Podcast appearances and mentions of ryan bonnici

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Play Episode Listen Later Dec 21, 2022 33:18

Part 8: Top Marketing Leaders Share Their Most Uncuttable Demand Gen Budget Items

Demand Gen Visionaries

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 29, 2022 23:19

Every week on Demand Gen Visionaries we sit down with marketing leaders from some of the world's largest and fastest-growing companies to uncover the demand gen strategies that have been fundamental to their skyrocketing success.In each episode, we ask our marketing-leader guests which three areas of investment are most important to their demand gen initiatives. Tune into this special mini-series to hear the budget items our CMO guests can't live without!Find parts: one, two, three, four, five six & seven---Episode Timestamps: Part seven of this special mini-series features 10 CMOs and marketing leaders from some of the world's fastest-growing companies, including:*(02:07) Dylan Steel, CMO of Coalition*(03:56) Chris Lynch, CMO of MindTickle*(04:47) Marie Hillion, Head of marketing at Livestorm*(06:25) Dan Verley, SVP of Sales Workplace Technologies at Canon Solutions America*(10:18) Cindy Knezevich, SVP of Brand and Communications at SalesLoft*(12:48) Micheline Nijmeh, CMO at JFrog*(14:53) Ryan Bonnici, CMO at Gympass *(16:37) Palmer Houchins, VP of Brand Marketing & Communications at G2*(17:55) Rich Donahue, CMO of IBotta *(20:38) Maria Pergolino, CMO of ActiveCampaign---Quotes:“Data can get you really helpful insights and tell you if you're way off base, but sometimes magic is figuring out the combination of what your customer says they want and what's aligned to their value, how much you have to shift their perception and change their mindset of what your product can be and can do and then find the sweet spot.” - Dylan Steele, CMO of Coalition Inc.People respond well to strong storytelling, no matter if you're in a consumer context or you're in a B2B context because even in B2B, there are people making decisions.” - Chris Lynch, CMO of Mindtickle“Adapt and try to not have the same approach, not only the language but also try to adapt to the mindsets of the region, the countries that you're going to enter in and you're going to target.” - Marie Hillion, Head of Marketing, Livestorm"Marketing is an invaluable tool and partner. When done well and when paired well, and we all consider the needs of the organization and what role we each play, it's really a powerful tandem when you go to market if things are aligned." - Dan Verley, SVP of Sales, Canon Solutions America"Brand is who you are, product marketing and demand gen is what you do. And so those two things work really well together when they're aligned, when they're not aligned, it can be pretty painful." - Cindy Knezevich, SVP of Brand and Communications, SalesloftThere's an old saying, the content is king and there's a reason for it. Organic search is all about content, same with paid search, but organic much more so, and the nurture you're building to get them to engage with you. - Micheline Nijmeh, CMO, JFrog“I think at the end of the day, the most important thing with your content investments is to invest in creating really good content.” - Ryan Bonnici CMO, Gympass“We're going to go to market with both a seller and buyer campaign, and this is where the brand becomes sort of a glue, we make sure that the way that we're presenting ourselves is cohesive.” -Palmer Houchins, VP of Brand Marketing & Communications at G2“You have to trust that you're hitting the audience the right way and you're getting your message there the right way. We want to be the right message, we want to be with the right partners and that's true of any influencer, right? As long as you have the right partner it's probably going to be a really good partnership”. - Rich Donahue, CMO of IBotta “ It has to be a mission that you stand behind and it has to be something you can differentiate. There are many products out there in the world that like you can't tell the difference between two of them, and if you can't, it's then really hard to differentiate. It's really hard to do great marketing, you have to choose an opportunity where you feel like you can do something with your skill, with that marketing.” - Maria Pergolino, CMO of ActiveCampaign---SponsorDemand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.---LinksFollow Ian on TwitterConnect with Ian on LinkedInCaspian Studios

"Expanding Reach Through Partnerships" with Ryan Bonnici

The Medical Marketing Executive

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 5, 2022 17:42

Kurt talks with Ryan Bonnici, Chief Marketing Officer at Gympass. Ryan shares more about how the awareness of employee wellness has grown in recent years and how wellness companies like Gympass can position themselves as a benefit to offer potential employees. He also talks about how the team at Gympass quickly pivoted from in-person to virtual offerings and how they're continuing on as the pandemic wanes.

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18. Career Advice from a Global CMO w. Ryan Bonnici

Smarter Marketer

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2022 42:00

Ranked in Forbes World's Most Influential 50 CMOs list, Ryan Bonnici shares career advice marketers should take onboard. Ryan has gone from marketing roles in Australia to global CMO roles for two tech unicorns in the USA. Guest: Ryan Bonnici was awarded 26th place on World's Most Influential CMOs in 2020 list by Forbes (up from 41st place in 2019). He is currently the CMO of Gympass, an employee wellness benefit that offers unlimited access to the world's largest network of gyms, studios and activities. Ryan has extensive experience across B2B and B2C marketing and sales development, which has led to a strong understanding of the processes behind the job, refined interpersonal skills and an advanced understanding and track record in achieving strong positive return-on-marketing-investment and business growth. Follow him on [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanbonnici/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanbonnici/)], or go to the Gympass website [https://site.gympass.com/us (https://site.gympass.com/us)]. Find Us Online: James Lawrence LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameslawrenceoz/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameslawrenceoz/) Smarter Marketer Website: https://www.smartermarketer.com.au/ (https://www.smartermarketer.com.au/) Rocket Agency Website: https://rocketagency.com.au/ (https://rocketagency.com.au/) Rocket Agency LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rocket-agency-pty-ltd/mycompany/?viewAsMember=true (https://www.linkedin.com/company/rocket-agency-pty-ltd/) Buy Smarter Marketer: Hardcover: https://amzn.to/30O63kg (https://amzn.to/30O63kg) Kindle: https://amzn.to/2ZqfCWm (https://amzn.to/2ZqfCWm) About the Podcast: This is the definitive podcast for Australian marketers. Join Rocket Agency Co-Founder and best-selling author, James Lawrence in conversation with marketers, leaders, and thinkers about what it takes to be a smarter and more successful marketer.

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Content Marketing Essentials with Ryan Bonnici, CMO at Gympass

Demand Gen Visionaries

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 19, 2022 32:16

This episode features an interview with Ryan Bonnici, CMO at Gympass. Gympass is a complete corporate wellbeing platform that ignites every journey to feel good. Gympass is reinventing wellbeing, making it engaging and accessible. Ryan is a globally renowned marketing leader and has twice been included in Forbes' ‘World's Most Influential CMOs'.On this episode Ryan shares his insights into why investing in content is essential, ways to drive revenue and demand, and the importance of your distribution strategy.---“I think at the end of the day, the most important thing with your content investments is to invest in creating really good content.” - Ryan Bonnici CMO, Gympass---Episode Timestamps:*(02:57) - Ryan's role at Gympass*(05:54) - Segment: Trust Tree*(15:15) - Segment: The Playbook*(16:38) - Ways to do paid marketing right*(19:25) - The importance of your distribution strategy*(21:50) - What content you should invest in *(24:42) - Building roads that lead back to your website*(30:18) - Segment: Quick Hits---SponsorDemand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.--- LinksConnect with Ryan on LinkedInConnect with Ian on LinkedInLearn more about Gympasswww.caspianstudios.com

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#68 - Everything your CMO doesn't know how to tell you with Ryan Bonnici, CMO at Whereby

FINITE: Marketing in B2B Technology Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 23, 2021 38:18 Transcription Available

You could have the best CMO in the world, but there might be some things they don't know quite how to tell you. From take more risks, to hire better people, to give better feedback... you might need feedback on your feedback! That's why we welcomed B2B marketing superstar Ryan Bonnici on the FINITE Podcast. You'll probably follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter, he's Forbes 26th most influential CMO, former CMO at G2 and current CMO at Whereby - an easy video meetings platform. Listen to this episode to learn how to be a better B2B marketer and get to the next step in your career. (Hiring template unavailable)---The FINITE Podcast is made possible by 93x, the leading digital marketing agency for B2B technology, software & SaaS businesses delivering SEO & PPC strategy that drives leads, pipeline & revenue growth.And The Marketing Practice: The global B2B marketing agency built to close the gap between marketing engagement and business results.---To apply to join the FINITE community, head to finite.communitySupport the show (https://finite.community/)

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Why B2B Marketers Need to Stop Playing it Safe

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Play Episode Listen Later Aug 11, 2021 37:49 Transcription Available

In this episode, we talk to Ryan Bonnici, CMO at Whereby

Balancing Relationships and Results: How to Deliver Feedback and Encourage Innovation with Ryan Bonnici (CMO at Whereby)

Supermanagers

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 5, 2021 46:19

In episode 61 Ryan Bonnici shares why managers should show and tell their teams what their expectations are and how to balance relationships with results. Ryan has led teams at companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, Hubspot, G2, and now... he is the Chief Marketing Officer at Whereby. In this episode, Ryan discusses delivering specific feedback and his best practices to scale teams through delegation and autonomy. Tune in to hear all about Ryan's technique for inbound recruiting... and even gives us an overview of Whereby's meeting habit

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Growth and Marketing tips, with Ryan Bonnici, CMO of Whereby

The SaaS Revolution Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 15, 2021 44:00

In this episode of The SaaS Revolution Show, Ryan Bonnici, CMO of Whereby and one the best CMOs in SaaS, speaks with SaaStock's Alexander Theuma to share tips around growth and marketing. Ryan shares: - His journey through different areas of marketing to becoming a CMO - Moving from G2, valued at around $1.4bn, to Whereby - The trend from a purely sales-driven model to an organic and/or inbound model and more!

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How to Align Yourself for Impact, With Ryan Bonnici

The CXM Experience

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 15, 2021 29:25

Organizational silos hurt your business, and disrupt your customer experience. Ryan Bonnici, CMO at Whereby, talks with me about how crystal clear organizational alignment can prevent problems before they arise, ultimately driving growth and smoothing out those customer experience bumps. Ryan is a passionate senior executive leader with fortified marketing and management skills. He's currently CMO at Whereby, and #26 on the Forbes 50 Most Influential CMO list. Follow him at: https://twitter.com/ryanbonnici

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SaaStr 426: How to Market at Mass Scale, with Harry Stebbings and Ryan Bonnici, CMO @ Whereby

The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 8, 2021 39:12

In today's SaaStr insider episode, Harry Stebbings sits down with Ryan Bonnici, Chief Marketing Officer at Whereby to chat about how to market at scale. Together, they cover how to hire marketers at scale and how to use marketing to set your brand above the rest.

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#15 - Ryan Bonnici on leading a 70+ person marketing team

CareerHQ by Superpath

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 20, 2020 20:51

Ryan Bonnici is the CMO at G2. This conversation is from a course we created for Superpath Pro subscribers. That course, "How to talk to your CMO about content marketing" is only available for Pro members and you can learn more about that here. Ryan sheds light on what it's like to lead a huge marketing team. In this case, the marketing team is focused mostly on organic search. They fuel that channel with SEO, content and user-generated content. Ryan talks all about this and more. You can follow him on Twitter at @ryanbonnici.

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Why Mental Health And Vulnerability Belong In The Workplace (With G2’s Ryan Bonnici)

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Play Episode Listen Later Jul 31, 2020 30:01

Ryan Bonnici stopped setting his therapy sessions as 'private' on his work calendar. And he wasn't quite prepared for what happened next. Because by openly sharing his own struggles with mental health in the workplace and being vulnerable, the CMO of G2 showed his team that they could be vulnerable and open with him. On this episode of CMO Conversations, Tricia and Ryan discuss how this simple shift to his calendar served as the catalyst for becoming an outspoken advocate for mental health, building deeper connections with his team, and growing as a leader. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends. You can connect with Tricia and Ryan on Twitter @triciagellman @ryanbonnici @HYPERGROWTH_Pod

Why Mental Health And Vulnerability Belong In The Workplace (With G2’s Ryan Bonnici)

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Play Episode Listen Later Jul 31, 2020 29:57

The New School Demand Gen Mindset at G2 with CMO Ryan Bonnici

Demand Gen Visionaries

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 28, 2020 48:15

Ryan Bonnici discusses why the campaign-based approach to marketing needs to be jettisoned for a new school mindset that constantly tests and adapts, his philosophy for creating useful content that drives value and leads to conversion, how he's driven growth at G2, and much more.Key TakeawaysThe campaign-based approach to marketing needs to be jettisoned for a new school mindset that constantly tests and adaptsDemand gen leaders need to be leveraging intent data in order to increase the efficiency of their demand gen spendCreating interactive content that dramatically increases lead conversionMaking more intentional and digestible content by researching complex topics and simplifying for an easier, more simple user experience results in higher trafficQuotes“I think of demand gen differently than most B2B SaaS marketers. How do I generate as much marketing source pipeline for the business as possible? How do I increase our brand awareness and trust? So that pipeline, whether that was through marketing or through sales, flows through the pipe more efficiently.”“We can't just rely on organic word-of-mouth. We need to really try and improve our technical SEO and prove the breadth and depth of the content on our site.”“Most marketing teams over-index on influence and should over-index more on sourcing revenue for their sales team. You can over-index and they think there's like this holy grail of attribution that I have yet to see any company really have when it comes to influence.”“I just fully believe at my core that inbound marketing and attracting someone to you and giving them value is just a better way of doing business. It's a much longer-term way of doing business. It creates a moat around you that paid can never do.”“I just ultimately look for the team to think about not just creating content for content's sake, but if we're going to write something, how can we write it in a way that's better than everyone else. Can we do more research so that we can simplify this complex topic to make it easier to understand? Can we identify better metaphors? Can we write a catchier headline that increases click-throughs? How do we really do it a little bit better than everyone at each of those different stages of the content creation process?”SponsorDemand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

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How To Scale Your Career (And Your Marketing Team) Really Fast With G2’s Ryan Bonnici – Part 1

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Play Episode Listen Later Jul 28, 2020 33:41

At the age of 10, Ryan Bonnici decided he wanted to be a CMO. By the age of 30, he’d joined G2 and turned that dream into reality. In this episode of CMO Conversations, Ryan shares lessons learned from previous roles at Microsoft, Salesforce, and HubSpot and how he applied those learnings to scaling the G2 marketing team. Plus, hear from Ryan on the three things a board wants the CMO to focus on, how to effectively do customer marketing, and the digital strategy his team used to grow traffic from 500,000 to 6 million buyers each month.Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends. You can connect with Tricia and Ryan on Twitter @triciagellman @ryanbonnici @HYPERGROWTH_Pod

How To Scale Your Career (And Your Marketing Team) Really Fast With G2’s Ryan Bonnici – Part 1

career microsoft scale cmo salesforce hubspot g2 marketing teams ryan bonnici

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 28, 2020 33:41

At the age of 10, Ryan Bonnici decided he wanted to be a CMO. By the age of 30, he’d joined G2 and turned that dream into reality. In this episode of CMO Conversations, Ryan shares lessons learned from previous roles at Microsoft, Salesforce, and HubSpot and how he applied those learnings to scaling the G2 marketing team. Plus, hear from Ryan on the three things a board wants the CMO to focus on, how to effectively do customer marketing, and the digital strategy his team used to grow traffic from 500,000 to 6 million buyers each month. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends. You can connect with Tricia and Ryan on Twitter @triciagellman @ryanbonnici @HYPERGROWTH_Pod

EP 70 | Ryan Bonnici - How G2 structures its marketing team to accelerate growth and increase retention.

CHURN.FM

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 15, 2020 46:48

Today on the show we have Ryan Bonnici one of the World's Most Influential CMOs as named by Forbes currently leading the marketing team at G2. In this episode, we talked about Ryan’s responsibilities as CMO at G2, how he and his team split their focus, and how G2’s Product team mirrors their marketing team’s structure. We also discussed G2’s Buyer Intent and how it arms companies to predict churn, how their retention team measures success, and how they guide their free users into their paid funnel. As usual, I'm excited to hear what you think of this episode, and if you have any feedback, I would love to hear from you. You can email me directly on Andrew@churn.fm. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter.

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615. How CMOs Lead in Uncertain Times

The FlipMyFunnel Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 25, 2020 38:06

Think about the most famous leaders in history. Were any of them known for leading through easy times? Responding to crises is what defines a leader. How will you respond? On the latest episode, I am joined by 2 incredible CMOs who have a ton of great tips for how you can better lead your marketing teams through this unprecedented time. And those battle-hardened guests are Meagen Eisenberg of TripActions and Ryan Bonnici of G2. --------------- Join me for weekly special LinkedInLive sessions where I interview your favorite guests like Pat Lencioni, Seth Godin, Whitney Johnson, and Kim Scott — LIVE. Here's the one-click invite: https://evt.mx/mSGV4Ka8

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1235:The Sales Process Is Broken w/ Ryan Bonnici

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Play Episode Listen Later Mar 27, 2020 32:11 Transcription Available

The sales process is broken. Nobody actually enjoys buying anymore—especially not software. And when it comes to most sales processes, the human touch has just disappeared. Randy Frisch, CMO at Uberflip, recently talked with Ryan Bonnici, CMO at G2, about his approach to this problem. They talk about: How being a mini CMO prepared him to wear all the CMO hats Ryan's take on how the sales process is broken (& how to streamline it) Why marketers should think like consumers Four weeks off a year is the bare minimum Check out this and other episodes of The Marketer’s Journey on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play!

Marketing Geniuses to Pay Attention to in 2020 | Ep. #1318

Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 11, 2020 9:01

In episode #1318, we are going to talk about the top marketing geniuses to watch in the 2020. In marketing it is key to surround yourself with those are thinking outside the box, trying out novel ideas, and taking on the most creative approaches to the everyday marketing tasks. Stay tuned to hear our list of who we are following and why they are worth your time. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:25] Today’s topic: The Marketing Geniuses That You Need to Pay Attention to in 2020. [00:33] Eric Siu: avid reader with a lot of information to offer. [01:09] Neil Patel: always tries new, unconventional things - choose non-consensus and right. [02:13] Ryan Bonnici: strategies on where marketing is going, the long-term view. [02:59] Syed Balkhi: entrenched in the WordPress ecosystem. [03:50] Brian Dean: tactical approach, testing new ways to grow without producing a lot of concent. [04:21] Yaniv Masjedi: building a good marketing team, and treating them like family. [05:02] Grant Cardone and Gary Vanerhuck: keeping a pulse on the social web. [05:35] Matthew Barby & Kevin Indig: understanding SEO and newsletters. [06:16] Russell Brunson & Ryan Deiss: implementing sales funnels and monetizing email lists. [06:56] Patrick Campbell: creative approach to content creation and customer response. [07:52] Erik Rivera: thinks outside the box with novel ideas. [08:16] To stay updated with events and learn more about our mastermind, go to the Marketing School site for more information. Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: Ryan Bonnici G2 Syed Balkhi WPBeginner OptinMonster Brian Dean Backlinko Yaniv Masjedi Grant Cardone Gary Vaynerchuck Matthew Barby Traffic Think Tank HubSpot Kevin Indig Russell Brunson Ryan Deiss Patrick Campbell ProfitWell Erik Rivera Honest Paws Leave Some Feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with Us: Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

Marketing Geniuses to Pay Attention to in 2020 | Ep. #1318

Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 11, 2020 9:01

In episode #1318, we are going to talk about the top marketing geniuses to watch in the 2020. In marketing it is key to surround yourself with those are thinking outside the box, trying out novel ideas, and taking on the most creative approaches to the everyday marketing tasks. Stay tuned to hear our list of who we are following and why they are worth your time. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:25] Today's topic: The Marketing Geniuses That You Need to Pay Attention to in 2020. [00:33] Eric Siu: avid reader with a lot of information to offer. [01:09] Neil Patel: always tries new, unconventional things - choose non-consensus and right. [02:13] Ryan Bonnici: strategies on where marketing is going, the long-term view. [02:59] Syed Balkhi: entrenched in the WordPress ecosystem. [03:50] Brian Dean: tactical approach, testing new ways to grow without producing a lot of concent. [04:21] Yaniv Masjedi: building a good marketing team, and treating them like family. [05:02] Grant Cardone and Gary Vanerhuck: keeping a pulse on the social web. [05:35] Matthew Barby & Kevin Indig: understanding SEO and newsletters. [06:16] Russell Brunson & Ryan Deiss: implementing sales funnels and monetizing email lists. [06:56] Patrick Campbell: creative approach to content creation and customer response. [07:52] Erik Rivera: thinks outside the box with novel ideas. [08:16] To stay updated with events and learn more about our mastermind, go to the Marketing School site for more information. Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: Ryan Bonnici G2 Syed Balkhi WPBeginner OptinMonster Brian Dean Backlinko Yaniv Masjedi Grant Cardone Gary Vaynerchuck Matthew Barby Traffic Think Tank HubSpot Kevin Indig Russell Brunson Ryan Deiss Patrick Campbell ProfitWell Erik Rivera Honest Paws Leave Some Feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with Us: Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

Ep. 46: Ryan Bonnici | Know When to Pick Your Battles

Thoughts That Rock

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 24, 2020 20:48

In this episode, we talk with RYAN BONNICI, a big-time, globally-renowned, digital marketing and sales leader, who is currently the Chief Marketing Officer at G2 Crowd. Ryan talks about how to prioritize your life and only focus on the things that can actually make a difference.THOUGHT:Know When to Pick Your BattlesCONNECT:Website: G2.comFacebook: Growth GuyInstagram: @RyanBonniciTwitter: @RyanBonniciLinkedIn: Ryan BonniciBRAND & RESOURCE MENTIONS:n'sync (Bye Bye Bye) - WikipediaAAA - AAA.comForbes - Forbes.comMicrosoft - Microsoft.comHubspot - Hubspot.comSalesforce - Salesforce.comEntrepreneur Magazine - Entrepreneur.comLifehacker Magazine - Lifehacker.comMillennial - WikipediaGeneration X - WikipediaBilly Shore (Share Our Strength) - NoKidHungry.orgJonathan Kozul - WikipediaKenny Rogers - KennyRogers.comG2 Crowd - G2.comAirBnB - AirBnB.comIPO - WikipediaGot2bGlued - Schwarzkopf.comBanding People Together - BandingPeopleTogether.comBig Kettle Drum - BigKettleDrum.comHard Rock International – HardRock.comRock ‘n Roll With It: Overcoming the Challenge of Change (Brant Menswar) – RocknRollWithIt.comCulture That Rocks: How to Revolutionize Your Company’s Culture (Jim Knight) – CultureThatRocks.comCannonball Kids’ cancer – CannonballKidscancer.orgKeppler Speakers - KepplerSpeakers.comCertified Rock Star - CertifiedRockStar.comThoughts That Rock – ThoughtsThatRock.comSpectacle Photography (Show/Website Photos) – SpectaclePhoto.comJeffrey Todd “JT” Keel (Show Music) - JT KeelRYAN BONNICI'S BIO:Ryan Bonnici is a globally renowned digital marketing and sales leader.  He is the chief marketing officer at G2 Crowd (the world’s leading B2B software and services platform) and has been featured in publication such as Forbes, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, CMO, and Lifehacker. Over the past ten years, Bonnici has held senior leadership roles at some of the world’s most innovative technology companies, such as Hubspot, Salesforce, ExactTarget, and Microsoft. In his most recent role, he was the senior director of global marketing at Hubspot, where he led teams in Boston, Sydney, Singapore, and Japan. Ryan is passionate about helping businesses of all sizes grow through the use of data-driven marketing, sales and growth strategies. For more frequent updates from Ryan on marketing, CRM or social media strategies, feel free to join the 115,000+ people following him across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. 

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Marketer's Journey: The Sales Process Is Broken w/ Ryan Bonnici

The Marketer's Journey

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 18, 2020 31:23

The sales process is broken. Nobody actually enjoys buying anymore—especially not software. And when it comes to most sales processes, the human touch has just disappeared. I recently talked with Ryan Bonnici, CMO at G2, about his approach to this problem. What we talked about: How being a mini CMO prepared him to wear all the CMO hats His take on how the sales process is broken (& how to streamline it) Why marketers should think like consumers Four weeks off a year is the bare minimum Check out this and other episodes of The Marketer's Journey on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play!

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Ep. 129: Growth modeling ft. Peter Schroeder of Onna

cmo scaling up g2 ryan bonnici

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 10, 2020 39:36

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

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Ep. 112 Scaling Up With The CMO Of G2 Ryan Bonnici

Scaleup Valley Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 10, 2020 39:48

On this episode of Scaleup Valley, Mike Dias speaks with Ryan Bonnici, CMO of G2 to discuss his journey scaling this review platform.

#CategoryCreation 18: The Category Name Matters Less Than You Think w/ Ryan Bonnici

cmo g2 b2b growth ryan bonnici b2b growth show

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 22, 2019 49:26 Transcription Available

In this episode, we talk to Ryan Bonnici, the CMO of G2, about why you shouldn't confuse “category creation” with having an “official” category on a site like G2. Want to get a no-fluff email that boils down our 3 biggest takeaways from an entire week of B2B Growth episodes? Sign up today: http://sweetfishmedia.com/big3 We'll never send you more than what you can read in < 1 minute. You can find this interview, and many more, by subscribing to the B2B Growth Show on iTunes. If you don't use iTunes, you can listen to every episode by clicking here.

59: Ryan Bonnici / Inside G2's Explosive Growth

Ground Up

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 18, 2019 51:42

Ryan Bonnici, CMO at G2, checks in after 2 years at the company to share: - how they grew the team from 5 to 80 people - how he structures the marketing team into 3 pillars - how the marketing team measures success - the strategies that helped them grow monthly sessions from 500,000 to 5 million - his aggressive approach to goal-setting and planning - and more...

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Ryan Bonnici - CMO at G2 - How To 10X Your Career Growth

The Growth Hub Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 3, 2019 47:51

Ryan Bonnici is CMO at G2 and he's been named as one of the World's Most Influential CMOs by Forbes. In this episode Ryan explains how you can 10X your career growth as he outlines the factors behind how he made it to the marketing C-suite before the age of 30. In addition, this episode covers: - How you can map out your career path and set goals & milestones - How to move from an individual contributor to proficient manager and manage up - The characteristics and skills Ryan looks for when hiring - How to discuss and get raises & promotions - Overcoming challenges such as imposter syndrome and career anxiety - How marketers can move into leadership positions such as VP or CMO Links G2 >> https://www.g2.com/ Trust Me I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday >> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13542853-trust-me-i-m-lying The Power of Now by by Eckhart Tolle >> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6708.The_Power_of_Now?from_search=true Follow Ryan on Twitter >> https://twitter.com/ryanbonnici Bring Change To Mind & G2 Campaign >> https://www.g2.com/g2gives/bring-change-to-mind --- Advance B2B >> www.advanceb2b.com Follow The Growth Hub on Twitter >> twitter.com/SaaSGrowthHub Follow Edward on Twitter >> twitter.com/NordicEdward

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'Mental health in the workplace' with Ryan Bonnici

LonePack Conversations

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 6, 2019 24:44

The aim of our LonePack Conversations project is to help you all understand different aspects of mental health and how your work can be channelized for shattering the stigmas. In this episode, we've hosted Ryan Bonnici, the Chief Marketing Officer of G2, one of the leading software companies in the world. Ryan also serves in the Board of Directors of the mental-health-based NGO, Bring Change to Mind. He opens up about handling the pressures and challenges being in the C-Suite, the way mental health is perceived in today's corporates, and the simple things teams can do to promote mental wellness. To know more about LonePack Conversations, visit -https://lonepack.org/blog/

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SaaStr 268: G2 CMO, Ryan Bonnici on Lessons Learned From Scaling Marketing Team From 5 to 70, The Most Important Role of The CMO Today and How To Create Alignment Between CRO and CMO

The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 23, 2019 40:51

Ryan Bonnici is the CMO @ G2, the company that allows you to get the right software and services for your business with over 897,000 user reviews to help you make smarter buying decisions. As for Ryan, prior to G2 he was Senior Director of Global Marketing at Hubspot where among many other achievements, he scaled HubSpot's marketing-generated sales revenue by 330% year-over-year. Before Hubspot, Ryan was Head of Marketing @ Salesforce (APAC) where he led his team to achieve 227% YoY net-new sales sourced through marketing. Due to his success, Ryan has been named to Forbes’ List of World’s Most Influential CMOs. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: How Ryan made his way into the world of SaaS from Sydney, Australia and came to be one of the world’s leading CMOs with G2 today? What were Ryan’s biggest takeaways from his time at Salesforce? How did it change his mindset? What are the core differences when comparing marketing functions at the likes of Salesforce to smaller companies like G2? What can they learn from each other? Where does Ryan sit on whether marketing is an art or a science today? How did Ryan turn a $6,000 initiative at Hubspot into a product that generated $64m net revs? What have been Ryan’s biggest lessons in what it takes to acquire the best talent? How does Ryan build candidate pipe? What works most effectively? How does Ryan structure and run the process? What core questions does Ryan ask and find most revealing of the individual’s character? What does Ryan love to see in a candidate? Does Ryan agree that marketing teams should always be held directly accountable to a number tied to revenue? What type of CMO would Ryan bucket himself as; demand gen or brand? How does Ryan think about the relationship between the two? Ryan’s 60 Second SaaStr: What does Ryan know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning of his career in marketing? What is the biggest BS that Ryan often hears in the world of marketing? Which marketing leader does Ryan most respect and admire and why? Read the full transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Ryan Bonnici

Ryan Bonnici - Chief Marketing Officer @G2 (Formerly @HubSpot, @Salesforce, @Microsoft; Writer @HBR, @Forbes) - The Inbound Marketing Playbook, The Art & Science of Marketing Metrics, Ryan's Hiring & Retention Methodology; B2B Brand Building

The Naberhood

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 27, 2019 57:11

Guest: Ryan Bonnici - Chief Marketing Officer @G2 (Formerly @HubSpot, @Salesforce, @ExactTarget, @Microsoft; Writer @HBR, @Forbes) Guest Background: Ryan Bonnici is the Chief Marketing Officer of G2 Crowd, where he's driving the growth of the world's leading B2B technology review platform that's helping more than 1.5 million business professionals make informed purchasing decisions every single month. With previous positions leading global marketing at HubSpot, Salesforce, and ExactTarget, Ryan's marketing and SaaS expertise has been featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Entrepreneur, and LifeHacker. Guest Links: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram How We Grew Our Organic Traffic to 1 Million Monthly Visitors in Under a Year The Most Important Marketing Metric You're Not Measuring Learn.G2.com Episode Summary: In this episode, we cover: - The Inbound Marketing Playbook - The Art & Science of Marketing Metrics - Ryan's Methodology - Hiring and Retaining World-Class Talent - B2B Brand Building - What can we Learn from B2C? - Social Media Strategy - Ryan Talk's the Talk AND Walk's the Walk Full Interview Transcript: Naber: Hello friends around the world. My name is Brandon Naber. Welcome to the Naberhood, where we have switched on, fun discussions with some of the most brilliant, successful, experienced, talented and highly skilled Sales and Marketing minds on the planet, from the world's fastest-growing companies. Enjoy! Naber: Hey everybody. Today we have Ryan Bonnici on the show. Ryan is the Chief Marketing Officer of G2, formerly known as G2 Crowd. They have a $500 million evaluation on $100 million capital raised, where he's driving growth of the world's leading B2B technology review platform that's helping more than 1.5 million business professionals make informed purchasing decisions every single month. With previous positions leading global Marketing at HubSpot (who IPO'd back in 2014, they currently have a $7.5 billion evaluation), also Salesforce (who also IPO'd, they have $124 billion valuation), and ExactTarget (who Salesforce purchased). Ryan's Marketing and SaaS expertise has been featured in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Business Insider, Entrepreneur.com and Life Hacker. Here we go. Naber: Ryan, awesome to have you on the show. How are you? Ryan Bonnici: I'm doing well, Brandon, thank you so much for having me. Naber: Good. It is amazing to...I can see you right now, see your lovely hair, and hear your lovely accent, which is always a treat for me. You're in Chicago right now, correct? Ryan Bonnici: I am, yeah. I moved from Australia to the US a few years ago, and it's beautiful, sunny and warm outside, so I can't complain. Naber: Awesome. I've done some solid research on your personal and professional, from all the content you've put out there, and I'm pretty convinced, based on the moves that you made, that you're doing your penance for growing up in beautiful, best in the world to live Sydney and Cronulla, by trying to attempt to live in the coldest, major market cities in the US - in Boston, Chicago. Ryan Bonnici: Haha, yeah...this is true. Naber: No slag on those cities because I love both of them. Lived in Chicago for about five years as well. Hey, let's jump in. So, I know that you've had such an amazing career and, in the intro everyone's heard a lot of your accomplishments as well as a bunch of the companies you've gone through. So, what we'll do, I think today is we'll jump into some personal stuff first, for maybe a few minutes, and go through what it was growing up as Ryan Bonnici, and then we'll hop into some of the professional, and that'll be the meat of what we talk about. Sound okay? Ryan Bonnici: Sounds amazing. Naber: Cool. Trinity Grammar School, growing up in Cronulla, going through all the interesting things you did in your childhood to become the person you are today - which I believe, a perennial overachiever, which I'll talk about in a second. But talk about a little bit about, maybe three or four minutes, on what it was like being Ryan Bonnici as a child and growing up. Ryan Bonnici: Good question. Gosh, I think in one word, what it was like growing up as Ryan Bonnici as the child, would be "lonely" a little bit. Yeah, I was an only child. And, my parents wanted to have more kids, but they stay separated when I was young. And then I got back together, and they eventually divorced, but they didn't really want to have a second child because they weren't sure about what was gonna happen with their relationship. And so, I don't know. I remember just growing up and always wanting a brother or sister or someone to play with. And so, I definitely feel like I was a very different person then than who I am now. But I don't know, I think that shaped me to be honest, in good ways and in bad ways. So I think, early on and growing up, decided that I was going to put my self worth on my accomplishments, which I wouldn't recommend people do necessarily because you will always be unfulfilled because you're always trying to get the next best thing, or to make yourself better, or be better. And flash forward 30 years, and through a lot of therapy, I've been able to unfold a lot of that stuff. But, yeah, I don't know, that's probably the one word that would best describe me - maybe "lonely", and probably not very social. Which is bizarre, because I think across Linkedin, and Instagram, and Twitter, and different social networks, I probably have a few hundred thousand followers, which I share a lot of content with. So, I come across really social, but I'm secretly just an extroverted introvert. I grew up in Sydney, Australia. I didn't really focus all that much on school up until year 11 and 12, which are the two final years of high school, in Australia. And I don't know what it was, but something just clicked in my mind, and I was like, I really want to get a really good GPA because I want to be able to get into any University in the world. And so I worked my butt off and I got a 4.0... Naber: Wow. Ryan Bonnici: And then went to university for a year, and I was a bit burned out at university, and then I took a couple of years off from studying to be an international flight attendant, which kind is random. Naber: That's pretty cool. Ryan Bonnici: Really fun. It helped me save up to buy my first investment property back when I was 19... Naber: Wow. Wow. Ryan Bonnici: Yeah, and then I can jump into the career stuff, or happy to answer more questions on the growing up, or wherever you want to take it, Brandon. Naber: No, that's good. That's good. Let's pause there just for 30 seconds, and then we'll hop into some career stuff. But, you mentioned, you mentioned the word "lonely", and you've talked about - in a lot of the content you've put out around mental health, mental health in the workplace, and how it shaped you professionally - can you talk a little bit about that? Because you're really passionate about it. And, I think that's probably a good place to start because you talked about how some of the events in your childhood had shaped you up until who you are today. Can you just give us a little bit more about that, and how it shaped you as to who you are right now? Ryan Bonnici: Yeah, sure. So I think mental health is just something that, I think it impacts everyone to some degree. Some people have good mental health, somebody will have poor mental health. And I think everyone will experience poor a mental health, at certain times of their lives. I think for me, and my family anyways, there's definitely a genetic component because my mum, my mum's mum, there's quite a significant amount of depression and suicidality in our family. So I think some of my own experiences growing up, as well as some of just my genetics, I think predisposes me to have more issues in that space. Which I think I used to view as a problem, but now I just view it actually as something that needs to be trained in the same way that I train my body by going to the gym, I train my mind by going to therapy and doing different therapeutic modalities. And so, I think growing up as an only child and experiencing bullying when I was in primary school, just sort of...I think you attachment to your friends, your attachment to your family, your attachment to these key figures in your early years is really paramount in your formation of the world, and relationships, and whether or not you, when you interact with someone, whether you are going to over-index for them being trustworthy, or you're going to over index for them being someone who's going to take advantage of you, or whatnot. So I think for very good half of my career, I was definitely the latter. So I, unconsciously anyways, viewed everyone around me as a potential bully. And so that meant that I was super competitive and was always thinking about how people around me were going to, I don't know, get in my way, or take me down, or stabbing in the back, which sounds really dramatic. And it wasn't like I was going through my jobs and literally thinking that, and like planning behind the scenes. But I think what I've learned for therapy now, is that I think, and in some ways, I think I've grown a lot of empathy actually toward those parts of me that felt that way, and still sometimes do feel that way, because they were defensive and they were protective, right? They protected me when I was young by not trusting peopl..kids, when I was younger. It protected me from enduring more bullying. But once I was no longer at school, and in university, and at work where that doesn't really ever happen all that much, still sometimes happens, but not all that much, it's definitely less helpful of a strategy. So I think that shaped me in some ways and meant that I focus more on, I'll talk about it a bit later, but I think in career success you really need to focus on relationships and results, the two R's. And I think, it probably meant for me the earlier on in my career, I over-indexed on results. And I think now I do a better job at,equally indexing between results and relationships. Naber: Wow. That's great. That's a really good framework for people to think about. Thank you. And then I really appreciate you sharing all of that as well. We're lucky enough to know each other personally and professionally, which is really cool. So, I wish we had three hours, four hours, 10 hours to talk about this stuff right now. So that's actually a really good segue. You mentioned getting into university and then getting into your first few gigs and over indexing on results. Can you walk us through some of your, just walking through your professional jumps in the roles that you've had? Maybe in three or four minutes, and then I'll hop into a couple of questions about some of the superpowers I know that you have, and some of the things you've written about as well, so we can get a little bit more of your mindset. Ryan Bonnici: Sure. Yeah. So, I basically started, my career in tech started at Microsoft, into Microsoft for their, I forget what it was called, but it was basically their accelerator program, their leadership program. Microsoft either hires people that are fresh out of university that they identify as folks with leadership potential, and they fast track them to management, or they hire people with 10 plus years of experience. Microsoft almost exclusively never hired anyone with from one to nine years. So I entered through that leadership track, and that was my first exposure to Marketing. I always knew I wanted it to be a CMO. And weirdly, I always knew I wanted to be a CMO before 30. So yeah, I started my career at Microsoft. And then, after spending some time there and learning a lot about B2C Marketing, a company called ExactTarget, which was based out of Indianapolis, in the US, was growing internationally. And Microsoft was a really big user of ExactTarget's email Marketing platform, of which I was a user. And so when they launched Asia Pacific, they hired me as their first Partnerships Marketer. So I then joined ExactTarget, and spent a few years at ExactTarget. And there I really was able to move up, in both experience and in leadership. And so, I built out a big team there across Asia Pacific while I was at ExactTarget. And then ExactTarget was acquired by Salesforce. So I was able to then spend a few years at Salesforce running their Marketing for Asia Pacific. Again, a really remarkable super innovative company, but quite a bit smaller than...a little bit bigger than ExactTarget, but quite a bit smaller, the Microsoft. So I was running all of their B2B Marketing. And so, at ExactTarget, I suppose I was able to really refine, I would say my enterprise B2B Marketing playbooks. So how do you work with Sales to create net-new Sales opportunities for Sales, as well as nurture and accelerate existing Sales opportunities to move them through Sales process faster. So it's very high touch, low volume game, the enterprise B2B playbook. And I had done that for quite a few years and really enjoyed it, but I felt I had really pushed it to its extreme. And, at that time, I was really interested in the company called HubSpot because I was fascinated by how they were doing Marketing, and I love their product. And so I then moved to HubSpot, and was the first Marketing hire in APAC, and then built out their APAC Marketing Team across Sydney, Singapore, Japan. And what I loved about HubSpot, and what was really important to me in my journey, was that HubSpot was still B2B Marketing, but it was B2B at scale, right? So we were selling our software platform, which was an all in one Marketing and Sales platform to small and medium businesses. I think the average sale was about a thousand dollars per month, for HubSpot. And so when you're selling a product that, it's less about high touch and more about, high volume. And so that was really important to me because, eventually I still do want to start my own company. And while I love the enterprise playbook that I used at ExactTarget and Salesforce, when you're throwing big events and doing a lot of that high touch, high hand holding activities, it's really expensive, right? We're talking millions of dollars. Whereas at HubSpot, we had much tighter budgets because we were much more focused on ROI-focused Marketing, and the biggest driver and the most effective driver for ROI-focused Marketing and B2B, and in B2C actually in a lot of senses, is content Marketing. It takes a little bit more time than some of the other strategies, but once you build up traffic from content, the leads, and the MQL's, and the revenue just keeps flowing. So I love...probably prior to G2, my time at HubSpot, those three years, the most proud, time of my life. It was also really challenging, but I learned so much in that first year, about how to do scalable Marketing. So I'm so grateful to have worked there, and just genuinely love the team there so much. I then moved over from Sydney to the US with HubSpot to run their Global Marketing in the sense of digital, social, brand campaigns, PR - and that was fun because it exposed me to another part of Marketing that I didn't have as much exposure to in APAC. And then about, gosh, a little under two years ago, then moved to G2. And the reason why I wanted to move to G2 is that I love B2B, but I think eventually I realistically want to get back to B2C or a B2B / B2C role. And what I love about G2 and a lot of the most innovative businesses today - like Uber, Airbnb, they're all marketplaces... Naber: Marketplaces, yeah. Two-side or three-sided marketplaces. It's amazing. Ryan Bonnici: Yeah. And they're really fascinating, and super complex and difficult. But I wanted that challenge. I think, if you look at my roles from moving in B2C at Microsoft, to Enterprise B2B, to SMB B2B, I don't like it when I'm comfortable, because I don't feel I'm learning. And I find it takes me a year to basically, without sounding an arrogant douche bag, it takes me a year to become an expert at something. So, my first year at G2 I was hopeless maybe. First year at HubSpot, I wasn't hopeless, but I didn't feel I could add as much value necessarily as the other marketers on the team had been there longer. And I find, typically it takes me six to 12 months to learn everything from that industry and that company and the existing people on the team. And then at the six to 12 month point, I'm able to have a bit more of an integrative understanding of what we should do next because of all of the experiences that I've had. And so, yeah, I always find that when I do my best work is from years one to three, the end of years one to three. Yeah. Naber: Very cool. That's actually amazing to know about yourself. You know, wot many people really have that self reflection, understanding of where their best work comes from, how long it takes them to be good at something, what the expectation of themselves, and how to manage that. That's, that's great. I've always been so impressed, impressed by your career, for a lot of reasons. You've accomplished more in a shorter space of time than most, and at really high velocity. But a lot of people that do that, they usually go usually a "T". As in they usually have a lot they have very thin breadth across a lot of things, but a lot of depth in one thing. You have depth and so many things across a Sales and Marketing spectrum because of you're unique set of circumstances, that you both put yourself in, and that you were put in a for the roles and responsibilities that you've had. All the way across, operations, digital, and Sales, and Sales Development. You actually, mentioned that, your job is part marketer and part Sales person and one of your articles. And I think that that's just a true testament to your background, your experiences, to have that mindset. But one of the things I want to talk about right now, you just mentioned, all the amazing businesses you'd worked with. I want to talk about talent. And how you think about attracting, pipelining, hiring, retaining great employees. So you and I both subscribe to the same mindset, I believe, from the content that you've put out there and from having conversations, that talent and hiring is the number one priority for every business. And should be for every single hiring manager as the CEO of that hiring process. So always be pipelining, even and especially when you're not hiring so you can get rockstars on your team, regardless of having readily available headcount or budget, regardless of of having those things open. So let's break those things down. attract pipeline, hire and retain. You talk about in some of your content, I think it was in an Entrepreneur.com article, you talk about not just thinking about Sales and Marketing from an inbound perspective, but thinking about recruiting, hiring and attracting talent from an inbound perspective. Can you talk a little bit about that mindset, and how you apply that to the way that you hire talent? Ryan Bonnici: Sure, sure. Yeah. So, I think the reality is, and the way I think about recruiting is, most people that are actively looking for a job are actively looking because they're probably not good at their job, and that's the reality. And people that are good at their job, they don't look for jobs. They are constantly...they're working hard, they're doing a great job for the company that they're at, and it's businesses that intrigue them that they might want to speak to. So, I'm at a loss for words for the exact word that I described this. I did a talk on this once at a big HR conference in Singapore. But you've got people that are actively in the process, and then you've got your inactive folks. And you're active folks make up something like 10% of the pool, and inactive or dormant candidates, which again, that's not the right word for it, make up 90% of... Naber: Passive candidates. Ryan Bonnici: Yeah, your passive candidates are making up...they're the best candidates, but they're not the ones coming to job boards and looking for you. And so you really need to be focused on how do you attract them. And so I'm a really big believer in that, for really key talent. you need to be proactively meeting, and building relationships, and learning about people and what they're doing and working on. And so I probably do job interviews...I interview about, I don't know, maybe five to 10 people a week. Sometimes for roles and I don't even have open. And when I say interview, that's a very loose term. It's more so, 50% of those might be official interviews, 50% of them are literally just coffee catch ups - where I've sent a note to let's say, the Head of PR at a big marketplace that I won't say because I have spoken to someone recently in that space, and I'm like "Hey, I absolutely love the PR that you're doing at your company. I read a few of these stories, and they're fascinating. Would love to just sync up marketer to marketer and see if we could learn from each other and just chat" And I genuinely actually do, I just want to get to know these people and learn about them. And all of the best hires I've ever made have been passive candidates, because it's based off of their work, not them being actively in the cycle. So whenever I see a great company running a great campaign, I'll look at, okay, who runs campaigns at that company, and I'll then stalk them on Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, and slide into their DM's, and work out a way to meet with them because I'm genuinely interested in their craft. And it's not a Sales pitch because I am genuinely interested, and they can see that and they get it. And that's how I open up. That's how I like to fill funnel right now. That's not to say I don't work with a recruiter. I have a recruiting of here at G2 that's constantly hiring roles for me. But most of my director and above level roles, I rarely, rarely hire...not because I choose to, but I find that most people that I will hire at director or VP level will be folks that I have found myself. Because I think that if you're a passive candidate...and I get emails all the time from recruiters and I'm passive in that I'm looking for a new job, but I rarely respond to them. But if a CMO or CEO at another company that I was really interested in, reached out and said, "Hey, love what you've been doing at G2, and how you completely changed the brand, and how you've grown traffic, and I listened to on a podcast - would love to catch up." That's something that I'm like, yeah, YOLO. I want to meet other smart folks, and I like to hear that the things that I'm doing are getting noticed, selfishly. And so that sort of thing - that works. And so that's how I think about recruiting. I'm pretty process oriented. When I'm going off after a candidate - a passive candidate - I'm a little less process driven because it's very much that I am just looking for great people out there. When I'm in Director-level or below interview, when someone's in our active recruiting cycle, and whether or not we've found them or they found us, I use a bit of a case-based method for how I interview. So I basically start off the interview, where I want to learn a bit more about them. But then I asked them a pretty simple question of, "What were you brought into your company to impact?" And so this has helped me really quickly understand, if they give me a really long answer or they can't answer that, it just shows me that they don't really know why, what their role is at the company. So I'll ask them that to understand. So if someone asked me that at G2, I'd say "Well, I was brought into G2 to drive more Sales revenue, increase our brand, and drive more traffic. And then I'll follow it with a specific task. So I asked them, "Can you please describe the task, or the challenge, or the project, or the problem that you were brought in to solve?" So they might say, "Well, I was brought in to to increase our MQL to SQL conversion", right? Or Blah, blah, blah. And then I will ask them, okay - after whatever they say - then I'ill ask them, "How did you measure your success on that thing?" And then they might say, and this is the worst response ever, they might say, "I wish I could measure it, but my company doesn't really care to measure those things." And then I would dig in further, "Oh, okay, that's okay. Let's say your company did measure those things, how would you want them to be measured?" And that way, I can work out is their brain thinking about measurement in the right way? And then after I understand the measurability component, I then go into action. So, "What projects or tasks did you specifically work on to reach success?" And what that helps me understand is - did they actually do the job? Because companies have lots of successes. We as a Marketing team have done a ton of success, and we talk about it as a team. So it would be easy for someone to take ownership, or pretend that they drove the success of the team, or something else. So this "actions" thing is important to me because it helps me understand, from start to finish, what was their involvement? Did they partner with someone? Where did the idea come from? Did they hit roadblocks? That's really key. And then I'll ask them, "What results we're actually achieved?" And then I'll go into timeframes, "So, how long did it take to get here?" and scale around what would they maybe do differently, or would they do it again or not? And so, that's just really quickly, at a high level, the case flow that I like to go through when I'm interviewing a candidate that has a core set of skills that I'm trying to get deep into and understand how they think. Separate to that though, I think, for me, I really care about people that are data-driven, growth focused - so they have experience in growing things. And the data stuff, the growth stuff, that will come through in this case method that I use. I want people that are lifelong learners, that are obsessed with...if you do want to work on my team and you aren't on social media, and you aren't obsessed with how ads work, and how tracking works, and how digital works - this isn't the right team for you. So I can tell from a lot of their online presences already, whether or not they're probably going to be right for me. And yeah, that's high level how I think about the actual nitty gritty process of it. And then when it comes to retention and growing employees, I have a pretty direct approach where I connect with most people on the team every other month. I connect with, obviously, all my direct reports every week. But I try and encourage them to really understand that transparency is the most important thing to me. And I try and mirror that to them. And by being really transparent with them and sharing with them, what I am working on, what I'm finding challenging, why I can't do what someone has asked me to do, and giving them the logic. And I think today with employees, that they crave to understand "why?" you as a leader make the decisions you make. And, I think, for a long time, leadership decision were made behind closed doors, and people were just told what to do. And I think Gen-Y's, and most employees now in today's workforce, want to be involved, and want to be able to share their opinion, and I'm really encouraging of that. But I also explain that this isn't a democracy. And I want everyone to share their opinion, so that I can make the best decision. And I might make a decision that is different to what you want, but that doesn't mean that I won't listen to you and respect your opinion. But I have to make a decision at the end of the day, and I might have a broader perspective than you because I'm getting all of your input, and then I have all the inputs from my job, and being on a leadership team, that you might not have. So yeah, that's really quickly, I guess how I think about, recruiting, interviewing, and then developing and retaining employees. Naber: That was great. You did my job for me - all the way down to the method, and the process you use, some of the questions you ask, the examples you gave. I really what you said around the vulnerability and transparency of communication...openness of the communication within your team. You write about that and some of the things you read about making sure people can share. Ryan Bonnici: I really think...I can always keep doing a better job, this is something that I need to work on - partly, it's something that I have needed to really focus on consciously, because it's so different than my style a few years ago. And I think that's partly through a lot of therapy, and a lot of my own work, I realized that some of those defenses that I used to have as a child that were helpful then, weren't helpful as an adult, as a leader in business. And so I've had to develop there further. But I think that...this is a bit of a, not a sad story, but I had a colleague yesterday who I love that they're on my team, they're amazing, who we were meeting for a one on one, and they texted me and they said...let's see if I have the message (*searches phone with Ryan Bonnici style, focus, grace, and precision)...it was basically, long story short, "Hey Ryan, I'm really sorry. I'm not going to be able to make our one on one right now. I think I'm having a panic attack, and I might head home." And naturally I was, "Please, do what you need to do for it, and take care of yourself." And I don't think an employee would have sent that to me previously. They might've said, "I'm out sick" or something. But I have said to my own employees in the past, over slack, when I was having an anxiety attack at some point, I just canceled all my meetings that day and took a mental health day, pretty publicly. And I was like, "I'm out today guys, I'm taking a mental health day." And I was in the office, and I had to go home because I just wasn't feeling it. And the amount of people that texted me after for that to say that they appreciated me being so public with that helped them feel they could bring their whole selves to work. And if they are feeling similarly, they don't need to lie about how they feel. They can just be open. And not to say that they have to, but I think again, it's all about sort of living it yourself, and showing others that they can do the same thing. Naber: Totally. Setting the standard, demonstrating the standard, so you can hold the standard. I talked to someone about that, about culture the other day and I believe it's the exact same thing with mental health in the workplace and openness of communication. That's a really good example. Thanks for sharing that. And you keep that openness, from a retention perspective, I think the openness that you keep with the way that you talk to your employees and the way that you talk to your teams - it sounds from the way that you're writing and the example here, I read an article that you'd written the other day, sorry I read the other day that you'd written, talking about encouraging your best employees to consider outside job offers, and having that very open dialogue and open discussion. Can you talk a little bit about that mindset and what that means to you? Ryan Bonnici: Yeah, sure. So I think part of it is that too many leaders and people in business tip toe around the idea that people are going to work for a company forever, right? And I think the reality is that the average lifespan of a marketer at a company is, gosh, two years maybe. And so yeah, if you look at my track record, it's three years on average. Naber: I read the other day, it was something like - those coming out of college right now are poised to have something like 13.2 employers throughout their life. Ryan Bonnici: Yeah, that makes sense. And, I'm really open with people because if you look at my track record, I've done the same. And so what I really want to encourage people to do, is if reaches out to you for a job offer because they think you're a good fit for a role, you should respond. I mean assuming you want, you don't have to, but you should...and I do this, I would always respond to them. So recruiters hit me up all the time, and they be like, "Hey Ryan, I have a CMO role or CEO role at this super sexy high growth company, blah, blah, blah." My first message back, I have no niceties, I'm like, "Thanks for your message. What is the company?" Because that's all I care about, right? Who is the company that we're talking about? Because there's heaps of roles out there, but I don't want to work for just anyone or for everyone. And so once they tell me that the company is, then if it's an interesting company, I might chat to them or their leadership team to learn a bit more. And I think why that's important is because it helps me solidify to myself if I am in the right role myself. By chatting someone else and seeing what other roles are available and by asking questions I can work out, "Oh gosh no, in my role today, I'm so much happier." But it also helps me have a baseline understanding of - what roles are out there? What are the typical skillsets that are needed,? How much are people paying for my skillset? Which helps give me visibility into, do I need to be asking for more money at my current company, or am I paid fairly. And so I think if you treat your employees really, really well, and be open and honest with them in that, they're not probably gonna work for you forever, and that you want the best for them in their career, because you understand that they'll then be an advocate for you and your company afterwards, then they're a little bit more open about these things. And so, and yeah, I just do that with my team, and I practice what I preach. And so it means that that encourages folks to feel open about that they can come to us and say, "Hey, I have this job offer from this company. I don't necessarily want to leave, but they're offering double what you guys are offering me." And if this is an employee that's amazing that we couldn't do without, then we'll try and do whatever we can to keep them. And that might mean more responsibilities, if they've shown that they deserve it. It might mean more pay. It depends on why the person's making the decision, right? And that's case by case, but I think you can get a better understanding of that, and help them see as well, by asking them questions about the role and the company...I often times find that I will uncover things that they don't know, or haven't realized. Like, they haven't asked how much budget they might, or who their boss is going to be, or if they were told that they could run a team - but is it going to be in writing that they will get to run the team? And just these things that they haven't asked. And they start to then realize, holy shit, I have so much more potential and bandwidth here on Ryan's team. Yes, the grass might seem greener on the other side because they're offering more money, but there's a reason why they're offering more money. It's because they can't get good talent. So, I don't know, and by doing that they may realize that, yes, they should leave, or not. And so, I think I preface always these conversations with my team with a bit of an asterisk, in the sense of that you might go through that process and come to us and say that there is this offer that you're going to take, and we might say to you, if we don't feel you are contributing well on the team or you're not someone that we want to change the situation for, you should take the role. Naber: Take it. Ryan Bonnici: Yeah. No, exactly. Naber: That's the best case scenario for everybody too, it's great. Ryan Bonnici: Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. You should take that role because we think that you are paid fairly, and as per your last performance review, we've made it pretty clear to you in terms of what you would need to do to get to the next level, and you haven't done that yet. So, we're happy for you to stay here and keep developing you, but if it's money that you want, you're not going to get that here until you put in the work that we've shown you. And I think just from having that dialogue, they can better understand how much more quality coaching and development they are going to get with you than another company. And they can then make their own decision. So that's how I try and think about it. Naber: Awesome. Thanks. Thanks so much for the multiple, multiple layers you went into with that. And you've been, you've been at so many businesses where you've had just amazing people at those businesses, built awesome cultures. I think one of the things that people want to hear about is, how you think about talent. We just talked about that. And then also, a couple things around the science of what you've done. So building Inbound Marketing Engines, you've been at the Mecca of Inbound at HubSpot. And I couldn't even count on two hands how many amazing people I know at HubSpot, and how many reasons I love the culture there, as well as love the products. And so even people outside the business feel that way. But, tell us what you learned at HubSpot about building Inbound Marketing Engines that translates to G2 and how you've built that engine right now, as well as every subsequent Marketing engine you're going to build. What translates that everyone should be doing as they're building their Inbound engine. Ryan Bonnici: Gosh, okay. So, I mean, as you mentioned, working for HubSpot has taught me everything that I know about Inbound. And that was actually, when I mentioned before why I was so grateful for work there, was I just was able to work with the smartest Marketing minds, and I just fucking love that team, and miss them so much. They're a big customer at G2 actually, and I got the chance to head back to Boston last month because we recorded this amazing customer success video with their CEO, Brian Halligan and Kip Bodnar, their CMO. And they were talking about all the value that they get from G2, and why they couldn't connect with their customers if it wasn't for G2. And so it was so fun to get to go back there and profile this company that I was so proud to have worked at, and that was a big customer of ours. It was really quite nice. Look, what I think what I learned there is that...HubSpot literally wrote the book on Inbound Marketing. And so, I think what I learned about was just how to take a really data driven approach to drive, to creating content that drives results. And I think, blogging and writing, Content Marketing is something that can be done really...most people do it horribly wrong. Because everyone can write, so everyone thinks they can be a blogger or a content marketer. And anyone can actually write good content, if they have the right training or if they use the right assistance tools. The problem where I think most people go wrong with content Marketing is once you've decided what you're writing about, if it's not the right topic, you can't optimize it for something whereby no one searches for that topic. So, optimization, SEO optimization when it comes to content Marketing, happens before topics are even selected, before pen touches the paper. And that's why my VP, Content & SEO is an SEO by trade. He ran SEO at Atlassian, and now leads SEO and Content for us G2. And the reason being is, you need to look at...you to just start with keyword research and work out, okay, where are people searching? And which searches indicate that this person is our persona that we are trying to attract to our website, blog, etc? And then you need to work out, okay, how high quality are the keywords in relation to the persona - like, is 50% of the traffic that we're going to get for this keyword with a million searches going to be our buyer persona, and if so, that means 500,000 of the 1 million is going to be out traffic. Or, alternatively, there could be a 700,000 terms per monthly searches that has a 90% percent alignment to your buyer persona, which is going to be higher than that 500,000. But if you just chose the biggest number, you might not get as much of the right people. And so we take a super data driven approach. And we, we literally published, just yesterday, I had the team publish a playbook. And it's a five part playbook - on learn.g2.com (https://learn.g2.com/hub/1-million/how-we-grew), which is our learning hub - which was literally the entire play by play that we created to create a blog at G2 just last year, around seven months ago, that went from zero visitors to over a million monthly visitors within seven months or something like that. Insane growth, right? This blog now makes up...this blog is driving millions and millions of visitors, and it hasn't existed - per month, I should add - and it hasn't existed for more than a year now. You know, HubSpot's blog drives about 6 million monthly visitors, but HubSpot been working on that bad boy for about 10 years. Naber: Wow. That's a great proportional perspective for how fast your blog has grown. Ryan Bonnici: Yeah. We are on track to hit 4 million monthly by the end of this year - that's goal that I set the team for the blog alone. Our total website, we'll be at about 10 million monthly by the end of this year. And when I joined G2 our traffic was around, it was less than a million a month. So, in two years to go from less than a million monthly visitors to 10 million, which is where we're on track for, that's fucking insanity. Naber: That's literally 10x. That's insane. Ryan Bonnici: And that's not just my work, it's not just the Marketing team's work. We have a great product team that we work with, we have lots of contributing content writers that create content...But majority that traffic's all organic as well, I should have said. We don't do any paid content. And so, yeah, that's one thing that I'm really frickin' proud about. Because, I mentioned earlier, relationships and results. Relationships are super important, but results are as well. I think, you said I was able to fast track my career. And, I was, I got the Cmo role at G2 when I was 29, and I couldn't have done that if it wasn't for really overindexing on results. And what I mean there, is if you tell me to hit a million monthly visitors, I'll hit four (million). And it's not because I'm trying to show off or anything, it's basically because I derive a lot of self worth through my work achievement. And, over time I'm getting better at disconnecting and finding self worth from who I am as a person, regardless of job, but that's still something that's really important to me. And so, I'm thankful for that part...that lonely boy role that I played when I was younger because it helped get me here, and I don't think I would change it looking back. Naber: Wow, that's an excellent answer. I love it. I hope everyone...I don't think people could write down notes fast enough as they're listening to that. So can we dive in one more layer on that? So two things. One, what are the phases you go through as you're thinking about building a strategy - for one year, two years? If I'm listening to this as a Head of Marketing or Head of Sales & Marketing, and I'm thinking about - what are the phases I'm going to go through? You've directed this movie multiple, multiple times. So what are the phases you go through as you're building a strategy. And then two, what does your scorecard look like do that you know how to measure it? Ryan Bonnici: So, I guess, it can be a bit different depending on if you've been doing content Marketing for awhile, or if you're just starting out, it's slightly different. If you've been doing it for awhile - and I wrote a big blog post Entrepreneur magazine called The One Marketing Metric That You're Not Measuring, which outlines this process in more detail. If anyone Google's The One Marketing Metric That You're Not Measuring and my name, they'll find it. But basically, if you've already been creating content for a while, step one would be explore all your Google analytics data, map it and connected to your CRM data, and worked out which blog posts are driving the most organic traffic, and what's the conversion rate of that traffic into leads, and leads into MQL's, and MQL's into revenue. And then you can start to connect, what content topics that I'm writing about? If I think of HubSpot, one content topic they might write about is Marketing automation, and another content topic they might write about is social media, another contents topic they might write about is Marketing budgets - because, all of those things are things that a Marketer would be searching for, and they sell to a Marketer. And so, you would then group all of your content in pages around those topics, and see, okay, in the aggregate how much traffic has the social media content driven to our blog organically, how much of those organic visitors to social media content have been converted into leads, etc. And you can start to work out what content topics are driving the most revenue at the bottom of the funnel. Yeah. Does that kind of make sense? Connecting the two? Naber: Yep. Ryan Bonnici: And then, so that would be what I would recommend you do if you've already got a lot of content, you are driving organic traffic, and you want to get a bit of an understanding of what is and isn't working. If you're just starting out fresh - and then once you've done that, you then can still do what I'm going to suggest now - but if you are starting out fresh, then what I would suggest is just, you know, your buyer persona better than anyone. Think about, sit down, and think about what does this person do in their day to day life. And I if use the HubSpot example again, the Marketing persona that we were trying to attract, I don't just think of about their job in the context of my software. So what I mean by that is, yes, HubSpot's platform does email Marketing and social media. So those were two of the topics that I touched on before. HubSpot product does nothing around budgeting, but we still created content around that topic because that was something that a Marketer needs help with. They create budgets - they go to Google, and they search for budget templates. So it's not just about creating contents that are close to your product, it's about creating content around topics that your buyer persona would be searching for regardless of whether or not they are looking for your product at that moment in time. Okay? And that's a really important piece because if you just create content topics around the things that are in relation to your product or service, they're way more competitive typically than other topics because that's, that's the simple "dumb" Marketer to thing to do. Sorry, that's a bit mean. I shouldn't say the "dumb" Marketer thing to do. That's just the thing that everyone does naturally. You don't have to be very creative to think about doing that. And so, and I'm not saying that you shouldn't do that, but you should be thinking broader as well. I feel bad now the saying "dumb" Marketer. Naber: Ha, I think people will forgive you based on all the valued you're delivering, so don't worry about it. Ryan Bonnici: And so, once you start to look into those different topics, that's when you start to do keyword research and using tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs. But, ideally come to G2, and search for the best SEO software, and we'll give you personalized recommendations. And then you can start to look at some content tools that are out there, and group these different topics to see what kind of volume of people are searching for the topics? How difficult is it to rank for these topics? So most of the different platforms will give a difficulty score of one to a hundred. A hundred - meaning it's impossible, you are never going to rank for this unless you are facebook.com. To one - any person that launches a new website can rank for it. And so you want to choose a mixture of difficult terms because they typically have higher volume, and a mixture of some easier terms because they typically have a lower volume. And the easier terms are good because they start to drive immediate traffic to your site because you can rank for them quickly. But also, once you start driving organic traffic, then you start to create the flywheel effect whereby, okay, all these new people that are reading your content are going to enter your subscription process. And then they'll be return visitors for email Marketing. As well as, they're probably creating, if they're marketers and that's who you're attracting, they probably have their own blogs. If they really liked what you wrote about, they might link to you. And then if they link to you, that helps you increase your domain authority, which then helps you rank for more difficult terms. So you want to be doing both. And I think that's a mistake that we made early on at G2, where...and it was my fault, I joined from HubSpot, and we had a domain authority of 92 out of a hundred at HubSpot. And so when I joined G2, I think we had a domain authority only around 80. So some of the terms that I wanted the team to go after very early on were just too difficult. And so we didn't drive any traffic to them until six months later. And the team was smart enough to say, "Hey, while we've created some of these really difficult, high volume content, we need to do some easier content that's going to be a quicker win in the meantime to get the flywheel going, to get Google noticing our site. I know I explained that really quickly to a certain extent, but I know we have limited time. And there's...I could talk about this literally for 24 hours. There's so many details to this, and it seriously...if anyone wants this step for step, they should just go to learn.g2.com (https://learn.g2.com/hub/1-million/how-we-grew) because we published the playbook for this yesterday. Naber: Awesome. Do you remember, for the audience, do you remember what the title was? Ryan Bonnici: I think the title of it is literally, how we grew our organic traffic to 1 million monthly visitors. (https://learn.g2.com/hub/1-million/how-we-grew) Naber: Okay, sweet. Very original title - that's good. Ryan Bonnici: Haha, yeah, very original. Naber: For everyone listening, I'll put the link to in the description of this, of this episode. (https://learn.g2.com/hub/1-million/how-we-grew) Hey, last thing I want to talk about because I know we do have limited time, is one more superpower that I think is really clear to everyone - that both follows you on social, understands how your career trajectory has gone, as well as the businesses that you've helped build - is around brand building. You just went to Cannes Lions, and you wrote a Linkedin article about it being a big chance for B2B marketers to learn from top B2C Marketing strategies. And you talked about B2B brand building a little bit in that. You also have on social media, your following...you mentioned it a little bit earlier, but I couldn't believe the numbers that it was looking at. I mean, I could, but I couldn't at the same time. And you have 21,000 fans on Facebook, 56,000 followers on Instagram, 20,000 followers on Twitter, 32,000 followers on LinkedIn. Every single one of those platforms is extremely challenging to get even close to a fraction of that, let alone have that consistency. So could you talk a little bit about, building brand from a,B2B perspective, and then also from a social perspective where you can marry those two things together, however you think about it. But I think a lot of people are going to struggle with building their B2B brand because you mentioned, B2B is so far behind B2C and being able to do that. Ryan Bonnici: Yeah. Yeah. So, I think B2B Marketers are traditionally the worst at building brands. And it's because, B2B typically, when you're selling to businesses, you're typically selling a higher value product. It's very logical, rational. You're solving a very specific problem. Which means that because it's so Sales driven, and because Sales focuses time on those pain points with prospects, Marketing just seems to always be quite clinical and boring and corporate. So the reason why I went to Cannes was because, I think the B2C world do a much better job when it comes to...When it comes to CPG, consumer package goods, and fast moving products, it's far less logical and rational, and it's far more emotional, and gut, and instinctual. And so their content and campaigns are always very visceral. They're very much about making you feel a certain way. They're about surprising you, delighting you, making you laugh, making you cry. And I don't necessarily think that, B2B should go completely down that path. But I think as a CMO it would be silly of me not to, it would be dumb of me. Here we go, I'll pay myself out and make up for my last comment. It would be dumb of me not to go to that event, at least once, because there's stuff that I can learn from that industry. And I think that's actually, funnily now that we talk about it, a very good proof of what I said before, that I am obsessed with learning from other people in other industries, selfishly because I want to steal all of their great ideas and apply them to my world, and integrate them better than anyone else. And I think I genuinely do a pretty good job at understanding many aspects of Marketing, more than I think other CMO's that have just stayed in one lane. And it's because I just push myself out of my comfort zone. So, yeah, I don't think B2B CMO's do a very good job at that. And I don't think we have done a very good job at G2. And so, I want to upskill myself so that I can help upskill my team, etc. I think, if you look at software today, right? There is something like 60,000 pieces of B2B software out there. There's probably, there's something like 250, maybe a thousand different email Marketing platforms. And so in the B2B space, B2B used to be a differentiator...so B2B software - SaaS - used to be, I think a thing that could differentiate you in terms of winning or losing. If you're a company that got in on SaaS and software early, that gave you an unfair advantage. And I think today everyone uses software. Everyone uses 50 different pieces of just email Marketing software alone. The software is less the differentiator today, and it's how you use the software. And so, once you move into a parody market where you're selling products that are similar to everyone else's...and not all software categories are like this. CRM certainly is, email Marketing certainly is, Social Media is kind of like that. These categories where there's tons of different options, they're all kind of similar. People, when they're making the decision, they're going to lean more into some of the emotive components because if your products are all the same, who wouldn't want to work with the brand that's a bit more fun, and is a bit more enjoyable, they like more. And so that's kind of my thoughts B2B branding, and that's why we at G2 went through a rebrand earlier this year, where we dropped the Crowd from our name, so we're just G2 now. We completely redid our logo, our brand colors, but it was more than just a visual refresh. It was more actually that we as a company changed our mission, and our focus, and shifted because we understood our buyers a little bit more. So that's what I would say on the B2B branding side of the house. On the personal brand and building your own brand on social, I talked about this at Drift's conference last year. I keynoted there and spoke about how to build your career and your brand. And I think sometimes people feel embarrassed to toot their own horn, and it doesn't need to be that. But I think the way I've always viewed it is that, the bigger my clout as a person, as a marketer, basically the more interesting I am to people so that they follow me, that they want to interview me, they talk to me, they allow me to talk at events - the more valuable I am to an employer. Because I already have a platform to talk to people, right? So, if you think of me in my current role, right? When I go into my next role at my next company - which no idea when that will happen because I love G2 - I've published content for HBR, for the World Economic Forum, for...fuck, there's just so many publications now. I all of these connections there because they trust me, and they know that I'm not writing Salesy content. I am exposing my flaws, and talking about wins, and I'm giving their writers something of value. And so when I go to my next company, now immediately I have this rolodex of companies that I can write for, and all the buyers they're going to say Ryan as the CMO, GCO, etc. of this new company. And I'll naturally...I'm a Marketer, so I'll naturally pull in a very natural, lovely way, a mention of that company that's super authentic to what I'm writing about, obviously - and, yeah, it's a win-win. And so, I think my lesson for folks listening that are yeah, okay, well it's easy to get press when you're a CMO and write for these companies - when I wasn't a CMO, I still was doing it. You just have to start smaller. And so the step by step process that I told people to do is - you probably already worked for a company, so tap on your content Marketing teams door and say, hey guys, hey gals, I would love to create some content for our company blog. And no content Marketers are going to say no to that because they have really big traffic goals, and they want more content. And say to them, hey, what topics do you guys need content around, and let's see if I can find a crossover of where I have a skill set and where you need content. And then work with them, publish some content, publish more content, that helps get you on the map. And then you then might get noticed by someone, and someone might ask you to write for them. But now at least you can at least proactively reach out to tier three publications, and say, "Hey, I write for insert company publication here', and here are a few links to some of my work. I just recently put wrote this piece of content about topic x, which I think would be a really good fit for your audience. I've pasted it in the email below, let me know what you think. And if you publish it" And that just kind of gets you up and running, you know? And so if that person doesn't reply, try another tier three publication. And that's genuinely how I did it. And then I went from tier three to tier two. And then when I started creating content for tier one, I referenced my tier two work, and you just slowly work your way up. And then after a while, you don't need to reference it anymore because people would just Google your name and they'll see all of the content, and that's the proof, kind of thing. So, yeah. Naber: Excellent. You've been doing this for so long - personally and professionally. Ryan Bonnici: Oh - The only thing I would add as well, Brandon, is that I think for...the biggest asterisk on all this before, and it's kind of like what I mentioned with content Marketing, if you don't have the right keyword and topic idea from the get go, you will fail. With building your personal brand and writing content. If you aren't authentic, and if you don't have something unique to say - that's key - no one's going to publish your bullshit. If I wrote a blog...that blog post that I wrote for Harvard Business Review about why I tell my best employees to seek other job offers - if I wrote why I love to run one on one meetings...like year, no shit, Sherlock. Of course we all know that that's important. Like, "Oh Ryan has a different view on career progression and letting people leave." That is interesting. So, that's where you need to be a marketer, and you need to think about storytelling. You need to think about your unique skill set, and how you can tell a story that people will want to read. Because I think if you don't have that from from the beginning, that no one will ever reply to you and this won't work for you. Naber: Love it. Unique and authentic. I've heard that over and over from a few different businesses that are great at it, people that are great at it...You've just been doing it for so long, that's extremely valuable, and thank you for the examples and all the detail. You're running short on time right now. I want to get one rapid fire question, and then we'll wrap. Is that okay? Ryan Bonnici: Sounds great. Naber: Okay, cool. So this is a question, and I explained this to guests each time, this question I usually ask people on their birthdays. Your birthday's not until October, October 3rd, I believe, and we both have October birthday, so I got excited when I saw that. It's not creepy, maybe it is that I know that. But anyways, the question I was asking is, what's the most valuable lesson you've learned in the last 12 months personally? Ryan Bonnici: The most valuable lesson I think that I've learned in the last 12 months... Naber: Personally, we'll get to professional in a second. Ryan Bonnici: Yeah, I was just going to go there anyways. It was probably could be more...to be kinder to myself. I think has probably been the biggest lesson that I've learned in the last 12 months. Because I think, this job and this challenge, which was bigger than I had ever taken on, definitely pushed me to my limits last year. And I think, and I'm in a really good place now. But I got pushed into...and I'm saying "got pushed" is maybe just a defeatist way of saying that I let myself get too stressed out, or whatnot. As tough as I am on others around me, I'm 10 times as tough on myself. So that little Freudian slip of "dumb marketers" means that secretly, I think that I am a dumb Marketer. And that's, like fact. Like, deep down I'm insecure that I am that persona. But, I think, I've definitely learned over the last 12 months, through a shit-ton of therapy, to just be kinder to myself. Because everyone is fighting their own battles, whether you can see it or not, and most often times the folks that piss you off the most or that activate something in you, have something deep going on inside of them, but that what you're seeing is just their defense mechanism to help them avoid dealing with whatever it is that they were trying to avoid. And I've been there. And so, I don't succeed at being kind to myself and others everyday. But I think it's something that I'm actively working on. Naber: Awesome. Be kinder to yourself. I actually need to steal one more thing because I feel the extra two minutes is going to be worthy of the way that you feel after it, because you've given a lot of really good career advice. What's your best career...I think you're going to expand on it a little bit earlier. But what's some of your best career advice that you have for young professionals as they're navigating their career? Ryan Bonnici: Well, I think my best career advice that people today, young and old, would be that, we're really lucky today because of social media, it's so easy to find interesting people. And so I touched on before, in terms of what I do when it comes to recruiting, when you see a really cool ad, or if you think about the brands that you love, or the companies that you'd want to work for, going to Linkedin, to Twitter, to Instagram, and follow all of the leaders at those companies that are doing the awesome work. They're sharing content on how they think, how they feel on all of those channels. And so you can learn so much more about them that way. And who knows, maybe you can reach out to them because you study them so well, and you have a really poignant question to ask them that they think was an impressive question. And then they'll take time to have coffee with you. And then you get a job offer...I really think that the best way we learn and can grow in our careers is by looking out there and finding who are the best people doing the best work. Let's learn from them, and let's copy them, and let's recreate what they're doing in a better way. And so that's probably my best career advice. And I think next to that is just, don't forget about the relationships in career. And I think, I would say that that was something that I needed to realize a few years back. I think most people though over-index on relationships, and don't over-index on results. I was the other way around, which wasn't great either. But I think you need to crush your results, right? If your boss tells you to jump here, you jumped double there, or you jump to where they are asked, and show them something else that you jumped to where they didn't know they needed to jump. But you also need to do relationships, I think, at the same time. I think you can burn bridges if you don't do that. Naber: Awesome. Ryan, you the man. Thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate your time, brother. Naber: Thanks for having me. Brandon was nice to chat. Naber: Hey everybody, thanks so much for listening. If you appreciate it and enjoyed the episode, go ahead and make a comment on the post for the episode on LinkedIn. If you love the Naberhood Podcast, we'd love for you to subscribe, rat

love ceo relationships director university head social media chicago australia google science marketing pr japan entrepreneur sound sales microsoft dm writer forbes connecting uber unique airbnb hiring singapore seo roi b2b indianapolis crowd saas insane personally cmo crm ipo playbook separate salesforce lived cannes business insider marketers content marketing chief marketing officers world economic forum passive retention b2c harvard business review drift asia pacific sherlock hubspot mecca yolo methodology gpa cpg inbound brand building apac sql freudian b2b marketing atlassian gen y inbound marketing hbr marketplaces sales marketing g2 global marketing semrush lifehacker cannes lions salesy ahrefs sales development cronulla b2b marketers marketing metrics exacttarget mql b2b b2c marketing playbook b2c marketing brian halligan g2 crowd ryan bonnici gco

How to Increase Your Probability of Breakthrough Marketing Success | Ep. #1091

Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 27, 2019 34:36

In episode #1091, Ryan Bonnici walks us through his marketing hacks. Tune in to hear how you can increase your probability of breakthrough marketing success. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:52] Today’s Topic: How to Increase Your Probability of Breakthrough Marketing Success [01:20] You should focus on traffic before you focus on conversions. [01:51] Ryan is really social and loves connecting with new people, so follow him on Twitter! [03:10] People don’t create content for all stages of the funnel, which they absolutely should. [05:31] The conversion rate at top-of-funnel traffic is obviously lower than at the bottom of the funnel. [06:10] Top marketers measure content at a topic level. [09:40] It’s important to do keyword research. [11:45] It’s important to have a good relationship with sales. [12:00] You need to have a strong common language between marketing and sales. [13:45] You need to set up an SLA. [15:40] It’s possible to extrapolate future success from current sales metrics. [17:40] It’s important to leverage good reviews. [18:00] HubSpot does a good job at being transparent. [18:25] Marketers need to have more say in packaging and design. [18:40] RxBar is a great example of transparent packaging. [21:00] There are not enough marketers that create and build strong personal brands. [21:27] The most important part of branding, is that you need to have a unique viewpoint. [22:35] Marketers must be willing to exist in the public eye. [24:34] Creating content is important to building your brand. [27:45] Beat your competitors at their own game. [29:31] BuzzSumo helps you see what your competitors are sharing, but not if the content is resonating with their audience. [31:15] Make sure to wrap your links, so you get more conversions. [31:30] If you’re scheduling a lot of content, you need to check when your audience is online. [33:05] Email Ryan if you want further content from him and his company. [33:32] That’s it for today! [33:41] We are going to take applications for live intensive sessions. Just go to the Marketing School site for more information and to apply. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

How to Increase Your Probability of Breakthrough Marketing Success | Ep. #1091

Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 27, 2019 34:36

In episode #1091, Ryan Bonnici walks us through his marketing hacks. Tune in to hear how you can increase your probability of breakthrough marketing success. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:52] Today's Topic: How to Increase Your Probability of Breakthrough Marketing Success [01:20] You should focus on traffic before you focus on conversions. [01:51] Ryan is really social and loves connecting with new people, so follow him on Twitter! [03:10] People don't create content for all stages of the funnel, which they absolutely should. [05:31] The conversion rate at top-of-funnel traffic is obviously lower than at the bottom of the funnel. [06:10] Top marketers measure content at a topic level. [09:40] It's important to do keyword research. [11:45] It's important to have a good relationship with sales. [12:00] You need to have a strong common language between marketing and sales. [13:45] You need to set up an SLA. [15:40] It's possible to extrapolate future success from current sales metrics. [17:40] It's important to leverage good reviews. [18:00] HubSpot does a good job at being transparent. [18:25] Marketers need to have more say in packaging and design. [18:40] RxBar is a great example of transparent packaging. [21:00] There are not enough marketers that create and build strong personal brands. [21:27] The most important part of branding, is that you need to have a unique viewpoint. [22:35] Marketers must be willing to exist in the public eye. [24:34] Creating content is important to building your brand. [27:45] Beat your competitors at their own game. [29:31] BuzzSumo helps you see what your competitors are sharing, but not if the content is resonating with their audience. [31:15] Make sure to wrap your links, so you get more conversions. [31:30] If you're scheduling a lot of content, you need to check when your audience is online. [33:05] Email Ryan if you want further content from him and his company. [33:32] That's it for today! [33:41] We are going to take applications for live intensive sessions. Just go to the Marketing School site for more information and to apply. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

Ep. 100: 13 Things I've Learned About High Performing Marketers From My First 100 Episodes

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 22, 2019 35:34

The Inbound Success Podcast launched on August 28, 2017 and today marks the 100th episode, and 100 straight weeks of publishing interviews with high performing marketers. On this week's Inbound Success Podcast, I'm taking a break from interviewing guests to share with you 13 trends that I've observed from the 99 interviews I did throughout the last two years. Listen to the podcast to learn more about the 13 things that the world's top-performing inbound marketers are doing, and get links to the specific episodes where you can dive deeper into each topic. Transcript Welcome back to the Inbound Success podcast. My name's Kathleen Booth. I'm your host, and this is the 100th episode of the podcast. I thought this was a great opportunity for me to take a break from the usual routine of interviewing some of the incredible marketers that I get to speak to every week and look back on the last 99 episodes and try and digest some lessons learned. I've had the incredible good fortune of speaking to some really amazing marketers in the last two years as I've done this podcast. It's given me an opportunity to meet people I otherwise never would have met, to learn some things that have really kind of made a difference for me in the way I think about marketing, and have prompted me to take a second look and reevaluate the way I've been doing some things. So, thought it was a great opportunity to share some of those lessons learned with all of you. How The Inbound Success Podcast Got Started But first, I wanted to just take a moment and tell a story about why I started the podcast. It was about two and a half years ago that I had my own marketing agency, Quintain Marketing. I had had the agency for 11 years. I'd gone to a lot of marketing conferences and listened to tons of podcasts, and watched webinars, always looking to make myself a better marketer. I had a lot of clients that I wanted to help. I also wanted to market my own agency and do better every day. I always would listen to these folks talk about the marketing work they were doing and the incredible results they were getting, and so infrequently felt that there was anything really tangible that I could take away from it and immediately use to improve my own marketing. This podcast was really an attempt to solve for that. It was me trying to scratch my own itch, and in doing so hopefully helping some of you. The interesting thing about this has been that it has certainly done that for me, and it has also done so much more. I already mentioned that it's enabled me to meet so many people I otherwise would never have met. There are a lot of people in the marketing world that I really admire and respect. And having the excuse of saying, "Hey, would you like to come on a podcast?" is a great way to meet someone new and to meet and to form that relationship, so that's been great. I've also met some really incredible people that I didn't know about through my guests when I ask them who else is doing a really great job with inbound marketing. And those relationships have been amazing. One of the most amazing and incredible things about this is that it changed the entire course of my career. One of first people I interviewed when I started the podcast was Bob Ruffolo, who is the founder and CEO of IMPACT. Now, I work at IMPACT. The reason is that before we started to hit the record button for the podcast interview, we were just talking about how things were going. I was telling him that I thought I might be ready to make a change, and that led to me selling part of my company to IMPACT and joining the team. That's been a really major shift in my life and a great one. I've learned so much. I get to work with some really smart people every day and do very, very interesting work. All this has come out of this little podcast. And most importantly, I've learned a lot about marketing. As I said, that was my original goal. 13 Lessons From Interviewing 99 High Performing Marketers So without further ado, I looked back through the 99 episodes I've done before today and really saw 13 themes emerge. That's what I'm going to share with you today. 1. There Is No "Secret Sauce" The first one ... And some of these, by the way, are going to seem like no-brainers, but they're important because it's important to remind ourselves of the things that we kind of already know. First one is, in most cases there really is no secret sauce to being an amazing marketer. The folks that I interviewed who were the most successful have a few things in common. Number one, they are voracious learners. They're always trying to improve their knowledge. They're always hungry for more. And they're consistent. That's huge, the consistency. A great example of that is Goldie Chan. I interviewed her. She's often referred to as the green-haired Oprah of LinkedIn. She has the longest running daily channel on LinkedIn. She's posted a new LinkedIn video every day for I think it's about two years. It's incredible. It doesn't matter where she is, what's happening, whether she's feeling well, whether she's traveling, what her access to Wifi is, she finds a way to do it because consistency is so important for her. And it's really paid off. They also do a few things and do them really well. A great example of that is Rev Ciancio who I talked with about Instagram marketing. Rev has an incredible Instagram presence. Which by the way, do not look at it when you're hungry because his pictures are all of mouthwatering hamburgers, french fries, pizzas, chicken wings, nachos, essentially everything that's bad for you, but that tastes so good. But, Rev has a fascinating strategy for how he approaches Instagram and has built an entire business around it. He does one thing, and he does it really well. Alex Nerney talked about Pinterest similarly, just a platform a lot of inbound marketers overlook, but he's really figured out a way to make it sing for him. The hungry learners who are consistent and who pick a few things and do them really well, that's really the secret sauce, which essentially isn't so secret. That's number one. 2. Listen To Your Customers And Prospects And Use What You Learn in Your Marketing Number two is they really listen to customers and prospects and use that in their marketing. Again, sounds like a no-brainer. We always talk about the need to do persona research and to build buyer personas, but I think what happens is we get very often so caught up in building the actual persona that we forget the big picture, that it's not about having this fictional profile of a person. It's really about understanding the way our audience thinks, what their real pain points and needs are, and the language they use to talk about that. A couple of the interviews I did were great examples of this. Barron Caster at rev.com who uses their own transcription product to transcribe all of the conversations they have with customers and then pull actual words that customers have used out and feed that into the copy on their website and landing pages, and that's gotten them amazing results. Val Geisler and Joel Klettke, two of the most accomplished conversion copywriters out there, both also talked about this type of research and understanding deeply, deeply the needs of customers and prospects. Paul Blamire at Atomic Reach, who is head of customer success and makes it a point to speak to new customers shortly after they've onboarded and really understand what brought them to the company and how the product is solving their needs. And he feeds that back in not only to marketing but to product development, to every aspect of the business to deliver a better customer experience from first touch in the marketing process all the way through the experience of using the company's product. 3. You Don't Need Fancy Tools Or A Big Budget Number three, you don't necessarily need fancy tools or a big budget to get incredible results. There are some really great examples of this. Oli Billson who I recently interviewed about the small events he's doing that are delivering tremendous amounts of revenue to his business. Chris Handy who talked about marketing for a Pre-K school, really small campaigns, but they just really ... They understood their audience, and they used the available tools that they had and got terrific results for the school. Adam Sand, who's using direct mail in conjunction with inbound marketing, super old school, but very effective for him. And Harry Campbell, who's The Rideshare Guy, and he's probably the top content creator in the ridesharing space. So think Uber, Lyft, Lime, Bird. He just started blogging and has created some great content and a big following. You really don't need fancy tools or a big budget. You can do it on your own with what you've got, if I go back to the first thing, if you're consistent, if you pick a few things and do them really well, and if you're a hungry learner who is willing to roll your sleeves up and apply what you're learning. 4. Connect With Your Audience On An Emotional Level Number four, the best marketers connect with their audiences on an emotional level, another thing that might seem obvious but that I think a lot of marketers get wrong. We tend to put our marketing hats on and make our marketing all about ourselves or we fall back into that comfortable place of corporate jargon, and kind of robotic speech, and use words like leverage and synergy. Nobody talks like that in real life, or not at least the people that you want to hang out with. The people who talked about this were Kieran Flanigan of HubSpot who shared their hearts and minds strategy for creating content with two types of content, content that solves a person's problems and tells them how to do something, that's really that mind's content, and then the heart's content, which taps into a pain and emotional need that the audience has. Then, Katie Stavely from Mautic. This is ironic that these are the two examples I'm giving for this one because HubSpot and Mautic could be considered two different sides of the same coin, HubSpot being a paid marketing automation, CRM, customer service platform, and Mautic being a completely free open source alternative to it. Katie talked about how important it was to be authentic in your marketing, especially with their audience, which it's all about community. It's opensource software, so your community is helping you develop your product. But regardless, the idea is to really make that emotional connection. 5. Sometimes The Biggest Wins Come From Content That Is Not Related To Your Products Or Services Number five, with content marketing, sometimes the biggest wins happen when you don't create content about your products or services. We as marketers, as inbound marketers, think a lot about top-, middle-, and bottom-of-the funnel strategies. We're always brainstorming what are the questions that our audience is asking as relates to our product or service. That often leads us to create content that is very much about us and not so much about our audience. But, I had two interviews that I thought really highlighted how successful you can be if you flip that script and talk nothing about yourself. What I mean by that is ... I'll start with Stephanie Baiocchi, who was actually Stephanie Casstevens at the time I interviewed her. She hadn't been married yet. And funny enough, she was not working at IMPACT. That's another great outcome of the podcast. Now she is. But, she talked about a campaign that she was running for a client that sold solutions for medical waste from physicians' practices. Originally, they were creating a ton of content around medical waste, and it just wasn't working. The reason is that their audience, which is really the office managers for physicians' practices, already has a medical waste solution. You can't be in business if you don't, so they weren't out there searching for any information about medical waste. They didn't even realize they needed to switch providers or that they had a problem. It was when she kind of took a step back and thought, "What are the biggest problems that office managers have? It doesn't need to have anything to do with medical waste," and she realized it was patient no-shows. They created a patient no-show policy template that office managers could use. That was a total home run. What it did was it opened up the conversation with their audience so that eventually they could begin talking about medical waste. But at that top-of-the-funnel level, they needed first to really open that conversation, and product- and service-related content wasn't going to cut it. Another person who did that really well was Ryan Bonnici, who is now the CMO of G2 Crowd, but at the time was working at HubSpot. HubSpot's a company that has a huge audience. Of course, trying to broaden the top of the funnel at a company like HubSpot is challenging. All the low-hanging fruit is gone, and so you really have to get creative. He was trying to target a small business audience. He really asked himself, "What are the problems that small businesses have?" And, again, doesn't have to have anything to do with HubSpot. He realized when you're starting your business or when you come to work at a small business, one of the first things you have to do is come up with an email signature. You're usually either copying one that somebody else in the company has created or you have to create it from scratch, and it's kind of a pain. He built an email signature generator, an online tool where you could type in some information about yourself and it would spit out a really nice-looking email signature. That tool generated a ton of traffic, leads, and revenues for HubSpot, and it cost them only $6,000 to build it, but the impact was enormous. So, great lesson learned about getting out of the habit of creating only product- and service-related content and thinking bigger. 6. Paid Ads Are An Essential Part Of Any Inbound Marketing Strategy Number six, the old myth that paid ads are not inboundy is dead, or it should be dead. This one was woven throughout almost every interview I did. It's funny because when I first started working with inbound marketing, it was back with my old agency. I had discovered HubSpot. We were following their original methodology of attract, convert, close, delights, for those of you who've been in the HubSpot world for a long time and all. I remember many times going to INBOUND and seeing Brian Halligan stand on stage and talk about how the old way, the old interruptive way of marketing was paid ads, and people didn't like being interrupted. I think we all read that as, well, paid ads are not acceptable if you're an inbound marketer. That myth started dying, I think, several years ago, but it's worth repeating that paid ads are, I would say, not even just inboundy, they're essential to an inbound strategy in this day and age. I'll just list off a bunch of names of my guests who've talked about it. This isn't even a complete list, but Mark Rogers, who at the time was with Carney and grew The Daily Carnage newsletter using Facebook ads; Sterling Snow from Divvy who's used ads to drive leads for their platform; Moby Siddique who has his own inbound agency and does some incredible Facebook ads work with Messenger bots; AJ Wilcox, who is a LinkedIn ads expert; Ali Parmelee, who's one of my coworkers here at IMPACT who does incredible things with Facebook ads; Anthony Sarandrea; Rick Kranz. The list goes on and on. All of them attribute the success that they're getting and the incredible results to some form of paid ads. Let that be the final nail in the coffin of that old myth. Let's really embrace ads, and not just checking the box with ads and promoting our posts, but really taking a full funnel approach to advertising. Because that's the other thing that these folks talked about is it's not about boosting something on Facebook. This is about really digging in and getting good at ads and thinking how ads can be used at every stage of the funnel. 7. Content Distribution Is Critical Number seven, it's not enough to create and publish your content on your website. You've got to promote it and distribute it. This is one that I've heard time and time again. A lot of the best marketers I've spoken to say you should spend twice as much time promoting and distributing your content as you do creating it. I think for a lot of us that equation is backwards. One person who talked about that was Kipp Bodnar who is the CMO of HubSpot, probably one of the companies that is the best at inbound marketing. He talked about what a game changer it was in the last year when HubSpot really threw some muscle behind content distribution and how that impacted their traffic. This is a company that already had amazing traffic, by the way. Then, Phil Singleton. I loved my interview with Phil who is an SEO expert and an author. Phil talked about this great strategy he uses for clients where he's creating e-books, just like lots of inbound marketing agencies do. But then he takes the e-books that he makes for clients, or he takes a collection of blogs, for example, and compiles them into any book, and he publishes them as Kindle e-books on amazon.com, and also in some cases as hard copy books through Amazon direct publishing. It is so simple, and straightforward, and inexpensive. It blows my mind that more marketers are not doing this. It was a cool episode, so definitely check that out. But yeah, the lesson is don't just like write those blogs, create those e-books. Think about what are you going to do with them once they're published. How are you going to get them out in front of the world? 8. Original Research Can Drive Tremendous Results Number eight, original research can have amazing results. I had several interviews where people touched on what has come of original research. One of the people I think that that is most famous in the marketing world for doing this is Andy Crestodina. He has been doing a blogging survey for several years and really credits that with bringing a lot of attention to his agency, Orbit Media, out of Chicago, giving him a ton of backlinks and press. It's a pretty simple survey. He does put quite a bit of effort into promoting the survey itself so he can get a lot of responses, and then once he gets those responses into packaging that content so that he can turn it into things like infographics and articles, et cetera. But, it's not just Andy. Michele Aymold from Parker Dewey uses original research and data to boost her marketing results. Clare Carr from Parse.ly, they actually don't even have to do that much research because simply by the nature of the product that they sell they have access to a lot of proprietary data. She's really productized that and used it to get a tremendous amount of press. In fact, she was able to dramatically cut back the amount of content she was creating while getting better results because the data itself was so attractive to their audience, and it also helped her reduce their PR spend. Then, Rebecca Corliss at Owl Labs. They produced the state of remote work, and that's gotten them quite a bit of traction. 9. Community Is A Powerful Tool To Fuel Growth Number nine, community is such a powerful tool for marketing. This is an interesting one because here at IMPACT we've been working really hard over the course of the last two years to build our own community called IMPACT Elite, which is on Facebook. We've learned a lot about community in the course of doing that. I would say it has been a game changer for our business, certainly. We now have over 5,000 people in that community. It's a delicate balance how you run it. You can't make it all about yourself. It has to truly be about helping the members of the community and getting them to the point where they're almost running it, if you will. I spoke to several other people who have built communities and had similar experiences in terms of the community being a fundamental tool in the growth of their business. One was Bill Faeth who is a marketer who specializes in the limousine and transport business. He has Limo University, and he has a big community around that of limousine companies. Frank Gruber, who started Tech Cocktail in the beginning and turn it into Tech.co, which was then acquired, he now has a company called Established. But, he began this grassroots community all over the country of startups and people interested in the startup ecosystem and wound up building a tremendous media business from that. Nikki Nixon who at the time I interviewed her was running the FlipMyFunnel community for Terminus. Ameer Rosic who has a community focused on blockchain called Blockgeeks. And Mark Graham, who is an old friend of mine doing amazing things, he's up in Canada and has a software platform called Commonsku and has built a great community around that. All of these folks doing incredible things with communities in very different niches, I should say. For Bill, it was limo companies. For Frank, it was startups. For Nikki, it's people who are ABM practitioners. For Ameer, it's folks in the blockchain community. And for Mark Graham, it's people in the promotional products world. All of these different niches need communities and people are hungry to connect with others who have similar interests as they do. 10. The Quality Of Your Content REALLY Matters Content quality. I had a couple of great interviews on this. This is one that I'd love to talk with more people who are focused on this. In this day and age, you can't just be creating content and checking the box. You have to really create great content that is better than anything else out there if you really want to get amazing results. One person who talked a lot about this was Oli Gardner and how he is putting a lot of effort into really making the content that they create be the best that's available on the Internet. Emily Maxie from Very talked about this, too, really digging deep and creating unbelievable resources for your audience. Both of these folks are getting great results in terms of traffic, and that traffic ultimately turning into leads, because they took the time to create in-depth pieces that really added value for their audience. Seems like it should be obvious, it's another one of these, but it's really not too a lot of us. I mean, you might think your content's really good, but is it the best? When you Google that topic that you created content about, is your piece the best thing that you can find in the search results? If not, go back and spend the time and make it better. I think one of the lessons I've learned is it's better to make less content that's better content than it is to create a high volume. 11. Creating A Podcast - Or Being A Guest On One - Is A Good Way To Build Your Brand Another theme that came out was podcasting. It's sort of ironic because we're on a podcast talking about podcasting. But a lot of my interviews, as I went back and reviewed, had to do with podcasting, beginning with George B Thomas, who I've had the privilege to work with over the years here at IMPACT. He's now at Impulse Creative. George is a prolific podcaster, and he's ... It might seem easy when you listen to him. It just seems like, "Oh, there's a guy that just has a great rapport with his audience," but he puts a ton of thought into how he does these podcasts, how he structured them so that they not only deliver value for the audience, but that they have naturally built-in incentives for people to share them and to grow his audience. That's really worth listening to if you're somebody who wants to start a podcast. Andrew Dymski is another person who's been podcasting for a long time and who I've been a guest on his podcast. He's been a guest on mine. He's got some great insights. Ryan Hawke, who has The Learning Leader podcast, Ryan blew my mind just with how prepared he comes to everything. He talked about this, too, how before he does an interview the amount of preparation he does, the amount of preparation he does when he even just invites somebody to come on his podcast. This guy is serious business, and that's why he's so successful. He really has put the thought into it and turned his podcast into a business. Dan Moyle came on the show and talked about podcast guest interviews. So not necessarily starting a podcast, but if you want to get the word out, going on other podcasts as a guest. At the time, he was with a company called Interview Valet. What's been really cool for me is seeing the other side of that. I get pitched a lot by companies like Interview Valet, and there are certainly other ones as well. They'll send me an email and say, "Listened to your show. Thought it was great. Here's a guest that I think would be really good for you." That's how I've gotten a lot of my more interesting guests. There's something to that podcast guesting strategy that really I think can help you get traction and raise your profile if you're trying to build a personal brand or trying to get the word out about a product or a service. There are plenty of companies like Interview Valet that, for a fee, will take care of that for you. It's kind of like having a talent agent. I also talked to Jay Acunzo about podcasting. He is actually a consultant to other companies and helps them create, produce, and get the best results out of their podcasts. One of his clients is Drift, which comes up a lot on my show. People love Drift, always cited as one of the best examples of a company doing inbound marketing really well, and they have a couple of podcasts. Then, Jeff Large of Come Alive Creative. Lots of folks talking about podcasting. It really stuck out to me that it's not just about, hey, everybody should have a podcast, and I don't think everyone should. It's not right for everybody. But, podcasting can play a role in almost everybody's marketing strategy for sure. 12. Video, Video, Video Number 12, video. Can't have a list of trends and things that are important in marketing without talking about video these days. Some of the guests that I've had that have spoken about this are some of the more impressive people that have been on this podcast. In 2019, I opted to kick the year off with an interview with Marcus Sheridan, who is an amazing man that is a big role model for me. I currently get to work with him at IMPACT. But, he's somebody that I followed for years and I have so much respect for because he sees things about marketing and about customer behavior that a lot of other people don't, even though they're staring us in the face. One of the things that he has really seen and committed to is that when it comes to marketing and selling, we can't just tell people something. We have to show it to them, too, and we show it to them using video. He talked about how important video was going to be in 2019. I know that he's out speaking at conferences and talking about video all over the world. Also, Eric Siu. I kicked off 2018 with Eric Siu doing predictions for last year. He talked about video as well and was like, "Video's going to be huge in 2018." So in both of my kind of yearly prediction episodes, the guests that I've had have cited video as one of the biggest things we should be paying attention to. And then, of course, I already mentioned her, but Goldie Chan, who is a LinkedIn influencer and creates a new LinkedIn video every single day, has made a career around those videos. She's amazing. She travels all over the world and is sought after as a speaker because of the LinkedIn video she creates. And Dennis Yu who has turned video into a formula for building people's personal brands. It's really impressive what he does. They're these short little videos that he films. Using that medium has helped countless people create brands for themselves. 13. Lead With Brand Which brings me to my 13th and last lesson learned from 99 interviews with incredible marketers, and that is that all of these strategies, and tactics, and approaches are powerful. But at the end of the day, the most important thing in marketing is brand. Brand is paramount. Without it, you can have some quick wins but you'll never have a true success that will last over the long term. I'm only going to cite one example here because it's the one that comes up the most. And if you listen to this podcast with any degree of regularity, you know that at the end I always, always ask my guests, "Company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now?" There is one company/individual, the company and the marketer who's spearheading it for them, that by far comes up more than anybody else, and that is Drift and Dave Gerhardt, who I was very fortunate to have as a guest early on. I can't tell you the number of times people have mentioned Drift, and it's not just people from the marketing world. It's folks that have come onto this podcast from all different industries, and they all cite Dave Gerhart and his work building a brand at Drift as the one succeeding the most with inbound marketing. It's not for me to say what that brand is or to really try to encapsulate what Dave has done, but I think it's fair to say that they've built a brand that's incredibly authentic. There's no artifice. There's no fancy tricks about it. They, of everybody, really reflect everything I've said about the past, you know, this list of 12 to 13 trends I just spoke about today. When I look back through this list, they are doing a few things and doing them really well. They really listen to their customers. It's not about fancy tools or a big budget. The things that make them successful don't have anything to do with that. It's about connecting on emotional level. It's about creating content that sometimes doesn't have anything to do with your products or services. They do paid ads. And it's not enough to create and publish your content, you've got to promote it. They are so good at that. They've got a tremendous community, really high-quality content, a bunch of podcasts. They use video better than almost anybody else, especially on LinkedIn. Checkout Dave Gerhart's LinkedIn presence. And they just have a really strong brand. So my hat is off to Dave Gerhart and the team at Drift for ... If I had to give out an award for top inbound marketers, I think it would go to them. Thank YOU For Listening But really, everybody that I've interviewed over the course of the last two years has been so impressive. It is just my absolute privilege to get to do this every single week. I also wanted to say thank you to you for listening. Podcasting is a funny exercise. As I record this, it's Sunday morning, and I'm sitting in my home office, which is a tiny little room that actually had to be permitted as a closet because it's so small. There's chaos happening around me in my house. I'm by myself talking into a microphone. I'll go away, and I'll turn this into an episode. It'll go live tomorrow. You'll be hearing this Monday, if you get the episode right when it comes out or sometime after, and you're out there listening. But when I create these things, it's just me in a room. To know that there are people who choose to listen to this every week is just an unbelievable honor and a privilege to me. So, thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening to this content. I hope so much that you've learned something from it and that, even if it's in a small way, it's helped you get better results from your marketing and feel like a smarter marketer. If that has happened, then I feel like I've succeeded. With that, I will say I would love to hear from you. It's been a hundred episodes. If you are a regular listener, please take a moment and contact me. I always say at the end you can tweet me @workmommywork, which is my Twitter handle, but you can also message me on LinkedIn. You can email me at kbooth@impactbnd.com. You can send a carrier pigeon. However you want to do it, I would love it if you would get in touch and let me know what you like about the podcast and what's something that I can improve because I'd love to make the next hundred episodes even better. With that, I won't belabor it. Thank you again for listening, and I'll see you next week. Or not see you, I'll be talking to you next week for episode 101.

ceo amazon canada chicago google internet marketing pr video tech brand podcasting impact uber oprah winfrey rev seo pinterest wifi cmo kindle crm messenger established marketers lyft booth drift hubspot lime inbound pre k carney high performing abm terminus things i've learned marcus sheridan interview valet divvy aj wilcox parse jay acunzo eric siu andy crestodina mark rogers dave gerhardt mark graham orbit media learning leader brian halligan g2 crowd kathleen booth phil singleton val geisler joel klettke flipmyfunnel george b thomas dan moyle anthony sarandrea goldie chan ryan bonnici bill faeth ameer rosic kipp bodnar oli gardner owl labs rev ciancio chris handy mautic tech cocktail impulse creative adam sand for frank alex nerney jeff large blockgeeks sterling snow frank gruber bob ruffolo oli billson come alive creative commonsku andrew dymski inbound success atomic reach paul blamire impact elite barron caster ali parmelee clare carr nikki nixon

Ep. 94: How Audience Research Helped Rev.com Triple Landing Page Conversion Rates Ft. Barron Caster

Internet Marketing: Insider Tips and Advice for Online Marketing

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 10, 2019 40:34

Rev.com's Head of Growth has tripled the company's landing pages conversion rates across all major products. Here is how he did it... This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Rev.com Director Growth Barron Caster talks about the company's process for conducting audience research, and how the insights gleaned from that process have enabled them to triple their landing page conversion rates. If you like detailed, actionable takeaways, this episode is for you. Barron is sharing his exact process, right down to the nine questions he has his team ask when conducting audience research interviews. This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live, the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford Connecticut and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with special guests including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS". Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my conversation with Barron include: Barron runs "growthproduct" and marketing at Rev. Marketing is focused on website traffic and growthproduct is about conversion. Barron believes that the best way to improve your marketing results is to learn from your customers, so he tries to speak to at least one customer every month. In addition, the team at Rev uses Net Promoter Scores to track how their customers are feeling about the company's products. He also has a requirement that everyone on his team meet with at least two customers per quarter to conduct audience research, and they have a stipend to support that effort. To ensure that the information gathered during customer interviews is accurate, Barron has created a one-pager that details exactly what should go into it, who they should be talking to, what questions they should be asking, etc. The one pager details the nine specific questions (shared in the transcript below) that his team must ask. All of the team's audience research interviews are recorded and transcribed using Rev. There are a dozen people on Barron's growth team and they meet for a half hour every week. During this meeting, they share the findings from their audience research in a "quickfire round" format. They pull key insights from this research and use the actual words of the customer to update copy on their website and landing pages. This has resulted in a 3X improvement in the company's landing page conversion rates. Another trick that Barron uses to understand customers is listening to what they are asking on the company's website live chat. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Check out the articles that Barron has published on Medium Read Barron's article on how he tripled Rev's landing page conversion rates Visit the Rev.com website Listen to the podcast to hear Barron's process for gathering audience research and using the findings to inform Rev's conversion rate optimization strategy. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and this week my guest is Barron Caster who is the Director of Growth at Rev.com. Welcome, Barron. Barron Caster (Guest): Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Barron and Kathleen hamming it up while recording this episode Kathleen: This is such a cool interview for me to do because I use your product every single week. And so for those listening who don't know what Rev.com is, Barron can give a more complete description, but I will just say I do this podcast. If you listen with any degree of regularity and if you visit my show notes, all of the show notes are transcribed using Rev. So I send Rev, through the cloud, I send my audio file, and then usually within a few hours it comes back, and it's this beautifully transcribed, written version that I don't have to do myself. So I love Rev.com, and we use it for other things too. As a team we create the SRT files, which is what we use to caption our social videos, and many other things as well. So I'm really excited to have you here for that reason. Barron: Thank you. I'm excited to be here and excited to talk about what you just did for us, which is using customers' words to inform and educate other people, and to show the value of the services you provide. So thank you for the glowing introduction. Kathleen: Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure. There's nothing better than talking about a product you actually use and love. Barron: Totally hear you. Kathleen: Speaking of which, though, I know I only use certain parts of your product. So before we dig into the actual meat of the conversation, can you just take a minute and tell the listeners a little bit more, first of all about yourself, because you have an interesting background. You've been an entrepreneur. You've been a venture capitalist. You've done a lot of different things, and so I think that's kind of interesting as far as how it influences the work you do now. And then also give us the quick spiel on Rev and all of its different products so that people listening have a sense for the full breadth of what the company does. About Rev.com and Barron Caster Barron: Cool. Thank you. Yes. I'll give a quick introduction on myself. I started with an education in mechanical engineering. I got my undergrad and master's from USC in Los Angeles. And then I promptly threw my degree to the side and became a venture capitalist looking at the wearables, healthcare, and mobile spaces. And I worked at a firm called General Catalyst, evaluated early stage investments, and realized that before I wanted to spend more time investing, I really wanted to get operational and figure out the inner workings of a great company and see what that looks like. So I joined the fastest growing company at the time. It was called Zenefits. Kathleen: We are also a customer of Zenefits. I love them. Barron: You're a customer. Rev is also a customer of Zenefits. It was the fastest company at the time to go from zero to $60 million in AR, and I was there at an incredible scaling time of the company, saw a lot of incredible things there, met tons of amazing people, and then after being there and seeing this crazy scaling period, they started to have some issues, but I saw a future for myself in product, which I was not doing at Zenefits. So then I moved to Rev, which I'd never heard of at the time, to join as a product manager. And at the time, Rev only had a few services. I joined as a product manager on our core transcription service. The one that you just talked about so gracefully. Thank you for that. And then I started our growth team. I've been at Rev now three years, and I now run all of our growthproduct, and marketing. So "growthproduct" is one word and then marketing. And growthproduct is a few product managers working on products that once people are actually on our site, convince them to use our services and marketing as all of the things that inform customers about our services. So you also think about it in terms of traffic and conversion. Marketing is the traffic and brings people awareness and educates them, and then conversion is once they're actually on Rev properties, how do we convince them to buy from us? Kathleen: Great. And one of the things I thought was so interesting about your background, and I'm kind of jealous I have to admit, is that I have always wanted to go through Brian Balfour's Reforge program. Barron: Oh yes. Kathleen: I follow him really closely online. I love every single thing he writes about growth and product market fit, and all of that. You've been through that program, so I'm kind of excited to see how that comes into the conversation, or if it does. Barron: Brian and everyone from the Reforge program are incredible. He leads the thinking in a lot of ways and has helped define what growth teams look like. I went through the program when we didn't have a growth team at Rev. I think it was a month old, and I was the first person on it working with one of our co-founders trying to figure out what should the growth team look like longer term and what should be build towards. So by looking at all the frameworks and ways it's built at different companies, that helped us inform what it should look like at Rev because growth teams are going to look totally different based on the company and the people within the company, but it's really good to talk to other people who have done it. And we do that for all of our learnings at Rev. We try to talk to industry experts and figure out how are the best people doing it. How Rev.com Conducts Audience Research Kathleen: Love it. So when you started talking about how you kind of handle marketing and you handle growthproduct and you think of traffic and conversion as those two sides of the coin, and when you and I first spoke, you talked about how a big factor that influences how you approach these things is the audience research that you do. So maybe we could just start out there and you could talk a little bit more about audience research and where that fits within your strategies. Barron: I think it should help inform almost all strategies at the company, not just on the growth team but in pretty much all the things that we do. And I think there's just a number of ways that you can do customer research. One of the best is talking to them. So, take it a step back. A lot of marketers really love... They work for companies. They know what their company offers, and they love talking about all of the things that their company does today because they know the features. They talk to the people that are building them. They hear a lot of about why they're great. But what you really need to do is get out of the building, talk to your customers and understand why are they actually using you. What value does your service provide? How do you change their lives? What do they like, not like about it. What they want to improve, to really narrow down what is special about your product and service. How are you differentiated? We do it in a number of ways. I think talking to people is always great. I try to have at least one very in-depth customer conversation a month, even though I'm not even working day-to-day on specific channels or features, just to help inform the sorts of things we're doing. And then we also have a lot of other inputs from customers, whether it be Net Promoter Score, online ratings and reviews, and reading where people are talking about you online, emails to support, talks from sales, all of these different places are ways to get as much feedback as possible to help inform what you're doing. Kathleen: And I like that you try to do it once a month. That's something that I'm kind of working on too which is when you're in marketing, you're not always in a position where you have direct customer contact, but it is so important to come up with some kind of a cadence so that you don't become so out of touch. Barron: 100%. And I've actually... on my team started creating requirements that people get out of the building, we have a stipend for it, talk to customers, meet them in person, hear about their journey, how they found out about us, what they're using us for, what they love, don't love, all those sorts of things for at least two customers per quarter. It's a requirement even though many people will never have customer interaction in their day-to-day. I think it's essential to have that empathy and understand what are we actually trying to do here. Kathleen: Oh, I love that. Let's actually get a little bit kind of down to brass tacks here. You're requiring your team to do these customer meetings or conversations. You're doing some of them. Do you have any kind of guidelines or framework that you use or that you ask them to use for those conversations so that there's some degree of consistency in the information you're getting? Barron: Yeah. I'm a huge documentation nerd across the board, so whenever I have an idea for a project or things that I want to work on, I write out a document to explain my thinking very clearly and get feedback on it. I think it's extremely important. So I have a one-pager about the homework, exactly what should go into it, who you should be talking to, what questions you should be asking, all of those kinds of things. And then everyone shares it back in their own format, and then we discuss it as a group. And I have the questions if you would like to hear them. Kathleen: Yes. Of course I would like to hear them. Rev.com's Audience Research Questions Barron: Great. I like to break it out into almost like the moment before discovery, and then questions around discovery, and then about the service itself. We have nine key questions and then a couple bonus questions, but they are how did you know that you needed a transcription service? Before Rev, were you using a different transcription service or doing it yourself? So those are kind of how did you know had a need, and what were you doing? Then how did you find Rev? How did you evaluate Rev, or which transcription service you wanted to use? Those are kind of on the once you've discovered it, how did you actually evaluate it? And then more into the use case. So what do you use Rev for? What does that process look like? How has Rev changed your life is a really interesting question because it forces them to think about the value you provide and quantify it, which can be very hard for marketers at times to figure out the specifics of value that you add to people. What is your favorite part about Rev? Least favorite part about Rev? This one is a personal favorite. How would you describe Rev to a friend? What is your service from their perspective? And then who else do you know that might benefit from using Rev? So what other use cases can they think of top of mind that would be relevant? And then my two bonus questions are what other product app services do you use and love? So you're usually talking to someone who is not like you but they use your service, so what is the typical person that uses your service? What else are they doing? What other things are they reading online? What other actions are they taking to try to see if there are any nuggets in there about other things that you could be doing to get in front of other customers and users. And then also what are your favorite newsletters, podcasts? Like what information do they consume on a regular basis? Kathleen: I love that. And I really like that you ask that question about how would you describe Rev to somebody else because what's that famous quote they say that, "your brand is what people say about you when you're not there?" Barron: Yeah, exactly. Kathleen: That's really what it is. You're finding out what your actual brand is out in the marketplace, as opposed to what you want people to think your brand is. And hopefully- Barron: I totally agree. Kathleen: ... those two things match up, but they don't always. Barron: You want them to, and then if you don't, then you can dig into why. Deriving Insights From Audience Research Barron: And then another big requirement around this homework assignment is that all of it is recorded and transcribed using Rev. So another big piece of it is dogfooding, which is another thing that marketers sometimes don't always do. They take their products at face value instead of really using it, understanding the nuances of what actually looks like for a customer to be spending money on this, and what is the value that it adds back to their life. So when I ask people what are the insights from it, they actually have to go back, read through our online, easy to use, interactive transcript viewer, and highlight things, comment, do all of those sorts of things, but it really gets them in the mindset of dogfooding and what is the user experience. How should we be talking about it? Rev's Transcription Services Kathleen: I'm going to digress for a minute because you as a company have two different transcription options. There's the one that I have always used which is $1 per minute. Really reasonably priced in my opinion, and it's very accurate, so I don't have to spend a ton of time cleaning up the transcription after I get it. But then I saw that you recently released, and I'm not sure if it's still in beta or not, a new option that is going to be 10 cents per minute. It sounds like it's AI powered, and it's a great option for people who want like really quick results. Could be a great application for which could be exactly what we're talking about right now which is audience research interviews. Can you just talk about that for a second and then we'll pick up where we left off? Barron: Definitely. Rev historically has had a lot- Rev.com has had many human services. We have human audio transcription. We have English captioning for English videos. And then we have foreign subtitles for English videos, and foreign document translation. And it's always had these human services. But over time we have served many transcription customers, and... over 100,000 transcription customers, and we have all of this information and data about accurate transcription. So we decided as a company to make an investment a few years ago in speech technology. And we said we have the world's leading English dataset around English transcription. We want to create a speech engine around this. And we have and we launched a consumer version of this under a separate beta brand called Temi.com. For a number of years it's been incredibly successful. So now we're going to put that automated service that has industry leading accuracy because we have top speech scientists working on our incredible data to make the best engine out there, and we feel like it's in such a good place that we're going to serve it on Rev.com. So we've been doing it under a separate brand name for a number of years, and we feel like it's more than ready for prime time, so we're bringing it to all of our happy Rev customers who may have always used our human services, and we feel like this will be a great option in addition to our portfolio for certain types of audio. As you were saying, you don't always need perfect transcription. For this podcast, we're going to have perfect transcription because we want to know exactly the things that were said, but in certain cases, you have tons of interviews and you really just need to know the gist of what people were talking about or pull out some key quotes here and there. And that's when the automated version is ideal. So right now it's still in early access and we're rolling it out for prime time for all new customers starting in a couple weeks. Kathleen: That's great. Barron: And we're really excited for that. And then we also serve it directly to developers through an API as well under a brand Rev.ai. Kathleen: Neat. That's going to be a game changer as far as I'm concerned because I have no problem paying $1 per minute for the podcast as you said because it's important. I'm publishing that text. And it's for a variety of reasons, for accessibility, for somebody who wants to read and not listen, it needs to be legible and accurate. But it would be cost prohibitive if I were going to use that service to transcribe every sales call my team did, every meeting we had, every audience research interview. That could get expensive. And so this makes it so... I love that it makes it so accessible and you almost don't have an excuse not to do it, right? Barron: 100%. And we at first, when we launched our own automated version, we were a little bit worried about cannibalization. We're saying, "Are we disrupting ourselves too much?" And when we started giving it to customers, we saw no, instead of switching from human to automated, there were actually just recording more and getting more things transcribed. So we saw a lot of lift instead of shift. So we're really trying to broaden the market and make transcription more accessible to a wider audience. Kathleen: Well, and I can say just... Here's a little bit of audience research for you. Again, we've used it extensively for podcast transcription. I haven't used Rev for transcribing audience research interviews. I will now. It just is... It's so simple. Not trying to do a commercial, but I do love the product, so I wanted to say that. Barron: I knew you'd turn this into a commercial. Kathleen: You guys... So you do these interviews. You have the question set. And then I think I heard you say that everyone shares the results of the interviews in their own format. But part of that format is having the actual transcription, correct? Barron: Correct. We share the transcripts and Rev invests heavily in our online transcript viewer so when you get a transcript back from us, it doesn't just come in a Word doc. It used to, and we realized that people wanted to collaborate around them, so sharing learnings around a transcript. So we invested heavily in making a very simple, easy to use but robust online editor that people can share with teammates, make comments on, highlight key things, take notes around. Almost like a Google Doc where it's like a online viewer that a lot of people can share and look at together. And that's... yeah. So everyone shares the transcript with other members of the team. How Rev's Team Uses The Insights From Audience Research In The Company's CRO Strategy Kathleen: So you're having periodic meetings. How often do those take place where you all get together and review these findings? Barron: I do quick-fire rounds so we do those like once a quarter based on recent findings, but I encourage people all the time to talk with customers, and we have a budget for that where people can go out and get them transcribed no problem. And I urge people to always share learnings in a transcript back whenever they have them, and then we have a more formal meeting around it once a quarter. Kathleen: Tell me more about what a quick-fire round is. Barron: Oh, well we have almost a dozen people on the growth team, so we have a half hour meeting every single week to talk about different key topics. So when I say quick fire it's just everyone talking for a few minutes about the key findings that they had or any interesting insights or use cases that they discovered that weren't on our radar before. Kathleen: So you're sharing all of this feedback with the team. The team's sharing it with each other. Can you talk a little bit about then how you actually incorporate this into your marketing and your CRO strategies? Barron: Definitely. Each person on the growth team is working on a different project. So for the marketing team, we're much more channel focused, so we have someone who runs our paid marketing, someone who runs content, someone who runs SEO, someone who runs influencers, and social, and PR. So whenever you hear a customer insight, people on the team try to think about, "How can I incorporate that into the things that I am working on?" And CRO at Rev lives under the product side of things, and I did CRO for my entire time at Rev. Almost my entire time at Rev. So when we were working on conversion in A/B testing, we used customers' own words to inform the tests we were doing and actually use it as our own copy. Because we believe that customers understand the value of our services a lot more than we do because they proactively sought us out, started using us, and find value to keep coming back. So they really understand what value Rev has to offer, and we want to use those insights to help inform the next batch of people that may come across us. Kathleen: So it's true like voice of the customer application, you're pulling quotes out. You're using those quotes... Or is it full quotes, or is it just instead of calling it a transcription, we call it X kind of thing? Barron: It's a combination. We have customer testimonials on our website as well, and we also have a Twitter feed that shows real tweets from customers, just more forms of social proof, so that's actually using their own words that they have written. But then we also just use it to inform the landing page copy. Like what are the types of things that customers say about us? And I could pull up an example. Let's see. Kathleen: Let's do it. Barron: On our website, Rev.com/transcription, Audio Transcription Made Simple, that's been a tagline we've had for a while. That's because all of our customers say we're so easy to use. And I manage our entire self-serve business so it's my job to make sure it stays that way, as easy to use as possible. But then under the fold, and under the main call to action, we say, "Rev's transcription service help you capture more value from your recorded audio." That came about from me from a customer interview. They said that. They said, "You helped me capture more value from all the things I'm recording." Kathleen: Great. I love it. Barron: And we used that, and now we put it smack dab on the page, and people relate to it, and they understand exactly what it means because that was a real problem that someone had. They said, "We're recording all this audio. We're not sure how to get value and insights from it." And they used us, and they said, "This is incredible. You changed the way I work," and I said, "That's amazing. Everyone needs to know that." Right? So that's one example. And then throughout the page there's other pieces that we've gotten from customers over time. Kathleen: Great. I love it. And so it sounds like the key to what's making it successful for you guys is having a very systematic approach of everyone's getting out there and doing the interviews. Everyone's having them transcribed. They're coming back. You're all sharing the learnings, and then that can easily be applied. The Results That Rev Has Seen From This Process Kathleen: Can you talk a little bit about some of the results you've seen from the experiments you've run using the voice of the customer? Barron: Yes, I can. And I read a post about this on Medium as well, but in using customers' own words we have managed to triple the... landing-page-to-paid conversion rate for three of our services. So for the audio transcription, our main service on mobile, we managed to triple the conversion rate, so that means tripling the effectiveness of your ads because you're paying for every time someone comes to your page and you want each of them to convert. So we've done it for our main transcription service. We did it for our automated transcription service. And we did it for another Rev side project that we ended up actually shuttering a year ago because Rev always tries new ideas and businesses, and we experimented with one that ended up not working, but it wasn't because of our acquisition. It was because of other issues with the business. Kathleen: Wow. That tripling of the conversion rate, is that kind of an average across the board, or... and are there some pages that have had amazing results and some that are smaller? Or is it usually quite a big impact that those kinds of experiments have? Barron: We experiment on our main service landing pages. We spend a lot of time and energy getting people to understand what the service is and what value it provides. I will also say it's easier to test on your highest volume pages because you have more data to make more informed decisions. And you have more customers that you can talk to and learn from as well. So most of our work usually starts on our highest volume services, and then we transfer those learnings to lower volume services as well. The lion's share of my work has been on our transcription businesses because those are Rev's most mature businesses. How The Rev Team Conducts CRO Tests Kathleen: And can you just talk me through how you manage those experiments? Are you starting with a hypothesis and just choosing one variable at a time like classic A/B testing, and how long do you let the experiments run? Is there a defined time period or does it just depend on volume of sessions to the page? Barron: Those are both great questions. So the first question was how do you run experiments, and it's very hypothesis driven, but I would say you can't start with a hypothesis. You have to start with learning that helps inform what your hypothesis should be. Right? So for our website, we realized that... I watched a lot of user sessions. I talked to people. And I realized they weren't actually reading the words on the page. We had so much copy on our website... this is two and a half years ago, and people just weren't reading it. We had all the information there; it just wasn't packaged in a way that people could digest. So we made it a lot more digestible, and we saw that it was working. But the hypothesis was people aren't actually reading even though the content is there. We need to make it better. So I'd say start with learning that will help you develop your hypothesis. And then in terms of how we test, yeah. Sometimes we'll package a couple ideas together into one bigger test, but it will always be testing a singular hypothesis because if you just make a bunch of changes that you're not sure will be beneficial, you could end up hurting things and you wouldn't know. Another thing is once you have a certain number of... Actually, I'll say really quickly that Andy Johns who is a venture capitalist at Unusual Ventures, and he was a founding member of the growth team at Facebook. He's worked at Twitter as well, I believe, Quora and Wealthfront. At Wealthfront, I believe, he was the VP of Product and Growth, and now he's a venture capitalist. He has a great framework for thinking about experimentation as a size of the company and your maturity level. When you are a small business you don't have a lot of data so you have to spend tons of time and energy working around crafting the hypothesis the right way. Is this the right way to test it? Being very, very thoughtful around each test because you don't have enough data to move quickly with. So you have to be very, very thoughtful before putting it live. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, you have people that have tons of data such as a Facebook or a Pinterest, and they are well known, their growth teams, for testing so many things as quickly as possible. Because they have all the data in the world, so they can run an A/B test statistical significance- Kathleen: In like hours. Barron: ... in minutes. I think faster than hours at times. They just... So they test as many things as possible because they have almost unlimited data. Whereas a lot of people listening to this podcast are probably trying to figure out how do I make the most with what I have? And it's around being incredibly thoughtful for how you do things. And then you asked how long you test for. We've had A/B tests... So it's always important to set like a minimum bar before starting the test because once you launch a test, emotion will come into it and it looks like something's really hot out of the gate, you said, "Let's call it right now. This is amazing." And then things normalize. So I've gotten really, really good over time in not checking results early because although it's tempting, it can definitely skew your emotion and your emotional state. Kathleen: It's like confirmation bias too sometimes when you see- Barron: Yeah. Exactly. So setting a baseline is good, and there's a lot of articles out there about statistical significance and the sort of time you should wait, but we did it anywhere up to months for statistical significance on key changes because data was limited on certain services, or certain pieces of the funnel. Kathleen: And I was reading the article that you wrote on Medium where you talked about this, and one of the things I thought was interesting, we spent a lot of time talking about customer interviews and audience research, but I thought it was really interesting that you also look at chats, for example, on the site. I think you guys use Intercom. Is that right? Barron: Yeah. Not only do we look at chats, I ran Intercom for months on the site myself so that I could fully understand what questions customers are having and what they wanted to see. By seeing the high volume of people in real time through whatever chat widget is hot these days, whether it be Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, there's a number out there, but getting in touch real time with your customers when they're making buying decisions is hugely important. So yes, we have a number of ways we're learning from customers, and another very popular tool, and I have another article about different tools out there, but full story, in session viewing, and I know there's tools like Hotjar are out there that do the same thing, but seeing how people are interacting with your site is extremely powerful because you can user test all day long and it will not give you real data what customers are doing. Seeing it live is almost magical. It's really cool, and it will help you be a lot smarter about your decisions. Kathleen: We use Lucky Orange for the same thing and it's amazing how it also can help you find bugs on your website that you would not have ever realized existed. We found this weird bug on mobile that was just on like iOS tablet versions X, Y, and Z, and it was because we were seeing, we saw a really strange change in the time on page and the bounce rate for that very specific device and started going into Lucky Orange and looking at user sessions for people using that device, and I was like, "Of course. There's a pop-up that's messing things up." And it's just amazing what you can learn the more you dig. But it is a- Barron: That is spectacular. Kathleen: It's a rabbit hole though. It's a deep one. Barron: I love that. The only other source that I'd say is... sources that are amazing are your support and your sales team. Your support team knows what the biggest customer issues are because they talk to them all the time, and sales is trying to convince people to use your products so they know what the biggest questions are from people when evaluating. And to help inform that, I've done rotations on both of those teams in the past. If your company would allow that, I highly suggest it because it just helps you understand what the problems are a lot better. Kathleen: Amen. I was on our sales team for six months before I took on this role as head of marketing, and it was hugely valuable. And we record all of our sales calls, so I still think listening to those is so important. Barron: Amazing. Yes. And getting them transcribed so you can read them easier. Kathleen: Exactly. Using the new 10 cents per minute tool. No, this is great. You have so many good articles on Medium. I'm probably going to put a few of those links in the show notes, so if you're listening and you want to see more of what Barron has written, check out the show notes for sure. And you are @BarronCaster on Medium. I'll put that link in as well. Barron: Thank you. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: And a couple questions for you that I ask all of my guests. I'm curious what you're going to have to say. First one is when it comes to inbound marketing, which is really what this podcast is about, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now? Barron: Yes. There are many people I think that are killing it. Kathleen: You can give me multiple names. That's fine too. Barron: I will. How deep do you want me to go on how I think they're killing it? Kathleen: Oh. Fire away. I'll stop you- Barron: Great. I think- Kathleen: ... if I need to. Barron: Okay. I think the first name that comes to mind is Neil Patel. I think he's done a great job of building an incredible content library that is extremely extensive, and he touches people on all different sorts of mediums. He's active across all social channels, and he's built up a personal brand that is extremely strong. And what he's done more recently in the past couple years is layer on tons of free tools that incentivize people to come to his domain to evaluate their website, and see what their SEO is, or look for keyword ideas through his Ubersuggest tool. And I know he's focused on acquiring these different tools to help bolster his audience and provide value to people. So he always leads with value which I think is incredibly important. So as an individual who is a brand, he stands out amongst the crowd to me. And then another company that I think is doing really well, is this company called Animalz which is a B2B, content marketing agency that I love and I've been in touch with recently because I subscribe to their newsletter and all their content was incredibly thoughtful and informative around content marketing. So I could tell they did an incredible job because I loved reading and opening their newsletter, and it led me to reach out to them about their business. So because I'm a converted customer, I am a huge fan of the work that they've done in being able to show their value to me. And then- Kathleen: And that's Animalz with a Z, right? Barron: Animalz, yeah. Animalz with a Z. And then the last company that I'm not a customer of but I really like what they're doing is G2 Crowd. Ryan Bonnici over there who used to be at HubSpot has created a content engine that is unparalleled, I think. And they're just producing a high volume of high quality content, which is very difficult to do, and I know they're investing heavily in doing that. Kathleen: Ryan's been a guest on the podcast. Yeah, he's a really smart guy. And you're the second person to mention Animalz, so I'm going to have to reach out to somebody there and get them to come on now, because that's- Barron: If you talk to Jimmy, he's great. Kathleen: Jimmy, I'm coming for you. Barron: Great. And what they do is they... Most agencies will shop out a lot of their work to other freelancers, and they believe in value and quality so hugely that they only have in-house writers. They only staff in-house people, which is difficult to do as a large agency, but it helps you keep quality consistent across the board. Kathleen: Interesting. Well, those are great examples for anyone who wants to check them out. Again, links will be in the show notes. Second question is with digital marketing changing so quickly, how do you stay up to date? What are your personal kind of go-to sources for great information? Barron: This is an amazing question. My first answer is that you shouldn't be looking for the latest developments. You should start by going back to the classics of marketing because a lot of the classic principles don't change. It's more of the mechanics that change. So like the people I love and refer to commonly are Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, like Robert Cialdini. These like great marketing minds and advertising minds where the principles last forever. Like I created a robust A/B testing program at Rev, and then I read Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising, which was written 100 years ago, and he had all the same principles. I was like, "Oh my God. I would have saved so much time by visiting this first." When before I had been reading all the blogs and trying to figure out what the best tech companies were doing. A lot of the principles are the same. It's more of how you actually bring them to market that's changing. And for that, I really loved Drift as a brand because I think that David Gerhardt, who runs a lot of their marketing over there, subscribes to the same philosophy. He constantly revisits the classics and then figures out how does that work in today's modern world, but he starts with principles. And I think the principles are extremely important. And then my last favorite, more general growth newsletter that touches across product development, entrepreneurship, marketing, and growth, is Hiten Shah who's actually related to Neil Patel, and he has a just incredible newsletter that's very informative, and he does deep dives on businesses and their go-to-market that will help inform you about how great brands that you know today actually made it, and the evolution that they went through over time. Kathleen: I love it. So many good suggestions. Lots of reading ahead. Barron: I don't mean to overwhelm, but- Kathleen: No, this is great. I think- Barron: ... if you have limited time, start with the old stuff and then work your way forward. I'm also a big fan of Nassim Taleb and Antifragile as a book, and he has this thing he calls the Lindy Effect. The longer something has been in existence, the more likely it is to exist for a long period of time. So these older principles still hold true in today's modern world. Kathleen: I can't wait to check some of those out. One thing I've noticed from doing so many interviews with different marketers is the best marketers are just these voracious learners. They're always wanting to find something more to educate themselves with. So lots of recommendations. If you're listening, go get all the books. How To Connect With Barron Kathleen: Barron, if somebody wants to learn more about you, or has a question, or wants to learn more about Rev, what's the best way for them to get in touch or find you online? Barron: You can check out my Medium that you will post later which is great. You can send me an email directly. It's my name barron@rev.com. Please reach out if you have any questions about anything, or if you have ideas of articles that you want me to write, I would love to hear that as well. I'm always looking for ideas on things that people are curious about so I can answer a question for a lot of people. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: Love it. All right. Well, thank you so much. If you're listening and you learned something new, which I'm pretty sure you did because I feel like there's a lot of good stuff in this one, I would of course love it if you would leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice. And if you know somebody else who'd doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, Tweet me @WorkMommyWork because they could be my next interview. Thanks, Barron. Barron: Thank you so much, Kathleen. This has been incredible.

#497 Mental Health in the Workplace: Interview with Ryan Bonnici

Play Episode Listen Later May 9, 2019 29:26

On today's episode of the Internet Marketing Podcast, Andy is joined by Ryan Bonnici, Chief Marketing Officer at G2 to talk about a range of topics including re-branding, hiring and mental health in the workplace. On the show you'll learn: Why & how G2 Crowd re-branded to G2Why internal buy-in is key when it comes to a re-brand What to look for in rockstar candidates when hiringWhy it's important to "hire slow but fire fast"How to get your team doing amazing & disruptive marketingWhy it's important to talk about mental healthHow not to burn out in a high pressure jobWhy it's important to be open with your team when it comes to mental health Plus, Ryan provides his top tip/key takeaway. If you'd like to connect with Ryan you can find him on Twitter here and on LinkedIn here. You can also find out more about Bring Change to Mind here. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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Crushing Growth Goals with Ryan Bonnici

Marketing Trends

Play Episode Listen Later May 7, 2019 46:34

This episode of Marketing Trends features an interview with Ryan Bonnici. He is currently the CMO of G2, and previously served as the senior director of global marketing at Hubspot, and the head of marketing of APAC at Salesforce. On this episode, Ryan discusses his background and how he turned a job as a flight attendant into a career in marketing. He also dives deep into how he has been able to successfully drive growth, including how he was able to generate $64 million with a $6k campaign. Click here for full notes and show notes. Marketing Trends is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Pardot, B2B marketing automation on the world's #1 CRM. Are you ready to take your B2B marketing to new heights? With Pardot, marketers can find and nurture leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI. Learn more by heading to www.pardot.com/podcast. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com.

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Why your staff will benefit from participating in the job market

Fast Track: Career conversations with Margie Hartley

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 22, 2019 19:00

Increase staff retention by encouraging staff to participate in the job market. Ryan Bonnici, Chief Marketing Officer G2 Crowd discusses the intrinsic value of professional development in staff retention and the long-term benefits of supporting staff to pursue external opportunities with Executive Coach Margie Hartley.

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How G2 Crowd Leads their Industry focusing on Content Hubs, Traffic Generation, and High Output Experiments

SaaS Breakthrough

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 18, 2019 54:04

Meet Ryan Bonnici, the CMO of G2 Crowd the world’s leading B2B technology review platform that’s helping more than 1.5 million business professionals make informed purchasing decisions every single month. Previously, he lead global marketing at HubSpot, Salesforce, and ExactTarget. In this episode, you'll hear about Ryan's journey from HubSpot over to G2 Crowd and the lessons he learned while making that transition. You'll hear what the first 120 days of going into a new company are like, what it was like for Ryan to be a CMO and the challenges that he was up against. You'll learn all about the major marketing experiments that have crushed the G2 Crowd yearly goals. And you'll find out how Ryan turned a $6,000 budget into an insane pipeline of growth for HubSpot. This story is remarkable. It's inspirational. It's a fantastic listen. You're absolutely going to enjoy this episode! Show Notes: 04:20 Creating Access to Unbiased Trusted Data From Actual Users 06:40 Differentiators: Size and Not Pay to Play 08:15 Joining G2 Coming From HubSpot 11:45 Building an Amazing and Strong Marketing Team 13:15 Building Traffic and Demand Gen Funnel and Team 14:20 What The First 120 Days Looked Like 16:35 Hitting Big Traffic Goals With Really Strong Content Team 19:20 Experiments: Inputs and Outputs 21:10 Mistake To Avoid When Selecting Content to Create 22:20 Content Strategy: Hubs and Spokes 25:50 A System for Content Tracking 27:40 10,000 Words Content vs Quick Win Content 29:50 The 6,000 Dollars Marketing Experiment 36:45 Don't Try This at Home Without These 38:10 Nurturing Top of Funnel Leads 43:00 Next: Doubling Down Further On Content 45:35 Lightning Questions

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How to manage negative employees

Fast Track: Career conversations with Margie Hartley

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 1, 2019 19:33

The costs of negative employees to business is well documented, so how do you manage and impact positive change? Ryan Bonnici, Chief Marketing Officer G2 Crowd discusses the implications of setting clear expectations, establishing time frames for positive change and the benefits of constructive honest conversation with Executive Coach Margie Hartley.

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Ryan Bonnici, G2.com CMO, on selling to educated users

Inside Intercom Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 21, 2019 30:36

Ryan Bonnici thinks the process of converting leads has gained a sleazy reputation in the B2B world. Hear what he thinks authentic selling looks like in an age when customers are more educated than ever and how brands can move from being transactional to being a trusted partner. Ryan also shares the steps he's taken to build up marketing at G2.com and the lessons he's been learning.

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An In-Depth Guide to Content Marketing for Long-Term Growth

Everyone Hates Marketers | No-Fluff, Actionable Marketing Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 19, 2019

Want to learn how one B2B marketing campaign made $64 million from a $6,000 budget? Ryan Bonnici joins the podcast to share the exact steps he took and how you can follow his strategy. Listen in to hear us talk content marketing, search engine optimization, and how to drive tangible results without using growth hacks. We discussed: Why you should go after the top of your funnel vs. optimizing for conversions How content marketing impacts your sales funnel and drives long-term growth Why you have to validate data before you create any piece of content How to get into your target buyer’s head to find out exactly what they’re searching Why most of your content shouldn’t be about the products you sell The effective way to search for keywords based on an intent to buy Prioritizing low difficulty keywords vs. high difficulty keywords Why you shouldn’t rely on blog posts to learn about new strategies Resources: The World’s Most Effective B2B Marketing Campaign Email Signature Generator by Hubspot Ahrefs SEMrush How to Do SEO Yourself: A Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research (With Examples) Skyscraper Technique by Backlinko

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Ryan Bonnici of G2 Crowd talks inbound marketing, content creation, and his motivation to succeed

Marketing Today with Alan Hart

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 9, 2019 46:35

In this week’s episode of “Marketing Today,” Alan talks with Ryan Bonnici, chief marketing officer for G2 Crowd. A self-admitted unconventional thinker, Bonnici started his career in an unconventional way — as an international flight attendant. But Bonnici used his time in the air to talk with the executives in first class and gain an understanding of the way they think. More importantly, a connection he made provided him with a conventional opportunity: a job at Microsoft. In addition to Microsoft, Bonnici has worked for companies like ExactTarget, Salesforce, HubSpot, and now with G2 Crowd. In this freewheeling and frank conversation, Bonnici reveals some of the decisions he’s made — that have paid off big — and the thinking behind them. And like a lot of successful marketers, Bonnici believes in taking chances, even if you don’t always succeed: “The best way to learn,” say Bonnici, “is just to do and to fail — and to learn from that.” Highlights from this week’s “Marketing Today” podcast include: Bonnici discusses his background and career path. (1:15) Bonnici says G2 Crowd thinks of itself as the world’s largest business commerce marketplace. (6:16) “A philosophy of attraction” — Bonnici’s thoughts on inbound marketing. (7:31) How Bonnici turned $6K into $64 million for HubSpot. (10:08) “A little bit naughty, a little bit defiant.” Bonnici reveals his thinking on selling ideas in. (16:22) What Bonnici is up to now at G2 Crowd. (21:19) Bonnici on the divide between brand-building and performance marketing. (24:04) Pay attention when hiring and provide specific and detailed feedback: Bonnici on his approach to team-building. (26:29) “An extroverted introvert” — Being bullied as a child gave Bonnici “serious motivation” to succeed. (36:22) From fitness and project management to travel and meditation — Bonnici reveals some of the brands he admires. (39:32) Support the show.

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737: Ryan Bonnici – CMO – G2 Crowd

The Tech Blog Writer Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 4, 2019 43:12

G2 Crowd real-time & unbiased user reviews help you objectively assess what is best for your business. Leverage the crowd, limit your risk, and get what works. Ryan Bonnici has a unique career path. He started as a flight attendant while still in college in Australia as a way to pay the bills and see the world at a young age. He met an executive of Microsoft on a flight one day which launched him into a career in Marketing for some of the worlds largest and fastest growing companies (HubSpot, Salesforce, ExactTarget, and more). Now he’s the CMO at G2 Crowd, where he’s driving the growth of the world’s leading B2B technology review platform that’s helping more than 1.5 million business professionals make informed purchasing decisions every single month. I invited Ryan onto the show today to discuss the unexpected disruption inbound marketing Is making In HR & hiring. For example, traditional recruiting often relies on job ads, head-hunting, and similar outbound; yet, trends are showing these methods to be inefficient and expensive, while only tapping 15-25% of the total market. Ryan shares his insights on how the recruitment process is taking a shift, in favor of inbound recruiting to attract, engage, and hire excellent talent (all while reducing hiring costs). We also talk about how to use AI & Machine Learning to improve your marketing funnels. When it comes to marketing, analyzing data is a key component of successful campaigns - especially when you’re working with a large customer base. Ryan has worked with AI & machine learning technologies and has seen them influence his own campaigns significantly. But, he's careful not to exaggerate the current capabilities and advises the best is yet to come.

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360: Five Principles for Accelerating Your Career with G2 Crowd’s Ryan Bonnici

How to Be Awesome at Your Job

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 22, 2018 52:58

G2 Crowd Chief Marketing Officer Ryan Bonnici shares his five steps for figuring out and advancing along your career path. You'll Learn: Two core principles for mastering your craft How to get good at giving and receiving feedback Two LinkedIn tricks that make all the difference About Ryan: Ryan Bonnici is the Chief Marketing Officer of G2 Crowd, where he's driving growth of the world's leading B2B technology review platform that's helping more than 1.5 million business professionals make informed purchasing decisions every single month. Prior to G2 Crowd, Ryan held several leadership roles in some of the most well-recognized companies in the tech industry. He served as the senior director of global marketing at HubSpot, where his efforts led to triple-digit growth for the company's marketing related sales. View transcript, show notes, and links at http://AwesomeAtYourJob.com/ep360

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Ep. 60: Get $64 Million in Revenue From a $6,000 Marketing Budget Ft. Ryan Bonnici of G2 Crowd

Technori Podcast with Scott Kitun

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 15, 2018 49:32

What if I told you that you could invest $6,000 in your marketing and get a ONE MILLION percent return on investment? Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? This is exactly what Ryan Bonnici did during his time at HubSpot, and what he is planning on repeating now that he's taken on the role of CMO at G2 Crowd. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Ryan shares exactly what he did to deliver unheard of results and how you can do the same thing for minimal investment. His approach is simple, accessible and something that any business can replicate quickly with a bit of out-of-the-box thinking and the help of a web developer. Listen to the podcast to find out how Ryan helped HubSpot generate $64 million in revenue from a $6,000 marketing investment - and what it takes to get similar results for your company. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. My name is Kathleen Booth, and I'm your host. This week my guest is Ryan Bonnici, who is the CMO at G2 Crowd. Welcome Ryan. Ryan: Hey, Kathleen. It's so great to be here. Ryan and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: Yeah, I'm excited to talk with you today. Before we jump in to our topic, tell our audience about yourself. About Ryan Bonnici Ryan: Absolutely. So, I'm the chief marketing officer at G2 Crowd, and I've been here for, gosh, a little under a year now. G2 Crowd is the world's largest business intelligence software reviews platform. We do a lot of different things, but ultimately, we help millions of buyers every month find the best software and services to use for their business because, I think we all know, just like you and I right now Kathleen, are speaking on software to make this call happen. Software really fuels business today. You can't really run a business without software, even if it's a top of the line. So, software's huge. It's a $4 trillion industry each year. And so, yeah, we're right in the heart of that, and it's a really fun place. A little bit about me and background, gosh. I started my career at Microsoft doing consumer marketing, loved that, and then I moved to a company called ExactTarget, which was an email marketing service provider that folks might remember. It was acquired by Salesforce a couple years ago for two and a half billion I think. I was at Salesforce then for a couple of years leading their APAC marketing team - Asia Pacific marketing - which was fun so, got a lot of experience with link building, marketing, and demand generation in different regions and launching in new countries, and no cross language fun. And then from Salesforce I moved to HubSpot, where I was doing a similar role leading their APAC marketing, and then I moved over from Australia to HQ in Boston and was leading their corporate marketing. So running everything from all of their social media accounts, to all of their PR strategies, to their campaigns, so all things digital and brand marketing really. So, that was a crazy time and a really fun time, I mean HubSpot was an amazing company. And then I moved to G2 Crowd late last year and have just never been happier Kathleen. I just love this role, I love this company and it's been such a crazy year. When I started, there were five marketers on the team and now I have thirty marketers. I've hired like 25 people since the start of the year. And the team's just like- Kathleen: Wow. Ryan: ... Yeah crazy growth. I've hired a lot of people over the last decade, but never have so many people, so quickly ... and it was kind of a whirlwind, but we hired some amazing people and we had to relocate a lot of different folks from different places. I'm really happy and excited and so really happy to be here with you. Kathleen: Yeah you know it's interesting. I've been familiar with G2 Crowd for a long time. Before I was at IMPACT, I used to own my own digital marketing agency that I had for eleven years and we were HubSpot partners, so I certainly reviewed HubSpot on G2 Crowd, as well as a number of other software platforms. But where I really found G2 Crowd could be extremely helpful for me, both at my agency and then at IMPACT when I first joined, I was on our sales team, was in a sales capacity. We were looking to sell marketing services and we always did marketing on HubSpot. It just so happened that that was our platform of choice. So, inevitably, when I would be talking to a prospective client that didn't yet have a marketing automation software platform and I would mention HubSpot, the question would always come up, "Why HubSpot, why is it so great?" And I always found that the most powerful thing that I could do, instead of signing HubSpot's phrases or sending them to a page on my site or HubSpot's site - I mean I of course did all that - but the most powerful thing was to be able to just say, “Here's this third-party review site. Look at how it's ranked. This is completely impartial and you can compare and contrast it against everything else here.” That was the thing that always seemed to seal the deal for people, because as much as you can establish yourself in a position of trust as a sales rep, they're never going to trust you quite as much as the thousands of other people out there who've reviewed the product. So, it's a great platform. Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. It's a great platform. Software is kind of going through this really interesting renaissance and progressing growth, and I think that if you think maybe back twenty or so years, software was in its infancy and it was really clunky and it was typically very enterprise focused, with a long sales cycle, and complex, long implementations. I remember when I was at Microsoft, which was only ten years ago, the implementation time for a Dynamics CRM, which wasn't in the cloud back then even, was just very different to how technology is today. I mean all people that have bought software, have been burned by software that they were told will do one thing, and then when they get it, they realize that it actually doesn't do that. So yeah, I think marketers, we do a really good job at marketing products and sometimes we do too good of a job whereby I call it vaporware. It's like software that a product marketer has made look really pretty on the site, but the reality is that the product doesn't actually exist today. That's what I love about moving from software companies to now, you know, G2 Crowd, where we're really impartial to your point and we're this marketplace that helps connect buyers with sellers. It's a really fun place to be. Kathleen: And I will say the other thing about marketers, is that we do have a little bit of 'shiny object syndrome' when it comes to software. I'm responsible for my company's marketing software spend and I get a case of angina every time I look at the recurring monthly expenses of that budget, so I'm constantly trying to figure out, do we really need this? Ryan: Yeah. Kathleen: Being able to vet those expenses before they come on, is fantastic. So, you came on to my radar when somebody said this is a guy who is able to generate - what was it? - 64 million dollars in revenue, from a six thousand dollar marketing budget. Somebody said that and I was like, “That is someone that I need to interview.” Because that's like the perpetual challenge as an inbound marketer right? Every company of course has a goal for their marketing, but not every company has a budget to match their goal. It's that old 'champagne taste on a beer budget' kind of conundrum. And so, when I heard that, I thought, “Wow. There's got to be some really great lessons to be extracted here, that really anybody could use.” Because six thousand dollars is an amount of money that's incredibly acceptable for the vast majority of my listeners. So, let's start at the very beginning. Where were you when this happened? What were the goals that you were going after? Who was the audience? How Ryan Generated $64 Million in Revenue from a $6,000 Marketing Spend Ryan: So, this all started in early 2016 and at the time I was living in Sydney Australia, which is where I'm from originally as you can probably tell from my accent. I was with HubSpot for about a year at this point. I always find this as a random side note that when you move to a new company, I feel it takes the first six months to just learn the basics of the company like how things work, how the strategy works, like get programs up and running. It was kind of at that one year mark where I was finding really cool, creative ideas that maybe will surpass what others in the organization are thinking. I don't know why, I'm just an ideas person. I love thinking outside the box and doing fun things. And so, at that year point I was starting to get to know the business and I was hitting all of my goals really easily. I had an amazing team under me, and our goals at that time were to drive marketing qualified leads to the sales team. So, that was kind of the core goal. And one of the things that I always said to my team was that generating MQLs isn't that much thought, it's pretty basic. You create content, that content converts to a lead, and then you write an email to them saying ... we would send emails every Tuesday and Thursday, and they would have a download for the person. And then there'd be a follow up CTA of like, “Hey, you've enjoyed this email marketing ebook, would you like to chat with someone from HubSpot who can help you assess your email marketing strategy.” So very value ad ... and helps when you have a sales team that understands this approach. They do a really good job of actually adding value to the person while also obviously trying to prospect them and see if they could buy HubSpot's tools. So we'd been doing that for a while and we started to consistently hit our goals, and I think to me, in any job that's when the fun begins, once you've worked out, "Okay, I know what I need to do to hit my goals." Hitting the goals is typically the boring part. It's the creative testing outside of the standard that you can have a lot of fun with. So, the team and I sat down ... and I remember just thinking back, we kind of sat down and said, "Okay, so the people that buy from HubSpot are businesses, typically small businesses, but businesses of all sizes can use HubSpot." And so, we said, what are some of the things that business people do? Because we kind of exhausted the typical things that marketers and sales people do, right? So, as we were sitting down, we're thinking that, okay, where a business starts, like let's just think of a very early stage business. What does someone do? They buy the domain name, they probably buy Google apps, or maybe in the minority they buy Windows or Microsoft 365 for their email. And then, they get business cards and then they set up an email signature for their Gmail. And that's stuff that everyone does at every company. When I joined Microsoft I remember ... I vividly actually remember designing my email signature and looking at other people in the org, and copying and pasting what they had. And, I noticed that at HubSpot that was the same and everyone had different email signatures. And so, this is I think what I try and teach people to do, that we I think did well at HubSpot, and I've had my team do as well here. When you have an idea about content to create that you think your buyer persona might like, don't just create it because you have a gut instinct or you know they will like it. Use a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs to actually work out whether people searching for this term in a high volume. And so, we looked at it and the search terms "email signature" and "email signature generator," they both have combined on hundred thousand plus monthly searches in the US alone I think. Globally it was much larger than that. And we were thinking about it like, what better to create than an email signature generator because all the things that go into creating an email signature are the things that typically go into a lead form - you know, your name, your job title, your cell phone number, your email address, et cetera. And so, we worked with a HubSpot partner in Sydney - there's a guy called Ken that runs it and I still work with Ken today, he's building a tool for me right now at G2 Crowd, which is gonna drive lots of leads in the traffic for us here. Which is a secret for now, but I'll tell you about it when it's live. Kathleen: We'll have to do another episode. Ryan: We'll have to do another one when I complete it and have results. I've done this a few times now, and it's never not worked for me yet. And so, yeah we made it, it took maybe a month or two to build, six thousand dollars like ... crazy cheap money. I had a rockstar on my team, her name was Alissa, and she, over the course of the first month of launch, she looked at generating links to our email signature generator from other sites that ranked highly for that term. And then, yeah, gosh, from when we launched it like I think in April 2016 till about August 2016, we were generating upwards of 50 thousand organic visitors a month. Kathleen: Wow. Ryan: And it has something like a 50 to 70% conversion rate to lead, which is crazy high for a landing page. But, this wasn't like your typical landing page, this is a tool, and anyone that clicked through kinda knew what they were getting into. And yeah, so over the course of two or three years while that was up and running, I emailed this friend recently, maybe a couple months ago, my colleague who is on the ops team over at HubSpot ... “Hey, like can you give me the latest stats for the tool, I wanna see how it's doing.” And yeah, it's still consistently the number one organic lead source driver to HubSpot. It generates something like 50 thousand monthly leads, and 64 million dollars in net new source revenue. So, these are people that weren't in HubSpot's database before they came organically through ... found it through the tool, then started getting nurtured by HubSpot and then became customers. Kathleen: That's incredible to me because I have worked with HubSpot long enough to know that it has this mammoth contact database. Sometimes I feel like the entire world is in HubSpot's contact database. Ryan: Yeah. It's about seven million contacts I think. Kathleen: ... it's a huge number. And so, it's pretty incredible that such a high percentage of the leads that were generated through this were brand new. When- Ryan: Yeah. Well it makes sense if you think about it cause this is kind of a different topic than the persona, that we would normally always create content that marketers were actively looking for. But, I think what we realized on the inside was that marketers are just people in business, they search for other things. That's where I think most businesses go wrong. They only think about offers where the content or free tools are really close to their offering. When I went to my boss at the time - that was HubSpot's CMO, Kip Bodnar, who I just absolutely adore, loveliest, smiliest human ever and one of my best mentors - he thought it was a stupid idea, and he was like, “No, that's crazy. That's going to attract really low quality people to our site and generate low quality leads. It has nothing to do with marketing.” And I just fundamentally disagreed, and I had my own budget, so I still went ahead with it. And I remember five months before I left, him saying to me like, “It was really good that you made that tool.” Because the year before I left, they were really struggling. They were hitting their goals, but it was really tight. They hacked through a lot of proactive campaigns, and I remember him saying like, “If it wasn't for that tool. That tool is making up like 25% of our total leads being generated every month. Thank you.” And I was like, “Oh, that's a good feeling.” Kathleen: Yeah. Now, to that point. So, that was kinda gonna be my question. When you build something like this, I imagine that there are a fair number of leads that come in that probably aren't great leads. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff because if really what you're doing is just generating email signatures - I assume you're asking for basic contact information - so you don't know a lot about that contact. Are you enriching that data using a third-party tool to figure out is this a good fit for us or ... what do you do to get that information? Ryan: Yeah. Good question. So we had a very long list of optional things that people could put into their email signature. If anyone listening here wants to check it out, if you literally search email signature, you'll see HubSpot's email generator ranks like first, second or third on Google depending on when and where you're searching from. But, we ask a lot of different things. You'll see some options as well, like would you like to add a social link, would you like to add a banner image, a headshot, et cetera. Regardless of what they actually gave us, once they clicked the button they would get a visualization at the time of doing that of what their signature looked like, and they could edit that. When they wanted to download it to go to their email or to their Office 365, they clicked a button and an iframe/JavaScript popup would pop up and would say, "Hey. Thanks so much for this. One more step, we just need to know a few more things." And depending on what they had told us, like if they'd given us the email address and phone number, then those fields wouldn't be shown, obviously. But the key questions that we ask are never on the form because we wouldn't get any signatures, was how many employees do you have? Do you sell ... What was the question? Do you sell services? Are you a marketing agency? And then there was one more question, was what CRM do you use? So it basically was like the final form fields from your typical HubSpot lead form. And the reason why we use those is because when you have five thousand, five million, seven million contacts in your database, that was the way we would filter them between different sales teams, different geo's, different verticals things like that. And so actually, once they'd given us that information, that was all we needed to then nurture them accordingly. And we just had smart nurture set up ultimately, so yes. I'm sure a lot of low quality leads did come through that tool. But that's kind of part and parcel of in their marketing is that you're going wide so you're gonna be getting your ideal target for sure, but you're also going to get people that aren't there. But I think that's key to our velocity and growth, when you go after everyone in that kind of an instance as opposed to just going after a small segment. Because all the students that like the email signature, that wanted to set up a fancy Gmail signature when they were going out to look at job hunting, now, all of them know about HubSpot. They're all in the database. They're all learning. They, maybe five percent of them, become marketers later in life. Now, they've got HubSpot. It's a long game, this idea. This isn't a quick win kind of strategy. Content is not about that. But it's the most sustainable and long-term way, obviously, to grow your business. Kathleen: So talk me through what happened after somebody hits submit. You mentioned then they get nurtured. Give me a sense of how you take the lead that converts on something that and shepherd them through a journey that ultimately leads them to a point where you're encouraging them to enter a sales funnel. Obviously, that's a delicate thing to navigate, so I'm curious to hear about how you manage that. Ryan: I guess I don't know, to be honest. To be honest, most companies over-engineer and over-complicate journeys, in my opinion. If you're giving high value, high quality content, it doesn't actually need to be as personalized, I think, as people think. Because we had so many contacts in our database, we knew what kind of content worked really well for new leads. The moment any lead came into HubSpot, regardless of whether it came from the email signature generator or website grader or a standard ebook, naturally they would always get a kickback email immediately that said, "Hey, thanks so much for using email sig generator or downloading an ebook. Here's a link where you can go back to that resource. And PS, if you would like to learn more about HubSpot's marketing automation software, you can click here." We would always have in everything that we did a fast-forward link, if you will, to basically allow people that were interested and ready to buy to do that, and that would push them to a standard MQL page to book a demo. If they didn't click that, then they would just go into the standard onboarding / nurturing of all new contacts. I don't know the exact format and content of these, but one email might say, "We're HubSpot. We create all this great content, and we have these free great tools." And the second email might say, "Hey, would you like to subscribe to our blog?" And the third email might say, "Hey, here's one of our most popular downloads. It's a free infographics template with a hundred different templates that you can use to make infographics at your business". They were very general downloads, right, but really high value in a sense that they were things that anyone could get a value out of. And then once they moved through that, each of those conversion points would always have a MQL offer within it. So, if they clicked through the landing page and downloaded the templates, they would get a kickback email, or on the thank you page, saying, "Hey, would you like to learn more about how you can accelerate your marketing in other ways? Click here." Kinda just went, then, from that normal flow, if that makes sense, Kathleen. Kathleen: Yeah, it does. And I have to laugh because I know Kip. He's great. He is very smart, as you say. And I did notice that they must be now drinking the Kool-Aid of this whole concept, because in the last few months, I saw that they released the out-of-office message generator. Ryan: I created that. Just let me put it out there. So, I actually- Kathleen: Nice. Ryan: Yeah. I'm so happy to see that go live 'cause I started building that, it would've been in ... It was the start of 2017. So, email sig generator started crushing it at the end of 2016, start of 2017. Worked with Ken, the same guy, to build that. We got it to kind of like an MVP stage where it functionally was working, but the landing page hadn't been built, and we hadn't worked out the quirky responses for different things. And I remember before I left, pinging it to - 'cause at that point in time, the team I had moved onto was no longer the one that did that kind of creative stuff - I think I forwarded it to the HR team to say, "Hey, this could be a cool recruiting tool for you. People that are looking to take holidays use it." And so I think they then ... I don't know. It took them a year or so since they left for them to then finish it off. I'm sure this wasn't a high priority, and it wasn't someone's dedicated role. But yeah, I saw them bring that out. I've been meaning ... I have it in my to-do list to try it out, 'cause I wanna see where it got to in the end. But yeah, I remember doing that. The big thing that I tried to teach my team was, "Hey, you wanna try and work out a way to make the tool give you the info that you need in your lead form." So, you would ask a question like, "What industry are you in?" in our normal lead forms. In my mind, I thought, okay, cool, a really creative way we can ask that question for this tool, I was gonna say, was we should say, "Hey, we wanna personalize your email signature, and every industry is different. Some are more corporate and boring, aka finance, and some are more creative and fun, aka marketing. Tell us what industry you're in, and this will help us personalize your out-of-office message." And I don't know if they actually built that into it or not yet. I need to check it out and see if that was there. But yeah, so, we did that. And then one tool I wasn't involved in but was always on the list was the invoice generator. They launched the invoice generator a little bit after I left. I think they launched a business card generator, which was just basically a re-skin of the email signature generator, but basically now it's a straight out visual that you would print as opposed to something you paste into your Gmail. I also created a free tool for my own personal website. I have a website, executiv.co. It's basically a site where I curate content from executive coaches and just experts in their field to help other executives that are moving on up in their career to learn from folks that have already been there. And personally, I'm big into reading books to help me get better. I remember a few years ago reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni, I think his name is. Really good book, a lot of execs have read it. There's this assessment in the book that I really liked. It's basically like, "Hey, answer these 25 questions, and we'll tell you if your team is functional or dysfunctional." And so I converted that into a, I don't wanna say a tool, 'cause it's more simple than that. Basically it's other questions, a lead form to give me your email address, and then I ask you, "Does your team do this?" yes, sometimes, no. There's 25 questions like that, and they then click a button at the end that says view analysis. And then they get an email with their score. And in the email, it says, "Hey, these score results will be better if you can share this with your team and get your team to do this as well." And so I created this free tool two and a half, three years ago, and I still get thousands of net new leads through it every month. Because what happens, it's crazy. Someone at Microsoft will do it, and then they'll get my kickback email that says, "Hey, why don't you share this with your team and see what they think." And then you'll see if one person comes in from a new company, and then 10 or a hundred net new leads will come in from that same company. And then that gets shared to someone else, and then the same thing that happens. It has this really interesting virality effect. I don't need to generate any press for it because people are always reading the book. So that's Five Dysfunctions of a Team assessment, and I'm the only one that has a free tool for the assessment. I haven't touched that website, literally, or published any blog posts on it in three years, and it still generates thousands of leads a month. It's crazy. Kathleen: What I find really interesting about this is we've talked now about three different tools. We've got the email signature tool, the out-of-office generator. Those are in one category targeting individuals, individual leads. And then you have the one on your website which, as I listen to you talk about it, it's striking me that that is a very good example of a type of tool that somebody could build if they were interested in doing more account-based marketing. Because obviously with account-based marketing, you're looking to saturate as many contacts within a certain organization as you can, and you've got a tool that has that built into it. So, that's really interesting. Ryan: It's pretty cool, yeah. It's pretty cool. The way this business works, I work with executive coaches in different cities. And when leads come through from different people, I have them sorted by geo, and then I can connect executive coaches with people that indicate that they have dysfunctional teams. So, the executive coach comes in and trains them. It's a really nice way for me to make passive income without doing anything. Obviously, they come to me for assessment, and then I connect them with executive coaches. I function like a matchmaker in that I make money from every time I match make someone from the coach. So, it's a genius, on the side kind of thing. I shouldn't say genius. It's incredibly simple, which is, in my mind, what is so cool about our tools and so genius about them is that they're really basic. And the point is most people just don't know how to think about their persona, right? So, executive coaches want to find people that need help, and people that need help read help books around leadership. So, this beautifully connects them. I just love getting in the mind of a buyer persona and working out what they're looking for online. Kathleen: Let's dig into that for a second, because I think if somebody listening is sitting here thinking, "Okay, I wanna do this. This seems like a great idea," the first thing standing in their way is how to conceptualize the tool itself. So, can you spend a second and just walk me through the thought process that you go through or how you approach this to figure out what is that right tool for the audience you're targeting? Ryan: Totally, totally. Why don't you select a persona or someone that you want me to attract, and I'll just do it live on the spot. So, you can say- Kathleen: Cool, okay. Ryan: Maybe create a company. It could be a legal firm or it could be ... You choose, and then I'll think about it and go live with you and try and work it out. Kathleen: Sure. Well, let's use my company as an example. That's an easy one. So, we're targeting marketers. Ryan: Okay. Kathleen: And they can be anywhere from mid to senior level marketers who run marketing for a company. So, they're the in-house person generally leading the marketing team. Ryan: Okay, cool. That's kind of easy, though, just 'cause a lot of the tools that I've created in the past are for marketers from my experience at HubSpot. Kathleen: I'm throwing you a softball. Ryan: Yeah, that's a real softball. In that instance, what I would be thinking about is okay, so I'm trying to attract a lot of marketing managers. And you're selling the marketing services, is that right, Kathleen? Like, you wanna be their agency and help and support, yeah? Cool. Kathleen: Yeah. Ryan: So, the easy thing for you to do that most people would do, which won't work as well, is create content about why you need a marketing agency to help. Now like this, I would say that you should have that, obviously, on your side for people that you attract through other content to then help them see that and work out why they should use you. But before that, to get more people to your site, I would be thinking about, "Okay, marketing managers - what is something that they need to do?" They manage marketing budgets. What's something that's hard about marketing budgets? They have to hire people, so marketing job titles, marketing job descriptions. They might be going to Google and searching for marketing job descriptions to work out if they're hiring their second marketer or third marketer, who that would be. They might be going online and searching for marketing templates or marketing greetings. I would be thinking about that, and then I would be going to your SEMRush, your Ahrefs and saying, "Okay, I put in those keywords." And then I would start to look at that and all related keywords, and then I would just go through them from top to bottom from which has the most following to the least following. And then I would start to identify which ones could be tools. So, marketing job descriptions I know is one. Marketing salaries is a big one. Maybe you create a tool that allows a person to select their job title, and it shows them the estimated salary - things like that. Like how to become a CMO, they might search for. I'm trying to think of other tools. I already have created so many of these tools for marketers. Kathleen: I always thought that ... It's funny. So, I used to work with clients in all different industries. I always thought that a great tool would be an RFP builder, so like, if you wanna try to build an RFP for marketing support services. Go in, and there's prebuilt modules that you can choose and drop in, and then it spits out your complete RFP. You could do that for so many industries. Ryan: Totally. Kathleen: It could be network engineering RFP or construction RFP or what have you. Ryan: Totally. You know that thing I told you that I was working on? That's literally it. Kathleen: No! Ryan: Yeah. If you think about it, it's perfect for us because our site replaces the RFP process. So, who better to attract to the site than someone that's old school still and thinks they need to do an RFP? So, we're actually building an RFP generator for different industries that customizes the questions and the outputs. You're onto it, Kathleen. You've got this. Kathleen: Great minds think alike, Ryan. I'm telling you what. I used to, prior to my career as a marketer, I did government contracting in international development. Ryan: Nightmare stuff, those contracts. Kathleen: Totally different sector. So, I used to have to respond to RFPs, and I always thought no one in their right mind who has to write an RFP ever wants to write it from scratch. So, everybody is working off of something, right? Ryan: Totally, yeah. So, the way it's starting is they come to our site, and they're gonna select "Are you looking for a content marketing agency? Are you looking for content marketing software?", et cetera. And then from there, it'll personalize the questions we ask, et cetera. And it will just spit something out. But then it also says, "Hey, did you know that G2 Crowd has live data from X many companies itself (insert the name of the RFP thing that you're doing)? Click here to learn who is the number one based on customers like you." It pushes them straight into our review process. Which then, we wanna obviously then be the matchmaker to find them and connect them to the best supplier for what they need. That's how we make money, right? We don't care where they go to, 'cause we make money regardless, but we wanna connect them to the best person for them. Kathleen: Love it, love it. Well, I obviously think it's the best idea ever because I came up with it, too. Ryan: Yeah, exactly. Good job. Should we split the commmission? I think we should. Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. I didn't have to do anything, but I will 100% take half of the credit. The other question I have is if somebody is listening, and they are thinking they might want to do this, the first thing, like we just said, is figuring out how to get to what that tool should be. But then the obvious next challenge is how do I build it? And most companies that I have spoken with don't have somebody in house who could be like, "Yep, I'm just going to build that tool." Walk me through anything you need to consider when you're looking for somebody to build it for you. And you talked a little bit about how much you spent building these things. Is it $600, $6,000, $60,000? What are the elements that most affect how much you're going to have to pay for something like this? Ryan: Yeah. So even at HubSpot when I was there we had a 200 person marketing team, and we didn't have the resources ourselves in house. So I definitely don't think you need to do it in house. I think for this kind of a thing, the thing that makes it expensive is if it's very complex, and simply just because the more complex the tool is, the longer hours of development you need to basically buy from the agency. So like if you need an email signature generator it's pretty basic, right? You're allowing a text field for someone to insert text, and then you are just showing them that same text, but in a more stylized way. So pretty basic kind of like, rules, and if they want to change the color, you just change what the color looks like of that text, so pretty simple. Also I'd probably say that, in general, I think they would cost more than six grand, maybe they'd cost like, on average, 10 to 20 grand. I think we got a really good deal partly because this partner wanted to work with us, because they thought it was a cool idea and wanted to be a part of that. So let's say the RFP generator that we're building right now is costing around 30 grand, so quite a bit more. And that's just because it's much more complex, and the applets need to be very custom based on what the person says, and we're pulling in live data. That was one thing that the email signature generator couldn't do. So the complexity would change, so like if you want to create an image, something that creates images, or outputs a media file, that's gonna be more expensive probably. If you wanted something that outputs something basic, then it's very easy, so that would be the main thing I would be thinking about. The process of building it though is pretty simple. So what I'd typically do is I'd get a pad, a small pad or a big pad, and I'll literally just get a pen and draw out the pages of the app, so like what the home screen would look like, and then what the first page of the app looks like, and what the buttons will be, and that will evolve over time, but I just create that and I turn that into photos into like Google Slides, and then I share that with different developers and say, "Hey, this is the tool I'm trying to build, this is the goal of it, it needs to be built on HubSpot." Then I would literally find out from different developers who get what we're trying to do, who can do it, but then what are the different costs, and then I kind of go from there. Kathleen: Yeah, so it definitely sounds like the costs can vary. I guess in terms of if somebody's listening and thinking, "Well, is it worth it for me to do it?" it comes down to the costs per lead, and it sounds like the example you have from HubSpot, the cost per lead is like so infinitesimally tiny. Ryan: That's the other key is that you need to then work out before you build it, part of the validation process is is there enough demand to pay this back? So when I say demand, is there enough monthly searches around this topic specifically, and also how competitive is that topic? So that's the other thing to think about is I speak at conferences all around the world really often, I love keynoting, and I talk about this a lot. The big thing I say is that you probably shouldn't be doing this if you are just starting out. If you're just starting out, start with a blog, get a blog up and running. You need to build domain authority. Because if you don't have domain authority, a tool's not gonna rank, you know, realistically, unless it's a brand new thing. So the five dysfunctions of a team, my personal website, Executive.co, has a very low domain authority, and I mentioned I haven't blogged for three years, but it still ranks number one, because not that many people have created tools for that. No one has, sorry, so it's the first thing that comes up. So you can start with this strategy from the get go, assuming it has a domain authority maybe under 20 or 30, but if it doesn't, sorry, domain difficulty, like difficulty score under 20 or 30. So I've been thinking about that, but this should just be supplementary to your content strategy, just be another thing you're doing, in my mind. Kathleen: That makes sense. You gotta tackle the building blocks first before you can get fancy. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Well this is so interesting. I love the strategy, I feel like it's definitely something anybody could do, especially given that it's pretty easy to outsource the development of it. Shifting gears for a minute, so there are two questions that I always ask my audience, and I love hearing these answers because I always learn something new when I ask them. I'm particularly curious to hear your answers because you have such an interesting background. You're at G2 Crowd now, you've worked at HubSpot, at Salesforce, at Exact Target, at Microsoft. You've written for - I looked at your LinkedIn profile - you've written for Entrepreneur Media and Business Insider, et cetera. So you have such an interesting diversity of marketing experience. The question - this is a big buildup - the question is, company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Who is a great best practice example? Ryan: There's a few folks. So inbound's a pretty broad term. I think some people that are doing inbound or content marketing well - like attracting audience, which is what inbound is, I guess, at its essence - on social, I think that you've obviously got your big media companies, like your Buzzfeeds, but they do a great job at working out what are the exact formats for content that are really sharable, so they all go viral. I think Gary Vaynerchuk is a really interesting person. He's a little bit annoying, I think, but certainly, no offense, Gary, love you long time. But, he gets the whole idea of being controversial and saying things that are shocking and that gets people sharing his content. He's also a master at persona-based marketing. So he does his rants and he selects a specific persona for each rant. He'll choose marketers and have a rant about why marketing is broken. He'll choose the education industry and do a rant about why schools are broken, and because he gets really specific in his rants, those personas then share - like people in education, teachers - will share his content like really crazily viral because it's so targeted to them. When marketers see his rant about marketing, they'll do the same thing, like "Oh my god, I can so relate to this," et cetera. So I think he does a really good job at inbound marketing when it comes to social. I'd say like in terms of web content, like in owned channels, like website blog, I think that G2 Crowd is doing a really good job now. The team has grown blog traffic in the last year by like 50% month on month, so we really approached it with a new strategy here after I joined and the team has just been rallying behind it and we've got 10 content marketers now, so they're doing an amazing job with everything we just talked about, but less so in the context of tools, more in the context of just content, so working out what our different personas want, and validating that with search volume research, and then creating content around those topics, and clustering it as well, in the same way that HubSpot thinks about content clusters, content hubs. Who else? HubSpot's obviously doing really, really well. There's a lot of different companies, there's so many, gosh. I think Drift is doing a great job, so Dave Gerhardt over at Drift is doing really cool LinkedIn content - a lot of good LinkedIn videos at the moment - which go quite viral because LinkedIn still doesn't have a whole lot of video content. So if you're one of the first people to move on a platform when they launch new format or content, typically you can game the algorithm because they want to get more of that content on there. Kathleen: Yeah. Ryan: Yeah, I don't know, got a quick list of some of them, but I'll think more and let you know if there are any others that come to mind. Kathleen: Yeah I had Dave Gerhardt on as a guest, and he talked about his LinkedIn takeover strategy with video and how it worked is really interesting, and I have to laugh because he's done a few videos since then of when people send him swag in the mail - the unboxing videos. And the greatest thing ever was, so he did a few unboxing videos, and sort of drew out their swag and unboxed it. And one guy sent him, the swag was an actual branded box cutter, because he was like "You're unboxing all of this stuff, you need a branded box cutter." Ryan: I remember seeing that, that's freakin awesome. That is very, very smart. Kathleen: So, second question, obviously digital marketing is changing so quickly, how do you stay up to date and keep yourself current on everything that's going on? Ryan: Yeah, that's a great question. So I think to be really good at digital marketing, first, you kind of just need to be in the trenches, and you need to be playing with digital and living in digital form. So that's kind of why a lot of people on my team will come up and ask like, "Hey, you know I want to get better at digital marketing, should I do a course?" I'm like, "No, do not do a course with anyone." Digital marketing changes every other freakin week. Even if they have Snapchat in your course or something, in a month's time the content will be old, because they'll change the platform, so just don't bother with that. The way I stay up to date, and I think the way I try and encourage my team to stay up to date, is I just block out time every day on my calendar to check Product Hunt and to check G2 Crowd to see the new platforms that are being published. And so I find between G2Crowd.com and between producthunt.com, that gives me a really good pulse on what technologies are new and growing and people have liked, and so that helps me kind of work out cool ideas and strategies because the challenge of digital marketing is it's hard to think about cool, creative cutting edge strategies if you don't know what new technologies are available. So thinking back, a nice win where I had with that, two years ago, it would have been the start of 2017, I ran an experiment with my team when I was in Sydney with the marketers in HubSpot, and what I did was, we sent out an email like we always did for an ebook download, and 50% of the people who came to our landing page, I swapped out the form with a Facebook messenger bot download. This was before Facebook Messenger bots were a thing, and I found basically this developer in India who created this hokey little tool to do it, and ChatFuel and all of those folks weren't around then, or maybe they were, and people didn't know about them. Anyway, what we found was that there was a higher drop off in terms of conversions on the landing page, so people were more willing to do their email address than Facebook Messenger just because they were used to email, but what we found was the conversion flow once they'd become a Facebook messenger subscriber was crazy high. What we would do is once people had subscribed by Messenger, instead of sending those people another email the following week with the new offer, we would send them the new offer via Facebook Messenger. And I wrote a big blog post actually I think about this on the HubSpot blog after we did this, but what we found was that we had a 90% open rate on Facebook Messenger, and a 50 or a 70% click through rate, I can't remember, one of the two, click through rate. And it makes sense, right? If you think about it, when you get messages on Facebook Messenger, and I get a little red circle, I check it immediately because it's not a branded channel. It's not a channel that you're used to getting branded messages from. So if you have something there, you typically think, "Oh, okay this is a friend." But they'd opted in to Facebook Messenger alerts, so they'd always open it 90% of the time, and then 50% of the people would click through, so it was able to actually convert far more many people to MQL than email was. So fast-forward. I remember sharing those results with our CEO, and our CTO Don Mesh, and saying "Hey, this is seriously cool shit. A we need to be doing this for all of our landing pages, and B, we need to build this technology into our tool for marketers," and then I think, gosh, eight months later, HubSpot acquired motion.ai, which was one of the worlds leading bot platforms out of Chicago, actually, which is where I am based out of G2Crowd. So it's cool that my ProductHunt stalking and learning about new tools allowed me to have that really interesting experiment that had great results and led me to kind of take Hubspot down that journey or the start of the early stages anyways. So I still am always on ProductHunt every day and I'm always testing out new things and flicking links to my team saying "Hey, check this out, we need to try this." So that's kind of how I think I I started out. Yeah. Kathleen: Yeah it's great, it's a great platform. Well, all of those are great suggestions, and I'm definitely going to check those out. I will include links to all of that in the show notes, as well as to the email signature generator, the out of office generator, all of those tools. Ryan: Cool, and I'll send you a link as well, Kathleen, because I wrote a really in depth blog post on the email signature generator and how we created it, and I screen shotted a lot of my research as well, so for folks that want a really specific step by step process and folks that don't believe me on the ROI, I've got all the screenshots of the stats so they can see that as well. Kathleen: That's fantastic, I would love that. I'll definitely include that as well. [Read Ryan's blog here] If somebody has a question, wants to learn more about G2Crowd, wants to reach out to you, what's the best way for them to find you online? Ryan: Yeah, I mean, I'm a social ho, so I'm on every channel. I think I use the same handle on every platform, so it's just my name, Ryan Bonnici. That's b-o-n-n-i-c-I. Feel free to connect on LinkedIn or Twitter or Instagram, I respond to everyone that messages me, as long as they don't say, "Hey" or if they don't hate on me. If they disagree with what I'm saying that's okay. I love the discourse. Kathleen: Great, well I'll include that in the show notes as well, and with that, thank you so much, this was really fun and interesting, and I loved meeting somebody else who also thought of the RFP generator, now I know this thing's got legs, I'm looking forward to seeing it finally come to life on your site. So we'll look forward to that. If you're listening and you found some value in this conversation, I would really appreciate if you would give the podcast a review on iTunes or Apple Podcast or the platform of your choice. And if you know someone doing kickass inbound marketing work, tweet me at WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. Thank you Ryan. Ryan: Thanks Kathleen, thanks everyone!

The Top 3 (or 4) Tools Every Startup Needs

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 10, 2018 29:33

Launching a startup is nearly impossible, regardless of funding, experience and even luck - but, if there was one thing that might just separate the top founders from the pack, it's knowing how valuable time is. Imagine, when Instagram blew past 1,000,000 downloads they still had just a 13 person team... THIRTEEN! How is that possible? I'll tell you how; it's possible because of exceptional time management skills (and accompanying collaboration tools). In case you've never heard of G2 Crowd - which is hard to imagine, given the millions of monthly site visitors - G2 is something of a Yelp for SaaS tools and it has quickly become the go-to spot for founders and other tech-enabled businesses to review, read and engage with popular apps like Salesforce, Heroku, Sprout social and others. Newly (9 months on the job) hired CMO Ryan Bonnici joined me live in-studio to discuss what it's been like taking on such a senior role, where G2 Crowd is going next and what his top 3 tools are for startups looking to compete at the highest level.

134: Choosing Better Marketing Tools

Growth Marketing Toolbox

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 27, 2018 29:52

On this episode, the Chief Marketing Officer of leading B2B technology review platform (G2 Crowd), helps us choose better marketing tools. Ryan Bonnici is the Chief Marketing Officer of G2 Crowd, where he’s driving growth of the world’s leading B2B technology review platform that’s helping more than 1.5 million business professionals make informed purchasing decisions every single month. With previous positions leading global marketing at HubSpot, Salesforce, and ExactTarget, Ryan’s marketing and SaaS expertise has been featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Entrepreneur, and LifeHacker. For the full show notes, click here.

entrepreneur forbes b2b saas salesforce business insider chief marketing officers hubspot marketing tools lifehacker exacttarget g2 crowd ryan bonnici

How to empower the voice of the customer through reviews with Ryan Bonnici

The SaaS Revolution Show

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2018 34:14

On this week's episode of The SaaS Revolution Show, Ryan Bonnici, CMO at G2Crowd talks about empowering the voice of the customer in marketing activities. Before Ryan headed the marketing activities of G2Crowd, he used it as one of two main sources of figuring out whether to apply for a certain company. The kind of reviews a company got was a clear indication of upward growth or lack thereof. This is how he would determine if it was worth the leap. Ryan career choices have taken him from ExactTarget and Salesforce all the way to HubSpot and now, G2Crowd. Through all that he has tasted very different flavours of marketing - from spending big enterprise budgets to building a frugality ROI muscle in SMBs. As a marketplace which is as much about B2C as it is about B2B, in G2Crowd Ryan gets to combine skills from each of his jobs. And he loves it. What unites his efforts is empowering the voice of the customer through reviews. Listen on to hear: How the customer voice evolves as a company grows and how to be prepared for some common pitfalls Where to start with getting reviews How to measure the effect of word-of-mouth At SaaStock Ryan will take us through his decade-long experience in marketing, picking up the five most important lessons he learned. We will hear much more marketing wisdom on the SaaStock stage from the likes of Dave Gerhardt, VP of Marketing at Drift, Megan Eisenberg, CMO, MongoDB, Ryan Carlson, CMO at Okta, Kieran Flanagan, VP Marketing at HubSpot and many more. You can catch Ryan together with Dave and Kieran at the Growth Marketing bootcamp during SaaS.City on October 15th where they will share practical tactics and frameworks to achieve hypergrowth. Places are limited so grab a ticket for SaaStock and claim your spot at the bootcamp now https://www.saastock.com/tickets

Ryan Bonnici, CMO at G2Crowd - AI in Product Marketing, Marketing Internationally, Hacking Content

Stack and Flow

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 19, 2018 40:24

In this episode Ryan talks about: Where AI meets product marketing Why regional marketing is the best path to CMO Content marketing that's not journalism and generates huge returns

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8: Flying Blind: From Flight Attendant to CMO w/ Ryan Bonnici

The Career Hacking Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 28, 2018 40:10

flight attendants flying blind ryan bonnici

634: Marketing Measurement: What Most Marketers Are Doing Wrong (and How to Fix It) w/ Ryan Bonnici