Podcasts about quintain

House building is rarely out of the news these days especially since the government fell so woefully short of its own completion targets last year. Evara is the largest privately owned home builder in Ireland and aims to build 1500 houses a year starting next year. It's also given itself a full rebrand to stress its deep roots and longevity. Joining Joe this morning was Michael Hynes is the chief executive of Evara formerly known as Quintain.

We think that this interview with Catherine was so good that we wanted to run it again to make sure you didn't miss it the first tome round!  Formerly known as PfP Capital, Thriving Investments is a leading fund manager with a social conscience. The business already manages three living strategies totalling £700m and so far it has acquired and delivered 3,500 private rented sector and for-sale homes and has six regeneration projects under way, as it targets 20,000 homes over the next decade. Prior to joining Thriving Investments Catherine was an Executive Director – Strategy & Investment at Quintain and has previously held roles at Hudson Advisors and Lehman Brothers among others. Catherine has an MBA from INSEAD and is a graduate of the University of Reading. I sat down with Catherine to discuss a broad range of subjects which covered some of the following topics: * How she got into real estate * Working across surveying, banking & private equity * Not being afraid to take a backward / sideways career move * Skill stacking * Turning capital wins into community gains * Advice for those early in their career * Building 20,000 homes in the next decade   Oh, and one last question - who are the People, what Property, and in which Place would Catherine invest should she have £500m of capital at her disposal. Catch the full episode which will be live on Spotify, Apple and Youtube NOW! The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne Who do you want to see on the Podcast? Link in the comments below

Simon Carter is the CEO of British Land.He has extensive experience of finance and the real estate sector. He joined British Land from Logicor, the owner and operator of European logistics real estate, where he had served as Chief Financial Officer since January 2017. Prior to joining Logicor, from 2015 to 2017 Simon was Finance Director at Quintain. Simon previously spent over 10 years with British Land, in a variety of financial and strategic roles and was a member of its Executive Committee from 2012 until his departure in 2015. He also previously worked for UBS in fixed income and qualified as a chartered accountant with Arthur Andersen.In May 2022, Simon was appointed to the Board of Real Estate Balance, a campaigning organisation working to improve diversity and inclusion in the real estate industry.

Catherine Webster - CEO of Thriving Investments. Formerly known as PfP Capital, Thriving Investments is a leading fund manager with a social conscience. The business already manages three living strategies totalling £700m and so far it has acquired and delivered 3,500 private rented sector and for-sale homes and has six regeneration projects under way, as it targets 20,000 homes over the next decade. Prior to joining Thriving Investments Catherine was an Executive Director – Strategy & Investment at Quintain and has previously held roles at Hudson Advisors and Lehman Brothers among others. Catherine has an MBA from INSEAD and is a graduate of the University of Reading. I sat down with Catherine to discuss a broad range of subjects which covered some of the following topics: * How she got into real estate * Working across surveying, banking & private equity * Not being afraid to take a backward / sideways career move * Skill stacking * Turning capital wins into community gains * Advice for those early in their career * Building 20,000 homes in the next decade   Oh, and one last question - who are the People, what Property, and in which Place would Catherine invest should she have £500m of capital at her disposal. Catch the full episode which will be live on Spotify, Apple and Youtube NOW! The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne Who do you want to see on the Podcast? Link in the comments below

James Saunders, chief executive officer of developer and asset manager Quintain is in the interview seat in PropCast this week, discussing the firm's flagship Wembley Park development, the importance of branding in real estate, and why listed real estate firms can struggle to complete large redevelopment schemes on time.

This week head of masterplanning Julian Tollast and David Hughes, estate landscape manager tell us about the transformation of Wembley Park which has given the area around the eponymous stadium an ''urban arboretum" and includes far more extensive and varied green space than people may realise.One of London's largest development schemes of recent times, the long-neglected neighbourhood received more than £2bn investment from Quintain in 2004 giving a new lease of life to the original landscape, first designed by Humphry Repton who laid out the original gardens for Wellers, the home of the Page family, in the late 18th century. One of the highlights of the development is the addition of an avenue of "champion trees of the world" which line the route from Wembley Park underground station to the stadium, developed with the assistance of Tony Kirkham, formerly of RBG Kew.Tollast discusses plant selection and design principles which incorporate formal planting in some areas and "informal shaggy planting" in others. Hughes explains the maintenance regimes and some of the challenges of maintaining a landscape that has to withstand the footfall, litter and tree-climbing antics of tens of thousands of football and music fans on a regular basis. He also recounts his plans to introduce beehives on the high profile site.They also recount the particular challenges they faced in the wake of the tumultuous European Cup Final of 2021, not to mention the stresses of drought on the landscape and trees and and challenges to maintaining and increasing biodiversity. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Quintain Living is the award-winning rental management company with over 3,000 “Build to Rent” homes in Wembley Park. The business has big ambitions, and will be responsible for 6,000 rental homes in the next five years amongst a total 8,500 homes being built by developer Quintain at the site by 2027. Quintain Living promises ‘a living experience like no other' and use design to help fulfill it. Join us this week on designbyus, where we interview Jonathan Houlbrook, Head of Design at Quintain Living. We'll explore how design works when you can't easily iterate, the design values that drive his work, and how living spaces are created with different user personas in mind. Check out the show notes (for free!) on our Patreon: https:/www.patreon.com/designbyus Follow Designbyus on Twitter: https:/twitter.com/designbyus_fm Follow Luigi on Twitter : https:/Twitter.com/luigi_dintrono Follow Ravi on Twitter : https:/twitter/raviisoccupied --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/designbyus/message

Phil Martin, founder Blanco NinoMichael Hynes, Joint Managing Director, Quintain (building 5,000 homes at Adamstown)Michelle O'Keefe, Head of Wealth Advisory at Goodbody Stockbrokers Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

PlaceTech editor Paul Unger is joined by Quintain's first CTO, Jim Eaton-Terry, to talk about how he landed the role, his background in the proptech industry, such as working at FlyBe, and what new, innovative tech excites him the most.

The Propcast Season 2, Episode 5   Title: Tech Enabled Build to Rent with Rajesh Shah Summary: In this episode we speak to Rajesh Shah on Quintain and Tipi to talk about tech enabled Build to Rent.    The Propcast by Louisa Dickins, Co-Founder of LMRE the leading Global PropTech recruiter brought to you in partnership with UK PropTech Association, The UK PropTech Association is a membership organisation to drive the digital transformation of the property industry. This show will focus on connecting the PropTechs, real estate funds and VC's globally…and get everyone talking about innovation of the build to rent environment.   About Our Host Louisa Dickins https://www.linkedin.com/in/louisa-dickins-ab065392/?originalSubdomain=uk Louisa started her career in property working at a well-known estate agency in London. Realising her people skills, she moved over to Lloyd May to pursue a career in recruitment. She now is a Director at LMRE, who are a specialist recruitment firm driven by PropTech and recruitment professionals, and Louisa oversees their 5 core areas. Louisa co-founded LMRE and provides a constructive recruitment platform to the new disruptors in real estate. Louisa is also on the board of Directors at UK PropTech Association (UKPA). About LMRE LMRE believe there is a better way to recruit. LMRE focus on a more comprehensive, client led focus delivering exceptional talent to the right place at the right time. They are passionate about the industry and passionate about people's careers. LMRE spend time with each client to become and an extension of the business, and their transparency and core values help them grow with the sector. LMRE simplify recruitment and innovate with our clients and evolve the people driven, PropTech community.   About Our Guests Rajesh Shah https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajesh-shah/?originalSubdomain=uk Rajesh is Quintain's Executive Commercial Director, working in our Build to Rent (BtR) business,   Tipi, having set it up in 2015. Rajesh is responsible for all commercial and financial aspects of the   Tipi business to position it to become the UK's largest BtR platform. He works closely with the wider Quintain team on the design and pricing for future plots at Wembley Park and new business. Rajesh joined Quintain in 2008 as the Transactions Director responsible for refinancings, acquisitions, disposals and joint ventures.   Rajesh has worked in real estate for over 20 years across a range of sectors including commercial, residential and retail. He has led transactions ranging from raising capital for new funds through to acquisitions and disposals of property portfolios and businesses. Prior to Quintain, Rajesh spent 10 years at Land Securities, where he was Investment Strategy Director at its Trillium subsidiary. He led the pricing of Trillium's new business transactions as well as portfolio management of existing assets. Prior to this he worked at PwC as a management consultant in sectors including real estate, retail and media.   Resources LMRE website www.lmre.co.uk   UKPA www.ukpa.com   Quintain www.quintain.co.uk  Tipi www.tipi.london    Insights from this Episode One of the things we learned early days is a very strong focus on customers, be it the landlord's at that point when we slowly sold the apartments or ultimately the customers who lived with us - Rajesh They're really bringing neighbourhoods to life and creating communities, which I think that's what a lot of us are all seeking, this new concept of living – Louisa I spent probably 12 months heavily researching and taking the foundation we had within Quintain, but looking very, very hard at what the customers really want as renters at large in London and beyond what our pain points were – Rajesh we want to make sure we stand uniquely for, is the whole strength and depth in customer service – Rajesh Rather than sector specific, what we've been testing very heavily in our recruitment is mindset. People really willing to go the extra mile are people really willing to put themselves into the customer shoes, willing to take every problem to its resolution – Rajesh  But ultimately, the success with the data is really are we improving enhancing the customer enjoyment and benefits – Rajesh   Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart   Sponsors You're listening to a podcast produced by A PODCAST COMPANY. This show was made by Podcast Syndicator where we help you go from start to grow to make money with your podcast. Let us help you share your message and your voice with the world. Reach out now. Jason@apodcastcompany.com to find out more. Thank you for listening and do come back to hear more shows like this.    1) Hey, don't miss out on a free webinar! 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James Saunders was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Quintain in October 2019. James was previously Chief Operating Officer of Quintain and has been a main board director since 2017. As Chief Operating Officer, James led the place-making and estate management at Wembley Park, commercial partnerships, group marketing, IT and health and safety.

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 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.

Data has been described as more valuable than oil. But not all data is created equally. Huge risks arise if you don't have the right data, and you don't use it correctly in property investment. So how do you get it right, at a time when data collection seems topical, controversial and indeed essential for modern businesses? Gavriel Merkado, CEO and Founder of REalyse, leading UK real estate data and proptech disruptor, joins Anna Clare Harper to discuss the value of data - including how successful investors are using it, and what the rest are getting wrong. Gavriel is an expert in using data and analytics to drive the right investment decisions, with a strong background in quantitative analytics, hedge funds, trading and equity broking before making the shift to real estate, including at Quintain and Essential Living. Highlights of this episode include: What data is actually valuable, and how it should be used in real estate The rapid evolution of data, and what this means for property investors Common mistakes investors make - that cause them to lose money and waste time - and the four characteristics your data needs Using data in a property crisis Resources: www.realyse.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/gavriel-merkado-17759917/ annaclareharper.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/annaclareharper/ https://annaclareharper.com/book

A couple of years ago, while working at Quintain, a plugin for Gmail called Just Not Sorry started making the rounds. The stated goal of the app was to help women specifically use fewer "undermining words" in their emails -- like "I think," "just," and "sorry."  So, whenever you type an email, the undermining words would be underlined, as if you misspelled something. At the time, this seemed very helpful to me, since I tend to apologize, even when I haven’t done anything wrong. Or, I sometimes I act as if what I’m asking for is a bother, when I’m all I'm trying to get my work done, like everyone else. Flash forward to today, and while I still apply some of the principles I learned through the usage of Just Not Sorry, I haven't reinstalled Just Not Sorry in my IMPACT email.  However, I noticed last week that I was getting stuck trying to reword emails to be less apologetic. There was one email in particular, where I felt incredibly awkward. Not because I was being overly-apologetic, but rather everything I tried to say sounded completely unnatural, given the context, when I tried to avoid undermining myself verbally. I was frustrated and, ultimately, spent close to 30 minutes, tripping over myself not trying to say words that were now considered "bad." Which got me thinking about this whole debate all over again. Are these "undermining words" really a bad thing? Should we be trying to fix them? Is there some truth to women in the workplace feeling like they need to apologize more, or is this a case of women’s behavior coming under undue scrutiny?

EP6: Gavriel is founder and CEO of REalyse, the UK's leading big data analysis platform, helping property developers and investors to better understand the market, its opportunities and risks. Having previously worked in derivative structuring and quantitative finance with several hedge funds, he joined Quintain and then Essential Living, overseeing analytics across their £bn developments. The lack of fast, accurate, and reliable data in the market is what prompted him to create REalyse.Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/NicoleBremner)

Jessie-Lee and I are back this week, fresh off HubSpot's #INBOUND17 conference in Boston. We spent three full days with 21,400+ of our closest friends in the INBOUND community, learning and getting inspired -- so needless to say, we're a little tuckered. But we're not too tired to talk about our biggest takeaways. Prior to this year, Jessie-Lee and I had both been to INBOUND more than a handful of times as part of the Quintain team -- this year, however, was distinctly different.  Not only was the tone of this year's conference a departure from previous years, we were there as new members of the IMPACT family. (Oh, and we were named HubSpot's Partner Agency of the Year, which is kind of a big deal.) We didn't go the ho-hum route, passively attending sessions to get a few tactical takeaways to start using back at home. We worked. We did live website throwdowns. We were moved by incredible speakers. We crushed some of our personal, big, audacious goals -- and now realize we need new ones. We gained perspective. Most of all, we learned we don't just want to grow for the sake of it -- we want to grow to be better. Enjoy! What We Talked About Big themes of diversity, inclusion, and positivity. Jessie-Lee went to INBOUND to learn... and came home with a mattress. Moving beyond the marketing trope of "authenticity" to a new level of self-awareness. The importance of growing better, not just bigger. How, if you want to stand out, you have to be okay with not fitting in. My INBOUND session wasn't a complete bomb. That one time I embarassed myself in front of Dharmesh at INBOUND Rocks. What we loved the most about INBOUND this year. ...and more! Resources We Talked About HubSpot product announcements at #INBOUND17 Live at INBOUND, The IMPACT Show with Bob and Nick "Lady Gaga and Elton John's Amazon Echo" What Is a Content Style Guide? (+ Free Content Style Guide Template) Resources from my INBOUND talk on Content Style Guides IMPACT website throwdowns "Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging" by Brené Brown Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah's #INBOUND17 keynote We Want to Hear from You! First, subscribe to Creator's Block on Apple Podcasts. Second, have a question or an idea for a future episode of the podcast? Let us know!  Creator's Block: Twitter, Instagram Jessie-Lee: Twitter, Instagram Marcella: Twitter, Instagram Liz: Twitter, Instagram Or, you can leave us a comment below! Until next week...

For long-time listeners of the Creator's Block podcast, you know it's been awhile since I've stepped into the recording studio to "pull back the curtain on inbound, content, design and agency life" for all of the creatives and content creators out there.  The podcast is still undergoing a bit of a virtual face-lift, so we won't back on a regular basis for another few weeks. But in the interim, I've invited two guests to join me for a special edition of Creator's Block -- Kathleen Booth, our very own VP of Strategy, and Jessie-Lee Nichols, Marketing Manager at Link Labs. Given the events of the past few months, we're dedicating this week's episode to the big, hairy (and often scary) elephant in the room...  Change.  It doesn't matter what your job title is or how long you've been in the game, we all know that nothing stays the same forever. Of course, sometimes changes are welcome -- a new promotion, for example. But they aren't always.  So, how do you go with the flow and not reach for the panic button when the unexpected happens? Tune into this episode of Creator's Block to find out! What We Talked About A recap of the Quintain and IMPACT merger What really happens when two new groups of people need to work together Finding a "new normal" when it comes to time management How inbound marketing is changing and impacting the industry What happens when you become a new mom and get a new job Why "failure" is a sought after trait in entrepreneurs What entrepreneurs have in common with Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker How the biggest changes often yield the best new chapters in life Why being uncomfortable and scared is when real growth occurs Our advice for those undergoing change in their own lives ...and more! Resources Quintain and Impact Joined Forces: Here's Why (& the Lesson for All) Remote Work: The 10 Biggest Misconceptions 6 Rules to Live by When You Work in an Office but Have Remote Team Members Creator's Block will be back on a full-time basis soon! Until then, however, drop me a line in the comments. I'd love to hear your experiences with managing life's curveballs -- both in the office and at home. 

As Quintain's dedicated content manager, I spend as much time creating content as I do reviewing content created by others. That means I have a front row seat to all of the editorial quirks and idiosyncracies of my fellow Quintain team members, our clients and... well, myself. (Alas, I am not perfect.) Then, a couple of weeks ago, I noticed something that almost everyone was doing - again, including myself. Most content creators - whether you're a marketer, or you're burning the midnight content oil for your own business - make wimpy word choices when framing their ideas or offering advice based on what is often years of experience. They play it safe and use apologetic language that undermines their authority and the power of their content.  For those of you sitting there saying, "I'm not 100 percent sure what you mean, but I am not the kind of person to be a wimp about anything," I get it. In person, you stand behind your ideas. In meetings, you speak with conviction and confidence. But who are you once you get behind a keyboard? You'd be surprised by how many people succumb to apologetic writing, no matter how much of a rockstar they are face-to-face. What's worse, they don't even realize they're doing it.    QUESTIONS WE TACKLED:   Is there a great conspiracy against Liz? What does it mean to be apologetic in your writing? What words and phrases should you avoid as much as possible? Why is being too wishy-washy a bad thing, even with topics that obviously involve a lot of variables? Why do people naturally tend to write this way? How do you walk the line between professional and appropriate, without eroding your credibility? How do you write with confidence without also sounding like a jerk? How do you stop writing like an apologist once and for all? Which ice cream chain is now officially on notice? LIZ SAID: "When I read a blog, I don’t want it to be filled with “maybes” and “might bes.” I want them to tell me what to do with some kind of authority." SHELBY SAID: "Stop making excuses for your content."    RESOURCES AND STORIES WE MENTIONED:   Gmail plugin: Just Not Sorry Kickstarter: Vincent Van Gogh action figure   GET IN TOUCH AND SPREAD THE CREATOR’S BLOCK LOVE What did you think of this episode? Is there another topic or question you want us to take on? Or do you just want to say hi? Reach out to us on Twitter at @CreatorsBlockHQ or using the hashtag #creatorsblockparty. You can say hi to me at @naptownpint and Shelby at @shelbstheging. You can also join us in the Creator's Block Podcast group on Facebook, where you can ask questions and get inspired. And don’t forget - whether you love us or hate us - we would really appreciate you reviewing our podcast on iTunes!  …until next week! 

We are no stranger to talking about blogging on the Creator's Block podcast. (We've talked about why people hate it so much, as well as three quick strategies for writing killer blog introductions.) Why do we talk about it so much? Because while we can all agree that blogging is an essential part of any successful inbound marketing strategy, it's also the marketing activity people tend to complain about the most.  Specifically, there are two excuses that crop up in conversations both internally at Quintain and with our own clients time and time again. First, "I don't know what to write about." Second, "But I don't have any time to write a blog - I am so busy!" So, on today's episode of Creator's Block, Shelby and I aren't just complaining and commiserating - we're providing you with tested strategies and tips for picking great topics and finding the time to blog. (Spoiler alert: You have more to say than you think, and guess what? We're all busy.) Enjoy! WHAT DID WE TALK ABOUT? Do you really not have time to blog, or are you just not making the time? What's broken? Your process or your strategy? Are you choosing the right kind of format for your blog? Are there other formats you can explore to make blogging more efficient? Wait a minute, where do infographics fit in? What do you blog about when you think you don't have something to say? When should you pick your topic? How do you properly scope a topic? How broad should your audience be, and how does that influence how easy a blog is to write? When is the best time to set deadlines for yourself or others? What are some strategies for those managing other blog contributors? Are you setting up your work environment to actually make blogging enjoyable? What are our favorite strategies for "hacking" the blogging process?   RESOURCES WE MENTIONED: Video: Why You Should Create Insights, Not Content Distraction-free writing apps: Bear, Calmly Noisli ambient sound board Pomodoro technique Pomodoro application   GET IN TOUCH AND SPREAD THE CREATOR’S BLOCK LOVE What did you think of this episode? Is there another topic or question you want us to take on? Or do you just want to say hi? Reach out to us on Twitter at @CreatorsBlockHQ or using the hashtag #creatorsblockparty. You can say hi to me at @naptownpint and Shelby at@shelbstheging. You can also join us in the Creator's Block Podcast group on Facebook, where you can ask questions and get inspired. And don’t forget - whether you love us or hate us - we would really appreciate you reviewing our podcast on iTunes!  …until next week! 

This excerpt from "The Viscountess Interrogates" by Cameron Quintain was narrated by Wilson Fowlie.

This episode is sponsored by Circlet Press! This excerpt from "The Viscountess Investigates" by Cameron Quintain was narrated by Wilson Fowlie.

In this episode of Inbound Agency Journey, we have the pleasure to chat with Kathleen Booth. Kathleen is the co-founder and CEO of Quintain Marketing. In our chat she sheds light on how they deliver inbound services, inbound sales enablement, and how they won a HubSpot Impact Award. Enjoy!

“Timing is everything” in London investment. Those are the wise words of Quintain’s head of fund management Nigel Kempner, who welcomed Property Week podcast presenter James Max into his offices on Grosvenor Street this month. In a wide ranging interview with the BBC London broadcaster, Kempner explained in depth how Quintain came together in its […] The post Listen to Quintain investment guru Nigel Kempner on what makes a good deal appeared first on The Property Week Podcast.