Podcasts about kathleen you

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.

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.

What role should LinkedIn play in your overall paid advertising strategy, and how can use it to drive highly qualified leads for your business? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Modern Media Advertising Director Anthony Blatner shares his LinkedIn advertising strategies. From how LinkedIn should be used in combination with other channels as part of a holistic paid advertising strategy, to what ad formats perform best and how to work with your sales team to ensure any leads you get are being followed up with, Anthony covers everything he does to help Modern Media's clients get killer results from LinkedIn. Highlights from my conversation with Anthony include: LinkedIn is great for targeting niche audiences at scale. The cost per click on LinkedIn is higher than it is on other platforms, so it's important that you have a strategy for following up on any leads you get from LinkedIn. In Anthony's experience, LinkedIn ads work well for company's with a customer lifetime value of $10,000 or more. Whereas the cost per click on Facebook is generally around $2, on LinkedIn, it starts at $4.50 and goes up from there. LinkedIn is best for top of the funnel advertising, where you can attract a new audience and then retarget and nurture that audience on other, less expensive platforms. Anthony has found that LinkedIn lead forms work well for his clients. They tend to have a higher conversion rate because prospects don't have to leave LinkedIn to convert, but when you use a lead form, you sacrifice the ability to cookie a contact.  If you are concerned about GDPR compliance, there are a number of ways to use lead forms to secure explicit consent and stay GDPR compliant. Another LinkedIn ad format that works well are newsfeed ads. Whereas on Facebook, video works well for this format, Anthony recommends using images on LinkedIn because you are being charged by the click and not the impression (which is how Facebook works). There is a new LinkedIn ad format that uses chatbot-like functionality called conversation ads that is also worth checking out. Anthony says sponsored InMail can be an effective way to get more conversions for ads that are already tested and proving successful in the newsfeed. With many marketers cutting their ad spend due to budget restrictions relating to COVID, Anthony says the cost per click on LinkedIn is down 30 to 40 percent. He recommends setting a maximum cost per click when advertising on LinkedIn, and then playing around with lowering that number to see how little you can spend and still see results. If you are doing LinkedIn ads and not seeing great results, it is most likely due to your targeting. Anthony recommends that you go back and revisit your targeting strategy to see if that helps.  The minimum number of emails you can target on LinkedIn is 300. Resources from this episode: Visit the Modern Media website Connect with Anthony on LinkedIn Contact Anthony by email at anthony@modernmedia.io  Listen to the podcast to learn how the top LinkedIn ads experts are using the platform to drive leads, and how can, too. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and today my guest is Anthony Blatner who is the advertising director at Modern Media. Welcome Anthony. Anthony Blatner (Guest): Hey Kathleen. Thanks for having me on the show. Anthony and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah, I'm looking forward to getting into it with you today, talking about some LinkedIn ads. But before we start, can you please tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and about modern media and about really just how you wound up doing what you're doing today? About Anthony Blatner and Modern Media Anthony: Yeah, absolutely. So modern media, we are a LinkedIn ads focused agency. We do a lot of B2B lead generation and all of our focuses on LinkedIn ads. The way that I got to being here is I actually come at it from the tech and software development world. I originally started my career working at IBM, working on their consulting teams, working on big eCommerce stores. Really enjoyed that, got to travel around a lot. I live in Austin, Texas and I also got involved with the startup community while I was here and ended up falling in love with that. So after a few years at IBM, I spun off to start my own mobile app development consulting company who would build mobile apps for for a variety of other companies, a lot of startups, some other like larger tech companies that we would partner with. And when I was doing that, I saw that we were building all these apps and like some of these companies would actually have startups with build an app and launch and like do very well. And we had a number of clients that went on to get acquired or like Stallard technology. And then we also work with some bigger partners who may have already had a customer network and they launched their app and it goes up to that customer network and does very well out of the gates. Then you would have other companies who would spend all this time and money developing app their software and then they would launch it and without a good marketing plan in place, it would just sit on the app store. No one would download it. And you'd see how much time and effort these teams are putting into this. And without, you know, without that marketing plan afterwards, then it was just, you know, it was dead in the water. So I saw it, I saw the need for it and then we naturally got pulled into doing it, helping out with a lot of those. So from doing marketing for my own agency and for a lot of clients I ended up just really loving the marketing that I was doing, so a few years ago, transitioned to focusing solely on marketing. So now Modern Media focuses on marketing. B2B lead-generation solely using LinkedIn ads. Kathleen: I love how focused you guys are because I mean, I come from an agency background. I owned an agency for 11 years and you know, I think that's the big conversation in the agency community, right? Like it's easy to try to be all things to all people, especially when you're chasing dollars. But there's really something to be said for niching down and becoming, you know, the best expert in the world on the thing that you want to do, you know, and focus on. So I think that's great. Anthony: No, it wasn't easy to get here. You know, it's a lot of trial and error along the way to where getting into the marketing. A lot of the apps that we started by marketing, no, sometimes we did start with like Facebook ads and Google ads. So like I've, I've done a lot of all of that kind of advertising over the years. And just with my background and with the type of clientele we had, LinkedIn was just repeatedly becoming the best platform to market them on. So we had done a lot of Facebook, done a lot of Google. I'll tell you a story of probably the first one that really stuck out for me. They were, they were, this was a company that we were taking on to do marketing. They were at big data, but they are the big data platform. They sell their tools made for enterprise companies. It's like thousands of dollars a year. They were doing the traditional Facebook and Google marketing. But as we audited their account and looked at their lead list, a lot of the leads that were coming in from Google were like people looking for jobs, searching for jobs or students looking for research. And they were, you know, they were following best practices for keywords and negatives and all that stuff, but you still get a lot of leads coming in. And then on Facebook it'd be a lot of people who are maybe clicking on the ad cause it had like a pretty picture in it or something that was attention grabbing. But a lot of those leads that were signing up were just not good fits. Their sales team was complaining that they were wasting a lot of time calling out these people and they just weren't qualified to buy. They didn't have the budgets to buy the software. So we took him over to LinkedIn and you know, targeted like CTOs, data scientists at specific types of companies who would be had the, their platform was made for a few different industries. So chose those industries, chose companies I think like a hundred people and above and just right out the gates. Those leads that were signing up were like the perfect fit for them and they're just like, this is night and day. Like the clear differentiator there. And since then it's just been like, I'm just an advocate of LinkedIn now for, for B2B for these industries that that's our focus now. Who is LinkedIn advertising right for? Kathleen: That's great. Now I feel like when people think about online advertising, they have a lot of choices these days. You mentioned a number of platforms just, and you know, in the last few minutes I guess my first question for you is really who is LinkedIn advertising right for and where does it fit within that big mix of different options? Anthony: That is a good question. That is a very important question to ask. So it's not, it isn't a good fit for everybody. I'll tell you a few things about it is LinkedIn is great for targeting niche decision makers at scale. It is a more expensive ads platform to use than a lot of the other ones out there. So it's good for companies that have the resources to go work those leads that they acquire. It's going to be more expensive to acquire those leads than like most other channels. So, you know, they're higher value leads need to work them when people are signing up. It is more expensive to acquire them. So you, your offer, your LTV for your customers should be high enough to make sense. What we'd like to see is an LTV of about 10k for that ROI to make sense. You know, if your sales and marketing engine is very honed in, you can be less than that and still make an ROI. But that's a good rule of thumb. If you're on Facebook ads, you can get CPCs under a buck, you know, they might be a dollar to $2 on average. On LinkedIn the minimum is about $4.50 in the US so right out of the gate, that's their floor and you're just going up from there. And if you're targeting CEO's only, you know, that's gonna be even higher than that. So just be prepared for higher acquisition costs. And that leads to how it fits in with the ecosystem. LinkedIn is great for starting the conversation and for acquiring very high quality traffic. Once you acquire it, you know, you want to then nurture it on other cheaper channels or more cost efficient channels. So once somebody signs up to be a lead, you know, follow up over email, outbound calling oftentimes we retarget with Facebook and Google ads. So we acquired traffic on LinkedIn and then well, retarget on Facebook and Google because it's a lot cheaper. And you know, retarget those ads, retarget those leads to, we're doing lead generation on LinkedIn, and then retargeting them to maybe book a call on Facebook or Google. Kathleen: Got it. So it sounds like from what you're saying, focused lists you know, not kind of throwing a bunch of darts at the wall and hoping one sticks. It's like if you know exactly who you want to target and you have some good targeting parameters around whether that's job title, what have you, and then the budget to be able to support a larger, potentially larger per lead ad spend the team in place to follow up on those leads. And then really from an expectation standpoint, using it at the top of the funnel. Understanding LinkedIn ad formats Kathleen: So then knowing that if somebody is listening and they're thinking, okay, check, check, check, you know, all of these things I have, can you talk a little bit about LinkedIn ad formats and what you find performs really well? So like, what do you need to have in order to advertise effectively on LinkedIn? Anthony: Yeah, so a few things. So approaching the LinkedIn campaign is a few things and I'll kind of tell you about our most common campaign we'll do for people is a lead generation campaign on LinkedIn using lead magnets. So a lead magnet is some asset of value that your target market would be interested in. So a guide, a PDF, a checklist or something like that. Linkedin, like I said, this is starting a conversation with somebody, your target market. So offering people guides and easy downloadables is the best way to start the conversation to get them interested. Most, you know, unless you're a major brand, most people have not heard about your company. So leading with like buy now or contact us isn't gonna do as well. We're gonna have a much higher cost per lead. So on LinkedIn use lead magnets to start. As far as ad formats, we do often use the LinkedIn lead forms. They will auto-populate with the person's information. So the lead form is a little form when you click on the ad that'll open up right inside of LinkedIn, just like a Facebook lead form. They work very similarly. But on LinkedIn you can auto fill that with information from the user's profile and it comes with information from your profile. While you know on Facebook it's usually personal email addresses. In LinkedIn you do get number of personal email addresses, but you also get like work email addresses as well. I find that data quality is very high coming off of LinkedIn. And we also often use like job title and company name so we know who are these leads that are signing up. Or using the LinkedIn profile. You are also going to look up those leads afterwards and you know that that gives you a lot, a lot more richer information about your lead. So you can see, okay, who is this person, where do they work? And understand, you know, understand where your leads are coming from. Usually, you're setting those targeting criteria up front. So you know, people coming into your campaign are going to be part of that audience. But our average campaign or our most helpful one is, is using the LinkedIn lead forms, your lead generation offering a lead magnets to, to your audience. Kathleen: So this is an interesting topic to me because I've heard this, that lead forms are more effective than trying to get somebody to like go to your website and convert. But I guess my question is really if you're using a lead form, What are you sacrificing? I use HubSpot and so I can't, if I use a lead form, I can't cookie somebody. If I can't cookie them, then I am giving up the ability to see all that rich data about their behavior on my site, et cetera and things like that. But then you had mentioned also using LinkedIn leads or ads rather to then retarget those people on other platforms. Can you do that if you're using a lead form? Because at that point, you're not having a tracking pixel firing on your website. Anthony: Right. At that point we retarget based on the email. Kathleen: Okay. So if, but if there... Anthony: You lose some data you know, that is, it is different than going to the landing page and opting in. So we do often use both, but most common is using the lead forms. The conversion rate is just much higher. Typically using the lead forms the quantity you're going to get is going to make sense. You will see a lower conversion rate for pushing people to your landing page. But I do say, you know, there are times where maybe you don't have the sales team available to call all those leads. So it is more important for you to get fewer, more higher intent leads. And then at that point maybe a landing page is a better one for you to use. Because we do have accounts where like, you know, if they have a large budget they can be driving a lot of leads through there. And if you don't have the sales team to contact all those leads, like, Hey, I'd rather have higher intent leads. So landing page opt ins would then be better with them. LinkedIn ads and GDPR compliance Kathleen: Yeah. Now the other question I have about lead forms is, it relates to GDPR. So if you're driving somebody to your site, you have a lot of control. If you're trying to be GDPR compliant, you have a lot of control over how you structure, you know, your opt-ins and your GDPR language, et cetera. I don't have a lot of experience with LinkedIn lead forms. So can you talk a little bit about, if somebody is trying to adhere to GDPR, can they use LinkedIn lead forms and if so, what kind of control do you have over being able to document that opt-in? Anthony: Yeah good question. So we haven't seen too many issues with that on LinkedIn. Two things with lead form that you can include is number one, you were actually required to include a link to the company's privacy policy. So usually you use the privacy policy which will cover, you know, all those terms. You can also include a little blurb at the bottom of the lead form. Anything else that you want to make clear to the user as they're signing up. So those two inputs as far as that we usually get involved, you know, we're, we'll use the privacy policy from the company. And any other information on the lead form that needs to be, Kathleen: So am I correct that there's no explicit checkbox built in that would say, for example, I agree to receive other communications from company X, Anthony: You can add a custom checkbox to do that. Kathleen: You can, okay. Okay. So that would presumably then solve that issue if somebody was really being strict about how they complied with GDPR? Yeah. Great. When should you use a LinkedIn lead form? Kathleen: So yes, there's this trade off then with lead ads and it sounds like it's important to understand your goals. What I'm hearing, or at least what I'm taking away from what you said, is that if your intent is to really have a laser focus on your certain market or your leads that you want to attract and, and your goal if they do convert is to really follow up with a phone call from your sales team, then it doesn't really matter if you're driving them to your website and having them fill out a form because the goal is to get the sales team call them and or, and, or reach out by email. And so, you know, having a lead form would make sense there. But then it sounds like if your goal is to either put them into, you know, a full funnel nurturing sequence where you're retargeting on Facebook or something or where you're going to do mass emails then maybe it might make sense to not use a lead form and instead to direct them to a form on your site. Is that accurate, would you say? Anthony: Yeah, we've got the best results that we see are when we, when we use lead forms to drive the higher volume of leads and then the client usually has a sales team who's on top of those leads right away calling them, you know, it's like they say like the five minute after submission rules, like the best practice, you know, contact them soon afterwards. But five minutes is very fast. But if it, Hey, if you're on top of your leads, call them right away. Like, that's where we should have the best results. The sales team do work those leads. If someone signed up, they've indicated interest and if you position your lead magnet the right way, then they should be very open to like a sales conversation or at least that introductory like discovery. Hey, how can we help you in conversation Kathleen: Do you give your clients any coaching as far as how to follow up on those leads? Because I think the one thing I've noticed is that there can, there's the potential for a big mismatch. Like somebody fills out a form on LinkedIn to get a white paper there. They might not be expecting to get a phone call. So how do you advise your clients to follow up? Anthony: Yes, good question. So LinkedIn is great for starting the conversation. It is top of funnel. Be aware that these leads, this is probably the first time that they're seeing your company, they probably opted in to get your lead magnet. So yeah, I kind of joke about the five minute rule thing. I would say that it's very fast to contact them at the point where they have just for the first time seeing your logo and heard about your company. They probably haven't even come to it, had time to read that lead magnet yet. So I, you know, I don't say within five minutes, contact them soon. But you know, some of it is like you want that lead magnet to help do some of the education and warming up with them. It might take a little bit of time for somebody to receive that email, to click through to read it or to receive that email and then go read it. And then yeah, follow up with them, have them on an email sequence, follow up with them shortly after that and then have the retargeting funnel in place. So that's you know, if they sign up via email, if they click through and pixel them, then you can retarget them with ads afterwards. So we do recommend like a multi-channel approach afterwards as many touch points as you can, you know, shortly afterwards, while while it is still top of mind for them. And then there's a lot that goes into the lead magnet strategy as far as, you know, how do I pick the best asset? How do I create the best asset that's going to work here? For companies and brands and topics, services, that's they are, that are, it's like the levels of awareness thing pyramid. If they are not very aware of what your solution is and you work that you want to focus on their pain points and make the topic about them. If they are more aware, maybe if you are a well known brand and maybe you can make the topic about yourself if there's something that they're interested in. So for lower levels of awareness, keep in mind that this is the part of the first time the senior company. So that call, the way I coach people about that call is that needs to be very introductory, very discovery. How can we help you get focused? Other LinkedIn ad formats Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. Now we talked a lot about lead ads. Can you talk through what are some of the other ad format options on LinkedIn and for each of them, you know, when would you use it and, and how does it generally perform? Anthony: Sure. so the next, so as far as specific ad units in the newsfeed, so that's a sponsored content and you have image ads and you have a video ad there, you also carousel ads. And they work just like Facebook carousel ads essentially. We actually start with image ads most of the time. So I know, you know, on Facebook everyone's about video and like video performance better on LinkedIn to start, we often, we always start with, we almost always start with image ads in the beginning because we find on LinkedIn you're usually paying per click. Whereas on Facebook, usually paying costs, CPM by impression. So on LinkedIn you want to reduce the chance of any irrelevant clicks to your ads. So that in one way that is don't be misleading. You know, on Facebook people tend to be very curiosity invoking of like drawing the click in. That could be flashy videos, that could be vague copy that's just curiosity invoking. On LinkedIn you want to be very direct about what's what it is you're offering, who you are, who you're targeting because you don't want people to just curiosity click, okay, Kathleen: You're paying for that. Yeah, that's an expensive click. Especially when five bucks is your minimum. You could have bought yourself a latte at Starbucks. Anthony: So, we're usually starting with image ads because you can instantly, somebody can consume images rather than watching a video. We usually find, to start, videos tend to be flashy and like eye catching and they draw the click more often. So in the beginning we see images perform better. And then once you prove your audience, which audience you should be split testing a number of audiences, once you prove which audience is the best, which ad angle, which imagery is the best, then we can then go turn that into a video or create a video similar to that. And then, at that point we do see often video can outperform images. So in in the newsfeed you have images, video next format that we most commonly use is probably sponsored InMail. Sponsored InMail can be great. It can be expensive as well. So it's mostly InMail charges you per send. I think the minimum 5 cents per send. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it is a lot when you add it up over the size of an audience. Sponsored InMail is great because we do see very high open rates of those messages. Keep in mind a lot of people that are opening those are probably just clearing out the notification. So the offers that work best in sponsored InMail are the ones that are like the, if you have a very appealing offer. So usually we'll start by testing in the newsfeed and if an ad does very well there, then we will take that and go turn into a sponsored InMail ad. Because if it's performing really well in the newsfeed then that means the offer's proven and that we can go take and put in as much with InMail. Sponsored InMail, you know, it's a one, it seems like a one on one conversation and if it's like, if it feels like a personal offer that you're making to somebody usually, you know, sometimes offer a free consultation there or like free gifts there are, do, do better. But it's, it's a good ad format to try out. Next, Linkedin just released conversation ads, which are kind of the next evolution of sponsored email ads. This gets more to be more chat bot like so we do see LinkedIn does follow. It's tends to follow Facebook and a lot of different ways. And you know, we've seen how Facebook has evolved with the last few years. We've seen Facebook Lives, we've seen chat bots and stuff like that. Linkedin is kind of following along the same steps. Kathleen: So can you actually explain how that would work? Cause I haven't seen that at all. I'm super curious about it. The chatbots. Anthony: So it's not, it's not a chatbot, but I think LinkedIn's on their way to getting more towards this. But conversation ads, you will create a chat flow. So instead of just a sponsored InMail message that you send to somebody, it is similar to that. You send the message, but then they have a few options that they can choose from and you can create a, a tree from there. So that if somebody clicks on option a, you know, essentially you can offer them multiple different things in the app. So the reason why we've seen performance improve from it, because you can offer people, you can make multiple offers, Kathleen: Right? It's like a choose your own adventure kind of a thing. Now, does that appear as a direct message in their inbox or how does that appear? Anthony: Yes. Kathleen: Interesting. I haven't seen that. I'm going to have to now search for it, find it in the wild. So, so many different options. Who is finding success with LinkedIn ads? Kathleen: I know you work with a lot of clients. Can you share any examples of, you know, campaigns or companies that you've worked with who are using LinkedIn ads really successfully? Anthony: Sure. so right now, well, just in general the HR space always does very well on LinkedIn. So I'd say for any space, any campaigns that I would highlight, like it's probably gonna be an HR campaign. The biggest categories on LinkedIn are like, I think IT is number one. And I think HR is number two, and then it's like the rest of the tech software world and then like financial services. So if you're in one of those categories, those are the biggest audiences. So those are probably gonna be great campaigns for LinkedIn. I'm always surprised when somebody gives me a very niche audience to target how many people I'm able to find on LinkedIn. So, and pretty much any niche decision maker, any niche B2B targeting, go scope out what the audience sizes. And I'm always surprised how many people I can find in the different niches. But to highlight any campaigns, HR, I'd say just in the last, especially in the last couple months since we've all been quarantined and at home, the HR category has been very active on LinkedIn. So not only have ad prices gone way down the last few weeks, they're down about like 30 to 40% in a lot of cases. Kathleen: Now, I've heard that. I've heard that also for Facebook. And is that on LinkedIn? Is that because basically so many companies have cut their marketing spend and so the demand side if you will, has gone down Anthony: Exactly. LinkedIn is an auction, just like Facebook. Kathleen: Yup. Okay. Anthony: So less, well, it's a combination of less advertisers and then also more eyeballs. Supply and demand there where we're all stuck at home. So everyone's spending a lot more time online. Kathleen: Yeah, I've heard, I've heard a ton of people say they're spending way more time on LinkedIn these days. How to structure your bidding strategy for LinkedIn ads Anthony: A random tip is I always recommend bidding max CPC. Do not use auto-bid on LinkedIn because you just, you say go spend wherever you want it and LinkedIn will go whatever it wants. Set max CPCs for most of your campaigns. We've noticed that we can drop that max CPC all the way down, nearly all the way down to the floor. Each audience in each geography has its own floor so go test in the tool and see what yours is, but we dropped it nearly down to the floor for a lot of campaigns and I'm seeing cost per lead improve a lot. Kathleen: Wow. That's awesome. Okay, so sorry, I interrupted you. You were talking about examples and you talked about HR. Any particular campaigns that you can think of that have done really well lately? Examples of successful LinkedIn ad campaigns Anthony: Yeah, so there's two very specific HR ones I'm thinking about right now that, especially in the last few weeks, that they've done very well. I mentioned how like lead magnet strategy is very important. They both release lead magnets that speak to kind of what's going on right now, how to hire in tough times and how to support your people during tough times. And, you know, COVID messaging might be getting stale now, but especially over the last couple of months, it's been performing super well. So where they were traditionally between a 40 to $60 cost per lead, they're down below $30 per lead. And then the other campaign, they were a little bit more cause they were targeting a higher level of HR people. And they're down below 50 bucks per lead. So yeah, we've seen lead costs like almost cut in half in a lot of cases. And just like HR activities, you know, through the roof. So those ones have done really well. Attracting high quality leads on LinkedIn Kathleen: And then would you say the quality of the leads - I know you mentioned doing almost the opposite approach from Facebook where you're trying not to be click baity cause you're paying by the click. And I'm interested specifically, because you talked about one example that was targeting very senior level people. That's an audience that's usually really hard to get in front of. So can you talk a little bit about what your experience has been if somebody is going after like a C level audience, what are some good tips for being successful with that on LinkedIn? Anthony: Absolutely. That's why you use LinkedIn. Cause a lot of these upper level people, there's just no other place or way to target them without, without buying an email list. Yeah, there's no other place. Linkedin is the best place with that kind of data at scale. And LinkedIn's always the first place that people update their profile when they get a new job or get a promotion. So it's very high quality data and that's the only place, a lot of times, you'll see these people. As far as targeting goes, the LinkedIn audience approach is the opposite of Facebook, I guess. Again, with Facebook you give it, you know, you tend to give it a big audience and you let the AI algorithm go find the best people for you and that audience. On LinkedIn you want to do the opposite because, because you are paying cost per click, you want to exclude any irrelevant ones. So you want to be very niche, very laser focused on who you want to target. As far as lead quality goes, you know, you're setting up your targeting in the beginning. What are the job titles I want, what are the functions with the seniorities? So if you're not getting those leads, the right leads coming through your funnel, go back to your targeting and tweak that up. You don't usually have a problem with lead quality. The quality is always clients. It's always funny, like a client that has run Facebook ads in the past and like, we'll have like our lead tracker set up and they'll see the job titles and company names coming in and they're just like, perfect, perfect, perfect. And sometimes we'll get feedback of like, Oh, this title was a little bit off maybe because you said this, so let's go add this exclusion and then we'll go work that back in. But, well, yeah you know, if your leads that come through on LinkedIn aren't a great fit, then just tweak your targeting a little bit. But you can set the specific job titles in specific industries and company size you want. So lead quality is usually awesome. What is the minimum audience size for a LinkedIn ad? Kathleen: Yeah. now one of the things I've always been interested in and I feel like it's changed, what is the minimum audience size that you can target on LinkedIn because there are some crazy opportunities with LinkedIn ads. I love the idea of you're submitting a proposal to do something for a company and how few people can you target in that company with your ad? Anthony: 300 is the minimum. It Is a little bit bigger of a minimum than Facebook. I want to say Facebook is a hundred for a minimum. So in two cases is yes, it is hard to be that laser targeted in some cases. It's also a challenge when you want to retarget cause if you are building a lead list, you're gonna have to wait until you have at least 300 leads to go retarget them using the email method. So maybe a simple alternative that is go connect with those people on LinkedIn and send them a message via your chat. Anthony's tips for anyone getting started with LinkedIn ads Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Well, what tips do you have if somebody is listening and they're thinking they want to get started with LinkedIn ads? Is there anything you wish you knew that would have helped you avoid some mistakes? Anthony: Hmm. Anything that I wish I knew. So I have a number of tips that I usually talk about, so I'll give some of those. Well I'd say the biggest thing I wish, like even if I would have told myself this a year ago I probably wouldn't have listened, is don't ask for too much information from your lead in the beginning. You know, you're starting the conversation. They don't have any reason to trust you yet. Keep it as minimal as possible. And that's going to maximize your conversion rate. You know, I go check out a lot of their ads just because I'm always interested to see, what are they advertising? What are they asking for? What does the lead form look like? I opened some of these companies' lead forms. I'm just like, you have seven imports.Is anybody submitting this form? Questions and stuff like that. I'm like, I should reach out to you and be like, Hey, I know your cost per lead is terrible. Do you want some help? That's the biggest thing is these people don't know you. They don't have any reason to trust you yet. Only ask for the information you need, which is usually like email address to send them the guide and then continue the conversation from there. Various other tips. I'd say the image thing is a big one. We get a lot of people who wanted to just have a folder of videos and like let's use these. Let's start with images first and then get those converting and then move to video afterwards. Some other tips are I mentioned the don't auto-bid. Start with max CPC and bid low and then crank it up slowly until you find the sweet spot. Short and direct copy usually works the best. So now on Facebook, a lot of people write these long copy and a lot of emojis and stuff like that. Short copy tends to do best. Keep it shorter than about 150 characters and won't trigger the "see more" button. Most people don't click the "see more" button. I'm kind of, I advocate in both cases where you want your CTA, you want it to be standalone above the "see more". If somebody doesn't click the "see more" it should still be just as appealing. But for the people that do click the "see more", here's a tip that clicking the "see more" button does not charge you. So there's no harm in having more copy than the rest of your ad for the people that do click that "see more" button. So split test both short and long. I do say, I will say we do see shorter, usually performs better. But there is usually no downside to having more copy there. Kathleen: And then with images, I know Facebook has a limitation of how much copy can you have on your image? Are there any limitations like that in LinkedIn? Anthony: Nope. Actually we use a lot more copy and images. Kathleen: Okay. And then the other thing I've heard with Facebook is that you should have a very active page where you're posting often to sort of like warm up your audience, which I think is interesting cause I feel like nobody ever sees any Facebook page posts, but that's a different conversation for another time. So do you ever, what kind of advice do you give people regarding their LinkedIn company page? Not their ads, but the page itself as far as how that should be used to support a good LinkedIn ad strategy? Anthony: Yeah, good question. So you want to have the basics covered. LinkedIn company pages people tend to have more, more connections and more followers on their personal page. So I'd say put most of your focus there, but you know, if you are running a company page, you should have that company page fully filled out. It should look nice and professional and polished and it should have some activity on there. If you were gonna go hire a social media person to manage your profile, I'd say have them manage your personal profile because you'll have more activity there. Because you have more connections in your personal than typically a company page. But have all the information filled out, have good imagery there, have all your links filled out. And then, to bring back the lead magnets again, a lot of times in the headline or in the about section of the body copy, I recommend putting that called to action there. Download our guide. And while that link won't be explicitly clickable, we do see a lot of people will copy and paste it. Make it a simple URL. Mydomain.com/guide and then they'll go there and get it. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: That makes sense. Great. Well, shifting gears I have two questions. I always ask my guests and I'd love to hear what you have to say. First one is, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound marketing? Anthony: So the company that has been advertising to me the most is outreach.io. So they're a pretty well known company out there, but they just, they must spend a lot on their ads because every time I log into LinkedIn I see them there and I'm always like, that's a good ad. I like that ad. So I'd say that they do a very good job. I think I've probably signed up for a few of their lead magnets because I always scope out what other people are doing. Their content's good and their ads are good quality. And if I was to give people any tip, it's you can go see the ads run by any LinkedIn page out there just like you can on Facebook by going to that company page. On the left hand side, on desktop, there's a little navigation bar on the bottom it says ads and it'll show you those, the ads being run by that company page. So for whatever your industry is, go scope out what your competitors are doing and maybe similar offerings are new. Kathleen: That's a great suggestion. Second question, marketers tend to have a common pain point, which is that so much is changing so quickly. LinkedIn is a great example. I feel like just when you feel like, you know how it works, something big changes and it's, you know, you almost have to start over. How do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated about Anthony: In the world of digital marketing? For LinkedIn specifically? I'd say I see there's not much content out there about LinkedIn ads. So the surprising thing, like as I've learned this over the years there's so much out there about, about Facebook and Google ads, like the huge communities and stuff like that, of courses, everything. There's not much about LinkedIn ads. So I've gotten the most by joining a number of different groups and like asking questions to people there and like, and like, just like working one on one with other people who are active advertisers. Kathleen: Any particular groups that come to mind? Anthony: LinkedIn Official Advertisers, a group on LinkedIn. That's a group on LinkedIn. Yeah. I have a small one that I started recently. It's called, this is on Facebook, LinkedIn advertising strategies. Kathleen: And you said that is or is not on Facebook? Anthony: That is on Facebook. Yeah. Okay. Got it. LinkedIn groups overall are still, Kathleen: Yeah, they've kind of like died on the vine a little bit. Anthony: I hope that they put more effort or like, you know, improve them because I think there's a lot of potential. Like we've seen how Facebook has put so much focus on groups and how they've been, like a number of groups that I'm in are super active and super valuable. I hope that it does the same there. Kathleen: So yeah, I was going to ask you about that. It's funny, I'm glad you brought it up cause it is, it used to be so great and then it just, was it just, Ugh. I mean I don't spend any time in LinkedIn groups these days, but I used to spend a ton. How to connect with Anthony Kathleen: So okay, well we're coming to the top of our time. So if somebody is interested in learning more or they want to reach out to you and ask a question, what is the best way for them to connect with you? Anthony: So the best way to connect with me is on LinkedIn. I think I'm the only Anthony Blatner on there. So go look me up. Connect with me and send me a little message in the add now and the add connection requests because we all get tons of them. You can find me at my email is anthony@modernmedia.io and then our website's modernmedia.io. If you're looking to learn more about LinkedIn ads or understand strategy, I have tried to put out a lot of content as I've learned over the past few years, knowing that there's not much out there. I've tried to put out more content to share with others. So we have a number of blog posts about funnel strategy, lead generation strategy and then specifically LinkedIn ads, tips and best practices. We got one about lead magnets and then we have one about all the tips around copy and creative. What works the best. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Awesome. Well, I'll put those links in the show notes so that people can go check that out. And if you're listening and you have learned something new today, which I certainly have, head to Apple Podcasts and please consider leaving the podcast a five star review. That's how other folks find us. And 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. Thank you so much, Anthony. This was great. Anthony: Thanks for having me.

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

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

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

How did 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.

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

How 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.  

Data shows that using one-to-one, personalized videos in your marketing gets better results, but few marketers or actually using it. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, BombBomb Chief Evangelist Ethan Beute breaks down the topic of personalized video - from why to use it, to how to do it well, when to use, who it's right for, and what kinds of results you can expect.  Bottom line - by just about every measurement of success, using one-to-one videos gets better results. And with so many new technologies available to make the creation of one-to-one video easy and affordable, there is no reason not to get started. Highlights from my conversation with Ethan include: BombBomb is a video platform that, amongst other things, supports the creation of one-to-one, personalized videos. Ethan says that we are successful when we connect with people and are sincere in our ability to provide value - so this ability to do it in a more complete way, with today's technology, is simply a return to the way business was exclusively done just a few generations ago. The biggest reason more marketers don't use one-to-one video is that it requires vulnerability, and many people are uncomfortable appearing on camera. There is also a behavior, or habit, change required so that when people would normally sit down at a keyboard and type out a message, they think instead about creating a video. A great way to get started with one-to-one video is by sending it to people who already know and like you - for example, your internal colleagues. There are several use cases for one-to-one video, from landing pages with form fills, to frequently asked questions, emails, customer testimonials, and success stories. Other common use cases include when you have to explain something complicated, or demonstrate a product. Ethan recommends that if you include a video in email, you don't put the full text of the video into the email. Use the email like a teaser. The most important thing to consider when making one-to-one videos is what is in it for the recipient. Why would they open your video? A couple of things you can to do increase the chances someone will watch your video are use an animated preview thumbnail, and do something in the first few frames to really customize it, like hold up a whiteboard with the recipient's name, or do a screen capture of their LinkedIn profile. Adding one-to-one video to your emails generates powerful results. 81% of people said they get more replies and responses, 87% of people say they get more clicks, one in six said they doubled or more than doubled their click rate, 68% say they convert more leads, and 10% said they doubled or more than doubled their conversion rate.  These same results all increase by 2 to 5% when you use an unformatted email template meant to mimic a personalized gmail. Resources from this episode: Visit the BombBomb website Connect with Ethan on LinkedIn Follow Ethan on Twitter Learn more about using personalized video in Ethan's book Rehumanize Your Business Check out BomBomb's gmail video solution Listen to the podcast to learn more about using one-to-one video in your marketing. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and this week, my guest is Ethan Beute, who is the Chief Evangelist at BombBomb. Welcome, Ethan. Ethan Beute (Guest): Thank you so much. I really appreciate the invite, and I'm looking forward to the conversation. Ethan and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: Me too, and I love your t-shirt. People who are listening can't see this, but he's got on a t-shirt that says, "Rehumanize," which definitely is related to what we're talking about today. Let's start out by having you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and about BombBomb. What do you guys do? About BombBomb Ethan: Sure. I've been with the team for eight years full time and two years part time prior to that. A, we've been at this a long time, and B, I've been involved with it for a long time. We maybe had a couple hundred customers when I started full time back in 2011 and more than 45,000 today, so it's been a really interesting journey. And I think it's just, there's so many factors that we're working in our favor at the time. What we do, we make it very easy for people to get face-to-face again through simple video. The ideal situation is that you and I could get together and have this conversation in person, but time and distance are the things that keep us apart. Here, we were able to work out time, and then, we use Zoom to cover the distance. It allows us to be there in person when we can't be there in person, and that's what this style of video is. It's simple, personal videos, typically webcam, smartphone, unscripted, conversational. Not to put on your home page, not to build a YouTube channel with, but in order to get face-to-face again where it matters most for you, and for your customers and future customers. We have a tool set that works in Gmail, in Outlook, in Salesforce, in Outreach, in a bunch of other CRMs and platforms, our own web application, mobile apps, etc. But the premise is, you're better in person. You're going to communicate with people more clearly. You're going to connect with them more effectively, and ultimately, you're going to convert at a higher rate when you get face-to-face. And those conversions aren't just a macro conversion, like a signed contract or something like that. It's also the micro conversions, like more replies, or a return phone call, or more clicks through to fill out that form or to give a review, or whatever the case may be. And so we've found that, when people are a little bit more personal and a little bit more human in their communication, instead of relying exclusively on the same plain black text on the same white screen that doesn't differentiate you, doesn't build trust and rapport, and doesn't communicate nearly as well as if you just looked someone in the eye and just spoke to him or her. And it's a really effective and satisfying way to communicate with people. Kathleen: Yeah, I really could not agree more with that. We're recording a podcast right now, and we're starting a little late, because I had some technical issues. The technical issue I was having specifically is that my webcam wasn't working. And you would think, "Well, why do you need a webcam to record a podcast, which is an audio podcast?" But the reality is that it makes a huge difference if I can see the person I'm talking to and vice versa, not only to forge a connection, but the facial expressions, my hand moving as I talk. And also, not talking over each other. Our ability to have a great conversation is so dramatically influenced by our ability to see each other. Ethan: I agree completely, and I know a little bit more about you. Even before we started speaking. You have a really nice little diffuser going. I can see- Kathleen: My essential oils back there. Ethan: Yeah, yeah. I can see photos of your family. It's the spoken and unspoken things. It's the body language, but it's also the context and all this stuff. It's just so much more rich. And again, effective, as you already said. You know when I'm winding down, and I can see when you're ready to ask a follow up question so we don't speak over each other and things, but it's also more satisfying. I feel a little bit more connected to you. You're able to read the word on my t-shirt, and know that it says something about me and the way I look at things. There's just so much there. That's what all of this is all about. Ethan: It is about getting to the MQL number or the SQL number or the revenue number or whatever, but all of that is facilitated through, and I don't want to sound trite and go, "It's not B2B, it's not B2C. It's H2H." It's true. I don't want to be trite about it, but that's all this is really about. "We are successful when we connect with people, are sincere in our ability to provide value, and so this ability to do it in a more complete way, with today's technology, is simply a return to the way business was exclusively done just a few generations ago." Why more marketers don't use video Kathleen: You just mentioned something really interesting to me, which is "with today's technology." I have noticed that, in the last few years, there are just a proliferation of tools available to support making these kinds of videos. But there actually are an astounding number of marketers who are not taking advantage of them. I would love to just start by talking about why you think that is the case. Ethan: I'll tell you exactly why it's the case. I think one of the biggest hangups is that it requires vulnerability. That's it. We don't want the discomfort of appearing on camera. There are some other things too in that there's not a lot of best practices established. I think a lot of people see people on LinkedIn, with this maybe this style of video and think, "Who do they think they are? I would never do that. I can't do that. Can I do that? Is this good enough? Am I good enough?" Just to bring it back to the vulnerability. "Do I actually have anything to say," and all of these other pieces, and so I think a lot of it is that personal piece of, "I'm not comfortable enough in my own skin to put myself forward in a real and honest way, sitting here in my cubicle," or as I'm doing, standing in a bedroom in my dad's condo in West Michigan. We are who we are. We are where we are. And if we come with the right spirit of service and, again, trade word, value, that it all works out. I think the human factor is the single biggest factor. And then I think, more practically, this simpler style of video, there are not a lot of best practices established. I think there aren't enough people modeling it. A lot of people are ... Any typical adoption curve that's fat in the middle, we're still on the early upside of it, and so the followers that want to be a little bit more cautious and comfortable in, "Oh, other people have done this successfully," we're not quite there yet. I think there are people sitting on the sidelines, maybe waiting and watching. And it's behavior change in general, this idea of hitting record instead of going to the keyboard when I'm responding to a customer inquiry, or making that initial touch, or following up after an appointment, or all these other various places you can drop videos. It's a habit change, so even some of our best customers will confess, "Gosh, I love this. This is great. You guys are awesome people. I love what you allow me to do for my customers and in my business, but gosh, I just wish I used it more often." Even people who have jumped all the early hurdles, and we can get into those more specifically, but even people who've jumped all the hurdles are still struggling to make it a habit, which is the thing that I'm most excited about in the work that I do, is getting more people to be more consistent about being more human in their day-to-day communication. Kathleen: You have hit the nail on the head, in my opinion. Because, and I speak from experience, because at IMPACT, we've had a stated goal in the last year of really weaving video throughout every single thing we do as a company, and I have seen both of the things you said. One, I have absolutely seen and I have experienced it myself, that feeling of, "Oh, I didn't put on a nice enough outfit." Or, "I haven't done my hair, so I couldn't possibly do a video today." I've been experimenting with LinkedIn video a lot in the last few months, and it is funny, I do feel like the days when I wake up and put an effort into my appearance, I'm like, "Gosh, I should record three of these in different shirts so that I take advantage of the fact that I look good." And you find yourself getting all caught up in appearances, as opposed to just acknowledging, "This is what I look like today. Let's show the world, and that's okay." But then also that muscle memory almost that you tap into when you need to communicate. A lot of us don't think of video first. I always think of it as building a culture of video within your company. Again, we've been trying to do this for the last year, and we have some tools in place that help us create one-to-one videos really easily. They're in-browser, and it's interesting to see adoption. There are a couple people who are just amazing at it. They use it for everything. And then there are definitely people who, you can remind them time and time again, and they still default back to writing. And so much is lost in that writing, so much of the context. One of the greatest things that I think we did as a company, and I'm going to give credit to our COO, Chris Duprey, is that we actually had this communication training earlier in the year. And it wasn't so much about video, but what he did was, after the communication training, he asked everybody in the company, once a week, a question about how they were implementing what they learned, and he required them to answer that question via video. You had to post a video of yourself answering his question in this particular Slack channel, and it was a great structured way of getting people used to having that kind of a conversation by video. But it was funny to watch, because there were definitely some people who, you could just tell, they were procrastinating doing it. Or they didn't want to show themselves. Absolutely, everything you just said is true, and I've 100% lived it within our company, the whole spectrum of people who are early adopters to people who are true, true laggers. Ethan: I love it. The confidence piece of, "I feel like I look good today," is a real thing. And when you are feeling it, definitely create opportunities to do that. Even my use is pretty streaky, where I might send 15 or 20 or 30 videos in a day in order to execute something that I'm working on, and it requires benefits from one-to-one communication. If you are feeling it, ride that. But if you're not, know that you care a heck of a lot more about your own appearance than anyone else does. The other cool think that I love that you all are doing there is, and it would be one of the tips that I would offer for anyone just getting started, is start with the people who already know you and like you. These are your coworkers, and so an internal Slack channel with your team members all talking about what we're learning and how we're going to move forward together in these types of things, is a really great way to start getting comfortable, because it is a new skill. You're not just going to pick up the saxophone, or pick up a lacrosse stick, or sit down at the piano, or open up a Mandarin language book and just be expert out of the gate. And this is a new skill. This idea of looking the camera in the lens and speaking as if you're speaking to somebody isn't the most natural thing we've ever done, so this idea that you're going to practice is super, super important. And the idea that you can do it in this safe, closed space is just a killer idea, so yeah, props to Chris. Kathleen: Yeah, Chris is a smart guy. Using one-to-one video in your marketing Kathleen: In terms of marketing, there's so many use cases for these one-to-one videos, but let's zero our focus in for a minute on marketing, because I have some other areas I want to talk about too. Marketing, specifically, can you talk a little bit about some of the use cases you've seen, where one-to-one video can be useful? Because there are plenty of use cases for non-one-to-one video that I think most marketers are very familiar with, but how do you see one-to-one specifically being used? Ethan: I'll start with the common thoughts, which is the idea that it's recorded once and used over and over again, but it goes to one person at the right time. This would be, maybe, something that you would write and script and edit, and it isn't truly in the context or even the spirit of what you and I have been talking about with regard to video. But anywhere that someone is making a transition, this could be from a form fill to a free trial, or a free trial to a customer, or any of these points of transition for the customer that are in marketing's zone of activity or responsibility set. Frequently asked questions is always a great source of video content, whether that is for an email nurture sequence or a YouTube playlist or a set of blog posts. Whatever the case may be. Anything that your best customers are wondering about or need to know in transition from one place to the next is a great place to do relationship building and teaching and nurturing through video. I would add then that, for the marketer in general, some places I've personally ... I was a one-person marketing team for about three and a half years, and then we've dramatically grown the team out over the past three or four years since then. I sent a ton of email, and I did not send it from a group address. I sent every email, whether it was a newsletter, one of these nurture type emails, trade show pre-event marketing or post-event followup, I sent all of them from my own email address. And so A, if you're not sending email from a real person, I encourage you to do so. The reason you're sending email isn't just to blast information out. It's to create conversation and to help people, but the benefit is these replies, the things people wonder about, the things people thank you for, this is how you understand your customers. If you're not getting on a phone with them regularly, this is another great way to have those conversations. And do you need to budget time for it? Absolutely. What I found myself in ... I'll go to a really fun one. If you send emails to large lists of people as I was doing, as the sole practitioner and even as we were building the team before I handed some of this stuff off to other team members, I would regularly get, from time to time, on an email to 80,000 or 120,000 people, get that periodic reply that says, "Why are you in my inbox? I hate you." Foul language. Kathleen: Isn't it amazing how awful people feel like they can be over email? Ethan: Right, unsubscribe. And so, it's funny. What I would do in all of those cases is I would just hit reply, and I promise I'll give you a couple more good use cases, but I would hit reply and I would say, "Hey Jeff, Ethan Beute here with BombBomb. Wanted to let you know I got your email. Hey, I am so sorry. It does me no good to make you upset. I don't want to send you email you don't want to receive. I know the outcome is going to be terrible. I wanted to let you know that I've personally manually unsubscribed you in both of the systems that we use to have email. And if you ever want to get face-to-face with people as I'm doing here, to build a relationship and let people know what's going on, just reply. Let me know. I'd be happy to resubscribe you any time." And about one third of the time, you get nothing back. About one third of the time, you get an, "Okay, thanks." And about one third, maybe a little bit less of the time, you'll get, "Oh my gosh, that was really nice. Yeah, resubscribe me." Again, all anyone wants is to feel like they've been seen and heard. That person who was very angry in the moment, maybe they just lost a deal, or got chewed out by their supervisor, or got a piece of bad news, or woke up on the wrong side of the bed, they get your email and they are just ready to start firing. All they want on the other side is, "Hey man, I see you. I hear you. I'm sorry. This is not in my best interest either. I don't want to spam you, because that's bad for both of us, and I've taken care of the issue." That's all anyone wants. I do customer testimonials, customer success stories. I think, yeah, you could write a rule set in your CRM or something that will produce a list of your most active customers or your longest lasting customers or customers within a particular segment or whatever, and send a mass email requesting that they send a video testimonial or some kind of success story or whatever. That's okay. I typically prefer to do that on a one-to-one basis, because I do want their personal story. I might template the email with three or four tips on how to provide that story or that testimonial, or leading questions or a structure for how they might respond, or go to a third party site and leave that thing you want to give that instruction. But I think, even if it's 85% the same video, I think it's worth 45 seconds a person to let them know that you appreciate them. There's a benefit here too. Smiling is like gratitude in that the more we practice it, the better we actually feel. It's a chemical benefit. It's an emotional benefit. It's a physical benefit to us. And so this idea of anything that's positive in your customer communication, I think the more you can do that and be sincere in it ... Your current customers are your best source of your next customers, period. They're least expensive, the warmest, etc etc etc, and so why not honor those people? Those are the people that you can turn into the loyalists and the advocates, simply by, even with 40 seconds of your time, they're going to say something like, "Oh my gosh, thank you for taking the time to send that video." And you say, "Oh my gosh, it actually took me a quarter of the time it would have to type all this out." Anyway, I could go on, but I think when you look at the times when you're clicking Send, you're going to find opportunities where you can communicate more clearly or make a stronger human connection or make a bigger impact or be much more clear in your communication, and those are the spots where you might take care to hit Record. And again, once you get comfortable and get over those human issues in the beginning, you're often going to save a lot of time. Kathleen: Yeah, there are so many great use cases. Again, speaking from personal experience, and I wouldn't say we're experts at this, but we've been playing around with it a lot, and some of the more effective use cases that I've seen are ... We have a Contact Us form on our website, so for anybody who's interested in talking to someone from our sales team, we actually have one person, her name is Myriah, who everybody talks to first. And so, we made a video of her. On the page, it says, "If you fill out this form, this is the person that you will be speaking with." And it's her saying hi and saying, "I'll be the one you're talking to," and explaining what she's going to cover in the call. That's been very effective, and people really like that. They're like, "Wow, I really did get her on the phone." And then- Ethan: That's the really interesting thing. When people greet her on the phone, there's not just the basic relationship building there, like the psychological proximity. There's also a degree of authority there in this idea that, "Oh, it's really you." This idea that they feel like they know you, and so when you get on the phone, it's like, "Hey, it's you." What a benefit to the entire rest of the relationship, especially if that's the first touch they get. So good. Kathleen: Yeah, we've done that also in a lot of our email marketing, like you were suggesting. Whether it's promoting ticket sales for an event and having somebody ... I'm a user group leader for HubSpot, so whenever we invite people to our next user group meeting, there'll be a little video of me saying, "Hey, I hope you can make it. Here's what we're going to cover." And it's funny, because when you pair that with the email ... We have one of our email templates. We call it "conversational email," but it's basically a stripped down email template. It looks literally like it came out of my Gmail. It's done by design. It still has the CAN-SPAM footer, but it's subtle. We just stripped all the formatting out and made it look like every other email you get. And when we create the email like that and make it very personal and from me, and then have a video of me in it, it's sent through a mass emailing system, but it is astounding, the number of replies I get. People saying, "Oh, thanks for your email. I'm sorry, I won't be able to make it." Nobody responds to a formatted mass email to be like, "I'm sorry. I can't make it." But the fact that they're doing that, it's because it really feels like they're getting a personal email from me. Ethan: There's a social reciprocity element. I feel like it's subtle. You can't describe it. They would never articulate why they chose to reply to that email. If you deliver it as if you're speaking to one person instead of, "Hey everyone." If you're like, "Hey. As someone in the HubSpot community here locally, you blah blah blah ..." When you speak to one person, they feel like it's for one person, and there's this, almost an obligation to participate in a different way. The same as your front desk or your admin who's the first point of contact and the router of all of the opportunities, that she's greeted in a different way as well. I'm not surprised by that result, but I love to hear it. Kathleen: Yeah, you also talked about one other thing, which I've found to be true as well, which is when something's complicated, I actually love video for that. Because it is exhausting to think about having to write out an email about a complicated topic, when you can just turn your video camera on and, in no time, just talk it out. And then send that to somebody. I think it's easier for you, as the person who needs to communicate the message, but it's also easier for the one receiving it to understand it. Ethan: Completely, and so when you fold in something like screen recording, that helps as well. If you need to walk people through a process, or walk through a form or a document, or a piece of software or something else, this idea of being able to blend show and tell together is especially powerful for detailed and complicated topics. And a point of caution here that I would offer people that say, "Oh gosh, this is great. I'm going to add some videos to my emails." A, I definitely agree with your idea of stripping down some of the emails and making them more ... We call it Gmail, Gmail style, Gmailesque. But then I would also say, don't be redundant. The text in the email is meant to support the video, and the video is meant to support the text in the email, to ultimately make it clear to people, "Why did I get this? What's my opportunity? And how do I proceed?" You do need some text maybe to help compel that video play. The video is there to bring the message to life, to maybe add some clarity or add some emotion. In the case that it's an event invite, really build it. Sales is the transfer of emotion, so capture the spirit of the event and what you think is really cool about it, or attractive and why you would just plain not miss it. These kinds of things are going to naturally draw people in, with fellow human beings and fellow social creatures that we are. And then, there's often a tendency then to put all the detail from the video in the body of the email. I strongly discourage that. Then there's no reason to watch the video. Again, these are all habits. No one send is the thing. Just speaking of your HubStop user group, these are people that you reach out to monthly or quarterly. You maybe have some exchanges. You're going to be back in their inbox, and so the more you train them that, "I don't need to watch the video, because it's all here in the email body," they're not going to watch the video. Or the more, in general, let's step outside of the user group. The more emails you send ... Every single email you send, you're training people to open or delete your next message by how good it is. And it's the same thing with any aspect of that email. You're training people to know what to expect from you when your "from: name" and "from: email address" hit their inbox. We need to be careful to keep the human elements in the video. Out of courtesy, if it is a complex topic, go ahead and include a list of bullet points or details, or date, time, location, street address stuff that you don't necessarily want to memorize and put in the video. It doesn't belong in the video. In video, in email, you can use them together, the video and the text to be complimentary, to compel people to ultimately take you up on the call to action, whatever the purpose of that email is. How to do one-to-one video right Kathleen: That's a great point, and I think what it speaks to is, what are some things that you should be aware of if you want to do this well? If somebody says, "I'm into it. I want to create a one-to-one video. I like that tip of 'don't be redundant.'" One of the other things I learned was, when you hit that record button, already be smiling. Because, if you put a video thumbnail in something, and you have a serious face, it's not going to entice anybody to watch. Whereas, if you have a big smile in that thumbnail, somebody's going to want to hit click. It's much more inviting. Are there other tips along those lines that you have for people if they're going to test this out? Ethan: Sure, absolutely. Something that happens when people first get started is they think the video is magic, because a lot of people selling video solutions are selling magic. That's just my shorthand for "dramatic promises that this is the one thing you've been looking for, that it's going to make the difference in ..." What's going to make a difference in your business and a difference in the world at large is being consistent about doing it and making it a habit, and now this is part of the way we communicate. It doesn't replace phone calls, doesn't replace text messages or emails or social messages. It's just part of what we can add into so many of our situations to, again, bring it to life and convey the emotion, have people feel like they know us. What people will often do is just record a video and send it on its own, essentially. And then they wonder, "Why didn't they play my video?" Which is the wrong question. That's backward looking, looking to blame. You can learn and apply it forward, but it's too late. You've already done all the action. If we instead ask, "Why would he play this video? Why should she play this video? Why would they watch this video?" Then we're going to be much more clear. This is just ... and you don't have to go through all these steps every time. Like you're sending a marketing email to 1,500 or 15,000 people every single time you send a one-to-one email, but once you start getting habitual about it like, "Okay, what's in it for this person," and when you're clear on that, you're going to A, record a much better video. Because you're much more clear about the intention and the value to the recipient, but it's also going to come through in your subject line, one line of text to tell someone why to play the video, and then a supporting line of text after the video to drive the call to action, which I assume you'll be talking about in the video. Being clear on what's in it for them from the get go is going to set you up to create a much better experience for them from subject line through opening it through watching the video through following up on the call to action. Being clear on the value is a good one. Something that we do at BombBomb, we take the first three seconds of your video and automatically turn it into an animated preview for you. That gives you three seconds to do thinks like, of course, smile or wave or gesture at something in the room. I keep a little whiteboard on my desk, a dry erase board, and I'll write notes. Sometimes I'll draw people's logos. I'm using the animated preview as well to let people know why they should watch the video. You can do that in a static thumbnail as well. Other people use sticky notes or iPads. You can use screen recording, where your little face is in the corner, and you're over top of their LinkedIn profile or over a blog post that they recently published, or a podcast episode, or a podcast they host. These kinds of things to let them know, "This is just for you. This is not something that I ..." Because as video becomes more common, the same reason that direct mail fell off, I feel like it's having a little bit of a resurgence. The reason it fell off is, we all know this is just ... "This went to everybody. It's not necessarily relevant to me," and all of these things. Video will reach that point. I actually think we're years away from it, because there aren't enough people doing it, for some of the reasons we already described. There'll be a point at which we need to be much more clear about the value of video. I think we still have a window here where, simply using video in some of these places where it's not necessarily expected or common will get you an extra lift right now, but especially as we go forward. This ability to convey the value to the recipient and reasons to participate, because goodness knows, our time and attention are not going to be more available in the future. They're only going to be less available, and so we need to be more clear about these things from the get go. Who should be using one-to-one video Kathleen: So true. Now, what do you ... I imagine there are people who hear this and they think, "Okay, one-to-one video. I get it, but by nature, it is unscripted. It is less polished. It is more informal." What do you say to people who come back to you and say, "My brand, that's not congruent with my brand. My brand is more corporate. It's more polished, and this isn't going to fit with it Ethan: For starter, I would obviously ask some follow up questions. My flippant response is, "You are wrong." My flippant response is what I said earlier, which is just ultimately, you need to honor those elements, and I think some of that's going to come through. Maybe you control your setting a little bit more. You control your clothing a little bit more, but ultimately ... I wrote a piece years ago called The Shiny Authenticity Inversion. It was based on anecdotal evidence from working with thousands of people around this, and people using video in YouTube, in Facebook, even at the time, five years ago, let's say, and in email and these other places. And they say, "I do all kinds of video. I have all this expensive video equipment. I made a studio in my office or in my garage or whatever, and I do all this great stuff." But the videos that generate the best response are my simplest ones, where I just hold out my iPhone and I just talk to people. I organized that, and then I specifically set corporate against human in a table to characterize it: scripted versus conversational, edited instead of one take recording. This kind of shiny, scripted, produced, edited, animated open, like the video opens and we're in a polished video. And I think the reaction to the simpler style is a reaction to, or an echo reaction even, to Seth Godin's television industrial complex. This idea that, if you had budget enough to produce a video and put it in front of enough people that you would inherently and immediately have trust, the idea that you had enough of a budget to create a television campaign in the '80s and '90s, was enough for people to say, "Oh, these people are super legitimate." And now I think we're overtrained that way. This idea of pulling the curtain back, and stop putting on all of this overdressed ... Brene Brown's language for it is like armor, and some of these other things, this overly produced scenario, where we act as if. We act as if we're not the same as you. We're not the same as ourselves. We're better than ourselves, all this dressing up. There are places for it, and I think there are ways to do this that honor the spirit of your brand and are true to who you are. But ultimately, people want to know that. They want to see you and hear you just like they want to be seen and heard. They want to know and trust the person who's on the other side, and so I think the more we can ask why when we feel defensive about these ideas of being more honest, and being more direct, and being more personal, and being more human in the work that we're doing. Another thing is, "This doesn't scale." It doesn't, but you've got to pick your spot. I say, if you as an agency are doing high value/low volume, then I think there are a lot of places to do this. If, like us, as a software company with 40,000 customers, are doing high volume, you need to pick your spots and say, "I'm going to do mass emails for this," but when people reply or when I go through the analytics, I'm going to follow up underneath and be truly person. You've got to pick your spots where it's going to make the most sense and the most value for your organization. I would say the same thing to your question of, "That's not me." And by casual unscripted, I don't mean you have no idea what you're going to say when you hit record, or that you're going to do it in the parking garage, the fifth floor of the parking garage underneath your office building. I'm not suggesting that it's intentionally trashy, although my shiny authenticity version was. I feel validated. About a year later, the Content Marketing Institute, which produces a ton of amazing content, a gentleman did a piece called Visual Realism: The New Way to Build Trust. And he broke down how Levis, Coca-Cola, Betabrand, and some of these other really big companies are intentionally dumbing down the quality of their photos and videos in order to ... appear more trustworthy. And so, while we're down here wondering how we can put more gloss and polish and budget behind our video efforts, these companies that have 100,000x your budget and more people and more time and all of this are trying to find their way back down toward the rest of us, in terms of being approachable and being trustworthy. I would just encourage you, if you take this position of, "I can't do that because," ask a couple layers of why, and be honest with yourself, because ultimately, you're going to win when you can put yourself forward more often. Kathleen: You know who nails this, who's a great example of it? And I think proof that you can really get real and not jeopardize your business credibility, is Dave Gerhardt, who is the head of marketing at Drift. Drift is a very, very successful company that is growing like gangbusters, that sells into other very, very successful companies. And Dave not only does super informal one-to-one style videos, but sometimes he'll do it after a workout when he's sweaty, or walking down the street with one of his kids. He takes it to an extreme, but it's because the stuff that he's saying is so valuable that nobody cares what the setting is. And let's be honest. We're all human. We don't walk around 24/7 in tailored suits. We all have lives, and so it shouldn't come as a shock to anybody that people work out, people have kids. But if you have a message of value to deliver, I think, being willing to do that any time, any place, is very humanizing. When you talk about trust, it's funny, and you talked earlier about every email you send is an opportunity, or reinforces whether somebody should open or delete. What started turning in my head was actually Jason Fried, who is one of the founders of Basecamp. In his books, he talks about something called the trust bank, and he talks about it with respect to employees, but I think it's just as applicable here, which is that, he talks about when he hires somebody, he has a full ... He has a trust bank, and every action you take, every interaction you have, either puts more money into the trust bank, or it takes it out. I think it's the same thing with video and with email. Every piece of content you create is either going to add to that trust bank or remove from it. Yes, while you might make a fancy, polished video, is that adding to the trust bank or is that withdrawing from it? Is it going to make you feel colder and less accessible or is it going to invite somebody in? Ethan: Yeah, and is it self motivated or is it in the service of the other person? The other interesting thing then is, with Dave, which is a great example, and you'll find other people of note, familiarity, large companies or big names in and of themselves, doing this. I think, if you find yourself standing back and saying, "I would never do that," or "I just don't have the same kind of value to add," I think, A, he's getting the benefit of some of the things I got when we turned our cameras on to start this conversation, which is, I see where you work. I know some things about you. There's some things around you that I can attach myself to and say, "I have some affinity with her," without us ever saying a single word. And it's the same thing with him. When he's leading his life and allowing you into it, it's not just about the message. It's also about, "I like this guy a little bit more." Or, at a minimum, "I know more about him." And the value of that is so intangible, but significant. And the other thing I would say, for people who think, "Gosh, if I'm going to step it up and I'm going to communicate these messages in video, I need to have something extraordinary or extra special or super insightful," or these kinds of things. I just don't think that that's true. I think, for starters, most working professionals, who've achieved even some moderate level of success, have a lot more to teach and share than they would ever give themselves credit for. And then again, going back to customer value, you probably know, if you're a competent marketer, you know where people get hung up and where people are successful. You can communicate these things en masse or one-to-one to people who are stuck. They've maybe been with you for awhile, but they're stuck and they need to move forward. Or people that are just getting started with you. Short line on that is, you have a lot more value to offer than you probably recognize or give yourself credit for. If you look around, you're going to find spots where you can be more personal and more helpful, and you can do this and you are good enough. How does one-to-one video translate into marketing results? Kathleen: I love it. I feel like I could talk to you about this forever, but I'm realizing that we're running out of time, and there are some important questions I want to ask you before that happens. First one is, we've talked a lot about the why and the how. Can you address ... How does this move the needle? How does this translate into marketing results, and what have you see in your experience? Ethan: Sure. I've seen all kinds of wonderful things, from an anecdotal standpoint. Again, as a front line guy for years, who sent all of this stuff personally, I have relationships with hundreds and hundreds of our customers, and I know their stories and how they're using it and all that. Survey data, 81% of people said they get more replies and responses to their emails. Again, the goal of the email oftentimes is to generate a reply, especially in sales. As you start moving into the MQL or SQL range, depending on how you're structured, you might still have a BDR or SDR function within the marketing team. Some people separate it. It's actually separated at BombBomb. It's now on the sales side of the fence, not that we don't have a ... You've got to draw a line somewhere, not that we don't have ... collaboration. More replies and responses. 87% of people say they get more clicks through their emails. I think it was one in six said they doubled or more than doubled their click rate. 68% of people say they convert more leads. I think 10% said they doubled or more than doubled their conversion rate. This one gets more into, and not necessarily a hardcore marketer, but 90% of people said it allows them to stay in touch more effectively. I think it was 40% said they doubled or more than doubled their ability to stay in touch effectively. And then I think it was 56-57% of people say they generate more referrals. And those numbers, specifically in our Gmail instance, again, the question was, "Compared to traditional, typed out text emails, how much of a lift does BombBomb video in email give you?" When we asked the same thing exclusively in the Gmail context, all the numbers were the same, but with two to five points on top of it. Which, again, goes back to this idea of the simpler style email. Not necessarily the full blown design header, graphics, colors, these things that, again, signal to people that this is polished, this is for everybody, this has some gloss on it. And it's appropriate in moments, but I think the more we can strip it back a little bit and get straight to the heart of it, typically the better off we're going to be. On the CS side, which may not necessarily be directly of interest to marketers, but there's something there. First touch resolution has dramatically improved, so when someone reaches out with a problem or a question, which again, I got as a marketer, being able to send a video and even a pre-recorded video that addresses that specific question, dramatically reduces the back and forth time, which A, eats up your time as a marketer or a team member, and then B, frustrates the customer in that, "I'm going back and forth. I have a meeting to go to. I still don't have my resolution. I'm not clear. I don't understand." These longer exchanges, so first touch resolution, people filling out satisfaction surveys increases. And I think it goes back to this reciprocity piece in your story of, "Oh my gosh, it's really you on the phone." It's that. How to connect with Ethan Kathleen: Yeah, yeah. I like that. Well, if somebody wants to learn more about this, or they want to reach out to you and ask you a question, what's the best way for them to reach you? Ethan: My name is Ethan Beute, E-T-H-A-N B-E-U-T-E. You can hit me up on LinkedIn. You can email me directly, Ethan, E-T-H-A-N at BombBomb.com. I co-authored a book on simpler personal videos called Rehumanize Your Business, and you can learn more about that at BombBomb.com. It's just the word bomb twice, B-O-M-B-B-O-M-B.com/book. And, of course, you can find it on Amazon as well. We walk through all the stuff. What is this all about? Why does it matter to you and your business? Who's actually doing it? When do you send a video instead of text? How do you technically do it? And then we have some advanced ... How to get more emails open, how to get more videos played, how to get replies, responses, clicks, etc. And then how do you follow up? What happens when you send a video email to 500 people? What do you do with the 168 people who opened it but didn't play the video? How do you follow up with that? So a bunch of follow up strategies as well. We want to make this accessible. I am sincerely convinced that, when this becomes a more standard business practice, and again, I don't see this as a strategy or a tactic. This is just a different and better way to communicate using today's technology. The bandwidth that we have as recorders and senders, and the bandwidth that our customers have as recipients, and the nice cameras we have built into our laptops and our phones and all of this. This isn't ... My vision and my hope for this is that this becomes a more standard way to work, because it's going to bring us closer into relationship with one another. It's going to close this, "We're more connected than ever, but we feel more disconnected and lonely and unseen than ever." It's just going to be a better way to live and work as a practitioner on the company side, and as a stakeholder on the customer side. I'm very encouraged by its growth and the receptivity to it. I recognize the human challenges, and I hope people can go forward. I hope the book is of some value in that process. Kathleen: Amen. Well, I will put those links in the show notes for sure. If you want to connect with Ethan or check out the book or BombBomb, head to the show notes. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Two questions I always ask my guests, and I'm curious to hear what you have to say. The first is always, company or individual, is there a particular person who you think is doing inbound marketing really well? But I'm going to twist it and ask you, is there an example of a company or individual who's doing personalized one-to-one video really well? Because you work with a lot of these companies, so who should the audience check out if they want to see a best practice example? Ethan: Good one. We just spent a lot of time with one of our really good customers who's just ... We're all in Colorado Springs. I'm not at the moment, but our company is and I typically am. But there's a company called Madwire Marketing 360 that's up in Ft. Collins. They were already a really good company culture, and you can see that when you get into some of the content that they produce, but they really just took this on and ran with it. Ethan: The adoption there was just really amazing. I've been a part of the adoption of video on a variety of teams and company situations, and they just really, really ran with it. It's been really inspiring, and the results they're getting are fantastic. Kathleen: Great. Well, I'll definitely put that link in as well. And then, digital marketing is changing so quickly, and I always hear marketers complaining that it's like drinking from a fire hose. How do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated? Ethan: I read a lot of books, and I read them in print, and I read them with a pencil. I'm not a hardcore gadget, tool, tech guy. I'm not looking for new apps. I'm not looking for new tools. I want to understand the problem first, and so I think there's something about reading. The pace of it, especially reading with a pencil, where you're very clear about what's super important, which I underline. And when it's also of secondary importance, which I put in parentheses. There's something about that process. I think so many people run to digital tools, but they're not clear on the real problem they're trying to solve, and therefore, the implementation is either incomplete or potentially even not helpful. They think that just by evaluating three solutions and subscribing to one of them that they've solved their problem, and in fact, that's just a very, very beginning, and very often, it's a reflection of the fact that you didn't truly understand your problem. I'm much slower. People on our team, thank goodness it really does take a variety of disciplines and backgrounds and stuff, because I do have gadget guy and gadget gal and app guy and app gal on my team, which is awesome. That's what helps me as well is my colleagues. If you're not that type of person, it's okay. It took me awhile to come to terms with that myself, but know that we all add value in the process, and being very, very clear on what you're actually trying to solve is the most important step to staying abreast of the latest changes in martech. Kathleen: Yeah, I love that you're a pencil and hard copy book kind of guy, because I love nothing more than making notes in margins and underlining and marking books up. All right, well we are just about out of time, so again, head to the show notes if you want to know how to contact Ethan or if you want to learn more about BombBomb. You know what to do next... Kathleen: And if you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learned something new, please consider leaving a five star review on Apple Podcasts. If you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because I would love to interview them. Thanks so much, Ethan. It was fun. Ethan: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it too, and if you're listening, if you've listened to other episodes, go leave that review. It really matters. Kathleen: It does. Thank you for saying that. All right, see you next time.

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

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.  

How can eCommerce businesses reduce their time to first purchase by 10X? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, WordPress developer and eCommerce expert Jason Resnick shares the process he uses to help eCommerce businesses dramatically reduce the time from first touch to first purchase. And while Jason works primarily with eCommerce businesses, the advice he shares is equally applicable to businesses in other verticals. From visitor segmentation, to behavioral analytics and content personalization, Jason goes into detail on the process he has used to help one client reduce time to first purchase from 40 days to 8, and for another client from 9 days to 1.  Some highlights from my conversation with Jason include: Jason is a WordPress developer and eCommerce marketing expert. According to Jason, one of the keys to reducing the time to first purchase is to capitalize on the positive emotion that a visitor feels when they discover your site for the first time and get them to explore further. One way to do this is by adding a widget to your site with related blog articles. Asking your visitors a qualifying question is a good way to learn a bit more about them and then use that information to tailor what you show them. With these types of questions, and then behavioral information like the articles and pages your visitors are looking at, you can create a lead scoring model. Based on the topics that a visitor is consuming content on, you can use that information to change the copy on your CTAs to make them more relevant to your visitors' interests. In eCommerce, the first 90 days are crucial. If you can't convince a new contact to purchase something with the first 90 days, the odds of ever selling to them drop dramatically. When Jason works with new clients, he begins by taking baseline measurements of how long it takes for a new contact to go from first touch to first purchase. By using segmentation, intent awareness, and personalized copy, Jason has been able to reduce time to first purchase for one client from 40 days to 8, and for another client from 9 days to 1.  When it comes to converting new leads into customers, Jason says it all comes down to trust, and you need to build trust into every interaction you have, from your website copy to your email marketing. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the Rezzz website Follow Jason on Twitter Connect with Jason on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to learn exactly how Jason helps his client shorten their sales cycles - and how you can too. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Jason Resnick, who is the founder of Rezzz. Welcome Jason. Jason Resnick (Guest): Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Jason and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: Tell my audience a little bit about what Rezzz is, and your background, and how you came to be doing what you're doing now. About Rezzz Jason: Sure. Rezzz is my business, it's what I've been doing for, this August will be nine full years, full time for myself. I am a solopreneur. I don't have a team behind me, but it's a web development business. I've always loved the eCommerce space, and the human behavior behind all of eCommerce. Where most developers and designers shy away from eCommerce so early on when eCommerce was ramping up in the early 2000s, I flocked to it, I was attracted to it. I built my business around helping online businesses, and I call them eCommerce, it could be anybody taking a transaction. I have nonprofit clients. I have online coaches. I have clients that sell physical products. Basically anybody taking a transaction, to help them get anonymous visitors into being customers, and then customers into repeat customers, and then repeat customers into raving fans. I do that through a number of different strategies and tactics, which most of them revolve around what's called behavioral marketing, or email automation, but also a mix of onsite personalization, that's where my skillset as a web developer come into play. Kathleen: Yeah. You know, it's funny that you say that about marketers shying away from eCommerce, because I've worked with a lot of marketers in my time. I was an agency owner for 11 years, and of course now I'm at Impact. It's true, I know a lot of marketers, and a lot of them say, "I don't touch eCommerce." It's almost like they're afraid to. I know one or two who do it, and the ones I know who do it have like gone deep, I think because there's such an opportunity, or a vacuum left by everybody else. Why do you think it is that marketers shy away from it so much? Jason: I think it really stems from there's so much tech involved with it, and it's so close to the bottom line that it's easy, I mean, and this is going to come out bad, but because there is a direct correlation that business owners see X dollars coming in per month, per day, or whatever it is from the site, when you say that you can affect that, they're going to see that result immediately. Most marketers, and obviously when we build campaigns sometimes those things take some time to build up, and sometimes you have to have those difficult conversations with clients a little bit earlier on in the eCommerce space than, let's say nonprofits, or standard brochure type websites, those things. I think that because of not just that, those difficult conversations that you might have to have, but also the tech side of things, if something goes wrong, if you're the point of contact and you don't necessarily know at a deep level what those technical bells and switches are, then you're going to be like, "Uh." With your hands raised and saying, "I'm not sure. Let's go see what we can find out from the tech team." I think at least from my experience, that's what customers tell me when they come into my ecosystem. They want somebody that, they may not know all the technical aspects of things, but they do understand that some things do take time, and they just want somebody that can take care of all of it for them. They don't want that ping pong match like, oh this is the host, and this is the developer, and this is the marketing side of things. They don't want that ping pong match, and they kind of just want that holistic point of contact person to be able to say, "Yes, there's a problem." Or, "Yes, this is what we need to do." At least from my experience I think that that's the reason why a lot of people shy away from it. Kathleen: Yeah. It's interesting because web design, development, et cetera, in general comes with a lot of high stakes, especially in this day and age when so many people find your business by your website. With eCommerce, as you rightfully pointed out, it's like way, way, way higher stakes, because your business is your website. Jason: Right. Kathleen: Your website is your business. Either way you look at it, if you break something, you're breaking the entire revenue stream of the business, not just like, oh our customers couldn't see our website today, or we didn't get another form fill. Jason: Right. Kathleen: Yeah, it's not an inconvenience, it's a major, major risk. I can totally see that. Now, and I should say, you came with very high marks, because I met you through one of my past podcast guests. This is one of my favorite ways to get new guests, is when former guests reach out and say, "Hey, I have somebody you should talk to." That actually happened in your case when Val Geisler, who I interviewed a few months ago, wrote to me unsolicited and said, "I really think you should talk to this guy." Val, for those who either didn't hear her episode or don't know, is an amazing email conversion copywriter, mostly for B2B SaaS companies. I have a tremendous amount of respect for her, and as soon as she wrote to me I said, "I'll talk to anybody that you think I should talk to." Jason: Thank you very much. Kathleen: Yeah. No, that was a good introduction. You do a lot of work, because you're in eCommerce, and what is interesting to me about you is that you're not just a web developer/designer. You work on some of the other aspects of eCommerce businesses, personalization, conversion optimization. How did you get from web design and development into these other areas? Jason: I think actually it, well my career took me in that path, but I think as a person it was the other way around. I've always been interested in human behavior. I got a minor in psychology in college. For me, and I went to college in the late '90s, and that was the advent of the internet. I mean, I remember going to the computer lab and building my first webpage. That was in like '96. Kathleen: I remember learning Basic. Jason: Right. Yes. Me too. Kathleen: I'm not going to say any more, because then that'll really date me. Jason: For me, when the advent of the internet came along, that was intriguing enough, because I was actually going for computer science at the time. At that time it was a lot of compiling code, and waiting for things to happen. Yet the web was like, I put code on a screen and I hit save, and I refresh and boom it's there. Hey, that's pretty cool. That intrigued me, but also my human nature side of things, just being perceptive of the world around me and kind of how people interact with certain things, and why they do what they do, and why they don't do what they don't do, always intrigued me. When the eCommerce world hit, pre Amazon, all the rest of it, people were afraid to put their credit cards in. Even online, let alone cellphones weren't even really a thing at that point in time. I was working for a consulting firm at that time, and we dealt with a lot of startups, and all of them wanted some sort of eCommerce in some sort of fashion. For me, it was always interesting to say, okay, if we use certain buttons in a certain way, and certain text in certain colors, we could create this, I don't want to say an artificial, but a perceptive environment of being safe. Where they can submit their credit card and not feel that they are sending it over and somebody's copying that down and running away with their identity. For me, that was the genesis of where I am today. I've always just kind of had that snowball effect, and really focus in on that specific part of my development skills. Because as you said, a lot of people were shying away from it, and I always knew that I wanted to work for myself. I had to find that niche, if you will, that sweet spot to really plant my flag in, and fit into a market that I could become known for. That was how I started all that. Just as the web evolved, now with email marketing, and how much data you can collect on somebody just by asking them a few questions, you can segment, you can promote certain things based around where a person is in their journey and their awareness. You can do all these things and marry things like your email marketing platform with your website with a little bit of code. Now there are services out there that can do this too, that your website can look completely different with two different people. It's all based around what you know about that person, where they came from, demographics, or even just what you know they clicked on in your last email. That's always been interesting to me because that's like the mom and pop of like the early 1900s, where somebody would walk into the store and you would have all your stuff ready because they knew you came in every Thursday. They knew who you were. For me, having that personalization and segmentation is what allows you, as the business owner, to know where your potential customers are, where your customers are, where your repeat customers are, and know how to cater to them in the best way possible. Kathleen: You know, it's fascinating that you just brought that up, because I literally just, as we're recording this, this morning published my latest episode, which was a conversation with Shai Schechter, who's the founder of a company called Right Message. That's exactly what he talked about, was his platform that he's built lets you ask your visitor a simple question like, what brings you here today? He actually equated it to the conversation you have when you walk into a shop. Like nobody is saying, "What industry are you in?" It's, "What brings you here today?" Jason: Right. Kathleen: Based on the answer to that, you can dynamically then update the copy on the page. He was seeing like 10x improvements in landing page and CTA conversion rates from that kind of like small amount of personalization. I definitely think there's something to it. Jason: Yeah, absolutely. I know Shai, I've known him for a couple of years. We've met at some events and things of that nature. Yeah, he's built a great platform. His platform's called Right Message, and I use Right Message as well for some assets of my business. Yeah, I mean it's that idea of, we've gotten away from that broadcast everything to everybody. Now we want to really cater to the one on one. That is what's going to increase conversions, and that's what's going to help you convert non customers to customers as quickly as possible. The more you know about them, the more that you can speak their language, the more that you're serving up the thing that they want at the right time, that's going to help you with your conversions. Reducing The Time to First Purchase Kathleen: Yeah. Now you, as you said, you do a lot of work in eCommerce, and one of the biggest areas of opportunity for optimization in eCommerce is how long it takes from first touch, if you will, with a lead or a prospect, to getting them to purchase. Time to first purchase. You've done some interesting work on shortening that time period, can you talk a little bit about that? Jason: Sure. Yeah. As you said, any time somebody sees you for the very first time, there's this innate human factor inside of us that, hey, we like this thing. This is awesome. There's this emotion, this euphoria that you get on the human side. What you want to do is, from a technical perspective, is to be able to capitalize on that euphoria, that feeling of good that somebody sees in you. What you can do nowadays is just ask them a couple of questions, or in the behavioral marketing side of things, see what they click on, what is interesting to them, what do they not click on? Those kind of things, prior to them even being in your email list. When they're in your email list obviously there's more details that you can get to, but with code snippets and things of that nature you can actually change your website around what they're reading on your blog. What you can do with your own blog, if you will, and I'm sure many of you have seen it, is that you have this "widget" that says, "You may also like ..." Or, "Here's other content that might be interesting to you." Because what you're on, the article that you're reading at this point in time, there is related articles in that same category on that same website. What they want you to do is, hey, if you're interested in this, then go check out this as well. They're trying to move you along in that journey to know that if you have a specific problem, well we have some resources and we know how to solve your problem. What you can do in the background of things is you can do "lead scoring". If somebody, let's just say on your website you have a bunch of articles around pricing or things of that nature, pricing, let's say you also have things on sales, or marketing. If somebody hits a couple of articles on your marketing side of things but they never look at pricing, then you could potentially change your website around that a little bit more. Make your calls to action to talk about marketing versus pricing. I do this on my website plenty of times. If somebody comes to me from, because I specialize in convert kit and drip, if somebody comes to me from the convert kit consultation, or convert kit experts they call them, if that webpage, then my services page gets reflected on that. I don't even mention drip, I just mention convert kit, because that's where they came from, so I'm assuming, based on their behavior, that that's what they're interested in. They're not interested in anything else that I do. You can be mindful of these sort of things, and just talking their language allows you to then get them to the next stage faster. Because if I can echo what they're saying to me, based on their actions what they're saying to me, then just us as humans we're going to say, "Hey, that's what I'm looking for. You know what I'm talking about." What I'll try to do in that respect is to be able to then grab their email address, and then market to them in that end. Talk to them about convert kit. Talk to them about potentially segmentation and those kind of things, or automated workflows if that's what they're looking for. All of this data really just gets passed over into my email marketing platform and my welcome sequence tailors to that. What that does is, like for my clients, is to be able to then baseline how long it takes for someone to first opt into your email list and then buy from you, because that window of opportunity is finite. Once you go past about 90 days, and obviously this depends on the type of product or service that you're selling, but on average 90 days, then you're not going to convert, or you're a lot less likely to convert. You want to be able to then, especially if you're selling multiple things, sell quickly. You want them to get that first purchase because that's always the hardest, and then get them to repeat buy after that. With just some small tweaks, and some small segmentation, and intent awareness, because we can dive into that a little bit more. Just based around some of those things you can then shorten that time frame greatly. I have some results where I've done for my clients, take their baseline of 40 days to the first purchase, and gone down to eight. I've had another client where it was nine days down to less than a day. Kathleen: Wow. Jason: It's just a matter of knowing and understanding the actions that somebody's taking, and then putting the right promotion, if you will. I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to be a buy, it could be an email opt in or whatever. Putting the right promotion in front of them. How To Measure Time To First Purchase Kathleen: Let's wind back a little bit. Let's say I come to you and I'm an eCommerce company, and I'm interested in focusing on this time to first purchase kind of metric. You talked about how the first thing you have to do is establish a baseline of how long is it actually already taking people to get from first touch to first purchase? Walk me through exactly what you're doing to measure that. Are there certain tools that you put in place? Tracking tools, what is it you're looking at in order to determine that? Jason: Sure. I think only one person was tracking this that came to me, which makes my life easier. Most times what I look for is really I look for obviously their customer list, and I take their email addresses. Then unfortunately there's no tool to marry this stuff. I basically take a spreadsheet, an export of that, of all their customers, and then I go to their email service provider and I see when they opted in. Then I try to figure out, based on the dates around them becoming a customer and when they first opted in, and I kind of take a baseline, if you will, "baseline", on what their metric is. Then I have a conversation with the business owner to kind of gauge what their sales team sees, if they have that data, and try to come up with the best possible estimation that they have for this. A lot of times, I mean there's obviously a percentage plus or minus, but a lot of times it's pretty accurate if you know the data that's there. Because we all know when they purchased their first thing, we all know when they came onto the email list. If it happened to be that ... I try to discount those that have zero day initially, because a lot of times people in the email marketing world, and I'm sure a lot of your audience knows this, a lot of times people will opt in with a different email than they'll actually pay with. Kathleen: Yeah. Jason: If they opted in on the same day they purchased, for the baseline I take that away. Kathleen: Yeah, there's a lot of XYZ@123.com. Jason: Right. Kathleen: Don'temailme@pleasestop.com. It's amazing how creative people get with those fake email addresses. Jason: Absolutely. Obviously there's some experience factor in there for where I try to come up with that baseline. Then what I do once I have that, then I go into their email marketing platform and I essentially create rules that store when they become an opt in, but also when they actually purchase. Which is just a custom field that really just does some math to say, okay, they subscribed on this date, they became a customer today, let's minus the two, how many days are there? Over the first month or two of doing that, I kind of gauge whether that baseline estimation that we first did is accurate enough to go off of. Then we move from there more into the optimization, asking certain questions, things of that nature to try to shorten that time. Jason's Process For Shortening Time To First Purchase Kathleen: Let's talk about that stage next. I've come to you, I say, "I need help with this." You calculate those initial baseline metrics. Then what? It sounds like you're using personalization and targeted offers in order to pull people through that customer buying journey. Is there any kind of like discovery process or research that you're using in order to determine what the right offer is, or the right way to persuade them? Jason: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of it is, in my own research anyway, is looking at their analytics first. Seeing what people are actually looking at on the website, because a lot of times it's not what the owner thinks. I want to make sure that I have the data, because for me, I'm a data geek and the numbers don't lie. If the business owner tells me one thing and the data tells me another thing, then we have a conversation to try to reconcile it in some way. That's first things first, is really looking at Google Analytics, or any other metrics that they could possibly have. A lot of people use Hotjar and some of these other tools out there that help you with the customer interaction on your website. I start there. Then I have conversations with the business owner as well as certain key members on their team, if they have those kind of people. People like marketing, sales, people that are closer to the customer, if you will. Support teams, those sort of things, to really start to get an understanding of, and it's not even technical, it's just what kind of words do you hear all the time? What pain points people are struggling with. What opt ins do you have on your site that actually can map to a product? Because a lot of people, especially in the eCommerce space, they say, "Hey, we had a discount for this. Sign up on your first purchase." Is that working for you, or is something else working for you when you run a holiday sale instead? I try to gauge what that customer is thinking. Because we can assume that we're putting the best foot forward, but if the customer is coming to you depending on the product or service obviously, they're coming to you with two things in mind. One is their intent, they're intent on solving the problem. Is the page that they're on, or your product, or service, actually going to solve their problem that they have right now? Two, what's their motivation behind solving that problem? I really want to get down to those two things. It's not scientific in the way where there's actual numbers, at least initially. I want to make assumptions on that, and put campaigns out, look at welcome sequences. Look at all of these kind of things that they're already doing that we can inject some questions, or inject some relative links to blog posts, or products, or whatever, os that we can get a better gauge on what their intent is and what their motivation is without actually asking them. Kathleen: Now you talked about nurturing sequences, and onboarding workflows, and things like that. I do find it's very easy in this day and age to overwhelm audiences with email particularly. Do you have any rules of thumb that you use as far as like, how soon do we email them and how frequently do we email them? Anything as far as even style of email, because I know there's a lot of different opinions on very designed emails versus plain text. I'd love just on the topic of email to hear your thoughts. Jason: Yeah. I mean, that's a whole nother episode. Kathleen: I know. Jason: Yeah. To answer the first part of the question about how often, frequency, those kind of things. First I have to know what they're doing already. If you came to me and said, "Look, I do a once a month promotion." If you just switch that up to a daily, then your list is going to be obliterated and they're going to be like, "I don't even know who this person is." They're going to get high on subscribe rates. If you have a pretty regular cadence, say once a week or something of that nature, it's really just throw it out, if you want to add another email. Because for me, my business when I send emails, I get paid. I will always try to mix in emails where I can. For how I like to do it, I try to do it in a human way, not just like let's just keep sending links to podcasts and blog articles, or products, or services, or stuff. I try to have the subscriber opt into those things. You can do that in a way where if you had, let's just say you had a cadence of every single week on Tuesday you send out an email to your list. You could just send out an email on Tuesday saying, "Hey look, we're going to add another email, or two emails, we're going to have it on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday now, and we're going to talk about this. And if you're interested in that, just click this button." They're automatically opted in. You could do things in a more human way, and it goes back to that whole mom-and-pop philosophy is, I want the subscriber to tell me. All of this stuff allows you insight into them, into the subscriber at an individual subscriber level. If they're excited to hear more from you, then you know that, hey, well they may be interested in a product or service that I have that's outside of the free level. You could do those kind of things. You can surely incentivize people with discounts and all of those other things. While that stuff does have its place and works, for the long term, creating those raving fans and repeat buyers, it's all based on trust. The trust factor comes in where you're actually genuine with them and, "Hey, I have an offer, I'm going to do this. If you're interested, all you have to do is let me know." Kathleen: You talked earlier about some examples of results in terms of shortening that time span. I would love to hear a little bit more about that. Do you have a couple of maybe specific examples of it started out at this long, went to that long, and like what led to those key changes? Jason: Yeah. I mean, specifically with some of those results, the one that's interesting is that one that was almost two weeks and I shortened it to a day, inside a day. That was really based around, it is a digital product company, but they also had a service on the back end of it too. What it was, was the funnel was very linear. It was somebody opts in and we promote this product to you, and it was a flash sale. It was like within 24 hours you can buy this for 99% off. That kind of thing. If they didn't take you up on that, then you go into this long term nurture sequence, which was basically two emails a week. Out of that it was pitching that same product over and over again, but at full price. It was, I call it a soft pitch. It's more like, hey, you've seen them in the bottom of your emails I'm sure, like in the P.S., like hey, we also if you're interested in this, we have this product. Which worked fairly well, I mean, nine days to opt in to convert to a customer is good. What they wanted to do was they had a lot of different products that served a couple of different audiences. Immediately when they opted in, unless they opted in via a specific opt in, they didn't know which audience they were. What I wanted to do was I wanted to basically put that front center. I mentioned it a little bit earlier on beforehand, is we can know before they opt in what they've already looked at, through JavaScript and cookies and local storage on their browsers, and that's all in the tech world. If we know what they looked at, then we kind of know what audience they're in. Instead of just pitching them that one thing on the back end of the opt in, let's pitch them the product that makes sense to them. That was the first step, was to really try to put that in place, which made a huge impact. I mean, that was just, that initial just, hey, let's look at the blog posts that they're looking at, and store that data. How many did they look at? How frequently did they look at? Based on that, let's position that product offering that's that tripwire product, if you will, for the next 24 hours at that discount, that's the product that makes sense for that audience. That shortened it almost to three days immediately, because people were more receptive to that offer because it made sense to them. Then there were some tweaks we made to the landing page, to the copy, based on some feedback that we got from those people that actually bought the product during that time. We made some optimizations, and that even shortened the time to first purchase. Kathleen: It's interesting to listen to you talk about this, because obviously the examples are eCommerce, but in my head I keep asking myself, is there anything here that doesn't apply to another type of sale? For example, like a complex B2B sale. I'm not hearing anything that's so specific to eCommerce. It's really just, if I'm understanding you correctly, it's really just about looking more closely at their behavior, and using that behavioral information and those patterns that are created to serve up information that's more directly relevant to their interests. Is that right? Jason: Absolutely. I mean, it just goes back to business in general. If you go to a conference, let's say you go to a conference with all colleagues of yours, they're in a similar business or industry than you are. You're going to talk to them in a different way than if you're going to a higher level conference where your customers might be. It's also a matter of awareness of the person that's viewing your online store or your website. Have they never seen you before, or are they intimately familiar with you and they know your name, they know your services? It's that buyer journey that happens with everybody, whether they're buying a pack of gum or they're buying some service that's going to cost them $10,000 a month. Obviously there's sales cycles, and that all comes into play, but it's the same business. You want to earn that trust. You want to speak their language. If you know the problem that you're proposing a solution for, then that person's going to be more receptive to hearing you. When you hear, that's where the conversion is. It's a matter of just taking them along that journey in a proper way, whether it is a complex B2B or whether it's a transaction where you just pull out your credit card and put it in. How Difficult Is It To Implement? Kathleen: This sounds straightforward on the one hand, the concept is straightforward. Then on the other hand it sounds really intimidating in terms of being able to execute it. Can you talk through how complex this is, and is this something that the typical business needs to hire a developer to do for them, or are there tools out there that make it really easy to do this? Jason: Yeah. I mean, it's as complex as you want to make it really. I like to try to keep things as simple as possible. I mean, I even, I have a thing on my white board, what would this look like if it was simple? Because we can over engineer everything. Once you start thinking one thing, it leads you to another thing, and you're going down this long rabbit hole, and you're like, "Oh my god, I don't know how I'm going to even do this thing." What I try to do is, if you come to me and you have decent enough traffic, you have decent enough sales, and we can have a conversation that's around potentially segmenting your audience better, if you don't do all that already. By segment I mean more so than customers versus non customers. If you're actually doing anything in regards to helping your customers move along the journey, meaning are you doing regular email sequences? Are you blogging? Are you doing these other things? If you are, then it's as simple as starting to think about what problems or what products are related? Let's just say you have a product that solves a problem that, let's say a developer has. As a developer I might have a problem where I need more RAM, or more compute power. If I go to a website and it just says, "Hey, buy this hard drive, or buy this RAM, or buy this monitor." Okay, but if I clicked on a blog post of theirs that talked more about compute power for my computer, and then I went to their product page and then it gave me three products that could help me there, I'm more likely to buy from there because they've already positioned a couple of things based around what I know, and I didn't sign up or anything. You can just start thinking about the product that you have and what problems that solves. That will help you start to build these things out. Keep it simple. Write it down in a notebook, or write it down in a document. You don't need a overbuilt tool to do all this stuff, at least initially. We mentioned Shai before. Right Message is a tool that you can build these. You don't need code. They give you a piece of code to put on your website, but you can build these in a visual editor. There's other tools out there as well. Initially it's really just even that widget we talked about earlier about, hey, you might like this content. On a lot of WordPress websites you can build that. There's plugins out there that would help you do that stuff. You don't necessarily need the code for that either. Keep it simple if you haven't done it yet, and see what sort of results you get. I mean, if you come to me, and usually people that do come to me, they already have this idea, they have the traction. That's why I said it earlier on, it's an established online business that I help, because they have the traction, but they want to increase more sales, they want to increase better brand relationships with their customers. They kind of have an idea that they can do this, they're just not sure what the strategies and the methods to go about doing it. What Kinds Of Results Can You Expect? Kathleen: Yeah. Are there any rule of thumbs that you use for like what kind of improvements that, on average, you think businesses can expect to experience if they go from not being contextual or using personalization to once they've done it? Jason: Yeah. It's hard, it's really based around what the price point is, to be honest with you. I feel like if it's a sub $100 product and/or service, people are more impulsive and you could probably see a quicker uptick in the percentage based around that. If it's north of $100 thing, then it's going to be a slower growth. You kind of need a little bit more time and data to see what's actually going to work and pull the triggers. On the other side of that is that those that are north of $100, you could ask existing customers certain things, which I would suggest things like, where were you when you bought this? What problem did it solve? How has it been since? By asking those questions of existing customers, you can help shorten that on the front end of it. I mean for me it's such a general rule, but I always say you could get 3% to 5% of anybody you talk to, to buy something. Obviously that's a very general rule. I always want to push that a lot higher than the 5%. What I try to do is I try to get the pages in which people are landing on for the purchase like 30% or more. Trying to get the messaging right, trying to get the distractions away from the page, because that's what a lot of eCommerce sites do. Just case in point, look at Amazon, they don't do a lot of that. Once you start going into their checkout process, the closer to your wallet that you get with Amazon, they remove everything. A lot of people don't even realize it. A lot of customers anyway, don't realize that the navigation goes away, continue to shop goes away, contact us goes away. All of these things go away as you start moving closer and closer to actually paying. Who better than Amazon to follow? Because they have the traffic, they have the data, and they publish a lot of these experiments for people to look at. I always try to, obviously depending on the price, I try to figure out what their baseline is. I want to always try to 10x the ROI that they put into me for their business. Kathleen: That makes sense, yeah. I kind of figured the answer when I asked that question might be some form of, it depends, so thank you for humoring me and answering that. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Well I'm curious to hear your answers to the two questions I usually ask my guests. When it comes to inbound marketing specifically, who do you think is doing it really well right now? It could be a company or it could be a person. Jason: Yeah, I mean, as far as inbound marketing, I'd have to say somebody that does it really well is Chris Marr. He runs the Content Marketing Academy, and he's a marketer that obviously he runs workshops for larger companies. What he does well and how he talks about what he does, it's always it's like the softest sell possible, and then you're just like, "Hey, yeah, I want to go to Chris, because he knows what he's talking about and he gets great results." His methodology and everything he talks about, it makes perfect sense. For me, I've known Chris a few years now. I've had him on my own podcast. It's just, I don't know, it's simple but yet so highly effective that it's sometimes like, hey, this is easy. Kathleen: How did I wind up buying from him? Jason: Yeah. You wonder what's going on. Yeah, if it's somebody, I would recommend checking out Chris Marr if you haven't already. Kathleen: That's a good one. I'll put that link in the show notes. Then with digital marketing changing so quickly, and especially the field that you're in, it can be very hard to stay up to date on all the new developments. How do you personally stay educated? Jason: That's a tough one. I try to, because I toe the line between tech and marketing, there's a lot of noise. What I try to do is I try to curate a lot of what I see. For me, Twitter is my home away from home, if you will. I get educated through Twitter, and who I follow there, and really put together lists on my profile that are really targeted to specific people that are knowledgeable in the space. I'll go to Twitter first to just see what people are talking about, and things of that nature. If it comes up one, two, three times more than the first time that I see it, then I'm like, okay, let me see if this is something of interest. Then what I'll do is I'll sign up to specific newsletters. Some of the newsletters that I sign up to, I may only sign up to it for a month or two and the unsubscribe, but it'll get me the information that I really need at that given point in time. I really try to reduce the amount of noise and distraction, and so I kind of use that just in time learning strategy where, okay, Facebook's changing something in their ad algorithm or whatever, now while I don't do that, my clients do, so I want to be up to date on what they're doing, at least knowledgeable to have some sort of conversation if they ask me a question. I'll go check out that for a little while. I'll talk to some people that I know in the industry, say, "Hey, what's going on over here? Is this something I should pay attention to, or is this just noise?" It's really curated, and it's more outreach for me than letting it all come to me in a flood. Otherwise, I would never get any work done. Kathleen: Yeah. I hear that. Who are your top, let's say three favorite people to follow on Twitter? Jason: Well, that's tough. For business and products, I would say Justin Jackson is probably, he's always interesting to follow because he learns out loud. He tries things. He owns a product business himself, and he's been in the product game for a long, long time, and he knows about that space. In the online world for me, business wise, as far as product goes, Justin Jackson. Chris Marr I follow. He shares a lot of interesting content, marketing links, and strategies, and that sort of thing. I follow him. Then one that I've always followed for a long, long time, probably since day one of me signing up to Twitter, is Paul Jarvis. I've tried to model my business after what he does, which is I'm small potatoes compared to what he's able to do at this point. He's always remained small, and he's built his business designed around him and his lifestyle. That's how I've built my business over the past nine years, is around the life that I want to live, and so if I start going down the rabbit hole of thinking of scaling up, and hiring, and agencies, and growing in that world, while it's attractive, it's not actually what my long term game is. Seeing Paul saying, "Hey, I'm going offline for a couple of months. I'll see you in December." Whatever it is that he does, it's like, oh yeah, that's why I do what I do. He's kind of almost like a grounding rod for me. Kathleen: That's interesting. I'll have to check him out. Any particular newsletters? You mentioned that you subscribe to a few newsletters. Are there any that have stood the test of time, that you haven't unsubscribed from, that you really love? Jason: Val's is one. Kathleen: Yeah, Val's great. Jason: Yeah. She's one. Another one that I really like is Margot, what's her last name? (Margot Aaron) She's a straight shooter. She kind of pokes, she's a marketer herself, she's a copywriter, but she pokes fun at marketing. She's one that I follow because it's like, hey, here's a headline that you're supposed to read, and here's a button that you're supposed to click, but if you don't really want to, you don't have to. It's kind of like allows me to inject my own personal brand into what I do. Because as a business owner, I know that my customers come to me, they could get what I do by going to anybody that does a similar thing, but they come to me and they become a customer of mine because there's something that I'm putting out there that they jibe with. My personality comes through in a lot of what I do, my website and all that. I wear being a New Yorker on my sleeve. I'm a pretty straight shooter too. I try to over communicate in some respects with my clients. They sort of appreciate that, and so I call my clients on certain things, I wrangle them in when they need to be wrangled in, and I challenge them. That is what most of my clients have said that that's why they stay on with me, is because I don't just do what they ask me to do. I help them along the way. Kathleen: Yeah. That's great. If you remember Margot's last name, let me know, because I'll put that link in the show notes as well. Jason: Will do. Definitely. You Know What To Do Next Kathleen: Sounds like a really good one. Well if you're listening and you like what you heard or learned something new, of course I always love it when you leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts. If you know somebody else doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because they could be my next interview. Thank you so much Jason. This was really interesting. Jason: Yeah. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.  

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.