Podcast appearances and mentions of kathleen well

In this special episode of the BG Ideas podcast, we present a roundtable discussion about the significance of Kamala Harris's appointment to Vice President, brought to us by the Center for Women and Gender Equity and the Division of Diversity and Belonging. Titled “Being the First but Making Sure You Are Not the Last.” This panel was moderated by CWGE director Dr. Kacee Ferrell Snyder and features three guests: Dr. Melissa Miller, Dr. Kathleen Kollman, and Dr. Lisa Dubose.  Announcer:From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas.Musical Intro:I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment.Jolie:Welcome to a special bonus episode of the Big Ideas podcast brought to you by the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, associate professor of English and American culture studies, and the director of ICS.Jolie:What follows is a round table discussion hosted by BGSU Center For Women and Gender Equity about the first woman and person of color to serve as the Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris. Titled Being The First, But Making Sure You Are Not The Last, this conversation has been adapted for the Big Ideas podcast.Jolie:This panel was moderated by CWGE Director, Dr. Kacee Ferrell Snyder and features three guests. Dr. Melissa Miller is Professor of Political Science at BGSU and a former ICS faculty fellow. Dr. Kathleen Coleman is a lecturer of English at the Ohio State University and a recent graduate of BGSU's American Culture Studies PhD program.Jolie:Dr. Lisa Dubose serves as the Director of Human Resources for Employee Relations and Professional Development at BGSU, where she also earned her doctorate in leadership studies, and she has taught for the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame.Jolie:Due to the ongoing pandemic, this round table was recorded remotely via computer. As always, the opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of BGSU or its employees.Jolie:Bowling Green State University is situated in the Great Black Swamp in the lower Great Lakes region. This land is the homeland of the Wyandotte, Kickapoo, Miami, Potawatomie, Ottawa, and multiple other Indigenous tribal nations, present and past, who were forcibly removed to and from the area.Jolie:We recognize these historical and contemporary ties and our efforts toward de-colonizing history. And we honor the Indigenous individuals and communities who have been living and working on this land from time immemorial. Kacee:Hello, thank you all so much for being with us. My name is Kacee Ferrell Snyder. I am the Director of the Center For Women in Gender Equity and the co-Director of the Center For Violence Prevention Education at BGSU. Today, we have some great guests with us to talk about our new Vice President, Kamala Harris, the first woman, and first woman of color into this role of Vice President of the United States.Kacee:In our program today, being the first, but making sure you are not the last, is presented by the Center For Women in Gender Equity and part of the Division of Diversity and Belonging. Our round table participants today are Dr. Melissa Miller, she is an expert on American politics with a specific focus on elections and voting behavior, women inAmerican politics, public opinion in the media. She teaches courses in American government, political parties, voter behavior, women in America, politics, and research methods. In 2016, Dr. Miller was named Master Teacher, which is the highest teaching award on campus.Kacee:Dr. Kathleen Coleman completed a PhD in American culture studies at Bowling Green State University in 2020, so congratulations. She's currently serving as a lecture of English at the Ohio State University. Her research focuses on representations of gender in film, television, literature, and other popular culture texts. Dr. Coleman is working on turning her dissertation, If She Were President: Fictional Representations of Female US Presidents in Film, Television, and Literature into a Monograph.Kacee:And Dr. Lisa E. Dubose is a duly certified Human Resources Administrator with nearly three decades of experience in public and private sector industries. She is currently employed as Director of Human Resources for Employee Relations and Professional Development at Bowling Green State University, where she also earned her EDD in leadership studies. She has instructed as an adjunct at two universities, which include teaching for the past two summers an accelerated master's level, strategic human resources course for the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.Kacee:So thank you all so much for being here for our round table discussion. I'm really excited to hear from all of you and hear your perspectives. So we're going to kind of dive right in here if we could. My first question, and I'm going to ask all of you to answer it. And Dr. Coleman, if you could start, share what your initial reaction was when you found out that a woman was nominated for the VP slot, and/or that there was a woman VP elect?Kathleen:Yeah, it was very exciting. I really didn't think that would happen. I was finishing my dissertation on a similar topic, right as the last woman who was still running for President dropped out of the race. I was literally finishing the last few bits of my manuscript that day that she dropped out. So to find out that Kamala had been picked as Joe Biden's VP choice, I was delighted.Kathleen: And then to have them actually win, I was also delighted, but again, I was surprised. All of my research was indicating that things were not necessarily going to go in that direction for this election cycle, because historically, we've had a lot of trouble getting women past a certain point in that process. And even the women have made it all the way to even the top of the ticket as a party nominee, a major party nominee, no woman had yet actually won the electoral college.Kathleen:So it was a sense of both joy and relief. And also, man, I'm going to have to revise a lot of stuff now in my work, but I'm happy to do that. I think it's a great reason to do that. So yeah.Kacee:Thank you, Dr. Miller?Melissa:Yeah. I actually have two responses. The first was when Joe Biden named Kamala Harris to be his VP nominee, which happened in August. I wasn't surprised, and I think that's kind of a cool thing, that in fact, there has been some normalization of women on a presidential ticket running for President. There had been two prior nominees for Vice President on a major party ticket.Melissa:And there had been a weeks long Veepstakes that I'd been following closely. Joe Biden had signaled that he would name a woman all the way back in March during a debate with Bernie Sanders, so I wasn't surprised. It was more like,"Oh, okay, good pick." I immediately went to my political science brain, "Okay. What does she bring to the ticket?" Et cetera, et cetera. Melissa:But then fast forward to the Saturday after the election which was the day that it became clear and was basically announced in the media that the Biden-Harris ticket had won. I was driving with my teenage son and I suddenly got this chill, and I turned to my son and I said, "I don't know if you understand what a big deal this is. We have our first woman VicePresident."Melissa:I started pumping my arm and my teenage son said, "Mom, you need to calm down or we're going to have to pull over." So for me, it was a little bit of a delay, but a real sense of the historic nature and a real turning of the page in women's political history in the United States.Kacee:Thank you, Dr. Dubose?Lisa:Yes. I mirror what my colleagues have stated. The level of excitement that I had was significant. It's significant because now there was representation of someone who lookedlike me, as a woman, as a Black woman, and as a researcher whose study was on the experiences of leadership advancement of African-American women. It told the different story, and just like my colleagues said, the information that I had gleaned over the time period where I was doing my research showed something else because that's what history dictated.Lisa:But this was a time of a shift, of a change during such an uprising of social injustice related issues. And so the excitement had many layers of it, but of course, key is representation is everything. When you have someone of a diverse background that looks different than what we had typically been seeing over the centuries that we have existed in this country, it tells us that there is acceptance.Lisa:So my initial feeling was that of excitement. And then as a person of color who experienced certain types of discrimination, and who has, as a human resources professional, investigated those types of discriminatory behaviors toward people that didn't look like the majority, I also had a little bit of fear, "What is this going to mean for the ticket? Will this ticket be allowed to actually push forward and win? And will there'll be additional threats that may not have been a consideration if a male had been selected for this position?"Lisa:And so I let that fear be overcome by the joy and excitement to say, "You know what?" It's a new day and we have to be a part of this continuation of change through conversations just like this. And so it's important for us to continue to talk about, yes we can, yes we are, yes we will. And then the third element is that I happen to be in the same sorority as Kamala Harris.Lisa:So as a Senator, and now as the Vice President, she is my sorority sister. So I am very happy to be able to state that as well, but it's very meaningful and I believe it's going to assist in helping to change the dynamic and the fabric of how we move forward in our country.Kacee:Thank you all so much. So Harris talks a lot about those who have come before her, and how important they have been to paving the way for her. She's also said that, although she's the first, she will not be the last woman or woman of color in this position.Kacee:Why do you think it's taken so long for a woman to be in one of the highest positions of government? And why do you think we still have not seen a woman in the highest position? So Dr. Dubose, do you mind starting? And then Dr. Miller?Lisa:Absolutely. Well, we all know the research that is surrounding the glass ceiling, and when it comes to women in the workplace and how there's this impenetrable wall or ceiling that exists, that says, "You can see what's out there for you, but we're not going to allow you to break through that ceiling to achieve it."Lisa: So that barrier is something that's real, there're entire commissions that have done research about it. A Federal Glass Ceiling Commission is one of them, and there's significant research on the Department of Labor website that talks about these trends. Now, when it comes to a woman of color, there's an additional element that is of concern, which is called the concrete ceiling.Lisa:So with the glass ceiling, you see it, but you can't attain it, where there are significant barriers. With the concrete ceiling, what it's stating is we don't know about it, we don't hear about it, and the intent is for us not to achieve that. So that's the precursor of all of the types of barriers that have existed, that prohibited women and women of color from advancing.Lisa:So as we move forward down the continuum of what's happened in our government, there were laws that were put into place to try and abate those issues, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is one of them. And that's Title VII, where it really addresses any kind of marginalization and making sure that there's an entity that is reviewing those kinds of cases that are coming forward, at no cost to those individuals that are feeling as if they're impeded. So we're beyond 50 years with that law, but guess what? We're still facing the same thing.Lisa:So the history of our country has said, "No, you women need to stay in a particular place. You can't have too much ambition. It's okay if you have this level of position, but not the senior level position. It's great for you to be support, maybe beside, but not ahead." And that's not true. We have to catch up with what other countries have done and how they've had women in senior leadership roles, running countries and making a huge difference. We're a super power, so our super powers have to be advanced by understanding that we are able, we are capable, we are knowledgeable, and we are forces to be reckoned with. And if we're at the table, we bring an entirely different discussion, an element that helps us move forward. Lisa:So it has hindered in the past, but every time we make an advancement, it chips away at that ceiling that's glass, and that ceiling that's concrete, and we're going to keep chipping away at it.Melissa:If I can just tag along on everything that Dr. Dubose said, and also add that everything that's true in the workforce, there's been a sort of a companion thread of research among gender scholars in political science and in women's studies, that those very same barriers have been present for women.Melissa:Just to put this in historical context, the first woman to run for President was Victoria Woodhull, who was born in tiny Homer, Ohio. And she ran for President in 1872 as the nominee of the Equal Rights party. She was famously caricatured in a political cartoon by Thomas Nast as literally the devil. But let me just underscore, that's quite a long wait until 2020, the first woman to be elected Vice President. Melissa: The office of President of the United States is the most masculinized elective office, probably in the world. And the traits that people associate with it are strength, decisiveness, authority. These are not stereotypically feminine traits. Stereotypically feminine traits are things like compassion and empathy, and caring, and that's not historically what Americans have been looking for in their President. So there has just been plain outright sexism among voters.Melissa:Now, that of course, has been chipped away at, in the feminism's first wave and the second wave. A lot of progress had been made and women began to enter elective office in greater number, but still that highest glass or concrete ceiling had not been broken. And there are some additional reasons why we have yet to see a woman as President.Melissa:One is that there just are so few women in the pipeline. We think of those stepping stone positions to the office of Vice President, or the office of President. And they are sitting US Senator, sitting Member of Congress, Governor of a key State. And when you think that even as we sit here today, women are just 27% of the US House and 26% of the Senate, and only 18% of Governor's mansions, there just aren't that many women that are there in those stepping stone positions.Melissa:Why is that? Well, so few women run for office and when they do run, they tend to wait until their children are grown up. Whereas a man might run for office for the first time, maybe at the local level, in his 30s. A woman, when she runs for office for that first time, tends to be in her 40s or 50s, which then means she's going to have a much more abbreviated career and won't get up to that maybe US Senate position. Melissa:So that is another key factor. I am just so thrilled, however, that this one glass ceiling has been broken, again, to begin to normalize women at the pinnacle of American politics. And hopefully that will lead to more women being excited, picturing themselves and envisioning being involved politically, and eventually running for office.Kacee:My next question is how does Harris' multiple identities, woman, she identifies as Black, Indian American, she's a daughter of immigrants, those are some of the identities that she holds, how does that play into her role as VP? And Dr. Miller, if you would like to answer that, and if anybody else wants to chime in after, that would be great.Melissa:First, let me say that those multiple identities were a factor in herbeing chosen, and that didn't surprise me at all. And in my view, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. The number one reason anybody gets chosen as Vice President is because of something they bring to the ticket. So we think back to Barack Obama choosing Joe Biden to be his Vice President. Joe Biden had that lengthy resume in Washington, DC, a lot of foreign policy credentials that the ticket needed, that Barack Obama felt would help him get elected. Melissa:So now we look at Joe Biden's selection of Kamala Harris and the fact that she was a woman, and a woman of color in particular, was a real nod, an acknowledgement that women and people of color were absolutely essential to winning in November. So this pick in that regard was normal. She was picked because he felt that she would help him win.Melissa:In terms of those identities going forward, one thing that we'll be looking for is how visible and how prominent of a Vice President she is. In recent decades, Vice Presidents have been more active and been given more responsibilities by the President of the United States. And so I hope that we will see Kamala Harris play a very visible role as a governing partner, because again, the more visible she is, the more she is a role model, the more that normalizes women at the pinnacle of American politics. Melissa:So I'll be interested in watching for what portfolio she has as Vice President, and whether it might dovetail with some of those multiple identities, but at a minimum, if she's visible, she normalizes women and women of color in American politics. And I think will serve as an inspiration to women to hopefully run for office themselves.Kathleen:Can I add something to that too? That's an amazing answer, but I also want to point out that for any of us who take or teach women's studies courses, that we often instruct undergraduates in the idea of intersectionality when by Dr. Kimberly Crenshaw, and we think of intersectionality sometimes as being, here's how your identity markers interlace to increase oppression basically, that someone, if they're a person of color, if they're a person of a non-masculine gender, that it can be a detriment to their success.Kathleen:But I think that in terms of deciding who he wanted to be his Vice President, that Biden was looking at the fact that intersectionality can, as Dr. Miller said, help with representation and help the Vice President speak to multiple constituencies. So I think that multiple constituencies can take inspiration from the new Vice President's identity markers, and that those are all good things.Lisa:I agree with it and I will build on that even further. I used as a reference point in my research, Dr. Siddle Walker and Sneary, and they built upon research talking about the ethic of justice with Rawls and the ethic of care with Yale again. And added to it, it's not just the male perspective we need to consider, it's not just the female position that we need to consider. We also need to add that diversity element into it.Lisa:And when you ask a person who has been typically marginalized, you understand with a little bit greater depth, instead of thinking, "Well, I believe this is what they need." No, it's an inclusive conversation that allows us to give our voice, lend our experiences, which makes the overall outcome better, and it reaches a broader audience. And I'll give an example. There's a couple of different groups that Vice President Harris has mentioned in her acceptance speech.Lisa:And she talked about her experience within sorority life and what that means to the Divine Nine, which is the historically Black sororities and fraternities. And then also, historically Black colleges and universities. That is a huge factions of hundreds of thousands of individuals who could individually vote, but the level of influence that permeates from that group is significant.Lisa:And so that movement was expanded. So you have the female, you have the person of color, you have the educational background that sometimes had been underrated saying, "They can't accomplish certain things," and it has been demonstrated to be inaccurate. And so with this accurate review of who was selected, who was able to show and share that these experiences of her life brought her to the point of being qualified and capable, it's significant, and it made all the difference in the election. So I agree exactly with what my colleagues stated.Kacee:Thank you. I'm going to jump to a question because I think it relates to some of the things that you're talking about. Amanda Clayton, who's a political scientist at Vanderbilt University said that, "Women can either be seen as leaders or they can be seen as feminine, and two don't go together." And so this classic double bind, how do we get past that? How do women who want to go into politics, or who are in politics handle that?Melissa:Let me just say that for listeners to recall, one of the most prominent memories that many of us will have, and it's easy to Google, you can easily Google this and watch it on YouTube. And it was just shocking, but it really brought to millions of television viewers, the double bind in Technicolor. And that was a 2008 Presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, where one of the reporters on the stage pointed out in his question to Hillary Clinton, that New Hampshire voters did, according to the polls, think that she was more qualified to be President, and had the experience necessary for the job more so than her male competitors, and Barack Obama in particular.Melissa:The reporter then went on to say, however, that New Hampshire voters didn't like her as much as they liked Barack Obama. And would she like to respond to that? That was sort of the double bind in a nutshell, that she had the qualities to be President, but it's another way of saying sort of like, "You're not feminine enough." One good bit of news I can report from the world of political science is that recent research on this question is suggesting that the double bind is not as pronounced as it used to be for women on the ballot.Melissa:So there was an interesting study by Deborah Jordan Brooks of Dartmouth, and she did a series of experiments in which she asked voters to read a mocked up news article that she made it look like an actual news article, about a US Senate candidate. And there were different news articles that she used. One was about a candidate who broke down, crying on the campaign trail. One was about a candidate who showed anger on the campaign trail.Melissa:And then at random, the people who participated in this experiment, they only read about one candidate. They either read about a candidate named Karen, or they read about a candidate named Kevin. And that was the only difference in what these voters read about in terms of these candidate descriptions for Us Senate. And guess what? There were no significant differences in how the candidates were rated.Melissa:So she interpreted this as evidence that maybe we're not any more penalizing women for appearing too feminine, and read that as sort of weak, not strong enough, susceptible to crying, nor do they penalize women for being real strong as when they show anger on the campaign trail. So that's one of several studies in recent years that at least in politics, we are no longer penalizing women on the campaign trail when they rub up against that double bind. So I think there has been progress made.Lisa:And I will add to that because I remember watching the four-part biopic of Hillary Clinton. And one of the comments she made is, "I wish I would have been more aggressive, but I was told that I should not come across harsh." And so in that moment, I think she believed that she could have changed the potential outcome if she would have followed her instinct, versus the advisement that people give on what people are thinking, and what people are writing.Lisa:One of the things that we have to become more comfortable with as women and women of color is being our authentic selves, because when we're taking on characteristics that are being pushed on us, it's not going to ring true. And so we should have the same rights to be authentically ourselves, to speak about things that are of value, speak of experiences that we've had from our lenses, that will build more rapport with audiences that look like us or audiences that support difference.Lisa:And so I think it's really important for us to be more conscious of controlling the narrative, and not always responding to the questions that are being asked of us in a way that's a lose-lose situation, but redirecting the question to say, "I appreciate the question you asked, let me tell you this." And speaking the truth of what their capabilities, qualifications are, because you will be penalized if they think you're too feminine, you'll be penalized if they think you're too masculine.Lisa:So just be your authentic self, which says you're qualified to do the work and speak to that, instead of emotions that are continually tried to be placed on us, to have to respond to. So even though the individuals may ask an innocent question, it can be skewed. And so we have to make sure we're prepared for that.Kacee:Thank you. Dr. Coleman, I think your research is so fascinating. And I am wondering if you can share a little bit more about prior to the election, the only examples that Americans had of President or Vice President came from popular culture, as far as women go in that role. So programs like Veep, if any of you have seen that, and Commander-in-Chief.Kacee:So to what extent did movies and television shows help pave the way for Vice President Harris' election, versus hinder the progress that she has made?Kathleen:Well, the examples of female presidency that are in popular culture texts in the 20th century are overwhelmingly negative to varying degrees. There's not a lot of them up until about 2000, and most of my current research has focused on 20th century representations, and those have been incredibly problematic. Those that are actually shown as somewhat positive, have still an air of the ridiculous around them.Kathleen:They're in either cartoons or comedies, or pieces with a little bit of unreality about them. There's a science fiction movie, for example. So having certain genres be represented with a female President, lends it an air of implausibility, whether or not that female President is shown as competent or not.Kathleen:And then as we get into second wave feminism, the representations actually get more negative up until about the late 1990s. In the 1980s, we see several incredibly, I would say direct pieces of backlash against women's pursuit of higher political power. We see comedies that are farces. We see there's a novel where the female President is completely insane, and we see just generally a lot of this masculine angst, where the first gentleman is a little bit more centered than his wife, even though she's presumably the one in more power, and that he is just endlessly full of a lot of complicated feelings around his wife having more political power than he does.Kathleen:So I think that these representations, even if they were designed to put the idea in the minds of the public and the audiences of women could achieve the presidency legally, it's a possibility, that it ended up having the perhaps deleterious consequence that it makes the voters think negatively of the idea, even if that wasn't the creator's intent.Kathleen:Once we see getting into the 21st century, there're more representations, there're a ton of novels. And then as you mentioned, Veep and Commander-in-Chief maybe the most notable examples, but bear in mind, Commander-in-Chief, even though that was actually an overtly positive portrayal of a female President, it only lasted one season. And it was very much designed to be the female West Wing.Kathleen: And you can see a lot of commonalities between those two shows, and yet unlike the West Wing, even though they're arguably of similar quality, Commander-in-Chief did not last nearly as long, and the main difference being this one is showing a female President. The West Wing is showing a male President.Kathleen:Veep, as wonderful as that show is and relatively high quality, she's not a competent leader at all. And similarly, House of Cards, we've got a high quality program, but the female President is arguably duplicitous and has a lot of political machinations, and she's really out for herself. So they have been gaining in number, which I think does help normalize it as an idea. But in terms of whether the character is shown as a positive leader, we really haven't seen that too, too much.Kathleen:I will say, there are several novels from the early 2000s that do show competent female presidential leadership, but unlike television and film, novels don't necessarily hit the zeitgeist as much. You don't necessarily have the wide audience as you do for visual media.Kacee:Thank you. So we've been talking a lot about politics at the national level, but representation obviously is important at every level. And I think you all have talked about that throughout your questions here. Do you all have any thoughts about having a woman and a woman of color at the VP level, is going to affect us at a local level?Lisa:As I stated earlier, representation is everything. And when you see someone looks like you, it is encouragement to say, "I can accomplish this too. Let me look to see what it is that Vice President Harris has that allowed her to achieve this level of success, and how do I need to equip and prepare myself in order to be able to do that at a local level, because she had to start the same way any other politician traditionally starts?"Lisa:And so with that, it's important for us to make sure that we're developing those pipelines that Dr. Miller talked about, and making sure that we have mentors and sponsors that are able to help with that development. And some of the outcomes of the findings from the research that I did, and where I was interviewing highly successful women who are over major organizations, they had achieved levels of experience being an African-American woman, and a lot of it talked about making sure that you're gaining the experience that you need, that you're having networking as a part of who you are and what you do on a regular basis, and not just touch points, but meaningful networking to say, "How is it that I can be successful?"Lisa:Now, the benefit of having social media and technology the way we have it now, while you can have interpersonal relationships and having dynamic conversations, you also have the ability to research and watch footage of others that can help with your development. So if it's something that you're interested in doing, making sure that you're finding someone who can help sow into you information that can help with your growth and development. Lisa:And it doesn't just have to be from a woman. It can be from others who can assist in understanding the process, doesn't mean that you have to follow it exactly, but getting that historical understanding and seeing what you can build and how you can navigate through that process to make the change that you're wanting to make.Lisa:So I think part of it is making sure that you have this fortitude, this courage to strike out and do something that's different, understanding that you may not be a part of the majority number wise, but you can be a part of the change that does happen. And so, as long as we are willing to nurture one another, we all have different skillsets. We all have different types of research, but our backgrounds and what we have to contribute all are factors that can assist someone or many in being able to reach their personal goals. And so I think that's the value of having a variety of lenses at the table experiences knowledge basis because it all works together.Melissa:I will just say that I think it may be some time before we see the effect of having Vice President Harris in that very visible national role, as well as other women. And so to the extent that there are women at the national level in prominent positions, it has this effect of young girls, young women, and all women really, of beginning to visualize themselves.Melissa:So there may be a little bit of a delay, but I'm happy to report that women... I should say girls who are in their pre-teens, their teen years now, watching the inauguration today, watching the next four years, there's going to come a point when they don't remember that the US ever didn't have a Vice President who was a woman, right?Melissa:So sometimes it takes some time, but I think what we can all hope for is that more girls and young women and women in general, women from diverse backgrounds, women from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, different socioeconomic backgrounds, do enter public office because as we've alluded to throughout today's conversation, women bring a different voice to the table, and it's a voice that needs to be part of the conversation.Melissa:So there may be a little bit of a delay, but at the local level, I'm looking forward to seeing it become that women aren't the anomaly, that they have for so long been on the ballot.Kacee:Thank you. Are there any other final thoughts that you all would like to share?Melissa:I'll just share one quick one, which is, if listeners out there want to accelerate the advancement of women in politics, it's very easy for you to take action. Just ask a woman to run for office, whether that's local office, whether it's City Council, or school board, or mayor, or County Commissioner, women are much more likely to run for office if they're asked to do so.Melissa:Men are much more likely to just take it upon themselves to run and not wait to be asked. It's an important ingredient in getting women on that ballot, is that they get recruited by others. So that's something we can all do, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, or an independent. If we are ever going to get women in those pipeline positions that will lead to a woman elected President someday, we need women in these lower level offices with the years it takes to get to the US Senate or get into a Governor's mansion. So that one day we can have a woman President of the United States.Lisa:And I'll make a quick comment. Businesses are a microcosm of our government, and from my human resources lens, it's important for us to ensure that when we are in positions that allow us to have influence, to use that influence to make sure that we're not just talking about diversity, we're not just talking about belonging or inclusion, and we're not just placing something on our website because it looks fantastic, but mobilizing it to make sure that there are provisions that are made to make these things move forward, to bring equity into the workplace more fully.Lisa:So that means that we have to put the money and the resources to make that happen, and understanding that it's not just a function of one department and division, it has to be the responsibility of everyone that is employed within organization to say, "This is the part that I am accountable to do to make these changes, and the best way to do that is policy development." But beyond that is including it in essential functions where that any individual that is in leadership, that's responsible for hiring, whether it's internally or externally, they are measured about how they're moving forward the goals of the organization. If there's a measure in place, then action will happen. It's easy to take action, you have to just do it.Kathleen:I want to add too that taking action and encouraging real life political movement and women in business, that if you're an artist and you feel like art isn't activism, art absolutely is activism because as Dr. Dubose said multiple times, representation matters. So if we have better representations on women in political power, I think that it will continue to help normalize it to audiences.Kathleen:So if you're an author, content creator, or even just some kind of influencer, you want to amplify the voices of people doing this kind of work well, use your position, use your power, use your voice to do that.Kacee:Thank you. Those calls to action, I think are exactly what I was hoping to hear. It's a great way to wrap this program up. So I want to thank you all again. I know that everyone is incredibly busy and I feel like I got so much out of this conversation personally, so I know that everyone else will as well.Kacee: So again, thank all of you so much for being here. This is an exciting time. It's a challenging time, and I hope that everyone has a fantastic day. And thank you again. Jolie:Thank you for listening to this special episode of Big Ideas, and thank you to Kacee Ferrell Snyder, Melissa Miller, Kathleen Coleman, and Lisa Dubose for the thoughtful conversation. Special thanks to the Center for Women and Gender Equity, and the Division of Diversity and Belonging. Sound editing for this episode was provided by DeAnna MacKeigan and Marco Mendoza.

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.

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.  

Billion dollar companies rely on competitive intelligence to stay ahead in their markets. What lessons can the rest of us take from how they use CI to make better decisions? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Cipher Systems VP of Marketing John Booth talks about what competitive intelligence is, and how companies can use it to inform decision making. Cipher's customers are some of the largest companies in the world, and they have highly specialized units dedicated exclusively to competitive intelligence. Not every company has the budget, or the team, to support that, so John explains what the rest of us should be looking at, and how we should use information about our competitors to develop marketing and business strategies. Highlights from my conversation with John include: Many marketers use the terms data, information and intelligence interchangeably, but they are very different things. Intelligence is the product of analyzing information and data, and it requires people to do it. There's also a lot of confusion around the difference between business intelligence, market intelligence and competitive intelligence. BI is the information you have within your own business, whereas MI is the information about what is happening in the market.  Competitive intelligence is information about your markets and also your competitors and how that influences your ability to sell within your markets or deliver the services that your business does. There are three kinds of software tools used in competitive intelligence: 1) Generic tools like Sharepoint or Google Alerts that can be used or many things: 2) Specific tools like Klue that are built to fulfill a very particular need, such as sales enablement; and 3) Purpose-built tools like Cipher's Knowledge360, which are built specifically for competitive intelligence professionals. Before any business engages in competitive intelligence, it should start by developing a deep understanding of its differentiators, strengths and weaknesses. Resources from this episode: Connect with John on LinkedIn Visit the Cipher Systems website Listen to the podcast to learn more about competitive intelligence and how businesses both large and small can use it to get an edge.   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 none other than my husband John Booth. Welcome John. John Booth (Guest): Well, I mean, it only took 150 some odd episodes for me to get an invitation. Kathleen: Saving the best for last. So I don't know if my listeners know this, but John and I, so John and I used to own a marketing agency together for 11 years and somehow miraculously, we're still married. And when people ask me what he does now, I always say he does the same thing I do just at a different company. He is also a vice president of marketing. He is VP of marketing for a company called Cipher Systems, which is in the competitive intelligence space. So John, for those who may not know you, who may not know Cipher, can you just tell my audience a little bit about yourself as well as about Cipher systems and what it does? About John Booth and Cipher Systems John: Sure. So as Kathleen said, I was a part of our digital agency for about a dozen years or so. And before that I held different sales positions started out in the staffing world and then held lots of different positions there. But since Quintain, I have joined Cipher systems and Cipher is a small, there's probably about 20 of us now, competitive intelligence firm. John: And we'll give to the definition of that because it's, I think it's very important. I see a lot of similarities in the competitive intelligence to what I saw in the content inbound marketing world maybe 10 years ago. So it's it's a, it's a developing industry and I think more and more people within the organizations, particularly certainly larger organizations are finding the need for, and using competitive intelligence today. But so we have a classic kind of services side of the business. And, and then in addition to that, we have a technology or a software side of the business where we have a software platform. It's a cloud based competitive intelligence platform that acts as a knowledge management system, as well as the competitive intelligence tools for all of your competitive Intel and dashboards and reports and newsletters and, and information like that. Kathleen: And what kinds of companies does Cipher work with? John: So Cipher works with large organizations. So our ideal buyer has more than a billion dollars in revenue. Typically at least 5,000 employees, they're headquartered in the United States and they operate in industries that have one or one of two key kind of characteristics. The first is they're either highly regulated. So think financial services, insurance, healthcare, or the industries are incredibly competitive. So think about things like technology government contractors those types of industries. So those are, those are kind of the, the ingredients that make for the need for competitive intelligence. Kathleen: So side note, I just think it's really funny this doing this interview because I am interviewing you like I don't know the answers to these questions already. But everyone listening doesn't so I still need to ask them. So one of the reasons I wanted you to talk about who you work for or with the kinds of companies you work for is that, it's the thing that I have found interesting, kind of watching as you've worked there is that prior to you working at Cipher, you know, I was familiar with the field of competitive intelligence, you know, roughly but there are such different levels of it, right? I mean, the stuff that you guys do, like you were saying, it's really big companies that have, you know, the stakes are high. They have a lot to lose. It's highly competitive or regulated or this or that. It's serious business. And they have teams of people whose jobs are just to do competitive intelligence. And then you have like the kind of competitive intelligence that, that smaller companies do where you're like, I've got a Google alert on my competitor, you know, that sort of thing. And so it's, it's very interesting to me the different shades of it. So segwaying from that, you mentioned defining competitive intelligence. So like how do you guys see it? What is it, how do you define it? What is competitive intelligence? John: So so there are a couple of key definitions, just so the audience and, and the two of us are on kind of the same page here. So the first one is the difference between let's define data, information and intelligence. So an example of data might be the number three. Okay. So that is data. Alright. Information is a series of data pieces. So an example, a pretty example of information is a streetlight. So a streetlight has three different colored lights, right? Red, yellow, and green. All right. And so when red is on, I stop when yellow is, I slowed down or hit the gas. And when green is, I continue on my way. So that is, so that is information. So there's several different data points there. There's the number of lights, what the, the, the meaning of those lights. Intelligence is the product of analysis. So intelligence requires people today. So so you might hear a lot of the impact of artificial intelligence on competitive intelligence and market intelligence and things like that. So today, intelligence requires a human being to perform some type of analysis and deliver some types of insights to the business that's intelligence. And that is that's what has value. So just simply gathering information, there's no value that's delivered to the organization. It's not until a person actually applies the filters and understandings and kind of teases out what this might mean that there is any value delivered, and that is intelligence. So then I'm going to define three other terms that are often kind of used interchangeably. And they shouldn't be much like a, when we had our agency often found that people would use marketing, advertising and PR interchangeably, when, as marketers, we all know that those are completely different you know, services and they mean different things, but to the lay person, they kind of get interchanged interchangeably. So competitive intelligence market intelligence and business intelligence are often interchanged kind of the same way. So let's use business intelligence. So business intelligence, we define that as the, the information that the business intelligence is based off of information on your business. So if you think about if all of the information that we have within our four walls of our business, that is our business intelligence. Okay. So if you manufacture something that might be how many widgets that you can manufacture in an hour and how many people you need and the profitability of those widgets, et cetera. So business intelligence really means focused on your business, right? No external sources or information, it's all internal data. Market intelligence is just that it is the market. It might be trends in the market. It, it might be consumer behavior and how consumers are responding to certain trends or, or things along those lines. And then competitive intelligence is information about your markets and also your competitors and how that influences your ability to sell within your markets or deliver the services that your business does. Kathleen: So earlier you mentioned that competitive intelligence requires people, but you guys sell competitive intelligence software. So like, how does that work? John: Because software, obviously it doesn't have people in it, but so think of it as think of it as this. What's a good analogy? So if I am a marketer and I have a tool like HubSpot, which we love, because it allows me to host my website, allows me to post and schedule my social. It allows me to have my content and edit it and do keyword work. All of that helps me with my marketing strategy and deliver a strategy. So you wouldn't buy HubSpot and say, Oh, well, HubSpot is going to do my marketing strategy. It's, you know, it's going to, you know, help me be a better marketer. Yes. But it still requires people to deliver that strategy. You know, you you're using a tool. Yes. but the tools can never, they, there are at least the tools today can not replace what an analyst, a researcher, a strategist, a person, a marketer, could be a product marketer. You know, what a person does. What kinds of tools are available to support competitive intelligence? Kathleen: And I feel like there's this vast array of tools out there for competitive intelligence. Like I mentioned earlier, it's everything from a simple Google or all the way up to a platform like you guys have that is used by huge corporations. So maybe you could speak to like, kind of what that landscape looks like. John: Right. So one of the one of the things that we're trying to educate people that are looking for tools are the different types of tools. We believe there are three different kinds of tools out there. There are what we call generic tools, and those are tools that are typically they've been built for a different purpose, but they're often adopted or adapted to a competitive intelligence use. And a good example of that is SharePoint. So SharePoint wasn't built for competitive intelligence, but SharePoint is, it can be an adequate kind of knowledge management source. It can, you know, you can have teams adding information to it and downloading information. You could even, you know, use some of the collaborative features there, et cetera. And so that's like the use of a generic tool. And then you have your your second type of CI tools, a tool that is built for a specific really for a specific person purpose. And, and an example of that is, so there's a company, one of our competitors, Klue. And they do a very good job of sales enablement. So if you have a large sales team and you want to empower your sales team to close more deals, and you want to give your sales team the resources that they need to have the right information at their fingertips, when they're on calls and and kind of, and, and sell against other competitors, they're a great tool for that. And then you have the third category, which is kind of that the tool that is built specifically for competitive intelligence and, and those are tools that do primarily three things. They gather information. So they're going to allow you to aggregate information and that information could come in from newsfeeds. It might come in from subscriptions to information, the research that you have it, it might be internal documents that you have kind of those business intelligence documents that we talked about. It might be information that your sales or marketing team uncovers maybe during the course of their day. So one of the things that, that we help companies with is most companies have just, just dozens, if not hundreds of nuggets of information within the organization, but they just don't have the ability to give it visibility. So, you know, it's, you know, the salesperson that knows what he's up against for a particular deal, because the prospect shared this with them and it's sitting within his inbox and he's the only person that has access to his inbox. So the product marketing team that is getting ready to do the roadmap for their product, can't see what the customer, the prospect is looking for because they don't have access to this information. So that third tool allows all of this information to go into it. And then with our tool, we use artificial intelligence and natural language processing to automatically tag this information. And we use semantic learning for it to identify things like location company and individuals by reading through and analyzing the, the, the content that you're adding to the system. So, there are those types of tools and, and it's interesting. We did some research a couple of years ago. The pharmaceutical industry is by far kind of the most advanced commercial, competitive intelligence kind of industry. Most other industries, they're still kind of developing CI practices and, and most outside of the pharmaceutical industry. And I kind of call that life sciences. So not strictly just pharmaceuticals. Most organizations have I think it's like 1.2 people working on their CI. So not big teams, not, not at all. How can marketers use competitive intelligence? Kathleen: Yeah. It's so interesting. It's such a specialized field. I feel like you know, now coming back to kind of, the focus of this podcast obviously is inbound marketing. So a lot of marketers are listening and this can seem very unapproachable because like, for example, if you guys, you work with really large companies and they have these dedicated people let's start with what, how are those companies using competitive intelligence and how is that helping them make better business decisions or get better results from their businesses. And then we can kind of bring it back down to, for smaller companies, what are ways they could begin to approach this? So let's begin some like actual examples of how this plays out. John: Okay. So so I think that that, that the marketers marketers today, this is, this is my own belief. I believe they're, they're waking up to this need for competitive intelligence because your inbound marketing is no longer delivering the results that you were seeing before. So for just about a decade or so, we have as marketers, we've been really focused on the content I'm creating and attract, creating content, solving problems, answering questions, et cetera. And we've been rewarded with that with prospects and customers and results, and kind of the, you know, Marcus shared approach. They have questions kind of, you know, answer their questions and, and, you know, you'll be rewarded well. In the beginning that was really, really successful because there were fewer people doing it and, and the people that were doing it for the most part were really doing it. You know, it's not until much later that you're downloading the ebook and it's actually just 18 PowerPoint slides with two bullets on each slide and has nothing to do with an actual book. So we have to, as marketers look for things that are going to give us results. And so, as we were focused kind of internally on what we're talking about, what our prospects and customers are talking about, we're really ignoring what was going on in our market and our competitors. And so we were ignoring these macro issues. And so competitive intelligence is kind of the other side of the equation. So you know, you've take your prospects and your customers, and that's one piece of success. And then, but, but you can't do that in a vacuum. Those that do SEO work understand that. So you find out what your teams are, you know, what you want to rank for and what your competitors are ranking for. And then you do SEO work to help change those rankings. Well, your competitors, don't just sit still. They're also looking at what's going on in the market and looking at the actions that you're doing. And so, you know, we found this need to to address, well, how do I understand what's going on in the marketplace and how do I position myself against my competitors or the other options that that my prospects and customers have. So that's a long roundabout way of explaining how companies are using competitive intelligence to better deploy their resources. And so when, when you're doing this before, you can get to actually doing competitive intelligence work, you have to have a really clear understanding of your differentiators and, and your vulnerabilities. So that's where, you know, somebody who wants to begin doing competitive intelligence work, I would challenge them to to, to sit down and do the, the work on how are you different from your competitors, you know, and, and where do you have overlap and where is that overlap? Where does that lead to, or where could you be vulnerable because of that overlap? What impact does competitive intelligence have on businesses? Kathleen: So the larger companies that you guys work with, obviously have that part figured out. They, you know, they have their teams in place, they understand their differentiators. So when they undertake competitive intelligence, how are they using it? Like in practical terms to get better business results? Do you have some case studies or some success stories or anything like that that you can share of how, like, how does competitive intelligence produce better outcomes for these companies? John: Yes. So this was this was a very kind of rude awakening coming from the marketing agency world where you know, you have clients and you're working with clients and you're doing great work for them. And you ask your clients, Hey, you know, would you mind providing a testimonial, a quote, being a part of a, you know, a white paper case study you know, sharing your experience and, and usually it's, Oh yeah. You know, they're very supportive of that when you are in the competitive intelligence world, nobody wants to talk about the tools that they're using, what you're doing for them, because by nature of it, you are, you know, you're giving away intelligence for your competitors to use against you. Kathleen: You know what other industry is like that? Cybersecurity. I know that, of which you speak. John: So let me, I can talk in some kind of in general terms. So we estimate and Cipher has been around for 20, 25 years. We estimate that most most people doing CI work spend about 70% of their time gathering and organizing information. If we go back to the definitions that we had of data, information, and intelligence, data and information add zero value to the business. So you're spending 70% of your time on things that have no value add to the business. Only 30% of your time is on the analysis, developing the insights, you know, all of that information that your CI consumers, whether it be your sales teams, your, your C suite, your product development team, your marketers, they all need this information, but the bulk of your time is spent gathering it and, and organizing it. And, that is because your business is complicated and information comes in lots of different forms, and some of it is structured. And some of it is unstructured. You know, you have information internal reports. You have, as I mentioned before, you have emails that are received from salespeople. You have teams that are out in the field and going to trade shows and seeing you know, what your competitors, their messages at their trade show boots, you have competitor websites that are changing and messaging. And so so what our tool does is it automates a lot of that. For example we have many customers before they started using our tool Knowledge360, that would have 18 number. And some of them would have more that would manually go out to competitors' websites and look at their websites and look for changes in their websites. And that could be pricing changes if you're in an industry or, or, you know, a market that is price sensitive, you want to know about those changes. And, you know, it could be messaging changes. So by using a tool like Knowledge360, we can automate that. And so the tool goes out, it gathers the information. It says, Hey, this page has changed. It highlights the, the, the new information, you know, and, and that's, that's there in one color, it highlights the information that has been changed or removed and another color. And now an analyst can take a look at that and say, Oh, this is really meaningful. You know, so that's, that's an example of how are a tool like ours or how anyone can use competitive intelligence. So, to monitor the messaging that your competitors are using, or if they have a pricing page, you know, you can, you can monitor that for changes in their pricing. How do companies use competitive intelligence? Kathleen: So it sounds like the tool itself can be used to save time to streamline the process, but like, what are these companies doing with this information? How, like, why are they spending all this money on competitive intelligence? What is it doing things successful? John: So if you think about this so it's helping them be successful by giving insights and providing this intelligence that your decision makers are looking for. And ultimately, hopefully you're, you're enabling them to make better informed decisions. So if you think about think about someone that has you know, you're wearing glasses, but they have blinders on, and you can only see right in front of you. And you're making your decisions based on your field of vision that is just in front of you. Now, you take those away and you have a wider field of vision, and you have more information. You may, you may make a different decision. Kathleen: What's an example of something, a marketing thing that I might do differently based on the information I would find? John: So here's, here's an example. So if I have a, let's say I'm a nationwide company and I compete with someone on the East coast. Okay. And they're a good competitor. I went against them. Sometimes they went against me sometimes. But I have offices on the East coast and also on the West coast. Well, if I had a CI department, one of the things they might be monitoring or looking for is job postings with my competitors. So if all of a sudden, one of my competitors is posting a sales manager position in the Seattle market, and they're not in the Seattle market. And one of my key customers is in the Seattle market. Oh, that's something that I want to know about because it looks like my competitor is coming into, if they're going to invest in building out a sales team, putting an office in Seattle. Now, all of a sudden, my sales people that have only had to deal with maybe the competitors that were in that local market without this East coast competitor, they now need to be aware of this new competitor coming into the market. And that may change how we position ourselves. It may change how we price things. It may change, you know, the terms of her contracts. It could have all types of different information, you know, of, of business decisions that we make. How Cipher uses competitive intelligence for itself Kathleen: So I'm assuming that you guys are, as I like to say, drinking your own champagne, because I don't like the phrase eating your own dog food. So how does Cipher use competitive intelligence? John: So so we use this fantastic tool called Knowledge360. It's very comprehensive. We have several dashboards that we use. And one in particular that is called our competition crusher. And so with our competition crusher dashboard, it's a feed of news announcements on it's a feed of social. It has intelligence that our salespeople gain talking to prospects and customers. Our marketing team will add information like messaging changes that we might see and all of this battle cards. So if we know we're going up against a particular competitor, we want to, you know, we want to draw attention to these benefits of using our product. And, and if we know that there are gaps, you know, we want to ask our prospects about, you know, the gaps that we know our competitors have. So, that's one example of how we're using it to kind of gather all of that information, organize it in a way, you know, and the beauty of using something you're using a tool that provides dashboards is the dashboards are updated in real time. So unlike, you know, most people, if they have any experience or exposure to CI work it's typically a part of the, you know, quarterly sales meeting. And there's somebody that comes up that says competitor ABC is doing this. And then, you know, they share the PowerPoint deck and, you know, a quarter later another report comes out, but there's a lot of time and a lot of change that goes on between, you know, the publishing of those two different reports. And, you know, you may make different decisions having a dashboard that's always on always available, always monitoring. You're always getting the most up to date information. And so we share that with our leadership team, our sales team, marketing team, customer, all of them add to, and, and consume information from those dashboards. Prediction markets and the future of competitive intelligence Kathleen: And then real quickly, because I feel like this could be an entirely other podcast episode. I feel like with competitive intelligence, you're looking at things that have already happened, right? You guys have something I find fascinating, which is this other side to your business where you can do much more predictive stuff. It's super cool. And you have something called predictive markets. So can you, somewhat quickly because we are coming up on our time, just give people a sense of what I mean, cause that's really like competitive intelligence looking into the future, if you will, or trying to figure out what's gonna happen in the future. So how does that work? John: So that is really cool stuff and it is relatively new. So Cipher systems and another company Consensus Point, we merged towards the end of last year. Consensus Point is a a research company. So as competitive intelligence professionals, they gather information and they do research. You have two primary types of research yet. Primary research and secondary research, secondary research being research that's available to anyone and those might be market reports or things that are publicly available and anyone has access to those or they're not restricted. Primary research is research that you do, you hire someone to do on your behalf and that's information that you have. And that if, if done correctly and on the appropriate things could be a competitive advantage having this primary information or more information about a particular topic. Well, what you're talking about is predictive markets research. So if you think about primary research, most people are familiar with polls and surveys. And so that is a traditional kind of primary research method that is it's, it's very effective for certain things. It's also riddled with problems for other things, for example human beings in general, we are very poor predictors of our own performance. So you know, just ask anyone with a child and ask them how bright their child is. Nobody is going to tell you that their child is below average average, you know, they're Oh, you know, top 1%, 10%, 5%. Well, that's not true because most of us are average. Kathleen: That's why it's the definition. 90% of us are not in the top 10%.  John: That's exactly right. So what a prediction market is, is it is think of a market, probably one of the most common is the stock market. So, you know, the stock market is a platform where people have are placing wagers on whether or not, you know, the value of a company is going to increase or decrease. So if you think about this, and this is a great book that I'll have to give you. It's by a poker player. I'll give it to you so you can add to the show notes, but basically if you ask somebody, you know, do you think Apple stock is going to be higher than it is the value of it is going to be higher in one month from today's point you know, you might say, yes. Okay, well, how much are you willing to bet it's up? So if you put real money, your hard earned money, like how many shares of Apple stock are you willing to purchase at today's price? Check out "Thinking In Bets" by Annie Duke John: You know, and it is, are your beliefs, do they change? So a prediction market is, you are using the social behavioral characteristics of individuals and their collective kind of wisdom of the crowd, thinking about whether or not the probability of something becoming true or taking place. And so that is a much more accurate indicator of actual events that happen than simply asking someone in a survey or a poll. So now, what we're so excited about is the two of those together. So now you know, our platform, not only do we help aggregate information that you're gathering and do that analysis on it, we are now adding this research component to the tool as well, so that you can do your research. You can, you know, you can store it within one central repository and you can make it available to the organization as it needs to be Kathleen: Cool. And I know you guys are using it for things like trying to predict what the world post COVID is going to look like and all kinds of other really interesting forward looking applications. So thank you for sharing that. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: We are now coming towards the end of our time, so I wanna make sure I squeeze in my couple of questions that I ask everybody. The first is, of course we are all about inbound marketing on this podcast. So is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it with inbound marketing right now? John: Let's see, you know, I I just recently became aware of a tool MarketMuse. I think that they're doing a very good job with their messaging, kind of very classic, kind of inbound marketing freemium model, et cetera. So I would say that they're one company that does a really good job of inbound marketing. And I have to say then another one that comes to mind and you know, full disclosure here, I'm a customer and and a big fan of Databox. I think Databox, and Pete Caputa's doing a phenomenal job there. He cranks out more content and they use their chat panel to support customers and are really all about helping customers solve problems. And they're, they're doing a fantastic job. I think, of inbound marketing. Kathleen: Yeah, Pete's awesome. And fun fact, he was a very early guest of this podcast. So if you want to get some insight into how Pete does marketing, you can listen to that episode with him. And I will put that link in the show notes. Question number two. The biggest challenge I hear marketers share with me is that so much changes so quickly in the world of digital marketing. So how do you personally keep yourself educated and up to date on everything that's going on? John: I have a hugely unfair advantage being married to a fantastic marketer who is constantly scouring the interweb for the latest and greatest tool and slacking me at home because yes, we have our own personal Slack channel for our youngest son and Kathleen and myself. But, selfishly I rely heavily on what you share with me. Kathleen: Well, that's a valid answer and it's true. I mean, it's so funny. So we're sitting here, it's during the COVID pandemic and of course we're still working from home. So I am up in my office, which is on the second floor of our house. John is in his current office, which is smack dab in the middle of our kitchen. And we are Zooming with each other from two rooms away and yes, we Slack each other from two rooms away all week long. So we are the big old marketing nerds that do that. How to connect with John Kathleen: All right. If somebody wants to connect with you learn more about Knowledge360, ask you a question about competitive intelligence. What is the best way for them to connect with you online?  John: I would say the best way to connect with me is via LinkedIn. John Booth, like the guy that shot Lincoln, but not related. And if you want to learn more about Knowledge360, you can go out to Cipher-sys.com or TryK360.com and learn. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Awesome. I will share that in the show notes. Thank you for joining me, John. I know you have a busy day. We are recording on a Sunday and I'm pretty sure there's like some kind of house project that you want to be working on instead of recording a podcast with me. And if you're listening and you learn something new and you like what you heard, please, head to Apple podcasts, leave the podcast at five star review. That is how other people find us. And I would really appreciate it. But that is it for this week. Thank you, John. John: Thank you, Kathleen. Kathleen: And happy father's day. Because we are recording on father's day. You're the best for doing this for me. Thank you. Alright. That's it for this week. Thanks for listening everyone.

How can brands stand out and drive incredible customer loyalty? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Katie Martell talks about what it means to find your "exceptional truth" as a brand, and why that should be the guide for everything you do as a marketer. As Katie says, "the only thing in the middle of the road, is roadkill," and brands that fail to speak their truth get lost in the crowd. In our conversation, we wade into the controversial waters of whether and when brands should speak out and take a stand, and how to do it in a way that keeps you tightly aligned with your customers. Highlights from my conversation with Katie include: Katie says it is the job of the marketer to understand what is happening in the world. Marketing controls brand perception, and brand perception influences whether someone will buy from you. If you're in marketing, you have to understand where your brand fits in the world of your buyer's identity. When you know what your buyers care about, you can align that with your brand values, and you have an opportunity to take a position that will strengthen your place in the market. Katie says that brands that don't take a position get lost in a crowded marketplace and are not a part of the conversation. By taking a stance about what you believe, you can change the conversation in your market and, in doing so, become a market leader. Katie says brands need to find "exceptional truths" - little kernels of truth that get buyers to stop, pause, and rethink the way they see the world. When you've created that seed of doubt, buyers are open. They're leaning in, they're listening to what else you have to say. And that is when marketing works at its best. That's when they're more receptive to your pitch. This takes knowing buyers so well that you know where they're misinformed or what they don't know or what they don't understand so that you can challenge that. This approach is based on the concepts outlined in the book The Challenger Sale, which is typically used in the sales world but has a lot of application to marketing. Marketers need to be confident to convince the organizations they work for that this type of challenge is the right approach. This can be hard because marketing is a "voyeuristic" profession - meaning that everyone can "see" marketing so they think they are an expert and know how it should be done. As a marketer coming into a new company, its important to determine what your exceptional truth is and then find ways of rolling that out across your marketing in a way that makes your brand unique and different. Resources from this episode: Visit Katie's website Follow Katie on Twitter Connect with Katie on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to hear Katie's take on why it is so important for brands to find their exceptional truths, and how to use that in your marketing to gain a competitive edge. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Katie Martell, who is an on demand communications strategist based out of Boston, Massachusetts. Welcome Katie. Katie Martell (Guest): Hi Kathleen. Thank you so much for having me. Katie and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I am excited to have you here. For everyone listening, I heard Katie speak at Marketing Profs B2B Marketing Forum in, what was that? September or October? October of 2019. Back in the days when we still went to conferences in person. And I was just so blown away. She gave such an amazing talk on Rabble Rousers and it really not only struck me for the content of the talk, but also, you were just an amazing speaker. We can have a separate conversation about that. But anyway, that's why I wanted to have you on and share some of your amazing wisdom with everyone who's listening. So I could go on and on about you. but before I go down too much of a tangent, I would love it if you would explain what an on-demand communication strategist is and what you do, and also a little bit of your background and how you wound up doing that. About Katie Martell Katie: I would love to, and I have to start by saying thank you for the kind words about that talk last year. So the title of that talk was something like "Market Like a Rabble Rouser" and it came from this fascination I have with the world of politics and persuasion mixed with what I do as a marketer. So I've been a marketer in the B2B realm for 11 years now. And what's been interesting is, I've been marketing to marketers for the majority of my career. And that was first at a B2B data services company. We were an early sponsor of the Marketing Profs event. That was a startup that I grew up to acquisition. And then it was a PR firm, an analyst from my own MarTech startups. So I've kind of lived multiple lives, worn many different hats, but always marketing in this world of B2B tech, and MarTech specifically. So I've been a student of marketing in a time when it's completely changing from what was the kind of capital M marketing that we've known it to be. And so this talk was just honestly, they had asked me what I wanted to talk about, which is a moment in time where you go, "Oh, that's a dangerous, that's a dangerous ask of me." And I was honest. I said, "Let's talk about what's happening in the world of misinformation, persuasion." I'm talking Russian trolls, I'm talking campaign interference. I'm talking all the stuff that, you know, you read on the headlines, on whatever news outlet you choose to follow. And let's talk about what marketers can learn from it. So I get up on stage. I give this talk. It went over a little bit of time because that's, hello, it's me. Well, people were absolutely polarized in the audience. We had half the room, a little more than half, I will say, who were like, "Yeah, we got the takeaway. This is great. Thanks so much." And the other half that I just think, I don't know what, didn't go across as well for many, because I presented a lot of information about Russian trolls and some of the exact campaign ads they used and it was pretty incendiary stuff, but that was the point. I was trying to get people riled up and hey, achievement unlocked. Kathleen: But I also think, isn't that polarized response just such a perfect reflection of why that talk was needed in the first place? Katie: I hope so. I was encouraging folks to really, you know, rouse the rabble, you know,? Create emotional responses, shake things up, and that's kind of what I did on stage. Kathleen: Well, and to be clear, just to interject, your talk was not an inherently political talk in the sense that you weren't taking sides, you were presenting facts, right? And people can take that and do with it what they want, but I just wanted to put that out there. Marketers need to pay attention to what is happening in the world Katie: Well, I appreciate it. And let the lesson and the takeaway here be that we need, as marketers, to pay attention to what's happening in the world. I mean, the world around us, look at this past week and today's date. I don't know if you're going to give the date here. It's June 1st. So we are coming off of a weekend of civil unrest, Black Lives Matter protests. It is a time where, if you check social media, you're bombarded with hashtag activism and names and everybody from brands to individuals getting involved in this current conversation. We as marketers should be watching this and learning. Kathleen: Yes. I mean, actually, it's interesting that we are having this conversation today because I literally, just this morning, was online on social media and I saw one person saying something about how you have to speak out and you have to make your positions known. And another person's literally saying "I'm not going to support businesses that don't say anything." It's interesting. There's so many different sides to what's happening right now, but it really doesn't matter what you believe about the current situation. The fact is that the world around us is going to make judgments and make personal buying decisions. And they could be different ones, person to person, but they're going to be made based upon what you do and or do not say right now, right. So if you're not paying attention as a marketer, you're not doing your job Katie: Because this is our job. It is our job. Marketing controls brand perception, right? Brand perception is the reality for consumers. They make a decision about us before they engage with us by the way we act through marketing. That's the kind of inherent "duh" that we know about our jobs, but what that means at a time like this and what it started to mean over the past, I would say, decade or so as the world of social movements, identity, and brands and corporate world they've started to intersect. And so what that now means is, if you're in marketing, you have to understand where your brand fits in the world of your buyer's identity, whether they believe in the Black Lives Matter movements, right? These kinds of areas that were kind of gray areas before of, we don't want to get political. It's not appropriate for every brand to have a comment on what's happening. For example, we're talking about the treatment of African American individuals in the US, if your brand happens to live values that embrace diversity and inclusion and have large representation from that community and you take steps to make sure that their employee experience is great and yada, yada, yada, you might as well leverage that in marketing. You might as well show the world that you're on the same side as the giant movement that's now building in States and cities around the world. My God, this is a great opportunity for marketers, which I know sounds dirty to say out loud, but it's absolutely a time to take advantage of the global zeitgeist right now, and be part of the conversation, be part of the narrative, earn trust. It might help you differentiate. It is a way of saying to the world, "This is where we play, this is what we believe, this is who we are as a brand" that may go well beyond what your product or your service does. That is an opportunity. Kathleen: I agree with you. This is such an interesting conversation. In the past year, I had a conversation about this with someone who I've always considered to be very much a professional mentor/idol/role model. I've come to realize as I've gotten to know this person better that they feel very strongly about keeping all politics, all commentary on social issues, completely out of business. And that is their personal belief. It has come into focus, I think, with this last election cycle, and we had a big debate where the person was saying companies should never post about politics. I personally don't believe that, nor do I think every company should post about politics. People will disagree with me and that's fine, but I think that it all comes back to really understanding your brand. And in this case, especially for privately held companies, brands are very inextricably interwoven with the person that owns the company. This is going to come right down to the owners of the company and what they personally believe in. There are some companies where the person that owns it is never going to talk about politics because that person, as an individual, doesn't talk about politics even in social settings. But then you have companies, and there's some examples I'd love to cite, like Penzeys Spices. They are a spice company out of the Midwest. I had discovered them years ago because I was looking for some really niche spices. I like to cook and I had followed them, and then I started seeing this stuff on Facebook and they come out really, really strongly. This is a long story, but I got into a really big debate with this person. And the person was saying, you are going to lose customers and that's not good for your business. And you're going to alienate people and that's not good for your business. And my feeling is, that might be fine. If you're somebody who believes that you want to live your beliefs and you want your business to live those beliefs, you may lose customers, but you will probably have the ones you keep drive tremendous loyalty and you may gain as much, if not more, than you lose. So, diatribe over. You're the guest, not me! Katie: Oh, please! I love your point of view. I'm honored to be here because I think you are just brilliant and I love your work. You hit on something really polarizing right now which works at multiple levels. It also kind of hearkens back to the fundamental truth that not all marketing advice is going to apply to every company. And I feel like that's an important disclaimer, because we tend in marketing to say, brands should do this, they shouldn't do that. It's really, to your point, what is right for your business, your customers, and most importantly, your goals. Now that spice company, I don't know them, but I guarantee their goal is not to be the spice for everyone. It sounds like they know exactly who their buyer is and they know exactly what that buyer wants from them. They want a spice company that stands for more than spice. Great. Not all car companies are going to be a car for everybody, right? Just like with Patagonia, right? If you're buying a jacket to go skiing and they have a set of brand values that they know aligns with the subset of the total market, but that subset will be inherently loyal to them because Patagonia is an example of a brand that's been consistent against their values. For years, they've always been kind of counterintuitively anti consumption. They sell retail products. They need to drive consumption. Remember that famous ad that was like, "Don't buy this jacket"? You don't know it. You have to Google it. And it's Patagonia saying "We cause too much waste in our industry. We build products that may cost you a little more, but they're sustainably made and we want you to wear them for longer. We're going to help you repair them. We're going to give you some tools to make sure that you can make sure you get the most out of them. They're longer lasting." These are brand values that the buyer can relate to because the buyer also shares those values. So this really isn't a new marketing problem. We like to think it is because of social media and hashtag activism and all the propaganda that's happening. But this really isn't old school marketing best practice. Know your buyer, know where you fit in their world. Bill Bernbach has a great quote that's like, "If you stand for nothing, you'll find some people for you and some people against you. And if you stand for nothing, you'll find nobody for you and nobody against you." Which is worse for a marketer? To be completely out of the conversation or to be clear about where you sit and stand and who you're intended for? I love old time radio. There's a great Sirius XM station about the radio shows from the era of when that was entertainment. Somebody had this quote in the old timey accent. They were like, "The only thing you find in the middle of the road is roadkill my dear." Right now, today, brands do not have to have a comment on who should be president. That is politics. That is up to the individual. We each have a right to vote. Stay out of it unless you're relating to the campaign or you're lobbying for a certain group. Honestly, we need to have a say about issues that matter for our buyers. That's it. If it doesn't matter to your buyers, it shouldn't matter to you and your marketing. If you're a founder, I'm going to kind of disagree with you on this, but if you're a founder trying to lever your organization for your own political, personal views, that's a mistake because not everyone in your company is going to agree with you. Just like not every one of your buyers is going to agree with you. You have to find middle ground. That's what this is about. When you canvas for a political campaign and you're going door to door for, I don't know, Bernie Sanders, you don't open the door and knock on the door and say, let me tell you why you're wrong about insert political candidate. You find common ground. You say, what do we share? What are we aligned on? And how do we then move forward together? It's not about polarizing. It's about recruiting people to see the world the way you do. And those people likely bring the same set of values that you do. Kathleen: To be clear, I should say because I probably didn't explain this, I'm not advocating that businesses come out and say "Vote for so and so." I'm more coming out and saying that the context that came up when I talked about it with somebody, was that there were things happening politically that impacted other issues, whether that's the environment or social issues, et cetera, there was like a trickle down. And there were businesses that at the time were coming out and standing for or against those environmental or social issues. That was what sparked the conversation. It's very interesting to me because the things that swim in my brain when I get into this conversation are, there is an increasing amount of data that started to come out, particularly with younger generations, that they are actually much more likely to buy from businesses that are willing to say what they stand for. Again, I'm not talking about politics, I'm talking broadly about things that you stand for. And I loved your statement about the only thing in the middle of the road is roadkill. Because you know, you look at social activism and business today and you see companies like Tom's shoes, which stand for something, and Patagonia, which stands for something. These businesses are doing very, very well, particularly amongst a younger demographic. And so I think part of it is knowing who you sell to, as you said. Part of it is also recognizing that over time, things are going to change as this younger demographic ages and people follow them, who knows? I don't know what will happen with the next generation, but today's 20 year olds are going to be the 30 and 40 year olds of tomorrow and the next decade, et cetera. And so as our customer populations age, their preferences come with them as they do. It reminds me of the conversation that I've had with people about niching down as a business. I used to own a marketing agency and agencies talk about this all the time. Should we be the agency for everyone? Or should we declare that we are serving this one niche? And the fear that everybody always has when you get into that conversation is the fear of having to say "no" and turn people away. What most data shows, and most people find when they do it, is that when you niche down, you actually thrive. You make more money because you really find the right fit customer and they have a higher perception of you. They stick with you longer, et cetera. And so, there's an echo of that going through my head as I listened to us talk about this. Understanding your brand promise Katie: Absolutely. And again, it comes back to branding basics. You have to know the promise that you're going to make to anyone. That's what brand is. Brand is a promise. When they engage with you, they want to know that they're going to get something that you've promised them. You don't have to take a stance around hot button issues. Stay away from hot button issues, unless you're ready for that, unless that's really core to your business and your values and live throughout the organization. There are many examples, from our history, of B2B companies that stand for something in their industry. This is where this needs to be applied to B2B. B2B listeners might be thinking, this doesn't apply to me because I sell, I don't know, refrigeration. And I'm here to tell you, there is, within the world of refrigeration, a company called Stirling Ultracold, that was kind of a smaller player within this world of refrigeration. They would sell to pharmaceutical companies, and we're talking commercial grade keeping stuff cold, right? That's the extent of my knowledge, but they are ultra low temperature freezers that companies need. This is a great example of a company in a world that we would think, what is controversial about this space? The way they were disrupting their own industry was just with this idea of sustainability and energy costs and carbon footprint -- these things that their product enabled companies to decrease. They saved something like 70% of energy costs. Energy and sustainability and carbon footprint was never a consideration point for this buyer before. They just didn't look at it along that list of criteria that they're making their decision against. It didn't matter. Suddenly, here's a company who comes forward with a great PR program, really strong thought leadership, a leader who says, "I believe we have a responsibility to have a smaller carbon footprint. And guess what? My products enable you to have it." It suddenly changed the entire perimeter of an industry. That is the exact same advice that you and I are preaching right now. Just take a stance in what you believe in your own market. That's how you're going to change the conversation in market. That's how you're going to find buyers that are aligned with you around this value that now matters, and in a broader sense, you know, to the world, but really in this industry. And that's how you're going to differentiate and earn that trust, is when you declare "Here's what we're about." And you do that with confidence, because that allows the buyer to look at you and say, "I know exactly what I'm signing up for." Change the conversation in your industry Kathleen: I love that. And it reminds me of a talk that I heard by April Dunford. Katie: Love April Dunford, high five. Kathleen: I heard it at HubSpot's Inbound conference. April Dunford is an expert on positioning and she gives this talk about the four different ways you can approach positioning for your business. And I don't remember the nickname she has for it, but the example that she gives for one of the ways is about changing the conversation. And she talks about Tesla and how before Tesla, the leader in the electric car market was the Prius. And the whole conversation in electric cars was about battery life. How long could you drive before you needed to recharge? You could substitute refrigeration, but the bottom line is that, as a new entrant, if you think about coming into an established market, you're not going to have the first mover advantage. You're not creating a category per se. So how do you catapult yourself to the head of that market? You do it by changing the conversation. And so she talks about how Tesla came in and totally changed the conversation by saying, "Yeah, whatever. Battery life. Of course, we all have battery life. It's really all about how sexy is the design and how fast does the car go?" And now, you see a completely different dialogue happening in electric cars. You see Tesla as a front runner. And you see a lot more electric car manufacturers focusing on design and speed because they made it sexy. And that's the new conversation. And it sounds like that's exactly the same thing this refrigeration company did. Finding your "exceptional truth" Katie: They had to. And this is really where I think, and I know I'm a little biased. I come from a communications background. I've seen the power of content marketing and PR and all of that working in tandem to lift up brands. I mean, I'm a startup girl at heart. When you can't be the loudest voice in the room and you can't be the dominant player of which, by the way, there's only one in every industry. So the majority are not dominant players. All of us need to figure out how to get more strategic with the way we leverage PR and content. I think we've fallen into a bit of a trap, and I'll use that word gingerly because of the rise of inbound marketing, because of the rise of the tools and tech that allow us to publish a lot of content. What we've sacrificed are the kernels of little ideas that we're using to seed the market. We've become really good at publishing education tips and best practices, which are great and necessary. This podcast is a great example of one. The issue is that we've lost sight of what creates movements, what creates change in people. It's that little kernel of truth. I call them exceptional truths that get people to stop, you know, pump the brakes and go, "Wait a minute. I've been thinking about things all wrong." And when you get a person, a human being to stop and kind of pause, you've got them, that's it. When you've created that seed of doubt, the way that they saw the world may not be that capital T, truth, they're open. They're leaning in, they're listening to what else you have to say. And that is when marketing works at its best. That's when they're more receptive to your pitch, to your ideas and your path forward, but it takes knowing the buyers so well that you know where they're misinformed or what they don't know or what they don't understand so that you can challenge that. This is drawing from, everyone knows, The Challenger Sale. Applying The Challenger Sale to marketing Kathleen: I was just going to say, I used to be in sales and in the sales world, this is The Challenger Sale. Katie: Yes. I don't know what happened. I mean, how can The Challenger Sale extend its way to marketing? Not to say that it hasn't, but you know, is that a puppy? Kathleen: Yes. I have two who are laying at my feet and every now and then they lift their heads up and say, "Wait, there's a world out there!" They're getting excited about The Challenger Sale. Katie: They probably are just as confused as I am as to why The Challenger Sale didn't work its way into the world of PR and content marketing. To me, we need to challenge the way the buyer sees the world. I think very few brands do that. Kathleen: It's very true. I have worked in sales before and when I was in that job, I read The Challenger Sale. I used that approach in sales and it made me very successful. And you're spot on. That has so much applicability in marketing. I owned an agency for 11 years and I worked with a lot of different companies and there is, in marketing, this lemmings syndrome where we see the lemmings running ahead of us and we want to follow them off the cliff. If they're doing it, it must be the right thing to do. And it extends from everything, from messaging and the way we talk about what we do, to things like brand colors. I used to do websites for attorneys and they all wanted forest green and maroon and these very stodgy, old attorney colors. And I remember I had one client and I was like, "Let's just do something crazy." And they were like, "But nobody else did that." And I was like, "Precisely." There's this inclination both amongst marketers and within the business world to play within the lines. And I think that does hurt us. There's a sea of sameness out there and it's the content we create, it's the colors on our websites, it's the way we message. It's, you know, "Hey, you should or should not talk about this in our industry. We don't talk about that so I'm not going to" and I really think that that has tied our hands behind our backs, Katie: I have a lot of empathy. I mean, I'm a Pisces. I'm gonna look at every situation from both sides. And it's empath to the Nth degree over here. But I do have a lot of empathy for the modern marketer. And this comes from being one, but also selling and marketing to them for 10 years. I've been on the megaphone side of MarTech vendors back in the day when there was a hundred of us, marketing solutions in a world of digital marketing that was now starting to shift. Don't forget, 10 years ago, we now had to be good at becoming top ranked on Google. We now had to start using social media to develop a two way dialogue. We then had to automate everything. Then we had to start measuring everything. Now we're trying to leverage AI. It has moved at such a pace. It all happened in nine years. It has moved at such a pace that the marketer, the poor beleaguered marketing ops person and lead gen new roles that are being created because of this ecosystem in MarTech have inherent uncertainty, an inherent doubt and inherent fear because thinking about it, you and I work, we do marketing for a living. This is our income. How are we going to support our families? This is more than a job and an industry, buyers and marketing. I always had this kind of point of view when I was marketing to marketers. The buyer is more than a director of marketing at an IT company. They are an individual who's just trying to figure it out. And a brand like a HubSpot who comes out right at the turning point of an industry in flux to say, we have 10 ways that you can do this better. And five tips for this and seven strategies for success in that, that brand is going to win. That fearful buyer who's like, I just need a job, and I need to keep ahead. The biggest fear for the marketing buyer is falling behind. If we fall behind, we're no longer relevant. If we're no longer relevant, guess what? There's some 23 year old who's going to come up and take our spot because they know Tik Tok. I'm being hyperbolic, but that's constantly on our minds. And so we have to have empathy for that marketer who's like, we are going to do the things that work and copy the things that work because they work and we need a win. It's really those organizations that can allow their marketing team to do what they do best. That means leave them alone. Let them understand the buyer and the market, the way that they're supposed to. The challenge of being a marketer Katie: Somebody else said to me that marketing is a very voyeuristic profession. Everyone can see it. Unlike finance, unlike R&D or engineering, or even sales, to an extent. Everyone can see marketing. Everyone in a business thinks that they're an expert in marketing because they see marketing all day. They see billboards. They see ads. They feel like they know the science and the practice of marketing. That creates a lot of pressure on the marketing team to kind of do whatever everyone else thinks they should be doing. So we have a department that's not only fearful of falling behind, but also facing pressure from the business to do things that may be counterintuitive to what marketing should do. To your point, the lawyers with the maroon versus doing something different. The telling of exceptional truths, the disruption, the rabble rousing, it works on teams that allow marketers to operate with confidence and hire marketers that are allowing them the space to push back and say, "No, this is what marketing does. Our job is to understand who the buyer is, what they need and why we're uniquely fit that market. And that may look different than what you expect, but that's why you hired me." If you're listening to this and you're young and you love marketing, but you're unsure of the path ahead, that's the strongest thing I think you can do is to hone this sense of what marketing does for business and the sense of confidence that you need to bring to every meeting. You almost have to defend your job at every go, but the more you do it, the more resilient you get, the better you get at it. Kathleen: Well, I think it also points to what you should look for in a place of work. I completely agree with everything you just said, and, and I don't often talk about where I work now, but I'm at this company Attila Security, which is in cybersecurity. I knew I had landed in the right place and I had this sense when I interviewed. When I got into the company and I met with the CEO and I presented him with my 90 day plan and strategy, this was about 30 days in, he said, "Yeah, just do it. I hired you because you know what you're doing", you know? "You don't need my permission." And I was like, "Wow, what a great feeling". When you're interviewing, that's a thing to really watch for and to dig into and to see if that's a trait that you're going to find amongst the leadership team of the company that you go and work for. Katie: I wonder how to ask that in an interview. I'm a startup girl who's just been at companies where inherently, there's no one to tell me what to do. What would you ask if you were interviewing? Kathleen: As somebody who hires a lot, I've always been a big believer in behavioral based interview questions. Those are basically, you don't ask people "What would you do?", you ask, "What did you do?" And you ask people to talk about actual experiences. So I would probably ask something along the lines of, you know and it depends on if it's a company that's had marketers before. I would say, "Tell me about a time when a prior head of marketing proposed something that you weren't sure about or didn't necessarily agree with, what did you do?" And if they haven't had marketers before, if it's a startup, I would probably ask them something about being at a prior company. Or I would say, "Tell me about a time the head of sales proposed something," or somebody else in the company presuming that there are other leaders. Because I think past behavior speaks better than hypotheticals. Everybody can come up with the right answer, hypothetically. For what it's worth, that's kind of the approach that I've taken, but some of it is also just a feeling that you get from talking with people. And I think that's something that you hone over time as you work in more places and you're exposed to more different types of people. Standing out in a world saturated with marketing content Kathleen: But one of the things I was thinking about as you were talking, you mentioned HubSpot and how they solve for something very specific at a time when it was a real need. And, it got me kind of circling back to a little bit of what we started with here, which is this need to tell exceptional truths and should companies go there? Should they not go there? One of the things that I started thinking about as you were talking is that the interesting unique moment that we live in right now is that content marketing has become so commonplace. And there are so many companies creating content that there is this saturation. There's just a lot out there. There's a lot of blogs. There's a lot of newsletters. There's a lot of video out there. We're all busy. Nobody has the time to read all of it. So how do you choose what you're going to consume? And this applies to anybody, any buyer out there has this dilemma whether they're actively searching for something or not. And it seems to me that one of the factors that's really affecting what works now in marketing is that one of the most effective ways to stand out amongst a very saturated world of content is to have a point of view. We've talked a lot about in the marketing world about authenticity, and a hot topic lately has been email newsletters and getting really real in your email newsletters and showing personality and individuality, even in company newsletters. And the reason that that's working so well, I believe, is because it is different. Just the fact that it's different and just the fact that it doesn't sound like everybody else, people gravitate to that. So I'd love to know kind of what you think about that. Katie: I a hundred percent agree. Mic drop because you said it yourself. This idea that everyone is a publisher, everyone can produce content - it makes it more important than ever to do what we were suggesting 20 minutes ago, which is to know exactly who you're talking to, what they value, the ways you share that value and just be confident that that is the niche that you have decided to own. You cannot be all things to all people. I'm hearkening back to my marketing undergraduate. This was a long time ago now. It's the one thing I learned. This is not new, right? We just have a proliferation of information now available to us. It makes it more important than ever to have not only a clear point of view, but first a very clear intended audience. You cannot be the solution, in your case, for all CIOs. You're the solution for all CIOs that are extremely risk averse or something. There's something about your buyers that you are really aligned to. Well, many companies fail to understand what that niche looks like and where that alignment happens. I have a newsletter. I call it the "World's best newsletter." I started it when I started consulting, frankly, honestly, truthfully as a way of reminding the world that I wasn't gone. I was leaving a startup at that time that I had co-founded and I was the public face of, and I needed a way to take that momentum and transfer it into my consulting, speaking, whatever it is that I do, practice. So I started a newsletter. I had no intentions with it. I had no best practices around it. I probably break every rule in the book. People love it. And what I do with it is what I've done from day one. I collect the things that hook my attention throughout the week, that I believe more people need to read, and I send it out weekly. And I say, "Here's what is important to me". I am a human being with other other interests outside of marketing. I'm a fierce advocate for feminism, and I'm a fierce advocate for human rights. And I have a documentary coming out about the intersection of marketing and social movements. And all of that is jam packed into this little newsletter, seven links and a quote of the week. It makes no sense. If you were to tell me, as a marketing consultant, it wouldn't make any sense. There's a lot of marketing stuff in there, but sometimes there's a really important New York Times cover story about racism in America. It works for me because people know what they want from me. It's neat. I have been really reticent to do that. It feels wrong. It goes against everything I'm taught as an email marketer, but you know what? It performs. It might be because it's real. I think it's because it's honestly what people want from me. I think that's really what matters. And they come back to it week after week because it serves that need and it's fresh. They don't get it from other people. Finding your unique brand voice Katie: If you're a business, trying to figure out what to send in your newsletter, think about that first. Just like a product and the way that you develop a product, look at the consideration set. What are you up against? What are the other emails looking like from your competitors or even others in the same general industry? Do something different. Maybe it's just doing it shorter. Maybe it's coming at it from a totally different angle, right? Content and thought leadership should be treated like product development. Not only is it something new and different, but it's like this muscle that you have to work on. You've gotta be really good at coming up with the processes to uncover those insights from inside the business to say, "This is what we believe, what we know." And then really, really good at delivering that in a fresh and new way. That's what makes the job of content fun and hard. But it's not what most people do. Most people opt for the easy ebook, the 10 tips, best practices. And then they wonder why isn't this performing? How to find your exceptional truth Kathleen: So true. So if somebody is listening and they're a marketer, who's come into a company and they're thinking about - and let's talk about startups because I think that's the best way to illustrate how this works. If you come into a startup as the first head of marketing, it is a green field, right? You get to shape the clay. If you're coming into an established company, that's a different story, but it's still, the challenge is still there. It's just how you navigate. It might be different. Putting on my hat as head of marketing at a startup, I'm coming in, it's the first time we're going to have a marketing strategy. If I wanted to come in and really mine the richness of what you talk about as exceptional truths, what is the playbook for doing that? Katie: Well, good luck finding a playbook. The place to start, in my mind, is to ask yourself the question, just like you would if you were starting a movement and activism, "What is the change that you want to see in market?" What is that end result that you're hoping to get people to switch? It could just be, you want them to choose you instead of a competitor. Great. So what does that mean? What belief do you need to shift? What misinformation do you have to correct? What new insight, to quote the Challenger model, do you have to bring to the table to get them to see the world a bit differently? I'll give you an example from HubSpot again, because I think HubSpot did this so well. And it's an example that we can all relate to. Your podcast. The name is a great example of the power of what they were able to do, how this came to market. I hate to say it, they were just a blogging, search engine optimization, social media, and eventually an email tool mixed into one. They were not the only player doing this at the time. However, they thought about this brilliantly. They needed people to see the way they wanted things to change. They were advocating for us to use these tools instead of cold calling, billboards, et cetera. The way that they got people to make that shift was to create a dichotomy or create an enemy. I actually presented on this at their conference two years ago, create an enemy. You can find it on their inbound library. And they saw the world in two ways. There's inbound and outbound. There's the new way forward, Mrs. Beleaguered marketer, who doesn't want to lose her job, the way that you're not going to fall to irrelevancy. And there's the old way that you're going to fall behind if you keep using it. They were extremely polarizing with this perspective. It was just one article that started all of this, right? They were like, "Here's the way forward. This inbound and outbound. One is good. One is bad. White, black, right? Devil, whatever it is." And 80% of the market was like, "Oh man, there's no way I'm going to go there." They were pissed because HubSpot is over here, challenging the existing status quo, the way they sell. 20% saw that and went, "Oh, you're right. Let's opt into this." And so HubSpot now of course built an entire movement around inbound marketing. It is a practice. It is a job title. It is a category in and of itself because they started with that kernel of what changes do we need to create. We need to figure out a way to get people to move from A to B, to go from what they think they know to what we want to advocate for. And then they brilliantly built a movement around it. And they did so with a ton of content ideas, a community of people that were proud to call themselves inbound marketers and this kind of repetitive, consistent muscle they use to push the movement forward, now extending years and a $125 million IPO and19,000 people at their conference. It just has ballooned because they were smart about this kernel of truth that they've never deviated from. Are you going to be the next HubSpot? No. This is right place, right time, right conditions and market. But, you do have to find and be willing to provoke, with purpose, the existing beliefs of buyers, and then be consistent about that. If you can do that, your startup is going to make a lot of noise. You're going to punch well above your weight. Even if you don't have the biggest budget, you're going to make waves and you have to be willing to do that or risk falling into irrelevance. Kathleen: It's a really incredible story, that story of HubSpot and it's certainly not the only one. You have Mark Benioff at Salesforce who famously picketed outside with a sign that had a big red X through the word software. And he similarly named the enemy and it was software and his solution was move to the cloud, software as a service. That is an approach that absolutely works. I would say to go out and read The Challenger Sale. So many sales people read it, but so few marketers do, and I love that you brought it up in this conversation. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: We are going to run out of time soon so I want to make sure I ask you my questions. I could talk to you forever. My first question that I always ask my guests is of course, this podcast is all about inbound marketing, and is there a particular company or individual that you think is just a great example of how to do inbound marketing in today's world? Katie: I think Rand Fishkin and his work with Moz and now with SparkToro which he actually details really well in a book called Lost and Founder. It's a great book. If you're thinking of starting a company read this first. It may scare you away, but he always was the example for me of somebody who was again, challenging white hat versus black hat, giving away all the industry secrets to become a trusted industry resource, to ranked the highest, but it really builds trust in his company and him as an individual. And I think it's just his consistency, Whiteboard Fridays, he was writing five days a week. That's still the best example of consistent inbound marketing. Kathleen: You know, it's so funny because I could not agree with you more. He is somebody that I have followed really closely. I read his book. I read everything he does at SparkToro. I follow him religiously. And I have been very surprised. I think you might be the first person that has mentioned his name. I ask this question of every single guest and that has baffled me because I think he's amazing. So I'm really happy that you said that. Katie: He's also the world's nicest guy. We both spoke at the SpiceWorld conference in, I want to say, 2018. Both of us were speaking in the marketing track and I'm sitting here backstage fan girling because I love him. Who hasn't read his stuff? He comes off stage with the mustache. He's the nicest guy. He's just, you know, very down to earth. And I think that's the secret. He wrote this content to truly help others. And I think that genuine purpose behind the content is really what sets him apart. More people should have mentioned him. Kathleen: Yes. I agree. And maybe they will now because we'll turn them on to his stuff. All right. Second question. You mentioned earlier that the biggest fear of marketers is falling behind. And the second question I always ask everybody is exactly that. It's like every marketer I talk to says, they feel like they're drinking from a fire hose. There's too much to keep up with. So how do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated? Katie: 100% LinkedIn. I'm a huge advocate for using LinkedIn appropriately. I have a big following there, so I love it as a platform, but I also use it to consume a lot of best practices. I ask a lot of questions. I'm constantly looking through comments. It's become a resource that just, I find invaluable. It's a mess. Sometimes now people take advantage of LinkedIn to post some really nonsense stuff, but at the core of it, it's there. Can I give two answers? There's a lot of Slack communities that are being built around specific topic areas. I'm not in marketing, but I'm part of a great marketing operations Slack group that keeps me knowing what's going on. I work with a lot of MarTech vendors still as an amplifier now and a community evangelist. I need to know what's going on. And so even on that, in the practice, these Slack groups are hidden sources of insight. So if there's not a Slack group for your world, your community, build it, invite people. They will come. This is not field of dreams. They're desperate to connect, one-On-one, sometimes outside of the loud world that is LinkedIn. Kathleen: That group would not happen to be the MoPro's would it? Katie: No, but now I want to join that one. Kathleen: I'll send you a link. A guy I interviewed once for this podcast has a marketing operations Slack group that I am in. But I agree with you. I have a ton of Slack groups and there's only like, let's say, two or three of them that I'm religious about checking every day. They're just insanely valuable. But, love all of those suggestions. Again, I could talk to you all day long, but we're not going to do that because we both have other things we need to do. Great conversation. I'm sure people will have opinions, both ways, about what we said here today, but that's okay. That's why these conversations are important to have. If you listened and you disagree, tweet me. I would love to hear your perspective. This is all about learning and listening and I'd love to hear what more folks think about this. How to connect with Katie Kathleen: But Katie, if somebody wants to learn more about you or connect with you online, what is the best way for them to do that? Katie: They can Google me. I'm very, very, very Google-able. You can LinkedIn me. You can find my website. I'm just, I'm everywhere. Kathleen, congratulations on over 150 episodes of this. This is a service to the community and we are grateful for it and it's a lot of work to put these together. So thank you for doing what you do and thank you for having me, really. Kathleen: Well, I very much appreciate it. And I will put links to your personal website as well as your LinkedIn in the show notes. So head there if you want to connect with Katie, and she does produce some amazing stuff, so I highly recommend it. You know what to do next... Kathleen: If you're listening and you liked what you heard today, or you just felt like you learned something new, I would love it if you would leave the podcast a five star review on Apple podcasts, because that is how other people learn about the podcast. And finally, if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, please tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Katie. Katie: Thank you, Kathleen. Everyone take care.

How did IMPACT grow the subscriber base for its email newsletter to 40,000+ in under two years? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, IMPACT Editorial Director Liz Moorehead talks about THE LATEST, IMPACT's email newsletter. Created in 2018, THE LATEST is written by Liz and sent out three times a week. It's one of several email newsletters that were created around the same time and are really disrupting the world of email marketing. In this episode, Liz shares the story of THE LATEST, from how she writes it, to the newsletter format and design, how they grew the subscriber base, and the impact the newsletter has had on IMPACT's business. Best of all, she shares her advice for anyone who wants to start an email newsletter, or is interested in revamping the one they currently publish. Highlights from my conversation with Liz include: Liz is the Editorial Director at IMPACT, where she overseas a team that publishes approximately 25 articles a week and a thrice weekly email newsletter, THE LATEST. In 2018, IMPACT had a large audience and a lot of content, but no email newsletter. THE LATEST was originally created as a way to consolidate all of the email that IMPACT was sending and create a better experience for its subscribers. When THE LATEST launched, there were only about 1,200 subscribers. Today, there are around 42,000. The newsletter goes out three times a week and every issue is personally written by Liz, and sent directly from her email address. Each issue begins with a personal story by Liz, where she often includes very personal details. This choice to mix a business newsletter with very personal stories was a deliberate one that has helped THE LATEST connect with its audience. Liz's advice to anyone writing an email newsletter is to be honest and vulnerable, but keep the stories somehow relevant to the content and audience. Liz tested a variety of different formats for THE LATEST, and eventually landed on one that is very text heavy, with few if any images. This ran counter to what she thought would work, but testing proved it to be the best performing format.  She uses emojis to break up the text and draw the reader's eye to what she wants them to see. IMPACT uses HubSpot to measure the performance of its marketing and through that, can tell that THE LATEST has influenced more than 2 million dollars in revenue. Resources from this episode: Visit IMPACT's website Check out THE LATEST Connect with Liz on LinkedIn Follow Liz on Instagram Listen to the podcast to learn what makes an amazing newsletter and how you can use your newsletter to grow an audience and drive revenue for your company. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is my good friend Liz Morehead, who is the editorial director at impact. Welcome, Liz. Liz Moorehead (Guest): I am so excited. Can you believe it's taken us this long to have the idea to have me on this podcast? Liz and Kathleen having WAY too much fun recording this episode. Kathleen: And if I'm being honest, I honestly think I thought I had already done it, which is why I didn't do it because I thought I already had.  Liz: I'm going to try not to take this personally. You may get an official demerit in the mail. The jury's still out on that. We'll see how today goes.  Kathleen: I don't know how this happened, but we're making it right now. I'm so excited to have you on because you are somebody who is doing so much amazing work in so many different areas. To be candid, when I invited you, I had to choose because there were so many topics we could have covered. You're the pillar content pro and all these other things. But the thing I really wanted to talk with you about is email newsletters. But before we get into that, pose people out there who may not know who you are or who or what IMPACT is, can you please talk a little bit about yourself as well as the company? About Liz Moorehead and IMPACT Liz: Absolutely. So as you mentioned, I'm the editorial director here at IMPACT. IMPACT is a digital sales and marketing company. That basically breaks out into a couple of different things. Number one, we consider ourselves the top educators in the space of digital sales and marketing, and that manifests itself through our publishing. We publish the anywhere between 20 and 25 articles a week, seven days a week, even on Christmas. We have IMPACT Plus, which is a self guided learning platform for digital marketers, sales pros and business leaders. And then we also have our agency services as well. So we originally started out as an agency, you know, the traditional inbound marketing HubSpot partner agency before we really started getting our claws into the education piece of it. One thing I will say though that is a little bit different about our agency services is that instead of the traditional model of, you know, "Hey, just, you know, kick your marketing over here, we'll take care of it. Like don't worry about it. We got it, we'll take care of it," we have more of the "Teach a man to fish" model. So we do a lot of empowering businesses to bring their content in house, bring their video in house, really take ownership of their marketing technology stack with things like HubSpot. So that's, that's IMPACT in a nutshell. All things digital sales and marketing. If you have questions about it, basically just come to us. Kathleen: You've had an interesting journey because you're like part marketer, part editor, part writer. You're a different kind of a person than we've traditionally had on the show. So could you talk about your journey a little? Liz: My journey is strange. I never fancied myself ever getting into marketing. I only ended up in marketing and quite frankly, landing in your lap Kathleen, as the result of a layoff. Prior to being in the inbound marketing and content management space, I had been working in communications and I had been working as a senior editor at a digital publisher that catered exclusively to trade associations and then they overhired, or there was a market contraction, and there were a bunch of us, since we were the last in, we were the first out. So my editorial team, we all just like, 50% of the people, left like overnight. Then, the next day, a mutual friend of ours who was working at your agency Quintain at the time said "you should come out for lunch." I'm like, "I don't want to," like, "I want to stay in pajamas, I want to be sad, I want to keep crying cause I just lost this job that I really loved." And it turned out it was when you were guys were doing the Inbound Marketing Summit at The Metropolitan in Annapolis. And I walked over to her and I said, "I had no idea the rest of everyone that you worked with would be here." And that's how you and I met, because you said "You're the one who writes the beer column for the Capital Gazette. Right?" And I said, "yes". And the next thing you said was, "I don't like beer". And then I, there was a little pause and in that pause I'm like, "This is the worst 48 hours". I'm like, "I look like I just got dumped. I feel like I just got dumped. This lady in front of me, dressed to the nines, and I looked like, just awful." And then you said, "But I like your writing". Kathleen: Yes, it's true. I was a devotee of your beer column, which I just think, it's hysterical because you're right, I don't like beer. I don't drink any beer, but I loved reading about beer because you made it so interesting. So go figure. Liz: Yeah. So I came on board at Quintain and I'm going to make this part of the story pretty short, but it was kind of, it was a, it was the first time I had really failed at something. I was very excited to be in marketing. It was a new challenge. I had done each piece of that job desperately across different roles throughout my career. Things that I had done historically very well, and it just wasn't working. I think about a year or so afterward, you and I had one of those “carefrontations”, a candid conversation, a crucial conversation, whatever you want to brand it as. And you and I were sitting there talking and you and John Booth, your husband, who ran the agency with at the time said essentially, you know, we have a right person, wrong seat. So you put me in a content management role. That was, I feel like, when my career changed, because prior to that moment working in marketing, I had always been brought on in the way we had discussed it. As, you know, "you needed a marketer who knew how to write". And the reality is I was a writer who had a strong marketing backbone. It was the flip. And so once I really went into that role, which at that time I remember you saying like you had heard about it from Marcus Sheridan and you know, there were all, you know, people were starting to realize that you couldn't just like market, you had to have someone who knew how to write, who knew how to communicate, who knew as a native skillset, the way people know how to build dimensional, like email marketing strategies and revenue campaigns and like all of these things that are not native skillsets. To me, brand storytelling, interviewing, voice and tone development -- like, how do you make content that is so memorable that people not only remember the answer that you told them, they remember that you're the one that said it to them. That's the kind of stuff I was really good at. So to be able to really focus on that exclusively in the role just really changed it. But that is something we're still seeing today. You know, there's more traction, there are more content managers now, but at the time, you did something that was atypical. You created that role that I think was, in a way, ahead of its time. Kathleen: Well, you're giving me a lot of credit, but you are an incredibly talented writer. And for those listening, Liz and I have had the opportunity, and I would say for myself, the good fortune, of working closely together several times. We don't work together now. You've had a really an amazing career and, I would say, she has set the bar for what it means to be a Head of Content in many ways, in the sense that not only does she do an amazing job, but she also teaches others how to do it. Why IMPACT started THE LATEST Kathleen: So that being all said, let's talk about email newsletters. I want to preface this with, when we were working together back in 2018, we were both at IMPACT and IMPACT produces a lot of content and has a big audience. But at the time, it didn't have a newsletter, which I always thought was interesting because it had this huge, built in audience. So we were talking about creating one, but we really wanted to create something special and not just kind of check the box with a newsletter. It just so happened that that all happened around the same time that I feel like newsletters were undergoing a Renaissance. It's funny, I just gave a talk on this last night. 2018 was the same year that Morning Brew was founded, that The Hustle was founded, that Ann Handley started writing Total Annarchy. That was a pivotal year for email newsletters. And I think I would hold up the newsletter that you're involved in right alongside those others in terms of the, you know, how it's kind of breaking new ground on what it to send an email newsletter. So with that as an intro, maybe you could rewind the clock and start at the beginning. For people who are listening and might not be familiar with the newsletter, could you talk a little bit about, you know, what it is, how frequently it is sent, who the audience is, et cetera? Liz: I like how you phrased the history, by the way, of THE LATEST, because I remember that conversation. "Liz, how would you feel about writing our newsletter?" And I said, "Nope." I waffled, was a bit wishy washy. I was trying to say no, but with as many yes words as possible. And then you did that thing that you're so good at doing, which is like basically communicating that you're voluntelling me. Like, "So you're going to try it out and see what you think about it." So that went pretty great. So we have THE LATEST. It's meant to give digital sales and marketing pros everything they knew need to know to make smarter decisions, faster, and to do their job better in around five minutes. It hits inboxes Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. I do emphasize to people who may not have heard of this newsletter before or are new to this, yes, an actual human being writes it. That human being is me. I spend about six to eight hours a week working on it and it is a labor of love. Now, Kathleen, you remember the discussions that we had. We had already been doing some passive email distribution of our content, but we were starting to run into a couple of challenges. You know, HubSpot, for those who may or may not be familiar, has an option where you can automatically generate instant, daily or weekly digests of the content that you're publishing. We had scaled up rapidly from the traditional model of like, a few times a week of publishing content, to what I mentioned before, you know, seven days a week. No holidays off, 20 to 25 articles a week. That's a large volume. And we were running into a situation where we had emails competing with each other. You know, we had events we wanted to promote. We had all of this content that was going out and it was just this passive valuable-ish maybe kind of thing that we'd been sending previously. So THE LATEST was really meant to solve for that, as the centralized location where we could put all of our most important information. And we had a new opportunity to show one of the things that we believe about the most at IMPACT, which is our people, our products. So if that's the case, we're going to make it as personal and as impacting and as thoughtful and hand curated as possible. We wanted it to be as valuable as it could possibly be. Kathleen: So that was the nice things about newsletters, is it's their ability to consolidate a lot of what you want to communicate to your audience. And I do remember at the time that, you know, we have those instant blog notifications going out, but we were emailing people about events, and webinars and you know, social groups that we were running. There was a time, I think we counted and people were getting, you know, an email every day from us, if not more than that. And that can quickly lead to major email fatigue, which you know, really can hurt your sender score. So that was a great reason to shift over to the newsletter in and of itself, was let's email people less and let's be more efficient about it. But I think you're right, there was so much more to it in terms of being able to really cultivate a voice and develop a relationship with the audience. Getting personal in a corporate email newsletter Liz: I believe though, that was the thing I didn't expect out of it. And I'll admit, I'll still get the heebie jeebies every time I have to smash the send button on a newsletter that goes to I think 42,000 people at this point. That's still something where in the pit of my stomach, I'm like, "fine". The thing I never really expected out of it is that piece you just mentioned, which is really developing a relationship with your audience. I remember when I first started writing the newsletter, earlier issues were a little bit more pithy, a lot shorter, not very personal. I always like to embrace the Kathleen mindset of "keep doing stuff until people tell you to stop doing it", then just keep going and see what happens. And so I started using it, especially last year, to just be more emotional and honest about where I was personally because I went through quite a bit of stuff last year. I'm just ripping off that bandaid. I now live in Connecticut, but I used to live in Annapolis, Maryland with you -- not with you in the same home, but like a mile down the street. I was married at the time. I am not married anymore. I was moving up in my career. I was trying a lot of new things. I was experimenting with a lot of, just, new things professionally. It was a really big year of growth for me and I started talking about it. I started talking and I had no idea. I don't know what possessed me to do it, but very similar to Ann Handley and a lot of other newsletters you might see out there, we really focus on putting the letter in the newsletter. Now you may think to yourself, well, things like divorce and moving and all that stuff -- that's not really relevant to digital sales and marketing leaders. What was surprising to me is how many of those elements of going outside of your comfort zone, being willing to embrace change, all those things really apply personally and professionally as well. And the audience, that really ended up resonating with them. I would get start getting responses and replies. You know, we were in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic and I remember there was one where like, I was trying to be positive. I was trying to be like the little fortune cookie, you know, confused to say it's all gonna be fine. Like it's not, I couldn't get myself there. And finally I just wrote this thing about how I was just flirting with an emotional cliff. I wasn't in a really horrible spot, but it was becoming increasingly more difficult to carry the weight of my own feelings, carry the weight of the feelings of my friends and family -- the fear that for a while there was really gripping the country and the world and still is to some degree. That was one of the issues that I got the most responses to. It becomes this thing where I essentially started just writing to the people in front of me and they would respond and they would also still read all the stuff I put in there -- still read everything else. They would read all the articles, they would click through everything.  Mixing business and personal in email newsletters Kathleen: so taking a step back, as I think it's interesting, if somebody isn't familiar with the newsletter, this might be confusing. This is a corporate newsletter in the sense that it is IMPACT's newsletter as a company, but you write it pretty much every time. Every now and then somebody else jumps in if you're on vacation or, you know, for whatever reason to take a Saturday off. But really, this company newsletter starts off every time with a very, very personal introduction from you. So can you just talk about that dynamic because I think that's a dynamic that is going to be very new to a lot of people. They might be thinking, "why would you have a company newsletter come from one of the employees and start with a personal letter from him?" Liz: Well, let's face it. People trust human beings. People buy because of relationships they have with human beings. Now more than ever, since we are trapped behind our screens, my entire social life is conducted via Zoom at this point and has been for the past seven plus weeks. They don't want to talk to a nameless, faceless company. They want to talk to a human. Also, if you want to just get more technical and tactical about it for you business leaders out there going "I don't know, we're different. That's not for us guys." Just to be perfectly candid with you, your open rates will increase if it comes from a person. The moment we stopped sending things from IMPACT or "Liz from IMPACT" or "whomever from IMPACT" and just put "Liz Morehead", boom, open rates popped. Kathleen: Yeah. It's funny, I was, so I mentioned I was giving a talk. I gave a talk last night to the Public Relations Society of America about basically this topic of newsletters. I talked about having it come from a person and, and how a lot of companies are very skeptical and they think "No, our audience is too professional, we need to be more formal." The example I love to show that shatters that myth is there's a company called CB insights, which is a technology analyst firm. Like, big time tech companies, you know, are their clients -- the Googles, the Microsofts of the world. This is a very highly respected company in the analyst field. They have an email newsletter that has hundreds of thousands of subscribers and it comes from Anand Sanwal who's one of their principles. This is the part I love the best. He signs off, like at the bottom of the newsletter, he writes his intro just like you do. And at the very bottom, instead of saying "from Anand", he says, "I love you, Anand". This is a highly professional tech analyst company and one of the principals signs off the newsletter "I love you". Like, you know, I think that that to me just says, if they can do that, then anyone can kind of cross that bridge and become more personal in the way they do their email outreach. Liz: A hundred percent and I get that feedback a lot too. "Well, Liz, you're in marketing, you're allowed to do this kind of thing". I'm like, wait, hold on a second. Our target audience are high level VPs, CEOs, no nonsense business leaders, and they're reading and subscribing to my newsletter. It's still works. Yeah. I think a lot of people talk themselves out of trying things before they're even willing to see, you know, they're, they're ready to indict it. They're ready to pass judgment and say, "Oh, this won't work for us. Yada, yada, yada." But that's not true. And I would also say, you know, this is something we've been seeing with video right now too. This sounds like a strange correlation, but especially in this, you know, in the wake of Coronavirus, the threshold for production quality right now is a little bit lower, especially in video. People are expecting you to be in your homes, to be more human, to be more open. And I think this is a great opportunity for us to open that door and realize, yeah, so they're tech people or they're this or they're that, but they're also humans first. They are human beings first. The anatomy of THE LATEST Liz: But to get back to your original question, yes. So the anatomy of the newsletter in terms of how it's set up. At the very top you're always going to have a big headline that basically showcases the three top stories that we're covering in a given issue. So for example, the one that went out yesterday was "How to have really difficult conversations over video" and "Are you ready to do content marketing right?" and "How we planned and executed a 3,000 person virtual event in only three weeks." So we'll have that right underneath that. If nobody wants to read my letter, that's fine because we give you the links to those three articles in a little box right above it. So you could just like, you know, "That's fine Liz, you have a lot of feelings. Maybe later I want to read this stuff." Now underneath that then we have the letter. The letter itself usually falls into one of two categories. I would say 75% of the time it is somehow tangentially related to one of the three articles that's included. I like to keep it relevant. There are, however, the fringe cases -- that other 20% of the time where it's like, I have something I want to talk about. Maybe something big happened at IMPACT. Maybe there's just something more global that I want to talk about. For example, let's just go for it. The issue when I told everybody I was getting a divorce and I did it kind of euphemistically was the New Year's Eve issue. So it really made sense because essentially I was saying I was moving to Connecticut and doing so by myself. I'm only going with my cat. It's crazy to think about what the beginning of this year was like versus the end of this year. And I think a lot of us are feeling that way. That is something where like there's a bit of a balance. It's not always like, emotional bloodletting, but that's how I bring those types of stories in. I don't just decide, "Well I don't have anybody to talk about my feelings with. I'm going to do it here." It has to be relevant to the moment, to the context of what I'm talking about after the letter. Then it goes into a little bit more detail about each of the articles. You know, what question does it answer, what is it about, who wrote it? And then I also include some related links. So for each article, if somebody is interested in the topic, but that's not quite the article they're looking for, I'll pull in some other things. We feature our latest podcasts and shows -- the usual stuff like marketing events you need to know about. And then right now, because everything is so stressed out, we used to have something called weekend nonsense in our Saturday issue. Now it's in every issue because I think we all really need a laugh right now. And then I might throw in like, "Hey, I'm reading this" or you know, I, I fool around with what's in there. But that's really the anatomy of it. The goal is essentially to make it something people are excited to open. I think if you're creating an email newsletter, yes you want to drive traffic to your own site. But when I wake up on the days that I have to put this together, my number one goal is to make it something so insanely valuable that no one will ever regret having opened it. Even if they don't click through, that's fine. I just want them to feel like I have somehow made their job easier, their life easier or made it easier to make some sort of decision that day. Designing your email newsletter Kathleen: That's awesome. Now I know way back in the beginning we had a lot of debate about what this newsletter should look like, and how it should be formatted. There's lots of different schools of thoughts on this -- you know, how many graphics do you include and pictures and videos and gifs and emojis? Liz: So many things. I was so wrong. Kathleen: So talk a little bit about that. I think it's evolved over time and you've done a really good job of testing everything so that you can make data backed decisions. Can you share a little bit of that whole evolution and what you've learned? Liz: Sure. First of all, it's good to keep in mind, just from an email deliverability perspective, the more graphicy, flashy, design-y your email newsletter is, there is a higher likelihood that people will not see it that way either due to settings in their email that automatically turn off images if you're in a particularly like cybersecurity or technology focused space. Outlook inboxes are brutal in terms of what they will let through or what they will actually show. So we tried to keep the structure of it pretty lightweight. It doesn't look all the way plain text. There's some tabling in there, there's a little bit of structure, but for the most part it's just a basic rich text editor. But it wasn't always that way. Well, originally it wasn't. We had a little bit more structure around it, but for the most part I would say as long as I've been doing it, I really try to keep it more of that loose structure. Now a couple of the things though at the beginning that I, let's just talk about the thing I was most wrong about. So, as you know, every blog article you publish on your website should have a featured image associated with it. You know, people like things to look at. So I was of the idea that every featured article -- because again, they were under that welcome letter for me, there are three articles -- that every single one should have like, a featured image with that. We did that for a while and the open rates were great, but the click through rates were fine. Then somebody said we should test it without images. I just thought that was going to be a disaster. I am always coaching people about content, when they create it, to not create giant word walls. Beause that's the first thing that makes people go, "No, no, this looks hard. I don't want to do that. That is visually, that is not a content piece I would like", you know? So this idea that we were going to have just like, so many words, really freaked me out with no visuals. Lo and behold, when we took out the three featured image, one per each of the articles, our click through rates went up. Now that I think about it, it kind of makes sense. Imagery in a newsletter. If you subscribe to it already or will be in future, you'll see that I still use images, but they're purposeful. They're only there to drive the story forward. They're only there to provide visual context where I think you actually need the context. Otherwise it's not there. There are no images. I like to use emojis, which is also another thing I was wrong about. Not really so much in the text or the letters, but we use them as visual guides. Like for example, there's always a pointing finger in front of every headline for each of the three articles. The marketing calendar always has the same little calendar box, hot topics and Elite -- I'm very proud of this one -- a little spicy pepper. Things like that. It's so that people can visually scan and they get used to knowing where things are. And it allows me to visually call things out without it being intrusive. But that was something I was always very against. Just, you know, I'm, I'm knocking on the door 40, I've never been a huge emoji fan. We had to have like two or three people in our team at the time help us try to figure out Snapchat, and I still don't understand it. I've just never been an emoji person, but it allows me to add a little bit of personality, razzle-dazzle when I want it. Occasionally I'll just like throw one in to be a little bit cheeky in my intro, but that's really the only visual compliment other than me including an image when I feel like it's necessary. Otherwise it's just, it's just words and links. Kathleen: I think this is another area, like, emojis are a great example where you hear people say, "I can't do that because my audience is older and more professional". But the audience for THE LATEST is, how would you characterize it? Liz: All over the place? I think a lot of people on the surface would say, okay, so you're a young, hip marketing agency. You can get away with this stuff. The people I hear the most from -- this reminds me a lot of my beer column. Everybody always thought that my beer column audience was like young bearded flannels, you know, the usual beer drinking crowd. And I did have a lot of those. But the people I've heard the most from, my most devoted people who still actually read me to this day, even though I retired from that like what, six, nine months ago? They're older, 40 and above. It's the same thing with this. Some of my most devoted people, the people I hear from the most, are much more established in their careers. CEOs of businesses, VPs of sales and marketing. One of the guys is actually one of our clients, was one of our clients. He's like some good old boy from Tennessee. He's a straight shooter. He's just that guy. People you would never imagine are actually reading my newsletter and they're engaging with it. The other thing I'll say about emojis, too, is that remember it doesn't always have to be a smiley face. There are emojis for things like charts or very basic things like a calendar tab. You know, take a look at what's available to you. You can get away from the kitty stuff, you can get away from like the silly stuff. There's a lot of good stuff in there. Kathleen: Yeah. And there's a great site. My favorite resource, the site getemoji.com because you could just go there and you can see them all and you can copy them and use them wherever you want. I use them a lot, not just in email newsletters but in LinkedIn posts and stuff like that. The other thing too is that going back to the conversation we had about fact that a lot of your images will get stripped depending on where it's being sent to and what the email platform is. Emojis are Unicode text. So you are able to make your visuals have a little bit of flair. Liz: It gets in there without it getting stripped out. Kathleen: Yeah. Liz: So that's really nice. It's, it's good for me. I use it for visual hierarchy the most. Kathleen: Yeah. It's very, very effective for that. What impact has THE LATEST had for IMPACT? Kathleen: So, this started in 2018. Can you talk a little bit about the results? Like how large is the list now? What are you seeing in terms of marketing results from the newsletter? Liz: Oh yeah, for sure. When we started this, I think the  number was somewhere around like 1200 people maybe because we didn't want to force opt-ins. We had people who were opted into our daily, our weekly notifications, but we didn't want to force people to come on board with it. We did an initial push, I believe, with garnering subscriptions. We brought some people over who were already opted in in certain capacities and it started as a very small list. After that, today, I think I already mentioned it, we're now at 42,000, and in terms of results of what we're seeing from it as of today, we're closing in on about $2 million in revenue associated with it via HubSpot, which is outstanding. Kathleen: That's awesome.  Liz: It's a newsletter. You watched me last year on stage at IMPACT Live. I like content that makes money. You know, a little little skin off my back there. I'm pretty happy that that's uh, that's doing well. The results really speak for itself. I think if you go into that with the same mindset that I have, whether it ends up looking like mine or not, it's not just about what articles do you want to in here? Do you want to drive traffic? If you just focus your entire energy for a couple hours that you're putting it together and say, "I want to make this the most valuable thing that my ideal buyer would have in their inbox", you will be astounded at the brand evangelists you can build out of that. Email newsletters in the time of COVID-19 Kathleen: That's great. Have you had to change anything with the newsletter as a result of this whole craziness with the Coronavirus? Liz: I think what's been surprising is how much benchmarks no longer matter. Like, we had all this benchmark data, right? We've even written the same articles, like "When's the best time to send an email newsletter?" When's the best time to do to do that? Those rules no longer apply because everyone is trapped at home. So for example, we had, you know, a pretty steady average open rate that had been growing incrementally over time. And then there were a couple of days just because, you know, I think a lot of people can relate to this, as soon as Coronavirus hit, it was, it moved like a wave across the country and around the world. But when it would hit wherever you were, it was like 24 to 48 hours of complete madness. There was shell shock. There was, what are we doing at our company? There are all these things that need to happen. And so I was talking with Vin, our VP of Marketing, one day and I said, "Look, there's no way I'm going to get to this until like, THE LATEST is actually going to be the latest my time. Like that's just how it's going to happen because I have X, Y and Z to do." And he's like, "Those are the top priorities. As long as it gets out the door today, I don't care when it gets out." We had sent it at like six or seven o'clock at night. We had almost doubled our open rate. Kathleen: Wow. Liz: It was absolutely absurd because it made sense. Right? People are now just sitting at home, not understanding boundaries between work and play because, I don't know if anybody else is like me, I know I'm done with work when I move from this side of the couch, which is the right side of the couch, to the left, just to kind of mix it up just to see what happens. That's been kind of crazy. I would say also the level of emotional honesty I'm allowed to get to has been great, but it is a balance. I really was struggling for a couple of weeks there of, you know, I used to find inspiration for the newsletter out in the world, face to face human interactions. What do you do when 80% of your stimulus for how you create as a writer for me is gone? That was really a big challenge for me. Some days I feel better than others. And I think as this has become more of a normal, as this has become more status quo, again, this is the end of week seven of this, at least for me, I'm learning to find stories in different ways. But for awhile there it was hard. You know, just, I couldn't be depressed all the time. Kathleen: You can only talk about your favorite Netflix show so many times, right? Liz: Well the other thing too though, is that there's an emotional delicacy to it. There is a reality that I need to constantly be aware of. There's a difference between humor that genuinely puts someone in a good mood for the first time in a day and humor that's tone deaf and falls flat and actually ends up offending someone. So it's been a tricky thing to figure out because I understand that everybody has a different situation. Here's a good example. IMPACT Plus is that learning platform we were talking about earlier. I run the virtual peer group for content managers. We have CEOs and business leaders, sales and videographers and content managers, yada yada yada. So I run the content manager one. We had a content manager virtual peer group scheduled for the week after everything just caught completely on fire. I had originally slated to be teaching people how to build a content strategy, and instead I was like, I'm not sure if this is what they even want to be hearing about or if this is even what they care about right now. I'm so glad I didn't do that because as it turned out, a couple of people on the virtual peer group had been laid off, weren't even content managers anymore, but they were still there, there were business owners who were concerned whether or not in a month they were going to still have the business. I mention that because I had a similar reaction to THE LATEST. I remember the first couple of issues, I sat there and said "Am I helping people who have just lost their job?" You know, I'm in a place of privilege. I still have my job. It's all relative in terms of what everybody's dealing with, but that is a privilege. I've had to maintain situational awareness that I'm not speaking to an even more diversified audience with a much more volatile emotional range. And I'd say that has been a really big challenge, but it's also been really fun. Like yesterday's issue of THE LATEST I talked about weird food and combinations and stuff. Like the other night for dinner, I had this fantastic 2015 red Bordeaux from France and I paired it with an Oscar Meyer baloney sandwich and I started getting all of these funny emails back from people. One guy was like, "The only reason I was able to build a spreadsheet last night was because I took a break and stood over the sink and ate cold pizza." I think good advice for this is to just be honest. Everybody's kind of blindly feeling around the dark room for a light switch right now, but the only way you're going to get through it is just being aware of who your audience is. Be cognizant of the emotional state they might be in, but don't let that restrict you from a place of fear. Let that give you freedom in terms of the stories you're telling because I think people are really looking for people to be honest. I'd say that's one of the big impacts that this pandemic has had on our newsletter. I was already being really honest. I was already really doing a lot of these things, but it's made me a much more creative storyteller in terms of where I find stories and it's also made me, I think, a much more empathetic storyteller. It's made me more human, more open, more personal. Whereas I think the knee jerk reaction might otherwise be to restrict, pullback, be more corporate. What Liz says you should know about starting an email newsletter right now Kathleen: if somebody is listening to this and they're thinking, well, I might want to try either starting a newsletter or revamping my newsletter and taking a different approach, if you had to give somebody advice on, if you were starting a newsletter now, what, what would you tell them? Liz: I think it's important to have a very clear idea about the why behind the newsletter. Why are you making this choice? Is it because your current email marketing isn't working? Is it like us, where you have so many different communications? We need to bring that together and there's a new opportunity to do it better. Really understand your why. I would say that's the first step. Then be very clear about what your goals are. I think that if you're going to go into this, like, "we need to check the box, we need to do a newsletter," then what I'm talking about is not for you. In fact, I'd say probably in a year or so, that kind of email newsletter stuff I don't think is going to really survive. It'll be there. People will open it, but it's never going to drive the brand awareness that you want. It's never going to create that community. It's never going to make people initially have that reflexive "I have a question about this. I should go to them after that." I would say when you're building out what goes in your newsletter, you need to put out of your mind, your priorities. You need to say, "What is it that, if I were my ideal buyer, what would make me go, 'Oh wow' every time I open that newsletter?" -- that's what you want. You want to create that moment where somebody opens it up and it's a present like on Christmas morning and they say, "My gosh, they got this just for me!" That's what you want to do and it's going to look different. You know, you may not have the crazy personal letter or like, I think one time I made like condolence cards for marketer's failing email campaigns and stuff. Like I get really weird in mine. Just make it personal, tell a story, you know, make it so people understand that there's a human behind what you're doing and then just commit to it and be willing to try different things. Be wrong about images. You know, you're going to have to fight a lot of your own instincts. You're going to have to do a lot of testing, you're going to try things, they're going to work, they're going to not work and that's okay, but be consistent. Kathleen: Yeah, and just keep doing it. Check out THE LATEST Kathleen: If somebody wants to check out THE LATEST or subscribe to it, what should they do? Liz: Just go to impactbnd.com and if you scroll down, you'll see a little bar that says THE LATEST. You could see the latest issue and then there's a big button that says "Subscribe to THE LATEST" and you'll get me -- actually me -- in your inbox three days a week. Kathleen: You can scroll through so many past issues of it, unlike many newsletters which only exists in your inbox. I think the cool thing about what you guys do is you can go back and read prior issues on the website, which is really nice. So you can try before you buy if you want. Liz: Yeah, absolutely. I mean if you follow me on LinkedIn, my username is Liz clam. Every time a new issue of THE LATEST comes out I share the web version of it, which is, you know, it's user friendly to look at.  Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: All good things must come to an end, but we're not quite done yet. I have two questions that I always ask all of my guests and now it is your turn to answer. The first one being, we talk a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really like the shining example of doing inbound marketing?  Liz: That's a great question. And the funny part is, is that I always knew these questions were coming, but I'm still racking my brain about this. I think my answer probably would have been different had we had this about a month ago before everything happened or I guess more than a month ago at this point. I've been spending a lot of time on LinkedIn recently as I think a lot of people in our space are. And I have to say, I have been blown away by three people who our names we're all familiar with. Marcus Sheridan and Ann Handley they started doing this live series about being trapped at home and talking about the most pressing questions, concerns, and fears that everybody was having now that we're all in this new reality and I just thought that was a really fascinating and new way to do inbound in a real time, human way. Kathleen: That's really cool. Liz: There's also a guy named Chris Carolan and he is a member of our content manager peer group. I'll make sure to get a link for him so you can put it in the show notes. He is in the manufacturing space and the stuff that he has been doing recently has been, I don't think he realizes what he's doing. He is a little pioneer of inbound and also now virtual selling. So doing sales demos. There's this whole idea that as a sales person, you need to be in front of a person in order to sell to them. He's doing virtual sales demos, still closing deals, and he's also creating insanely good content about it. He's probably one of my favorite people to follow on LinkedIn and I'm not even in manufacturing.  Kathleen: That sounds like me and beer. Liz: Exactly. I will never build anything but I will follow him forever. Kathleen: Yes, exactly. Awesome. Well I will put the link in the show notes for those people. Second question. The biggest pain point I always hear from marketers is that digital marketing is just changing so quickly that it's like drinking from a fire hose, trying to keep up with everything. How do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated about all things digital marketing? Liz: I mean, I almost have a cheat answer. I'm the editorial director at IMPACT, so I have to read pretty much everything that we publish. And it's across video, sales, and marketing. It's across HubSpot marketing technology, developing your strategy. And we also have a whole section devoted to just news reactions, which contextualizes the latest digital sales and marketing news. So by virtue of my role, I know I'm a little bit spoiled in that I have to stay up to date. But here's what I will say. I use Feedly. I've never gotten over the demise of Google reader. I think it was the biggest mistake Google ever made was getting rid of that. But Feedly is now the devil I know and I've used it to create digital marketing news and publishing newsfeeds for me. So I follow SEO Journal, Marketing Land, Search Engine Land, Forbes CMO Network, Digiday, all of these different things. And then on the publisher side, it's like, What's New in Publishing, Poynter, things like that. I just go in there and scan. Even if you're just scanning headlines, you don't have to sit there and be like, I'm going to take three hours out of my busy day and I'm going to read all these articles. I just skim and I look, I just try to stay abreast of what is happening. There is no secret sauce, no silver bullet to staying up to date. You need to come up with a process and a schedule and you stick to it. Kathleen: But I want to say, I mean you guys create THE LATEST as a way for people to stay up to date, so you can subscribe to THE LATEST and piggyback off of all the efforts of the folks at IMPACT who are trying to summarize the news every day for you. Liz: Thank you for shamelessly self promoting me so I didn't have to. How to connect with Liz Kathleen: All right, well now we really are coming to the end. If somebody does want to ask you a question or reach out to you or connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that? Liz: So the best way for you to do that is to find me on LinkedIn. My name is Liz Morehead, L I Z M O O R E H E A D. And if you like pictures of beer and cats and the occasional Connecticut state park, you can find me on Instagram at @whatlizsaid. Also, fun fact, if you go to impactbnd.com and type the word "genius" in the search bar, you will be brought to every article I have ever written. Kathleen: That is amazing. I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that just to see it work. You know what to do next... Kathleen: All right, well, thank you so much for joining me, Liz. If you are listening and you liked what you heard here -- and how could you not because Liz is amazing -- or you learned something new, which again, how could you not because Liz is amazing, apparently she's a genius -- head to Apple podcasts and please leave the podcast a five star review. That is how we get in front of new people and they find a find the podcast and hear and learn from amazing experts like Liz. If you know someone else who is doing kickass inbound marketing, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much for joining me, finally, Liz. Liz: I know, I know. Talk to you again soon Kathleen.

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 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.

How did Chili Piper grow to become one of the hottest new sales software providers, and what would the team do differently if they had to start all over again? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Chili Piper Founder and CEO Nicolas Vandenberghe shares the story of growing his company, from his early days bootstrapping, to what he is doing now that he has secured venture capital funding, and what he would do differently if he had to start over again today. One of the biggest things Nicolas would change is his approach to marketing. Listen to the podcast to learn why he would have started investing in marketing much earlier than he actually did, and how he thinks that would have changed the company's growth trajectory. Highlights from my conversation with Nicolas include: Nicolas started Chili Piper to help solve the problem of companies not booking meetings with interested inbound leads. The solution he developed helps his customer double their bookings. Nicolas credits his early success to achieving product-market fit quickly. The company gained traction in the US market by using what it calls the "bullseye" strategy, which involved targeting highly influential customers to establish social proof. This strategy was successful in helping Chili Piper bootstrap its initial growth. Now that the company has secured venture capital funding and Nicolas needs to scale it, he wishes he had made a larger investment in marketing earlier. Chili Piper calls the category in which it plays "buyer enablement" and is focused on creating products that are so good, buyers will demand to switch to them. This is how Nicolas believes they will unseat the incumbent providers, like Microsoft and Google, that their prospective customers currently rely on.  Resources from this episode: Visit the Chili Piper website Listen to the podcast to learn why startups should invest in marketing early, and how even an unknown startup can take on the industry giants. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm Kathleen Booth and I'm your host, and this week my guest is Nicolas Vandenberghe, who's the CEO and co-founder of Chili Piper. Welcome, Nicolas. Nicolas Vandenberghe (Guest): Thanks. I'm happy to be here. Nicolas and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I’m excited to have you here. I've been sort of watching you and your company for a few years now and I have a personal passion for startups. It's something that I've invested a lot of my time in, and I really especially love following startups that bootstrap for some of their time and find success, so I'm really excited to talk to you about that, and how you fueled your growth, and what the company does. About Nicolas Vandenberghe and Chili Piper Kathleen: So let's actually start out, if you would, by having you tell my guests a little bit more about yourself, your background and story, because that's pretty interesting as well, and Chili Piper and what the company does. Nicolas: Sure. I'm originally French, as I'm sure everybody will guess. I came to the US in the mid '90s. I went to Stanford Business School with the idea of traveling the world, and when I was there I met Steve Jobs. He was invited to our class. He sat on the floor. At that time he was CEO of Next, going next to nowhere. It was an amazing experience and I thought, "That's what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be like him, doing tech companies." And so I proceeded to do that and I've done several startups, not quite as successful as Apple, I must say, but enough success to be happy and done three different startups. I also had spent a lot of time in sales, so I funded my studies. I say that I sold newspapers in the streets of Paris. It's a true story. I am very proud of it because I outsold everybody else; this newspaper that sold more than anybody else. So I have a passion for sales and more recently I got to know the world of sales is going to be completely changed. Digital is going to have a big influence and it hasn't happened yet. Right now we are still at the stage where records have been put in place. That's what you call CRM. But it's a different role for crossing the chasm and I make a distinction between a system of records and system of action. The system of action is what should be used to do your job, and that is yet to be invented. So that is the business of Chili Pepper is to say we're going to be the company that will bring central revenue to the scene. Kathleen: I love that, and it's one of the reasons I was excited to talk to you. I've been working in marketing and actually sales, I've been in sales roles as well for a long time, and technology and tech stacks have become an increasingly important part of the daily lives of anybody who's in marketing or sales. It might just be me, but I feel like on the marketing side, there have been just substantial advancements in making the technology a lot more user friendly, but on the sales side, maybe not as much, for the most part. You see that with CRMs and systems of records as you referred to them. Things like salesforce.com. Everyone I talk with kind of both loves it and hates it, and the problem with these platforms, if they're not user friendly, is they don't get used. Your tech stack is only as good as the decisions of the person who is meant to be using it. If they choose to use something else, then it's garbage in and garbage out. So that's my little rant but what I like about- Nicolas: You're absolutely right, and still to this day the service is so bad that these days you have companies saying, "If you don't put your data in Salesforce, I won't pay your commission." It's like threats and punishments to use the software. I mean, imagine if I had to tell my kids, "If you don't use your iPhone, I won't give you any candies." Kathleen: Yeah, it's ridiculous. Nicolas: Right. That's right. Kathleen: It's ridiculous that we're in that position. Yeah. Nicolas: That's why I'm trying to change the system. An introduction to Chili Piper Kathleen: I read an interesting article that said that today every individual, marketer, and salesperson is their own CIO because of this exact problem. Because as a company, you can choose to put software in place but every individual person on that team is going to decide what software they're actually going to use. If there's friction in the process, they're going to find a way around it. It's sort of like water. When water hits an obstacle, it goes around it and carves a new river. And I think that's what people do with software. So tell me a little bit about exactly the problems that Chili Piper solves for because you mentioned that it's great for revenue teams, but what exactly does it do? Nicolas: Yeah, so I started the company to help sales people, and we accidentally stumbled into inbound process. It's something relevant to this podcast. What's happening is we started with helping people schedule their meetings. So especially with complex situations where there's a big SDR team booking a lot of meetings for a big company team, which they should book with the routing being fair with a round robin distribution. So that's how we get started. And I was talking to some of our customers and saying, "What's your job?" and they say, "I am an inbound SDR, and what do you do?" "Some people come to the website, marketing people spend a lot of money to bring them to the website. There's a form to request a demo or talk to somebody. I submit the form and my job is to call them and to book that meeting." I said, "How is that going for you?" and they said, "It's going great. We're converting at 40%." To which I said, "Wait a minute, you're telling me that out of a hundred people who want to have a meeting, only 40 of them get a meeting? Because somewhere they got lost?" That seems completely crazy to me but it seems to be accepted in the industry. That's what it is. You have a 40% conversion rate inbound, you're doing great. I didn't even have the... beat yourself up! I don't want to touch it. I'm 40% right. Thinking like it would be the ultimate achievement. So we decided to build a solution for that and what we did is a small piece of JavaScript that companies put in their webpage, in their form, and when the form is submitted, we get the data from the form. We can augment the data with solutions like ZoomInfo and Clearbit, these kinds of data sources. And in real time, based on this data, we need to find the right rep who should handle that prospect. We can dial the rep and dial the prospect and connect them in real time or we can retrieve the calendar and show options of the prospect and book a time. So instead of saying, "Thank you I need to call you," say, "Just pick a time that works for you," they pick a time they're all set. That seems obvious, but we are the first - and only to this day - company doing it. When I launched it I said, "That seems too obvious to be true. I must be missing something." It turned out I wasn't. All of our customers doubled their conversion rates. We had people at 80% conversion, a lot of people at 70% conversion. We had a company that was at 23% and went up 55% which is a very high volume. So it just works. It was just a matter of innovating, coming up with a new way to do things. The reason why it stayed at that level for so long is because we were just at the junction between the marketing and sales. So marketing thought we were bringing a good job bringing a lot of leads. Sales thought we were doing a good job filling up the leads. The reference point was outbound, right, so all these companies you reach, you convert maybe 10% percent of meetings. In inbound we were getting 40%; that looked good. That was a disconnect, so we're putting that all together with all inbound solutions to do this, handle it very efficiently and improve conversion rates. Kathleen: It's really genius and it's funny how you mentioned that nobody thought of it sooner. You know, it makes me think of an experience that I recently had as a buyer, and I should preface this in saying that you referred to this under the umbrella of buyer enablement because I do think it's all about giving the buyer choices and allowing them to choose the path that they want to take, and not then putting things in their way. It makes me think of, I was recently looking to vet agencies that do pay-per-click marketing and I went on to a website of a particular agency who I will not name and they had sort of like a quiz that they needed me to fill out instead of a contact us form, and I get the logic behind it so I filled out the quiz even though I was sort of annoyed. I just wanted to talk to somebody and then at the end of the quiz, it was like, "We'll get in touch with you to set up a meeting," and I thought, "Well, no." Now I really want to talk to somebody and there was no way for me to go to any kind of a contact form or find any phone number. It's interesting. By the time they emailed me to set up the meeting, I had already found somebody else that I was really happy with. So there's like a perfect example of how the 60% of people who can fill out a form, who say they want to talk to you and then don't actually turn into a viable, bottom of the funnel lead/opportunity, because you've allowed that time in between to be filled with another solution, or they've talked themselves out of purchasing, which I'm sure happens a lot. But it's frustrating. It's frustrating as a buyer. Nicolas: It's crazy, it's crazy. Something similar happened to me. I submitted a form to talk to somebody at LinkedIn. At the time, it was a while back, I wanted to buy a license of their solution, and you had to talk to a sales person, so I submitted the form and they said, "Somebody is going to call you," and to my knowledge, nobody did call me. It turned out that two weeks later, it's not that somebody did call me the next day, but it was a 408 number and I got my setting that it go straight to voicemail, because I didn't know the number, and so I never knew that somebody had called. And it doesn't make sense these days. So with our solution, a company has the option to connect in real time. We even have what we call real time video. So if you... it's used a lot by companies for their in-app solutions, so if they're the free service, or paid service, somebody wants to talk to somebody, the most efficient in-app format for conversation is Zoom Video, because you can see each other, you can share your screen you can really engage with others. We have a real time Zoom Video connection, where you can submit a form and say, "I need to talk to somebody," boom, so here is your Zoom Video link and you're connected to somebody over Zoom. So, that's such a better experience for the potential buyer to be in real time connected to Zoom Video as opposed to waiting and wondering when they're going to be reached out to. Kathleen: I want to make sure I understand. Are you telling me... I get that you guys through this JavaScript code can do this on a website, but you're saying that in-app, somebody can also use Chili Piper and immediately spin up a Zoom conversation with... Nicolas: That's right. Kathleen: That's a game changer. I mean, just like when you talk about trial to customer conversions and adoption and eliminating those friction points early in experience... that's amazing. I did not realize that it did that, which is very very cool. Nicolas: Yeah. I think we need to market it a little bit better. Kathleen: Well, there you go, we're talking about it on the podcast. When should startups invest in marketing? Kathleen: One of the things I am fascinated by is your earlier story with the company, when it first started, because, as I mentioned, I work with a lot of start-ups. I am a head of marketing for a start-up right now, and the conversation always revolves around, in those early days, before you have really deep pockets or VCs have thrown a lot of money at you, what should the approach to marketing be? I feel like there's really two schools of thought from the founders I've met. Either they believe in throwing all their money and resources at sales and having an entirely sales led organization and they defer marketing until after they get a lot of investment money, or they really really believe in marketing and make an early investment in content and building out their top of the funnel, etc. And that's a bit more of a long game but it's a leap of faith so I'm sure there's an in between but I seem to talk to those two people who fall in those two courts. So I'd love to hear what your experience was, because you were successful in your early days bootstrapping. Nicolas: That's a great way to put it, and I will say that I think the right approach is to do the second, the all in, in marketing. I mistakenly did the first and went to sales, so I'm here to exemplify the mistake. We did something right at the beginning -- the strategy that I call the "Bull's eye." When we came up with the first product -- and the first product was around handoff between teams, so distributing between SDRs and account executives -- we had a company come to us and say, "I have this problem, can you solve it for us?" And so the product market fit was easy because somebody came and said, "I have this problem", and we check if other companies have this problem, and we finally did, and so there was no question of having an idea and- Kathleen: I was going to say, because that's the danger of having that one customer who's the squeaky wheel and you build out a product just for them only to find out nobody else wants it. Nicolas: Right, right, so the worst part of that, we actually went to SaaStr. Only SaaS companies, and I went around and said, "Do you have that problem?", "Yes", "Do you have that problem?", "Yes", so more than half had that problem. Then we did something that was inspired by the fashion industry and namely I was exposed to, in the early 2000s, Louis Vuitton, the luxury brand, built their business in the U.S. They targeted the most influential people in the world, the celebrities, so they were not so well known in the U.S. except for a few people. They went to famous actresses and got them free bags and free jewels, so these actresses were photographed. That was the center of the bull's eye. From there, they went to what they call socialites. In every city there are people who are more visible than others. They're social, they're visible. They targeted these people, and from there they extended it. So it was a top down, concentric circle. That worked really well and we did the same and thought, "Okay, which companies are the most influential in our space?" Obviously it's not Beyonce that helps you sell software. It's companies like Square, Greenhouse in New York, Segment in the bay area -- the companies that people look up to and say, "These guys know what they're doing when it comes to sales and marketing." So we targeted these companies. It may have taken longer to get the business from them, but once got the business, other companies came to us and that built our early inbound flow from these companies saying, "Hey I booked with Discover Org," "I booked with Discover Org, that was awesome, that was the same experience," "I booked with Segment and it was great, I just did one yesterday. That was a good experience." So that's what did well to get started to build the foundations. And back to your question from there, what we should have done was build the marketing and expand it, our content and case studies. Instead, what we did is extend our sales team, so that worked. Every rep paid for themselves. We were able to bootstrap. We passed two million without funding. It worked well but now two years later we think, "Well we have to build these foundations," because if you want to grow to the hundreds of millions in revenues, you can not do it without a strong brand, and a strong marketing presence, so we waited too long to build marketing foundations at the outset. Kathleen: This is such an interesting conversation to me and I appreciate your candor in saying you would have done it differently, but I think if somebody is listening they might be thinking, "He says that but they were successful," and so I'm curious what you think would have been different had you started marketing earlier? Would there have been a different outcome or would it have been the pace that would have changed? Nicolas: I expect that we would have grown faster. We typically double over a year, and  expect that we would have done even better than that. You have to think, the number one problem for us starters is product market fit. If our customers more than double their conversion, they have a return investment that is massive. That's obviously the first place to get to, but once we have that then the question becomes, how fast can I go and what's the most effective way to go so for all you listeners, you can bypass the product market fit. The question we're addressing now is how to go from there and the marketing investment is more leverage, so for the same investment, you're able to serve more people. Initially it doesn't work, but when it does work then you have more leverage right there. A piece of content can reach 20,000 viewers. A rep can not be in touch with 20,000 viewers at the same amount of time. That's the leverage you need to get and how you're able to grow at 3x or 4x instead of 2x because you get this leverage from marketing, that's big. We just hired a CMO a few months back, and we're putting all these things in place. That's why I say, we'll see if it all happens, but I have a lot of trust in our CMO and his team to make it happen. I can see he is already putting in the information and I can see how it makes sense. About the "bullseye" strategy Kathleen: Well I definitely think you have a good team, I did a little bit of stalking on LinkedIn to see who was on your marketing team and it looks like a really qualified group of people so I'm sure you're going to see fantastic results from that. I want to go back to something you said earlier, about the bullseye strategy. That's interesting to me because you talked about how Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy used that to bring Louis Vuitton into the US. I've seen it also with one of the people that I sort of idolize who is Sara Blakely, who is the founder of Spanx, she did the same thing. She sent products to Oprah and other people like that. In some respects, that can be really risky, and those are examples of product companies, but if you're sending product to somebody you don't really know, if they're going to do anything with it, if they're going to evangelize it... In your case it was going after really high value accounts. While it's one thing to say, "We're going to do this, we're going to land the biggest fish in the industry," it's another thing to make it happen. So, I am curious, did you have another approach, or what did you do in those early days that you were able to get those meetings, especially as a company, at the time, that these other companies haven't heard of. Nicolas: Yeah, it's actually not so much high value accounts we went after, it's highly visible accounts. It's a strong difference. You get a lot more licences from selling to, say, I am thinking of an example, HP, than you get from selling to Segment. Both are costumers actually, and HP came much later, so we got a lot of licenses. Equal industries, these days. Marketers look up to Segment to what they should do much more than HP, HP is known for other things. The target was not so much larger deals, it was very much who do people look up to. It turned out that you think that, "Well how did you get about getting these costumers," people look up to these companies because they are forward thinking, and because they are forward thinking, they are interested in trying new tech. I remember Segment had this French guy, Gillaume Cabane, and there was this discussion and he pushed back and I said “Hey Guillaume, you're super, and on the leading edge. Surely if I am right, you don't want to have missed it." He said, " Okay, fine we'll do an AB test", and boom, we did an AB test, he went across 61%, it was super successful. He led a team that was known in the industry as forward thinking because he would try new things. That helped us, because we would go to companies that would try new things, because they would implement these practices, and to implement these practices you have to take some risks. You have to go and squeeze new solutions, you have to explore, you have to be willing to try new things. So that's how we did it, and more practically, since...we implemented, and immediately, I did most of this in person. I actually went to events, meet ups and met in person in the early days. It's not really scalable, but in the early days that's the best way to do it. Nobody knows who you are, if you email campaigned people will ignore it, so you have to go in person and engage in person, and try. Once you get a few reference accounts, of course the game changes, and you can go online. How Chili Piper gets customer success stories Kathleen: Well, it definitely seems to be working because, I think, when Chili Piper came on my radar screen, I actually heard Udi Ledergore from Gong talking about some of the results they have gotten. I am curious, you're going after these highly visible accounts, they're having some success. Do you have a particular way of approaching them and asking that they talk about those success stories? Nicolas: Yes, Udi is a great guy and Gong is definitely one of the visible accounts that we love. We do case studies. We have a case study with Gong, it's on our website. We have one with Grow. We have one with Segment. So we definitely package it as success. Then we ask them to share with other companies in the community. Often you have questions in the community say, what should I use, partner with them? That's something we could have done better, but we did pay attention to make sure that these champions would serve as references and would talk about us through case studies, and other type of discussions. How Chili Piper is approaching marketing today Kathleen: Now, you got your first round of funding last spring, was it April of 2019? Nicolas: Yeah. Kathleen: Since then, you've gone on to hire some folks for the marketing team, you mentioned you have a new CMO, and I saw a few other roles. How big is the marketing team today? Nicolas: We just hired....It's four people now. Kathleen: Okay. As you think about looking forward, what is your approach to marketing, what are you looking for in the year ahead? Are there particular things that the company is focused on in terms of building its brand, its content, etc.? Nicolas: Yes. When we took money last year, we were cash positive, so we didn't need the money from the existing business. What we wanted to do was to invest in product development because we developed the new IDs that we thought were mature enough to bring to market, or to start building. I should preface with that our inbound solution is growing. Of course we want to keep growing the business. We're about to launch a very bold take on inbox, so we're taking on Microsoft, Outlook and Gmail. With the new inbox, the difference is a collaborative inbox. The idea that revenue teams will be able to, we syndicate account-related emails across email boxes, so if you take a common account, you can see everything being discussed within the account, directly in the inbox. Let's just say an account, let's say Gong, so if it's just for Gong, I'll see every email that's been sent to Gong, every meeting with Gong directly into my box from everybody. Then I can chat, comment on it, so ask somebody, "Hey, what did you do, say, when you talk to him at that meeting?" It's a collaborative inbox. We think it's exactly the type of approach that sales and revenue teams need, especially the account manager, or CS. We need to know whether that's happened before. We're about to launch that, and back to your question, we have this marketing team of four, what do we expect from the year? Well we have this dual mission of building the business around our solution. As you pointed out, not everybody knows about everything we do, like the in-app solution. And start to position that new product line around our inbox, our collaborative inbox and revenue teams. It's a lot to do. We are going to invest in content because we see that, obviously content marketing stuff works well, but in case there are lot of questions from companies, a lot of the things we do are new, leading edge, the idea of specializing revenue teams... What should the account managers do, what should the CS, costumer success do, how should the head off be done, how to be the best account manager of the best CS? We are fortunate to have a lot of customers who are very smart and have great ideas, so we can bring these ideas, write them up and bring this content. That's a big piece of what you're going to do in the future to lead the change... We said earlier on in the podcast, I'm a big believer that sales and revenues are going to be completely transformed with a new set of tools, so we want to make sure that we evangelize that. How Gong is building the "buyer enablement" category Kathleen: Now, it's interesting to me, because you coined this term buyer enablement and a lot of what you're doing, as you explained rightfully, is new. It's something that hasn't been done before. This inbox, totally different than what anybody has constructed. You know some of the functionality that you have in your initial tools, totally different. I am selfishly going to ask you this because I am fascinated by the topic of category creation. So, as a smaller company, you're thinking about this concept of buyer enablement. I assume you're also talking to analysts, companies like Gartner or Forrester, what have you? How do you look at that, because everything I've read, and I've researched, and seen about category creation, it's an incredibly difficult play. But if you can pull it off, it can be huge. But it's not a quick thing to build a category. I just would love to hear your thinking about that, and how much of your strategy revolves around that term, buyer enablement, which you're really coining and introducing into the market, versus drafting off of existing searches and things like that. Nicolas: I'm smiling because I had a long discussion with our CMO yesterday about the category creation and the role of analysts. You have to think that an analyst is not going to come up with an innovation that's in your category currently. An analyst is not going to say that, "the new way of doing inbox is collaborative inbox, and this is the new category, and players come play in my new category." Kathleen: Right. Nicolas: Their job is to observe where the market is going and say, "Oh there is something new happening there, it's real," and, "I'm going to call this category, I'm going to explain it within there." That's typically useful in crossing the chasm when you're moving to mainstream. When you move to mainstream, you need this clear explanation of what it is about, but when you build a category you're not at that stage, moving to mainstream, you're at the other stage, the early state. Our focus is to provide a solution to an existing problem. It's going to sound boring, but the fact that this problem is big enough that it's worthy enough of being labeled its own category is unintentional. We think that sales people should have better tools, and we think that inbox and calendar, we are also going to launch Chili Calendar, should be specialized for them. Because it works, we're going to solve the problem, and we're going to help them coverup their revenues better. Hopefully someday Forrester, one of our costumers is Forrester, will call that a new category, will put us in the right quadrant. It works the other way. Once we’ve done it, they'll say, "This is what's happening and we'll do it," so for now we focus on the solving the problem. It's not as hard as it seems in a sense to create a category because if the problem is real, you're going to have real movement in the market. A great example, that has happened recently, is sales engagement. Sales engagement is actually, in effect, is synonymous with sales development, it's the tool for sales development. Their job is to prospect and to engage the initial engagement. A bunch of companies can request tools early on in to us, CalTAP and Yesware, they were doing templates. Then SalesLoft and Outreach which came with a better way to do it, which was cadences, multi-touch cadences, it's the right tool for this team. They did that tool. Then they got a lot of costumers, high growth. Somebody, I'm not sure who, called it sales engagement. They thought, "Oh, that makes sense, I like it," and then the category was born, but it didn't come the other way around, it didn't come the other way around. So buyer involvement is a term we've used because we strongly believe that the focus has switched on the buyer, and that's what we do with our inbound solutions. You can't let your buyer wait two hours or two days to get that. It’s a focus, but it’s more of a philosophy. We don't expect that somebody is going to come up and call this category buyer enablement. Some day the category will be called, and as a mission, we hope that we'll be in the right quadrant when that happens. Kathleen: I think that's the right way to look at it, because everything I've seen is that even if an analyst sees it as a new category, they're not going to spend the time to coin it as such until there is more than one player in it. You can't have a category with only one company, at least in the eyes in most analyst firms. Nicolas: Yeah. How to unseat the incumbent solution provider? Kathleen: I think you're right. Last question, and then we'll kind of move into the wrap up. The thing that you're talking about doing, especially some of these new products around inbox start to get into the territory of taking on very well entrenched existing tools. If I'm an enterprise level sales person, I have an inbox already, well I mean if I am anybody these days I have an inbox. Nicolas: Yeah. Kathleen: Often, in these larger organizations, it's generally Outlook, it's Gmail, and these platform, Google, Microsoft, have their tentacles into just about every aspect of the business. So, how are you accounting for the fact that there is going to be an incumbent product in everyone's hand already, and does what you're building play with these other things, or how does that work, because that would seem very daunting? Nicolas: That is a great question and it's for sure that the feedback we're getting from a lot of people, especially in the investing communities, are people who've never switched from our product, they get so attached to our product. Kathleen: Well I don't know about that, Outlook is like SalesForce, people love to hate it. Nicolas: You must be a Mac person because it doesn't work very... But the world has changed. Kathleen: Yeah. Nicolas: People adopt new tools much faster than they ever did. You see this on the iPhone, the level reduction, but look at Slack. There was email, there were also a bunch of messaging solutions like Skype and PICCHAT, but they came up with a better one, and people switched must faster than they used to. It's up to us to come with a solution where the benefit is so obvious, it's a better way to do it, that people will switch intimidatingly. That is much less of a risk than the investing communities sees, because people do switch. If in the inbox, this company called Superhuman that launched, say took after the inbox, and they've been successful. Now there are so many new apps that users are accustomed trying new apps, changing new apps, and if it's better, they will do it. The job is to do something that is obviously better, and that's the challenge. If we do, then companies will switch, and usually will switch. Kathleen: You just said something interesting, and this is my follow up question. Users might switch. This goes back to how we started the whole conversation about every person being their own CIO, because, especially in larger enterprise, I could see a sales rep saying, "Oh, I want to use this." But at the end of the day if you want to get enterprise adoption, particularly for something like inbox, isn't the CIO, or the head of IT the key decision maker in that process. Which is a different audience than maybe you've dealt with in the past so- Nicolas: Yeah, yeah, but there are two privileged citizens in the world, software developers and sales people. The software developer or sales person say, "I want that tool, nobody gets on their way," because you don't want to mess up your software development and you don't want to mess up your sales. The reason for that is because obviously the software developers build the product, and you want to make them happy, but sales people, they bring the revenues. If they say the tool is going to help them, then it's very measurable. That's the thing that's beautiful with our inbound solutions, that Chili Piper for the work sites. When conversion rates double, it's directly twice as much pipeline from inbound, the return investment is very easy to calculate. It's not the feel good solution where you think, "Oh. That is helpful." No, you have twice as much pipeline, and that's easy. So, same thing. When we launch our inbox, you're going to see shorter sales cycles and higher conversion rates. I mean obviously it will be more subtle, I don't expect that it will double conversion rates. It will be a few points, but it's a few points on your total revenue. So if you can increase 5% your revenue, then the company making $200,000,000, that's 10 million, we'll charge less than 10 million. Kathleen: Yeah. Nicolas: We'll all make money. Kathleen: Well I think you're probably right about software developers and sales people. I am just waiting for the day when the marketer becomes the privileged citizen as well. I have a feeling I shouldn't hold my breath. Nicolas: You're right, marketers on a budget also, but for some reason, they struggle a bit more. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Yeah, yes. This is the path we choose though. Well, all right, so... Shifting gears, there are two question that I ask all of my guests and I would love to have what you have to say about these things. One is the core of what we talk about in this podcast, is inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you really think is killing it right now with inbound marketing? Nicolas: Well, I am going to be boring and name the king, and the king is HubSpot. They've nailed inbound marketing. To a large extent, they've been so good that they've been able to hide the weaknesses of their product. It took the longest time to... But now they have a reasonably good marketing product, a reasonably poor sales product. They've written the book on it, and I think all the other companies that are doing well... A lot of companies have spun off of HubSpot and are doing well. In the case of Drift, they take the playbook, they replicate it, and it works for them. That's definitely the company I would mention. Kathleen: Okay. Well I've definitely heard those names, HubSpot and Drift, a lot on this podcast. The second question is, the biggest complaint I hear from marketers, or the biggest pain point I should say is that digital marketing is changing so quickly, mostly driven by technology. They feel like it's trying to drink from a fire hose to keep up with everything and to stay on top of latest developments. How do you personally stay on top of things? Nicolas: On top of all marketing and technology, all the tools are there? Kathleen: Right. Marketing, but also you're kind of in that sales and marketing technology space. Are there particular blogs, or podcasts, or people you follow? How do you stay up to date? Nicolas: Of course, since we're in the space, we want to know what's going on at anytime, so it's almost our job to stay open. I do that with all the tech, I was looking at whatever tools can help us. We have this concept of decision memo, so whenever we look at the particular piece... For example, I want to train my salespeople better right now. The first reflex we have in the company, at Chili Piper, is to say, "Is there a piece of software that could help us do that," and of course we’re biased, because we are software developers, but that's how we do it. That's the answer to your question, we go outbound looking for solutions. There'll be different places where we can find good advice. Podcasts are a great one, yours in particular. We listen to what other people do, say, and you learn a lot more from podcasts because people leave more practical description of what happens. Look at the vendor talk, often abstract. Then there are also online communities where people discuss the best tools, and we pay attention. Then we do, we take, random demos. Right now we are in the process of taking tons of demos from Learning Management Systems, for this particular solution. We have tech savvy people in the operation, that also makes a big difference. I see companies that don't invest in operations, or don't put the right people in operations, and they're held back by that choice. It's a super important opinion that all companies over sites get tech savvy strong people in their operations. These people are able to bring in new technology. Kathleen: Yeah. I think that makes a particularly big difference in the early days, when everyone has to be willing to roll their sleeves up, and not just strategize but do a lot of the work as well, and understanding how to use technology is very powerful for that. How to connect with Nicolas Kathleen: Well, we are coming to the top of the hour, so I wanted to make sure I ask you, if somebody wants to learn more about Chili Piper or reach out and connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that. Nicolas: That is to come to our website, because we use our own tools. Chili Piper is a play on word, chili pepper, Piper as in pipeline, so it's C H I L I, Piper, Chili Piper, and if you request a meeting with us you'll see our technology in action. It will pop up for you so you will be able to book it. Kathleen: Great, I'll put that link in the show notes. Also, I didn't tell you I was going to do this, I also want to give just a small plug for Gipsy Time, which is another company that you are involved in founding. I just submitted my request to get in on the early access, it looks really cool, because one of my biggest problems is I have a million tabs open on my computer at any given time, plus Slack, plus inboxes, and it's super distracting, and it looks to me like you're solving that. Is that right? Nicolas: Thank you, I am really delighted to hear that. Yes, yes, it's a typical case of solving your own problem. I have ADHD, I have a focus problem, and these to-do lists, they keep accumulating tasks, and I needed to manage a way to do that. On the side, I did this other company, Gipsy Time, to help people focus. It's not about capturing the task in the long to-do list, it's about getting it done. We have the distraction blocking, where you can block, close all your tabs, and reopen them when you're finished. Make sure how much time you spend on something, make sure you spend the right amount of time. Did I tell you... When you requested that... Invited, it's very promising and it's helped me a lot in getting more done. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Well, I need it for sure, so I can't wait to get my invitation. Well, thank you so much for joining me this week, this has been so much fun, if you are listening, and you like what you heard, please head over to Apple Podcasts, and consider leaving in the podcast a five star review, that's how we get in front of new listeners. And, of course, if you know somebody else who is doing kick-ass inbound work tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next interview. Thank you so much Nicolas, this was a ton of fun. Nicolas: Thank you, great fun, yes.

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

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.

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's the best - and quickest - way for a B2B business to gain marketing traction and turn contacts into customers? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, boomtime CEO Bill Bice talks about his approach to word of mouth marketing. A serial entrepreneur, board advisor and one-time venture capitalist, Bill has seen what works across a wide range of companies, and now his company boomtime is helping B2B businesses grow by leveraging content and LinkedIn to generate buzz. Check out this episode to get the details of Bill's process and learn how you can use it to improve your own inbound marketing results. Highlights from my conversation with Bill include: Bill says that the three main objectives of word of mouth marketing are to build our audience, follow up on all of the prospects that you're generating, and stay top of mind with that audience. The easiest way to generate new business is through referrals, and the key to getting referrals is to give your audience something to talk about. Bill says most companies make the mistake of talking all about themselves on social media, when in reality they should be focused on educating their audiences. The two most common mistakes that companies make when it comes to marketing are to not make it a top priority and not be consistent with it. Three keys to successful marketing are building a response mobile website, having a robust email marketing program, and making a lot of connections on LinkedIn. In a crowded content landscape, one of the best ways to stand out and attract qualified leads is to build an audience and then invest in educating them through your content. Boomtime helps companies use this same process by outsourcing content creation for them to 300+ subject matter experts. They also help manage their clients' LinkedIn strategies. Bill says that with a well optimized profile, he'll get between a 35 and 50% acceptance rate on connection requests, sending 40 to 50 connection requests a day, and 6 to 8% of those people will start a conversation either from the connection request or he will often send a followup message with whatever the best performing piece of content is. Resources from this episode: Visit the boomtime website Connect with (or follow) Bill on LinkedIn Check out Bill's B2B Marketing podcast Listen to the podcast to learn how word of mouth marketing can help you increase the ROI of your marketing strategy. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week my guest is Bill Bice, who is the CEO of Boomtime. Welcome to the podcast, Bill. Bill Bice (Guest): Kathleen it's great to be with you. Thanks. Bill and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah, thanks for joining me. I love your story because you scratched your own itch and solved a problem that you were having and I always find that those are some of the most interesting conversations. So I'm really excited to dig into it. Can we start by having you tell my audience a little bit about your story, who you are, what you're doing now with Boomtime, and what led you down that path? Meet Bill Bice Bill: So I feel like I was born an entrepreneur. I started my first company when I was 18, a software company, and of course I had no idea what I was doing, but over enough time, got a great team, and built a great company, and out of that we had enough success in selling that company that I got to be part of an early stage VC fund. And so I have founded and invested and been on the board of a whole host of companies. I actually sat down and counted them up so I could say it's 27 companies, and there is a not shocking correlation in those companies, which are the ones where we've had the most success are where we really focused on going to market and nailed that. And so you do all this really hard work to create an amazing product or service, and yet how good you are at marketing is going to determine what kind of reward you get for doing that. And I just got really frustrated in trying to get great marketing for my own companies, and so I decided to tackle that problem. Kathleen: I love it. And I think probably most of the people who listen to this podcast would agree that great marketing is important for growing your company. So that's awesome. So can you talk a little bit about specifically what Boomtime does? Bill: Yeah, so we've really focused in on B2B, we have a history in doing some work in B2C, but most of my experience has been in B2B. And the thing that I really like about B2B is that we've been able to take sort of the core framework or playbook and apply it to really any sort of highly complex, valuable transaction. So it doesn't really work for things that are volume-based. But if you're selling something high value, then the approach, I mean, I'm really a programmer at heart, so to me it was all about the data. And one of the things that I have found really challenging about marketing is unlike every other discipline in our businesses, here we have one that just refuses to accept scale and efficiency. It's just a core problem with marketing. And we do it everywhere else in our business, and it really has to happen in marketing also. And so I just tackled that from the standpoint of following the data in a very iterative process and learning what works. We don't really have to, although experimentation is key, we don't have to you, you've got bigger competitors who have spent millions of dollars figuring out how to do exactly what you need to do. You've just got to figure out what's the smaller version of that for my business that's going to work for me. And so that's what we've been doing in the B2B world. It's very much a B2B content marketing inbound approach that is what's really compatible with most of the sort of small, that two to $20 million a year business that really does a great job of taking care of their customers, but would like to grow. Or maybe has been growing in that sort of plateaued and didn't really quite understand what was making that work before, and what was making it work was word of mouth. And so we now live in this great era where we can actually really amplify the effect of word of mouth because we're all connected digitally. And so that's the thing that we have focused on. Word of mouth marketing Kathleen: So let's take it to another level of detail. I love that you said that the challenge that you're trying to solve is making companies go-to-market strategies repeatable, scalable, more efficient and really focusing that around the power of word of mouth. What does that look like in practice? If somebody is using boomtime for example, and this isn't necessarily a commercial for the product, but obviously you were trying to solve a problem that you saw through the product. So I'm curious to know, in detail, what does that really look like? Bill: Well, so the three things we want to accomplish is we want to build our audience, we want to follow up on all of, we would be much better at capturing and following up on all of the prospects that we're generating. And then we want to stay top of mind with that audience. And if you do those things really well and you do it with this focus on, let's take the thing that's already working, word of mouth, and let's just leverage digital tools to accomplish the same thing. So we think of it as social currency, like we're going to create a lot more referrals. So let's assume that referrals are really valuable to your business. And the vast majority of business owners I sit down with and I say, well, one of my favorite questions is, where'd your last couple of new clients come from? And the answer, 99% of the time is, "Oh, it was a referral from so-and-so." Because that's what really works. And if you focus on giving your audience social currency, giving them a reason to talk about you, there's a really wonderful thing happens, which is you get more referrals. And the way you do that is just flip your content, flip your marketing on its head. So most marketing for most companies, 100% of what they do should be 10%, because it's all about them. It's the number one mistake in marketing is talking about yourself. Nobody cares. I mean, honestly, your clients just don't care about the new person you hired, the new client that you won. That should be 10% of your marketing. If you put 90% of your effort into sharing your expertise, then suddenly your marketing becomes this really valuable way to communicate with your audience and you give them reasons to talk about you. Word of mouth marketing in practice Kathleen: So can you give me an example of a campaign, for example, that either you've done or that one of your customers has done using the system that you have in place, just so that we can maybe have a mental model through which to understand how it all works? Bill: Yeah, I'm going to use ourselves as the example, because we had the classic problem that a lot of, we don't really consider ourselves a traditional agency, but you see agencies do this all the time, which is you're really good at marketing and yet you don't apply it to yourself. Kathleen: Our first child. Bill: Yes. The thing that's really helped us grow is when we, we actually changed our internal processes to be able to treat ourselves as a client and give one of our marketing strategists credit for us as if we were paying ourselves as a client. Because only by doing that did we actually put the priority in our own marketing. We're literally having the same problem that every business has, which is marketing's always the fourth or fifth thing that you think about, and everybody gets stuck in this same cycle of you focus on marketing when things are kind of slow and then they pick back up. And yet the second biggest mistake in marketing is inconsistency. And it's just clear in the data that being consistent in your marketing is the number one thing you can do to make it pay off. Whatever you're going to do, do it consistently. Pick a longterm strategy you can really commit to and be serious about it. And so when we started doing the same thing for ourselves, which is literally just laying out everything we've learned and following the data, I mean, it's amazing what happens when you bring several hundred like clients together, put them on one platform, be able to aggregate that data and see what's happening. It's so difficult, even if you can have the best marketing director in the world, you only have the data in your one company to work with. Being able to multiply that across several hundred companies, it's incredible what you learn. So we've just taken that and started sharing what we've learned. I'm very passionate about small businesses. It's where innovation comes from, it's what drives our economy. I would love for every small business owner to be doing exactly these things. And our version of this is to share our expertise and what we've learned and layout exactly what you want to do in your marketing. It's the best way to promote what we do, just to share. I mean you can literally take this and go do it yourself. You will be better off if you do that. And that's my number one goal with every one of our clients is we want their prospects to be better off because sat down and got exposed to that company. Whether they ever choose to use their product or service or not, because that's what's going to create word of mouth. Kathleen: So you guys used it for yourselves and what did that look like? Talk me through your campaign that you did. Bill: So it's very content oriented. So in B2B, one of the things that I love about it, it's actually pretty simple. Because if you do three things well your marketing is going to work. If you build a responsive mobile website that really pays attention to the customer journey, if you do really good email marketing and you build an audience on LinkedIn, and if in particular, if you stitch those together and understand the customer journey across those three channels, you will really understand what's working, what's creating engagement and you will be able to get new prospects and pull them down the funnel. And so when we started doing that for ourselves and putting out regular content that was just sharing what we know how to do, it created a different perspective in our audience about who we are and what we do. And it started bringing to us prospects that are much better educated, that were ready for much deeper conversations when we got started. It's one of the core problems in marketing today, which is our prospects have access to so much information, and there's so much that they can learn. You've really got to decide do you want to be an order taker or do you want to be part of that educational process? And the only way you can really create new sales opportunities is to start at the very top of the funnel and be part of that educational process. So that was the change that happened for us when we really started talking about here's what works, here's what we've learned, and just laying that out and doing that consistency thing. When we started doing that really, just week in and week out, every single week. It takes a while. That's the problem with it. I don't believe there are any miracles or short term fixes in marketing, but if you commit to it and then the results start to come in over time and it really changes the trajectory of your company. How content fuels word of mouth Kathleen: Now, how does the content that you're creating feed into word of mouth? Bill: Well, that content is that social currency. It's giving people really concrete things that they can do. So let's take LinkedIn, for example. Like no matter how much effort you're putting into LinkedIn, you should be putting more. If you just look at the engagement data and the growth over the last two years, it's incredible what's happening on LinkedIn, and they really made the switch to getting people to really put time in depth into LinkedIn. And I look at LinkedIn as the ideal networking event, right? I get to meet exactly who I want. I don't have to eat high calorie food at the same time, and you need to approach it like a networking event, which is you're really there to build your network and be helpful, to that note. And if you take that approach and you say, "Okay, I've got an audience now that I'm going to build on LinkedIn, I'm going to run an aggressive connection campaign to get connected to every great prospect for me that's in the market." And then you say, "Okay, now I'm going to share the thing that I know, that I'm an expert at because I've got perspective across..." You might be the CEO or CIO, whoever your decision maker is in your prospective company, you're running your one company. But I work with hundreds or thousands of companies like you, which means I can bring perspective to you that's really valuable to you. And if you're willing to share that, to give away whatever you consider the most valuable thing that you have, give that away as your marketing. That will dramatically change how prospects see you and it will create sales opportunities that didn't exist before. And so executing it on that on LinkedIn is the primary way that we grow. This is very meta, because that's how we grow and the way we do it is to describe exactly how you should do it. Kathleen: Got it. So it's an education play through LinkedIn, then? Bill: If you're in B2B, it's really the best way to grow your company. You'd have to be in a really strange niche for the prospects you want to not be sitting out there on LinkedIn today. Now there are quite a few other software platforms that help B2B and other types of companies with content marketing, with inbound marketing, companies like HubSpot, you've got SharpSpring, there's a ton of them out there. How does the solution that you've built fit within that ecosystem? Well, sort of the short answer is HubSpot with help. So we're not selling a piece of software. What we're doing is selling the end result, the service. So the big surprise with HubSpot, and HubSpot's a great platform, there are a ton of really good marketing automation systems out there, and if you're going to do this internally, you absolutely should implement one of them. The problem, the surprise, after you start paying for that subscription is then the two people you have to hire to get any value out of HubSpot. And a lot of companies, what they really want is just the end result of that as opposed to having to go through all of that process. And one of the things I've seen over and over again, so if you're going to do that internally, one of my strongest recommendations is everybody tries to create the content internally and unless you really put tremendous focus and resources behind that, it almost never works. You really need to go. So the way we've done it is we've built a network of 300 subject matter experts. We don't do any writing internally. There's always somebody out there who already knows your audience really well. Go find that person who you don't have to teach them your market, they've been writing for it, they have been working with the industry pubs or the events in that area, and you can, half hour brainstorming session, you can come up with six months of editorial. What you need is a great stream of regular content that doesn't require you sit in front of a blank screen and have to come up with it yourself. So you can implement all of this yourself, you just, you need to put in the marketing automation system. You need to find the resources that know how to do that. And then you've got to follow the data to really understand what's creating engagement and keep testing every piece of it so you get better with every turn of the cycle. Kathleen: So if somebody is using Boomtime, do they also need to have these other platforms or is Boomtime really a replacement for these things? Bill: So if we're doing that as a service for somebody that you don't really need a marketing automation system. It's great if you have a CRM. One of our biggest challenges is that nobody really uses their CRM the way that they should. And so our approach is to integrate with the CRM and put the end results in the CRM system. One of the challenges with that building your audience part is that your sales team always has many more opportunities that they're working on than what ends up in the CRM. CRMs are really designed for sales managers. And if you put somebody in the CRM, you're going to get questioned about it. So what most sales people do is they only put people who are fairly deep into the funnel into the CRM, which means we're not building our audience and we're not following up with all of the prospects that we have. So one of the tricks that we do is go mine the email boxes of everybody who's customer facing in your company and feed that into your CRM so we're getting that central database. Because particularly if you're in B2B, your sales people are talking to those early prospects via email. So there is a record of it and we can go capture it and we can make their job easier by filling that information in for them. And it's amazing what happens if you just follow up on all those prospects that are already in your firm. It's great low hanging fruit, you just got to go get it. Kathleen: So do you typically work with smaller companies? Because it sounds like really this is a solution for companies that don't have a large marketing team, for example, that really need the external help and that don't have a super sophisticated tech stack already in place. It sounds like it's a good way for a company that recognizes that they need to be able to make their marketing more scalable to really get started with that. Is that accurate? Bill: Yes. So you sort of have two groups. It's the kind of $2 to $5 million year company where we're really doing it for them. And then once you get to the point where you have a marketing director, often we're just working under their direction doing this one piece that I recommend you get automated and process around it no matter how big you are, which is just this regular flow of really great content. The ideas come from in the company, come from the executive team, but we get the content creation outsourced because it's so expensive to do it internally. And if you do this well, that of course is the hard part. Doing it well is difficult. But if you do, then having this regular flow of great content come in, no matter how big your company is, just feed your whole marketing operation in a really wonderful way. So unless you're to the point where you can have a full time staff of writers doing that for you, and even then I would argue it's going to be really cost effective to supplement that with outside resources. So we'll often work with a larger company where that's the piece that we do, because we've gotten really good at it, and there's just, there's a ton of value for you getting that piece essentially automated. From the marketing director standpoint, you just have this great flow of content that shows up and gets distributed and you get data behind it. So I recommend making that happen no matter how big you are. Kathleen: So it's very interesting, because there's a lot of debate around this topic of should you insource or outsource content creation and you are definitely falling on the outsource side. It's interesting, I am building a team right now at my company and I've chosen to totally insource it. So I've hired a writer. For me- Bill: You know what you're doing. Kathleen: Well, let's just say for me it's also that we're in a very technically complex industry and I feel like I need somebody who can, it's a big learning curve and I want somebody who's full time in it, really learning it. Have you found success in addressing that through outsource content? Bill: Yeah, but you have to avoid the copywriter problem, which is the somebody who was working, really good writer, but was working on a car dealership last week and he's going to figure out your very niche enterprise SaaS solution this week. And so the way to do that, we do a lot of work in professional services, law firms. So if you're going to work in a law firm where the partner, the practice head for that area of law is very particular about that content. The only way you can do that is to go find a JD who's practiced in that area before. But the law firms never going to create it internally because they could be billing $600 an hour instead of writing the blog article you want them to create, but you can go find somebody who's been in that practice area, didn't enjoy the practice of law, understands the area really well. Get the ideas from the practice head in that 30 minute brainstorming session, give them five bullet points about the things that they need to cover. They can go do the research, and then all we have to do is get the voice right, which frankly is really difficult. We've ended up dividing that into two levels. The expertise to get the content and then an editor who's really good at capturing the voice. Kathleen: Yeah. I will say that when I've seen outsource content creation work, the only way I've seen it work is when you have a writer who's interviewing your subject matter expert. Anytime I see companies say, Oh, here's a topic, go run with it, I just see crappy, crappy results. because honestly whenever you're outsourcing and you're just giving somebody a topic, I feel like with that person is doing is they're Googling that topic. And so by definition you're not going to have anything new to add in your content, because it's coming from aggregations of other sources. Whereas if you interview a subject matter expert, you can get something original. But that does take a very strong writer and a very strong editor to really be able to do that well and in a way that is unique. Bill: Absolutely. And if you just wanted a content farm, I mean 90% of the efforts should be on creating great content. And so by definition, you're not going to get there if you're cutting the corners there. If we don't have great content, all the tactics that we talk about aren't going to matter one bit. We have to start with really capturing the unique expertise that you have and finding interesting ways to communicate that. Kathleen: So if somebody is listening and they're thinking, I want to improve my marketing results, I'm a B2B company, what are some really concrete things you think that they could do right now to get started? Getting started with word of mouth marketing Bill: Well, what everybody always wants is more leads, and the easiest solution is to go spend money on ads to generate those leads. And yet one of the reasons it's so difficult for that smaller company to ever get an ROI on that is that without the marketing foundation in place, that's never going to pay off. So don't take the easy route. You got to focus on those core pieces first and build that funnel and actually be capturing and following up on all your prospects. And then the easiest way to expand your audience is to focus on LinkedIn. If you take the same approach and you're very helpful and you're sharing expertise, then you can run a LinkedIn connection campaign where you're adding 1,120 new connections a month, every single month, growing this audience of exactly the right prospects that you're now sharing really valuable insight with and that will do a wonderful thing for you. It will create sales opportunities you didn't have before. It'll be the right sales opportunities with people who are much further down the process and are really ready to have a serious conversation with you. So what we see in the data is with a well optimized profile, we'll get between a 35 and 45%, sometimes in the low 50% acceptance rate on on the connection requests, sending 40 to 50 connection requests a day, and six to 8% of those people will start a conversation either from the connection request or we will often send a followup message with whatever our best performing inside driven piece of content is. None of this can be salesy at all, we all get those kinds of connection requests. Kathleen: I was going to say, are you doing an InMail? What are you doing there? Bill: It's not InMail. It's really building the network of people you should be connected to, because you have expertise that's directly relevant to them. And it's sharing that, it's not selling them. I mean, I see that all the time of we get something back from a client who just wants to dive right into the sales pitch. And that would be the same thing as walking into a cocktail party, meeting somebody for the first time, and then starting to give them a sales pitch. Until they ask for it, that doesn't work. You've got to build the relationship first. But if you take that approach, this is the easiest, most concrete thing you can do in B2B to get more sales opportunities. But ironically, the way you do that is stop selling. What kinds of results can you expect? Kathleen: So what kinds of results have your clients gotten from doing this? Bill: So that those are kind of aggregate numbers across the hundreds of of connection campaigns that we're running in just sort of any kind of high value B2B, a lot of professional services, a lot of high end products. And so the thing that we really look at is how many new opportunities are we creating and so, oh, a really good campaign, so my connection campaign, I'm running at about a 54% acceptance rate on connections, which is great. One of the things you often have to do is optimize your profile specifically for that audience that you're going to go after. If you're going after multiple niches, do one at a time, because you'll get a much higher connection. And then we're getting our primary source of new clients is off of the connection campaigns that we run for myself and our chief revenue officer. So this works much better for the executive team in your company, particularly for smaller companies. It's really not about your company profile at all. That's just not where we're going to get the activity. And even in a larger company, the more you can get the executive team and people higher up in the company to participate, the better the results that you're going to get. People want to connect with other people on LinkedIn and it just, it works so much better. And so that six to eight percent of new conversations, when you think about that coming from a thousand new connections a month, this is really the new form and you can run this yourself. You can take an hour a day and do a golden hour of prospecting around LinkedIn connections and you will get much more value out of that than making cold calls for that same time period. But if you're a salesperson who's responsible for doing that for your company, you will get better results if you can get the VP of sales or CEO to do that and let you run it for them. Kathleen: So you have about a 54% connection acceptance rate. And you mentioned that those turned into clients. What is your conversion rate from the people who accept your connection to your leads and then to your customers and how are you measuring that? How are you, how are you tracking? Bill: So there's a plus and minus to LinkedIn, which is the data's really easy to follow, but for personal profiles, the only way you can get it is logging in and looking at it, and it disappears after three months, which is kind of annoying, but it's really easy to see what's working to create engagement. And the LinkedIn algorithm is really simple. Likes and comments are essentially equal value and then you can just chart it and see how many likes and comments you get versus the percentage of your network that gets exposed to that feed. It's just a direct relationship. So I call it going everyday viral. Like our goal isn't to come up with the one piece of content that just explodes. It's to have regular content that does well over and over again in this really specific audience is exactly the people that you want to talk to. And that gives you two bites at the apple. When you make the initial connection request and sometimes you just happen to be reaching out to somebody right when they need your expertise and so you get lucky. But now, because they belong to your network, if you follow that up with a regular flow of insightful content, then you get to talk to them forever so you get a second forever bite at the apple, and both of those are really effective. You get sales opportunities that come right out of the gate and then it just comes with that regular followup. As long as you're good at getting exposure to this audience that you've created. And so many people do work on LinkedIn where they only focus on the first part, building the network, and they don't really focus on the regular updates to that network that really leveraged having created it. And if you do both, you'll get a much better pay off from that effort. Kathleen: How quickly should somebody expect to see results from something like this? Bill: You're going to get early positive indications. So you'll get some wins that show you you're in the right direction. We typically see it within the first 30 to 60 days. But the real payoff comes when you've been doing this for six months, 12 months, 18 months. We really put a focus internally ourselves on LinkedIn starting two years ago and we're seeing a much more significant pay off today than we did in the first six months. Because you really get a reputation for providing valuable information. then one of the great things you can do, somewhere about 5,000 connections, you should switch your LinkedIn button from being connect to follow, because you'll get enough organic traffic now that people will just start following you because of the content that you're sharing. And they won't even show up as asking for connection requests. They're just following you, you're not following them. And that's really when you sort of hit the point of getting a real payback on what you're doing. Kathleen: And you do that in your LinkedIn settings? Bill: I do. Yeah. And you need a big enough following where it makes sense that people would come and start just following you because because of what you're doing and you need to be doing those content updates very regularly. But I get about, right now, about 40% of the additions to my network come from people just following me as opposed to the connection requests that we're sending out. Kathleen: Got it. Very cool. Well that's an interesting tip I haven't heard somebody mention before, so there's a new one for you. Switch your button from connect to follow. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Before we get too close to out of time, quick questions for you that I always ask all my guests. The first one is, we've talked a lot about inbound marketing here and content marketing. I'm curious, who do you think, company or individual, is there somebody that you think is doing particularly well right now? Bill: What I want to do is, is turn that into a suggestion for, because there's somebody in your market that is doing that really well. And what I always find very valuable, anytime I'm starting to work with in a new area, is I want to go find whoever is the, I'm not looking for the biggest player, I'm looking for sort of the mid size company that is big enough to have weight behind what they're doing, they're really good at it and they're showing innovation. So I want to flip that around just a little bit and say there's somebody doing, I mean, I've always been able to find one in every single market we've gone into. So even in legal, this enormously conservative market, there's always, we start working with an intellectual property law firm. We found a firm that is doing an excellent job of content marketing in that area and I find it so much faster to learn from somebody who's already doing a really good job of that then to figure it all out ourselves. And somebody is doing that in your market, so spend the time to go do that. And every single market we work in, we have found somebody who's really great at it, who's already doing it, that we've learned a ton from. Kathleen: Anyone in particular who stands out, anyone who somebody wants to go online and see someone who's really best in class that they should look at? Bill: So the IP example, Fish and Richardson does a really good example of, that's one of these really niche-y examples. That's a deep technical area that's tough to do well. And so seeing somebody do it well, it's really the best answer to the question you asked before, which is how do you pull that off? Kathleen: Okay, great. And digital marketing obviously changes so quickly. How do you personally stay up to date on everything that's going on in that world? Bill: So I've become a huge fan of podcasts, now. I'm finally following in your footsteps and doing a podcast. So I've learned from your podcasts, there's about 20 different marketing related podcasts that I listened to. I really like, particularly in the sort of email marketing and LinkedIn side, I like Growth Hackers, because there's always somebody who's already run a test that's doing the thing that you're thinking about doing. So I'm just a big, so unlike when I was 18 and I thought I knew it all and it took me a really long time to figure anything out, I think it makes so much more sense to take advantage of this unique attribute we have of being able to find somebody who already is doing what we're doing, put ourselves in their place and learn from them. Like our ability to get where we want to go so much faster, because of that is amazing. So let's learn from everybody who's already done it before and Growth Hackers is just full of people who are doing exactly that. And I love, a lot of it's very data-driven, which obviously I'm big on, and just great way to learn. How to connect with Bill Kathleen: Bill, if somebody wants to reach out and learn from you or has a question and wants to get in touch, what's the best way for them to do that? Bill: So I'm a CEO of boomtime.com. I love talking about marketing. Happy to have you reach out if you want to. If you want to see the thing that I'm talking about, I'm easy to find on LinkedIn. Go look up my profile. You'll see exactly what we are talking about and of course we're at boomtime.com. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Great. All right, well if you are listening and you learn something new or liked what you heard, please stop what you're doing, take a minute, and go to Apple podcasts and leave a five star review for the podcast. It makes a huge difference. That's how people find us and I would greatly appreciate it. 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. Thank you so much, Bill. Bill: It's been a lot of fun. Thanks. Kathleen: Thanks.

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.  

How did Jake Neill help B2B SaaS company SocialChimp cut its cost of customer acquisition (CAC) by 95% in 30 days? Jake Neill This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Lead Hounds Marketing CEO and Co-Founder Jake Neill breaks down the 90 day accelerated growth strategy that he and his business partner use to help their client meet aggressive growth goals.  Jake's Digital Experience Roadmap framework can be applied in any business, and he shares the specific story of SocialChimp, a client that he worked with to cut CAC and generate more than 5,000 qualified leads. Highlights from my conversation with Jake include: Lead Hounds Marketing focuses just on strategy and leaves marketing implementation to its clients and partners. The company has a specific customer journey framework that it uses to build 9 day, accelerated growth plans for clients. One client, SocialChimp, needed a way to more predictably generated new qualified leads and customer acquisition. Using their framework, Jake and his partner cut Social Chimp's cost to acquire a customer by 95% in 30 days, and generated a 7.41 return on ad spend. They also generated 5,677 leads at an average cost per lead of $5.15. Jake says there are three things that are key to making any offer successful - the audience, the message and the offer. A successful campaign must be focused on one particular type of customer avatar, and that customer's key pain point. The Digital Experience Roadmap has seven relationship levels: strangers, visitors, leads, qualifieds, opportunities, customers and fans.  Jake generally begins by building out a good lead magnet and finds that with that in place, the rest of the roadmap tends to build itself out. Jake finds that the best lead magnets are hyper specific and able to be consumed quickly - things like checklists, tools, etc. For SocialChimp, Jake created a "real estate swipe file" aimed at realtors that is converting at 84%. Once you acquire a new lead, then you have to qualify them. Jake finds that deep dive content such as webinars and ebooks work very well at this stage. One thing that many marketers miss is the step that involves turning customers into fans. Jake says there are incredible opportunities for upselling at this stage and growing revenue without having to acquire any new customers. Jake uses paid ads to promote his initial offers and get them in front of the right prospects. When it comes to nurturing leads, Jake says it is critical to keep your marketing human and make sure you are using language you would use conversationally and not artificially pushing a sale onto someone who isn't ready for it. Resources from this episode: Visit the Lead Hounds Marketing website Check out the SocialChimp case study Connect with Jake on LinkedIn Connect with Jake by email at jake@leadhoundsmarketing.com Listen to the podcast to get learn exactly how Jake uses the Digital Experience Roadmap to build 90 day accelerated growth strategies for clients like SocialChimp. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and this week my guest is Jake Neill, who is the CEO and co-founder of Lead Hounds. Welcome, Jake. Jake Neill (Guest): Hey, Kathleen. Thanks for having me. Jake and Kathleen hamming it up while recording this episode together . Kathleen: I’m excited to chat with you. Can you tell my audience a little bit about yourself and about Lead Hounds? About Jake Neill and Lead Hounds Marketing Jake: Yeah, of course. So, Lead Hounds Marketing is, we're a company of just two people, and our sole focus is on giving people a formula and framework for predictable growth. So, our objective is to put people on a path to doubling their sales. So, we live, eat, and breathe strategy specifically. So, we're not as much... Early on in our company's journey, we were doing Facebook ads, doing all kinds of things, but what we realized was there's a real need in the industry right now for people who are architects. So, what we did was we partnered up with another company in San Diego named Digitopia, and they are a full-house digital marketing company, and they do kind of the SEO, PPC, all that kind of stuff. So, we partnered with them and used their framework to engineer what we call Digital Experiences to turn strangers into fans, and then they do the implementation side, or the client does it in hands, or in-house. Sorry. Kathleen: Nice. I like that you guys have zeroed in on strategy as your strength. I think there's a lot of agencies that try to be all things to all people, and there is something to be said for not doing that and becoming very specialized. I say that as somebody who has been in agencies for 13 years. I used to own one, and now I'm in one as well. Jake: Yeah. 90 day accelerated growth plans Kathleen: Yeah. Well, one of the reasons I was excited to talk with you is that you guys do specialize in working with B2B SaaS, and you have these 90-day accelerated growth plans where you're able to get really great results for your clients. It's not like a blueprint. It's not like a copy-and-paste solution, but you do have kind of a structured approach to how you do this, and I loved that when you and I spoke you were able to share one particular case study that got amazing results, and I thought it would be fun to just use that as the example through which to break down what this framework is that you use, and how it functions. So, let's maybe start at the beginning, and if you could talk a little bit about how you guys think about the customer journey, you have a particular name for it. Jake: Yeah, totally. So, yeah, like you said, I didn't mention that earlier, but we do focus on B2B SaaS. We've done a lot across different industries, and the framework applies across tons of industries. The framework's been implemented for companies as big as Toshiba, and then all the way to startups. So, I'll show you... That's the case study that you're referring to, that we had already spoken about, was a case study for a B2B SaaS startup. I think it's a really powerful case study because it shows that you don't need also these big budgets and an established business to implement these principles. No matter what your size is, you can implement those things today. Kathleen: Yeah, and you have a couple of resources that I'm going to link to in the show notes. So, I think one of them is an example of your customer journey framework. So, if you're listening, and you want to have some visuals to refer to as you listen, if you happen to be in a place where you can do that, head to the show notes, and you can pull that up and actually see it as we talk. Click here to view the SocialChimp case study Jake: Yeah. I would highly recommend pulling up that document, and you can even pause the podcast as we're focusing on each relationship level, and you can even kind of put in your own. How would that apply to your own business? That would be really helpful. That way, it's not kind of like drinking out of a fire hydrant. Customer journey framework Kathleen: I love it. All right. So, let's start at the beginning. Talk us through how you think about customer journey. Jake: Cool. Yeah. Well, the first thing that I kind of want to start with is just the output, because I want people to understand that when you implement this methodology, that it actually works. So, we implemented it for a company called SocialChimp, and with SocialChimp, they were a startup. They were looking for funding, and they didn't really have a way to predictably acquire customers, which is what I see happening across the board. That's the biggest issue, is how do we create predictability. Tons of people are pushing a lot of different tactics, which are vital. Right? The tactics are important, SEO, Facebook ads, webinar funnel, whatever it is that you're trying to implement, but the problem is when you don't have a systematic approach to turning strangers into customers, then you're kind of like a bull in a China shop. Right? You're knocking over everything. You don't really know what's working, what's not working. Sometimes things work, but you don't really even know how it worked, why it worked. So, if you can't measure that thing, then you can't optimize it or do more of it. So, this framework really helps you get the foundation, and when we implemented it for this company, we cut their cost to acquire a customer by 95% in 30 days, and we generated a 7.41 return on ad spend, and we also generated 5,677 leads at an average cost per lead of $5.15. Kathleen: Was this all in 30 days? Jake: No. So, the first 30 days was cutting the cost to acquire a customer. That did happen, and the 95% decrease happened in the first 30 days, but the campaign's been running for a little bit. It's still running to this day, and still producing predictable results, which is really important because with the tools and tactics, they might work also for a period of time, but they only work for a set amount of time. They might be working for the next six months, but they're not really what you're going to build the foundations of a business for years and years to come. Kathleen: Got it. Okay. So, let's walk through it. Jake: Yeah. So, one last thing before I jump into the methodology is there's a couple things that you have to understand, is with all marketing across the board, there's three things that have to be hit in every single campaign. There's your audience, your message, and your offer. "With all marketing across the board, there's three things that have to be hit in every single campaign. There's your audience, your message, and your offer." - Jake Neill, Lead Hounds Marketing So, I know it's very basic, but what I'm going to assume is that you already know who your audience is, and that you can already articulate the offer to that prospect or that customer in a good way to actually move them to action. So, you already have those things dialed in. I'm going to assume that. So, if you don't have that dialed in, then make sure you dial that in before you implement the methodology. Kathleen: Yeah, and I think most listeners of this podcast probably have all that together, because they're generally pretty savvy marketers. Jake: Perfect. So, in order to understand the methodology, the first thing you need to understand is a little bit just briefly about the actual client themselves. So, we implemented this methodology for SocialChimp, and they have a software that automates social media posting for various industries, so real estate, wealth management, insurance, all kinds of stuff. So, what we had to do first was identify and hone in on our target market. This is a big mistake I see people making early on, is they try to create campaigns that funnel in tons of different customers, but you have to... You can build multiple campaigns, but for a successful campaign, it needs to be focused on one avatar. So, what we chose were real estate agents. The last thing, too, before we jump into the methodology is the... When you identify the audience, you need to hone in on a key pain point. A lot of you listening to this are going to skip this step, and you're going to start working on the Digital Experience, and it will fail if you do that, because hyper-specificity is key to the success of building out this roadmap or this Digital Experience. So, for the client that we serviced, their target market was real estate agents, so what we did was we interviewed real estate agents, we spoke to them, we did our research, we did our due diligence, and what we found was their biggest pain point was, how do I build and engage social media presence without any kind of time? So, they're all stretched for time. They want to sell real estate, but it takes a lot of time and commitment and consistency to post. So, we had to build a Digital Experience out of that. So, at this point, if you don't have the Digital Experience map, I'm about to jump into it. Definitely pause, download the Digital Experience, and then follow along with me. Kathleen: All right. Jake: So, on the Digital Experience map, we have seven relationship levels, and you see those on the side here. I'm going to briefly touch on them. There's strangers, right? That's the very first step. Someone has no idea who you are. So, the questions you have to start asking yourself is, what offers are we going to offer strangers to turn them into visitors, and then visitors, to turn them into leads, and then once we have leads, how are we going to qualify those leads, and then once they're qualified, how are we going to turn them into sales opportunities, and then once they're a sales opportunity, how do we close them into a customer, and then from a customer, ultimately, into a fan? So, those are the seven relationship levels that we have to implement in our business if we're going to see the consistency and the predictability. So, at the first level, you've got the blog post here. So, what we have is what we call a cornerstone piece of content, and that's how we turn strangers into visitors. But I want to take one step up to the lead sector just briefly, because that's actually where we start. If you can build and identify a lead magnet, a really, really solid lead magnet, then this experience begins to kind of build itself out. So, what we did for this client was... A lot of you are already familiar with a lead magnet. By the way, a quick note on lead magnets. The hyper-specificity is super important, but also that it can be consumed rapidly. I see a lot of people using things like eBooks, but those are better used for deep-dive content, which is later in the journey, because it consumes a lot of their time. So, at the lead stage, and this would change your business, if you guys can come up with a really, really, really good lead magnet, a lead magnet is... When you're thinking about a lead magnet, think about tools, checklists, things that can be consumed really quickly and solve a problem. So, with a lead magnet, the place that we always start is making a promise. So, I don't even start with the tool itself. I identify what promise can I make to the prospect that's in alignment with the key pain point. So, what's the best possible thing I could promise? So, what we did for this client was we identified, well, they want more social media engagement, and they want to do it in less time. What if I could hand you more than a month's worth of proven social media content to post to your newsfeed? Right? Where most people would go and say, "Well, let's educate them on how to post better posts." Well, the issue is they don't have time, so you're missing the mark. That's why it's so vital to identify that key pain point early on. Kathleen: That makes a ton of sense. Jake: So, what we did was we created the real estate social media swipe file out of that promise. We said, "How can we give them over a month's worth of proven content?" Well, we just went to... I think it was BuzzSumo, whatever the app is that has... You can find most engaged content. We grabbed the most shared real estate content of 2018. We grabbed 40 posts. We put them into a swipe file, into a PDF document, and then we wrote some copy. We wrote some different copy variations for each post and embedded a link. When the real estate agent clicked the link, it populated the social media post into their newsfeed and gave them 40 free posts to post for, depending on how many times you post, a month or more. Kathleen: Awesome. Jake: So, that lead actually to this day is converting at 84%. So, 84% of the people who land on that page are giving us their email address, and it's not because of the landing page design and the landing page copy. That, of course, matters, but it's about identifying an offer that aligns with that key pain point at this stage in the journey. Kathleen: Yeah. It's like the best landing page copy in the world can't make up for that offer. Jake: Yeah, exactly. It doesn't matter if you're... Yeah. I mean, you could offer a toothbrush, you could write the best copy for a toothbrush, but I don't know how many people are going to opt in, give you their email address for a free toothbrush. Kathleen: Right. Jake: So, once we identified the lead magnet here at the lead stage, the rest kind of writes itself. One thing to note as we're going to build out this experience together, each stage, as you elevate the relationship, it should be the next logical step. So, I should be able to say, "Because you read this blog post, you might be interested in downloading this lead magnet. Because you consume this lead magnet, you might be interested in watching this video. Because you watched this video, you might be interested in this product." So, it needs to be this logical progression. So, after we identified the lead magnet, we went down to the blog post stage, and this is how we turned strangers into visitors. Yes, you can create tons of different content. You can do SEO, this kind of stuff, but the cornerstone piece of content is this one kind of content that explains the value of the actual tool itself. So, what we did was we created a blog post called How to Repurpose Your Content and Get 10 Times the Exposure. So, if you notice the blog post, once again not teaching them about social media, it's showing them how to save time and increase their social media engagement. It's showing the power of repurposing content, and then the tool, what does it do? It gives you the content, the repurposed content kind of done for you. So, there has to be that logical progression. From the lead stage, now you have an email. So, if you guys know about using automated emails, this is where that would kick in, but don't let... If you don't know how to use automation and the CRM and everything, don't let that hold you back from building the experience. That's just a way to push people to the next stage. So, once you have a lead, you have to identify, how do we qualify this lead? So, this is where we build deep-dive content. So, in the SaaS space, a lot of times it's kind of videos around the product, but in most every industry, webinars work really great. This is also where eBooks can work. So, in this experience we built out a free trial video. We said, "Okay. Well, you just downloaded 40 social media posts. Well, how about we turn those 40 into an unlimited amount of social media posts?" So, that's where the free trial, we showed them the software that curates all these posts for them, and then posts it to their newsfeed every day for as long as they want. So, after watching the free trial video, we had a qualified lead, and then could offer that person a free trial offer. So, we said, "Now that you've checked out our video, now that you've checked out our software, would you like to take a free trial?" So, this is a really, really important step. It's a little more straightforward in the software space, because usually it's a demo or a free trial offer, but the foot-in-the-door offer is essentially an offer that you can give that's a low barrier to entry, so it's not your core offer. You don't want to jump in and say, "Buy my product," yet. You want to say, "What could I offer this person to get them to commit one of two things, either their time or their money?" A lot of people forget the value of getting someone to commit their time. Sometimes it's harder to get a commitment of time than a commitment of money. Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. Jake: Yeah. Maybe for the viewers who aren't in the software space, just some examples of ways to turn qualified leads into opportunities, let's say you're a brick and mortar. Let's say you're a dentist. People offer $20 teeth whitening. Right? It's not the core offer, but where does a dentist want to have the sales conversation? Where do they want a sales opportunity, when your mouth is open, and they're working on your mouth, and they want to say, "Hey, you've got some loose teeth here, or some crooked teeth. Have you considered braces?" Then that pushes them to the core offer. So, that's an example of an entry point offer that's not in the SaaS space, but if you are in the SaaS space, demos and trials work fantastic here. Kathleen: Yep. Jake: Then, obviously in the SaaS space, software works, selling actual software after the free trial. Now, there's all kinds of practical things about getting people to actually use the free trial. A lot of people sign up and don't use it, so you need email automations and things pushing people to actually use the software, but the software, your core offer, is that next step. Then from the core offer, after someone purchases, the next step is, how do I turn them into fans? So, at the fan stage there's a lot that we can do. What we want to focus on at the fan stage is increasing the lifetime value and the immediate value of a customer. So, what you do here is you offer complementary services to the core offer that would be interesting to the prospect in order to increase that value. So, for them we said, "Hey, you've taken the free trial. You're now using our software to post every day for you. Would you like some more awareness?" So, we offered them paid ads. We said, "You know, we're not..." Once again, it's not costing them time, but they're getting to spread their message out and build their brand and get more engagement to more people, because we're going to manage their ads for them, and maybe do something like a hundred dollars a month, something simple. But that was a really good complementary product, and we had 10% of people took that upsell, and then it allowed us to increase the lifetime value of a customer by 20%, which is extremely important because you can move your entire top line by 20% with one single offer. Kathleen: And without signing any new customers. Jake: Right, exactly. Kathleen: Yeah. Jake: So, that essentially is the framework. I don't know if there's anything that you feel like would be good to hit on in terms of helping people with the more practical side of thinking through any of these offers, but that's just one example in the software space. Kathleen: Yeah. I mean, it sounds like... So, we're talking about going from a stranger to a visitor, to a lead, to a sales opportunity- Jake: Or to a qualified lead. Kathleen: ... to a qualified lead, to a sales opportunity, to a customer, to a fan. Correct? Jake: Correct. Promoting your offer Kathleen: So, really, it's an expanded kind of concept of the customer journey. You guys have a special name for it, the Digital Experience? Jake: Yes. Kathleen: Yeah. It sounds like the key to it, at least what I'm hearing, is really deeply understanding the pain point, because if you get that wrong, it's like Dominoes. Right? You start at the beginning. If you get it wrong, nothing else works. Jake: Yeah, exactly. Kathleen: So, for SocialChimp, you did this exact thing. You walked us through all the different offers and the content, et cetera, that you created. One thing we didn't really touch on too much was, how did you promote the offer in the very beginning? Jake: Yeah. I mean, the way that we promoted it in the very beginning was with paid ads. I mean, there's a lot of ways to promote, and it also depends on your goals. What I see a lot of people missing on as well is the business math on the front end. They don't actually calculate things like, what is the lifetime value of a client? Well, maybe the lifetime value of a client is a thousand dollars, and then you have to ask yourself, well, what percentage of that profit are we willing to spend to acquire that customer? So, let's say typically a business is going to use 10% of two to three years worth of the value of a customer. If you're a startup, sometimes you'll use the whole lifetime value because you want to scale, but most businesses aren't going to use more than 10% of the first two to three years of the value, the profit, not the revenue, the profit of a client. So, it's identifying it early on, how much am I willing to spend? So, if the lifetime value is a thousand dollars, and you're willing to spend 10%, then you know the cost to acquire a customer can't go above $200. Then what you can then begin to do is you can begin to map out your conversion rate at each of these levels. So, you can say, "Okay. What percentage of visitors are becoming leads? What percentage of leads are becoming qualifieds, qualifieds into opportunities," and so on, all the way up to fans. You can then begin to reverse engineer the percentages. So, let's say at the customer stage you are turning 10% of customers... Or let's do the opportunity stage. You go to your sales team, what percentage of opportunities are we currently closing? 30%. Well, if you want to add an additional 10 customers, then you need to make sure you're bringing in another 30 sales opportunities in order to close those customers. So, you can reverse engineer all the way back to the visitors, and I'll actually... In the Digital Experience worksheet, I actually have a business math section, and you can fill that out. We won't have time to go over that in this call, but you could fill that out and identify what is your max cost per click. So, then you can decide what platforms to play on. So, if my max cost per click to drive a customer is going to be, let's say, $1.50 to turn the stranger into a visitor, then I'm probably not going to play on LinkedIn ads, because LinkedIn has a price floor, and you're not going to be able to drive traffic for that $1.50. So, setting up the business math on the front end is really important and vital to the success of campaigns, and it also helps with... If you're a CMO, for instance, and you're reporting to the CEO, it's really important because sometimes a CEO doesn't necessarily have realistic expectations of what should happen on the marketing side, and you can't dispute the numbers. Right? So, what you can do is you can show the numbers and create realistic goals around customer acquisition and what budget you'll need to fuel those customers. Kathleen: Yeah. I love that you guys focus on the cost of customer acquisition, because I think that's a big mistake that a lot of marketers make, especially those that are new to pay-per-click. I hear people ask the question all the time, "What should my budget be?" Right? They think that there's some magic lump sum number, like you're going to say, "Well, if you spend $3,000 a month, you're going to get results." It's really, the premise of the question is flawed because it shouldn't be what should your budget be. It should be how much are you prepared to spend to acquire a new lead or a new customer. As long as you're staying within that amount, your budget could be infinite. Right? Jake: Right. Kathleen: If it's resulting in customer acquisition, then you wouldn't want to cap it, certainly. You wouldn't want to say, "No, I got 10 customers. That's the end of my budget." You would want to keep it going. So, I think that's so interesting, that little shift in mindset that happens, and it's definitely something that you see... The mistake is something you see made a lot by people who are novices with pay-per-click. Jake: Yeah, definitely. So, I'd highly recommend using the business math section on that experience worksheet, and just as you build out your own experience, measure the conversion rate from customers to fan. Well, you can start from visitors to leads, and all the way up, and then measure those numbers, and it's kind of a fill-in-the-blank document, and it'll produce at the end of it what you'll actually spend. It will create the goals for what you can spend to acquire a customer, and that'll inform everything moving forward. Kind of to jump to the original question, I know I kind of went on a side tangent, I think it's an important one, but what we realized was this software was only being sold for $49 a month, so the cost per click that we could drive was on the lower end. So, we chose to play on Facebook. We didn't choose Google Ads or LinkedIn or anything like that. Of course, real estate agents are using Google, but the prices are a bit higher. So, we knew if we were going to get a really big return on our investment, then we needed to really drive home some good offers that could drive low cost per clicks, and Facebook's a great platform for that. Kathleen: Yeah. Now, you also have used retargeting. Correct? So, once somebody gets into your funnel, if you will, or into this Digital Experience, there are ways you can use retargeting to push them faster down it? Is that correct? Jake: Yeah. Yeah. So, that's actually a really important point. I'm glad you brought that up. The middle section on this experience map are the offers that we're going to give someone at each of these relationship levels, but on the outside you see things like retargeting, advertising, SEO, social media, email marketing. These are the platforms and the tools that you use to move people through the journey, and that's where I see most people starting, and that's a very, very, very bad mistake because of what we talked about earlier where you're just going to be implementing content, SEO, retargeting, and you're not going to have a systematic way to predictably bring in customers. So, we did implement retargeting, advertising, social media, all this kind of stuff, but it was to move people through the journey. So, you see, at the first stage, at the visitor stage, we started running ads. Our goal was to push as much traffic to this blog post as possible to build up an audience that we could then retarget. Right? So, retargeting, we retargeted the blog traffic to the lead magnet to get them to give us their email address. Well, now that we have their email address, we have a way of contacting them in multiple platforms. We can speak to them on email and retargeting ads still. So, for people who downloaded the lead magnet, we had email sequences. Kind of just a note on when you're doing this as well, keep it really, really, really human. We didn't say, "They downloaded the real estate social media swipe file. Quickly, buy the free trial. Watch the free trial video. Buy this thing." People can ascend really quickly through the Digital Experience, but we kept it, and our emails would follow normal relationship building, and we'd say, "Hey, because you downloaded this swipe file, I thought you might be interested in watching this video about how you could have a lifetime of proven highly-engaged real estate," and it's just like, "Hey, check this video out, and it's because the action prior to what I'm asking you to do now is you kind of raised your hand and said, 'Hey, I'm interested in this kind of thing.' Let me give you more of it." So, it's really about thinking from a value. It's not this kind of... A lot of people talk about this kind of stuff purely in funnel terms, and they think about funnels and funnel hacking, but a lot of times, people get so caught up in those things that they're just looking to make the sale as quickly as possible. But I think when you... That's why we changed the language from funnels, where people are kind of dropping down in the funnel, to elevating relationships, building experiences that are going to actually earn us the right to do business with our customer, as opposed to these kind of gimmicks that are, "Maybe we can kind of get our customer to buy with this thing." Kathleen: Yeah, marketers are the worst at that. I always say this. We're people, right? We're people who buy things, and we know, as people who buy things, what we like and what we don't like when we're marketed to, but then when we go and put our marketing hat on and become marketers, it's like we throw everything we know about being human beings out the window, and we do the opposite. It's like, the biggest mystery to me of marketing is why do we allow ourselves to do that. Jake: Yeah. I mean, it's wild. I see it happening all the time. I see people, "Hey, you read this blog post. Do you want to get on a call so I can talk about me and my product?" No, I actually don't. I also try to keep things in that human-to-human mindset and ask myself the question, number one, put myself in my customer's shoes, in my prospect's shoes. Would I want to receive this email? Does it make sense for me? Does this thing add value to my life? If the answer is no, if this email... This is a great principle to use. If you're going to send out an email, whether it's automated, eblast, or if you're going to post a blog post, so many people get caught up in, "Well, how many emails do I need in order to push them to the next step? How many blog posts do I need to post each day or each week?" The answer is not about the quantity of content that you're pushing out as much as the quality of content, because when you put something out, it says something about your brand, and if you're putting out crap, then people are going to... They're going to start associating you with, this isn't worth my time. So, if you send them enough emails that aren't valuable, they're going to start... Number one, they're either going to unsubscribe, or number two, in their mind they're going to say, "I don't need to open this email because I'm not going to miss anything." But if you're always adding value, then when they see an email come through from your brand, then in the back of their mind, "I know I'm busy right now, but if I don't read this, I may lose out on something really important to learn." Kathleen: Yeah. My little hack for that is instead of imagining I'm the recipient, because sometimes that can be hard for me, I actually think of a friend, and I think, if I were emailing my friend Abigail, what would I say? I wouldn't say these spammy things, right? I would be friendly. I would be helpful. So, I picture a real person, and I write to them, and that's really helped me a lot make things less marketing-robot-like. Well, this is so cool, and hopefully people have gone in and downloaded the visuals, because it is very helpful to follow that along in this conversation, and if you didn't, go download it afterwards and then re-listen to it again, because you'll get more out of it. The results Kathleen: But I want to recap, go back to the results you got, because this is the exact process you used with SocialChimp, and you guys had crazy good results. So, can you just mention those again? Jake: Yeah. So, when we built out this Digital Experience, we took someone who was getting terrible results, they were spending way more money than they were bringing in. Their cost per trial was $1,147. That's pretty bad. Now, what were they doing? They said, "Oh. Well, we've got a great product, and we're giving you something for free. Do you want it?" So, they were running ads straight to their free trial, but that would be like me walking up into a coffee shop and saying, "Hey, I'm pretty awesome, and I'm rich and funny. You want to get married?" Just because those things may be true, I may be awesome, and we may be a great potential match, but if I come at it with that approach, then I'm going to turn off that person. So, in the same way, I can't come across in that way to my customers. I see a lot of people telling stories about themselves to their customer, but the real question that we need to ask is, how do we change the story that our customer tells about themselves? How do we take them from point A to point Z, where they want to be? So, when we stepped away from that and said, "Okay..." They wanted to hire us originally to run their Facebook ads, and I told them, I said, "I won't run your Facebook ads because you have a much more fundamental problem. If you push traffic to this system right now, then you're just pouring water in a leaky bucket, and you're just going to be wasting money." So, we had to build out that experience, and when we did that, we cut the cost per trial from $1,147 to $56 within just 30 days. Kathleen: Wow. That's crazy. Jake: Yeah, you can see the... We were selling the product for $49, but we also had an upsell that 10% of people took, so it made the monthly payment $59 a month. So, within 30 days, as a SaaS product, they were recouping what they were spending to acquire a customer. It's really, really, really powerful for a SaaS company. Kathleen: That's awesome. Definitely speaks to the value of kind of that whole... You have to slow down to speed up. Don't just try to drive traffic to a bad offer or a bad website. You've got to have a solid foundation. I love it. Jake: Yeah. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Well, before we wrap up, I have two questions I ask all my guests that I want to ask you. The first one is... We're always talking about inbound marketing on The Inbound Success Podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really doing inbound marketing well right now? Jake: Well, besides you, I would say DigitalMarketer. If you haven't heard of them, it's digitalmarketer.com, and my agency's actually certified partners with them as well, they've got tons of resources. But they are phenomenal at this. They really, really, really focus on adding so much value that you almost feel obligated to purchase, because by the time they offer you anything that you have to pay for, you've already learned so much that you know a couple things. Number one, there's this kind of feeling of, well, I need to give back to this person, and then there's also the feeling of, well, I got so much value for free, I can't imagine how much value I'm going to get when I pay them. Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah, they are great, Ryan Deiss and Marcus Murphy and the whole team over there. They're just killing it. IMPACT is also a partner of DigitalMarketer. It's a great company. All right, second question. I always hear from marketers that there's just so much changing in the world of digital marketing, and it's really hard to keep up with. How do you personally stay up-to-date and on top of all of that? Jake: Yeah. So, there a lot of ways. I would also say I do stay up-to-date through DigitalMarketer because they are one of the leading trainings and resources for individual companies, marketers, and digital agencies. They're kind of on the cutting edge, and they are certified with so many people like us who are in the trenches, and then we relay that information to them so that they can get quite a large amount of data around what's working, what's not working. So, I use DigitalMarketer, and then that's how I stay up-to-date, but I really think a lost art is looking back at some of the older advertising, like some of the books, like Breakthrough Advertising. If you haven't read that, it's really phenomenal on copywriting. But going back all the way to the people who were writing direct mail and getting people to literally mail... They were mailing something to someone's house to get them to purchase a product from one single letter. It's really powerful psychology and principles to be learned from those people as well. Kathleen: Yeah. I love that whole going back and being old school. I've had a bunch of people mention that, and everyone cites different books. I think the one you mentioned is a new one. But some of these principles don't change, because they just have to do with human nature. So, it's not like there's new advances in human nature in 2019. It's the same basic principles, and I think sometimes we lose sight of that as marketers. So, great insights there. How to connect with Jake Kathleen: All right. If somebody's listening, and they want to learn more about Lead Hounds, or they have a question and they want to reach out specifically to you, what's the best way for them to do that? Jake: So, they could email me directly. My email is jake@leadhoundsmarketing.com. That would be probably the quickest way to get a response. Kathleen: All right, awesome. I will put that link in the show notes. So, if you want to reach Jake, either shoot him an email or head to the show notes and get that link. You know what to do next... Kathleen: If you're listening, and you learned something, or you liked the podcast, please leave the podcast a review on Apple Podcasts, preferably a five-star review, but I say this every week, and this week I'm going to challenge you if you're a regular listener to take a moment and do that. Leave a review if you haven't done it already. I would really appreciate it. It helps get the podcast in front of more people. If you know somebody else who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because they could be my next interview. Thank you so much, Jake. Jake: Thank you, Kathleen. It was awesome.

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.  

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.

How do businesses use buyer intent data to increase the number of sales appointments they set by 6X? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, LeadSift Founder Tukan Das breaks down the topic of buyer intent data and provides the best explanation I've ever heard about what it is and how companies can use it to grow the number of sales opportunities. From who buyer intent data is right for, to where it comes from, what type of data you can expect to receive, how companies are using it, and the results they're getting to how much it really costs, Tukan covers it all in this not-to-be-missed interview. This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford, Connecticut, and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with special guests including HubSpot Co-Founder and CEO Brian Halligan, world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS."   Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my conversation with Tukan include: LeadSift leverages buyer intent data to help B2B companies understand who is interested in purchasing their products or services. Tukan believes that buying intent, in general, is the most important unit in digital commerce. Buying intent can be measured from online and offline sources and is basically a probabilistic score that indicates the likelihood that a person or company will purchase something. LeadSift gathers buying intent data by crawling the entire internet and looking at public posts for "signals" - where people are mentioning specific things that LeadSift's customers want to track. Signals can include a variety of things such as keyword mentions, competitors mentions, conference mentions, and more. This process is automated and done at scale, and the data is then fed back into LeadSift's data engine and ranked. When you use LeadSift, you get a ranked list of accounts along with the key contacts that you should be going after because they are the ones that were showing the intent signals. One common use case for buyer intent data is with account-based marketing campaigns. Another use case is running audience match ads on Facebook or LinkedIn targeting the buyers that have shown high intent. There are many types of signals that LeadSift can use to generate buying intent data, but working with their customers they have discovered that signals relating to keywords perform better than signals relating to competitors. Buying intent data is useful for B2B companies with 50 or more employees and with average deal sizes in excess of $10,000 a year. Buying intent data is priced starting at $1,000 a month. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Check out the LeadSift website Connect with Tukan on LinkedIn Follow Tukan on Twitter Listen to the podcast to learn more about buyer intent data and the specific use cases that can help grow your sales funnel. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. Today, my guest is Tukan Das who is the CEO of LeadSift. Welcome Tukan. Tukan Das (Guest): Hi Kathleen. Nice to be here.. Tukan and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: Great to have you. Can you tell my audience a little bit about LeadSift and yourself and what the company does? About LeadSift Tukan: Sure. My name is Tukan. I'm the CEO and co-founder of LeadSift. LeadSift is a sales intelligence platform that helps other B2B technology companies identify which accounts are actually looking for their solutions at any given time. That's the 30,000-feet view of LeadSift. One thing that I'd like to add is we have been working on LeadSift for about six and a half years. Our mission at LeadSift, and we have had a few pivots, but our mission at LeadSift has always been the same. It's around mining publicly available data to predict when a company or a person is looking to buy another product, whether it's a software product or a physical product or something like that. That has been our goal at the company, and in its current iteration, we are helping other B2B technology companies identify and predict which other companies are potentially going to buy their solution. Kathleen: That's interesting. Coming from the world of marketing, there are plenty of tools available to identify when an individual contact is interacting with your website and showing signs of purchase intent, but it sounds like you're talking about even outside of that, correct? Tukan: That's correct. What you mentioned is that's more on the first party intent when someone's coming to your website, interacting with your content, downloading the data or filling out a form. What we focus on is the outside world where they're having interesting conversations, which some of them could be potential signals of buying indicators. Those are the ones that we try to pick up and use as predictions. Kathleen: Now at the risk of getting into the territory of jargon, is this what is commonly referred to as buyer intent data? Tukan: It is. At a high level, yes, it is. Kathleen: This is interesting to me, and I was excited to talk to you about it because I have been hearing lots of people talk about this lately. I feel like it's the newest hot buzzword in the world of marketing, but there definitely appears be a lot of confusion around it, and so I would love it if maybe you could just start by demystifying. Every time I've heard somebody talk about this, they say there's all this publicly available data, and they mine it, and then they tell you who's out there. What Is Buyer Intent Data? Kathleen: I think the question I've always had is I want to understand how that really works. What is that data? How specific is it? Where does it come from? Is this GDPR compliance, all the questions that probably you get from of marketers? Maybe you could break that down. Tukan: Absolutely. I have a interesting philosophical view about buying intent. I personally believe buying intent in general is the most important unit in digital commerce. Basically, buying intent, what it means is identifying a customer in the journey of them buying a product. It is basically a probability of assigning a probabilistic score to a company whether they're going to buy your product or a product. That's all buying intent means. Now in reality, buying intent is generated both on online sources and even offline sources. It could be someone coming to your website and requesting a demo. That's a very strong signal of intent, or someone picking up the phone calling you or someone you meet at a coffee shop saying, "Hey, I want to know more about your product, buy from you." They're all signals of intent, but in reality, a lot of those signals are private to you and your own company, but that doesn't constitute the entire word buying intent. To reach the scale, you need to pick up signals that are happening on the outside world, but the reality is in a B2B setting, unfortunately, no company goes and waves a flag and says, "Hey, I'm looking to buy a new database or a marketing automation software." No one talks like that. Life would have been a lot easier. Kathleen: Well, it would be easier for marketers, but it would be hell for that buyer. Tukan: Depending if there could be a way to manage the number of requests and all those things. In the absence of that, everybody who is in the buying intent space, what they are trying to do is they're trying to come up with different proxies or signals and then combine all of them to make that prediction of this company likely to be buying a solution. As with any prediction engine, it can never be 100% accurate. It is a prediction. This is something that we tell all our customers, and I want to clarify this. I think there's a big misconception about buying intent that it is sort of like a silver bullet, "Oh, you told me this company is good market, 100% they're going to buy." No, they are no. It never works that way. If we could predict every company that was going to buy someone's software, I'd be a lot richer. Kathleen: I was going to say that we couldn't afford your services. Tukan: There you go. There you go. I'd be charging money to come into this podcast. With that being said, everybody is trying to look at these different proxies. There are a few different ways of looking at buying intent. Every company in the space has their own definition. The way I look at it or we look at it at LeadSift at a high level is there could be multiple different signals. A signal could be if we see someone engaging with my competitor on anywhere that we can publicly get, that could be a signal of intent. If I see someone engaging with a complimentary company, that could be a signal of intent. For example, our partners are Marketo, Salesforce or even Outreach and SalesLoft. We don't compete with them, but if you see someone using that product or engaging, showing interest about that product, that gives us an indication that they have a tech stack and they are showing interest about outbound marketing, so that could be interesting to LeadSift. A signal of intent could be someone researching or reading up on topics like account based-marketing. That could be a signal of intent. A signal of intent could be someone attending a specific event or a trade show. Those trade shows could be big as Dreamforce. It could be Sirius Decision Summit, or it could be niche events like FlipMyFunnel events that are happening or a webinar that is happening. If you're engaging with that content that the webinar's putting out, chances are this is top of mind for you. You might or might not be in the market right now, but you're more aware of this topic. A signal of intent could be someone growing their team. If I see someone who's hiring for a head of demand gen or someone hiring a lot of SDRs, chances are they are investing on demand generation and outbound marketing is very high. That's a good point to be. If we see someone announce a new product or launch a new partnership that might need a solution that we are doing, that could be a signal of intent. Basically, I think there is this myth or misconception around this black box approach around intent is like, "Ooh, we figured out from these publishers or whatever that these guys were researching about this topic, and that's why you should go after them." I think it's a lot simpler than that. It could be boiled down to all these different signals combining them and then coming up with a final score which are a probability saying, "These are the companies did these different things, and that's why they are more likely to be interested in your product right now." I don't know if I answered that question. Kathleen: No, those were actually really good examples. I guess the question that immediately then springs into my mind is you gave specific examples of if I'm engaging with a competitor or attending a certain conference or researching a certain product, and you qualified your definition of buyer intent as drawing from publicly available sources. What I'm trying to wrap my head around is what, and maybe this is the secret sauce, but what are those publicly available sources of information that reveal that data? Where Does Buyer Intent Data Come From? Tukan: Exactly. To give you an example, let's say you are interested in tracking a competitor or a specific partner of yours, and anytime you see someone engaging with them, that could be an interest. What we would do is we would look at the competitors that companies that you're interested tracking all their digital channels, whether it's social blogs, their forums, their YouTube channels, anything that is out there, and we would see when people are commenting, asking question or anything about them on those channels or on Quora or Reddit, ProductCon, Twitter, LinkedIn, anywhere they're mentioning something about that company or maybe they posted a webinar and they are sharing the link to the webinar, which maps to the domain of the companies. That's a signal. That's how we would figure it out. The way we do it, and there is no crazy secret behind it. If in reality all of the data that we're getting is public as I said, if you had 10,000 interns or researchers that are annually going over the entire internet, they could get the same exact signals. We just do it at scale and automate the whole process. Kathleen: You're basically finding a way to scrape all of that and then process it- Tukan: That's it. Kathleen: ... and put a formula behind what is a meaningful level of interaction. Tukan: Absolutely. Yes. Kathleen: That is a great explanation. That is the best explanation that I've heard yet about how this actually works. I feel like sometimes the people who are in the business of buyer intent data almost intentionally make it seem like this black box, but thank you for clarifying that. Tukan: Not a problem. I think there is a problem. I'm actually writing a LinkedIn post about it. I think there is a challenge there where on purpose, there is this misconception and there's a level of complexity that's added when it's not needed. Maybe they do hide some things. I don't know, but for us, it's purely crawling. It is literally crawling the entire public works for you at scale, and then getting this information. Kathleen: It makes sense. I agree with you that there is a problem because I think that the natural instinct when you feel like something's deliberately being presented as mysterious is either you don't trust it. Like, "Are you getting this data from an untrustworthy source," or that it's possibly too good to be true. I feel like a lot of people have shied away. Now, you go out and you crawl all of these sites. You look at all the interactions that are happening. You're able to synthesize that into meaningful insights for your clients. What Kind of Data Is Included With Buyer Intent Data? Kathleen: If I am somebody who is purchasing buyer intent data, what does that look like? Am I just getting a list of company names? Am I ever getting down to the individual contact level? How granular can you get? Tukan: No, that's a great question. Because of how we get the data, how we collect the data, we are probably the only company in the entire intent data ecosystem that can provide intense signals the level of a contact. When we give you an information, we would actually tell you, "You should go after Dell as a target account because their head of marketing was recently engaging with your competitor's content." That's what you get. You get a ranked list of accounts along with the key contacts that you should be going after because they are the ones that were showing the intent signals. When we, I guess, score or rank these accounts, we take into account who was the person that was showing interest in an IT services solution, a head of marketing, showing interest about the topic is okay versus if the IT director showed an intent signal. Their score will go up, so we incorporate all of that and present that data to you. Kathleen: You mentioned account based marketing earlier, and I wonder when you then return that data, you're able to get to the individual contact level. Let's say you mentioned Dell. Let's say there's 10 different influencers or decision makers at Dell who are showing intense signals. Are you able to package that together and say it's not just like a laundry list and there happens to be 10 people from Dell somewhere in the list? Is it, "Dell is the company. Here are the 10 people?" Tukan: That's exactly it. The way we presented it would say, "Here is Dell. These are the 10 people, and these are the different things they did." Kathleen: That's really interesting. I can see that being very useful because I've spoken to other companies that have pitched me on buyer intent data, but really all they're selling is a list of company names. It's better than nothing, but I wasted a lot of time marketing to the wrong contacts in those companies. Tukan: You asked a question earlier on about GDPR compliance and things like that. There is a confusion in the market because one of the things that clients tell us is, "How do you get contact level data?" If someone saw an ad on Forbes, they have an IP data that you reversed mapped to a company, but how the hell do you know who that person was? The way we do it is because we don't use cookies or we don't use IP data, we are basically crawling the web. When you're crawling the web, there is an individual who was doing an activity that gave us an indication that this makes it relevant for you to go after. That's how we are able to provide not just Dell but the key contacts that you should be talking to. All of this data is publicly available, so if your SDR was manually researching, he or she would have found this information. We just made it that much easier for them using technology. Kathleen: That makes sense. That was a great explanation. Thank you, very, very helpful. Now, if somebody is hearing this and they're thinking, "Okay, this is really interesting," can you talk through some specific use cases of how companies might use this kind of data to fill their sales funnels? Use Cases For Buyer Intent Data Tukan: I'll give a couple of examples, one more from a marketing perspective, the other more from a sales perspective how it can be used. One of our customers, they're fast growing in endpoint security space, highly competitive. Everybody in that space is super well funded, and it's a massive problem. One of the things they did was they had a list of target accounts that they wanted to book meetings with, basically try to get engagements on. They came to LeadSift, and they gave us that big list of target accounts along with it. They gave us a list of keywords and competitors that are of interest to them or topics. We work in this case was we were crawling the web picking up signals and contacts and pushing them directly into Marketo. A certain percentage of the signals were on target accounts that they were interested in during conversation into, and some of them were just green field or white field accounts or whatever they call them that fit the ICP but it's not in their target account list. We are pushing the data into Marketo, and they have it sync with Salesforce typically. That's the typical flow. When we pushed it into Marketo, they score them. Once the score reaches a certain score, they pass it over to the SDRs to go ahead and try to book a meeting with the contact that we picked up on that target account. Not just saying, "Hey, go after Dell because Dell is showing interest or talk to these three people within Dell because they were talking about these topics that you care about." That's how they did. I'll talk a little bit later about how they used interest in scoring techniques, but the result that they got was they had this started off with 100 accounts, target accounts to have discussions with. Within three months because of this contact and the signals we picked up, they had meetings with 60 of them. That was great, and over a period of six months, they got... I forget the number. It's high six figure in pipeline that they generated from those 100 accounts plus the new ones we identified. That's an example of how someone needs to think 10 signals into Marketo, push to Salesforce coupled with their account based strategy into booking meetings and creating opportunities from there. Kathleen: That's great. Tukan: One thing that we found out from them they were sharing was in the scoring mechanism, they actually found out when companies were engaging with specific keywords versus when companies were engaging with competitors, the key word engagement were actually giving them better results than competitors, which is interesting because my initial gut would have said, "If someone is engaging with my competitor, that's the hottest one I should go after." They found it opposite. It makes sense, but after, I thought, "Maybe some of them might be already too far in the buying journey. Kathleen: Too far down the funnel. Tukan: Yup. That was an interesting thing, so they adjusted the score in Marketo accordingly based on the kind of triggers. The other thing they also did was they were also looking at how many unique people within one of those target accounts were engaging. If one person engages three times, that's not as valuable as three people within the target they're gonna engage in one time each. They were using that because one person engaging multiple times might give you a false positive. They might have some prior relation, but if three people engage or like x number of people engage with this same trigger events or competitors, that's a better signal. Those were some interesting insights that we saw a customer use our data from a marketing perspective and being very successful. Who Is Buyer Intent Data Right For? Kathleen: That is really interesting. Now, in terms of the types of companies that are using this data, it sounds like it is very useful for B2B companies and companies that have a high transaction sales values or considered purchases, if you will, where more than one decision maker is involved. Is that accurate? Tukan: Yup, that's very accurate. In terms of our buyer persona, and when you look at our ICP and clients who have been most successful, so we look at companies in the small to medium sized enterprise, so 50 to 500 employees. Those are the ones. In B2B technology, 100%, and the other is their deal size needs to be meaningful. If their average deal size is, let's say, $1,000 a year, then they don't really need intent signals are even an outbound sales team, but if typically their deal size is at least $10,000, $12,000 annually, in that case, it makes sense for them. That's a sweet spot we have seen. Then there is another group of companies that we work not directly but through our partners. Those are more the large enterprises, so those 5,000, 10,000 employees. You have the HPs and the Oracles and Adobes of the world where we work with our partners. In their case, they do truly a multichannel or omnichannel marketing strategy where they take our data. They would do media buys, contents indications, email nurture, and things like that, but our sweet spot is those 50 to 500 companies that are heavy on driving sales revenue pipeline and things like that. How Much Does Buyer Intent Data Cost? Kathleen: Let's talk about the numbers then, because I'm curious. If somebody is listening and they're like, "This sounds amazing. I need to do it," what should they expect to spend, and how is the spend calculated? Is it based on the number of leads you're delivering? How does that work? Tukan: No. This is very interesting because it's not a cost per lead or ad spend or media spend type model. It's a purely subscription-based set up where you pay a flat fee, an organization wide license for your entire company, which is dependent on the number of triggers you're tracking. A trigger could be a name of a competitor or a name of a keyword or a topic or an industry event that you're interested in tracking. Based on that, they pay that fee and we push the data directly into the system. In terms of exact dollar value, it starts at around $1,000 a month. It's not crazy, but that's the price point that we charge, and it's a subscription model. Kathleen: Is there any general sense you can provide us to like if I'm spending $1,000 a month, what should I expect in terms of value? Tukan: Absolutely. Absolutely. That number changes, to be honest with you, Kathleen, based on how niche or how broad they're targeting, but on an average, all our customers get around 200 signals, intent signals a week, so roughly 800 to 1000 signals a month. That's the average. Our model is not capped on the number of signals you get. Some of our customers get a 1000 signals a day. For example, if someone is attending an event or sponsoring an event and they want to track people that are likely going to that event, they might get 400 or 500 accounts a day when the event is happening, but on an average, I would say between 800 to 1000 signals every month on unique accounts. Kathleen: I want to make sure I understand correctly. 800 to 1000 signals a month, that's 800 to 1000- Tukan: Accounts. Kathleen: ... in full contact level? Tukan: Yup. Kathleen: Really, if you're saying that you started $1,000 a month, that's for all intents and purposes about a dollar per contact. I know you don't want to call it. Tukan: No, but yeah. Sometimes you can do the ROI calculation if you do want to look at it that way. Kathleen: I mean, to me that sounds like a no brainer. I'm not being paid to say this, but it sounds like a no brainer only because if I do Facebook ads or something like that, a $1 costs to acquire a new contact, and this is a much more qualified contact, I would argue, that's pretty darn reasonable. Tukan: The way some of our customers would use the data and look at it is let's say you use it for a 90-day period, and in the 90-day period, that's a good enough period for you to then activate the data. One is us providing you the data. These are not inbound leads. Excuse me, you still need to nurture them, but assuming you ae following up with the data. Within 90 days, you should be booking 10 to 20 meetings, and then you can do the math from there on. Out of those 20 meetings you're booking, you should be having these many opportunities, and from there, they'll close. It's very easy to do the ROI from that perspective. What Kinds of Results Can You Expect? Kathleen: No, that makes sense. That's really interesting. Are there any averages in terms of results that you see your clients getting? Tukan: Yup. Few things. This is another example that I thought of is from a sales perspective. We are working with a digital marketing agency actually out of New York. They're national. They obviously do Facebook ads and different ads and inbound paid to drive leads. Reference is a big thing, but outbound is also a channel for them to generate leads. What they were finding is the number of meetings that they were generating through outbound was trying down because the way they were doing outbound is as everyone does is by static list of companies that fit our criteria and just hit them. They came to LeadSift to help them identify companies that are showing intent, potential companies that they can brand, I guess, in this case that they might be interested. They ran an email nurture campaign. That's what they're running. On an average, they're getting about 6% of the people that they're reaching out to are booking meetings with them. That is a very, very high number of people that are booking. The industry average is less than 1%, so they have tripled the number of people they're having meetings with in a month using the intense string. On an average, 6% is very high. That's of the outlier. This is not replies or positive replies. These are people that are actually booking meetings with them. On an average, we see... Assuming you have some baseline. You have an outbound process, whether it's email coupled with social and things like that. The average is at least you have twice the number of hit rate or connect rate or meetings rate than. That's the average that we see assuming you have a baseline, you already have a process set up. Kathleen: Well, and if you're not doing outbound sales, because there are plenty of companies that don't have really robust outbound sales programs, I imagine you could still take this data and create a custom audience for your paid advertising. You could do a look alike audience from that. There's a lot of different ways that if you didn't want to do direct outreach to the contacts, you could still pull them into your orbit in a subtler fashion. Tukan: Absolutely. We are seeing people doing that Facebook custom audience, Linkedin ads. That's also one of the things is to do paid media to drive people in there. Absolutely. Kathleen: Interesting. Wow. Well, that is really cool. I love hearing the details of how the sausage is made. It's the first time anybody's explained it really well to me, so I appreciate it. Tukan: No problem. Learn More About LeadSift Kathleen: If somebody's interested in learning more about either the company and its products or about this topic, and they want to connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that? Tukan: Couple of things. The best way is to go to leadsift.com. We have a pretty simple website. There's quite a bit of... We produce a lot of content and webinars and things like that, so do check it out. Kathleen: I'll put the link in the show notes for that. Tukan: Perfect. Request a demo talk to one of us or just reach out to me at tdas@leadsift.com. Find me on LinkedIn. My Twitter is @TDas. Just reach out to me. I'm deeply passionate about this whole idea of mining intent from unstructured web. I believe there is no single source of truth for intent. There's different ways to look at it. If you want to know anything more about LeadSift or just a general idea about intent-driven marketing and sales, hit me up. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Love it. I'll put all those links in the show notes. Now, we can't wrap up without me asking you the two questions that I always ask my guests. First of those is we talked a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or an individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound marketing? Tukan: That's a good question. I think I'm going to give altruistically different answer. I think one company, one person that is absolutely killing it is Jason Lemkin with SaaStr. I think they are doing a phenomenal job with inbound marketing, creating content that startups find valuable from early stage to growth stage or scale up. Unbelievable content they're getting. They have podcasts. They have the SaaStr show. I think Jason has probably written 100,000 answers on Quora and things like that and his LinkedIn post. I think they're doing a phenomenal job with inbound marketing. Kathleen: That's a really interesting one that I've not heard before. Tukan: I thought so. Kathleen: I might actually just then tweet Jason and see if I can get him to come on the podcast. Tukan: You would be amazing because you ask any startup founders, CEO or anybody in a tech startup space, everyone knows about SaaStr. SaaStr itself is becoming the go-to conference for all SaaS companies to go, and it is all because of Jason creating content every day and they're doing a phenomenal job. Kathleen: I love it. Well Jason, if you're listening, I'm coming for you. Now the second question is the biggest challenge that I hear marketers talk about is that the world of digital marketing is changing at such a lightning fast pace, and it's really hard to keep up with current best practices, new technologies and developments. How do you personally stay educated? What do you do for yourself? Tukan: Again, this also might be a different answer compared to what everyone else has said. Maybe because I'm not a marketer by trade. It might be a bit of a cheesy answer, but the best source for me to learn is actually talking to customers who are all marketers. When we talk to customers, we do the first five minutes of a sales call, we ask them. It's what's their process? What are they using? We get unbelievable amount of insights into what this entire world's looking like. They actually literally educate us, which we then use for other customers to get ourselves better and all that. That's one source that I think is phenomenal. The other is actually, I'm part of a few groups in Facebook and LinkedIn. One of them particularly is called SaaS Growth Hacks. It's from early stage companies, super active. There, I get a ton of insights into latest marketing trends, cool hacks and crawl tracking stories or things like that that people are trying out. There's a lot of discussion. People ask questions. People comment. I skim through it at least once a day to get some cool insights into what's going on, what's working, what's not working, what to be aware of. Those would be my two big sources of learning about the latest marketing trends. Kathleen: Those are good ones. I'm going to have to hunt down that SaaS Growth Hacks. Tukan: Absolutely. It's a great Facebook group. Kathleen: Good. All right. Well, there you have it. I will put the links for all of those things in the show notes. Now you know how to reach Tukan if you're interested in learning more about LeadSift or buyer intent data. If you have been listening and you learn something new or you liked what you heard, I would love it if you would leave the podcast a five star review on Apple Podcasts. That makes a huge difference. If you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at Work Mommy Work, because I would love to interview them. Thanks Tukan. Tukan: Thank you Kathleen. Kathleen: It's great having you. Tukan: Same here. It was a pleasure.  

Personalization can improve conversion rates by, on average, 10X, but only 4% of businesses say they're using it. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, RightMessage founder Shai Schechter talks about the lessons learned from his review of 500+ landing pages and calls to action and why personalizing your website copy can dramatically increase conversion rates. Shai's process for personalizing is simple. Ask your visitor a question, and then use their answer to deliver website copy that speaks directly to their needs. The results are conversion rates 10X higher. Sounds simple, right? So why are so few businesses doing it? In this week's episode, Shai shares a simple, straightforward, and easy solution that makes implementing personalization - and getting crazy good results with your conversion rates - a no brainer. This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford, Connecticut, and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with special guests including HubSpot Co-Founder and CEO Brian Halligan, world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS."   Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my conversation with Shai include: RightMessage is conversion optimization software that helps people get more email subscribers and sell more via their websites. It does this by allowing the user to create a popup on their site that asks a simple question of the visitor, and then use the answer to that question to dynamically deliver personalized content on their website. It can be used on any type of website and is installed by simply pasting a line of javascript code into the backend of the site. Shai worked with more than 500 websites to test out different approaches to personalization and learned that by personalizing calls to action, he could improve conversion rates, on average, by 10x. There is a long list of variables that can be used to drive personalization, including both implicit and explicit data. The process that RightMessage uses to personalize content begins with a popup that asks the visitor a simple question. In Shai's experience, "What brings you here today?" is the question that performs the best. He suggests that the best way to get started with personalization is to target website visitors that have not already subscribed to your email list, and use what you know about visitors to customize the value prop on your call to action for subscribing. On average, Shai said that 20 to 30% of visitors answer the question in the popup, and then 20 to 30% of those who answer the question convert on the follow on offer. Data shows that 94% of customers think personalization is critical to the success of their business and only 4% of businesses say they're doing a lot of personalization. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the RightMessage website Check out RightMessage.com/impact for a special offer just for Inbound Success Podcast listeners Follow Shai on Twitter Connect with Shai on LinkedIn Email Shai at shai@rightmessage.com  Listen to the podcast to learn what Shai learned from analyzing more than 500 landing pages and CTAs, and how those insights have helped him 10X conversion rates. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week my guest is Shai Schechter who is the founder of RightMessage. Welcome, Shai. Shai Schechter (Guest): Hi, thanks for having me. Shai and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: Yes, I'm happy to have you here. This is such an interesting case of how you came to be on the podcast and it's a first for me. I got you as my guest via a tweet. You had tweeted out that you had learned a lot about what makes a great opt-in form and CTA and that you had worked on more than 500 websites and had seen conversion rates of up to 10X and I was literally just browsing Twitter and saw this and thought, "I need to talk to this guy." So, the power of Twitter, right? Shai: Right. I don't know what made Twitter show it to you. Maybe we'll never know but I'm glad you saw it. Kathleen: It's the black magic that Twitter does behind the scenes but it happened and that's all that matters. Before we get into that actual story of what you did and what you learned talk a little bit for me about your background, about what RightMessage is and what led you to start it and what the company does. About Shai Schechter and RightMessage Shai: Yeah, sure. RightMessage is essentially conversion optimization software. It's something that people use on their websites. It helps them get to more subscribers to their e-mail list and helps them sell more to those people. But what it's doing differently and what's making it prove quite effective for the people using it is that it's all about kind of saying, not everyone in my audience is going to be the same so how can I segment them a little bit? How can I understand the different kinds of people coming to my site? How can I learn who's coming to my site and then use that to pitch more appropriately to them. And so to say, not everyone who comes to my site is looking for exactly the same thing and the same copy isn't going to resonate with all of them. So maybe we can ask them a question. Maybe we can learn something about them. Maybe we already know something about them because of how they've been interacting with our site or with our company and use that to really say, "I'm not going to just blast every possible call to action at you at once. I'm going show the one thing that's relevant to you right now." Kathleen: If I understand correctly, is it looking at information on visitors and I presume that those visitors will have been cookied in order to deliver that information? Is that accurate? Shai: Yes, the absolute ... So we don't do any of the kind of ... We don't do the stuff that Facebook's doing where they're following you around the internet, none of that. It is literally maybe, "What are they reading on my own company's blog right now?" Or, here's a question to them like, "What brings you here today? Why have you come? How can we help?" And they give you that little bit of information and you can then help them. You can then give them a better experience because of what they've just told you. Kathleen: Then that information is used to effectively dynamically update the information on the page? Shai: Yeah. Kathleen: Correct? Shai: Absolutely. Kathleen: Okay. Shai: And that may just be the call to action itself. It may be ... You know, if they tell you that they're really ... If you sell courses to help people get started with business and they tell you that they are really struggling with finding out what their audience needs then right there and then let's say to them, "Here's my course that helps you with that exact thing. I've got a whole suite of e-mail courses that could help you or I've got a couple of ... there's a webinar coming up that would be perfect for you. I'm going to suggest you do that. I think that's going to help you the most right now." Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. Now, does it work on any website regardless of how the site is built? In other words, if my site is on WordPress versus Drupal versus custom html, can I use RightMessage regardless of platform or CMS? Shai: Yeah, absolutely. It's like it's one line of Java script you put into your site, so pretty much any website, or landing page builder or whatever, lets you do that. We don't replace your website builder and we don't replace your e-mail list. We essentially just tie the two together and say, "Now your website can do the same kinds of things that maybe you're already with your e-mail marketing where you're sending different campaigns to different people. Now you can do that on your website or any website. Kathleen: Oh, that makes all the sense in the world. What led you to create it? Shai: I am a developer by craft. I'm a software person and so to me when I started ... I was consulting a few years ago and I'd had a couple of software products in the past as well. So when it came to kind of saying, "Right, I need to grow this consulting business. I need to learn how to market this business. I'm not going to rely on word of mouth any more." It wasn't for me a reliable way to grow a business and I started learning more about marketing. I started doing ... I had my website and I was learning how online marketing kind of worked and because I had this software background, to me a website was something that ... Most websites that I dealt with had been web apps, right, where everyone sees a different experience because you log in and then you see something. I see something different on my Facebook then you see on yours, right? So I was making these marketing websites for myself and for clients and to me it was like, "Why would I put an opt-in form to join my newsletter at the bottom of a blog post to somebody who's already on my newsletter, right?" Kathleen: Yeah, correct, 100% Shai: Right. It's not good for me because that's a bad thing. If someone's on my newsletter the last thing I want to say to them is, "Join my newsletter." That's a wasted opportunity to say something more effective to them and it's very unfair to them. They don't want these pop-ups in their face being like, do this thing that you've already done. To me it was really common sense to sort that out. It seemed like a very natural thing to do but I think that's because my understanding about websites is that website changes. It's different for different people. So I started doing this stuff and marketers around me were like, "How the hell did you just do that?", right? They had no idea it was possible. When I was speaking to developers they were like, they saw it as an obvious thing to do but when I started helping marketers do this on their own sites, then developers would be like, "Why is anyone paying you money for that?" The marketers are like, "I had no idea that you could do this." Kathleen: That's so great. I feel like some of the best ideas in the world are the things that for some people have been staring them in face forever, but for other people, it's like revolutionary, right? Shai: Right. Yeah, it's just we're like in two separate worlds and if you can intersect them a little bit. Then a friend of mine, a man called Brennan Dunn, he's kind of come to the same realization on his own. He had kind of an educational product website. He was selling courses to help freelancers. He came from the same background as me. He also worked in software and then moved heavily into marketing and he was doing the same thing I was helping my clients doing. He was doing it on his own sites and he was also seeing these amazing results. When someone started his on-line course, his free e-mail course, he'd ask them a question about themself and that was very easy for him to do because he's just wrote some custom java scripts on his marketing site. Then later on after they'd been through his free e-mail course he would promote his paid course using different language depending on what they had said when they started the free course. So based on why they said they wanted the free course he then pitched how the paid course could help you do that exact thing. He was also tracking results and those kind of results we were both seeing these really high, really high conversion rates. We ended up, he was the one that kind of said, "Why are we sitting here helping marketers do this one by one. What if there was something where they could do this themselves?" So you don't have to write any code. You can just point and click and set this up for your own sites and we can help you make it easy as possible to see these same conversion rates that we were seeing. Kathleen: How old is the company now? Shai: What I've just described was all happening about two years ago, a little bit more. In the end, we officially launched this product a year and a half ago. Kathleen: Wow. Shai: It was never meant to be ... we didn't go all in on this right away. It was meant to be a little evening project and we'd kind of throw it together. He had a bit of an audience for it. I would build it over the course of a few days and it kind of ended up growing a lot bigger by accident. Kathleen: Which I suppose is what happens when you have product market fit. Shai: I guess so, yeah. Shai's Review of 500+ Websites (and Lessons Learned) Kathleen: Well, that's great. Thank you for sharing that story. Now you mentioned when you sent out your tweet that you had worked with more than 500 sites and were able to glean some insights from that. Can you talk a little bit about what led you to look at those? Are these sites that are using RightMessage? Shai: A lot of them are. What really happened, when we started, when RightMessage started it was less about the opt-in forms and the calls to action on your site and it was more about you can personalize everything, right? You can change your headline. You can the testimonials. You can can make your entire site dynamic to who someone is and that does really help conversion rates. It's also really overwhelming to get started with. When its like, "You can change anything on your site", people were overwhelmed. So what we started doing is kind of working really closely with people who were ... Some of them were customers. Some of them were people who had been customers but they had decided they weren't ready for it yet, as returns. Some of them were people who we thought this would work really well for but again they kind of saw it as overwhelming and what we wanted to do was find out what is important to them right now? What would they want to ... What are the metrics they're trying to improve on their website? And what it came back to time and time again was by looking at the data of what personalization was working really well for the people who were doing it and looking at what it was that people wanted to be doing better on their site, all of it pointed to it's the calls to action. It's those points, those make or break point where you're saying to someone, "Now I want you to do something. Now I want you to sign up for my e-mail list" or "Now I want you to take a free trial of my product" or whatever that next action is. Those were the trigger points where the people who were doing a little bit to make those dynamics, make those personalized we're seeing 10 times higher conversion rates than the people who weren't. That's why we need to focus. Kathleen: Can you talk a little bit about ... You talked about how you could either use data, it sounded like data on their behavior or answers to a question to fuel the personalization. Can you talk a little bit more about that and what have you seen in terms of that initial collection point of information, if you will. What is most effective? Shai: Yeah, absolutely, and that's the important part, right? If you don't know something about somebody there's nothing you can do to talk to them in a way that's going to resonate. So we split into the two that you've just described there you've got the explicit and the implicit. So you've got the explicit profiling which is asking them a question and we've started to gather a lot data about what the best questions are to ask. A lot of it boils down to it's really common sense stuff in the sense that it's exactly what you would ask them if you were chatting to them face to face, right? And that might not just be on their website either. That might be questions that you've asked them in a survey that you sent out to your list, for example. Anytime where they actively tell you something in a form or in a survey. Then you've got all these implicit things where, which are things like, "Have they already bought from me?" "Are they already a subscriber on my e-mail list?" They didn't have to tell you those things, you can see those already. Kathleen: Yeah, the latter sounds like they're more kind of where they are and which stage they're in of their buying journey, if you will. Shai: Yeah, absolutely, the stage that they're in. If you've got a blog and it's got different categories what you'll often find is that somebody is kind of binging articles on one specific category because it's the one the care about right now. That again can tell you ... They're answering the question of which category are you interested in without being asked it. So the categories do that and that also includes things like ... You've also got if somebody clicks through to your site from someone else's site, what does the site that they clicked through from tell you about who they are? Kathleen: That's interesting, yeah. Shai: So yeah, you've got little insights like that as well, but if you're just kind of getting started asking them works really well. I think it also helps, it makes for a softer pitch, right? If instead of saying immediately, "Join my course", "Buy my thing," if you first ask something you're getting that, it's kind of that easy yes. Then you can use that immediately to say, "Right, based on what you said, here's what I think you should be doing." Kathleen: Now I'm assuming there are, some questions are better than others in the sense that it could be tempting, for example, to say, "What's your budget?" That's a very bottom of the funnel almost, like, sub-funnel question. Shai: Yeah. Kathleen: Have you seen the most success of much more top of the funnel, kind of softer questions? Shai: Yes. "What brings you here today?" is essentially the softest and best performing question. The first question that we see. You can follow that up with something that's more about the person, maybe their industry. It depends what's going to be relevant based on the field that you are in, but yeah as a first question, it's like the, "What brought you here?" "How can we help you?" kind of question works really well. It makes sense, right? If you're in a store in the real world and the shop assistant comes over to you and they start with, "What industry are you in?" That's a little bit harder, harsher. Kathleen: Awkward. Shai: Yeah, it's kind of like, "Why do you want to know?" Kathleen: Exactly. Shai: Where as like, "What brought you to the shop? What are you looking for?" Okay, I immediately ... I know why you're asking. It's clear how that's going to help, it's going to be in my interest to tell you. That works really well as the first question. Kathleen: Are the questions generally, well I guess this is a two part question. Let me ask you first, does RightMessage have a feature that allows you to create and present that question or is that something that you have to do for your own website? Shai: Right, yeah, no, so that's what RightMessage'll help you do. Kathleen: Okay, and does that manifest as a pop-up? Shai: Yeah, so you choose. You've got a whole suite of ... If you think of any opt-in widgets at all, it's essentially the same options, right? You can show a sticky bar at the top or bottom of the page. You can put a pop-up module in the middle of the page when they, if they go to leave the site. Or it might just be in-line, kind of an embedded widget at the bottom of a blog post or a little slide up toaster widget in the corner. It's all of those things. It's whatever you want to be doing, probably whatever you're doing right now. We're just sorting those out. Kathleen: At the risk of getting super technical and a little too technical even for myself, you know I've had varying experiences with pop-ups. I know that there are some that Google doesn't like because they create a poor experience and there are some that because of the way that they load can slow page load times. Can you talk a little bit about the way you built the product and how it impacts those two factors? Shai: Yeah. We're very much about ... I don't know if you've seen, there was one of these little fake gif video things going around recently. It was like the state of marketing in 2019 and it was just these pop-ups everywhere. We're trying to do everything we can to be the opposite of that. A lot of that does come down to ... A lot of the reason that you have all these competing pop-ups everywhere is because you're not sure what to pitch someone, right? You've got your e-mail opt-in but then what if they're ready to start a trial? Okay, so we've got to put a pop-up for the trial over here. Then at the end of the blog we're going to put something else. You've got all these ... Often the reason you have all these competing, all these different pop-ups is because you've got all these different things to offer. One of the things that we're trying to make really easy to do is to say, if you know which one thing this person needs right now you don't have to go bother them with so many touch points, right? You can be consistent with it. It doesn't have to be from a pop-up. You might just want to do one pop-up. You might want to do no pop-ups at all. It might just be that you have a soft pitch at the end of your blog article, right? In terms of the Google thing we don't ... Google, especially on mobile really doesn't like the 'in your face' pop-ups. If you're on mobile then automatically they overcome a much softer, it's a little trade right at the bottom so it's not in the way of the content at all. We're not doing that because of Google. We're doing it for the same reason as Google, which is that it's a bad user experience. For instance, when someone has come to your site for content and then you put something in their face that interrupts that content, yeah I understand and agree with why Google doesn't like those things and we're trying kind of do the same. Kathleen: Does the pop-up load asynchronously? Shai: Yeah, so it won't slow down the sites or anything like that. How To Get Started With Personalization Kathleen: Okay. That's great. You ask, you present ... to go back to what we started with. You present the visitor with this question and it's a soft kind of introductory question that allows you to learn something about that person and then RightMessage then gives you the ability to begin to customize things. I imagine knowing, like, I'm a marketer. I know marketers pretty well. I imagine that the temptation as a marketer would be to go down the rabbit hole and spend a lot of time trying to personalize too many things. My guess would be that there are probably a few small things that you can do. It's that 80/20 rule, right? What are the 20% of things that will give you the 80% of results? If somebody was to just dip their toe in the water at this do you have typical advice you give them about what the few low hanging fruit things that they should start with that are going to give them their biggest bang for their buck? Shai: Yeah, absolutely. We actually just this week started this recipe book of really simple and high converting things that you can do. But at it's core, so yeah, if you're just getting started I would say wherever it is right now that you're pitching that first thing to people which may be an e-mail course or joining your e-mail list or some other thing that probably isn't your kind of main end-of-the road, ultimate most expensive product or service, where ever you're doing that right now on your website just switch that to ask one question first. Then if they are anonymous, if they haven't joined your list yet then pitch that list. Pitch it exactly like you were doing before just change the working to describe the benefits and one of the benefits of it as being related to the things they just answered. So look at your list and look at what are the main reasons that people might want to join their list. Or if it's an e-mail course, what are the main reasons that people join it? If you don't know that yet then maybe it's time to survey people who have already done it or ask them just after they've joined, "What was it that made you join?" You can then feed that back into what your multiple choice answers should be to the question. Once you know that, ask the question and based on the answer pitch your entry level product or e-mail list or whatever it is in a way that describes how it helps with that thing that they just said. Kathleen: That's great and it's pretty simple and straight forward. Shai: Right, and the conversion rate increase even of that, I've seen people go from 2% opt-in rates to like 20% opt-in rates. What Kind of Marketing Results Can Personalization Deliver? Kathleen: That was going to be my next question. Can you talk a little bit more about some of the results you've seen for companies that use this? Shai: Yeah. You do see some variant. It depends on where people are doing these pitches and who their audience is as well but a lot of people, when they set up the basic thing that I just described, it's fairly typical to see something like, and it's hard to give typical. Depending on where you're doing it you might get 1 or 2% of people answering the question but it's also, it's very common to see 20 or 30% answer, especially with a question like, "What brings you here today?" So yes, 20 or 30 and I've seen it higher than that as well. I'd say 20 to 30% I would not be surprised if somebody set this up for the first time and was seeing that kind of answer rate. Then the pitch that comes after it, that kind of initial opt-in pitch, you might see the same again. You might see something like 20%, 30% act on that. It depends. It depends on the audience but something like that is not at all unusual. Kathleen: Which is a very strong conversion rate. I mean, most companies that I see, their conversion rate, their visitor to lead conversion rate, is usually somewhere around 1 to 3% on their website. Shai: Exactly, exactly and it depends. It depends where it's coming from. It depends, you know, is this brand new to a blog? It depends where the traffic is coming from. It depends where this traffic has come from. It depends where you're doing this pitch and all of those things but yeah, if somebody was getting a couple of percent opt-in rate before I would be very surprised if they didn't see that more than double when they start doing this. I think it kind of ... It almost makes sense when you stop and think about it, right? If someone is on your website they're trying to figure out whether you can help them and anything that you can do to make it easier for them to translate from what they're reading on your site to have that apply to their own life, is going to make it more likely that they ... If someone's not sure that you can help them they're just going to bounce. Kathleen: Yeah, I mean fundamentally we're all lazy, right? Shai: Right. Kathleen: We just are, all of us. As a business the more you can cater to that and hand or spoon feed the answers that somebody's looking for the better you'll do. Shai: Yes. Kathleen: It's just the truth about human nature. Shai: Yeah, it's the difference between the sales person who reads off a script versus the sales person who finds out a bit about you and what you need and then tailors everything, explains how the product can help you specifically. Or like the real estate agent showing you around a house. They either just describe each room or they find out what kind of person you are and then they paint the picture for you of how, to help you see yourself living in that house. "You have kids? This room would make an amazing playroom." Kathleen: Right. Shai: That would be ... they're not going to say that. Kathleen: There's your man cave, right? Shai: Right. Exactly, exactly. The other thing was, so I was just listening to your, you had an episode with Rev.com, with Barron a few weeks ago and when he was talking about the audience research they were doing, that really resonates with me because that's the same kind of thing. They were going and asking their audience all these kind of questions about why they had used the product and what they were doing before and all those kind of things and they'd taken that and used that in their marketing. They'd taken those phrases and that became the subheading on their website. Other people would come and read that and they were like, "Yeah, I certainly ... This really resonates with me" because it was real language from customers, from other customers who were like them. So we're just doing that in real time. Kathleen: It's so simple and it seems so obvious just to use the words the customers use but it's amazing how few companies actually do it. Shai: Yeah, I saw a statistic recently that 94% of customers think personalization is critical to the success of their business and 4% say they're doing a lot of that. Kathleen: That's an incredibly wide gap. Shai: Yeah, and the mismatch, then they dug deeper and they're like, "What's stopping you?" It was all like, "It's hard to know where to start" and "We don't have the tools. We don't have the technical capability to do that." How Hard Is It To Implement Personalization? Kathleen: So to that exact point, how technical do you need to be to set this up, to use it, to run it, et cetera? Shai: You don't. You need to be able to install a little java script or have a developer who can do that. Kathleen: I was just going to say, so if you can't do that, if you have somebody who runs your website for you, whether that's in your company or an outside contractor, this is what, a five minute job? A one hour job? Shai: Yeah, that part is like a one minute job. It's copying and pasting. It's the same as if you were installing Google analytics on your website or any of these other things, that is you copy this and you paste it into your website builder. Then from there it's literally a point a click kind of, "Here is a ..." It's a flow chart builder, right? You start building out these parts. Is the person on my site anonymous? Yes? Let's ask them this question and then let's pitch them this offer. Kathleen: A series of if/then statements kind of. Shai: Essentially, yeah, with questions along the way and an offer at the end to buy it. Then you hit, Publish in the corner. You press the Publish button and whatever you've set up will immediately go out and be live on your site. Learn More About RightMessage Kathleen: Great. Well, if someone's interested in learning more about RightMessage, what should they do? Shai: They should go to RightMessage.com. In fact, they should go to RightMessage.com/impact. I'll set something up there that will get them something that the ordinary folk don't get. Kathleen: Aaah, special offer. I will put a link in the show notes for that. Shai: Yeah, I'll sort something out for your wonderful listeners. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Great, thank you for that. I'm curious to get your take on the two questions that I always ask my guests. Company or individual, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Who do you think is doing really great work with inbound marketing right now? Shai: I like this question. It's a difficult question, you know? Kathleen: Well, there are so many possible answers. I'll just preface it with, it's interesting to see the direction that people go. Some people provide answers that are within the marketing world of marketers doing inbound marketing really well. Others come with these examples that are just from out in the wild and both are equally fascinating so I always love hearing what people say. Shai: Yeah. For me at the moment kind of the inbound, kind of the good inbound marketing is the non-obnoxious, not in your face, the softer marketing, the educational marketing. I think everyone is starting to or a lot of people are starting to move that way. They're kind of tired of the in your face stuff. When I think of who's really good at that it's people like, I keep getting e-mails from Ben Orenstein at Tuple who just every e-mail I get from him I'm like, "He is not trying to sell me right now" but it makes me want to buy. It's so, here is tons of value and here's some cool stuff. You're learning about the product along the way but it's not a hard pitch. We love that. Kathleen: It's interesting that you say that because I'm, somebody once said to me and now I've become a big fan if it and I wish I could remember who first said it, that the best sales people do not sell, they help people buy. It sounds like that's exactly what he's doing in those e-mails. Shai: Yeah, and it's also, it's people that aren't afraid to say, "Maybe it isn't right for you." The assumption of marketing is that, 'You should buy this" is flawed, right? It's, "We're going to help you figure out whether you should buy this. If you should then I want to explain why it would be good for you. If it is ... but it might not be and I'll take you too." A lot of our customers are really good at this at well and it's kind of what brought them to us is that we also don't go for that hard thing. So Alex Hillman, Stackingthebricks.com and Pat Flynn I think is doing some really amazing marketing at SmartPassiveIncome. Josh Duty, Fearless Salary Negotiation, he's doing incredibly at SEO and then leading from that to courses in coaching and so on. Yeah, I'll stop there. Kathleen: That sounds like some great examples. Shai: Yeah. Kathleen: Well, I'll definitely put those links in the show notes because those are some new ones that I haven't heard before and that always makes me excited. Second question, with the world of digital marketing changing so quickly how do you personally stay up to date and educate yourself? Shai: Yeah. So much of what I'm learning about marketing at the moment is just from interacting with our customers. I don't have ... There are very, very few websites or podcasts that I subscribe to and listen to every one. I wait until the smart people I have surrounded myself with recommend something or start talking about something. That's when I take note. That's also my hack for not getting overloaded by all the new information. It's just ... Kathleen: It's easy to do. Shai: And it also, it means you're getting so many ... You're learning so many strategies from people who aren't quite in your realm. Like we were saying at the beginning, right, you take marketing and technology and you put them together. Of course that happens. When we start working with our customers who are like in the Bee photography world. That is a real thing. Yeah, they take photographs of bees and and honey and it's like the stuff that they're- Kathleen: That is incredibly niche. I love it. Shai: They're going to have totally different kinds of conversations than I am and learning stuff. So yeah, just surrounding myself with really different people I found far more effective than following one source. Also, just there's so much of these new marketing developments aren't new at all. It's all just kind of ... It's the old school marketing and then translated then now into the online space. A lot of that's what we're trying to do is taking stuff that makes sense in the real world and bring it on line. I find it's easier to learn about marketing from the old school. I try not to- Kathleen: A few people have said that to me, that some of their favorite marketing books are the ones from 40, 50 years ago. Shai: Hmm, 100%. It's the same in software. It's kind of the same in programming as well. There's these new technologies coming on the scene every week. Sometimes it pays to be just like, "The old stuff can work." Keep an eye on the new things but don't jump on them immediately. Will this really work in my business? Reason it out for best principles. Kathleen: That's great advice because I will say I think one of the weaknesses of most marketers I know is they fall very easily for shiny penny syndrome where there's that new thing. They want to try it but it's easy to get distracted and spend a lot of time and resources chasing that new thing as opposed to investing in things that are going to deliver for the long term. Shai: Yeah, especially when, like in the feedback look from trying sometime in your marketing to know whether it's working can sometimes be quite long. It can be really hard. You can try something new and you may not see results from it immediately depending on what it is but it may be working well and it may be about to work for your future. To that same thing is like, you start to see your metrics creep up. It could be from the thing you just did this week. It could be from the thing you did a few months ago and it's just taken time to really kick in. Kathleen: Yeah. Shai: So yeah, if you're immediately, it's like, "Oh no. I've tried this for week. It's not working. We've got to go and try something else" you're never going to, it's never going to work. How To Connect With Shai Kathleen: Well, it's so interesting hearing what you've learned through this process of looking at all these sites and I'm fascinated by what RightMessage can do and the fact that it's easy for anybody to use. If somebody wants to, has a question about what you talked about and wants to reach out and connect with you, what's the best way or them to do that? Shai: You can always ... My DM's open on Twitter @ShaiSC. Kathleen: This is how we met. Shai: It is, exactly. S-H-A-I-S-C. Yeah, that's going to be the easiest way to get a quick reply from me. Kathleen: And I can testify to that. It was very fast. I DM'd you and you responded right away. Shai: Yeah. Kathleen: Great, well I will but the link to your Twitter handle on the show notes and if you're listening and you enjoyed this, liked what you heard, as always I would really appreciate a five star review on Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice. If you're listening and you know somebody else doing kick ass inbound marketing work, Tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to interview them. Thank you so much, Shai. Shai: Thank you for having me.

Animalz is quickly gaining a reputation for being one of the top content marketing shops in the B2B SaaS world. Here's how they approach content creation... This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Animalz marketing director Jimmy Daly dives into his process for creating content for Animalz. As the guy in charge of both marketing AND sales for Animalz, he splits his time between marketing/lead generation and closing deals. When he's on sales calls, Jimmy pays close attention to the questions he gets from prospects and turns each of those questions into an article on the Animalz blog. This process has netted strong sales results that the company can track directly back to the individual articles Jimmy creates. This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford, Connecticut, and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with special guests including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS."   Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my conversation with Jimmy include: Jimmy is responsible for marketing and sales at Animalz, which is a B2B content marketing agency. Because Jimmy is involved in both sales and marketing, he is constantly listening on sales calls for the questions prospects are asking and turning them into articles on the Animalz blog. Jimmy thinks that a lot of marketers do buyer personas wrong and focus too much on creating fictional characters. In his case, he thinks of his audience on a spectrum from tactical to strategic. If he's writing to a tactical audience, that person needs instructions on how to do something. If he's writing to a strategic audience, they need a framework for how to make a big decision.  By focusing on creating content about the questions he gets in the sales process, Jimmy can in some cases attribute three or four deals worth $50,000 to $75,000 to an individual blog article. When new articles are published, Animalz emails them out to its newsletter distribution list, but Jimmy is also a fan of using Tweet storms to gain traction and visibility online. Another form of content that Animalz has seen get strong results for its clients is thought leadership articles. They define thought leadership as essays that express a strong, original point of view. The average new article on the Animalz website gets 3,000 to 5,000 views in the first two months after publication.  Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Connect with Jimmy on LinkedIn Follow Jimmy on Twitter Check out the Animalz website Listen to the podcast to learn more about how Jimmy leverages the conversations he's having with sales prospects to build a more effective marketing strategy for Animalz. 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 Jimmy Daley, who's the marketing director at Animalz. Welcome, Jimmy. Jimmy Daly (Guest): Thanks so much, Kathleen. I'm happy to be here. Jimmy and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: Yeah, I'm excited to have you here because your agency has come up twice on this podcast before. As my loyal listeners know, I always ask my guests who is doing inbound marketing really well, company or individual, and two times now I've had one of my guests say Animalz. I think most recently it was Barron Caster at rev.com. So whenever I hear that sort of pattern happen, I think I need to talk to that person. Jimmy: That's awesome. That makes my day. Kathleen: Yeah, so I'm glad you're here. And for the listeners, can you just talk a little bit about who you are, your background, as well as what Animalz does? About Jimmy Daly and Animalz Jimmy: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm a longtime B2B content marketer. I've been working in some capacity in content marketing for almost 10 years. I started as a writer, evolved to kind of managing freelancers and other writers, and now as a marketing director at Animalz, I'm responsible for new business. So I'm in charge of marketing the company and then also doing our sales, which has been a very interesting evolution, as I think we'll probably get into a little bit. Jimmy: Animalz is a content marketing agency. Primarily, we work with B2B SaaS companies. We've been around for about four years. We're a distributed team, a fantastic team too, we have some really great people. We work with awesome customers. I feel we've built a model that allows us to hire great people, pay them good salaries, that allows us to create really, really high quality work, which helps us attract fantastic clients. So it's a great system and a really fun place to work. Kathleen: That's great, and obviously, it's contributing to you guys producing great work, because the word on the street is that you're a good agency to work with. Aligning Sales and Marketing Kathleen: One of the things I was fascinated by when you and I first connected is how you talked about, I asked you what was really moving the needle and you talked about some of the ways that you're kind of aligning sales and marketing. Because you kind of are like a one-man sales and marketing team, correct? Jimmy: That is correct, yes. Kathleen: Yeah, and it's funny we talked about- Jimmy: To caveat by saying... Sorry, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. It feels unfair to take too much credit for all the amazing business that we get because so much of it is driven by word of mouth. I feel fortunate that in my first role doing sales that we have very low volume requirements, right? We're not like a SaaS company that needs hundreds or thousands of new customers a month. We only need two or three or four for a really fantastic month. Kathleen: Yeah, but it's interesting to me because I think there's a lot of conversations that happen amongst people that work at really large companies about what is the best way to achieve sales and marketing alignment. I think that sometimes the fact that there are just a lot of people involved kind of serves as a barrier to seeing what could be a much simpler and more elegant solution. I liked when you talked about how you address this issue that you could be a larger team doing what you're doing, you just happen to be one guy. It shows how when you're one person and you have to do it all, how you align with yourself. So I want to talk about that a little bit. Jimmy: Yeah, definitely. Well, certainly, it's easier with just one person, right? I'm a writer at heart and so I'm constantly looking for ideas to spark what will be the next blog post for the Animalz blog. Luckily, I get so much of that through our sales process, right? So I spend a lot of time on the phone, meeting potential customers, trying to close deals, onboarding new customers, and that provides me with a lot of fodder for blog posts. Jimmy: We have a very, very lean process where basically I am just constantly observing the things that I'm hearing in those sales calls, and then documenting them on the blog in one form or another. So if I hear two or three different people on a sales call mention a similar thing, then that gets jotted down. That goes in the editorial calendar. There's probably two dozen of those in the editorial calendar right now that have not even been written yet. Actually, one thing I've learned very related to this is that most B2B SaaS companies have very, very similar problems. Because we're so specialized in that niche, it allows us to by speaking to one company, we can speak to almost all of them. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a great point, and it really hits home, because one of the owners of IMPACT is a man named Marcus Sheridan, who has literally written a book called, They Ask You Answer. He wasn't a marketer by trade, he was a pool guy. He had a pool company, and he just started listening to the questions he was getting from customers because he was out on sales calls all the time, and then answering them. The answers that he wrote in the form of blog posts generated a tremendous amount of traffic, leads, and then eventually sales for the company. Now of course he's a marketing speaker and an author. But what I love about that approach and what I so appreciate is it's so elegant in its simplicity. I often say, at least in the case of Marcus, it took a non-marketer to figure out that that was a thing. Jimmy: Yeah, that's so interesting. Kathleen: It's common sense, right? It's solving for the people. If one person has a question, odds are there's like hundreds, if not thousands of them, out there with the same question. They just haven't happened to reach out to you directly to ask it yet. Jimmy: Absolutely. Now that I've had this experience of experiencing the full circle of someone finding a blog post, reaching out, talking through problems, realizing there's another blog post to be written that sparked someone else to reach out, et cetera, et cetera, I, thinking back on previous jobs, realized that I hadn't spent hardly any time talking to customers. I was just so focused on optimizing a piece of content for search or doing keyword research or trying to build links to a piece of content that I overlooked this very, very obvious fact that you have to actually talk to the people that you're trying to reach so that you can have a very nuanced understanding of their problems. Do You Really Need Buyer Personas? Kathleen: Yeah, and it's funny that you say this because I also have had long conversations with Marcus about the concept of buyer personas, because he actually says you don't need buyer personas in marketing, which is somewhat controversial because I feel like go to any marketing conference, read any marketing book, talk to any marketing expert, and then I'll be like start with buyer personas, right? Jimmy: Right, right. Kathleen: His point is, it's kind of related to what you're saying, which is that instead of spending a month doing all this research and interviews and this and that, and then creating this like fictional profile, if you spend that same month and just sit down and catalog 50 questions and write 50 answers out in the form of blogs, you'll be so much further ahead than you would have been had you done a month's worth of audience persona research, which I think is true. Jimmy: Fascinating. Kathleen: That's sort of what you're saying. Like, no staged interview can substitute for an actual live sales conversation. Jimmy: No, it's so true, and I would agree with Marcus that I'm personally not a huge believer in buyer personas. I'm sure in some cases they're executed in a way that's really useful. Typically, the way that we see them executed is like, Software Sally is a mid-career manager and she has this problem. It's so fictional that it's hard to take this fake demographic and turn it into a marketing campaign. Jimmy: We actually think about that in a very different way, which is so like when I'm writing a post for the Animalz blog, I'm thinking of the reader on a spectrum from tactical to strategic. If we're writing to a tactical audience, that person needs instructions on how to do something. If we're writing to a strategic audience, they need a framework for how to make a big decision. And a lot of little steps is actually not very helpful. They need more of an overarching principle. There's kind of a mix of those different things, but I found that to be a much more effective way to think through, okay, we have this topic, there's this tactical way we could go about it, but if we want to reach this more decision maker level person, we have to kind of take a step back and try to understand the higher level problem and address it from that angle instead. Kathleen: No, I always say we get caught up in this term buyer persona, and as you say, people tend to create these somewhat useless but entertaining profiles of people who don't exist. What we really need is buyer persona, it's good audience research, which essentially is what you're doing when you have these conversations with people and catalog what they're saying. Jimmy's Process For Capturing Content Ideas Kathleen: So let's talk through an actual example. You're having these sales calls, you're getting these questions. Walk me through your process. Is it simply you just make a note and you say, "Oh, I better go write a blog on this?" Or do you have a structured process around it? Jimmy: I wish I could say I had a very structured process. I don't though. I think over years of doing content marketing, I'm tuned in, right? I'm observing very carefully what people are saying, how they're saying it. Are they frustrated? Are they excited? I sort of pull those threads as I uncover that we're onto something. Jimmy: A very good example of this happened, I don't know, probably almost a year ago now, where I got on three sales calls in a week and three different people told me they had this exact same problem, which was that their organic traffic was actually declining over the last three months or so. I thought that was very interesting, and in each case it had prompted them to do some research about why their traffic was declining, reach out to some friends to try to help them figure out what was going on, and then that prompted them to reach out to an agency to potentially help them. Jimmy: To me, that was like the most obvious example because it happened in such a short period of time. But we wrote a blog post about that, about why organic traffic declines and things you might do to reverse that trend. That post has been hugely successful for us. It turns out a lot of people have that problem. Just through our very, very lean process, we made sure that it was documented, published, distributed, and I could attribute probably three to four more deals that were closed, at least in part, as a result of that exact article, and those deals are good for, $50,000 to $75,000 a year each. Kathleen: Wow. Jimmy: So, it's a easy, simple process with a big payoff. Kathleen: I love hearing that kind of data because you always have people who say, "I don't have time to blog," but I don't know anybody who's billable rate is as high as $50,000 an hour, or let's say it took you four hours, $10,000 an hour. Even some of the best attorneys I know don't charge that much. So, there's a good case there for spending the time. Jimmy: Absolutely. Animalz Content Promotion Strategy Kathleen: Now you've mentioned you write it, you edit it, you optimize it, and then you distribute it. Can you just talk through a little bit, I mean, is this a case of you write these blogs, you put them on your site, and it's, if you build it, they will come? Or is your content distribution or promotion strategy somewhat responsible for the results you're getting? Jimmy: That's a good question. So a few things happen. I should again caveat this by saying, as an agency, we have very low volume requirements. Our blog frankly doesn't get all that much traffic, doesn't need a ton of traffic in order to really help the business. Two to three new deals in a month is a fantastic month. So I actually don't go crazy distributing content. Jimmy: We have an email list with a few thousand people on it. They get everything. I have a personal email newsletter with about 5,000 people on it. I include our stuff in that. We have a really strong network of customers that we will sometimes ask to help us amplify content. Then other than that, I'm a fan of tweet storms. Whenever I publish something new, tweet storms have been a really useful way for us to get stuff out. Then I ask our team to help re-tweeting or sharing stuff. So again, it's simple. The reach is not enormous, by any means, but it's big enough that it works. Kathleen: That's great. Have you done this with clients or have you advised clients on doing this and have they seen similar results? Jimmy: Hmm, that's a great question. In a few cases, yes. In some cases, it just doesn't quite work. So like for example, many of our customers are B2B SaaS. Their primary objective is growing organic search traffic. So we're doing the things you would probably expect. We do a lot of keyword research, we write really long informative posts, we optimize them for search, et cetera, et cetera. That provides a certain amount of leverage in their distribution, because over time they can get a lot more traffic out of organic search than we'll ever be able to get for them doing one-off promotional things. Jimmy: For some of our other customers though, there's this bucket of customers that we work with, and we produce thought leadership content for them. That type of content also works very well using the same very simple mechanisms that we use for our own content, because it's more about making an impact, sharing an idea, and less about the more traditional content distribution where it's about basically page views. Kathleen: Now can you define what you mean by thought leadership content? Because I know people use that term in different ways. Jimmy: It's funny you ask that. I have a half-written blog posts about this exact topic, because you're right, people do think of it in very different ways. The way that it typically manifested Animalz, a thought leadership content strategy is built around sort of this idea that we internally call movement first, where the emphasis is really on sharing strong original ideas and that is like the core of the strategy for that type of content. It often looks more like an essay than it does regular content marketing. It often lives on Medium or a different part of the site than the rest of your blog content. Those things don't all have to be true. Jimmy: We do have a couple of cases with customers where we're doing SEO-driven content with thought leadership characteristics. Simply meaning that we've started with a keyword, but then we've taken a very different approach to the style and the tone of that article. I guess ultimately it means different things. To me the thing that it really means is this piece of content is born from a great idea and it is hopefully encapsulated in that article in a very concise way. Kathleen: That's interesting, and I love that you mentioned not all of this content lives on your site. You mentioned Medium, which I'm always curious about Medium. I think it has so much potential, but you can also, if you don't do it right, spend a lot of time with no results. Jimmy: No, totally. I'm actually personally not a huge fan for the problem that you just stated. We have encouraged a couple customers recently to launch personal blogs that are affiliated with the company that they work for, which is a strategy that I'm liking so far. Obviously, there are institutional hurdles to jump over when you do that kind of thing. Kathleen: Right. Jimmy: But owning the platform provides a bunch of advantages that tend to make it worth it. How To Approach Bottom of the Funnel Content Kathleen: Yeah. Going back to this notion of sales and marketing alignment, at a very, very simplistic level, what you're talking about is being very mindful of the questions you're getting in the sales process, and then answering those questions in your articles. I feel like this has the potential to be incredibly powerful, but it also has the potential to be insanely misused by content creators who venture into the territory of being overly self-promotional. In other words, using a sales question as an excuse to write a blog that is all about the company and their products as opposed to bigger picture questions that a prospect has. Can you talk me through, like do you have any personal guardrails around how you handle that type of content, what topics you'll cover, what you won't, and how often you venture into that very, very bottom of the funnel kind of topic area? Jimmy: Wow, that's a really interesting question. I don't know that I have come across a situation yet where the only answer to the question is you should hire Animalz. I mean, certainly I drop mentions in there occasionally, but just as a company we think about this so differently. Jimmy: I'll give you an example. You know our core business is content marketing services. Through this process of closely observing the problems that come up on sales calls and then also the problems that come up with customers, because there's plenty of those too, we're in the very early stages of building out some software solutions to address those problems. I anticipate that in the future, this problem that you bring up will become more top of mind because we're going to have more things to promote, right? There's just so few companies that are interested, willing, and ready to hire an expensive content marketing agency, that hopefully there will be many, many more that would be interested in paying $10 or $50 or $100 a month to use a piece of software that would solve some of these same things. So yeah, that's interesting. I imagine that's something that we'll have to be asking ourselves more closely over the next six to nine months. Kathleen: Yeah, I think a good example is a question that everybody gets at some point in a sales process is how much does it cost, right? That's a very different question than what do I do if my organic traffic is declining? How much does it cost in the wrong hands could be answered in the form of an article. That's basically like a substitute for your pricing page. In the right hands, it's an opening point for discussion around the factors that impact cost. Jimmy: Got it, okay. I think I better understand your question now, so that's a great point. In general, I would like for us to be as transparent as absolutely possible. Interestingly, we find that many of our customers do not have strong Google Analytic skills. So as I write the post about how to diagnose problems with the organic traffic, I just explain exactly the steps I would take in Google Analytics to start doing the research. We're happy to tell you exactly what those steps would be. Then the hope is, and often the reality as well, is that that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's one of so many possible things going on that they ultimately possibly could need help with. It sounds Cliche, but we established that little bit of trust early on, so hopefully they'll think of us when the time actually does come. Kathleen: Yeah, it sounds like your focus is much more on educational topics than it is on, I would call them sort of sales topics, but it's really that bottom of the funnel, those types of questions, which I like. So you're answering questions that are educating the audience and making them smarter, not so much answering questions that help them choose to pull the trigger and purchase from you. Jimmy: That is correct, yes. Kathleen: Yeah, there's an important distinction there. Jimmy: Definitely. The Results Kathleen: Can you tell me a little bit about, do you have any sort of data around like the traction? Do these posts tend to get, percentage-wise, more traffic than some of your other articles? You mentioned that some of them have led to deals. What have the results been from using this approach? Jimmy: That's an interesting question. I can tell you, as I mentioned, none of the posts on our blog are what I call whales. None of them are just like outliers getting tons and tons of traffic. For the most part, they all are, I don't know, they probably 3,000 to 5,000 visits in their first two or three months of publication, which is just okay, but it's not- Kathleen: Which is great, if that's the right 3,000 to 5,000 people, that's all that matters. Jimmy: Totally, yes. Kathleen: You could have 300 to 500 people, and if they were the 300 to 500 people that are looking for an agency, then that's all you would need. Jimmy: Yes, totally. The reason I'm having a little trouble giving you a really specific quantitative answer on how effective they are is because something I've noticed in our sales process is that almost no one reaches out as the result of one interaction or mention of Animalz. It's always two. So they might say, "I heard about you guys at a conference, or a friend mentioned they liked a blog post by you guys, or I'm in this Slack group and someone shared an article that you guys had written." Then sometime later on, they were on Twitter or they were searching for something, and they came across a second piece. It seems to be the power of those two things together that prompts people to reach out, but it's very difficult to track what what those two things are, because usually one of them, or in many cases, one of those things has happened offline and we're not going to be able to get data on it. Kathleen: It's funny that you mentioned that because as I mentioned at the beginning, I reached out to you after hearing your name twice. Jimmy: Yes. Kathleen: I think I'm proof in the pudding. Jimmy: Totally, yes. I think this is probably a little different than the way that most SaaS companies operate. So agencies are able to grow by word of mouth in a way that SaaS companies simply are not. I know I keep throwing out caveats, but we are writing about SaaS content marketing all the time, but we are not a SaaS company. Therefore a lot of it is like do as we say, not necessarily as we do. Kathleen: Interesting. Well, I love that. I love the process. Any other guidelines for somebody listening around how to write those articles or how to make them especially useful? Jimmy: Get feedback on them from people that don't work at the same company that you do. So that's something that I do. I don't do it as often now, but I did it quite a bit when we were initially getting the Animalz blog rolling. I just reached out to friends in the content marketing world and asked them to review drafts of our posts, and I got a lot of really good feedback on that. Kathleen: I love that. That is so simple. It's so simple and something that so few people do. Jimmy: Yes, totally. You can just get better feedback if you don't talk to the person you're asking to review it on a daily basis. I'm part of a couple of Slack groups full of content marketers, a Facebook group full of content marketers. Those have been really amazing resources for getting good feedback on work. I discover things in those feedback sessions that I can't imagine I ever would have figured out any other way. Kathleen: Oh, can you share any of those Slack or Facebook groups, the names of them? Jimmy: Yeah, so there are a couple. So there's a Facebook group I'm in that I believe is just called Content Marketers with an exclamation point. Very good group. I started a Slack group of my own called Content Marketing Career Growth. There is another one I'm in. It is called Content in UX, which is also very good. It's a huge one. There's a ton of people in there, a really, really good community. I'm sure there are others. If you'd like, I can send you links. Kathleen: Yes, please do, and I will include them in the show notes. That would be great. Jimmy: Cool. Kathleen: Yeah, I found similarly some of those groups to be incredibly helpful. I mean, we have our own group which has IMPACT Elite, that's a Facebook group, and then I am a member of Online Geniuses, which is huge. It's all different marketing disciplines. Then I think I might be a member of Content in UX. Sometimes there's so many groups I lose track. Jimmy: Yes, it is easy to lose track. Kathleen: But that's a great tip, to just go outside. If you were talking to a company that had a larger sales and marketing team, any thoughts or advice or insights for bigger company teams on how to operationalize a process like this? Jimmy: Yes, so the first thing, in a perfect world, this would be easy to do, I would have content marketers get on sales calls and I would have sales people write blog posts. Not as a way to test them, but just to have them operate in the other person's world every now and then. I feel like it's trendy, especially for SaaS companies to say every one of the company does customer support twice a year or something like that. I think that if you are going to be doing marketing to support a sales team or you're doing sales that is hopefully the result of high quality marketing, you have to be in the other person's shoes at least every now and then. I would definitely recommend that. Jimmy: Also, there was a thing, I spent a year working at QuickBooks doing content marketing for them, and they had a program set up where once a week they would have a real live QuickBooks customer in the office. They were there for the day and people from around the company could book time with them and ask them questions. So you knew that every Thursday from 9:00 to 4:00 a customer would be there and you could schedule time with them and you could ask them whatever questions you want about how they found QuickBooks, what did they find useful, what do they not, et cetera, et cetera. Jimmy: I think for companies of a certain size, assuming you have enough customers to support a program like that, it's a great idea because we would find that in our weekly content meetings, our team would get together and questions would come up that we just didn't have answers to. Then somebody would say, "Oh, well, why don't we just ask the customer on Thursday?" So we'd book time and we would do that. Kathleen: That is so nice to be able to do that. Jimmy: Yeah, it was fantastic. Maybe it's once a quarter, maybe it's twice a year for smaller companies, but formalizing the process is important. Kathleen: I love that. I wish that I could have a customer in the office every week, but alas, we are not in that position at this point. But no, that is a great point about switching roles and sitting in the other seat, because I do think sometimes there's this very natural tension that builds up between sales and marketing, I think you and I talked about this, I used to be on our sales team. Now I'm on our marketing team and I have much more empathy for our salespeople than I think I would have otherwise. Jimmy: Yes. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Yeah, it helps a lot. Well, shifting gears, I'm curious to hear now that I told you several people have mentioned Animalz name when I've asked this question, I'm curious to know who you're going to talk about. So company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Jimmy: Such a good question. So there's a few that come to mind. Am I allowed to offer more than one? Kathleen: Yeah, go for it. Jimmy: I tend to find that companies that do inbound marketing really well build steam and build a strong reputation over time. So I'm a big fan of not just people who are kind of off my radar today, but who have been there for a couple of years and a few that stand out. One company that I think has just done an incredible job over the past five or six years is Wistia. One, because their branding has evolved from, well, it's still friendly and kind of playful, but it's so refined now. It's tangible. The good vibes are tangible when you visit their site. They write really high quality stuff. Their videos are excellent. I mean, I'm not really a video person, but I find myself on their site all the time because I'm just curious what their marketing team is up to, because there's always something new and a little different going on. So that's one that I would call out. Kathleen: That's a good one. Jimmy: You mentioned Barron Caster from Rev at the beginning of this podcast, and it's funny, I was actually just on a call with him this morning. As I've been exposed to what he and the team over there are doing, I am increasingly impressed. One thing that I like about what they do is that their product marketing is straightforward, obvious, but not overly promotional at all. Jimmy: A good example is they have their product marketing team, and they've tied this into their content strategy as well, their product marketing team has come up with solutions for all the possible entry points to a transcription service, and I find that they've just done it in such a perfect little way. So for example, they built iPhone apps for phone call recording, right? That creates this very easy transcription workflow for journalists or anyone who has to do research or interviews for their job. They did the same thing with a voice recording app. They have a Zoom integration. They've just figured out all the little ways that people might work transcription into their day-to-day, and they've addressed that. Jimmy: I find that type of subtle, very useful product marketing to be inspiring, right? Because they're not hammering you with ads and obnoxious copy. They're just kind of offering you a dozen different ways to build their really, really good product into the work you're already doing. So I love that. Kathleen: Yeah, I would agree. They do a nice job of really tightly aligning marketing and product. Jimmy: Yes, yes, definitely. Kathleen: Well, a second question, digital marketing is changing so quickly, and the number one gripe I hear from marketers is that they have a really hard time keeping up with everything. So how do you personally keep up and stay up to date and educate yourself? Jimmy: I do most of that offline, to be honest. There's a couple of blogs that I keep track of, like Tomasz Tunguz blog I really like, especially now that I work in sales. He talks about sales quite a bit. He also talks about just the SaaS industry, which I find to be increasingly useful information as I spend less time on the ground doing the marketing and more time talking to customers. So that's one. Jimmy: I'm a very loyal reader of Ben Thompson's Stratechery blog. Similar thing, like his really deep dives on business strategy I find to be useful. I feel like that has provided me with a lot of context for conversations that I have with customers. Jimmy: But like I said, I try to do quite a bit offline too. So one really fantastic resource that I read recently was Jim Collins, Good to Great. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a great book. It's such a classic. Jimmy: It's so good. You know, the examples that he uses in there are just timeless. They've stood up so well. Kathleen: Absolutely. Jimmy: So that's one. I have a book on my desk that I keep keep with me all the time, called On Writing Well by William Zinsser, which helps me with the day-to-day writing of blog posts and emails, but also sales proposals now. Whenever I find myself getting stuck on something, I'll open up that book and the answer is always in there. Kathleen: And it's called Unwriting. Jimmy: It's called On Writing Well. Kathleen: Oh, On Writing, got it. Jimmy: Yes. William Zinsser is the author. Kathleen: Great. Oh, lots of new good ones here. I always like when I hear new ones, because this is how I stay up to date is I just ask other people and then follow their lead in my podcast. Jimmy: That's a great idea. How To Connect With Jimmy Kathleen: Well, Jimmy, if somebody wants to learn more about Animalz or wants to reach out and connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that? Jimmy: Yeah, animalz.co, we have a kind of outdated, not very fancy website, but hopefully the content there is helpful to you. We also have a podcast and you can find all that stuff on there. Kathleen: Animalz with a z, important to know. Jimmy: Yes, Animalz with a z, and then if you'd like to reach out, please do. Probably the best way to do that is Twitter. I spend a lot of time on Twitter, probably too much, but it's just Jimmy_Daly. Yeah, if you ever want to chat content strategy, hit me up. I love chatting about it. Kathleen: Great, well, thank you so much. And if you're listening and you liked what you heard, you learned something new, I would love it if you would give the podcast a five star review on Apple Podcasts. 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, Jimmy. Jimmy: Thank you, Kathleen. That was fun.

Social media collaboration and approval software startup Planable has been growing at a rate of 25% month over month, something the company's co-founder attributes to its marketing team structure. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Planable co-founder Vlad Calus talks about how he built the company's marketing team from the ground up using a three pronged approach focused on people, processes and tools - and why that approach is key to the companies fast growth. Vlad has written a book on building the marketing team of the future and in this interview, he summarizes in detail how Planable's team is structured; the processes they use on a daily, weekly and quarterly basis; and the software tools they've chosen to implement. This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford Connecticut and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with special guests including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS".  Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my conversation with Vlad include: Planable is a content collaboration platform for marketing, freelancers, and agencies. For the first two years of the company's history, the marketing team was trying to use growth hacks to achieve its objectives, but quickly realized that was neither sustainable nor scaleable.  When they hired a new marketing director, the team began a process of studying how high performing marketing teams operated, and from that research, decided to focus on content marketing as the core of their strategy going forward. From their, Vlad identified that there were three main pillars of effective and efficient marketing teams - people, process and tools. When it comes to people, Vlad says that marketing teams need to have individuals with clear roles and clear ownership, as well as a defined quarterly marketing plan. The teams processes need to deliver transparency, consistency and alignment. And the tools that the team uses need to be effective. Vlad's team uses Zoom, Slack, Dropbox, InvisionApp, Google Drive, Planable, and Frame. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the Planable website Follow Vlad on Twitter Connect with Vlad on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to hear Vlad describe, in detail, the approach he used to build Planable's marketing team and how that structure has enabled the company to grow 25% month over month. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and this week my guest is Vlad Calus, who is the co-founder of Planable. Welcome back, Vlad. Vlad Calus (Guest): Thank you. Thank you Kathleen, and thanks for having me. Vlad and Kathleen hamming it up while recording this episode together . Kathleen: I am particularly appreciative that you joined me, and it is crazy late at night, your time, because you are based over in Europe. Vlad: Yeah, exactly. I'm currently in Bucharest, and in Eastern Europe. Kathleen: Well, I appreciate you staying up and burning the midnight oil to join me for this podcast. For those who are listening, can you talk a little bit about what Planable is, and your background? About Planable and Vlad Calus Vlad: Definitely, yeah. So, Planable is a content collaboration platform for marketing, freelancers, and agencies. Basically it's a mock up of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, that helps you preview how the content would look like, like 100% pixel content, and then you can simply just ask for feedback or collaborate with any of the stakeholders in the team, including brand managers, or human resources, or legal, or anyone else just to make sure this is the right content that you want to publish on social media. Then you can just simply ask for an approval, and then schedule the content directly to social media. Kathleen: Great. And you personally have a really interesting background. You went through Techstars, you were on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, you're a very active startup mentor. Can you talk a little bit about your background and what led you to co-founding Planable? Vlad: Yeah, I would love to. So, I would say that at the age of 16, I started participating in a lot of non-profit organizations and starting my own organizations, just because I was feeling and trying to fix the problems in my own community. Like starting from really small problems and then just trying to get some use time and good time for myself, and learning something from everyone. And then at the age of 19, I found my first or second job, and I went to a startup competition called Startup Week in Moldova, in my home country. And I ended up meeting two of my current co-founders of Planable just by accident. I was just walking around them, looking for a team to join during the competition. And when I just started with Xenia, who is my current co-founder, we start chatting about the idea that we wanted to work on, and I just started talking to them, "Hey, may I join with your team? Would really love to participate. I really don't want to go home. I would really like to make it happen." And then we started, on the second day, we started actually working on this idea and debating it more. We participated with something related to the social media, but it was like an initial concept before making everything happen at Planable. And we ended up understanding that all of us shared the same passion and frustration for social media, and frustration in terms of the problems that marketing agencies and social media managers are fighting with. And couple of hours after that, we just won the competition, and we were invited to a pre-accelerated program in Romania. And we just founded a company then, and everything started there, and just in couple of months after that, we ended up being part of Techstars London, which I really believe changed the way our company work and exists, because it gave us a big round of funding, over 120K, and lots of support. We also started the company, we started monetizing the product and the company then, during the Techstars, and gave us the first support from actual people, like actual customers, and people that we understood that really, really believe in our vision, our company, our product, and everything that we are doing right now. Kathleen: That's great. And I've always been impressed by the businesses that have come out of Techstars, and so it's fun to get to talk to someone whose gone through the program. Now, one of the things that I thought was interesting about the experience you've had is, you started right from the very beginning, you're one of the founders, and you've been growing this company, and a lot of the people I talk to on this podcast, we talk about their marketing techniques and strategies, and how that fuels growth. And when you and I spoke, I thought something so interesting was that you have plenty of marketing techniques and strategies, but one of the things that you consider to have been a major contributor to your growth is the way you've structured and grown your marketing team in particular. And so, I wanted to dig into that a little bit more with you, and explore how that has worked, and the results you've gotten. How Planable's Marketing Team Is Structured Vlad: Definitely, yeah. So, changing the way our marketing works, our marketing team works, actually was one of the most important things that happened to this company. Because the product side was always working and ticking, and the product was always developing. We had and we still have a brilliant co-founder and CTO that came up with the product and division, and the way everything works. But we had to compensate this with the marketing and the business, and actually getting the first users and customers to the product. So, the first two years of the company, we were trying really, really hard to do any growth hacks that you could ever read on the internet, and all the Facebook groups, and Slack communities, and Twitter, List, and everything else. I would say that we really tried to bootstrap our way in the most possible way. But then we just understood that nothing is actually working, and nothing is actually scalable. Like really, really scalable that could generate us success in the long term, and that we could actually replicate all of this. So, in I would say April last year, we ended up partnering with a brilliant new employee, who is called Miruna. She's our head of marketing at the moment at Planable, and we just started talking with her about the fact that we need to restructure our marketing team. We need to work on something from the ground up and start making some extreme, extreme changes. And we started this by analyzing the whole industry and understanding what are the biggest issues of marketers, and what are our issues, and starting to understand how can we work on solving this problem from the very beginning. So, right now, marketers are facing enormous challenges when it comes to content marketing, because content marketing was something that we wanted to focus on, completely. This would be the ground zero, the main, main focus of our marketing team. And when we understood that there are couple of main problems, like an enormous amount of wasted time and effort results in productive ... loss of productive hours than creating the content. And lots of PR crisis are being created because there is no clear approval process, there is no feedback, there is no communication. And there are campaign that are launched, that should've been launched exactly because the content was not approved. And then we also started to think more about the content marketing, and how can we actually scale it. So, we ended up thinking about many of the pillars, or many of the parts of content marketing, and how it should be structured. And we ended up creating a system for our own team that we started with couple of colleagues and analyzing this within the team, and then we understood that many big companies actually have a very, very similar structure but we would never actually understood this. This was just the way we were. So, we understood that there are three main parts of ... of an effective and efficient marketing team, and this is the people, the processes and tools. These are the three main pillars that we understood that we have to implement in our team. "There are three main parts of an effective and efficient marketing team - the people, the processes and tools." - Vlad Calus Click here to Tweet this quote Building a Marketing Team: The People Vlad: So, I would say that the first when I was mentioning about the people. People are obviously the essence of any content marketing process. You have to have people in order to deliver everything that you want. And then we understood that in order to have an efficient marketing team, all of us have to have very clear and understood roles in our team. And start working on the main skills and best skills that each of us have, in order to actually succeed. So, we just looked at each other and started to think, "What's all of us do?" Because all of us, we were free marketers back then, and we were like full stack marketers. We were doing everything- Kathleen: Everyone was doing everything? Vlad: Exactly, yeah. Everyone was doing everything, no matter what. We just looked at the task and then was like, "Should I do this? You do this? Okay, let me do this today, and then we can next week ..." This is how we would do it. And then we just understood, we looked at everyone and started discussing this. "Okay, what can I do?" I am not the most, in my case, it was I'm not the most creative person, but I can really deliver. I am an efficient person that can deliver lots of stuff, I can promote our content, I can work on twitching the content exactly the way it is from the technical perspective. And then Miruna, my colleague, was the most creative brain of Planable, because she could really speak the way our brand would speak on social media and digital. This is something she just had this from the very first day, and I was amazed by this. And then we also had the third colleague. She was Luciana, she was the most creative person on the social media. She likes engaging with people on social media. So, we understood that we need to have clear roles. In my case, it was SEO, search engine optimization. I need to tweak all of the content that we are creating, and then I also need to write the content for Planable outside of Planable, like writing guest blogs, and also representing Planable outside the building. Miruna was the one that was creating the content and also doing all the design part, and Luciana was doing the social media and the newsletters. So, we had three main pillars of content marketing, divided by three persons, so we understood that we have clear roles established. This was the first part to create clear roles. And also, the second part was to establish a clear ownership of everything. So, if you, for example, Luciana was doing social media and newsletters. There might be chances when we have to help Luciana, she needs creative ideas or design materials on everything else, but this still means that Luciana has a complete ownership on this. We even made ... and this was the second part, and the third part that in terms of the people, we had to do a clear plan for the next quarter. We are doing 12 weeks iterations on the marketing plans, because we think this is the most efficient. We are not trying to jump on the next six or 12 months, or even three years. We believe that this might be a waste of time, so this is why we try to stick close to three months iterations only. So, just to sum up, this was, for us, having a clear ownership, having clear roles, and have a clear definitive marketing plan for the next three months on all of the marketing objectives that we do. Kathleen: Yeah, we use quarterly planning as well, and I agree with you. You certainly could come up with a plan for a longer time horizon, but so much changes, and I've really found over time that quarterly is the most effective time interval for that kind of thing. Vlad: Yeah, definitely. I also was speaking with lots of teams that they are also using that quarterly, but also six weeks iteration. This is definitely something that you can do. Unfortunately, being a small team such as ours, it's hard to actually feel like you've implemented a lot during the six weeks, so we just give us lots of time during this 12 weeks, like three months that we do quarterly. Kathleen: Yeah. So, that's how you approach the people element of your team- Vlad: Exactly, yeah. Kathleen: Yeah. Vlad: And there is also something that we also related to the people, something that was super, super important for us. We understood that we cannot do everything, so this is why we need to get other stakeholders into the team. Meaning that we started using lots of video and audio production teams, like design and branding, website building, link building, data scrapping, people on the PR side, people on the page marketing, and so on. Because we believe that everyone should do the best that they could, and if you don't have the time, but have the resources, you should definitely use. Because for example, we are also doing people of marketing, this is a video blog, and we just understood that we would waste a lot of time on video production. We can film, or we can create a content, but editing and post producing the content is super, super hard for us. Kathleen: Yeah. Building a Marketing Team: The Processes Vlad: Yeah, so moving on. The second part was about the processes, because in terms of the processes, we wanted to make sure that we don't have only a clear plan, but we can also implement all of this plan and we can deliver everything that we proposed ourselves. Unfortunately, lots of teams are making critical mistakes in terms of this, because they are not having the clear workflow and the clear processes established within the team, and within the whole company. And we understood that we have, and we need three main aspects of this. First, we put transparency at the top of our processes. And we put transparency at the core of our entire workflow, because we believe that transparency was the most important thing, and transparency in terms of what's everyone doing today, this week, this month? What are the main files that we should access, for example, I should have the access to all of the marketing files, and all of the marketing materials, even though I don't actually have a need of them, but I should have them in case I need to be involved in this process. And transparency, because there is, for example, social media or email marketing teams, they have two departments and therefore two ways that they are not even communicating between them at the time that they most need, because we believe that collaboration empowers teams to not only create better content, but also be more efficient, and better at the way content marketing team works. Then the second part was about consistency. We understood that we need clear consistency on everything we do. For example, when I just started content marketing and writing articles, this was one and a half years ago. I was literally staring at the blank Google Docs document for 20 or 30 minutes, and could not came up with any ideas at all. So, because of that, I was just trying to get inspired all around the internet with any ideas that I could, and just writing random keywords, and starting to write something from those keywords, just to get this creative flow going somewhere. And then I tried to make it consistent as I could, so I just had the task in my task management tool that each day I am writing at least one hour a day. No matter what, no matter if this is good, no matter how perfect this is, but I just wanted to write. And then at the end of the week, I was starting to editing all of this content, and putting everything that I could. Because I was trying to throw all the raw idea that I had, and instead of editing and then being depressed because nothing really works, I was just trying to constantly came up, like throw ideas to this digital paper, and make sure that I move and I do something actually. Kathleen: Yeah. It's a great goal to be able to write out an hour a day. I feel like so many people say they're going to do something like that, and then they never follow through, so kudos to you for actually doing it. Vlad: Yeah, because I believe that a lot of marketers, and they really show this when I was speaking with marketers over the past year, a lot of marketers have exactly this struggle of writing content. They think that writing an article of 2000 words, or 3000, or even in my case writing a book of 30 000 words, this is super complicated. But I think about this like a process that you have to complete, and something that you have to deliver if you are consistent, and I believe that writing, especially writing, this is a skill that you empower with consistency. If you write more, you can create more and you write better. Kathleen: Yeah, and we should mention that you are a published author. You did write an entire book called Marketing Teams of the Future, which is sort of what we're talking about here in terms of how you built your team, so this isn't just a couple blog posts that you're getting out. This was an entire book. Vlad: Yeah, exactly. Because I focused the book exactly on this part, how to build your marketing teams by showing all of our examples of the team, and then speaking with some of the best marketing teams out there, from InVisionApp, Digital Crowd, Night Watch, and many more, and trying to understand what are the most efficient teams in the world, and how can we do this better with our help and anyone else. And then the third part of processes was about alignment, like making sure that alignment starts with a clear strategy, and then with consistent daily variables. In our team, these are two parts that we did. The first part is that we have a marketing meeting at 10:00 AM each Monday. There is absolutely no chance that we skip this meeting, unless you are on vacation we give you the full freedom on your vacation. But usually if you're traveling, if you're not in the office, we will connect you with a Skype call or Zoom call, or anything else, and we'll do this meeting at least for 10 or 15 minutes to make sure that everyone is aligned. And then the second part, also something that lots of marketing teams give, I believe is super important to do it one to one's between the marketing managers and between the marketing teams themselves because there are lots of things that people usually want to speak, but we just miss speaking just because maybe this is not the right time, or maybe this is not the right environment. Or this is just not the conversation that you would have at the desk with other colleagues in there. And this is why, if you at least plan one, one to one, at least once a month, or in our case once in two weeks, this will help you make sure that everyone is on the same page. You have everyone is expecting the same thing from you and from the team, and from the deliverables and everything that you do. Kathleen: Yeah. So, you've got your three points under people, you've got three points under process. Let's recap each of those again just so that everybody's following along. Vlad: Definitely, yeah. So, in terms of the people, the three things that we did was about making a clear ownership, what's everyone doing, and then the second part was about establishing clear roles, and clear things that everyone is doing. And then the third part was about creating a marketing plan for the next quarter, because this is what we do at the quarter, and this is something that I would recommend. And in terms of the processes, there were three parts of what we do, and I would suggest implementing in your team as well, this is first of all transparency. Everything has to be transparent across your marketing organization. The second part is consistency. Really embrace consistency from the very beginning. Try to do content marketing each day, try to write an article each day, do social media each day. Write at least one newsletter each day, and you will see that day by day, you will feel improvement in yourself, and your own marketing team as well. And then the third part is about alignment by making sure that everyone is on the same page, and discussing and communicating all of the expectations and the variables clearly within your team. Kathleen: I love it. Thank you for recapping that. And then you had ... so, in addition to people and processes, you had sort of your third overarching category of things. Could you talk a little bit about that? Building a Marketing Team: The Tools Vlad: Yeah, the third part was about the tools, and in terms of the tools, I would say that this is pretty straight forward, but I want to mention first of all that, do not rely on tools because no automation tool can or should replace the creative force of your team. Because when time consuming, repetitive tasks are automated, these billable hours can't be spent on creative work. So, we should work only with the tools that we really understand that value for us, and that really feed for our team. And in my case, in the book I just presented a couple of tools that I can also send you the links after that in email, but in terms of the list that we are currently working with the tools, and something that we would suggest. First of all, this is using Zoom for all of your video calls and everything else. We switched to Zoom. Before that we used Appear.in. I really loved Appear for connecting on the video calls directly for the browser, but that didn't work for us all the time. Sometimes we had issues, sometimes our customers couldn't connect, so we just switched everything to Zoom, and wow. Over the past four months, I never had a bug. Never had an issue. Kathleen: Yeah. Vlad: This product is just working- Kathleen: It's pretty great. And people who are listening can't tell, but we are on a Zoom call right now. That's how I record the podcast, and I probably spend six hours of my day on Zoom, because we're a mostly remote company, and so all of our meetings, all of my conversations are on Zoom. It's fantastic. Vlad: Exactly, yeah. And in terms of the other tools that there are, I would obviously recommend to use Planable for all of your content management creation and social media, and then there is also InVisionApp, for all of the prototyping in terms of images and creative content that you are doing. There is also Frame. I really love this company. If you even open the website that they have, it's a super beautiful website. When you are a creative person, or work in a marketing team, this really fulfills your heart when you see a beautiful website in a team. Kathleen: And what's the URL of that website? Vlad: Frame.io, I think. Yeah, Frame.io. Kathleen: Yeah, I'm pulling it up now so I can look at it while we talk. I love looking at nice websites. Oh, okay. So, for video review and collaboration. Vlad: Exactly. Yeah. Kathleen: Yep. Vlad: This is something, so we are basically describing Planable as Frame IO, but for social media. Kathleen: Got it. Vlad: Because this is something very similar. And if you look at the list that I am presenting right now, you can actually see that all of the platforms are also collaboration, because I really believe that collaboration is the key of any marketing team right now. Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. Vlad: And then there is obviously the Slack for building a transparent environment that we were speaking about because you can create all of those channels, and anyone can join those channels and you can simply collaborate on everything that you do. Obviously also for assets management, you can use Dropbox, or Google Drive, or anything that fits you. We are personally using Dropbox, we are personally using Google Drive across the company. I am using Dropbox and Apple Cloud for some personal stuff that I am doing right now. And then the last one that I highly recommend almost all the time, this is Airtable. This is spreadsheets on steroids. Anyway, this is the way I am ... the founders describe it, because you can almost do anything in Airtable, that is similar experience to spreadsheets but actually really different. Kathleen: Well, you have a very similar list of tools to me, because we use all of those I think with the exception of Frame. We actually use Wipster, which is really similar, so very similar functionality. But yeah, if I'm not on Zoom, I'm usually on Slack. Vlad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kathleen: And yeah, and we are using Airtable as well because we had some complex spread sheeting needs that we couldn't solve with Google Sheets and its been great. Vlad: Yeah, exactly. And we use Airtable for almost anything that we do in terms of the list, and the databases in our team. For example, we have a specific list in Airtable for recruiting, we have another sheet for marketing list, like events, or podcasts that we are listening, or events that we want to be part of, or speaking engagements. And lots of other stuff that we do. And Airtable really, really helps us make sure that we are on point with our idea. Even though our marketing plan and ownership plan, and everything that I was saying is also part of Airtable. Kathleen: Yeah. That's great. So, you've outlined really your overarching three kind of pillars, I would say. The people, the processes, and the technology. Talk to me about how that impacted your ability to grow the company, to deliver results through marketing. How Planable's Team Structure Enabled It To Grow Vlad: Yeah, definitely. So, we started implementing all of this processes, and then we obviously did not see any major results from the very first day. But when we started observing some of the patterns that are happening in all of our analytics, so first we started seeing a growth in our traffic. So, it was like the first couple of weeks, it was an incremental traffic. Like 10%, and then 15%, and 20%, and then everything else. And we actually felt like wait a sec, it's growing. It's actually something is happening in here. And when we started understanding where this is coming from, and we ended up analyzing all of the sources, and it's actually from the content that we were creating. And then we started speaking with the people that shared this content on social media, like Facebook, Twitter, and everything else, and we were saying that it's really exceptional content that we are creating, and we really feel like we answered the questions that we proposed from the very beginning of the piece. And this was a clue for us that we are doing something the right way. We are actually creating the right content for the teams, and we understanding for us, this was exactly because we built this processes and workflows in mind, and we were building everything the right way. And when we saw the growth in traffic, we saw the growth in the number of users, and this obviously reflected the number of our revenue. So, and then looking over the past 12 months of the growth from June last year to June this year, we can definitely say that we have month over month growth of between 20 to 30%. I would say that the median number is 23%, but it obviously varies from one month to another month. For example, for our surprise, December was one of the most spectacular months that we've ever had. Kathleen: That is interesting, because I feel like almost every company I know that works in something related to marketing, December is a very slow month because- Vlad: Oh wait, no. Sorry. Sorry about that. This is June. No, this is January. So, January was the most spectacular month, and then December was one of the ... oh my God, one of the most horrible months. Kathleen: I was going to say, that sounds more like every other company... Vlad: Yeah, sorry about that. Yeah. Yeah, this is because we felt ... and in January, we felt like is there anyone looking for a new subscription for their team. Kathleen: Right. We have the same conversation every year. We have usually got tremendous traffic growth in the fourth quarter, and then after the first week in December, it's like it all falls off a cliff. Nobody's working, it seems. Vlad: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I never saw so sad Google analytics on our website like in December, especially the past two weeks. It was just dropping. We had probably minus 60% drop in all of the traffic and then it quickly came up- Kathleen: Which, as long as it comes back is fine. Because if you know it's going to dip every December, you can plan for that. But yeah. Vlad: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And the most funniest thing, I will never understand this, is that people were signing up for new subscription on January 1st. And I was like, "What the hell are you doing in a new subscription?" Kathleen: Right. Vlad: But then we start analyzing, and we understood that their trail had expired, and they had lots of content planned, and they did not want to give up on this, and then we just ended up publishing next. And we had to renew their subscription, which is a good sign, so we can put- Kathleen: That is a good sign. Vlad: Yeah. And we can prepare for more marketing campaigns or ideas at the end of December and beginning- Kathleen: Yeah. What I like about this story is I've always personally had a belief that marketing is a little bit like weight loss, and health and fitness, you know? There's lots of people who kind of think they're going to get this magic solution, this diet that's going to miraculously have them lose all their weight, and it might in the short term. There's all kinds of fad diets that help you lose weight quickly. But does it last? And usually the answer is no. And unfortunately, the real solution in health and fitness slash weight loss is consistency and good old fashioned calories in, calories out, right? And in marketing, I honestly believe it's a lot like that. There are plenty of little fads and shiny objects that you can chase, and they might give you a short term boost, but as you said in the very beginning, those are not scalable things. And with the tech changing so quickly, and algorithms changing so quickly on social and on Google, if you're just chasing the latest greatest fad, you're always ... it's like chasing your tail. You're always going to be chasing something. So, it made me happy to hear that your great results came from consistency and good old fashioned, you know, content marketing. Vlad: I love it. I love your comparison. I was actually thinking yes, this is totally true. I completely agree with that, yeah. Kathleen: Yeah. It's great to see. So, the company is now how old? Vlad: So, we are now ... so, we started the company in February 2016. I would say that we worked two years in order to get the product on the market and actually feel like people see the value of this product. We started monetizing the company after one year and a half, but then it took us two years in total to get to the product market feed when we understood that people actually see the value and we understand, and we are building something valuable for people. Kathleen: Yeah. And in the meantime, you've been seeing this consistent growth and traffic, and leads and sales, and- Vlad: Yeah, exactly. Because we just understood that if something is working, let's try to stick to it. And you can always stick with consistency. Try incremental, super, super small, super, super small steps. But just do this consistently, week over week, month over month, and make sure that you keep up the same pace. Kathleen: I think that you had a lot of great tips, but I think the one for me personally that resonated the most and that I'm going to try to take to heart is blocking off an hour every day to write. Because really, we do live in a world where content is so central to getting found online, it's also so central to how you nurture your leads and convert them. Even once you have customers, content is central to that. Preventing churn, and developing loyalty, so I love that suggestion, and again it goes back to that exercise and eating right analogy. You got to do it every day, you got to stick with it and you will eventually see results. So, that is going to be my resolution. It's not the new year, but I'm going to make a resolution to write for an hour every day. I love that. Vlad: Yeah, definitely. That's a good one. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Well, before we wrap up, two questions that I always ask all of my guests, I'm curious to hear your take. When it comes to inbound marketing, and content marketing, is there a company or a person that you think is really doing it well right now? Vlad: Yeah, I actually have someone else in mind, but when you just asked the question, I immediately came up with Drift. I really think that oh my God, I'm following these guys over the past years. We are using [Intercom] personally, just because we went with Intercom, and it was a great decision back then. But we just can't really change from Intercom to Drift, but I just look at the Drift with what we do, and wow, these guys, what we do is completely amazing. There is the founder, and then there is ... Kathleen: Dave Gerhardt. Vlad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kathleen: Dave Cancel, and Dave Gerhardt, or as they like to call themselves, DC and DG. Vlad: DC and DG. Yeah, exactly. DC and DG, and what they do on social media, this is completely nuts. They are super, super active what they do. They came up with new projects, new content, new ideas, new landing pages, new books, new everything. And then we do this all of this experience is so beautiful and so extraordinary that I feel like I am part of this company every single day. Every time, when I read something about the company where they are products, I really feel proud that we did this, that we are doing this. I feel part of this company. Even though I am not even a user, I am not even a customer of this. And they did this just by creating a culture of their company that this is like we are building something extraordinary. Especially even their attitude that they do. DC, when they have a conference that we are organizing, probably a couple times a year, and they saw how DC is writing messages in Twitter that, "Let me know if you are coming to the conference. I am coming to personally pick you up at the airport and get you to the conference. From the airport, to the conference." Kathleen: Yeah. Vlad: This is the most amazing thing that a founder can do in the day of the conference. When you have so many things to focus on in the day of the conference, you are picking up people from the airport. Like, really? This is the commitment that I want to see from all the company that I am using. Kathleen: That's great. You know, it's funny. So, I did have Dave Gerhardt, who's DG, on a as a guest on the podcast, and he was one of the earlier guests, and it was so fun to pick his brain specifically about what he is doing with LinkedIn Video, because he's really good with that. And but what I love about what you just did is I've had, since that time, I've had a lot of my guests actually mention Drift when I ask this question, but you're the first person who's gotten really specific about what it is you like about how they're doing their marketing and how it made you feel. And I think that's so interesting, and I love what you said about feeling like you're a part of the company even though you're not an employee, you're not a customer. That's a very fascinating take on it. Vlad: Yeah, in case of my book, I interview 20 people, and DC was one of the people that I wanted to make an interview for 20 minutes, to get him in the book. But he actually didn't have time, and he forwarded the message to DG, and when DG also didn't have time. But when I asked for a quote, and he gave me at least a quote. Kathleen: Oh, that's nice. Yeah, they have a lot going on. Vlad: Yeah, exactly. I was like, "Okay, I totally get it. Please give me a quote at least. I would be super, super happy for a quote." And they did it. Kathleen: That's good. Well, second question. The world of digital marketing is changing at a lightning fast pace, and the thing I hear from most marketers is that they don't have the time to keep up with it. So, how do you personally educate yourself and stay on top of everything that's changing so that you remain on the cutting edge? Vlad: So, couple of things that I do, this is I have couple of people that I'm following on Twitter. This is obviously Matt Navarra, everyone knows about Matt Navarra in social media. There is no chance you don't know about Matt Navarra in social media, because he is writing all the latest updates in social media, and everything what's happening. And then there are also other people that I am following, like Geoff Desreumaux, from We Are Social Media. Also, I am also following We Are Social Media a lot. This is WeRSM- Kathleen: WeRSM. Yeah, one of my other guests turned me onto their newsletter, which is great. Vlad: Yeah, this is super awesome, I love their newsletters just because they add the GIF usually in the beginning of the newsletter, and it's usually fun. Yeah. And I'm also following, and I am part of lots of Facebook groups. Like SaaS marketers and founders, and product marketers with Josh Fechter, and B2B bloggers as well. And I believe that Facebook groups are helping me to stay in touch with the marketing industry, like from underneath. From the underground of it. Because you can read lots of updates and everything else what's happening in the industry with like on TechCrunch, and many other websites. But actually getting the true reaction and understanding what's truly happening in industry, you can only get from the people that are doing this every single day, consistently. And then this was the first. There's Twitter, then second is Facebook, and the first part, this is Zest. I met the founder last year, and- Kathleen: Yam? Yam Regev? Vlad: Yeah, exactly. And they are doing an incredible job with building a platform that helps you put all of the best content right in front of you directly in your face, and they really put some of the best content. I am constantly ... if I'm looking for some marketing content, there is no chance I'm not looking this on Zest first of all, and if I don't find a good answers, I might Google it or as for someone else for more tips and tricks on this. Kathleen: Yeah, that is a very good one. I know we use it a lot at Impact. And I actually just emailed Yam, who is the founder of Zest, saying I wanted to have him on the podcast, so Yam, if you're listening ... answer my email. Vlad: That's awesome. Yeah, if you want I can just drop him a quick message- Kathleen: Do it. Do it. Let's gang up on him and get him to come on. He's great. Vlad: I will message him on Facebook after our call and make sure that he answers your message. Kathleen: Perfect. Vlad: Yeah, he's really cool. I invited him for a conference in Moldova, in my home country, and lots of people said that he was one of the best guests that they had. So, I really think he'll be a great addition to the podcast. Kathleen: Yeah, yeah. And Zest, it's Zest.is, if you're listening. It's a great browser extension for Chrome, so when you open a new window, literally it's like a curated publication of top marketing articles. So, totally agree with you on that one. Great, great suggestions and insights, Vlad. How To Connect With Vlad Kathleen: If somebody wants to learn more about Planable, or get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that? Vlad: So, if they want to get in touch with me, like really if you have absolutely any questions, hit me up on Twitter, or LinkedIn, or Vlad@Planable.io. I am more than happy to help and answer any questions. As Kathleen also said in the beginning, I am trying to be active in mentoring communities, so I am trying to ... I'm currently actually mentoring couple of people on building their own digital agencies, and also their startups. And if you really have any questions or need some advice in this, we'd be more than happy to chat or jump on a call. And then if you want to learn more about Planable, and see how we are changing the content marketing collaboration generation, just go on Planable.io. Kathleen: Great. Well, I'll put all those links in the show notes, so if you want to check any of them out, head over there and you'll be able to get in touch with Vlad, or check out Planable. Thank you so much. This was really fun, and it's great to hear your story, and I'm so impressed by what a structured process and team you have for a company that really is still very young. So, there's kudos to you for figuring that out as quickly as you did. Vlad: Thank you. I really appreciate that, and thanks a lot for having me today. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: Of course, and if you're listening, and you liked what you heard, or learned something new, of course leave the podcast a five star review on Apple Podcasts. We always appreciate it. Vlad: Yeah, totally. Kathleen: And if you know somebody else doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because they could be my next guest. That's it for this week. Thanks, Vlad. Vlad: Thank you.

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

Kathleen Kelly Janus Back for another episode of the Bonfires of Social Enterprise. Kathleen Kelly Janus is our guest discussing her new book, Social Startup Success, How the Best Nonprofits Launch, Scale Up and Make a Difference. Kathleen is an award-winning social entrepreneur, lawyer, and lecturer at Stanford University, where she teaches social entrepreneurship.  And, as usual, we have a great Detroit artist playing a full song at the end of the episode so stay tuned.   http://bonfiresofsocialenterprise.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/KathleenJanus53369.jpg () http://bonfiresofsocialenterprise.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/KathleenJanus53468.jpg () http://bonfiresofsocialenterprise.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/SocialStartup_3Dcover.png () For the full transcript click below Read Full Transcript Hello there, this is Romy back for another episode on the Bonfires of Social Enterprise. We have author, Kathleen Kelly Janus, as our guest discussing her new book, Social Startup Success, How the Best Nonprofits Launch, Scale Up and Make a Difference. Kathleen is an award-winning social entrepreneur, lawyer, and lecturer at Stanford University, where she teaches social entrepreneurship. And, as usual, we have a great Detroit artist playing a full song at the end of the episode so stay tuned. Before we get rolling down the lane with good advice from Kathleen, let's see what Natalie has come up with for our Fun Fuel for this episode. I'm Natalie Hazen and I am bringing you this episode's Fun Fuel. Since this episode talks about Non-profits not operating on survival mode, I started thinking about what survival mode really means and I my mind drifted to cool animal survival instincts. Survival instincts are inherent to all creatures great and small. I often wonder how animals survive natural disasters such as wildfires and tornados. I think of the birds being whipped around by such high winds and wonder if they get swooped up in the turbulence or soar higher. According to TuftsNow.com, birds can ride out intense storms by taking advantage of microhabitats. Gale force winds can knock even the sturdiest of tv weatherman off their gait, but birds can seek shelter on the lee side of trees or deep inside thick hedges. The decrease in wind speed in these microhabitats can be huge, and as long as they stay put, they are not actually buffeted much by the wind. Now they do need to find food to last out the storms. There are some reports of birds increasing foraging activity as a storm approaches, which indicate some birds can detect subtle changes in air pressure, which can indicate an approaching storm. When this happens, they immediately try to get as much food as possible. The more fat a bird has, the better chance it has of surviving and riding out a long-standing storm. So let's join up with Romy and today's guest to learn more about nonprofits not operating on survival mode. Love it, love it, love it. Thanks, Natalie! Alrighty, I had the opportunity to talk with Kathleen while she was in San Francisco preparing for her book launch. I mentioned earlier that Kathleen is a lecturer at Stanford, but she is also a co-founder of Spark among other human rights organizations. She informally advises a variety of non-profits and social entrepreneurs in San Francisco and more globally. Let's drop in on our conversation and learn more about Kathleen and her great new book. Romy: What prompted you to start to write a book on how to scale? Kathleen: Well, this is a really critical question, as you know, Romy, and I think that it can be a controversial word, like a four-letter word, in the nonprofit sector and the for-profit sector because I think a lot of people would say that scale isn't necessarily a good thing for a number of reasons. Maybe we don't want big organizations. Maybe we want a lot of organizations working together. Maybe we want more Mom and Pop organizations that communities know best how to solve...