what you do, if you don't share what you do, people in product who are writing code all day are just going to be like, "Oh, marketing doesn't do anything." You need to showcase the things that you're doing and boast them proudly. Sharing your work is a very important thing. Like at Onna, whenever my team creates something, does something, we have like a marketing shares channel where we show everything that we do, so it allows us to showcase what we do. And we want to hold ourselves accountable. We want someone to call us out if something isn't up to our brand standards. If something doesn't look good, we want people to call us out on that, because we want to be better and we want to be held accountable. And the second thing is marketers that just sort of never execute and just move too slowly. We want to be known as a department that can get things, spin something up, spin up an MVP and be able to iterate. So that's another aspect, that we want to be known as a team that's on the ball, that's snappy to a reasonable amount. We don't want people to come to us and throw off what we're working on. My team operates in marketing sprints so we can protect ourselves from those things that come in. We have our priorities locked in for two weeks, but we can tell people and we can set the expectation but next sprint we'll put this in and we'll get back to you in like two to three weeks with something ready. Kathleen: Yeah, I love that marketing shares channel idea. It was funny. Months ago I interviewed Dave Gerhardt, who has been the VP of marketing at Drift. He's just left to take a new role. But he talked a lot about sharing your work, but it was sort of more internal within the marketing team. And I've done that now for a while. Ever since I first talked to him about it, I started implementing it, and it's been great. But what I haven't done is that next step, which is what you're talking about, and that's having marketing shared outside of the team with the rest of the company. And I love that, because you're right. I think a lot of people do think marketers are just sitting back there, as somebody once said, doing arts and crafts, right? And it's a lot more than that. And unfortunately a lot of the work we do does take some time before there's very publicly visible things to show for it. And so taking those pieces and sharing them out as they're ready, I think, can be very powerful. So I'm going to do that too. I'm going to copy your idea. Peter: Yeah, I really like it. And I think that I've heard from some people like, "Oh, my team's afraid to share things internally." And it makes me question like, how can you be afraid to share things internally but okay to share them externally?  Kathleen: Yeah, that's a bad sign. Peter: Yeah, that's a really bad sign. So it just promotes good work, good behavior, good actions. So I'm a big fan of it. Kathleen: Now, do you wait until those things are done? In other words, are you sharing drafts of things, or are you sharing completed, shipped work? Peter: To the whole team, we're sharing shipped work. We do have the internal marketing team sharing where we share early versions, early drafts, to make sure that we are buttoned up. But we're sharing to the whole team final products. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Great. That's awesome. I love it. Love this topic, and I will definitely put your slide in the show notes. Changing channels a little bit right now, I have two questions I always ask all of my guests. I'd love to know your thoughts on this. The first is, when you think about inbound marketing, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it? Peter: Yeah, absolutely. I think Ryan Bonnici at G2, the CMO over there, he's doing amazing work. I think he built an incredible team over there from an inbound perspective. If you're not following him on Twitter, on Instagram, follow Ryan Bonnici of G2. He's like my favorite CMO in the world. If you're thinking about going to a marketing conference in 2020, check out the G2 Reach conference. I think that I went last year, which was the first year, and Brian's just doing incredible things out there for all marketers. I encourage everyone to watch him and see what he's doing. Kathleen: Yeah, he's incredibly creative. I interviewed him as well, so I will also put the link to my interview with Ryan in the show notes, because he talked about some really cool stuff that he did at HubSpot that he was rolling out at G2 Crowd as well, so that's a good one. He is super creative, and he moves fast also. Peter: And he's also just a really good person and really funny. He's just entertaining too. If you ever get the chance to talk to him or watch anything that he puts out there, he's genuine. He's thoughtful. He doesn't just talk about marketing, but he talks about like mindfulness, things like imposter syndrome for young marketers. Just overall great person, great marketer. I think he's doing it better than anyone. Kathleen: Yeah, agreed. All right, second question. Marketing changes really quickly. A lot of marketers I talk to feel like they're drinking out of a fire hose. How do you personally keep educated? Peter: Yeah, I think marketing is changing rapidly, but I think the fundamentals kind of stand the test of time. So I'm a big fan of reading marketing books depending on what I'm going through. Like one of the things I always fall back on is How to Win Friends and Influence people by Dale Carnegie. If you just understand empathy and you understand actually what makes people tick and what people want, that's where marketing starts. We're trying to influence people. We're trying to empathize with people and understand their problems and present them with value. I think things like Elad Gil's High Growth Handbook, it's a book that he wrote that just outlines anything that really anyone could go through at a SaaS company. And then depending on what your specialty is, like if you're in something like content or copywriting, reading, something like Ogilvy on Advertising, such a good copywriting book. So depending on what you're going through and what role you're in, there's so many books that have been written that tell you the foundations and the principles of what have been done, what you should be doing, and things that have already been tested. You don't have to go learn things on your own. These things have already been done, so learn about it and then put your own flavor on it based on what you're going through. Kathleen: I'm so excited that you mentioned a couple of specific books, because I love marketing books. I have a lot of them on the shelf here behind me, which you can't see if you're listening. But yeah, I have Ogilvy on Advertising, but I haven't read a couple of the other ones you mentioned. So my little trick for that is, I love to listen to them on Audible at like 1.5 speed. But then if it's a book that has a lot of meat to it, I'll get the hard copy and do that at the same time so that I can mark up the pages. It's a good way to get through things quickly without... Peter: Yeah. Yeah, I think audio books have been great, because you can just power through them on your commute. They've been great. But for the books that I really like, I do love having a physical book and highlighting it and writing in it. That's hard to beat. How to connect with Peter Kathleen: Yeah, 100%. Well, I love all of those suggestions, Peter. If somebody wants to learn more about Onna, or the topic of growth modeling, or they want to just reach out to you and connect, what's the best way for them to find you online? Peter: Yeah, people can follow me on Twitter @peterschroederr with two Rs. If you have any questions about this, any of this, just feel free to email me at peter@onna.com. Happy to talk to anyone anytime and help people out who are like going through this for the first time and and just walk them through this. Just as much as as growth modeling, I love that career modeling with people too, and building out their own careers and next steps and sort of where they want to go. So big fans of both topics. You know what to do next... Kathleen: That is incredibly generous of you to offer. Thank you so much. If you are listening, I will be putting the links in the show notes for those things, so head over there if you want to reach out to Peter. And if you did listen and you learned something new or you liked what you heard, please consider heading to Apple Podcasts and leaving the podcast a five star review. That helps us get found by new listeners, and I would really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Peter. I appreciate everything you shared with us today. Peter: Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time. Hope everyone enjoys it.  

Partner relationship management software provider Allbound is growing at 150% year over year largely due to the company's inbound marketing efforts. Here's how they're doing it... This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Allbound Director of Marketing Tori Barlow goes into detail about the company's inbound marketing strategy. From the tech stack, to team structure, metrics, paid ads strategy and more, Tori pulls back the curtain on what she's done to drive growth - and why collaboration with the sales team is key to her success. Highlights from my conversation with Tori include: Allbound sells partner relationship management software, which is designed to help companies manage their partner channel sales programs. When Tori took on marketing for Allbound, she started by building a strong foundation of KPIs, tech stack, performance monitoring and strategy. When it came to KPIs, she identified the company's Salesforce instance as the "single source of truth" and used it to establish what the historical performance had been. She used the data from Salesforce and the company's overall revenue target to determine how many marketing qualified leads (MQLs), demos and opportunities they would need to hit the revenue target. When it came time to define MQLs, Tori didn't want to simply define that as anyone who requested a demo so she worked with the sales team to create a scoring rubric based on the content her prospects were consuming. Any prospect that reached a score of at least 50 was passed on to sales for follow up. Once a lead is designated as an MQL, they become a "sales accepted lead" (or SAL) when a demo has been booked and a sales qualified lead (SQL) once the demo has happened and the sales team identifies that there is a viable opportunity. Once she had her lead stages defined. Tori focused on the tech stack. In Allbound's case, they set up Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, and then used Marketo and Salesforce to track their performance. Now, they are beginning to experiment with account-based marketing and buyer intent data, but Tori's advice for marketers is to focus on and really master the basics first. They are also using Sendoso to send out direct mail as part of their ABM campaigns. In tandem with all of this, they adjusted their paid ads campaigns to focus less on the top of the funnel and more on nurturing what Tori calls "hand raisers." All of these changes have contributed to Allbound's organic traffic increasing 40% year over year and their search engine rankings increasing by 23 positions. In addition, the company's revenue has grown by 150%. Tori accomplished all of this with a marketing team of two people (herself and Allie, her coworker). She is now in the process of hiring a third person and the company is also onboarding a marketing and sales operations specialist. Resources from this episode: Visit the Allbound website Request a demo of Allbound Connect with Tori on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to learn more about simplifying the messaging for complex products and services, and how, if done right, it can help you get better marketing results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and my guest this week is Tori Barlow who is the director of marketing at Allbound. Welcome Tori. Tori Barlow (Guest): Hi. Thanks for having me Kathleen. Tori and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I'm excited you're here, and I'm really excited about what we're going to talk about. Tori: Me too. About Tori and Allbound Kathleen: Yeah we connected because I heard that you guys were generating a ton of inbound leads and I'm always excited to pick apart how that's happening. Before we dig into this conversation though, can you just tell your story. Who are you? How'd you get where you are today, and what does Allbound do? Tori: Yeah, so I'm really excited to chat with you as well. Thanks again for having me. So I'm Tori Barlow. I am the director of marketing here at Allbound. And a little bit about me, I am originally from Atlanta, and currently live in Denver, Colorado. And I have been in marketing for, I want to say, over eight years now. I kind of started an agency life where I learned the ropes of paid search, SEO, email marketing. So kind of had my hands in a ton of different pots in marketing. And then moved in-house where I manage the SEO and paid search programs there, which was quite different from going from client relations to an in-house type of role. So that was a huge change for me at that period of my career. And then moved back into the agency life to get a little bit more hands-on with analytics and attribution from a marketing perspective. And really understanding how in order to have a successful marketing program, what are the key tracking metrics that you need in order to measure success and do your job. So that was kind of the beginning of my marketing career. And how I ended up at Allbound, I previously worked with our current CEO, Daniel Graff-Radford, who is amazing and anyone listening should reach out to him and connect with him. He has a wealth of knowledge throughout many industries. But I always told myself if I ever got the chance to work with him again, I would jump on it. And so that's how I ended up here. And so Allbound is a five year old company and we sell software that's called Partner Relationship Management Software. And essentially what that is, is a tool for partner managers to manage their entire partner life cycle. So let's say Zoom, for example, has distributors and resellers for their software. Zoom's partner manager would kind of manage all of their partners from training and onboarding to deal reg all in one platform. And Zoom is one of our clients as well. So that's a little bit about me and Allbound. Kathleen: That's great. Oh my gosh, a couple things. One, I love that you said, you had this person that you'd worked with and if you ever got the chance to work with him again you would, because that really resonates with me as a marketer. It's so important to have a great working relationship with the CEO. And to be really aligned in terms of your vision and how you do marketing and how the CEO participates in marketing, all of those things. So if you find a great relationship where you have that kind of alignment, it's like, yeah, jump at it every time to do it again and again and again. Tori: Oh yeah. And I think all marketers can relate to this. It's sometimes challenging bringing your ideas or budget requests or program requests to executives or CEOs. And if they kind of understand the working cogs and wheels of what you do, all the better. Kathleen: Yeah, totally. It's so much less exhausting. So the company is five years old. How long have you been there? Tori: So I started back in March and it's been a whirlwind. I can't believe it's already the end of the year. And I still feel like I'm learning everything every day. But yeah it's been several months. And when I first came on there was not really a consistent marketing strategy. So I was so lucky to be able to come in and work with Ali Spiric, my other marketing colleague, and kind of develop this entire marketing engine. How Allbound is growing with inbound marketing Kathleen: That's the part I was really excited to talk to you about is, you know you guys are growing pretty quickly. And to be able to support that kind of growth and not have things break and fall apart you need to have a really strong foundation. And this is something I'm very, very passionate about because it helps you do your job better. It's like, my husband always likes to say you, sometimes you have to slow down to speed up, right? And this is a great example of that. Like in the beginning, if you take the time to put the right engine in place and to get those things set up right from the get-go, you will go so much faster later. So let's talk about that. What kind of an engine are you building? Because you guys are getting great inbound marketing results. And I'm curious to hear what goes into creating a platform to deliver that. Tori: Yeah, I think that's a great question. And going back to your, you know, one day hopefully nothing will break. I wonder if we'll ever get to a day where all technology is smoothly running, but it's nice to think about. And I think there's different steps you can take to put into place of avoiding that, essentially. But when I first came on in March we kind of had carte blanche to figure out, okay these are our goals, these are our revenue goals. And as a startup it's pretty important to generate that net new revenue. So from a marketing perspective, you have to have all the pieces in place in order to support that from a sales perspective. So when we sat down and kind of understood the KPIs, we first understood and kind of worked backwards. Okay, this is our revenue goal as a company. How can marketing help facilitate that? And so our first step was kind of looking at historical data. Our source of truth is Salesforce. So we tried to identify, okay, month over month for the last one year, because that's all the data we had, was, how can we back into, how many MQLs do we need, how many first demos do we need, and how many opportunities do we need in order to get to that revenue number? So I know I was a little intimidated when I only had one year's worth of data to plug and play all these numbers. So that kind of took a little bit of the stress off with forecasting and backing into MQLs. And once we figured out, okay, this month we need 50 MQLs, or this month we need 40 MQLs. What are the programs in order to do that, to get to that number? And the way we defined MQLs, or a marketing qualified lead, was we sat down with sales and we talked through, okay lead scoring's a big part in our base of prospects in Salesforce. What do we define as a lead that's ready to be passed to sales? And so that was probably a very pivotal conversation and a very important one for us to tackle first with the sales team. Plus it kind of gave... Go ahead. Working with sales to define MQLs and SQLs Kathleen: Oh no, I was going to say I would love to talk more about that because I've actually seen a lot of marketers and sales people asking about this recently. Like, how do you define MQLs versus SQLs? And it's not the same everywhere obviously. Every company has to figure it out for themselves. But I'm curious, in your case, when you worked on defining, in this case a marketing qualified lead, was that purely based on demographics and firmographics? Were there behavioral aspects to it? How did you pin that down? Tori: Yeah it's a great question. And I think I would like to think of it as an ever evolving process specifically within startups or smaller businesses. Only because you want to grow that base, you want to grow the time on the phone with potential customers that we kind of decided, okay for our marketing qualified leads, anyone who submits a demo, regardless of company size, employee size, et cetera, we're passing them off to sales because we need to grow our base. So we kind of opened up the floodgates for just any sort of behavioral, if you cross this request threshold, we passed you to sales. On the other hand, if they fill out a piece of content or if they take one of our quizzes, that probably is not a very good indicator that they're ready to talk to a sales rep. So we created a scoring process based on priority content intent and then kind of going down the tracks of, this isn't really a priority so we're not going to assign a ton of points to this. But we came up with a method of once they hit 50 points within our marketing automation software, then we'll pass them to sales and they're deemed ready to talk to them. I think over time we'll want to revisit this every six months as we grow our base and say, all right, people who have 30 people in their company, or less than 50, we really don't really see any traction with them anyways so we're going to maybe negate that score or take away from that score. Kathleen: Then do you, beyond MQL, do you also have an SQL or sales qualified lead category? Tori: Yeah. So our process is, it goes MQL to sales accepted lead and that is a demo on the books and a calendar invite to the prospect. And then after that it's a SQL or sales qualified lead. Which kind of sounds confusing now that I think about it, with a lead verses opportunity, but our SQLs are deemed qualified opportunities by the AEs. Kathleen: Okay. Got it. All right, so sorry I interrupted you there because I wanted to learn more about your MQLs. Keep going, keep telling. Tori: Yeah it's a very important piece of the puzzle. Kathleen: Yeah. How Allbound tracks marketing performance Tori: So then our next question is, okay we have our metrics, we have our goals, now what? And how do we track this? So one of my favorite parts of a marketing engine, if you like to call it that, is what do we need to track and how do we prove our success? And I think every marketer's nightmare is, okay, I just got $100,000 for this year in marketing spend, now what? And I think this is an important piece to any marketer is, do you have your tracking set up? Do you have all of your firing implemented correctly from your marketing automation platform to your CRM and vice versa? Otherwise you could be spending good money on something that you have no idea if it's working or not. So our first goal was to set up something called Google analytics. And that is essential to, I believe, every digital marketer understanding website behavior, website trends, seasonality. When I first came onboard, I remember seeing so many different spikes and trends year over year. And kind of digging into the data a little further we realized, okay, this isn't even implemented correctly. So we needed to take a step back, and what you mentioned earlier of, take some time to slow down and then you can get there faster essentially. Kathleen: Yeah. Tori: So we stripped out all of our analytics and reworked everything to, again, what our goals are that we just sat down to define. So we were tracking goals incorrectly in Google Analytics. So we kind of reworked that puzzle to then match up to what our company goal was at the end of the day. So that was a first step. And then mirroring that and implementing that all the way through GTM, Google Tag Manager, and all of these other pieces to the puzzle for what Google Tag Manager can track as well, like Bing, LinkedIn, Facebook, all of those important channels from a marketer's tool set. So we started with Google Analytics and GTM, and then the second piece of the puzzle was our marketing automation platform. So in our instance we use Marketo. And within Marketo, we had to really sit down and think, okay, this is our new lead scoring, is it even set up correctly in Marketo? So that also was not aligned with the goals we just sat down to create with the sales team. So we kind of had to plug and play with what we were firing for behavior scores and what we were sending over to Salesforce as an alert to the sales team. So this sounds pretty easy to sit down and tackle in one day. It's very, I would like to say it's more of a manual process and more of a thoughtful process that I would recommend going through. Only because you want to make sure you're now tracking everything to the proper standard that you've just decided. So we sat down and we mapped out all of our ideal conversion levers from a source of truth or Marketo or Salesforce standpoint, and then integrated that within the platform. So that was the third piece of the puzzle. And then the final piece was making sure, okay, do Marketo and Salesforce talk to each other okay? And if not, we need to fix this stat. So that was another big undertaking of, okay, this field maps did that, do I need these Salesforce fields for my Marketo campaigns, et cetera? So working with our marketing automation specialist at the time was a very heavy piece to the puzzle on implementing all of that tracking. Kathleen: Yeah, I just went through that at a place I've been working and it's overwhelming at times. That's all I have to say about that. Tori: I know I'd like to feel like I'm a technical specialist now in Marketo, but it's so much more than that. And so cumbersome that it's a lot to handle. But it is- Kathleen: Now that Marketo-Salesforce combination, you really almost need just a marketing ops person. Tori: Oh for sure. Kathleen: To manage all that. My eyes glaze over when I just think about it. Tori: Yeah. Marketing ops I feel is a role that is so important for any marketer these days. And it's funny, we're actually about to hire a sales and marketing ops person that will kind of combined to one. And I already have like five pages of requests for that. Kathleen: Are you just like so excited for that person to start? Tori: So excited. Kathleen: They're going to walk in the door and you're going to be like, "I'm so happy you're here." Tori: I want to take you for the first week. Kathleen: Yes, yes. Let me buy you lunch because you're going to be my new best friend. Yeah, I totally agree with you. If you have somebody good who knows how to make the technology work, oh gosh, what a difference that makes. So you have Marketo and Salesforce, you have Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Are there other analytics platforms that you're using in combination with those things? Tori: Yeah, it's an interesting question. We currently don't have any implemented right now, but we are shifting a lot of our strategy to be more cohesive with the sales team. We're noticing that, to your point, what this podcast is about with inbound. You know, inbound is definitely a good chunk of our revenue source and lead source. But what we've kind of dabbled in this year is ABM. And I know it's such a buzzword and so hot right now, but it's been around for awhile as everyone said. But we just tried to implement a strategy that worked for us as a small company and we saw success with it. So what we were seeing was our SDRs would outbound these targeted accounts, at the same time marketing would upload these targeted accounts to LinkedIn and target them with gated content, for example. So we would get those buyer intent signals from targeted accounts. And what we were noticing was, essentially, if our SDRs were outbounding these prospects, someone else within the organization would come in and request a demo on the website. So it was this tag team initiative that truly spoke for marketing and sales working together, which was like a marketer's dream, right? So we talked to ourselves and said, hey, this kind of manual process is sort of working so far. Is there any way we can scale this? And so right now we are kind of looking at some technology for reverse IP lookup functionality or data enrichment functionality, as well as some better prospecting tools for our sales reps that will ultimately work in conjunction with marketing efforts. Kathleen: Have you looked at any buyer intent data? Tori: Yes we have. We've kind of looked at... You mean specific software or just what we are noticing? Kathleen: No, like specific software that would deliver a high intent leads to you. Tori: Yeah, so we're going through that vetting process now. We have looked at G2 Crowd, we have looked at Leadfeeder, Clearbit and so we're kind of still in the vetting stages. So if anyone has any recommendations, love to hear them. Kathleen: I will give you mine when we're offline because I try to stay very unbiased on this podcast. Tori: Okay. Great. Kathleen: But yeah, I think, that's something that I'm really intrigued by right now. I think the potential for it is tremendous. And there's not a lot of companies really using it yet. Tori: I agree. And I think even, we just signed on with this one tool that helps us automate direct mail and then you can track that into Salesforce as part of your ABM strategy. And so, I remember when I first started marketing several years ago, my company was sending out direct mail pieces and people were like, why are you still doing that? Like that's so last year. And now it's back. Like now it's this thing again. And it's cooler now. Kathleen: So I just had this rant on LinkedIn about that because it was funny, somebody posted a Marketoonist cartoon about all these different things being dead. You know, like email is dead and direct mail is dead and the role of the CMO is dead. And I feel like at this time of year in particular, there's a lot of those, "2020s coming, this is dead" proclamations. And I honestly believe, first of all, nothing is ever dead. If it's not working, it's because you're not innovating or you're not doing it right. Tori: That's a good point. Yeah. Kathleen: So it's funny with direct, I think there's always been a place for direct mail. It's just that it was not, it was abused. Right? Tori: Executed. Yeah. Kathleen: People didn't do it well. So done well it can be very effective, for sure. So there, I just did my rant again on the podcast. Tori: I'll supplement that rant. I saw a really good idea for a prospect gift that an SDR could maybe send that said, it was a pair of socks and the message was, let's start on the right foot. Kathleen: Oh, I love that. Tori: We thought that was cute. So yes, to your point, I think it's creative and how you use it is what matters. Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. So can you say the name of the company that's doing your automated direct mail? Tori: Yeah, we just decided to go with Sendoso. Kathleen: Oh, I love them. They're such a great company. Tori: I heard good things. Kathleen: And not only because somehow or another I won some sort of gift card to their swag store. I think I went to a webinar they did and they sent me this $50 voucher for their swag store. Tori: Nice. Kathleen: And their swag store is awesome. It's all pet related. So I have two Labrador retrievers and I got two Sendoso leashes, a Sendoso Frisbee, and a Sendoso tennis ball toy. And my dogs are going bananas over all of it. It's really cute. So thank you- Tori: I might have to go. Yeah, I might have to get a dog just for those swag gifts. Kathleen: There you go. All right, so any other elements to your tech stack that you think are important? Tori: For a tech stack, I think as a marketer I definitely get those googly eyes of, ooh, I really love this. Especially if someone is marketing to me in a smart way. Since we are marketers, we respond to good marketing, right? So I think I've had the tendency to say, oh, I really think this technology would be great. But I think something important that I've had to remind myself is, start with the basics. And if something's working, then find a technology to maybe scale that. I think that's been super important for us as a small company. So to answer your question, those are all the technology pieces we have right now, but I'm ready for more soon probably. Kathleen: But I think your outlook is really smart because I got excited about talking to you because you guys are not a huge company. You don't have an endless budget. And I don't think that there's enough information out there on when you're at that small but growing stage, what do you do? Like what needs to be in place? And I love getting into really granular detail about it. And you're right, if you have huge VC dollars, sure you can go out and buy every shiny penny technology solution that's out there. But if you don't, you really need to be judicious. And there are plenty of ways to do things in a scrappy manner and get great results until you're ready to make that big investment. And you know that strategy is working. Totally on the same page with you on that one. Tori: Right. Yeah. And I think sometimes you can feel like, okay, something's not working or maybe you have slow lead days and you kind of feel that altogether when those leads don't come through. And it's like, okay, what can I do now? Or what can I have now? And the reality is you just kind of have to sit it out and give it time to prove itself. And I know that sounds painful, but I agree. I think you kind of just have to do one piece of the puzzle at a time. And it's also important, you could have all of this technology and maybe the sales reps don't use it or they don't find it useful or they weren't onboarded correctly. So is it even useful at that point? So I think taking the technology steps one piece at a time and training is all the more important. How inbound marketing is fueling Allbound's growth Kathleen: Absolutely. Now you talked about getting results. Can you speak a little bit to how Allbound, like the kinds of results from inbound marketing that Allbound to seeing? Tori: Yeah, so we had to, once we got the marketing engine running and we had this year's worth of cleaner data than we've had before, what we started to see was an increase in MQLs and demo requests. And what I'll say for that, I'll kind of back up a little bit. At the same time of kind of getting all the tracking and the plumbing in place, we also started a new paid search program and a new SEO program. And what that entailed was, we were kind of looking at our keywords from a paid search perspective and we are really spending a lot of money on very top of funnel terms that these prospects would download content. Again, if we go back to when we sat down with sales and what was a good qualified lead, downloading content wasn't something of priority. So we re-swizzled a lot of our paid search strategy. We restructured our entire Google AdWords account and really focused on, okay, what are the keywords that the hand raisers are focusing on, and what types of ad copy and landing pages do they want to see? And so that was one piece of the puzzle of that fundamental building block. And then the second piece was the SEO strategies. So I'm kind of partial to both of them because that's my background and I have found tremendous growth just from having a set SEO plan. And so what we started with was the technical piece of SEO. So asking ourselves questions like, can Google see us from a code perspective? What is Google reading on our website that maybe we don't want Google to know about us? And by that I mean, maybe we're phrasing who we are in a way that we don't want to rank for organically. So we took an inventory of all of our top nav pages, what our title tags, what our code was saying from an SEO perspective, and really honed in on our top value drivers for our product. And then from there after the technical piece was in a good spot, we then focused on content. So our whole strategy has been laying that foundation from the SEO perspective, but then gradually creating content that's relevant to our buyer but also helps us rank organically for Google. So from that piece of the puzzle we were able to increase our year over year traffic by 40% from an organic perspective. And from a keyword ranking perspective we had increased 23 positions overall for our total tracked keywords in Google search console. So those incremental changes that we made just in these last several months have tremendously helped us with our visibility on Google. So that's one piece of the puzzle. And then from the ultimate goal from, how can marketing contribute to the revenue, we saw increases in month over month and quarter over quarter MQL volumes. Which ultimately resulted in more first-time demos for our prospects. What we got really excited about was once we piloted this ABM initiative, we started tracking something new for marketing, which is I think very important. And it's called marketing assist opportunities or meetings booked, which again, an SDR is prospecting and somehow marketing was involved in one way or another, whether that's LinkedIn ads or reading our content and self identifying through that. And so we started tracking marketing assisted conversions in Salesforce. And so the trend line is an interesting hockey-stick with how much marketing has assisted in opportunity revenue month over month just this year. Kathleen: That's so great. I'm so happy to hear that that's something you're tracking because I do find that a lot of companies look at attribution as a very binary. Meaning that they feel like it's either sales or it's marketing, right? And that does not in any way reflect the reality of the situation. You know? There aren't going to be a lot of cases except in really low touch, low price SaaS where it's all marketing, right? Or e-commerce. You know, if you're talking about a complex B2B sale, you're going to have a combination of both. Inevitably. And I feel like too many companies spend too many calories arguing over whether it's really sales or marketing that closed the deal. So it's nice if you can have that middle ground, look at assists or look at first touch versus last touch, and acknowledge that it's a combination of these things that leads to deals getting closed. Tori: Yeah, I 100% agree. I think every company struggles with the, no, this was an SDR deal. No, this is a marketing deal. We've struggled with that too. I think it's very common and natural. And I think what we are trying to for next year in 2020 is, we all have the same goal. So marketing goals are bubbled up into sales goals, which this year they really weren't. So we're kind of shifting that focus to really be on the same team and have that mentality of we're helping each other, how can you bounce back if leads are slow one month? You know, how can we help with outbounding with messaging or content? So we're trying to play that tag team game, and it's a learning game for sure. But to your point, we're all in the same company. Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah. You're all rowing in the same direction. So your organic traffic, it sounds like increased 40% year over year. What's happened with overall lead gen and company growth? Tori: Yeah, so our company revenue grew over 150% 2019 compared to 2018. Kathleen: That's awesome. Congratulations. Tori: Thanks. We have seen tremendous growth in our net new business and we are looking to double that even next year with all of our strategies in place. So it's been a very successful and also just fun year to be at Allbound. How Allbound's marketing team is structured Kathleen: That's great. Now what we haven't talked about, and I'm curious to know is, what does the team look like that's supporting all of this? The marketing team. Tori: Yeah. You're talking to 50% of the marketing team. So our team is very small. It's myself and Allie, and we are very nimble and agile with projects and what we're tackling. But if you look at all that's in our project base, we're tackling everything from webinars to paid social to paid search to reporting and email marketing. We're kind of tackling the whole gamut. So we definitely handle a lot that comes our way. But it's been so rewarding and I would say we've both learned so much and are so lucky also to have a wonderful CEO that says, you guys have carte blanche, test it, see if it works and let's find a new solution if it doesn't. So it's been really fun and we're excited to... We're actually in the process of hiring a third marketing person to join in January. So if anyone's looking, please send your resume to me. But I think this person would have a hand in the piece of the puzzle to be that marketing engine in 2020 as well. Kathleen: Wow, I am so impressed that you're doing all that with two people. That's a lot. And what amazing results too. That's great. Seriously, you guys are killing it. Do you have outsourced support as well or is it just the two of you literally doing everything? Tori: Yeah, so we outsource our marketing automation and Salesforce ops right now. So that is something that's, like we talked about, so key to the puzzle. And then we outsource some of our content writing. And so Allie does an amazing job managing the content strategy. We just put our first content marketing calendar together for 2020, so it's been great to have a plan for content which is good. But yeah, it's been primarily us tag teaming and then those outsourcing pieces. Oh, and we also outsource our paid search agency. They manage our, you know, they pull all the levers for AdWords and Bing, and then we have our SEO consultant as well. Kathleen: Okay, great. Well I'm super impressed that you've been able to do all that with a small team. That's amazing. Tori: Thank you. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Yeah. Well there's two questions I always ask my guests and I would love to know what your answers are. First, since you guys are doing so well with inbound marketing, is there anyone else, either a company or an individual that comes to mind that you think is really killing it right now with inbound? Tori: That's a great question. I would say I love the progress that a company called Terminus is doing, the ABM company. I remember when they were very small and their CEO was, several years ago, pitched to our CEO in an office and now they're this huge company. And I think it takes a lot of different types of marketing for something that successful to happen in a few years. And so I would say Terminus is kind of crushing it in that sense. And then I would also say, I've kept an eye on companies like Gong, I think Gong, the recording software does a tremendous job with relating and speaking to their target audience and they kind of nailed the messaging down. So I've had my eye on them and look to them as great inspiration as well. Kathleen: Yeah, I totally second those. Both of those. They're great examples. The other thing I like to ask people is that digital marketing changes so quickly, and as someone who is a master juggler working on all different aspects of marketing for her company, how do you stay up to date and keep yourself educated on everything? Tori: Yeah, well I love reading blogs like Search Engine Land and I keep up with the Google blog just to stay up to speed there. I'm really lucky with our paid search agency, they give us tidbits of what the Google betas are and what's coming up from a paid search perspective. And then we're really lucky at Allbound have something very special that's a monthly book club. And so we read sometimes the latest and greatest business books, but also other books that have proven to be successful in different frameworks like sales or marketing or product. So I stay up to date with that from that element as well. And I think that's great too because then everyone can kind of get in a room together and share their insights and share their perspective on certain things. And then from there you bubble off into different tangents and can research that on your own. So I love those blogs, but I also am a huge fan of just reading any sort of analyst reports like Forrester, huge fan of keeping up to speed with what the new tech reports are and who's entering the space from a technology perspective. How to connect with Tori Kathleen: That's a great suggestion. I love all those. If someone is listening and they want to learn more about Allbound or they have a question for you about what we've talked about today, what's the best way for them to connect online? Tori: Yeah, so you could just visit our website and fill out either a contact us form or if you're interested in a demo or a request a demo. We're also available to chat on our website as well if you have any questions. And you can reach out to me directly on LinkedIn as well. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Great. All right. Well, if you're listening and you feel like you learned something new or you enjoyed what you heard today, head over to Apple podcasts and do me a favor and leave the podcast a five star review. That's how we get discovered and more people can listen to these episodes. And if you know someone who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next interview. Thanks so much for joining me, Tori. Tori: Thanks for having me.

How does a marketer charged with helping tech companies and the blockchain industry simplify messaging and help his clients reach their audience? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Dennis Lewis of Greenlight Digital talks about the strategies he uses to market one of the most complex and misunderstood products in existence - cryptocurrency. The lessons that Dennis has learned as a marketer and cryptopreneur can help any marketer understand how to translate industry jargon or complex products and services into language and messaging that anyone can understand. In this interview, he shares his thoughts on customer research, storytelling, and striking the right balance between technical content and simple messaging. Highlights from my conversation with Dennis include: Dennis describes himself as a marketer and cryptopreneur. He says the blockchain is a decentralized bookkeeping system located all around the world, and being maintained by literally thousands and thousands of computers working synchronized. His company, Greenlight Digital, provides marketing services for technology and blockchain companies. He got into marketing blockchain when a friend of his did an initial coin offering (ICO) and asked him for marketing help. Dennis says that all marketing needs to start with the problem that a product or service solves for the customer. Unfortunately, entrepreneurs tend to fall in love with their products, and put that before understanding the customer. Dennis's mantra is "listen, think, and do" and he says that marketers should heed those three words. One of the more impactful books he's read is The Culture Code by Clotaire Rapaille. The book talks about the three brains that every human being has: the reptilian brain, the limbic brain, and the cerebral cortex. All decisions are made by the reptilian and the limbic brains. The cerebral cortex is used to justify the decision you've already made. Marketing needs to feed the reptilian and limbic brains by forming an emotional connection, and the best way to do this is through effective storytelling. There are many ways that marketers can learn more about their customers, from doing focus groups, to researching what they are saying on online forums, or even inviting a customer to coffee. The most important thing in marketing is to assure your customer that they won't look bad or be embarrassed due to their decision to buy your product. In addition to having strong messaging, your brand needs to stand for something. That is the most effective way to differentiate from the competition. Resources from this episode: Visit the Greenlight Digital website Connect with Dennis on LinkedIn Follow Dennis on Twitter Get Dennis's book Behold the Cryptopreneurs Visit the Cryptopreneurs Club Listen to the podcast to learn more about simplifying the messaging for complex products and services, and how, if done right, it can help you get better marketing results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week my guest is Dennis Lewis, who is a cryptopreneur and blockchain marketing specialist with Greenlight Digital. Welcome Dennis. Dennis Lewis (Guest): Hey Kathleen. Thank you for having me on. Dennis and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on because I'm actually weirdly fascinated with cryptocurrency and the blockchain, but I think maybe not everyone is quite as nerdily interested in that as I am, so maybe you could just start by explaining what a cryptopreneur is. I don't know if I'm going to try to have you explain what the blockchain is because that might be biting off more than we can chew, but give my guests a sense of what it is you're working on. What is a cryptopreneur? Dennis: Sure. So, I mean, let's go ahead and try and bite off a little bit here at least so that we can give everybody kind of something to wrap their heads around. The blockchain isn't really all that complicated as it may seem. Like most technology sectors, the people in the industry tend to really kind of dive into all of the plumbing and the complications of it. Sure, we could certainly throw out a whole bunch of weird sounding words to make it sound complicated, but it's really just a bookkeeping system. It's just a way of keeping track of transactions that is decentralized. It's all around the world being maintained by literally thousands and thousands of computers working synchronized, but you know, no single point of failure. That's in a nutshell what a block chain is. It is a decentralized bookkeeping system. Kathleen: That is a great explanation and it totally ties in to what we're going to talk about today, which is a big challenge I think a lot of marketers have, particularly in these more technical industries, and that is simplifying the complex. About Dennis Lewis and Greenlight Digital Kathleen: Now before we do that, maybe you could talk a little bit about your journey. How did you wind up doing this, and what is Greenlight Digital? Dennis: Okay, sure. Well, it's funny, like all great things in life, I got into this industry just by accident. It wasn't a planned event. It wasn't enormously prepared either. A friend of mine called me up one day and said, "Hey, we're going to do this thing called an ICO where we're going to try and raise some money. We don't know anything about marketing. Can you help us?" And I knew absolutely nothing about cryptocurrency at the time or blockchain and I didn't even know what an ICO was, And like the brave soul that I am, I just rolled up my sleeves and said, "sure, let's do it." That's where the journey began with blockchain. Rolling back farther, because there's some gray hairs on my head, a long time ago I worked for IBM. I spent my whole career sort of trying to make things that most people think are complicated, make them easy to understand. And I realized that that isn't a skill that is very common. A lot of people are really good at making simple things complicated, but going the other way around it seems to be less frequent. That's why I'm excited today to talk to you about making the complex simple. As far as Greenlight Digital, that's my company. We are a boutique marketing agency. We do everything from content marketing, to social media, to working with companies on their branding and their messaging, full suite sort of marketing, mostly for tech companies and blockchain companies, although we do work with some traditional companies as well just to kind of keep us on our toes. That's pretty much what I do. I like to tell stories. Kathleen: I love it. And you really, I think, hit the nail on the head with marketing, which is that a lot of us, especially trained marketers, and this is so interesting to me, that tend to make things more complicated than they need to be. A lot of marketers really, really struggle with boiling things down and expressing the value of that thing they're trying to market in a way that is simple and easy for the audience to understand. So, this is one of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you, because if you can do it in blockchain, I feel like you could do it in anything. Dennis: You're probably right there. You know, it's funny, but in our industry, marketing is so hooked recently on all of the plumbing, all of the technical part of marketing, which is awesome and it's interesting and it is important, but I always tell my customers, it all boils down to the words on the page. If you're not making a connection with the right person, if you're not saying the right thing to the right person, you can have all the bells and whistles that you want, it's not going to work. I'll take a step back and I'll go back. I remember that when I was back in the day at IBM, I remember going to conferences with big companies that IBM, they had, they were always doing the best, and there were always 50 presentations and they were always about the new version of product X, Y, Z, and these are the new features and these are the new... This is what makes this one better than it was before. And you could look out in the audience and see people dozing away. They were literally, I think it was the best cure for insomnia that's ever been invented, it's just send them to a tech conference and they'll sleep like babies. It really got me thinking, and I guess that's sort of where all this came, the problem is that it all boils down to what problem you're solving. If you're not making something better for somebody, then your features and your benefits and your whistles and your bells and your shiny stuff, it just is irrelevant. I mean, people just don't care. You always start with the problem. You have to start with the problem, and if you don't you'll go wrong. People just won't, they'll tune out. There's so much information out there right now. Gosh, I mean, how much time do you spend staring at Google Chrome every day? You know? And how many people are competing for that time of your eyeballs? And they're smart people, right? They're there, they're good at it. And if you want to kind of get your fair share of those moments of those eyeballs, you really have to be interesting. It has to be engaging in that. It has to be, and it has to talk to that problem because otherwise, what's in it for me? Kathleen: Yeah. Now, I totally agree with you, but I feel like that's much more easily said than done. Simplifying the messaging for complex topics Kathleen: So when you think about this challenge of simplifying the complex, and let's use the stuff you're working on now with cryptocurrency and blockchain, if you're working with a new client or something, how do you tackle that? Where do you begin with that process of trying to make it simpler and easier for an audience to understand? Dennis: Sure. So one of the things I've learned is that entrepreneurs always fall in love with their products. They fall in love with what they're doing. And that's great. That's normal. It's kind of what you have to do if you're going to build something. But I always tell them, "Look, you've got to fall in love with your customer first. You've got to put yourself in their shoes." Who are you serving? Who is the person on the other side and why would they care about what you're doing? Because if you think it's going to be everybody out there is going to fall in love with your product because you have, you're mistaken. They just don't care about your product. And I mean, they'll gladly give you money if you can make the pain go away, but if you can't make the pain go away, they couldn't care less how many hours, how many people, how much sophisticated technology you throw into the basket. That's your problem, that's not theirs. I always start there. I always say, "Look, you've got to focus on the person on the other side. It's always got to be about how you're making their lives better." And that could be by delivering a pizza quicker or it could be curing cancer. It's not necessarily that problems have to be big or they can be small, it's, they have to be real. They have to be something that somebody cares about and because otherwise, why are we doing this? As a marketer, and I know you've undoubtedly come across this as well, people frown on us. They think we're manipulators, they think we're tricking people into buying stuff when it should be all completely the other way around. If you've got a product that makes things better for your client, you'd be doing them a disservice not to tell them, not to try and get them to use it, not to try and get them to have access to that solution, you'd be a bad person. Kathleen: It is sort of depressing because I have seen stats that say that people, when they rank how much they trust different types of people, I think marketers ranked down there with used car salesman for how much people trust us, which is really depressing. I would like to think that we're not quite in that category, but maybe I'm underestimating the value of used car salesman. I don't know. Dennis: You got to be at the bottom of the list. Kathleen: Right. Exactly. No, you hit on something that I really agree with that and feel quite strongly about, which is that a lot of times when people talk about marketing, they talk about trying to sell things to people and I really think that marketers are more successful when they have this mindset shift and they think of it as, we need to help people to buy as opposed to try and sell them something. We are helping them to purchase something and we're doing it because that thing genuinely solves a problem for them. I think if you can shift your mindset in that way, it produces much better marketing. Understanding your customer's pain Kathleen: So you talked about needing to understand the pain that the customer is experiencing. How do you do that? Dennis: Well, I guess that the only way to do that, is like every human being does it, is by being empathetic, it's by listening. On all my emails, I always start with, I was in the same three words and it's kind of been my slogan for years and years and years and it's, "listen, think and do." The order of the three words is very important, it always starts with listening, and that's a lesson I learned from my grandma and I could tell you a good story about how I learned that lesson. Kathleen: I'm now very curious. Is it a quick one? Can we hear it? Dennis: It's not too long, sure. My grandma was an amazing woman, she died at 101 years old and she was smart as a whip. Up until the very end, she was winning at bridge. I remember being a little boy, and I was always a talkative little boy, and I remember she sat me down in the kitchen one day, she put this mirror in my hand. She said, "Dennis, look in this mirror and tell me what you see." I said, "Grandma, it's me. I am in the mirror." And she says, "Yeah, but tell me something specific. How many mouths do you see in that mirror?" I said, "Well, I've only got one mouth." And she said, "Now how many ears do you have?" I said, "Well, there's two ears Grandma, of course." And she said, "Well God made you that way on purpose." Kathleen: I love it. Way to go grandma. Dennis: Yeah. So yeah, it's all about listening. It's all about putting yourself in the shoes of the person. And sometimes that's easier said than done, but the way I see it is, there was a really a great book, it was called The Culture Code, by this French person, Clotaire Rapaille, I don't know, I can't even pronounce his name, but really good book, the Culture Code. In the book he talks about the three brains that every human being has. There's a reptilian brain, a limbic brain, and then there's the cerebral cortex, the brain, that kind of gray mass that we all think about when we say "Brains." In the book he says that all decisions are made by the reptilian and the limbic brains. The cerebral cortex is used to justify the decision you've already made. So kind of like when you're going to go buy a car, you're going to buy the car that you want. You're going to buy the car that you secretly know that you just want that car, but you're going to sit down and you're going to study it. You're going to look at a kazillion different factors so that you can feel justified that that's the car you're going to buy. But pretty much you've already figured it out, which car you're going to buy beforehand. He talks about that in the book. And so, you've got to have an emotional connection with your audience. You have to, it can't just be, "We're faster. We're more sophisticated. We do this better. We give you a better ROI. We give you..." All that is great. You need to do that in your marketing as well because you do need to feed that cerebral brain, but you've got to make the sale down deep. You've got to grab a bit, that's why great marketing always tells great stories. Kathleen: So you start by listening, I'm assuming, when you say that, you mean listening to customers or prospective customers, is that correct? Dennis: Yeah, that's right. And that could just be go out and read, go to the forums, look at how they talk, look at what they're talking about. It doesn't have to be super sophisticated. You don't have to have spend millions doing focus groups and all that stuff, which is great I'm sure. If you've got lots of resources, go ahead and do that, there's no doubt that that's a good idea. But there's a lot of ways, we have so much information now. Sit down and have a coffee with somebody that's in your target audience and try to figure out what motivates them. Why would they be interested in something that you do? Most of the time the motivations are often completely different from the answers. You have to read between the lines. If you're selling in a corporate B2B market, you know it. One of the most important things that you have to do is make sure that people understand that they're not going to look bad by buying your product. That they're not going to be embarrassed. Their boss isn't going to get mad at them later or say, "Look at what a bad decision you made." And those are objections that are real and they're emotional and that's a big part of B2B sales is developing that security for your customer. And those are the kinds of things you've got to listen to. Turning customer research into messaging Kathleen: Yeah. So if you've done this, if you've sat down and listened to customers and you understand some of the pain they're feeling, some of the problems they're trying to solve, how do you then take that and make it actionable? Dennis: I always take notes, because usually the words that your customers use are the words you ought to be thinking about using, and then you can get creative about it. But don't, don't try to be, you know, you never want to make it. Yeah, you don't want to, you don't want to fill your head with too much stuff, but make it simple. Try to spell out that pain and then say, "Hey, and I make it go away by doing this." And when you do that, people, if they have the pain, they'll listen. And if they don't, that's okay too. Part of it is just being willing to hear "no." Go for the no. I mean, I'd much rather have a conversation with somebody who comes out and says, "Nope, I don't need this." I think that's great. That's good. I mean, a no is much better than a maybe. How Dennis markets crypto Kathleen: In a technically complex industry like crypto, let's actually use some examples. You've done marketing in this industry, what have you learned as far as what the pain is or the problem is and how have you translated that into a more simplistic way of communicating about it? Dennis: We talked a little bit about the blockchain being a bookkeeping system and when I talk to people about in the industry they come and they say, "Oh, but our blockchain is faster, it's got a more sophisticated consensus algorithm. It uses better cryptography, it's more secure." And all of this stuff. And I say, "Yeah, but why don't we talk to them about how you can use it for healthcare. Why don't we talk to the users about how you can use it to make democracy better? Why don't we talk to them about how you can use it to make social media where you're not the product instead of what it is now where we're the product being sold? Okay?" These are ways of making the technology relevant, making it personal. Of course, I want the blockchain that where, the solution to be robust and fast and better than all the rest. That's great, and you'll get to that point, but that's not how you lead the conversation, because nobody's interested in that really. I mean, that should be a given, right? I remember Warren Buffet once said that, "The only problem with technology is that pretty soon everybody in the room, all your competitors have the same technology as you." He's really good at metaphors. He said, "At the beginning you stand up on your chair and you're the tallest person in the room, and then everybody else starts standing on the chair so you've got to go find a ladder." Kathleen: That's a great metaphor. I love it. Dennis: I always try to tell customers, you have to frame it in things that are important to the people that are listening. So sure, if I'm going to be talking to investors, well of course I want to appeal to their desire to pick the winner. It's maybe not a spreadsheet of, this is going to be a 13.8% ROI compared to a 10.4, right? I mean, come on, that's silly. But if you're talking to a VC company, what do they do? They're looking for the unicorns. They're looking for the projects that have the best possibility to shine, so talk about that, go there. If you're going to talk about if your product is really good at making micropayments, well talk about how this could be used in Africa to improve the lives of people in Africa. Make it something that people could visualize, that they can see, that they can feel. Because that's where you get people engaged. Tell a story. I really believe in stories as stories are really the the oldest part of humanity is telling stories. Yeah. When you sit down with somebody, it doesn't matter how hardheaded they are. If you look them in the eyes and say, "Look, I want to tell you a story." You can just watch people's defenses drop down, because everybody loves stories. So figure out a way to put your product into a story. Kathleen: That's a great suggestion. And I like that you, I mean I think you've been very clear and the top line messaging needs to lead with the benefits, not the features of the product or the outcomes that the audience will experience or the use cases. My experience has been that, that that is very effective and especially in grabbing attention. And then at some point in the sale there does come a moment when that buyer may want more technical information, or someone on their team may want more technical information. Dennis: Oh, definitely. Balancing the simple and the complex Kathleen: How do you handle that in terms of the way you do marketing? When is the time and the place for conveying the technical specs, if you will, versus that simplistic top line messaging? How do you strike that balance? Because I think you can also be too simple and frustrate your audience if they're not getting their questions answered when they're at that evaluation stage. So I'd love to know how you think about that. Dennis: That's great. I wish I had a golden rule. I'm almost tempted to just ask you, because you probably know a lot more than me. Kathleen: Don't bet on it. Dennis: My experience over a long time in this, and it's just that, it's not anything, it's not data-driven really, it's just gut feeling, is that most of the time we dig into the details too soon. That doesn't mean that you can just not dig into the details. There is a time, but you want to know that your customer really wants it before you give it to them. I think that's the deal because otherwise, how many times have you sent a beautiful proposal with 30 pages of, you've sweated all the details, and it ends in somebody's inbox and then crickets, right? You don't hear anything back. You've given them probably too many excuses to not buy from you. So, I don't know, there's a dance there. I wish there were a one size fits all solutions, but my gut is, is that people will get the information, that's part of having publishing content and making sure it's out there. People don't talk to us very soon anymore. It used to be that you would go out and you'd take customers out for lunch and that's where you'd start the process, right? Nowadays it's completely the other way around. When somebody actually comes to have a conversation with you, they've probably done an awful lot of research about it anyway. They probably know more about you than even you realize. Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. I know, I've always thought about that question of like, when do you share technical information? I've always liked the approach that events and conferences take when they sell you on the notion that you need to be at the conference, and then they have the convince your boss letter, where they just acknowledge. They're just right up front and they say, "We know you need to convince your boss to spend the money, so here's a letter you can just hand to them, customize it for yourself and go." And it's a very kind of explicit acknowledgement of the dynamic that happens in the purchasing process, and I've always liked the idea of translating that and taking the convince your boss approach and applying it in other ways. So for example, I've worked with a lot of cybersecurity companies on their marketing and that dynamic exists in that industry too, where you have your less technical buyer, it could be risk officer, it could be somebody at a senior level in the organization who knows they need to keep it secure and they're concerned more from sort of a boardroom level that, "We're a secure company. We're not going to be at risk." But at some point in the buying process, some sort of analyst that's lower than them in the hierarchy of the company is going to be called in and asked to vet the product, and I've always liked the idea of having a convince your analyst packet where it's like, "Just hand this to your analyst. This is everything they need." Dennis: That's a really great strategy. I like that. Kathleen: Being that up front about it. I don't know, I mean I don't have enough proof to know that it works, but it seems to work in the conference and events world, so that's why I've always been intrigued. Dennis: But I think that comes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, the, what's the problem you're solving there? The problem you're solving for your buyer, who's your champion inside that organization is, they want to look good inside. They want to look good with their boss. They don't want to be called out because they missed something that was a glaring error and they want to feel that they'll be respected and their credibility will increase because of making this deal with you. What you're doing is you're making it easier for them to do that. You're saying, "Yeah, look, I understand." You know, you're not going to go up to somebody and say, "Hey, I'm going to help you not get fired by buying my product." But you've got to have that in your head right there. That's what they're thinking. You know, am I going to is this going to help me get my year end bonus? Is it going to make me look good? Am I going to get the next promotion because I did a good job on X, Y or Z? And by keeping those human aspects in mind and having that preparation where you can say, "Okay, yeah, I know you're going to need to, this is going to have to be bedded here. I've got this whole planned out for you." Show that you've really done your homework to get the vetting materials together. And then I've always thought that making other people look good is a really great strategy, not just for selling, it's just a good strategy in life. Kathleen: Yeah, make your customer the hero. Absolutely. Dennis: Yeah, definitely. Companies that have done a great job of simplifying their messaging Kathleen: Well, do you have any examples of companies that you think do this really well? And they could be crypto companies or they could be other types of companies. I'm just curious, like, if somebody wanted to go out into the internet, and I'm springing this question on you right now, so for anyone listening, he has not had a chance to think about this in advance, but I'm just curious like when you think of companies that are really great at simplifying the complex, are there any that spring to mind? Dennis: A lot that spring to mind that aren't great, but I'm not going to go down that way. Gosh, it's a tough question. But there are companies that... It was a company that I remember we're using a software that it's a project management software and I remember that really did a pretty good job of explaining and putting the content out in a way that, I believe it was called that LaSeon I they do JIRA and stuff like that, so that kind of comes to the back of my head, but now it's been a long time so I don't know, maybe they've moved on and they do it really poorly now. Kathleen: Well, I was going to say the one example that I think of immediately, and it's funny because I always ask people on this podcast, is there a company or an individual who's really doing inbound marketing well right now, and the answer I get most commonly is Drift. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them? Dennis: Yep, mm-hmm (affirmative). Kathleen: Yeah, they're actually a company that I think does this really well. And Dave Gerhardt who has been their VP of marketing who's actually leaving, or by the time this airs will have left Drift to go somewhere else, really brilliantly did this. Because I'll never forget, I went to their conference, HYPERGROWTH, it was like either last year or a year and a half ago, something like that. What they did that was so smart was they boiled everything they do down into one word and it's fundamentally like a chat bot, live chat tool. They're now introducing other features. But you know, you could talk about this in terms of chat, right? But instead they boiled everything they do down to one word, which was "now," and they talked about how, as customers, we want our information now, we don't want to have to wait. If we have a question, we want the answer now. And really that's sort of the essence of what chat bots and live chat solve for. And I just thought it was brilliant. And somebody asked this question the other day, if you had to boil what you do down into one word, what would that one word be? And I'm still trying to figure that out. Dennis: I'm a storyteller. That would be my word. Kathleen: It's tough, right? It's tough. Dennis: It is. Kathleen: But I think, I just thought that was interesting. So for me, that's the example that I think of when I think of a company that does a really good job of simplifying the complex. Dennis: Yeah. I mean, sure. As a marketing geek, like you probably are. I just love to, watching the TV, I always liked the commercials better than the programs. Everybody gets up and leaves in the commercials, and that's when I'm sitting there looking at them like yeah, I just love it. And especially get to Christmas and- Kathleen: Oh my God, at the Super Bowl, I watched the Super Bowl only for the commercials. Dennis: Yeah, I love the way that some of the brands tell really great stories in a 32 second, or a 60 second spot. And they tell a real story and they kind of, they can reach right in there and grab you in the gut. And I think that's what, I love watching that. That's more B2C kind of companies, but I think B2B marketing should be just as fun and just as entertaining. Kathleen: Oh, I totally agree, but it's so not in most cases. And the ones who are able to do it tend to do really, really well. Stand for something in your marketing Dennis: Yeah. Because I don't know why it is. I mean, I guess I do. I know that I see this with my clients sometimes too, they're scared. It's scary to be something that not everybody else is. And I tell my customers, "Look, you can be boring, but you have to write big checks. If you can't write big checks, you cannot be boring." Because there's no other way there. You can't, you can't play it safe and shine at the same time unless you've got... If you've got the budget to pour people into your funnel nonstop and it doesn't matter, you can just keep pouring, go for it. You can be boring and you'll still make sales. But if you don't have that ability, you don't have those resources and you have to be careful, then you can't afford to be boring. You've got to be entertaining. You've got to be funny. You've got to be controversial. Kathleen: Authentic. Dennis: Authentic. Got to stand for something. And you know, hey, you, you've got to be willing to, to rub a few people the wrong way sometimes. And that's just the way it is, because otherwise, if you're too nice to everybody, you're nobody to anybody. Kathleen: And it doesn't mean... I get what you're saying, but it's interesting. I've talked to some people about this who disagree because they read it as you're being offensive or mean, and I don't think that's what this is about. I think this is just being authentically true to who you are and understanding that not everyone's going to agree with you. Dennis: Exactly. Kathleen: Instead of like, you don't need to attack anyone or name and shame or call anybody else out. It's just being true to you. Dennis: Exactly. But you know, it's being willing to be brave enough to say what you think and sometimes you even using language that is brave enough that people will understand like, "Hey, these guys, they really mean it." You can't fake it though. I mean, if you fake it, you'll get caught because have really good BS radars, right? It's easy to tell when somebody's being aggressive just to call attention to themselves, but when you know that somebody actually believes something, that's what people, they feel it. We're having this conversation about marketing, I know that people out there understand that we like this. This is fun. It's interesting. We do this for a living because we like it, because it's meaningful. I'm not ashamed of being a marketer. I like it because I think that I'm doing good. I don't take clients that I don't like, if they don't fit with who I am, then they need to find a different marketer, right? Kathleen: Oh, totally the same for me. I have to believe in not only the product I'm marketing, but the claims that I'm making as a marketer. I can't make myself do marketing if I think the claims are overinflated or BS or not true, or unsubstantial. Is that a word? Dennis: Yeah. I think it is. Kathleen: You have to be able to go to sleep at night and be happy with yourself. So I totally agree with that. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Well, I can talk about this with you forever, but we don't have forever. So first I have two questions I always ask all my guests and I'm really curious to know what you're going to say. Earlier I talked about how one of those questions is, is there a particular company or individual that's really killing it with inbound marketing? Anyone come to mind for you? Dennis: Yeah, it's probably too simple, but HubSpot is really good at it. I mean their marketing materials are spot on. They really are good at using content to drive people to their solution. Kathleen: Yeah. And they better be because they invented the term inbound marketing, so they better be. Dennis: I guess so, right? Kathleen: And the second question is really with marketing changing so quickly, a lot of it, digital being driven by technology changes, how do you stay up to date on that changing landscape? Dennis: Oh gosh. I guess probably like everybody, you're always reading, you're always looking at stuff. I try though. I think for a long time I was suffering from the shiny penny syndrome. I would try everything new that came my way and we would test it out. I would drive my team absolutely crazy doing different stuff. I've tempered a bit that I try not to, you have to do it kind of yourself though. I learned the lesson that it really isn't that important. It's all about what you're saying and who you're saying it to. So, you know, play around, do it as best as you can, places to read. I mean, gosh, there's, there's one guy I would definitely recommend any marketers should go check out bensettle.com. Ben Settle, he's very irreverent, but he's a great marketer, a very good email marketer. You just get on his emails and listen to them. I guess that's my tip. How to connect with Dennis Kathleen: Ooh, I love that. I'm definitely going to check that out. Thank you for sharing that. Well, if someone is listening to this and they have questions or they want to learn more, is there a good way for them to connect with you online? Dennis: Sure. Dennis H. Lewis on LinkedIn, DennisHLewis on Twitter. Definitely check out my book on Amazon, Behold the Cryptopreneurs, and you can go to thecryptopreneur.club and cryptopreneurs.club and you can get the first four chapters for free. Kathleen: Oh, awesome. I love it. All right, well I will put links to all of that in the show notes, so if you're in connecting with Dennis, head to the show notes and check that out, that'll all be in there. But in the meantime, thank you Dennis. This has been great. I've really enjoyed talking with you about simplifying the complex and getting your insights on the best way to do that. Dennis: I guess the last thing to say is talk to your grandma. She probably has a good idea. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Yes. Go to the grandma's for the advice. All right, well that's it for this week. If you're listening and you learned something new, or you enjoyed this podcast, please head to Apple Podcasts and consider leaving the podcast a five star review, that is how people find us. I would really appreciate it. And if you know someone else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, as always, please tweet me @ workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. Thanks so much. That's it for this week.

Sit tight space cadets! We interview Kathleen Oh, the Creatrix and the ONLY facilitator of breath work in St.Catharines.

Rylee Meek went from being virtually homeless, with $600 in his bank account, so selling more than $2 million within just six months. Here's how he did it... This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Rylee Meek shares the story behind The Social Dynamic Selling System, his approach to using dinner seminars to generate qualified inbound leads.  Rylee's selling philosophy is built on a belief that success hinges on getting prospects to know, like and trust you, and he does this through dinner seminar marketing. Now he has parlayed his success with this approach into a business where he trains other entrepreneurs on how to use this same system to grow their own companies. In our conversation, he breaks down exactly how it works, and how you, too, can leverage Social Dynamic Selling. Highlights from my conversation with Rylee include: For the last ten years, Rylee has been using a process he calls Social Dynamic Selling to sell a variety of products and services. He says that the product or service isn't the focus - it's the environment that involves bringing a group of people together, establishing the presenter as that authoritative figure in that industry, and then ultimately getting potential clients and customers to know, like and trust them. Today, Rylee teaches and consults with other business owners who want to learn how to use his process to grow their business. When Rylee works with a new client, he starts by asking what they want to sell and then digging deeply into what the ultimate benefit is that the customer would get from that product. The Social Dynamic Selling approach works best when the product or service being marketed has a high price point or upsell value. Rylee's process relies heavily on direct mail to generate initial interest in his dinner seminars. To generate an audience of 25 registered dinner seminar attendees, Rylee sends out around 3,000 postcards. These results are generated from one send, as opposed to a multiple step direct mail campaign. Once attendees are in the room, Rylee says it is critical that the presenter NOT do a hard sales pitch. Instead, the goal is to establish a relationship and get the audience to know, like and trust you. Rylee and his team track six measurables: 1) response rate; 2) RSVPs; 3) show up rate; 4) appointment set rate; 5) appointment rate; and 6) close rate. His goal is to generate an ROI of 300% from each event. One of his recent clients generated $11 million in sales in less than a year using this approach. Resources from this episode: Visit the Social Dynamic Selling website Follow Rylee on Facebook Connect with Rylee on LinkedIn Follow Rylee on Twitter Get Rylee's book, The Social Dynamic Selling Blueprint Listen to the podcast to learn how you can leverage dinner seminars - and Rylee's social dynamic selling formula - to generate qualified inbound leads. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. Today, my guest is Rylee Meek, who is the founder and CEO of The Social Dynamic Selling System. Welcome, Rylee. Rylee Meek (Guest): Hey, Kathleen. Yeah, I'm happy to be on here. It's going to be fun. Rylee and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah, I'm excited to have you here. I was really intrigued reading about your background, and kind of your, let's just call it a rags to riches story. I think it would be really interesting if we could just start by maybe you sharing some of that story. What was your journey? How did you wind up doing what you're doing now? Then we can finish it with, really what is social dynamic selling. About Rylee and Social Dynamic Selling Rylee: Sure, yeah, happy to do that. I'm 34 years of age now. I started really my entrepreneurial journey, I guess, probably at the age of 14, 15. It all started based upon me getting my first actual job at the age of 15. I grew up in South Dakota, a tiny, tiny town in South Dakota, like less than 1,000 people. Kathleen: Wow. Rylee: There wasn't much for opportunity there, but there was a little gas station that I had the opportunity to go make pizzas at, at the age of 15. My hourly rate at that time was minimum wage, $5.15 an hour. So, tough to get excited about that, but I still went to work. My first shift, I worked eight hours. I did the math in my head after I calculated that, and I thought, "There's no way I'm doing that again." Kathleen: You want to know something funny? I too was a short order pizza cook- Rylee: Really? Kathleen: Around the age of 15. So, we'll have to have a whole separate conversation about that. Rylee: Absolutely. Absolutely. That was kind of my initial introduction to really the workspace, I guess we'll call it. I was in high school at the time, and I realized there're additional ways to make money versus just having to go work for somebody and creating your own platform or your ability to earn income, is really based upon some of your own efforts if you really put your mind to it. I was introduced to a number of different network marketing companies, MLM companies, which at the time was an amazing personal development time for me, going through high school and just be around... I completely drank the Kool Aid within those industries. Being around just like-minded people that were all about personal development, and opening your mind, or just expanding your vision. I think that really has attributed to where I've come today, which is surrounding myself with those types of people. The day I graduated high school, I actually moved up to Minnesota. Like, literally the day. Not really to come to Minnesota, but more so just to get out of South Dakota. I needed more. I wanted more of an opportunity. I moved to the big city and was fully planning on going to school. My initial intentions were to become a chiropractor, which you own your own practice, but you've got to build your own practice with that. I like the idea or thought process behind that, that I wasn't really working for somebody. I was still working for myself. During that time period, I started to make a decent amount of money just selling things. The network marketing company that I was with at the time was nutritional supplements. I put together some catchy little campaigns that I was doing in newspapers and PennySavers and things. I was retailing between $10,000.00-$15,000.00 a month in nutritional supplements. At the age of 18, 19 at the time, I was doing pretty well for myself. I thought, "This is great. Why do I want to go into student debt, and go down that path when I can just build my own business doing this?" So that's what I really did. Through that time process, kind of in that network marketing world, MLM, whatever you want to call it, a lot of the pitch of that whole atmosphere is why earn 100% of your own efforts, or 1% of 100 people's efforts? I always loved that. That was kind of the goal, was that mailbox money, or just that residual income. I realized what I was doing certainly wasn't something that was duplicatable. I was working 15 hours a day, meeting with people, and going through our sales process. They would physically come into an office that I had rented. I was working my butt off, making good money, but I certainly didn't have the time to enjoy it the way I should. I started to look at a number of different opportunities. Kind of flash forward a few years at least, a number of different business ventures that were successful, some failed. Learning a lot through the process, I had an opportunity to go to Mexico when I was 23. We were opening up operations there with, again, a different company that was expanding into Mexico. I ended up renting out my condo here in Minneapolis, and moved down to Mexico in Puerto Vallarta. We had a beautiful spot just up by the beach. Things were going well. It was great. It was a fun time in my life. About five months into that process, the Mexican government shut us down, shut down all operations. We pretty much were done. We didn't have anything to do. We packed up our stuff, we came back to the states. I pretty much invested all of my money. I'd even rented out my condo here, so not only was I pretty much broke, but I was homeless essentially. I had to go sleep on my sister's couch, and I was just kind of looking for the next thing. This would have been in April of '09, I think it was, in which I came back. I spent really that entire summer just trying to figure what play, what I was going to do next, full well knowing I didn't want to go work for somebody. I don't know why. I know why, of course, but it was just no matter what, I was going to try to figure this thing out on my own. I ended up coming across this ad on Craigslist of all places. It said, "Work three days a week and make $10,000.00." I thought, "Yeah, right." But- Kathleen: Your curiosity got the best of you, huh? Rylee: Exactly. Exactly. A nice little catchy phrase that they had there. I inquired upon it. I had multiple conversations with gentleman, and he started talking about these events where he was getting groups of people together, and then delivering a presentation and selling his products. It was the first time I was really introduced to this concept of selling one to many versus one-on-one. Everything that I'd done up to this point, was pretty much meet with somebody one-on-one, give them the whole sales spiel from A to Z, and then try to close the deal. It was a new concept for me. I didn't really fully grasp what it meant, because one of the frustrating things for me leading up to this was, as much as I wanted to believe in direct sales, your income is unlimited, you earn what your worth, I realized that that wasn't necessarily true because granted, I could sell higher ticket items and make higher commissions in that standpoint, but I was still limited by the amount of time in a day. I could only do so many presentations in a 24 hour period. My income was still capped. After multiple conversations with this gentleman, he invited me out to one of his events. It was a couple of hours away. I'd driven down to it, and that's when it really hit me. It blew my mind that I walked in this room and there was 20, 25 people sitting there, all chit chatting, having a good time, enjoying a nice meal. He bought them a free steak dinner. He delivered a presentation, and it wasn't like this sales-y pitch, like rah-rah, rush to the back of the room or anything. It was just getting them to ultimately know who he was, and if they liked him, they trusted him, then he had the ability to ask for that second appointment or at least the opportunity to present price on what it was that he was selling. I left that meeting, I just couldn't shut off my brain. I had a couple hours drive back, and my wheels just kept spinning, and spinning, and spinning, and full well knowing, you know what, I didn't want to go work for somebody. I started just to think about what could I sell through this format, because it's a beautiful system. I realized getting these people together, how do I get people, how do I market to them to come on out and have any interest in what I'm even talking about. I spent months and months trying to figure this thing out, and by that following summer, I did my first presentation, my first campaign, in which we did some direct mail, just little postcards. I invited people out for a free steak dinner, and I had 15 or so people that showed up at my first event. Through this process, I literally remember I pretty much spent all my money. I remember driving to this first event I had $693.00 in my bank account. It was like, "Okay, I've got to figure this out. How do I get these people to ultimately want to do business with me?" I ended up making a few sales through that process. Flash forward a decade now, it's been since I've been doing this, we've sold multiple different products and services through this format. The product or service isn't necessarily the focus. It's really the environment that we create where we're bringing a group of people together, establishing the presenter as that authoritative figure in that industry, and then ultimately getting our potential clients and customers to know, like and trust them. That's what we've really kind of been doing over the last decade, and fixing and refining that process, which is now what we know as The Social Dynamic Selling System. Kathleen: Ah, there we go. You brought it full circle. I love it. One of the reasons I was interested to talk about this is that I feel like this format can be used well, or it can be completely abused. I've certainly seen examples of it, where you go in and you're like, "Oh, crap. It's like those timeshare pitches," where you're like, "I've got to sit in that room for three hours to get my free night." Rylee: Right. Kathleen: There's definitely bad ways to do it. Some people will walk in and know that they're trading a steak dinner for a hard sell, and it's a terrible experience. I always wonder, do these places actually get people to buy anything? What I thought was interesting about your approach, and really what made it kind of inbound-y, is a few of the things you just said here, that's it all about getting people to know, like and trust you, which is really the heart of inbound marketing. It's not a hard sell. It's a get to know you session, if you will. I think you said something that really stood out in my mind, which was you didn't say, "We tried to figure out how to sell them something." You said, "The events were all about how do we get them to a point where they want to buy from us?" Which is a very different thing. It's a subtle difference, but it's an important thing. I think the, "Having them want to buy from us," tracks with know, like and trust, and "How do we sell to them?" tracks with, "Lets spam them and give them the hard push, and guilt them into buying from us," or what have you. Rylee: Right. The Social Dynamic Selling process Kathleen: That was why I was interested in chatting with you. Let's actually break this down. If you would, really pick apart and describe to me the process you're using. You realize you have something you want to sell. You've said yourself, the product really doesn't matter. So, if somebody's listening and they're thinking, "All right, how would this apply to me?" You've got something you want to sell, then what? How do you tackle this? Rylee: Sure, absolutely. When I started out, it was all about, "What could I sell? What could I sell?" And then it was, "Okay, that did great." My first six months, literally, we were selling energy conservation products. I am the least mechanical person on the face of the earth. Literally, my wife is the one who hangs the pictures in our house. For me to be selling home remodeling and home improvement products, it was like I couldn't give two cents about that, but it was the process of being able to connect with our clientele, our customers, understanding what their wants and needs are, but really what their wants are, because I really feel people don't buy what they need. They buy what they want. It was about creating that environment. My first company, in our first six months, we did $2.1 million in sales through this process. Then that's when I started looking at, "Okay, what else could I sell? What else could I sell?" It wasn't until about three or four years down the road, where I realized- Kathleen: You did $2.1 million in the first month, did you say? Rylee: The first six months. Kathleen: The first six months, okay. I was going to be like, "What? That's crazy." I mean, that's still really good. Rylee: Yeah, it was great from going from $693.00 in my bank account. Kathleen: Yeah, that's pretty awesome. Rylee: When I started to look at different products, and when I would go out and have my sales weeks, and I'd come back, I remember so clearly just this lack of passion that I had. I didn't care what I was selling. Were we helping people? Yes, but that wasn't it for me. When I really had that realization, I remember so clearly, this was like a Wednesday night, I came home. I'd had a successful sales week. I was sitting down. My wife and daughter were already asleep. I just started thinking about, "What am I doing with my life?" Yeah, we're making money and that's great, but if you don't have any passion or you're not enjoying doing it, it ain't worth it, really. I mean, it's just not. That's not what I wanted for my life. I realized my passion really was people, and being able to help them develop a sales strategy to take their products to the marketplace, because if you build it, they don't come. You've got to figure out a way to get them to want what you have. That's when I really pivoted in my career to moving more to consulting and teaching people how to do this versus physically doing it myself. Anytime we onboard a new client, or somebody that's even questioning, "Does this make sense for me? Can I do this?" We always start out with a quick strategy call, and really kind of determine, what is your product, and not even just what are you selling, but really, what truly are you selling? You know, getting into the actual benefits of the benefits of it, and can we create a story, an environment that we can take people on that emotional journey that want we have? It always goes back to the old "People don't buy a drill because they want a drill, they want a hole." But we even obviously take it further than that, that they don't want the hole, they want the picture hung. They don't want the picture hung, they want their house to feel warm and comfortable. It's the benefits of the benefits, of the benefits that we really try to get into on these initial calls to determine, is this product saleable through this format? Who is Social Dynamic Selling right for? Rylee: But then also we really want to get into the numbers, the money aspect of this. I will be the first to tell you that what we do isn't for everybody by any means. If you have a $48.00 widget and there's no additional upsell or upside of that, or no additional lifetime value of your customer, this is not going to be the format for you. You're just not going to have a return on investment that is going to allow you to do this long term. I want to be very upfront with people on that when we do our initial strategy calls, that this does take some money to do some marketing with this. Getting started Rylee: We do a ton of direct mail initially. I call it, "We fish with corn dogs," and really what I mean by that is there's not a fish in nature that would sustain a life on solely eating corn dogs, but if I put a corn dog on a hook and throw it in the water, they're going to bite it every single time. My goal with that initial outbound piece, I guess, is to bring them in. I'm hooking them, and then once they're within my group, within my environment, now I can really nurture them, and feed them what they need to actually truly be fed. That's what we do. We do a ton of direct mail in that aspect, but once our message is clear with the client or customer, whatever the product is, we want to have continuity within that whole process of the message that's been given initially to them calling to RSVP for the actual event, to the confirmation call, to just the culture that they walk into for this actual event. Most of these, we host at kind of mom-and-pop steakhouses. We're not booking out huge comfort centers, or rooms, or anything like that, because that whole process of know, like and trust, you need to be able to connect with them. If you can get them to come to a neutral environment where they're not feeling pressured, like you had mentioned, that timeshare thing where they literally chain the door and you can't wait until you get out there. It's more of just creating that neutral environment in which we're having a good time, we're joking. We're really getting to know each other and understanding who you are, to obviously know who you are, but then that like and trust is the most important aspect of our whole process through our system. Kathleen: I love that you started with figuring out what it is somebody's really selling. You're not a marketer by training, and I always say this on this podcast, that sometimes the best marketers are the ones who are not trained. What you've figured out intuitively, is something that a lot of marketers are taught, but not all marketers actually do, which is really focusing on the outcome, the benefits, as opposed to the features and the inputs. When you talked about you're not selling folks a drill, you're selling the picture hanging, the home feeling cozy, et cetera, that's something that I think many marketers get tripped up on. Using direct mail to attract prospects Kathleen: We focus more on features than on benefits. That makes sense to start there. Assuming somebody's listening and they have figured out their benefits, they're able to tell that story of the compelling problem, let's say, that their product or service solves, then you have these direct mail pieces which is, if I understand correctly, that's primarily how you're driving registrations for these dinners. Is that correct? Rylee: Yeah, primarily it is. We've done a lot of online, Facebook, SEO and different Google Ad Words, things like that, to get people try to register for these events. But by far, the highest return on an investment is direct mail. Part of it is because it's such an easy, measurable format for us. When we do these events, first off, we do them all throughout the country. This week alone, we hosted over 63 events. Not over, but 63 events exactly this week. We're all throughout the country, so when we determine where we're going to go, it could be Evansville, Indiana, it could be San Diego. It can be any city. It can be anywhere throughout the country. When I determine who my demographic is, who is my ideal client, and we create that message to get them to take action, when we do a direct mail piece, the data that's out there that we can purchase is amazing. If our target demographic is blonde hair, blue eyed kids from... Whatever it is, we can get so specific with who we're going to be inviting out to this, where we'll craft a message to speak to them specifically. If I send 5000 pieces and I get 50 phone calls, that's an easy thing for me to measure to start my initial process of what my return on investment is going to be. Measuring success Rylee: There's six measureables that we track throughout every single campaign, every single week, for every single one of our clients. The reason we do that is because I'm not physically in San Diego doing our events this week, but I need to be able to have a bird's eye view of an understanding where things are at. Is our message off? Is the phone conversation off? Are we saying something that's turning people off? Is the venue icky? Is it in a bad spot? Is there parking that's tough for people where they don't want to walk three miles to get to the venue? All of those come into play when we're tracking this, and measuring this. But it all starts with that initial how do we get them to take action? That's where direct mail has really been the primary focus for us. Kathleen: Okay, so now I have a bunch of questions. First of all, it sounds like, if I'm understanding correctly, you're defining the audience, and then you're able to purchase a physical mailing list that matches those demographics. If you want to have, let's say 25 people show up, do you have some benchmarks around how many postcards you need to send out to get that many people? Rylee: Yeah. Yep, absolutely. That is going to be different per industry and per product, I guess, because for instance, we're working with a solar company, and they consider a household as one buying unit. You have husband and wife together, so that's two people coming in for one potential sale, versus when I work with our medical doctors. When we're inviting them out, we're still sending one invite to one household, but there's two potential sales, maybe three or four dependent upon how many people live within that home. So, all of that comes into play when we determine how many people we're going to try to attract. When we do these invitations, we're not just doing on Monday only at this time. We're planning, we're giving options throughout the week, where if there's usually two, three four, sometimes five or six options within that area, maybe all at the same venue. We might do a luncheon and a dinner on Monday, and then just a dinner on Tuesday, and then a luncheon on Wednesday. Whatever the case is. Again, that is all going be dependent upon who we're trying to attract, because a luncheon might not be good for somebody whose working a nine to five job. We might need to look at focusing on an evening, or sometimes it's Saturday morning breakfast. All of that comes into play when we really peel back the onion on determining who is our true client, and how do we want to get them to the actual event. I can safely say personally I love doing presentations or rooms with 20-25 people. Kathleen: Around, like ball park, understanding that it's all different, but around how many invitations have to go out to generate 20-25? Rylee: Maybe up to 3000, just to be safe. Kathleen: Okay. Rylee: For instance, this week I was out in Ohio. I flew in and out, and did some events for one of our clients. We had sent 6000 pieces. We hosted three events. The first one had 23 people, I think. The second one had 18, and the third one had almost 30. That's where we give it some options. Part of it too, is we've got to make sure the room holds enough, and that's kind of choosing the venue, making sure everybody's facing forward. There's a lot of components that go into truly hosting a successful campaign. Kathleen: Yeah, I was going to say do you ever have situations where you have a much better turnout and you're like, "Oh no, more people want to come, and we don't have the room." Rylee: Yeah, it's a terrible problem to have. That's where our event team will... We'll know in advance if we have an over-response that's above and beyond this, could we add an extra day or time? That's stuff that we kind of monitor, because part of our campaigns is we want our invitations to hit in time, where we know how often these are filling, do I have to send some booster, even some online stuff to try to boost our response rate because mail hit funny that week, or a snow storm came in. God forbid, I'm in Minneapolis right now, and it's negative 10 out right now, I think. Kathleen: Oh, God that sounds terrible. Rylee: And it's snowing still. It's like it shouldn't snow when it's that cold. There are certain things that are out of our control that you do still have to be flexible and be able to roll with the punches with this a little bit. We try to control as much as possible, knowing what we know works within the system here. Kathleen: In general, do you have a sense of how many times do you need to hit that same audience before they'll say yes? Is it one postcard and 25 people respond? Or, is it one postcard sent three times? Rylee: Yeah, it is usually one approach, and this is where kind of that fishing with the corn dogs. To me, if you send me... This is personally, and this is why I'm probably not a good example of this, but if somebody sends me an invitation that I don't care anything about, I don't care if they're feeding me a steak dinner, there's no way I'm going to go. But there are some people out there that they don't even care. They come to the events, and they don't even know what they're for to listen to. They're there for a free meal. Whatever. I love those people because the Law of Reciprocity takes place here, in which they're coming out, I'm getting them to love me through this hour chit chat that we're talking about. They know everything about me, and that's setting know, like and trust. Even if you get the people that are never going to do business with you, they are your biggest allies because they know they're never going to do business with you, and they're the people smiling, nodding, giving you great feedback and energy within that whole room. Know, like and trust Kathleen: Let's actually talk about that for one second, because you said you have that hour and your goal is to get them to know, like and trust you. Can you shed some light on both how you do this, and how you advise your clients to do this correctly so that it's not just a hard sell job? What happens in that hour? Rylee: Yeah. Let's call it an hour. Sometimes it could be less, sometimes it could be more, dependent upon if there're demonstrations or things like that. While this the first time they're physically meeting you, this isn't the first time they've had any interaction with us. They've received an invitation. They've talked with potentially you on the phone, if you've called to do the confirmation and things like that. We maybe have given them direction of, "Go look at this prior to the event." By the time they get out to meet you, they have at least a decent understanding of what's going on here. Now, I call it, this is your circus and you're the ringleader within here. Immediately, you are established as the authoritative figure, because you are, you're the speaker. Name an event that you've gone to, and you haven't immediately had a respect for the person on stage speaking. They've created that environment where they are that authoritative figure. Now, assuming you know your product well, which we just assume that, the goal isn't just to educate them and make them think how smart you are, and how wonderful the features are of your product. We've kind of said that. The goal is to get them to know that you're human. You're just like them. We take people on an emotional journey through this process, because I fully believe every buying decision is emotional, but it has to be backed by logic. We take people on this emotional journey. We teach of NLP, neuro-linguistic programming, in this with getting people to be able to speak to their subconscious of feeling certain things within the environment. That's what we talk about getting them with the drill. We're not talking about, "Okay, this drill has a 3.5 volt battery, and it's going to spin at X amount rate per minute." Whatever. Who cares? Nobody cares about that. They want to know what's in it for them. That's all anybody ever truly cares about, is what's in it for them. We can talk about all those benefits full well knowing by the end of these, they know my life story, they know my daughter's name, they know where she goes to school. We're creating a relationship, a bond, with these people, and I'm not there pressuring them. This isn't rah-rah, rush to the back of the room and buy this course, and blah, blah, blah. I mean, we could do that, but that's not what we teach within our system. At the end of it, assuming you've done a good enough job where they like you, you're just simply asking for that next appointment. That's it. We're not closing deals. We're not selling things within these environments. It's just, "Okay, we're to help. If what we talked about is adventurous to you, we're available all day tomorrow." So, we are creating a little sense of urgency in doing that, because we're in town for a period of time, where we've got this special rate for this consultation. Whatever it is, we can create that sense of urgency to get them to make that decision. Most people don't make decisions. They need a reason to make a decision, and that's where I say people don't buy what they need, they buy what they want. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. But you can put salt in his oats, and he'll want to drink. That's really what we're trying to do with these educational events. We truly speak to express, not to impress. The presenters going up there, and making people think how smart they are, that's just not what we focus on. It is getting them to... Again, I always just come back to that know, like and trust, because people do business with those that they know, like and trust. Six measurables to track Kathleen: Absolutely. You said something earlier that my ears perked up at, which is that you have six measureables that you're tracking in all of these cases. Can you just kind of quickly summarize what are those six things? Rylee: Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, our response rate, which is more of our outbound, our initial hook, where if I send X amount of pieces or I have X amount of clicks or whatever the case is, so we're tracking that. Then to the actual RSVPs, because just because they respond doesn't mean that they're going to register for the event. We want to make sure we have a proper registration rate. When we do our confirmation calls, we want to make sure there're strategies of the words that we use on how to get people to actually show up to the event. So, we have our show up rate. Then from there, you do your presentation and at the end of the presentation, you're asking for that actual appointment. Then we obviously we have our appointment rate. By the time we go to meet with them the next day, some may fall off, some decided they didn't want to do it, or something came up, and they... I hate that "cancel" word, but they cancel the appointment. So, we want the actual appointment set rate. And then, obviously once you meet with them, the close rate, the actual, "I made the sale, and there was a physical transaction there." If I can measure all of those throughout this process, again, I could be anywhere in the country looking at an event from across the country. I kind of equate it to we've kind of created an offline funnel system. Everybody talks about the online, you start up top. It's like, okay we're trying to get as many leads into there, and now we're constant sifting the sand, bringing them down to actually only meeting and spending time with those people that truly want what we have to offer. The cost structure Kathleen: Yeah, I think you described it well. They're like funnel metrics, conversion rates at every different stage. Are you also tracking the cost of acquisition? Rylee: Oh, yeah, most definitely. Most definitely. Kathleen: I would be interested in knowing kind of what that ratio usually looks like, because you talked earlier about how if you have a $43.00 widget, it doesn't make sense to do this. Rylee: Right. Kathleen: What kind of a multiple do you need to have to make this really work? Rylee: Again, any time we onboard a new client we're always starting with that end in mind, of "All right, if I can net $1,500.00 of sale on my product, can I make this work?" Or, "If it's $4,000.00 of sale, can I make this work?" Some of the data that we have to buy could be more expensive than others. If we're just sending a post card to every door direct mail, anybody could do that. That's cheap. Go ahead and do that. But when we're buying specific data, and the invitation that we have to craft, if it's mailed, it could be a certain card stock, it could be in an envelope. Rylee: We've done video invitations before, where it's a physical, they're getting it in the mail. We've done- Kathleen: Those are cool. I've gotten those before. They're really neat. Rylee: Yeah, we've done chairs before, like physical chairs that we have to mail out. Because you need to get their attention. If you're trying to figure out how to get past a gatekeeper, we do a lot of B2C, business to consumer, but my goal is to talk to that corporate executive, but he doesn't check his own mail. We've got to figure out to get past that, where we can... Some of those cost more, but I don't need to send as much to get the response that I need. That's everything that we kind of take into consideration in building these campaigns. My sweet spot is a three to one ratio of what we're spending. Can I at least make three times that? Net profit, three times that, because if you're only about to do two times that, or if it's four times that, maybe we're not spending enough money on marketing to bring that number down. So, that three to one ratio for me, is just kind of that sweet spot. If I go to the casino, and I know that every third quarter I put in I'm going to four back, I'm never going to not do that. This is a well oiled machine for the right products and campaigns. We're doing these every single week. A lot of financial advisors do these. They do selling annuities and things like that, but they do them once a month or once a quarter, and then they're working with them. What we do, it's more of like let's keep this thing going, constantly keep you in front of that correct audience so you never have downtime, you never have that slow season utilizing this marketing format. Kathleen: Let's talk about where the rubber meets the road, results. Rylee: Sure. Rylee's results Kathleen: Can you share some examples of ROI for a typical campaign like this? Rylee: Yeah, I've got so many examples. One of the most recent ones, we met with a group of doctors. It just would be actually about a year ago now we started our initial conversations. They were trying to do events like this. It's educating people about what they do. We're not getting into too many specifics. We went out and saw their events that they were trying to host, using Facebook ads and things like that. They're very smart. They do a great job at educating, but the goal isn't... There's no ROI in educating. You have to still create that environment to get them to take action. Through our consulting with them, we hosted our first campaign. This would have been in February of 2019. So, from absolutely zero business through our format, they've done over $11 million since February of this last year, solely utilized in our system. Kathleen: What kind of cost basis goes into generating $11 million? I'm just curious what the ROI is. Rylee: Sure, absolutely. That's definitely a lot higher than three to one. Again, it partly depends on the margins that we're working with, but realistically, like I said, if we determine a campaign is going to cost five grand, six grand, whatever that amount comes to, I'm inviting people out, we have meals involved here. We want to make sure that we're at least going to be able to confidently be able to earn $15 grand off of that campaign. Otherwise, they just might not make sense. There might be other ways to go about this. That's again why I say we're definitely not for everybody, but for those that we are for, it's a great system to constantly have that pipeline full of new potential clients. Kathleen: Great. So interesting. I have so many more questions, but we don't have much more time. Rylee: Yeah, exactly. How to connect with Rylee Kathleen: Thank you for sharing a lot of the details about how you're doing that. If somebody has questions, or they want to learn more, what's the best way for them to connect with you on that? Rylee: Sure, yeah. Our website is SocialDynamicSelling.com, so SocialDynamicSelling.com. That actually has some exact case studies and things like that, that you're kind of asking for. It really gets into the specifics on ROI and things. That's a good site. They can schedule an easy strategy call on there. I wrote a book last year, so all of that's available on there, they can get more information on. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Awesome, well I'll put that link in the show notes for anybody who's interested. Of course, I have to ask you the two questions I always ask everyone. The first being, we talk a lot about inbound marketing on the podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it with inbound right now? Rylee: I travel a ton, so in my downtime I will throw up social media and just try to catch up on certain things. I think Gary Vee is always out there, his face. He has a ton of videos and things like that, so I think he's obviously crushing it. A new one, well he's not really new, but Steve Weatherford. I don't know if you know him, but he was a former punter in the NFL. He's created a real brand just in the health and nutrition kind of field. I think he's crushing it right now as well, with just the content that he's putting out there, and creating that environment, that following of getting people to want what he has to offer. Kathleen: Very cool. I have not heard the Steve Weatherford one before, so I'm going to definitely have to check that one out. The other thing is, of course, digital marketing changes so quickly. Your somebody whose totally self-educated in this area, so I'm curious, how do you stay on top of the changes happening in the world of marketing? Rylee: Yeah, absolutely. Completely self-educated. I think I probably spent more than having to go to college than I would have through this process- Kathleen: That's what they call "winning ugly". Rylee: Exactly. Completely worth it, and it really has just gone back to surrounding myself with not really like-minded people, but how about like-minded people, where everybody is here to help, and surrounding yourself with that. Iron sharpens iron, by all means. So, being able to surround yourself with those type of people, and continually feeding off of that information. Through that, I meet with mentors and coaches, and things like that, but we're always working through books. I listen to a ton of Audible, which is great. I always do the every month by three, so that way I know I'm listening to at least three a month, new books, a podcast all the time. Again, I travel a ton, whether it's on a plane or in a car. Sometimes it's nice just to have that downtime and chill, and zone out to some music, meditate or whatever. But utilizing that time specifically for bettering yourself, I think has been crucial in what I've been doing over the last decade. Kathleen: Yeah, I'm a huge fan of Audible and podcasts as well. I love with Audible, putting things on 1.5 speed, especially business books, because it's not like you're immersing yourself in a story. You're like, "I want the information and I want it quickly." Rylee: Yep, yep. Keep it going. Kathleen: You can tear through some Audible books that way. Rylee: Absolutely. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Great, well, thank you so much. This has been really interesting. If you are listening and you liked what you heard, or you learned something new, I would love it if you would head over to Apple Podcasts and leave the podcast a five star review. That's what helps us get found, and in front of new listeners. If you have a minute, consider doing that. If you know someone else who is doing great marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because I would love to make them my next interview. Kathleen: Thank you so much, Rylee. Rylee: Yeah, thanks Kathleen. This is has been fun.

How do companies like Dell, SAP and LinkedIn build successful B2B influencer marketing campaigns that translate into real business ROI? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, TopRank Marketing CEO and Co-Founder Lee Odden talks about B2B influencer marketing and what it takes to build influencer campaigns that deliver measurable marketing results.  Lee uses his own agency, TopRank Marketing, as a laboratory where he tests new influencer marketing strategies that he then rolls out to clients like SAP and Cherwell Software. In this episode, he shares advice on how businesses can partner with influencers, and what kinds of results to expect. Highlights from my conversation with Lee include: TopRank Marketing is a B2B digital marketing agency focused on content, search and influence. Lee sees B2B influencer marketing as an opportunity to give subject matter experts a platform to talk about things they're really passionate about, and do it in a way that is a win for both the influencer and the business with which they're partnering. The best influencer campaigns bring together and curate credible voices in a way that gives them value from an exposure standpoint and at the same time are very "infotaining" to experience on the consumer side. With B2C influencer marketing, very often brands are simply feeding the message to the influencer. By contrast, with B2B influencer marketing, brands are giving the influencers - who are experts on a topic - a platform to create and share a message of their own. For companies interested in using influencer marketing, Lee says it is important to begin by identifying the business or marketing problem they are trying to solve. The next step is then to identify the topic about which the business wants to be influential. This is often in the form of a topic cluster, much like you might see in SEO. Once that topic has been identified, Lee and his team use three criteria to identify the right influencers: 1) Topical relevance (the degree to which that individual's own content that they're publishing is a match at a relevance level to the topic of influence that they're targeting); 2) Resonance (the degree to which that topic of influence actually resonates with the influencer's first and second level network); and 3) Reach (network size). Lee says that the process of identifying influencers is similar in many ways to the process of search engine optimization because influencer marketing is optimizing for both findability and credibility. Unlike B2C influencer marketing, B2B influencers do not always expect payment. It really depends upon the type of influencer you are working with and the level of commitment you are looking for. Lee suggests starting small and working with unpaid influencers before committing to larger paid partnerships. Lee has built strong relationships with a variety of B2B influencers and credits his success to something he calls "influencer experience management," which is essentially the process of ensuring the influencer has a positive experience working with the brand while also obtaining a high return on their contribution. One way he does this is by shortening the time horizon between the influencer's investment and effort and the return that they see, as well as by delivering longer term value. When it comes time to promote influencer content, Lee says it is important to be emphathetic to the influencer in developing a mix of media and messaging that you can supply to them and which they will want to promote. Timing is also important and it is critical to have sufficient volume of promotion right at the launch of a campaign in order to trigger social algorithms to show the content at the top of the feed. In terms of results, Lee says that if you are new to influencer marketing, you shouldn't expect that your first campaign will deliver a large number of leads, BUT you should plan to use the assets you develop in your lead gen campaigns and over time, you will see results. He suggests thinking of your first campaign as a pilot, and then building from there. Resources from this episode: Visit the TopRank Marketing website Check out the TopRank Marketing blog Follow Lee on Twitter Connect with Lee on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to learn how to build a successful B2B influencer marketing strategy. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm Kathleen Booth and I'm your host. And today, my guest is Lee Odden who is the CEO of TopRank Marketing. Welcome Lee. Lee Odden (Guest): Hey, it's great to be here, Kathleen. Lee and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I am so excited to have you here. I've been following you online for a very, very long time. And this is one of my favorite things about hosting a podcast, is it gives me an excuse to meet and talk to people who I would otherwise never have a reason to get to know and pick their brains on really interesting marketing subjects. So, looking forward to doing that with you today. Lee: Well, I'm going to have to reciprocate. I'm going to have to reciprocate because I'm really... I'm interested in picking your brain too, so. Kathleen: Well, let's do it. Let's get to the picking. Lee: All right. About Lee Odden and TopRank Marketing Kathleen: So, for my listeners who may not be familiar with you, can you tell my audience a little bit about yourself and who you are, what you do, what TopRank does and really how did you wind up where you are today? Lee: Well, that's quite a story and I'll make it short. So, I'm the CEO of TopRank Marketing. We're a B2B digital marketing agency focused on content, search and influence. We create experiences that inspire people basically. And we started as a PR firm in 2001. I joined as an SEO guy at the time and started to really explore the confluence of content and PR/earned media and earned media and owned media and how we can surface a relevant audience, not only buyers but also journalists, through optimization. And I remember that kind of combined into this sort of hybrid mix of services that we have today where we are serving clients like Dell, LinkedIn, SAP. We've done work for Oracle and Adobe and lots of other really cool B2B technology brands. We're based in Minneapolis where it is wonderfully cold and snowy. We are in the heart of winter a little bit earlier than normal, but that's okay. That makes for some a very fun running in the morning. And that's one thing about me, I've become a runner in the last 12 months or so. Kathleen: Do you have some of those tracks things for your running shoes that they have the little springs on the bottom? Lee: I didn't. So, I opted to get some... oh God, what are they called now? Something One One, Kona One One, anyway. So, these are some special shoes that are made - they're actually a trail running shoes made for the winter. Kathleen: Oh, wow. Lee: So, it's a hybrid between a trail running shoe and a hiking boot basically. So, it's got a huge foam foot bed but with super grippy Vibram soles. And I ran in the ice this morning and it worked great. So yeah, I'm an all-weather runner. Kathleen: Oh, that's great. I used to be a runner. But things have caught up with me and my knees decided that I would no longer be a runner. So, now, I am an avid spinner Lee: There you go. Kathleen: But I miss running and I missed it. I used to love running in the snow. It's so pretty and it's such a great way to experience, snowy world. Lee: Absolutely. I spent many years not doing very much at all being very much a computer geek type person sitting behind a desk. And so, while a lot of other people my age are in your seat... in the situation you described where their hips or their knees or their ankles or various tendons have gone caput, I don't have that. So, hopefully, I have another 20 years or so of the joy and the euphoria that comes right from the... all those endorphins firing after a great run. And what's really interesting about what I found about running and really a big fitness focus for me over the last year and a half or so is the parallels to marketing. You know what I mean? Because it's just kind of interesting and very curious. I think the people expect to lose weight overnight because they tried a new exercise program or meal or diet plan. And people sometimes look at marketing tactics and feel the same way. A lot of inbound marketing tactics actually like SEO and content. It just doesn't work that way. You've got to invest, you've got to commit and all those other things. So, there's a lot of interesting parallels I think between fitness and marketing performance. Kathleen: So true. And you just gave me the perfect segue into my next question, which is that you and I really first connected around this because you reached out and asked me to participate in your B2B marketing fitness guide, which was related to MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum. I was speaking there and you were putting together a guide that essentially did tie marketing and fitness together and were asking for almost sort of submissions around that. And it's funny because when I got that email from you, I was like, "Yes, I have always thought this too" that with fitness, we all know what we're supposed to do, right? We know that we're supposed to regularly exercise and this and that. It's just that so few people actually do it. And it's the same thing with marketing. We pretty much all know what we're supposed to do. But so, few companies and marketers actually managed to do it consistently on a regular basis over time. So, I thought that was genius. But the other thing that really what's interesting to me as I interfaced with you and your team around that project was just the whole process that you put together and how incredibly thorough it was, how thoughtful and detail oriented it was. Watching you execute that and the way that you worked with the different contributors and influencers on the project to me was fascinating. And so, that's what I was excited to dig into today since then I've learned that you do this kind of influence our work not just with your own company but with all kinds of clients. And so, I would love to talk about that with you. B2B influencer marketing Lee: Sure, sure. It's one of the joys of what I get to do and that is to shine a light on people with great talent. And it's in the context of Influencer Marketing. But really, it's interesting to me to have an opportunity, create conversations to create opportunities or architect opportunities where people can talk about things that they're really passionate about, situations where they can add value. And then, as puzzle pieces, pull them together into an experience that really showcases them in a really positive, optimistic light. And ultimately, I'm after a 360 win situation. This brings me great personal and professional joy to get to do that. So, there are opportunities for marketing obviously when trying to create thought leadership or customer acquisition or we have other obviously traditional marketing objectives. But how can we create value for people first? How can we bring together and curate super credible voices, experienced voices together in a way that gives them value from an exposure standpoint? But at the same time, because of the story behind it all, it's very infotaining to experience on the consumer side, right? And so, people enjoy consuming the information, they are inspired to share it, people that contribute enjoy consuming the information and they too are inspired to share it. And ultimately, becomes more successful as a result. Kathleen: So, this is really interesting to me because you think about this term "Influencer Marketing" and it's a very broad catchall for a lot of different things. And I think most people think of influencer marketing and they're probably thinking of things like somebody pays a Kardashian to plug a product on their Instagram feed or the Fyre festival. There is certainly that kind of influencer marketing where you're just really paying to put your product or service in front of that person's audience. But then, there's this whole other world that I think you've tapped into which I think is the more interesting one. And I love that you refer to it as an experience. But what I noticed about the way that you managed this particular project that, that got this going was that it wasn't the typical, "Hey, you have an audience. I want to get in front of it." What will it cost? It was, "We're creating something and we want you to be a part of it." And the big takeaway I had was that every... I kept speaking only for myself as somebody who participated. I felt like I had a sense of ownership in it, right? Because I played a part in creating it. And I think that's a very different angle to Influencer Marketing when your influencer has a feeling of ownership actually co-create the content with you seems to lead to a very different outcome. So, maybe you could just talk about that a little bit. Because I just feel the spectrum of Influencer Marketing. Lee: Absolutely. One of the big challenges of our time in the marketing world is the growing distrust consumers have of brands. And so, our opportunity as marketers is to bring forward as much authentic information and create as many authentic experiences as possible. So, rather than treating people who are credible experts -- and in the case of B2B influencers, we are really talking about credible experts as opposed to people who self-anoint them, an influencer who are really good at taking selfies and all that other silly stuff -- so, what we're looking at is inviting them to contribute to a thing that's bigger than ourselves, right? Where in some cases, it really is changing the world, it's a movement. Others' work, we've done with SAP and the United Nations around some initiatives around the United Nations around purpose. And it's like pretty remarkable. Where I mean, these influencers are just CEOs of major corporations and celebrities sometimes and then... and other folks. But on the other hand, it's other folks who are working in their industry and they've really established the respect. And they also have that domain expertise too. So, rather than feeding them a message, rather than treating them like an ad by which is where the B2C world tends to focus, we're rather trying to help them. First, we identify them as the credible person around the topic and that that topic resonates with their audience. That's our data informed homework we do beforehand. And then, once we invite that person because they are credible and there's evidence that they are credible, we do invite them to contribute and we want to hear their authentic, authentic voice. We want to hear what their opinion is in the context of an overall story. And then, whatever they say is perfect because it's real. And that's what people are looking for. And that's why I think it turns into that experience that is not only good for the contributors, but it's obviously a good experience for the audience that we're out there to attract and engage. Getting started with B2B influencer marketing Kathleen: I love that. And trust really is at the heart of business. When people are buying from you, they're buying because they trust you. And that authenticity is the biggest thing that fuels that... You named a lot of the different companies that you work with. It's an incredibly impressive list. I imagine there are many clients and prospective clients who come to TopRank and they talk about wanting to do some form of influencer marketing. Can you talk a little bit about what those first conversations look like -- when you engage with someone or consider engaging with someone? I imagine that influencer marketing is not necessarily right for everyone and, or you have to have the right set of expectations. So, how do you suss that out? Lee: Yeah, that's a great question because people come in from a variety of perspectives. So, a lot of the time people come in from a marketing or demand gen perspective. And in that case, they may say influencer marketing outright because they've pulled themselves through education, around industry information or conferences or whatever and have come to the conclusion that this is something that will help them get solve a marketing problem. And so, really, what we're after first is defining what that marketing problem is because it's not always an exact match. You know what I mean? Also, we have people who have interpreted what the expression influencer marketing means and then, for example, if they see it only as an ad. We had a company recently that said, "We have 30 days." There's been some positive news in our industry that would be good and a good reflection on our brand and the problem that we solve as a company. And so, we have 30 days to quickly... I want you to find some influencers, run a campaign and take advantage and sort of ride the wave of this positive news in the industry. It's like, "no." But we're very focused on organic and authentic advocacy and engagement, not on just paying people who are willing to say something nice and it's not legitimate or genuine, you know what I mean? And also, the timeframe makes no sense. 30 days is crazy, especially in a B2B context. So, the first thing we're looking for is to really understand what it is that business is... what's the business problem or the marketing problem they're trying to solve? And the degree to which partnering with credible experts can help solve that problem. And the interesting thing is, from a demand gen lead gen standpoint, that is totally reasonable. And it is possible within a short period of time to find people who the right kind of people who can contribute to that outcome. It's not always possible. You do have to look for data, you have to look for evidence of people who are already actively advocating for the brand and that actively publish, that are respected in the industry. And when you have the good fortune of finding those combination of traits, then, you can reach out to them, invite them to contribute to something and have a reasonable expectation that one of the outcomes from that content you collaborate on is going to result in some sort of MQL. And usually, in a B2B case, it's a download or a trial or demo or something like that. On the other hand, there are people from PR who come in. And it's influencer relations to them, not influencer marketing. So, they think of it from an analyst relations standpoint. They're thinking more thought leadership. They're not looking at conversions. They're not looking at lead gen per se. They're looking at building the influence of the brand, building the reputation of the company and even ways in which they can elevate the influence of their key opinion leaders and senior executives. Well, that's a very different approach and is also appropriate as a collaboration with industry influencers. It's just executed in a very different way. So, we find out what it is that it needs to be solved and then we apply the expertise and knowledge and the networks that we've already built with all these different influencers in the different industries, especially in B2B industries and then architect a plan on how to do that. Identifying the right influencers with whom to partner Kathleen Booth: So, if you get someone in who has the right expectations and it's a good fit and you think influencer marketing makes sense, one of the things I'm curious about is, how do you identify the right influencers? I assume there's obviously a component of, they need to have something of a following. But I imagine there's probably more to it than just that. Can you talk about that a little bit? Lee: Absolutely. In fact, one of the biggest failures that people make is, when they do focus only on popularity. It's easy to do that, but everyone's doing it. And of course, it can be faked. It doesn't happen as often in B2B as in B2C. So, to identify the right influencers, starts with topic specificity. What is it that you want to be influential about? What topics are going to matter to your customers or to the audience that you're after? The association of that topic of influence amongst influencers is something that can then elevate the brand and can give the marketing message more credibility, more reach and more engagement. So, we have to understand what those topic or topics are. Usually, it's a topic cluster. There's a primary and derivative topics -- something similar to what you might do with SEO for example. And once we identify those topics, then we use a variety of approaches to brainstorm influencers -- everything from interviewing people at the brand to looking at CRM data to social data. But ultimately, we're going to use a platform that is crawling the social web platforms like Traackr, T-R-A-A-C-K-R. I spell it just because it's easy that... not spell that right. And so, what they're doing is they have a database of millions and millions of people on all the things that they're sharing and what their followers are interacting with. And so, the minimum criteria, the data points that we're looking at are topical relevance, the degree to which that individual's own content that they're publishing is a match at a relevance level to the topic of influence that we're after. Second, we're looking at resonance, the degree to which that topic of influence actually resonates with their first and second level network, right? Because we don't want it to be weird that they start talking about Apple mice or something like that and they never talk about that. And then, the third thing is reach, of course, which is network size. There are other elements like audience characteristics and what kind... do they publish their own blog? Do they publish to industry websites? Do they speak at conferences? Are they a book author? And there are other sorts of signals that are both online and offline that we may consider according to the situation. And increasingly, we're starting to bring in SEO metrics. So, we want to know sometimes where there's someone isn't a recognized entity by Google, right? And so, are they on Wikipedia? Are they showing up in... from an SEO perspective provided that the reason why we're doing the campaign has SEO expectations. We'll look for those criteria. That's not always the case, but increasingly it is because there's a lot of congruence between topic specificity as it relates to SEO and topic specificity as it relates to influence. You want to help someone be the best answer. And what we like to say is we're optimizing for findability. But we're also optimizing for credibility. So, all those factors come into play and identifying well, who's the right match, right? And obviously, there are other things, and I know that I could probably write a book all just about this but we want to make sure that the type of content we have planned is a match for obviously what they publish. So, YouTubers -- video, right? Bloggers -- text. Podcasters -- audio, and so forth. And making sure that we're really aligning from a value standpoint what that influencer has demonstrated through their interactions with their community and the values that brand stands for. All those things factor in to picking the right person. And still, after a campaign or two, it may turn out to be that that person is not a fit because influence is temporal. It is not permanent. It goes up and down and it is very important to revisit these... some of these criteria on an ongoing basis and that's something most brands are not doing. Working with influencers Kathleen: I hear a lot of marketers talk about influencer marketing and they're intrigued by it. They love the idea of it. They see the potential. But I think sometimes what stumbles them or causes them to stumble is the actual, like, execution. How is this going to work? And for somebody who's listening and they're thinking, "This sounds great, I love this idea, I'm willing to go out and find these influencers that combine the credibility with the popularity and all of the other things you just mentioned", this is a two-part question. First of all, what kind of expectations should they have around, should I be paying these people? And if so, how much? And the second part is, if they're not getting paid, what are the odds they're going to actually say yes to participate? Lee: Sure. So, getting paid or not paid especially, now, we happen to focus on B2B, so that's where my most of my experience lies. In B2C, if someone has a significant level of popularity and experience being an influencer for brands, almost all the time they're going to want to be paid. In a B2C scenario, where people don't get paid, maybe you have a cause-oriented marketing initiative. So, the influencer is part of the same cause or initiative that your brand is interested in and you come together to make a big difference and that's something where they may just volunteer their time because you believe in the same thing. In B2B, it's less common for influencers to be paid. There's a lot more content and when you look at the full customer life cycle at a B2B scenario, there's just so much more content involved as increasingly buyers are pulling themselves through that sales cycle or through that process before they ever contact sales. So, what you would pay an influencer for is what you would pay a consultant for in a lot of cases. So, for example, well, let's look at this. When I reached out to you and some of the others, you know I mean, they were super credible, it was a really a great group of people that shared a quote, a 50 to a hundred words, that's not normally a paid thing. Plus, we have a great reputation in our industry for making people look really good. We put them in these interactive experiences and it really does showcase and everyone gets... it's really valuable for them and they can monetize that exposure in other ways by being more credible at their job. It could contribute to book deals, it could contribute to paid speaking gigs or consulting gigs and so on and so forth. So, on the other hand, if I asked someone to... well, for example, I'm working with Brian Solis on an industry report as an analyst. I'm paying him. I mean, he's an influencer but he's also an analyst. Kathleen: But that's what he does for a living, right? Lee: So, he's doing work. Yeah, exactly. And that's a good distinction too. So, there are different types of influencers. There are "brandividuals" and I would say Brian is one of them. These are professional influencers. They are making it their business to continually collect intelligence to do analysis, to be a thought leader in their industry. So, they also publish and they actively engage in the network. And they're able to do this in a way that creates much value that it just makes sense to engage them on a paid basis. So, I mean, sometimes this manifests as a keynote presentation or they may emcee a whole track at your user conference. They may do a webinar for you that is hyper focused on something that you can monetize through lead gen. Or they could create a whole eBook or they could do a video series. We engage influencers like Tamara McCleary for example, who is the host for a season of podcasts for SAP called Tech Unknown. And you've got to listen, if you get a chance to listen to season two, just the first episode just dropped. It is so cool. We're talking about supply chain management and it's actually interesting. It's actually, it's amazing. You go from a farm in Thailand somewhere to a coffee shop and it's all audio. It's like you're listening to an NPR well-produced show but it's a podcast. And influencers are involved both as a host and as guests. So, the host is probably a paid situation whereas the guests are not because they're only on for one show, for one interview or whatever. So, hopefully, that makes sense. So, I think a lot of people just starting out feeling optimistic. They can start off by identifying people who are already advocates for their brand that are also influential and simply invite them to do something simple, share a quote, share commentary about a report, share some insights. Or at this time of year, some trends. And start things that way and see how that goes. And you can build from there. Building win-win influencer partnerships Kathleen: Yeah. And if I hear you correctly, part of it is also making it a great experience for that person who contributes. It's not just asking and getting the information, it's the follow-up that you do, the way that you help that person leverage their involvement in order to achieve their own goals. Whether that's building their personal brand or as you... I think you mentioned publishing a book or getting a speaking gig. I feel like there's that whole, you called it earlier a 360 win. How do you make it a win for them as well? Lee: I think that absolutely. And we call that "influencer experience management." So, customer experience is so much of a, a term, or it's in the vernacular of marketers these days of selling platforms and marketing services or whatever. And we apply those same ideas to the influencers that we work with because so many of them are organic sorts of collaborations and value exchanges that we have to. It's very important that we make it easy for them to do their best for them to enjoy it and to get a disproportionately high return on their effort. And that spells a win for everyone. It really, really, really does. Examples of TopRank influencer campaigns Kathleen: So, assuming that I wanted to do an influencer campaign. I'd love to just talk through what... how this work, what are some of the better frameworks for them and what kinds of results I could expect. And I guess the best way to tackle this might be to do it through some examples because I know that you've used your own company as a bit of a laboratory to try out new strategies and figure out what is going to work well and what isn't. And then, you tend to roll that out to some of your clients. Maybe you could share some of those examples and talk through the kinds of results you've gotten? Lee: Sure. So, excuse me, one of the earlier examples, I think it was 2012 or so, we approached, or Joe Pulizzi and I were talking. So, he's the founder of Content Marketing Institute, Content Marketing World conference. We were talking about how we might collaborate together. Because previously, our blog is fairly popular and we had been a media sponsor for quite a few conferences as a blog which at the time was very... you had to be actual magazine or have a massive email list or something like that. So, I had great success with that kind of collaboration with events and publications. And we were talking about what we could do together. And I thought, well, how about if I do this? Now, today, this is going to sound so unique. But at the time it was fairly unique. So, I thought, well the conference has, I think it was a secret agent was a theme somehow. I don't know if that was a theme of the conference. But oh, know what it was. So, I suggested, how about if I reach out to somebody of the other speakers and invite them to share their expertise as a preview to the conference. We'll publish this before the event and it'll attract attention to the conference. At one level, that was like, "Yeah, duh, that makes sense. Okay, great." But what I knew as a speaker is that this is a multi-track conference. And nothing is more disappointing to showing up at a multi-track conference and finding out that three or four other super popular people are speaking at the same time as you and there's only 25 people in your seats. So, I empathized with the speakers in this way. And so that is part of the context of my invitation to some of the really popular speakers that I didn't have a relationship with as an invitation to give them exposure, immediate return on their effort, opportunity is really what that was. And I learned a lesson in this. So, I started out thinking, I would just do 10 question interviews and publish the interviews on our blog. That was the format of the content I had in mind. I sent out these 10 questions to quite a few of the speakers and only one responded. And that was a big failure. So, one of the questions was, can you share one secret about content marketing? And I thought, I'm going to try this again. And so, I repositioned a question. I said, I asked it as if I was a character, I said, "You're a secret agent and you've just returned from a meeting with your handler and now you have a secret that will save the content marketing world. What's that one secret?" And these people who had no time for the 10 questions rapidly responded, many in character, "This is agent 35. Here's my secret from technology company X, Y, Z." And we got, I don't know, 30s or 25 responses. And so, we use the vintage James Bond sort of theme where you have an aged folder with coffee stains on it. And the red-letter stamps secrets as an eBook aesthetic that Joe Kalinowski at Content Marketing World created the cover. And then, we took that cover's inspiration and created all the interior aesthetics and everyone loved it. They had all these graphics and we positioned them as the little Polaroid photos and all this stuff. So, it was, what is it, 40,000, 50,000 views over the weekend on SlideShare alone. It was the featured content on SlideShare and other speakers at the conference were talking about it because it dropped right before the conference. So, that really set the stage for events and content, the people speaking at events and content, as something where we could create immediate value for people, right? Because, the hypothesis was not what can we get from people, it was what value can we create for people. But we've got to shorten the time horizon between their investments and effort and the return that they see. And we also want there -- because it would be digital content -- we want there to be an ongoing or long-term return as well, hopefully. So, that was the framework for what we still do today. And actually, that was the framework for the project that you contributed to as well. Kathleen: Yeah, it sounded- Lee: And so, there's lots of other examples like that. Yeah. Kathleen: Yeah. And kudos to you for recognizing a huge pain point because yes, I have spoken at many a multi-track event and there's nothing worse than there being three tracks and the other two guys have packed rooms and you're like, "Okay, you five people, we're going to have a really interactive session because there are so few of us." Lee: Yeah, exactly. Promoting influencer marketing content Kathleen: So, that's great. What I thought was really interesting is, a lot of what you talked about is, it really is leveraging the classic principles of marketing. Because when you talked about reducing the number of questions that you asked, it's the same principle behind how many forms do you put in a... or fields you put in a form. If you asked for 15 things, not a lot of people are going to respond. You asked for two things, you're going to get a lot more. So that makes a lot of sense. But I think one of the most interesting aspects of this to me is, how you enabled the share-ability. Because I know you did this with the one I participated in as well. And you talked about the graphics and making it really cool kind of Polaroid picture like things. Can you maybe talk through how you... what happens once the piece is done? In other words, what assets do you deliver to the contributors and how do you follow up with them to encourage sharing? Lee: So, the, the magic of promotion starts in the planning. So, I talked about topic specificity as it relates to search and influence. So, we use search data as a reflection of demand and we use other data sources to kind of get an idea of what questions are people actually asking around the topic, the brand wants to be known for. And that actually informs the influencers we pick but also the questions we asked them to give insights about. So, there's information architecture if you will, to the way the content is curated and then structured that follows through then to the promotional assets that are delivered, right? So, for example, if I worked with you on a future project, I'm like, "Kathleen in inbound marketing, inbound marketing." So, I'm going to ask you about inbound marketing. And then, in a promotion asset it may be an infographic, it maybe an interactive infographic. We often repurpose content into promotional videos. Actually, I've got a great example for you to just... we did a conference, had a game theme. All right. So, we decided to use 8-bit video game as an aesthetic. And then, we did these promo videos where we literally turn the influencers who contributed into these 8-bit characters and you could... and then, it had the music like the Mario Brothers music... and the left to right and the scene moving behind them and whatever. And so, we use those as a promotional videos and we gave static images, we gave the video content to the influencers to share. And of course, we shared that on our own network as well. And obviously, we pre-write social messages. And that is an art all by itself because the social message you would give to the industry is a completely different social message you would give to someone that works at that brand or to the influencers themselves, right? People often mistake that influencers only want to self-promote and they'll give them a graphic with their own photo in it and it's like, no, in certain cases that is... the last thing in the world they want. But if you give them a graphic with a photo of all the influencers that they are participating with, now, that is motivating because by association, that'll lift their credibility. Otherwise, it just looks like gratuitous chest beating. Kathleen: It's so awkward when you're like, "Look at me. I'm doing this thing." Lee: Yeah. And so, it's being empathetic. That empathy is instrumental obviously in marketing but especially with promotion. And so, there are promotional assets that are a mix of media and messaging. There's also a timing that comes into play. As we all know, social algorithms will emphasize engagement within a very focused period of time. So, when there's a launch, we want to architect as much organic sharing as possible around that very specific launch time so that algorithms will respond and then feature that content higher in the feeds and that sort of thing. What kinds of results can you expect from B2B influencer marketing campaigns? Kathleen: So, at the end of the day, you run a campaign like this. What kind of results does it deliver? Lee: So, again, results and metrics and all that obviously are tied to the goals of the program. While some people will start with a campaign sort of idea, really what it is, it's a pilot. And what you should expect from a pilot where you don't have an influencer program in place already is simply to create great relationships with the influencers to have created content that you can repurpose for demand gen efforts, which could lead to the lead gen that you're after. But as far as the actual influencer content on that pilot, that is a top of funnel thought leadership type of expectation, that's the reasonable expectation. And again, like I say, you can repurpose that content for demand gen efforts. You can deconstruct that influencer content and use its ingredients to put in other demand gen and lead gen types of efforts long-term. But I wouldn't expect leads off of a pilot. I really wouldn't. That said, we have had pilots do really well. There's a company, it is an IT service management industry called Cherwell software. The very first pilot we did for them, or the pilot we did for them, I don't know, they're 15 influencers talking about... is reacting to a report, an industry trends report that they had produced. And so, the influencers are reacting to that data and the content of that report, we put it together as an eBook. We gave them compelling content to share that one campaign because obviously, you were encoding all those URLs that they're sharing. That one campaign was responsible for 22% of their pipeline for the entire year. Kathleen: Wow. Lee: It's an award-winning campaign. Demand Gen Report gave it the Killer Content Award offer that year. In fact, well anyway, I'll stop there. But we're continuing to work with them- Kathleen: I want a link to this campaign so I can check it out and put it in the show notes by the way. Lee: Absolutely. Yeah. And so, that can happen. But that's not typical. And the thing is, when you do a pilot like this and you don't have influence or relationships already, I mean, it only makes sense that you're just opening the door to this as a tactic. It's kind of like, if you know about SEO. Obviously, if we optimize something and we get a couple of links, we're not expecting a flood of leads after a month, that's crazy. Or even a quarter, it takes time to earn it. Now, if your starting point is one where you have a super mature website and you've got hundreds of thousands of links in all kinds of content and you're just making some technical mistakes, you can fix those things and have great expectations. Same sort of thing in influencer marketing. If you already have really great relationships and credibility with industry influencers, but you're just not activating them in an effective way, we can see that. And then, we can architect an experience for them that will result in the thing that you're actually after. So, it really depends on the goal. It depends on the starting point. But ultimately, no matter where you start, we can get there, right? There's a phased approach that you can take, a maturity escalation that you can follow or a path of escalation and maturity that you can follow that can take you from experimenting to being processed and transactional to be more relationship focused, ultimately, being... having momentum and being fully integrated. Companies that are nailing B2B influencer marketing Kathleen: Now, you mentioned Cherwell as an example of a really successful campaign. Are there other companies or specific campaigns that spring to mind if somebody is listening to this and they want to go out and see a living breathing example of how this was done in the wild? What should they look at? Lee: Absolutely. So, another great example is a SAP has as a Tech Unknown podcast. I mentioned that before. So, just if you Google "TechUnknown" as one word or "SAP Tech Unknown," you'll see season one has been out there and we just crushed it with the downloads or they crushed it with the downloads. And so, Tamara McCleary was the host inviting industry experts from within and with outside the organization and just really talking about topics of interest to their buying audience. Same thing with Dell technologies where Mark Shaffer and Douglas Carr, are the influencer hosts and they're interviewing people within Dell technologies, group of companies as well as outside experts about things that their audience will care about. Also, another podcast example I'd love to share is 3M. 3M publishes the largest study of science on the planet, right? It's the study, State of Science Index study. And as a complement to that, we started a podcast where their chief science evangelist, Jayshree Seth, I'm hoping I'm saying your name right, is the host. And then, she interviews people from astronauts to educators other intellectuals or practitioners in business that work in the field of science to help people understand how science impacts our lives. And again, I think we're on season two of that. So, audio wise it's a great opportunity. Episodic content bodes really well I think for influencer engagement because it creates a platform you to have guests. And it's a very natural metaphor for what people already know to be exposed to different ideas and for you to invite people who can add to your sort of portfolio of influencers. Because when you create that interview experience, the experience can inspire advocacy long after that episode has dropped for that person as they go about talking about things of interest in the industry. We also create a lot of interactive assets. So, the marketing, fitness, the B2B marketing fitness thing that you were part of was a slightly interactive. There was a conference where I... the topic, what was the topic? Break Free of Boring B2B. So, in fact if you search "Break Free Boring B2B," you'll find this. And so, I gave a challenge to my team and our designers came up with a couple of designs and one of them was basically, it would be 150-foot-tall grizzly bear with lasers coming out of his eyes lighting up the city. I was like, "Okay, that sounds great." And so, we used that as the aesthetic for this interactive infographic that featured experts in B2B talking about how to not be boring, how to break free of boring B2B marketing. And we also created a promotional video, which was as or more popular than the actual inner infographic. So, that went over. Well, people talked about it and I could show it on my mobile phone and people are like, "Oh, that's amazing. Can I take a picture of you holding that infographic on your phone." Which turned into new business for us. But that also instigated a series of interviews, which we are publishing twice a week now through January where we interviewed people about the series is called Break Free B2B or Break Free B2B Marketing. So, I mean, what a topic, right? It's universally interesting. How can we break free of status quo? How can we break free of legacy mindsets? How can we break free to greater results? So, there's so many things that we can talk about. So, that one influencer generated infographic initiated an ongoing series of episodic content. And it's really that episodic content that's creating all the momentum. So, I know that's a whole bunch of ideas there. But I think what's common amongst all of them is, one, topic specificity, meaning that we know the brand wants to... they stand for something that the customers care about and we find people who are influential around those ideas that have something of value to contribute. But first, we're creating value for them as a reason to contribute. And all of them are experiential, right? They're experiential at their audio capture, they're interactive if it's static capture or heck, we've even done virtual reality experiences that feature influencers. So, it's something that is experiential for the influencer and it's experiential for the consumer, the audience that you're after. And then, ultimately, because of those meaningful, relevant experiential characteristics, they are productive. They have impact and they deliver on a return on the investment. Kathleen: Those are all great examples. And I'm really actually looking forward to checking them out because I think there are lots of brands that kind of check the box and have a podcast for example. But as a podcaster myself, I've really come to appreciate how much strategy there needs to be behind what you're podcasting about and how that fits in with your broader goals and then how that informs who you have on. Like, there's a lot of work that needs to be done before you sit down in front of the microphone and start talking. And so, can't wait to check a couple of those out and see what they're all about. Repurposing influencer content Lee: Absolutely. And one of the great things about all of this is of course the re-purposing opportunities, because when you are planning to repurpose as part of the content planning itself, atomizing or deconstructing the influencer content into ingredient content is easier. And it gives you a library of a resource to draw from to add to your sort of recipes, if you will, to follow the metaphor of other content types that you're creating. So, if you're contributing an article to an industry publication, you go, "Oh yeah, I talked to Kathleen and she said that really smart thing and I've already got that saved. I'll pop that into that article and contributing to Forbes." And are you going to be disappointed that you show up in Forbes? Probably not. Six months after you actually gave the quote in the first place. So, it's something that is the repurposing opportunity is great because it creates more value from a marketing standpoint. But also, it's a way of showing love to your influencers long after their original contribution and it keeps that love alive, which is super, super important in an organic relationship. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Absolutely. Well, I feel like I could talk about this forever with you because there are so many good nuggets here. But we do not have forever. And so, before we wrap up, there are two questions that I always ask all of my guests. We'd love to hear your answers on these. The first is that on this podcast we do talk a lot about inbound marketing. And I'm curious, having worked with so many different companies, is there one particular company or individual that really stands out who's just killing it with inbound marketing right now? Lee: I think I racked my brain around this a lot. And one company that I think that has had a long view of this and is doing really, really well that we work with is LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. So, about five years ago, Jason Miller, who was at LinkedIn at the time -- now he's at Microsoft, had tasked us with finding and interviewing influencers for a new guide he was putting together called The Sophisticated Marketer's Guide to LinkedIn. That one guide, five years ago, which had a 21,000% ROI, had become a sub-brand for LinkedIn. So, if you Google the expression Sophisticated Marketer's Hub, you will find an index of what that one guide has turned into. eBooks, podcasts, a video show, a print magazine, blog posts, obviously social -- they even repurposed the podcast into an actual book. They have learning courses. They verticalized a lot of this content for other specific industries and they're just... I think they're just doing an amazing job at creating a micro brand around this idea of the Sophisticated Marketer's Guide to fill in the blanks as it relates to LinkedIn as an inbound marketing exercise. Kathleen: It's fascinating how it has blossomed and sort of mushroomed into this other thing entirely over the years. Marketing is changing so quickly. That's the biggest complaint I hear from marketers is they can't keep up with it all. How do you personally stay educated and keep up with the changing landscape? Lee: Oh, that's a secret, Kathleen. I can't really... I'm just kidding. My network is the number one source for sure. Also, my team. One of my great joys in life is getting to meet with my team and talk about challenges and successes that they're having. And I learn an awful lot about that. I'm also afforded the opportunity to experiment with our agency. I'm still very much a marketing practitioner. So, whatever time I can carve out for experimentation is a great learning experience. I also subscribe to different topics, not so much websites but to topics so through social channels, there is content around marketing that surfaces to me. There are some individuals that I'll follow. Obviously, people like Ann Handley as an example. Certainly, I speak at a lot of events and rather than just... dine and dash as it were, I like to come in and I stay and I sit in on sessions. And also, competitive intelligence. I'm a big fan of understanding what the market is doing, not just direct... they're not just other marketing agencies, but also other businesses and really doing a lot of reflection and analysis on what seems to be working for other companies in the industry and creating some lessons at our company. We do quite a bit of knowledge transfer, lunch and learns and other structured learning opportunities. And so, all these sorts of things keep me accountable to sharing knowledge with my team and they are sharing knowledge with me as well, right? So, it's very dynamic situation, very symbiotic in that way. And yet, I still feel like I only know 10% of what I need to know. Kathleen: Oh amen. I have the same problem. There's never enough time. But, yes, it does definitely. I mean, you have an amazing network. And certainly, people like Ann Handley, et cetera, these are people that you can learn so much from. So, I love that idea. But I think for somebody who doesn't have a network, they could probably even approximate what you're doing by putting together a really curated Twitter feed or set of blogs they follow of people that clearly know a lot and absorb it that way as well. So, that's a great strategy. Lee: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I can't underestimate the value of experimentation. And whether you're able to do the experimentation yourself or if you happen to be working with an agency and you can carve out a little budget for experimentation, I highly recommend it. How to connect with Lee Kathleen: Yeah. Now, if someone's listening and they want to learn more about Influencer Marketing or they want to reach out and ask a question or somehow get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to connect with you online? Lee: Well, people can certainly come visit us at toprankmarketing.com. And there, they can find our blog, which has many, many articles over the last five or six, seven years around Influencer Marketing, especially B2B Influencer Marketing. And you can certainly connect with me on the Twitter, L-E-E-O-D-D-E-N on LinkedIn or lee@lee.to. You know what to do next... Kathleen: All right. Great. I will put all those links in the show notes. So, if you would like to learn more or connect with Lee, head over there and you'll find all of those contacts. And if you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learn something new, we always appreciate a five-star review on Apple podcasts so that other people can find the podcast as well. Kathleen: And if you know someone else doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next interview. Thank you so much, Lee. This was a lot of fun and very informative. Lee: Thanks Kathleen.

What does the data tell us about what is working - and not working - for marketers in 2019 and beyond? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Trust Insights Co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist Christopher S. Penn shares key insights from "12 Days of Data", a series of original articles that he and his Co-Founder Katie Robbert have created to analyze 2019 from an analytics perspective and see what marketers should be considering as they plan for 2020 and beyond. From which social media platforms are delivering results, to how press releases are performing and whether content republishing is worth the time and effort, Chris dives deep into the data and shares some surprising (and some not so surprising) results.  Highlights from my conversation with Chris include: Trust Insights is a "marketing data detective agency." Christopher and his co-founder Katie reviewed data from the past year to identify trends and key insights that marketers should know about heading into 2020. On Facebook, one out of every 4,600 followers engages, likes, comments or shares brand content. The engagement rate is 0.0215.  By comparison, email marketing had a 2019 engagement rate of around 2.62% - 121 times more engagement than Facebook. For influencers on Facebook, one out of every 11,000 followers engage with content. The median engagement rate for brands on Instagram was 0.472 - so one out of every 200 followers engages with content. In calendar year 2019, brand engagement of unpaid content on Instagram went from 0.57% to, as of the most recent, 0.31 - that's a 45% drop in engagement this calendar year for brand content on Instagram that's not paid. Instagram is the influencer's platform of choice with a 1.37% engagement rate median, however that rate has dropped 40% over the last year so it will be important to watch it going forward. YouTube engagement rate on a per video basis is a median of 3.7%, so it's higher than email. One out of every 27 views engages with the content. When Christopher and Katie looked at overall performance of those top channels and broke down those 200,000 channels into deciles (10% increments), the top bracket had 75,000 median views per video, the 90% bracket was at 35,000 views, the 80% bracket was at 12,000 views, and the 50% bracket is a thousand views. The press release has a median of zero views. 60% are sent by a wire service, and almost 14% are sent out by agencies. 18% of the email contact information in press releases has already gone bad. 11% of content has been republished this year. According to Chris, the key takeaways from this data are that you should invest in "owned land" not "rented land" - meaning favor email, etc. over social media. But he also says its worth investing heavily in YouTube and video in general in the year to come. Resources from this episode: Check out 12 Days of Data Visit the Trust Insights website Listen to the podcast to get more details on the data that matters most for marketers in 2020. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and today I'm excited to have with me my guest, Christopher S. Penn, who is the co-founder and chief data scientist at Trust Insights. Welcome, Christopher. Christopher S. Penn (Guest): Thank you for having me. Christopher and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I am super excited. It is the week before Christmas and I specifically wanted to interview you for this Christmas/holiday episode because you've been dropping what you're calling 12 Days of Data, and we're going to dig into that and what it means for marketers. But first, can you tell my audience a little bit about yourself, who you are, what you do, and what Trust Insights is? Meet Christopher Christopher: Sure. Trust Insights is, I describe it as a marketing data detective agency. If you've got marketing data mysteries, we help you solve them. As a data scientist, my role in the company is to write the code and process the data to solve those mysteries for clients. So when a client comes in with a challenge of some kind, we've got to figure out how we're going to solve it. Is the problem solvable? Is the problem a knowable problem or not? And sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. So it really depends on what the challenge is. My background is originally in IT, but life changed radically for all of us on August 24th, 2011, when Google Analytics introduced multichannel funnels, which is their big jump into different types of attribution and life has never been the same since. Kathleen: Yes. The thing I always say, and my listeners will have heard me say this before, but I kind of always liken it to when you go to the grocery store and you're on autopilot because you just know where everything is that you always buy, and then all of a sudden they move things around, and you're like, "Wait, the milk is in a different place." And I always like to say that Google moves the milk on us a lot. I love your background in IT. And this is one of the reasons that I've become an avid follower of yours, is that you are amongst, seriously, you are amongst the most scientific marketers I've ever met. Without pandering too much, I am going to say that I am always completely in awe of the insights you're able to extract from data. So this is a good one. If you're listening and you're interested in analytics or data, pay attention, because this guy knows his stuff. All right, with that said, 12 Days of Data. So first of all, where did this idea come from? I love it. About 12 days of data Christopher: I used to work at a PR agency for a number of years, and one of the things that was always a struggle was, what do you do at the end of your content when a lot of people are out of the office and things? How can you make something that lasts a little longer than just a hobby thing? Or is it so totally self-centric that is like, "Hey, we had a great year!" and it's sort of giving yourself a pat on the back, which nobody really cares about. And so when we founded Trust Insights two years ago, my CEO and partner Katie Robbert and I were like, "What can we do that doesn't do those things? It isn't self-congratulatory pablum and provides utility." And so last year was our first full year in business. We're just trying to get started and to stay in business. And this year we got to thinking of looking at the calendar. There's been a recurring column in our weekly newsletter called "In the Rear View," and- I'm sorry, rear view mirror. And essentially, I've written code throughout the year to analyze different datasets like YouTube engagement, Instagram engagement and stuff. And I had the idea at the beginning of December, well, we want to do something. We want to do something unique, but we also don't want to embark on a massive new project. What if we reuse the exact same code, but instead of it being on a shorter timeframe for the newsletter, we just made it for it 2019, year in review? And that's where 12 Days of Data came from, was this idea of reusing code with all the data we have, to look at what happened to the year that was and the value there for marketers, especially for many of the statistics around things like social media, is to be able to see what happened this year that is worth paying attention to. Kathleen: I love that. Now, were you analyzing just your own data, or what was feeding into these models that you built? Christopher: We use a number of different tools, so for a lot of social media data- for Facebook and Instagram, we use Facebook's CrowdTangle software and we monitor about 4,000 brand accounts and about 5,000 influencers in those platforms. So it's pulling out a few million posts at a time. For YouTube, we use the Talkwalker platform, and we actually have a running task, basically every two weeks, downloading statistics about the top 100,000 videos on YouTube by views, every couple of weeks. So we have a very large library of content to work with there. For news and press releases, we use Google's GDELT Project, which is essentially the Google news backend. So it's all the news that Google sees throughout the year. So it's tens of millions of articles and we can extract the data from that, as well. So that's sort of what we use for these datasets. Because again, you raise a really good point in your question, a lot of retrospectives and claims that companies make use very limited datasets that inherently have some kind of bias in them. Like there's one famous company that, you know, I will not name names, like, "Oh yeah, we emailed our mailing list and this is what marketers think," Well, no, that's just what people who like you think, that's not all marketers. So we try as much as possible to get away from that. Kathleen: Yes, self-selecting audiences produce very interesting conclusions. Christopher: Yes. Kathleen: That's fascinating. And I would wager that most marketers aren't even aware of those data sources. So it's interesting that they exist and we could probably have a whole 'nother conversation around that. But I want to make sure we get through our all of our 12 Days of Data, as well as some of the insights from that. Insights from the 12 days of data Kathleen: So let's start, and can you walk me through, what were the 12 Days of Data? What were some of the findings that came out of it? Christopher: Well, it's funny, as we record this, we are still actually in the midst of it. We're on day eight as we record this, of the 12 days. So the ones that have not been finished yet are things like SEO link decay, and email marketing, and content republishing. Facebook organic and influencer engagement and reach But what we have seen so far, for Facebook brands who are running Facebook pages, first thing there, engagement for brands, terrible. One out of every 4,600 followers engages like a comment or share, on brand content. So to put that into perspective, if you were to think about standing in front of your office, if you engage with any one person out of 4,000 you would automatically be doing better than your Facebook page. The engagement rate is 0.0215. For comparison, email marketing, which is one of my personal favorite channels, had a 2019 engagement rate, according to MailChimp, around 2.62%. So that's 121 times more engagement. So Facebook brands, not really moving the needle all that much. That's not really surprising. Anyone who's been doing unpaid Facebook marketing knows that you're literally shouting into the void. Influencers have it even worse. On day two we looked at influencers on Facebook, popular personalities, individuals who have Facebook pages, celebrities like Dwayne Johnson for example. Numbers there? One out of every 11,000 followers engage with content. When you think about it, so these folks just having a median of 5.6 million followers, and they get 200 reactions per post, is an astonishingly low number. And in that example, you're talking thousands of people you need just to get anyone to pay the slightest bit of attention. Email, 301 times greater response rates. So any thoughts on the Facebook side before we move on Instagram? Kathleen: Yeah, I have so many things I want to say. Okay. First of all, to be sure everybody's really clear, we're talking about organic Facebook- Christopher: Unpaid content. Kathleen: Business pages and influencers. So it's interesting. I've definitely seen the way the wind is blowing with Facebook business pages. It's been quite some time since I've put much effort into posting on them. Certainly paid is a different story, but organic has not done a whole lot. But I do still hear some business owners saying, "We need to get more followers on our Facebook page," and hopefully they're listening to this and realizing, no, you really don't. It's really not that important. That would be one thing that would seem to jump out at me, but I'm curious. I want to make sure we're- are we talking specifically about Facebook or does this apply to Instagram as well? Christopher: No, Instagram is a separate data set. Instagram has a separate API. Kathleen: Okay. Yeah, they're both owned by Facebook, but that was going to be my guess, because, just kind of anecdotally, what I've seen is very different results on Instagram. So that's interesting. To what do you attribute the significantly poor performance organically for influencers than for businesses? Christopher: So because they both use the same account type, the business page, Facebook has deprioritized those in the feed significantly. They've made multiple changes in the news feed over the years to say, "We're going to continue deprioritizing business pages," because two reasons. One, they want to try to get back to that whole friends and family thing to make Facebook more engaging. And two, they want to make more money. They have basically said, not in as many words, but Facebook is pay-to-play, and anyone who does not realize that at the end of 2019 probably needs to maybe spend some time at a good social media conference or something just to hear and listen to- this is the way the systems work now. Kathleen: Yeah. Do you think that influencers don't fare as well as businesses has something to do with the sheer volume of followers and the likelihood that some significant percentage of those are probably not real, or they're not- in other words, if you're a business that has 50 followers, the odds are those 50 followers chose to follow you for a real reason? Versus being Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and potentially having millions of people, some of whom could be bots, et cetera. I mean, is there any of that playing into this? Christopher: I think there's some of that. Some of it, like you said, is the fact that Facebook's algorithm, and this is true of all of these social networks, the algorithms are designed to prize certain specific outcomes. Obviously one of those big ones is engagement. If you are publishing stuff and people are not engaging with it, it becomes sort of a vicious circle where the less engagement means you show up less which means you get less engagement and so on and so forth, until you get to really substantial diminishing returns. It's one of the reasons why a lot of folks have pivoted to Instagram, because they get better results out of that platform. It's not as overcrowded as Facebook is. Kathleen: Yeah. Although it's starting to get worse, I would say. Christopher: Oh, yes. Email newsletters Kathleen: Personal opinion here. So the other thing I was going to say is "amen about email." I just posted something about this, because I'm so sick and tired of people saying things like, "Email is dead," or "Email is boring." I feel like email is having this total Renaissance. And you're a good example of this, because you have a really great email newsletter, and I hate to even call these things newsletters because it seems to imply some really tired old Constant Contact template that adds no value. But people like you, like Ann Handley, they're just- there's this movement afoot of really fantastic, I would say bespoke newsletters, and you can look at big businesses like The Hustle, and the... What am I thinking of... Daily Candy? No. Christopher: Yeah, you're thinking of, there's Daily Carnage. There's Morning Brew. Kathleen: Right, Morning Brew. Yeah. I mean, these are companies that are forming businesses around email newsletters. So, all a long way of saying I could not agree with you more about email being one of my favorite channels. And one of the reasons I like it is so many people screw it up. So for the people that don't, there is such an awesome opportunity to stand out. Christopher: There is. But I think one of the most important things people don't realize and don't give enough thought to is something we've been saying since 2006, which is don't build on rented land. You don't own- back then it was you don't own your MySpace profile. You don't own your Facebook page. You are at the mercy of private companies. You own your email list, and as long as you pay your bills to your ISP and your marketing automation vendor, you can use that list however you like. It does not go away. It does age out, parts of it do, and so maintenance and hygiene is important, but fundamentally, email, as long as you get into the inbox, your content is delivered the way you intended. With Facebook, for example, if I post five times on my Facebook page, I don't know if the same person's seen all five updates. When I have five different sections in my newsletter, as long as you open it, as long as it gets to you, the content is arriving in the state as I intended it. And so that's a part that, again, a lot of folks don't think about. Kathleen: Yeah, I would agree. Okay, so Facebook organic is not good. Email, great, by comparison. What else do you got for us? Instagram organic and influencer engagement and reach Christopher: Okay, let's move on to Instagram. So for brands, for unpaid content, Instagram, we looked about 4,000 accounts. The average- the median, I should say, the median engagement rate for brands was 0.472. So one out of every 200 followers engages with content. That's obviously substantially better than Facebook, but it is still relatively low. And what's interesting is that in calendar year 2019, brand engagement of unpaid content went from 0.57% to, as of the most recent, 0.31, which is the most recent reading. And that's a 45% drop in engagement this calendar year for brand content on Instagram that's not paid. That's a pretty substantial decline. If somebody came to you and said, "Hey, this channel is going to decline 45% in its effectiveness this year," you might give some serious thought as to, how much should I be investing there? Kathleen: Yeah, and it kind of feels like, to me at least, this is just the natural next step. Now that Facebook owns Instagram, they have a playbook that they've run on Facebook and it feels like they're starting to run that playbook on Instagram, so. Christopher: Yep, exactly. When you think about it, Instagram stories were created for a very specific reason. A. It was to take some of the wind out of Snapchat's format. But B., It was a natural new source of inventory for ads, because like Facebook, Instagram is essentially running low on inventory, on ad inventory. So we're having these new formats, IG TV, stories, et cetera. You have the ability to create more ad space. Now if we flip over to the influencer's side, for Instagram, influencers there- Instagram is more or less the influencer's platform of choice. 1.37% engagement rate median. This is looking at 4,000 some odd accounts. One out of every 73 followers engages with content, so it is a substantially higher engagement rate. Now that's it. Influences began the year at 1.89%, and as of the most recent reading, was around 1.1% so that's about a 40-ish percent decline for influencers. Kathleen: Wow. Christopher: It's still good, but it's not good. Again, email, more than twice as good. Kathleen: And did you say, I can't remember if you said this, but did you say how the engagement with email changed over the course of the year? Christopher: No, we don't have those stats folks from MailChimp. MailChimp just published that static stat. Kathleen: Got it. So we know with Facebook and Instagram that results are declining rather precipitously, we know email is good, we just don't know what direction it's heading, getting better or worse. Christopher: That's right. Kathleen: Okay. Christopher: That's right. Kathleen: So Instagram still holds promise, but maybe not for long. Christopher: Right. And the thing that we said in one of the posts was, look, if you are looking at using influencers for your marketing, don't sign an annual contract. Sign a month-to-month contract, because influencers in particular took a really heavy hit at the beginning of the year. They had a substantial drop in their engagement in January and then early February so they lost a lot of granite, kind of tapered off and leveled off since then. It's been a gentle decline since then. But again, if you are talking to an influencer of any caliber, you probably don't want to sign that year-long contract. Kathleen: That's a really great point, and something that I wouldn't necessarily have thought about, is just how the trends, as far as engagement over time, should inform the way you contract with influencers. That's really interesting, and something that I think is worth continuing to watch. Christopher: Yeah. Kathleen: All right, so is there any good news from social media? YouTube video engagement Christopher: It depends on how you define social media. So YouTube, we define YouTube as a form of social media even though it's a video-hosting site, and it is also the second largest search engine on the planet. But it does have a social network, albeit kind of a bizarre one. YouTube performance data, though, has been really interesting. Now this is the case where we can't, because of the way the API is structured, easily differentiate between brands and non-brands. We actually have to look at the performance data of videos initial of themselves and then try to analyze backwards even what channel it's part of. So we looked at 200,000 YouTube channels, a half a million videos, a YouTube engagement rate on a per video basis is a median of 3.7%, so it's higher than email. One out of every 27 views engages with the content. Kathleen: Wow. And is that trending up or down? Can you tell from the data? Christopher: Also trending down. It began the year around six-and-a-half percent and it flattened out in mid-September around that 3.3% mark. And it's actually been bouncing back upwards a little bit. So YouTube is beginning to recover its engagement, but it's fascinating to look at that. Something else is really interesting with YouTube as well. YouTube has a very sharp head, which means that the top 10% of channels get huge numbers of views, and then everybody else gets a mixed bag in terms of channel size. There is a tremendous amount of opportunity on YouTube because video is a lot harder for people than taking a picture with their phone for Instagram. And so for brands that are willing to make the commitment, YouTube's green space for a lot of industry industries is still available. There's still the opportunity for you to create content in your vertical, in your niche, that is seen, that is followed, especially for lagging industries, highly regulated industries. As long as you can come up with an angle for creating content, you're going to do really well on YouTube. When we looked at overall performance of those top channels and broke down those 200,000 channels into deciles, 10% increments, the top bracket had a 75,000 median views per video. The 90% bracket was at 35,000 views. The 80% bracket was at 12,000 views, and by the time you get to the 50% bracket is a thousand views. A thousand views on a video is not an insurmountable number. We all have email lists that are substantially larger than that. And the engagement rates remain pretty consistent throughout. So for brands who are thinking about, "What should I be doing to get some more social performance in the new year?", you've got to take a look at YouTube. Kathleen: Yeah. Now did the data tell you anything about views and engagement by length of video or anything along those lines? Christopher: We didn't look at the length of video. That is something that is technically knowable. It's in the API. It's just, we didn't pull that data. Kathleen: Yeah. So that's really interesting that it's still performing so well. I know YouTube's made a lot of changes over the course of the last year, some of which have been controversial for its creators. So I imagine there's been some tumultuousness within that community, but it sounds like it's worth sticking out. Well, and certainly for businesses that aren't necessarily going on YouTube to monetize, but just really for visibility. And the engagement is so interesting to me, and I wonder how much of that is generational and I'm sure that's not an answer that comes from the data, but, I have a 13 year old son, and YouTube is his primary, you know, what was TV for me, it's YouTube for him. And so I imagined it there's some real generational differences in consumption habits there. Christopher: Yep. Yeah, YouTube is far and away. I know this, Pew Research had some of this research and so does Edison Research, in their share of ear research. YouTube is the dominant channel for people under 18, but across the board, because it's tight integration with Google, and the fact that people do a tremendous amount of "how to" searching on YouTube, it's such an incredible place to just spend some time. So much so that one of the things that we're looking at for ourselves in 2020 is building up our own company YouTube channel, putting more helpful content, doing more tutorials and stuff because we recognize that's where things go. And if you're good with technology and you can do some video optimization, you can do really well on YouTube for not a whole lot of investment. I know the investment's going to be mostly on the content creation side and you can use, and you should be using some of the more advanced advertising techniques on the platform. But there's a lot to be done. Kathleen: Yeah. And there are some great tools like TubeBuddy that make optimization pretty easy even for novices. And it's very reasonably priced. So I would agree with you. For me, video has got to be a huge part of anybody's marketing strategy these days. And I think it's really, what I've seen a big shift happening is going from companies like hiring videographers on a case-by-case basis, to companies really internalizing that role because the demand is so great to have video be a part of everything you do these days. Christopher: The demand is great and a good videographer is going to be- what's the Tom Webster expression, "reassuringly expensive", but the content, if people think from a marketing perspective, how can my content be helpful? You don't have to spend top dollar to make it look like broadcast, unless your company is a broadcast video company, then, yeah, you got to, because you can't look incompetent. But for your average business, Joe's Plumbing Shop, you really want it to look like a plumber shot the video. So, no super 24 frame per second cinematic camera. Nope, it's the plumber with the smartphone and saying like, "Yeah see this rusted widget here. Ain't supposed to look like that." Kathleen: Yeah. But I would say even though it could be expensive to hire a videographer, I still think it's far less expensive than, if you really want to produce a high volume of video, trying to outsource it all. You're going to pay way more if you take that approach then if you just bring somebody on board. So there are definitely some economies to be had by internalizing that role. But you're right, some of the most viral videos on YouTube are also some of the least produced. So there's that. Press release performance Christopher: Exactly, exactly. And then so last seven and eight days, we looked at something very, very, very old. Again, I used to work at a PR firm. So we decided we would take a look at everyone's favorite punching bag, press releases. The press release has a median of zero views. Huge surprise there. 60% sent by a wire service, almost 14% sent out by agencies. And this was the part, the one that I thought was interesting. 18% of the email contact information in press releases has already gone bad. We used a tool called MillionVerifier. And the reason for that, is that public relations as an industry has so much churn. Some agencies have like 60, 70% churn, meaning that someone who works at the beginning of the year, there's a 60 to 70% chance that by the end of the year they're not going to be working there anymore. They will have gone somewhere else. And so a lot of these pieces of content, people are cranking out tons of content but it's not being read, it's not really valuable, and it's just a fairly unreliable thing. But one of the fun things we do is we look at the most overused words in releases based on simple frequency counts. And the top 10 list this year are: "service," "first," "leading," "experience," "future," "best," "platform," "largest," "partner," and "solution." Sort of the top 10 of- Kathleen: Oh, my God. I feel like that's like a mad libs where you could literally just string those words together and you've got a press release. Done. That's so funny. Christopher: You really could. I said, "We are an industry leading platform with the best service and largest partners with a turnkey solution that future proofs your experience." Boom, got all 10. Kathleen: Oh my God. Christopher: But it means nothing. Kathleen: That is hysterical. And shame on us marketers for using those words and they've become so meaningless. It's like the word "leverage," and "synergy," like, ah. Where's the barf emoji when you need it? Christopher: Ah, yes, there's a great Weird Al video about that. It's not as bad as people making up words. I saw a job posting the other day on LinkedIn. I almost threw something at my screen. It said it was a B2B technology company, it says, "Become a 'solutionator.'" I'm like, what the heck does that even mean? I think the word you're looking for is problem solver, you don't solution things. You solve problems and you probably need to invest in a dictionary. Kathleen: Oh my gosh, that's hysterical. So is there ever a time when it makes sense to do a press release in your opinion? Christopher: For publicly traded companies, the gold standard for disclosure as required by the SEC is regulation FD, fair disclosure, and a press release is the gold standard for meeting disclosure of material events to the public. A number of years ago, the SEC actually ruled that social media was an acceptable channel, but given how algorithms like Facebook's work, there's no guarantee that your investors are seeing that content. So I would say if you are bound by regulations like that, press release is the way to go. It is provable in court, you have a receipt, you could show you spent the two to $1,200 to release one and you've met your requirements. Kathleen: Yeah. I would also say in my limited anecdotal experience that the one time I have seen somewhat decent results come from press releases is when you announce another round of funding. You're announcing a strategic investment or an a-round or what have you, because the financial press does seem to pick up on press releases, and other investors definitely look at that. And I think there's a little bit of a, you can definitely get momentum from those kinds of announcements. But outside of that, I actually just met with a startup yesterday who has a consumer product, and they were super excited to launch it right around Black Friday and he met with me to tell me just how disappointed he was in the results he was getting. And he had spent money on a press release through one of the wire services and his agency sent him the dashboard of results, and it was basically what you said, it was essentially, statistically no results, and then they listed some of the top links that they had gotten and it literally was like Yahoo Finance. It wasn't anything that would ever reach his target audience. So that was just a very fresh example to me that underscored exactly the problem you're talking about. Christopher: Yeah. You know, news releases, the hint should be in the name. If you have actual news, a news release makes sense because you can then circle back with reporters or influencers in your space. And say, "Hey, here's the official news." The thing is, most companies don't have anything that's actually newsworthy. They think it's important, and I get that. We're all proud of our accomplishments, but it's not news. It's not something that- it's not like, "hey, the CEO of this company just got caught doing this thing and this thing," like, okay, that's actually news. That's the kind of thing you want to put a press release about out. But that's actually news. Most of what we do on a day-to-day basis is not newsworthy. And so it's no surprise that news releases are completely unimpactful for most people. Kathleen: Yeah, and I've also noticed if you really have great news, you're almost always better off spending the bulk of your money to have a PR person actually do one-on-one pitches with relevant journalists as opposed to just blasting it out there via the wires. So, anyway. Well, that's interesting. Totally, totally reinforces what I had been thinking about press releases. But it's good to hear that it's backed by data. What's next with the 12 days of data? Christopher: Exactly. So coming up in the next few days, we're going to be talking about content republishing. We know from our last look that approximately 11% of content has been republished this year, which is a high water mark in terms of companies just recycling content on their websites and such because there's a whole bunch of that "do more with less" mindset out there in the world. We'll be looking at SEO link decay, how quickly do links go bad by industry. We did that not too long ago. Kathleen: Oh, that's going to be interesting. Christopher: Yeah, it's between like three and 12% of links just die after a certain amount of time. And then we'll finish off on Christmas Eve with our 2020 email marketing forecast as to what weeks of the year in 2020 you should or should not send emails. So that's sort of the last few bits for the series. Kathleen: Ooh, I love it. I can't wait to see those. Now I know that you've published some content around what you and Katie at Trust Insights are going to do differently this coming year based on what you've learned from all of this analysis. Could you talk a little bit about that? What should marketers do differently in 2020? Christopher: So one of the big things is YouTube, figuring out how to improve what we do on YouTube, to make it more consistent, to make it part-and-parcel of the way we do our marketing. So we have a weekly newsletter, there's data built into it. One of the things I'm thinking about for the next year is, like I do in my personal newsletter, creating some video content to go in each newsletter. Because it's not rocket surgery, particularly with the kind of stuff that we do. Again, not an expensive production to turn on some screen casting software and just show an example of how to do something. So that's a big thing. Another big thing is focusing on the properties we own, doubling down on our website, on our email newsletter list, on our Slack community, stuff that we own that we have control over, because social algorithms across the board are going in the wrong direction, down to the right, which is never a good place to be. And frankly, when you own something, A. You tend to take a little bit better care of it. And B. You really can see much better data. Like we can see data about people in our Slack channel. We can't see that with a Facebook group in anything meaningful. We can see granular detail about who's opening what emails and things. We can see exactly where somebody goes on the website. And so these are the kinds of things that will help us segment our audience better and get a better sense of, like, this is what to spend time on, what not to. One of our big watchwords as a team next year is really about focus. Focus on what's working, and leave behind the things that we experimented, we tried, eh, there wasn't a there there for us. Kathleen: Yeah, that's an interesting point, because I do think marketers get very excited by the shiny and the new, and we tend to spread ourselves really thinly, and that does not produce great results. So it sounds like for 2020, video, a focus on YouTube. Really, if you look at your social strategy, putting more energy there and then definitely not spending a lot of money on press releases. Christopher: No, no money on press releases. At the end of the day, and I think this is important for every marketer, your marketing is a product, right? It is a product that somebody buys with their attention, and it is the precursor ownership to actually doing some kind of commercial business with you. If your product is crap, you're not going to sell them the thing that actually trades money, right? If your newsletter is terrible, if your social media is terrible, you are essentially putting bad product out into the world, and customers will judge that first sale of the content, look at it and go, "you know what, I don't want to buy from these people, because if this is what they do publicly- they're willing to share with the world publicly, I can't imagine what kind of garbage we're going to get behind the scenes." Kathleen: Yeah. I always like to say, it's about building a habit. Especially with the things like email and YouTube channels, you're trying to get your audience to build a habit of inviting you into their lives on a daily, weekly, whatever that frequency is, basis. And that's really a privilege to be a part of their daily routine and habit. And if you violate that privilege with crummy content, shame on you. Christopher: Yep, exactly. Think about your marketing as a product treat. If you have a product marketing manager within your company or a product development team, have them critique your marketing as though it were a product. You will get some feedback that will be hard to hear. Like, "hey, you did absolutely no user testing. Hey, you have no QA whatsoever. Hey, there's bugs everywhere." But if you commit to making your product better, meaning your marketing, you will get better performance. Because the reality is, we all know so much of marketing is garbage, that even today you can stand out with good stuff, it doesn't necessarily have to be the best of the best. It just has to rise above the rest of the industry. That said, also keep in mind that one of the things you are competing for as a marketer is attention, and your competition is Netflix, and Disney+, and politicians mouthing off in the government, and Taylor Swift, and contestants on The Voice. All of those people are competing for the same share of ear, and the same share of mind that you are. So you have got to earn your way into even a few seconds of their day. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a good reminder. It can sound intimidating, but I always think of it as, you can either win that share of mind by producing the most unique top-notch content, or you can win it by being the most authentic. There are different paths to getting there, and you happen to be a brilliant data scientist who can produce this unbelievable original research. So if someone's listening and they're thinking, "But I can't do that, that's too complicated," you can also travel the path of extreme authenticity, which brings its own very loyal following and sense of attraction as well. Christopher: I agree. You know, one of the things, when you look at how people search for stuff, particularly on YouTube, there's a lot of "how to," there's a lot of "explain this thing to me, explain how this thing works." One of the folks who I think does a super job of this is Robin Happel in the mortuary, funeral home industry, who explains like, hey, this is what's going to happen when a loved one dies, and these are the things you're going to need to do, and these are the things where someone will try and take advantage of you when you're in a diminished emotional state, a compromised state, to charge you money for things that you don't need to pay for. So now, even though it's uncomfortable to think about it, he's doing a really good job of saying like, this is the stuff that you need to know in advance so that when the inevitable does happen, because we all do die, you are prepared, you can make rational decisions. Kathleen: That is such a great example. And talk about an industry that doesn't necessarily do very good marketing. So there's tons of opportunity. Christopher: Exactly. But everybody's a customer. Kathleen: Exactly, at some point or another. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: So that actually is a perfect segue into the two questions I always ask all my guests, the first, and you might have already given me the answer, but we'll see, the first being, you know, we talk all about inbound marketing on this podcast. When you think about inbound, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really just crushing it right now? Christopher: Ah... It's funny because inbound has... Well let me ask you this, I'm going to turn this back around on you. When you say inbound marketing, what does that mean? Kathleen: To me, it means any form of marketing where you are creating content, assets, campaigns, et cetera., that are designed to attract people, that, I was going to say have a need. But this is a really hard question, Chris. You're putting me on the spot! That are designed to attract people at their moment of need, versus marketing that is going out and proactively getting in front of people and trying to convince them that they have a need. I guess that would be how I define it. This is not out of any dictionary, and it's probably wrong, but. Christopher: Well, I don't think it's wrong because one of the things, I remember back in the heyday of inbound marketing, you're talking 2014, 2015, when social media was not pay-to-play, the folks over at HubSpot who originated the term were all about search and social and all these things that allow you to create stuff that attracts people instead of you having to go spend money on ads. Well, search has gotten a lot harder. Social media has become entirely pay-to-play. So there isn't a lot of "in" in inbound left. When you look at Google zero click search results, zero click means you don't get that traffic. You may get the customer but you don't get the traffic. And so when we look at companies that are doing, I would say more digital marketing better, or scaling the digital marketing, I look at folks- he's a very polarizing figure, but I look at Gary Vaynerchuk as a good example of somebody who has figured out, for the type of marketing that he does and for the industry that he serves, he's very good at what he does. Creating massive amounts of content and essentially drowning out everybody else. Kathleen: Yeah. Well, and to be clear, I should clarify one thing. When I say attract, I think that can include paid, 100%. I think there's a way to do pay-per-click that is very inbound-y, and then there's a way to do it that's not. And attraction is about trying to get in front of the people that are the right fit for you that need something that you have, or that will need something that you have, as opposed to trying to- it's the whole old "force it on them whether they need it or not" mentality. Christopher: "Grab them by the tie and choke them until they buy." Kathleen: Exactly. Christopher: I would agree with that. I think inbound, the modern definition I would say, is probably more about building and maintaining the relationship before somebody needs you. So that when the need does arise, you have share of mind. You're there first. You may be the only choice in somebody's mind and that makes your overall cost per acquisition lower. Kathleen: Yeah. I talked about this in my talk at INBOUND, it was about brand publishing, and this is something that publishers do really well. Most marketers think, "I have a product, now I have to go find my audience," and publishers think, "I'm going to build a loyal audience. And then once I have that, I can naturally just introduce my products." And it's like a little flip of the mindset, but a very critical one. And that's why outlets like Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's website, can sell people anything, because they have that audience already created. But there's a lot of companies that do it too. Like Equinox, the fitness brand, has its own lifestyle magazine. There's so many examples of companies that do that well, and that speaks to exactly what you're talking about. And it goes back to my point earlier about building a habit. If you're already part of somebody's daily life, because you're delivering value to them, and I guess maybe that's a better way to define inbound. It's marketing that delivers value to the recipient Christopher: Delivers value and builds brand, because one of the things that people are not paying attention to in marketing is understanding how consumers get information. When you are walking around and you're watching people talk to their phones, they're in their homes, they're talking to their smart speakers, and their smart devices and stuff, there's not a screen, there's not a keyboard. And so if you have brand, then somebody can say, "Hey Alexa, play the Marketing Over Coffee podcast," and it can find that, right? They think about that, but there is zero search result. There is just brand. Nobody says, Alexa, show me the 2200 marketing podcasts that are available. Nobody wants to do that. So if you don't have that brand, that loyal audience as you say, you are in a incredibly dangerous and very expensive position. Kathleen: Yeah, I would agree with that. All right. Second question is, this conversation is a perfect example of this. Digital marketing is changing so fast. Much of it driven by technology, and search engines, changing the rules of the game, or moving the milk. How do you personally stay up-to-date and educate yourself? Christopher: So one of the things I do is, in my newsletters, I put together links of things that may be worth reading and one of my cardinal rules of a newsletter is if I didn't learn anything when I was putting it together, certainly nobody else is going to. So I ended up building myself a system where, I subscribed to about 1500 blogs, and the posts from those blogs goes into a SQL database. Then there are four pieces of software I wrote that scrape those blogs, scan them for specific keywords I'm interested in, and score them, and then I take the top 100, and that's what I look through when I'm putting together my newsletter. And more often than not, there's like, ah, I didn't know that happened, click on my old links to read the article, and go, "that's actually something I needed to know about." So I have essentially a curation system I built for myself to stay on top of what's happening, because you're right, it does change so fast. Kathleen: Chris, when are you going to productize and sell that? Christopher: So... one of the focus points for 2020 for us is improving our products and services, because a lot of what we have- I describe myself as an engine builder, which is important. You need an engine, but you also need things like seats, wheels, the steering wheel and stuff, and those things I tend not to build. So we're going to try and figure out how to put some polish and shine in the interface on a lot of things, because right now the interface to a lot of these things is a little command line on my computer. But yeah we'll get there. Kathleen: Yeah. I mean, sign me up for the early beta when it gets ready, because that sounds like an amazing solution to this problem of drinking from a fire hose for a marketer. Christopher: We have two clients that are using it right now and they actually use it for their social schedule, we wrote an extension for it for Agorapulse. So it just makes a hundred posts in a CSV and just load the whole thing up. We did it that way because we wanted to make sure that we got the timing right, they wanted to be testing around the clock to determine what times of day people engage with their content. So they put up a hundred posts at a time, scheduled evenly throughout the day, and then can see in their social media tools, these are the times when our audience is actually active. Kathleen: Man, it is just amazing what you can do if you know how to write some lines of code. Christopher: That's the challenge. How to connect with Christopher Kathleen: Very, very cool. Well, I am just blown away. This is so fascinating and it's totally got me thinking about some things I want to be doing next year. So I appreciate that. If someone's listening and they have a question for you, or they want to learn more about this, or they want to read 12 Days of Data, where should they go online? Christopher: Easiest place to go is to our website, trustinsights.ai. Simple place, you can find everything important from there. Kathleen: Awesome. Well, I'll put that link in the show notes. I will probably also try to link to 12 Days of Data to make it as easy as possible for you to find. You know what to do next... Kathleen: If you're listening, and if you are listening and you learn something new, which, let's be honest, if you listen to this whole thing, you've definitely learned some new things, it would be fantastic if you would head to Apple Podcasts and leave the podcast a five star review. Speaking of data and algorithms and the way search works, reviews help a lot, so that would be great if you could do that. And if you know somebody who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next interview. Thanks so much, Chris. This was a ton of fun. Christopher: Thank you for having me.

How did David Bain turn his podcast content into a book? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Marketing Now author David Bain talks about how he went from podcasting to livestreaming to publishing a book - and how any marketer can repurpose audio content into electronic and printed books. Highlights from my conversation with David include: David started podcasting all the way back in 2006. His first attempt at repurposing audio content was to publish transcripts and compile them together. When he did that, he realized that transcripts don't work well for creating longer form content that people want to read. If you're thinking of creating audio content, quality audio is key. David recommends purchasing an ATR 2100 mic. You can also add professionally recorded intros and outros. David uses an iPad app called Boss Jock to edit his audio. After David got more serious about his audio content, he began pre-recording video using hangouts. From there, he moved on to live streaming. In 2015, he recorded a year end episode for his podcast that featured 20 to 30 marketers giving tips. The next year, he decided to feature 100 marketers and make a book out of their advice. David has worked with both Kindle Direct Publishing and Ingram Spark to produce ebooks and physical books out of his repurposed content. Resources from this episode: Visit the Marketing Now book microsite  Connect with David on LinkedIn Follow David on Twitter Listen to the podcast to learn how to repurpose podcast content into a book - and what that can do for your marketing results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm Kathleen Booth, and I'm your host. This week, my guest is David Bain, who is an author with the book, "Marketing Now", coming out any day now, and also a prolific podcaster. Welcome, David. David Bain (Guest): Hey, Kathleen. Great to be on with you. Thanks for asking me. David and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah, I'm excited to talk with you, because you have quite a bit of experience with podcasting. You're also a marketer by trade, who has held various marketing roles. But, it seems like recently your focus has really been on the medium of podcasting, and now turning what you've done with podcasting into a book. Maybe we could start out and just you could tell your story, your background, what you've been doing, kind of led to you where you are now, and what you're doing now? About David Bain David: Sure. I've come to realize recently that's impossible to do everything in the world of marketing. It used to be possible, I reckon, maybe about five to 10 years ago when you're talking about marketing or maybe digital marketing, to say that you're a marketer or you're a digital marketer, and people would understand that you do a broad variety of different things, but all under the marketing umbrella. Nowadays, it's just so much involved, I think you have to specialize a bit. I guess I'm specializing a bit in podcasting and live streaming, and turning that into a book, as you say. I've been involved, I guess, in marketing for about 15 years or so. It was about 2004 that I really started to realize that I could publish webpages and do things like Google Ad Sense onto the pages, and start to make some decent money out of doing that. That's how I got started in marketing experience. Within a year or so, people were asking me, "How on earth do you actually do that?" So, I was helping a few people to do that, and I ended up building that into a few digital marketing courses, and discovering podcasting about the same time. I actually launched my first podcast way back in 2006. Kathleen: Wow, that's really early days for podcasting. David: It is, it is. It's a year or so after iTunes introduced podcasts. Prior to that, I guess you could do it with RSS feeds, but it was becoming really technical, and there wasn't much of an audience out there. It was really iTunes that brought it into the mainstream. Kathleen: That's amazing. I mean, that's so early on. How did you decide to do a podcast at that point? David: I think I had an iPod, or maybe a device that could listen to it, or at least I was able to download iTunes onto a computer and then discovered podcasts through there, I think, and then thought, "Wow, this could be an incredible medium for marketing, or for actually broadcasting content and distributing content." I had a website at the time, that was a fairly generic business article's website, because at the time when you're involved with SEO, then if you wanted a webpage to be ranked fairly highly, then all you had to do was submit an article to a third party article's directory, and have yourself an author bio at the bottom that had a keyword-rich link back to your website. That could fairly quickly rank it highly. I thought, "Okay, I'll get into this article's game by having an article's website." So, I had a business article's website. The first podcast was actually reading articles in audio form that people had submitted to me. Kathleen: So, you were like Audible before Audible. That is so interesting. David: Well, maybe a very, very small version of that. Kathleen: Yeah, wow. Fascinating. It's changed so much over the years too, really. It's gotten so much more sophisticated in terms of the delivery mechanisms, and the people that are participating, and the formats, et cetera. David: It's absolutely crazy. Back then, you're only talking about 30 years go. We're obviously recording this in 2019, but it's night and day in terms of quality and technology that's available to you, but also people's Internet connections, and devices. There's just so many things that have happened over the last few years or so. From podcasting to publishing a book Kathleen: Yeah, it's amazing. Now, your latest kind of adventure is taking some of what you've done with podcasting and turning it into a book, correct? David: Yes, it is indeed. I think podcasting lends itself quite nicely to either producing transcripts, or making the content available to people in other means. What I tried to do initially was produce some transcripts of the show and publish that. I came to realize fairly quickly, that actually people don't love to read transcripts, books, articles, whenever people write anything. It's an entirely different form compared with the way they actually say something. What I ended up doing was transcribing a series of live streams initially, and then taking the transcripts and completely rewriting them, to be honest with you, to make them into a readable form for our book. It's a whole lot of work to do that. I figured out that actually, I had to have an eight hour live stream to produce roughly 60,000 words of transcripts, and that is an average size of a 250 page book resource, or an average book basically. But in order to actually get the book in really nice readable form, you have to rewrite it. So, it's as much work, if not more work, than actually writing a book from scratch. Kathleen: You know, this is actually a really interesting topic to me, because I have show notes, and my show notes include an executive summary, if you will, but then I include the full transcript. Part of the reason I do that is also just for accessibility, anybody who is hearing impaired and wants to be able to read it. There's also an SEO benefit to having all of that copy and keyword-rich stuff on the page, but I will say that it's interesting when you look at a transcript. I really read mine, and I go through and I don't really heavily edit it, but I just sort of clean it up a little bit, and I add some headings to make it a little bit more digestible. I'll add some links in here and there. One thing I've learned from doing that, is you're absolutely right when you say that people speak differently than they write, and also than they want to read. I have learned that I start pretty much every sentence with "Yeah." David: I know, it's horrible, isn't it? Kathleen: From reading my own transcripts. David: When you edit everything. Kathleen: It's horrifying. I have now this conscious effort I need to make to not say the word, "Yeah" at the beginning of a sentence, and I'll probably do it 20 times on this podcast now that I've said it. I've had a few guests who have, for reasons connected with how they manage their personal brands, who've wanted to go back and edit the transcript and make it sound like it was something that was written as opposed to said. It totally turns it into something different. I've actually had some debates. With one of my guests in particular, I had a real debate about this because I was like, "It's a transcript. It's there for people who can't listen to the podcast, and want an accurate representation of it. So, we can't just completely change it." But I like what you're talking about, because that's really taking it to a different medium, where you don't have to preserve the integrity of the transcript. You can turn it into something that captures the spirit of it, but is much more elegantly written, if you will. David: Definitely. There were so many things you were sharing there, Kathleen, that we could probably have a full conversation about. When you were talking initially about the fact that obviously transcripts themselves have to be turned entirely into something completely different. What I find is actually the guests, as you've to a certain degree alluded to, actually prefer the written form when that form is representing them. I've reached out to every single person that have participated in the production of a live stream, and they've been completely happy. So, I've done it with the approval of other people as well. But you're also talking about SEO, and an SEO benefit as well. I believe that although Google, because it's probably the most important search engine for the majority of us listening, although it is looking for text to crawl, it's increasingly becoming better at being able to look into audio and see what people are saying, and looking through videos and seeing what the video is about as well. It's not perfect yet, but we're getting to a stage where Google is going to be able to transcribe audio without the written text being there. To a certain degree, the SEO value of producing a transcript, I think next to a podcast, is going to diminish over time. Then the question is, why are you doing that? Are you doing it really for people to view? I've probably been a little bit lazy in the past, of not wanting to do podcast transcripts beside every single episode. Have you actually had many people ask you specifically for transcripts? Or are you doing it because you feel it's great as an inclusive thing to do for all of your audience? Kathleen: It's really more of the latter. Philosophically, I like the idea of making the content accessible regardless of someone's ability to consume it in a certain format. I've philosophically chosen to include transcripts for that reason, but I will say that it's interesting, I publish my show notes on IMPACT's website, which has a lot of traffic. There are several podcasts on that website, and I believe, if I'm not mistaken, that my show notes get more views than most of the other podcast show notes. So, I do have a theory that from an SEO standpoint, there's something there. But again, it's not just a straight transcript. Like I said, I put some H2s in to chunk out the sections, help kind of make it easier to digest. There's also a section at the beginning that if you don't want to read through a whole transcript. You can just look at that. It's been an evolving experiment, honestly. David: I think that's a lovely tip, actually, putting H2s in there, because Google is looking for ways to break down the tanks on a webpage. If you're demonstrating that actually it's more than a transcript to a certain degree, that is what you're greeting because you're editing it so much, and you're ensuring that it's correct, and you're making it as easy as possible for the reader to consume it. I guess those simple things like H2s and perhaps some other small elements that you can bring in like list elements, maybe, if someone's referring to a list as well, would make it much more likely for search engines to treat that text positively. Kathleen: Yeah, it's a labor of love. Quite honestly, I'm not sure if you just made an ROI calculation, if I could prove that there was the ROI and the amount of time I spend. But it's interesting. It's just sort of the direction I've been going lately. Getting started with audio content Kathleen: I feel like we could have a whole conversation about that. But back to yours. Let's actually rewind for a minute. Can you talk a little bit about the podcasting or the live streaming that you were doing, that led to this notion to create a book? David: Sure. Sorry, I can't help asking questions. It's the podcast career in me. Kathleen: No, it's great. I love it. David: I love having a conversation. Kathleen: This is a good conversation. David: I believe that when I see other people live streaming, or producing lots of video content that they get some of the basics wrong, such as decent quality audio. I'm a strong believer that people should start off with a basic quality audio podcast to begin with, and that if they do that, if they have a piece of equipment like... Sorry, I'm talking a microphone that I'm using at the moment actually, but this ATR 2100, I wanted to refer to. The microphone that I'm using is an Electro Voice RE20, which is a more professional microphone. The microphone that I was wanting to refer to was the ATR 2100. The ATR 2100 is a very basic dynamic microphone that you connect to a computer using a USB. It's got a more professional connection cord, an XLR as well, but you don't need to worry about that. If you have a basic microphone like that connected to your computer, you connect with someone using Skype, and you record using a free piece of software that you can connect to Skype. That's all you need to begin with. Then you record 20 or so episodes to begin with, and you get comfortable with producing your audio podcast, and then you move on to video after that. I would encourage anyone that is looking to do live streaming, produce video, is to really think about your audio quality to begin with because certainly when it comes to YouTube, many people consume YouTube videos by walking around the house and occasionally referring to the screen. They're actually out for the decent audio quality content, and they're more likely to skip your video if you're difficult to hear, or you're just not good enough quality. Kathleen: Yeah, I think that's so true. I mean, I have a Blue Yeti microphone, which is, I would say, kind of comparable to the ATR, around the same price range, and easy to connect. You don't need to be any kind of an expert to use it, and don't have to spend a lot of money. It makes a huge difference. To that, I would add, having a really good Internet connection because I definitely had a good solid few months when I moved offices, where my Internet was not reliable. It was some of the most painful times. I had people messaging me who were listeners going, "Have you checked your Internet? It's cutting out a lot." It makes for a terrible experience. You're absolutely right. David: I love your guest booking experience as well, because you are very definitive with guests, with regards to what's good and what's not so good as well. I've done the same thing with many shows as well. Unless you're very specific with people, then people are going to get it wrong, or their audio quality isn't going to be as good as it could actually be, and you're not going to be delivering the highest quality of audio product to your consumers. Some people are switch off because of it, so you have to be like that. Kathleen: Yeah, no one wants you in their ear for 45 minutes with terrible static, or as one of my guests once did, shuffling papers right next to the microphone. David: Yes, or beards, yes. Kathleen: It's just a horrible sound. David: I don't know if you've experienced many beards on microphones. They are not so good either. Kathleen: Yeah, yeah it makes a big difference. So, what type of podcasting were you doing that led to the live streaming? From podcasting to live streaming David: Sure. I got more serious about podcasting about 2014. I think I played with a little bit before then, but as I alluded to, I did about 20 or so shows to begin with solely in audio format. I moved onto what I considered the next stage to getting a decent microphone, doing things like incorporating my intros, my outros, and different bumper noises. I've got this app on my iPad called Boss Jock that I connect to a mixer, and then I can bring that audio into it as well. That makes the show easier to edit in that you don't have to do everything towards the end as well. After that, I started recording on pre-recorded video. I started Hangouts at the time as unlisted video. Then that made me feel more comfortable, because I knew that if everything went wrong I didn't have to release the video at all. It made me feel less stressed to begin with, when I was getting involved with video. The next stage after that, as I see it, is live streaming and actually live streaming to social media, and looking at comments as you're live streaming as well, and being able to bring those comments into the conversation. There's so many different skills involved, and different aspect of that when you're starting video to begin with. You want to be comfortable looking into the camera, at least for the intro and the outro sections of your show. You want to be incorporating your musical elements, if you bring that into the show as well, and of course the readers' comments as well. You just can't do that to begin with. I see so many people, as I mentioned earlier, just starting live streaming and not being able to do that because they haven't gone through those steps. Kathleen: You were doing some podcasting, if I'm correct, for SEMrush as well as for MobileMonkey. You've had a lot of experience, both with your own podcasts, working with some other companies. David: Yeah. Repurposing podcast content into a book Kathleen: What gave you the idea to think about venturing into the world of books? David: Of books. Well, I've done, as you say, a lot of different podcasts. I've probably interviewed about 500 different marketers, so I've got an incredible database of contacts out there, people that I can reach out to. About 2015 or so, I decided to produce an end-of-year show, so perhaps I'd interviewed about 100 people by then. I thought, "Okay, it's be a lovely pre-Christmas-type show to get 20 or 30 marketers on and all give their thoughts of the year, what's their number one tip from what's happened during the year." Yeah, I had about 20 or 30 people on. It was about a two hour live stream, and it went really nicely. The following year, I decided to double it up and potentially make a book out of it. The following year, I did a four hour live stream and had just over a hundred marketers join me live. I gave them all three minutes each to share their number one actionable tip. I took the content and made my first book out of it. It did fairly well. It sold a few thousand copies. It just seemed to be the next logical step in terms of publishing content. I think you have to go where the opportunity is, but you have to really look to see what your competitors are doing out there, and also you have to work harder than other people who are out there. 10 years ago, I used to be able to publish blog posts and quite easily get those blog posts ranked. Then it moved on, and you had to publish incredible blog posts that 2000-5000 words long. Now, unless you've got a fairly authoritative domain name, it's even quite hard to get those sorts of posts ranked. "So, where are the other publishing opportunities?" I thought. Well, perhaps it's not even online at all. Loads of people still read books. It doesn't have to be Kindle book. It doesn't have to be any book in any form. It could be a physical copy book, and people still read physical books: paperback books, hard copy books. "First of all," I thought, "Well, it's very hard to publish a book. It's a lot more effort to publish a book. So, if I publish a book then it's going to position me above other people producing content around the same kind of topic." Then I thought, "Well, there are thousands and thousands of people that want to read this copy in book form as well." So, I guess those are some of the reasons I chose to publish a book. Kathleen: I have to laugh, because hazards of podcasting, I'm in my quiet home office and my dogs start to go crazy. That's the home alarm system, as I like to call it. David: Oh, that's great. I heard that in the background, Kathleen. I was wondering if you were able to edit it out at all. I thought, "Okay-" Kathleen: No, I always tell my guests when I listen to podcasts, I like it to be really organic and not overly scripted. So I say, "You know what, we're going to roll with it." So, I'm leaving this segment in so everybody can hear my two Labrador Retrievers who like to play- literally, if anybody walks by the front of my house they go crazy. David: And I was trying to talk over it, thinking- Kathleen: You're so good. David: Maybe you were going to be able to edit that out, and it was going to be easier for you to- Kathleen: No, we'll leave it in, because- David: Okay. Kathleen: It just gives more color to what's really happening behind the scenes. David: Great stuff. How David published his book Kathleen: You decided to publish a book. Can you talk a little bit about how you went about doing that, because I've had a couple of people on who've talked about writing and publishing books, and they've all taken different approaches. This is something I'm very interested in. I've spoken to so many marketers who've talked about either wanting to write a book, or wanting to use the content creators within their company to create a book as part of their marketing strategy. David: Yeah. Kathleen: There's the route of working with a publisher. There's self-publishing. There's so many options now. Can you talk about how you specifically did that? David: Sure. I haven't gone down the working with a publisher route, mainly because I think there's more profit in it being a self-publisher. I initially, several years ago, published some books just for Kindle. If you publish books for Kindle, then as long as you're charging between $2.99 and $9.99 in US dollars, then you can get 70% commission as a result of doing that. So, that's quite appealing. Then after that, when I published my first physical book, which was called "Digital Marketing" in 2017, that book was also published using a service called CreateSpace at the time. That's been merged into KDP, which is called Kindle Direct Publishing, but you can publish paperback books through that service. If I'm publishing a book for $14.99, and through that service for a book that is 268 pages long, it's costing me about $4.10 per book to get that book produced- Kathleen: Hard copy. David: No, that's our paperback copy. That's a paperback. Kathleen: Oh, okay. Well, yeah, but I mean printed. Printed copy. David: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, sorry. I'm just differentiating because hard copies- Kathleen: Hard cover and paperback, right, right, right. David: Exactly. They cost quite differently. But paperback, they cost in general just over $4.00 if you're producing a book which is about the same size as mine, which is 268 pages of paper. Kathleen: Am I correct that, because I've talked to somebody else who has used Kindle Direct Publishing, am I correct that there is no minimum quantity for orders? You can order like one at a time? David: Yes. Yeah, yeah exactly. You can order them yourself personally. You can get your pre-published copies, which have a bit of a nasty extra bit on the front to say, "Do not resell." Then after it's published, then you can get the proper versions, which are the single copies. However, obviously you're going to be charged postage for doing that. So, sometimes you're better off getting 10 copies, or something like that. You can also do the same through another service called IngramSpark. IngramSpark also will produce that hard cover version of your book for you. If you're producing a hard cover version, then it's normally about five or six dollars to produce, because you've got that hard cover on top of it, and you've got your sleeve on top of it as well. So, you generally have to price it a bit higher. Hard cover versions, they're generally about $25.00. The paperback version is generally about $15.00. There's not much more profit in the hard cover version. I think the only benefits really for the hard cover version, is the perceived value of it. Because again, it looks like a higher quality product, so if you have your own events, and you're speaking at events, and you want to take hard cover copies of your book with you and sign them, then the hard covers are very nice in terms of perceived authority. Kathleen: Yeah, it's really fascinating to me, because the technology is such now that anyone can really do this. There's no issue with affordability. There's no issue with you need to have the connections in the publisher world. Anyone can write a book and publish it, and create a really very professional quality-looking printed version, as well as Kindle version, which presents an amazing opportunity from a marketing standpoint that so few people have taken advantage of. David: Well, it's hard, hard work to do and it takes a lot of time to do. So, I can understand where people don't want to do it. But I think it's about planning your content marketing out for the entire year, and if you're doing a podcast, if you're doing a series of blog posts, if you really think about it then you can design 12 chapters in a book out of the content that you produce. To a certain degree, you can write your book over your year out of your content that you're already producing. So, it needn't take a whole lot more effort. Which came first, the podcast or the book? Kathleen: Is that the way that you went about doing it this time? Did you really conceive of this in advance, and then create audio content kind of knowing that your end game was to create the book? Or did you have this audio content and then think, "Wait, this would be great fodder for a book." David: It's the way that I probably will do it in the future at some point. What I did this time was a few months ago, I hosted a massive live stream which was eight hours long. I had 134 marketers on that. Then I took the transcript of that and then completely rewrote it. Then I determined the categories of each piece of advice that all the marketers share. So, it was just the one question that I asked everyone. Hello doggy. I've got a two old son, and he likes to say, "Hello doggy." Anyway, look I think what I did this time was a whole lot of work, probably too much work, but it was a learning process as well. I categorized all the content after receiving it, because I was just about to say I asked all the marketers the same question, "What's your number one actionable marketing tip right now?" They all shared that number one tip. I thought the tips that were shared fitted very neatly into three key sections of the book, and then also into 12 categories from there as well. The 12 categories, of course, turned into 12 chapters. From the research, I've done 12 chapters. It's quite as nice number to have within a book. That's a nice way to break it down, if you're planning a book as well. If you want to write a whole book as a one-off, 60,000 words, that sounds quite a lot. But if you break it down into 5000 words per chapter, even 4000 words per chapter, plus an introduction and conclusion, then that's not too much to do. The difference between blogging and writing a book Kathleen: Now a lot of the marketers that listen to this podcast are prolific content creators. They are very accustomed to blogging, to writing articles. Many of them are also podcasters of their own right. I'm interested to know from your perspective, what do they need to know about creating content that is intended for a book as opposed to writing articles or blogs, which is a little bit more episodic, is there something different that you need to do as you approach that project? David: I think the key thing is, is to have that thread. So, to have that thread that binds the different chapters together. So, you can't just write 12 separate large pieces of content without that intended thread together, and the intended overarching topic of your book. I think you have to start with the end in mind. A good way to do that, is actually to research Amazon, to have a look at categories of books and to see what exists already, and where the opportunities are. Because one outcome that some authors wish to achieve is to get a bestseller. You can get bestsellers in different categories of Amazon as well. It's quite nice to take a screenshot of your book being number one in a category of Amazon. If you look into what topic of marketing, or another area of your business, and you find a category that's either under-serviced or perhaps doesn't actually have the type of book that you believe that you can offer, then that's a good place to start. Then you've got your topic of your book. Then it's a case of brainstorming maybe three sections, then four different chapters within those sections of your book, and then starting writing from there. Then you've got your thread, which binds everything together. Marketing your book Kathleen: So you write the copy, you probably create cover artwork, you pull all this into the Kindle Direct Publishing system so that you're able to publish the book through it. You just talked about people wanting to have Amazon bestsellers. What does someone need to know as far as the work that has to happen to market the book, especially before it's even published, because the little amount of research I've done into this, it's very clear to me that a lot needs to be done before the book even hits the virtual shelves, to lay the groundwork for a successful book launch. I'd love to hear from your standpoint what you're doing for that. David: From a successful marketing perspective on Amazon, one of the key things is reviews. It makes it more likely for people who stumble upon your book to decide to make that purchase if there are positive reviews. So I think that's a bit of a given. It's much, much better to have something in the region of 10 reviews in the marketplace that you want to target. I'm targeting with USA and the UK, and you want to have a reasonable number of views in those marketplaces. You've also got to be thinking about [crosstalk 00:31:22] together. You've got your hard cover, your paperback, and also your Kindle edition, and perhaps even an audiobook version as well. They can be all tied together. You can ask Amazon to tie those things together. One of the important things to try and get on a bestseller list within Amazon is to get a decent number of sales within a short time period. I would be guessing to a certain degree, but I'm pretty sure that if you can get maybe even just 100 sales of your book within 24 hours in a category of Amazon that's not particularly competitive, then you're quite likely to get fairly high within that category. So, a number of reviews. If you publish your book a few days before you intend to say that you're going to publish it, you reach out to your friends and your colleagues, and you ask them to buy it, and then you ask them to submit a review as well. Then on publishing day, you do some kind of live event. I'm doing a massive live stream on launch day. One of the intentions behind that is to get as many people as possible to buy it as soon as possible, and to get that algorithm of Amazon to notice that there's a lot of sales of that particular product happening. That's going to move it up the rankings. Kathleen: So I did see that. I went to your MarketingNowBook.com website, which if you're listening, you should check it out. I saw that you have the book launch party set for December 10th. I'm definitely going to sign up to listen to that. I'm curious to see how that comes off. It's a great idea. It's interesting what you said about having a slightly different date when the book goes up onto Amazon versus the official launch date. David: Yeah, well you can do that with one person. With IngramSpark, it's possible. There are lots of strange technicalities. With IngramSpark, it's possible to have your book available to purchase prior to launch date. With Amazon paperback, with a KDP paperback, it's not possible to do that. But with Kindle, it is possible to do that, to have pre-orders, is the technical term. You could have your book available for pre-order. I believe though any sales made within that pre-order period doesn't count towards the ranking after the book's been ranked. That's not going to help a lot with regards to your ranking afterwards, so you do want to make a lot of sales, if possible, on rank day. What I'm going to do is make my hard cover version and my Kindle version available on December 10th when it launches. I'm in the process of doing a quiet launch for the paperback version. That's going to be publicly available hopefully within the next few days. We're recording this on the second of December, so it'll be available a few days just before the 10th of December if everything goes according to plan. Then I'm going to get a few friends and colleagues to buy it, and to publish reviews on that version. I'm going to have that linked together with the hard cover version and the Kindle version, which is going to be then published on the 10th of December. Kathleen: That's great. Well, I can't wait to check out the book when it comes out. Again, if you're listening, you definitely need to go to MarketingNowBook.com so that you can sign up to attend the live stream. This has been so interesting, David, just hearing this whole process laid out. While I think you've made it clear that obviously writing a book is no easy undertaking, and I think it's important to understand, but I also feel like you've made it very accessible in terms of understanding the process of bringing a book to market. So, I appreciate that. David: Yeah, hopefully a couple of people give it a go. It's not easy, but if you plan it out beforehand, then you can save yourself a bit of heartache, perhaps, that I've gone through. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Yeah, that's great. Now I have two question I always ask my guests, and I'm curious to hear what you're going to say. We talk a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound marketing? David: The company that springs to mind is a company called Conversion Rate Experts. They've been doing this for a while. What they do is they put together blog posts that are on a fairly infrequent basis. They probably publish maybe just once every two months or so, but they are incredible case studies that really help you with conversion rate optimization. Although these blog posts are thousands of words long, they've got videos in there, they've got wonderful images in there as well. You feel that you're getting a lot of value from that. Towards the bottom of the page, they say what you should be doing now. Then they've got a list of call to actions at the bottom that introduces you to their service. But it never feels like they're asking for the order beforehand. They're providing so much value beforehand, and they link up lovely emails with this as well, and entice people to read the articles. I think that a lot of marketers haven't necessarily got the right idea of what a blog is. A lot of blog publishers don't have this sense. Obviously, blogs originated from web blogs, which were regular updates of people's activities. To me, a blog is just a publishing opportunity. It's a CMS now, with some marketing opportunities baked into it. It's just a publishing opportunity. If it's a publishing opportunity, you can publish any type of content in there, and I think this company, Conversion Rate Experts, demonstrate that a blog can be used for different reasons. Kathleen: I love that point that you just made about a blog being a publishing opportunity. The last job that I was in, I was really charged with building out essentially a brand publishing business for the company, which is really just like a blog on steroids, if you will. It's articles, it's podcasts, it's all the different type of content that you think of when you think of a publisher. There's no reason that any company can't do that. It's certainly a more aggressive approach to content marketing, but it can be a very powerful one, all of which lives on a blogging platform. Kathleen: So, you're absolutely right when you characterize it that way. David: Great. Kathleen: Love that. Now, second question, the world of digital marketing is changing at what can seem like a lightening-fast pace. How do you personally stay educated and up-to-date? David: Funny enough actually, since I've started being really serious about podcasting in the last five years or so, I've probably read less to keep myself up-to-date with things. I've interviewed about 500 or so different top marketers out there, and that's been a wonderful way to keep up-to-date with things. I would say to people if you haven't started a podcast, simply do it to have great conversations with powerful authorities within your niche. I would have done all these podcast episodes with a view to just having the incredible conversations, and making incredible contacts that I've made. Obviously, not all my guests would have wanted to do that. They would have wanted to have the content distributed as well. But for me personally, that's been a great source of knowledge. I listen to a couple of podcasts as well. I listen to a podcast called Podcasters Roundtable, which is a good source of podcasting news, what's happening in Apple Podcasts, and podcasting in general. I listen to Mixergy, which is more of a digital business/entrepreneurship-type show, but that's a great source of information for me with regards to what's happening right now in digital businesses. Then I could tie different marketing activities up to that. The final source that I'll give you, if I'm hosting shows that relate to SEO and pay per click, then Search Engine Land is probably one of the key blogs that I go to, to keep abreast of the latest news there. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a great one. You are preaching to the choir when you talk about the power of podcasting. I always say if people listen to this, they've probably heard me say it several times, that I would keep doing the podcast even if no one listens, which as you pointed out, I'm sure my guests would not want that. It's an incredible learning experience, and I get to talk to people I would never otherwise meet, and to learn from them. That's just such an amazing gift, so I could not agree more with what you said about that. David: Absolutely. How to connect with David Kathleen: Well, if you are listening and you are interested in connecting with David or learning more, David, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you? David: I've got a brand new domain name that I just acquired a couple of months ago or so. Obviously, I'm using MarketingNowBook.com as the landing page for the book, but I'm really happy that I've finally got the DavidBain.com domain name. It took me a long time to get that. There were many people that squatted on it for a while, but I eventually got it. I had to go down to auction to get it. I'm thankful to have David Bain on LinkedIn, David Bain on Twitter, and DavidBain.com as well. I guess any of those areas are good. You know what to do next... Kathleen: That's great. All right, well if you're listening and you liked what you heard, you learned something new, please head to Apple Podcasts and leave a five star review for the podcast. That's how new people discover us. If you know somebody else whose doing kick ass inbound marketing work, Tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because I would love to have them be my next interview. Kathleen: Thanks so much, David. This was a lot of fun. David: Great to be on with you, Kathleen. Thanks again. Kathleen: Yeah, and you win the award, by the way, for muscling through more dog barks than any other guest. So, kudos to you. David: Sounds good.

My friend Kathleen Oh talks with me about Integration Counseling! Confused about your life, messages you are getting or finding your cosmic mission? Kathleen can help you wake your dragon!! https://coachkathleenoh.com   Subscribe on Apple podcasts Watch Paranormal Karen Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Rontowski Contact Karen: karenrontowski@gmail.com Please also enjoy Karen and Kira Can Read! https://www.karenrontowski.com Produced by Mike Flinn https://twitter.com/Unorisingmedia     Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Rontowski Contact Karen: karenrontowski@gmail.com Please also enjoy Karen and Kira Can Read! https://www.karenrontowski.com Produced by Mike Flinn https://twitter.com/Unorisingmedia

Big data sounds great, but how can marketers extract insights and put together reports without spending all of their time crunching numbers? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Anna Shutko of Supermetrics talks about how marketers today are dealing with data. From juggling data from 5+ sources, to wrangling spreadsheets and figuring out how to continuously monitor your data pipeline, Anna shares how Supermetrics clients are taking on these challenges while saving themselves considerable time - and how you can, too. Highlights from my conversation with Anna include: Supermetrics is a marketing automation tool that transfers data from a variety of sources to the marketer's destination of choice. In addition, Supermetrics offers data warehousing through Supermetrics for BigQuery. Supermetrics' goal is to make marketers' lives better and easier so they can focus on what actually matters. Anna says that marketers today need to be technologists who know their business, know their platforms, know at which stage of the funnel they want to use the platforms, and know how to use data from all those platforms together to create a comprehensive narrative from their data. According to Anna, the best KPI for any marketer is revenue. If revenue is growing, then marketing is doing its job. One of Supermetrics' customers was able to cut the time they spend on reporting down from three to four days a week to a few hours. With a platform like Supermetrics, which allows you to continuously keep your data updated in real time, you can simply check the data once a day, knowing that its up to date, and then go about your business. You can also simply provide your stakeholders (ex. board) with a link to view your data at their convenience. Anna says that the biggest mistake marketers make is to focus on vanity metrics like impressions. Resources from this episode: Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic  Supermetrics Reporting Template Gallery  Supermetrics Customer Success Stories Sleeping Giant Media Success Story Supermetrics HubSpot connector Supermetrics for BigQuery  Inbound Success Podcast episode 111 with Jake Neill  This Won't Scale playbook by Drift SaaStr Podcast for all things SaaS The Growth Hub Podcast for marketing topics Julian Shapiro's guides Listen to the podcast to learn more about how marketers are cutting their time spent on reporting using Supermetrics. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And Today my guest is Anna Shutko, who is a product marketing manager with Supermetrics. Welcome, Anna. Anna: Hey, Kathleen, and thank you so much for having me on the show. It's such a pleasure to be here. Kathleen: Yeah. And I think you might actually qualify as my guest, one of the guests who is coming from the furthest away because you are in Finland right now. Correct? Anna: Correct. Yes, we are based in Helsinki, Finland. And yeah, so originally from Russia, and I moved to Finland and I've been living here for about seven years now. Kathleen: All right, and how -- just because the weather is changing here, so I'm currently kind of obsessed with weather -- how cold is it where you are? Anna: Basically, it's plus seven degrees Celsius. I'm sorry, I don't know what it's like in Fahrenheit. Kathleen: Cold, cold. I know that's cold. Anna: Kind of cold yeah. It usually drops to minus 20. So it's- Kathleen: Oh my gosh. I don't know how you do it, I would not survive in that climate. Well, it is getting colder here and the seasons are changing. But I'm so excited to have you on and to pick your brain because we're going to talk a little bit about analytics, which is something that's very near and dear to my heart. But it's one of those topics I think people talk a lot about, but they don't get very specific on and so I am actually really excited to get specific with you. Anna: Yes please. About Anna and Supermetrics Kathleen: So before we dive into this, though, can you just talk a little bit about, first of all, yourself and what you do and also what Supermetrics does? Anna: Yeah, sure. So I'm Anna Shutko and I've been working in Supermetrics for three years now. So I am one of the first employees of the company, I joined as employee number seven in 2016. And since then we've had a really, really rapid growth. So it's indeed an exciting journey. And I'm still continuing as you can imagine, the company is not the same as it was, not the same at all. Now we're hitting 70 like headcount. So it's been quite a wild ride. And I started as a marketing generalist, because as you can imagine, we're a team of seven, and everybody was doing everything, I was the second employee on the marketing team. And as the company grew I realized that product that's Supermetrics does is my passion and I want to devote more and more time to it. Now as we are hiring more people, I'm actually able to concentrate in product more and more as we go so I'm very excited about it. And in the future, I will be leading integrations marketing, which means, and I will explain everything how Supermetrics works and what integrations are in a minute, like integrations as their own stream as their own branch of marketing, so to say, so yeah, pretty excited about it. And like I mentioned, I fell in love with the product from day one. I remember how I was applying to Supermetrics, and I opened the website, and I saw this amazing product in the website was look really, really bad, but the idea was there. And yeah, since then, we changed the website and we added many more new and far more amazing products but I'm continuously in love with the company and products that we do so this is where my passion as a product marketing comes from. Kathleen: I have to just say, as a marketer, I have to laugh when I hear you say that you came in and you had a bad website because this -- I have experienced that in my career. And I never know whether to be excited or sad, because sad that you're coming in and the website stinks but excited that you get to come in and like change it and immediately show such big results of your marketing efforts. Like a website redesign is an awesome opportunity to just make a huge impact on a company's marketing so there's great opportunity there as a marketer, but it's also like "aargh." Anna: Yeah, I totally feel you on that we had a huge redesign project, but actually now the website really matches the company's identity of the company's products and shows how amazing they are. So I would prefer to see it as an opportunity. Kathleen: Yeah, you guys have a great website. So if you're listening and you have not checked out the Supermetrics site, definitely take a look at it. It's really well done and very cohesive from a visual branding standpoint. I've always liked your site. Anna: Thank you so much. Yeah, so a couple of words on what is Supermetrics and what do we actually do in this little red box. So, Supermetrics is a marketing automation tool and we started by developing a tool, which transfers data from different data sources, or as we call them "Integrations", those things, which transfer data from different APIs to different data destinations. So we transfer data from platforms like Google Ads, Google Analytics, Facebook ads, Twitter Ads, and now new ones for example Quora Ads, name it to spreadsheet tools and we started from transferring all this data to Excel then we move into G Suite. So next product was Supermetrics for Google Sheets aka transferring data from now it's 50 plus sources to Google Sheets. Then as Data Studio got rolled out, we partnered up with Google and we're actually the first ones to develop Connectors, which work entirely in Google Data Studios UI. So transferring all these different data to Google Data Studio. And now we enter the data warehousing space with our newest product Supermetrics for BigQuery and this is a completely new product game changer. So marketers can take advantage of BigQuery and store a lot of historical data there without necessarily learning how to code, really like hardcore, so everything is pretty intuitive. You can set transfers, and then visualize the data in big powerhouses that we're calling Tableau, Power BI for example. So that's the evolution of Supermetrics. In short, I love to describe it as a data pipeline, just easy to imagine, right, pipeline, we transfer data as if it's like water, for example, to all those different data destinations, and keep the work flowing. So previously, without Supermetrics marketers had to copy, paste, or download CSVs. So imagine, if you need a report for your client tomorrow, you have to go to every single platform like Facebook ads, Google Ads like I mentioned, ecetera, copy, paste, or then download all those different CSVs and compile them into one file. Edit every single data type and make sense out of the data and it was nightmare. I cannot even imagine how people did it without Supermetrics before. So we basically automate the whole thing so there is a really smooth sidebar or engage Google Data Studio there is this selection tool where you can very easily connect to all the sources you need. And you can select, which data do I want. For example, I want clicks from yesterday's clicked by campaigning for example, I want Facebook ads campaigns. And boom, this data just appears in your spreadsheet. It's really easy. I think it's the easiest if you watch the video, and I will add all the links to the video. So then people can pause the podcast, follow along or check our site out if they want to. So yeah, you will just really see how easy it is to create a marketing report and our motto, so our idea is to make marketers' life better and easier so they can focus on what actually matters like talking to the client, analyzing this data, spotting trends, sharing this report with their colleagues. If it's a collaborative tool, like Data Studio, it's super easy to do. And because we're a data pipeline, it gives us this flexibility. So we don't really have a fixed data destination where we transfer everything. People already know how to use Excel, so they can just transfer their data there and just go ahead and continue their work. So that's who we are. How marketers are taking on big data Kathleen: I love that. This whole topic is so interesting to me, and I was just having this conversation with somebody the other day, because my company is also in the data space, but we just happened to be in cyber security but there's a similar problem with marketing and with cyber security, namely that, there's all this sort of excitement around the availability of big data. And data is wonderful but what winds up happening I think, a lot of the time is there's a lot of noise and not a lot of signal. And meaning there's a ton of data, but you don't necessarily need to look at all data, right? You need to get to the data that matters the most. And the most important thing isn't the data itself it's the insights you source from it. And so, I would love to just kind of get your thoughts on especially for marketers. Do you see marketers successfully dealing with that challenge right now and how do they do that? It is such a big, hairy kind of area of I could be measuring all the things and tracking all the things. I guess this is like 10 questions in one I want to ask you so many things, like what are the most important metrics? How are marketers winnowing it down to what matters the most? Like, you guys work with a lot of companies, how many exactly is it? Anna: So yeah, indeed we do and I think I already previously mentioned to you, so it's 400k, 400,000 people who've tried or are using Supermetrics across all the different products, so huge numbers. Kathleen: That's interesting, it must give you some pretty fascinating insight into what information marketers are tracking and what they're looking at and what sources they're drawing data from. So let's start out actually by a lot of the people who are listening to this podcast, a lot of them tend to be practicing marketers and they're senior enough that they deal with strategy, but they're also kind of deep in the weeds with some tactical execution. And if somebody is listening and thinking I need to set up a reporting framework and I need to decide what are the most important KPIs to track? Can you share a little bit of, through what you see in the platform, like, what are those top KPIs that you tend to see marketers looking at? Anna: Yeah, so of course every single marketing reporting framework is unique and it depends on the company, there is no right or wrong, there is no one framework or one approach I could share and then everybody would apply it and then I would be in a very happy place. I wish that would be possible. But it's an art, it's science and everybody has to use their own judgment. Of course, I can pinpoint some things for example, nowadays you're completely right -- marketing is becoming more and more and more data driven. And marketing is actually becoming more and more technical. So there was this one chart I love referring to which is called the MarTech 5000. Not sure if you've heard of it. And it just shows on a larger scale, how the MarTech space has transformed over the years. So in 2011, there were something about, if I remember correctly, 150 solutions. And right now there are over 7,000 solutions. So imagine all those platforms and every single marketer is using maybe in their own platform, or some unique custom setups in the same HubSpot or Salesforce in the same platform everybody's using. So like I mentioned, is becoming more data driven, it's becoming more unique and is becoming increasingly complex. And what I see is that the profession is changing so we're not just more curious anymore, we have to be marketing technologists to successfully implement all those strategies. So knowing the platform and knowing at which stages of your funnel, you should use a particular platform, maybe it's a new platform, like Quora Ads for example. And it's an entirely new set of metrics because the nature of platform is different. You also have to take that into consideration. So basically to sum it up, knowing your business, knowing the platform, knowing at which stage of the funnel you want to use this platform, and knowing -- and this is where Supermetrics comes into play very nicely -- how we can use data from all those platforms together to create a comprehensive narrative from your data. Say you want to use, for example, Search Ads as top of the funnel, this is what we see commonly happening, people using Search Ads, maybe display ads to attract attention so they will be metrics like impressions, to impact your further questions like impressions clicks, in a way micro conversions or conversions as in their positioning to the website or going into down the funnel. Then in the bottom of the funnel, people are already more familiar with the company. So there can be many different other platforms coming into play that continue handling data so they can go on the website track. So then there is Google Analytics. They continue with another platform. Quora Ads again is a very good example because there you can have different targeting levels and you can target different questions now that people have already got their food for thought about your company. And in the end, you can, again, hammer them with more maybe brand-related content now that they're already familiar with your brand and then lead them gradually to closure. And again, this is where understanding of the product comes in handy. I will give our own Supermetrics example. So we have Supermetrics templates, basically, those are free to use files, which people can use and they work with our Connectors. So it works like this, you get this file, you click three buttons, and it all happens in Data Studio UI or, for example, Google Sheets UI and this is gets populated with your data as you use Supermetrics Connectors. But the trick is that you have to use Supermetrics Connectors to automate this dashboard. Of course, you can put your own numbers and the formulas would work, there is no problem with that you can also use it manually. But the beauty of those templates is to use them in an automated manner. So by knowing that those templates, activate trials, again, if we talking about SaaS, you know that in the bottom of your funnel, you can put this specific lead magnet, like in our case, this is the Landscape, there can be some our tool and then usually tracking through Custom Code or through Google Analytics, how those things convert and then afterwards I think that at this point, people start using more and more complicated platforms to track this post-purchase journey to accurately predict what kind of people convert? How do those people behave? And are there any like rookie purchases? So this is, again, where HubSpot comes in very handy. The platform has expanded a lot. Or Salesforce, then you can connect this data from Salesforce to top of the funnel, or middle of the funnel content data and then see how people who click on your ads and search literally through the whole journey have converted and what kind of people are there and based on that data, then you craft an improved marketing journey. Now that was a really long explanation but yeah, just hope to get the general idea out there so that you should know the business you're in. You should know the tool, you should know how to use those tools together, how to use this data together. And yeah, just focus on metrics like ROI that's my personal belief because marketing cannot function separately or completely separately from overall business, it has to bring results, it has to bring insights. So I think revenue is a very solid indicator of whether something working or not working, and in our case, this will be ROIs. Marketing tool sprawl Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense and you touched upon something I wanted to ask further about, which is you have to know your platforms and I think you said you need to be a technologist these days, which I think is really so accurate. There are so many different platforms and you can't just be a strategist anymore you have to know how to get in and make these software tools sing for you, because that's where a lot of the value gets unlocked. Do you have a sense? Well, let me back up how many different data sources or platforms does Supermetrics integrate with right now? Anna: It depends on the data destination. So for example, for BigQuery, it's far more complex to add a data source, so we have less of them there. But I would say that more than 50 if we don't count those in detail, or like early access, fully integrated, fully developed platforms, there are around 50 and I have to say that our engineers did a great job because not only do we provide the basic of I call them the basic metrics for some platforms like HubSpot, for example, or Adobe analytics, we also provide the Custom metrics. So if people have created their own metrics, they are also able to fish them out with our tool and like visualize them. Kathleen: So there's about 50 different fully integrated platforms and plenty more kind of in development. Do you have any sense from the way that you all have seen customers using Supermetrics of, on average, how many different sources the typical marketer is pulling in? I'm just curious. Anna: Yeah, of course, I will give you a very, very rough number because there is no generalization to be made. Some people prefer to use one platform very heavily others prefer to use a bundle. But I would say that around maybe like five would be something like an accurate number. Kathleen: Yeah, it's so interesting, because just from my own experience even in small organizations, like, my company is small and in early stage, hopefully will be very big in a year. But, we still, I feel like we have a lot of different platforms. We have marketing automation, we have our website, we have Google Analytics, we have our CRM, like our video marketing platform, our SEO add-ons, there's just so much and pulling it all together is a little bit of a nightmare. And I imagine without a tool like this is super time consuming, and I think that that's probably one of the biggest pain points marketers have, is the amount of time they spend on reporting. Like you said, you work with a lot of different companies I know you and I talked and you have some examples of companies that have used the platform and some stories about how it's helped them save time. Can you maybe share some of that with us? Supermetrics customer stories Anna: Yeah, definitely, and I love sharing those stories because the clients are amazing and some of them have been with us through like absolutely everything. So they started using Grabber, which is now our legacy product so the tool pulls data into Excel. And now they want to try or are already trying Supermetrics for BigQuery you can imagine some of them have used all five of our products, so definitely an evolution there. But coming back to your question one of my favorite client success stories is Sleeping Giant Media. These guys- Kathleen: It's a great name, side note, I just like the company name. Anna: Yeah, they're great and the people they're amazing. So the team is based in Britain, and they've been using Supermetrics like I mentioned for a while. They started with Supermetrics for Google Sheets and now they're looking into Supermetrics for BigQuery. So Sam, big shout out to Sam is our one big Supermetrics fan and he even talked about us at Brighton SEO, which was just amazing we never asked him to but he just went out there and spoke about us. It was really heartwarming. So he told a story that they used to spend around three to four days just on marketing reporting, aka copy, pasting numbers, collecting- Kathleen: Three to four days a month, right? Anna: Three to four days a week. Kathleen: Ah, oh my goodness. Anna: Imagine well, I guess they were not doing it exactly like every week, but maybe like every other week let's say. They are a fully functioning marketing agency providing a wide range of services. So he would get in Monday morning and start collecting data and then they're emailing all the cc's. By Wednesday evening, he would finish all reporting for one maybe two clients, depending on the scope of the project, of course. And then he had Thursday and Friday. So Thursday the client meeting to discuss how campaigns are going, whether there is some adjustments have to be made, et cetera, et cetera. And then it would just leave basically Friday and well, if he's not doing reporting next week, then the next week to implement all the changes. Which to me sounds crazy, because this is something you should not be spending that much time on. This is not a very highly intellectual job like copy, pasting numbers feels so basic -  people doing this and he's started using Supermetrics so he's time basically time he spent on reporting cut down to something like an hour or maybe like an hour and a half and if he needed to do a reporting for absolutely all the clients in the agency that would be in one day. Kathleen: So what does he do with all his newfound free time? Anna: Great question. So he's already talking, well, obviously you started sharing those results with the clients. So he started talking to the clients more and this I think even further reinforces the idea that we help inbound marketers because then we encourage with this free time you can have more human connection. You can ask more relevant questions, you have more time to even think or like process the client's needs. And, in addition to this, he was able to make more relevant analysis now that he had more time. So he could actually process the numbers in his head and think, "Aha, what would our next steps be?" And then react accordingly? So we usually have two types of reports people are doing with Supermetrics. So one type of reporting is this for example, monthly reports where people pull together numbers from all those different sources to assess their monthly progress to see what kind of plans do they have to make for the next month, and then so on and so forth. And the second type of reporting that we commonly see is the ad hoc reporting. So say, okay, this campaign, this bid is acting wild I did not know what happened. Some numbers are going down they're not normal compared to the benchmark or this is someone unusual behavior. Let me just quickly pull out a few numbers and compare them and figure out what's the root cause? Is it something seasonal or is some competitor in the picture, like to understand what's happening. And I really loved one comment, this is from a different client the agency is also based in the UK, they said that it's much, much faster and much easier to pull those numbers with Supermetrics rather than going through the whole Facebook ads UI trying to dig into campaigns and figure out what exactly went wrong. So there you go. So you can also do this ad hoc kind of very quick analysis to see whether some immediate action has to take it and I think this makes you very, very proactive versus being a reactive reporter. You look at the numbers, it's like, "Oh, my God." The moment is gone, things have already happened. But this way, you can very quickly act upon those changes and as a result make your clients happy and avoid some potential setbacks. If you for example, have Black Friday and say something's going wrong then you don't have much time to react. You're losing money basically. So yeah, it really is- Kathleen: Do you have any sense for how often, because Supermetrics really gives a continuous flow of data, correct? Anna: Yeah. How often are marketers reviewing data? Kathleen: And so you could theoretically be checking it all the time. But do you have a sense for how often at least in best practice cases, marketers are looking at that data? Anna: Yeah, so they can set triggers that would refresh data automatically. So I would say that people do so that they set up a reporting dashboard, then they set it up to refresh, so that the data is there for the next day, usually. Of course, they can do like hourly refresh again, if it's a fast pacing, budget campaign, but usually they you do this, I come in to the office, I see fresh data in my dashboard. So every morning, we can do a quick catch up with my colleagues, look at this internal report and see how all of our different clients are doing. If it's an agency, if it's an internal team, then just see how campaigns are performing and then see what we're doing during the day. So that's the usual, I would say, very typical scenario, or according to my experience. Kathleen: And then it seems like, for reporting, like if you're somebody like me, who has to put together a report once a month for your board of directors, you could just really kind of screenshot and paste the graphs into a PowerPoint or something along those lines if you wanted to, or you could distill the data in some other way for like a monthly report. Anna: Yeah, definitely, you can do this. What I would do personally, if I was the one doing this, I would use Google Data Studio because this way you don't have to copy paste anything and you can share this file with really nice dashboards they've updated their design and they're rolling out as far as I know, more comprehensive and even better looking design soon. So you can just connect all the sources put all the numbers and like I mentioned also provide those templates so you can get some inspiration from there. Our designers also do a very nice job creating those lovely designs. For example, we have some Supermetrics for HubSpot templates there in our gallery and I will also give the link to all the materials and the gallery so people can check them out or if they listen to the episodes and try everything themselves. Check out the Supermetrics reporting template gallery But yeah, I would do something like this. And then at the same time, you would not need to refresh the data because the data will be refreshed automatically there. And the board of directors can see new numbers and in addition, you can also connect your custom data source, aka if you have revenue numbers in a database, many companies do have those. So especially if it's a board of directors, they would be very interested in the impact marketing has made on their revenue and other business metrics. So you can pull this data from the database and you can show it side by side with the marketing spend, for example, to give them an even bigger picture. The biggest mistakes marketers are making with data Kathleen: That's great. So any thoughts on, you know, what you see the marketers doing as far as the biggest mistakes they're making with tracking data reporting on it, et cetera? Anna: That's an interesting one. I actually have never thought about this. Mistakes. Well, maybe one thing that comes to my mind is maybe like focusing too much on the vanity metrics as I call them, aka like a lot of clicks or like impressions or worse like it's a impressions. Metrics that give you ... I would say these are maybe like unrelated metrics in a way that they're not very directly related to the business metrics, because for example, in some cases, sales cycle can be quite long. So you cannot accurately assess how much the campaign will generate in the future just simply because people have to go through multiple steps and multiple touch points to even get to the discussion about purchasing your product or tool or license. And so yeah, focusing too much on impressions, focusing too much on metrics then, like I said, not maybe necessarily related. This comes back to the product. You should know your sales cycle and I would suggest breaking it down into different steps and basically monitoring and benchmarking each step and see the conversion rates. I don't exactly remember, a gentleman did an episode with you and he suggested a very good framework for this. There was even Excel spreadsheet. So this is maybe something we could also pulling back to this episode in the comments. Kathleen: I'll have to figure out which one that was. Anna: Yeah, unfortunately, I don't remember. Kathleen: We'll figure it out. Anna: We'll figure it out. Check out the episode Anna references here Kathleen: I know we can do it and we'll put the link in the show notes. Yeah, I know that I've had so many great guests it's interesting who've contributed so many great ideas that oftentimes I was thinking and in fact as I listened to you talk, that I need to go back and listen to some of my earlier episodes, because now I'm on I think I just published Episode Number 117 when we're talking about this, and there's so many earlier ones that are still great in terms of the information they deliver. Who is Supermetrics right for? Kathleen: I imagine that this type of reporting isn't right for everybody because some marketers might have much simpler platforms or maybe not. Maybe it is for everyone can you talk through who do you generally see using a solution like this? Anna: So our most common user personas, so to say, are marketing agencies, so somebody who is doing marketing reporting consecutively and then they have to do it almost every day or at least monthly to put together those good looking reports for their clients. But of course, those marketing agencies can be of different size. There can be a five person as we are now seeing with required there can be a five person very tech savvy small team, which focus on marketing technology and purely some maybe hardcore analytics with the elements of normal distribution and some predictive analytics even or they can be a very big marketing agency like TBWA who want to work client success stories. So yeah, agencies are very typical for us. Then we have internal teams so basically marketing departments, which want to monitor their own campaign, how they're progressing. Then even if they don't have a client, like you just mentioned, reporting to their board of directors and showing what impact marketing has made on their sales et cetera. And also, we've added HubSpot Connector, which is not only marketing, but it's also CRM. So then they connect their marketing data together with the CRM data to give more background information and make a 360 degree analysis. So these are very, very diverse I have to say. Kathleen: Great. So really it sounds like anybody, regardless of size, who has a strong focus on data, tracking data, analyzing data and reporting on data? Anna: Yeah, I would say so. Well maybe there is some categorization, I would say that smaller teams tend to use Google Sheets and Excel aka Spreadsheet tools. If the team is very tech savvy, or they have a lot of historical data, then I would straightaway advise them to use Google BigQuery because they would immediately otherwise hit that cell limit and the reports will be bulky, the reports will be slow. This is just not the right data destination, if you want to store terabytes and even more like 2, 3, 4 years of historical data to see different trends. So to summarize, bigger marketing agencies who have many clients, many big clients like big brands want to own their data because imagine those big brands spend a lot of dollars collecting this data, cleaning this data up. And they want a place where they can successfully store the older data so they can store data in BigQuery as their database and then they can instantly connect data from their Facebook ads, et cetera, to BigQuery through Supermetrics, and then visualize it, for example, in Tableau or Power BI to get the full picture of their marketing reporting. And yeah, smaller teams tend to use Data Studio, Google Sheets, which are completely free tools, so they are not paying per usage for them. So for them that would be cheaper and therefore more suitable option. How to learn more about marketing analytics Kathleen: Okay. Now I'm going to spring a question on you that I didn't tell you I was going to ask you and you may not have the answer because this is totally off the cuff. But as you spoke about this, you talked about, like, when you start to do more, you should move over to BigQuery. And I imagine for some marketers that could seem kind of intimidating, especially if they don't come from a highly analytical background. So are there certain places that you know of, or can recommend if somebody's listening, and they're thinking, "Oh, my God, that sounds really complicated." I need to get up to speed and learn more about analytics and how to use something like BigQuery. Is there somewhere online they can go to learn and become better at analytics? Anna: Yes, and I actually do have to say that we're working on this. We're very well aware of this worry that people have that, oh, I've been using maybe more simple UIs for my whole life. And now there was this whole like jobs and transfers and the whole different environment, which is coming with this BigQuery. So first of all, I do have to say that we're working on creating a bunch of materials for BigQuery specifically that will show how can use Supermetrics products if you're a marketer like videos, where do you click? How do you create different kind of transfers? How to use different kind of joins? So this is something that we're really hoping to provide and also we do have natively build Data Studio Connectors so after a marketer has gathered all the data in BigQuery, they can use our connector to visualize their data in just a few clicks. And, again, as we publish a video you'll see it's very, very simple and what I really love about BigQuery, although it does sound intimidating, but Google does provide learning resources for that as well. And if you look at the UI, you will notice that it's very, very intuitive. So to say, well at first it's maybe a little bit challenging, but once you get a hang of it, it's actually pretty nice, it's quite clear. From our side, we also provide this monitoring suite where you can see how your transfers are performing. Is your data flowing all in nicely? Is there something to worry about or not? Usually all our transfers are fine. So people have mentioned and you can also see from the client success stories that data flowing in nicely and we haven't experienced that much challenges with Supermetrics for BigQuery. But yeah, more resources coming up. Google does provide their own resources and I think it's important for marketers to at least look into this if it's relevant for them, because this is the general trend. This is where the world is going and you want to be ahead. You definitely want to at least understand what kind of technologies are there. I really liked the quote one of our clients have mentioned. So they said, "It feels like Google BigQuery compared with other providers is built with agencies and with marketers in mind." So that sounds reassuring to me at least that people do say that it's actually feels like it's built for marketers. So I would say, yeah, wait for ours resources and then go and explore on your own and try not to be intimidated by this very techie sounding word. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Yeah it can be a lot to think about. But that's great that you guys are working on creating some resources. All right, we can talk about data forever but I have two questions I always ask all of my guests at the end of my interviews, and I would love to get your answers. The first one is, we talked about how the focus on this podcast is about inbound marketing. Who can you think of that whether it's a company or an individual who's just doing inbound marketing really well right now? Anna: Yeah, I will say quite a common answer and I'm pretty sure other guests have already mentioned this company. I think Drift is doing a fantastic job when it comes to inbound marketing, so they have not only created their own category, but when they interact with the people, with their clients, it feels very, very human, which I think they got this trend. This is something many of us need as marketing is becoming more and more techie. We need this kind of catalyst, we need this human connection to feel welcomed. And like I mentioned, they're doing a fantastic job there and one very good example is this one scale playbook, those 41 or 42 plays. As you read through this playbook, you can literally see that the company's trying show their best and make people feel welcomed and warm if they're using their product. Kathleen: Now, that's great. A lot of people have mentioned them, but that's because they're doing great things. Anna: Exactly. Kathleen: Second question is where do you personally go to learn and keep up so that you are able to stay abreast of the cutting edge developments in marketing? Anna: Yeah, so I prefer not to have a one stop shop. So depending on the topic I want to learn more about I go to a variety of different resources. So if I want to learn something more general about what's going on in the world of SaaS marketing, I listen to the SaaStr Podcast. Another amazing podcast I can recommend is the Growth Hub Podcast, and my colleague Edward is a proud host of this podcast. I really love his interviewing style and the guests, which have been on this podcast are simply amazing. So go check it out the Growth Hub Podcast, by Advanced B2B. A couple of other things. So of course I go to MarTech Today and SEJ if I want to learn about news and recent updates, and for us it's especially relevant, because we need to keep up what's going on with all the data source companies. Julian Shapiro, I'm not exactly sure if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, has a couple of fantastic guides on how to write a great copy, how to build a really nice landing page, how to A/B test. So one really good resource there as well and yeah. How to connect with Anna Kathleen: There's a couple new ones there that I haven't heard about. So we'll definitely check those out and put the links in the show notes. If someone wants to reach out to you, if they have a question about what you've talked about, or they want to learn more about Supermetrics, what is the best way for them to connect with you? Anna: Yeah, so definitely the best way is to reach out to me directly, maybe not through the company Twitter, but I'm @superpoweranna on Twitter. Kathleen: That's such a great handle. Anna: I love it as well. It's like Supermetrics plus me. So yeah, @superpoweranna on Twitter, and yeah, just hit me up with anything. And I also am very actively checking LinkedIn messages so Anna Shutko on LinkedIn, please don't hesitate to connect and I'm very happy to have discussions, answer the questions about anything there. So yeah, LinkedIn and Twitter, I would say, are the two go places. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Great. Well, I will put links to all of your various social accounts in the show notes so people can reach out to you and thank you so much for joining me. This was really fun just to talk about analytics and to geek out for a little bit. If you are listening and you liked what you heard or you learned something new as always, I would love it if you would leave the podcast a five star review on Apple Podcasts. That is how people find us and hear about us. And of course if you know someone else who's doing kick ass in non-marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork and I would love to make them my next interview. Thanks, Anna. Anna: Thank you so much Kathleen. Kathleen: So fun.

How does a solopreneur take on the highly competitive insurance industry and win marketing mindshare? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Chris Greene of the Flood Insurance Guru shares his journey with content creation and why he's committed to creating 365 flood education videos, 150 flood blogs, and 100 flood podcasts this year. Chris proves that there is no excuse to NOT invest in content creation. As a business owner, he runs his company, invests in continuous learning, and still manages to create an insane amount of content every week. The results are pretty incredible. He's closing deals from his YouTube channel and other content on a regular basis, and says that today, 100% of his business comes from his digital marketing and content creation efforts. In this episode, he breaks down exactly how he does it - and how you can too. Highlights from my conversation with Chris include: Chris took a video course and realized there was no educational video on flood insurance. He saw that opportunity and began to create videos for his business. He then realized that his videos would have a greater chance of getting found if he also created written content, so he started blogging. Because he travels so much, he realized that podcasts would also be easy to create and would work well for his audience. Chris creates a new video every single day. He films them himself and keeps them to two minutes or less. Chris took a class called Made You Look Video that got him comfortable on camera and taught him video marketing essentials. Now he has a YouTube channel with separate playlists for each type of person in his audience (ex. realtors, lenders, property owners, business owners, etc.).  To free up more of his time for content creation, Chris hired a virtual assistant to help him run his insurance business and take care of the administrative work. He believes strongly that he needs to be the one creating content because he knows the subject matter best. To save time, Chris will often shoot a whole week's worth of content in one day. He uses Vidyard to create one to one vidoes and to host his marketing videos so that when he sends a video to someone, he can see if they've opened it. He keeps the entire production and editing process simple so that it takes him five minutes or less to edit a video. Chris generates a lot of inbound business from his Facebook presence, and uses his YouTube channel for sales enablement. One interesting benefit that Chris has seen from his content creation is new partnerships with other insurance agencies that don't want to sell flood insurance. They work with him because they see him as the expert on the topic, and that brings him a considerable amount of business. Chris spends about two hours every day creating written content and says that blogs don't necessarily need to be long to be effective - they just need to be as long as they should be to get the point across. In addition to his videos and written content, Chris is creating podcasts that are generally about 10 minutes long. He estimates that, in total, he spends thirty to forty percent of his day creating content. Chris says that 100% of his business comes from his digital marketing and content creation efforts. Resources from this episode: Visit the Flood Insurance Guru website Connect with Chris on LinkedIn Follow Chris on Twitter Connect with Chris on Facebook Email Chris at flood@communityfirstagency.com  Listen to the podcast to learn how committing to creating content can change your business - and your life. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and today my guest is Chris Greene, who is the president of the Flood Insurance Guru. I got a guru today. Welcome, Chris. Chris Greene (Guest): Thank you. Chris and Kathleen hamming it up while recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah, thanks for being here. I was really excited to talk to you, because I think your story is exactly the example of what I love to highlight, which is just consistency, and putting in the work really pays off, because I had heard that you had decided to do a year of flood education videos and 150 flood blogs in 150 days. You're doing videos, you're doing blogs, now you're doing podcasts. It's like, man, you're rolling up your sleeves and getting it done. I can't wait to dig into it. Before we do, can you tell my audience a little bit about yourself, your background, and how you came to be doing what you're doing today? Meet Chris Greene Chris: Yeah. My name's Chris Greene, I'm president, owner of the Flood Insurance Guru. I've been in the insurance field for about 10 years. Actually hold a master's degree in emergency management with a focus in hazard and flood mitigation. I had a really bad experience buying a house about 10 years ago. I got about two weeks from buying it, found out I was in a really high risk flood zone. It was going to change my house payment by almost $3,000 a year, and the realtor said "Yeah, that happened on the foreclosure." For four years I just didn't bring it up, because I didn't want it to be an issue. And so what happened is, I discovered this really bad process and lack of education. So, over the next eight to 10 years I was working for Captive Insurance Agencies at the time. I kept getting my feet a little bit deeper and deeper. And when I started my own company about five years ago, I wanted a catchy website, so I came up with the Flood Insurance Guru, as a joke, but when people started learning what our educational background was then, they started saying, "Oh, you really have experience, you guys actually have an educational background on this," and it just kind of took off. And then that brought us to this year. Once you get outside the coast, there is no education on flood. We want to spend one full year where all we do is we provide education. It's not about selling, it's about what's currently going on. If we could just provide that, then I think we can compete with these bigger companies, and I think we can beat them because of the value that we provide. And it's just kind of taken off. I didn't know it would be the worst year in US history for flooding when we did it, but now not only do we do the education videos on flood insurance, we do them on disaster assistance, SBA loans, whatever, every single flood map across the country we do an update on. This morning, I just started a podcast for Houston, Texas on the recent disaster assistance that was approved by the president. What does it mean for the people there, who is it impacting and their resources. A year of flood education videos Kathleen: That is awesome. So, let's roll back a little bit. You decided this year to do a year of flood education videos. You started with videos? Is that correct? Chris: It is. I did. I'm in a video course that's been really good for me, and what we discovered as a community, there's no video, there's no resources on this. So it's like, we're just going to commit to video. And once you start committing to video, you realize, you know, Google is not seeing these videos unless it's YouTube. We need to get some text out there. Then I started blogging with it, but then everyone's like, "I'm always on the road. I wish you had a podcast," and we talked about it for a while and then we finally started one about six months ago. Kathleen: That's awesome. So, let's talk about the videos. You're not a huge company. So, the idea of making a video a day is very ambitious. How did you approach that? Do you have a videographer? Is this something you do yourself? Chris: I do it myself every single day. It's just me and I have a virtual assistant who helps us on the back end. Usually all of my videos are two minutes or less. I want it to be quick, I want it to be educational, and I want somebody to be able to take at least one thing away from our video every day. Kathleen: And how are you filming them? Chris: I was using my iPhone for a while, and actually bought a Canon DSLR, I set it up on location. I shoot all my videos on site. So I travel the entire country. If there's a flood issue going on a thousand miles away, I travel there, I talk to the people in that area and actually shoot my videos there. Kathleen: Okay. And did you have any special training for that? I mean, how did you- Chris: Well, I'm in a video course that has kind of taught me the psychological part of your buyer's, persona, you've got the education part, what people want, really learning to be on camera and things like that. And that's what's really helped me a lot. It was a course called Made You Look Video. What was funny was that the first 10 videos we had to do were, not really inappropriate videos, but they were just like, make you really uncomfortable. Like, "Hey, what's your favorite vacation?" Or, "What's the most embarrassing situation you've been in?" And the whole point was, "Hey, we're doing this because we want you to feel comfortable on video." Kathleen: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because I think for people who haven't done a lot of video, I actually think that's harder than the whole technical, how to film and how to produce. Everybody I talk to tends to say, "I'm just not comfortable being on video." I'll be honest, I feel the same way. I feel very self conscious. So, was it doing those really kind of honest and as you said, almost embarrassing videos that broke the ice for you? Chris: That did break the ice. But then if you go back and look at some of our videos now they're like... That course has taught me to, "Hey you have to do something to separate yourself." So I've got one video where I'm actually spitting out spoiled milk. I've got another video where I'm dressed up as a grandfather, another video where I'm laying on a mattress. Stuff that catches people's attention and everyone's like, "Oh, I can't watch your videos because you look like an idiot." Everybody else seems to like them. And I said, "If you think I look like an idiot, means you're watching it, means I'm doing my job." Kathleen: Now, you're doing these as part of the flood education series? Chris: Yep. Kathleen: Oh that's so funny. Chris: I have them all broken down on my YouTube. I've built different lists for realtors, lenders, property owners, business owners where they can go exactly to that list and only watch the videos that pertain to them if they want. How Chris makes the time to create video content Kathleen: So you're uploading each of the two minute videos to YouTube. You said you're using a virtual assistant and what does that person do? Chris: Actually, the virtual assistant doesn't really help me at all in the video. They just help me on the insurance, out of the backend. Like they're helping me with the quoting, the paperwork and all that so that I can spend my time on the content because that's what separating us. I've tried to use other people for content, but it's very difficult in niche markets because they don't have your educational background. And you can tell sometimes when you read a blog that they may not know what they're talking about. Kathleen: Yeah, yeah. Now, are you- Chris: Here right now, how to do content creation for us and that's the big struggle. I'm actually having to teach him some stuff on the flood side first so that when he writes it, it makes sense. Kathleen: Are you doing all the editing and production of the videos too? Chris: Takes me less than five minutes to edit because I said they're all short. They're simple. They're easy. Kathleen: Yeah. I was going to say, what's involved in that or what kind of programs, platforms are you using? How complicated is it? Chris: It's fairly easy for me because I just use iMovie and everyone said, "Oh, you screwed up on this word." I said, "That's great, that means people know that I'm human." I will never shoot a video more than twice. Now there's certain situations I'll shoot it more than once, but I will never shoot it more twice because I want people to know that it's real. I want people know it's not a script and yeah I did screw up but that's what you want to see. Just like I use Vidyard for all of our one-on-one videos when I'm doing flood quotes, I send all of our customer's quotes through Vidyard because I want them... They might be 2000 miles away from me, but they feel like I'm next door because of video. Kathleen: I couldn't agree more and we've just had this conversation before I hit record for this podcast where I said, unless all hell breaks loose, we're going to keep going. And people ask me that all the time. Like, how much do you edit the podcast? And I really don't, unless there's some big terrible thing that happens in the middle of it. I believe that people prefer things that are less scripted. And so I leave in a lot, like if the dog barks or I've had podcasts where my 12 year old son walks in, in the middle of it and asked me for a snack, and I think you could see that as unprofessional or you could just see it as lending flavor and context to the life that's happening behind the content as it's getting made. So, I love that approach. All right, so you're spending, let's say, it sounds like less than half an hour a day on the videos. Chris: Like today, I'll actually shoot... This week is the first week I've actually been on a schedule all week. So, this afternoon we'll spend about two hours and I'll shoot the whole week. Kathleen: Oh, smart. So you're bundling it together. Chris: I do that in case somebody comes to me and says, "Hey, we're having a real issue with this." Then I will bump it up in the week. But the reason I do that, I always have a week there. If something comes up, if there's a lot of disastrous stuff going on it may take my time away from video and I like to have a few in my back pocket just in case. Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah. I feel the same way about podcasting. I need to have several in the can because you just never know what life is going to throw at you. So, you're putting these on YouTube. When you first started this year of flood education videos, did you already have a YouTube channel? Chris: I really had... Not for the Flood Insurance Guru, for our old company I did. I just set this up this year and everything in the course I went through, really taught me how to set it up. I use a tool called KeywordTool.io, that has really helped me with tags and seeing what people are searching for. And so we really haven't put any money to the YouTube channel yet because we've done so well with it organically. Chris's results Kathleen: So talk me through what "done so well" means, like what kind of results have you seen in this time that you've been posting? Chris: Honestly, most of our inbound market really has come from Facebook, not so much YouTube. YouTube, what we've done is we've built a knowledge base article for it now, that's using snippets with HubSpot. So our customer has a question, we'll send them the snippet and then they can click on it, takes them over to our YouTube channel. And so we've kind of done that. Kathleen: Oh interesting. Now are you also getting organic reach through YouTube? Chris: I am because we've actually sold a few policies last month actually off YouTube where people have searched our videos. Kathleen: Wow. And how much do your videos get viewed? Chris: Honestly, I don't have that many views. I have one video that has like 108 views on there and I have very low other views on it because I haven't really paid money on it because I'm really just using the YouTube part as a resource library. It's the Facebook organically. What we figured out, is how to use Facebook as a search engine optimization tool instead of like an ad. So everyone else is throwing this money at it. We're sharing it on our personal page, but what I've done with my personal page is I've been very strategic with who my friends, who's sharing and all that. A lot of people, what they do is they go search flood insurance on Facebook in Rhode Island and we come up in Georgia. The tags that we're consistently using is pulling our information up for them. Kathleen: I love what you're saying because I've had this conversation quite a bit with some of the folks that I've worked with over the years about how long should you expect it to take inbound marketing to work and to produce results for your business. And there's kind of two schools around that. One school says, "Oh, don't expect anything for six to 12 months. It's an investment in the long term." And I think that can be true if you're putting all of your eggs in the basket of getting found organically because it does take a little time. But there's this other school that says that inbound marketing should work right away if you're creating content that can be used for sales enablement. And if your sales team, which in this case is you, is actively sharing that content with the prospects they're talking to in the sales process because it can speed up the sales process, it can increase your close rate, et cetera. It sounds like that's what you've been doing. Is that correct? Chris: That's correct. And we knew it was going to be a longterm game, but honestly, I said 12, 18 months. I didn't think that we would build a national brand in six to nine months and not really put any money behind it. Because some of the unique information we were providing people just sharing it like crazy and we created a really cool partnership with some other insurance agencies who don't really know flood, don't want to know it. And that's all we do. And that part has just taken off for us because they keep seeing our content. 150 blogs in 150 days Kathleen: Now blogging. You committed to doing 150 blogs in 150 days. We got to talk about this, Chris, because I have been in this game a long time and I cannot begin to tell you how often I hear people complain about the amount of time it takes to blog. And these are marketers who do marketing for a living, complaining about having to blog. Very often they're complaining about having to do it once a month. That doesn't even get to the CEOs I talked to who think they just don't have the time for it. So we need to unpack this a little bit because I have a feeling you're going to just dispel all of this. Chris: Well someone once taught me, and actually it came from I think originally from Marcus Sheridan. From a company called Agency Nation. His name is Joe Giangola. And he said, "Look, it doesn't matter if you write a 3000 word article, or if you write a 500 word article, write as many words as it takes to get your point across." Kathleen: Oh, so true. So true. Chris: So, it's not, "Hey, I need 3000 words and put a bunch of crap in the article that's not value." I'd rather have a 300 word article to get straight to the point and give people what they need. Kathleen: Well and the truth is most people don't have the time to read long things anyway. Chris: And most of my articles are probably 500 words to a thousand words. Kathleen: Yeah. So, how long does it take you to write these articles? Chris: I would say it takes me about two hours a day and I do it at night, usually from about 10 to 12 at night. What I do is now I'm basically putting a blog out for every single one of my podcasts now, so I basically keep three separate blogs. I keep our podcast blog, I keep what's called a flood map updates, and that's if the flood map changes for an area, we do a blog just on that. And then I run a regular blog and so I mix it up, I write three to five blogs a week between the three. Kathleen: Now is your podcast a blog, is it like show notes or is it just a companion article? Chris: No, a lot of times I'll do a full detailed one. It's not like a breakdown. Here's what I try to do, I write an article, just a generic article on that subject matter, for the podcast and I like to come back with our regular blog and take that same blog, but now relate it to a particular area like Birmingham, Alabama and apply it there. And that's what I've kind of started to... Kind of taught myself that last couple of months. Now, Hey, let's just do it on this generic topic. Now let's come back and apply it to a particular city. First of all, it's for SEO, but now we could relate to that audience and we're giving that audience what they need. What is the ROI of content creation? Kathleen: So you're spending about two hours a night. I think a lot of business leaders listening to this might think, how could it possibly be worth my time? Like why wouldn't I either outsource for somebody to do that or hire somebody junior who gets paid less to do that. Talk me through for you, how you see the ROI of that two hours of your time. Chris: Well, the thing for me with the two hours of my time now, is through this whole inbound marketing and learning all this, what I've learned is that actually I have a passion for writing and I enjoy the blogging. I've actually handed off the other stuff so I could spend more time on the blog. Like the quoting, inside our company, our VA's handle all that. So I can handle the content and like someone goes, "Are you going to outsource the content?" I said, "Probably not. I enjoy it." I enjoy when someone comes to me with a question, I can break that question down and I can turn that question into maybe 10 different podcasts. 10 different blogs and apply to different areas because my educational background, it's very hard to outsource and have someone else do that. Kathleen: Do you find that it's getting easier over time? Chris: Yes. Kathleen: Is it getting quicker? Chris: But I'm also learning to build it out a better way. Like, "Hey, these are the five ways to do this." All right, let's build a pillar post on this subject matter. Now let's put 10 sub posts underneath that for different areas. Kathleen: Yeah, I mean the consistency part is what blows my mind. How do you stay on track? Because that is, that's a major commitment. Chris: It's tough. Now, the podcast actually is pretty easy. All of my podcasts are 10 minutes or less. So, I do a podcast that morning usually and I'll go out, shoot a video that kind of relates to the podcast that afternoon and then put the blog together that night. Kathleen: Wow. So what percentage of your day overall would you estimate that you're spending on creating content? Chris: Probably 30 to 40%. Kathleen: Wow. And- Chris: I'm also doing this... Now, I do have VA that helps me with some research, but also what I'm feeling is, I actually spend a lot of time driving around during the day though, looking at different locations to shoot certain things on. Like I had one the other day where a house was completely crumbled and so it wasn't a plan, but we ended up shooting a video on cracked foundations. Kathleen: Oh wow. Chris: And so that's where a lot of my content comes from as well. How Chris comes up with topics Kathleen: Yeah. So that was going to be my next question. Can you talk me through how you come up with your topics? Chris: Our topics come from every single question we get from our referral partner, a customer or prospect and what's also currently going on. Like last week, FEMA updates their manual every six months. So I broke down the new manual and made a podcast and a blog out of that. There’s disaster assistance that was approved for last week in Texas. I made a blog out of that because those are the things that people want to know what's going on. As I said, we walk them not just through the insurance process, the disaster assistance and all that because no one else will do it. So what happens though is when we do do that, when they do need something for a flood change, a flood insurance. They're going to remember us because we're providing so much education. I'm a terrible salesperson, I'm the worst salesperson in the world, but I'm really good at marketing and education. Kathleen: Do you have a particular system you use for capturing those questions? Because you're literally running around all the time. Chris: My iPhone. Kathleen: And what do you use on your iPhone? Chris: Notes. Like when they call me asking me, I take that question, I'll put it in there. Last night I was going through about 40 different questions over the last two weeks, I wanted to address this week. Kathleen: Wow, that's a great tip. Yeah. Answering questions, it's tried and true strategy. Chris: So, I would use a notepad and paper, but then I would lose the paper. I'd lose the question. Chris's results Kathleen: Yeah, you definitely have to do what works for you, right. So, let's talk about the results you've gotten from this, because we've talked a little bit about the traction you got with the videos, but now you've got videos, you've got blogs, you've got podcasts. As you mentioned, you are in an insanely competitive industry, insurance. That is one of, if not the most competitive industries from a marketing standpoint, from an SEO standpoint. Talk me through the results you've seen. Chris: Actually, we've seen really good results and everyone else says the exact same thing you do, but they don't realize it's actually the complete opposite. You see, once you get outside coastal areas, no one knows anything about flood. And no one's wasting their time on it. So when we can provide the content in areas like Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, we don't have a lot of competition. The other day when I looked at some of our keywords for Arkansas, Nebraska on YouTube, it was $1.12 And $1.50 because no one else is putting it out there or they're not going to waste their time on it. They're going to go to Houston, they're going to go to Miami or New Jersey, but what about all those areas in the middle where there's no resources and we can provide those resources. It doesn't matter how much competition we have, they can't keep up with us on the content. Kathleen: Now, do you find yourself competing against really, really large insurance companies and how does that play out? Chris: [crosstalk 00:19:46] the other day, because we picked up the phone and we called the customer back. Kathleen: Yeah. How does that play out from a digital marketing standpoint though? How do you take on, I can't think of one off hand, but all the big insurers, right? They have so much money to throw at their marketing. Chris: Because like you just said, they're throwing it at their marketing. They're not throwing it at their content. They're saying, "Hey, I can save you 40% on your flood insurance." That's great, but how do you change my floors out? How do you help me through this process? That's what the customer wants to know. Then yeah, I'd love to save money here, but I need you to get me point B before I get to point C. Kathleen: Now, are you spending money on paid ads now? Chris: A little bit, but I do it completely different than the companies you talk about. Kathleen: Okay, talk me through how you do it. Chris: What I do is these companies that said they'll spend all this money and "Hey, let me save you 50% on this." Well, I get a copy of every single flood map change across the country. Well, what happens is you can make a decision to buy insurance before that map changes and if you do, you get a preferred rate. So I target those areas six months before with content every single week through YouTube and walking them through the whole process. So when it does change or it's about to change, they remember seeing our content for six months. Not that we can save them money, but "Hey, here's what's going to happen, here's the process you need to follow whether you go through us or not." And that's how we've been able to beat a lot of them out. No one else wants to spend that time. They want to capture the sale. Kathleen: Now, what percentage of your business these days is coming in through organic and social and these digital efforts that you're undertaking? Chris: Honestly, from a strictly digital standpoint, pretty much a hundred percent of it now. Like even though the insurance companies we deal with, the process we built out for them is when they send us a customer, we actually build a link that's just for that insurance agent. And what happens is if they submit, a customer submits it, we redirect them. For that customer, leave them a review. We have a thank you card that goes to that customer in the mail with their information on there, not ours. We're here to help with a flood. But we're also here to make them look like a rock star so they have a customer for life. It's a win-win. And so we built all that in HubSpot, now. Kathleen: I mean intuitively you've landed on the best channel marketing strategy, which is make your channel partner look like a rock star and make their life as easy as possible. Yeah. I learned that after 13 years as a HubSpot partner, because HubSpot itself has one of the best channel programs around and they do that exact same thing. Chris: Yeah. And they're always like, "Why the link?" I said, "Because no matter where the customer is in the process, we can keep you involved." Kathleen: Yeah. That's great. Chris: And they like that. Kathleen: Yeah. Fascinating. So tell me about how your business is growing and what it's meant for you as a business owner. Chris: Well, I had this goal of, hey, I'd love to sell $1 million in flood insurance over the next five years. Well, I've had to adjust that goal because we've gotten to about 50% of it in our first year. But that was our whole goal, our five year goal. What happened is its just kind of taken off. We've spoken at a couple of conferences, we've been on a lot of different podcasts, not because we're just killing it on sales. But I guess because of the whole video thing, no one else was really doing that in our industry. No one's committing to it, particularly on flood, but no one's committing to it on anything else. And so what's happened is, being on those podcasts and things like that have helped us organically. People start reaching out to us, other insurance agents and we just walk them through and help them with their questions. And then before you know it, they're telling other people and it's just like a snowball going downhill then. Kathleen: Now how- Chris: Once you get going, if you get behind it. Kathleen: How important has it been to your success in doing this that you took on essentially a niche topic? Because you said that a little bit earlier how no one else was talking about flood. Could you do this same approach if it was a broader topic? Chris: Oh, easily. The reason I've done it though is because that's what my background is in and no one really has the background that I have in insurance. Like they've got some training, but they don't have that master's degree. I'm in the middle becoming a Certified Floodplain Manager. Probably less than 1% of insurance agents in the world have that certification as well. So you could do it with anything. But the reason I chose to do it and what I did it in is because of what my background is. I know people that are doing it in other areas as well. Now not the whole video thing, I mean you'd really have to commit, but the video course I'm in, a lot of people committing to two or three videos a week, which is great. My whole thing was, hey, if I can look back a year later, look at the knowledge base articles we've built, look at the library we've built just over a year. Look at the amount of questions we're going to be able to ask. Kathleen: Yeah. That's great. Well it's definitely inspiring and I think anybody who's ever thought, I don't have the time to invest in content or I couldn't possibly do it because I'm not an expert. I think that you provide a great example of somebody who's just taking the bull by the horns and is running with it and seeing great results. So, very cool. Chris: I've thought about starting a digital marketing agency next year, basically, what we're doing is taking the journey of this year we've been on and we're teaching other companies how to do it. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Love it. That's so cool. All right. Shifting gears for a minute. I have two questions I always ask my guests and you are a prolific inbound marketer so I want to hear what you have to say. Is there a particular company or person that you think is really killing it with inbound marketing right now? Chris: Yes. Nicholas Ayers, he's the one who actually runs Made You Look Video. I mean his video course, the whole psychological thing he puts behind it. He's got some of the silliest ads on Facebook with fanny packs, but what he's able to do with video, because he's been studying it for 30 years, it's just incredible. Kathleen: So Nicholas Ayers, Made You Look Video? Chris: But also his passion of, "Hey, I'm not going to keep this to myself. I'm going to help whoever I can with it." Now, we do a call every single week, he walks you through whatever you need. I mean, he's just awesome. Kathleen: That's great. Chris: And like I tell people, he's one of the main reasons, where we're at today is because of how they've been able to help us with video. And then Marcus Sheridan is another one. I was turned on to him about nine months ago. About the whole pool company experience. Kathleen: Yeah. Marcus's story is phenomenal. Yeah. And he is a great guy. All right, so things change fast. You are blogging, you're podcasting, you're making videos and putting things on YouTube and Facebook, what have you. How do you stay current and up to date on all of these developments around digital marketing with things changing so quickly? What's your strategy for that? Chris: Well, a lot of it actually is through HubSpot Academy. I spend a lot of my time in there and then I spend about an hour a day studying other things. I've got about 140 podcasts a week that I listen to. Kathleen: Oh my God. Chris: This being one of them, the HubCast, all these different digital marketing ones. Amy Porterfield is a big one. But I stay up to date because I travel so much during the week that I listen to all those. And honestly that's where I give all my content ideas from as well. How to connect with Chris Kathleen: That's amazing. I don't know how you find all the time. I mean, I love podcasts and I think I spend a lot of time self-educating but you make me look like an amateur. That's amazing. So, all right, Chris, you've totally blown me away. I can't wait to see what you do next. I'm betting some people are going to be listening to this and have questions. If they do, if they want to connect with you, reach out and chat with you. What's the best way for them to contact you? Chris: If you go to our website, just floodinsuranceguru.com, we've got our email address on there. It's flood@communityfirstagency.com. They can also find me on Facebook, which is just Chris Greene. They may have to send me a message because I think I am maxed out on friends. Kathleen: Oh no, we can't be friends. Chris: Well, I have to filter it out all the time. I've changed it and added a public image one on there, but I don't do much on there. You can also find me on LinkedIn. I do a lot on LinkedIn. Kathleen: Awesome. All right. You heard it here. I'll put those links in the show notes. If you want to find Chris head over to those show notes and his LinkedIn profile, his email address, his YouTube channel, all of it will be in there. He won't be your friend on Facebook until he clears out some other people, but you can ask him anyway. You know what to do next... Kathleen: That's awesome, Chris, thank you so much for joining me. And if you're listening and you like what you heard or you learned something new, please consider leaving the podcast a five star review on Apple podcasts. It makes a huge difference and helps us get found by other people. And if you know somebody else doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Chris. Chris: Thank you.

Cold email has gotten a bad rap in the marketing community, but there's a way to do it right (and get great results). This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, email copywriting expert Nikki Elbaz talks about cold email outreach. As a copywriting expert, and the email copywriter for Copyhackers, Nikki advises B2B SaaS companies on how to write emails that generate leads and sales, and she says there are definitely good use cases for cold email outreach. In this conversation, Nikki shares when you should use cold email, how to build your strategy, tips for writing subject lines and email body copy, the KPIs you should use to measure success and more. Highlights from my conversation with Nikki include: There's a perception in the marketing world that you shouldn't do cold email, but Nikki says that's really not the case and there are some good reasons to include it in your marketing strategy. The two primary use cases for cold email are for companies that are struggling to grow and acquire customers, and companies that want to invest in relationship building (acquiring leverage and influence and authority). Before starting any cold email outreach, Nikki recommends talking with your legal counsel to ensure you're in compliance with GDPR and other similar rules. Any piece of marketing is made up of list, offer, and creative. Nikki says you need to begin by identifying what your offer is and who you are targeting. Once you have that done, you can work on your email copy. Copy always first comes with research, which involves digging into who those people are and why they need what you offer, and framing in a friendly, authentic, honest, open way.  More important than creativity when writing cold emails is making sure that you have something that the person is interested in and needs, and framing it that way, and just being respectful of their inbox, of their time, and who they are as a person, and their role. When it comes to email copywriting, Nikki follows "The Rule of One," which holds that you want to pretend you're writing to one person, so being very human, and writing the way that you talk. Marketing emails should never be "one and done." Testing is crucial and should be done on an ongoing basis to ensure your emails are getting results. When working with cold email, its important for your audience to be homogenous, so it is often worthwhile to pair down longer lists into smaller, more similar segments. Your offer is a key part of your cold email outreach strategy, and Nikki says its important for the offer to be something that it is very easy for the recipient to say "yes" to. Resources from this episode: Visit NikkiElbaz.com Check out the CopyHackers website Visit Nikki's new project, unmassmarket.com Listen to the podcast to learn more about how to write cold emails that get results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. My name is Kathleen Booth, and I'm your host, and this week my guest is Nikki Elbaz, who is an email conversion copywriting specialist, but I also want to say you're sort of like a jack of all email trades, trades email person. I don't know how to say it, but your bio is so interesting that I didn't even want to attempt to summarize it. I thought you could do a better job of telling the story of what you do, and where you do it, and who it's for. Welcome. Nikki Elbaz (Guest): Thank you. That's one way of putting being a jack of all trades. Nikki and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Actually, I want to back up. I shouldn't say that because that makes you sound like a generalist, which you're really not, and that's part of why I was excited to talk to you, because you really have taken a deep dive into email and what makes it work. So, with that- Meet Nikki Elbaz Nikki: Cool. Oh, okay. So, yes. So, number one is I run my own email marketing company called Nikki Elbaz. Very creative name, I know. So, working with private SaaS clients and just doing all sorts of email sequences for SaaS brands, basically. SaaS especially has tons of different customer journeys and all that, so email is a lot of fun, and that's what we do at Nikki Elbaz. I am also the email specialist, the copywriter, the email copywriter at Copyhackers, which is a huge honor and privilege because Copyhackers is awesome, and again, we have all sorts of interesting, really fun clients that we work with, and all sorts of amazing different types of sequences, and just digging into stuff is just a lot of fun. So, those are my two main gigs, and I'm also launching something pretty soon with another email copywriter. Her name is Sophia Dagnon, and we are launching unmassmarket.com, and it's just going to be a place for learning for email marketing, or SaaS founders and marketers, just techniques, templates. Hopefully, one day we'll do courses, all sorts of just... Just a place to learn about email marketing for SaaS, because we didn't find it ourselves, so we are creating it. What any marketer can learn from SaaS marketing Kathleen: That's great. One of the reasons I'm really interested to talk with you is, even though you do a lot of work for SaaS, I have always thought... Because I've talked to other people who do SaaS marketing, and I think it's easy for marketers to listen and think, "Well, I don't do SaaS marketing, so this will not be applicable to me," but I have always found it interesting because I at least find that all of the lessons from SaaS marketing are totally applicable everywhere else. It's just SaaS, in many respects, has so much more pressure on it because for so many SaaS companies, it is a sale without a salesperson. So, the marketing itself has to do the job, in many cases, that a person would. So, it's like if something can work in SaaS, it's going to work anywhere. Right? Nikki: Yeah. Yep. Kathleen: In mind, at least. That's how I always think about it, but I don't know. I would love to get your take on that. Nikki: 100%, 100%. I actually was focused more on e-commerce for a while, and I just kept coming to so many objections with clients where I was... just too many conversations about, "Yes, this will work. Can we just try it? Let's test it. Let's do it," and the trust just wasn't there. With SaaS marketers, there's just so much more trust and willing to test things and try things and just do things, maybe because of the pressure, maybe just because of the culture of SaaS, where it's exciting and people are just into trying cool things and reading cool blogs and doing all this talking with each other. So, definitely, I was always wanting to bring SaaS tactics to other industry, and I wish more industries followed what SaaS companies are doing and started implementing them. They're just so human. They're so engaging and relevant, and yeah, it's fun, and I think people really respond to that. You'll see it in certain... especially in D2C brands, where they do kind of copy what SaaS brands do, especially the subscription boxes and things like that. You see that they get great engagement, and they get great brand loyalty, and I wish everyone would just become a SaaS marketer, even if they're not SaaS marketers. Kathleen: Yeah. Well, I think all of those really, e-commerce, D2C, SaaS, have in common that in some ways they're like touchless sales. Right? So, for all of those, the marketing materials, the assets, the emails, the ad copy, et cetera, it all has to speak for itself without the explanation of a human to back it up, or the persuasiveness of a human to back it up. I mean, yes, there are humans behind all of those things, but in so many cases the interaction that a prospective customer has is just with your marketing. So, you can't mess it up. It can't be plain vanilla, wishy-washy. So, I totally agree. I think it's fun to work in SaaS, and there are so many lessons to be taken away. So, if you're listening and you're not in SaaS, do not stop listening. I mean, this is going to be full of great advice. Before we came on, we were talking about... We're both members of Online Geniuses, which is a really big Slack group for marketers. It's great, tons of great information, great resource, and it's not just Online Geniuses. There's so many other Slack groups for marketers and Facebook groups for marketers, and you were saying something I found really interesting about a trend that you've noticed lately, and maybe you could talk a little bit more about that. The controversy around cold email Nikki: Yes, definitely, and yeah, I for sure have noticed this in basically all of the Slack groups. So, I always check out the email channels, because that's my thing, and what comes up again and again and again is questions around cold email, wanting to hear about techniques, wanting to hear about platforms to use, wanting to hear about engagement, all just questions around cold email. Somebody will inevitably respond, "Don't do cold email. Cold email is just... It's not a good technique. Don't do it. Inbound marketing, that's the way to go. Didn't you read Permission Marketing? Come on. Don't do cold email." Kathleen: Right. You're in violation of the universal rules of marketing. Nikki: Yes. So, when I see these kinds of comments, I totally get where they come from, but I think it's just an interesting... See, cold email is a valid technique, and especially when companies are small, and they're trying to grow. Inbound marketing, for sure, do it, absolutely. Content marketing, it's great, all of these techniques. Really, it should be everything. You should have your team doing all these different techniques, and if you're trying to grow fast, then cold email could be really effective, and it doesn't have to be in violation with all the things that we associate with good marketing, being authentic, being wanted, being helpful. All these different things could come in cold email. We're a little bit biased towards cold email in thinking that it is evil and annoying because we get really bad cold emails. Most people do not get cold emails. When I give presentations on cold emails, I'll put in a few examples of cold emails that I get, and I never get good ones. So, it's always these really bad examples in there. So, we're definitely skewed towards thinking that cold email can't be effective, won't be effective, is annoying, and we don't want to do that to our audience. But there definitely is a right way to do it, and it's a great technique to use if you're doing it right. When should you use cold email? Kathleen: So, you mentioned there's a place for everything. Right? It's almost like when they say about diets, everything in moderation. So, when is the right time to use cold email? Nikki: Good question. I think two times would be great. Number one is just if a company is small or they're having trouble growing or they're having trouble acquiring customers, it's just a good time to try it, test it out, see how it works. The next is, I would say, if you're working on relationship building. So, it's less about acquiring customers and more about acquiring leverage and influence and authority, if you're trying to get your content out to more people, not with those templated, "Hey, I wrote a post that's like your post," but really authentically trying to build a relationship with someone. That's another aspect where it could work really well. GDPR and cold email Kathleen: Interesting. Before we dig into that a little bit deeper, I'm curious... Geographically, obviously the European Union has a lot of rules that are different than other places, although in the US California is doing things that are starting to look a lot more like GDPR. Are there things that marketers should be aware of when it comes to cold email and geographic use of it? Nikki: Definitely talk to your legal team, see how these laws do affect things. They are kind of vague a little bit, so you can probably usually get away with sending one email. An entire sequence, you might want to check with your legal team, see how it goes, and then the US market is a nice big market, so definitely, you could reach out there and see how things go too. How to get started with cold email (the right way) Kathleen: Yeah, that's good advice. All right. So, if I'm a marketer and I fit one of those categories you talked about, and I actually do, I just started a new job at Prevailion, so I'll use myself as an example. We're an early-stage company. We just got our Series A round. We're just really bringing the product to market, and we don't have a huge database. I feel like we're exactly what you described. You need to build your network, get in front of more potential customers. How should I really start to think about cold email outreach so that I'm doing it right? Nikki: I would say that, number one, you want to define what it is that you are offering. They say any piece of marketing is made up of list, offer, and creative. In this case, it's usually just copy. So, you first want to hone down exactly what you can offer, and then you want to move on to your list, which is finding the prospects that need what it is that you offer. Then once you have that, then you could start writing the copy, and copy always first comes with research, so really digging into who those people are and why they need what you offer, and framing in a friendly, authentic, honest, open way of, "Yes, I'm pitching you, but I want to not be annoying, and I'm being transparent about this, and I really just want to help you." If you come from a place of, "I have a great product," and you are a great person, and you're respectful of both those things, then your cold email is not annoying. I think this is something that... I get this a lot, where people are always asking, "Well, how do you be creative, and how do you make an engaging subject line?" and all these different things on creativity. I think much, much, much more important than creativity is making sure that you have something that the person is interested in and needs, and framing it that way, and just being respectful of their inbox, of their time, and who they are as a person, and their role. Those things are much more important. Yes, you need to get people's attention, but writing a subject line that's like, "Help. I'm in jail," and then your body is, "Hi, I got your attention. Ha-ha. Now read my email," that's not going to... You got the open. You got the open. Great job. Kathleen: And then you just made them mad. Nikki: Exactly, or some people like it. I've heard feedback where people are like, "Oh, that's so cool. You're so creative," but just because you're creative doesn't mean that I now want to use your service. So, you got the open, but you don't necessarily get the response or the click, in whichever case it is with cold email. So, definitely, you want to start thinking about who they are, what you offer, and how you can tie it together and present it in a way that's really a no-brainer of, "This is the perfect fit for you, and you should do this, and it will be awesome." Kathleen: So, I'm going to totally put you on the spot. Nikki: Okay. Kathleen: I feel like that is so much more easily said than done, because as we've discussed, 99% of the emails that we get that are cold are terrible, so people are clearly failing across the board to do this well. I mean, do you have any tips or examples of wording? How do you walk that line of creating that feeling of genuineness and conveying that you respect their inbox while also acknowledging that you are sending them an unsolicited email and pitching them, essentially? Nikki: Yeah, definitely. I think just being really transparent and believing in your product, believing that you have something of value, and knowing deeply that they need it, not in a way where you're like, "Hey, you are terrible because X, Y, Z." That's another thing that people will do in cold emails, is they'll start critiquing and giving advice, and nobody really wants advice or to be insulted without being insulted. Even if you frame it really nicely, it's not a great way to start a relationship. So, just being very... I know this isn't helpful because it's kind of vague, but see, the really cool thing about cold email is there's this principle in email copywriting, which is called the Rule of One, that you want to pretend you're writing to one person, so being very human, and writing the way that you talk, and things like that. The cool thing is that with cold email, you are writing to one person. So, really just writing your email as if you're writing it to a friend, being really just honest and transparent. I mean, this is where it comes in, the whole believing in your product, and just framing it in a way of, "I really believe this will help you." Obviously, you could use formulas and email formulas that help you do this, like PAS, pain, agitation, solution, but just kind of write a letter as if you're writing it to a friend. Pretend your friend needs your product, and write this letter, and then kind of chop it down into an email. That can definitely help you with being friendly and personable and authentic and honest. Kathleen: Yeah. The Rule of One thing is super helpful. I use that a lot, more even... I definitely use it for email body copy, but I really use it for subject lines because I find that marketers tend to write very terrible subject lines in the sense that they're very stilted and corporate-sounding. It's like we all went to the same school of what a subject line should sound like, and made their subject lines sound totally robotic. So, I started doing that just intuitively a couple years ago. I have this friend Jen, and I always pretend I'm writing an email to Jen, and I'm like, what would I put in the subject line if this was Jen that I was sending it to? It wouldn't be like, brackets, webinar, blah, blah, blah. It would be, "Can I ask you a question?" or, "I thought this might interest you," and even down to punctuation, not using title case for every word. You don't do that when you're writing to friends. So, I don't know. I just think that's a really interesting trick to run through, and I think for every person, it's going to be different, who they picture in their head, but the more you can make it like a real, real person that you actually know, the more that mnemonic becomes really helpful. Nikki: Yeah, totally. I think it's... There's a lot of flack about customer personas and how they're not really authentic and all this, or maybe they are really important and all this. It's definitely very helpful when you're writing email to have a person, because yeah, then you picture them as a person that you're writing to, versus other aspects of marketing, the persona idea gets more fuzzy because it's not a one-to-one conversation. So, definitely with email persona, it helps tremendously. What we're saying with subject lines is... I've been having a lot of fun testing different types of subject lines, like just a subject line full of emojis, and that's it, just emojis. I mean, I personally will always uppercase my email when I write to friends, not title case on every line, but the first word is always upper- Kathleen: No, that's what I meant though. Yes, the first letter of the line, like a sentence would be- Nikki: But it is interesting- Kathleen: ... not every... Sorry. Go ahead. Nikki: Right, every word. Kathleen: Yeah. Nikki: But it is interesting to test what happens when you don't capitalize anything, because there are people that will write emails like that. So, just because I won't doesn't mean that my target audience doesn't receive emails like that more often. So, it's definitely been a lot of fun testing all different sorts of subject lines and things like that. That's another thing with cold email, is that it should not just be a one and done, this is the template that we sent to everybody, this is the email that we sent to everyone. You should be testing and iterating and seeing what gets opened, what gets responses, all this kind of stuff, because there are all those elements. You need the open. You need the response. You need the interest. Maybe they are interested in your product, but you're asking them to get on a call for 15 minutes, and they don't have 15 minutes. There's so many things that play into the success of your email, so definitely test, test, test, test, test, test, test. How long should your emails be? Kathleen: So, I have a question that I actually really want to ask you about this, because you mentioned that you do work for Copyhackers, and I have attended tons of Copyhackers Tutorial Tuesdays. I've gotten lots of the templates. So, I follow what you guys are doing, and one of the things that I think is really interesting, and I've always wondered about, so maybe you can finally clear up the mystery, is what I always hear from marketers that I follow is brevity is so key. People have such short attention spans. They want you to get right to the point. But I've noticed with several of the best email copywriters I follow, you, Joanna Wiebe, Val Geisler does it, the emails that I'm seeing are longer. There's more of almost a story to them, and I'm just wondering if you could comment on that. What is the relationship between brevity and effectiveness in email? Nikki: Definitely. I would say that for sure with cold email, you do want to try for brevity. Not necessarily. My most successful cold email was not short at all. But because you are new to the person, you do want to kind of just try to be short and to the point. Now, where storytelling comes in and all these ideas of really engaging the person, you have to, number one, know your audience, and number two, test, but a cool trick is stages of awareness, which basically, if you're... So, this is actually the opportunity of what I'm saying, that your first instance of cold emails should be short, but if the person doesn't know you and doesn't know your product, and doesn't even know, necessarily, that they need your product, you need more time to walk them through to get to that point of being able to say yes to you. So, it makes more sense to have a longer email because you need to walk them through all these objections and education and all this stuff to get them to this point where they can commit. So, I guess the reason why I say that your cold emails should be short is just because many people struggle with the storytelling, so I don't want that to get in the way. I want you to just be able to focus on your offer and how you can help people, and you don't need length if you can really say that very clearly and compellingly. If you feel like you do need length, I guess because I've seen a lot of cold... From students that I've mentored, I've seen cold emails that are long because they feel like they have to explain and talk about themselves and give social proof and benefits and bullet points. That kind of long email, yes, you're walking them through and kind of trying to hit objections, but it's very dry. It's not engaging. So, it's just kind of hard to find the fine line between long and engaging and not boring the person long, that kind of long. So, I guess if you are an email copywriter or a copywriter, or you're a great writer and you studied copy, then go for long. Don't be scared of... You must be brief. That's the most important thing in marketing. But if you just want to get your product out there, and you're kind of scared of this whole storytelling thing, then I wouldn't... With cold email, it's really just about doing it. The more you do it, the more responses you'll get. So, I don't want long to scare you. But if you do have a great story, and it's engaging, then don't be scared of needing to be short either. Did that make sense? Kathleen: Yeah. No, that does make sense, because like I said, I've definitely noticed that there are times when really good emails are longer, and it's just interesting to me to understand when you would use one or the other. But I agree with you because I think what I'm hearing you say is a lot of people use length as a crutch because they're not able to concisely say what they should be able to concisely say, as opposed to using length to really build a narrative and a story. Nikki: Exactly. Yes. You summed that up beautifully. Determining the audience size for your cold email outreach campaign Kathleen: Thank you. So, I want to go back. You mentioned that with any email there is the list, the offer, and the creative, and I want to go back to the list for a second, because you said something earlier that I picked up on, which is that you want to think like you're writing an email to one person, but then you said you really are writing it to one person. So, to clarify, when you talk about cold email, are you talking about one-to-one cold email, or are you talking about one-to-many cold email, or both? Nikki: So, it depends. I've written cold email for sales teams to send to other teams, and they do address it to one person, but they're sending it... It is a sort of template that they send out to a whole bunch of different companies, whole bunch of different teams. So, it definitely could be both. I guess in that instance I was referring to when you're trying to build a relationship, and you are sending it to one person. But even still, you're sending it to a smaller list than you usually do- Kathleen: So, that was going to be my question, just to make sure, was if you're going to do a list, do you have any rules around what size, how big is too big, how should you do segments and subsegments? Can you talk about that a little bit? Nikki: Yeah, definitely. I think it depends what your goals are, obviously, like everything else, but they usually have something in common together, all the people that you're trying to reach. So, for example, I did a cold outreach for Sprout Social, and it was for a retail push, a push for retail e-commerce brands trying to streamline their social media management. So, they broke it down into different company sizes, not quite company sizes, but more the company size according to their goals with social. So, that was one segment, was... One segment was retail, and one segment was what their goals were with social, on retail social. So, that was two segments. Then did we segment it even further? Then part of the template that I wrote for the sales reps was also personalizing it towards what their social use was. So, I wrote a few A/B emails based on how they were using social. So, there was kind of like those three elements of segmentation, their industry, their size and goals, and then how they actually would use the tool. Does that answer your question as more- Kathleen: Yeah, yeah. No, it does. I mean, it sounds like you want your audience to be homogeneous, at least when it comes to the dimensions that you're focusing most closely on, whether that's everyone has this job title, and I'm targeting them for that reason, or everyone has this pain point, and I'm targeting for that reason. That level of homogeneity is important so that you're going to be able to speak to them, and it will resonate. Nikki: Especially because their pricing plans correlate with what their goals are and what types of roles the people at the company are taking. So, it's hard to talk about the features and benefits that you're going to have if you're just talking to everyone who will be using different features and benefits, and what their pain points are, exactly, all that kind of stuff. It's important to be able to write your email to be able to segment them according to what is important to them. KPIs for cold email outreach Kathleen: So, from a list standpoint, if you're doing cold email, by nature, people haven't heard from you before, and you're sending it to a list, not a one-to-one. Are there any standard metrics that you use to judge, hey, our subscribe rate shouldn't be above X, and our spam complaint rate shouldn't be above X? Nikki: We don't have standards. I think it depends on your industry and what your standards are. You always want your conversion rates to be higher than they already are, and your unsubscribe rates to be lower, but definitely, if you're going to be sending a sequence, putting in a little unsubscribe button is very helpful, especially with GDPR and all this kind of thing, to just let people know, "Hey, I think this is something that's interesting for you, but if you don't want to hear from me again, that's totally fine. That's okay. We'll move on to someone else." That also helps psychologically because people don't like to miss out on things, and if they buy into it, then they really buy into it. So, you can't lose if you allow people an exit. What types of offers work best with cold email outreach? Kathleen: Yeah. That makes sense. So, it was list, offer, creative. When it comes to offer, cold outreach, are there certain types of offers that work really well versus others? Nikki: Definitely. You want to be convenient for people. So, if you're asking them to get on a call with you, don't tell them, "Hey, book a free demo with me for 30 minutes." Even though that is what your sales team will normally do, you'll have your team book demos for 30 minutes, you want to get them to micro commit before that bigger step. So, just like, "Hey, can we get on a clarification call for five minutes?" before you even mention the word demo and 30 minutes. Don't scare people off with that. So, definitely, whatever your offer is, it should be something that is very easy for them to commit to. You can sweeten the pot and offer incentives, just whatever it takes to make it a really, really compelling offer. So, think how you're solving their pain. That's your actual offer, and then surround your offer with things that make it easy for them to say yes to. Kathleen: So, would you say that the biggest mistake that people make when it comes to the offer aspect of this is that they ask too much? In other words, they go too far bottom of the funnel with the offer that they're making? Nikki: Absolutely, for sure. I would also say that they... or they do both. They either do making this huge ask, not huge, but a big ask for a cold email, or they kind of leave it very vague and very the ball in your court, so like, "Hey, what do you think about this?" or, "Let me know what you think," or these very vague, not committing... It's very easy to say no to something like that, and you don't even have to say no. You don't say yes, which essentially is a no. So, I've seen emails that do both of that, like, "What do you think about a 15-minute call?" No, I think a 15-minute call is a bad idea. Kathleen: Right, right. Nikki: So, definitely, you want to really offer something, and not just like, "Can we catch 15 minutes?" but, "How's 15 at this time?" being really specific and assertive, and also offering something that's very easy to say yes to. How does including a video impact the effectiveness of cold email? Kathleen: Yeah. Now, have you ever studied or tested in the cold emails you've done how including a video from the sender affects results? So, in the last two years, the team that I was working with at IMPACT, we did a ton of testing of including a video or a GoVideo of the sender actually putting in, "Hey, this is Kathleen. Just wanted to put a face with the name and tell you I'm hoping to connect with you," whatever you're saying, but having that in there. I'm curious to know if you've tried that out at all. Nikki: Yes, definitely. That Sprout sequence that I just mentioned had a Vidyard, actually, not just a video, but Vidyard video. Kathleen: I love Vidyard. Nikki: They are pretty awesome. So, we haven't got the results back on that yet, but how did it go at your previous job? Kathleen: We saw it made a huge difference, in general. We did it with a lot of emails, and what we found was that... Well, it was a combination of two things, including a video, and then stripping formatting out of the email and making it look as much like a regular Gmail as possible. Those two things when put together blew my mind. So, I was a leader of a HubSpot user group, and I used to send the templated emails that were just formatted and regular copy about new meetups, and to encourage people to register. People would register. I would never get any emails back, but then when we switched to stripped-down format and video from me saying, "I hope you'll be there," it was so interesting. All of a sudden, I started getting personal replies like, "Oh, I can't make it this time. I'm so sorry." People were really responding to me as opposed to, oh, here's a hug email. I'm going to register. Then it was funny because HubSpot changed the way you had to market those, and I had to go back to a templated email, and I never get replies anymore, and I can't put video in. So, there you have it. I don't know whether it was the stripped-down formatting or the video, but it was dramatic, the difference that it made. Nikki: Yeah. It's fascinating to me that video in email has not advanced more than it has, because it really does increase conversions amazingly, because all of a sudden it's a real person instead of just a nice, pretty template or a block of text. Obviously, there are companies that are making a difference like Vidyard, but why is it not a standard feature in Gmail to just- Kathleen: Oh, I know, especially if you're able to put the person's name on the whiteboard and have an animated gif with you smiling. It's hard to resist that when I think you're the recipient, but- Nikki: They also know that you're invested in them and invested in general in your offer when you go lengths to personalize and to be human. What kinds of results can you expect with cold email outreach? Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm curious. You've done this work with different clients. What kind of results have you seen from cold outreach? I would love it if you could share some of your success stories, and what kind of response rate did they get? Nikki: So, my biggest success story is actually how I started working with Copyhackers. I sent one email to Joanna Wiebe, which obviously was not a list. It wasn't any... It was just me to her, and it was one email. I landed an $11,500 project from that, and then a few months later I sent her another email that was more of like a joke kind of email, totally unrelated. It was like a personal email almost, and she's like, "Okay. That's it. You're going to be my new email copywriter." Kathleen: That's great. Nikki: So, that was a pretty cool win. Kathleen: Yeah. I mean, if you're going to get hired by Copyhackers to be the email person, you better be writing some great emails to Joanna. Nikki: Yes. So, that was really fun, and- Kathleen: I love it. What about at scale? Have you had any interesting successes with one-to-many emails? Nikki: So, Sprout Social, we didn't get the results back yet. There was another campaign that I wrote recently. Let me think for a second. Kathleen: I know. I'm springing this on you last minute, which is totally not fair. Nikki: I'm trying to think. Who was it for? Oh, LoyalSnap, which I don't think I saw the results for that either, unfortunately. I don't think- Kathleen: Well, we're going to have to do a part two then at some point. Nikki: Yeah. Kathleen: We'll do a Nikki Elbaz interview, the sequel, and get the results. Nikki: Cool. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Yeah. So, we're coming up to the top of our time. I want to make sure I have a chance to ask you the two questions I always ask everybody, which the first one is, company or individual, is there somebody you think is really killing it with inbound marketing right now? Nikki: Hands down, Drift, because they were built first as inbound. That's all they did, and then they created their product to satisfy their audience's need. You can't get more awesome than that. They have so much fun delighting their users and their employees. It's this whole experience of buying into their culture and getting free gifts from them, from a bot. They're just so fun, and they're very authentic, really thought-provoking thought leadership from their employees, so it's also great that they give a platform to their employees. They're doing so many good things, so many things right. So, definitely follow them if you're not following them already. Kathleen: Yeah. It was funny when you were talking about email subject lines, and you said some companies send the all lowercase subject lines and the emoji subject lines. I almost interrupted you to say, "That's Drift," because that's how I first started noticing the all lowercase subjects lines. They had sent one, and I was like, "Hmm, that's interesting. They're testing putting no capitals in their subject lines. I might need to test that." Yeah. It's good to not only follow them, but really look at their marketing and see what they're doing, because they try things a lot of other people are afraid to try. Nikki: Yeah, they're ahead of the game in that aspect. Kathleen: My other question that I always ask people is... Digital marketing just changes so quickly, and it can be really hard to keep up. How do you personally stay up-to-date? Nikki: So, obviously there's a bunch of places that I'll read their blogs and things like that, like Drift and Copyhackers, obviously. My new favorite is The Product-Led Growth Collective. They're pretty new, so bare bones content, but really high-level, great stuff on product-led growth, obviously. But I think the best, best place that I keep up learning is just Slack groups, social media, from other people that are in the trenches, doing things that I'm not doing, doing things that I am doing, and asking questions that I haven't thought of, or just really being in it with other people. I just love being a part of those conversations. They're pointing you to great content. They're asking questions that lead to amazing discussions. It's just a great way to open your horizon and learn more. Kathleen: Any particular groups that you're really fond of? What are your top three? Nikki: So, Demand Curve is my number one. Then there's also Online Geniuses, and I guess I would say... This isn't applicable for most people, but The 10X Freelance Copywriter by Copyhackers is a really awesome community, and I have a lot of fun in there. So, that's my number three. Kathleen: Great. Yeah, those were all good ones. I'll have to... I'm already in Online Geniuses, but I haven't checked out the other two, so I will have to do that. Nikki: Cool. I wouldn't underestimate also just Twitter and LinkedIn in general. Just finding the people that you like to follow and reading the discussions there, for sure, is pretty awesome too. How to connect with Nikki Kathleen: Amen. I totally agree with that. If somebody wants to reach out, ask you a question, learn more, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you? Nikki: Join my email list. Then I can email you. Kathleen: And then you can see Nikki's amazing emails. Nikki: Exactly. So, you could sign up at nikkielbaz.com, and that's how you get on my email list, and then you have my email, and you can even email me too. Kathleen: All right. I'll put the link to that in the show notes, so head to nikkielbaz.com and join the list. Thank you so much for coming on. This was really interesting, and I love digging into cold email. Such a controversial topic. I feel like we should be really subversive and start to post more about it in our group so that we can share your opinion. Nikki: All right. You know what to do next... Kathleen: But no, thanks for coming on. If you are listening, and you liked what you heard, or you learned something new, please leave the podcast a five-star review on Apple Podcasts so that other people can find us, and if you know somebody else doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Nikki. Nikki: Thanks for having me.  

This celebrity ghostwriter says there are six things that every piece of content needs to have in order to be considered influential.  This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, celebrity ghostwriter Joshua Lisec shares his six pillars of influential content - a formula that any marketer can use to create better content, whether it be for a blog or a full-blown book.  In addition to being an accomplished author himself, Joshua has ghostwritten more than 40 books for celebrities, well-known entrepreneurs and other people who have compelling stories they want to tell, and he's used the six pillars in each of these cases to create books that have gone on to become best sellers and produce significant business for his clients.  Highlights from my conversation with Joshua include: Before Joshua agrees to work with business clients, he holds a manuscript strategy session in which he identifies what that client wants a book to accomplish for their business. Once he begins working with clients, Joshua starts by reviewing their existing body of work which can include anything from blogs they've written to YouTube videos, to case studies on their website. When setting expectations, Joshua tells his clients to expect to put in an hour a week for the first few months. Next he looks at the books that are in your category. What are your future readers saying about those books? What did they love? What did they not like? What did they buy hoping to learn but did not? By looking at what the market is saying, he can narrow down everything that you could write about to what you must write about. He suggests going to Amazon, GoodReads and Barnes & Noble and looking at the neutral (as opposed to very positive or negative) reviews of books to see what people are saying about them. When Joshua begins to write, he ensures that everything he creates follows the 6 pillars of influential content. The first pillar is credibility. This is your lived experience of how you made progress, how you got from where you were in the land of suck to success, how you're going to help people achieve that as well. Even if that success is merely progress. That's good enough. The second pillar is connection. This is where you're telling your readers what they actually want to read. You know this because you've gone and looked at neutral feedback of other books. So you know what your readers want, what they don't, you structure your book to give them what they want, but also make sure they're following a step-by-step path to get there. The third pillar is compelling. Write at the fifth-grade level. Simple English, easy to read. Anyone who's a PhD can understand it. Anyone who's a kid can understand it. The fourth pillar is counter industry. Name and shame the bad ideas. Not the companies, not the brands. The bad ideas, and explain why they did not work for your readers. You create a special intimate trust bond when you do that. The fifth pillar is a call to action. Make it stupid simple for people to get into your funnel. Make it better, faster, cheaper, easier than DIY-ing it, following the instruction inside of the book, literally copying by hand into their journal. And give them the templates, download one email, everything. Circulation is the sixth pillar. This is where you're applying your advice to literally as many people as possible, but you're still targeting your specific avatar, your target market by of having 80% of the examples or so be your target market with the other 20% being people who are just wildly not, but that's okay because you're still reaching that broad audience. You are also writing for your ideal reader. Resources from this episode: Check out Joshua's website Use the Book Ideas Generator to figure out what topic you should write about Take Joshua's Free Training Program Learn more about ghost publishing Visit Joshua's ghostwrite and prosper website Listen to the podcast to learn more about the six pillars of influential content and how you can apply them to your own marketing copy. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is Joshua Lisec, who is a celebrity ghostwriter. Joshua, tell me more about what that is. Joshua Lisec (Guest): Sure thing, Kathleen. Glad to be on with you today. As you said, I am indeed a celebrity ghostwriter. In fact, I am the only award-winning, celebrity recommended, number one international best-selling, certified professional ghostwriter on the planet. Joshua and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Oh my God. There were so many adjectives in there. Joshua: Indeed, indeed. You could say writing books is a bit of an obsession of mine. I've ghosted over 40 of them in addition to my own books I've authored over the years. I have worked with everyone from your A-list celebrity types, your big day entrepreneurs, the breakout stars of tomorrow and the occasional great grandma wants to share with the kids what it was like to grow up during the war. Kathleen: Great. I am fascinated by this topic because I've always wanted to write a book, but I'm one of the many, many legions of people who talks a great game and then never puts pen to paper. And if somebody is listening they might be wondering, well, what does this have to do with inbound marketing? And what I thought was so interesting about it is that you have actually worked with people who are looking to write books with the ultimate objective of generating business, not just telling their life story. And you have some really interesting insights into what it takes to write a book that will accomplish that goal and then also how to promote it. So I'm excited to dig in. Joshua: As am I. When should you consider writing a book? Kathleen: Yeah, let's start with if you have somebody come to you who says, "I have a business and I think that writing a book could be a great way to generate leads or build my business or et cetera. Talk me through like is there a conversation you have with them to determine whether that in fact is the right way to accomplish that goal? Joshua: Absolutely. We have what's called a manuscript strategy session which we get into the details, what is it that you want your book to do for your business? Every entrepreneur, business owner, marketer that I work with who wants to write a book, they see an end result. So I want to mail copies of my book, autograph with the handwritten letter to my dream 100 prospects. I've got clients, they do that, they don't even promote the book. They just do that and they get their multimillion-dollar deals, when you add up all the consulting and the gigs that come from that. You have people who use their book as kind of a springboard to join an online program, very successful track record there. So when we get into is what do you see your book doing for your business that you cannot do without the book, because a book is like a key that opens any door of authority, influence and credibility that you desire. So we have to get clear on which one it is that you wanted to open. That's the very first thing. So we're talking about the end game, first part of the conversation. Then we get into what this book needs to do, what content it needs to share in order to make that happen. And there's a specific model that I use with every author. It's called the 6 Pillars Of Influential Content. It's a model to create well, influential content, whether that's a 300-page book or a 300-word blog post. It applies to all of them because any content, any message that you're getting out into the world needs to pull people in, persuade them to do it your way and then gently push them, propel them to take the next step and ascend inside of your business. It's a true inbound marketing project. So that's what we get into in this conversation. We'll get into the six pillars later on here in this conversation, you and I Kathleen, but we want to make sure that your message your book, idea, does in fact check all six box so to speak, that you have everything, and there's some authors that don't. So I'm very frank with people like, it doesn't make sense for you to write a book at this point if you don't have the track record yet. Although I will say that most people who wonder if they do have a track record or not, those are the ones who need to be writing the books. It's the one who were like, "I got this." Who usually have no idea what they're talking about. So that's something that I found and it's been interesting, is if you're questioning like, maybe I should, maybe I should, there's a good chance you have long ago checked all six boxes inside of your business and it does make sense to write a book to generate inbound leads. What does it take to write a book? Kathleen: Oh, I have so many questions. I guess first would be, I talked about how I've always wanted to write a book, but I've never done it. What kind of expectation setting do you do with people who come to you saying they think they want to do this, as far as like the amount of time and effort and an input that's required to produce a really good book? Joshua: Sure thing. Yeah, this is not one of those processes where it's like hey, I'm going to interview you, question and answer like a journalist, transcribe the answers, fix the typos, hey, it's a book. No, it's not. It's barely a booklet. It's a transcript that's probably not worth the bytes of data that make it up in the digital file. We do it different. Rather than say, "Oh, question asked, question answered." We want to start with the body of work you already have so everyone who comes to me, even if they're at the beginning of their career as an entrepreneur, maybe they had, 20, 30 years in corporate world, now to launch the consulting business and they want to book to propel them to credibility into that go-to expert status and then industry, you're starting with something. Maybe it's articles you've written, a newsletter you put out, maybe you've given speeches, you have presentation. I had one client who, he had over 250,000 words worth of YouTube videos when we transcribed all of them. So I felt like Michelangelo carving away everything that wasn't David from this block of marble so to speak. So everyone is starting with something. So we want to first see what do you already have that we could potentially repurpose for this book. Obviously kind of massage it into something different, make it be what it needs to be for this book, but there's something there. Are there success stories? Are there clients you work with that have done amazing things? Do you want to perhaps connect me with some of your clients and we can interview them and put together their success stories into this book? Even if you have very few, very few things you need to get this book going, I always tell my clients, "Expect to put in about an hour a week for the first two to three months. That's it." So people are like, "Wow, I can definitely do that." Kathleen: Less than I was expecting, I'll be honest. Joshua: Yeah, it's a lot more attractive to do that than to try to DIY it and you're getting up at 5:00 and staring at a blank Word document for two or three hours and then you're like, "Screw this, I'm onto something else." Kathleen: Yeah. Joshua: So the reason why we don't need that much time is because once we have our kind of body of work and repurpose this material. What we do next is we go and look at the books that are in your category. What are your future readers saying about those books? What did they love? What did they not like? What did they buy hoping to learn but did not? That's your opening. So by looking with the market is saying we narrow down everything that you could write about to what you must write about. That combined with the material you already have gives us a solid direction and structure for the book. So these few conversations over a couple of months, an hour a week fills in all those additional gaps. We have everything we need for a winning profitable lead generating book. Kathleen: So are you basically then going onto like amazon.com and reading reviews? Is that how you're doing that research? Joshua: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, yes. One of my clients is in the reputation management industry. In fact, he's the CEO of the largest one in the eastern hemisphere and he's taught me something, working with him I've learned quite a bit about authentic reviews and what do buyers look for when they look at reviews, what is most important? How can you tell a fake review? So there's a lot of five-star reviews that are obviously fake. Even if it says verified, unfortunately. And there's a lot of one-star reviews that it's the competing author who's paid for these fake reviews on their competition. That's very common, unfortunately. So we look at the neutral reviews, which by and large tend to be honest authentic reviews, the two, three and four star reviews. That's where people have put some thought into what they want to say. Like, "I bought this book because I wanted to learn about topic A, B, C. And it was promised in the book description on Amazon. I saw in the book cover jacket. I saw them on a webinar promoting their book." I said, "Hey, it covers this topic I really want to learn about. It's critical for my business." You buy the book. There's one paragraph. So yes, it was mentioned, but you're going to say this in the real like, "Hey, I bought the book to learn A, B, C. I got one paragraph." And you'll see patterns across the different places where there are reviews, even on the Google Play or Apple iBooks for example, you'll start seeing patterns where people are saying the same sort of things over and over. The author said they would cover this, they did not. I felt like they over-promised and under-delivered. That's a gap in the market that you can fill because what you don't want to do is to write about something that no one cares about, that is irrelevant or has already been covered. We see that as well. People say, "Just stop talking about topic X, Y, Z. I've seen it enough." And you'll see that often, like, "This book is just rehashed advice from Russell Brunson or from Tony Robbins or for Carrie Green or whoever. We've seen this again. We're done. Let's try something different." So that also is kind of a warning sign for you to avoid that topic or to give a unique take on it that has been seen before. Kathleen: I love that advice to look for the neutral reviews because you're right, nobody's going to plant a bunch of neutral ones and there's also ... But even if the positive ones are genuine, there's not a lot to necessarily learn from that as much as there is from the neutral ones where there's something somebody thought was missing. So that's a great piece of advice. Is it fair to say, when I was listening to you talk earlier about how you start working with authors, is it fair to say that if you are someone who is a prolific content creator, like if you have a YouTube channel, if you're blogging a lot, that you are probably a really good candidate for this kind of thing, just because of because you do have so much out there already? Joshua: Absolutely. Absolutely. Because in that case you have this vast body of work that to you is overwhelming. You're at a strange paradox because there's so many things you can write about, but when you start you type chapter one, you don't know what to say. And like, "I could say this and this and this and that topic and that topic and all these other things." Well, the process that I've designed is one that helps you sort out the topics you shouldn't write about. They're fine to have on your YouTube channel, a course about it for example, maybe you have an e-book that you've done before, a series of webinars. But the process will help you identify the most profitable content that should be in this book in order to generate those leads, get the media appearances, the speaking invitations, converting people from being a reader into a high ticket client, maybe a member of your exclusive mastermind. So that a $15 sale becomes a $15,000 lifetime customer value relationship. The 6 pillars of influential content Kathleen: Interesting. So somebody decides they're going to move forward, you do the strategy session with them, you then go review, you look at the reviews of the other books in the space to see kind of what people are hoping for, what might have been missing, what makes a great book. And then you're ready to begin. Can you talk a little bit about the six pillars that you alluded to earlier? Joshua: Absolutely. As we get into that, I do want to mention that the manuscript size of the session is at no cost to authors because that's where we want to make sure that it actually makes sense for us to work together, is a book in the cards for you. So that, of course, is a complimentary experienced authors. With that said, let's get into those 6 Pillars Of Influential Content and how you get those in the book. So everyone listening right now, think about your book idea because that's where we're going to go. If you can check all six pillars, and I'll show you how, or if it's clear that it's not a right fit for you, that's okay. Maybe the time will come for you to write a book. Kathleen: I love this. This is my opportunity to see if that that kernel of a book that I've been harboring in my head is real. So let's do it. Joshua: Perfect. The first pillar of influential content is credibility. By this I do not mean, "Hey, I know what I'm talking about. I have the credentials and I have the experience, 20 years, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Basically what's on your resume or CV. That's not what I mean, because what you'll be doing is competing against other authors, who, well they have all the credentials, they have the resume, the cover letter as well. Your credibility is your lived experience, your unique journey from the land of suck to where you are now, success, because what you are as the author is you are a Sherpa, a guide, the person who's taking folks on the journey from again, where they are, where you used to be, to where they want to be, to where you are now. So the best way to build the credibility pillar is to open the book sharing your story, how exactly you did that, how you became this unique expert. In short form content, this could be as quick as a simple sentence that's towards the beginning. And I in fact practice what I preach. At the outset of this call, I built my credibility pillar in this interview, this content, mentioning that I was the only such and such, award-winning celebrity recommended international best-selling certified ghostwriter in the world. No one can touch that. And in your case, you also have a combination of lived experience, yes, credentials, the track record, but the unique story to get to where you are today. So that's the story you want to tell in the first chapter, is build that credibility pillar and then towards the end of the chapter of make this great transition to say, "And now I'm going to help you. Here's how we're going to get there." Give a quick preview what you're going to cover in the book and then list in a glorious row of bullets, a column, you might say, "Here's all the ways your life is going to change." Think of these as action verbs. Second person, you're going to do this and this and this and this and this. The reason why we're doing all this, we're essentially selling the book. We're selling you, the author, in chapter one because people can get it for free on Amazon. I'm the guy who always download the book samples to see if I want to proceed further. So are your readers. You can even go and look at the read more or look inside on Amazon. So the purpose of chapter one, this opening chapter, introduction, whatever you call it, is to sell people on buying the book. Kathleen: So to clarify, you're saying that chapter one will be free? Joshua: Yes, that's just how it is inside of Amazon in our day and age. People will click it, they'll look at the table of contents and they'll look to start checking out chapter one to see if this thing's worthwhile. So that's where you need to sell people on your unique credibility that you're the person, not just how this is a great book. But like, "Wow, I want this person to take me on the journey that they themselves have successfully accomplished so I can get there and reap the rewards as well." Kathleen: Got it. Joshua: That's the best-seller. Kathleen: That's pillar number one, right? Joshua: That's right, credibility. Kathleen: Okay. Joshua: Second pillar is connection and we've already covered this a little bit where we have all the things you could write about, we're connecting marketplace demand with your knowledge base and we're making sure that the contents of this book, look at the table of contents match what people actually want. You are connecting your material to the demand of the marketplace. That's why it's so critical to look at the reviews. So you know what people want to read the next book, that they check out that's in the category that you are. Make sure that the entire structure of the book is including the things that people want to learn from you, but also it's in a linear order. Remember, you're taking people on this journey and all best-selling stories, whether it's fiction, novels, literature, movies television, they follow what's called the hero's journey. We co-op that for nonfiction. It's not a protagonist who's the hero. It's the reader who is the hero. And so what we have to do is connect their story to yours and bring them along with you. And structuring your books that there's a clear outcome, set clear sets of outcomes for them that they're going to learn these things going to have this type of confidence. They're going to be able to do a A, B, C things, get this result, this outcome. That's very, very attractive. That's the purpose of the second pillar, connection. Kathleen: Very cool. I want to go back for one second to the first one, credibility because something was like in my head as you were talking. You talked about credibility needing ... Like you're the expert explaining what your success has been. If somebody's listening, I feel like one of the questions that they might have is, "Well, I'm not this super successful person, I haven't gone on to do great things." Can you maybe put a little bit more definition around what success really means? How high is that bar? Joshua: Sure. Sure. So I think Tim Ferriss did a really good job of answering that question about 12 years ago with the four-hour work week, which is that if you are further along, then the next person, to that person, you're the expert. You're the expert on the progress that you have made. So it's not like it's totally perfect. Authors that I have, in many cases they've gone on a journey, they've achieved some sort of success, but bare minimum progress. And let's be real, if you haven't achieved progress for yourself or for your customers your clients, you don't even have a business. Like you're a wantreprenuer at this point. And I don't even think you would be the ideal listener for this podcast. So for everyone listening, it doesn't just have to be your personal story. It can be your journey of creating success stories. I have a lot of people who own different types of agencies, graphic agencies, digital marketing agencies. So for them, their credibility is their journey taking other people to the land of profitability and spending less time in their marketing campaign. So they can kind of borrow from that success and they might say like, "Hey, I can do the same for you." Kathleen: I love that Tim Ferriss thing that you mentioned because that really puts it in perspective and I think would take the pressure off of a lot of people who might otherwise disqualify themselves from this. I deal with this all the time in my job. I do marketing and I have a lot of experience, but I don't consider myself by any stretch to be a top marketing expert. But it's funny, I'll have a lot of people come to me and ask me for advice and it's because for whatever reason they feel like I have more experience than they do. I think when you frame it in that light, you can all of a sudden start to see yourself differently. I don't have to be an expert to everyone. I just have to be an expert to the particular audience that I'm writing to. Joshua: That's right. You've made more progress, and that progress is worth at least 20 bucks. Kathleen: Yes. Joshua: To learn about to how to achieve that as well. Kathleen: All right. Okay. So we talked about pillars number one and two. What's pillar number three? Joshua: Compelling. So this is where you don't want to write a textbook. I find that people who come from 8:00 to 5:00 world, the corporate world, they tend to knock over this pillar, demolish this pillar, unfortunately. The kind of simple hard-and-fast rule for building the compelling pillar is to write at the fifth grade level. Imagine that you were literally writing for children. The fifth grade reading level is the industry standard within publishing. Get too abstract, use too much jargon, then you're going to fly over people's heads, they're gonna have to reread it. If they can't visualize it, if it's not a sensory experience, if it is not a metaphor or an analogy to introduce something, then it's not going to be compelling, it's going to be cryptic, which is not one of the six pillars of influential content. The inverse of this. So always think about how can you make it simpler, what's the simplest way you can say this with as few words as possible. Cut all those prepositions out of your sentences. You don't need them. Throw away the adverbs. If you feel like you need the adverbs, it's more likely that your verb isn't strong or descriptive enough. I need to be able to picture exactly what you mean when you use a verb without the adverb thrown in there. Think of adverbs are like salt, too much of it and you just can't. It's a garnish, you might say. So compelling, write at the fifth grade level, use visual language, concrete, simple terms that anyone who doesn't have anything close to your experience, even someone outside of your industry can pick it up, can learn from you and can take action based on that. Kathleen: Joshua, this one pillar is like a masterclass in how to do marketing right, not just how to write great copy, because really this is the biggest mistake I see most marketers make. My audience is full of marketers and it's just unbelievable. They put their marketing hat on, they forget that they're human beings. They speak like marketers, not like humans. They use fancy words that don't mean anything to their audiences because they think it makes them look smarter. It's just uh, marketers, and I love myself and we're the worst. We love using jargon and it's funny because I just a week and a half ago started a new job and this is really resonating with me because I'm coming in to a cybersecurity company where it would be very easy to speak at a level that like even somebody with a PhD couldn't understand because cybersecurity is so complicated. One of the reasons they hired me was because I don't come from that background and they're like, "We need help translating this for the normal person." But it's not even just translating it for the normal person, like boiling it down even further, and I feel like this is such a universal challenge with marketing, with communications in general, is de-complicating the things we're saying. Any further advice on that? When you are working with people, how do you get people out of that habit of making it too complicated? Joshua: Sure. Well, of course, that's one of the things that I do for them, is I bring you- Kathleen: How do you do it? Joshua: I bring it down from the 12th to the fifth grade. Well, one of the things, there's all sorts of different tools that you can use to literally look at what's the reading level of this. It would be the Flesch-Kincaid score, that great average will tell you, "Hey, this is written in 11.8." Who is the end of a junior year of high school. Well, I need to bring it down to that fifth grade? A practical terms of people who want to DIY this, what's your industry? So in this case it would be the cybersecurity. So if you have position that's in the idea of marketing cybersecurity, maybe there's specific solutions or type of technology that it is that you want to be marketing. Here's what you do. You go on to Google, you type in what a technology is. You put that in, that's your first keyword. And then you type Wikipedia Simple English. That will pull up the version of Wikipedia, not the normal one that's kind of like the default for people in the English language, but there's an alternative Wikipedia in Simple English. It's literally one of the languages, German, French, for example, English, Simple English. And go look at how that article describes your product, your technology, its uses, its function. That's more so how you want to be writing in your copy. Kathleen: Okay, how did I not know that this was a thing? Who uses this? How did I not know about Simple English Wikipedia? Joshua: It's very popular in the ESL where the English is a second language community because that's how they kind of get their ... I guess they could say get their brains and the vocabulary around more, I guess you could take industry topics, not so your everyday kind of vernacular English, but rather on specific topics that maybe jargon doesn't easily translate into their native language, well, Wikipedia Simple English is perfect. So that's how you write copy especially in the technical fields. Is consulting the Simple English Wikipedia article on your product or on the technology. Kathleen: That is so fascinating. I feel like as a marketer I want to incorporate that into everything I do now because I mean, that's it. You go to write an email, you need to simplify it. You come up with your about us page in your website, you need to simplify it. It applies to everything we do as marketers. It's all about boiling it down. So I'm like going to bookmark Simple English Wikipedia going forward. So that is an awesome tip. I love it. All right, what's next? I can't wait to hear the next one. Joshua: The fourth pillar is counter industry. And this applies to all sorts of marketing, not just using a book to generate leads for your business or for your clients' businesses. The kind of industry pillar goes like this. I would say this to authors, in digital marketing as an example, there are over 50,000 books that people can buy, why should people buy yours? I usually get a deer in the headlights look at that point like, right. Kathleen: I don't know. Joshua: And now we need to get some clarity like okay, when people come to you, when your prospects come to you, what did they try before that didn't work? Where did they get that advice? Oh, they got it in a TED Talk? Oh, they got it from this famous person who's on the cover of Entrepreneur magazine? Everyone else is following their advice and it's not working anymore? Call that crap out. The counter industry pillar is all about not specifically pointing to hey, this person gets terrible advice, but name and shame the ideas, the strategies, the ways to go about getting results that you know aren't working. Maybe they're not working anymore. A lot of my digital marketing clients who come from that space are asked to call out what their clientele are still trying to do that just does not work anymore. Maybe worked 10 years ago, but times have changed. So this is where you can really set yourself apart, make your value proposition shine by consistently pointing out why you're doing it the way you're doing it? Why you're giving specific steps to accomplish this objective? Why are you teaching it this way? Why they want to follow your framework your model your approach to things rather than what they've done before? Even just spending a couple of sentences on why it doesn't work anymore the way that used to work. That's totally fine. Another common thing off authors will do especially in saturated markets where there's so much competition, spend a chapter on the myths about your industry, an entire chapter. I do this all the time with clients where okay, what are the terrible pieces of advice has that all of your clients are following? That's a chapter and that needs to be towards the beginning because then you're going to tell them how to do it properly. So this way you can go counter to what the industry titans have been saying and you can be the person who gives that aha moment and they realize, "So that's why famous person ABC's ideas aren't working for me. I thought it was my fault. I thought that was my problem. I thought something's wrong with me." And you just say, "No, either they don't work. They just don't work period or they stop working because of an industry shift for example or saturation in that space." So you can give people a glorious sigh of relief. There is an amazing quote that I always like to reference. It's called the One Sentence Persuasion Course. And it goes like this. As my marketer Blair warned, "People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions and help them throw rocks at their enemies." So persuasion in a sentence is that right there. The counter industry pillar takes on justifying the failures like, hey, you got sucky advice. That's why it didn't work. You allayed their fears. Oh, yes. There's good reason to fear doing it the same way that you've always been. We're doing it differently. We're doing it a way that works. You can rest easy. And you confirm their suspicions as well because you knew it couldn't be you that was screwed up, it was the process you're following that's broken. Throw rocks at their enemies, well, literally say, "Hey, these are stupid ideas. Let's break them down and explain why they don't work." Of the several little points of persuasion right there in that one sense, this fourth pillar just about takes on all of them and implements them for you. So this is an underused pillar. Make sure that you take advantage of it in your content. Kathleen: That's such a great quote that you pulled. I love that. And this whole topic kind of harkens back to that notion and marketing of having a common enemy, because that's what kind of gets people emotionally tied in with what you're advocating for, whether that's selling a product or a service or an idea. When you have a common enemy, people feel more of a sense of belonging, like it's us against them. And the common enemy doesn't have to be a person or a company, as you said, it could be an idea or an approach that's outdated. So I can see where that would work really well. All right, what's our next pillar? Joshua: The fifth pillar is the call to action. And this, like the third pillar compelling, simple as possible. What exactly do you want people to do next? With books, this is how you make the big money. Everyone listening now is heard of Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson. Jay Conrad Levinson, when asked about his first book Guerrilla Marketing, he said, "Guerrilla Marketing made me $10 million. The royalties only paid about 30,000, but the consulting, the coaching, the speaking, the products, the programs that I sold because I wrote this book account for the remaining $9.9 million." And of course, that's because he has a strong call to action to go get his free newsletter, to get updates, to learn more, to be part of his tribe, his world. So this is the way where you get from the $15 sale of the paperback the $15,000 mastermind. Make it an easy road to ascend right into your business to buy your other products and programs. And the way that you can do this inside of a book is to have free content upgrades. I'll give you an example from digital marketing. There's a client that I had, he, in his case, he told me later that his book was directly responsible for $1 million in revenue inside of this business over a 12-month period because he had a strong call to action. It went like this. So there's a chapter on how to write copy and design high converting landing pages for his specific industry, like the things that you need to be aware of in here in this industry that apply really to this industry, the specifics. He gives you the formulas, the templates, everything you need to go do it yourself. Then at the end of the chapter we say, "Hold on. You don't need to do it yourself. Go to this free page. Share your email with us so that we can send you this downloadable template." And saying ClickFunnels obviously because that's what they were using and you get your affiliate income for signing people up for ClickFunnels. He'd already written the copies, designed it. It was exactly what was explained inside of this chapter that we given you the how-to process. So you can DIY it or you could be smart and just go download the templates for free basically. And we have these sorts of free content upgrades for every topic from getting reviews, like here's a, go get this downloadable script, word-for-word script that you can copy and paste it so it's tech-based. You don't have to copy it from the book, type it into your computer. You just go download it. All sorts of free content upgrades that make it easier, faster and cheaper to implement what's taught in the book. So think about how you can give away as much how-to knowledge as possible. Literally your step-by-step processes. Don't worry about giving away the farm, as we say here in Ohio, give it all away because what you'll do is halfway through this book, you'll overwhelm people with so much to do to get the results that we like, "Is there a faster way to do this?" And then you come right along and say, "Yes, I have these content upgrades, these templates, these tools, these tactics, these techniques, download them all in one place." And it's the logical call to action. So people go from the book to being on your list and now they're in your funnel for your webinar, for your discovery call, for whatever your offer looks like to turn a once-off client into some serious high ticket income. Kathleen: Yeah, you pretty much answered the question I was going to ask, which is what's the right way to do that call to action, because I am sure that there are plenty of people who hear do a call to action and think, "Oh, I'll offer like a free consultation or a meeting with me to scope out a project or whatever." And that's very, very bottom of the funnel and I think probably a little bit more salesy than makes sense. So I like the idea of giving people tools that they can use to DIY things and in doing so bringing them into your orbit. You mentioned getting them signed up to receive your emails or to watch your webinars. I would imagine you could also probably, if you're really being a savvy digital marketer, you would have retargeting pixels on your website. So even if they don't fill out a form, as long as they visit your site and you have that Facebook pixel, what have you, you can then go and serve them up with retargeting ads on other platforms. Joshua: Absolutely. Absolutely. A strong call to action is a difference between losing money on a book and making a crap ton. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a technical term, right? Crap ton. Joshua: That's right. Simple English Wikipedia. Kathleen: Yes, that's writing for the fifth grader, right? All right, next pillar, we're on the last one now, right? Joshua: Yes, the sixth and final pillar is circulation. There is, and I know everyone in the audience has heard this before. If you're marketing to everyone, you're marketing to no one. That's like marketing 101. The inverse is true in publishing. To have a successful book right for anyone, for everyone. The reason why, 92% of book sales are according to Nielsen come from word-of-mouth marketing. It's the number one way that you're going to get people to buy the book. Think about every famous, take personal development. Think of all the personal development books, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Just take those two examples. Who wants to be more effective person? Who wants to win friends and influence people? Everyone. Of course, it just so happens that the authors were targeting the business professionals who could ... Let's take the 7 Habits for example. That person wanted to do more keynote speaking, wanted to be in front of more business people, who want to be more effective executives for example, they wanted to ... He basically had these consulting services lined up for a specific type of reader. So what you want to do is think about all the different types of people that your advice, that your strategies can apply to, can be useful for. So it has broad, it has circulation potential where your ideal client could give it to their spouse, their spouse could give it to their college-age kid. The college-age kid could read it and recommend it to the professor. Professor could recommend to the dean. Dean can recommend it to ... So on and so forth. This is how massive book sales come about, not through selling one copy the time, but through creating circulation inside of an individual reader's network with your book. So then you say, "Well, how do I actually get people to take my call to action? I'm writing for everyone. How does that work?" What you do is when you're giving your examples of how to follow your strategies step-by-step, because you're giving the how-to, the step-by-step, your examples will be your ideal clients. So you make them the stars. You highlight how you've helped your specific market or industry. Throw in a few other examples, think 80/20. 80% of the examples are your specific avatar or avatars, your ideal clients, and then there's some that are kind of completely unrelated, but you're still covering them. So that's how you get circulation while also still having a specific message that is useful to your target market. Kathleen: So helpful. I love this framework. Can you just quickly go back and summarize the six again so that we can remember and really kind of like cement it in our heads? Joshua: Absolutely, the 6 Pillars Of Influential Content. The first pillar, credibility. This is your lived experience of how you made progress, how you got from where you were in the land of suck to success, how you're going to help people achieve that as well. Even if that success is merely progress. That's good enough. Second pillar, connection. This is where you're telling your readers what they actually want to read, you know this because you've gone and looked at neutral feedback of other books. So you know what your readers want, what they don't, you structure your book to give them what they want, but also make sure they're following a step-by-step path to get there. Third pillar, compelling. Write at the fifth grade level. Simple English, easy to read. Anyone who's a PhD can understand it. Anyone who's a kid can understand it. Fourth pillar, counter industry. Name and shame the bad ideas. Not the companies, not the brands. The bad ideas, and explain why they did not work for your readers. You create a special intimate trust bond when you do that. Fifth pillar, call to action. Make it stupid simple for people to get into your funnel. Make it better, faster, cheaper, easier than DIY-ing it, following the instruction inside of the book, literally copying by hand into their journal. And give them the templates, download one email, everything. Circulation is the sixth pillar. This is where you're applying your advice to literally as many people as possible, but you're still targeting your specific avatar, your target market by of having 80% of the examples or so be your target market with the other 20% being people who are just wildly not, but that's okay because you're still reaching that broad audience. You are also writing for your ideal reader. Options for publishing your book Kathleen: Great advice. Thank you for summarizing that. I feel like there's not enough time in the world for me to ask all the questions I want to ask you, because this is so interesting. I wanted to talk about promoting your book and all this other stuff, but we're running out of time. So a couple of just short final questions here. I've done some other interviews with people who've talked about writing books and they've talked about how it's become so easy now to get your book printed. There's Kindle Direct Publishing. There's Amazon's Solutions where you can print even one book at a time. So it sounds like if I'm correct, there's really nothing that should stand in your way of creating this book because we no longer live in the days when you have to contract with a publishing house and spend $20,000 to get your run of books printed. Is that right? Joshua: It depends on what your objectives are. I have authors whose hearts are set on the traditional path, the agent, the publishing deal, the six-figure book deal for example. I have a track record of helping authors go down that path. I wrote a piece for the Nonfiction Authors Association about how to actually do that, what some of my clients' experience have been, the pros and cons of that. With self publishing a big concern people have is quality because there are so many shoddily thrown together books that are self-published. A lot of people are like, "Oh, you self-publish? I don't know man." That's what people will say. So what we've done inside of my business is we've developed a complimentary service to ghostwriting called ghost publishing. Ghost writing, someone else does all the work, you take all the credit. Ghost publishing, someone else launches a publishing business, your own imprint right alongside of your business. You don't have to do any of the work. We've combined the best of self-publishing, which is higher royalties, total control over the process, your timeline. We've blended that in with the best of traditional publishing, which is industry standard quality. The quality, the level of attention to detail that comes from New York City publishers, we apply that to this book process. Also distribution, the total number of countries, access to wholesale channels, the low margin, high volume sales through bookstores, libraries, book fairs. All that's available through this process. There's also special little things that go on the copyright page for example every traditionally published book has, no self published book does. It will set you apart. You get that as part of this process. So most of our authors actually choose the ghost publishing model because they get the quality of a big five, like Simon & Schuster, Random House quality book and the distribution of that process, but they get the creative control, the freedom that's afforded by, and also the speed that's afforded by self-publishing. Promoting your book Kathleen: Okay, that's good to know. And then you get your book published and you're like, then what? You have to get it into people's hands. Any quick like two minutes or under words of advice for the best way to promote your book? Joshua: Sure thing. There's a couple. One of which every New York Times, Wall Street Journal best-selling campaign you see nowadays follows this process I'm about to explain to you. It's a special limited time bonus. When your book comes out you want people to buy as many copies as soon as possible. One of the ways we do this, especially in the digital marketing space, is an expiring bonus that's available for like 48 hours after the publication date, 48 hours afterwards. So basically it goes like this. Buy the book within two days, you have two days to buy the book now that's out, and forward your purchase confirmation to this special email and we'll send you the audiobook edition for free. You'll also get access to one of our premium courses at no cost to you and you'll be signed up for a live question answered webinar exclusively with the author to talk about the book, ask any question you have seven days from today. You only get access to these bonuses if you buy within the next 48 hours. Come on. Let's do this. And usually there's like a price promotion in there, knock $5 off the price, 99 cents exclusively for the first few days for example. That's how you get lots of people to buy at once. Then when let's say on Amazon you rocket up in the best-seller and now you're number one because you're selling beaucoup copies, take screenshots of your book as a best-seller. Oh, look, you're number one. Oh look, you're in front of Gary Vee, Robert Kiyosaki, Anthony Robbins. Oh my goodness. Share that everywhere on all your social media channels. I had one author. She doubled her best goal for book sales because she started showing all those screenshots of her book selling more than copies than the celebrity writer next to her. So do not discount what a simple screenshot can do because success begets success. Follow that. Use the special limited time bonus offer and you will start your authorship journey off right. How to connect with Joshua Kathleen: Great. All right, we're close to the top of our hour so I don't want to end without asking you a couple of questions. First one is, if somebody is listening and they want to learn more or they have a question for you, what's the best way for them to reach out and connect? Joshua: Absolutely. A couple different ways. If you are an aspiring author and you want to have the key that opens any door of opportunity that you desire for your business or for your career, I work with several people who work in the corporate world and they want to use the book to earn that that promotion quite frankly. So what their objective is head on over to entrepreneurswordsmith.com. There's a few free tools that you can find there. One of which is a Book Ideas Generator. You're sitting there wondering, could I have a book in me? Does that make sense? But what is the title? I have no idea. What would I write about? I'm not sure. What you have to do is just type in your industry and your product or service and this thing will spit out in seconds winning book ideas for you personally, title and subtitle, to get those wheels turning and help put some structure to a winning book idea for you. That's The Entrepreneur's Wordsmith if you're the aspiring author. If you are a marketer maybe, a copywriter and you like this idea of the big money ghost writing world where you're working with celebrities and thought leaders and the influencers of tomorrow, I can teach you how to get into this world at ghostwriteandprosper.com. I have a free training there called the 7 Myths About Ghost Writing That Keep Most Freelance Writers Broke As F. Kathleen: That's a great name. I bet that resonates a lot with people. Joshua: It does. It does. I think the average or median income rather, the median income for freelance writer somewhere around 40,000. So yes. Yes. That should be one project, not your annual income my friends. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Right. All right. So then the two questions I always ask all of my guests, which I definitely want to ask you, this is obviously a podcast about inbound marketing. Writing and publishing a book is one form of inbound marketing, if you're trying to do it for marketing or business purposes. Is there somebody out there, a company or an individual that you think is really killing it with inbound marketing right now? Joshua: Absolutely. Absolutely. Her name is Heather Prestanski. She is a sales and marketing consultant for high-ticket businesses. So basically, is your product or service more than a couple thousand bucks, she is the one to follow, Heather Prestanski. Kathleen: Great. I will definitely check her out. That's a new name and I always like when I get new names. And then the last question is, the world of digital marketing is changing so quickly. How do you personally stay up to date with everything? Joshua: Well, one of the ways I do is set the trend myself. One thing I did not mention today is that I am the only, the first and only ghostwriter in the world who uses a software driven process to write in my author's authentic voice. Each of us has our own unique fingerprints. We all have our own unique way to communicate. We use the data science of stylometry to literally measure and understand your unique author voice and then we recreate that on the page. So that's where the future is going and we're already there. Kathleen: Awesome. Well Joshua, so much good stuff here. I really could talk to you forever. I feel like there was probably four podcasts that we smashed into one today. But thank you for sharing all that. I love the six pillars. I'm going to like write them and put them on my note next to my computer, because I think it really can apply to any kind of marketing copywriting, not just writing a book and it's a great framework for it. So thank you for coming on. You know what to do next... Kathleen: And if you are listening and you like what you heard or you learned something new, I know I learned a lot, please go to Apple podcasts and leave the podcast a five star review because that is how other people find us and we get new listeners and if you know if somebody else who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thank you so much Joshua. Joshua: And thank you Kathleen. I enjoyed myself today. Kathleen: That was a lot of fun.  

How did Steve Sheinkopf and the team at Yale Appliance use blogging to grow the company's website traffic from 30,000 visits a month to one million visits a month while increasing revenues by 350%? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Yale Appliance and Lighting CEO Steve Sheinkopf shares his company's journey from a small Boston-based lighting and appliance store that relied heavily on advertising for business, to the world's most trafficked appliance website and a business in the process of adding its third store. Central to Yale's success was Steve himself, who blogged five times a week in the early day's of the company's content marketing efforts and continues to create key blog posts to this day. Highlights from my conversation with Steve include: Yale Appliance is the most trafficked appliance website in the world Steve started blogging in 2007 and at the time, Yale Appliance was spending around three quarters of a million dollars on radio ads. From 2007 to 2011, Steve blogged five times a week, but despite the volume of content he was publishing he wasn't seeing any results.  In 2011, Yale was getting 30,000 visitors a month to its website and today, it gets close to a million a month - all due to the shift that Steve and his team made in the way they undertake content marketing. Yale doesn't talk about itself on its blog - it talks about statistics and facts relating to its products, and that is what makes readers trust them. Steve says blogging is all about building domain authority and to that requires a sustained and consistent effort when it comes to content creation. Steve sees blogging as a core competency of his business at Yale and as such believes strongly that it shouldn't be outsourced. Steve still writes blogs for Yale, but today, the company's sales people blog as well. The company tracks the ROI of its content marketing efforts and can show, using data from HubSpot, that views of its blog and buyers guide have driven millions of dollars in business. Steve writes all of the posts relating to reliability, "best of" lists, and articles detailing problems that frequently occur with certain brands. One of the biggest benefits of Yale's content marketing efforts is that the leads it generates are very high intent. His team can see the content they've consumed on the website and it shows exactly what they are interested in. The average appliance store in 10 years has gained probably 15 to 20% in revenue. We've, increased our revenue probably 350% in the same time. 37 about 122 million in a 10 year period. So that certainly plays a part of that in terms of stores. We've gone from one store to we're adding our third in November which will be our biggest store. The average appliance store in 10 years has gained approximately 15 to 20% in revenue. In that time, Yale has increased its revenue by 350%, from 37 to about 122 million in a 10 year period. They have also gone from one store to adding their third in November which will be the company's biggest store. Resources from this episode: Visit the Yale Appliance and Lighting Website Follow Steve on Twitter Connect with Steve on LinkedIn Email Steve at steve.sheinkopf@yaleappliance.com  Listen to the podcast to get learn how Steve Sheinkopf and the team at Yale Appliance and Lighting used content to drive traffic, leads and sales. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week my guest is Steve Sheinkopf who is the CEO of Yale Appliance and Lighting. Welcome, Steve. Steve Sheinkopf (Guest): Good to be here Kathleen. How are you? Steve and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I'm great. I am excited to have you on and I can't wait to dig into our topic. But, not everybody who's listening may know who you are, so can you just tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and your business? About Steve Sheinkopf and Yale Appliance and Lighting Steve: Sure. We're a 97 year old appliance company located in Boston Massachusetts. We sell appliances, lights, we do a lot of service work, and our company's powered by really content marketing and not advertising. That's pretty much what we do. We sell all brands of different appliances, from Sub-Zero down to Samsung and we compete against pretty much 60 Brick and mortar competitors in a 20 mile area plus Online plus Amazon, Wayfair and all the people, Home Depot, that sort of thing. Kathleen: You're being very humble and so I'm going to toot your horn for you because this is like a David and Goliath story. You guys do compete against 800 pound gorillas with huge budgets. If I understand correctly you also in some respects, at least for content and search engine share, you compete against the manufacturers of the appliances that you sell. So on paper this story shouldn't be possible which is what I love about it. But you guys have one of the most trafficked, if not the most traffic to appliance websites in the world. Correct? Steve: Yeah. I think so. Kathleen: It's amazing. So all right, for people who are listening, I have been bugging Steve and his team to try and get one of them on this podcast for about two years now because I first started hearing this story of Yale Appliance a couple of years back. It was before I joined IMPACT I had heard about it from Marcus Sheridan, who plays a role in the story. And then I had the opportunity to get to know these guys better through IMPACT and all along I've just been so impressed. The reason, and it is a classic content marketing story, and I say classic because it's the things we're all told to do. Only you guys actually went and did them which is the big differentiator. But the reason I was so excited to have you particularly on is that most of my guests are marketers and they're already drinking the Kool-Aid. The biggest challenge they tend to have, is getting the C-suite not only to buy-in, but my gosh for them The Holy Grail is to actually participate in the process. And you've been doing this all along. So that's really what I want to talk about. But let's kind of rewind the clock if you would and start back from when you first began. I've heard the story a couple of times but I'm sure everybody hasn't. So maybe you could just tell the tale of how did you guys first travel down this path? Because you're a 90 year old company and you were not always the most trafficked website for appliances in the world. How Yale Appliance discovered content marketing Steve: Oh, clearly not, clearly not. It's a long story but really it starts in 2004. I went to this thing called The In-Planet and it was absolute genius. There's a bunch of it was I think Boston visors or the Bain or McKinsey guys, they were talking about the future of marketing and they were talking about how digital one day overtake outbound and to prepare for it, it wasn't happening yet. And they said. "The least you can do is get on the whole review side, that reviews are going to play a big part of how people are going to purchase from your company." So that's the first thing we did is we got on with all the yelpers and instead of berating them for giving you bad views, we looked inside ourselves to say. " Maybe we're really disappointing people organically." So we started in 2007 blogging. And at the same time it was doubling down on radio. We did a lot of radio at that time I think it was the final number was somewhere around three quarters of a million dollars. And we doubled down during the recession and the more we advertise it was like diminishing returns. I used to ask the phone people anybody called them radio ads. When we started doing it in 2000 it was popular by 2010 no one really seemed interested. So we started blogging in 2007. It was 2011 when I met Marcus Sheridan and I thought it was going to teach Marcus something. The first conversation we have, everybody loves Marcus. He's like a folksy guy and back if we rewind the clock in 2011, at that time I was blogging every day but I wasn't blogging by keyword. I wasn't- Why the CEO of Yale Appliance dedicated himself to blogging Kathleen: Now you yourself were blogging? Steve: Yeah, I was. Kathleen: I just want to clarify that. Steve: I did that five days a week. Kathleen: That's amazing. Did you publish, was it five blogs or was it? Steve: Five posts a week. Kathleen: That's great. Steve: Well it's great when it's good stuff, not so great. And it was well-meaning, but it wasn't... Even when it answered the question I never titled it right, I didn't met a tag it. So our first conversation was just absolute beat down. It was pretty bad, but he was right. At that time we have 30,000 people a month going into our site, which on paper doesn't seem bad but we started blogging strategically and now we expect a million visitors a month, we were busy and somewhere out six, 700,000, we're not. And with that comes certainly more leads, more traffic, more business and that's what this is about. And I can't believe that, I can't believe. But if you were to say to a CEO, look we're going to start this program that's not going to be effective in six months, then you probably not going get much buy-in on the C-suite. But if you say to somebody, I'm going to reduce ad spend to zero and increase revenues disproportionately to your market share - I mean, what does the bottom line look like? And it's a great learning tool and it creates trust and it creates distrust for your competitors that aren't doing this. They're selling products that maybe they shouldn't be. That's a pretty compelling case so if you structure like that, I think people get more buy-in from the people that need to buy in to say this is a revenue expense game and it's what, how people really want to consume stuff. Because nobody really wants to listen to me say how great I am. In fact, we never talk about ourselves. We talk about statistics and facts and helping people make purchases because you go to all these content marketing seminars they talk about trust and that's how you really trying to do. If they trust you and your pricing is good and your execution which is the back half of what I really work on is are we executing to, what our value proposition is? Because blogging without execution is just bad. Work on execution first then blog. So that's the whole story. Kathleen: You raise a really interesting point and I've been in this inbound or content marketing game a long time. I had an agency for 11 years. Something that you said really struck me because you talked about if you say to a CEO, we're going to create blogs and you're not going to see any results for six months, that is what I would say the disproportionate percentage of people in this space say it when somebody says, how long will it take for me to get results? Which everybody wants to know, right? Because that's what it's all about is the results people will always answer with, well it takes time. Six months to a year you'll start to see something. And while there are aspects of content marketing that that is true for, there are also aspects of it that that is absolutely not true. Where you can see some sorts of results right away. And I think you're right when you set that expectation that's going take a while. That's not exactly the best way to sell it. Steve: Well, I mean, blogging is about domain authority. Strictly we use words to cover up what we really mean and you don't become an authority figure with one or two posts. You need to show over a long period of time that you know what you're doing, whether it's getting a client, business, life, whatever it is. You don't become an authority with one good post. That said, if you write about something that's brand new that nobody else's, you could probably rank high pretty quickly. Kathleen: Oh, for sure. Yeah. I've always said that the best moments in my content marketing career have been when I googled a question and didn't find an answer for it and I was like, ha ha, I'm right that answer. So what I'm curious about is you actually were convinced even before you met Marcus, that just that blogging in and of itself had value now obviously there was a better way to do it. Why you should insource content creation Kathleen: But what I'm really interested in understanding from you is when you first had this realization that hey, we might need to blog as part of our corporate strategy. What was it that convinced you personally to write? Because I think most of the CEOs I know who have that Aha moment and realized blogging is important. Their first thought is, I'm going to assign that to somebody or we're going to outsource it. Very few think I'm going to do it. Steve: Well, it's like anything else. You want to outsource things that either you're not good at or someone can do cheaper. If you want something to be a core competency you have to do it yourself, right? You can't be good at something, outsource it and then hope it gets better. Right? If you want it to be a core competency where every year, like every month, every week, every, if you're part of it and you're interested in it and intrigues you and it touches the customer it's important. That's something you don't outsource. So it's a matter of I think people that are outsourcing, the losing the whole kind of how do we get better? How do we read, what are customers asking and how are we better solve the problem? Goes into merchandising, it goes into everything we do, what lines we sell, what lines we don't sell. Because we have the finger on the pulse of what we think the customer reacts to. But you're never going to get good at it... Let's forget about if we call it something else, like social media or writing or customer outreach. If you're outsourcing it as a methodology, nobody's going to know your business better than you do. And it doesn't matter which content conference we go to whether it's Impact or Inbound or HubSpot or whatever those. Anybody that's outsourcing with writers from whatever, what Fiverr from Indiana they're just not getting the results they could if they did it themselves and treat it like a crucial pillar of our business of ,your business which it could be, which it should be. Who creates content at Yale Appliance Kathleen: Now in the beginning you were writing five articles a week. What does that look like today? Are you still actively writing or are there other folks in the company that are primarily doing it? Steve: Well, it really depends, but the sales people. Sales people write blogs to varying degrees. I still edit most of them and I still write the important ones. And again, some of the ones I've written have, there are two that are over 2 million, 20 million views. But forget about the views, we have a report that shows people that go into our buyers guide from blogs and how much money we derive from that on a monthly, yearly basis. It's certainly well worth doing financially to do that, be part of it. And again my time spent at the CEO and culture and metrics and enforcing standards, after that really social outreach which I can reach a whole market of people by writing a blog. It's just so worth my time I think. Kathleen: And you mentioned that you write the important posts and that there are certain posts that really take off. What are the topics that you feel like best come from you? Steve: Well, the ones that resonate are the ones that are reliability posts that we were ranked manufacturers based on a service in the first year. I think some industry problem ones, are best from me, I think some of the comparisons other people can do. Again, when you look at blogging, if you want to figure out if your sales people know what they're talking about, you read their blogs. And if they can't tell you what the five best gas range tops are and in a blog they probably won't be able to sell if the customer comes into the store. So is a good learning tool for new people to just read Wiskott-Aldrich. So the time to get a new person up is much quicker. But I write reliability, best and problems ones. Kathleen: Were you always just really comfortable with writing? Is that a format that you gravitate to? Steve: Not initially, I realized the value of it but if you look at what I wrote back in 2007 versus what we write now, it's much better, much different. And that's true of anything. Everyone always says. "I'm an awful writer." Everybody is awful. This saying that every expert starts as a beginner. If you stick with it and you write three articles a week every week, if you're new, by the time one year rolls around, you've written 152 articles. That's enough for authority, but you're going to be much better after a year than you are in the beginning. Everything you do that you practice you work hard on you're going to get better at. Whether it's blogging or anything else in business. Kathleen: Now, do you find that you've gotten faster also? Steve: Yes. I think in blogs now. I've been doing it for since 2007 .I think in blog posts like comparisons and invest because I've been doing it for that long. Kathleen: How long does it take you to produce a blog? Steve: Me? Kathleen: Yeah. Steve: I can produce a blog in probably a couple of hours. The ROI of Yale's content marketing efforts Kathleen: That's great. I think it's interesting because a lot of CEOs would hear a couple of hours and think there's no way. My time is too valuable for that. So you mentioned that you guys have systems put in place to track how he is this content turns into revenue. Can you give me a sense of what that looks like and what that's produced? I don't even know if you can get it down to like what is a blog worth? I'm sure each of them is worth a different amount, but I'd love to understand better what kind of ROI you're seeing. Steve: Well, let's forget the fact that basically the path to purchase goes to the Internet. It has since probably 2005. Alright? So but the way we do, we use a very crude metric. I have Google analytics where I can... that our time on site jumps when you talk about a blog posts really, time on site pages views equal to consumers. But we can talk about store visits, but in terms of share revenue the number that we look at over a 12 month period is anybody that's downloaded a buyer's guide. So let's say you download a buyer's Guide and get 20th. If you come into the store buy with that same email address, we track them and let's just say your friend, partners, significant other, spouse buys under theirs, that's not tracked. So just from the people that download buyers guide, they buy it comes out to be about a million or a million and half per month in revenue. Yeah, that's just that not including... What we tried to do when you look at when anybody looks at Google analytics, typically Marcus said for his pool company, once they hit pages 30, his conversion goes up. For us I think it's seven minutes or 10 and a half pages and blogs play a big part of that. You want to get trust and then you want to execute. And that's kind of how businesses and the blogging is in marketing is half that or say a third of it, the sales and execution, delivery, install, all that stuff has to be in order for this to work. Certainly the articles have to be good, but the delivery experience, the installation experience and the service experience of what we do, which is our differentiating factors have to be as good if not better. Kathleen: So this has had a major implication for your overall business. Obviously it's not just revenue, clearly you're getting a lot of traffic and that's turning into business for you. But can you talk a little bit about some of the new directions that you're thinking of heading in as a result of this? What Yale's success with content marketing has meant for its business Steve: What we've been able to do certainly on the revenue side. The average appliance store in 10 years has gained probably 15 to 20% in revenue. We've, increased our revenue probably 350% in the same time. 37 about 122 million in a 10 year period. So that certainly plays a part of that in terms of stores. We've gone from one store to we're adding our third in November which will be our biggest store. But really what we've done is we've taken that 2% that we normally two or 3%, we normally take in marketing and we put it in customer touchpoints and really the customer touchpoints, are systems and people. We've been able to keep good people because instead of blowing it on $3 million worth of say, Glow Buds or radio spots or something, we have a better medical, we have 401k matching. To me that's... You market to your people first and those people market to your customers. So we've been able to take that wasted spend and put it into areas that people really appreciate. And that's people, systems, displays, warehousing, all that stuff, that's the other half of it. Is to take that money you would have spent and put it where people really want it. The first thing during the recession when we change management, first thing I said is we're going to answer the phone, right? We're going to answer the phone and we're going to be good on the execution side. And we put our money towards that rather than putting money on marketing. And it wouldn't take off if we didn't have some kind of social profile, which that whole blogging is a part of really, if blogging is a core competence that helps people come into the stores and then it's the execution side. It's two parts to this it's not just blogging that drives the revenue. It's the execution that keeps the revenue. Kathleen: It's funny because there's lots of buzz that I hear at least that we could be due for another recession sometime in the next couple of years. When you think about the evolution of the company and how you've done marketing and consider that there is this prospect that we may get hit again with another recession. How do you think the company will fare given your new marketing approach? Because it's very different than what you did the last time around. Steve: I think we'll do a lot better again because one of the things is we're not wasting money. We all know that outbound marketing is a negative ROI deal. I think as long as you understand who your customer is and you're straight and transparent with them, I think you have a leg up over people who do not do that. And that's pretty much everybody in our space. There's some people that are doing it, some people that are doing well, but they don't understand the whole execution side. Kathleen: Now the other thing that I think is interesting is historically you've been a local business. You're in the Boston area and well that's a big local market. It's still a local market and now you're getting all this traffic. I have to imagine a considerable amount of that traffic is not from the Boston area. Some people might hear that and think, well that's great that you have more traffic, but it's not really, that's not valuable traffic because they're not going to be able to walk in the door and buy from you. How do you look at that? Steve: Oh that's very true. 88% of our traffic we cannot sell to. Because delivering an appliance it's not like delivering Sharmane tissues.Especially in Boston because we got brownstones and walk-ups you need very specialized delivery people. That's why we pay the delivery people well because we're not spending it on marketing. But the worst thing you can do is ruin your reputation by not execute. It's a fair question a lot of this traffic is not really valid traffic. Let's take a million people say that we got last month on the blog or 800,000 or whatever it was, say it's 800,000 we'll minimize that means 12% of 800,000 in your market. How many people... We write to a specific audience. So how many people? 12% of a million or 800,000 it's still a lot of people that's still you're writing to 70,000 people. They're not reading your blog because they want to get to something else. It's still a significant amount of people in the market. There's no way to hit, it's like the old days they talked about radio ads. It's like they sold it to you. There's 100,000 home owners but only 2% of them are in the market and only 2% of those will listen to ad. The people that are clicking on a blog posts are showing intent, right? So those are 70,000 people showing you intent because they're clicking on something. It's not like the old radio or TV metrics. So that's still a lot of people looking to buy from you. Kathleen: Do you ever foresee that there might be an opportunity for you to somehow monetize that other 80%? Steve: No, unless we're directly involved in the actual fulfillment of the order. I don't want to be involved. If we look at... There's a lot of really good online appliance stores that have really good interfaces. They put their money on the front end, but if you look at the reviews on Yelp or Google, they're so bad and over time that'll catch up to you. Right? Because really, the one thing that I always tell the people in the marketing department is don't forget that your consumer and the path to purchase is okay, you'll read a blog everyone talks about what's the one thing, it's all about attribution. You'll read a blog post, you'll go online and you're mobile, you'll sit on your tablet, but somewhere down the line you're going to read reviews before you decide to purchase from that company or not. And you don't want everybody loves Impact because you guys do good work. But if you had a two star reputation on like Yelp or Google, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Right. So, I'm willing to... First of all, there's enough business in a local market. I want more, it's cheaper in, and easier and better to be in the Boston market. Than being partly in Boston, in somewhere in L.A. which is actually our biggest market for the blog, New York. I think it's better logistically to stay where you are. Kathleen: I was going to say maybe someday you'll have... You have three stores now maybe you'll someday have 30. Steve: The way it works from a business standpoint, this goes a little bit back to blogging is you have a warehouse. You want to maximize that warehouse, then in a third store you need a bigger warehouse and you want to maximize that warehouse and then you run stores up that warehouse, that's where it becomes the most efficient to do business. Going to L.A and having logistics there and hiring and hiring service people in a whole new network is much more difficult. Steve's advice to other CEOs Kathleen: It's a good problem to have too much traffic and more than you can sell to. I want to go back to this issue of most CEOs don't necessarily see the justification for being personally involved in this. If somebody is listening and they are a Content Manager or the Head of Marketing and they're passionate about creating content for the company and they want the CEO to be involved, As a CEO yourself, do you have any advice for the best way for that person to approach the CEO and get them excited about taking part in this process? Steve: It's like we said in the beginning, there aren't too many opportunities to increase your brand in the profile of that brand. There's not too many ways to create trust and there's not too many ways to raise revenue and reduce expenses at the same time. What is your bottom line look like by raising revenue and reducing expenses? And that's really my job is to... We used to be happy if we reduced expenses by 30, 50, 60,000. Well now we're talking about reducing expenses at our level 700, a million, $2 million in increasing the top line revenues by since we'll be doing it anywhere from eight to 15% a year in a highly competitive market. There aren't too many opportunities to do that. In fact, there aren't any opportunities to do that. And if you're a CEO and your other face of the brand of the company and it comes from you and you're answering people's questions and handling people's problems, that goes a long way in building your brand there. If it isn't that, what else would you be doing? I could sit there and run the warehouse, but there are people that run the warehouse better than me. I could sit on Ops, the people that run operations better than me. It's important for a CEO to understand the metrics of success in the company, but terms of really the overall of really the fundamentals of a P&L we have revenues, we have expenses. If you raise one and lower the other one, that's what we're paid to do. And this is a unique opportunity to do it. Now, do you have to do it to my extreme? No, clearly not. I got involved 12 years ago but if you were to do a post or two a week and maybe handle a couple of dicey problems and show that you have kind of deep seated knowledge of the industry. Especially if you're selling services, which many people do and you show that you handled that problem, a person with that problem is probably going to give you due consideration. Right. That's the way it works. Kathleen: It's very interesting that you brought up the thing about personal brand because that's something that I've been giving a lot of thought to lately. There are so many companies creating content now. You were fortunate or had the incredible foresight to start doing this very early when this wasn't as ubiquitous. I just went to HubSpot's Inbound event there were 26,000 people there who are all drinking the Kool-Aid of content marketing. And you look at crowds like that and you think, wow, all these people are bought in. It's getting harder to stand out and I really believe that one very effective way to stand out is through personal branding. Because anybody can kind of copy generic content, but you can't copy a personal brand that is inherently individual. So I'm curious in your experience for you personally, aside from the business results, what have you experienced as you've put your personal brand behind the content? Like has that resulted in anything for you? Steve: First of all let's not give me so much credit. I ran out of money. I didn't have a choice. Most good content marketers will tell you during the recession, we all ran out at doe. That's why- Kathleen: I owned a business in the recession. And I can definitely second that. That's why I started blogging too. I was like, I have all this time and no money. I'll write. Steve: Exactly. I could've just as easily destroyed a 90 year old company, which I was very close to doing. That's it I'm not really interested in my own personal brand. Really having gone through the recession as both of us have, it's more important for the company to have a strong balance sheet than it is for me to build a personal brand. And personal branding is, brands are like sponges. They can't they get everything, they keep everything that's good and bad about the brand. And the fact that my personal brand, your personal brand impact Yale, we don't know own the brands anyway. It's what's being said out there that really shapes what the brand is. Kathleen: Don't they say that your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room? Steve: Your brand is what other people say. We've lost control of our brand when the Internet became popular. So, really personal branding... I think people appreciate I still answer most of the questions on the blog and I think people appreciate the fact that it's not me I'm not building my personal brand. I think a lot of people need help they're not getting in other places. And what I do is just, I give them the what to do and how to do it. And it's not about building a personal brand at all. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: So interesting. I love your story and it's unbelievable what you guys have done. We don't have too much more time, so I want to make sure before we wrap up that I asked you the two questions I ask all of my guests. The first one being we're all about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you know, who you think is really killing it with inbound marketing right now? Steve: Obviously great adversary Marcus Sheridan his killing it. I think back to our first conversation, there were two thoughts and went through my head as A. I need to do this B. I want him to eat his words. And you know the funny thing is it's like I want it to be better than him. But it never worked out that way because he was on other things it's almost like you go into the battlefield and you get a note from guys saying. "Hey, the land is yours and by the way I love what you're doing and all the rest of it, but I'm busy taking over France or whatever." His journey into his personal brand of videos is really compelling and I think his role with the pool company. I think they do a great job. The person that I liked the most in this space is a Crystal Cornea and what she did at Block Imaging I thought was fantastic. She made buying refurbs cool. She made people in that company feel cool writing about it. For me, I tell people it's good to do because it's good for your personal brand that I shouldn't control your brand. But she made it cool to do that. I've kind of lost touch with Block and what they've done since but I know she's left and she works as a consultant for other people, but I really love the way she goes about it. She's very inclusive and she did a great job with Block. Kathleen: Yeah, she's really impressive and you know, Marcus is, you're right. I interviewed him I think he was my first episode of this year. And the thing that I love about Marcus and you totally hit the nail on the head. He's constantly evolving. And the reason to me is that he's such a student of human nature, which is what makes him great at content marketing. He is not a marketer. He is a student of human nature. And so that is what led him to realize that, hey, we just have to answer people's questions. Right. This isn't super scientific it's almost once you tell somebody they sh they're like, Duh. But it took somebody who wasn't a marketer to figure it out. And somebody who's a keen observer of people. And that's the same thing that he's doing with video. He's a very keen observer of people and how they interact and communicate and so it makes them incredibly successful. Steve: Oh yeah. I think I the fundamentals to content marketing is the same fundamentals of everything else is. A. Do know what you're doing? B. Can you communicate it? And that'll come if you know what you're doing and C. And this is the really important part, this is like the C-level stuff is, are you executed once you've said that? And those three, if you put those three together, you have some special. Kathleen: And I always say also, can you get out of your own way? Because often marketers are their own worst enemies and they take their human hat off and put their marketing hat on and they write like robots and it's just, it's interesting. Steve: So they write and a lot more people are starting to write for search engines and that's troubling too. And they can't basically answer the question. There's so many people that... Everyone talks about tips, hacks, it's got to be 2000 words now or whatever it is. But the person that answers the question that best will get ranked because Google's not stupid they'll give the best experience wins. And if you can answer the question on a 1,000 words and is more compelling than the person writing 2000 words and you'll win. Kathleen: Right. The only correct answer to how long does an article need to be is as long as is required to answer the question. Second question is, the world of digital marketing is changing really quickly. And obviously your a CEO, you're not wearing the marketing hat in the company, but you're somebody who is keenly aware of marketing. How do you stay up to date and make sure that you're not falling behind the times with marketing? Steve: That's a great question now that I'm in Boston now I've commuted to stores. I actually have a commute. So I podcast a lot and there's some good marketing podcast. Patel has a very good one, Tony Robbins has a good one, some of the paid search guys have good ones. There's five or six, I'll listen to I'll read blog post and then I'll go to some conferences. Impact has become important over the last couple of years.Certainly HubSpot, we've been going to HubSpot they used to have it at the, at the Hilton hotel and [Copley 00:37:51] two rooms. When I was there initially I think it was 400 people in two tracks. And RF, which is the Retail Foundation in January they put a good one in New York, such marketing conferences and other one I'll go to like four or five conferences a year. If there's a good class I'll do that, Linkedin learning is apart, Social Media Examiner, they have to get some good stuff too. So it's a constant because everything changes and you want to be on top of that certainly. Kathleen: It Can be very tough to keep up with but I do think it's a matter of picking your five or six sources that you really love and just sticking with those and you've got anything else on top of it. That's gravy. Steve: The one thing is it's you can only be especially if you're a small team and I think this is geared more to a small business maybe, but you've got a small team or if you're a single person, like me and Pat were initially. You can only be very good in it one or two aspects. You can't be great at blogging, great at Instagram, great at Pinterest, great at Google ads. You can't be great at like there are 10 things that you can be really great in marketing that can move the needle, but pick one or two. That A. Figured out where customers are and you learned Google analytics for that. And two figure out what your passions are. If your passions with photography, like I'm not, Instagram would be a good one for you, Pinterest would be a good one for you. Wherever you think you can really dominate a certain aspect, rather be just mediocre at everything. You do not need to everything you needed to one or two things really, really well. Kathleen: Right. That's the old Jack of all trades, master of none problem. Right? Steve: Very true. How to connect with Steve Kathleen: This has been so great if somebody wants to learn more about Yale Appliance or connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that? Steve: I don't really know. Kathleen: Visit your website I would assume, right? Steve: Yeah. I'm on Twitter I guess like everybody else. I've got 3000 followers. I have no idea who they are. Certainly LinkedIn, my email address, you can certainly give steve.sheinkopf@yaleappliance.com. This community it's been really good to me and I'm happy to really answer any questions that anybody has. About marketing or inbound marketing or anything else. So email, Linkedin. My name is Steve Sheinkopf obviously, Twitter that type of stuff. I'll get back to you eventually. Kathleen: Great. Well, I will put the links to all those things in the short notes. And of course you already said that you answer all the questions on the blog. So I would think that people could go there and if they have questions about appliances, they know who to ask. You know what to do next... Kathleen: And if you're listening and you learnt something new, or you liked what you heard, of course, please leave the podcast a five star review on Apple Podcasts. That's how we get funds. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thanks Steve. Steve: Alright. Thank you Kathleen.

Lots of marketers talk about the importance of backlinks, but few have solid processes for earning them at scale. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Liam Martin digs into the details of the backlinking process he's been using to 10X organic traffic to his business websites, including Time Doctor and Staff.com.   If you're serious about SEO and understand the importance of backlinks, this episode is for you. Liam gets into a lot of specifics about how he hires his team of researchers and linkers, what they're paid, how they're incentivized to get links, and how he tracks performance. He also shares the copywriting formula he uses to convince other sites to link to his.  So many actionable takeaways that anyone can use to build their own backlinking strategy! Highlights from my conversation with Liam include: At the time Liam started building his backlinking strategy, he'd been blogging for three or four years and had a domain ranking of around 60. Today, his sites have a domain ranking of 80, which is a significant improvement and an impressive ranking in its own right. They had been focusing on on-page SEO for quite some time and realized that if they were going to get serious, they'd need to do more off-page SEO.  Liam rebuilt his entire team to be able to focus on off-page SEO and today, he has a sales team focused specifically on getting links.  Liam is the CMO and has two people (an Editor and SEO Manager) who report to him. Under them, there are writers, researchers and linkers. Once they identify keywords they want to target, their researchers try to find the content that current ranks at the top of the search engine results pages for that keyword, and identify the email addresses and names of the authors of that content. They will not carry out a backlinking campaign unless they have at least 500 emails. Once the emails are identified, they are sent to the team of linkers, who are the people that conduct the outreach to the authors that they would like backlinks from.  His team has a 15 to 20% conversion rate on the emails they send out. To incentive his team, Liam developed a compensation system that rewards linkers based on the domain authority of the links they get. He has found that listicles and statistical articles get the most backlinks. Because his team is remote and located all over the world, Liam spends time each quarter auditing some of the emails they are sending out to make sure they are on-brand.  In the two years that Liam and his team have been executing this strategy, they've gone from getting just a few links a month to getting hundreds of links a month, all while improving domain authority and organic traffic considerably. Resources from this episode: Check out the Time Doctor and Running Remote websites Subscribe to the Running Remote YouTube Channel Connect with Liam on LinkedIn Follow Liam on Twitter Join the Running Remote Community Group Follow Liam on Instagram Get in touch with Liam at liam@timedoctor.com or liam@runningremote.com  Listen to the podcast to get the step-by-step backlinking strategy that Liam Martin and his team use to build domain authority and grow organic traffic. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. My name is Kathleen Booth, and I'm your host. This week, my guest is Liam Martin, who's the co-founder and CMO of Time Doctor, Running Remote Conference, and Staff.com. Welcome, Liam. Liam Martin (Guest): Thanks for having me. Liam and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: I am excited to talk to you because I got an email from somebody who said that you had increased your organic traffic from 12,000 to 120,000 in under two years, which is a big jump. When I hear things like that, my first thought is "I want to talk to this guy and find out how he did it." About Liam Martin Kathleen: Before we jump into that, though, I want to hear a little bit more about you and your journey, and how you wound up where you are today, and talk to me about what these various companies and events are all about. Liam: Sure. Well, first of all, before we get into that, I didn't do it. Other people did it, which is actually the only way that you can do this, which we can talk about later on. So, human being, more specifically, human being on Planet Earth, more specifically in Canada, I am a co-founder of, as you said, Time Doctor, Staff.com and Running Remote, and those all kind of tie into a singular concept, which is we really want to empower people to be able to work wherever they want, whenever they want. So, we personally have a hundred remote employees in 32 different countries all over the world, and we believe that working remotely makes people happier. It reduces global suck on Planet Earth, and that's really why we do everything that we're currently doing with Time Doctor, Staff and Running Remote. Kathleen: I have to just say before you go on to the next thing, I so wholeheartedly endorse that because I have been working remotely for the last two years at a company where 60% of the team is remote, and I manage a team of eight people, and I think five of us are remote. It has not been detrimental at all to our effectiveness. So, 100% agree. Liam: It will even get better once everyone goes remote. There is a, what in the industry we call a double silo effect, or founder magic problem, which is if you have a physical office, and then you have remote employees, a lot of those remote employees feel disempowered to be able to make the same decisions as the local employees, because they're closer to the decision maker. That's actually really problematic, which is why I'm in one of my crash pads right now. We used to have eight. Now we have two because they were just so ineffective for us in terms of having office space. Even when there's four to five people in this office, and we're going to do a meeting, we all do meetings on our own Zoom accounts. So, we all meet separately to be able to make sure that everyone has the perception that we are all separate, because those remote employees will definitely feel left out if everyone's kind of around me, who is the decision maker. It creates significant long-term problems in terms of your business. Kathleen: I love that, because it puts everybody on an even playing field, and as somebody who has been remote, I can speak to that, the power of that, absolutely. It makes a huge difference. Liam: But we're here to talk about SEO. Right? Kathleen: Yes. Liam's SEO strategy Liam: So, basically, the entire SEO content strategy came from our belief that you can effectively build a content team with remote workers, and they can be as effective, if not more effective than an in-house team. So, we had basically been kind of playing around with blogging for maybe three to four years, and we had built up to maybe a DR, I'd say 60 sites, and for everyone that maybe people don't know, DR is domain rank on Ahrefs and SEO Moz. You'll be able to- Kathleen: 60 is really good. Liam: Yeah. 60 is pretty good. I think we're an 80 now, so we definitely moved up a few pegs, and it's all exponential. So, a 60 to a 70 is 10 times harder than a 50 to a 60, as an example. So, we had built that site up to about a 60, and then we realized, well, we need to get really serious about this. One of the things that we weren't paying attention to fundamentally was our off-page. So, we were doing a whole bunch of on-page. We knew how to optimize for that, and again, for anyone that is not really knowing what the heck I'm talking about, on-page is basically where you change the on-page factors of a website, and off-page is where you bring in new backlinks to a particular web page. So, we had basically rebuilt the entire team off of that premise. So, we built a sales team, which instead of getting deals, they would get links. We implemented a technology stack behind that. So, fundamentally, the way the team is structured right now is I am still the CMO, so I review two individually that directly report to me, which is the content editor and the SEO manager. The content editor has a team of about 20 writers that we all have on contract. Me, the SEO manager, and the content editor, we meet every quarter to be able to define all of the different keywords for the next quarter. We identify those keywords through Ahrefs. That's what we use to be able to do all of our SEO research. Then those particular keywords are sent out to the writers. We pre-vetted all those writers, so we know exactly what kind of quality of work they can produce. Those articles come back to the SEO manager. Then the SEO manager has his team, which is we have linkers and researchers. So, usually we'll have one researcher to every two linkers. The researcher will identify... Let's say I'm trying to rank for online collaboration tools, which we're number one for, which is about a $36 click. We also identify very clearly when we're trying to figure out our quarterly numbers or our quarterly keywords, what are we looking for. So, we may not be looking for the end traffic number. So, if we really wanted to, we could probably get a million clicks coming to the website per month, but they'd be really non-valuable clicks for us. So, online collaboration tools is a $36 click, which is very expensive, and I think it has about 2,000 searches a month. That one keyword probably does $60,000 to $70,000 worth of traffic value to the website per month. We identify that keyword. We get our researcher to basically go in and identify who are the top people in the SERPs, and then who are those top people in the SERPs that other people are linking to. We do not proceed on a keyword unless we have about 500 emails that are contextual, that are all set up. The email then goes to the linkers. So, the researcher basically researched the data, and then the linker is kind of the closer. They'll go out and say, "Hey, I need to... Hi, Kathleen. This is Liam from Time Doctor. Really excited about chatting with you today. I saw this article about X, Y, Z, about online collaboration tools. I saw that you linked to it in this context. I think I have a better link that I can redirect to you, or I would love it if you linked to my website as well, to this web page as well. However, we've looked through your site, and we've identified that you're really trying to rank for Starbucks coffee cups," as an example. "It looks like you're ninth for that, and we just happen to have an article about Starbucks coffee cups, and we put you in it. Here's the link that we gave you." Then that is really the big jump that we basically had, which was I get about 40 to 50 of these a week, of people that are just doing cold outreach emails. Fundamentally, the success rate on those, because we used to be doing those, were about 2% to 3%. Now we get about 15% to 20% success rate, because what we've done is we're actually giving out a link. So, we're telling them, "Listen. We've given you a link. Here's the context of that link, and more importantly, I'm going to make this super easy for you. We'd love to be able to be in this article. Here's the paragraph that we've already pre-written for you. So, if you want to just cut and paste and throw that in, you can absolutely do it. If not, you can write something else." Those definitely work for what I would define as the DR 50-plus range, because there's two different categorizations of the way that we do outreach. So, if someone has a domain rank of above 50, it's probably a multi-email exchange, so basically, those linkers need to act like salespeople. So, they need to be able to communicate very clearly through email. The average exchange for us is seven email exchanges before we actually end up working on a partnership. So, it's pretty intense, but it definitely works. As I said, it's a 15% to 20%, basically, conversion rate. Kathleen: Wow. All right. I have so many questions for you. This is really interesting to me, and to back up, backlinks is a topic that I think is fascinating as a marketer. I've been in this business for a long time on the agency side. I've worked with some really savvy marketers, and it has been very surprising to me how many of them give little to no credence or effort to backlinking strategies. They either discount- Liam: I mean, they're in trouble then. Kathleen: I know, I know. They discount the value of backlinks altogether, or they understand conceptually that they're valuable, but they don't put any effort into it. They just sort of wait for backlinks to happen organically. In some cases that happens, depending upon the type of content you create, but in other cases it doesn't. It's always been interesting to me because when you read online about backlinking, there's a ton of content about why it's important. There's not a ton of content about how to actually go about doing it well. So, this is why I'm really interested to dig into this. Liam: The other part that's really important that's connected to this is you can run these campaigns, but at least in my experience, I see the majority of them fail. So, if you go to an agency, a DR 50 link is going to cost you about $500, generally, $300 to $500. Our cost is, I believe last month it was $36 per DR 50-plus link, so a significant cost reduction, and that's just, basically, I know that agencies are running these links, and they're acquiring them for $36, but then they're selling them on for $300 to $500. So, it's actually very profitable to be able to do this type of work, but you're right. There's isn't that much value inside of it because I think a lot of people try and fail. How Liam holds his team accountable for backlinks Liam: So, what we did, which was different, is we didn't just implement these processes. We also made everyone accountable to these processes. It was very difficult to be able to get the right measure in place because, as an example, let's just say I said, "Well, I need to find out how many backlinks you're going to get. I'm going to measure your success by how many backlinks you get." If you're a linker, what you're going to do is you're going to approach a whole bunch of DR 10 sites, because those are really easy to be able to get backlinks on. We just got a backlink last week from Salesforce. It's a DR 89 site. It's very, very powerful as a backlink. It's probably worth a thousand DR 10s, as an example. So, how am I supposed to reward someone for working on a month-and-a-half to be able to build a really, to be able to link to a DR 89 when instead you could probably, in that same amount of time, get 10 DR 10 backlinks? Well, what we implemented was cumulative domain authority. So, in essence, what happens is at the end of the month, we count up not how many backlinks you got, we look at that measure as well, but then we also measure the amount of DR you got inside of all of those links. So, if you got a backlink from Salesforce, which was 89, you'd get 89 points, and then if you got a regular website that was a DR 11, you'd get 11 points. So, 89 plus 11, that's now your new score. You got 100 points, and let's keep going on through the week and the month. Then we just pay that out based off commission. So, literally, the top linker for that month gets a cash bonus, which they're always fighting for. What type of content is most likely to get backlinks? Kathleen: I bet. So, I want to back up for a second. You start, you identify the keywords that you want to rank for. You're creating all this content. Are there any particular types of content that you find perform better in terms of other people being willing to link to them? Liam: Yes. So, as an example, Time Doctor is a time tracking tool. It's pretty boring. No one really wants to link to time tracking blog posts, so it's very... We also have another category, which is our golden list. So, we usually have a floating list of five pages that if someone owes us a favor, we'll ask them to link to that. So, it might be something super boring, like maybe one of our integration pages, and we want to rank number one for Asana time tracking. That would be an example. No one really wants to link to the Asana time tracking page, so we would throw that up there. But outside of that, listicles, those are the ones that end up converting better than anything else, and they're very easy to be able to get links for if you're doing direct outreach. Outside of that, however, there are the statistical articles, which are basically just link juice. So, we do a lot of articles, like we tracked 10 million work hours, and here's what we found, that type of stuff. You don't even really need to do link building for that, primarily because, number one, they're going to acquire links on their own, and number two, it's very difficult to be able to optimize them for a particular keyword that we would end up seeing as a purchaser's keyword, as a buying keyword, which is a little bit unfortunate. But you can write those types of articles to basically raise your general domain rank, but you're not necessarily going to rank for anything in particular. So, you might write 10 of those, as an example, and maybe your domain rank will go from 80 to 82, whereas if you had written 10 very focused keywords for conversion, you might get an extra 50 customers a month, but your domain rank is not going to go up. Kathleen: Yeah. That makes sense. It's interesting you talk about kind of data-packed articles, because in my experience, the type of content that we've seen perform really well from an organic backlinking perspective is infographics, and that tends to be because they have a lot of data behind them, and they're easy to share, and people like to pop them into other articles and things like that, but yeah. Building a backlinking team Kathleen: So, you create this content, and then you have this team of people. You mentioned having researchers and linkers. Can you talk a little bit more about how you found those people, and what kind of a profile are you looking for? Liam: Sure. So, for anyone that kind of wants context on this, I would suggest you read From Impossible to Inevitable... Aaron Ross is the author. From Predictable to Inevitable. Darn, can't remember the name of it. Kathleen: One of those two. Liam: Just Google Aaron Ross, and read his book. He was the guy that took basically Salesforce to a hundred million a year, and his model was to divide... His big kind of aha moment was dividing a sales rep from a lead generator. So, that was a big, huge sort of moment in sales, which was people that talked to other human beings should generally not be doing the research to be able to find those leads, and by dividing those two tasks, he was able to significantly improve the productivity of his team. I'm just implementing the same thing for SEO. So, we have a researcher that literally goes out and identifies not just, as I said before, let's say the top 20 on SERP results for a particular keyword, but we'll use a tool like Ahrefs to go into those SERPs or into those links, and we'll see who linked to those people, and that's where we amass our list. We do not proceed with running a campaign unless we have a minimum of 500 emails to work with. Kathleen: So, let me pause you for a second. Let's just, for argument's sake, say your keyword is remote work. I'm just going to make this up. So, you have this keyword, remote work. You've created content, and then you say to your researcher, "Go do your thing," and they take the words remote work, and they're looking at who is already ranking for that keyword phrase. Is that accurate? Liam: Yeah. So, I'm just going to use the direct example that you just sent me right now. Kathleen: Awesome. Liam: So, the first article, or the first URL for remote work is We Work Remotely, who's actually... We know these guys. They're good friends of ours. They have a DR 74 site, and they have about $250,000 of monthly traffic value. So, they have to their main page 1,200 referring domains. Kathleen: And you're seeing this all in Ahrefs, correct? Liam: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So, all I would do is I would then grab that list, I would identify everyone that has actually linked to that base domain from that list, and then I would load it into another tool that we have called BuzzStream. BuzzStream is basically the tool that we use for outreach. So, we load everyone into that, and then it gives you the context of all of the conversations that have occurred. So, once we load those new 1,200 people into BuzzStream, we might identify that we've already actually spoken to about 273 of those people, and here's the context of one of those linkers that interacted with them. So, I can also give you context, which is, "Hey, Kathleen. This is Liam. I know that you spoke to John a couple months ago about link X, Y, Z, but I would love to talk to you about link A, B, C," so that people have that context, and they know, "Oh, okay. I'm actually being listened to," and that just allows us to be able to automate the process a lot faster and easier. So, once that's actually all loaded in, then we'll usually have some templates that we've already worked from, but usually inside of those templates there's customization that goes into every single link that goes out. We do not let a non-customized email go out for anyone that's below a DR 50. We've just found there's kind of... That's the line that we've drawn, which is there are people that get these emails all the time, like me, and there are people that don't. Usually, the ones that don't are pretty easy to be able to knock off, and the ones that are a lot more difficult, you need to have context, and you need to be able to float above everyone else, because think of... I'm that person. In my inbox today, there were probably about... I think I saw about a dozen of these types of cold outreach emails, and none of them really work because they're asking for something, and they're not giving me anything in exchange. Kathleen: Yeah, I'm that person, too. I get a lot of those emails, which is part of the reason I was excited to talk to you, because I'm like, I want to talk to somebody for whom this is actually working, because I know most of the ones I get, it doesn't work. But to back up for a second, you get the list from Ahrefs of domains that are linking to, in this case, We Work Remotely, and you're putting... Am I correct that you're putting those referring domains into BuzzStream? Liam: So, what we'll do is we'll find out who is the author that actually linked to that particular article. Kathleen: Oh, okay. Liam: So, did it come from a blog post, or did it come from a base domain? Wherever the link came from, we try to hunt down who the author was, because we want to talk to a human being, and then we redirect that back over. So, that takes a while. That's why you need researchers to be able to do that. I would probably say a good researcher can knock out something... Let's say we're just going to take all that data and crunch it into BuzzStream. Out of those thousand people, BuzzStream will probably only figure out about half, and then the other 50% will go through them and will throw out people that are DR 10, as an example, because it's just fundamentally not worth our time. We'll pay very special attention to everyone that's a DR 50 and above, and we'll do two to five minutes of research per person, and we'll just identify who they are, what we think their email address is, and then we'll do that outreach. Kathleen: So, talk to me a little bit more about how you find these researchers, and what kind of experience or background or profile are you looking for? Liam: Sure. So, we generally find these guys all over Planet Earth. Our researchers don't necessarily need to be good in the English language. They need to be good at doing research, so a lot of attention to detail, data entry people, data work, those are the people that we really look for. Fundamentally, we're looking for people that are excited about the grind, because it's a grind. I'm not going to tell you anything different. If you go to any sales floor, you'll have closers and you'll have SDRs. Right? SDRs are the people that are basically developing the lead for the closer, for the actual salesperson, and they're doing the research on that. Those people grind out every single day. Usually, they'll do that for a year or two, and then they get upgraded to being a closer. So, we do the same thing inside of the company. Everyone has a passion for SEO, and that's actually another big just basic requirement, is a lot of people will come in and kind of say, "Well, I know how to do SEO, and I ranked this local," I don't know, "this local coffee shop for coffee in Timbuktu," or something like that, and they come in a little bit cocky, but then within a week or two, we just realize very quickly that they're somebody that should be a researcher, and not necessarily a linker as of yet. So, they'll spend about three to six months... Generally, some people, if we're trying to develop them as a linker, we'll usually have them be a researcher for the first three months, just so that we can see that they can do the grind, because if they can't, they're generally not going to stick around that long even as a linker. Then some people love to stay there for... We've had people that have worked with us for years as linkers. They love the job. Kathleen: If somebody's listening, and they're like, "I want to do this," how much should they expect to pay for a researcher? Is this an hourly job or... Liam: So, it really depends. We pay a base, and then we add a commission structure to the amount of researched individuals that end up actually converting, not converting, but that are actually legitimate. So, we'll do this research, and then someone will say, "Hey, it's definitely Kathleen, and this is Kathleen's email address," and it will end up bouncing, so that counts against their rate. So, generally for us, our researchers are all above 95%. I believe no one starts to get into commissions until they're above 97%, but that's generally the way that we run it. Those people would be anywhere from, I would say, 500 to 1,000 US per month per linker, and those guys are generally going to be found in the Philippines. You're going to be able to find some in Indonesia, maybe some in Bangladesh. However, in my opinion, you're going to pay a little bit more for people in the Philippines, but they are way more effective than people in those other countries in Southeast Asia. Kathleen: So interesting. Thank you for sharing all that detail. That's really helpful. Okay. So, we've talked about the researchers and what they do. So, they identify the opportunities, they find the email addresses, and then they turn that over to the linker. Correct? Liam: The linker, yeah. Kathleen: Got it. Liam: So, the linker the is very different from a researcher. They must have a very solid grasp of the English language because they can't just send a template. They have to be able to edit those things and communicate in the way that our target market, our target demographic, would actually communicate, which are generally people in Western countries. So, they would not say something like, "Hello, ma'am, Kathleen." They would say, "Hey, Kathleen. What's up? This is Liam from Time Doctor. Saw this article, thought it was really cool. Listen. You made a huge mistake. You didn't link to my article. No problem. I can totally solve that for you. Here's a paragraph of exactly how to link to me, and by the way, we saw inside of your site that you really want to link to Starbucks cups, and we know that we can totally figure that out for you. We already set up that link to be able to send out. Hope you're having a great day. Would love to be able to chat with you about the link," as an example. That would be the way that you would communicate, and that's going to get a much higher response rate than the over-formalized communication that generally you'll find with individuals from Southeast Asia in particular, and to a degree, sometimes in Eastern Europe. So, that team is actually a lot more distributed. We have some people in Southeast Asia. We have some people in Eastern Europe. We have some people in California. We actually have just implemented a much more serious team in Lagos, in Nigeria, for any of you that maybe have gotten this email a couple years ago or 10 years ago. You know, the Nigerian prince emails? Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah. Liam: So, that doesn't work anymore, but these guys are email ninjas. They're absolutely amazing operators at figuring out how to be able to get a response from someone and communicating clearly. So, they're amazing, and a lot of them kind of want to go legit. So, they will work for a company like ours instead. Kathleen: Interesting. Yeah. I mean, a lot of those guys did get people to respond to those Nigerian prince emails, so- Liam: Generally, it would be a .004% response rate, but that response rate would end up being something- Kathleen: Paying for the whole thing. Liam: Exactly. So, that's something that... Even with these direct emails outreach programs, they still do work, but they only have a conversion rate of about 2%. You want a convert rate of 15% to 20%. We found that we're a lot more cost-effective. I've spoken to some agencies, and they probably work out a link to about a hundred dollars per person, and it's because they just don't take the time to be able to build context. The other added advantage to building context is you don't just get one link from that person. You may get five or six over two years, because you have that personal context, and I've got all that context in BuzzStream, so I can bring it up whenever I want, and Kathleen remembers this interaction that we had seven months ago, as an example. How to conduct backlink research Kathleen: So, you talked about when you do this outreach to... Let's say I'm your recipient, and you do this outreach to me, and you say, "I know that you're trying to get found for terms like Starbucks cups." Who is doing that research, how are they doing it, and how are they identifying that that's the goal of the recipient? Liam: So, I would slot your domain directly into Ahrefs, and I would identify what are the top links that you're trying to work for, and there's two categories. There's kind of like a top three. So, usually people that rank first to third, you're not really going to be able to change their lives in any significant way in terms of that particular keyword. It's usually quite competitive, or it's a branded term. The ones that we really like to go after are the seven-to-10 space. So, those are the keywords that they're probably working on, and maybe they actually only launched that article three months ago or six months ago, and they're trying to work on it, and we can see they're trying to work on it, because let's say there's five or six referring domains into it, and we'll say, "Yeah. We'll just put a link in there. We'll just link from our site to your site." They understand the value of a DR 80 link, which is actually quite funny because a lot of the times we get outreach from, let's say, a DR 65-plus website, and my first response is, "I'm interested, but I'd love a link back." The smart ones say, "Of course," and the stupid ones say, "Well, I don't have the authority to be able to do that." Well, just for anyone that's listening, do that, because that's going to convince me... You're talking to an SEO person, and I'm not going to link to a DR 60 if I'm a DR 80, if I'm not getting anything back. Right? So, that's really something that I just don't understand that's not happening in the industry, because for us, we're very happy to be able to give out those links. We see that as kind of just... We do it before we ask for anything back. In that introductory email, "By the way, here's a DR 80 link. Really happy to see if we could work in a deeper way," and if they don't want to work with us, that link stands. Asking for backlinks Kathleen: Yeah, yeah. So, there's that element of reciprocity. Okay. So, they have this data, they know what they're trying to link for. You've talked about how these emails are crafted. I'm curious. You talked about sometimes it's seven emails back-and-forth. What's happening in those seven emails? Because it seems like the way you're putting these emails together, it's fairly straightforward. You've laid out all the context. You've given them the paragraph of text. I mean, at that point, it would seem to me, as somebody who gets these emails all the time, that they either say, "Okay. Yeah, I'm going to drop it in. Here it is," or, "No." So, what happens in that back-and-forth? Liam: So, there's a couple main kind of categories of things that happen. One of the things that happen, particular on really powerful sites, is, "Hey, Kathleen. Not a problem. Links are $500 a pop, and here's the context." Then we have to go back saying, "Listen. We don't pay for links. We're just looking to be able to have you link to our website, and we've already linked to your website. Here's our stats." So, we literally pull in, "Here's our Ahrefs data. We'd love to be able to see if we could work on a deeper partnership together." That's one major category. Kathleen: Got it. Liam: Another one is no one really has the authority to be able to make that decision. So, sometimes we actually contact someone who is, let's say, a blogger that's maybe done piecework for that blog, and they say, "I don't care because I wrote that article six months ago, and thanks for reaching out, but I don't really care." Well, then we have to say, "Well, do you know who's in charge right now? Could you let me know?" Then we're going to get access to that person. Then we, in essence, send the same email. Then the other ones end up actually just turning into larger partnerships. So, we'll actually say, "Well, maybe we shouldn't just work on this link exchange. Maybe we should also do a webinar together, or maybe we should do something else together." So, all of the linkers have full authority to be able to build at least the framework for those partnerships, and then it gets approved by me. Keeping the team on-brand Kathleen: Okay. So, this is super interesting. You have all these people distributed all over the world, and you're giving them, really, a lot of leeway in terms of the way they communicate with these other domain owners or authors or bloggers, et cetera. My first question is, do you ever worry that the way that they communicate or the things they say are going to kind of go outside of your typical brand voice or have some kind of negative ramification on your company or your brand? Liam: Absolutely. So, we do spot-check auditing on all of the emails that are going out, and we're really fast and responsive to... We have a lot of linkers on the team. I think we have dozens on the team altogether at this point. So, a friend of mine said, "Well, do you know who this person is?" I said, "No, I don't know who that person... It doesn't ring a bell to me." "Oh. Well, they just emailed me from Time Doctor saying they want a link." So, we need to be mindful about that, and he actually said, "This is probably one of the best cold email outreaches I've ever gotten," which was great for us, but I need to be able to be mindful of that context to make sure that there aren't negative implications on the brand. So, the way that we do that is audit the process. So, I'll even do randomized auditing of just... I'll look at every quarter maybe 10 emails from each linker, and that doesn't take me more than a minute or two to kind of float through, and then our SEO manager also makes sure that all of this stuff is being monitored properly. We're also really looking at... So, we're always trying new things, new titles, new copy templates, and we share that information amongst ourselves. So, in that process, a lot of this... We had an article just recently, or an ad just recently that went out that got really good attention. It got a really fantastic click-through rate, but it also got a lot of hate. So, we have to understand what's the difference between trying to get someone's attention and trying to get someone's attention and then hating it. We need to be able to draw that line. Tracking backlink performance Kathleen: Interesting. Yeah. I mean, that was going to be my next question, was how do you keep track of it all, but it sounds like you've got processes in place, you have a team in place. Liam: Yeah. We do the quarterly audit. We make sure that our SEO manager is managing all those linkers very quickly and efficiently, and then we're always exchanging information. We literally do a weekly meeting about what's all the new split tests that we've tried. So, every linker is also responsible for implementing a test every week, I believe, inside of their copy. So, they're basically always optimizing their outreach, and then we come back, and we do some more learnings. We also make sure that everyone's reading all the industry news for SEO and all that kind of stuff, so that if there are some interesting new insights, we can implement those as well. The impact of backlinks on SEO and traffic Kathleen: Interesting. So, I'm fascinated by this whole process, but I want to shift gears for a second and talk about results. You've touched on this a little bit in terms of response rates and things, but let's just go back and recap now. So, this is a process you've been doing for how long? Liam: We've been doing it for about two years. I think if anyone actually wants to jump into Moz or Ahrefs, you'll pretty much see the exact point in which we started doing it because we were going from getting, I don't know, maybe a couple hundred links a month to getting, or sorry, getting a couple dozens links a month to getting a couple hundred links a month. So, we literally just- Kathleen: Can you send me a screenshot of that? Because I would love to put that in my show notes. Liam: Yeah, sure. No problem. Kathleen: That would be awesome. So, you've been doing that for that amount of time. Talk me through, again, your response rates, what this has done to traffic, how the links have grown. Liam: Yeah. So, the bigger thing that we've really seen is general increase in domain authority. That's been the thing that's allowed us to... So, as an example, if we talk about remote work on Time Doctor, Google's generally going to give us the benefit of the doubt. So, they're automatically going to say, "These guys blog about this stuff all the time. They really are a trusted source in that particular niche, so we're going to give it more traffic than we would a DR 10 site that's never written about remote work or outsourcing ever before," and that's really the huge advantage, is a lot of this stuff is quite disingenuous when I discuss it because we're currently at the point in which the snowball effect has really taken hold, so Google already really trusts us. If you're a brand new person with absolutely no links whatsoever, I'm going to tell you, this is going to take about six months before you really start to see dividends, but however, I would say, and this is a bold claim, but I would say over a 10-year period, so if you plan on owning a business for more than 10 years, SEO is the absolute best cost-per-dollar advertising method known to mankind. It is better than, in my opinion, viral traffic, because those are spikes, whereas this is continuous long-term traffic that is going to be so cost-effective, it is probably 60% of our overall funnel, and we spend as much money as we possibly can on Facebook ads and everything else, and we just constantly come back to SEO because it's just such a return on investment. Kathleen: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, and I would agree with that. That's one of the things at IMPACT that we're really fortunate... We have a tremendous amount of organic traffic, and it has saved us a lot of money in not needing to advertise. Liam: I almost see it as it's an investment that produces dividends, whereas a Facebook ad, as an example, is you're going to get conversions now, and those are going to be great. You're going to get a conversion this month. Those numbers will probably work, right? You put in a hundred bucks, and maybe you make 110 bucks. But with SEO, you're going to put in a hundred bucks this month, and maybe you're going to get a dollar back this month, but then next month you're going to get two, and then four, and then eight, and then 16, and if you continuously put in that hundred dollars every single month, you're going to start to create fantastic dividends. Kathleen: Yeah. I always talk about it as the difference between renting a house and buying a house. When you rent your house, you stop paying rent, you get evicted, and you got no value. Liam: Yeah. Well, you're renting the traffic. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Yeah, exactly. So, fascinating. All right. Well, so interesting. I could talk to you about this forever, and I love the amount of detail we've been able to go into, but we're going to run out of time. So, two questions that I always ask all of my guests, the first is... We talk a ton about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really doing inbound well right now? Liam: Yeah. I thought about that quite a bit, and my original response was HubSpot, just because their SEO game is so strong, and they blog about everything. If you throw them into a tool like Ahrefs or Moz, which is generally how I see websites today, they will blog about kitchen utensils, as an example. They just want traffic with a big capital T. So, I've recognized that has been really interesting. The other website that I would talk about, which is relatively new, and it's not really a website, but it's more like an app, is Wish.com. So, I don't know if you've ever encountered that e-commerce site before, but they've, in essence, built an app that's gamified e-commerce. So, think of it almost like an Amazon, but it's a video game. So, it's Amazon, but it's a video game, and what they're doing is they're doing a lot of SEO traffic to be able to bring in a free lead, and then they are doing a lot of retargeting into the game again. So, they'll say, "Hey, webcams are 95% off today only," and it's a Facebook ad, and when you click on it, you're brought into the Wish app. So, it's a very interesting process, and they've, in essence, taken the architecture and the mechanics of the video game world for mobile games, and they've moved that into an e-commerce platform. When I look at their numbers and how much money they're spending, it boggles the mind. I think that they are doing the same thing that Amazon did back in the early 2000s where Amazon bought... I mean, they were the number one customer for Google, I believe, Google Search, for eight or nine years. They did that because they knew there was such a massive arbitrage opportunity to be able to shift all of that traffic off of Google, which honestly should've built their own e-commerce platform, and they're moving it into Amazon, and now they've built one of the largest companies on Planet Earth. So, I would check out Wish.com, even just install the app, and then just see how they interact with you, because I think it's genius. Kathleen: So interesting. I can't wait to check that one out. Second question, the thing I hear from most marketers is that the world of digital marketing is just changing so quickly, it's really hard to keep up. There's so much information coming at you. How do you personally stay up-to-date and make sure that you're still kind of on the cutting edge? Liam: I hire experts in every domain who think about this stuff morning, noon and night, and I pay them a ridiculous amount of money to talk to me for about an hour or two a month. Kathleen: I like it. Liam: So, I have one client, I have an SEO consultant, and I pay this person $2,000 a month, and we have a one-hour conversation a month. Kathleen: Oh, my god. Can I get a job doing that for you for one hour? Liam: This guy is the guy that does- Kathleen: That's a great deal. Liam: ... industrial-level SEO. He's built sites that you would definitely know of. He's managed teams of hundreds of SEOs in single shops, and he's someone who's very passionate about this particular subject. So, for me, I can then take the context, and I usually have myself, my SEO manager, and my content editor on that call, and then he looks at what we've done over the last month, what the goals are for the next month and in the next quarter and in the next year. He's also able to make course corrections that we are not mindful of. So, as an example, let's say our yearly goal is we want to get 10,000 referring domains. Let's throw that out into the air. I think we've got about 5,000 active referring domains, and we have 11,000 historical referring domains right now. So, we want to do 10,000 active referring domains within the next year. Well, what do you need to actually get to that target? Then we identify what we need to do to get to that target. Okay. Then at the end of the day, he'll boil it down to, "Well, you're currently doing 10 blog posts a month. You need to ratchet up to 68 blog posts a month if you want to hit that particular target." So, what's the architecture that we need to be able to implement to be able to hit that target? That's the kind of stuff that I am somewhat not very mindful of, and I should actually be a lot more. As the CMO, I should really be directing the ship in that type of direction, but these consultants that have done it before, they're the ones that I really go to for that type of expertise. Kathleen: Yeah, makes sense. Liam: Yeah. How to connect with Liam Kathleen: Well, this has been fascinating. I have learned so much. If somebody is listening, and they have a question, they want to learn more about you, the work you're doing, or they want to check out some of the companies that you're involved with, what's the best way for them to do that? Liam: You want to check out Time Doctor, go to timedoctor.com. If you want to talk with me, this is another kind of side idea that I have, which is I think that YouTube is actually probably going to be the next place for SEO, so I'm doing some experimentation on YouTube. So, if you go to youtube.com/runningremote, you'll be able to find me, and you'll be able to find a whole bunch of videos. All of our stuff from our Running Remote Conference is free, and we just post everything up there, so you can consume as much as you want from it. But if you put in a comment, I will interact with you within the hour. So, that's the source that I really want to kind of put all of my eggs into because I believe that YouTube is Google 10 years ago, and there's a massive opportunity right now. It's the second-largest search engine in the world, and people actually, instead of just getting a blog post and someone looking at it for 35 seconds, even if they're looking at my stupid face for 35 seconds, it gives you more context, and it allows you to know, hey, this is who I am. You might want to buy some stuff from me in the future. Kathleen: I feel like next year I'm going to have to reach out to you again, and we'll do another interview on the results of your YouTube experiment. Liam: For sure. Kathleen: Awesome. Well, thank you for all of that. I will put all those links in the show notes, so if you're interested in reaching out to Liam, check out the show notes, and you should be able to get in touch with him there, or check out Time Doctor. You know what to do next... Kathleen: If you're listening, and you've learned something new, you liked what you heard, please leave the podcast a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. That is how we get found by new listeners, and if you know somebody who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, please tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because I would love to interview them. Thanks so much. That's it for this week. Thank you, Liam. Liam: Thanks for having me.

How did financial industry startup Rocket Dollar achieve double-digit month-over-month growth in the highly competitive financial services industry? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Rocket Dollar co-founder Thomas Young shares details on the marketing strategy that helped this scrappy startup take on the 800-pound gorillas of the financial industry and quickly grow into a household name within two years of the company's launch. The great thing about Thomas's approach is that it doesn't require a huge budget and is something that any company - in any industry - can use to get results.  Highlights from my conversation with Thomas include: Rocket Dollar sells self-directed 401(k) and IRA accounts for anyone that wants to invest their retirement savings outside of stocks and bonds. The biggest use case is investing in multifamily real estate, venture funds or directly into startups in a way that is tax-protected. The company is a startup in the financial services industry, which is highly competitive and has very large, established players with enormous marketing budgets. Rocket Dollar had to overcome several challenges, one of which was people concerned that the company would not be around in a few years. In addition, they had to fight the perception amongst their target audience that people should be very conservative with their retirement savings and invest only in the traditional, established brokerage houses. Thomas has found that the best medium through which Rocket Dollar can address the challenges it is facing is email, so Thomas's goal in the beginning was always to get someone's email address. One way the company got traction in the beginning was by building upon the personal brands of its founders and focusing specifically on winning its local market in Austin, TX. The team that founded Rocket Dollar knew that differentiation would be key to the company's success, so everything from the company name, to the colors used in the branding and the design of the website is deliberately different than the rest of the financial services industry. Another way they differentiated was through messaging. While the rest of the self directed investing community was using anti-Wall Street messaging, Rocket Dollar channeled a more positive outlook that resonated well with its audience. The Rocket Dollar team knew that it would be essential to build trust with their audience, so they made a concerted effort to personalize the way they marketed, from sending emails directly from a founder rather than a corporate catch-all address, to including their faces on the website, etc. When they were ready to really turn on lead generation, the team used paid search to connect with prospects who were ready to buy. They did this by purchasing ads targeting long tail, high intent keywords that the bigger industry players were ignoring. This approach resulted in approximately half of the company's new contacts coming from its paid search efforts. When a new contact lands on the website, the primary CTA they are faced with is "get started," which is basically an immediate sign up for the product. Anyone who doesn't complete the sign up process is put into a lead nurturing workflow and subscribed to the company's newsletter. They have found that staying top of mind works very well for them, whereas anything that smacks of a hard sell really backfires because it jeopardizes the trust they've built with their audience. The team has invested heavily in creating educational content that it can share via email, and the result is that the company's unsubscribe rate is below a half a percent. Whereas 50% of the company's business comes from its pay-per-click marketing efforts, the other 50% is split evenly between leads from channel partners and customer referrals. Rocket Dollar has grown considerably in the last two years and now has customers in all 50 states, $75 million worth of IRA assets in its accounts, and grow in the double digits month over month. Thomas's advice for other startups that are competing in crowded markets is to win your backyard first, focus on getting email addresses (so you don't have to pay for access to your audience), and pay attention to the little things (make sure your marketing is very buttoned-up). Thomas also recommends leveraging the personal brands of your leadership team.  Resources from this episode: Visit the Rocket Dollar website Connect with Thomas on LinkedIn Follow Thomas on Twitter Contact Thomas by email at thomas@rocketdollar.com Get $100 off the setup fee on a new Rocket Dollar account using the code INBOUNDSUCCESS100 Listen to the podcast to get all the details on how Thomas and the Rocket Dollar team structured a marketing plan that enabled them to take on the giants of the financial industry and achieve double-digit month over month growth. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Thomas Young, who's the co-founder and VP of marketing at Rocket Dollar. Welcome, Thomas. Thomas Young (Guest): Thanks, Kathleen. Thanks for having me. Thomas and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: You have an interesting background because you formerly were an agency guy that used to work with financial services firms, but now you're actually the co-founder and VP of marketing in-house at a financial services firm. Can you talk a little bit more about your journey and your story, and also Rocket Dollar and what it is? About Thomas and Rocket Dollar Thomas: Sure. Yeah. So, my journey, it's been pretty fun and pretty fast-paced. Just right out of college, I kind of jumped into the startup ecosystem here in Austin, and my natural focus just sort of shifted to marketing, sort of accidentally. It was kind of the area that resonated the most with me. I graduated from UT Austin with an economics degree that helps in what I do today, but really, my focus and my sort of passion is marketing. I was working full-time at another company where one of the partners of that company also ran a financial advisory business sort of on the side and asked me if I could help her with some just very basic funnel stuff, everything from running Facebook ads to email marketing, just sort of seeing if we could learn together. It turns out I really enjoyed my time doing that, and so through her network I started getting more and more freelance clients, to the point where I basically quit my day job and focused full-time on this agency freelancing, and what I would do is just kind of run the project and then hire other contractors on Upwork or Fiverr or whatever to sort of help me with the heavy lifting. I really enjoyed doing that, and it was fun to market challenging products, which financial products are always challenging to market, and they're expensive to market, and so you have to get really crafty and creative, which I really enjoyed. In the sort of process of doing that, I came across this product that Rocket Dollar sells, which I'll get into in a sec, and I really didn't like the way it was being done by other companies, and I knew that just being in Austin and being in this space, that there was tech play here, and that this was a product that I really liked, that resonates with not only me, but with a lot of people, a lot of different investors. When I met my co-founders, we kind of decided that it was kind of a no-brainer to do this, because I knew the product, I knew the marketing, and my co-founders know the tech. So, it was just a very natural fit, and it came together really fast. So, what Rocket Dollar does is we sell self-directed 401(k) and IRA accounts for basically anyone with an IRA or a 401(k) that wants to invest their retirement savings outside of stocks and bonds. So, the biggest sort of use case that we have is you set up a Rocket Dollar IRA, and then you can go invest in multifamily real estate, or you can invest in a venture fund or directly into a startup, and it's all tax-advantaged, all tax-protected. So, any gains, for example, if you invest in the next Facebook as an angel with your IRA, you'll never pay taxes on it. We simply set up the structure of the account. We help you track your investments across whatever asset class, and then we service the account on the reporting side to the IRS. So, in a nutshell, that's what Rocket Dollar does, and I've been fortunate enough to not only be in on the ground floor, but also continue marketing this product that I really enjoy. David v. Goliath: How Rocket Dollar tool on the big players in the financial services industry Kathleen: Interesting. So, you alluded to this when you were talking about what led you to Rocket Dollar. It's obviously in the financial services industry. I too have had some experience with that at the agency level and know that it's incredibly competitive. There are a bunch of 800-pound gorillas in the industry, and that have really deep pockets, that can throw a ton of money behind the keywords they want to get found for. There are a lot of players, sheer numbers. So, coming in as a relatively new player in the industry that has a business model that is intended to be a high-growth model, yes, it's a tech play, but it's SaaS, essentially. It just happens to be in financial services. How do you wrap your brain around... You're going to have to grow this company a lot, and a lot of that growth is going to have to come through marketing, because this isn't an enterprise sales team pounding the pavement. I mean, I don't even know where to start. Talk me through how you begin taking on those Goliaths. Thomas: Sure. Well, it is challenging, and it's a lot of fun, but basically, what we started at the beginning is we knew that we were going to have to overcome several things. One is we're asking people to trust us with their retirement savings as a startup. So, the question, what happens if you're not here in two years, or in three years, or in five years, that question came up a lot in the first year of Rocket Dollar, and it scared a lot of people. So, that was one that we had to overcome. The second one was it's a completely new way of thinking about your retirement savings, something that you've been learning about since you were probably... Most people hear the word IRA from their parents when they're growing up, and the indoctrination of Fidelity and Schwab and Vanguard is strong, that this is money that is completely sacred, that you can't touch, that you can't do anything with, so just give it to us and let us fee you from now until you're 60, and that's strong for a lot of people. So, you have to overcome that. Then yeah, just getting any sort of bandwidth in that space, we have to be really creative with our lead gen, and then also with how we approach, for example, paid search on Google. I mean, it's so expensive when you knock up against certain keywords, and then it just drops off on other ones. So, we've been really creative there. The way that I think about it is if I can get to an email, then I can build that trust, because now I can communicate sort of one-on-one with that potential customer, with that consumer in a really cheap way, and then take my time building that trust. I'm not trying to sell you today. I'm not trying to sell you tomorrow. I just want to make sure that this is a good fit, and the best medium for us to be able to do that has been email. Then the other thing that we did just from the very beginning was try to win Austin. We're based in Austin. Our founders are known here. So, we each had a personal brand, if you will, and we really leveraged that in order to get Rocket Dollar sort of off the ground, and then just letting that sort of goodwill that we built up in Austin spread organically throughout the state, and then traveling to different conferences, making sure that we were there, that we were very present, very available, and that helped us a lot in the first year. It was not a lot of digital marketing, and a lot of face-to-face interactions, which I think really helped us out. Kathleen: I can appreciate that, though. I used to have an agency, and I live in Annapolis, Maryland, which is not a huge market. This is where my agency was, and I remember any time there came an opportunity that involved doing marketing for one of the small number of really large companies here in Annapolis, I was like, "We have to win this, because it's in our backyard." You have to win your backyard first, first and second and last. Right? You have to win at home if you're going to have any hope of winning everywhere else, because it's the friendliest market, and it's a great place to test out and kind of hone your messaging and your strategy. So, I can very much appreciate that approach. Now, did it really start with how you positioned the brand? I mean, is that kind of the first step, given that you're in this crowded marketplace? Why differentiation was key Thomas: Well, yeah, and one of the things that we knew that we needed to do was be a little bit different. The name Rocket Dollar is, in and of itself, different from some of these agencies, or some of these companies, I'm sorry, that are named after these titans, J.P. Morgan and Charles Schwab and these... We knew we needed a little bit of a different angle, and we needed to be just interesting enough to pique a little bit of curiosity. So, we did that. So, just beginning from the name, beginning from our approach to how we build our website, and just the tone that we took, it all sort of came together pretty organically, just because of the way we are as the founding team, but it was very conscious to not be, for example, another blue and white or green financial services company. We threw out the purple, and everybody thought we were crazy, and we got a lot of pushback, and now it's kind of just our thing. Kathleen: Yeah, can you actually... I want to dig into that a little bit, because this is something that I've run into myself. I used to, for example, do a lot of work with law firms, and there was one law firm I worked with, and I was like, "Everybody else is going forest green. You need to go left when they go right." You do get a lot of pushback because it's like, well, everybody else is doing it this way. So, I don't know if it's a fear-based reaction or what, but can you talk me through that decision-making process, and how did you get consensus around that? Thomas: Well, luckily for us, there was only two of us in the room at the time when we decided, so it wasn't this big... We were sitting in a conference room of another startup that Henry, my co-founder, was a board member of, and so they used to lend us this conference room with a whiteboard so we could sort of sketch out our ideas. We were on, I think it was Fiverr or Upwork or something, getting our sort of first logo made after we decided on the name, and we got this huge swath of different ones and different logo. One of them was purple, and Henry was like, "That sort of speaks to me," and I saw it, and I was... "Well, it's the one that stands out the most. These other ones look like regular financial services' boring logos, and I really like that purple." , we kind of just decided right there in about 15 seconds that we were going to have purple as our primary color. Then when we went out to investors, and when we built our first pitch decks, and when we hired our first employees, everybody just... They didn't really like it, and then now it's just a thing, and everybody knows us as the purple guys in Austin, and it just very naturally became our thing. Kathleen: But how did you make the decision to stick with it in the face of VCs and others who were saying, "We don't like this purple. It doesn't work"? Thomas: Probably mostly sheer stubbornness, to be completely honest with you. I think we just got attached to it, and the pushback wasn't all negative. There were some people that really liked that approach. So, we heard both sides of it, and we just decided that we were going to stick with our guns. I liked it as a marketer because it would just let me be a little bit different. On every conference that we went to, our logo is going to be a little bit different than everybody else. Everything we sponsor, it's just going to pop a little bit more. So, from a branding angle it was really easy... I really liked it just because it was easy to see, quite simply. There wasn't a whole lot of extra thought, whether purple means anything, or whether it stands for anything. I mean, I know that it does, but- Kathleen: Yeah. I think it stands for royalty, so maybe that means that you guys will be the kings of the industry someday. Thomas: Well, that's what we're going for. That's what we should've told the VCs instead of the fact that- Kathleen: There you go. Thomas: But no, it just happened very sort of naturally. Kathleen: In hindsight, do you think that taking that deliberately kind of different approach to visual branding helped set you apart? Thomas: I think so. I think it got us just that first little bit of mind share. The name as well, Rocket Dollar doesn't really convey that we're in the retirement industry, that we're selling IRA and 401(k) accounts, so I think that sort of piqued curiosity at the beginning, too, and Henry, our CEO and my co-founder, he had a company prior that was sold to Goldman Sachs called Honest Dollar, and they did very small business... It was a tech play on small business retirement accounts for businesses with less than 10 employees, that getting a 401(k) plan is very expensive. It was that, and so they exited, and it was a good win for them. So, Rocket Dollar was just kind of the natural progression. Now you can take a little more risk with your money, and so rocket it. I think we decided at 2:00 in the morning that we liked that named and... Kathleen: When all great names are developed. Right? Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Kathleen: I think in the case of my business, it was very late at night over a bottle of wine. Thomas: Yeah. There was a couple of cocktails involved, and we bought the domain on his phone at 2:00 in the morning for like $1,800, and that was just it from that day forward. Audience research and product development Kathleen: Awesome. So, you established the name. You got the visual branding. What came next? Thomas: So, at that point we started really just focusing on product, and so we weren't really thinking about the marketing in a traditional sense. Even though I'm a marketer, I was pretty heads-down with our product team, just building what the MVP was going to look like. So, during that time, we also had the ability to sit down with a lot of people around Austin and sort of generate that first sort of list before we launched. So, we really just focused on product, and then on just communicating with our stakeholders, and we did the classic "download your email list off of LinkedIn," and just start communicating what you're doing, seeing if there's interest, asking questions, sitting down with a lot of potential customers in Austin. The coffee shop across the street, by the end of those two or three months, they already knew to have our coffees ready. So, we just talked to a lot of people and asked them what part of our product resonated, what part scared them, what part they were excited about, and really focused on getting our messaging through that, listening to people that I'd sold these accounts to prior, that I knew were customers of the last company that I worked for, and also people that just were interested in sitting down with us. So, it was just really kind of a month-long listening campaign, if you will, to sort of determine what our voice was going to be. For example, a lot of people in this specific niche are very anti-Wall Street, and so they take a very negative tone, a very anti-government tone, very fear-based tone that resonates with a certain audience, and it works because I've sold these accounts that way before. I didn't want to be that company with that tone and that negativity, and so it was really more about building an empowerment sort of message and sort of a... This is going to sound really cheesy, but a "reach for the stars with your retirement dollars" message, and that resonated really well with everyone I talked to, not just people that would've liked the anti-Wall Street or people that really thought that this was too risky, but they liked that tone. So, once I heard that enough, I knew that that was sort of going to be our voice for when we started going outside of our little bubble in Austin, and it's worked. We get really good feedback on how we approach our messaging. Kathleen: It's really interesting that you bring up that choice of taking a fear-based or a positive approach to messaging. I've done some research into this, and I've been fascinated by it, and there's a lot of data from particularly the public health space, that while fear-based messaging can work, positive messaging that taps into positive emotions is so much more effective, especially over the longterm. It goes back to antismoking campaigns, and I think it's really interesting because right now we're kind of coming full circle where they're using these pictures of people with tracheotomies and disfigured faces to try to convince people not to smoke. The most effective antismoking campaign was the Truth campaign, and it's because they realized that if you want to keep kids from starting to smoke, the whole reason they start to smoke has nothing to do with them not understanding the health implications. It has everything to do with them wanting to rebel against their parents. So, if you make it, "Hey, rebel against Big Tobacco that's trying to control you," then they're like, "Yeah, I'm going to stick it to Big Tobacco and not smoke." That actually worked, as opposed to, "You're going to get black lung disease. You're going to need to have surgery, et cetera." So, then they did the same thing with heart bypass patients, what got them to make healthy changes over the longterm, and it was all more positive messaging. So, it's just interesting from a marketing standpoint that so many industries continue to use the fear-based messaging, I think because it is kind of easier, but I don't know, what my observation has been, that the ones that tap into the more positive stuff, those are the companies and the brands that actually build the most loyal following over the longterm, because that's what people really climb onto, and they want to be a part of a movement. Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. Even at its most basic level, it's just who we are as people, the people that work at Rocket Dollar. So, I'm kind of Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky. I come into the office with a big stupid smile on my face every day, and I'm not good at fear marketing because that's just not who I am. Building trust through personalization Thomas: So, it was also really easy for us to take this tone, just because it's our natural sort of way of existing, and I think that having that sort of authenticity early in our marketing, well, early and to this day, really helps us because it's very clear that there's people at the other end of our emails and of our messaging. I mean, I sign our emails. Our marketing emails, I sign them personally, or Henry does, or somebody does, because we want to make sure that there's people. We plaster our faces on our own website all over the place so that you can see who you're interacting with, who you're talking to on the phone, who is running the company that you're trusting with your retirement dollars. I mean, all of that is really important, especially in the retirement space when you're going up against these big brands like Fidelity or Charles Schwab or whatever. Kathleen: Yeah. I love that, that whole concept of personalizing it to transfer the trust. Getting into the audience's email inbox Kathleen: From what I understand, the company is under two years old, and it sounds like you spent the better part of the first year really developing the product, nailing down the messaging, et cetera, and then you talked about how then it became all about getting into somebody's email inbox. So, can you pick apart for me what approaches have you taken to that, what has worked really well? Because obviously, you're going after a big audience in the post-Austin kind of world. How do you go out to a cold audience and make it into their inbox? Thomas: Sure. Well, it's been fast. I mean, from when we sort of looked outside of Austin to having customers in all 50 states was a couple months. So, it went really fast. So, there is a natural sort of group of people looking for this product, and so at the beginning it was just capturing people that already knew that this was something they wanted to do, and it was going directly after our competitors on paid search, for example, and just capturing sort of the top of the funnel. Well, it would really be the middle of the funnel, because they already were aware. They were already educated. It was just a decision-making process. So, we were really good at capturing those people because the other people in this space, frankly, are just a little bit behind us on the tech and on the cost and all that, so it was pretty easy. Kathleen: Wait. Now, can you explain that a little bit? Because I think that's easy to say, but this is a challenge a lot of people have. This is an industry where your competitors are very well established. I'm sure the bid price for the keywords is really high. So, how exactly did you beat them at the paid search game? Thomas: Sure. Well, it was actually just going a little bit on longer-tail keywords, because the Charles Schwabs, the Fidelitys, they don't do exactly what we do, in that they don't sell you an account that allows you to invest in real estate or in stocks and bonds. So, whenever we go a little bit deeper into the keywords, the volume's actually much lower, and the keywords are much cheaper. So, if we were just bidding IRA, and then you're going to get all the big boys, and that's going to be a $15, $20 keyword. I mean, it's going to be ridiculous. Kathleen: Did you go after that at all, those short-tail keywords? Thomas: No, no. We couldn't afford it at all. The people that are searching for that are thinking about a Charles Schwab or a Fidelity account anyways. That's what they want. They want the stocks and bonds. But when you go a little bit further, then there's the people looking for, "Well, can I do real estate in an IRA? Can I do startups in an IRA, or investing in cryptocurrency through an IRA?" So, then you get to those, and yeah, the volume is lower, but the price is also lower, and frankly, it was more than we could handle. We weren't ready to scale and hit hundreds of accounts a month or thousands of accounts a month. So, it was good for us to be able to test that sort of slowly before really pouring gasoline on the fire. It was also a more educated audience because they knew that they wanted a self-directed account, and then we weren't going up against Charles Schwab. We were going up against Pensco Trust Company or Equity Trust, or some of these that as soon as you see their reviews online, it's pretty clear that we're going to just beat them on customer service, which is really where we do beat a lot of these people at, and our price point is significantly lower because, like you mentioned earlier, we're a SaaS play, not a service company. Kathleen: So, what percentage of your new contacts comes from paid search, roughly? Thomas: Probably about half. Kathleen: Okay. So, these people convert on an ad. They get into your database, and then you're putting them into email drip flows. Is that right? Thomas: Yeah. I mean, someone comes to our site, and we don't really have just plain lead captures. We really just have a signup button, and so that's our first lead gen, basically, tool. At that point, if they do not finish buying an account, then they come into sort of a short-term nurture that then turns into a long-term nurture after about a month, and then it goes into a newsletter list. So, we've found that if people... Because of the sort of mid-funnel group that we're really heavily going after in the paid search, they're already aware, they're already educated, if they don't convert within three days, it's going to be... They will convert. A percentage of them does convert, and it's a high percentage. It's going to be probably a month to three later, and that's simply because whenever you buy an account from us, you self-direct your money. So, if they don't have an investment in mind, they don't set up the account until they knew what they're going to do. So then really, it's just about staying top of mind in this space so that whenever something does come across that they want to do, it's just an automatic reaction that, "Hey, those Rocket Dollar guys, I'll just go set up my account there. It'll be easy, cheap, whatever, and then I'll make my investment." So, I'm really just more focused on staying sort of relevant, providing value, talking about the space, talking about different investment types, and then people convert naturally once they decide it's something to do. The thing that really does not work well for us is the hard sell, because people, the minute you start trying to do a hard sell on a retirement account, people lose trust, and then it's just very transactional, and it's not really... You lose, and we found that out pretty early. So, it's just providing content, being top of mind, staying in touch, and people convert naturally. Email lead nurturing Kathleen: Is there something you're doing in those email nurture sequences or in your newsletter to really keep people engaged? Because I do find for myself at least, if I show that initial interest, I convert on something, but if it is that two-to-three-month period, and I'm not ready to sign up, I get very highly likely to unsubscribe unless something is really, really delivering value, because I don't like my inbox being cluttered by things that are not really worth it. Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely, and I'm the same way. One of the big investments that we've made is on educational content. So, we share a lot of blogs, a lot of webinars that we're on sometimes. We've launched our own podcast that's growing pretty quickly. So, I think as long as we provide educational content and really go for those light bulb moments with people where, "Oh, I didn't know that. That's cool. Let's see what comes next week or next month or whatever," as long as we share something that resonates and a little bit of a longer form, not just get a hundred dollars off emails. Those are really annoying. But we spend a lot of time and energy creating content that we think will resonate. Our unsubscribe rate is below half a percent, so it's really working, and we write about what we're reading or learning in that moment. So, it really kind of happens organically, what we choose to share, especially in our newsletters. Our nurture emails are a little bit more permanent. We don't edit them that much. But our newsletter and our blog is really just sort of what the team is interested in that week. So, that's worked, and I think we'll continue to do that. Channel marketing and referrals Kathleen: Now, you mentioned about half of your new contacts come from pay-per-click. Where does the other half come from? Thomas: Yeah. So, the other half, we spend a lot of time with partners, so people that are raising money for their own projects. So, it could be anybody from a real estate investor raising a small syndicate fund to an entrepreneur that's raising a fund, or that's raising money for their own startup, or there are some bigger partners. So, for example, Gemini in the crypto world, Fundrise, sort of these investment platforms, we go to them and say, "Hey, to tap into another pool of funds, did you know that people can invest in you through an IRA? Send them to us. We'll set up the account for them, and then you get their money as an investor." So, that's worked really well for us, too, on the brand-building side because these trusted sources are referring us business because we're taking care of their investors. As long as we continue to take care of other people's investors, we really win there. That, I would say, is about 25% of our business. Then the other 25% of our business is customer referrals. So, our own customers are telling people about us, and that's working really well. We do have a referral campaign that kicks off about 60 days after someone purchases, make sure that their account's funded, that they've made an investment, at which point we do circle back and say, "Hey, if there's anybody in your audience that you think would be interested in this, here's some material that you can share. We'd really appreciate it." The cool thing about these accounts is that it's, I think, the only retirement account that people talk about with their friends over the dinner table because they feel really smart when they bought a rental property with their IRA. So, it's natural that our customers share it, and it's... Yeah. That accounts for about 25% of our business, is just our referral campaign. Kathleen: Yeah. It's a lot more interesting than saying, "Yes, I am 30% invested in a low-risk bond fund." No, no, no. I don't want to hear about that. Customer Facebook group Thomas: Yeah. No, it's definitely something that people like to talk about. We have a really great customer-only Facebook group where people talk about what they're doing, where people share ideas, where people ask us questions. So, our team is in there moderating it all the time, and it's kind of the, "Oh, you don't have anything to do for an hour? Let's go check what's happening in the Facebook group." People are sharing some really cool stories. So, we market that a little bit, where you get access to this investor group. So, people like that education, and that group sort of sparks creativity for a lot of our customers, and I think that that really has been a good thing for us to do. Kathleen: That's interesting, because I guess... Correct me if I'm wrong, but are there many other companies like yours or in the industry that are tapping into Facebook groups? I don't get the sense that there are. Thomas: In my experience, no, and I've bought accounts from most of our competitors, just testing out their processes, seeing what's going on and what's not, what they're doing well, what they're not doing well, and then comparing it to what we're doing well and not well, and no, I've never been invited to a Facebook group. Kathleen: Yeah. It's also interesting, too, because... This could be my lack of knowledge speaking, but from the limited knowledge I have of marketing in the financial industry, you have FINRA and SEC guidance on what you can and cannot say yourself, but I imagine in the Facebook group your customers can say anything, pretty much. Is that right? Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, they can anything they'd like, and they do. But one of the advantages that we have is as a... I mean, technically we are a third-party administrator, so we are really handling paperwork. We're not advising. We're not investing. We're not touching money. So, we have a little bit more leeway in what we can say than a traditional financial services company. I mean, we cannot advise, but we can... Most of our customers aren't looking for us to advise. What they're looking for is if we come across a deal that we think they'd be interested in, a lot of times we'll share just if we have a personal relationship with that customer, which a lot of times we develop that relationship, and we can speak to the legality of whether it's an allowed transaction with the IRA, because that's a pretty clear yes/no. That's sort of where we keep it, but we'll talk about... If I make an investment through mine, I'll post it in the Facebook group and say, "Hey, I thought this was cool. I did it. If anybody else wants to participate, there it is." So, it's pretty crazy how much money moves around just off of those little posts that we put on that group. Our partners, luckily for us, are realizing that we're tapping into almost 10 trillion dollars worth of IRA money, and that there's some significant funds there for their projects. What makes Rocket Dollar's channel marketing strategy successful Kathleen: That's interesting. So, the partners interest me because I've talked with a number of different people on this podcast about channel marketing strategies, and I think this sounds like a channel marketing strategy, but with a twist. Fair to say that that's really what it is? Thomas: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, we market directly to partners to try to get them in our... I mean, we have a whole separate funnel for partners and a whole separate section of the website for our partners where they can learn about raising money through IRAs with the goal really being of them referring us customers. What we tell them is, "Hey, look. It's available. You don't have to know all that much about it. You have to know that you can do it. Send them to us. We'll educate them. We'll let them know what needs to happen. You don't need to work that hard. Let us work hard, and then the end result is that you get your deals funded faster, and your investors will be taken care of." Kathleen: It's funny that you put it that way because I've been actually a reseller, a value-added reseller in a number of channel programs, and when I talk with people about what I think, at least from that side of the equation, makes a great reseller program, it is the programs that make your life really easy as the reseller. So, I was a HubSpot partner for 11 years, and they have an amazing partner program, and it's because they make your life so easy. They spoonfeed you white-labeled content. Here's 10 emails you can use to nurture people. They put you through sales training. Literally, you can't almost fail, and that makes it such an appealing program to be a part of, and it sounds kind of like that's the same approach you've taken here. Any thoughts on what it is that has made your partner program so successful? Thomas: Well, I think at the end of the day it's that it gets... I mean, they're not even resellers. It just gets their deals funded faster. So, it's a true win-win. We get a customer, and they get money into their deals. So, it's not even that... It's just a tool for them to make their life easier, so it's like... The easiest way to put it is if they have to work less and I'm saving them time, and they're just getting their money faster. I mean, it's just really that simple for us, and we're not paying our partners. Maybe we'll give them a discount, but it's really just... We'll make your life easier if you refer us business. Kathleen: Yeah, that is huge. Thomas: Yeah, yeah. It's pretty simple, but it's powerful. Rocket Dollar's growth Kathleen: So, can you share anything about the company's growth in the last two years, and kind of where you are right now as opposed to when you started? Thomas: Yeah. So, like I mentioned earlier, we've really sort of grown in 2019, is really when poured a little bit of fuel on the fire. We have customers in all 50 states now. We've got somewhere around $75 million worth of IRA assets in Rocket Dollar accounts. Right now, we're really sort of continuing to grow in the double digits month over month, so it's going really well. Then we're really focusing again on our channel partners, but some of the bigger ones. So, we're going after the big players, the YieldStreets of the world, the Crunchbases of the... Or Crunchbase. I'm sorry, Coinbase, the Coinbases of the world, where it's really a mega strategy where it's not five or 10 accounts. It's a thousand to 5,000 accounts, and really hooking in to their APIs with our own so that it's just a seamless experience for them and for their customers to get into their deals with IRA dollars. So, that's really sort of what's on the roadmap, and then we are also launching, about halfway through next year, a robo advisor so that if you don't know the alternative deal that you want to participate in, you can have your traditional stocks, bonds, mutual funds, inside of a Rocket Dollar account, so when you are ready to make that investment, your money's all right there, and you don't have to set up the account, or when you exit an investment, you don't have to transfer again to Vanguard or to Schwab. You can just do it all inside Rocket Dollar. So, we're really sort of pursuing the whole account versus just the amount that you're going to use to buy that rental house instead of transferring... If it's a hundred-thousand-dollar house, people are transferring a hundred-thousand dollars over to us, we'd rather them just bring over the whole thing and have everything in one account. So, that's really our product roadmap for the next six months to a year. What does it take for a startup to succeed in a highly competitive market? Kathleen: That makes sense. Now, if somebody is listening and they have a startup, and they're in the same situation you were two years ago, where they're entering a market that's very crowded, that has some very well funded incumbents, can you sort of boil down to two or three things that you think, based on your experience, are essential to do to be successful in that situation? Thomas: Yeah. I think number one is win your building, win your block, win your zip code, win your city slowly, and it's a lot of manual or in-person interactions. It's really getting yourself out there, and then your company sort of follows. I think that's number one, because you're not going to win on Google. You're not going to win on Facebook. You're not going to win on Instagram, because these guys are spending a day what you might raise for your entire seed round. I talk to people, I met with a company the other day, and they said that they haven't turned on their full digital spend. They're only spending $350,000 a month. Kathleen: Oh, amateur hour. Come on. Thomas: Yeah, and that's what I spend in a year. Kathleen: Right. Thomas: Right? You're not going to compete on their turf, so you got to be creative and come up with your own turf. For us, it was winning Austin, and your goal being not selling an account, but getting an email address, and that way we could continue to communicate with you without having to pay for it, if you will, because I can write copy, and I can write emails, and so it was really just finding the cheapest way to talk to people, and for us it was email. The other thing is we really focused on the little things, on appearing very buttoned up, on punctuation, on editing, on grammar, on spelling, everything that you don't really think about, but the minute someone sees a typo on an email from a financial services brand, you've lost because you can't be making those mistakes if you want to talk about someone's retirement. Kathleen: Right. If we can't trust you with our commas, how are we going to trust you with our dollars? Thomas: Exactly. Exactly. So, those two things for us were very sort of fundamental, is winning Austin, and then just focusing on the little things, like spending the extra hour to edit a blog post, or spending the extra 30 minutes to lay out the email perfect, and those little things really added up for us. We're still doing them. I mean, it's still a huge focus for us. We're still trying to win trust. We're still trying to win mind share. So, everything that we did in year one we're still doing. Kathleen: Now, just to digress for a second, you mentioned something that we really didn't touch on, which is putting yourself out there. I think you briefly mentioned it earlier, personal brands. I think there are probably a lot of founders who are technically very savvy about the product they're building. They're very passionate about it. But I've met many who are very reluctant to put themselves out there. Any advice as far as how to do it, why to do it, and what impact it's had on the business? Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. We've been lucky that two of our three founders are very extroverted. Henry and I are comfortable in front of crowds, and Rick, who's our third co-founder and our CTO, is also very comfortable with people, and he's very technical. So, we got very lucky that we have three founders that are very willing to grab a microphone. It really doesn't faze us all that much. Henry already had a pretty strong personal brand in Austin because of his prior exits, because of his work in the 401(k) space for... He set up probably a couple hundred 401(k)s for different businesses around Austin, so he was very well known. To be completely honest with you, I struggle with the whole concept of personal brands because it's not really my forte to really promote me. I'd rather promote the brand. So, it was something that I had to learn, but I think it's just practice and getting out there, and taking every opportunity that you can to grab a microphone, to speak, to talk about your company, and you don't even have to talk about yourself. Just talk about your company, because that's what you're passionate about, and that's what you know, and that's what resonates with people. Start with your audience. Start with your people. Right? If you're very technical, go to technical meetups and practice there, and then just grow slowly, and you'll get more and more comfortable just by sheer process of repetition. Kathleen: I love it. That's great advice for, I think, really anybody who's trying to build a company, whether they're the founder, the head of marketing, the head of sales, et cetera. Thomas: Absolutely. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Well, I don't want to finish without asking you the two questions that I always ask all my guests. Thomas: Sure. Kathleen: We talk a lot about inbound marketing on The Inbound Success Podcast, so is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with that? Thomas: You know, I hesitated to say this because we talk about them so much, but I was having a conversation with our account manager at HubSpot a couple months ago, and they really kill it. They've actually recently stopped having any sort of outbound sales at all. They are only inbound now, which I thought was risky and also amazing. I mean, they must be doing it so well to be able to take that big of a bet on- Kathleen: I'm convinced it's because their database has every single person on the planet earth in it. Thomas: Oh, yeah. No, they know... Kathleen: Yeah. Thomas: No, I think they're doing it really well, and it's obvious that they're still accelerating, and they're still growing. I mean, we're on HubSpot. I love HubSpot. I'm a huge fan. Their educational content, it's fantastic. I think that they really are doing a really good job. Kathleen: Okay, and then second question, one of the biggest things I hear from marketers that I speak to is that things are changing so quickly. Digital marketing is like drinking from a fire hose. How do you personally, as the head of marketing and a co-founder at Rocket Dollar, how do you stay up-to-date on everything? Thomas: Well, I'm sure like a lot of other guests, I read almost everything. I spend a lot of time... I love Medium.com. They have some really good publications. There's one called Better Marketing that is fantastic. It has really good content. So, I'm on Medium a lot. I read a lot of just news and a lot of sort of industry... The CMO section of The Wall Street Journal I think is fantastic, just because it's all relevant and timely. Then there's three books that have really spoken to me that have been fantastic, and one of them is called Don't Make Me Think, and it's all about user behavior online and why some things work and why some don't, and A/B testing and all that. It's pretty in the weeds, but it's fantastic. Another one is Lean Analytics. It's fantastic. It's very dense. It's like a textbook, but if you can get through that, you'll come out the other side just really able to sort of mix the creative and the analytical bit that's really important for marketers. I mean, the part that drew me to marketing was the numbers as much as the creativity, and I really like that balance. So, Lean Analytics is a great one if you're heavy creative and need some analytics help. Then there's a third that's really just a guide. It's called The Art of Digital Marketing. It's a big, thick book that's fantastic. So, those three, I think you could definitely get freelance clients just if you read those three. You could start working and marketing, and then just staying up-to-date with when Facebook changes their algorithms or when Google changes their bid process or whatever. That's just the sort of in the weeds stuff. But yeah, I would say Medium.com and those three books. Kathleen: I love those suggestions. Yeah. Those are three books that I have not heard people mention on here before, so I will definitely check those out. If you're listening and you want to find all those things, of course I'll put the links in the show notes, so head there to get ahold of those. How to connect with Thomas or learn more about Rocket Dollar Kathleen: If somebody wants to learn more about Rocket Dollar or wants to connect with you and ask a question, what's the best way for them to do that? Thomas: Yeah. So, I set this up for this podcast, but if you go to rocketdollar.com/inboundsuccess, we can talk there, and then also, I set it up, just if anybody is interested in one of these accounts, we'll knock a hundred bucks off the setup fee if you use INBOUNDSUCCESS100 at checkout. And then if you want to reach me personally, my email is thomas@rocketdollar.com. So, feel free to reach out. I mean, I stay on top of that, and I'm pretty open on it. So, that's really the easiest way to get to me. Kathleen: Great. Again, I'll put all those links in the show notes, so head there if you want to take advantage of any of those opportunities. You know what to do next... If you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learned something new, leave the podcast a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. That helps us a lot get in front of new listeners. And of course, if you know somebody else doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because they could be my next interview. Thanks so much, Thomas. Thomas: Cool. Thank you, Kathleen. I really enjoyed it.

Influencer marketing holds tremendous potential for brands that want to have an impact on Instagram, but influencer fraud has become a major issue on the platform. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Oliver Yonchev of social-first agency Social Chain USA talks about Instagram influencer campaigns and the steps brands can take to avoid influencer fraud. In addition, Oliver shares concrete examples of brands doing Instagram influencer marketing well, along with specific advice on how to work with influencers in order to get the best results. Highlights from my conversation with Oliver include: Since its founding four years ago, Social Chain has grown to 700 employees with six offices around the globe. Influencer marketing is expected to capture between $5 and 10 billion in marketing spend in the next year. Everything on Instagram - including followers, likes and engagement - can be faked. There are even apps built specifically for this purpose. If someone has a million followers, but they get no comments, and 50 people like them, their audience isn't real. Engagement is one of the only on-platform metrics on Instagram that gives us an idea of something successful or not, so identifying engagement fraud is critical for brands doing influencer marketing. Social Chain created a software product called Like-Wise that examines the velocity at which engagement is attained on Instagram and identifies fraudulent engagement. 80% of the time, you see a natural decay in Instagram engagement. Engagement comes within the first hour, very quickly, and you get a natural decay over the course of 24 hours. What you can see is there are a lot of factors that can affect that, being paid promotions, paid social, shout outs from one of their influencers, features within feed, all of those things can affect. Of the ten thousand influencers that Social Chain originally monitored using Like-Wise, almost 25% of them at some point, had manipulated their engagement. Oliver believes that 80% of influencer campaigns are poorly executed. One of the biggest mistakes brands tend to make when working with influencers is to not allow enough time to see results.  Oliver says that the best influencers are your own customers, so if you're considering doing influencer marketing, start there. Another common mistake that brands make is they get too prescriptive in the content that influencers create for campaigns. Oliver suggests giving influencers a strict list of do's and don'ts, and then allowing them the creative freedom to develop content. For brands looking to identify influencer fraud, one strategy is to look at someone's follower size, go on a post, and see, proportionately, if less than 2% of their following is engaging with something. If that is the case, it generally means it's not a quality audience. Resources from this episode: Visit the Social Chain website Follow Social Chain on Twitter Follow Social Chain on Instagram Follow Social Chain on LinkedIn Read the Wired Magazine article on Instagram influencer fraud Check out Social Chain's Instagram influencer fraud detection tool Like-Wise Subscribe to the Social Minds podcast Follow Oliver Yonchev on Instagram Listen to the podcast to learn more about working with influencers to improve your Instagram results, and how to avoid Instagram influencer fraud. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and this week, my guest is Oliver Yonchev, who is the managing director at Social Chain USA. Welcome, Oliver. Oliver Yonchev (Guest): Hey, amazing to be here, thank you for having me. Oliver and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: I’m really interested to speak with you, because you come from quite a large agency that is doing work with some very large brands, and really interesting work when it comes to influencer marketing, which I'm particularly fascinated by right now, and I think it's kind of been trending in the news because of all of the influencer fraud that's happening. About Oliver Yonchev and Social Chain Kathleen: Before we dive into those topics, though, could you maybe tell my audience a little bit about yourself, and Social Chain, and what the company does, and how you would up where you are today? Oliver: Yeah, of course, so I'll start with my background. Like a lot of marketeers, I kind of stumbled in the world of marketing, I've always pursued creative endeavors. I was a musician, a past rockstar once upon a time at the ripe old age of 16 and 17. Then I fell into the world of radio, funnily enough. It kind of felt like a natural segue from when musical aspirations didn't quite pan out. I went into the world of radio. So my base is working for media owners, and I worked for a large media owner in Europe called Bauer Media, and that had one of the largest radio portfolios. And radio was a really great grounding, being it's in the world of podcasting now, and podcasting's got the attention of the marketing world. So I've long been a fan of the medium of audio, just because of its personal nature, a lot of reasons. And actually, from a point of view of selling quite a linear media, I always felt that you had to be more creative. You really had to think about store arcs. You have short periods of time to keep people's attention. So a lot of the principles that make you an effective marketeer today, I kind of got my roots in my career, did that really well. As a media owner, they're a large publisher as well, so I started to evolve, sort of stuff, in radio going into publishing, digital ad products, and that kind of segued me into joining a company called Social Chain, which was a startup in Manchester about three years ago. I'd heard a lot about this company, they were making a lot of wage, they were known as "the kids that could make anything trend." You know, there was this air of illusion about Social Chain. I actually stumbled upon a TED Talk that was by the founder of Social Chain, Steven Bartlett, and his TED Talk was entitled How some Twenty-somethings Built an Multi-Million Pound Media Empire Knowing Nothing About Business. Kathleen: Nice. Oliver: So quite an intriguing title, yeah, and I found It really interesting. Me and Steven connected, funnily enough, not too long after that, so I was aware of Steven. He asked me to join the business. The business was very much in its infancy. I say "infancy", it was probably about 60 people in the business at the time. They were doing really interesting things in the social publishing world, so, you know brands would come to Social Chain and say, "You have a huge following." So, back three years ago, Social Chain amassed around 400 social media assets. These are communities based on passions, everything from sport, fashion, gaming, you name it, dogs, animals, people are passionate about lots of things. Brands used to come to Social Chain and say, "We've got a message, we want you to tell lots of people." Social Chain had amassed a following of about 385 million people, actually made it one of the world's biggest publishers, which meant you do some really interesting things creatively. I joined the business, helped the business build out its commercial entity, you know, this was new media, the world of influencer marketing, the world of social publishing, and I kind of helped navigate those waters for the business in the UK. Since my joining, the business has accelerated, become a powerhouse agency, you know, from its infancy, what would have been four and a half years ago. Social Chain was two people, it's now 700 people globally, we've got six offices across the world. The US office is the latest edition, we opened about a year and a half to two years ago. We have a team of about 30 people in the US, growing quickly, and we do everything and anything in the world of social media, starting with instagram strategy, that underpins content marketing and that underpins influencer marketing, and social media management, through to the full filigree of that. We have about 60 videographers, designers, and illustrators in house, that mean we do lots of things quickly. As a business, if I was to say two things we pride ourselves on being really good at, is fundamentally, we're creative through and through. I think being vanilla in the world of endless scrolling through news feeds is probably not a good thing for a brand or marketeer to be. And then the other thing, we have a deep appreciation for the rich insight that's available. You know, social media is a reflection of society, as well as we can learn a lot from how people behave, although the data is somewhat skewed, we all an inclination to provide the best version of ourselves to the world. So we just have a deep appreciation for data, and the creative art that is social media. Kathleen: I find it just fascinating how quickly the agency grew. I mean, I come from an agency background, I've been in the agency world, oh my gosh, for 13 years, and it's not easy. I've been there, it's not easy to grow an agency, and to go from two people to 700 in four years is almost unheard of, so that's pretty impressive. To what do you attribute that growth? Oliver: You know what it is? It's a couple of things. The agency was founded by people that had never worked in an agency, and I know that sounds a strange truth to underpin success, but Steve and Dom, who started Social Chain, both exceptional entrepreneurs, you know, 26 years old now, each of them. They've been entrepreneurs since they were in diapers, the types of people that were building businesses and selling things. And social media was a vehicle that they used to promote their businesses prior to Social Chain very successfully. They believed in the medium. What I would say a lot of the success has been looking at things from first principle. So, I think, timing is fortunate. We were very good story-tellers in our early days, we had this air of illusions about us, "the guys that could make anything trend" was the ultimate vanity tick for marketing directors across the world's biggest brands. I think we were born out of a unique place, being social publishers first. So if you think, we were never an agency, the first thing we did were a group of young people that were rounded up, that knew how to navigate social media, knew how to speak to the mindset of the followers that they've cultivated. And that's kind of one of the two. And the second thing is, just, I think, this appreciation for creativity, and looking at social media very much as much as it's a scientific art, it's a data art, it's creativity through and through. For me, social media is very unique in the sense that it's one of the only mediums outside of PR where the budget doesn't dictate how many people see the thing I produced, it's actually the creativity, how many people like it, share engage. So I think we have really good bones as a business, I think the business, like many, we've worked incredibly hard, and the other thing is, we've put a lot of value on personal brand. You know, Steve is a young entrepreneur, Steve has a master following of over 2 million followers himself, personality. He's an inspiration to a lot of young entrepreneurs, aspiring people. So as his equity has risen, so has the business equity. And that's been a primary driver for us to, you know, accelerate our growth. And then the third component is, we've not done this alone. We have a german investor called Georg Kofler, who from our early days has been very supportive. Georg Kofler was the founder of a TV network in Germany called ProSieben, which later sold to Sky, to the Murdoch empire, and he saw what we were doing as a form of new media, had a bit of a vision for what the business would be, and been incredibly supportive, so he's accelerated, certainly from a funding point of view. And then we've got a bunch of people that work really hard. And the last thing I think worth noting is, we do a lot of unique things as a business, so we truly put culture first. And when I say that, we take a lot of inspiration from interesting businesses, but we do things in the sense of, we were the first people in the world to have a happiness manager. Like, their sole responsibility isn't HR, it isn't, we put them front and center there, to improve our culture, to do interesting things, to give people an outlet. We've just launched a program, whereby we offer a therapist, it's opt out, so everybody has to take a therapy session once per quarter, and they have the opportunity to opt out, looking after our well-being. We used to do unlimited holidays, which we've always done, and some people, as the business has grown see that as a bit of a... there's a skepticism towards those type of things, like people will work less if they have undefined boundaries. So we scrapped that and said, "Write your own contract." So everyone in the business has gone on to write their own contract. If you want 40 holiday days, you have 40 holiday days. We've put a level of trust in our employees that I think is somewhat unheard of, and I think in doing that, people go above and beyond. I've never known a business... and our working spaces are very creative, our office in Manchester has slides, ball pits, jingles, you name it, we have it. And I think those things have... on a bottom line, looking up here now, we spend exorbitant amounts of money on our people. Like, truly ridiculous. But I think far too many businesses forget that a business is made up of people. And we want this to be sustainable. We want our interns to have the opportunity to create a work environment where they could have a family, you know. We want this to be complimentary to people lives, so that real focus on culture, on setting really solid values of a foundation, as a business, and lots of hard work are probably a lot of the things that have led to their success. Fighting Instagram influencer fraud Kathleen: I love that, that's so interesting, and I feel like we could literally have an entire podcast interview just on the culture aspects of the agency, but I want to pick your brain, because, I mean, to be a social first agency... I mean, it's true of all digital marketing that it's changing incredibly quickly. I think social media is at the forefront of that. It's kind of like, I joke that it's like when you go to the grocery store, and you're in your groove. And you go to get the milk, and they've moved the milk, and it like totally upsets the apple cart and changes your whole routine, only multiply that by a thousand in social media. They move the milk, it seems like, every minutes. And one of the platforms that you all do a lot of work on is Instagram. I've been really, really interested in Instagram for a while now. And in fact, it's funny, just today before I got on with you, I was reading an article in Wired Magazine about Instagram influencer fraud. And I think this is becoming higher on people's radar screens after things like the Fyre Festival, but it was talking about how it was really almost like an arms race between the people who are trying to game the system, and the technologies and the platforms out there that are helping influencer and brands and agencies identify fraud. So it's this ever-evolving thing. So I want to talk about influencer fraud, and I also want to talk about how brands can work with influencers to get results, because obviously avoiding the fraudulent part of that is a piece of it. But maybe we could just start with talking about the fraud, because I think that is so timely, and I'm just curious to hear your take on where things stand right now, what you see happening, and what you think brands need to watch out for. Oliver: Yeah, for sure. You raised an underlying truth of the world we operate in, the significant amount of change that we go through. I think you made the point of the goal posts changing all the time, an algorithmic factor that's true today is not true tomorrow. And actually, to one of the earlier questions about success, that willingness to change, and not being romantic about how we've always done things is probably another reason why our client work is pretty successful, and kind of encouraging and that. So on influencer fraud, influencer marketing isn't anything new, per se, the phrasing of it, the industry, the rapid growth, you know. Influencer marketing is expected to grow to spend in excess of between 5 and 10 billion next year. It's huge, huge business, and I think that fundamentally comes down to one thing, because it's really, really, effective. But in people understanding that there's opportunity, I think many brands or marketeers have gone into the industry bullish, and where there's opportunity and so much opportunity for individuals. We've got this democratization of audience where you can be in your bedroom, at 16 years old and have a million people at your fingertips, and brands want to access those millions of people. So you've created this environment where social currency is real tangible worth, and as a result of that, humans are imperfect, and there's a lot of fraudulent activity. I think the fundamental truth about influencer fraud is, everything in the social world can be faked, meaning your followers, your likes - for a couple of dollars, you can go on an app, write your own comments, and fake your engagement. And this is something, as practitioners of the art of social media marketing, this is nothing new, but when we're in a time when so many dollars are being exchanged in this industry, and ultimately, brands are footing the bill, and this isn't a black and white thing. There isn't one piece of software that can really safeguard you and protect you. There's methodology, there's process, there's software, there are a a lot of factors that can help safeguard you. So I think one of the things that we did is, we invest a lot in a whole host, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a variety of software across multiple things to deliver our services. One of the things that was asked of us last year was, "How do you know if someone is manipulating an engagement?" There's quite a clear methodology to look at if someone has manipulated their follower growth. In its basic principle, if someone has a million followers, but they get no comments, and 50 people like them, their audience isn't real. So there's some surface things that as a brand, a business you can look at. So these disparities but because engagement, comments, likes, everything else can be manipulated, people do this. So we were asked some questions of our clients last year, it then became a real talking point at last year's Cannes, where the CMO of Unilever, Keith Weed, kind of put this as a real primary talking point of the summer being that they were no longer going to work with influencers that manipulated their engagements, bought followers, bought likes and such. So what we did is, because this was happening at the time, we looked at our software, we tried to come up with answers for how do you monitor engagement, and there wasn't any. So what we did is, we're not a tech business, per se, but we worked with our in-house innovation team, and we looked to develop some methodology and a piece of software that allowed us to spot engagement fraud. Simply because engagement's one of the only on-platform metrics that gives us an idea of something successful or not. You know, I post something, and the feedback I get in the form of a like, a comment, and such, that's the only way that a brand can often know if their thing has been successful. Of course, in commerce environments, you could come up with more complex methodology, but it's a real fundamental part, it's one of the main things the industry looks at, when working with creators and picking talent. We all talk about high engagement being important, which is it. So we developed a piece of software, we call that Like-Wise, we launched that, and in short, what Like-Wise does, is it looks at the velocity of which engagement is attained. And what you will see, 80% of the time, you get a natural decay. Engagement comes within the first hour, very quickly, and you get a natural decay over the course of 24 hours. What you can see is there are a lot of factors that can affect that, being paid promotions, paid social, shout outs from one of their influencers, features within feed, all of those things can affect. But generally you don't get a... there's about a 20% degree of variance. What you see in people who are manipulating their engagement, is you see anomalies in that growth pattern. So, really, really high engagements in very short bursts, and these come from the likes of bot farms. And many of these engagements are real. There are apps out there that you go on, and for me to go on an app, and comment a thousand times on something, and say a thousand things on my profile, I will get some currency back and I'll get a thousand things back. So you've created this gamified environment that are actually real people, engaging on real content, but it's all inflation. So it's an absolute fascinating subject. So when we launched this tool, as far as we're aware it was the first of its kind, and the response was phenomenal. Within three days of telling the world about this thing, we had over a thousand inquiries, from influencers, from brands, from agencies, which really put on spotlight on how significant this was for the industry and what people thought of it. So that's been something, a service that we've been offering for going on almost a year. Kathleen: I find this so fascinating, because you described the, let's call it the engagement curve of, you know, temporally, when engagement happens after a post is put up. And I imagine that as soon as you discover that, there's probably going to be a new tool that then figures out how to mimic what is essentially a natural curve, and so, it's kind of, like, almost cyber-security. Like, staying ahead of the malicious actors is like a full time job, I guess. Oliver: Yeah, for sure. And I think one of the things that we built in... We when we first launched the tool ahead of it coming out, you know, our rudimentary version of that looked at some simple benchmarking. We're very cognizant that algorithms change and shift, and the way that engagement is delivered naturally changes. So what we did is we looked at developing that further, and we've employed some AI technology that ultimately monitors patterns and behaviors, and looks for anomalies that sit outside of those natural curves. We got to the point where, ahead of launching, we'd monitored around ten thousand influencers, looking at a real spectrum of posts, everything from sponsored posts, through to paid posts. And we can only access people that have their profile open, so anyone who has a closes profile, we can't. Because we're not plugged into the API or anything like that, it's simply looking at behaviors of engagement. And we're very aware that the way these apps work, and the way manipulation work changes all the time, hence we've in-built some learning, to allow us to, as best as we can, stay ahead. And we were very aware that us doing this to solve the solution for our clients, was something that we've taken. You know, it's hard to put a light on it, and I think it's the industry's job, I think it's the platform's job to really take this stuff seriously. What we did find that was really staggering, and this is probably some of the headlines that the media were really interested in, of the ten thousand influencers that we originally monitored, almost 25% of them at some point, had manipulated their engagement. It was absolutely... we expected a lot, it blew our minds with how frequent. And this extended, not just influencers, this was celebrities, this was brands themselves. Some of the world's biggest brands were manipulating their engagement, whether that's rogue social media managers, or what. You know, you've created this environment where a like has an intrinsic worth, and as a result of that... the last thing I'll probably say on that that's really important is, you know when we launched this, the amount of self-policing that went on was so... we'd look at people that stopped manipulating their engagement. When the world knows this thing exists, there was a lot of self-policing that went on. So I think for the greater good of the industry, I would argue that a lot more software solutions offer something similar like this now. I think it's for the better. What happens if Facebook and Instagram remove like counts? Kathleen: Yeah, I would tend to agree. And you know, it's going to be interesting to see how things evolve with Instagram and Facebook, more broadly as an umbrella, talking about removing like counts from posts. I guess that's going to put all the focus on gaming comments. Oliver: Yeah, what do you think of that, because there's very mixed opinions on it, right? Kathleen: You know, I wouldn't say that I've formed a complete conclusion yet. My understanding is that you as the poster will still be able to see your own likes, it just won't be public-facing. So I think it's good that that will still be there, because really at the end of the day, if you don't have that, what are you measuring? And especially for influencers, how do you prove to the brands you're working with that you've gotten any kind of results? You know, it seems a little bit like... My first impression, and this is not a fully-formed idea, is it a little bit reminds me of when you have children, and everybody gets a trophy. It's sort of an attempt to mimic that, like, "We're going to take like counts away so that people who don't get as many don't feel lesser." I don't know, I sometimes wonder if it's a little bit like a nanny state mentality, but I definitely want to think about it a little bit more. Oliver: Yeah, I love this debate, and I think there's a couple of consequences. Do I think it will rollout permanently? I'm not convinced, despite the rollout going across multiple countries. I think it'll have an impact, I think it'll have a couple of consequences. First and foremost, the reason, or the skeptic in me may have a different opinion, but, say their reason is to protect young people. I can't imagine what it's like, growing up, where your worth is predicated on how many likes you get, which is a truth. That puts a lot of pressure on young people, so the platforms have to take some stand.So I kind of get it from a safeguarding point of view. Then, to hear the perspective of talent and influencers and creators, there were many that came out publicly and cried and were outraged by this, because it's their worth. I think a byproduct of getting rid of the like count means, I think a lot of the talent will go to buying followers again. You know, from the surface level, so many people will do transactions based on surface figures. And I think a byproduct of that may be some further mispractice. Now there's a clear disparity, and people are a little savvier to different things that go on within the industry, I think that's a byproduct. I think what'll happen to the general public, I think people will post more. Young people, people of all ages, will not post a picture, because they're waiting for the perfect time at which they will get the most amount of likes. Which is absurd to me, because people worth is, "Oh, it didn't perform as well as the last one." So I think the posting frequency will increase, when there's not this public facing number, if that's the case. Then I think the last thing that will happen, and probably the relevant thing for marketeers is, if you're working with an influencer agency, as long as the information is accessible in some form, through third-party software, through the platform itself through speaking with the agents and they can provide that information, I don't think it'll affect the industry too much. But yeah, it's a very interesting debate. I know there's a lot of skeptics, of whether it would work. I think some of the motives are pure, and are the right step, but for me, Facebook are the master puppeteers. You know, if something going to affect the bottom line, and share price, and it has a bearing, that's the thing that will make their decision, not their efficacy. Kathleen: Well, and the wild card I think, and not to belabor this, but the wild card is really the influence that the evolution of platforms like WeChat and TikTok is going to have. Because if those platforms preserve those elements, and people start moving over there... I just want to fascinating talk by Mari Smith, who's like a big Facebook evangelist, and she talked about Mark Zuckerberg's biggest fear isn't the government, it's WeChat. Because it's becoming the one-stop shop for life, basically, not just social media and how that's why he's introducing Libra, the cryptocurrency, and other things like that. So I do think that... I know they're testing these things right now, and I think what those other platforms do, and how they perform, I have a feeling will probably influence this as well, but all remains to be seen. Oliver: No, I agree. And I think the Facebook empire, which encompasses the world's biggest speaking platform, or one of them, being WhatsApp, I know it's not as widely used in the US, but it's a huge platform... and when they figure out how to commercialize that, the conspiracy theorist in me says that there's a race here. If you think of every single social platform, although... everything that started with Pinterest, now to YouTube, allowing shoppable tags within feature. They're trying to create their short of share of environment where people buy things without leaving the platform, and this is universal across, not just certain advertisers. At which point, then, as a user, when I can use the Libra, the Facebook coin, whatever the cryptocurrency is the save 10% on this thing that I want to buy, that's seamless... Suddenly, they own the money, they own the environment at which you're buying, they own your attention. And I think that you're right, it's learning from what happened in China, looking at WeChat. And WeChat has similar challenges to Facebook as a primary platforming, being WeChat's not losing so many young people. They no longer use WeChat because it's seen as their parent's thing. And you've got all these micro economies in WeChat. But yeah, the sleeping giant, of course, is TikTok, and in China, I believe it's called Douyin, the same thing. But that's the real sleeping... I think they're going to have problems commercializing it, and there's so many things wrong with it, from an advertiser's standpoint, but I love the chaos that is TikTok right now because I think it's opportunity. I think you can be creative, I think you can cultivate audiences, I think no one fully knows what they're doing right now, yet. Kathleen: Totally. Oliver: That makes it an interesting place to work in. So yeah, I love that environment. When should brands consider doing an Instagram influencer campaign? Kathleen: Well, I could probably go on about this forever, because it's such an interesting conversation. I want to shift us, though to brands that are interested in starting to experiment with influencer marketing. You guys have done a ton of this. When you sit down with a brand, and they start talking about this, I guess my first question would be, really, what are the best use cases for influencer campaigns? Because when I think about a social campaign, I think about, usually, your goal is either broad brand awareness, or it's lead gen, or actually it's, you know, sales. So, are there certain use cases that make more sense for influencer campaigns than others, or is it equally applicable to all of those? Oliver: Yeah, I think 80% of the industry does influencer marketing badly. I think long gone are the days when you can take a picture, post it, and expect anyone to care. Influencers are vying for your attention, you know, as you scroll through news feeds. People are so passive in those things. I think when we sit down for a brand, there are a couple of things we try and.. if we're looking at an influencer program, the first thing we do is be very clear on what an influencer's role is. An influencer holds influence only over the audience that they've cultivated. So, for me, it's been very clear on what it is you're buying. When you pay $1000 to an influencer, you're buying... in many cases, you're accessing their audience, and that's the thing that most people focus on. But it's not the most cost-efficient way to reach ten thousand people, it's certainly not today. It used to be, but today it's not. But what you're also doing is asking them to create something. A lot of influencers have cultivated followings because they're very creative people. And then the third component is that you're having an endorsement from someone that holds influence over that audience. So when you spend $1000 with someone, they tell your audience about you, who they hold influence over, and they reach those ten thousand people, you know, suddenly you can start to perceive value. So the biggest mistakes that happen influencer marketing is not giving clear purpose. You mentioned, people kind of test the market, brand awareness. I think you need to be very clear. If your goal is to create really interesting content for your own social feeds, make that a singular purpose. If you want to sell things, come up with a framework, and a measurement framework that allows you to track success. And there's a lot of testing and learning, like I said, as much as influencer marketing and social media is a data art, there's no amount of data that can tell you when things are going to work, it's very much a creative endeavor. I think the third bit of that is, when it pertains to creativity, you have to look for depth. Again, people are passive, people are mistrusting, people don't trust influencers, they know it's a paid partnership. You have to look for depth. A couple of programs that we ran, one that is of significance, that makes a lot of sense, is we work with Brita. And I think it's a really good illustration because it was probably my favorite influence campaign of this year. And what we essentially did is, Brita have an authentic voice to speak about plastic and our use as a society of plastic, because they offer a solution to that. So, what did we do? We looked at a program whereby we shine a spotlight on the fact that in 50 years, if we continue with our plastic usage, and don't change our behaviors and Brita have the solution to that, our beaches, our holiday destinations are all going to be ruined. So we work with a lot of big creators that have a voice, or that speak to environment issues. We took their holiday pictures, and we photoshopped them and make them look awful, we covered them in plastic. And what we did with that is, the reason was to create aa juxtaposition in people's news feeds. The story was about plastic, but if we just took a Brita bottle and said, "Hey, this is going to help," no one cares, they scroll past. What we did, is you're scrolling through your news feed, and you see this beautiful image that's powerful, that's covered in plastic, like, "What's this?" You read the caption, and it's an emotive message that comes from the influencer of what they're doing. The second phase of that, was them to go, "Look, this is how Brita now helps me in my life. I'm not perfect, I'm going to stop using bottled water, I'm going to use my Brita filter." This is how its done, so it was a really... it was a two-step narrative. The PR coverage around that reached in 50 countries. We had the Daily Mail, through to UNILAD, LADbible, and those things. Because what we did it... and that earned media off the back of that was so significant, and we're yet to see the sales impact of that, but real good example where we've taken a message and we've thought about it with depth. And our purpose was singular purpose of raising an issue, and interpreting that creatively. Another brand that's probably worth mentioning, and you've said earlier, "What industries do really well in influencer marketing?" Other than the obvious being beauty, fashion, think of areas that are inherently social. For beauty and fashion, people follow fashion influencers, so fashion's you know, a place that's a natural fit. One of the brands that we've been working with, one of our longest-standing clients, we've been working with them for over four years, is PrettyLittleThing. They're part of the BooHoo Group. They now do about 30% of the business in the US. And they're a rags-to-riches story. Ten years ago, they were market traders, now they're a company that turns over a billion dollars every years, they're a multi-billion dollar company. And they've done that by disproportionately tripling down on influencer marketing for years. And one of their successes is they've done it consistently. They work with a lot of girls consistently, for time and time and time and time again. And they've refined their modeling, and they've made changes to how they do things, and they adapt their creative. But one of their key to successes was doing it. And I think a lot of brands going to influencer marketing test the water, do one post, try and determine if it works or not, and in no other form of media would you do that. You wouldn't put a billboard up of one singular for one day and go, "How's it doing?" No, you wouldn't. There's not many mediums where you would do that, so I think you have to take basic fundamental marketing principles, and apply them to influencer marketing, and not treat it as a separate art. But there are a lot of nuances to it. There are a lot of things that you have to be aware of, in terms of what you're looking out for. But a really good starting place for any brand is, your customers will always be your best advocates. If you can figure out a way to harness your customer base, those that have followings, that's the win. That's like the ultimate influencer marketing, because it's the truest form. Beyond that, there's a million and one things you could sort of explore. But I would say the brands that have invested for long periods of time in influencer marketing are brands that have had meteoric rises in very competitive industries like fashion, like beauty. But we've worked with everyone in influencer marketing to haulage firms, you know, a lot of people in the business community, the crypto community, you name is, there is a place for influencer marketing. How significant that place is will vary, you know? Working with influencers to create social content for campaigns Kathleen: Yeah. You raised something interesting that I'm really about, which is actually how the content gets created. And you mentioned that, in most cases, most influencers are also very creative people, and that's why they become influencers, and I'm really curious, when you work with clients, how do you advise them to work with influencers on the creation of the actual content that they're going to post to their feed? Because I imagine, there is a real danger to brands being too heave-handed in their control of the content, and kind of like ruining the content, and also dampening the influencer's voice. But there's also, on the other hand, the danger of giving the influencer complete control, and then you could wind up in a situation where you don't get the outcomes you were looking for. So how do you handle that balancing act? Oliver: Yeah, I think it's one of the industry's biggest challenges, particularly, the larger the business. The ramifications of the world's largest businesses getting their comms wrong can be hugely significant, so I get the resistance to want to give a ton. But, to me, working with influencers is no riskier than working with just a really bad idea. So, you know, working with an influencer for me gives people a voice. I use the example sometimes, I talk about... Let's go back a few years, something non-offensive... Kendall Jenner Pepsi. Kathleen: That's the one I was thinking of. It's so funny that you mentioned that. Oliver: One of the world's biggest influencers, celebrities, whatever you want to call her, entrepreneur. The reason that advert didn't work wasn't because they worked with one of the world's biggest influencers, it was simply just a really bad idea. That was misguided, and that's the risk that all marketeers take. I think we're in this world now where there's this level of trust that has never been had to be given before in marketing, whether that's a social media manager doing a reactive tweet, and the speed at which they have to do that, all the way through to working with a hundred partners, that have never... and influencers, and creators that might not know every nuance of your brand. I think what brands have to do is... bad influencer marketing is dictatorial. It's 100%, it's inauthentic, the audience won't like it, it will serve no purpose. Where you can be a little more dictatorial is if you are not planning on using the content for an influencer's feed. If you're using them purely as a creator, because they're a great photographer, and it's going to sit on yours, then you can be a little more dictatorial.If you are going to place anything on an influencer's feed, allow them to interpret that their own way. What I would suggest, guidance point of view is, give them the strictest list of don'ts. Don't post competitor brands, don't do X, Y, Z, don't do this. And then from a freedom point of view say, "This is the single thing we want you to get out of this post, this stream, or partnership over the next three months." And allow them to interpret them and work with them to shape it. You know, good agencies will do that. Our job as an agency that works with... we work with anywhere between 700 to 1500 influencers a month, real volumes of people, and some of our biggest challenges is convincing brands to give up that freedom. And I think the way to do that is, we want to have a really thorough, robust process in terms of sign off, you know? There's editorial control that allows that- Kathleen: There's like veto power. Oliver: Yeah, there's veto power. I think there's other things, if you do your due diligence on who you're working with, you work with the responsible creators that... if you're risk-adverse, there's a lot of creators out there who have no bad history, or nothing of significance. You know, there are a lot of things. It may mean the person who's doing the identification has to spend longer in waiting to find, and it may slow things down, but that's the right thing to do. Because by the time they get to create something, they're more on brand. If you're working with the right types of creators, not just the big name that you've heard of, because that might not be right for your brand, then that's the way to do it. And I think it's one of the bigger challenges the industry has had, in coming to terms with giving freedom to someone else, but I think that's a universal challenge across the social media landscape. And I love the fact that... One of my favorite platforms at the minute is Twitter. I just adore Twitter for marketeers. Kathleen: Twitter is the most polarizing platform, people either or they hate it, there's not a lot of in-between. Oliver: I love it for marketeers, because it's one of the only platforms that presents consistent opportunity. If you can get your tone of voice right, and you can speak to a culturally relevant moment, timely, you know, you can have tremendous reach. Actually, I forgot, our creative director, he was telling me about a business case where, I'll need to get the name because I'm going to really ruin this story, but essentially, there's a brand that's stagnated for... it's a legacy brand, for about 80 years. Never grown, never grown. They changed their entire marketing efforts, and really just invested in working with comedians on their Twitter feed, and they put a significant team and resources around Twitter. Two years later, their business had grown 165%, sales, they've really cut through, they've become... you know, there's so many business cases where the brands have got it right. If you look at the fast food industry right now. There, if you look at Burger King- Kathleen: Wendy's Oliver: [crosstalk] Wendy's. Amazing stuff, and I love the collaboration between brands, there's so much about it I love, because it really does, for me, feel like you have to be a wicked brand to do that, you have to be a self-aware brand. You know, when a bank tries to talk about people in a disparaging way or tell people, you know, that's not self-aware brands. A bank should never tell people about what they're doing financially, because... I'm going to use an example for that to give that more context, but Chase did a thing where they put out a tweet. I think I'm... you know what, Chase are probably going to hate me, because I might be wrong about this. It was a bank, and ultimately put out a funny meme, that, if anyone else would have done that, it would have been fine. But the level of self-awareness by the fact that a bank was telling people that they were irresponsible, in the light of that banks aren't seen in the most favorable of light. And that's where I think really thinking about your strategy and really thinking about what you can and can't do. And sometimes for brands, you know, saying nothing is more than just trying to say something. And there's one thing I will say about social media as a whole I'd love any marketeers to really get away from, is these arbitrary number that have been created in the industry that are around posting three times a day, and doing it at set times, and releasing content for the sake that... all these habits that have been created that are not based on facts, not based on evidence. Really, we're in the game of... we always talk about volume matter and there's big thought leaders like Gary Vee that speak about volume. I'm very much for quality over quantity right now, and I think it's ever more important that you put your head space and resource in the right things when it comes to social media today. Tools for fighting Instagram influencer fraud Kathleen: Yeah, I would agree with that. Now, if somebody is listening to this, and they're not a huge brand like a Chase, or a Burger King, and they're thinking, "I want to get started with influencer marketing, but I'm really concerned about fraud." Beyond having somebody on their staff and manually cull through a bunch of profiles, are there certain tools out there that are accessible to the smaller brands that would help them get started, and identify the right accounts, and check to make sure they they're not full of fraudulent followers or engagement? Oliver: Yeah, you know what the simplest thing to do, a real baseline level, is look at disparities between content creatives. So simply look at someone's follower size, go on a post, and see, proportionately, if less that 2% of their following is engaging with something, it means their audience... it doesn't necessarily mean that audience is fraudulent, but it's not a quality audience. So, you can look on a search level, the second thing you can do, if you have any suspicion that someone's audience may not be real, simply click on their following, click on the likes themselves, and just scroll down. And you'll just see whether people are real or not. They've got dodgy names, you know, you see a lot of that. And the larger account, the more likely they are to have fraudulent followings, not through their own account but there's a lot of bot activity that gravitate toward large accounts. But on a real surface level, you can do some simple manual checks that aren't very time consuming, that will indicate and protect themselves. And there is another piece of software, that I know is free, that allows you to look at historic follower growth. So you can look at anomalies there. And it has slipped my mind- Kathleen: But if you message me after, I can put it in the show, now. And then- Oliver: Amazing. Kathleen: People with check those show notes and click through on that link. Oliver: Amazing. So yeah, there's that piece of software that does that, and that looks at historic data, so you know, if for whatever reason, someone grows in a day, a lot, they've probably bought some followers. Kathleen: That's good to know. I will also put the link to that Wired article in the show notes, because it also talks about those spikes and how to look through those trends over time and identify those patterns, so it's kind of interesting. How to connect with Oliver and Social Chain Kathleen: And if somebody has question for you, or wants to learn more about Social Chain, what's the best way for them to connect and follow you guys online? Oliver: Yeah, awesome. We're just @thesocialchain. You can follow us on Twitter, you can follow us on Instagram, you can follow us on LinkedIn. We also have a WhatsApp group that you can join if you click on our website, and look on that, What App group essentially sends a push notification every morning, at 10:00 AM UK time, so early hours US. But it sends a push notification that's just five interesting things that are happening in social media. We have our own podcast, Social Minds, which we work with industry professionals to promote topics and debates. And yeah, we do lots of things. If you want to reach out to me, personally, I'm @oliveryonchev on Instagram, Oliver Yonchev, and my email is just Oliver@Socialchain.com. Kathleen: Awesome. I'll put all those links in the show notes, so you can find that there. Oliver: Amazing. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Now, before we wrap up, there are two questions I always ask all of my guests. The first, I'm curious to get your take on it, we talk a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast... Is there a particular company or individual that you really think is knocking it out of the park when it comes to inbound marketing these days? Oliver: Yeah, so inbound marketing. So I think brands that have really interesting figureheads tend to do inbound marketing really well. And what I mean by that is I think VaynerMedia are doing incredibly well through Gary Vee, I think they get a huge amass of leads. I think we do it very well at Social Chain. In terms of brands themselves, I'll use someone like Gwyneth Paltrow, and her clothing brand Goop, Kylie Jenner, Kylie Cosmetics. Outside of that, I would say brands like Glossier, doing super, super well, doing interesting things, really being an editorial voice for young women. Oliver: I think SoulCycle, despite recent controversy, I think SoulCycle get a lot right. In the UK, there's a brand that does very little outbound traditional marketing. They're called Nando's, I'm not sure if you have them in the US. Kathleen: Nando's PERi-PERi? Oliver: Yeah, Nando's PERi-PERi. Those guys do some really interesting marketing. Kathleen: And they make great chicken. Oliver: They make great chicken, Portuguese chicken, which is fantastic. Who else? Tito's Vodka, I quite like, it's like, no fluff, it's like the vodka for the everyman, I think they've done some really interesting things. So yeah, so many great brands out there. I tend to focus on the ones that really get either their leadership, or they have really interesting thought leaders within their business, and seem to it particularly well. Kathleen: I like that point, because that has become sort of a theme I've seen emerging from some of my interview with people, is that personal brand is really taking more center stage when it comes to corporate strategy, because every brand is creating content these days. The ones that aren't, forget it, don't even worry about them, but anybody who's a contender is creating content, and so there's so much noise. And it's getting harder and harder to stand out with that noise, and I think a strong personal brand is one way to do that, so love that. Now, second question. The world of digital marketing is changing so quickly, social media is changing so quickly, we talked about this right back at the beginning, how often they move the milk. How do you personally stay up to date with all of the latest developments? Oliver: As a business, we are obsessed with change and sharing information. So our internal comms, of course, so I personally pay a lot of attention to the things we post on our own social feeds. As a business, we put out a lot of content, we invest a lot in our own marketing efforts, because as people that claim to be the world's best social media marketeers, if our social media isn't setting the standard, we're doing something wrong. So I think our channels do a good job of that. We use Workplace, being our internal comms, which is essentially Facebook for work, owned by Facebook, and we have a group called Everchanging Landscape, so internally, everyone in the business is always just sharing interesting things. So it doesn't have to be things pertaining to social media, we have called creative campaigns work. And if I scroll down this thing now, within the last hour, there's probably, I don't know, 15 articles being shared by people, people are commenting, so we create a culture that has people sharing. I think there's some great sources, you know, signing up, setting up Google alerts, the usual stuff, The Drum. You know, Adweek, all of those things, that's how you stay up to date. One of the things how we stay ahead, is actually just doing the lot of it ourselves, and what I mean by that is we have that fortune of owning lots of influential pages. So we stay ahead algorithmically, by, something happens, we notice a decline in reads, we just start testing things and learning. And I think more brands can learn from their own channels so much. It still baffles me that more brands don't do market research on Instagram Stories. "Hey, customers, do you like this color product, or this color product?" I don't know why this is not a systemic tool when you have people that have chosen to follow you as a brand. So I personally stay ahead by trying to be a practitioner as much as I can, and believe it or not, I've recently turned 30 and I'm one of the oldest people in the business. Kathleen: You old man, you. Oliver: I'm an old man, so I'm a little out of the loop from time to time, so I surround myself with young people that are doing this all the time, that also helps. Kathleen: Oh, my God, I am like an ancient person, compared to you, then. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Well, this has been so much fun, and so interesting, I feel like I could talk to you forever, about so many different things, but we are at the top of our hour. Before I go, I wanted to say to the audience, if you liked this, if you learned something new, leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts, because it makes a big difference, that is how other listeners find us. And if you know somebody else who is doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, Tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because I would love to interview them. Thank you so much, Oliver, this has been a lot of fun. Oliver: Thank you so much, thanks for having me, I can't believe an hour has passed, so thank you so much.  

One of the most overlooked aspects of marketing for many companies is their own employees' experiences. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, TINYpulse Senior Director of Marketing Andrew Sumitani talks about why employee experience has such a powerful impact on marketing, how the best companies create great workplaces and channel that into their marketing, and how the hiring process can affect both your culture and your marketing outcomes. Highlights from my conversation with Alex include: TINYpulse is a software tool that empowers employers to get feedback from employees and incorporate that into business decision making. Andrew says we are in a time where the employee experience is the brand for an employer. According to Gallup, only 12% of employees strongly agree that the organization does a good job of employer branding. The job of marketers is to look broadly at their scope and ask themselves, how can I create an employee experience here at this company that is so good that people simply want to authentically share that? The silent killer that impacts growth at most companies is employee churn. If you can slow that down you solve for a lot of things. In the hiring process, it's important to not just look for people who have experience in the role, but to also use almost a regression analysis-like approach that resembles lead scoring to determine whether someone is likely to contribute to content creation and support marketing. Approach marketing your employee experience much like you would anything else - by starting with stories and looking for ways to create content around them. You can also use a tool like BuzzSumo to find people who have written about other employers in your space and get them to cover you in an article. HubSpot, Zillow and LinkedIn are examples of three companies that do a really great job of leveraging the employee experience in their marketing. Resources from this episode: Check out the TINYpulse website Follow Andrew on Twitter Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to learn more about the connection between employee experience and marketing. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And today my guest is Andrew Sumitani, who is the Senior Director of Marketing at TINYpulse. Welcome, Andrew. Andrew Sumitani (Guest): Thank you, Kathleen. Happy to be here. Andrew and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: I’m excited to learn more about you and what you do at TINYpulse. Can you tell my listeners a little bit about yourself, and your story, and how you came to be where you are, and also what TINYpulse does? About Andrew and TINYpulse Andrew: Absolutely. So, I've been in the digital marketing space, got my start in advertising about 10 years ago, and mainly been working in startups. So really, my core competencies have been in demand generation, building traffic, SEO, and a lot of different hats, as folks who are listening maybe in the startup scene maybe, can attest to. And that brought me here to TINYpulse, working for David Niu. He's been a long-time mentor and steward of my career in the marketing space. So, having worked for him in the past, our paths crossed again at the opportunity to work for TINYpulse. So, I think that was a natural way for me to continue advancing into more of a management career here at TINYpulse, where we do a lot of different things. But, I think really, that the value proposition of TINYpulse boils down to one thing. And a lot of managers I think, will attest to this, which is that sinking feeling when an employee or a valued team member gives two weeks' completely by surprise. And it's a gut punch. And so, TINYpulse really solves that in a number of different ways. One is, if you ask any leader, "What are your top three competitive advantages in the marketplace?" invariably, if they close their eyes and really think about it, people's going to be on that list. And that's very, very important, and it's a very valuable philosophy. But when we actually look at the behaviors and tools that enable leaders to check on their people, and they're not checking on their people as much as say, their finances. But finances aren't necessarily going to be in their top three competitive advantages. So, what we've done here at TINYpulse is built technology that's really lightweight, really easy to use in a way that allows managers to get the deal, to get the feedback from employees that they really need to make smart people decisions. And ultimately, when it comes to understanding, "Am I at risk of employee churn?" Or, "Am I at risk of people leaving as a result of, say, a merger or acquisition?" It can be a positive reason. We give managers the tools to understand that, and make decisions around that. Kathleen: So, is it a form of employee NPS score? Andrew: That's one of the aspects of TINYpulse. So, we make sure with our customers, with regularity that they ask the questions quite simply, "How happy are you at work, on a scale of one to 10?" And that yields a lot of different insights, not only from a quantitative standpoint, simply getting a distribution of one to 10 scores, but also qualitative feedback. So, someone may respond to that question with an eight out of 10. And that might seem really good. And I think it is, and it's worth celebrating. But at the same time, that eight out of 10 person may be someone who's very valuable, who has feedback, and constructive feedback at that, that'll help them in a month's time, retain that score of eight out of 10, or even become a nine or a 10 out of 10. Kathleen: Yeah, I can see where having a tool like that would be so powerful. I manage a team of eight, and I do weekly one-on-ones with them. But there's something to be said for a precursor to your weekly conversation where they're able to sit and with clarity and without the influence of somebody staring them down, record their thoughts and their feelings about how things are going. And then, you can follow it up with a conversation. But yeah- Andrew: Absolutely. And we've done a lot of ... I've been doing a lot of personal reading too, and research into this as we develop more products, especially on the coaching space. But when we really boils down to it, what is going to help someone learn how to do something better, whether it's management or their job, or learning a new piece of software. Is it going to be reading it out of a book or is it going to be perhaps, a private lesson with an expert? Generally speaking, it's going to be private lessons with an expert. And if we take those concepts and map them to the one-on-one experience, that's where we find a lot of managers can use some help structuring their one-on-ones. How much time should they be spending on them? What can I do to, again, front load ... to your point, front load those conversations in a way so that we can quantify and understand the trending over time? So, if you were to have a report one day who rated themselves a two out of five for how they're feeling coming into the week, you might not go into that conversation blasting right into, "Hey, let's talk about your work items. Let's talk about your goals. How are your tracking towards your OKRs?" Someone who answers two out of five may have something going on in their personal life. They may have something going on completely outside of work that is worth talking about. And that's something we've experienced here at TINYpulse as we develop and release more products in the coaching space, which is, as long as it's a five out of five, they're doing great. So yeah, we can challenge that person with more. But that person who, maybe a two out of five or a three out of five, what are some of those things that are going to help that person get to four or five? And that may be something that, it might be outside of work, it might be quite simply, "I don't feel that I have the tools to succeed in this project." And that's a completely different topic from say, nudging that person to really step on the gas and keep a sense of urgency. That's a completely different conversation. So that's what we've been putting a lot of work into lately. The Connection Between Employee Experience and Marketing Kathleen: I'm fascinated by that topic, as somebody who manages people. But it's interesting, this is a podcast about marketing. And my listeners might be sitting here thinking, "This is great, but what does it have to do with marketing?" And one of the reasons I was excited to have you on is that you have a very interesting perspective on the connection between employee experience and marketing. Can you talk a little bit about that? Andrew: Absolutely. And, I think it's very, very ... it's a point ... it's a very salient point right now, because we are in a time where the employee experience is the brand for an employer. The workplace is more transparent than it has ever been. Culture is becoming more and more top of mind. And as a people try to understand what culture is, I think historically it's been thought of as this touchy-feely look and feel of a place. It used to mean ping pong tables, it used to mean perhaps, having drinks in the office. And at the beginning of that, that might've been true. It really represented a way of thinking and the way of thinking that that employer valued. But as soon as everyone gets a ping pong table, as soon as everyone gets a a beer tap, then it becomes no longer a differentiator. And as we all know in marketing, I think being able to articulate why your employer brand is different, is paramount to success in the marketplace. So, that's number one, which is, from our research, only a very, very small percentage. I think Gallup put it as low as 12% of employees strongly agree that the organization does a good job of employer branding. So, they have trouble engaging their employees over the longterm when it comes to that brand. One of our mentors, Scott Dorsey, shout out Scott, he left me with a very, very important piece of advice, which is as marketers, yes, we can worry about MQL's, we can worry about sales pipeline contribution. But it's important for us to think about our roles in the broadest context as possible. And what he meant by that was not just caring about those metrics, but also caring about, "How can I create an employee experience here at this company that is so good that people simply want to authentically share that?" And we see the effects of that in third-party review sites like Glassdoor. You can bet that anyone looking for those listeners out there, if you are hiring, that anyone who's considering your company, they're looking there for, for social proof. And that's another marketing concept that we come back to, which is, well, what are people at that company saying about working at this company, and what it's like, what it's really like, to work there. And, that has implications into how quickly teams can grow. How the silent killer I would think is, how much a company turns over their employees. So, how much are they retaining their employees for the longterm? How long is that tenure, and the ultimate, which is, how are they performing and what are they doing over time that contributes to the value of that company. Kathleen: Yeah, you make a really good point. And I love that advice that you got about looking at marketing in the broadest possible sense. I know that when I interview people for my team, almost to a person, they reference Glassdoor. People are out there looking. And I know I do this when I'm looking at companies. And I used to be in a sales role. And I would actually do this as a salesperson and look at the comments on the CEO because I was selling for an agency, which is a very collaborative relationship-based kind of working arrangement. And you want to know the temperament of the person that you're getting into bed with, if you will, from a business standpoint. And there were definitely a few prospective clients that I decided not to chase because I read their Glassdoor and found out that they had terrible reviews of the CEO. And I remember thinking, if this is this bad for employees, it's going to not be great for us as an agency-client relationship. So, I do think there's something that's really real there. And I also think you touched on something that most marketers really get wrong, which is that they do tend to focus so myopically in on legion to the exclusion of everything else. Not only to the exclusion of the employee experience, but also things like customer retention. We forget that marketing has a responsibility even after we land a customer. So, there's this vast area of opportunity for marketers, which I think would also place the marketer at a much more strategic role within the organization than most marketers are currently. Andrew: Yeah, I can't agree more with that. And so if we've, over the course of this episode, we've talked a little bit about the top of the funnel, if you will, which is job seekers using Glassdoor. They're looking at job openings. They're taking that social proof of ratings for what it is. But as for how those companies are fairing once an employee has joined their company, it's, "What are those companies doing to really sharpen the employee experience so that they can maximize the tenure of those talented individuals and maximize the value of their investments that they make in training, in onboarding, in retention, and all those components. And how does that reveal itself on the other side? Glassdoor in that lens, is merely a lagging indicator of what has happened. But it might not always be the best indicator. And I would argue it's a terrible indicator at times, of what a company should do if they want to grow. If they want to join forces with another company, if they want to change their culture, what are some of the things that they should be doing? And, I think some of those sites are very limited in their capacity. And that's where, with regard to what we do here at TINYpulse, what a lot of organizations are now adopting is more of a real-time feedback model, which is to constantly pulse your employees to understand, hey, with regard to, if it's NPS, it could be simple as something as a company holiday party. For many companies it's not a small investment. So it's important then to understand, well, hey, is that adding to the employee experience or is it not? And can you quantify that? And that immediately arms, not only marketers but HR professionals. If it's a smaller organization that doesn't have necessarily, the biggest HR team, the CEOs themselves to deploy those resources in a plus ROI manner. And it's no longer squishy, it's no longer about, "Hey was that about perceptions?" It's really about on the broad scheme of things on big data, from a big big data perspective, are the investments that we're making adding to the employee experience, not merely continuing it or not falling behind. It's a way for us to get ahead. How TINYpulse Leverages Employee Happiness For Marketing Kathleen: Now, you, yourself have built or actually rebuilt, as I understand it, a marketing team at TINYpulse. So, can you talk to me a little bit about, from your own standpoint, what you've done to build the employee experience on your team, but then also, how you are leveraging that for marketing? Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. I think ... I was in a circumstance in which I was a marketer of one and given an extraordinary opportunity to build the team up. And for me, A, I talked to a number of really smart marketers, but really wanted to take this approach that utilized real-time feedback, but also, some of what the broader industry has indicated about how to manage teams while how to manage teams when it comes to creative work, how to manage teams when it's not routine work. And for those listeners out there who are readers, I highly encourage you to pick up a book by Daniel Pink. It's called Drive. It's all about motivation, and what helps teams come out with the very best results. And for many organizations, I think the knee jerk response is to point to metrics, point to carrots and sticks and say, "Well, if I find the right carrot, if I find the right sticks, that's going to help me bring you the best results." Now, that may work to a certain level. But the one step above that is really about A, giving people what is the intrinsic value of working together. And marketing brands, I'd say, are a little bit different, in the sense that it's not routine work. One campaign that may work this month may fizzle out due to ad blindness, due to the Google ad words becoming insanely expensive, or one channel simply not working well anymore. So, there's a constant creativity that needs to be put into place when it comes to marketing. And when I look at those characteristics in terms of the team, it's not only, "Hey, what is your track record?" but, "Are you a natural producer of content? Are you more analytical, on average, than the average content marketer?" for example, and then finally, are these behaviors a struggle for this person? Or is it something that they're, they're naturally going to bring to the table? So, I think that that team aspect, that's an area where, in some of our hiring tools, when we look at success criteria, again, we try to quantify those with regression analysis, understand, "Hey, who are the people who can best suss out these qualities in that regard?" that's another area where I think in marketing can play a role. This starts to resemble lead scoring. It starts to resemble how to qualify a candidate. So, for those who are hiring out there, I really recommend looking to the concepts that are the bread and butter of marketing. It's inbound, it's lead scoring, it's, some combined with some great HR best practices to build a really great team. Kathleen: Yeah, you're so right about kind of the blurry line. I used to own an agency for 11 years, and I hired a lot of marketers. And at the time, I was a HubSpot partner and a customer. And I built out an entire hiring workflow in HubSpot, where you could submit your application through a HubSpot form. There was a workflow follow up. I mean it, it made my whole hiring process much faster. I think it went from three months to three weeks, or something, because it was all automated. It was great. It saved me a ton of time. So, I can definitely see where you're heading with that. Andrew: Yeah. Amazing. And, what is the SLA with HR and their ability to call down interested job candidates who have expressed interest? We have a very tight SLA with sales. Maybe it's they've downloaded something. Perhaps it's a piece of content, or a white paper, or an ebook. And the SLA might be that person should be getting a call within 30 seconds or our SLA's broken. But when we look on the hiring side to create a delightful candidate experience, what are we doing on the SLA side there? Are those folks getting an immediate call back? Are they getting followup? Are they getting everything that they need to understand what it's like to work at this company? I think that's where a lot of employers are starting to look to their marketing teams for those best practices. And it's amazing. Mike Volpe himself, Mr. Inbound at HubSpot, gave a talk on this about how to break down people operations in that manner. So, when it comes to a product, talk to the folks who are in sales and who know what is being solved when it comes to hiring in that pipeline. Look to the marketing folks so that you can have those broader conversations you can't reach. When it comes to retention, what are you doing to keep these people happy? That's where real-time feedback, that's where HR best practices, that's where incentive programs, that's where employee recognition becomes a much bigger part of the spectrum. Turning Team Happiness Into a Marketing Asset Kathleen: So, assuming somebody is listening and they're thinking, "I have a really happy team. I have a great culture, my team is really happy," I would think the next natural question that they would be asking themselves is, "How should I leverage that in the marketing that I do? What is the best way for me to capitalize on the fact that I have this great place?" So, can you speak a little bit to that? Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. I think applying the very same marketing playbook that we all know, and for those that may be still learning, the first thing I would look at is, "How do we create content around this?" No marketing without content being produced, no communication occurs without some kind of message being created. And so, that's where I would encourage a lot of the marketers out there, if you have a great culture, if you have quantitative scores around how happy your team is, if you have quotes, if you have testimonials, even if you have case studies of how someone may have entered the company as a teacher of English, and becoming a senior product manager, and leaving to go travel the world and become a senior product manager somewhere else. Those are the case studies. Those are the stories, if you will, that resonate with people. And human nature at its very essence, we respond to those stories. So, if you have outspoken employees who want to authentically share, give them an opportunity to speak about those. Keep your social posts updated regularly, social posts on your employee profiles, figure out what are the differentiating factors about working for your company that are the benefits that someone who is a valuable candidate is going to find compelling and want to say, "Well, I want to work in that company. And because those benefits are only found at that company, that's the place that I'm going to accept an offer down the road." So, ultimately again, just apply that same marketing playbook, create content, promote it, the 80/20 rule, which is, 20% should be on that content production, but 80% should be really on the distribution. Kathleen: Oh, I'm sorry. I have to interrupt you. I'm so glad you just said that. I literally, just posted a video to LinkedIn today talking about, somewhat ranting about, how I've interviewed like a hundred plus marketers now, for this podcast. And that is one of the most consistent themes of the most successful marketers, is they put more effort into content promotion than they do into content creation. But what I have noticed is that most average marketers, it's the completely flipped. They put way more effort into content creation than content promotion. So, Amen. Andrew: Absolutely. And use those same tactics. I mean, if you find, talk to your PR person. Who is the person who is getting stuff written up by other people, never, not just on your blog. If you don't have a huge audience, make use of someone else's. Use BuzzSumo. Find people who have written about really interesting companies. Use BuzzSumo. Find journalists who have written about other companies in your space, other companies in your geographic location, other people who have profiled people who might be covering the same type of topic. Then reach out to those folks. Find out if they are ... be their friends. Share their stuff. But, at the end of the day, what's really going to show value for them is giving them a piece of content that is going to be a value to their viewers. Now, if they've written about the employee experience, if they written about high-performing, high-flying cultures, chances are they're going to want to publish again, so that they can keep getting traffic for their posts. So, don't be afraid, reach out to those folks. And over time, what you'll find is that it can take a little bit of time to spin up. But generally what I found is that always, always, always has a longterm ROI that is going to work out just right. Companies That Do A Great Job of Leveraging Employee Experience For Marketing Kathleen: Yeah. Now, are there any particular companies that you think do a really excellent job of this? Andrew: Let's see. So, outside of present company, I think there are a few. Those in the marketing space, such as yourselves over at Impact. I think those over at HubSpot for example, very, very strong in their marketing. They screen for some of the folks who are going to socially post. Again, it's not a struggle for the average candidate to propagate the marketing message, not only on the product marketing side, but also on the employee experience side, which is, "How great is it to work here? What are the benefits that I get from this?" Not the features, but "What is a benefit that I get from this? I'm a happier person. I'm a better husband, I'm a better spouse, I'm a better parent because I work here." And those companies that do that really well, you're going to see them spouting this out. They're spouting it in their blogs, they're spouting on social. And again, they're finding ways to get employees to authentically share it. And they're doing that by creating such a great employee experience. So, whenever you find a really great social post by someone who's sharing something, again, really authentic about their employee experience, screenshot that and see if you can replicate that playbook. I see HubSpot doing this, I see IMPACT doing this. Any company that may have a Lifepath hashtag, folks at Zillow are doing that. These are the companies I think are really putting together campaigns around employee experience that will help build again, that candidate pipeline, and then also nurture the existing employee base so they can grow and have that negative churn. Kathleen: Yeah. The one that I've always been so impressed by is actually at LinkedIn. A good friend of mine from many years ago works there. And she's in the kind of the HR/culture department. And what I've always been especially impressed by with them, I mean, everything they do, employee-wise seems to be top notch, but the most impressive thing to me has been the way they've built this alumni network. So, they look at the employee experience as something that continues after you stop working there, and they have these reunions for all of their former employees, who come together and still love the company. And when you consider, as you said in the beginning, talent is so hard to find. When you consider that the people that you've taken the time to train, and who've gone on to other places, could someday come back. What an interesting investment to make, and what an interesting thing to see, and incorporate into their strategy. That's always been really, really cool to me. Andrew: Absolutely. If the company is the product, then, what are the benefits and what are the benefits that make for the right fit of candidate and the right fit of employee. And maybe it's work life balance, maybe it's career growth, maybe it's a pay and benefits, maybe it's mentorship from senior leaders, or culture and values, or all of the above. These are all those benefits that are worth testing out in your messaging to find out, hey, what's resonating with the right audience so that I can double down on that on what's working, maybe emphasize less what's not working or what's not as important to the candidate company fit. And, that in itself will make the ROI on recruiting, which is a very expensive tool that a lot of companies, I think, can continue to struggle with. It'll make that ROI much, much sharper. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Yeah. Now, shifting gears, there are two questions I always ask all of my guests. And I'm curious to know what your answers are. The first one is, obviously, we talk a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast. Are there any companies or individual people who you think are really knocking it out of the park with their inbound marketing right now? Andrew: Yeah, so I just think a few folks who have always had an influence on me. Mike Volpe over, I think he's, yeah, he's over at Lola Travel now. He's now the CEO there. He coined "inbound marketing" in the HubSpot days and he's still doing that. He's still practicing what he developed all those years ago at HubSpot. Another is a Neil Patel. And I've worked with Neil on a number of occasions. I think when it comes to content marketing, he's taken this idea of being just insanely useful to marketers to the extreme, which is, 20,000-word guides on how to break down SEO, versus hiring expensive ... a partner to do it, or bringing in an expert to help them out. This is a way for people and marketers to grasp some concepts that are a minute to learn but a lifetime to master. And I think he's done a really great job with that. Kathleen: Yeah, he gets mentioned a lot when I ask that question. It's interesting to see the trends over time of whose names come up. And his definitely is one of the ones that I hear a lot. Second question, one of the biggest kind of complaints I hear from marketers is that digital is changing so quickly that it's trying to keep up. It's like drinking from a fire hose. So, how do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated? Andrew: There are a couple of things. I'm highly-engaged on Twitter. I think that's a great place for marketers in particular, to stay engaged. A, because I think I find that's where a lot of more and more executives tend to to hang out online. LinkedIn is another, that's a close second to where I hang out. Is to go where one's peers are hanging out online. And, I used to be a person who really wasn't into conferences, but I've really changed in that regard. So if you're ever, I think, reluctant to make that investment is, to really, I think wholeheartedly embrace it. Because what I found over time is that for a lot of conferences I go to, it's not about necessarily, who's speaking. Yes, it's great to have really inspiring speakers, but it's about the networking and meeting with one's peers. It's just what ... If one wants to be a movie star, you got to go to LA to be in Show Biz. The exact same thing. And creating that who kind of love, which is knowing the right folks who are going to help build your career, and also give you not just learnings. I often come away from networking, not having learned anything, but just coming back to the office really inspired, and really ready to execute, and really ready to keep things tiny and lightweight. That's often what I need to actually progress. And it's not that, it's not about learning the greatest new tactics, it's actually about staying focused and not allowing those things to distract from what we're trying to do. Kathleen: Any particular marketing conferences that you really are partial to? Andrew: Yeah, I think Traffic and Conversions Summit is one. I think SaaStr is another one that's growing, and it's a great place to meet other marketers and folks trying to grow their business. If you're not in SaaS, I think growth marketing, I think it's Growth Summit actually that is the title is another one. But generally speaking, I think those have been places where I find the content to be really geared toward people like me. So, if you are in that space, check those out. You should be able to get a lot of value and get ROI by attending those. How to Connect With Andrew Kathleen: Yeah, those are some good suggestions. Well, if somebody is listening, and they want to learn more about TINYpulse, or connect with you and ask a question, what's the best way for them to do that? Andrew: Sure. Yeah, hit me up on Twitter. Follow me @andrewsumitani. Also visit us at TINYpulse.com. It's a great place to learn. We have the number two HR blog, hopefully number one soon, but the number two HR blog in the space. A lot, when it comes to what we've talked about here today, we have a lot of our stats when it comes to, well, what is it like using real time feedback and what kind of location does it have on Glassdoor? What are some of the latest industries? That's when it comes to employee retention, employee recognition or employee engagement. Check us out there. And yeah, love to hear from you. Kathleen: Great. And I will put a link to your Twitter and to the TINYpulse website in the show notes. So, head there if you want to click through and check those out. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: And if you are listening and you learned something new, or you liked what you heard, leave the podcast a five-star review on Apple podcasts. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, as always, Tweet me @workmommywork, because they could be my next interview. Thanks, Andrew. Andrew: Thanks very much, Kathleen. Five Stars Only. Kathleen: Five Stars Only, absolutely.

How does Alex Berman consistently get sales appointments and land deals with billion dollar brands? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Experiment27 Chairman Alex Berman pulls back the curtain on the email strategy he uses to close deals with Fortune 500 companies. From identifying your target audience, to developing an offer and writing cold emails, Alex goes into detail on his campaign blueprint and shares how both he and his clients have used it to win business. Highlights from my conversation with Alex include: If you want to get in front of big brands, Alex recommends that you start by identifying industries where you've had strong performance or a great track record. Then develop a "no brainer offer" for other businesses in that industry. Alex says that enterprise level companies want to see that you've done work with other companies of their size and in their industry. If you can nail those two things, then cracking into big companies becomes much easier. If you don't have a relevant track record, he suggests going after a smaller company in that industry and then gradually working your way up in company size.  Once you have identified the industry you are targeting and you have your no brainer offer, the next step is to build a landing page for it. Alex recommends creating four different variations of the landing page and testing to see which performs best. When it comes time to email the target audience, use a short subject line. Alex says "Quick question" performs best for him. The first sentence of the email is then a custom compliment aimed at the recipient (the emails are one-to-one). Alex has found that adding this in produces 10X the responses. That is then followed by a one sentence case study highlighting work you've done for a similar company in the same industry, and a pitch to meet with the recipient. Start by testing different subject lines with small audiences of 50 to 100 people to see which ones work best. The goal is to get a subject line that has an open rate of 80% or greater. Alex generally strives for a 4% meeting book rate (so, four meetings or every 100 emails sent). Alex likes to test different times for sending emails, but has found in general that Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday at 10 am works best. The strategy that Alex uses works best for companies that sell a product or service valued at $1,000 or more. Below that, Alex says that a company is better off using Facebook ads. The biggest mistakes that companies make when implementing this strategy are outsourcing it, not customizing the emails correctly, and giving up too soon. It can take several tries at testing to land on a really powerful subject line and offer, and the best marketers are the ones that stick with it. Resources from this episode: Visit the Experiment27 website Subscribe to Alex Berman's YouTube channel Check out Alex's Email 10k course Listen to the podcast to get the details on Alex's email campaign blueprint and learn how to use it to close deals with your target prospects. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Alex Berman who is the chairman of Experiment27. Welcome, Alex. Alex Berman (Guest): Thanks for having me, Kathleen. Alex and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: Yeah you know, I was intrigued to read your background and your profile. It talks about how you help clients get meetings with billion dollar brands. So like, land the big whales, if you will, and I'm really excited to talk to you about that, but before we dig into it, will you just give my listeners a little bit of background on who you are, what you do, and what Experiment27 is? About Alex Berman and Experiment27 Alex: Sure. So Experiment27 is part of a bigger holding company that I run. X27 does "done for you" lead generation. So we help companies match with billion dollar brands, but then we also have Email 10K which is of course where people it for it, or they can do it themselves following the course, and there's also consulting for advanced entrepreneurs, but we just kind of help them with lead generation. So basically, if it has something to do with lead generation in the business to business space, that is my specialty. We've been doing this for almost a decade now, and also I run a YouTube channel where we have I think over 28,000 subs, and all we do is post about free business to business sales training. Kathleen: Oh, I love it. And how did you get to be such an expert in lead gen? Alex: A lot of trial and error. It's the same thing that we talk about ... I mean, it's like any marketing channel where the first time you try lead gen, the first I tried it I tried it all wrong. I was spamming a lot of people. I didn't have the offer down, and what I learned is by sending in small batches and by customizing the messages, it allows you to get a lot more feedback quicker, and if you're able to get feedback quicker, you're able to improve the emails constantly. So the main thing that I teach is it's an iterative process of testing a campaign, sending it out there, seeing what the results are, improving it, and then getting a new list of leads that hasn't seen the previous campaign and testing that optimized campaign with email, and then continuing to improve that over and over again. And what that allows you to do is, one, you can get a bunch of sales with cold email which is really cool, but the other thing it does is it really strengthens your offer. So when you do use inbound, you use social media, you use YouTube like we do, it makes the offer that much more likely to convert. Designing Marketing Campaigns That Target Billion Dollar Brands Kathleen: Hm. So walk me through this. If I am a marketer, and I come to you, and I say, "I'm looking to reach people at these huge companies," the billion dollar brands that you talk about, those can be hard target markets to crack into. Walk me through your process from beginning to end if you're going to do this for me. Alex: Sure. So if you're an established company, the first thing I'm going to do is ask what case studies you have and what sort of companies you've worked with in the past. And from there, what I want to do is try to find patterns. So for instance, a lot of our clients are software as a service businesses or services businesses where, let's say, you had a good case study with a potato chip company like a consumer packaged goods company. Then what we're going to do is create an offer just around that company. I call it a no-brainer offer, and what we want to do is come up with an offer that is so good that people can't say no. For instance, for lead generation which is what I sell, it might be something like we're gonna book ten meetings in the next week with people in your ideal customer base, or we're going to give you the money back. Something like that is what we really want to nail down in an ideal situation, and you could do it across ditches like video production we help some people. Usually it's coming up with either a video idea that they like or their money back or coming up with a list of what the video is going to be like bullet points, an outline. From there, once you have the no-brainer offer, it's writing that in a way that highlights the case study, and we could talk about this in a second what to actually put in that email because it's very similar to what we put in Facebook ads when we do that too. But once you have that no-brainer offer and you frame it in a way that is extremely niche specific, then you test it in the market and see what they say. What I've found is with enterprise companies, what they want to see is ... they want to see you've done work with the companies of their size, and they want to see that you've done work with companies that are very similar, as similar as possible, to them. If you can nail those two things, then you're all set to scale the enterprise. If not, I would not approach someone like a Fortune 500 but instead go after people that are $5+ million in revenue, and then try to get one of those smaller case studies that you can then leverage to get these large enterprises. How To Get Started Kathleen: Okay, so that was going to be my question which is, obviously everybody's got to start somewhere. So, it sounds like what you're saying is you start within the same industry or product service, vertical, but you just start with a smaller firm. Correct? Alex: Exactly. So one mistake that a lot of companies make, even big enterprises, is they don't have marketing that's specific for one vertical. So for instance, let's say you're running a software as a service business and you're crushing it with live events, and you're also crushing it with CPG, or you're also crushing it with retail. They will be sending all three of those customers to the exact same funnel, they exact same website. So one of the things that we focus on is not only separating the marketing, so we'll have three different websites for each of those, or one different website for each one of those verticals. Kathleen: A full website, not just a landing page? Alex: Well, a landing page is basically a website. Kathleen: Or a microsite, a microsite. Okay. Alex: It's like a microsite, it's a one or two page site. Usually it's just a headline, some kind of testimonial, some case studies, and then the contact form. Maybe a breakdown of the services. But yeah, and then it's not just coming up with that, but it's coming up with three or four of those options and then testing all four in the market, seeing which one gets the best response, and then only at that point doubling and tripling down on the marketing. Because a lot of entrepreneurs, they have a theory for what their customer looks like, or they have a theory, even if they've been running a business 10-15 years, they kind of know who their customers are, but they actually haven't done a real analysis and figured out one, who are the customers that will be most successful when using this, and then two, who are the customers that I actually make the most money from? And it's cool to do that analysis and then also compare it to which one of these offers actually gets people to buy most often, and then hopefully you find an overlap there. If not, you need to do more research. Developing An Email Outreach Strategy Kathleen: Okay, so you craft the offer, you develop your case study, and then you're sending ... it sounds like you're starting with an initial email. Is that right? Alex: Yeah. It's normally a short email. We can breakdown what the email says if you want. Kathleen: Yeah, let's do it. I love to get as specific as possible. Alex: Okay. So the first thing that I like to test is the subject line. Normally I'll just say if people are writing their first email from scratch, I would say just go with "quick question" because I've sent over 2 million emails now, and that one still outperforms cross niche. So the highest chance to get an open rate is with "quick question." So sending that as a subject line's good. Then what we do is the first sentence of the email is a custom compliment towards the person's business, and this is not something you can outsource, this is not something that you can kind of fake, especially at the enterprise level. It needs to be a custom compliment, and it sounds something like, "Hey Kathleen, really love your Inbound Success Podcast. Long time listener. Love the interview you did with Alex Berman." Just something like that. Or if it's someone at Sony like, "Hey," director of marketing name, "congrats on the Q4 growth. Loved the latest earnings report." You know, just something that's very specific to their business, and what that does is it gets them to keep reading the next part which is the one sentence case study which usually goes like ... Let's say you are talking to Sony, and you worked with ... Who's a competitor to Sony? Like Hitachi. So that custom compliment. So, "Hey, I really love what you're doing with Sony. Love the Q4 growth. We just wrapped a project with Hitachi where we optimized their entire backend, and we were able to generate a 14% increase in," I don't know like new user engagement or whatever you guys did. "We'd love to do the same for Sony. Are you around for a quick call later this week? Let me know, and I can send over a couple times." Kathleen: You know, and I can serve as a testimonial to the fact that this approach works because all right, I'm going to actually read the email that you sent pitching me for the podcast which totally follows your formula. So the subject line was "Huge fan," and you said, "Hey, Kathleen. Just listened to your interview with Sangram Vajre from Terminus, and I was really impressed with the idea of using AI to fit data and automatically build landing pages and ABM campaigns for prospects." That was the initial compliment line, and then you said, "It would be incredible to come on your show as a guest. I run a YouTube channel with over 23,000 subscribers and have been on more than 100 podcasts including," and then you listed some out. So totally following the format you just described which is awesome. I love that you practice what you preach, and it worked, and I got back to you and said, "Yes!" So there you have it. Alex: Yeah. We practice what we preach because every other way is inefficient. Like okay, what I found is when we started doing the personal lines, when we started doing that we got a ten times increase. I know it takes more time. That might have taken four or five minutes. Like I had to look up that podcast episode, we had to listen to part of the episode and figure out what it was, and then after we booked, I did check out the actual episode so I wasn't lying. That all takes time, for sure, but the response boost is worth it, and the conversion rate increase which you might not even see when you send the emails out, but you'll see it like three, four months later. The number of people that work with you or get you on their podcast or whatever from an email like that is much higher than one of these generic cold emails that people are sending out. Kathleen: Absolutely. Now, you mentioned ... I love that you have this formulaic approach. I mean, it's formulaic, but it's like customized formulaic I would say. It's a blueprint more so than a copy and paste. So you apply this blueprint to the email, and you mentioned sending it out to a smaller group in the beginning. So define small. Alex: Small would be anywhere from ... So you want to make sure you get enough data. I would say a minimum of 50 people, a maximum of 100 people with a pitch like this. And what you want to test is a few things. So for instance, what was the subject line that you just read? Kathleen: Huge fan. Alex: Huge fan, okay. So huge fan might have been iteration number four or five, and the first thing that we're looking for is, and by the way this is all broken down in our course, Email 10K, email10k.com. What we want to do is you want to find the subject line that gets over an 80% open rate. So for instance, for podcasts if you open that, that's amazing. Quick question might have gotten under 80% so that was optimized out. When we were sending to breweries, actually the one that won when we were doing ... It was digital marketing for breweries in the United States, it was a beer emoji, and when we were sending to the entertainment companies like Netflix and TV Land and stuff like that, what was booking meetings was, "I was born to work with HBO," or "I was born to work with your company." Benchmarking Success Alex: So that is found through ... Yeah, just hardcore testing. 100 at a time. That's the first thing you're looking for is ... Well two things you're looking for, one is are people opening the email? You want at least an 80% open rate before you even touch anything else, and then two, are the emails any good? Meaning if you get a super high bounce rate then you're going to want to change the way you're finding leads. Kathleen: Now quick clarifying question on that. So you're testing these subject lines. Are you testing simultaneously different subject lines with different small audiences, or are you testing sequentially? Like, you send one, it doesn't work, you send another one? Alex: Sequentially's usually enough. Because the numbers that we're talking about ... So what you want is an 80% open rate. You want at least a 4% meeting book rate. So every 100 emails, you're getting 4 people signed up. So when you're dealing with numbers like that, it's a little easier to see when things are failing or they're succeeding. You'll be able to see pretty quick because you're either going to get a 14% open rate or like a 30%, or it's going to be 90. Right? And that's ... You're really going for those major win emails. Kathleen: All right. So it sounds like shorter subject lines work really well also. Alex: It completely depends on the niche. What I've found is in some niches, yeah, "quick question" works really well, shorter subject lines work really well, and that's because your custom compliment can be seen. If you look at Gmail or even Outlook, you'll see the subject line, and then you'll see that first line of the email. So if you have even just "Quick Q," which also works pretty well, they see that subject line, but then they also see the first line of the email before they open. So a good first line also will improve open rates. Testing Email Copy Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. So all right, you test this out, you land on a good subject line. You already have the body copy within the email written. Are you testing that as well? Alex: Yeah. So the main thing I want to make sure first is the subject line gets over 80% before we touch anything to do with the body. I would stick to the exact template that we talked about earlier. That's the baseline template, and then from there if 80% of the people are opening, and you're getting ... Usually it's about 20% reply or less, then we're rewriting the body of the email. Usually it's messing around with the case studies or messing around with the personalized compliments. A lot of people when they first start the compliments, they either go too far in one direction. So for instance, if I was sending this email to you and I had pointed out something specific about the Terminus podcast and written this long paragraph to you, the chances that that would work, especially to an enterprise level company, would be very level. But what people are trying to find and what we're trying to find is you want a compliment that's short enough but it's not super creepy. Like, you don't want it to look like you did a crazy amount of research. Kathleen: Yeah, you're stalking them. Alex: Yeah, exactly. But you also don't want it to be too generic. So part of it is finding that balance. How Long To Run Email Tests Kathleen: Now how long do you wait after you send those initial emails out to kind of close the test? Because obviously, I don't know, in my experience I find that some people look at their email right away, and then for other people it could be a day or two, and they might still open it. What's the right amount of time for that? Alex: After seeing hundreds of these campaigns, it's kind of evolved a little bit because I don't want it to say ... Like, the gut feeling is we should wait a couple days on our tests. What I've found is when a campaign works, it works so well that you can tell after like three or four hours. Kathleen: Wow. Alex: Especially if you're sending at the right times. For instance, the best time I've found actually is a couple hours before this. It's like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 10:00AM Eastern time is usually the best because it overlaps early morning Pacific, and then the other best time is later in the afternoon. So like 3:00 Pacific so you hit like 3:00-4:00PM Pacific. Kathleen: Okay. Alex: But if you're sending on those times, you should be able to see opens and engages. And then the other thing I'll do sometimes with replies is, and this is a little bit of an advanced tactic, but if someone does reply to your email and you're trying to follow up, you can see when they reply and then queue your followups to go out whenever they're checking their emails. Kathleen: Yeah, there's actually a great platform that we've used called Seventh Sense that does that for you which is pretty cool. It just tracks email open times, and then it develops a personal send time for everybody in your database. It's like magic. Alex: Yeah no, it's sick. Because I just sent 50 followups the other day, and it was crazy. Some people only do emails at like 3:00AM Pacific, or maybe they'll do emails at like midnight. Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah. Alex: You just can't tell. Kathleen: So if you have such a short amount of turnaround time that's necessary to conclude a test, it sounds like you can go through this entire process within a week. Alex: You can, and one of the things that I talk to new entrepreneurs about is especially when you're starting your business or if you have a business for a while and you're trying to find what market is worth investing in for your inbound, I would run 10-20 tests. Just even test different offers and different positions within that. Like before you even deal with optimizing or making sure the subject line works or whatever, stick to that basic template of "quick question" and write an email, and then write 10 different emails for 10 different offers. Like maybe one is selling your company like you only work with chip manufacturers. Or only work with software as a service startups, whatever. Just doing what we talked about with the case studies. Because what I've found is one of those ten, or even two of those ten, are going to blow away all the other tests, and then you only focus on those two. Kathleen: And then you just slightly change the contents to adjust for different industries and roll it out? Alex: The ... Yeah, you change the one sentence case study. So we just worked with this company, and we did this thing. Following Up On The Initial Email Send Kathleen: Okay, great. So I love this format. So is there something that comes after the email iterations, or is that it? That brings in the meetings? Alex: That brings in the ... So there are followups on top of it. One, and I broke all of these down in the course, but one is just like, "Hey, I'm sure you're busy and wanted to make sure this didn't get buried." That's a couple days later. Then the third one is, I call it like the big win. So something like, "Hey, we just had a big win working with this solar manufacturer we did that ..." like basically a second one sentence case study, and then asking them for another call like, "Hey, we'd love to talk. If you're around ..." I always try to end emails with question marks, too. Kathleen: Yeah. Alex: "Would you mind if I sent over a few times for a quick call?" is how I'll usually end them. Or I'll just say, "Let's talk?" Alex's Results Kathleen: Great. You teach this method, you've done this with different clients. Talk me through what kinds of results you've seen, and is it specific to a certain type of business or industry or company size? Alex: Is it specific ... So anyone that sells to people that check their emails. That's ... This is what I like to think about, so- Kathleen: A narrow target audience. Alex: It's narrow ... Well so if you think about it though like some businesses aren't good for this. So for instance what I found is loans or mortgages aren't really good because with those you just have to hit so many people that Facebook ads is a better thing. Used cars is also not a good niche for this. But most of the B2B. Anyone that's selling to manufacturers or anyone that works in an office. Things like that are best for this sort of thing. Revenue size I've found does not matter. We've met with most of the Fortune 500 for our clients and for ourselves, and we've met with smaller ... Like everyone from local businesses up to billion dollar brands this is good for. I try to avoid companies under $5 million in revenue because I mean, I like dealing with people that can actually afford this service. I don't like dealing with local businesses. Kathleen: Yeah, yeah. But I guess a local business could presumably take your class or if they heard this they could test out executing it for themselves. They could DIY. Alex: Yeah, for sure. Okay, so what businesses are benefiting from this? Kathleen: Yeah. Alex: I thought you were talking about what businesses are worth selling to. Kathleen: Oh, oh, oh, oh. Yes. Okay, got you. Yes. Alex: So what businesses are benefiting from this? It's usually any sort of business that has a higher ticket. Because this sort of thing like we're talking about, we're personalizing the emails. Every single email, it takes a decent amount of time. So I would say if your cost is under $1,000 per user, it's probably not worth doing this. You should probably do like Facebook ads or something. But if you're selling a service, like my background is selling mobile apps to the enterprise so we're used to selling $100,000 apps, or like $200,000 applications, websites, that sort of stuff, or even a lot of our clients will sell like $25,000 packages, $30,000 packages. Cold email is perfect for those. Kathleen: Great. Okay. So considered purchases, if you will. High dollar value sales. Alex: High dollar value sales, and sometimes they're not considered. I mean, you get the right no-brainer offer. Our initial marketing reviews were $8,500, and we would sell those after a couple weeks, and then that would just go into the retainers. It all depends on the type of client you're going after. Right? Because like for Sony, or for Home Depot or whoever, like $8,500 is very small. Kathleen: Yeah, that is not a considered purchase for them. Very good point. So talk me through the results that your clients are seeing with this, and how long does it take to see those results? Alex: So if you get an email right off the bat ... I actually just saw something in our private Facebook group this morning, some guy sold ... his name was Mark O, he sold $4,500 and then $4,000 off a month like two days after starting, but that's when everything goes perfectly if you get the offer right. If you're willing to put in the time and you're willing to test and you're willing to be wrong 9, 10, 11 times and just keep going back and iterating, I mean it could work pretty quick. It 100% depends on how fast you are, how intuitive you are with the data, and then how much you're willing to actually put into it because a lot of people, they find cold emailing extremely boring, and I did too until ... I had to purposely reframe each email as, "Okay, this email's worth $3. This email's worth $5," like whatever, like I had to reframe it just to get myself to actually work because it is super tedious work. Kathleen: Yeah, but it sounds like it gets easier over time. Alex: It does, and it gets faster. And once you have an offer, it's much better. The hardest part and the thing where you can get stuck for months at a time is trying to find the way that your business should be positioned to get massive amounts of money, and I know it sounds kind of weird, but it's like there is a way to frame any business where it becomes a no-brainer for clients, and then everything else becomes easy. And if you're not at that point where it feels easy and things are like going, until you've been there it's hard to describe it, but there's ... And you'll see it once you get it. There's such a difference between a business that works and a business that just kind of works. Kathleen: Hm. Interesting. Well I love it. 10x improvements like you were talking about are certainly attractive, and the fact that you can do all of this in a week is also very attractive. It's just it sounds like it's really just a matter of time and elbow grease. Alex: Yeah, and if you compare it to something like Facebook ads, like we run Facebook ads as well, and it's a similar strategy where you're filming 10-20 ads and putting budget behind all of them. Those actually take time to get the data in, and it costs money. Right, if you compare it to something like cold email, all that costs is time which for some people is money, but if you're a new entrepreneur and you're not charging like $700 an hour, it's not that much money. Common Mistakes Businesses Make When Targeting Big Brands Kathleen: Yeah. Now what do you see as the most common mistakes that people make when trying to do this? Alex: First most common mistake is they think they can outsource it all, and they don't want to do the customization. I recommend against that, especially in this initial ... the hardest phase, the research phase. Once you have something that works, you can scale pretty easy. They try to outsource too early, too. They customize in the wrong way. A lot of our clients are ... well actually, not a lot of our clients. Some of our clients are international. And so English isn't the greatest for them. Even if they come from like Germany or some Western country. So framing that compliment in a way that doesn't come off as like too crazy is actually something that I struggle with a lot with our coaching clients. That's number two. And then number three would be giving up too soon. And actually giving up too soon/settling too soon. Because you might try three tests, and like test one and test two book zero meetings, and then test three books two meetings. Then you might be like, "oh, I'm going to put my entire business onto test three," when really if you had tested like four or five more times, you might have sent an email that got eight meetings. Kathleen: Yeah. How do you know when to stop testing? Alex: So I would never stop testing. I know even with our ... so with the course part of our business, we spend 30% of our revenue on research and development. So just testing new ads and doing all that stuff outside of scale. I would never stop testing. It's always surprising. What we saw our add to cart cost go from $100 to $6 this week just by testing a new series of ads. Kathleen: Wow. That's crazy. Alex: Right? You can only get those improvements by constantly throwing stuff out there and seeing what works. Kathleen: Yeah. Very cool. And I love how specific you've been just in terms of sharing guidance on the actual wording of subject lines that works and the wording of some of the emails. It's really helpful. If somebody wants to try this, how do you recommend narrowing down your list? Because a lot of the people I know ... You said send it to 50 or 100 people. A lot of the people I know have lists that are much larger than that. Is it just literally a matter of, "All right, I'm going to export this list of 10,000 people, and I'm just going to take the first 100," or is there some other way ... Do you start with like a certain subpopulation? Alex: So what I would do is if you have an inbound list, I would actually ignore it for now. So you have marketing that works for your inbound list, right? Keep that going. What I would actually do is go over to Upwork or go over to LinkedIn and just start making lists of your ideal clients. I would send 100 cold. I would make a list of these people cold instead of going through the people that are subscribed. Because what you want is you test with the cold traffic where you can quickly iterate, and then once you have something that's working with those cold people, then you can take it back to your main list, and you know it'll work versus burning your main list on an offer that may or may not be okay. Kathleen: Do you have any concerns around if somebody does that, jeopardizing their sender score just because people hitting spam or what have you? Alex: Yeah, so normally ... And actually if you "Alex Berman how to avoid the spam box," on YouTube, I broke it down. But normally I'll recommend starting with a brand new domain for cold email, and then you warm it up over like two weeks. You subscribe to some newsletters, you make it seem like a normal email, and actually I would have a different domain for your cold emails, a different domain for your inbound like your email list emails, and a third domain ... actually even a third and fourth domain. Like third domain for cold ad traffic lists, right just in case, because spam is an issue there. And even a fourth domain for just customer communication. That way you protect everything. You keep it all super segmented. Kathleen: Does that get really confusing? Alex: Not for me. I mean, for our ads we've got like alex@X27.io, like alex@X27Marketing.com is our other list. alex@Experiment27.com. It's all pretty easy. Kathleen: And I'm assuming they all redirect at some point to...? Alex: They all redirect ... Yeah they all go to my normal inbox. Kathleen: Okay, got you. Very helpful. All right. Alex: It's a good way to protect your sender score there. Because what you'll also do is a lot of times if you want to test a bunch of different cold email campaigns also, you might, and what I make people consider a lot is you might want to buy a domain for each one of these different niches as well, and then that domain will just redirect to a website that's specific for that niche. The Impact of GDPR Kathleen: Do you worry at all with European like GDPR rules and the increasing focus on doing something similar in the US, do you worry at all that that approach is going to get tougher to use because cold emailing will begin to become disallowed essentially under regulations? Alex: If it's illegal, I recommend not doing it. What I've found is there's always a place for a personalized compliment. The personalizing the emails thing is ... that's what increases our response rate, and it's also what takes it out of the spammy territory. We're not sending messages to 10,000 people. We're not robocalling. It's nothing crazy like that. But I would ... Yeah, if you're in like ... Especially if you're in Europe or the UK or Canada or Australia, definitely consult a lawyer before working with someone like us or doing anything related to this. Kathleen: Yeah, it is getting- Alex: As far as I know, in America it's totally good so far except for maybe California is a little iffy right now. Kathleen: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. But it's interesting the direction everything's heading. It'll be interesting to see where it goes. Okay. Well- Alex: It will be, but it's not like these go away. You can use these same strategies ... Once you get this testing strategy down, you can use it for Facebook ads, you can use it for cold LinkedIn messages. You can use it for text messages. You can use it at events just like testing your elevator pitch at events. It's all the same kind of thing. Just taking words and trying to test the way that you're phrasing things to find ... it's almost unlocking a lock. You want to find a way of wording your business that gets people to buy. How To Learn More About Alex's Strategy Kathleen: Yeah. I love all of this. You've mentioned a couple things like you have a course and you have a YouTube channel. Can you say a few words about if somebody's intrigued and wants to learn more, where they can go to find more information? Alex: Sure. If you want us to do this for you, I would actually just start at the YouTube channel, AlexBerman.com will go right to the YouTube channel, and if you do want to learn this kind of stuff, it's Email10K.com, that's the course. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Okay, love it. Now, we can't finish up this interview without me asking you the two questions that I ask all of my guests. The first one being we talk a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular person or company that you think is really just killing it right now with inbound? Alex: Really killing it with inbound. I'm actually not ... I haven't been impressed with very many people when it comes to inbound. Even the greats, I don't know if they're testing or what they're doing, but I see a lot of weird stuff. Kathleen: Oh yeah? Alex: Who have I really ... I actually like Russell Brunson, what he's been doing with his ad strategies, and he runs a SaaS. It doesn't even seem like it. He's selling a software as a service, but he's selling it like an info product. There's some real next level stuff that Russell Brunson's doing. Kathleen: Oh, I'll have to check him out, and I will share his name and the link to his stuff in the show notes. Alex: He does a two week free trial, and then it's only like $150 a month for his software, and somehow he's been able to frame his thing in a way where it appeals to B2B, it appeals to entrepreneurs, and it appeals to ... He's going after like people that are selling multilevel marketing. He's got everything down in terms of how he's framing his thing. Kathleen: Interesting. I can't wait to check that one out. Second question, the biggest kind of complaint I hear from marketers is that digital is changing so quickly. There's so much to keep up with. It's like drinking from a fire hose. How do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated on latest developments? Alex: So this sounds kind of counterintuitive, but what I've found is if you stick to the basics and you just try to get like those fundamentals right, everything comes into play. So for instance, when I was getting into Facebook ads, all I had to do was take the offer that I knew worked and put it in general targeting, and then the Facebook AI figured out what it was because we knew the offer worked. Same with YouTube videos. We just have to create content, and it'll find an audience because our offer system. So I think if you create a product that people want, and you phrase it in a way that is very hard to say no to, you'll win, and it doesn't matter if you're at an event or if cold emails get banned, or like cold calling doesn't work anymore. None of that will matter if you can crack that, and then number two is just go where your customers are. I've gotten a surprising amount of work off of Instagram recently. Like to the point where I barely even use LinkedIn anymore. Kathleen: Wow. Alex: But that just comes down to who my target audience is, right? I'm going after younger people now, especially for this course offer, and they're mostly on Instagram versus when I was going after office workers ... Actually, all the office workers are on email versus any of the other social media channels. So I honestly, I don't worry about that at all. Kathleen: That's great. You have figured something out, then, because the vast majority of the other folks I talk to stress about it a lot, so there's definitely a lesson to be learned on the approach that you're taking. Alex: Ooo, okay. So I actually did figure this out. So if you want to figure out where your clients are, write a super targeted Facebook ad and put like $100 in it, and what'll happen is you put no targeting in. The way that Facebook works now is they'll find buyers, and what I've found there is not only will they find out who your ideal buyer is, for instance one of our ads is targeting ... it's converting really good with women between ages 25-65+ which is crazy, and then one of our other ads is only for men which is great, but the main thing that I've found was if you go to placements, it'll tell you exactly where your ads are converting. So for instance, some of our ads do really well on Facebook. Actually, one of my consulting clients was only selling on Instagram. Like hard pitching Instagram, and when we did this ad test we found out a bunch of his people were on Facebook, and he went out and did the same cold pitching on Facebook, and it was like 10-20 minutes, and he already had a bunch of leads coming in. So that's another easy way to find it out. Kathleen: Yeah, you know it's interesting you bring that up because I found that too that paid ads in general are the fastest way to test messaging because you instantly can see what's working and what's not. Alex: Yeah, exactly. You can test messaging there, you can test placements, and then the way that Facebook ... Facebook's getting so smart in terms of their machine learning. So it'll give you data you didn't even know you had. The ad that I wrote, I had no idea it would appeal ... The one that hits women, I think it was getting add to carts for like $10 for $1,000 course which is crazy, but for men it was $16 with the same ad. So I had no idea. Kathleen: Which is still reasonable, but $10's better than $16 every day. Alex: Exactly. Especially when you're comparing it to ... I was at $100 before. Kathleen: Oh, that's great. Alex: But no, you have no idea. It's only the machine learning that taught me that this type of ad works for this market. Kathleen: Yeah, it's crazy what Facebook can do now. It's a little scary sometimes, but it's also really cool. Alex: Yeah. How To Connect With Alex Kathleen: Great. Well if somebody wants to connect with you, has a question, wants to learn more, how can they reach out to you? Alex: Best way to talk to me is to grab the course, Email10K.com. I'm in the Facebook group right now. It's unlimited consulting. If you do just want to like, talk for free, I would go to the YouTube channel. AlexBerman.com will go there. And just leave a comment. I'm usually in there. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: Okay. Great. I'll put those links in the show notes, and if you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learned something new, of course I would really appreciate it if you would leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts. That goes a long way to getting the podcast in front of other listeners like yourself who could find value, and if you know somebody doing kickass Inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. Thanks, Alex. Alex: Thanks.

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