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Ever wondered how washing hog confinements could spark a thriving excavation business? In this episode of the Skid Steer Nation Podcast, host Ryan Deemer sits down with Jon VanZee, owner of 641 Excavating. From the unconventional start of power washing hog confinements to building a successful excavation company, Jon shares how failures, resilience, and a commitment to excellence paved his path. Key Takeaways: ✅Transitioning from one business to another and leveraging past lessons. ✅The impact of community connections and supporting local businesses. ✅Why knowing your numbers and bidding efficiently can transform your profits. ✅Tips for time-blocking, efficiency bonuses, and systemizing operations. ✅The philosophy of "Free or Full Price" and its role in creating boundaries for business success.

In this episode: The 7 Mindsets of Career Growth Resources Book: The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success

How Does The NFL Operate Like A Franchise? In this episode of On the Homefront, Jeff Dudan breaks down the NFL's business model and explores why it's considered a franchise. We all know the NFL as a sports league, but it's much more than that. From revenue sharing to standardization, discover how the NFL operates like a franchise, driving success for all 32 teams. Jeff uncovers the intricate system that makes the NFL one of the most successful franchises in the world. Whether you're a football fan or a business enthusiast, this episode is packed with insights on what makes the NFL a winning franchise model. Spoiler alert: It's more than just touchdowns and Super Bowl rings. Tune in to learn: 00:00 - Intro: Welcome to On the Homefront 00:25 - What Does it Mean for the NFL to Be a Franchise? 01:10 - The NFL's League Structure and Franchise Ownership 02:05 - Revenue Sharing: The Key to Competitive Balance 02:55 - The Power of the NFL Brand and Marketing 03:45 - Standardization and Uniformity Across Teams 04:30 - NFL's Growth and Expansion Strategy 05:20 - The NFL Draft: A Unique Recruitment System 06:00 - Conclusion: The NFL's Business Model for Success 

How Does The NFL Operate Like A Franchise? In this episode of On the Homefront, Jeff Dudan breaks down the NFL's business model and explores why it's considered a franchise. We all know the NFL as a sports league, but it's much more than that. From revenue sharing to standardization, discover how the NFL operates like a franchise, driving success for all 32 teams. Jeff uncovers the intricate system that makes the NFL one of the most successful franchises in the world. Whether you're a football fan or a business enthusiast, this episode is packed with insights on what makes the NFL a winning franchise model. Spoiler alert: It's more than just touchdowns and Super Bowl rings. Tune in to learn: 00:00 - Intro: Welcome to On the Homefront 00:25 - What Does it Mean for the NFL to Be a Franchise? 01:10 - The NFL's League Structure and Franchise Ownership 02:05 - Revenue Sharing: The Key to Competitive Balance 02:55 - The Power of the NFL Brand and Marketing 03:45 - Standardization and Uniformity Across Teams 04:30 - NFL's Growth and Expansion Strategy 05:20 - The NFL Draft: A Unique Recruitment System 06:00 - Conclusion: The NFL's Business Model for Success 

In this episode, host Mike Simmons dives into event strategies and tactics. He shares insights on different types of events, how to plan for them, and how to make the most out of attending or speaking at events. Whether you're attending a massive trade show or a small niche event, this episode offers actionable advice for maximizing your impact. Key Quotes from Mike Simmons: "Participating in events is an investment—time, energy, and money—so make sure it's the right fit for you." "One of the best ways to meet people is to attend sessions, observe, and engage with them afterward." "Going to an event as an attendee is just as valuable as being a sponsor, especially for smaller businesses." Mike Simmons shares strategies to maximize the value of attending or hosting events. He covers the types of events, such as large trade shows, vendor-specific, and smaller niche events, and offers tips on pre-event preparation, making connections, and post-event follow-up. This episode is packed with practical, actionable advice. This episode is brought to you by Catalyst A.C.T.S. - check out our weekly newsletter - Learn. Think. Act. - https://www.findmycatalyst.com/learn-think-act 5 Key Takeaways: Types of Events: Choose Wisely Large trade shows have expo halls and keynote sessions that offer networking opportunities. Vendor-specific events help you learn from others using the same tools and systems. Small, niche events provide targeted networking and more meaningful interactions. Pre-Event Planning: Prepare for Success Visit the event website to understand the theme, agenda, and who will be speaking. Identify key people you want to meet—speakers, vendors, or peers. Create a "must-meet" list to stay focused and make meaningful connections. Networking: Engage with Purpose Focus on attending sessions where your target audience is likely to be. Introduce yourself to others after breakout sessions or during lunch. Be strategic—don't pitch, but ask questions to learn more about the person and their challenges. Post-Event Follow-Up: Build Relationships Send personalized messages following the event to maintain the connection. Reference the sessions they attended or the conversations you had. Schedule follow-up calls or meetings to further discuss mutual interests. Attendee vs. Sponsor: Know Your Role Attending events for research or networking can be as valuable as sponsoring. Bring a team of 2-3 people to an event to cover more ground and gather diverse insights. Don't over-invest in booths unless you know the event attracts your target audience.  

111Hz Scientists CAN'T Explain Why This Audio Frequency HEALS People! watch on YouTube click here: https://tinyurl.com/42ycew5b In today's Meditation with MAT, we incorporate the healing frequencies of 111Hz. Paired with subliminal "Healing" affirmations, this blend aims to aid in rejuvenating the body, mind, and spirit, fostering a positive and uplifting experience post-listening. Through this harmonious fusion of music and affirmations, individuals can harness and accelerate the healing process utilizing the power of the mind and healing vibrations, cultivating inner peace, clarity of mind, and a renewed sense of well-being. Elevate Your Vibration and Success: Visit our Good Vibe Tribe Merch Store: https://tinyurl.com/goodvibemerch Books by Host: Master Your Mindset Book Recommendations: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ https://tinyurl.com/badassaffirmations https://tinyurl.com/toxicfreedietbooks https://tinyurl.com/onehabitdetox https://tinyurl.com/reduceanxeityju https://tinyurl.com/toxicfreedietbooks

Welcome, 7 Hatters! Today, we delve into the inspiring story of Dorothy Andreas, a remarkable entrepreneur with a profound journey of trials and tribulations, as we delve into hats 1, 3, 4, and 7, the soul, the servant, the entrepreneur, and the seeker.Growing up, Dorothy faced a challenging childhood marked by neglect and invisibility. Despite these hardships, she demonstrated extraordinary resilience, launching her first business venture at 19, and overcoming her father's skepticism about her business acumen.Dorothy's life was a series of hardships, from personal losses like her brother's and father's deaths to surviving an abusive relationship and navigating toxic, difficult business partnerships. Each challenge taught her vital lessons about resilience, self-worth, and the power of rewriting one's narrative.Today, after nine businesses under her belt, Dorothy focuses on mentoring entrepreneurs, specializing in money mindset and time management, and has authored several books, including "Streamline Success." Her story is a testament to overcoming adversity and using personal experiences to empower others.So, if you're looking to overcome life's ups and downs and learn the meaning of the true essence of resilience, let's extend a warm welcome to Dorothy on the seven hats...TakeawaysChildhood trauma can have a profound impact on a person's self-worth and relationships.Seeking external validation and love can lead to unhealthy patterns and choices.Self-development programs like Landmark Education can provide valuable insights and tools for personal growth.Addressing emotional wounds and healing from past traumas is essential for personal and professional success.Making a difference in the community requires determination, collaboration, and a deep understanding of the needs of others. Partnerships are crucial in achieving success, both in fundraising and in business.It is important to recognize and learn from toxic business partnerships and trust yourself and your leadership abilities.Difficult times can be overcome by adopting a mindset of resilience, learning from the challenges, and recognizing that the situation is temporary.Transitioning from running a business to consulting and mentoring requires a shift in mindset and a focus on helping others succeed.True success is not measured by financial achievements but by your impact on others and the ability to give back.Chapters:00:00 Introduction and Childhood03:19 Impact of Childhood Trauma08:13 Relationship with Siblings11:33 Seeking Love and Validation16:09 Starting a Business and Overcoming Challenges23:07 Dealing with Emotional Wounds28:36 Self-Development and Landmark Education36:42 Impact of Cancer in Family40:11 Bringing Cancer Care to the Community45:22 Fundraising for a Cancer Care Center48:36 The Importance of Partnerships51:00 Lessons from a Toxic Business Partnership57:02 Overcoming Difficult Times58:10 Transitioning to Consulting and Mentoring01:10:49 Transformation and Success-------------------------Visit https://www.the7hats.com/ for more information and more shows.Dorothy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dorothy-andreas-1047b91/Dorothy's Website: https://www.streamlinesuccess.com/My Bio & Links: https://sleek.bio/yuvalselikSUBSCRIBE AND REVIEW...Want to be the first to know when new episodes are released? Please subscribe and leave a review!Subscribes and podcast reviews are pretty darn important to iTunes, and the more reviews we receive, the more likely we'll be able to get The 7 Hats message in front of more people (It's all about the iTunes algorithms)I'd be extremely grateful if you left a review letting me know your favorite part of the show or episode :)

Welcome to seat11a, in today's podcast we are presenting Hubert Trunkenpolz, Member of the Management Board at PIERER Mobility AG Hubert is presenting his Elevator Pitch. 3 Pillars of Value Creation PIERER Brand Structure 28-years Track-Record – Revenue 28-years Track-Record – Unit Sales 4 Pillars of Success ▶️ Visit us: https://seat11a.com/ Company Profile: The PIERER Mobility Group is Europe's leading manufacturer of “powered two-wheelers” (PTW). With its motorcycle brands KTM, HUSQVARNA Motorcycles and GASGAS, it is one of the European technology and market leaders, especially for premium motorcycles. In addition to vehicles with combustion engines, the product portfolio also includes emission-free two-wheelers with electric drives (e-motorcycles, e-bicycles and e-scooters). As a pioneer in electromobility for two-wheelers, the group and its strategic partner Bajaj have the prerequisites to assume a leading global role in the low-voltage range (48 volts). Entering into the (e-)bicycle segment was another important step in intensifying activities in the field of bicycle electromobility. Electric bicycles are being driven forward under the brands HUSQVARNA E-Bicycles, R Raymon and GASGAS E-Bicycles in order to participate in the attractive market growth in this segment and to become a major international player in this field. www.pierermobility.com ---------------------------- ▶️ Visit us: https://seat11a.com/ ---------------------------- ▶️ Other videos: Elevator Pitches: https://seat11a.com/media-type/elevator-pitch/ Company Presentations: https://seat11a.com/media-type/presentation/ Financial Results: https://seat11a.com/media-type/financials/ The Big Conversations: https://seat11a.com/media-type/conversation/ ESG Topics: https://seat11a.com/media-type/esg/ Product Highlights: https://seat11a.com/media-type/products/ ----------------------------- ▶️ About seat11a: Seat11a is the next-generation roadshow for listed companies. We democratize financial intelligence by offering listed companies an investor video platform to address their message to Institutional and Professional Investors anywhere, anytime. ----------------------------- ▶️ For business inquiries: info@seat11a.com ----------------------------- ✅ Disclaimer: this publication is just for informational purposes only – it is not considered to give any investment advice! You agree to www.seat11a.com/legal/ and www.seat11a.com/imprint/

Today's episode is an exciting interview with health and life coach Jessica Elliott of Pure Sky Wellness Coaching! Jessica shares her story of going from a place of low confidence in herself and her abilities to gaining confidence through taking action and showing herself what she can accomplish! Her story proves that you have to just start, do it messy, and throw perfectionism out the window. You can only learn and get better through ACTION! Visit Jessica's website to see how you can work with her! Follow her on Instagram! Follow me on Instagram! Follow me on Facebook! Join the Rockstar Confidence Facebook group! Download my Affirmations Workbook: The Science Behind How They Work, and Best Practices for Success Visit my blog! Stay organized and reach your goals with a PUSH Journal! Use the code Kerri10

In Episode 3 and in various episodes since, I've shared pieces of my own story and how I went from very low confidence to relatively high confidence now. Today I want you to look back at your own story and see if you can see things in a different light. Play along with a little exercise to rewrite your story and gain a new perspective. Maybe you'll find a lesson that you can apply going forward, or maybe you'll see that things aren't as bad as you've made them out to be! Follow me on Instagram! Follow me on Facebook! Join the Rockstar Confidence Facebook group! Download my Affirmations Workbook: The Science Behind How They Work, and Best Practices for Success Visit my blog! Stay organized and reach your goals with a PUSH Journal! Use the code Kerri10

The ultimate goal of my podcast is to help everyone feel confident in themselves. A big part of feeling confident is feeling included. While a lot of the work has to start with ourselves, it can help SO MUCH when someone reaches out and actively includes us! I've been on BOTH sides of this equation, and I share a couple different stories from when I was purposely excluded, as well as how awesome it felt when people reached out to me when I was feeling down on myself. Let these stories help you feel more confident in reaching out to help others, or take heart that you might be the one they help! Follow me on Instagram! Follow me on Facebook! Download my Affirmations Workbook: The Science Behind How They Work, and Best Practices for Success Visit my blog! Stay organized and reach your goals with a PUSH Journal! Use the code Kerri10

Today we're talking about making BIG life changes. Decisions so big there's no going back to exactly how things used to be. Decisions that are scary and require more than just setting a goal, breaking it down, tracking progress, and all that usual stuff that we already know. Listen in for tips on how to overcome the fear of big changes, questions to ask yourself, and how to overcome the cycle of self-doubt! Follow me on Instagram! Follow me on Facebook! Download my Affirmations Workbook: The Science Behind How They Work, and Best Practices for Success Visit my blog! Stay organized and reach your goals with a PUSH Journal! Use the code Kerri10

(And now the Wizard of Oz is going through my head: "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?") With a GROWTH mindset, you are open to more learning, open to more possibilities, open to GROWING, and open to more SUCCESS! If you have a fixed mindset, you believe you have topped out when it comes to talent and intelligence. Listen in to learn how a growth mindset can help you overcome obstacles, boost your confidence, and design the life you desire. We'll talk about HOW to create a growth mindset if you need some help getting there! Follow me on Instagram! Follow me on Facebook! Download my Affirmations Workbook: The Science Behind How They Work, and Best Practices for Success Visit my blog! Stay organized and reach your goals with a PUSH Journal! Use the code Kerri10

Does drama seem to follow you around like a magnet? Maybe there's someone in your life who ALWAYS comes to you with their drama-filled stories cuz there's always SOMETHING going wrong. Today we're talking about some things you can do to reduce, and maybe even get rid of, drama in your life! Follow me on Instagram! Follow me on Facebook! Download my Affirmations Workbook: The Science Behind How They Work, and Best Practices for Success Visit my blog! Stay organized and reach your goals with a PUSH Journal! Use the code Kerri10

Our pasts will always involve both good moments and sad moments. Some moments last longer than others, and that's okay, but today let's talk about getting through it (not getting over it, but getting through it), learning and growing from it, and moving forward so that life can still be what we want it to be. We never have to forget what has happened to us or pretend it didn't affect us, but we don't have to stay there. Follow me on Instagram! Follow me on Facebook! Download my Affirmations Workbook: The Science Behind How They Work, and Best Practices for Success Visit my blog! Stay organized and reach your goals with a PUSH Journal! Use the code Kerri10

If there was ever a quick tip that you could use to INSTANTLY boost your confidence and even decrease stress, it's to take a moment to practice GRATITUDE. Gratitude has been shown to have psychological, social, and even physical benefits--it has even been proven to assist in battling depression and anxiety as a result. When you start your day with gratitude, or take a pause as needed in the middle of the day, you set that positive frame of mind that everything snowballs around! Listen in to hear more about what gratitude can do for your confidence...and see what my 5-month-old had to say about this topic! Resources: Stay organized and reach your goals with a PUSH Journal! Use the code Kerri10 Follow me on Instagram! Follow me on Facebook! Download my Affirmations Workbook: The Science Behind How They Work, and Best Practices for Success Visit my blog!

Does it sometimes feel like the world is out to get you? Like things just don't go your way no matter how hard you try? And maybe you've stopped trying, and now you're stuck? You need today's episode--you need to take back your power over your life! Listen in for my tips on how to own it again and get back to living the life you know you're meant to live! Resources: Stay organized and reach your goals with a PUSH Journal! Use the code Kerri10 Follow me on Instagram! Follow me on Facebook! Download my Affirmations Workbook: The Science Behind How They Work, and Best Practices for Success Visit my blog!

Today I'm sharing 4 tips on how to get out of a rut, finally take some action, and get moving on achieving your goals for this year, for this decade, for your life! Moms, you'll get a kick out of this one as my 4-month-old chimes in with his thoughts at the end, after I share my best tip of course! Resources: Stay organized and reach your goals with a PUSH Journal! Use the code Kerri10 Follow me on Instagram! Follow me on Facebook! Download my Affirmations Workbook: The Science Behind How They Work, and Best Practices for Success Visit my blog!

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

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

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

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

How does a "roofing company" growth hacker generate $240,000 from a $7,000 marketing investment? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, roofing company marketing expert Adam Sand shares the marketing campaign formula he uses to regularly generate 3300% return on investment for his clients.   A roofing business owner himself, Adam has parlayed his success marketing his own business into a new career helping other roofing companies to use digital marketing and direct mail to grow their businesses.  Over time, Adam has refined an approach to combining Facebook ads, video marketing and direct mail into a proven formula for lead generation that works for any industry - not just roofing. 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 Adam include: Adam joined his friend's roofing business and used Facebook ads to grow the company's revenue. He was so successful at it that he began to get other roofers asking him for help with their own Facebook ad campaigns. From there, his business advising roofing companies on growth was born.  While Adam's business is focused on helping roofers grow their companies, nothing that he does is specific to the roofing business (and therefore is entirely applicable to other types of companies looking to grow their revenue). Adam and his business partner have built a custom pixel that allows them to track website visitors and then enrich that data with the anonymous visitor's name, mailing address, and email address. They use this data to build a simple, three-step funnel that incorporates Facebook ads to drive top-of-the-funnel traffic, direct mail retargeting, and then a bottom-of-the-funnel offer. The campaign starts with a series of three educational videos that Adam boosts using Facebook ads. Anyone who watches one of the first three videos is considered to be a qualified lead and then retargeted with a fourth video that is more bottom-of-the-funnel and offers them a free upgrade (such as a vent) with the purchase of a new roof. Adam then uses his custom Dope 360 pixel to identify the visitors that have clicked through to get more information on the free upgrade offer and sends them a targeted direct mail postcard. By adding the postcard into the campaign, Adam and his partner are getting a 15% to 70% increase in their conversion rates. One way they measure ROI is by using call tracking software. The way Adam has set up the Dope 360 platform allows the user to log in every morning and see the visitors that have come to their site on the prior day, along with their enriched contact information, and then simply hit a button and have the postcard sent to them. Importantly, mailing and fulfillment is included in the platform and there are not minimum order quantities. This approach has enabled Adam to lower the cost per lead for roofers from $150 to $70. The ROI is also astronomical on these campaigns. Adam estimates that a typical campaign costs around $7000 and generates approximately $240,000 in revenue (this is a 3300% ROI). Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the Roofing Business Partner website Learn more about the Dope 360 pixel Connect with Adam on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to learn the exact process Adam uses to build campaigns that get extraordinary results by combining digital marketing with direct mail postcards. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm Kathleen Booth and I'm your host, and today my guest is Adam Sand, who is best described as a roofing company growth hacker. Never heard that title before, can't wait to dig into it. Welcome, Adam. Adam Sand (Guest): Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity to come on the show, and kind of see what I can offer the audience. I've looked into a bit of your episodes, and it looks like you have quite the advanced group of people and I'd love to contribute what I can and see if there's anything that might be taken away from it. Adam and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: Yeah, you know, what's fun for me about doing this podcast is obviously I get to talk to a different person each week because I'm interviewing somebody, but what I think is so much fun is some of them are like marketing luminaries, at least to me, people that I've looked up to and then I have the opportunity to speak with. And some are people I've never heard of, who are doing just amazing work. And I meet them and I interview them and I think, oh my gosh, how is this person not a luminary or are they a luminary in the making? And some of the most interesting conversations have been with people who are not marketers by trade or by training. They come into it and they're very intuitive. They're voracious learners, and sometimes they're the best at marketing because they understand the customer the best. So I was really intrigued when I saw your profile because you have this background in roofing, like literally companies that put new roofs on your house, and you've had tremendous success with that and now you're helping other roofers. You've become something of a marketing expert outside of roofing all together, so I can't wait to hear more about it. But to start with, because you do have such an interesting background, I would love it if you could tell my listeners your story, and how you became to be the roofing company growth hacker. About Adam Sand Adam: Well, it's a very odd, and everything I've done, I call it the accidental career. Everything has come down from just a series of well-positioned accidents. I owned a business before that had nothing to do with construction. I recognized an opportunity in that business that was basically in the app world. This was way back when apps were brand new and they were kind of a hot thing, and nobody was quite sure what to make of them. And what I found was when I closed this tanning business ... I had a couple of tanning salons, I sold them off, and I was no longer involved in it, I went in and I was like, you know what I want to do? I don't want to deal with people anymore. I wanted to make an app. I wanted part of the app millionaire gold rush, right? And so I made an app for other tanning salon owners who had a challenge of taking phone calls and trying to run the business at the same time. You either had to pay for an extra person, or you had to literally duck out of a sale to go take an appointment. And I thought man, wouldn't it be nice if people could just book an appointment on their phone? Which today is such a duh thing, but back then I literally was trying to convince tanning salon owners that this would be a good idea. And so I really dove into a different kind of business, like something totally outside of what I was doing before, you know, retail, service-based stuff. And I really kind of saw the power of technology and I spoke with a lot of tanning salon owners on Facebook, and so I really started to see and believe in the power of social media by trying to promote this app. We ended up doing fairly well with it. I made the app, I sold it to a large franchise, and then they ended up and eventually turned it into an app that many people know and use today. Part of my code is still lingering around inside that app somewhere, and they've turned it into a thing that they could use to then book for all their people, and that kind of moved into everything and all tanning salons. So from there I made some money, and my best friend, who he was about to have his second baby, he was not enjoying the company he worked for. The roofing company that he was at sold, so his bosses sold the company, and they made a bunch of money off of it, which intrigued me. He went to go start his own roofing business after a while, because he didn't really like working for the new guy, because the new guy didn't know anything. So when him and I talked, I said, "You know, you're not really running a business." He was just subcontracting. A big company would sell the roof, and then he'd come do the work. I was like, "You don't really own a business. You're just an employee that pays taxes differently." And so that's when I said, "How much did those guys sell that company for?" And he told me and I was like, I can live with that kind of exit strategy. So I said, "Let's do this together." I jumped in, and we were doing a lot of the stuff that was conventional. Facebook was not ... like it had the ads on the sidebar, that was it. There were no Facebook ads as it exists today. But everyone was talking about Crackbook, they called it Crackbook, and I had seen the power of it in communicating and connecting with people on social media. We hired the Google Ad Agency and all that, and I was like our account manager comes in, "Hey, can you run Facebook ads for us? I really think this would be a really good place to promote?" And they were like, "No, stupid, you don't sell roofing on Facebook. Roofs are how much?" I was like, "I don't know, six, 10, 40000 dollars." He was like, "Yeah, you don't have a buy now button for a roof. You need to track conversions. You need a buy now button." And then they were like, "And what's your lead magnet going to be?" And I was like, "What's a lead magnet?" Like if you're a dentist you give away a free tooth whitening and then you'd convince them to be full time clients. Or it's like, you gave away a free guide on how to lose weight, and then you sell online personal training or a fitness book or something. He was like, "That's what you use Facebook for, dummy." And I was like, "Okay." So then I fired them, and went to try and hire another company. They said they would, and then when it came push to shove, they wouldn't do it. I spent eight months trying to hire a Facebook ad marketer. And nowadays you can't throw a shingle off a roof without hitting 13 people with a ClickFunnels degree that are promising riches from leads from marketing on Facebook. But back then it didn't exist. Eventually I decided I would learn myself. There was nobody who could tell me exactly what to do, but one instructor online who ran one of those online courses, he said, "Hey, you know, you're right, I can't tell you how to do it, but I can tell you how to test and how to run assumptions and how to operate Facebook." And just then, the news feed ads started to come out, and he said, "And this is a great time to get into it." And so I went about learning, and when you learn, you spend a bunch of money losing and failing, but then eventually we had some massive success. Now sharing that success in the group as I went, just kind of like ... they had a little private Facebook group for all the students, like all these online course people have, and as I was sharing ... and then all of a sudden we had our big hit, he was like, "Hey, you know, we should get you on the podcast." And he did, and this is where the accidental career thing comes in. Because the minute I did that, all these other people, the other marketing guys, were like, "Hey, I want to try and make lots of money selling roofers Facebook ad marketing." Or it was like, "Hey, I own a roofing company, can you help me?" I was kind of flattered at first, and trying to just answer people's questions for free, and eventually it got so ... it was like another podcast interviewed me and then another podcast interviewed me. And next thing you know, I so busy I was like, I should charge money for this. Not like neglecting my other business to answer these people that flatter me with this hey, can you help me thing. And that blew up, and the next thing you know, it was like okay, fine, I'll run Facebook ads for you, 1500 bucks a month. And then there were others ... it was like, oh I don't have time, $5000 month, he won't say yes to that. And he says yes. Okay, $7000 a month. Okay, yeah, and I'm like holy smokes. Kathleen: There's a business in that. Adam: Yeah, and then I started to feel bad because some people obviously couldn't afford that and I know how hard working roofers are, because this is a trade that is not easy. It's a tough, tough job, and there are a lot of smaller companies that deserve to have success as much as the big ones. And so I said, "Okay, well can't I just put all these lessons into something?" I mean, now we've hired teachers to actually create pedagogical learning so that we could actually ... Because, I mean, roofers are not easy to teach marketing to. So I hired people with education degrees to help me teach them, like, "Hey, you teach children? Perfect, that's exactly what I need to teach people my marketing." And so we brought him on to help me create these courses. He was sort of like, "Hey, you know, I know you can't afford to hire me, but here, pay this 500 bucks a month and you can learn to do it yourself." It's exactly what I do in my roofing company and for a lot of these clients it helped. And that's where this roofing company growth hacker kind of started. Then when it became ... all these roofing companies started having problems with having too much business, I found out that companies, even $10, $15 million dollar roofing companies, they've got technological problems. They're still stuck 10 years back behind the rest of us. I mean, they're using triplicate paper, they're using old systems, they're still using dot matrix printers. So when they all of a sudden had too much business and wanted to fire the marketing guy because they don't need any more leads, it was either get fired or fix their problems. So I was like, "What's the problem you're having?" Too much business, we're not calling people back, and leads are leaving bad Google reviews. And I was like, "Okay, well I can fix that. I can fix that." Next thing you know, I became a CRM consultant, is what you call yourself now. And so with all the different stupid things that I do, for lack of a better word, growth hacker was the term that kind of seemed like it made the most sense. Now it's like this cliché thing. But yeah, it's essentially helping roofing companies run their businesses a lot more like how we do run our businesses online, using things like Slack and Trello and project management, and thinking about things in terms of how do we scale and optimize and automate our businesses so that selling a roof is just like selling something through a funnel. That's all it is, it's just half the funnel exists out there in the real world on houses. Kathleen: Yeah, and I love ... it seems like the real common theme underneath a lot of this is that you love to sink your teeth into a business problem and figure out a way to use technology and automation to solve it, and that was kind of one of the reasons I was excited to talk to you because when you and I first connected I felt like there were so many different topics we could cover in this interview. We could talk about your approach to Facebook ads, we could ... there are plenty of things we could do. Adam's Approach to Combining Direct Mail With Digital Marketing Kathleen: But what I thought was really interesting was how you strung together different elements of a marketing approach involving things like Facebook ads, but then also offline things, like a postcard, and a company's CRM and their back end data, in order to put together a 360 degree marketing campaign that really touches ... has those touch points with the customer in so many different ways. And it was very effective. So I'm excited to talk about that and dig into it a little bit. Adam: Yeah, and I thought that would be really good because the audience that ... from what I've seen from your other guests, is that this is not Basics 123 here, have you heard about the Facebook pixel-type audience. I mean, this is an audience of people who are looking for an edge, who are looking to be more competitive with their agencies, or to try and find ways to actually perform better for their clients, and kind of have those disproportionate results that maybe Facebook is feeling for a lot of people, has lost is luster. Because it used to be, oh yeah, do an image ad and anybody who engages with that ad, re-target them. Or like anybody who visits your website, just re-target them with an opportunity to purchase it again for 10% off. And that used to work like cookies, it was so simple. And we look at it now, it's kind of losing a little bit of its effectiveness, you need a little bit more strategy. And I love what you said at the beginning about knowing your customer, and beginning with the end in mind, how really knowing that buyer's journey. That is something that's so heavy in what I do, because with ... I mean, the construction industry, the home services industry, margins are huge, right? It's a business that not a lot of people want to do. Everybody wants to be a Gary V nowadays, they don't want to be a Bryan Bauemler or a Bob Vila or a Mike Holmes. They want to be like Gary V or Tim Ferriss. So there's not a lot of people that want to do construction, so the work requires a good margin to make it worth it. And so the business, from a marketer's perspective, I mean, I'd rather be a marketer for the construction business than join the cult of chiropractic dentists, that whole side. Or, getting into the whole online marketing, selling, e-commerce construction is a very underserved, hugely profitable marketing industry, or I guess an industry for marketing to pursue. And so for us it was how do we continue to maintain an edge and kind of perform in ways that roofing companies or construction companies or home services companies understood? And one thing that they really understand, and they already see value in, is direct mail and lawn science, right? Like these kinds of real life touch things that there's a tangible to it. And if you explain to a roofing company that you're going to send somebody a postcard, they're in. If you explain to a roofing company that anybody who hits their website you're going to re-target them with a digital postcard inside of Facebook, they get confused. But when you show them that they're one and the same thing, essentially, where you can ad extra media, extra education, and you can reach people at scale for pennies, like you literally can't throw flyers out your window for as cheap as you can get video views on Facebook. Well, then they start to understand. And as Facebook is starting to remove targeting options, most specifically home ownership, and then they did take away income for awhile, and now we know we've brought it back, but home ownership still doesn't exist. Now, Facebook doesn't want you to not be successful with your Facebook ads. They just don't want to make it so that any one month graduate of an online marketing course by some 19 year old influencer is now suddenly able to target Hispanic homeowners for high interest mortgages. They don't want Facebook to be used in ways that land them in the Senate hearings. Kathleen: Right, which is ... they're fighting an uphill battle, but they're working on it. And I should note, before we get too deeply ... Even though what you do is specific to roofing, it is totally applicable to so many different industries. Like there's nothing so particular about this, other than probably you're targeting options in Facebook, that is specific to roofing. So if you're listening and you're not in the roofing industry, don't jump off, this is relevant to everybody. Adam: Oh, absolutely. If you want to target people who like ... I mean, at the end of the day, this is all about targeting ... just allowing yourself to have every option. It's just about making sure you have choices. Because Facebook wants to be successful, they just don't ... they almost just want to make it a little bit like you have to be kind of advanced, or you have to kind of invest in your business a little bit. The barrier to entry is just getting a little bit higher because you can't just ... They just don't want it so that these people can continuously ruin everything. It's like Seth Godin says, marketers ruin everything. Kathleen: Yeah. Adam: And so what we've found is that Facebook used to share and enable us to buy ... Or not buy, but they used to enable us to target data from Epsilon and Acxiom and all these other third party data providers, but then that allowed us to target things like Hispanic homeowners, stuff like that that was something that was a problem, especially in the finance industry. So then they had to remove that level of targeting. Does not mean that we cannot still access that information when somebody hits our website, it doesn't mean that that information isn't still existing in that transaction of someone coming to a website. And so what we tried doing is plugging into ... Me and an affiliate of mine, we decided we would try to plug in to that data still by creating our own pixel, so that we could continue to use our content marketing campaigns where we educate people on process, the people and the product of our home services companies ... because he owns another home services business and has a marketing agency as well. But to continue to market our people, our process and our products, and then re-target the people who engage with those videos with another video talking about a very specific product and then offering a free upgrade to that product. Very simple, three-stage funnel, nothing fancy. Works awesome, but we wanted to increase the effectiveness of that, and also improve the targeting of it. And so with this pixel, what we found is that we were able to then still get the information, and then we can append that internet user data against the same data brokers that Facebook used to allow us to target from, Axiom, Epsilon, etc, etc, and when we run that internet user data against that waterfall, we could then, 24 hours later, have name, email and home address. Kathleen: So let's back up for one second, because I want to make sure everyone understands exactly what we're talking about. So if you're a marketer, you're probably familiar with the concept of Facebook advertising and the notion that if you have an ad account with Facebook, you have a pixel, which is that little snippet of code that you put on your site that allows Facebook- ... Which is that little snippet of code that you put on your site that allows Facebook to feed ads to people that have been on your website. You said you built your own pixel. Is this something that is used in tandem with the Facebook pixel, or instead of it? Adam: No, we still use the Facebook pixel because there's still a thousand other things that we can't do with ours. All this did was allow us to submit that information to our data provider and say anybody who hits this website, we want to know who they are so that we can then re-target them with a direct mail campaign if we want, or online marketing if we want. Driving Qualified Website Traffic Kathleen: Great, and so is there a part of this campaign that starts off the website? Are you using Facebook ads to drive people to the website first? Adam: Absolutely. This is a campaign that I run for my clients all the time. I coin it a 30 day roof booster. Essentially it's where you run three videos that are purely educational, not salesy, they're just content. It's to talk about the people or something about the company that makes them good, the process, video, something about the roofing process that helps customers understand. Product video, something talking about the product. We do some other ones, thought reversal. Kathleen: The very top of the funnel. Adam: Yeah, very top of funnel stuff, just to basically build audience. Then we offer a free upgrade to some products. We talk about is when we record a fourth video. Three videos acquire audience. The second level, fourth video, and I script these videos for clients to kind of show them, this is how the videos work. I run it in all these markets. Just basically record yourself talking like this and be an expert in the industry and it will work. The fourth video is talking about a product. We could talk about, in roofing, you talk about roof vents. In decks, you talk about those little light caps. In home, like washing your house, you talk about washing windows and how it's a great time to do it. There's something for literally every home services business. If you're talking about snow shoveling, talk about clearing the deck. There's something for every home services business. You're doing a basement, add in a smart home device. It works everywhere. The fourth video is about a product, some kind of upgrade to the base level of service. Instead of talking about discounts, you're talking about upgrades and then giving away free upgrades, because you can usually price condition the value of an upgrade beyond the price of its actual product. A good example in the roofing industry is vents. Vents cost $250, but the value of having adequate ventilation on a house is thousands of dollars of either air conditioning bills saved over 25 years of the life of your roof, up to damages caused by humidity and condensation wrecking your house. The value of a vent, when you educate them first, is thousands. The price to give it to them for free is hundreds. If you just say right out of the gate, "Hey, I'll give you free vents if you buy a roof," they're going to go, "Well, how much is a vent? $200? That's not that good of a deal." But if you say, "Hey, these are vents. They're awesome. They save you thousands of dollars on your air conditioning bills over the life of your roof, plus they're going to prevent any kinds of damage from humidity and condensation. You know, these are really good things. You should know about those if you're ever planning on doing your house, wink wink." Then a week later when they see an ad for free vents if you get a roof done, they're going to go, "Holy smokes, are those vents? Those are awesome. We go to make sure we have those vents." This is how that answered that lead magnet question a few years later after getting made fun of by these guys. We're teaching first and selling second. You have to first educate people so they felt empowered to make a decision about something that otherwise, it's not sexy. They're not interested in roofing. They love having clean teeth. They love losing weight. They love a new car. Roofing is something you do when you have to. You never replace your roof 10 years early just because. Kathleen: The videos really drove people, and the upgrade offer was what drove people to the website. Adam: Right. So now, anybody who watches video four, so you're re-targeting the three videos audience. Anybody who watched those videos, engaged with one of those one to three videos, they've self-identified as homeowners. So now, because who watches a video about roofing if they're not interested in roofing in the near future? Not renters. Not people who are 10 years away from needing to replace a roof. If they're going to watch a four minute video about a roof when they could watch a Trump video or a cat video or whatever, they're self-identifying as people who might be interested in roofing and obviously homeowners, so then they're re-targeted with video four to make sure they have the knowledge to value the free upgrade offer that we're going to re-target them with. Then we re-target them with that offer. Now, anybody who lands on that page, we're then able to have their name and address and email address just from having landed on the page by running it against that waterfall, provided by data providers. Now, 24 hours later within this dashboard, we just send them a postcard with that offer, free vents. Now in addition to targeting them in real life, we're also doing it on ... Sorry, I guess I should say in addition to targeting them on Facebook, like is conventional, like we're all used to, we added that online thing, and now that, our statuses, I mean, we're matching people 30% to 60%, people who hit that site. We're getting 30% to 60% of them getting their name, address, phone number and email. Kathleen: Based on their IP address? Adam: There's a few different things. It's a bit of a proprietary thing, but there's a few different things that we use to do this. It's all legal and it's all Facebook terms of service legal and everything like that, but obviously you don't want to give away the secret sauce. There's going to be at least one really, really smart person out there listening to this podcast who I don't want them to figure it out just yet. I just got the numbers back this morning. We're getting, at the bottom, a 15% bump over running it without, up to 70% bump in conversions running this bump. Kathleen: Sorry, clarify that. You're getting the bump from running the campaign with the postcards? Adam: Yeah. Let's say we're running the ad in Halton, Burlington and Oakville in Ontario, right? Kathleen: Because you are from Canada, if somebody has not already picked that up by his Canadian accent, which I love. Adam: Say we're running ads there, or we've also ran this exact campaign in Minnesota. If we run this exact campaign to three cities, very similar income levels, very similar everything, similar home ages. All the demographics are the same. We run this 30 day roof booster as I've done it conventionally, and then we run that same 30 day roof booster in a neighborhood 30 kilometers away where it's very similar. 17 miles away, where everything about it is very similar, but you add in that re-targeting with the direct mail that's just automated. We have no minimum orders. That's the thing. Data providers are now allowing people to build stuff like this and buy this information and access this data without having to order a list of 10,000 people. You can then append this data in a small amount. Kathleen: You described it to me, just to be clear, you described it to me as literally everyone's traffic flow to their website is different. If I'm using this on my website, I might wake up tomorrow morning and have 10 people in my dashboard with their name, email and their address, and I could just push a button and have a postcard sent to them, or if I'm some other business who gets more traffic, I might wake up and have 150. It really doesn't matter. The point is whatever that number is from yesterday is the number that I get, no minimums, no maximums, and I can just automatically send them a postcard. Adam: Exactly. The next day you just say, "Here. These are the 17 people that we were able to match or the 1,700 people that we were able to match. We've uploaded your design, your front and back of your seven by eight postcard, or seven by ten or whatever your postcard size is. You just pick the names you want to do or select all. Boom. Send. It's going to be, hi, Adam Sand. Here's your free offer. Here's a thing. Call us now. You got your own call. We have our own call tracking numbers. Make it so that we can do attribution and all those things so we can actually test this, because this has all been one big, giant test for the last four months. With that, we've been getting on the low end 15%, on the high end, 70% bumps. Kathleen: 70? Seven zero? Adam: Seven zero. Now, those are extreme cases with really good offers. These are not save 10% kind of monkey, rinky dinky offers. These are real, tangible offers where everything went right. That's a video that I did where we really talk about the value of the roof upgrade, and I'm really good at these roof upgrade videos after doing so many of them, that when I produce the kind of content that I'm used to producing, we can really make it so people really value those vents. When people really value the vents because we did a kickass job at audience generation with the level one videos, and we did a kickass value build video where people really understand and appreciate the value, and then on top of that we then have a good ad running people to that page, yes, then you get the 70%. But when everything is kind of amateur and you're dealing with a client who's never recorded videos before, or they're very amateur at it, then you're getting the low end, the 15%, just by proxy. Just by the fact that you're hitting them again. And it's extremely, extremely cheap. Kathleen: Is that 15% more people that contract and purchase their roof, or is that 15% more people who say, "Come out, I want a quote from you?" Adam: 15% more people that say, "Come out, I want a quote from you." Kathleen: But with the cost of a single new roof sale, the ROI, I have to imagine, is astronomical on that. Adam: Basically, as long as you're not a complete moron in the construction industry and you have a half decent business, yeah. Your closing ratio should be 30% and you can pay $150, $200 a lead regularly every day. Actually, this is a real thing. Home Advisor charges $150 to send you a lead, and every time, you're one of three. Kathleen: Yeah. I was going to say I bought a new roof last year so I do know how much that costs and what that means to the company. It's a lot of money. Adam: Yeah. You're looking at 20%, 30% margins because there's a lot of stuff that goes wrong. On a per job basis, you need 25%, 20%, 30%. Some things even more, like air conditioning is big. Flat roofs are even more. There's a lot of things- Kathleen: Yeah. I have a flat roof up top on part of my house. This is giving me bad memories of the check I had to write from last year. Adam: But occasionally, those guys putting on a flat roof, some kid leaves a torch on the ground. Burns the whole building down, and now their insurance goes up $10,000 here. There's a reason for those margins. If you're running a good business and have half decent salespeople, I mean, on a pure margin basis, I mean, construction and home services businesses are regularly conditioned to paying $150 to $250 a lead. Not a sale, a lead, and those aren't even always exclusive. Agency partners like myself who have some experience with their business can deliver leads for $70, $17 or something like, you know, something in that range. Then all of a sudden things get a lot better, especially when it's coupled with inbound marketing strategies, such as using content to create value in the product, and not just being, "Hey, we do this and here's 10% off." That's weak, right? The Dope 360 Pixel Kathleen: Yeah. Let's back up and talk about kind of the mechanics of this. I think lots of my listeners are probably familiar with and have done Facebook advertising. They're familiar with using video to do it. They get the concept of creating top of the funnel videos, driving people back to your site, having an upgrade offer. Where it gets more complicated is this notion of the pixel that you're talking about. When you and I talked, I was saying to you, my big goal from the podcast is for people to feel like they can walk away and do some of the stuff themselves. When we were talking and you first told me this story, I was like, I don't know if this is good, because are people going to be able to do this? But you actually have commercialized this pixel. Talk a little bit more about that, and the fact that somebody doesn't have to know how to build this in order to do it. Adam: Yes, absolutely. Essentially this social enhancement program that me and Dope 360 is the pixel that we're calling it, have created this dashboard and commercialized this so you can put the Dope 360 pixel on there. The whole fleet of stuff that we're doing that we've done that just, we couldn't even get into this podcast about. There's some stuff in there that two years from now, it's probably going to get ruined, because the success rates will be ... We were talking about that in the original call. The disproportionate success with some of the stuff that we're doing with this is going to eventually get reeled back, but right now everything is Facebook terms of service legal. We've created this pixel and allowed people to append this data and put this on their site and get into this dashboard. Not only does it allow you to do all this offline print marketing, but you're also building up a much better list. I mean, you're getting people who have landed on your page. You're getting more information from them than you would get from your typical Facebook pixel, because again, the Facebook pixel, you're allowed to use ... in your cookie policy, you're allowed to say that we're getting data. We're getting re-targeting information. We're collecting user data from using this website. We're going to retain it for X period of time. We don't have GDPR in Canada or the US yet. We're allowed to take this information. Then the fact that users voluntarily share this information with us means that you can then create a custom audience of these people who visit your website. You've got their name, their email, their home address. You've got this information. This is essentially an offline event set. Kathleen: You built the pixel, but what you're essentially providing to the user, does that include then the dashboard that delivers the addresses? Adam: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Absolutely. Kathleen: You talked about how you have a fulfillment house that's willing to do small batch orders. Is that included, the mailing? Adam: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Absolutely. When you get into the dashboard, and obviously we're rolling this out. We've been rolling this out gently to some people that we know, or to big franchises who wanted to run tests. We're slowly rolling this out to some agency partners, but essentially right now today, if I was talking to the right kind of agency, it's like, yeah, yeah. Free access to the dashboard. Put these pixels on your clients' website, and then you just pay for the fulfillment. You get the data for pennies. We're talking five to 15 cents per hit. You're talking nothing as far as running it against that waterfall. Five to 15 pennies and you're getting an enormous amount of data on the customer. Then the fulfillment, again, you're talking pennies. Nothing is a dollar. We're talking pennies. Some of the printing, some of the printing- Kathleen: Right, but you're going to have that regardless if you're doing postcards. Adam: Exactly. The pixel is free right now. If the right person is around, the dashboard is free. The data costs pennies, and the printing and fulfillment, the mail and delivery targeting is pennies, because again, nobody is doing this yet. All these companies that offer ... This information is available to Ford. It's available to IBM. These people have, they have the ability to directly partner with Axiom and Epsilon and all these other huge data providers. Right now the little guy doesn't have access to it. This is our way of getting access to it ourselves. We've built it for ourselves. Then essentially we're rebuilding the investment and the time and the testing and the energy by eventually rolling this out to US agency partners or to US clients. It's been a very, very cool journey, but I have to say that now that the consumer market is kind of used to being re-targeted online, they're getting, I guess, maybe slightly desensitized to it, but the psychology still works. It's just I guess the competition for re-targeting is just gone up, so the cost of getting ad performance has gone up, but because of the success of digital marketing, the cost of print and direct mail and all that kind of stuff has gone way, way, way down. The competition is way, way, way down. The number of junk mail you get is way, way, way down. When you can combine the timing, the personalization, the relevance of online digital marketing such as Facebook by re-targeting them with an offer based on some content that they've seen, which you can't do with direct mail right now. You just kind of say, "Yeah, give everybody in this postal code this offer and see if it works." Now you can say, "Send the person who watched this video and this video and went to this page, send them this postcard for this offer." When you can do that and then give that tangible thing in their hands, at least in home services, we're seeing a conversion rate that's almost like cheating. Kathleen: Yeah. That's great. It's funny too, timing-wise, because I just interviewed Oli Bilson, who's an amazing marketer. And he talked about combining digital with postcards and direct mail for a- Adam: Really? I never... I started listening to that one, but I didn't get a chance to get it fully done. Kathleen: Yeah, it wasn't exactly the same way you've done it, but he just talked about how direct mail is a part of his process for driving people to events, and how effective it was. I think it's one of those things that digital marketers can... It's very easy to brush off direct mail and think it shouldn't be a part of your process, but there still is definitely a role for it. Reducing The Cost Per Lead Kathleen: What I'm interested in hearing a little bit more from you about is the actual math and the ROI. So you talked about how roofers are used to paying $150 a lead. When you use this kind of an approach, how far down can you get the cost per lead for them? Adam: Again, so a lot of this has been preliminary testing, so there's still... We're still talking hundreds of thousands of impressions. We're seeing success in the range of, I want to be over zealous, I would say $70 a lead is easy. Kathleen: So like about half? Adam: Yeah, easily half. $70 a lead is easy. I mean, have we had small campaigns where I did the content for my company and yeah we got much lower? Yeah, sure, but I want to talk about what I was able to... What we were able to get for people within a variety of industries who didn't have the experience in digital marketing and knowing how to create a video that was really effective on Facebook, or more so hey this is the kind of video we need to do, and they could create the kind of content we're kid of looking for. We go, "eh it's okay." Those guys, we're able to get cut in half. We were able to cut the lead cost in half and more importantly, we're exclusive and they're nurtured clients. It's not like a lead from Home Advisor where you're one of three contractors that's being contacted where Home Advisor is the protective person, and they're giving you to three contractors of which are the best of the crappy bunch. Where it's not like oh, you're on Yelp or Angie's List or something like that, or just another Google ad click. It's not a conversion based on a Google ad click, remarketing thing on Adsense where they saw a picture for 10% off. I mean, this is a person who has watched at least two videos of you or someone with your company talking about your service and your product, and building value in some kind of upgrade that now they're getting for free. And the cost to providing that upgrade we target to be around 5% of the total price of the service, which is dramatically less than the usual offers which are 10, 15, 25% off early season special type stuff, right? Measuring ROI Kathleen: And the cool thing about what you did was that the postcard goes out in such a timely fashion, especially if it's in the local area that you're hitting them at that point of highest interest. So, from a ROI standpoint, earlier you talked about how adding the postcard into the mix, you already had a good formula with your videos, and then you add the postcard into the mix and that an improve results by anywhere from 17 to 70%. But when you look big picture at the ROI, taking the investment that a company has to make into a campaign such as this versus the return that they can potentially see, any ballpark data there? Adam: Yeah. Essentially, one campaign, $7,000 including marketing agency fees. I guess you should look at is as $2,500 ad spend, $2,000 in data and print and mailing. The whole thing where as far as like the hard cost, not including management, $5,000, $4,500. That there you're looking at 113 opportunities. I mean, the client reported that they're getting around 30% as far as closing rates show. Average ticket price, $8,000. Average margin, 20%. Oh, a puppy. Kathleen: Oh, there goes my dogs. Adam: No problem. So then you're looking around, let's say, 30 sold opportunities at a $2,000 profit margin. So when you're looking at $60,000 in profit... What is that? 130 times 80, or 30 times 8,000. What's that? Kathleen: I'm glad you're doing math so I don't have to. That's why I'm a marketer. Adam: $240,000 as revenue and then $60,000 in profit off of roughly a $5,000 or $4,500 hard cost in. And then your management fees if you're not doing it yourself, right?  Kathleen: Well, by any standard, that's a pretty incredible ROI. Adam: That's why I tell more people that they should stop trying to get... They should stop joining the bandwagon of people going after dentists and yoga studios, and maybe try looking at helping the construction industry, because they're good hard working people and they need our help. Kathleen: Yeah, I've always said, especially with the economy they way it's been the past several years, it's almost worth if I could go back and do college over. Instead of doing college I might become a plumber or an electrician, because if you're in that trade and you know what you're doing, and you show up on time, I think there's a gold mine to be made. Adam: Cream rises... We always say the cream rises to the top. We don't have to be perfect. We just have to be less crappy.  Kathleen: That's exactly right. Or what is that? It's like the equivalent of if you're being chased by a lion, just run faster than the next guy. Adam: Right. I mean, it is not... The competition is there, but it is not... I mean, we're not talking about the competition amongst dentists or realtors or personal trainers. The competition in the construction industry is lower just because less people want to do it. Less people want to be a roofer, or a siding washer, or a gutter cleaner, or an ice dam remover, or all these different kinds of businesses. Not a lot of people want to pour concrete or do landscaping. It's hard work, but because it's hard work you don't want to do it yourself. So you have to pay someone else to do it. And if you want to pay someone else to do it then you got to make sure you're paying the right price or else they're going to screw up your house and now you're going to have to redo it. It's a business where there is... It is a good business to be in. And the problem with this industry has been frequently client acquisition. How to stand out. How to present a unique selling point, your unique market position. How do you get customers to value your time? How do you get customers to appreciate the fact that you promised good quality? Well, you can't do any of that with a yellow pages ad, or a Google ad, or... I mean, you can try and run a flyer and jam a bunch of information from people, but they're just going to go, "Ah, too long. Didn't read," and they're going to move on to the next thing. By using the content strategies that I've learned over the last five years in teaching, in my case, roofers, and in my partner's case, a variety of home services industries, how to actually drive traffic using these specific video scripts that are two to four minutes long that all of a sudden make people pop down a funnel and then come out the bottom and educate a consumer that values your time; Then all of a sudden your prices are going up 30% in your market because people are willing to pay an extra 10, 15, 20% for a contractor knowing that they're not going to burn your house down, destroy your lawn, wreck your house, or cause you to have to call them back time and time again for you to not answer. These are huge, huge pain points and concerns for home owners, so home owners are willing to pay the price, especially if they're planning on living in their home. So if you can help customers understand what to value, and then empower them to make it an educated decision through a little bit of free content that you record once and put out at scale at digital, and then use the power of Facebook, and then use the power of the Dope 360 Pixels who really hammer them with your value proposition and your upgrade offers... This is not tough stuff. This is just simple marketing. Kathleen: Cool. Well, I love the whole system. It sounds super interesting, and there's a clear ROI case there for adding some old school direct mail back into your inbound campaigns. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Before we wrap up I want to ask you the two questions that I ask all my guests. I'm curious to hear what you have to say. One of them is: When it comes to inbound marketing, company or individual, who do you think is really killing it right now? Adam: Well, I hate her politically, and I'm sure I'll split the tide on this one, but AOC. I can't stand her policies, but that girl is killing it. I mean, she's got Netflix going on. I'm like, when you asked the question I really thought long and hard about it. I was like who am I going to say? Am I going to say Nike? Am I going to say Ford? Or am I going to talk about somebody everybody else has talked about? And I thought who is really killing it right now? And I said someone who I don't like that's constantly in my ear and constantly gets my attention, and constantly keeps challenging me to think about cauliflowers being a racist vegetable. That is someone who's killing it with inbound marketing, because she is using content marketing. She is using digital. She's using Twitter. She's even got her own Netflix special. Kathleen: She has a strong Twitter game, I'll give her that for sure. Adam: She's the one that's battling the other guy that's got the best Twitter game, President Trump who she goes up against every other day. I mean, I know I'm from Canada so I got no horse in the race either way, but I got to say if you want to see someone who is doing a good job at communicating online and using it to attract people to her thing she will very likely be, as much as I'm not a very big fan of her, she will very likely be a person who could challenge a presidency at some point. And she'll say, "I'm not showing up to a debate. Debate me online. I'm not showing up to a debate, living within the structure that was pre agreed upon by a bunch of stodgy old white pale stale men and we'll just go... No, I'm just going to run on my campaign and I'll get voted in and I'll win." Kathleen: I love that example. You're the first guest I've had to name a politician in that answer, and I love it. I am not afraid for people to stir the pot a little, so bring it. All right, that's a great one. Another question is, and this is particularly interesting with you because again you're not necessarily a marketer by trade, you're more of an entrepreneur, but you've become quite a savvy self taught marketer, so with the world of digital marketing changing so quickly... You know, everyone always describes it like drinking from a fire hose. How do you stay up to date and educate yourself about all this stuff? Adam: Obviously I have a podcast on... I listen to podcasts because I'm always trying to stay educated on that. I would say that I frequently listen to a lot of podcasts, right? I love the... What is it? The Marketing School podcast. I always have all the staples like everybody else, like the Gary Vee Show and stuff like that. But then some industry specific ones, things that are more going to for the things like me, like The Roofer Show and Roofers Coffee Shop. And then I find some gems. You know what I mean? Something like your podcast. I listened to a couple of episodes in the last few days and it's been interesting. I mean, for me, I try and just really wander the field a lot with podcasts because it's an environment where people are forced into knowing their stuff, right? Because you're now trying to communicate... You're trying to communicate a subject where you don't have the power of video, you don't have any infographics, you don't have an animation, you don't have a PDF, you don't have anything to work with. And then people are on the other end with just their ears, and you have to try and convey ideas about something that for a large part is pretty dry, right? I mean, compared to some other stuff. It's not Sportsnet, it's not... But you can... The things that I've learned... I mean, what we're doing with this direct mail stuff... I mean, we didn't invent this stuff. We took it from real estate and from big box retail. And we just found a way to make it work for home services and use the technology. A lot stuff that I use for my marketing has come from personal trainers and people like Gary Vaynerchuk. I learn stuff from Amy Porterfield, which is what webinars, and I learned... I take little tips from every different type of marketing and try and expose myself to new ideas because sometimes you run into a good idea that's like huh, I wonder if that'll work in the home sales niche, or the home services niche. The amount of stuff I've ripped off from realtors because their industry has got to constantly be super super competitive, super cutting edge. I steal stuff from realtors al the time because there are a few things that work for me. They're high competition. They deal with home owners. And their super high margin, high price type stuff that are focused around a knowledge difference, or a knowledge incompetence. That's me. That's podcasts. And that's a lot of showing up in a lot of different places. Kathleen: I like that tip of sort of observing adjacent industries that maybe cater to the same audience and taking a page out of their playbooks. Some of the best marketers I know are just really keen observers, so that's great. Adam: An unexamined life isn't worth leading, right? How to Connect With Adam Kathleen: Exactly. So if someone's listening to this and wants to learn more about you or do the work you do or is intrigued by the Pixel and wants to learn more about that, what's the best way for them to get more information online? Adam: They can find me as Adam Sand pretty much anywhere, but when you Google that that comes up with a lot of Adam Sandler stuff, which is great for all the stuff I did in my younger years growing up, washing that down the drain. But then you can also do Roofing Business Partner, so you can hit me up on roofingbusinesspartner.com and generally I have a lot of different little PDFs and blueprints that people can download to implement a lot of the stuff that I talk about here. And then if they want to talk to me more there, they're going to know how to reach me. Kathleen: Great. Well, thanks so much, Adam. Adam: It's not hard to find on the internet. I mean, this has been a really fun experience and you're a hell of an interviewer so thank you so much for... Kathleen: Aw, you're very sweet. Thank you so much. I will take all the compliments and I love hearing them, as I said, in your Canadian accent. I'm a fan. Adam: Thank you. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: It's awesome. Well, I appreciate you sharing all of this with us and I'll put the links in the show notes for how you can reach Adam, so check that out. And if you are listening and you learn something new and liked what you heard, of course I would always appreciate a new five star review on iTunes for the podcast, or rather Apple Podcasts. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass marketing work tweet me at workmommywork because I would love to interview them. Thanks, Adam. Adam: Hey, thank you.

How does a small agency regularly pull in $100,000+ from small, 20 to 40 person events? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Oli Billson shares how he has brought in over $1 million dollars in new business revenue from a series of just five small, workshop-style events.  Oli is the Founder of Oliver Billson Marketing and a popular marketing speaker featured in conferences around the world. His small educational events for entrepreneurs have become a significant driver of revenue (both one time and recurring) for his business, and in this week's episode, he shares the exact process he uses to plan, promote, and monetize these events. 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 Oli include: Oli speaks at a lot of marketing conferences around the world, and uses that as an opportunity to hold local events in the conference cities for area entrepreneurs and business owners. In the past year, he has run 5 of these small events around the US and Canada. Oli's events are two-day workshops designed to help businesses go "from inspiration to implementation." At the event, attendees get the "Automation Playbook," a pre-built, pre-packaged, well-engineered marketing that they could go and put to work immediately in their business. Every attendee is also given a free, 30 day trial of Oli's monthly membership program called "Player's Club." After the initial 30 days, membership continues at $400 per month. The average attendee stays in the membership program for 9.5 months. Attendees are also given the option to upgrade and join Oli's mastermind group at $15,000 a year. In most of the cities where Oli has held events, he does not have a lot of local contacts, so he relies on a two-step direct mail campaign targeted at a list he purchases from InfoUSA. The response rate for this campaign was 60%. This is coupled with a text and ringless voicemail campaign aimed at driving registrations. The key to monetizing events like Oli does, is to have offers that you can use to upsell attendees. In this case, Oli's offers were structured in a way to deliver recurring revenue to his business. Once someone registers for an event, Oli sends them what he calls a "shock and awe" box with event swag and a "stick letter" reaffirming their decision to register. This has contributed to a 90% attendance rate. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the Oliver Billson Marketing website Connect with Oli on LinkedIn Follow Oli on Facebook Follow Oli on Twitter Listen to the podcast to learn the exact marketing plan that Oli uses to generate six-figure revenue from small, workshop-style events. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and this week my guest is Oliver Billson, who is the owner and founder of Oliver Billson Marketing, and a serial entrepreneur with a fascinating background, welcome Oliver. Oli Billson (Guest): Hey, thanks for having me on. I'm looking forward to it. Oli and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: I'm looking forward to it too. So for my audience, I first met Oliver at a Digital Marketer's agency training day about a month ago, and he gave a fantastic talk on how he's driven traffic to these local events that he's been holding, and then the impact that that's had on his business and revenue growth. And so I was, as soon as I heard it I was like, "Ooh, I need to share this with my listeners!" About Oliver Billson Kathleen: But before we jump into that, can you talk a little bit about yourself, because you have a fascinating background, and I was interested to read on your site the evolution of you as a businessperson and how you wound up doing what you do now. Oli: Yes, sure, so it is a bit of an interesting story, I guess. I've never actually worked for anybody, I started my first business when I was 15 years old, building computers out of my mom and dad's back room, and that was my first foray, really, into entrepreneurship. And I, as well as having a passion for computing and building computers at that age, I also had a passion for cars, I absolutely love cars, still do to this day, and so what I did was I started an automated after-market business, and really kind of understood at that point, building that service-based business, the importance really, the lifeblood of every business, which is getting and keeping customers. And I was really lucky to be exposed to direct response marketing at a fairly young age, I was only about 19 years old, actually, when I read my first book on direct response marketing, immediately applied it, and really had some profound results from implementing that type of marketing. And it kind of defied conventional wisdom and popular belief, in terms of my circles at that time, the people that I knew that were building businesses. And they were quite amazed at the growth and the catalyst that that had had on my business, and so we grew those businesses and I kind of became known, now I suppose, for building businesses inside of businesses. So we started out as a service-based business, then we started helping other people in my niche at that time, start, grow and scale their own businesses, then we'd create another business inside of that business, which was our exclusive franchise, which we took from zero to 170 franchisees internationally in just less than four years, so very quick growth there. And then inside of that business I built another business which was a marketing agency out of the capabilities I built around marketing inside of that business, and then we transcended that into membership, and selling information and knowledge and expertise online through our memberships, and then into where we are today, which is nextlevelbusiness.com, which is an e-learning business where we help, obviously, service-based businesses, client-based businesses scale. Kathleen: Wow, it is so clear that entrepreneurship runs in your blood, very strongly. I love hearing stories like that, because there's an interesting pattern I've noticed in, I've now like 90-some-odd episodes into this podcast, and I interview different people every week, and they're all people who are getting phenomenal results with some kind of marketing. And what I've started to notice is that a lot of them, probably the majority of them, are not trained as marketers. They are people who have that very entrepreneurial spirit, they're very naturally curious, they're the kind of people who jump in and want to know the answers to things and figure things out, and they love a problem and figuring out how to solve it, and I feel like that is so what I'm hearing from you. It's great, it's- Oli: Yeah, absolutely. It's all about solving the problems for people, you know? Kathleen: Yeah, well, [crosstalk] and I think that's what makes you a great entrepreneur, is figuring it out and taking your business to the next step, because let's be honest, as an entrepreneur you're constantly going to be faced with, somebody once said to me, "As your company gets bigger, you don't have fewer problems, you have maybe the same number of problems but they tend to be bigger problems." And so there's only more things to figure out, so you've got to love that. Oli: Absolutely, yes. Yeah, totally agree with that. How Oli Grew His Business Through Events Kathleen: So let's talk a little bit about what I heard you talk about at Digital Marketer, which is these events. And this started out as something very small, that you quickly saw you were getting results from and then it expanded. Can you kind of rewind the clock and maybe share with the listeners what your original objective and idea was when you first began? Oli: Yeah, sure. Probably like a lot of people, I love attending events, and for those who know me well, I'm fortunate enough now to be asked to speak at events pretty much all around the world, so I love speaking at them, I love attending them. I think there's something special that comes with events in terms of the bond that you can create with people, potential customers, with the proximity that they bring. And there's lots of benefits to running events, from a sales, customer acquisition standpoint, of course, and they're often used as a vehicle, and over the years I've helped lots of other people actually put on their own events, and put butts in seats, and monetize them and have the whole strategy behind it. But although I knew all the benefits of running an event, I was actually a little bit shy to actually do my own events, for a number of different reasons, and probably those reasons were many of the reasons why people don't ultimately do it. Perhaps they're worried about attracting enough people to actually attend the event, they're thinking, "Well maybe I don't have a large enough list of potential people to attend the event," or maybe, "What happens if I can't get people to register for the event, what happens if I can't get them to show up to the event, and what happens or if it was a failure, how would I be perceived in the market if it was a failure?" And so, all of these are the common fears, really, that were running through my mind, and probably run through a lot of minds of the people that may even be listening to this. And really what happened was I was speaking at an event in San Diego, and a good friend of mine said to me, "Look, Oli, you're missing a huge opportunity here to really share your knowledge, expertise, wisdom, experience, with people when you come and speak at these other marketing events," and that's really how this initially evolved was, why not leverage my time in putting on a small workshop ahead or bookending it, really, to somewhere where I was already going to be? And for those of you who can't tell, this isn't an Australian accent, I'm from the UK, so I spend a lot of time over in the States, and most of our clients' customers are in the States. So I wanted to use this as an opportunity to run these events. But I was kind of, really what had stopped me before was all these falsehoods, really, that come with running events. And I thought, okay I'm going to do this, and the first one that I, at this point to just kind of just zoom out, we, over the past 12 months we ran five of these small events in the format that we'll go ahead and talk about here. And the first one that I ran was actually in San Diego. I was going to be back there again in a few months, almost a year from the day, actually, that we're doing this interview, now. And what I guess I didn't quite imagine would happen was exactly how well they would go, and whether it was just by luck or by some level of judgment and strategic thinking, we really did things quite differently to the way that most would go about this, and it really really had a very big impact. I think right now, just to, not brag, but just to kind of say as it is, we went from really going, I think one point, about $1.2 million in revenue from doing these small, big money, from these small events, really. In the format that we're going to hear. So it really does work, and it was done in a way that was very different. And what I mean by that is, I'm sure we've all attended the events where there's a, people have to make sales, right? They just have to make sales, they bring in other speakers, there's lots of pitching, and it creates sometimes not the best experience for the people that are attending. What I knew I wanted to do was stay true to our values and our business, which was really to provide lots of value, to provide a great experience for people who were there. And if they wanted to continue the journey with us, they could. So we all, we were kind of very clear on those principles before we started putting this together, which I think really helped us to stay grounded towards what we actually wanted to try and create, really. Kathleen: All right. That's great, I love hearing those specific revenue numbers, it's definitely not bragging and I think, the feedback I've gotten from my listeners is the more specific the data, the better, because, [crosstalk] it's one thing to come on and say, "I'm getting great results," it's another to be like, "This is how much money we're making off of it," so keep that coming. Oli: Good. The Event Format Kathleen: Let's talk about the event format, because I think that's really the next thing here is, exactly what do these events look like, where were they held, what was the cost structure, how many people did you target, et cetera? Oli: Sure. So we can run through them in detail. So the first event that we ran was in San Diego, and it was a two-day workshop. And it was sharply focused on people being able to go from information to implementation. So rather than just going to the event and getting information, that they would take home and hopefully execute themselves, we would largely be able to give them pre-built, pre-packaged, well-engineered marketing that they could go and put to work immediately in their business. So we could almost do a lot of the work for them, and create these marketing campaigns that they could deploy themselves, but take away a lot of the strain and the struggle that comes with doing it themselves. And so we called the event The Automation Playbook, because really it was largely about creating this predictable lead to customer journey, and having these playbooks, these campaigns, put into their business. And so what we decided to do was run these events so they were very, they were easy for people to be able to make the decision to come. So the price point was only $97.00 to attend the workshop. But because of- Kathleen: That's a no-brainer. Upselling Event Registrants Oli: Absolutely, no-brainer, right? But in order to make this a different, you know we're not going to get rich, and you could also argue how much value can you really also give for $97.00? And so what we did was, something that really goes against what most people will tell you about these events. And so what we did was, we actually got people to take a free trial of our membership at the time, of Player's Club, which was a inner-circle, my inner-circle, which was $400.00 a month. So what it meant was, just so you understand how it looked, they came and registered for the workshop for $97.00, but they also took a 30 day test drive of Player's Club. And it so happened the things that we would talk about at the workshop were the things that they'd get as part of membership. So they actually get these campaigns, these playbooks as part of membership anyway. So we obviously wanted them to continue the journey with us beyond this. But that meant then, we were really converting the workshop from a sales mechanism, to actually being more of a membership event. So it was a very different feeling. We actually spent most of our time at the event engendering them, indoctrinating them to the value of membership, and really getting the results for them that they wanted with the time that we had together. So it meant that after the 30 days, they would then hopefully continue as a member. And that's really where our revenue was going to be based in the back end, rather than in the front. And so it was on us to perform, and we did that, we did that very well. Oli's Event Marketing Plan Oli: What we ended up doing, to give you the exact numbers, and how we got people to the event, was, we have a little advantage, maybe, over some because I have a name in the industry, I suppose, speaking at different events. But, so we have a small list, in California, we had about, and a little wider than that, we had a list about five and a half thousand people, which is not insignificant, but they were people that were on our list. But we also knew that we wanted to go out to the market and meet them where they were, so we actually procured a list of 1200 businesses in the local area. So a very targeted list that we purchased from InfoUSA, to be able to target people with direct mail. Now a lot of you might be thinking, "Well in a digital age, why, why would we do that? Can we find other ways of doing this?" Well, we did a two-step direct mail campaign to these people, which actually prevailed to be the most expensive people to actually put into the event, but have subsequently, now we know all the numbers on the back end, actually prevailed to be the best long-term members and customers for us. And that worked extremely well. So we did email to our house list, to our targeted list of people that we'd already got, we also did some internal lead generation with text messaging, so asking people on our list, "Text the words San Diego," or "Diego," whatever it was, back, and then we would send them the information and invitation to then event, and then we also did ringless voicemail as well. So we did a recorded message that would show on their phone. And we got them then to text us back from that ringless voicemail, for us to then send the information about the event. So all in all, the net result was we ended up having, we ended up doing, what was it now, let me have a quick look here, I had to make a note of it for you. We sold 32 tickets to the event. Measuring Event ROI Oli: Now again, on high-level you may look at that and think, "Gosh Oli, 32 people? It doesn't sound like a lot of people in the room, how'd you make that work?" Well least we forget, they paid $97, which liquidated the cost of running the event for the two dates. You know, to get the hotel, and refreshments and that kind of thing, liquidated the cost for us. But also, because we promoted this in a four-week window, remember they were taking the 30 day trial of membership, they weren't actually charged their $400 for the membership, until after the event. Well what that meant was, only 10 people out of the 32 actually canceled membership, because they loved the event, they loved what we delivered, and they wanted to continue being a member. And that was fantastic because now we've got reoccurring revenue, obviously, from those people. And we also took the opportunity at the event to offer them an opportunity to apply for our Mastermind. So what it meant was 10 people out of the 32, they applied to become a Mastermind member at $15,000 a year, and six of those people actually bought. They didn't buy to pay over the year, they actually paid in full. So it looked like out of those 32 people it's a massive number per delegate that were there, of course. $93,000 in revenue, up front revenue, was generated from the event. And then, $8,000 of recurring revenue on the back end! And what I can tell you is, that model and that run rate, the stick rate, the attrition, was a nine, ended up to be a nine and a half month stick rate at $400.00 a month. Kathleen: Wow. Oli: So, fantastic lifetime value for using an event as a way to acquire members as well, and get them to stick. They actually ended up to be very, very good members, because not all lead sources are obviously the same, and what I'm trying to say here, if you get my point, is if we'd have acquired members through Facebook advertising, for example, then the cost of acquisition might have been less, than running an event, but the stick rate might not have been the same. It could have been three months, two months, as it has been in some circumstances. So, worked extremely well. Kathleen: Yeah, I have so many questions for you. But the first thing I think that really jumps out at me from listening to you talk, is that events, one of the reasons that events probably have a terrible reputation, is that I think too many businesses hold events thinking the event itself is going to be the money-maker. And what I'm hearing you say is really, the event is just essentially the gateway drug or the tripwire, to what is really a bigger offer that you have, and so if I'm listening to this, I think the first thing that I would be thinking is, "What is it that I'm really trying to sell?" It's not the ticket to the event, that's just the promise that the person's going to show up and the way to cover the cost. I need something bigger, longer term, perhaps recurring, that I'm really looking to sell to them, is that right? Oli: Yeah, absolutely. I think you've always got to start with the end in mind, and if you think really about this, the journey that you want to take people on, and the experience, on that journey, that you want them to have. I think what I really like about events is, and I'm totally sold on this now of course, but what I really like about these types of events is really the proximity and the bond that you can have with people, because you find out so much more about people's fears, frustrations, challenges, objections, and that then allows you to be able to iterate and change your offers and the way that you talk about things, in a much more accurate way to mirror and match those problems that you're solving for people, because of the time that you're spending with each other. Using Events for Audience Research Oli: And of course, you can also, I found out, find out very succinctly why people are also taking advantage of these offers, why they're continuing in membership, what they really thought about the experience, because they're going to give you that feedback. You're going to get it a lot quicker than you perhaps would in terms of some level of delay from a webinar, for example, or a post, you know, an NPS follow-up. Which are all great by the way, but there's nothing quite like events to be able to have that interaction with people. Kathleen: That's a really good point, because there's a big difference. You know marketers talk a good game about doing persona research and audience research, and there's a difference between setting an appointment and saying, "I'm going to call you and ask you 10 questions for my audience research," and sitting and having a cup of coffee with somebody before a workshop presentation. I think in the latter case, you get a much less guarded, more candid set of feedback than you do when you're in a structured interview setting. So that's an interesting point that you make there. Oli: Yeah, I think we also really embodied that feedback loop, because when you do an event like this, you get to know very, very quickly whether or not something works or it doesn't work or it resonates or it doesn't. And I remember listening to, I actually asked the question at the event, "Is there any reason why you wouldn't continue the journey in membership beyond this point? Is there any reason why you would cancel, I'd love to find out." Not to, if not for any other reason than I don't feel that we will have done our job, and it's my duty to find out how we can best serve you, and so I'd love to know your candid feedback, so please give that to me. And I think because I was just very authentic with that as well, that helped. But because it was different, you're face-to-face, toe-to-toe with these people, it really, you don't need to be something that you're not, right? You're engineering something for their benefit. I think people could tell that and see that, that you actually cared. And I think... You've got to go into these things in the right way, and I think the thing that we did that, somebody's looking at adding information, education, training, mentorship, whatever to their business, and they were thinking about doing this kind of model with a ticket and then a trial of membership, I think it really gave people the opportunity to find out whether or not we were right for them. It gave them a taste of, so rather than doing a lot of indoctrinating, a lot of reselling, a lot of reaffirming when they onboarded as a member, now we could do that in the confines of an event. That's probably the reason why it worked so well long term. Using Direct Mail for Event Promotion Kathleen: Yeah. All right, I'm going to shift gears, and I want to ask you some more kind of nitty-gritty questions. You talked about some interesting things in terms of how you acquired registrants, or put butts in seats, as we like to say. You talked about direct mail, and you mentioned you got your list from Info USA, which is definitely a source that I'm familiar with, and to clarify, you really purchased that list to do direct mail, not to do email campaigns, correct? Oli: Yeah, that's right. Kathleen: Yeah. So how many different direct mail pieces did you do, like for one individual recipient? Oli: So we did a two-step direct mail campaign, so sent an eight page sales letter to begin with, to all of those people, and then we followed that up with, anybody that didn't respond, with a postcard, a typical postcard, to again take people to, the actual call to action was one, to go to a vanity URL just so we could track the traffic and then obviously the opt-ins, and then secondly, to text a keyword. Because pretty much when people receive direct mail these days, they're not far away from their mobile phones, let alone going online and keying something in. You'd actually be surprised that the majority of people actually text in to receive the information for us, and then we have an automated text conversation, to then get them to the point where they had the opportunity to purchase a ticket. Kathleen: Now, if my memory serves, I seem to recall you mentioning that having two steps in that direct mail sequence was really important, because, even though you had the eight page sales letter, which would seem like, boy if anything was going to convince them it would be those eight pages, and then you followed it with a very simple postcard. Am I right in remembering that on that second step you actually had a really good response rate? Oli: It was almost double. Kathleen: Wow. Oli: It was almost double. In fact I think for this first event that we're just talking about here, it was like 60%. Kathleen: Wow. Oli: So, it was a lot, lot better response than just taking the first step. So we would have basically not, we would have got a whole lot less registrants from the direct mail. It would've almost meant that it wasn't profitable almost to run the first step.It would have just been one step. So actually by investing into two it actually paid dividends. And to be honest, multi-step, multi-media follow-up works every single day. So having this mix really works, and of course once they were in the funnel, once we'd actually lead-generated them, then they weren't just getting, they were getting all sorts of media as well to get them to convert. And the thing that we should also talk about, really is, and you're probably coming on to it, is how we got people to actually show up, because one of the big things with events is, and you'll hear this a lot in the industry is, they'll be like, "Yeah, we can get registrants, we just can't get them to actually show up," Kathleen: Yeah. Oli: And our show up rate across five events now, is 90-odd percent- Kathleen: That's huge! Oli: I can't remember the exact number. Kathleen: That's so huge! I run a HubSpot user group where I'm located in Maryland, and my rule of thumb is to expect about 50% of the people to show up. Now I don't charge for it, which probably if I charged money, I'm not allowed to do that, but if I could? It would probably make a little bit of a difference, but that's huge. Oli: Yeah, yeah. It's so big, because, and you have to invest into that, it's a little bit like the lead generation on the front end, you know that it's going to be a higher cost of registrant, for example, but arguably a higher quality. It could be the least cost of, it could be the lowest cost of acquiring a customer, as well, so that is a consideration. We did direct mail when people bought a ticket, we actually sent a box in the mail. So you can imagine, you buy a $97.00 ticket to a workshop, you're not getting any direct mail from that. Because we knew our numbers on the back end, we knew the value of the membership, we know how we can really help people, it meant that we could invest in that relationship. So we did a shock and awe box in the mail. We even did a customized tee-shirt, as well, that was sent to them. We had a whole welcome package that was sent over, a whole bunch of, it was like a box of goodies, really, that they got before they even got to the event. Because really what we're doing is, we're not just welcoming them to buying a ticket, but now we're reselling them on the benefits immediately of becoming a member, which clearly works well. Kathleen: All right. So you did these two direct mail pieces, how far apart were they sent? Oli: So we did, it was about five days, there or thereabouts. You could send them in slightly closer succession, the thing with direct mail is that there's a little bit of latency, where there's kind of the factor that they hang around, a little bit. See the funny thing is with it, is people that didn't respond to the first direct mail piece, they got the second, but sometimes that we actually found that they actually came back and actually responded from the first, because we used a way to track the difference, to discern the difference between the two direct mail pieces that we used. This is actually interesting numbers, that they got the second piece but didn't respond, but did from the first, even though they got the second. Kathleen: Yeah, it just gave them that nudge that they needed. Oli: Nudge, yeah. Just like an eight page sounds like, it doesn't really kind of go away, like it hangs around a bit, you know? Text Campaigns for Event Promotion Kathleen: Yeah. Now, you mentioned you directed them to a vanity URL so that you could track, and you also mentioned getting people to text. What was the platform that you used for the texting campaign? Oli: So we used Fix Your Funnel for the text campaign, but if you wanted to use something that was more HubSpot centric, then Yeti Text is a great alternative. It's made by the same people but just more focused into HubSpot. And that would be something to consider. Kathleen: And did the same platform also provide you with the ringless voicemail? Oli: Yep, they do ringless from there as well, but we didn't actually use them, we used a company called Slybroadcast which actually, funnily enough they actually use on the back end of their service anyway, so truly integrated. Yeah, and that's what we used for the ringless voicemail. I was very intentional with the ringless voicemail, was to say, "Hey it's Oli Billson here, I just wanted to reach out to you, obviously I've got your voicemail, but I just wanted to leave a quick note just to say I'd love for you to attend the Automation Playbook Live in San Diego, which is coming up in a few weeks. And right now is a great time to lock in your spot because we've got a few spaces left. Just text me back on this number, and I'll make sure that we will send you a link to find out more information." So what I did very intentionally was, the number that I called from doing the ringless voicemail, is actually the unified number for two-way texting, so I knew that when they picked it up, they could just text their number back that actually gave them the voicemail in the first place and that match really worked well. Kathleen: Now this is a really nitty-gritty question, but I need to ask it, because I've played around with texting and ringless voicemail campaigns, and a lot of the providers that I've worked with, they don't necessarily give you a full phone number, they give you a separate, special number for texting that doesn't look like a phone number? But I feel like, with ringless voicemail it doesn't seem like that would work as well, because it wouldn't look like a real person's number. So in your case, what did that look like? Oli: Yeah, so what we do is we buy, we bought a local number, that was local to where the event was. So when we did this in Toronto, we bought a Toronto number, and when we ran it in Austin, I bought an Austin number. And so, what that meant was, yes it was a local landline number, but we were just telling them that they could text back on that number. And it worked, it worked insanely well. I guess somebody's thought process wouldn't be, "This is obviously not a mobile number," but they do know that it's the local number, and they're tying in, "He said San Diego, this is a San Diego area code, I am in San Diego, okay." Kathleen: Yeah. Oli: Regardless of whatever he said I could text in, and you know there's a match there in some way. Kathleen: Yeah, thanks for clarifying that, because I think it's like those little details that really matter when you're doing these things, and they're the things that are the easiest to screw up if you haven't done them before. So you got people to come to the landing page, they engaged with the text campaign, they got the ringless voicemail, if they signed up you then sent them the box? What was in the box? The "Shock and Awe" Box Oli: Yeah, so, a bunch of, a bunch of things. I think most people wouldn't have expected to see everything that we put in there. So we had a branded tee-shirt. So we had a tee-shirt that was printed by us from, I think it was Custom Ink, was the website. And it was a lovely like, a really nice tee-shirt, it wasn't just like a crappy Fruit of the Loom thing, it was a nice branded tee-shirt. And then we had an agenda, for the event, a printed agenda for the event. It also had a stick letter, which is a letter, really that they'd read that we know that they would get, congratulating them on the decision that they'd made, and again in kind of reselling the benefit of the event. And then we put a bunch of testimonials, like a whole brochure, a 32-page brochure of testimonials from people that, if they're marketers, they would probably know who they are. So if somebody was like an Infusionsoft user, then they would know the CEO of Infusionsoft, we have a testimonial from them. If there was, just all sorts of different people who are like celebrities I suppose, in the marketing space, I have testimonials from them because they paid me for consulting or whatever it may be so I've got testimonials. And then also a bunch of transformative testimonials as well, from just normal people that they can relate to in lots of different industries, service-based businesses, client-based businesses as well and that I've helped over the years as well. So I sent them that for proof, and that really helped as well. And then we sent them a couple of of gimmicky things, like a little bookmark that they could use that was branded. We were going to do, like usually when we do this stuff we usually like to appeal to people's taste, so you could send some cookies or something like that in the box. We didn't do that in this particular case, but it's something that you could do in the future and you could tie them eating that to something in the letter, like you could reference it. Kathleen: Like "Take a bite out of your competition" or? Oli: Yeah, exactly. Yeah yeah yeah. So we just tried to create a situation that, all of the different pieces are paid for and everything in there, they all feel like, it's only a little thing, but they all feel different, that's more of a tactile thing. So people wanted to go through it and keep seeing what was in the box, and it had pink shredded paper- Kathleen: Oh, crinkle? Oli: Underneath it, they all sat on top of that. Yeah, that's it. So it didn't, they weren't rattling around in the box, you know what I mean? Kathleen: Yeah. Oli: And the box itself, I was on a podcast a couple of weeks ago with my friend Bill Glazer, and Bill was like, "I've still got the box!" Like, he's actually got it there, right? Because it was a high-quality, printed, branded box that we had. And, yeah. And we sent it FedEx as well, so again, all of those things kind of matter, because you know that it's like Christmas when somebody is opening it. Kathleen: It's so funny, I used to own an agency and we did a lot of, we called it dimensional mail, but it's essentially direct mail in a three dimensional package, with stuff in it, right? And it's amazing, the difference in response rates and reactions to people who get a box, than from people who get flat mail. I mean we used to have response rates of like 15 to 20%, and direct mail as you know, it's usually like 1 to 2%. Because everybody likes getting a box, they think it's like, "I might be getting a present," right? Oli: Exactly, yeah. Kathleen: And boxes get past gatekeepers, which is also a great thing. Oli: Absolutely. Measuring the Results of Oli's Events Kathleen: Well I love this, so I want to just circle back and recap, and let's talk again about what it cost you to put the event on, and then what your results were because I want to just drive that point home, of what this meant in terms of ROI. Oli: Sure thing. So the first event that we ran as I mentioned, $93,000 in front-end revenue and just under $8,000 in monthly recurring revenue. So then what we did was, I replicated exactly the same model in Toronto so I looked at another area, like another hub that would work, and I wanted to try Canada, so I did exactly the same thing. And in this case we generate 53 ticket sales, not 32, and it meant that we had 35 people out of the 53 continue in membership, so that was like $13,800 in recurring revenue, that we had from that event, right, because there was a lot more tickets that we sold, and $80,000 in front end revenue because nine people applied for Mastermind and five people became members at 15 grand each. So again, another 80 grand plus another nearly 14 grand a month in recurring revenue, which was great, okay? So those are the two results that we had, and I was like, "Don't stop now!" You know, don't stop doing this. So I was speaking at the ManyChat conference in Austin at the end of last year, and I thought, well I'm speaking at this conference, it was super last minute, super last minute, but I decided to put on another event. And I only had two weeks to promote it, so I knew that I wasn't going to sell like 50-dd tickets, 35 tickets, but because of how good the back end was on doing it, I thought, "What the Hell, I'll do it anyway." So I ran it in Austin and we only sold 17 tickets, which again, might sound like, ugh! That's not great- Kathleen: Well you're already there, anyway. Yeah. Oli: I'm already there anyway, right? But from that, 12 people that continued their memberships, out of 17, that was like $4,700 a month of recurring revenue, which was great. And six people applied to become Mastermind members, and five actually became members. So it was a little over $75,000 there from what was, and that was a one-day event because it was all very much last minute, I couldn't do my usual two-day event, so that's like $75,000 for one day, and then also then of course we've got $5,000 coming in from the recurring, from one day, so it made sense like, this is great, keep doing it. Kathleen: Yeah. It sounds like it's about $100,000 or more in revenue, per event. Can you, have you ever quantified fully what it costs you to put in on, not just the hotel and the catering, but the cost of acquisition? Oli: Yeah, sure. So for a two-day event, the first one that we ever ran, we ran on a real shoestring budget. So we didn't do catering. We put it in a really nice hotel, we did it at the Andaz Hotel in San Diego, which is downtown, it's a lovely place, great experience for a place, but we just didn't do lunch and we didn't do coffee and we didn't do that type of thing. We actually went to Starbuck's and bought the coffee ourselves, it was like, that kind of ghetto. But our cost for running the event was like, three and a half thousand dollars, that was it. That included room hire, we didn't do food and beverage with the hotel, we managed to negotiate it all, so that was really light. $3500 is negligible, right? What it worked out to in Toronto and Austin for those events, Austin was a bit different, we ran it at the Fairmont for one day, so it was a little bit more that what you'd expect to be half of that cost, and we started to put lunches on them. So what we found was, some people that wanted to consider joining Mastermind, we actually used that as a vehicle to then bring them into a lunch, so that I could actually get to know them better, not just what was on paper. We actually wanted to buy them lunch, because I wanted to find out more about them and whether or not we could really help them, and a great way to do that is to get to know people over lunch, after they've made their application. So there were some other costs, but I think on average, for a two-day event, it was under $5,000, for sure. Kathleen: Wow, that's insane ROI, so, there you go. That seems like a no-brainer! And you've been pretty generous in sharing, I know online and in different places, some examples of some of the things you've sent out, and so maybe I'll try and see if I can dig up some of that and include it in the show notes. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Before we wrap though, I have two questions that I always ask my guests, and I'd love to know what you have to say. I talk a lot of people doing inbound marketing on this podcast, when you think about inbound marketing today, company or individual, is there a certain person or company that stands out as doing it really well right now? Oli: I think from an inbound perspective, I think that you can really learn a lot from the education that, obviously HubSpot is such a big player, and you're so involved in their ecosystem, they're doing great stuff. But people like Marcus Sheridan, people like that, great people to follow, great people to model, and there's no, we're not short of great examples of inbound from those guys at all really. And some of the things, I was just on your website actually, earlier today, and you were, what was I searching? Oh, I was searching some definitions, this is how powerful inbound can be, I was searching some definitions for sales teams stages. And I was just setting up a new pipeline, and you were like the first result. IMPACT was the first result for discerning MQLs, SQL, and so I was like, "That's just the power of that." We're on a podcast together now, which is great, but that's amazing, isn't it, you know? Kathleen: It's cool when this stuff actually works. Oli: Absolutely, yeah. Absolutely. Kathleen: No, it is. Well the other question I have, and I always love, I love asking this because selfishly I want to know the answer, is digital marketing is just changing so quickly, there's so much happening. It's like drinking from a fire hose, and the biggest complaint I hear from marketers is just, "How do I stay up-to-date?" And so, how do you personally stay up-to-date? Do you have any go-to sources of information that you rely on so that you're always current on what's happening in the world of digital marketing? Oli: I think that people can really get hung up on doing a lot of learning, and not enough implementing. I would say again, none of us are short of resources and advice that we can go and get for free, or paid, whether it's programs or courses or groups or whatever. Or podcasts we could listen to, but really the learning comes from doing. And what I'd say, my advice to somebody is, really you don't have to spend too much time in this field to figure out what you could do, you just need to figure out what you should focus on, and go and do it. And make your own distinctions as you go, on what's working based on the numbers and the data to guide you on where the deficiencies are, so that you can plug those gaps and get help and support where you need them. And then hire in help for people to help you who have those specialist skills, to be able to do it. So I think I'm really big on implementation, and information's great, but there's nothing better than actually doing it. Kathleen: Yeah, that's great advice because I do think that it would be very easy to spend, as you say, spend all your time trying to learn and then really falling victim to shiny object syndrome, and thinking, "Oh, I just learned this, I need to try that," like you've got to kind of pick a few things and test them, and then if they work stick with them. So, great advice. Well Oliver I have learned so much, I learned so much when I listened to you speak at Digital Marketer, but it was, I'm actually really glad I got to hear it a second time around, because there were some new details that you shared that were so interesting, and we do a lot of events, so hopefully you feel like imitation is the sincerest form of flattery [crosstalk] because we may try some of those things. How Connect With Oli Billson Kathleen: But if somebody is listening and wants to learn more about this or about what you're doing or check out information on your events or your company, what's the nest way for them to connect with you online? Oli: Sure, so they should go to nextlevelbusiness.com/learn, and I actually put together a free resource for people that are there, who may want to learn about how to drive qualified leads into sales appointments, to actually have good quality sales conversations and that's using our framework called the Funnel Framework. So I've prepared a bit of training to give to your listeners, which it was previously a paid-for premium training, but you can go and get access to it, get a 24-hour pass to it at least to go and watch it, at nextlevelbusiness.com/learn, and you can go there and go and check it out. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: Perfect, I will definitely put the link to that in the show notes. Thank you so much, this was really fun, and great to dig in on all the details. If you're listening and you enjoyed what you heard or you learned something new, of course I would appreciate it if you would leave a five star review on Apple podcasts for the Inbound Success podcast, and if you know someone doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. Kathleen: Thanks again, Oli! Oli: Thank you, cheers.

What makes some podcasts successful while others languish and fail? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, podcast strategy and production expert Jeff Large talks about how to approach podcast promotion, from before you even begin recording, through to promoting individual episodes. Jeff is the Founder of Come Alive Creative, a podcast strategy and production company that works with businesses and executives to develop and produce podcasts that build trust with their customers, establish authority, market their services, and engage their audiences. In this week's episode, Jeff shares how he works with clients before, during and after recording podcasts to set them up for success when it comes to podcast promotion. 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 Jeff include: Podcast promotion actually starts before the launch of the podcast itself when you ask yourself, "What is my goal and who is my target audience?" Defining your goal is important. Is it reach? Engagement? Something else? The answer to this question will help define what your promotion strategy should be. Understanding your audience is equally important because your podcast needs to hit on a pain point that they have. It doesn't matter how good your promotional strategy is, if you don't have a good product. One and four Americans are currently listening to podcasts, so how you approach promotion will differ if your audience is already listening versus if they have never listened to a podcast. If your audience is not already avid podcast listeners, language is very important. For example, when you use certain language, like "subscribe to my podcast" versus "listen to my podcast", subscription has this connotation that I need to pay for it. Show notes are an important part of podcast promotion and should be approached like any other marketing copy in terms of SEO optimization and conversion copywriting. 20% of adults living in the US and the UK have long lasting disabilities and that makes it important to include transcripts of your podcast in the show notes. Jeff prefers Simplecast or Megaphone for podcast hosting. When it comes to social media, he's had the most success on LinkedIn and Twitter. One tip Jeff shared for social promotion was to write good excerpts of your podcast and create "quotables" - audio snippets that can be embedded into social posts. If you have guests on your podcast, don't be afraid to be direct and ask them to promote it for you. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the Come Alive Creative website Visit Jeff's personal website Follow Jeff on Twitter Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn Read Jeff's article on How to Grow Your Podcast Audience Listen to the podcast to learn the strategies and tactics for successful podcast promotion. 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 Jeff Large who is the owner of Come Alive Creative, which is a podcast strategy and production company. Welcome, Jeff. Jeff Large (Guest): Hello, hello. Jeff and Kathleen having a blast while recording this episode Kathleen: Glad to have you here. Jeff: Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm glad we got to connect in this fashion. Kathleen: Yeah, it's a little intimidating because you know, I kind of do this podcast, but I wouldn't call myself a podcasting pro, and I'm interviewing the person who teaches and helps other people do podcasting well, so I hope I don't mess up. Jeff: Oh, the feeling is mutual because you told me how many stats I need to have prepared to actually be beneficial for your audience, and so fortunately I've been working on an article for the past four hours this morning that have all to do with the numbers, and I'm hoping I can just remember most of it offhand. Kathleen: Well, it's not a test, so we'll talk through it, and we're going to get through it, but I'm really excited to have you because I've had a few other guests on who have talked about podcasting and this podcast is all about inbound marketing and podcasting itself is a very interesting tactic or channel that you can use for inbound marketing. But we tend to have focused on why you should podcast in and of itself, being a guest on podcasts. What I think it's still interesting and selfishly why I wanted to have you on is that it's one thing to do a podcast or to be on a podcast, but it's kind of the whole old the tree that fell in the forest analogy. If you do a podcast, and nobody listens, what's the point? And so, I've always been interested in the topic of promotion and that's something that you've done a lot of work on, you're doing more research on and advising clients on, so I'm going to pick your brain and extract all the good knowledge you have on podcast promotion today. Jeff: All right, excellent. About Jeff Large and Come Alive Creative Kathleen: Maybe we can start out, and you could tell my audience a little bit about yourself, and Come Alive Creative, and how you wound up specializing in this because it's a very interesting niche field. Jeff: Okay. What would be most beneficial? Because obviously there's a huge part of anyone's story. Kathleen: Well, let's start with you talking about what Come Alive Creative is and what you're doing now, and we can go from there. How about that? Jeff: Oh, okay, the short story on Come Alive, and the short story on me for probably the most recent context is I originally was a teacher, formerly trained, just a couple classes shy of my Masters. Probably ... I think we've been running about five or six years now. Come Alive started off as a web dev and digital marketing agency, went through a few different rounds of nicheing in different areas over the years like E-commerce in some different spots. And then finally about I believe it was 2016 it was about two-ish years ago now, two-ish or three-ish years ago, that for a variety of reasons decided to niche down just on podcasting, and so we off-boarded all of our clients. We only had maybe one or two at the time that were actually getting podcast services from us. And so we got rid of everyone, kind of started fresh, rewrote the site, did a bunch of things along those lines, and so since then have been specializing on the podcast strategy and production side of things. Kathleen: Great. I mean, it's amazing to me just how podcasts have exploded in the last few years. It's good and bad, right? It's good because there's so much great new content being created, but it's also bad because there's a lot of people who are just running into having a podcast because they think they need to and kind of taken this check-the-box approach. And so, while there's also a lot of great new content, there's a lot of new crummy content that is being created without a lot of strategy and thought behind it. So I do think it's interesting that you work with clients on the strategy side as well. Jeff: Yeah, yep. Kathleen: So, when it comes to podcast promotion, again, we're not going to spend a lot of time talking about why you should podcast or what your podcast should be focused on, or from a technical standpoint how to do it. Assuming somebody already has a podcast, and they would like to get it in front of a bigger audience, they would like to grow their listener base, can you talk me through some of the different ways that you approach that with the clients that you work with? Jeff: Okay. I think in order to do that well, this is a massive topic. Kathleen: Yeah, it is. Jeff: So, let me give you some maybe boundaries, and then we can explore what's most interesting. You want to think about it in terms of before you launch and after you launch. You want to think about it in terms of specific actionable things that you can do that there's really no ... there's no definitive this is the best way to do it type of guide. It's more of like, this is what we know from experience and research. And then there's also the elements of are you marketing to people that are already listening to podcasts or people who are not already listening to podcasts? Kathleen: Ooh, that's a good point. Jeff: So, I mean we can tackle any of that. What's most- Promoting Your Podcast: Before The Launch Kathleen: Let's start with before the launch. I think I like that approach. Jeff: Okay, so before the launch, hands down the thing that I'm always going to ask any prospect that comes through our funnel is, "What is your goal and who is your target audience?" And so with those two things, those are just defaults for me to good marketing and depending on what your goal is, can change the success, or the quote unquote success of your podcast where I think by default a lot of us just go to, "Hey, I want as many downloads as I can get." And I'm going to ask the question why, because it's not always the case. Sometimes you don't need reach, you need engagement, or you need these other things depending on what those goals are. And then secondly, we have to know who we're talking to in order to best cater to them, and for those types of things I could take a lot of nods from say, Andy Crestodina and his work at Orbit Media. I appreciate Joanna Wiebe in CopyHackers, Liana Patch talks about this a bit, Keeley Moore. There's a lot of really good marketers and copywriters that talk about the need for surveys, research, dig through those book reviews, review Quora. What is your industry or your topic talking about, and educate yourself in a way that instead of just waking up and going, "Hey, I got this great idea," and putting it out there in the wild for your article or your cast or whatever happens to be, but you're actually making informed decisions based on what they want to know and what will best serve them. Kathleen: Yeah, it's so interesting, you're the second person I've spoken to whose talked about looking at book reviews as a way of doing market research, and that's an approach that I think very few people do, but it's a gold mine. Jeff: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, it's crazy. I can tell you, say for one of our casts just in the prelim stage, it's really important really at the end of the day to vet these ideas. The more that I can guarantee success before I ever spend a moment or a dollar on anything, the better off obviously I'm going to be. And so, one of the casts that we've recently created was geared towards digital marketers, and I know you and I talked about this a little bit beforehand, but ways that I was vetting it is that I'm looking at where I'm getting my content from. I have the unfair advantage of I've already interviewed a lot of digital marketers on my own podcast, and I can see the analytics of whose episodes resonated better than others both in terms of the person that I had on, and the topic they were talking about. So, I'm able to gear stuff around that. Because of that, I had relationships with these people, so I interviewed, sent a couple really basic questions to kind of get me started in terms of what is the problem you're actually having as a digital marketer, got feedback from probably a pool of maybe 15, 20 different people that I sincerely trust. And so, it was for me very quantified data. And then from there, as I introduce other ideas that might not be featuring these particular people, or exactly addressing their problems, I'm going on Amazon and looking at okay, what are the top book reviews? Say one that I'm reading right now ... One Page Marketing Plan, I had to look at the shelf, is one that I'm going through now. And that has, at this point, it might have over 1000 five star reviews. And so, I know I'm pretty safe to feature information from this book on this podcast because it's already getting ... it's highly received in that way. And so, just doing that, and then additional things that we did were look at Quora, just look through the different areas that I know these people are hanging out, and figuring out what is it that they need listening to these other episodes, and vetting the ideas before they ever get created as much as possible. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a great point. I actually had a podcast before this one, and I was, at the time, completely guilty of what I talked about earlier which is thinking I just need to have a podcast. So, I went and created one, and there was no strategy behind it, and it was fun to make and all, but about 15 episodes in, I saw the writing on the wall that it was time consuming and wasn't going to get me the results I was looking for. And so, that was a big lesson learned. When I created this one, I did a lot of what you were talking about, which was really thinking through who am I trying to reach with this, and what is the outcome that I would like to have at the end of the day. And it has produced a far more sustainable, and much more gratifying podcast to create because I'll be honest, in the early days I did nothing to promote this podcast. I just did it, and put it out there. And I mean, I might've shared it every now and then on social, but it was a pretty lame and lackluster promotion strategy. But it still got listeners, and I think that really proves the point that you talked about which is that if the underlying premise is sound, and the strategy is sound, that in and of itself will solve for some of the challenge. Jeff: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, even to that note, what this really comes down to is it doesn't matter how good your promotional strategy is, if you don't have a good product, you're promoting not a good product. And you're going to be limited in that way. And so, that's why for me, it's so key. I think you could easily get analysis paralysis and spend too much time, and there still is that shipped is better than perfect type philosophies that you need to cross reference it against. But at the same time, we need to make the best possible product we can, both from a technical standpoint, that content standpoint, a listening standpoint, there's a lot of factors that go into what makes up a good cast before we can realistically have that conversation about let's promote it. Podcast Promotion: After The Episode Kathleen: Amen. Yeah, the best marketing in the world can't make up for a terrible product. I could not agree more. Let's say there is someone who has put that work in on the front end, on the strategy, and they've got a really solid concept and topics, and format, then what? When you think about the episode is made. Jeff: Yeah, see this is where it gets kind of crazy. Which route should we go now? Do we want to think about it in the context of ... actually, let me flip it back on you. Let me ask you a question. What kind of cast is this? Is it a narrative style cast where kind of public radio-esque? Or is it going to be an educational based type podcast, maybe interview like what we're doing now? Kathleen: I mean, I would say my audience by and large is, if they're podcasting, they're podcasting to establish thought leadership or drive leads for their business, so odds are it's the second type. Jeff: Okay, yep. And that's fine. That's good for context, because the way that you would approach those would be drastically ... ah, maybe not drastically, that's kind of a big statement. But they would be different. That plays into more of kind of holistically, and I don't think I need to touch on it as much, because it doesn't affect ... when you're niched, it's not as important but there is this element that we need to consider from the people that are already listening and that are already kind of podcast advocates, and then there's the people that are not. And the thing that we need to realize is that it's around one and four Americans are currently listening to podcasts. And then there's actually a fair amount of studies that are being released, and I don't have these numbers off the top of my head, but I know Australia's done some work, I think there's been some work recently in Europe, and then also I have an acquaintance of mine whose done a fair amount of work even in South Africa in terms of listenership across the board. And overall, we're looking at growth for sure, but when we're realistic with ourselves, most people don't listen yet. And so, for me, when you're in it, it's really easy to think, "Podcast, podcast, podcast." But that's just not the case. And so, when you are doing shows that need to appeal to numbers, that need to appeal to reach and quantity more so than just the quality of audience, we need to start thinking about where are those people who are not listening? What can we do to make them able to listen? And just really broadly speaking, I mean, it's everything from ... I know they've done certain more popular shows might pull out billboards, and it could just be like a kind of a fancy, more movie style image with the simple title, and then there's a very, very easy call to action, like listen on iTunes. Or listen on Apple Podcast and there's that logo. Or it might be fliers that you hand out at an event, kind of like guerrilla marketing style stuff. But it's just realizing where are those people who aren't listening, and how you pull them in. I think for me, a big piece of my own personal background is literature and language, and I think language matters a lot because there's been ... Triton Digital slash Edison Research put out this video, I think it's gotta be available online somewhere, but they played it at Podcast Movement this past year, the one that was in Philly, and it was these interviews with people who have never used a podcast before. And even that was super entertaining just to see how they reacted. And when you use certain language, like "subscribe to my podcast" versus "listen to my podcast", subscription has this connotation that I need to pay for it- Kathleen: Oh, that's interesting. Jeff: Yeah. It's stuff like that, that we just take for granted because we're so used to vernacular, and we're so used to the jargon that goes along. But for somebody that's hitting it for the first time ever, they're like, "I don't have a podcast app." And then we ask, "Do you have an iPhone?" And then they're like, "Yeah." And then we say, "Yeah you do, let me show you which one it is." And it's those kind of things, it's more of a usability. And so, we have to think about it really just dumbed down to if you have not interacted with this medium before, how can we talk about it? How can we present it and walk through? And maybe it's just you taking a couple of seconds on a social video that you put out there of like let me show you how to subscribe to my cast. And then you screenshot it, or whatever you're going to do. And it's simple things. And so, I think that's hopefully enough in that realm. Do you have any questions there? Kathleen: No, that makes a lot of sense. And I think people do forget to think about that, that we are so deep into this world of digital marketing and the lexicon around it is something that we're used to using. I had this realization this past two weeks, because I hired somebody new for my team. IMPACT is a digital marketing agency, we all do our marketing speak all day long. And the person I hired is actually going to be working on our content, and he does not have a marketing background. He has a writing and editing background. And we were like, "Perfect, that's what we need you to know. We can teach you marketing." But it was easy to forget, and in the first two weeks that he came on board, we're throwing around terms like SEO, and TOFU for top of the funnel, and he was just like, "What are you people talking about?" And it was a really good reminder that all this stuff that we talk about every day, and the language that we're used to using is not something that the average person uses, or is even familiar with. Jeff: Critical. Kathleen: Yeah. Jeff: Absolutely critical. So, all that stuff to say is just something you want to consider depending on who you're going after. So, it absolutely comes into play when we're talking about large project that need high amounts of downloads to justify when you are doing more of the story and entertainment style pieces. But I will say, we've spent, even as a company, we've spent a lot more time in what you're talking about. This thought leadership. A lot of the times, people will come to us because they want to build authority in the space, or thought leadership. They're trying to drive interest around a service or a product. They might want to convey say, the company culture, or have that inside look if they're like ... We have one company that we're courting right now, they do a lot of work with Advise financial advisors, and so they become the backend and they really like their culture, and they think it's good in that sense. And so, they want to be able to sort of pull back the curtain and show that to other people. And so, there's all these more niche reasons to podcast. We have another one, for example, it's geared towards ... we're in the middle of producing it now, it's in the healthcare space. It's geared towards specifically CDI, which I don't even remember off the top of my head what it stands for. It's like clinical documentation improvement, I believe? And so, basically how are doctors and nurses writing down the notes of when you're sick and you go tell them your symptoms to make sure that they're accurate and being tracked properly, and submitted to insurance properly. And so, it's like there's very niche audiences we're dealing with here. And so, that's why all of a sudden it doesn't matter if we appeal to the masses, we need to appeal to the right people well. And with that, there's again, a variety of things that we could touch on. And I want this to actually be helpful for you too. If I was going to do the shortlist, things like being consistent, guesting and cross promotion, leveraging the other aspects of our medium, so not only just the audio but the visual and the written, looking at things like our call to action, considering other aspects like accessibility, the networking pieces, repurposing content. There's a lot of areas we can dive into. So, again, lead the way. Where do you want to go? Podcast Promotion: Show Notes Kathleen: So, I'm gonna be selfish, as I usually am. It's funny, once I had a guest who came on and she said, "Is this really just a paid consultation in disguise?" And I was like, "Why yes, it is." So, selfishly, one thing that I'm really fascinated by is show notes. And there's a lot of content online about show notes, but not a lot of it is actually really helpful in terms of what some of the best practices are, and why you would do them? For example, we have five or six podcasts here at IMPACT, and the way we do show notes for each of them differs dramatically. In my case, I happen to transcribe fully the audio from my podcasts, and I have a complete transcription, but then I have like a summary at the top, if you will, for those who don't want to have to read the whole thing. Then we have other podcasts that don't have any transcription, they just put the main links, the key points, et cetera. I'd be interested in hearing you talk through kind of the pros and cons of some of the different approaches, and if there are certain approaches that work better when it comes to actually helping promote the podcast itself. Jeff: Okay. If we're looking at it from a copy standpoint, let's set the stage with what aspects we're looking at. So, for me, and anytime that we're approaching these, you gotta think about it from your title. That's obviously very self explanatory. You have to think about it from the excerpt and the summary, and so this is usually that shorter portion that when we're talking about websites is just that tiny excerpt that if you feature the post, the website post on the front page, like it's just that little snippet. Sometimes you automatically pull from the full article, sometimes you have a designated thing. It's also the piece that gets used on most podcasting platforms, so the distribution networks when you pull it up in your app, or if you're just searching Apple, or whatever it might be, or Google, it's that small snippet that explains what's going on. And then there's the actual show notes portion. And so, this is the element that would be usually associated with the post if you're putting your podcast, own episodes on your post on your site, or if you have the more filled out version on, say, if you're using a hosting company like a Bluehost or a Simple Cast, or whatever it might be. And then actually, the last part too where some people lump these two things together is the transcription. And if you decide to include that. So, again, for me, one of my big things that I like doing is I like learning from everywhere, and I just think certain people do stuff better than others. And so, for me this no longer becomes a podcasting problem, it's more of a copywriting problem, and I would default to most good copywriting practices. And so, again, some of those people that I mentioned earlier, like Andy, like Crestodina, or Wiebe, or these others, would be who I'm taking my hints towards. Or from, rather. And so, things like say, the excerpts. For me, these normally have to be brief, they should be engaging. You have to take it from the standpoint of somebody's just scrolling endless amount of content, what is going to grab your attention? And there has to be some sort of combination between a well written headline that represents the episode well that makes a promise and delivers on that promise so people learn to trust you, and then that excerpt should fill that out a little bit more. So, I get my attention caught by the headline of oh, this kinda fits the itch that I have right now, and then I can read that excerpt and go, "All right." Because for the majority of us, let's see here, I want to say mobile usership is a lot. I don't remember the number off the top of my head, but mobile ... the way that we're listening is more on mobile than anywhere else. Kathleen: Oh yeah. I believe that. Jeff: Yeah. And so, there's also been even a 10% increase over this past year in smart speakers, and so you're actually not even hitting any copy in that regard. It's usually you're already signed up for it, or you're seeing it through the app site. Actually, I take that back a little bit. But those are the kind of things you want to think about there. When it comes to the show notes themselves, again, this is where normal good writing practices come into play. We want to pay attention to things like keywords, and key phrases. We want to actually be leveraging anything that's going to positively influence our SEO. And so, for that type of stuff, I'm going to, again, default back to probably the work that your team's doing. Places like Yoast Blog, Moz Blog, different people that are actually companies and people that are authorities on SEO. I appreciate a lot of the work that say, even Donald Miller is doing with StoryBrand, and how he lays out ... It's more of a holistic website thing, but it's still just good in terms of conveying things well. And then last, and I think that one of the places that are really interesting for me is transcriptions, because there's this what I would consider a fallacy around if you have your transcriptions that you get better SEO. And I would argue, from everything that I've seen, that's not the case. Normally the way that we speak as humans, it doesn't lend itself to good SEO by any means. But we still, I would argue, want them. And I'll confess that not all of my podcasts have the transcriptions, but from an accessibility standpoint. And so, I had a really great conversation a while back with Kate Pescal. She's a professor out of Barcelona, and she actually does a lot of work with Epic Games, they're probably best known for Fortnite on their- Kathleen: Oh yes, I have a 12 year old boy. I know all about it. Jeff: Exactly. And so, she does a lot of transcription work for them, and she's just a disability expert. And so, even some of the stuff that she mentioned to me is that roughly like 20% of adults living in the US and the UK have long lasting disabilities. Often times there's some stats that say 70% of disabilities go completely unnoticed, so you're not even realizing you're having them. Not to mention the fact that we're sometimes in situations where we just can't listen. We might be at work and we're not able to listen, but we want to see this episode or this interview. And so, transcriptions really, from my point of view, should be utilized more as an accessibility piece, and more as an angle of inviting more people to come in and actually consume this content in a non-traditional way, or just a different way if they don't have access to that audio. Kathleen: I could not agree more. Now, I am biased because I transcribe my podcasts, so obviously I'm already coming at this from that angle, but ... You hit the nail on the head as far as I'm concerned, because yes, there is an accessibility issue that if you're really invested in making your content available to everyone who's interested in listening, the transcription is ... I think it's essential. But I just know myself, and what you said resonated about people can't always listen. It's not even just that people can't always listen. I am a really impatient person. This is ironic, because I create a podcast. And I do listen to podcasts, but I only listen to them if I'm someplace where I can't otherwise be productive with my ears. And what I mean by that is I'm at the gym, or I'm grocery shopping, or I'm vacuuming, or I'm mowing the lawn, my body and my hands are occupied, but my head and my ears are not. And so, it's like, "Oh, I'll listen because this is a way to be more productive with the time I have." If I am at my desk, I never, ever listen to a podcast at my desk because I'm doing stuff. But if a podcast comes across my radar at work, and I think, "Ooh, there's something important in there that I want to learn", I actually really like to be able to just quickly visually skim the transcription to get to that section where I think that important content might be, because I'm a much faster reader than I would be able to listen to something. So, for me it's like just a quick and efficient way to get right to that ... zero in on that point and then be done. Jeff: Yeah. Are you a one and a half or two times speed person when you listen? Kathleen: Yeah. I listen to Audible books on like 2X speed. I'm super impatient, so ... But podcasts I don't, actually. Podcasts I listen at regular speed. Because again, I'm stuck at the gym or I'm mowing my lawn, and it's like, "Well, I don't need to be fast." It's really like business books that I listen to at 2X speed because I wanna just get through them. Jeff: Yeah, that makes sense. Kathleen: But no, so that's very interesting. And I have had people reach out to me and say, "Thank you so much for having a transcript. It made it easier for me to consume this." So, there is something to that. Another thing that I'm wondering about with respect to this topic is, I did just see in the news in the last two weeks that Google has announced it's going to be indexing podcast episodes more now. And there's some new structured markup language around podcasts. Does having a full transcript help at all with that? Or is that really more around the schema markup that you're using? Jeff: I can not, at this point, speak authoritatively on that. So, I don't know regarding the transcript aspect. With the way that everything is trending, I don't ... you wouldn't be hurting yourself by any means to have a transcript. In terms of what I do know of what currently exists, and even some of the ways that I've seen Google play this out, it is more to do with that podcast schema. A lot of the times depending on how you have your podcasts set up, whether it's through these hosting companies or say you're running like a WordPress based blog and you have a Seriously Simple plugin, or you have say the PowerPress plugin, like a lot of them will just automatically handle that for you, so you don't even need to worry about it. And most of the time it's happening and you don't even realize it's happening. But it is quite unique, because you're going to start to see, and I've already seen it a bit, where you search even a particular cast or episodes, even the way that Google will return it in terms of listing them all and it's not just the standard what we're used to of link, and then metadata of an article. And so, it is quite fascinating, and even to your earlier points of everybody's jumping on this bandwagon, I think this is one reflection of stuff's moving quick. We're still kind of at the beginning of the wave in my opinion with all of it, even though it has grown a lot ... in popularity. But some of these software changes, from many major players, like they're having really good positive effects for people that are doing this type of work. Kathleen: Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, so I've hosted my podcast on Libsyn, which stands for Liberated Syndication, for those who don't know. And it has its pluses and minuses. One of the pluses being it makes distribution really easy because I just pop it into Libsyn, and then it shoots it out to Apple Podcast, to Spotify, and Spotify being another one of those ... like if people aren't aware, they are making a huge play in the podcast space. Jeff: Yeah. Podcast Promotion: Where To Host Your Podcast Kathleen: Yeah. I mean, there's going to be more competitiveness soon as far as who owns the world of podcasts. So, you know, do you generally ... with your clients, do you generally recommend a particular host? And software for distribution? Jeff: For me, in terms of ... you gotta think about it in a couple different ways. And this, I don't want to get too far into the weeds, but you have the area of where your podcast audio files are living, and that happens to be your media host. And so, again, if you're not as familiar with this space, your website's hosted somewhere. It's on servers somewhere. And the same way, your media files for your podcast need to be living somewhere, and you want a dedicated media host just because it's their designed to do. They're designed to be reliable, and to send it all out to everyone no matter where they are in the world equally, and like all of these things. And so, it's just a more foolproof solution than trying to throw it on your shared hosting server or something and crash your whole website and like four other people's sites too. And so, it's stuff you need to keep in mind. From the hosting standpoint, I don't think there's right or wrong. Again, I've used a ton of them, and so I don't ... I have only ill thoughts on maybe a few, which I'll just keep to myself because I'm not a huge fan of throwing people under the bus. But what I will say is that we primarily, if I can choose, which we can fortunately, most of the time, I'll encourage my clients to either use Simplecast, or Megaphone, depending on what they need. Simplecast just recently released a 2.0 version, and I will say there were some bugs that they've been working out, but they're getting a much better handle on it. I've been able to interact with their CEO, Brad, multiple times now. He has a really, really good team. I appreciate his own vision. The analytics that they're getting into are extremely detailed. It's types of things that we haven't been able to do in the past with the nature of how an RSS feed works, where most of the time the only thing that we got to understand was like who maybe downloaded this and where were they were like the stats that we got for a long, long time. Where now, they're actually able to use the tech that they have to diagnose individual users, kind of look at heat maps in terms of when people are dropping off on episodes. They're doing some really revolutionary stuff over there. And then the other one would be Megaphone. And I appreciate them because they have capabilities of doing targeted ads, and so traditionally speaking, when you have an ad on a podcast, like if you take that route, whether you're doing some self promotion of your own products or services, or you're actually having paid sponsorship, it becomes a lot more appealing because you normally would just hard edit whatever that ad was into the episode itself. And then it's just there forever. But the way that Megaphone approaches it is that you're able to target your ads. And so, you have the episode as-is, you designate spots within that episode of where you want the ad to show up, and then from there you're able to customize it based on the listener's geographical location, based on date ranges, based on whatever that episode happens to be, and you could have, say ... For example, we have a couple of my clients have large company sponsorships that might be doing multi conferences across the US. We can target it so people on the East coast are receiving an ad for conference A, and people on with West coast are receiving an ad for conference B based on- Kathleen: That's cool. Jeff: And so, it's stuff like that. And so, those are kind of the two major reasons why I like those particular hosting companies over others. Podcast Promotion: Social Media Kathleen: Nice. Now, what about social media? How have you seen podcasters use it successfully to get more people listening to their episodes? Jeff: I'll give two shorter stats. I'm not going to be able to speak on that one super well. I can tell you that from the recent Edison research, it looks like podcast listeners are more active on every social channel, and so some of the data that they've found is that 94% of podcast listeners are active on at least one channel, versus 81% for the entire population. And so, they got a big of an increase there. In terms of actually using it, that's not an area that I've personally spent a lot of my time. I inherently dislike social media. It's just a personal bias. And so, for me, the things that govern that is our actual ... our team runs a lot of that. We will often create the assets that are being used, and so whether we're talking, like for example, for most of our clients, the way that we write our show notes, and the way that we craft our excerpts and these different pieces that we're talking about, is intentional so it can be repurposed in other places. So, the excerpts, we'll write them in a way that it makes sense to have them on Apple and all these different distribution networks, but it also would make sense to include them in, say, like a newsletter. Of hey, here's this episode. Let me tease it with the title, and whatever, pulled straight out of the copy that we got from Jeff's team. We'll often pull quotables. And so, those can be used in multiple ways, whether you're just straight quoting the person, and then putting that out on your social media platform of choice. It might be using that, knowing where it is, timestamped wise in the episode so you can pull the audio and create what's ... a lot of people refer to them as audiograms. It's basically a kind of a mock video version. It's just the audio, and then you put a little visual. Normally people, you'll see it's like a square, and you'll see the audio wave files kind of going up and down as they talk, and there's different ways to promote that. And the idea is like oh, cool. I like that little snippet, I want to listen to more. Depending on the platform, we'll get intentional with like, say if it's LinkedIn, it usually is helpful to have my host or whoever is the person running that particular cast, give a genuine reflection of say, like hey, I interviewed this person, and I really appreciated these aspects of the interview, or the transparency here, or I disagreed with him here, and if you want to listen to more, here's the link. And so, there are tactics that we're using that work, but again, I would default to some more of the definitive people in the social media space, and then seeing what we could pull from them in order to make this a best practice. Does that make sense? Podcast Promotion: Repurposing Content Kathleen: Yeah. And you had talked earlier about the potential of repurposing podcast content. Is that kind of what you're talking about here in terms of the quotables and things like that? Jeff: Yeah. Yeah, for me, just recycling content period is so important, and so necessary. What we'll often do is create a single piece of content, and then just put it out there. And maybe if we're lucky, we'll reuse it in one or two different ways where you kind of have the generic oh, go listen to my new episode, or hey, this podcast got released here. But the reality is, is like there's so much that we can learn from it, and on top of it, our listenership or just humans in general, we learn in different ways. Very much like we already talked about with the transcriptions. Sometimes we want to read, sometimes we want to listen, sometimes we want to set. And it's a matter of tapping into these different styles, coupled with all the different technology that we currently have in terms of communication with social and all these different funnels and forms, and ways that we can talk to people and getting creative about how can I take this piece of content and really use it to its maximum potential and trying to have it in all these different places? And so again, generally speaking, a rule of thumb for me is if I can't reuse this piece of content, whether it's audio or written or whatever it is, that I'm about to create, in at least three ways, I won't do it. Just because I want it to go that far, and I want to be smart about it in the beginning. Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. People talk about that with content in general. If you're going to write a blog, you should spend at least as much time promoting it as you do writing it. And I think a lot of content marketers get that wrong. They just think that they need to pour their energy into building the thing. It's the whole Field of Dreams, if you build it, will they come? And while it might've worked in Field of Dreams, it doesn't work as well in the real world. Jeff: It's tough. I had a really good conversation just the other day with a marketer friend, and he was just saying, "The longer we wait, the harder it is." Kathleen: Yeah. Jeff: And been the case, if I would've started podcasting five years earlier than I did when I actually did, I would've been that much further ahead. And so, it's a matter of acting faster, but also like you just said, acting intentional. And knowing what we talked about, like from the beginning of our conversation, of knowing who we're talking to and what they care about, actually creating the content and sharing it in a way that makes sense, and then having a plan once it's live, to get it to the right people. So, I don't know, it's a big process, for sure. Podcast Promotion: Leveraging Guests In Your Promotion Strategy Kathleen: Any particular tricks or tips for podcasters like myself, how have interview style podcasts in terms of how you can leverage your guests to help with promotion? Jeff: What are you doing now? Kathleen: Let's see, what do I do? Well, I tag my guest in LinkedIn and Twitter. When I post the episode, I send them an email with the link. I create graphics for an Instagram story where I tag them. I usually pull out what you refer to as a quotable, and I create like a meme, and I'll put their quote maybe along with their picture and their handle in that and tag them in that post. I'm playing around with a lot of different stuff. Jeff: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Where have you seen the most benefit? Kathleen: Well, some of what I'm doing is too new to say. Like the Instagram stories, I just really started that a few weeks ago. I definitely have seen a lot of benefit from tagging people in LinkedIn. Just because the way LinkedIn's algorithm works. What I've found is that not only does that person see it, but a lot of their connections see it who might not have previously been listening. Jeff: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. I think a couple things, I mean even with what you're telling me, a couple things come to mind off the top of my head. For me personally, this isn't the case, say for all of our clients, because we have different clients with different target audiences in different places. But for me personally, I get the most success from, say, LinkedIn and Twitter. Part of it is because I'm most personally active on Twitter, and then in terms of a networking standpoint, LinkedIn just makes sense based on the way that the platform works. We'll utilize it in ways that I mentioned in terms of LinkedIn tends to be a little bit longer, tends to be a little more reflective, highlights the things that actually happened. Again, making promises and delivering on those things don't make anything ever clickbaity, or you'll lose everyone's trust super fast. And in particular, with Twitter, and the thing that I would even caution is that a lot of the time, it's easy, and this is something that I talk to my team about at times too, for our own internal promotions, it's easy to say, "Hey, I have a new episode with this guest." Well, the reality is, going back to language, nobody cares. Why is it engaging? And so, the medium doesn't matter. It's the same thing like, if a client comes to us to make a podcast, their pain point is sort of that they can't make it, but they're trying to get something else. Like we said, thought leadership is a huge thing. That's the end goal. Nobody really cares of I'm achieving that via audio, or written, or visual, or whatever. It's a matter of getting to that end goal. And so, in the same way, people don't necessarily care. Like I'm going to listen to a podcast because it's a podcast. We listen because we want the story. We want to know what we're getting from it. And so, when you present these things, talk about it in a way that actually highlights the person, their achievements, why the interview is interesting. And then I think the other piece too, and I haven't received it yet, because obviously we're just recording now. But the email that you send out as a followup, one of the things that I picked up from Dan Misener, from Pacific Content, and he has a really good course ... he has a couple courses on Creative Live, but he has one about growing your listenership. And it's this idea of we'll default to like, "Hey, do me a favor and promote this if you want to." The reality is, invite them in. Go, "Hey, this episode was awesome. You're going to want to promote it. I'm also doing you a favor." And don't come across like, condescending. But it's like, "Hey, this is what my team's doing." And you list everything that you just told me. We're going to promote it here, here, here, and here. Here's the link, do what you can to promote it on your end. I'd really appreciate it. Kathleen: Yeah. Jeff: And have a clear confident call to action for your guest of do your part, too. Let's make it beneficial for the both of us. Let's make it happen, and then have that proof of this is what we're doing because it matters. This stuff's important, get it out there. Kathleen: That's a great point. And it's like any marketing or sales, right? You have to have a good call to action. If you don't ask someone to do it, how are you going to expect that they're going to take any action? Jeff: Yeah. Kathleen: Love that. Well, that's all really good advice. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: I know we're running short on time, so I want to make sure before we wrap up I ask you the same two questions I ask all of my guests. Which is, when it comes to inbound marketing, company or individual, who do you think is doing it really well right now? And I'd love if you would pick somebody who's doing it well with podcasting. Jeff: [crosstalk 00:43:56]. Yeah. Who I just mentioned, Dan Misener at Pacific Content, two of the companies that I look towards and appreciate what they're doing in this space would be Gimlet Media, so Alex Blumberg and his team. And then Dan, and he's got several other team members, but Dan tends to be more of the public face of their company for Pacific Content. Gimlet is just out there doing it. They're just making it happen, and they're producing some amazing shows, and they have a terribly unfair advantage from like a radio production standpoint and the fact that Alex worked with Ira Glass and these just legends in the radio space. Puts them up there, and I've been able to work with some people on their team, or ex people from their team, and they're very talented. And then Pacific Content, Dan is hard to keep up with in terms of producing very quantified legitimate content in terms of how podcasting is working, and I reference his articles probably more often than I should, in terms of getting good data and feedback and seeing what he's analyzing and looking at. And both of those companies I think are very talented. Kathleen: Ooh, I can't wait to check out ... I'm familiar with Gimlet Media, very familiar. But I can't wait to check out Pacific Content, that sounds like a really good one. Jeff: Yeah, they're great. Kathleen: Second question. Digital marketing is changing so quickly. The world of podcasting is changing so quickly. How do you stay up to date? Jeff: I like learning, like I said. Have you ever taken the strength finder's test, from Gallop Poll? Kathleen: Yeah. Jeff: Okay. My number one is learning, and so by default, I'm usually just reading and listening, and doing all that a lot. I have simple, more like some maybe more tangibles that would be helpful for the audience. Like if I want a book, I normally just buy it. I take the whole Ramit Sethi thing of like ... what are you out, like 10 bucks, 15 bucks if it didn't go anywhere? But what do you gain? Potentially, a ton. And so, I'll just buy books. I'm a physical book guy. When I see articles, I have Pocket, just capture them all with Pocket is the way that I kind of manage all that. So, I'll see articles, often can't read them in the moment, but load them up into Pocket and then I'll just take time later to kind of skim through, and then I would say huge piece of it is just being able to talk with awesome people. Like yourself, like the people that I'm able to have on my cast, going to conferences, networking and that regard. And just really putting people in the network on the forefront of what we're doing, and taking time to meet new people on a regular basis. Because honestly, a part of it is just because I'm giving this off the cuff, I didn't anticipate answering that at first. I think that's the biggest thing is just being in contact with really good and really smart people on a regular basis. Kathleen: Yeah. Absolutely. That's why half the reason I have the podcast, it gives me an excuse to talk to people like you and learn from you. It's a great reason to get in touch with people you otherwise might not have any reason to do so. Jeff: Yeah. Kathleen: Well Jeff, thank you. I have learned a lot. And it's such an interesting topic. So you said in the beginning, there's so many directions you could take with this, and it's such a rabbit hole you could travel down, but I think for me, one of the biggest takeaways I got out of the conversation is just how important it is, is the foundational stuff. How before you even get started making sure that you've thought through your strategy, your audience, your targeting approach, and that will solve so many of the headaches that otherwise would come later on. Jeff: Yeah, yeah, I would agree. How to Connect With Jeff Kathleen: Well, thank you again. And if somebody is listening, and wants to learn more, is interested in connecting with you, what's the best way for them to get in contact? Jeff: I'll give you, I will say, two places. I'm going to break the rules of the one call to action. Either my company website, comealivecreative.com, or if you want to check out my personal hub, it would just be my name, JeffLarge.com. And both those sites link to each other, so it'll be pretty easy to find once you go to one or the other . Kathleen: Perfect. I will put those links in the show notes, and if you are listening, and you enjoyed what you heard, I would love it if you would leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts. And if you know somebody who is doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at work mommy work, because I would love to have them as my next guest. Thanks so much for joining me, Jeff. Jeff: Thank you.

There's a lot of hype about what it means to build a personal brand, but in reality there are a few simple things that anyone can do to establish themselves as an expert in their space. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, BlitzMetrics CEO Dennis Yu shares the simple process he says anyone - from successful CEOs to younger professionals just getting started in their careers - build a strong personal brand. Dennis is a master at building easy-to-follow, repeatable processes, and his approach to personal branding is no different. In our conversation, he breaks it down in a way that anyone, regardless of their marketing or technical skills, can follow. Some highlights from my conversation with Dennis include: Personal branding is really just a sum of stories that you collect that you sequence together. Four or five years from now, personal branding won't be a thing because it's just what we do as part of communicating, as part of marketing, as part of growing, as part of operating. Dennis's approach to building personal brand involves the creation of a series of one-minute videos that are lightly edited in tools like Apple Clips and sometimes in Premier or Lightweight Aftereffects or other tools so that they can be distributed then on LinkedIn, on the blog, on Facebook, on Twitter. Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner is a great example of someone with a strong personal brand because he obsesses about creating content to answer peoples' questions and solve their problems - but he's also an influencer because doing this has built a very large audience.  The secret to creating effective one-minute videos is to share stories that are empathetic, that are educational, and that bring people along in a sequence towards an overall mission that anchors your personal brand. When Dennis works with clients to create a personal branding strategy, he starts by building what he calls a "Topic Wheel." Then, he identifies experts in those topics and does one-minute videos with them. The videos aren't about him - they are about the people he is interviewing, who are all recognized experts. The Topic Wheel has three rings - why, how and what. Why is your mission, how is how you do things (educational content), and what is your offers. This is very much like a circular sales funnel. The outside layer of the Topic Wheel - the why - is personal branding. There are many tools that you can use to create one-minute videos, from Apple Clips to the Adobe Suite, regardless of your skill level with video. Once you've created your video, think about all the different ways you can reuse or repurpose your video, and distribute it out across a variety of platforms. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the BlitzMetrics website Visit Dennis's personal website Connect with Dennis on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to learn more about the exact formula Dennis uses to help his clients build their personal brands. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast, my name is Kathleen Booth and I am your host. This week, my guest is Dennis Yu, who is the Chief Executive Officer of BlitzMetrics and the author of Facebook Nation and, and, and I could list so many other things. Conference keynote speaker, expert on personal branding, Facebook, et cetera. Dennis Yu (Guest): Kathleen, you're too kind. Dennis and Kathleen having a blast recording this episode Kathleen: I was so impressed reading everything that you've done, when I saw your bio. I was really excited that I got to meet you in person a few weeks ago at DigitalMarketer, so thank you for joining me for the podcast. Dennis: Thank you. Kathleen: Before we start, I have a really important question. I was reading your bio and I saw that you have run 20 marathons, but you have run a 70 mile Ultra. What were you thinking? Dennis: I know, what was I thinking? It's my first one and my last one. I said to myself after running all these marathons because you know the thing is, it's a slippery slope because you run one and then you do more and then people are like, "Oh, you should run this Ultra marathon because you're gonna have this spiritual experience." I thought, all right I'm up for that and I ran a 70 mile race. It took me 12 hours. I set the course record. It was just outside of Microsoft's headquarters and when I finished, it was so bad that I had to be put in a wheelchair and wheeled to my gate at SeaTac airport because my legs were so stiff. Kathleen: Oh my God, I was gonna say, when people talk about spiritual experiences, all I can think about is when you're dying and you see the light. Dennis: Yeah. I didn't get a spiritual experience, I got a lot of pain. Maybe I didn't see past the pain, who knows? Maybe I needed to run 100 miles. Maybe that's what it needs to be. Kathleen: Oh my God, I am so impressed because you talk about how people run marathons and then they wanna run more. I ran one and only marathon the year I turned 40. Dennis: That's smart. Kathleen: I was like, I better do it now or it's never gonna happen. It's a good thing I did it because after that, I was like, no way, I'm too old for this. I'm glad I did it and I checked the box. That's awesome that you did that. Building A Personal Brand One of the reasons I was excited to have you on the podcast is that as part of the presentation you gave at DigitalMarketer's Agency Training Day, you touched on some of the work that you do building personal brands. You actually have a really cool process behind this. I think a lot of people talk about personal branding, but I've never heard anybody actually express it almost as a definable process. So I just want to dig into that and learn more about it and hopefully come away with an idea for people who are listening who might be interested in building their own personal brand, what goes into that? Dennis: Yeah, a lot of people think personal branding is this Tony Robbins, keynote speaking, motivational figure head who's doing the private jet and mansion lifestyle. I think personal branding is really just a sum of stories that you collect that you sequence together. If you're an agency, if you're an entrepreneur, it's not that you're showing only these highlight moments of the figurehead. It's the sum of what your people are doing, of your customers, of anyone that you engage with, someone you just had lunch with and they said something that's interesting and you pull out your cell phone, you say, "Kathleen, wow. That was so awesome. Can you just repeat that again? I want to share that on social." So you need a process to do that. So we're here in Miami and the last couple of days, we've been capturing one-minute videos for a fintech company that provides loans to small businesses. The kind of marketing they were doing is the kind of stuff that you'd expect that they would do. We go the CEO on camera. Literally, I was holding an iPhone and I was recording the CEO, asking him, "What's your favorite restaurant here in Miami? Tell me about your parents and the kind of business that they started and how that influenced you to run this particular kind of company. Tell me about what kinds of things stress you out at night." Then we drove to different small businesses, one is a pet store, another one is a food truck, another one is a computer repair place in the strip mall, and we interviewed these people, asking them about their why, how, what. Then I would put all of that in the bucket of personal branding. In fact, you know how a lot of people are talking about influencer marketing, content marketing, social media marketing? Now, those things have expanded to be so big that they mean nothing. It's just like digital marketing has expanded to be so big that you really can't define it anymore. Just like the phone was 50 or 60 years ago, or the internet was 20 years ago. It started off as this niche thing that people were specialists in and once it becomes so big, you can't really define it. I think personal branding is in that teenager stage where now everyone wants to do personal brand until the stage where, four or five years from now, personal branding won't be a thing because it's just what we do as part of communicating, as part of marketing, as part of growing, as part of operating. Because we see that's where things are going. We have everything we do, from a client standpoint or from our own internal operations or how we train people, encapsulated as one-minute videos. Everything's a one-minute video. For example, one of our guys this morning recorded a one-minute video on how to quickly see all of your tasks inside of Basecamp. In one minute, he said "Literally, did you know if you press control K plus whatever, it immediately shows you this screen with all of your tasks of the day and your schedule?" I'm like, "Pssh, I didn't know that." Or a one-minute video about this restaurant that's two blocks around the corner and how awesome it is. That's cool, that's very specific. Personal branding isn't this, I aspire to climb Mount Everest or I want to live a life of riches and make six figures every month. It's individual stories of other people, and thus our approach, which I think you find interesting and other people do too, is that we have a particular process on how we collect one-minute videos. It has to be particular because all of our work is being done by young adults. So these are 22, 23-year-old kids, if you will. I'm over 40, so I know younger than 40 is a kid. They go through our training. Maybe they served four years in the military and now they need a job and they wanna be able to make 35 thousand dollars a year, whatever they were making before, right, because they have a kid now or whatever it might be. We have everything check listed out, it's not that it's about personal branding, it's that the collection of one-minute videos. So instead of saying personal branding, I'll say the collection of one-minute videos are lightly edited in tools like Apple Clips and sometimes in Premier or Lightweight Aftereffects or other tools so that we can distribute then on LinkedIn, on the blog, on Facebook, on Twitter. Then amplify them for a dollar a day to be able to drive views, leads, and sales. That is mechanically what we do. It's not about me trying to motivate other people. We have a number of high profile personal brands like entrepreneurs that are billionaires. We have some of these guys as clients and boy, it's very shiny. But that is not what personal branding will be in five years from now. It'll be so defacto that anyone who's doing any kind of marketing, by definition will be doing personal branding and social media and SEO and all of that, not as separate functions, but they're all now the same thing actually. Personal Branding v. Influencer Marketing Kathleen: Yeah, it's very interesting. I have so many questions for you from what you just said. The first thing that comes to my mind is it's fascinating to me to have this conversation at this time because you use the word influencer earlier. There is this really interesting evolution of what it means to be an influencer now, especially with people from younger generations who grew up with Instagram and Snapchat and Facebook. They're very comfortable being in front of an audience and being very personal. Their definition of privacy, I think, is different than other generations. So I guess my first question is really, how do you draw the line between influencer and personal brand? Dennis: I don't like the word influencer because it's got that taint, look at me, I'm an influencer. You might as well replace that word for thinker. Oh I'm a thinker. I guess you're not allowed to think, Kathleen, because I'm a thinker. I'm an influencer and you're not. I even wrote an article on Influencive, which is the site for people to talk about being an influencer. The title of the article was Why I Am Not an Influencer. I think it got 23 thousand shares. Kathleen: It's like a dirty word now, especially after the Fyre Festival. Dennis: I tagged Michael Stelzner, who is one of my mentors. He is the guy in social media marketing. He runs social media marketing world, he's the founder of Social Media Examiner, he's got the biggest blog, biggest conference, makes the most money, has the biggest audience of anybody in the world of social media marketing. He told me how he was not an influencer and really he was a servant leader and how he does everything to take care of his team. I thought, wow, he is the exact opposite of all these people that are beating their chest. Look at me, look at me, look at me, it's all about me. Yeah, I would define him as an influencer because he influences the behavior of other people. He has the biggest audience, so by definition he's an influencer because he has the best education. His approach has been to be an influencer in the world of social media marketing to actively do research and find out every day, what are the things that people are searching for? What do they care about? He is so scientifically in tune with the data of what an audience wants that that's how he was able to grow Social Media Examiner to getting millions of visits per month on the site. There are a lot of people that are social media consultants, there are a lot of people that have a blog, lot of people with podcasts. We had an episode on his podcast, I think it was ... what was it called? He even chose the title because he knows what people want, so he came up with the title, What Marketers Really Need to Know About the Facebook Algorithm. The thing got 50 thousand downloads in the first month. I thought, holy moly. Mike and I chatted for half an hour and he got 50 thousand downloads. People are wondering, wow this guy is so big, will he interview me? I hope I'm next. Oh, will he let me speak in the Social Media Marketing World? That's what all of the moths are doing when they come to the flame. I ask him, because we spent the day together after Social Media Marketing World? After all that kind of stuff, he and I just hung out. I said, what question do people not ask you? He said, "They don't ask me how I was able to grow Social Media Examiner from nothing to the largest property in this space. The answer is because I use the data and I create content that satisfies that because I look at what the search engine queries are." 2% of his traffic comes to the homepage for Social Media Examiner. Kathleen: Yeah. Dennis: The other 98% is on every little micro-topic like why is my Facebook ad disapproved or how do I make a video or how do I use my Google Analytics and what's a good bounce rate? Those micro, micro moments. I define him as an influencer because it's not the tip of the iceberg of him speaking on stage in front of seven thousand people. It's his conference, so he can do that. It's the stuff beneath the water in the iceberg of lots and lots and lots of little stories and his process. Where he and I have massive alignment is we have deep process. The way he runs that conference that has seven thousand people, the way he organizes volunteers, how he trains them, how they come in a few days before, how they line up and they wear name tags and they know exactly what to do. Every single part of the process. You guys run and event, so you know what I'm talking about. The level of detail that's required. Can you imagine being a conference organizer? If you were to approach influencer marketing or personal branding the same way that you run a hospital where there's lots of processes and there's lots of detail. I think personal branding and this influencer marketing thing will have to evolve from witchcraft and Ouija boards and voodoo dolls to actual established processes for how you become a doctor, anything that requires an actual process like running a factory. I believe that's where we'll be in five years, but right now, people can get away with nonsense because there's not a lot of accountability. So it's easy to say, oh personal branding, well what the hell does that mean, right? You can't say hell, that's not good. What the heck does that mean? Kathleen: You can say hell on this podcast. Dennis: All right. Kathleen: Yeah, there's a lot of throw it at the wall and see what sticks. This is the sense that I get, then there's also a lot of copycat like oh, I see so and so doing this and it seems to be working, so I'm just gonna do that because that must be what works, because it worked for them, right? Dennis: Yep. Kathleen: I think in some cases that can work. Somebody might have stumbled upon a good tactic, but I think the thing that I've at least observed with people who talk about wanting to build their personal brand but then they don't really do it is they don't have a plan. Therefore, they're not consistent with what they do, so there's a lack of follow through. There's a lot of one off, here and there things, and ultimately that prevents them from getting traction which is why I thought your approach was so interesting to create the process because when you have the plan, you at least have something to follow. Then you know if you're on track or off track. Dennis: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Kathleen: I was gonna say, you mentioned in the beginning, meeting with the CEO of the fintech company and getting him to do one-minute videos. I'm really curious to know if you find any sort of, again going back to the idea of a generational divide, is there any kind of reticence, especially amongst the more established business leaders you work with, to get as personal as you're looking for them to get? One Minute Videos Dennis: Yes and no, because if you broad brush with the stereotype and you say, "Oh, those people under 30, they were born with a phone glued to their hand and Snapchat and all that." Actually they're digital nomads or whatever you want to call them. I don't think that's necessarily true. At the 40 thousand foot level, yes. Three days ago I was in Denver and I was with the CEO of a new company, it's my buddy Mark Karloff, he does MNA and buys himself billion dollar companies. I wanna say he's 56 or something like that. I said, "Mark, for your company, we're gonna have to make these one-minute videos to help explain what it does." It's the Hoover for law firms to be able to serve, it's called Proof Serve, you have to serve people documents, right? That's what happens in the world of the lawsuits, right? A lot of law firms have to do the serving in different states. He wanted to get more law firms to enroll and I said, "Well, you need to collect one-minute videos of the paralegals and what they do day to day because they're the ones who are choosing who's serving. You need to talk to the different people that are doing the serving so that you know that they are legit and not these crazy people that just signed up. You're trusting them to deliver your documents for you. It's an important case, you can't afford these documents to get lost." Collect one-minute videos so that people can see how real it is, so they can see that there are other personal injury attorneys that are doing the exact same thing, that they trust in their neighborhood, to collect at it's scale across all of the hundreds of customers that he has. Because other than that, what would you do? You'd create a glossy commercial or you're do a website. You'd sign up for InfusionSoft or there's all these marketing technology, but those are all ways that I believe people who, whether they're old or young, they try to hide behind the technology instead of connecting with people directly. I don't think that's an old or a young thing. Are people willing to connect at a human level to show empathy because they really care about their employees, because they really care about their customer? I think that you have a spectrum where the people who are 40 plus are actually more likely to really care because they're more likely to be more mature, they have more business experience, but maybe they don't understand exactly the mechanics of having to press record. The young people, maybe they make more video, but they are less likely to make video that is uplifting other people, that is sharing deep knowledge based on experience. If you're over 40, like you and me, you're gonna have a lot of stories. We have a lot of experiences to share and it's not just take a look at this food that I'm having, that I'm at the beach. Two days ago I stayed in this penthouse in Miami downtown on the 50th floor. I made some videos from the top. If I was a 20-year-old, I would more likely make videos showing how amazing this penthouse is. But instead, I made videos showing how this looks glamorous, doesn't it? Look at this view, all the way out to the ocean, there's South Beach, and there's downtown. Do you know this is an Airbnb that I paid $200.00 a night for and it's paid for by the client? Did you know that I flew here on Southwest airlines and I sat in the middle seat for four and a half hours all the way from Phoenix? I didn't tell you that, did I? Do you wanna know what it's really like? Do you wanna know some of the things that I struggle with in growing my company? That's exactly the opposite of what you'd expect of someone who's out on a balcony and overlooking the ocean in a penthouse at the 50th floor, right? Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah, that's so much more real. Dennis: [crosstalk] between older versus younger, it's not that the younger people are more willing to make video. It's who can share stories that are empathetic, that are educational, and that bring people along in a sequence towards an overall mission that anchors your personal brand. So anyone who's going into personal branding and I have to ask them, "Do you have a mission that's bigger than you, that's authentic? Not just because you want to help the world in some vague way, but you want to help small businesses save on their tax bill. You want to help local university students overcome crack addictions because their parents left them." It doesn't have to be some Mother Theresa kind of thing. We all have some kind of bigger thing that we're doing, like us, we're training up young adults. A lot of them that maybe they didn't go to college, where they just graduated from high school or that they came out of the military and they just had a kid that popped out and now they have to work. They're not trying to be a CEO, they're just trying to pay the bills, right? When you tie your mission to that, it's a lot easier to then build a sequence. If the personal brand is just look at me and my food, it's pretty shallow because you can't build a whole story around it, you can't get all these other people around it, you can't build the infrastructure that's necessary, what we call the topic wheel. What you saw when we were DM in Austin, we explained the structure of the topic wheel, about what anchors your brand are all the different topics and the topics move out to the individual stories of all the people you're connected to. Start With Your Mission (and Build a Topic Wheel) Kathleen: That's fascinating. So I love the idea of starting, if somebody's thinking they want to build their personal brand, of starting with figuring out what your mission is. Once someone has been able to successfully identify that, you talk about the topic wheel, the question I think people listening probably have is then, are all my videos about this mission or is it just a certain percentage? How does that fit in to this topic wheel? Dennis: The topic wheel allows us to all be humans, because there's something that you might do to make money, but you also might like to boogie board at the beach, you might also like Italian food, you might also have a parent who is disabled, you might also have a particular hobby, right? We start the topic wheel with six topics, we call this why, how, and what. So on the outside, we have different people that are telling stories around six particular topics. One of my topics is education, so Doctor Karen [Freeburg] is one of the people in my topic wheel because she is authoritative on education and we have lots of stories around that, we made one-minute videos around that. There's other people in education that are part of that particular topic. Another topic of mine is digital marketing and I'll put in people like Ryan Deiss because he's authoritative in the world of digital marketing and I've got plenty of interviews with him, where we've made one-minute videos where I'm not trying to get him to talk with things about me, although he has, but I'm interviewing him like a journalist. It's not about me, but it's about his knowledge and his experience, and I'm making it about him. Maybe I'm interviewing Tony Robbins or maybe I'm on CNN talking about the Facebook controversy or whatever it might be. Those are all different topics that are not to show that I am an awesome person or famous, but to precede the authority because I am spending time with people that other people recognize are legit in that space. When I make one-minute videos with these people and I boost it out there on Facebook and LinkedIn and YouTube and all this, that allows me to re-market for my topic, all the way into my product which is when I can sell courses on digital marketing, I can sell packages on implementing the things we talk about. The idea of why, how, and what is, why is your story, it's your passion, it's a particular moment in time. It could be when I was 18, I dropped out of high school and I wanted to be a professional athlete working for Nike. True story and I have a one-minute story talking about that and how eventually, they didn't except me, but then we got Nike later as a client to do digital advertising for them and how I learned that what the 18-year-old Dennis thought Nike would be like versus the 40-year-old Dennis was completely different. That Nike was this big corporate and it wouldn't have worked out for me as an athlete because it's long travel on the road. I guess I do a lot of travel on the road, but if your career only lasts a couple years as a pro athlete versus a 20 year career as a digital marketer. So those stories, the why stories are the outside ring of the topic wheel. Then move to the middle ring, which is how. Expertise, tips, how to do stuff, checklists, right? Remember, Kathleen, you saw all these checklists that we were showing, like how do you [crosstalk] manager? How do you get a drive in golf down the middle of the fairway or how do you tie your shoes with one hand or how do you juggle the ball? How do you do all the things that you know how to do, especially when you interview these other people who are experts. They've got tons of how do you do a very specific thing, right? So you're marketing from the outside of very specific stories. Not just, oh I was once really sad and now I'm successful, but specific things that had happened, specific moments in time where you point the camera, you can follow the scene of what happened, right? The beauty of the Pixar is that they focus on specific scenes. So the why we market to the specific scenes of the how, which are specific, let me show you how to do something very useful, like a recipe. Let me show you how to make my brand of chocolate chip cookies with macadamia nuts. I really like macadamia nuts. Kathleen: That sounds so good. Dennis: I know a lot, for example, about how to make a perfect batch of popcorn. I have a movie theater popcorn maker in my kitchen. Kathleen: That is so cool! Dennis: Do you ever walk to the movie theater and you're like, "Mm." You're almost willing to watch a bad movie just to eat the popcorn, or no? Kathleen: I, 100%, think that popcorn is the highlight of the movie. Then, so I have to ask you one important question then, this is a slight digression, but are you an add the butter oil to your popcorn person or are you a eat it as it comes out of the maker person? Dennis: Yes. Whenever people ask an either or question like do you want to eat the fish or do you wanna eat the burger? Yes. Kathleen: Yeah, I like adding the extra butter, myself. Dennis: Yeah, I add the extra butter to the popper, then when it comes out, I actually have the movie theater quality bags, right? I wanna simulate the whole experience. I've got a butter pump and I'll pump the butter in there too, on top of that. Kathleen: Dennis, you're a man after my own heart. I'm all about the extra butter. Gotta do it. Dennis: See? So then when we get together, maybe just outside of Baltimore, we can make some popcorn together. I'll ship you a popcorn maker, you'll see what I'm talking about. I'll show you how to do popcorn the way Dennis likes to do popcorn. Kathleen: I love it. I love it. Send me that one-minute video. Dennis: I'm gonna make a one-minute video, yeah. Yeah, and then we're sharing expertise on how is this different than microwave popcorn, which is garbage. Kathleen: Yes. 100%. Dennis: Yes, very different, and how movie theater popcorn tastes so good because it has coconut oil, did you know that? Kathleen: I did not know that. That's interesting. Dennis: If you try to use olive oil or butter, the flashpoint is so low that you burn it and that's why movie theater popcorn can go so high because coconut oil has a really high flashpoint. Kathleen: Oh, interesting. Dennis: We could make several one-minute videos about microwave popcorn and then you'd come away from that thinking, wow, that's really cool, I didn't know that. So I'm sharing how. Then I get specific again, into the very center of the onion tootsie roll, multi-layer thing, into the what, which is how you sell. See, conversion is about ... We all understand conversion, buy my stuff, it's on sale. The thing ends on Friday, it's got these many features, it's better than the competitor, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. There's only a limited quantity, but all these different ways of trying to get people to buy, right? All the things that you say, features versus benefits. That is the what. Everyone understands what. The trouble is when they get to marketing, they're so eager they can't help themselves. When they're supposed to be making why content, they somehow end up selling it again and they pollute the whole thing. It's like mixing chocolate milk and Coke together. I like both of them, but I'm not going to drink them in the same can. It's nasty, right? Or we ask them to, let's make a series of how videos. So around your product or service, maybe you're an agency, you wanna get more clients, you do additional marketing. Okay, talk about how you set up PBC Canvas. Talk about how you optimize, talk about how, but do not ... Resist the urge to start selling because that's the what. So if you keep these things separate from the why to the how to the what, then you actually have a funnel, which is a circular funnel. That's the topic wheel, it's every day content meaning you don't have to keep replacing it. It doesn't go stale. I believe if you do it right, from the very outside are all these people that you're interviewing. That's personal branding. The outside layer of your topic wheel is personal branding. Personal branding is not some separate thing about ... I was thinking, it would be fun Kathleen, we could rent a Lamborghini, how about? You and I, we could rent a Lamborghini for one day and just make all kinds of silly videos and drive around real slow. Kathleen: That's like Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians and Cars Drinking Coffee. That's what he does. He does a different car each time and they just drive around and talk. He has a whole show that is just that. I love it. Dennis: Yeah, this is my garage. There's many ways of doing it. Kathleen: Yeah. Dennis: But that's the superficial kind of personal branding. That's look at me and look at my lifestyle. If you have actual depth, if you have a structure, you have a process, then you're gonna build the topic wheel because it's the personalities that are the outside that are sharing knowledge, that are organized by topic. The topics then go to the very center, which is your company, your figurehead, the product you sell, whatever it is that you're trying to monetize. When you link why to how to what, you use the what to fund all the why and the how, so it's a self-funding funnel. Because all the people that do personal branding, guess what? It costs money, just like SEO costs money. It costs money to produce video, it costs money to edit, it costs money to put traffic against it, right? So what's gonna pay for that? Kathleen: Right. Dennis: Are you just gonna spend money for the heck of it? Kathleen: Yeah, exactly. Dennis: I don't see ROI off of this. I ask any of these people to do personal branding and they can't answer this question. I say, "What's the ROI of your personal branding?" They can't answer the question. Why not? Kathleen: That's a great point. Now, that was a really fantastic explanation of the topic wheel. I think that gives everybody a very clear framework, at least, within which to begin to break down what are they gonna talk about on video. How To Create Your Videos Kathleen: So I feel like there's, what am I gonna talk about? Then there's making the video, and then there's distributing the video. So let's talk for a second about making it. Earlier, you mentioned a couple of different tools and my ears perked up because I started to experiment with making videos and I'm gonna just say, I am the least technically competent individual on the planet when it comes to video, but I discovered one of the tools you mentioned, which is Apple Clips. I think it is the best thing since ... I was gonna say since sliced bread, but I don't actually like sliced bread, so I think it might be better than sliced bread. It is the greatest thing ever. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the types of tools that the average person out there can use to do this and produce a decent looking video. Dennis: So, there are 30 different tools that we use. Kathleen: Wow. Dennis: But that's a mix. We organize them into people that are just everyday people like you and me. Intermediate folks that are specialists that have maybe a year or two of training. Then we have our pro level, the full Adobe Suite, where you're doing things in Premier and Aftereffects. That's pro. I don't think any of us, unless that's what we do for a living, we have 10 people full-time as pro video editors. They are doing things according to standards that we have. But should you and I be learning how to do that? No. Kathleen: No. Dennis: You and I should be learning how to use Apple Clips and Otter.ai and the different video tools built into Facebook ads manager, through transcription. We should be pushing things out to fancy hands and Fiver for lightweight editing. Some of the editing that you can do, for example, Apple Clips allows you to transcribe live and it's pretty accurate. Kathleen: I did that last week and it blew my mind. Then I didn't realize you could also go in and edit it's live transcription so that if it messes something up, you can correct it. It was so easy. Dennis: There are apps that are built into Snapchat and Instagram and Facebook has 10 different tools that are part of Facebook Mobile Data Studio that allow for editing for free. Adobe has Adobe Express. There's lot of these tools and every day, I get three or four more tools that people say, "Hey, try this editing tool. On your app, it'll add these really cool filters." I even bought a ton of apps on my phone that will add motion, that will add just super cool effects, that you can lose hours of your day downloading dozens of these different apps that do different kinds of things. I would say just use Apple Clips and one or two other ones, and not- Kathleen: I think that's great advice. I may or may not have spent six hours last week downloading apps and doing exactly what you just described. Then I discovered Apple Clips and that rabbit hole ended. Dennis: A lot of folks, I know will say, well I'm not a video person. They're secretly afraid of all these tools, like I don't really have time to learn all these different tools. You know what? You have something called an iPhone in your pocket, okay? When you hit video and you hit the red circle to record video, that camera is so smart. The way it does multi point filtering and focusing and light, that if you literally do that and you have decent sound and you don't point it directly into the sun, then you will get good enough video that you can pay $5.00 or $10.00 that someone who's a pro can do the editing for you. I've learned this the hard way because I've probably spent 100 hours, 200 hours of my time playing with all these different apps and figuring out exactly which effects I like from which app. That's a waste of your time. With that said, Apple Clips, Otter.ai, the native tools inside Instagram and inside Facebook Ads Manager, that's all you need to know. The pro stuff, for example, at TNC, I flew in one of my friends from Facebook to speak. Same thing at Social Media Marketing World, I brought three other people to speak at the conference. I had professional videographers that I flew in that recorded on expensive equipment, everything miced up properly, everything sent off to our VAs in the Philippines, that do the video editing. So we do understand the pro side, but you gotta know when you're doing a lightweight video that's just walking along do a cell phone style video at the beach reflecting on some thought that you had, versus on stage, speaker reel, high authority, in front of 10 thousand people giving a keynote address. You're not always using one tool. Sometimes you need a butter knife and sometimes you need a chainsaw. Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. I love that you just mentioned all those specific tools because I'm totally gonna go out right after this and check them out. Dennis: We have a guide, I'll give it to you. Kathleen: That's great. Oh yeah, a link to it in the show notes. Dennis: All the cool videos and then how they fit into our process. Just because you can use a tool, doesn't mean it's worth anything because you've gotta figure out how it fits into a process with all the other tools and who does what because it's unlikely that one person knows how to do everything. So then take the finished video and turn it into an ad and write copy against it in a headline and to be able to look at the performance of it and to be able to go back and re-shoot. Usually whoever is the one recording the video is not the one who's editing the video. So that requires a process step. Anytime something's gotta move between different people, it requires a process step, right? How to Promote and Distribute Your Videos Kathleen: Yeah. Now assuming people figure out a way to get these videos made, whether they make them themselves or they get help, they're gonna wind up with all of these one-minute videos. How do you then ... What is your process then for getting them in front of an audience because obviously that's the objective? If the tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, it doesn't matter. So can you talk a little bit about that? Dennis: So once we've gone through video production, which could be as simple as me doing a video on my iPhone and automatically saves to my Google Drive. By the way, that's my little secret, everything goes to my Google Drive. I also have Dropbox and I have the Apple, whatever that's called, the iCloud. I have everything saved multiple places because I'm paranoid about losing it. Whether it's as simple as that or whether it goes through complex editing because it's speaker footage from multiple cameras, like a professional interview. We then distribute that in multiple formats. We take the long format, so it could be a 40 minute interview, and we'll put that in landscape format on YouTube on a channel. Our buddy, Matthew Januszek, who is the CEO of Escape Fitness, he's interviewed all the top names in the world of fitness. It could be Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lee Haney, the CEOs of 24 Hour Fitness and Lifetime Fitness. All the people because he's the guy. He does professional interviews. So the full length episodes, we'll show on YouTube. Then, we take one-minute snippets that are square, just the highlights, think of it as like movie trailer compared to the movie. The trailer's only a minute, it shows you all the big explosions, all the big scenes, but you don't really get the whole story, just enough to tease you, right? You know, movie trailers. Kathleen: Yeah. Dennis: Then we put the movie trailer on Facebook and we boost those through video views to build re-marketing audiences, to then sequence them to other pieces within the topic wheel. We take vertical, 15 second commercials, and we put those on Instagram as stories. We take the same one-minute videos that I mentioned on Facebook and we post those to Twitter and we can promote those posts. We have an annual bid at three cents of engagement, we never select Twitter's automatic thing because they'll bid it to $2.00 and spend all your money. We also will post it organically to LinkedIn, to our profiles. That way, you can create one piece of content, chop it up into 30 or 40 other little pieces of content and be able to use it across all your different channels and obtain multiple, multiple value. Gary Vaynerchuk posted something on LinkedIn a week ago, showing how he does that in his content pyramid. It's the same thing that a lot of us that are prolific agencies do on behalf of our clients because often you can't get the client to do this everyday. If you put it as part of their process and teach their support people, every time they repair that HVAC and get the customer right there, saying, "Oh, how is it?" That's obviously the best time. Wedding photographers, get them right then when they're happy, when they just got married, don't try to get the feedback two weeks later and get their review later. Try to get it right then. If you can't build it into the process, then you have to collect it every three months or every six months and you try to collect it all at once, with multiple people and you can chop it up. The odds are, it may be, Kathleen, you and I were expert interviewers but we're not going to be able to get 60 minutes of quality content because it takes 15 minutes to warm up. In the middle, they'll say some things that are good, but are you gonna force someone to sit through a 60 minute video to be able to catch those pieces in the middle? No, you pull those out and use those as carrots. Kathleen: Yeah. Now, how often should somebody be posting these videos? Dennis: As often as you have good content. So I think of Facebook, you can get away with once per day, maybe twice per day. If you're in news and media, sports media, you can do maybe six, seven times per day. The Washington Post and some of these other local news guys will do 40 times per day, local sites, 20, 30 times per day. But most brands, once per day. But don't feel like you have to post once per day. What we'll do is, maybe we'll be at Social Media Marketing World and wander around in the hallways and interview a lot of people, just for one-minute interviews, not some scheduled thing, but just by walking around in the hallway, we'll run into people that we know. We'll collect a bunch of one-minute videos, all in one day, and then sprinkle them out over the course of several months. So I was on CNN in Atlanta, talking about the whole Facebook controversy and Russian interference and senator we run ads, the whole congress thing. I was in front of three and a half million people, live, where they were, in the studio, asking me questions about all this Facebook nonsense. I made the most of that because I got that four and a half minute clip and chopped it up into a few different pieces. I'm now able to recirculate that as different pieces of content, and I've taken some of those highlight components and I've sprinkled them in to my speaker reel, to our company mission reel, to other reels where we're teaching about personal branding. If I can mix and match from all different kinds of videos that we have an reassemble that. Do you know the analogy of Mexican food, Kathleen? Kathleen: No, tell me. Dennis: You can take meat, cheese, beans, lettuce, tomatoes, and rearrange it into a chalupa or a tostada or an enchilada or a taco or a chimichanga or whatever it is, but it's the same ingredients, but just in a slightly different format, right? Kathleen: That's so funny and very true. Dennis: So that's what we're doing with our ingredients. So the wrong materials come in, meaning like the 30 minute interview with the client, right? Or you're doing it on behalf of a client and you're interviewing the customer and you have a continuous shot of 30 minutes where you're asking them a series of questions and saying, "Hey, don't worry about what you're saying because we're going to edit out the good pieces or whatever it is. If you stumble, just pause for two second and restart, and then we'll chop up different pieces and we can reuse those pieces into whatever combination that we want." So we think about the Mexican menu or the Chinese menu, you now have the ability to produce any kind of marketing material that you want. So a sales piece about a new product that you have, maybe you could reuse stuff that you already have. 80, 90% of what you have is what you can reuse and then the 10% is the stuff specifically about that new product. Then you don't have to create all this stuff from scratch again. Maybe it's because I'm lazy, but when we do this, it's like I don't want to have to keep redoing things about who we are and what we've done and who our best customers are. For example, when we first got Nike as a client, I thought that was incredible and making videos out there at the Nike campus, interviewing the executives at Nike is stuff that makes us look highly authoritative, but it also looks good because I can quote them. I can bring them to speak on stage like at the Adobe Summit where Nike says, "Hey, yeah, we use Blitz for social analytics." Well, how awesome is that? In front of the other people who are using Omniture, saying oh, yeah, Omniture doesn't do that. It's Adobe Analytics now, but oh yeah, we use Blitz for social analytics. I can reuse that, I guess we could call it a testimonial, but I can use that snippet in so many different places. Think about things that have been said to you, that have been said about you, that have been said about IMPACT, about your business partners, about the people that you have met. Think about all those amazing situations, imagine if you could wave a wand and you could reuse them anytime, anywhere, how powerful would that be? Kathleen: Well, and it certainly sounds like, from what you're saying, that it's making me realize, there are probably a lot of businesses that have a ton of gold nuggets in their B roll and in their video archives and it's like, half the battle is keeping it organized and knowing what you've got in there so you know when to pull those pieces back out and incorporate them. The other half, really what this is telling me, is that if you're gonna be serious about this, especially if you're gonna do it as a business, it probably makes sense to invest in in-house video expertise because you really just need to incorporate this into the fabric of your everyday life within your company. Outsourcing Your Video Process Dennis: Amen. You don't have to be a big agency, big budget, big team, or a big marketing group. We literally started with hiring VAs from the Philippines as $3.00 an hour. So you hire one person full-time. Do you know what that costs you for a year? Kathleen: No. Dennis: $500.00. Kathleen: Wow. Dennis: So $500.00 a month, Kathleen, for someone who's working for you full-time, 40 hours a week, college educated, a real human, they care about you deeply, they're better than Americans in the standpoint that they are loyal, they will stay with you, and they're happy, they're joyful, and we will send them stuff at the end of the day, say 5:00 PM, you know it's the other side of the world, so their time zone's upside down. When we wake up in the morning, it's ready. Kathleen: That's so crazy. That's the part that I think is actually kind of cool about working with folks in Asia is that if you're organized and you can get stuff to them at the end of the day, it's freaky how fast you can move. Dennis: Let me tell you my secret which is not so much of a secret anymore. There are one million Philippino's that do digital marketing at onlinejobs.ph. When I found this site 10 years ago, I could not believe my eyes. I said, "Wow, I can hire this guy at $1.50 per hour? Why don't I just hire this guy for fun, just to see. It's only $1.50 per hour. I'll buy him for like 50 hours, just see what happens," right? Kathleen: Right, can't hurt. That's a good tip. Side note, I absolutely love the people from the Philippines. I spent a lot of time there. Before I went into marketing, I did international development consulting and my last year that I did it, it was right before I had my son, I went to the Philippines, I think six times. That is such a cool place and the people are some of the best people. Dennis: We go there twice a year and it's just incredible. They love us and I love taking them out because I feel like I'm a big shot. We'll take them out to eat to the nicest places in Manila, send them off on a full day massage. I'll look at the bill, like we'll go to the nicest restaurants, right? Even Makati, which is the most expensive business area. Kathleen: That's where I used to stay. That's beautiful, yeah. Dennis: We're doing the penthouse thing and they think we're ballers. At the end of the meal or at the end of whatever it is, we'll go take them out karaoke. We have seventy in the Philippines. I'll look at the bill and I'll work it out, that's like four bucks a person. All right. Kathleen: Let's do it again tomorrow. Dennis: Yeah, maybe it's five bucks or whatever it is. I'm thinking, wow, you could live like a king for nothing. You could have an entourage, if you wanted to, I'm not saying do this. But you know this Kathleen, for $200.00 you could have six guys with machine guns follow you around the entire day as bodyguards. Kathleen: Yeah. Dennis: I've wanted to do that just for fun because I go there twice a year with our people. I was thinking, it would be cool if I had six guys with machine guns, all dressed up, walking with me as I'm walking downtown. Then have a couple people that follow me around with video cameras, just to see what would happen in the mall. This people think this guy walking in the middle here must be a celebrity. Kathleen: Yeah, this brings us full circle in our conversation because it goes right back to the very beginning where you talked about if you were in the penthouse standing on the balcony and if you were an influencer, you'd take a picture of yourself with a glass of champagne living the life. Instead, you were very real about, I flew Southwest. Your Philippines example's great because that's where you could be like, "This is just how I roll." Dennis: Yeah. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: I love it. I could literally sit here and talk to you all day, but I'm sure you have things that you need to be doing and I want to be respectful of your time. The last two questions I have for you are questions that I ask every guest that comes on this podcast and I'm really curious to hear your response because you do know so many people in the world of digital marketing. Today, when you think about the concept of inbound marketing, company or individual, who do you think is really killing it and doing it well? Dennis: Nathan Latka. Kathleen: Ooh, there's a name I haven't heard before. Dennis: Oh, you need to look him up. I think he's number one or number two in business podcasts on iTunes. Kathleen: How do you spell his last name? Dennis: L-A-T-K-A. Kathleen: Okay. Dennis: I first met this kid because he signed up for one of my podcasts or webinar like 10 years ago. He's just some 17-year-old and I'm like, "Who is this punk?" He kept hitting me up. I saw that he had started a company that did Facebook ads and Facebook apps, and he grew it to millions of dollars and he sold it. Then he started to take his money, invest it in other companies. He would go to a taco truck, for example, and say, "Hey, I'm willing to write a check right now to buy your business. Let's make a deal." Then he started turning the camera on, then he wrote his book that became an actual best seller. Then he started interviewing all the people that were entrepreneurs and running SaaS companies and asking them about their revenue and their conversion rater and their cost per conversion and their lifetime value and all their stats. How much revenue, how many employees they had, what's their turnover, and turned it into the dominant podcast for SaaS entrepreneurs. Now he's on TV all over the place. I think we had lunch, I think it was three years ago, we were in Austin. He was living in downtown Austin, one of the high rises. We were remarking about Donald Trump and how Donald Trump, whatever you say about Donald Trump, who cares what your politics are, he knows how to get your attention. Kathleen: Yeah, he sure does. Dennis: Gary Vaynerchuk knows how to get your attention. I consider them the same person. Dennis, what if I became the Donald Trump of digital marketing? I'm like, "You know dude? You're exactly the kind of guy with the personality and the shine and the intelligence and the speed to be able to do it, but just like with Donald Trump or Gary, you're gonna have a lot of haters." If you're willing to deal with the haters, you will kill it. You are so good. That's what he did. The next day, I saw on Facebook, all this commotion and it was Michael Stelsner and the other folks saying, "Who does this Nathan Latka kid think he is?" He sent out this email to his mailing list of all his customers saying, "You know what? If you don't engage on my emails, I'm gonna delete you from my list." All these influential social media people are saying how dare he do that? He can't do that. He can't be saying things like that to his customers. He can't be saying that to Michael Stelsner. He did. He's like, "You know what, Michael? You don't like my stuff, you can leave." I'm like, Nathan, dude, I know we talked about that, but I didn't think he'd actually do it and he did. Look at how successful he is. Kathleen: That's cool. I can't wait to check that example out because I get a lot of interesting answers when I ask this question and it's always really fun to discover somebody completely new. Dennis: Look at his videos. It'll just be a minute, you're in line at Whole Foods and you open up and do a search on Facebook or Google or YouTube, and you're like, "Okay, I'll just watch a little bit of this video." Then before you know it, you've lost two hours watching his videos. Kathleen: Oh dangerous. So in other words, don't watch them when I'm under a deadline on something, I guess. Dennis: I'm warning you. He's so good. Full disclosure, he's a client. Kathleen: Well, thank you for alerting me to him. That's gonna be an interesting one to check out. Now, the other question I'm interested to hear about from you is digital marketing is obviously changing so quickly. Technology is fueling a lot of it. How do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself on the cutting edge? Dennis: I don't. I know it's kind of a flippant answer because you could say, "Oh yeah, but I know your network and you know these people and these people and these people." Here's my little trick. When I was a younger man, I thought that I could work harder than everybody and keep up with the news and read harder and work harder and I've since discovered, since I turned 40, that I can't do that. So all I do is I associate with the smartest people out there. So the reason I go to conferences is not because I want to be on stage or because I'm trying to get more clients or because I wanna be famous, it's because I want to hang out with the people that have that knowledge so that if I have a question, I know who I can chat up and they will answer my question. So I don't at all pretend like I'm somehow the most knowledgeable person about everything going on in digital. You and I know there's so many different thing and so many different niches, it's just, even if you had 500 hours in a day, you couldn't keep up with all the things that are going on. All the different tools for video editing, no way I could keep up with that. But I do know that if I have a question about anything, I can literally pick up the phone and I know who to call and I know I can get the answer. Kathleen: Yeah. Dennis: So that's my secret. It's not what I need to know, it's who I need to know and that list of who is my topic wheel. So the people that pay us money, the people that we've worked with to be able to create influence is also who I count on for my expertise. So the way I make money is also the way that I'm able to educate. Even if I didn't make money off of these people, I would even pay money to hang out with the people like Michael Stelsner and Nathan Latka and David Burg and Ryan Dice, but we're being paid by these people. Isn't that incredible? Kathleen: That's a pretty great gig if you can get it, I'll say. Dennis: Yeah. Kathleen: Yeah, for me it's my podcast. That's why I do this. People who listen, know I am always saying I would keep doing the podcast, even if nobody listened. Thank God, people do, but I learn so much and today is a great example of that. I feel like I've learned so much from you, so thank you. You Know What To Do Next Kathleen: If somebody is listening and wants to learn more about you or Blitzmetrics or has a question about personal branding, what's the best way for them to find you online? Dennis: They can go to blitzmetrics.com, of course, and they can also look me up on LinkedIn, but please do not friend me on Facebook. I've been at the five thousand friend limit for the last eight years. Don't ask me for a blue check mark, don't ask me if your ads were disapproved, but absolutely, if you want to reach out to me on LinkedIn or go to my website, happy to chat with you there. Kathleen: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Dennis. If you are listening and you learned something new or you liked what you heard, of course I'd love it if you'd give the podcast a review on iTunes or the platform of your choice. If you know somebody who's down kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because they could be my next guest. Thanks so much Dennis. It was great chatting with you. Dennis: Thanks Kathleen.

When DigitalMarketer's conversion rate on its key offering dropped from 15% to 2%, they knew they needed to make a change. Here's what they did to dramatically increase their conversation rates throughout the funnel...   This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, DigitalMarketer's VP of Marketing Justin Rondeau goes into detail on the changes he made to the company's conversion funnel for its Lab product. From creating a freemium option, to tweaking the conversion form and creating remarketing campaigns based on audience behavior, Justin pulls back the curtain on both the changes that DigitalMarketer made and the rationale behind them. There are some interesting lessons to be learned here for marketers looking to increase lead generation and lead to customer conversions. 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 Justin include: DigitalMarketer is a company focused on building tools, trainings, and communities for digital marketers and for small to medium-sized businesses. They do this through a subscription service called DigitalMarketer Lab. There are three levels of Lab membership - Lab standard, Lab+ which includes training certifications, and Lab ELITE which includes monthly training days. DigitalMarketer used to have a tripwire offer that cost $7.95 and anyone who converted on it would then be upsold a Lab subscription. The conversion rate on that tripwire went from 10-15% down to 2% over time and it had a domino effect that really hurt the company's ability to sell subscriptions. They decided to change their approach and create a new tripwire that was essentially a freemium version of Lab, which would include all of the company's gated content. With the company's new freemium option, visitors to the site simply fill out one conversion form to gain access to all of the free content (rather than having to fill out multiple forms to get multiple pieces of content). This change has dramatically increased conversions at the top of the funnel and provided the company with data (based on content consumption within freemium accounts) that it can use to more effectively upsell freemium members to paid subscriptions. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the DigitalMarketer website Connect with Justin on LinkedIn Request to join the DigitalMarketer Engage Facebook Group Check out Simo Ahava's website Listen to the podcast to get all the details on DigitalMarketer's Lab conversion funnel, and learn more about the specific changes Justin made to increase conversion rates. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm Kathleen Booth and I'm your host.Today my guest is Justin Rondeau, who is the Director of Marketing for DigitalMarketer. Welcome, Justin. Justin Rondeau (Guest): Thanks for having me. Justin and Kathleen hamming it up at the start of the episode Kathleen: Yeah, I am excited because I just met you for the first time in person a week ago at DigitalMarketer's partner training day, which was amazing, can I just say, so good. Justin: I mean, we love that thing. Marcus did a really, really good job kind of growing that to what it is today, I think, with help from a lot of agencies out there including everybody there at Impact as well. Kathleen: Yeah, I can't believe you guys do it every month because it's like a mini day long conference that they put on every single month at their really fantastic headquarters in Austin, Texas. It's also streamed live out to tons more people who aren't able to make it there in person. That was a great experience, but I'm assuming there's going to be some people listening who don't know what DigitalMarketer is. Before I get too much further down my love fest for all things partner training day, let's stop. Actually, can you talk a little bit about who you are, what DigitalMarketer is, and what you do there? About Justin Rondeau and DigitalMarketer Justin: Yeah, I'm Justin, and I am the Director of Marketing at DigitalMarketer. We are really a company that's focused on building tools, trainings, and communities for digital marketers and for small to medium-sized businesses. We want to really empower people to have the knowledge and skills that are necessary to kind of thrive in the digital world right now. We do this through a subscription service that we have called DigitalMarketer Lab and through other things as well, but really our main focus there is making sure to equip marketers with the things they need today to succeed. Kathleen: I learned a lot more about DigitalMarketer last week when I was visiting. It's really interesting to me, because IMPACT is a company where I am that's like a hybrid between an agency and a publisher. I look at DigitalMarketer and you guys are a hybrid between an agency, a publisher and a SaaS company. I mean, it's really neat because you figured out a way to deliver value through these different channels, if you will, but it makes your business kind of unique in terms of how you have to market and sell yourselves. Justin: Yeah, it's interesting. On the one side, I think people look at us as if we're an agency where we're more of a training body at that point. I remember we tried doing agency work years, and years, and years and years ago, and we sucked at it. We were really bad. It's super hard I think, and that's why we wanted to help equip people in the agency world to be able to kind of connect the dots, where we were unable to. Because we really didn't realize that just creating trainings or investing in our own software platform to deliver these trainings wasn't going to be enough to really meet our mission, which is doubling the size of 10,000 businesses. We had to work with agencies, the people that connect the dots with those trainings with the people there. We need to work with people, boots on the ground, to do this. It is an odd perspective ... an odd kind of grouping of company types, for sure. I mean, for us content comes first, full and foremost, which hurt us for a little bit because I think we let the tech slide on our side, because we got a little bit of blinders on. Having to invest in tech, explain to people why they're paying for a subscription for trainings and courses versus just buying it outright, which they can do, but we have reasons for them to do the other thing. It's a lot of work on positioning and branding there that has taken years and year and years to get right. Kathleen: Yeah, I want to stop for a second and reflect on something you said which was really neat to me. You guys have this mission to double the size of 10,000 businesses in how long? What's the timeframe for that? Justin: We need to finish that this year. It's a tall order. We've been ... that was kind of our five-year mission. I know we haven't been the best with tracking it, to be quite honest, so I need to get back out there. Kathleen: I just think it's so cool that that's your goal. How did that come about? Justin: I mean, that was kind of the vision of Ryan and Richard for quite a while, because we believed that the best businesses should win, not the best marketers. We thought how we could help businesses win was through marketing, because marketing really does change the ... kind of the trajectory of any company. As soon as they start investing in it, they're going to start seeing growth. It was generally kind of almost like the internet marketing days when it was kine of even the skeeziest people could win, not the people who deserved. That's where we really wanted to differentiate ourselves. There were times where people were putting out content back in the day that was 2,000 bucks and wasn't even ... it couldn't hold a candle to something that we do for a seven dollar report. Ryan got the idea of, "Hey, I want to help grow businesses and help them double. I'm going to do that by changing the name of the game and going very, very high value with the content, kind of undercutting the price there because we know that it's more valuable. If we can build our list to help empower people, they'll want to stick with us, because they'll see the results right away." There was a lot of things that came from, but ideally I think the too long, didn't listen version of the synopsis of it is that we believe that the best businesses and best products, not the best marketers should win. Kathleen: I love that, that's so great. You guys have been pretty successful with it because you have a lot of people in your platform. You were mentioning earlier that your core ... your signature offering is DigitalMarketer Lab. Justin: Yes. Kathleen: Can you talk a little bit more about exactly what that is, and what somebody would find if they looked under the hood of that? About DigitalMarketer Lab Justin: Yeah. It's a bunch of gated content within our Lab platform, which is pretty much an LMS that we built in-house, where it includes some of our ... like at Lab level, because there's three levels of it. You have Lab standard, Lab+ which includes our training certifications, and Lab ELITE which includes monthly training days. Just like you have with Partner Training Day, they show up once a month for people who are agency partners. We do one of those for our Lab ELITE members once a month too. We have a lot of things going on in the office at that point. Kathleen: Then Partner Training being specific to agencies. Justin: Yeah. Kathleen: Lab ELITE training being specific to anyone who is a marketer, correct? Justin: Yeah, anyone who's a marketer, and those ones are focused based on what we call execution cycles, because we think training sans implementation is just another distraction. We want to make sure that we create very specific types of full-day workshops that then ... how we have Q&A calls and we lockdown the community. We say, "Hey, no more talking about all this other stuff. You're only talking about this cycle." Then we try to get ... the aim is to get them to launch in 10 days, whatever they were supposed to be doing. Kathleen: That is so fantastic, because that's kind of the same reason I started this podcast. I used to go to marketing conferences, and I call them the Cinderella stories. People would get up and be like, if I was at HubSpot's conference, they'd be like, "I went from zero to a diamond level partner in six months." These crazy success stories and you'd go to their talks and you'd feel really inspired. You'd leave the room feeling like either, "I suck because I didn't do that," or "Okay, I'm inspired, but I have no idea how to replicate it." That was really frustrating to me because there's no point to getting people all inspired and excited if they don't have the tools to do anything about it. That was the purpose behind this podcast was to give people the tools. I love that that is what you guys are doing as well, and helping them stay focused because marketers totally have shiny pennies. Justin: Oh my gosh, we do. It's like, "Look at that Chatbox. Oh, look at that." It's every time, every time. Kathleen: Yeah, that's great. When somebody ... your goal, it sounds like, as an organization when you have the individual marketer land in your orbit, is to move them ... and this I guess I'll put my SaaS hat on ... to move them to join Lab, correct? Justin: Yup, the main goal is to get them in there, get them into the Lab platform which ... I think some of the stuff we're going to talk about later today, I think a foreshadowing right now, is that is we needed to find a better way to get them in. We needed to reduce the friction to get them into Lab, because we truly believe once they're inside and they saw what was behind the paywall, without maybe having to have a paywall, they would want to stick around and actually see more of the premium things that are in there. DigitalMarketer's Conversion Funnel Kathleen: Let's set the stage for this discussion then, and talk about what was the problem you're trying to solve. You mentioned there was some friction. What did it look like pre the changes that you made? What were the hurdles in somebody's way? Justin: There's a concept we ... that Ryan really kind of coined called customer value optimization, CVO. The idea of that is really to extract as much value out of a customer as you can. It works, but it's short-sighted. You have to think about the journey as a whole. We've talked about things like customer value journey and those things, but what we had during the standard customer value optimization funnel was a five-step funnel that was ... you'd have a lead magnet, a really high-value and east-to-consume thing that you'd give in exchange for information. It could be name, e-mail etc. Then on the back end of that, we'd have an entry point offer, we'd also call that a trip wire offer, where it was connected to ... it was similar in content for whatever the lead magnet was because you know their interest in that. It would be for something like seven dollars, 27 dollars, something around there to change the state of the visitor. They're now not a lead, they're now a customer. You've acquired a customer. Then on the back end of that, we have an upsell for our subscription program. Be, "Oh, this thing you just bought is part of a bigger hole. You should check this out." Then on the back end of that, we have likely some sort of larger scale, what we call profit maximizer, which was, "Hey, here's this big old thing that I want to check out." We did that with tickets to events or anything like that. Kathleen: What's the cost of the subscription? Justin: The subscription ranges ... DM Lab standard is about ... is 49 dollars a month whereas the other ... at Lab ELITE level it's 295. They all follow that same structure where we have something in between there. What ended up happening ... this has worked for a very, very long time and I still think it does work, but you have to ... it has to be at the right stage of the value journey for it to be done appropriately. On ... where things kind of got a little hairy with ... we were used to a 40% lead magnet take rate, a 10% to 15% trip wire take rate and about a 15% to 20% activation ... or core offer take rate right there. What ... though the economics worked perfectly for those ... for that distribution, but as time went on the standard low dollar entry point offer just went from 10% on average, 10%, 15% on average, to 2%. The kicker was that means only 2% of the leads we were generating ... even new we had subscription offer at all. Kathleen: What do you attribute that decrease in- Justin: I think, I think perception of value, for one. I also ... because I mean, sometimes I think, "It's not going to do all that for seven dollars. This is just a cash grab." I think our customer avatars changed, their personas changed a little bit. I think being, "Oh why would I ... they're not trying to just spend that money, they have other things within their budget that they need ... that they're using things on." Then I just think we were asking too soon to ... too soon in the relationship. Then prior, we were kind of the only ones doing that and that's why it worked so well back then. Because like I said earlier on, we created methodologies to undercut essentially people kind of the skeeziest marketers that we could find out there and provided what value we could. It's ... we could ... if we would provide more value even a seven dollar payment would be a 2,000 dollar thing. Then everybody started doing that model, and it became recognized and understood and people ... when you're marketing to marketers about marketing, it gets very difficult. The cynicism level and kind of the level of, "Oh, I know what you're doing and I like it or I know what you're doing and I don't like it" goes up there. That's why we fundamentally had to change because you have people that start the trend, the trendsetters, the bandwagoners and then the late adopters. In terms of CVO, we're at that point where late adopters have already jumped on there needed to be something new. That was ... really what indicated that was that 2% ... that drop from 10%, 15% down to 2%. Kathleen: That's right at the top of your funnel, so that's going to have a domino effect. Justin: It was rough. Kathleen: You're looking at the situation and you know what your eventual goal is, and you figure out that the friction point is happening at that initial trip wire. Talk me through some of the changes that you made. How DigitalMarketer Increased Conversions By Introducing a Freemium Option Justin: Yeah, what we understood was really the hard part there was having them pull out the credit card. We tried ... we got rid of the trip wire. We did a bunch of things to test out. We're, what if we said you could get this when you join our subscription? Now everybody sees we have a subscription. Terrible. What if we put this price, but say it's free when you do ... when you join the subscription for ... terrible. Nothing would work ... I couldn't, I was ... really what the problem was, it wasn't a matter of seven dollar report or free trial or even dropping the trip wire altogether but, "Hey, this thing you just got is a part of this thing, you should try." They just didn't want to pull their credit card out at that point, they weren't ready to. They weren't there within the journey. Like I said, for CVO, you're trying to extract this much, but we were doing it at an inappropriate time. Kathleen: It's the whole "getting married before you've dated" thing. Justin: Yes, exactly. Where that was appropriate ... how we had it set was appropriate for a period of time, times have changed. What we decided to do was, "All right, well, what if we took all our lead magnets, just all of them, and we put them into Lab and created a new access level that didn't require any credit card, so go actually freemium with our content. That move was a conversation, it felt like a Seinfeld episode in my office that day. I was talking with our developer being, "Hey, we should do something like this." Someone else would walk in and be, "Hey, Justin, it's like a Jerry" and it just kind of ... it stonewalled out and the next thing I knew, within a day we had it all set up. Then we were, "Okay, how do I do this? What sort of information do you want to be asking?" We realized that we were also shooting ourselves in the foot on the ... not just on the side of getting people into the application, but also to ... on the side of our database to make sure that we're able to talk to people correctly. It's people don't want to just put a single e-mail address in something anymore and expect that it's going to give value. If they're doing that, then they know they're just going to get hit by promotions. You want to be able to talk with them the right way and identify who they are, identify their needs and how you can actually influence their business. We decided to go back to almost an old school microsite style landing page setup where what we do is we'd, "Hey, they have this lead magnet" and those conversions stayed about the same, 40%, 45%. On the next ... and so they'd fill out first name, last name, e-mail and company and they'd go to a new page. It was, "All right, hey, what do you do at company A?" It's these big buttons that you could press on mobile because especially you're coming from Facebook traffic. They're going to be on the phone on 80% of your paid traffic, it's likely coming from mobile from Facebook at this point. They click whatever one they want but I'm an agency or I'm the CEO or I'm the founder or I'm an executive or I'm just a marketing professional. They click those and then it goes and you go to the next step which is how big is your company and then it goes to a trial offer. It's, "Great your account's been created. While you're here, you can also learn about our trial. Kathleen: Is this, I'm trying to picture it in my head. Is it kind of a Typeform style where you answer one thing and then a new thing appears or can somebody see they're going to be asked four questions? Justin: They will see a progress bar at the top and whenever you have a progress bar scenario, especially if they've already done an action, they go to page 2, we're, "Oh look, you have one check mark there. Hey, you did one thing already, you might as well keep it going." It goes back to the six principles of persuasion there. Kathleen: I was going to ask you, how do you ... what kind of table setting do you do to let ... to set the expectation that there's going to be multiple questions and it's progress bars to a degree. Justin: The progress bar does, we don't. We don't do anything on the front ... the first page which I normally ... again, I didn't even ... I was going to test this later on, but because of the results, I just was I'm not going to- Kathleen: Why bother? Justin: It ... because we only have a 4% drop off rate to the account creation phase, so and also we'd ... if they put their information in and they just abandoned ... they just didn't create a free account. They still get their e-mail ... the PDF and the e-mail and all those things. All of those follow-up sequences are pushing them to create their free account still. Even if they drop off, we still have their information and we still do right by them, they just don't have a free account yet. Pretty much, we were, "What's this going to look like?" One of our big rules we have is anytime we have a new idea, we try it to the list first and to our people first, before we decide to put more into or put budget behind it or anything like that because this was as MVP as it could get. We ... it's ... I'm sure for some of the scenarios now, we'll be, "Oh, you e-mailed people on your list to fill out more information to get their e-mails." Yeah, I get it, I get it, I get it, but we are ... but that move actually works because it is database expansion. Now we know if they're a founder. We know if they're a founder of a company with 50 to 100 people. We know a lot more about things. It's just a good way for us to have a much more valuable database. One from our perspective of how ... of prospecting and two make sure that, again, because it's always not about what we want, it's about also what the customer wants. Make sure that we're not talking about things that just doesn't matter then. We tested it there and I believe there were 3,000 accounts created in a day. The login ... the immediate login rate was ... I think 80% of people logged in right away. It was unbelievable. I was, "Okay, this is a winner, hands down." Then the worst part was we didn't do a lot ... because I said it was super, super MVP, when they logged in, they just logged into the account and they would get a model, it's, "Hey, you should do these things" and they don't have access to those because that's just for the standard Lab people. It was a terrible user experience when they came in and that had to get fixed right away. We saw that there were lights there. Currently now we have this ... we have multiple ways to get into the funnel there, where our home page offer is just create a free account. For any one of our lead magnets, it's we start ... we ask those questions and it goes to a trial which ... the cool thing is, too, about 5% or 6% of the people who create a free account, they take an immediate trial right away. They actually do, then pull out their credit cards which is ... I'm, "You haven't been doing that for a while. What's going on here?" Which was pretty cool, but now we have probably around 23, 25,000 free accounts. Now ... where we're weak right now is we haven't done enough in terms of product marketing in there. We have some things, box some things, upsells and these other things. There's more we can do, but seeing that we're able to just grow and to the people seeing what the whole ... what Lab is all about without having to be told about it. It's show, not tell. It's just been a huge, huge win for the organization. Upselling Freemium Customers Kathleen: Yeah, that's really interesting because it's ... it sounded like now you can move into the much more of a SaaS and start looking at who's a product qualified lead. How do we market more effectively to the people that have already said yes once. Is that what you're going to focus on next? Justin: Yup, that's the next part of the game is really to come up with what product qualify dates look like, doing the lead scoring in there. Some other cool ideas we had that we're building out of this, too, is ... I talked about this with some people recently. One of the things that we really liked about this, as well, is that we kind of took control back. Because what we used to do is we just sent PDFs ... they have call-to-actions and then all this other stuff. We didn't know if they opened them, we didn't know if they consumed them, we didn't know if they were just opening and closing it right away, we had no information. Now, we can see what stuff are people looking at the most. What stuff do they jump into but just don't finish or they close out real fast? We can build custom audiences for our Facebook ... for Facebook and for Google off of this based on what they're consuming on there and then develop lookalike audiences with people who are more likely to say yes. This turns into something much bigger than just getting more product qualified leads. This gives us behavior of those product qualified leads once we define them and we're able to build out and put more budget behind it from a paid media perspective, and really just grow this thing. Adding Gated Content to Freemium Accounts Kathleen: Now, I can imagine somebody's listening and thinking, "Okay, if I wanted to do something like this, it involves taking some of the content that was not behind my paywall, whatever that looks like, and putting it behind my paywall. In doing that, am I going to tie my hands behind my back, as a marketer, because it's not going to have as much content then to work with on the front end? How do I drive people to that initial conversion point if I have less to work with? Can you speak to that element? Justin: I take ... only take the content that you've already gated, essentially. Anything that's, "You need to give me your e-mail address to get this" only use that type of content. I wouldn't take things off of your blog or anything that you just are using for pure kind of ... yeah, actually it would be anything that ... yeah, anything that is behind an e-mail address lock. Are they going to give you any information for it? Put it into a single spot. Then, do similar ... because I've always taught that specificity is super important when creating lead generation ... lead magnets, the generation tools, those types of things. Because it starts segmenting your list for you because, "Oh so-and-so's interested in x. They're interested in Facebook, they're interested in paid media, they're interested in conversion compensation, they're interested in design." If you get too ... you can still get that power if you do that on the front end and ask them more questions when they're signing up to create the account, you know their initial interest point was this. You still get that segmenting and you also get the power of, "All right, now they've given me more information, create an account and now I can monitor how they're doing things." You can do that ... if you don't have a SaaS product or kind of similar, you can do this super, super easily with ... there's ... I mean, one time we did this just with Instapage, where an old, old, old MVP which is what made me want this into Lab was ... we had a landing page and then we had another set of pages which we could monitor, what links they clicked and those types of things. Kathleen: I see people do it where they, instead of death by paper cut, where you're "every single thing on my website that you want you must fill out a form to get," I've seen people do it where it's "fill out this one form and you will get access to every single thing on my website," which I ... is kind of the equivalent of that for somebody who doesn't have a membership portal. Justin: Exactly, exactly. That'll work if the .... theoretically, I haven't done this myself there, but theoretically that should work the same because you're getting ... you'll still be kind of, again, taking that control back and having ... they'll have access to everything on there and just get to start to see within your web analytics, what are they doing? You'll be able to build more audiences. Kathleen: That's a much better experience for the customer, oh my God. Instead of five forms to get five things, one form and get it all. Justin: Yeah, because it's funny to me. Because even ... we're ... people are getting to this. I know if HubSpot can recognize your User ID then I think most cases that you can get to the content. I think sometimes if they need more information to fill out more ... say you're a marketer, an MQL not an SQL based on their system. That's just technology and marketing making the experience more delightful, but it's not taking anything away from the marketer. They're just getting less people re-opting in and there is something to the re-opt in. There is something to that, but for us, I want the re-opt in to be them logging into the account. That's how ... I need to fundamentally change what I consider to be the re-opt in and what re-opt ins are and what's necessary for those. That's what you're essentially getting. Say if we e-mailed a lead magnet to our list, great, and we're not asking for anymore information. That's all we're doing there is just how to annoying people. We've been doing that up until months ago, where we have a new lead magnet and we want people to go through the entire funnel to eventually have to take a trial. That was the end goal, but it's just an annoyance, where, "Oh I have to fill this out again. You guys have my information. What are you doing?" It just bungles up lists, too. Kathleen: The interesting thing about this approach is, if you're doing it the traditional way where you are having people react and you have, then, the opportunity to set a super low bar in the beginning and say, like you said, "Just give me your e-mail address." Then every time they come back, you can do progressive profiling where you're consistently adding new questions into the mix and building out a more robust audience profile over time. If you switch and take the approach you're taking then, you really have ... you kind of have to concentrate your ability to get to know your audience into that one first opportunity when they first fill out the form to join. I'd be interested in hearing kind of your thinking about how much is too much there? What really can you ask somebody to do in the beginning so that you're getting what you need, but you're not turning them off by the amount you're asking for? Creating Forms That Convert Justin: Yeah, that's ... it's a delicate balance. I think what we used to see ... I mean, I remember Oli Gardner used to show this really interesting chart about average conversion rates based off the number of form fields. Because it's not just the number of form fields, it's the question itself- Kathleen: How much revenue do you have? Justin: A whole different ... yeah, what's your social security number? Experian is probably the hardest thing ever there. I mean, really what it comes down to ... I don't like to just pick a number for things. I know in those charts you see a drop off from one field, two field, three, field, between four and seven it's about the same conversion rate. As you're getting higher up there, there's higher intent, so they're probably more qualified leads hitting those and they just have more intent to fill those things out. I used to kind of live and die by that for a bit, where I'm, "Okay, if I'm going to add four on here, I'm going to ask for some more information" or I'll just keep it three or less. It's just the information wasn't useful to me and you really have to ask yourself, "What do I need to know to make this worthwhile?" Then kind of you say, "Well, screw it. If you don't want to give me that information, I don't necessarily want you on my list or I don't want you as a free account because you're not going to make the move." I asked ... we started this ... actually this concept was kind of born out of this other thing and I actually presented a little bit of this at your conference last year which was about the binary segmentation question that we used to ask. We added some radio buttons so that really the trick here is using the right types of fields. You never use drop-downs, drop-downs are the kiss of death on mobile. Just don't do them. Again, everything's coming from mobile and always ... you have to always think mobile first. We'd ask for first name, last name, e-mail and then just, "Are you an agency or marketing, agency or consultants serving small businesses, yes or no?" We ask them self-identifying question and a really easy way to answer. We also made that field optional, but they didn't know because we never said it was optional. That wouldn't stop them from filling the form out, which I think maybe 10% of people didn't fill that out. They just did it because it was there. That's why I never have required versus optional fields noted. I will have certain fields that I make optional. I just don't want them to know they're optional. Kathleen: Interesting, you're the first person I've heard say that. Justin: It's a nice little trick I like to use because they'll just fill them out. They have momentum, they're just going to do it. If they don't want to, don't stop them unless it's absolutely necessary. Kathleen: Well, there's so much you can do with data enrichment now, too. We have this conversation all the time internally with my team because we had a few forms that asked for a lot of information. I remember saying to my team, "All right, what are we doing with all of this information?" If the answer is nothing, then let's get rid of the question. If the answer is well, we can get that same information if we have their e-mail address from whatever data enrichment solution- Justin: Clearbit or from something else. Kathleen: Yeah, then why make this person enter it in? It's- Justin: Exactly. Kathleen: ... silly. Justin: Yeah, I remember for one of our webinars ... I knew I was going to take a hit on front-end conversions. I put a phone number on there because it was for our certified partner ... webinars for agencies to try and get them to talk ... to create conversations for our certified partner program. I was under the assumption that those phone numbers were being used and they weren't. I was ... I mean, my cost per lead from media quadrupled my added phone number there. It's ... people don't like talking on the phone actually, but ... anyway, we're getting back to the idea of what questions do you ask. It's the stuff that you need to know and the stuff that's easy to answer and, again, avoiding drop-downs at all cost, so it's easy things and going after quick ones. I know my name, Justin Rondeau. What's your e-mail address? Who do you work for? For e-mail, you want to be very clear. If you want a business e-mail, say business e-mail or if you don't care if it's business or anything, say best e-mail, something like that. You want to be very, very clear about that to avoid any level of confusion of what they should be putting in there. Then we do company name mainly because we're doing some personalized stuff throughout the rest of the thing. Just to make them feel like oh hey, because when they see something that they recognize, it's kind of when you're thinking about buying a car and you see that car everywhere, you want ... you're always going to be identifying things that you self-identify with first. It's one of the first things you'll see. I mean, other than image ... people's faces and images on a site. The next thing you're going to see is anything that you self-identify with. It's just what happens, your eyes are drawn to it because your brain's moving so fast. On the next page, it's hey, so we just, cool, we have your information and then that new progress bar at the top and it just says, "So what do you do there?" Then we have five boxes that they click that just say Founder, CEO and underneath those we put in things ... put a little thing what a Founder and CEO would say, "I run the company." Agency and consultancy, "I help grow other people's businesses." Marketing professional, "I work in a marketing department." We always have name and descriptor because you want, again, take subjectivity out and so we ask that question because it's important for us to know if this is a decision-maker. That's how we kind of break everybody out, decision-maker or non-decision-maker. Then we have newbie, "I don't know what I'm doing." On the next ... because we have a lot of them ... a lot of people who are new and that's good, that's who we want to help. Kathleen: Right, that's your future decision-maker. Justin: Exactly, exactly. We don't want to just be, "Oh no, get out of here." What we won't do is pitch them on a massive product. We'll just avoid that because it's not good for them and it's not good for us. On the next page, another ... again, another question we didn't know. How big is your ... how big is insert company name? We say ... we don't just say small, medium, large. We go small, 1-5, medium ... then we put the numbers in there to, again, get rid of subjectivity and we make them as easy to answer as possible and go off of that idea of continuation and momentum to make sure that they one, know this is almost over by putting it at the top, but know that because of the momentum they have there, they're going to keep going until the end. Like I said, 4% of people drop off and that's it. Asking two more things with two new page loads, that's really nice. Kathleen: That's great. Now you made me think of another question that I have, which is that you're ... the before state that you were in, people had to pay whatever, $7.95 for the trip wire. Whenever you enter your credit card in, you have to put billing information in, you have to give accurate information. When you switched to this freemium model, did you see any uptick in people giving you fake e-mail name, etc. because they're ... because they could essentially for the first time? Justin: Not really. Anything on our ... on ... I mean, they've ... people have been giving us fake e-mails since when we had the lead magnets just for the creation of the account. It's been fine, I haven't seen a massive ... I think ... yeah, it's nothing new there. I think since they're not a purchase person yet, I think ... I don't know, I haven't seen it increase there. I think, if anything, it's probably stayed the same as it always has been because people ... I'm guilty of this. If I want some information online and I don't feel like getting e-mails from people, I just put a fake one in. Kathleen: Xyz@123.com? Justin: Yeah, yeah or screwyou@dontspamme.com. I'll put those types of things in hoping that on the thank you page I can just download it, but it's nearly ... everybody knows now for the most part you're going to be needing to give a decent e-mail address to get the content there. At least on the B2B side, that's where I kind of planted my flag for my entire career. It probably ... companies, maybe some e-commerce ones don't really care all that much because they're likely just consent to keep the code anyway and then a bunch of retargeting. Kathleen: Interesting. I'll be curious to see kind of how this plays out in terms of you guys tracking product qualified leads and working on that next stage so maybe we'll have to have a part two to the conversation at some point. Justin: That'll be fine. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: The sequel. In the meantime, I have two questions I always ask everybody that comes on the podcast and I'm interested to hear what you have to say. The first is, the concept of inbound marketing has now been around for a while, probably over 10 years at this point and it's evolved a lot. When you think today and you look at the world of inbound marketing, company or individual, who do you think is doing it really well? If I had to tell the audience to go look at somebody to see a best practice, who's really nailing it? Justin: Gosh. Who's doing it well? To be quite honest, I've been disappointed in a lot of people lately. That's a really hard question. I don't know. I mean, I can say, I mean, you guys have always done an amazing job with it and I just kind of point to you.  Kathleen: No, you're not allowed to say us because I feel like that's self-promotional. Justin: You've already ... people already point to you. Who ... if I'm going to look at content marketing in terms of who just provides immense value and really asks for ... he has things on there to get information, but he's been really building a speaking ... speaker following and some other good things. I go, "Simo Ahava, he's a tag manager genius." Kathleen: Wait, say that name again because I haven't heard that before. Justin: Yeah, Simo, I always pronounce it wrong, it's Simo Ahava. I'll send you the link, he's a tag manager beast. He has the best articles about tag managers. It's better than Google's documentation, it's the best. He is phenomenal and really, really lives by an inbound strategy, has forever. He's probably the guy I'd go to. Kathleen: I'm so excited because I love when I hear a new one because I get a lot of, well, HubSpot. I'm, "Don't tell me that." I need somebody else. Justin: He absolutely crushed it. I actually just saw an article that someone shared on LinkedIn today and that's actually why he popped in my head. He's also kind of a nerd idol of mine so that, too. He actually ... and it's out of his wheelhouse, he did blog post about what he's learned from speaking at so many conferences, so he shared a lot of speaker tips as well as... Kathleen: Oh, I want to read that. Justin: ... tip for conference organizers. It's just a great piece of content. Kathleen: I am definitely going to go find that when we get off of this. Justin: It's phenomenal. Kathleen: Question number two is that the world of digital marketing is changing, at what feels like sometimes a lightning fast pace. How do you personally drink from the firehose? How do you stay up-to-date and current on everything that's going on? Justin: That's hard. I rely on my team, I don't know. To be quite honest, I'm kind of a leader by doing and so in my world and expertise I kind of stay ... I like to stay sharp and stay doing things as much as I can without hoarding, but I really just ... I'm always curious ... if I'm signing up for something I'm, "Oh, that was cool. That was a cool workflow." It's just really ... I've always been a learner by doer and ... it was funny, my boss is very similar to that and I was saying, "Hey, I need to pick up a master class account for the video team." He goes, "Cool" because I know we have it, I was just, "Can you give me the login?" He's, "Well, it's cheap so just go buy one on the company card." I was, "Okay." Then, he came in later, he goes, "How sweet was that checkout?" I was, "Really good." He's, "Yeah, that's why I wanted you to do it." It's really just learn by doing in a lot of cases. I sign up for a lot of e-mails to see what type of e-mail strategies people are doing with follow-ups, with promotions. We have swipe files within our Slack ... the entire company we have ... is putting in things they see that are interesting. This landing page is really cool, this strategy is really cool, so we built a culture of people that kind of find neat stuff and share it all the time. That's kind of how we stay on top, I think it comes a lot from building the team. I know that not ... people listening might not have larger teams or anything like that right now. I'm telling you when you have that many people who are living it and then really understand that the principles that we teach, they'll be, "Hey, someone did this really, really cool, but look at this caveat that they did." They're, "Oh, that's genius." Pretty much all of my conversations with my boss are just with random thoughts. That was neat, that was neat, look at this thing Monday did to their members who pay monthly. They did this thing for an annual upsell. I was, "That's genius. I bet we can do that." Kathleen: Yeah, I guess if you don't have a large team, there are other ways to do it. I mean, I get a ton of value out of some Facebook groups I'm a member of including yours and then I'm a member of ... there's a lot of slack groups. There's Online Geniuses, which is super active and there are plenty of communities out there where you can kind of mimic that same experience, I think, if you bother to sign up for them. Justin: Exactly and people are so generous in this space. That's one thing I really love about this space right now. It wasn't always the case. I think a lot of people thought kind of what we're doing is a zero sum game and it's absolutely not. People are overly generous and that's what's made DigitalMarketer Engage such a great community, what makes IMPACT Elite a great community, what makes ... and why this stuff works because people are that generous which is- Kathleen: Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more and I think that is the true spirit of inbound, right? It's a pay it forward mentality. If I give my knowledge away, somehow, some way I may not know when now, but it will come back and benefit me sometime in the future. Justin: Exactly, exactly. Kathleen: That's a good thing. Well, so interesting. Now I'm going to go and I'm already a member of Lab, but now I want to go re-opt in and go through the process kind of like you were talking about. Maybe I'm going to make somebody on my team do it. Justin: Yeah. How To Connect With Justin Kathleen: That we can study this with a more detached eye. For anybody listening, if they want to learn more about this or learning more about DigitalMarketer, what's the best way for them to learn more online, get in touch with you, etc. Justin: I mean, DigitalMarketer.com, hands down, you'll actually ... you can go through that call really easily. You just click the button above the fold and you'll see that. Also, our blog is fantastic. Our content team is one of the best out there. I'm a little biased, but you know. Kathleen: It is good, no I will say that. You guys have amazing content and we, as an agency, have learned so much from you and continue to learn a lot. It's ... I will give my heartfelt endorsement. Justin: Then if you want to get in touch with me, I'm on LinkedIn. I think it's just ... you'll find me. I have a beard in the picture, so a little different. I mean, if you really want to get in touch with me it's Justin@DigitalMarketer.com. If you want to chat, I get lonely sometimes, so it's fine. Other than that, yeah, just check out DigitalMarketer.com, you'll get everything else. Kathleen: Great and I will put all those links in the show notes, so if anybody wants to check those out, they can head there. If you're listening and you learned something new or you like what you heard, it would be great if you would give the podcast a five-star review on iTunes. If you know somebody else who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I'd love to have them as a guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Justin. Justin: Thank you.

How can you increase your sales by 15% in one year just by communicating more with current customers? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, I'm joined by Todd Hockenberry, who is the CEO of Top Line Results and co-author of the book Inbound Organization: How to Build and Strengthen Your Company's Future Using Inbound.  Todd is an expert in helping companies increase revenue and sales by improving the customer experience, and in this week's episode, he shares why simply improving communication with your current customers can increase sales by, on average, 15% - all within just one year. 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 Todd include: Top Line Results helps B2B, and particularly industrial and manufacturing, companies adopt inbound principles. Customer experience is a discipline of marketing applied after the sale, and very few marketers or businesses get it right. Great customer experience starts by getting in the heads of your customers and understanding how they view your company, product or service. Harvard Business Review did a study and asked customers how long they wanted customer service people to be empathetic, and the answer was seven seconds. They want to hear "I'm sorry" within the first seven seconds, and after that, they don't want you to apologize anymore.  Customer service can actually increase customer loyalty in the long run by fixing problems. If you've got good systems, CRM, and a good centralized view of the customer, along with people that are focused on that, that are paying attention to the customers after the sale, you can drive a lot more revenue just by being there and by being helpful and extending that thinking of inbound all the way through the lifecycle. One company that does customer experience very well is Fatt Merchant. They do it by building a customer-first culture in which someone from marketing participates in every single meeting that the company has and serves as the voice of the customer. One reason that many companies fail to deliver exceptional customer experience is that their marketing departments are measured solely by the number of leads they generate and not by any metrics relating to the post-sale experience. Todd says that over the ten years he's worked with clients on customer experience he sees, on average, a 15% increase in sales just by focusing on improving the experience of current customers. One of the keys to delivering great customer experience is having someone who owns it. You also need a good tech stack, including a CRM and marketing automation platform, that can provide your team with a "centralized view of the customer." Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the Top Line Results website Connect with Todd on LinkedIn Follow Todd on Twitter Get Todd's book Inbound Organization: How to Build and Strengthen Your Company's Future Using Inbound Listen to the podcast to learn what you need to do to ensure your company is delivering a top-notch customer experience. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Todd Hockenberry who is the owner of Top Line Results and the coauthor of Inbound Organization: How to Build and Strengthen Your Company's Future Using Inbound. That's available in just about every book store I've been to as well as on Amazon. Welcome, Todd. Todd Hockenberry (Guest): Thanks for having me, Kathleen. It is definitely my privilege to be on the Inbound Success show, and anything I do with IMPACT is always a lot of fun. Todd and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: Oh, well we love working with you too. It's a love fest today on the podcast. Todd: Oh yeah. Kathleen: You know, I've obviously had an opportunity to get to know you, but I would love for you to talk a little bit more about yourself, your background, your company, and your book so that my listeners can learn a little bit more about who you are and what you do. About Todd Hockenberry and Top Line Results Todd: Sure. Top Line Results was founded almost 10 years ago. A couple weeks it'll be 10 years. My wife and I founded Top Line Results because I got fired, I lost my job, and I decided I was sick of working for other people and I was going to go do it myself. So what we focused on for really the last 10 years is helping B2B and particularly industrial and manufacturing companies adopt what we're talking about as inbound principles. And I had come across inbound principles probably about early 2000s, actually I was working at a turnaround. A company was dead and buried and we were trying to turn it around, but I didn't have a big budget, so I was doing early SEO content creation in vertical niche industrial markets when nobody else was doing it, and we saw tons of success. So I kind of started doing inbound before it was called inbound, so when I saw it and I ran across HubSpot, it just was natural to jump in. So when we started our business, that's what we started to do. We started to teach industrial and manufacturing and B2B companies how to use content, how to optimize it, how to create campaigns around content, how to connect with modern buyers using digital platforms. And that's really what we've built our business on. So we've been very focused on our target persona, which is kind of the, I would say the 15 to $100 million industrial manufacturing companies. We've gone a little bigger than that lately, but we really are consultants now and advisors and coaches on these issues. We're small. It's my wife and I and my daughter, and so we're not a delivery agency as much anymore. We just don't have the bandwidth to do it, so we really focus on teaching, and coaching, advising, and consulting with people on how to do these things. Kathleen: Oh, I feel like you and I could do an entire separate podcast on family businesses- Todd: Oh yeah. Kathleen: Because I had an agency for 11 years before I joined IMPACT and I started it with my husband, so we worked together for 11 years, and we actually got married when we started the company, so we had never been married and not worked together, and I, to this day, always say to people that my proudest accomplishment in life is that I didn't get divorced in the 11 years that I worked with my husband. Todd: Congratulations. I would say the question I get asked a lot is, people look at me and say, "How can you work with your wife?" And I say, "Really, it's the other way around. How could she work with me?" But the answer is that we are different in terms of the skillset we bring. We have different personalities, and when we're in her world, which is more technical and detailed, she's the boss, and when we're in my world, which is more kind of the strategy and sales and marketing side, then I'm the boss, so it works. We don't play in each other's sandbox, so that's what keeps us going. Kathleen: You know what? That's exactly what worked for my husband and I. That and also our offices were never right next to each other. When we had our office space, we had about 13 people in the agency, so we were in an office suite. His was on the opposite end of the suite from mine, so we tried to be as physically far apart as possible and also not have any overlapping responsibilities. Todd: Got you. Kathleen: So there's something to that. Todd: My wife and I share an office, but I'm out of it a lot, so I think I give her some quiet time she needs. Kathleen: That is a good thing. Interesting. Well as I said, that could be an entirely other episode, but for this episode, I was actually really excited to talk with you because, like you, I've been in this digital marketing, inbound marketing space for a long time, and one of the things I've noticed is that it's definitely an echo chamber, and a lot of us spend the bulk of our time if not all of our time focusing on how are we going to turn strangers into customers? And many of us started as HubSpot partners, and there's that whole "attract, convert, close" cycle, and we're so focused on that that we forget that a big piece of marketing is customer marketing, and that you really have to look at the whole lifecycle of the customer experience and the whole business because most businesses do have repeat business. They have customers that come back. Or they're SaaS, where you want them to just stay with you and prevent churn. And I think as marketers, we do ourselves a really big disservice by ignoring the post-sale period, so I am so excited because I get to pick your brain on this topic of what happens after you make the sale, because this is very much what you covered partially in your book and you've talked about a lot. So I don't even know where to start. Customer Experience & Inbound Marketing Todd: Well first of all, I think you're absolutely right. I think you nailed it. Inbound clearly started out as a way to attract, right? That was the beginning. And while that's still important, it's gotten a lot harder. There's a lot more content out there. It's more difficult to just throw a whole bunch of content out there and see the kind of success you're looking for. There were two ways I discovered inbound success, and I love the name of your show because I think there are two ways to think about that. It's about using inbound marketing or inbound tools to be successful, but inbound success to me is about what happens after the sale. And you'll see a lot more books and a lot more talk about customer success being a job, and you see these functions, it really came out of the SaaS world, and I learned this from HubSpot. When I was working with Dan Tyre to write the book, we interviewed a bunch of HubSpot people, and one of the sharpest people I met was Mike Redbord who ran customer success for HubSpot. And they talked me through the process where they would understand essentially everything that was going on with that client well before renewal time came up. So this was a complex ... because it's software, they had a lot of data and they could automate a lot of this. But the reality is what I discovered was that it was a discipline of marketing applied after the sale, which most people didn't think of. I go to client where they're, say, an industrial company, and I'll ask them, "Well, how do you communicate with your customers?" And I'm not kidding, I've actually had customers tell me this. They'll say, "We don't know where all of our equipment is. We don't even know who they are." So how could you possibly market to them if you don't know who they are? So the gap, I think in a lot of companies, between what they could be doing and what they should be doing is huge, and I think it's a huge opportunity to grow your business. And if you go back to the old cliches, it costs seven times more to get a new customer than it does to keep one. This is what we're talking about. Use everything you know about marketing inbound and apply it to your customers after the sale. So you asked me where to start, you said you didn't know where to start. I think I know where to start. This is where I would have started and what I teach my clients to do to start. Start with your mindset. You've got to get your mind right around this and realize that the way you're viewed is not the way ... The way you think you're viewed or the way you want to be viewed, your positioning, right? That's in the mind of your customer. It's not in the mind of your marketing team or in the mind of your sales team. It's in the mind of your customer. So you've got to get out of your house, get out of your company, and go there, talk to your customers and understand how you're perceived. I'm an old sales manager. I used to run sales teams, and I used to just lose my mind when I would hear from a customer and they would say, "Oh, we just bought one of those. We didn't know you did that." Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: Oh, I hated that because that's just being lazy. And I would say to most companies that I run across that other than the SaaS companies who seem to really get this because they want to produce churn, and that's a natural, right? You've got to get that recurring revenue. Or anybody that's in that recurring revenue model, they kind of get this. But if you're selling, say, capital equipment like a lot of my clients do, their next sale may be three years down the road, right? And that's important, but it's an easy sale to get if you just do your marketing between the sale and the next one. And it starts with that mindset where you've got to put yourself outside of your own world and put yourself in their world and understand what's going on from their perspective. And ultimately, this is all about adding value all the way through the life of the company or the life of the relationship. Everybody has customer service departments, right? But I still see a lot of people, and I think a lot of customer service companies and leaders think of their customer service as, "Well, if something's broken, then help them fix it." And it's the opposite. That's a reactive mode. It's really about today, it's like, "Keep me happy as your customer. Keep me satisfied. Keep me on track. Make sure I achieve my goals. Make sure the promises you made to me in your marketing and sales process I actually achieve those goals. Hit that ROI." And I've been reading about this and studying it a lot, and it's interesting because we hear a lot about empathy and we hear a lot about customer service and after the sale being about empathy, but Harvard Business Review did a study and they asked customers how long they wanted customer service people to be empathetic, and the answer was seven seconds. So after seven seconds, they don't want to hear, "I'm sorry." They don't want you to apologize anymore. They want you to do what? Kathleen: Fix it. Todd: They want you to fix the problem. Solve the problem. Exactly. That's all they care about. And if you look at other studies, you can see that customer service can actually increase loyalty in the long run by fixing problems, not shuffling them around to seven people, not getting an answering machine, getting a real person, being able to get connected via email or chat or after hours, right? These things, you build a system. And those are all inbound things, right? They're all ways to communicate and connect and share content and be helpful, and if you really absorb this mentally, that this is what you're there for after the sale, then you can build a system that'll take care of those customers in a way that's just fundamentally different than they're going to see most other places. And we all have to realize that everybody's expectations today are like Facebook or Amazon. Amazon's probably a better example. You want that kind of level of service. Or Zappos or these retail companies. And if you don't give that to them as a B2B company or an agency, whatever you are, I think you're going to be at a big disadvantage. And again, the goal is to be in front of them being helpful with the right information at the right time. And again, if you've got good systems, CRM, a good centralized view of the customer, you've got people that are focused on that, that are paying attention to the customers after the sale, again, you can drive a lot more revenue just by being there and by being helpful and extending that thinking of inbound all the way through the lifecycle. Kathleen: I love that you talked about it being a mindset or a culture, and you mentioned the name of the podcast, which is interesting. So it's called the Inbound Success Podcast. It's not called the Inbound Marketing Success Podcast, and there's a reason for that, and that is that to me, inbound is not really about marketing. It's a mindset. We actually have ... at IMPACT, we wrote the Inbound Manifesto last year, which, if you tweet me and ask for a copy, maybe I'll send it to you. But we describe it as being a mindset and a culture and an attitude, and it doesn't have anything to do with marketing. It has to do with a belief that if you are helpful and authentic and trustworthy and honest, that that will come back to you in spades in the form of business, in the form of other good things. It's sort of a "pay it forward" mentality, and you can apply that to marketing, you can apply that to customer service, you can apply it to really anything. But what I think is interesting is that you touched on something that I really believe, which is that yes, we as marketers tend to neglect this stage in the customer lifecycle. I think it's because in many cases, the way we're measured by the organizations in which we work is fundamentally flawed. A lot of marketers are measured based on how many leads are you delivering to the sales team? So if you're just going to measure your marketing team on the number of leads they're delivering, why would they care about what happens after the sale? There's no incentive there. Now, I say that. I mean, a really great marketer will advocate to have a role post-sale, but I think the incentive system is off. So I know I have people who listen to this podcast who are marketers, but I also have people who are business owners, and I think for business owners almost even more so than the marketers, it's important for it to start at the top with the belief that marketing isn't just to deliver leads. Yes, that is an important part of the job, but you've got to measure success on more than that. It has to factor in what happens after the close. Todd: I couldn't agree with everything you said more. You're absolutely spot on as far as I can tell and in what I believe. And a couple things. One, how many of your business owners out there have their marketing sales and service people sitting in a room together working on anything together ever? Most of them are separate departments with ... I've got one client that has those three different departments and they all have three different systems to manage the data with the customers. They don't talk to one another. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: They don't have any idea what's going on. And it's a big, successful company. So it's pretty common. So that goes back to that mindset and that belief, these people. That it's all a continuum. It's one connected thing and they're not separate departments because as far as your customers are concerned, they could care less about your departments, your bureaucracy, your processes, your rules. They don't care. They don't care. They want help. They want problems solved, they want to move forward, they're busy just like you are, and they don't care. They don't want to deal with your nonsense if that's what you're giving them. But let's go back to the beginning. That's why we wrote the book, what you talked about, your Inbound Manifesto, which is great by the way. I've seen it, and the idea that these are beliefs and principles, that the idea that modern buyers want to be helped first. That doing the right thing is helping them regardless of the short term economic interest in front of you. Treating people like human beings, right? You're not marketing to a demographic. You're talking to another person. I tell business owners all the time, I say, "Shop yourself. Look at your own marketing. Would you want that to be the way you're treated?" Kathleen: Right, and oh, by the way, all the things you just said about being helpful, treating people like humans, that will never go out of style. There's never going to be a technological advancement or a trend that makes us say, "Well, we shouldn't be helpful and we certainly shouldn't treat these people like humans." Todd: It's not new. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: It's not new. My daughter's in college and she's reading Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's the same stuff. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: That was from the '30s. It's not new. It's just the way human beings want to react to each other. But we've been throwing all this technology and all these tools at ourselves and we think that's the answer, and it's not. Success is us. It's being human and connecting with other people and helping them solve their problems. If your technology amplifies that, helps it, great. But it's not a substitute. It just is not. Now, if you're talking about transactional sales, I would say that Amazon is a real thing and in terms of, say, basic shopping, if I never step foot in a store again for the rest of my life, I'm happy. But if I'm buying, say, I was going to say a car, but that's not even good because my wife would buy a car online. But for a lot of sales, for professional service, any kind of complex sale, you're still talking about people and that's not going to go away. Kathleen: Well and even if you take Amazon, there are elements there that speak to what you're talking about. Helpfulness. This is why Amazon created Prime and eliminated shipping for a lot of things if you became a Prime member because they realized that that was a pain point for people, and there are elements in Amazon's business model that are purely about helping people and having a better experience as the customer. Todd: Sure. And the personalization and the specific recommendations are awesome. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: But this is why we wrote the book. This is why Dan and I wrote Inbound Organization, it's because we wanted to take these ideas of inbound, and Dan's a senior HubSpot guy, I think he was the sixth employee, he's been around forever, so I've been doing this for 10 plus years, so we've been around this idea for a long time and have a lot of experience with companies that have done it well and not done it well. And we want to take these ideas and tell people essentially that these ideas aren't marketing anymore, and they're not even sales anymore. It's just your business, and we need to get back to these foundational principles and apply them across your entire business. We talk about legal departments being inbound and we talk about accounting and finance being inbound, think about every time you work with a potential ... somebody you bought from, and they made it hard to pay you, right? Kathleen: Ugh. The worst. Todd: How crazy is that? Making it hard to pay you. Or legal departments that just, if you go through this complex sales process and the legal departments throw up a bunch of red flags. Everybody sees them as like the terms of use. You just click the button. Nobody reads them. How bad is that? I mean, come on, lawyers. Can't you do better than that? Can't you somehow boil that down into a paragraph of real stuff that you've surfaced the garbage and don't try to feel like you're putting on over on me? That's starting to apply inbound to your entire business. And don't even get me started on IT departments and how bad they are being inbound. Don't even get me started. Kathleen: Yeah. You know, one little anecdote. When you were talking earlier about how customers don't care about your processes and all that stuff, they just want things to be fixed, all I could think about was actually IT, and I worked at this job about 15 years ago, and I'll never forget. We had this IT guy who was just the nicest guy as a person, but every time there was an IT problem and I would go to him and be like, "There's this problem." He would launch into a five minute long diatribe about why Microsoft, their business model made it so that these things happened, and I just remember sitting there, in my head I'm going, "La, la, la, la, la. I don't care. Fix it for me." And that's exactly I think what's happening most of the time. What Does Best In Class Customer Experience Look Like? Kathleen: So assuming that I'm a business and I have this mindset and I believe, but I really want to do this right and tackle the post-sale stage and give my customers a great experience, can you talk a little bit about what that looks like? And let's zoom in from the hundred thousand foot view way, way down to, like, what are some companies actually doing to nail this? Todd: That's a great question, Kathleen. There's a great story in our book about something called Fatt Merchant, F-A-T-T Merchant, and that's their website, fattmerchant.com. If you're into payment processing, they're digital, online, amazing company. It's a startup here in Orlando. The lady who runs it, Suneera Madhani is an amazing person and just building a great company that has a culture that's just ... and you would recognize it, right? You walked into their office, it would feel like being in the IMPACT offices. Just totally absorbed in inbound. Their motto is 'The best damn experience', and it's on their walls, it's in every room. And everybody in the company's goal is to create the best experience for their customers possible. Their competition, there are some online competitors, but there's a lot of old line financial firms, so they're competing with these big, old time firms. And they're doing this by ... the way they do it culturally is they have a marketing person in every meeting in the company. It doesn't matter what department it is, there's a marketing person in there and they represent the customer. And they advocate and make sure that the best interests of the customer are being accounted for and that everybody in that room is solving for the customer regardless of what it is, whether it's a financial meeting, a product development meeting. Doesn't matter. They're bringing the customer in there and making it a real thing. Again, that gets the mindset and saying that, "This experience is our promise and that our practice internally and culture is we're going to live by that and nobody's going to be exempt from making sure that every decision we make is going to be in the best interest of the customer." Kathleen: That's really interesting, but I have to admit that the prospect of having ... I have a marketing team. I have seven people on my team, and the prospect of having to put one of them in every single meeting in the company is terrifying because then I would think, "When will we ever get our work done?" So I'm curious, operationally, how do you make that happen? You need to have [crosstalk] marketing team. Todd: You need to have less meetings. Well, again, I'm not sure that's exactly how everybody should do it. Certainly the point is ... I think a couple other things. I think business owners need to elevate the marketing function to a higher level in most organizations. I mean, again, in my world, we're dealing with traditional companies, marketing is kind of a back water, all those guys to the trade shows, or they outsource the website stuff to people like Impact, right? It's back water. They are not looked at as production, or engineering, or design as kind of running the show. And a lot of business owners come from that background. What I see, and it's going to take time, I see more and more business owners are going to come out of the marketing disciplines and the sales side and they're going to just know this stuff in their bones because I think the reason that'll happen is that the idea of this customer experience, and the customer journey, and customer success, being a competitive advantage and really one of the few ways companies are going to be able to differentiate moving forward, that will necessitate more leadership in companies coming from that discipline, whereas in a lot of technical fields, product superiority was what won the day. So engineers, designers, developers ran the companies. Today, I mean, tell me you can't find an alternative to anything. Tell me you can't find 15 alternatives to anything in five seconds. Ask Siri, ask Echo, whatever. Look on your phone, do a search. You're going to find a million alternatives. So product isn't the winner anymore as much as it used to be, and in many cases ... and again, if you think about overseas competition, again, product doesn't win anymore, so the experience and the relationships, these marketing and sales-related things become more and more important all the time to basically build differentiation. And companies won't be able to win on product features anymore. So I think the shift in leadership which will bring the mindset will help, but for you old time, you engineers and you product folks who have been around and done this and you're going to becoming from a technical side, I think it's a mindset, it's eating some humble pie and saying, "I don't necessarily know what's best for our customer all the time." Sometimes our marketing people who are out in the field talking to those customers, and watching their behavior, and seeing what works and what doesn't work, they have something to say too. So leaders need to elevate those people that really understand the experience and are seeing your customers to a higher level and to a more prominent place in the organization because again, engineering can engineer something awesome, you can build it wonderfully, but if the customer service people or the after the sale process ruins the experience, they're not coming back. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: They don't care. They'll go find somebody else. Kathleen: Yeah. So what are some specific things that you've seen companies do, marketers do within companies to improve that customer experience? Todd: Yeah. It starts with understanding the persona and really digging in and doing basic blocking and tackling, interviewing to understand the persona, map the buyer journey, and then do your thing. Build content that matches that journey. Think of your customer in terms of persona. Again, you can connect the dots. If they had this problem and they bought this solution, then they have these commonalities with other customers. Create great content for them. When's the last time an inbound marketer sat down and said, "I'm going to create an amazing video for my customers."? Or, "I'm going to create an amazing Ebook or an amazing tool for my customers."? Kathleen: Now, when you say content for customers, are you thinking content that helps them use the product? Because when I hear that, I think, "Oh, there's plenty of companies that have ongoing tutorials and things that help you get better use of their product." Or are you thinking about content that addresses other pain points? Todd: Yeah, I think you've got to think like a business owner. Think in business problems. The people that are buying your products or services, you should know their range of business problems that they have, and you should know how to extend the solution you sold into the next ones, the next sale. Think about the next sale. So create content that helps position you as the person or the company to come back to to solve that problem and extend the trust they gave you. They're basically buying from you, so they're saying, "I trust you." So therefore, you need to extend that. Again, I think things like training and product usage things are table stakes when it comes to this. You've got to have that. I'm talking about basically saying ... I'll give you a great example. The example we're talking about right now is a good one. How many inbound marketing agencies out there today offer a customer success program for their customers? Do you go to the leaders and the owners of your customers and say, "I can help you keep, retain, upsell, cross-sell, and extend your relationships with existing customers, and here's how I'm going to do it."? I haven't seen too many that do it. Most of them are still, "Hey, generate some leads. Get me more people to my website. Get me some top of the funnel stuff. Convert people so I've got more sales qualified leads." But how many walk in and say, "We can do all this stuff and we can help you grow your business with your existing customer base."? I do. I do. But I don't think a lot of other people do. Kathleen: So when you work with clients to do that, can you talk a little bit about some of the strategies that you advise them to use or give some examples of ... I would actually be really interested in, do you have any examples of where you've put that kind of a program in place and it's really generated measurable results? Todd: Yeah, I've got one client that we've worked with for a number of years, and they had a series of dealers where they sold some direct, but they also sold a lot through this dealer network, essentially just think of it as a distribution network. Well, they were frustrated because they had some dealers that were doing well and some dealers that weren't. It's kind of, you get a normal distribution of dealers, right? So what we did is we created a dealer health check system for them where we went through and we talked to the dealers and we looked at the behavior and the characteristics of the dealers that were successful. We created basically a check, they could create a score for these dealers so they could see which ones were successful and which ones weren't. Todd: Some of the obvious things were how much are they selling, how often are they buying, basic numbers like that. But we also included things like are they following the blog? Do they open emails? Are they consuming the content that we're creating that should be educating them about the opportunities and products and the customers? And then we also dug into CRM. How many communications were going back and forth between the sales people and these distributors and dealers? So we created this, basically we took all this data that we had and all the information and we created this health check system so it would show our client salespeople which ones were doing great, so then they wanted to keep pushing them and extend that, which ones were at risk, and which ones were really failing. So instead of guessing or wasting time, they were able to come up with a plan to use, again, some automated content as well as personal outreach to help those ones that were kind of in the middle, that's what we focused on. Getting the ones that were kind of in the middle that were doing okay but had some issues, move them up. And they've seen probably ... the latest I heard was probably about 15 to 20% increase in sales for that channel since they've started this, and it was about a year ago. So that is kind of combining things like CRM, content, sales teams. Putting it all together in a way that can give you a picture of what's going on, again, after the sale. So that was just one example. I've got lots of examples where companies have gone in and really, they don't do any marketing to their customers. Their after the sale marketing is basically, "Well, when the phone rings, we'll answer it." And I saw story after story where people just started a basic email campaign, just a really basic email campaign, like, "Here's what we're doing. Here's our new products." And all of a sudden, the phone rings, they get new orders. That's very common. I would say on average when we do that, we would see 10 to 15% improvement in sales just working with your existing customers. Not adding new ones, just applying these ideas to an existing customer base. I would say on average over the last 10 years of doing this that it would be 10 to 15% average increase of sales in the first year. Kathleen: Wow. Just by starting to reach out more. Todd: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Just paying attention to your customers, being intentional about it, using what you know about them to create content that would be interesting. If they bought this, then they might be interested in this. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: If they bought this to solve this problem, then they also have this problem, so therefore, let's talk about that. I don't think it's all that complicated, I think it's just taking what you already knew about inbound marketing and inbound sales and just moving to the after the sale piece. Kathleen: It very much reminds me of how a lot of SaaS companies, software companies, have the concept of a product qualified lead. You talked about looking at engagement data and stuff, and I interviewed somebody several episodes ago about this, and in the SaaS world, they have, as you've pointed out with HubSpot, they have this wealth of data on how much people are in the product, how they're using it, and they can surface areas where maybe things aren't going so smoothly. But the best SaaS companies, especially the ones that are going from premium or free trial to paid versions, look really closely at that during that period to then try to upsell their customers, and I think that other industries and companies don't do nearly as good of a job at that, and I think we can all learn a lot from the concept of a product qualified lead. So we have people that are "already engaging with our product", and that product could be something that they purchased from us, like a thing, an actual tangible thing, or it could be a service. Like IMPACT, we're a marketing agency, how are people interacting with our service? What are the telltale signs that they're product qualified? Meaning they might be qualified to purchase something additional or to engage at a different level with us? Most companies fail abjectly at doing that. Todd: Sure. And if you're in the software business, a product qualified lead, if you have a popup that says, "We have this ad on." Right? And if you click it to get more information, there's some automated things, and if you sell equipment or even if you sell professional services, things like that, you don't have that kind of built in thing, so you have to create that. You have to create that product qualification, and you may know that if somebody's asking for accessories or follow on parts or upsells, you may have a good sense of it, but you should also know. You should know pathways for people. I had an example where a client has a piece of equipment, it was a pump. Really basic stuff, it was a pump. But they were selling it to contractors, and very quickly we found that by buying this one product to do this one job, it allowed them to do another job that they could also do. So instead of just pitching the pump on the special occasions, it was a business development opportunity. So anybody that bought that pump, we started to create content to share with their customers about how they could grow their business. If you have this to do this job, you can also do this job, so here's a way you can help grow your business. And again, that's adding value with, again, content, what you know. You have to kind of create that product qualified lead and it's out there. And I've seen it in every product I've ever been around in terms of selling. From very high end capital equipment to working with my clients with software. Metal roofs. You name it. It doesn't matter. There's always something new and there's always something down the road you can help somebody with. If nothing else, create raving fans. Get them talking about you. Get reviews and ratings, get them to give you referrals. If nothing else, you can get that. Structuring Your Company For Customer Experience Kathleen: I imagine that this has some implications for organizational structure because if you are bringing a new customer onboard, and if it's not a totally transactional business. In other words, if you have some kind of an ongoing business relationship with that customer, then I imagine if all of a sudden your marketing department is getting involved in marketing to that customer post-sale, you have to make sure that from the customer's standpoint it feels like the right hand is talking to the left, and they don't have this disjointed experience. So for example, if they have ... in our company, you'll have an account representative who deals with you on a day-to-day basis for your marketing, but then we have a sales team, and we have a customer satisfaction person, and then we have our marketing team. So how do you structure the company internally so that from the customer's standpoint it feels like a seamless experience and everybody understands what the touch points are and you're not competing with 10 different emails from different departments in the company? Todd: I would say obviously there's a range of answers for that depending on where our companies are today. So let's take a company that's not really doing this right now, and then we'll come back to your example of IMPACT. If you aren't really focused on ... if you have that traditional customer service department and that's your after sale focus, look at your expense reports. How much are you spending on sales? How much are you spending on marketing? Compare that to how much you're spending on customer service and after the sale work. Look at your hours, or if you can do it, figure out the resources you're applying across the buyer journey. The whole customer lifetime. Look at where your resources are going. And I bet you a significant portion if not 10 times more of your money is spent on generating new business than it is to keep old business or existing business. And everybody knows the cliché, I've said it once already. Seven times more to get a new customer than it is to keep another one. So if you're smart, you would flip that around. You would spend more on after sale managing your customers than you sell on front end stuff. Now, I'm not naïve enough to think that's going to happen any time soon, but the reality is, you should be moving resources towards keeping your customers happy, customer success after the sale. So if you're not doing this well, you need to look at that and start allocating resources that direction. I think if you've already got a structure like the one you just described there, Kathleen, about IMPACT is not an uncommon one. I think the key I've seen there is that somebody owns the process. Somebody owns that customer and is responsible for making sure all those pieces are connected. So if you've got an account manager, their job is to work day-to-day with that client and deliver what you've promised, right? So it's hard for them necessarily to step back and think about the next step in the future. That's probably your sales team or it could be your customer satisfaction team. And again, I don't know how you're coordinated, but somebody has to own that customer for the life of that customer. Somebody has to be looking at the entire thing and saying, "Okay, here's what's next." And I see chief revenue officers, which may fit that bill. I see more titles around that that are showing up, and I would hope that that's the goal, to get to a place where somebody internally owns that relationship top to bottom or owns all of the relationships top to bottom and then is coordinating elements to deliver the right value at the right time at the right place. They can't be walled off from one another, whatever that looks like. You've got to have communication back and forth. And a lot of people that have worked with HubSpot, you'll see this, you use HubSpot, right? You'll see emails coming out six months before your renewal is due and you'll get a phone call from an internal person that's asked about how you're doing. They may stutter, they're going to see if you're doing well or not, right? And if you're a partner, you're going to hear the same thing. "How's it going with these accounts? The renewals are coming up. What do you want to do? Let's work together." Somebody's owning that. I think that's the key thing. If somebody owns that outcome, the outcome being the ongoing relationship, then I think you're going to win. Kathleen: It certainly seems also that you would need to have the right tech stack in place because you can have somebody own it, but unless all of your different players have really good visibility into what have the communications and the touch points been, then it could get very messy, very quickly. Todd: It's actually impossible if you don't. Kathleen: Yeah. So having a good CRM, and then I would think, I'm sure you and I would preach the same thing, having a marketing system, a marketing automation system that is fully integrated with your CRM so that the sales people can see what marketing is doing, the marketing people can see what sales is doing, and your customer success people obviously bridge all of it. Todd: Exactly. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: We would call that a "centralized view of the customer," where everybody can see it and know what's going on. And again, it sounds so basic, it sounds easy. The problem is a lot of companies I deal with have been around a while so they've got a lot of legacy systems. Those IT guys have been there since the '90s and they're used to servers and buy in software and they don't like the cloud. They've got all kind of biases, right? And they don't want ... they want these walls and they don't want information to get out and get shared because they're afraid of getting hacked, or losing it, or all these concerns. And they're legitimate, but there's answers. And if you don't have that centralized view of the customer, I would say, talking to the leaders of companies, I would put that right there at the top of your strategic initiatives. And if you don't have it, it makes it that much harder to deliver a great experience, which is the ultimate differentiation moving forward. Kathleen: Yeah. If you don't have a good customer list. I love that you said that at the beginning because it's true. It is so true. It sounds crazy, but I'm not going to name names, but I know a lot of companies that people might be very surprised to hear can't produce a list of their customers. Todd: I had a client a couple years ago that sold equipment that started at $250 thousand and went to well over a million dollars, and when I asked that question, "How good is your customer list?" They said, "We're not sure where all of our equipment is." Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: They didn't know where it was. I guess I was stunned. It's common, so again, that centralized view of the customer, it needs to be at the top of the list for leaders and owners. It sounds so basic and so rudimentary, but it's not. It's the beginning. You talk about the tech stack, that database is your business, and if you don't have it, then you can't build on it, then you can't build that experience. Or if you do, it's all over the map. One person may do it well, and over here it's not done well. Or this department does it well and this department doesn't because there's no connectivity. What's The Impact On The Bottom Line? Kathleen: Absolutely. So it's interesting as we're talking and I'm thinking about this whole conversation, the biggest takeaway to me seems to be that if all you do is get a good handle on who your customers are and start initiating regular contact with them, you have a good chance at increasing your sales by 10 to 15% within a year. Todd: Yeah. I mean, we would tell people follow up on your quotes, make sure you stay in front ... the basics. It's just, don't neglect those things. Those are relatively easy to do and just do those basic blocking and tackling. You're not going to go backwards if you do that. Number one, you're going to surface issues if you're talking to people and you're communicating with them, you're going to surface potential issues earlier and you're going to be able to deal with those. You're going to find new opportunities. If your sales team and marketing team are using content well, you're going to open up new opportunities and you're going to do something most companies aren't doing. So you're going to create differentiation right there in the after sale experience. So again, I think it's one of the easiest ways to grow your business without upsetting the apple cart or making a gigantic investment. Kathleen: Yeah. Agreed. So interesting. We could talk for hours about this. Todd: Sure could. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: But we don't have hours. So a couple of questions before we wind things up. My regular listeners know I always like to ask people, company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Todd: Well, there's a bunch. I mentioned FattMerchant. FattMerchant.com, it's a shameless plug for them if you need financial, payment processing services, they're awesome. Another company that was in our book is called Cerasis, C-E-R-A-S-I-S, and that's Cerasis.com. They're in the fleet management and shipping world. They compete with people like FedEx and UPS and they're amazing. They've created this amazing ecosystem and community around their business in a very traditional world where they're connecting people that are trucking companies with people who need to ship things. They are a wonderful example of it. And there's lots of individuals out there that are doing it well. On my podcast, it's called The Industrial Executive, I just interviewed Justin Champion, who is one of the inbound guys who runs the academy. In terms of a practitioner and teacher of inbound and inbound marketing, he's right up there at the top of the list. He wrote a book called Inbound Content, and he's just come out with a new blog strategy class and a video marketing class that I think are amazing. Kathleen: I love him. He's been a guest on one of our podcasts here at IMPACT. He's great. Todd: Yeah, big fan of Justin. And of course, IMPACT. You guys are at the top of the heap when it comes to agencies in the inbound world. You've been around it for a long time and I still read your blog all the time, and all the vlogs, so I'm still paying attention to what you guys are saying because I'm always learning from you. Kathleen: Well that is high praise coming from you, so thank you for that. If somebody is listening and they want to learn more about this whole topic or get in touch with you or if they want to buy your book, can you rattle off a few different ways that folks can get in touch with you online? How To Connect With Todd Todd: Sure. I'm easy to find. Todd Hockenberry. @ToddHockenberry is Twitter, LinkedIn. Happy to connect with people on LinkedIn, just search for my name. The book, InboundOrganization.com is our website for the book. Tons of info there, you can connect with all of our social accounts there. We've got a really cool thing on that website. It's InboundOrganization.com, no spaces. It's an assessment. You can take a 33-question assessment to see where you are in terms of your adoption of the inbound ideas across your entire organization. So it's free, you just fill it out and we'll send you the results, and it's been very interesting seeing the hundreds of people that have done it to kind of see where people are doing well and where they aren't. The answers are pretty insightful and a lot of the people that we know do it really get a lot of good feedback, so check that out. You can find me just Top Line Results or Todd Hockenberry, I'm all over the internet, and I would love to connect with you and answer questions and help you in any way I can. Kathleen: Love it. And I will put all those links in the show notes. And I'm assuming if they want your book, they can just go onto Amazon and get it there. Todd: Yeah. Amazon's great and a lot of Barnes & Nobles carry it, and a variety of other places you buy books. Inbound Organization. Check it out. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: Great. Well thank you so much, Todd. This has been fun, and I'm now inspired to take a closer look at how we're communicating with our customers at IMPACT. If you're listening and you enjoyed what you heard today or you learned something, take a minute, go to Apple Podcasts, and leave a review. It makes a big difference for a podcast like this one. It helps us get in front of more people, and I would be so personally grateful if you could do that today. And if you know somebody who is doing really great inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love for them to be my next guest. Thanks again, Todd. It was great chatting with you. Todd: Thanks for having me. It was my pleasure to be on Inbound Success, Kathleen, and I wish you lots of inbound success. Kathleen: Thanks.

What does a company whose business IS email do when it comes time to redesign its email newsletter?  This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, I'm joined by Liz Willits, who is a Senior Content Marketing Specialist at email marketing software provider AWeber. Liz has sent thousands of emails in her time at AWeber, and has studied the performance of thousands more sent by AWeber's clients. She knows a thing or two about what works and what doesn't when it comes to email marketing and when it came time to revamp AWeber's own email newsletter, Liz applied these best practices, consulted with AWeber's readers, and conducted tests to develop a newsletter format that consistently gets 30%+ open rates. 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 Liz include: Email is going through a renaissance and there are a number of companies that have now formed business models around their emails.  AWeber's new email newsletter, called FWD: Thinking, is designed to be more of a conversation with its audience than a traditional newsletter. When Liz began the process of redesigning the email newsletter, she sent a 10 question survey to the company's 30,000 subscribers to get their feedback. Based on reader feedback, Liz changed the layout of the newsletter to establish a clear visual hierarchy that would help readers understand what they should focus on. That simple change resulted in a much higher clickthrough rate on the first article in the newsletter. She also added images into the newsletter and says that modern email providers are much more capable of processing images, so they don't affect deliverability the way they might have in the past. Because many email providers block images by default, it's important to think carefully about your image alt text. Liz and her colleague split responsibility for writing the newsletter and one rule of thumb they follow is that the words they use need to be understood by someone who doesn't have a marketing background. The newsletter is sent from "FWD:Thinking" as opposed to "AWeber," and changing the "From" field has had a big impact on open rates. Liz recommends that email subject lines be between one and 20 characters and that marketers aim for open-rates above 15%, and click-through rates above 5%. List hygiene is important. Liz suggests removing anyone who hasn't opened one of your emails in the last six months. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the AWeber website. Reach Liz by email at elizabethw@aweber.com. Follow Liz on Twitter. Subscribe to FWD:Thinking. Listen to the podcast to get Liz's advice on how to structure email newsletters for maximum performance. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and today, my guest is Liz Willits, who is a senior content marketing specialist at AWeber. How's it going Liz? Liz Willits (Guest): Good. How's it going with you, Kathleen? Liz and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: Good. Good. Tell my audience a little bit more about what a senior content marketing specialist does, and what AWeber does. About AWeber Liz: Yeah. So, I've been at AWeber for around three years, and I do any kind of content creation. So, from webinars to landing pages, to blog posts, to guides, e-books, and email. I love email, and at AWeber, we're an email marketing platform. We're one of the oldest email marketing platforms, and actually, we invented email automation. Kathleen: Wow. Liz: Yeah. So, we are in the Philly suburbs. We have around a hundred thousand customers we help, and we help them connect with their audience with email. So, I'm obsessed with email marketing, I think that's my wheelhouse, and I love all things email. I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to email marketing which I never thought I would say that about myself, but it's true. Kathleen: Well, I love it. Email is a good thing to be obsessed with. I have been in the marketing world for many years now, and if ... I don't think I could count on two hands the number of times I've heard people say, "Email is dead! Email is dying!" Email is sort of like the cat with 9 lives, only it has more than 9. It never dies. I was just talking to somebody about this how, and in-fact, I think we're putting an article up on our website in the next two days about how email newsletters are undergoing a renaissance, and there are some amazing newsletters out there right now, and really innovative things that people are doing with email. So, it's a cool field to specialize in, and I'm excited to talk about it with you. Email As A Business Model Liz: Yeah, me too. And, I totally agree, email is really going through a renaissance. There are a bunch of newsletters that I subscribed to that I'm obsessed with, that I get every morning, and there are whole businesses now built around email. I think of The Skimm and Morning Brew, who their business model is the newsletter, so it's really cool to see how that is working out. Kathleen: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I have always gotten The Skimm. I don't get Morning Brew, so I'll have to check that out, but I get The Hustle and Quartz Obsession, and those are, again, like you said, those are all email newsletters that are essentially business models that started as a newsletter, and now, they're moving into other things, because their newsletter is so lucrative. Liz: Yeah. Kathleen: So, it's really interesting. It kind of, they've turned things around and they're coming at it exactly the opposite way than most companies do, which is they have the business, and then they start the newsletter. So ... Liz: Right. AWeber's Email Newsletter Kathleen: Very interesting. So, now you, at AWeber, you all have a newsletter. Tell me a little bit more about that. Liz: Yeah. We have a weekly newsletter called FWD:Thinking, and it's for anyone who wants to learn about email marketing, and learn from some of the top experts in the email industry. So, it's all about email, and sometimes branches out into digital marketing, but we actually just rebranded the newsletter this year, so we are definitely going through that new newsletter feel, and just looking at email newsletters in a new way at a new perspective, and more of a conversation with your audience. Kathleen: Oh, I feel like we're going to have a lot to talk about because we just launched our newsletter in August, and similarly, it was a very interesting, almost existential exercise, because we hadn't had one in several years, and the world has changed a lot in that time, and what constitutes a good email newsletter has changed dramatically. So, maybe you could just start with talking about when you went through your rebrand, I'd love to, if you could pull back the curtain and share with us a little bit about, what did your team talk about? What were your goals? What were the models you looked at? I don't even know where to start I have so many questions. Liz: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So, yeah. We've been sending a weekly newsletter for years, long as I've been here, and we hadn't updated it in the time I've been at AWeber which has been three years. We haven't made significant changes to it, and so we kind of were just looking at it and wondering what people were thinking about it, but we also have something we called a "sentiment widget" at the bottom of every newsletter we send, and it's basically this little happy face and a frowny face, and you can click on it depending on how you feel about the newsletter, and then it opens up a survey so they can fill in, the subscriber fill in more information about why they selected that. So, we generally get really great feedback, but there are some things we got in there like, "I'm a little bit overwhelmed by the newsletter sometimes. There's a lot of information in it." And things like that. And so, our team decided to do a full survey of our newsletter audience, so we built out a 10 question and 15 question survey to ask them what they thought of the newsletter, and if they had told us everything's perfect, we probably wouldn't have ... We might've ... We ... We're perfectionists, so we probably would've changed some things, but not to the extent we did. We got some awesome feedback about people who loved it, and some really great constructive feedback from people who said, "You know? It's a bit overwhelming at times. I want quick wins, and easy to-do items within the email itself." And, someone said to us, "It's good. It's a really good newsletter, but it doesn't knock my socks off." And we want that feeling of people being impressed by the branding and what's in the newsletter, so for me, when I got, when I saw that survey feedback, I was like, "Wow. We really need to rebrand our whole entire newsletter." Because I want it to be that feeling of, "This is amazing, and I can't wait for this to be in my inbox every week." So, that's kind of what caused us to do the rebrand and invest in time in that, because we're an email company, and we really want our emails to be something amazing for our audience. Kathleen: Yeah, you really just sort of have to lead by example when that's your business. Liz: Yeah. Kathleen: Now, how many people get your email? Liz: We have a little bit over 30,000 who receive our weekly newsletter, who's subscribed to the weekly newsletter in particular. Yeah. Kathleen: Okay, great. And, so you sent this survey out, you got the feedback. Talk to me a little about, from the feedback you got. What were some of the changes that you made, and how did they manifest in the new format? Liz: Got you, yeah. So, someone said that we needed to stand out more, so our brand design team rebranded the newsletter as far as look and feel. It was actually, we never had a name for the newsletter before, so we decided that it needed a name. The newsletter itself, it can't be "The AWeber Newsletter", it needed its own unique name and its own identity, so we called it FWD:Thinking, and that's F-W-D, colon, thinking. Kathleen: I was going to say, I love that. I immediately, of course forward thinking is a thing in and of itself, but I immediately was like, "Oh, you're forwarding the email because it's so good." And, that's awesome. Liz: Yeah, exactly. And so, our brand design team created a logo for it, and then we rebranded how all the imagery within the email, and the look and feel itself, so we coded out a whole new email template for it. It has its own colors and it's own look and feel now, so the branding is a lot stronger. So, that was one big change we made, and another thing was that, people told us, "There's so much content in this, and it's great valuable content, but I don't know where to start sometimes." So, we changed up the hierarchy of the email. We used to three articles right on top of each other, and the way it was designed was that the articles all looked the same. It was headline, description copy, and the CTA button. So, what we did in the new redesign, was we have one article at the top that takes prominence, and it's much bigger, longer description. And then, we have two sub articles below that, and they're smaller. They're side-by-side, so for the reader, it tells them exactly what article is most important, or what video is most important visually, and for us, it was a way for us to highlight our new content, because we were really only publishing around one new blog post a week, so to have three equally weighted post didn't make sense for our publication schedule either, so we share older content in those smaller sections. Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. Now, did you notice when you made that switch and you highlighted the one article on the top, have you noticed a difference in click-through rates since doing that? Liz: Yeah. So, the click spread, more people click on that first article. A lot more people click on the first article, and a lot less people, the second and third article get much fewer clicks, which was our goal for sure, because that new article is the one that we want to get the most clicks on. Overall click-through rate increased too, but what was most interesting to me actually, was the, how much of the clicks the first article now gets. Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. It sort of seems like if the other two articles are older, the click-throughs on those are nice-to-haves as opposed to need-to-haves, but the first one is a need-to-have. Liz: Right. Right. And, it makes it easy for our readers and our subscribers to just, if they only have time for one thing, that's the one thing they can click on. Because, that was a lot of the feedback we got too, was that, "I don't have much time. I end up saving these emails in a folder to read later because I don't have time to read them." Kathleen: Ah, the notorious marketer's "saved for read later" email folder. I used to have a folder that was labeled, "Read this today." And I had all my newsletters go into that, and at one point, I realized that there was like 5,000 things in my "read-this-today" folder, and I was like, "Either, I need to relabel this, or I need to get serious about actually looking at these things." Liz: Yeah. Yeah. And, I think, yeah, that's what happens to me, too. I have the same thing. I have folders where I share it for later, with good intentions of reading it later, but it doesn't always happen, and that was another thing we decided to do was to add read-times to all of our articles. So, we added to our top article, say something like, a six-minute read, or the time it takes to run a mile with an egg on a spoon, in your mouth. Liz: So, we'll have a fun comparison to the read time on the first article, and then the lower two articles have just a three minute read, two-minute read, and ... Kathleen: Wait, who runs a mile in six minutes with an egg? I can't run a mile in 10 minutes without an egg. Liz: I know, that was exactly what I said. I'm lucky if I run a six-minute mile after months of training, forget the egg on the spoon part. Kathleen: Yeah. I'm lucky if I run a mile, period. I like that though, that's great to inject a little bit of humor in. Now, going back to your first comment, you revamped the branding of the newsletter. How much of a factor in your decision making around the new newsletter design was deliverability and the need to balance the volume of images and other things in the newsletter? Liz: Right. So, I would have to say we always balance our images just based off of design theory, not overwhelming people visually, so we always do typically one image associated with each article, but as far as delivery, images have less and less of an impact on delivery anymore. So, images in your emails, really, I was just talking to our director of deliverability about this, and she's phenomenal, knows all these things about email deliverability that I would never have thought of or guessed, but she was telling me that, as Gmail, and Yahoo, and these internet service providers become more sophisticated, the weight of images in your emails matters less and less because they can handle them better. So that wasn't, delivery itself wasn't, a huge thing that we considered when we were doing imagery and the rebrand. Now, if you have a zip file in your email, that's a different story, or GIFs, if you're using a ton of GIFs, that can really up the load time of your email, and perhaps cause delivery issues, but images themselves weren't a big factor for us because internet service providers have gotten more sophisticated where they don't hurt you, your delivery rate doesn't hurt, because you added images. Kathleen: Now, what about from the standpoint of the user experience? Because one of the things I've noticed, and we've started talking about this ourselves, about myself, is that when I open my long crowded folder of things to read today, and I go into these newsletters, inevitably, I use Gmail, it's blocking the images, and of course, there's the little button that says "display images below", but I don't usually click it unless there's a really good reason. And so we've talked a lot about, how many images should we include if the majority of people aren't going to see them by default? And, if they don't click on that, then does it because a weird experience of blank spaces? I'm wondering if you all have talked about at all in your decision making about the newsletter. Liz: Yeah, absolutely. So, we always do a plain-text version of our newsletter, too, and we just set up the plain-text version in AWeber, and that version is, if there are no images showing, this is how it looks, and we also have alt-text on our images. So, if an image doesn't show up, the newsletter still makes sense. So, we've talked about that a lot, because, yeah, you're right, a lot of people have images turned off. You have to think about, "What's the experience for them?" And you have to also think about, "What's the experience for all of my subscribers?" Some of them might be using screen readers, so what does this sound like when it's being read out-loud? So, yeah. Definitely. We talk about that a lot, and I think that's where alt-text behind the image comes in. We make sure that if the image doesn't appear, that there is that alt-text that will give the user the prompt to know what to do still. Kathleen: Yeah, that's great. And then, you had also talked earlier about tone. It sounded like all had made some changes in the tone of the newsletter as well, in addition to just the look and feel of it. Liz: Yeah, definitely. We're trying to be much more conversational and more relaxed, and more like a friend in your inbox, not a market. So, we don't want to be that person who appears in the inbox and is using these marketing words like ESP and ROI and ARPU, we want to be that person who makes marketing and email marketing something fun, easy, and simple, because that's what it should be, and good email is a conversation in the inbox, and should be more like a letter to a friend rather than, sometimes what we intend to do as marketers is this formal writing. So, yeah. We're trying to make it fun with things like that read time, and just a more relaxed tone. Kathleen: And, you said, does ... The newsletter goes out once a week now? Liz: Yes, that's right. Kathleen: And, is it one person that writes all of them? Liz: It's my colleague and I, who's another content market on our team. So, it's the two of us who write them. Kathleen: Okay, because my next question was just going to be around having kind of at-least conceptually established what you want that tone to be like. How do you ensure that it's ... That, especially if more than one person's involved in writing, that the tone is delivered consistently, but also, are there any guard rails you set up? Because that, I feel like that conversational tone can easily veer into areas that could get a little bit trickier. I'm curious how you all have handled that. Liz: Right. Yeah, so we have a review process. So, whether I write it, or my colleague writes it, the other person reviews it, and so we're both looking at it from the tone perspective to make sure it aligns. And you're right, tone is tricky. A lot of people think tone means, oh, add in these really casual millennial-esque words, and now I have a great tone. Tone is difficult, because it's more like writing like you would speak, or writing like a person. And so, yeah. We definitely edit each other, and we have a very formal review process so that we can look for tone, and we always look for typos, of course, and things of that nature, but then also, is this the right tone? When we're both going to edit it and review it. Kathleen: Yeah. Any specific do's or don'ts that you all have developed? Liz: As far as tone, in specific? Or, just email review? Kathleen: Well, I would say tone and just language, the things you can and cannot say, that sort of thing. Liz: We, big thing for us, a big rule for in tone, is if an average person who's never had a marketing an article at all doesn't know what the word is, it shouldn't be in the newsletter. So, that's a big one, and I think that's an easy one to fall into because, as a marketer, you're so used to the language, that I think sometimes you don't even track the fact that the average person might have no idea what you're saying. Yeah. So, that's definitely a big rule for us to read from the lens of someone who's never read a marketing book or a marketing article. Kathleen: That's great. That's a really nice guidance, because we do, marketers are horrible, horrible violators of jargon, and we like to make ourselves sound smart by using big words, right? Liz: Right. Kathleen: So, what about who the newsletter comes from? What appears in the "from" field? Is it the company name? Is it a person's name? Liz: We actually switched it over to FWD:Thinking. So, the name of the newsletter, and we had a big boost in open-rates when we did that. And, changing your sender name is definitely something you want to do with care. So, you shouldn't change your sender name every week. So, if you do change it, it should be something that you stick with for a few months, because constant changing of sender name actually does negatively impact deliverability. So, we made a very conscious decision, and we talked about it for a while, too, of whether we should change the sender name. It had been "AWeber Blog" as a sender name, which is pretty boring, and not all that interesting. And, we debated it for a while, and we decided, "Okay, we're rebranding this newsletter. Let's go for it. We're going to send it from 'FWD:Thinking'." And, right after doing that, we saw a big boost in open-rate. And, but the thing to be concerned about, always with changing the sender name, is, "Will people recognize me in the inbox, or will I be marked as spam?" So, we made sure to make the introduction of our newsletter before we changed the sender name. So we wrote a whole article describing the rebrand, and our new name, and why we were doing it, and then, around a month later, after they'd been seeing the logo every week in the inbox, the new FWD:Thinking logo, that was when we changed the sender name, because we were very concerned that if we just all of a sudden changed it, that we could get marked as spam a lot, because people wouldn't know who we were. So, changing the sender name is definitely something to be careful about, but I think if you're, if you want a strong brand, it has to be something that's very consistent with what your newsletter is and what it's doing. So, if you're a solopreneur, you might want to use just your name, but if you're building a brand, it might be the company name. Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. What about subject lines? Do you have any kind of particular approach to that for the newsletter? Liz: I'm ... I think short subject lines are really effective right now. I think a lot of people have subject lines that are 40 characters and up, and I think one to 20 characters is really effective right now, because most people aren't doing it, and most people can't find a way to have 20 characters or less, and still be somewhat descriptive. So, it takes a lot of skill to be succinct, but to also be descriptive. So, I think one to 20 characters is a sweet spot right now, but I think it always changes. So, if everyone starts to do one to 20 characters, then I think long subject lines might work better. But I think short subject lines are great right now because a lot of people aren't doing them, and because of mobile readers. So, if people open your email on their phone and all they see is the subject line, it often gets cut off if it's more than 30 to 40 characters, so that's why the short ones are nice because they don't get cut off. Kathleen: Got it. And, do you tend to use subject lines that are descriptive of what someone will find in the newsletter, or is it something else that's more fun and playful? Liz: We usually use ones that are descriptive of what's in the newsletter because our audiences told us they appreciate that. In the past, we've tested fun ones, ones that aren't descriptive of our newsletter, and we've gotten feedback that, from our subscribers, that they said, "We like it when you use the descriptive ones and we know what's inside the newsletter." So, for our audience, that works well. But I know The Skimm, for instance, does really random, fun, quirky, subject lines that have very little to do with the email content itself. So, I think it's something as a brand or as a company that you should test with your own audience. Kathleen: Yeah, and that really fits well with The Skimm's brand, because they are kind of irreverent and snarky, and yeah. Liz: Yeah, absolutely. Kathleen: So, that's really the actual email itself. I would love to learn a little bit more about your process around delivering it, specifically things like, you have this large list, do you have any policy around whether you send to your gray-mail list, your less engaged subscribers? Do you have any kind of rule, if somebody hasn't opened one in so long, they get cleansed from the list? How do you handle list hygiene? Liz: Yeah, absolutely. List hygiene is so, so important, and I don't think a lot of marketers know how important it is, or are doing it the right way right now. It's really important that if someone hasn't opened your email in a while, you get them off your list, because they're actually hurting you. I've heard people say, "Well, I have a large email list. What does it hurt if I have a bunch of people who are on there but never open? Because, they might eventually open." But, it does actually hurt your email deliverability, which means how many emails are reaching the inbox. So, if you have a user, let's say they haven't opened in six months, I would delete them or send them a re-engagement campaign and ask them, "Do you still want to be on this list? If so, let me know. If not, you can opt out here." And if they don't open that email, I would definitely delete them off your list, because the higher your open rates are, the higher your click-through rates are, the more likely you are to get into the inbox and not the spam folder. Or sometimes, emails don't go anywhere, so definitely, regularly deleting people from your list is important. It's not how big your list is, but how engaged it is that matters. So we, I recommend, you aim for open-rates above 15%, and click-through rates above 5%, and so does our director of deliverability. So, if you're not around there, list cleaning can help for sure with that, and sometimes it might be a problem with your content, so if your content's the problem and it's not engaging, then that is what should be fixed. Kathleen: What about, do you have a KPI or a metric to shoot for with unsubscribes? Liz: With unsubscribes? No. What I like to do is keep a baseline of that. So, I have an average that I keep, for our newsletter, of how many unsubscribes do we get each time we send an email, and if that suddenly spikes, that's when I would be concerned. So, I don't necessarily have what you should aim for there. For spam complaints, though, you definitely want to aim for less than .1% or something around there. The fewer spam complaints you can get, the better, because those impact your deliverability. AWeber's Email Newsletter Performance Kathleen: Yeah, interesting. And, can we talk a little bit about the performance of your newsletter, specifically? Are you willing to share any of your own stats? Liz: Yeah. I can share some general stats for sure. Kathleen: Okay. Liz: Yeah, so as far as open-rates, click-through rates? Kathleen: Yeah. Liz: Yeah. So, our open-rates are usually around the 30% mark. Kathleen: That's really good. Liz: Yeah, it's solid, and we have sometimes where we'll get an 80% open-rate depending on the email. Kathleen: Do you crack open a bottle of champaign when that happens, since you're the email lady? Liz: Yeah. Yeah. I get super excited. But yeah, and it really, it varies from email to email. Transactional emails get such high engagement compared to newsletters, which I think is super interesting. A welcome email for instance. I've had welcome emails that I've got 96% open-rates and 60% click-through rates, which for me is crazy, because I think a baseline that people see often, is an open-rate between 20 and 30%, and a click-through rate between two and five, let's say. Liz: So, any time there's a click-through rate above 10% or an open-rate above 40%, I'm partying. But, it definitely depends on how frequently you clean your list, so if you are cleaning your list all the time, then you can expect higher open-rates and click-through rates. Kathleen: Yeah, that's so true. And, how does that performance compare to the performance of the newsletter before you made all the changes? Liz: So, before the changes, our click-through rates and our open-rates boosted. It wasn't world changing crazy changes, but it was, we definitely increased, and we got a lot of quantitative feedback that backed up our decision. I mean qualitative feedback that backed up our decision. So, users told us they loved the changes in the newsletter. So, we definitely saw an increase. It wasn't, now we get 90% click-through rates or open-rates every time, but definitely, definitely an improvement. Advice For Starting An Email Newsletter Kathleen: And if somebody was looking to start an email newsletter in March, or revamp the one they have, any advice that you would give to them? Liz: Get ... If you have subscribers already, get feedback on them on what they're looking for, for sure, because I think, for me anyway, I will often lead of my assumptions about my audience, like, "Oh, I think they want this." Or, "I think they want that." And then I'll ask them what they actually want, and it's very different from what I assumed, because I am one person with one perspective, and my subscribers might be a totally different audience with totally different needs and problems. So, definitely, definitely start with user feedback and subscriber feedback on what they want, and then listen to it, even if it's not what you wanted to hear. Liz's Favorite Email Newsletters Kathleen: Yeah. Now, you mentioned when we first started talking about this, that you have certain newsletters that you really love. Can you share what some of those are? Liz: Yeah, absolutely. I love The Skimm, I mentioned that. Greatist is another newsletter that I love. I don't know if you've ever heard of Greatist, love them. Kathleen: No, what, who does that? Because that's probably one if I just type in "Greatist", I'm not going to find it, is my guess. Liz: I think you actually will. I think it's greatist.com. I think that's their actual, that's their brand name. Kathleen: Okay. Liz: So, I think you would. They do a lot of lifestyle, all kinds of different articles. It's kind of like Buzzfeed in a way, it's Buzzfeed-esque. And then, another one I really love right now is called Finimize, and it's financial information delivered everyday to your inbox, so really good things on how the economy's performing and on different companies and how, what they're doing strategy-wise, and how that's affecting stocks. So, I think that newsletter is making financial stuff much more accessible. So, I always love when a newsletter takes a topic that people struggle with or they don't know much about, and makes it accessible, because that's solving a problem. So, for instance, The Skimm does that, because I don't have time to hunt down all these articles everyday and all of the latest news, and The Skimm just drops it my inbox and explains it in a really accessible, conversational way. Kathleen: Yeah. Liz: So, those are always the newsletters I love. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: That's great. Now, switching gears for a minute. So, I have two questions I always ask all of my guests. You've shared the newsletters you like the best, but I'm curious, when you take a step even further back, and you look at the world of inbound marketing, who would you say, company or individual, is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Liz: I think Joanna from Copy Hackers is doing a great job. She's a conversion copywriter, and she does these Tutorial Tuesdays every Tuesday, and it's just an educational 20 minute long presentation and Q&A, and she is such an expert in conversion copywriting, and then people just come to her because she has these awesome education sessions every week, and then uses email to promote her paid products from there. So, I think she's just doing a phenomenal job of educating and giving value to her audience, and keeping them around, and then pitching her product at the right time, where people would never think of unsubscribing from her email list because of the value she's giving, so she can promote her product pretty much as much as she wants. Kathleen: Yeah, I've actually gone to some of her Tutorial Tuesdays, and they're great. They're quick, to the point, no time wasted. She's a very no-nonsense person, I appreciate that about her. So, that's a good example. And what about, digital marketing is changing so quickly, stuff with email is changing so quickly. How do you stay up to date? Liz: So, I love ... Do you know Ann Handley? Kathleen: Yes. Liz: So, I love Ann Handley's newsletter, Total Annarchy. So, that's like the copywriting email geek within me. She shares all of these phenomenal articles on writing in her newsletter. It's a ... I think it's a bimonthly newsletter. Kathleen: Yeah. Liz: And ... Kathleen: Every other Sunday, I love it. Liz: Yes. Yes, every other Sunday. And, she's actually one of our customers. I love Ann, but she does such a phenomenal job on that newsletter, and I love reading all of those articles. I also love Really Good Emails, they have a database of awesome email examples that you can look through, but they also send an email out, I think maybe a couple times a month, where they talk about a specific email marketing topic, and how you can up your game in that area. Kathleen: Yeah, those are two really good ones. I love ... First of all, I love Ann Handley as a person. She actually keynoted the conference that we had in August, and I got to meet her in person, and she's just so cool and so fun and dynamic. But I love her, the voice that she puts into her writing. It's like, you really feel like you know who she is as a person when you read her copy, which is great. Liz: Yeah, absolutely. I'm friends with Ann as well, and it's her newsletter, but it's also, if you email with her one-on-one, it's the same tone as she uses in Total Anarchy, and it's this fun, conversational tone like you're her friend. And so I think it's really interesting how honest and real her tone is, because you can see it conveyed when you meet her in person, when you email with her just on a one-on-one basis, and through her newsletter. She's amazing. I love her. Kathleen: Yeah, I totally agree. She is the person she seems to be in her writing, which is fantastic. Well, so interesting, I must be a marketing geek as well, because I could dive in and talk about email newsletters forever. We spend a lot of time talking about it with my team, especially now that we have this newsletter that we have launched a few months ago, so this was a lot of fun. Thank you. Liz: Yeah. Thank you for having me. How To Get In Touch With Liz Kathleen: Well, if somebody has questions about the stuff that you've been working on, or about Aweber, or just wants to connect with you online, what's the best way for them to reach out to you? Liz: So, if you want to reach out to me personally, my Twitter handle is @LizWillits, and that's one of the easiest ways to reach me. You can also reach me at email at elizabethw@aweber.com. We have a 30 day free trial of AWeber, and if you go to aweber.com, you can access that really easily, or awebber.com/connect. Kathleen: Great. I'll put all those links in the show notes, so if you're listening, and you want to connect with Liz or test out AWeber, just head over to the show notes and you can get all that right there. And, if you're listening and you learned something, or you liked this episode, I would love it if you would leave a review on Apple Podcasts, or the platform of your choice, and as always, if you know someone else who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, Tweet me at WorkMommyWork, because I would love to have them be my next guest. Thank you, Liz. Liz: Thank you.  

Data enrichment might seem like a boring topic, but companies that are employing advanced tools like ReachForce use it to not only correct and enrich contact data, but to improve lead quality and close rates.  This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, ReachForce Senior Director of Marketing Kristi Bjornaas talks about the evolving field of data validation and enrichment and shares real-world examples of companies that are using tools like ReachForce to dramatically improve marketing ROI. 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 Kristi include: ReachForce is an 11 year old company with an end to end data management and enrichment solution. Their suite of products includes a form solution that is essentially a single line of code that you install on the back end of your site which allows you to enrich the data you collect on leads via hidden form fields (and thus, also allows you to reduce the number of form fields that a visitor sees). When a contact fills out a form, ReachForce first verifies whether it is a legitimate contact (and whether it is a duplicate already in your database), and then confirms that the email is deliverable. After that, it standardizes and formats fields like first name and address and phone number (important for companies that use autodialers, which require a certain formatting of phone numbers to work). Once the contact has been confirmed, ReachForce enriches it, pushes it into your CRM or database and appends it with custom fields in your CRM or marketing automation platform. Data enrichment can also help you determine whether to add contacts to your database, which is significant for companies that pay by contact volume for their CRM or marketing automation system.  One of the unique features that ReachForce offers is dropdown functionality on forms. So, for example, if I fill out a form and in the company field type "IMPACT", it is going to pull up all the different companies that start with IMPACT and allow me to choose from a list. It does the same thing with location information (for example, state). ReachForce client Marketo was able to increase conversions on its landing pages by 34% by reducing the number of form fields required from ten to four. Serenova was able to see 500% of inbound growth, and actually tie that into a 27% increase in their pipeline, all from reducing the number of form fields they required for conversions on their site.  By using data enrichment and validation at the form level, you can clean up the information you receive before it enters your database AND reject contacts that you're not interested in pursuing as a company. This should improve lead quality and ultimately, marketing metrics like conversion and click through rates. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the ReachForce website Connect with Kristi on LinkedIn Follow Kristi on Twitter Read the case study about how Serenova quadrupled average deal size using ReachForce Listen to the podcast to learn how companies are using cutting edge data validation and enrichment tools to improve the volume and quality of inbound leads. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week, my guest is Kristi Bjornaas, who is the Sr. Director of Marketing for ReachForce. Welcome Kristi. Kristi Bjornaas (Guest): Thank you for having me. Kristi and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: Yeah. You guys do some interesting things with data enrichment. And I'm excited to learn more about that. Before we jump into the topic, tell our audience a little bit about yourself and about ReachForce. About ReachForce Kristi: Yeah. So I've been with ReachForce about a year and a half now. And ReachForce has been around for, I think going on 11 years. And they've always been in the data adjacent space. And data's not really the sexiest topic that marketing and sales teams deal with. It's kind of a necessary evil if you will. I think the interesting thing about ReachForce has been they've evolved over time as the needs around data have changed. So starting from like, people need data, right? They needed lists, they needed contacts back 11 years ago when there wasn't as much focus on compliance/insecurity issues where they would, here's my criteria of my audience, give me a list. And over time we've evolved with the changing of technology to actually have a solution that's an end to end data management and enrichment solution. Our data's coming in from all different places. It's from your forms, from lists, from sales teams, from other tools and integrations you have, and it's coming in bad. And I know as a marketer, I don't really trust my data. There's tons of duplicates. It's missing information. So we try to do all these manual efforts to clean that up and to kind of plug in those important data points that we need for things like segmentation. And so we've evolved into having this complete suite that kind of protects your data, so you can have some more confidence in it when you're running your campaigns, reporting -- all of those things. And you can reduce the time spent on actually doing that manually. Kathleen: This is a topic that's really close to my heart because I, oh boy. I've been at IMPACT for almost 2 years now. And it's sort of like good and bad. I came on as Head of Marketing and this is a company that generates a tremendous amount of traffic and leads. Tremendous amount. And I can say that because I spent 10 years prior to coming over here at my own agency and I know, I have that basis of comparison. I walked in thinking "This is amazing, we get so much traffic, we get so many leads. There's literally 100's of 1,000s of people in our contact database." And when you're presented with that as a marketer, you think this is going to be like a layup right? But I walked in only to discover that while we do have 100s of 1,000s of people in our contact database, a lot of those contacts aren't usable. Some of them have bad email addresses. Some of them have moved on and then the email address is no longer good. Others just gave us a bad email address. First names, don't get me started on first names. Kristi: Yep. Kathleen: I'm a big believer in personalization and starting emails with "Hi Kristi," instead of "Hey there." But we quickly discovered that our first names were just so overwhelmingly inaccurate or riddled with errors that we would do more harm than good by using them. And so it's so frustrating as a marketer to have this huge database and not feel like I can use it. That was one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on. Kristi: Right. Kathleen: Because I wanted to talk more about how you fix this problem. Kristi: Yeah. I remember the days of like sending an email, and before you hit send, you mentioned like, first name and personalization. You kind of like take that baited breath right before you click send because you're like "I hope everything is right. I hope I'm not missing any first names. Or I'm hoping that they're spelled right. Or that there's no issues." We've gotten a little bit better over time improving our ability to do better personalization and segmentation. But yeah, it's definitely scary when you have all of these contacts and you're kind of like "Well I know my data's bad but send." It can be scary, but there's a solution to it, which is really great. And the impacts, beyond just that send or that personalization, are so much more far reaching into your entire marketing and sales process that we really even give it credit. Kathleen: Yeah. I will be honest. To this day, I still quake in my boots every time I hit send on a big email. And I know for a fact that if you talk to the six people on my marketing team, every single one of them would say the same thing. It's a terrifying experience because if it goes wrong, it can have massive consequences. And I'm a member of a few Slack groups for marketers. Like one, Online Geniuses, which has a lot of members. A lot from all around the globe. And you should see the conversations that happen around things like that. And the terror that it strikes in the heart of marketers. It's like one of those universal feelings we have. I think when we go to send things out, so definitely something I know lots of people listening are going to be interested in. Let's go back to what you were saying about ReachForce, because most marketers who are listening to this, probably have, hopefully have, a CRM or some kind of a database that they're working from. Kristi: I hope so. Kathleen: Yeah, exactly. I mean sometimes it's surprising. There are instances where that does not exist. But for the most part, I think the type of people that listen to this podcast probably already have that in place. So your tool is not a part of a CRM or a database, it's a third party tool, correct? Kristi: Right. Yeah, so we have a whole suite that has different tools within it to help manage the quality and completeness of your database. So a form solution that makes sure your incoming leads -- we're not an actual form, it's just a single line of code that you use on your existing form. So if you have any kind of form technology on your site that submits into a database somewhere, we can easily kind of tie in and enrich that form so that you're not having to ask all those questions that ... You know one of our customers is Marketo and they used to ask 10 questions on all of their fields, on all of their landing pages, and they reduce it down to four. And it's just some single line of code in some hidden fields on the back that the user never sees, but they were able to see a 34% increase in to their conversion on those landing pages just because they reduced their forms to four. But they didn't sacrifice any of that really healthy data because we have this third party, you know we're doing all that manual effort for you on our side. We have a matching algorithm that takes all this data, right? If you think of data as this big kind of thing that lives out in the cloud, we have a matching algorithm in which we kind of layer different data sets on and have data scientist that makes sure the accuracy and completeness of that kind of larger data set is there. So that when you submit that form, or we run that cleanse on that database, that we're able to kind of plug in and verify some of those data points that you have. Kathleen: So I want to dig into that a little bit deeper because I've looked at a variety of data enrichment solutions. And I feel like there are some that have integrations, let's say, with your CRM or they may or may not. Sometimes you even have to download a spreadsheet from your CRM and upload it into their system. And those work by going through data you already have and correcting it or appending to it, adding to it with additional information. It sounds like what ReachForce does is a little bit different, is that correct? That it works at the form level? How Data Enrichment Can Help Improve Marketing ROI Kristi: Well it works at the form level, but you think about all the different ways that your data's coming into your system. It's coming in through forms and sometimes people will be just solving the forms challenge, they're not solving all the other challenges. But it's also coming in from other integrations. Sales are putting in a lead that they might have gotten, but they may just put like the name and the email but nothing else, no other information. And also you go to trade shows, you have offline things that do happen in which you're uploading these lists. So there's all these different ways that lists can come in, and we want to make sure that your existing database, so you said at IMPACT you've 100s and 1,000s of contacts. You acquired those in some way and it doesn't really matter where they came from. But you need to kind of know who they are -- who needs to be taken out of the database, who's junk, who's moved on. And so what we do, is we take that whole database and we do have an integration with the solution where we turn it on and it runs your entire database to validate, standardize. So standardized formatting of a first name, or formatting an address. So there's a couple layers of functionality happening. So we first kind of do that verification, is this junk? Is it a duplicate? And then we verify is the email deliverable. And then we go and standardize and format all of those fields like first name and address and phone number even. You know if you have autodialers, you need certain formatting of that for those to work. So we go do all those things and then once we say this is a good contact, let's actually enrich it, and push it into the database and append. So we do custom fields in your CRM or marketing automation platform that we will enrich into on top of it. So I like to say it's this really robust solution -- that we're not just solving one of your data quality challenges, we're kind of solving all of them within this kind of platform that is meeting your data where it is, whether it's in your database now or it's going to come in later. We make sure it's in real time accurate and complete rather than like you said, there's a tool, you go and you import a list, you export a list. We do have that as one functionality because list is something that we do in marketing and sales, we'll probably never get away from that. But we want to make sure that you clean it up before you put it in ever. Kathleen: Amen. Kristi: Don't even waste your time. I have kind of internally said "Well, we have this kind of list functionality and we were rolling it out, it was in beta." I sponsored like a third party research report. And the company was so excited, there was like this 600 downloads of the report. This is our biggest one ever. I was like "I'm going to put it to the test." So I actually ran it through and found out that only 50% of those downloads were people that we even cared about. So we were able to actually negotiate like an additional piece of content because of it. So it helped me measure the ROI of that campaign just in terms of the quality. And I never even downloaded ... 50% of that list that was not usable, I didn't even upload that into the system because not only do you have data cost around that in my CRM, but also that's going to impact deliverability of my emails. Just like I was saying earlier, just far reaching impacts of just bad data beyond just that kind of first initial touch are really lasting. Kathleen: That's really interesting because I mean I selfishly think of data enrichment in terms of how can I know more about my audience and how can I improve the accuracy of the data that I have so that I'm more successful in my outreach to them. But I think it's interesting what you just brought up about the power of data enrichment to help you decide in the first place whether it's even worth putting the data into your system or not. And even more interesting to me, was that you said the data might be correct, but you might not be interested in that audience. Kristi: Right. Kathleen: You might say "This is a valid email address and a valid name and a valid job title, but I don't want to market to that person." Kristi: Yeah. Kathleen: So why put it in there? Kristi: Right. And I feel like for a long time, it was kind of like a numbers game. Like it's okay if some of them aren't good fits, it's the number, look at how many downloads we had. Especially in a world where we're needing to be super competitive, super relevant with our messaging, all that extra is just noise. If they're never going to buy from you, they're never going to be a good fit, you don't need them. And I think that's really important because I think especially with inbound, you kind of cast this larger, wider net. And how do you actually take that wider net and say, "Okay that's great. We really only care about these people and how can we get closer to the people that we're attracting are filling that net. And less of kind of the noise so that we can just gain more precision in our nurturing beyond that initial conversion." How Serenova Improved Inbound Growth By 500% With Data Enrichment Kristi: So we have a customer Serenova, who they increased, so they shortened their forms first off because they're using our smart form solution. But they were able to improve their inbound growth by 500%. But you can imagine what that looks like in terms of quality or fit. Yeah it might have improved it 500%, but how did they know like which of those are really who they want to target? So they actually were able to create this account scoring algorithm for like an ABM approach to those inbound leads coming in to say we care about two fields, more than anything, to identify fit and how we actually prioritize and follow up. So they look at revenue and industry. They think of it as a little quadrant. If it's a high amount of revenue in these three industries, then there are eight accounts, and this is going to go to our enterprise level reps and they're going to get followed up with immediately. The other people that are maybe in that lower left quadrant that are smaller companies and not really a good fit audience, they might go down a nurture track instead. So they were actually really able to segment that significant growth on their forms just by shortening them, but also that enrichment piece allowed them to be smarter in who they kept in the database or how they actually followed up and win. Kathleen: Okay, I have so many questions I want to ask you. Kristi: I know I think I just opened up a whole other can of worms there. Kathleen: So let's go back to, you said something very similar when you talked about Marketo and when you talked a Serenova in that both of them were able to shorten their forms. So can you tell me exactly what you mean by that? And how that happened? Kristi: Yeah. So in inbound, we are so focused on the conversion. We do everything to attract people to our site and to give them an offer that's compelling enough that they're willing to fill out this form. And we do so much to optimize everything else but that form. Because people are like "Well, sales needs to know industry, they need to know their job title. We need to know their revenue, so let's ask all those fields." So we try to- Kathleen: Nobody ever wants to tell you what their revenue is. Kristi: Well no- Kathleen: And you put that question in a form, and you definitely reduce the number of people who are going to complete it. Kristi: Absolutely. Or even accuracy. If you think about it, just an end user at a company and individual contributor at a company, I might not know our revenue accurately. Kathleen: Right. Kristi: And so I'm just going to, if you have a drop down, it's great that you have that drop down, it makes it a little bit easier. But I'm going to pick the wrong one or I'm just going to pick the first on that list or just kind of mindless select on. So your accuracy ... It's probably not even accurate or right in what they're submitting. And not only are you turning away, but you're probably getting wrong information if they are converting. But we kind of keep that same form, we ask the same fields on every single landing page. And so we really are looking at optimizing that form because the form is really that trigger event. And so I think it's still important to ask progressive profiling questions, but there are other, better ways to get that information that's more reliable than asking that individual prematurely on your site. Use that opportunity for progressive profiling to ask what's your buying timeframe, are you in market, other things that are more relevant that you can't necessarily get elsewhere. And so you don't have to boil the ocean with your forms. Kathleen: So are you saying, sorry to interrupt but I want to make sure that ... Kristi: Go ahead. Kathleen: So are you saying that the way it works, with ReachForce at least, is like I might have like Marketo, a 10 question form, and one of my questions might be industry and one might be revenue. Are you suggesting that to the end user, when I go to that site, I am only seeing let's say name, email address, job title, company name or something like that. And then the rest of those fields are hidden, but ReachForce is basically filling them in based on, it's like taking the information I'm giving in the first four fields and saying "now I know the answers to these others" and so the user never needs to see them. Is that what's happening? Kristi: Right. Yeah. So I actually, on my own site, I only ask four questions: First name, last name, company and email. And we take a couple of different things. We'll take like the IP address of some inferred data as well as their, when they plug in their email, there's some complexity around some generic ISPs. But based off of that email and that inferred data from the IP information, we're able to suggest what their company is. So if I'm filling out KBjornaas@ReachForce, I go click on that company field and those are the only fields that I'm seeing. I'm going to select my company ReachForce in Austin, Texas. And based off that... Kathleen: From a drop down? Kristi: From a drop down. Kathleen: That ReachForce has populated. Kristi: Um-hmm. Right. Yep. And in realtime, we're going to append 150 plus fields directly into your CRM so that your lead scoring is right the first time. When you route that lead, it's routed correctly. It's not kind of bouncing around to other people, trying to figure out where they're located. And so you're improving your conversion, but you're getting so much really healthy, accurate information on the back end that first time. So you don't waste your opportunity to progressively profile, you don't lose any momentum. If a hot leads coming in, you're going to know about it immediately. Your fits, part of your scoring's going to be complete because you don't have to have to ask it on the form fill. We're able to do account firmagraphic information as well as some contact level information, business card data only. So their kind of business entity of whom they are. So their job title comes through on that, what college they maybe went to, what are their expertise that they're endorsed for on LinkedIn, stuff like that. Kathleen: That's interesting. Kristi: So you can think about all the things that you can do with all that granular amount of information to kind of personalize that experience post-conversion. So you don't sacrifice your conversion rate because you're asking all these questions. We're able to give that to you and you kind of take the burden off the user to do that. Kathleen: Yeah, I like it for two reasons. And so full disclosure, we've looked at using ReachForce and it's something that I'm really interested in. So listeners, that's part of why I wanted to have Kristi on. And one of the reasons it appealed to me is that for example, we're starting to do more events as a company. And some of these events are location specific. And I want to be able to market to people, just for an example, who are in Connecticut. Now there's nothing more annoying than going into a CRM and seeing in the state field, sometimes CT, sometimes Connecticut, sometimes it's spelled wrong. Kristi: Oh yeah. Kathleen: Sometimes it's blank. And so standardizing that, and that's one of the reasons I liked your product is that it has the drop down, it populates. And so people don't have to type in their answer. It also, I feel like it saves time on the part of the user because it's so much easier for me if I just see Connecticut just popped up and I'm going to click it as opposed to having to scroll through a list of states. So I liked that a lot, but I also like that the user does have the ability to correct it if it's wrong. Because particularly with location data as you know, IP addresses don't always give you the right information. Sometimes somebody visits your site and they're traveling through an airport and you get one IP address, there's so many reasons that you can have faulty location information, so I love that drop down pops up and feeds you an answer, but if it's not correct you can correct it. Kristi: Right. And so I think that an interesting thing about business today is that you can have remote workers, you can have large enterprises that have multiple locations. And that's another thing that it accounts for. So say if ReachForce had multiple offices, it would bring up a list of all of our different offices. And the users could then select which one they would most likely, they would kind of tie themselves to. So even if they're in a different state, at a conference or something like that, they're based off of all the information that we know about them, they'll be able to select the right location. That way even for a remote worker, we're not going to give you like their home address, but you can get the site level on which they would identify to, maybe they travel there once a year. So we give you that kind of corporate hierarchy information. So you might be a business that sells office equipment to locations, but other businesses sell to, they don't sell to specific sites, they sell to the headquarters. So we actually provide that layer of information up the corporate hierarchy. So depending on how you sell, you can also kind of make those decisions. Like we sell technology. And so we sell to the headquarters, we're not selling to individual site levels. So we only look at that information. So we have some flexibility with, depending on what your business is, to provide different levels of information to you. Kathleen: Interesting. So back to Serenova, you said that they were able to grow, I forget how you phrased it, but it was like they had inbound growth of something like 500% increase? Kristi: Yeah. Kathleen: Talk to me about what you meant by that. Kristi: It'd be really hard to find one variable to anything we do that's going to significantly grow something, but they took an initiative to focus on inbound, and at the core of that was their conversions and the ability to convert. So they were creating more content but also shortened their fields. And so when they shortened those fields and created all this content, they saw this massive growth in their conversion rate from those inbound leads specifically. And I think it's really interesting about their story because I think often you have this whole marketing and sales initiative. Okay is this a marketing initiative or is this a sales initiative? And so inbound is such a thing that us marketers care about. I think the sales team cares when they get the leads, but they were actually able to tie that growth down to what it meant to their pipeline, their sales pipeline. Their ability to better forecast because they were better able to segment them out that way. They saw a 27% increase in their pipeline from inbound. So they were able to see that 500% of inbound growth, that marketing metric, and actually tie that into a 27% increase in their pipeline. So that kind of perked sales up to be like this inbound growth that marketing's bragging about, like actually has real revenue impact to us in sales. And so I think that was, looking at those opportunities to say how can I take what I'm doing on the marketing side and really tie it into the sales, what the business is really going to care about is important? I thought that was really cool that they were able to kind of correlate and tie the two together. Kathleen: Yeah. I've never met a marketer who hasn't experienced a sales person saying to them the leads you're sending me suck. Never met- Kristi: I hate that conversation. Kathleen: Yeah. It happens to everyone. And a lot of the times, it happens when you as a marketer are saying "Hey, we're sending you a lot of leads." And you might be. And in many cases, there's a high volume that inbound marketing can generate. But when the sales team comes back and says "Yeah there's a lot of them but they're all terrible." That seems to be something that we've all heard. And so it's interesting to hear that it really translated into actual pipeline growth for them. And I think this comes back to one of the reasons I do this podcast, because you know I always used to hear these stories or marketers getting amazing results. Like doubling conversion rates and revenue and traffic and this and that. And I always felt frustrated that I couldn't figure out exactly what they were doing to get those results. And it's not always like a big strategy that they're employing or some magic behind their content that's getting better results. I have found through now doing this, I think I've done something like 80 interviews at this point, I've found that more often than not it's very little things that add up. And this is a great example of that because, like what you said earlier about not even putting the data into your CRM if it's not good, that is a very little thing that can have a huge impact because if you don't put crummy contacts into your database, then naturally your ability to nurture the ones that you do put in is going to be better. And the likelihood that they convert, is going to be higher. So if you're listening and you've ever wondered how people magically improve their conversion rates, that's the one small, simple thing that you can do to do that really effectively. So I think that's what I'm so interested in about data enrichment. Kristi: Yeah. I always talk about data is involved in every single thing we do. Every email we send, every list we build, our scoring, every piece of technology that we use, it all relies on data. And so it kind of has its hands in everything and it's a bunch of these little things. I always talk about the power of 1%. Data's kind of that 1%. It's much greater than 1%, but if you think about just improving all these little areas by just 1%, what's the accumulative impact of that? And that's really what data's doing and just focusing on the quality and completeness of your data, is going to not just be 1%, in a lot of cases it's 500% or it's 27% growth. It's all of these little areas of tweaking just by improving your data that's kind of this foundation to everything that you do, you're going to have this cumulative impact of like really significant results. So I like that, kind of those little things that all add up. Kathleen: Yeah. It's so true. I mean if you think about it. Like in my head, I'm just thinking through "Wow, if you go through your database and you're able to remove a lot of the contacts that might be real, but are not the ones that you're trying to sell to, imagine what that might do to your email open rates, your click through rates?" You know there are so many metrics that would presumably improve if you clean data up. Just by cleaning data up. Not by making your messaging magically better, or improving the graphics in your emails or you content, et cetera, so it's a much quicker, less expensive path to success than some of the other ones I think we as marketers tend to fall back on. Kristi: Right. No one wakes up, like I said, data's not sexy, and no one wakes up saying "Oh, today I'm going to clean my data and be really excited about it." But the sexy things are all the things you can do because you have the better data. You know that really cool segmentation and personalization and nurture tracks you can send people down, that's the stuff that gets me super excited. Not the data itself because it's data. I mean I do get excited about the metrics and the reporting and stuff like that, but all the really cool, sexy cool things we want to do in marketing and sales, we can do that when we have a little bit more confidence in that data. Kathleen: I don't know, I was going to say if I woke up tomorrow and you told me I could clean up all my data in one day, that would be one of the most exciting days of the year for me. Kristi: True. True. I would say we spend a lot of time kind of, and we don't even think about it right, because it's now become so ingrained in our everyday, correcting emails or correcting formatting of things. Like we just do a little bit over time. Like if we could just remove that portion of our day to day, like we'd probably free ourselves up to do a lot more of those creative things that we got into marketing to do. Kathleen: So in your experience, because you guys work with a lot of different companies that are using your product, what are some of the more common, sort of low hanging fruit areas that companies tackle when it comes to data enrichment and get results from? Kristi: I would say one of the easier ways is just being able to standardize how you are segmenting. I think you said earlier, we've got Connecticut and all these different formats. It's just, okay what format do we want? Just starting like what do we want it to look like? Saying what that ideal looks like, and then setting these kind of, okay well let's go update our lead scoring and make it super simple. Like it's that. It's like, "Okay what is that format we want, and let's just clean that up." Because even just that, it saves me so much time not to have to type in a list or in my scoring, all the different variations of Connecticut, or all the different ways. Just that cleaning up is just going to make your life so much easier. Just that simple, like let's identify what we want it to look like and then what's just going to make our life easier. Kathleen: Yeah. We talked about that here at IMPACT because we do, as I mentioned, we do get a lot of traffic and leads. And a substantial portion of it is international. And we do work internationally, not necessarily every country around the world, but we do have clients that are from Asia, from Europe, et cetera. And we talked about wanting to better understand what countries our audience is coming from and then even by region. And we had the conversation like, you know in theory, somebody could sit and type in a list of every country in the world and build a drop down menu. But like who want's that job. Kristi: Nobody. Nobody. Yeah. Kathleen: Nobody. Right. And so I think even just for things like that, that's a tremendous time saver. Kristi: Right. Yeah. And we do it to where we can customize industries. You think about all the SIC and NICS codes of different industries and how granular those get. Well we don't necessarily need to report on all those, go in there and type all the different ones, we actually do that on our end so that you can define those industries however you want and those will all roll in under those categories. It's kind of just a cool way to make your job easier. Another thing I wanted to mention, and I think that this is so overlooked, especially if someone's already doing enrichment. Usually it's like marketing ops or maybe even demand gen, your demand gen teaming doing it, that kind of starts the enrichment project. So maybe they're doing something manually or they're using someone like ReachForce, they get the data and the do their piece of it but they don't make it available to other teams. So creating those views of the fields that you care about for sales or for the customer success team, I think that's one piece that people just miss, is what are those 10 attributes that we care the most about, and we're enriching them. We're doing all this stuff so that we can do cool stuff in marketing, but let's actually expose this to sales and create these custom views for them, and work flows around those specific fields. I think those are kind of a really missed opportunity a lot of times of people who are doing some type of enrichment of their database. Kathleen: That's a great point because I do feel like in most of the companies that I've worked with, that marketing and sales tend to be silos. If you make sales people happy, it makes a tremendous difference- Kristi: Yeah. Kathleen: In the ability to be successful as a marketer. Kristi: Right. I want them closing, I don't want them going and researching where the headquarters of a company is. I want to put it front and center and us all be operating off the same field. And just having that single source of truth, very obvious they don't have to go ... And it's just about trust really. They want to trust that the data's right and so that's why they go and they research on their own, but I want them on the phone, demoing. I don't want them researching. I want their time spent wisely. Kathleen: Yeah. And I loved your point earlier about shortening the number of fields you're asking for on a form. I think that's a easy win- Kristi: Super. Kathleen: For anybody who, you know if you've got more than four fields right now on any form, boom. That's a quick way to shorten it and see a big increase in conversions. Kristi: Right. Yeah and I think usually it's sales driving the number of fields. Also going back to that sales, well I have to know these things. Or sales is going to ask for these. If you could just build that trust and show them that they're still going to get that data some other way, they'll kind of lessen their desire for you to kind of add all those things. Because I think that as a marketer, we know that shorter forms are going to do better, but we have this sort of internal pressure from the sales team or some other operational thing that needs to happen that rely on those. So if you can just find a different way to get that, such as enrichment, I think that that will kind of solve the need there. Kathleen: I had this exact conversation with our sales team. We have a monthly sales and marketing alignment meeting and we were brainstorming like what we would really want to know about a new lead to determine A, whether they were a good fit, and B, like figure out how we wanted to nurture them in a way that would add value. And the list of fields that the sales team came up with on their wishlist was so long. And they were all really valid things that they should know and that they want to know. But as a marketer, I was like cringing looking at this list going "Nobody's ever going to fill out this form." Kristi: Yeah. I guarantee you one of those fields is probably what marketing information platform, know what you guys do, what marketing information platform. You can actually get that from a solution like ReachForce. Like we actually use that ourselves because we tie into the CRM and the Marketing Information Platform, that it's really important to send them down specific nurture tracks and then particular documentation on if they're on Marketo or HubSpot or Salesforce or Pardot. And that's something that we don't have to ask in our fields because we're able to enrich it in the backend which is, so it's kind of nice. The number of things that are available to us. I mean data, fortunately, unfortunately, it's kind of a commodity now. And so the data's there and we should be able to ... I think the expectation also from the consumer is that you have that data and you should be personalizing my experience and all that good stuff. So the more data points that you can kind of automate and enrich, I think the better, smoother that it's going to be for the user and also for that marketing to sales handoff as well. Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah. It's funny I think definitely data has traditionally, as you said, not been looked at as not being sexy. But I'll tell you, there are some folks on my team that would jump up and down and light off fireworks if we could solve some of our data challenges. So it is becoming more and more sexy as I think many marketers realize what bad data is holding them back from doing. Kristi: I agree. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: So shifting gears, this has been really interesting. You work with a lot of different companies, and I'd love to get your perspective on from an inbound marketing standpoint, what company or what individual do you think is doing it really well right now? Like whose the best in class example? Kristi: Yeah. Okay, so when I look at inbound and who's doing inbound really well or what resinates with me, I look at a couple of things. I'm like, are they answering my question? Are they answering the questions that I have? So content. And are they doing it across channels? Are they, depending on if I'm at my phone or kind of what I'm working on, are they answering that in different ways through video, through a blog, or are they transcribing that video? So are they making it easy for me to actually consume that content. So those are kind of what I would say are in baselines of just good inbound success. And you know short forms are part of that. They made it easy for me. So I think this is going to be a little bit ... So I've always, even outside of the question of who's doing inbound really well, is I always say HubSpot. That's kind of an obvious, but they just do it so well. And now I have my question, I type in Google and I put HubSpot at the end because I know HubSpot's going to have the content for me. I trust them. And also peer commentary is so important to us. Like for referrals, word of mouth, it's always very important. And I feel that HubSpot as an entity, has a style in their content that feels like they're a peer of mine. They have a friendly tone, so just really resinates with me and I always say, I constantly look to HubSpot to help learn from. So I always go to them. So that's kind of an easy one, but another one, I bet, again back when I worked at an agency and I was doing a lot of SEO, I turned to Moz a lot. And I think, again they've been around for a while and when Rand Fishkin was with them, I was like, that's my go to resource. You know they're using video. They're transcribing that video, doing the "too long, didn't read" version of it. I just knew I could rely and trust them. So I think those are two companies that do really well. Again probably dating myself because like those both have been around for so long and they're not anything groundbreaking, but they are the tried and trues in their experts and their particular areas. And they check all the boxes for me. Kathleen: Yeah, no, those are two very good examples. I'm glad you had a second one besides HubSpot because if somebody just tells me HubSpot I'm always like "You've got to give me one more." Kristi: Yep. Well I figured that, but genuinely, when people ask me that question I always say HubSpot. I make my sales team subscribe to their sales content or sales blog because it's just really good, helpful templates. They're just giving you helpful like actionable things that you can use. And I think that Moz and Rand, now he's moved on, still continues to provide that really, tools I would say. Kathleen: Yeah. I love Moz and I'm still an ardent follower of Rand Fishkin's on SparkToro, which is his new site. He writes so much, just really ground breaking stuff about search. Kristi: Yep. Kathleen: Second question, digital marketing is changing really quickly, how do you personally stay up to date with all of the new developments? Kristi: Yeah. So I think that LinkedIn has gotten really good the last couple of years on their algorithm. Whatever they're doing, I love it because that's where I go to. I look at LinkedIn probably more than I look at any social network now. Because again, going back to that peer commentary if you will, they have a way of just serving up, I hate this word, but influencers in marketing that I want to hear from. And I want to hear their commentary, I want to see them linking to things. So I really do, I follow people like Rand and Allen Gannett, formally of TrackMaven is another one. Like I follow all those people on LinkedIn. I go to LinkedIn because I know it's going to show up either what my connections are liking and following and so I just know that I can rely on those kinds of recommendations it's making on that mainstream. A second one that I have been binging, it's another podcast, I don't know if you've heard of it, it's Marketing School? Kathleen: Yep. Kristi: And I'm sure other people have recommended this, but they're just super quick, tactical, down to the point. I think they're like less than seven minutes podcast on topics I'm either interested or not. I always learn something new. I have a whole notebook full of just like tools I want to go check out and things I, like little tweaks to my campaigns going back to that. Those little tweak things that we can do, I'm now binging, I think I've listened to like 30 this last week. Kathleen: Yeah it's great. It's short, that's Neil Patel and Eric Siu. Eric Siu was actually my first guest of 2018. Kristi: Oh wow. Kathleen: So if you go back to the Inbound Success Podcast, the first episode of 2018 was Eric talking about his predictions for the year. Kristi: See, I'm way behind the times. Kathleen: It's awesome. No it's a great podcast. And they're really smart guys. Nice. Well thank you for sharing all those. I'll put links to all those resources in the show notes. If somebody is listening and want to learn more about data enrichment or they want to learn something more about ReachForce, what's the best way for them to find out more about the company and connect with you online? How to Connect With Kristi Kristi: So our website is ReachForce.com. There's a few ways I always recommend people get started with kind of this data initiative. We offer a data health assessment where we actually look at your data, and say here were some of your gaps and maybe how we can improve it with enrichment. Just to give you an idea about like how bad your data actually is. So that's like the main call to action on our website. Kathleen: I'm like afraid to take that. Kristi: It's eyeopening but it also makes you realize even all the efforts you're doing to try to like stop that seep in around your data. Like they're just not good enough if they're manual. And so that's always something that we do with every person that comes to our site. We say you need to start with a data health assessment because it'll give you kind of a clear path forward. And then also we offer a trial of that smart forms tool that we were talking about. Like you can go and get set up in under 30 minutes if you want. So that's on our website as well as one of the main call to actions at ReachForce.com. Those are two really good ways to A, see like maybe how bad your data actually is and how it could be improved, and B, just see how shortening your forms, even if you were to go and put it on your highest converting form for a month to see what kind of data you're able to get through. It's a super easy process to get it set up. There's not really a significant, other than like creating the fields that you want, there's not like a whole lot of implementation steps. So it's just super easy to get started. Kathleen: And fair to say, given your previous remarks, that the best way for somebody to connect with you would be on LinkedIn? Kristi: Yes. I always want people to connect with me on LinkedIn. I love following others and growing our network and learning from all the smart people on there. Like I said, that's my go to. I look at it before I even look at Instagram, so you know that's a big thing. Kathleen: Great. Well thank you so much Kristi for joining me today. It was really interesting to hear about some of the specific ways that companies are using ReachForce and just data enrichment in general. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: If you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learned something new, please consider giving the podcast a review on Apple Podcasts, or the platform of your choice. That always helps us get found by new listeners. And if you know somebody who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, as always, tweet me @workmommywork because I'd love to have them as my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much Kristi. Kristi: Thank you.

How are some companies using account-based marketing to shorten the sales cycle, increase penetration in key accounts, and improve customer NPS scores? This week onThe Inbound Success Podcast, Terminus Co-Founder Sangram Vajre shares his insights on the past, present, and future of account-based marketing, including who it is right for and how the sales and marketing teams of the future will be able to use buyer fit and intent data to laser target the accounts with the highest likelihood of closing. 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 keynote speakers 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 Sangram include: Sangram says that the easiest way to think about ABM is that it is focused marketing and sales activity. The best use cases for ABM are for companies with larger transaction value sales or those who are going after a smaller audience within a larger marketing strategy. ABM solves for a challenge that many companies experience. Specifically, it is a way to address situations where a company might be generating a lot of leads, but the sales team feels they are of poor quality. ABM 1.0 was about identifying the top 100 target accounts and going after those using targeted ads, custom landing pages, and direct mail campaigns. ABM 2.0 takes it a step further and uses buyer fit and intent data to automatically identify the best fit companies - the ones that are most likely to close - and then develop ABM campaigns around them. The ABM of the future could use artificial intelligence to take that buyer intent and fit data and then automatically build landing pages and ABM campaigns for those prospects. Sangram believes that in the future, marketing is actually going to own setting sales quotas because they will be the team that has that fit and intent data, which will make them more accurate in forecasting what can actually close. ABM is best suited to companies with a high degree of organizational readiness (meaning they are bought into the approach from the CEO down and they have a "one team" kind of mindset) and with larger sales transaction values. The three primary use cases for ABM are for acquisition, pipeline velocity, and customer satisfaction. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the Terminus website Visit Sangram's personal website Listen to the #FlipMyFunnel Podcast Connect with Sangram on LinkedIn Follow Sangram on Twitter Get Sangram's book Account-Based Marketing For Dummies Join the #FlipMyFunnel Community Listen to the podcast to learn how ABM is evolving and what the most successful ABM campaigns do to get results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host):Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast.I'm Kathleen Booth and I'm your host and today my guest is Sangram Vajre from Terminus. He is the chief evangelist and cofounder. Welcome Sangram. Sangram Vajre (Guest): Thank you, Kathleen. Excited to be on the show. Sangram and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: I am excited to have you here. I have not had anyone come on and talk about account based marketing before. Before we jump into that though, I would love it if you could tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and about Terminus and also ABM in case people don't know what it is. Abount Sangram and Terminus Sangram: All right. Sure. And as you said, I started to cofound Terminus about four years ago and prior to that I ran marketing at Pardot, which took me to this to acquisition within a year of Exact Target acquiring Pardot and then Salesforce acquiring Exact Target. So all of a sudden I went from running marketing for 100 people company for 10 million revenue all of a sudden to running it at Salesforce which was just incredible. It was a moment where I think I realized, I think I understood the meaning of scale. At Salesforce, I really had no idea before that. Kathleen: Trial by fire, right? Sangram: Totally. Totally. It's an incredible machine. And then co-founded Terminus. Ended up writing the first book on account based marketing that was published in 2016, believe it or not. So I'm about to write my second book this year and along the way started and really built this community called #FlipMyFunnel, which is all about challenging the status quo of marketing and sales. We have about 10,000 people in that community and a lot of really fun. It's awesome to see so many people doing some level of account based marketing. And I'm happy to share more through examples or stories of how incredible things are happening in companies. Kathleen: I was really impressed with the community that you all have built. I had Nikki Nixon, who was the head of the Flip My Funnel community, on one of my earliest episodes and community is something that we at IMPACT are very focused on and so it was really interesting to me to hear that story of how it got started and how particularly through some of the events you've held, that community has grown over the years. Sangram: Community is something, I have a saying on the #FlipMyFunnel podcast we talk about is really that without a community you are simply a commodity. "Without a community you are simply a commodity" - Sangram Vajre Click to Tweet this quote And if you think about anything like Hubspot for example, is an investor in Terminus. And I remember spending time with both Brian and Dharmesh then they became an investor in our company and I asked him why are you spending so much time and money on inbound? And they said, look, if somebody has to go build somebody that's going to compete with Hubspot toe to toe, first thing they need to go need to go and do is build a 20,000 plus community and hundreds of thousands of other people that are not even at this event but are online, they have to go build all that moat around them in order to even start to begin to compete with them at that level. So there is so much power in community and so do and Salesforce and Drift. And so I don't think we did anything new. I just felt like we definitely stumbled on this idea and thankfully and gratefully have been able to nurture it. Kathleen: Yeah, and it might not be something new, but I am amazed at how much we as marketers talk about the importance of community but so few brands and companies actually bother to truly invest in doing it. Kudos to you for following through. Sangram: I appreciate that. What Is Account-Based Marketing? Kathleen: So #FlipMyFunnel, I've always liked that name, too, because to me it so perfectly defines in marketing speak at least what ABM is in a way that anyone can understand. But to to rewind a little bit, let's go back to account based marketing. That's really what I wanted to talk to you about. How do you define account based marketing? Because I've heard it defined many different ways. Sangram: Yeah. So I'm not gonna give any analysty kind of definition. I think everybody can find a million different answers for that. I think quite simply to me it is focused marketing and sales activity, and that's all it is, really. So if you were in B2C where you are selling Nike shoes to any and everybody in the world, it makes sense to go after any and everybody in the world. But if you're selling to, let's say Fortune 500 financial services company for your supply chain product, guess what? There are only maybe 50 of them. So why in the world do we want to create content and qualification and all the processes that we all have created that has a roadblock to it? Why not start with the best fit accounts to begin with and then expand within the reach within them and then engage them and then turn into advocates. Why not focus on the 50 as opposed to 5,000 to find the 50? B2C has that problem. B2B thankfully does not have that problem. So that's why I think ABM is so cool. Kathleen: Yeah, it definitely makes sense that that larger transaction value that small audience, or the small audience within the bigger marketing strategy. So Terminus as a platform enables companies to more effectively do account based marketing. For the person listening who is either familiar with ABM or maybe not familiar but interested in learning more, tell me a little bit about what kinds of successes you've seen companies have with it. And honestly like how does it work? So if somebody says, I want to do focused marketing, what does that really mean at a practical level? Sangram: Well. So let's walk through an example of your document before we started to record, which is a company called Masergy is great customer of ours. They are in cloud communications and computing so I think most people can relate to that as a technology company and Malachi who runs their marketing is a phenomenal guy. We had him speak at a lot of the conferences and podcasts and all that stuff. So let me walk through almost status quo ABM 1.0 if you will and ABM 2.0. And I think as audience is listening to this and maybe they can figure out where they belong in this journey that you may be or may not be right now and trying to figure out to be on. So Malachi was in one of these incredible inbound marketers where he generated 25,000 leads, got 25,000 leads and he heard all the time from the sales team is like, well, they're not qualified. They're not relevant. They're not the right people and as you might know, Forrester came out with the research in 2016 I think that less than 1% of the leads are turning into customers. Kathleen: I was going to say, I'm pretty sure every single marketer that is listening has heard exactly that complaint from their sales team before. Sangram: And that's purely because we are going after again first trying to get any and everybody and then try to qualify it as opposed to going after the right people. So the problem is something that I think we have to own that we have created to begin with. So in a status quo world, I feel if you are marketing it and that's how the challenges you feel like at think of it as the status quo, that is pretty much what's happening in 90% of the company and it's unfortunate. I think we all need to wake up and look at it and think like, hey, it's not really sales problem. It's actually a marketing problem that we need to fix. So that's kind of where I feel he found himself as well a couple of years ago. Then he moved into this, what I would call AB 1.0 where I think more and more companies are finding themselves now who are jumping on the bandwagon of ABM which is saying, okay, well that's not working. Sending these 25,000 leads is not working. What do I do? Let me find the right people. Let me just go and select top 100 accounts that my sales and marketing team can focus on. That might be on a vertical, that might be based on sales stage that you are having difficulty converting, or it might be a sector or whatever it might be. So I think most people are now finding a top 100 accounts that I want to focus on. And to your point like, well how do you do it? What you really do and most companies are doing, they're running one to one campaign for each one of these hundred accounts. That means they'll have an ad that talks to that exact company and all the people in that company. So you're running advertising through platforms like Terminus and Google or whatnot. Then you are taking them to a landing page that doesn't ask for their mother's maiden name. It actually gives them the whole information about how you can actually help their industry and them and others in their industry be successful. So there's no gating of information. It's actually now your customers are going to spend more time on that page because you're literally taking to a page that is custom made for them and then you can add direct mail or stuff like that, too, to kind of engage them. Now you can do all of these things because you're only focused on top hundred. You're not focused on everybody. So you can do a digital advertising, you can do a Linkedin campaign, you can do a direct mail campaign, you can have a landing page that is focused on them, a stream of content videos for them. It's all possible when sales and marketing is working together at 1.0 level. And the results of that one, just in case of Malachi and Masergy they have over 250% penetration rate within the accounts they want to go after compared to any other account that they're targeting. Right? I think they knocked off a month in the sales process. So now they're closing deals much faster. Now you can imagine what kind of revenue impact you have in your organization when you're actually taking one month off your sales process. So how many more opportunities can your sales team work on? So their results are fantastic, but that's just because they're able to focus on the top hundred accounts. Right? Kathleen: So if I understand correctly, I'm a company and let's say I want to land Coca Cola as an account. I might set up ads via either Google or Linkedin or what have you that are targeted just at people who work for Coca Cola and then those ads are going to direct them back to a landing page that's either about the beverage industry or I guess it could specifically be about Coca Cola. Sangram: It actually should be. It could literally say your company plus Coke equals whatever because we do x,y,z. Kathleen: Yeah, and then potentially as you said, other items like direct mail, et cetera and the goal of all this is to get in front of and raise brand awareness amongst as many people within Coca Cola or at least within the right parts of Coca Cola as possible. Is that accurate? Sangram: Exactly and the reason you want to do that at that level is because we all know in B2B the decision making is by committee where there are five, seven, nine, 10 people are the decision making process. If all 10 people have heard about you and have seen your message and they may never fill up a form but they all have some sort of input in the buying process. Well if the CFO, the CEO, the head of sales, the head of procurement, and all of them have seen your brand chances as are you going to have somewhat of an in in that company because of the brand awareness you've created, but you can't create that level of brand awareness unless you are focused on them. Kathleen: Now, how do you do this without having the intended target feel like it's creepy. Sangram: It's creepy beyond creepy. But I think we all have sold our rights to privacy in many ways when we sign up for Facebook, when we signed up for websites that have over digital kind of body language to it. So in many ways, I'm one. So we do Terminus, one of the things beyond analytics and all this stuff that we do for canvas marketing as a platform, but one of the things we do is we do is digital advertising and I'm not someone who typically clicks on a lot of ads or digital advertising. I actually hate it. And I've told the founder of this company, but I loves ad when it actually does and serve a purpose for me. So for example, if I am looking for something and if I get the right message at the right time, it is an awesome thing. Otherwise it's annoying to me. Kathleen: I was just saying this, I was taking the train home on Saturday from a week away for work and I had, this is such a side story, but it's relevant. For Christmas, I wanted this one pair of slippers. Sangram: Yeah. Kathleen: And I didn't get it. And all of a sudden on the train, on the way home, this ad pops up and the slippers are on sale and darned if I didn't buy them within like five minutes of getting the ad. And it's exactly what you're talking about. I mean, this is it more of a B2C example. But yeah, I mean they knew I was interested. It was the right time and it was immediate, it was an easy yes. Sangram: Yeah. Kathleen: And I don't like ads either for what it's worth. Sangram: Exactly, none of us do, but we all value whatever is timely and convenient for us or the needs that we have. So I may not like a cupcake ad that pops up randomly for me, but I would love an ad for the right book or the right thing that I want. And B2B software is no different. If you're looking for it and you find the right connection, then you will spend time. So a company like Masergy is finding true success because these people are not converting on their website like the status quo thing. They're actually spending more time looking at oh this is good, this is great for our financial. They seem to have a great case study with a similar customer in our industry so they get our problem. They know what the messaging is exactly what you would create because you know enough about Coke so the messaging is going to be about it so they care. Like those are the feelings that you invoke in your future customer that standard marketing doesn't really do. So that's 1.0. And 2.0 sorry, go ahead. ABM 2.0 Kathleen: Yeah, no, that's what's going to be my next question is, all right, so what's 2.0? Sangram: If that's exciting enough for be people. If you're dipping your toes that already may feel overwhelming, but the reality is that if you truly care and if the deal size is big enough and if you can truly forward the velocity, it's really worth it. Now, if you're a transactional business where you're spending like 10 bucks a month subscription, it probably is not worth doing all the effort on it. Now ABM 2.0 is really interesting because now you go from this silo approach off like everybody and anybody and I need to go in and figure out who I need to go after and see less than 1% of the customers to the top hundred accounts and now it's super targeted, super engaged and connected and all that stuff. But now I'm getting proactive around my outreach and all that stuff is to this idea of running my entire business like that. Right? Imagine all of the target accounts that you want to go after now, not just hundreds, but maybe let's say your total addressable market is 3,000 accounts, right? And you know that your product or service is suited for those 3,000 accounts. Imagine having the ability to have a fit and intent score where you will say, okay, these 3,000 accounts have fit. These are great accounts. I just want to know whenever there is intent to buy any of these accounts somewhere online, if they're researching on G2 Crowd for a similar software. I want to know if somebody in that company is reading articles that have the keywords that I care about, I want to know. Right? So the fit and intent if you can combine that beyond the hundred accounts and say of these 3,000 accounts, any account that is the right fit and intent, I need to be alerted so that my sales can be prioritizing the experience for them. And then the same play that we talked about at 1.0, I can replicate it in a prioritized way for the accounts that are in market right now. And I think that's when you're running your business on a very hyper targeted, hyper personalized at scale. Kathleen: Now how do you, you talked about intent and some of the examples you gave were things that would happen off of your own web assets. So not on your website. It might be like you said, G2 crowd, for example. How are companies able to access this kind of intent data? Sangram: Oh, there's tons of providers right now in the market place. Like G2 crowd themselves would provide the intent.  Terminus connects with like you know Bombora. Bombora is another good one. DiscoverOrg would give you that information. Linkedin will give you that information now. Even G2 crowd as a set. And so there are tons of companies who are starting to pull all this information together and we as a platform, we are trying to hook up into all of them and say, okay, well we can run this for 100, but the beauty would be then you can run this for 3,000 and not leave anybody out there who's the right fit and has the intent right now because that's when you're going to win faster at a much higher level when you know the company that's in market. So all of these companies, they're more and more companies actually coming up with this data. Kathleen: That's interesting what you said about that you're really trying to hook up with all these different platforms. Because the first question that was going to come into my head was, I'm hearing a lot of companies talk about using CDPs, customer data platforms, in order to tie together the data they have in all different places. But it sounds like the direction you're moving, that wouldn't be necessary. You essentially would be the CDP. Sangram: Sure. I mean that's exactly right. Like we, I remember the really early days. Initially our thought was, hey, we're going to look at all the people in everybody's CRM and start helping them do advertising to them. What we quickly realized, everybody's data is shit. Like it's crap. And there's nothing in there. Like a lot of them are not updating data and there's all kinds of, there's the same companies alert seven different ways in CRM, like we all have the same issues. I'm like, okay, that's not gonna work. So we only get the names of the companies from our customers and the type of persona they want to target. Then we use our own intelligence by partnering with Linkedin and D&B and NetProspex and so many different data providers so that we have a clean set off information and then we are proactively targeting them and giving intelligence back to our customers. They're like, whoa, that's great. So I think you're absolutely right. I think we are relying a lot on good data from third party sources because most CRMs and most marketing automations, the data is not clean. Kathleen: Amen to that. It's terrible. It really is. It's my biggest pet peeve is just the garbage that's in these databases. Sangram: Yeah. Kathleen: So interesting. Okay, so it sounds like the key shift there from ABM 1.0 to 2.0 is in 1.0 you're manually creating your target list and in 2.0 you have a system in place that feeds your targets to you that is essentially automated. Is that accurate? Sangram: Exactly. Right, and now you're going back to okay, you want to automated, but now you want to automate it or you want to create this personalized experience, but now you are creating that personalized experience for anyone that is in market that has the right fit as opposed to this arbitrary hundred companies that I have decided because they sound great or my sales team said that this is important. Now I'm actually running my business on the smart content. What Will ABM Look Like In the Future? Kathleen: Well now I'm really curious to hear what your predictions will be for what ABM 3.0 will look like. Cause I have some ideas that I've gotten as I've listened to you talk and I'm curious to know if they're going to be similar to what you come up with. Sangram: I don't know. I just came up with 2.0. I don't know what we get going. Kathleen: I mean the first thing I thought of was if the second step is the system basically feeds you, these are the companies you should go after. In my head, I'm thinking, well the third step is then you have a system, an artificial intelligence system, that just spins up the landing pages. Sangram: Oh yeah. Kathleen: From your relational database. It says, oh they're financial services. Well we have that template. Pop their name in and then it's really truly the robots are doing our jobs for us. Sangram: Oh you, you are spot on when it comes to personalization of this whole experience. I mean right now people are throwing bodies at it. Kathleen: Yeah. Sangram: Hey, you know what? Go create 50 landing pages. We have a customer Snowflake for example. They're running 500 one to one campaigns. 500. They have 15 people now I think six and by end of Q one, so by end of Q one they're supposed to have 15 people with the title of account based marketing. So you can think about how they are because they're like, well, does every one of them have regions and then helping to personalized experiences for it. So we are actually in some ways putting bodies in place because we don't know if there is a way to automate all of this experience because it's so rich and so valuable and so unique in many ways right now. Kathleen: I'm sure we're not far off from it. Sangram: Oh, no. Kathleen: So talk me through the one thing we haven't really touched much upon. We've talked about ABM from the marketer's standpoint. Walk me through at what point in this process in an ideal world, should sales enter into the equation and what does that hand off look like? Are they involved the whole way? The Marketing To Sales Handoff In ABM Sangram: There is no handoff. I think that's where we got it wrong. I feel like some of the blame is on me as well as part of that, that old group of people. I feel like there is no hand off. Sales and marketing hundred percent has to agree on the way this is going to work. Otherwise you can't create a personalized experience. If the sales person's not going to call as soon as the direct mail is hit to the right person, then you know it's not gonna work. If the sales person is not going to follow up when they see an increased activity of the right accounts on your website because you have get rid of all the forms and now you have five kind of right people on their website if they don't do that work that's needed to follow up on, then in the B2B world, it's still not going to work. People are not going to just come and swipe credit cards if you're selling a $100,000 product. So sales are super important. What's bigger difference I think if you want to go the predictions route is I think marketing is going to own the process of figuring out who to go after because they're going to have fit and intent data. So imagine as a marketer and you could say, hey, we want to open an office in, we want to expand our business, great. Based on the information that I have from all of these different technologies that I'm able to cobble up together, I can see that in Boston there is the highest concentration or best fit future customers. There is a lot of intense action going on over there, too. So we should open a sales office in Boston and put two people in there because based on the quota that we are hitting, it makes sense that two sales people. So imagine that a marketer can set up sales quota and not only that, a marketer can figure out the forecasting of which deals are going to close. Because a lot of times the sales would say, oh, I think 30% of them are going to close. And a lot of times, quite honestly they have no clue. Nobody has any clue why somebody went dark or what happened there. Right? But now marketer can say, hey look. And we have seen this happen at Terminus and a lot of customers say, look of these 10 deals that you planned that they're going to close this month, let me tell you, 7 of them have not even spent a minute on our website in the last month and a half. So let's get rid of the bullshit. There are only 3 that we can have a full opportunity to close. Why not just focus on these three? We know there's interest in there. Let's do more campaign. Maybe do a in house dinner over there and try to close the deals with these three because the seven, the chances are they're not going to close this month in the next two days, right? So that level of intelligence in the front portal, from fit and intent and then forecasting, is unique and new and I think the marketer is going to be in the driver's seat. Kathleen: I feel like all the sales people who are listening are going, "No way. Marketing's not going to set my quotas." Sangram: I think they want it. If they are smart to recognize the power in this thing, I think they would want it because they can actually have a higher quota at a much higher velocity and they would actually be doing what they're the best at, which is influencing the deal and closing it. But marketers can now, we are all going to be more of an intelligence provider. Here's the intelligence of who you should go after. Here's the intelligence who can close faster, so maybe focus. We are really helping sales team to do their best and I feel like the future really is going to be where sales fully embraces marketing's role in helping them win more deals. ABM and GDPR Kathleen: Interesting. One thing that came to mind as I was listening to you describe all the disparate sources of data, especially the intent data, the first question that came into my head is how does this all fit within the increasing movement towards giving users more control over their information and privacy and GDPR? Can you talk a little bit about that? Sangram: Yeah, I think it's great because you're no longer emailing people without their permission. And the advertising that you're seeing are proactive advertising and interest that you have already shown interest for, which is why you bought those slippers because you kind of wanted that. Kathleen: They had my number, I'll tell ya. Sangram: They had all information that you have willingly provided to them. So I think as long as it is helpful, I think people are going to be okay with it. I think the reason GDPR is actually good is because people are spamming, right? People send a newsletter which is all about it and people want a newsletter that's all about who is getting the email is coming too. So it's such a different thing. I think all of that is happening because we just don't know who can bite the bullet. We don't know who's going to pay the bill. We don't know who's going to buy the product or service. In this model, because you're focused on a few that actually matter, that's why you heard me never say or use the word "prospect" in the process. You're prospecting is dead because the only prospect that you don't know if they're going to be a customer or not. In this case it's all future customers because you've already done the homework to figure it out if they're best fit and can you serve them or not? Have you served other people like them or not? If it's not best fit, you shouldn't be spending any time with them at all. Who Is Account-Based Marketing Right For? Kathleen: Yeah. So there are a lot of companies that are practicing account based marketing. Tell me a little bit about who this is right for in terms of the type of company, because they're obviously, it does take a certain degree of manpower to build out these assets. There's an investment on the front end especially if they're going to buy a platform like Terminus. Sangram: Yeah, totally. So I think there are two ways of thinking about that, Kathleen. One is the organizational readiness, because no matter how many resources you have, I've seen it fail tremendously in many, many ways. And one of the one was that the organization is not ready to adopt that. So I'll talk about that in a sec. And then the other way is also to figure out like are we selling and do we know who we're selling to and as the audience really open to it? So I'll get into that as well. So organizational readiness, meaning if you have a sales driven quota or marketing, sales driven culture or marketing driven culture, then this is not going to work because it has to have a "one team" kind of mindset. This will only work when organizations fully understand the importance of doing it. And believe it or not, it starts with the CEO, not CMO or CSL. It actually starts with the CEO because it's a business transformation that we're talking about. We're talking about clarity around having aware of what your total addressable market is. I'm sure if you ask your audience right now, I would guarantee, majority of them will not know what their total addressable market looks like. How many exact number of customers they can potentially sell to this year. That was like, these questions are not something marketers jump into. Typically they are like siloed in the sales world or maybe. Like everybody, the CEO to the board, to the CFO to the CMR, everybody has to agree on the total addressable market and that's organization readiness. So if you don't have that kind of stuff, I think it's going to fail and I've seen it fail. It might succeed. but I've seen in fail more than not. And the other part is around the idea that are you selling like let's say you're selling $50,000 product which has an annual subscription which you can upserve in the next couple of months or a couple of years to $100,000 or $150,000, ABM is perfect for you. That makes perfect sense. But if you're selling for like 10 bucks, Dropbox kind of subscription fee kind of stuff, unless it has a tremendous potential then it won't make sense for you to do it because the cost of acquisition will go off the roof. So this is really for accounts that that do matter and have a higher revenues. Mid market, if you're selling to mid market and enterprises, even if you're a small shop, so this is, I want to really clarify, I've seen companies that are really small, like 10 people shop be wildly successful because they sell $100,000 $200,000 worth of services or product. And I've seen companies that are big companies, even public companies that are selling to SMB, they are not successful at all because if your target audience is smaller and it just won't work, you'll have to scale so much. What Kinds of Results Can You Expect With ABM? Kathleen: Right. And what about results? Like do you have some examples of what companies have seen as a result of doing these types of campaigns? Sangram: Well, I mean, some of it, what we talked about Masergy where their engagement rate and I think penetration within the right kind of targeted council is up by 250%. They knocked off a sales month from their entire sales process because they were able to do that. To me, that that sounds like millions of dollars. Even beyond that, 85% of their revenue came from one product and they have three more products to sell. So they have to figure out a way to upsell the other two products and they just were trying to create awareness. So now you're going apply ABM to customer marketing. So you already know the customers that have this one product, let's say cloud computing. You say, okay, now I want to run the same ad to other business units or other personas in that company making your customer like somebody in their company look like hero and show how you're helping that business owner. So if you're selling to GE and you have one business unit and you want to sell it or the business unit, it's awesome. Like that's a hundred percent ABM. So what they found out that they are creating more sticker products line and business line for them, but most importantly, and this was this was the best, that they found that their NPS score, which is the net promoter score for the customers who bought more than two products after they launched the ABM because they knew so much about them already as the best fit, went up from 70% to 90%. So think about that for a second. You're not only serving your customers and upselling your own process services, because you're serving the right people and because your focus again is on the right people, you're able to serve them, you really are able to solve their problems so you're not trying to close more deals, you're trying to close the right deals. So they're going to be more delighted than ever before because they're not going after everybody. Kathleen: That is really interesting. I have never actually heard anybody talk about using ABM for upsells and cross sells. Sangram: Actually that is the best use case than demand generation. I think because we're in marketing, we think we need more acquisition. It's actually parsed into three - acquisition, pipeline velocity and customer marketing. If you were to start ABM, if you have never jumped into ABM at all, I would say jumping into pipeline velocity or customer marketing first. Pipeline velocity, which means if there is a deal in play and you know when it's going to close, let's say 30 days or 60 days, perfect. Your sales is going to be cooperative, the finance team is going to be looking at those deal, your CFO, CRO, everybody's in it. So if you can show movement there, you get by in there, so that's the best place to start 100% because that's where you're going to see you already have a good customer, why not get more of the from the good customer? But pipeline velocity, Kathleen I think is a very understated area of focus and if you're piloting with the top accounts, it's not actually acquisition, that's the last place you want to go because you have no idea when they're going to be ready to truly buy. Pipeline velocity, customer marketing, I think that's where gold is. Kathleen: Yeah, the customer marketing stuff is so interesting to me, because we always even, I mean we're not a huge, huge company. We're probably 65 people. But we always have this challenge as an agency when we offer a new service for the first time of how do we, you know, yes, can we send an email to every client we have? Absolutely. But what's an effective way to keep reminding them that we do this now? Like for example, in the last year we added a full fledged video production and training department and some of our clients are really aware of it and others aren't. And it's just interesting to think about even just running an ad to clients saying, "did you know we do this" and directing them back to a landing page for customers only. Lots of ideas spinning now. Sangram: I think that's beauty. ABM is not a tactic. It's a strategy. It's not a tool. If somebody says that, "Hey, we use Terminus and we're doing ABM" I would say you're not, because we're not doing direct mail, we are not doing call cadences. We are not doing a lot of the other things, the landing pages. So that's not it. We're not ABM. We play a wider role in helping you enable an ABM program, but ABM is a strategy that you and your organization need to really care about and focus in the area of that you need the most help. And your use case of saying just, I mean that's the cheapest, the amount of, if you were looking at a dollar return, that's the best place to kind of put in. But we end up putting more money in acquisition than actually getting more from our own existing customers. Kathleen: Absolutely. And if you have a tiny targeted audience, it's worth spending more per click or whatever the metric is because they're warm, so interesting. So you mentioned a couple of companies. Was it Masergy? I want to make sure that everyone knows how that's spelled so they can see it. Sangram: Yeah. Masergy and Snowflake is another company. Phenomic is another company. We actually do something called internally called customer in the office. So every month we try to bring in a customer and have them share with you. That's why these stores are so fresh for me because every month I'm hearing from them literally how it's transforming their team, their sales and marketing relationship and their organization. Kathleen: I love that customer in the office thing, that's great. Keeps me really close to not only the successes but some of the challenges people are facing. So definitely if you're listening go check out those companies to see some examples. It might not be obvious on their site, I'm guessing, because a lot of this is sort of happening behind the scenes under the curtain specifically directed towards their target customers. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Changing gears for a minute, I have a couple of questions that I always ask everyone who comes on this podcast. Curious to get your take on this. The first one is company or individual? Who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Sangram: Well, I mean the company probably comes to mind is Drift. I'm sure others have mentioned that as drip, like what David Cancel and David Gerhardt are doing. I feel like they're building a great category and it reminds us a lot of what we have done in the past, but I feel like they're doing it better then what we have done to be very honest. So it really, really feels good to see what they're doing. Kathleen: Yeah, their names definitely come up a lot. And I did get to interview Dave Gerhardt. I was like, "I keep hearing your name, you have to come on the show." Sangram: He's great and the team is awesome over there. Kathleen: Second question, with the world of digital marketing changing so quickly, we kinda touched on this earlier with ABM even changing so quickly, how do you personally stay up to date and on top of all these new technological advancements and trends in marketing? Sangram: I mean, just like you, I feel like I have, I think the podcast is a great way to learn. So I listen a lot of podcasts. I listen to Inbound. I listen to Donald Miller's podcast. And I almost sometimes go back to we need older books but instead of newer ones, because I think what hasn't changed is that we are all humans, thankfully, and what hasn't changed is the emotions and the feeling. And I feel like the more I go back to that, the better it gets. So like podcasts is like the radio. It's back to radio. You're recording this thing and it's going to go live. That is crazy that it is the new thing right now. So I feel like podcasting is like the new white paper of the world. Videos are like the new blogs of the way. In many ways you're just going back to some of the older ways of communicating just one to one in a very authentic way. So wherever that authenticity line goes, I try to follow that. Kathleen: Right. And thank you for mentioning the specific podcasts that you like cause I'm always on the hunt for new ones. Sangram: Yeah. Connect With Sangram Kathleen: So I'll definitely check those out. Well, if somebody has a question, wants to learn more about Terminus, or has a question about ABM, generally, what's the best way for them to find you online? Sangram: Well, so I post on a very regular basis on Linkedin, so just find me, Sangram Vajre on Linkedin. Terminus is terminus.com. You sort of join the community, #FlipMyFunnel. Kathleen: Great. And I'll post the links to all of those things in the show notes. If you're listening and you found value here, you know what to do, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice. And if you know somebody who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at workmommywork because I would love to interview them. Thank you, Sangram. It was great talking to you. Sangram: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

How can a simple change in your keyword research approach dramatically increase traffic, leads and revenue? This week onThe Inbound Success Podcast I spoke with Emily Maxie, VP of Marketing at software development company Very, and Stacy Willis, Emily's strategist at IMPACT, about the incredible results they got by focusing on pillar content and topic clusters.  The two of them shared how they worked together to revamp Very's SEO strategy and why the new approach they used for keyword research at Very has inspired Stacy to change how she carries out keyword research for all of IMPACT's clients. The results of this work are impressive - an 88% quarter over quarter increase, and 1100% year over year increase, in website traffic, along with notable improvements in the quality of the company's leads. 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 keynote speakers 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 Emily and Stacy include: Very is a software development company that focuses on IoT and machine learning. The company was doing digital marketing and while it was successful in driving traffic to its site, it was the wrong kind of traffic and the leads were unqualified. Working with her strategist, Stacy Willis of IMPACT, Emily identified three key topic areas that all fit within service offerings that would be the right fit for Very, and developed a pillar content and topic cluster strategy aimed at building credibility in those areas.  For those three main topic areas, Stacy and Emily used SEMRush to identify the related keywords that had the highest search volume and lowest competition. Pillar content needs to be at least 4,000 words long and to gain immediate traction while her team worked on creating that long form content, Emily started by publishing blogs that were focused on her subtopic keywords. Emily makes it easy for her team to produce content on highly technical subject matter by interviewing her company's subject matter experts and then writing the blogs herself, but giving them an opportunity to review the articles for accuracy before they are published. Her big tip? Don't "write past what you understand." Emily began posting the subtopic blogs at a pace of three articles per week in June of 2018 and before she could even publish her pillar content, the company saw an 88% quarter over quarter increase in website traffic. As of this January, the company's year over year traffic increase has been 1100%. Very is now also ranking number one for "IoT application development" and for "IoT app development" - two of its target keywords. Stacy shared that the experience with Very has been so positive that it has inspired her and the team at IMPACT to change the way we approach keyword research, and now they focus exclusively on keywords that are related to their pillar content topics. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit verypossible.com Check out the Very blog and resource center Connect with Emily Maxie on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter Connect with Stacy Willis on LinkedIn Check out two of Stacy's favorite keyword research tools: SEMRush and Answer the Public IMPACT's pillar content on website redesign For great examples of companies and people doing inbound marketing really well, check out Emily's recommendations, Women Who Code and Harvard Business Review, and Stacy's recommendation, Invision. To stay on top of the latest changes and trends in the startup world, check out Emily's recommendation, the Reboot Podcast. Listen to the podcast to learn more about the changes that Emily and Stacy made, and get the specifics of their new keyword research and SEO strategy. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host):Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. This week on the Inbound Success podcast, I have two guests. One is Stacy Willis, who is a strategist with IMPACT. And the other is Emily Maxie, who's the VP of marketing with Very. Welcome to the podcast. Emily Maxie (Guest): Thanks. It's great to be here. Emily, Kathleen and Stacy recording this episode Kathleen: Stacy's been on the podcast before. She's a familiar name. You haven't been on before. Tell my listeners a little bit about yourself, your background, and also about Very. About Emily Maxie and Very Emily: Yeah, absolutely. So, my long ago background, I went to school thinking I was going to be a journalist, and graduated the year that the iPad came out. And all newspapers were laying people off. And so I worked at a newspaper for about a year, but ended up pivoting into marketing pretty quickly. And landed doing marketing at a technology company, and just really love doing marketing at tech companies because it's kind of the fact based very analytical side of journalism that I love. But it's also an ability to be creative, and it's much more in demand than print journalism is. And yeah, it's just kind of my niche, and it's something I love. And then Very is a software development company that focuses on IoT and machine learning. And we have been around for about seven years. I've been with them for about a year and a half. Kathleen: And IoT, for anyone listening, is the Internet of Things. Which I feel like I want to ask you to define that, but I also know that that's an incredibly hard thing to define. So I don't know, are up for it? Emily: That's like the Pandora's box right there, right? Yeah. I can give kind of ... I'm sure this isn't the official definition and it might make our technologists cringe, but for the marketers out there, any devices that you have that are connected to the internet is the Internet of things. So we've seen the refrigerators that are connected to the internet and you can see inside of them from your cell phone or things like that. We recently created a connected fish tank where you could turn the lights on and off, and check the water temperature from your phone. So all of those interactions between our physical world and the internet is what Internet of Things is. Kathleen: That's so cool. Well good definition. All I could think as I was listening to you say that is the last thing I want to be able to do is see inside my refrigerator, unless I absolutely have to because it's gross. Emily: Yeah, yeah. Stacy: And that refrigerator that can tell you when something's gone bad. That's great. Yeah, or if you're out of milk. Kathleen: I saw something in People Magazine the other day and it was Ryan Seacrest's refrigerator, and I'm not kidding, it looked ... There's no way they cook in that house. And he had baskets with ribbons on them inside of his refrigerator. And I think the only food in there was like spirulina shots. If I had that fridge I would be fine looking at it all day. Stacy: Of course. A Keyword Strategy for Very Kathleen: So interesting. So the reason that I was excited to talk to you guys, the two of you, is that you worked together on a really interesting effort to revisit the keyword strategy for Very, and it had some really impactful results. So let's rewind the clock and start with really what ... First of all, obviously Very is doing digital marketing. That's what you're focused on. What are your goals? What type of clients are you looking to bring in? And what types of keywords were you targeting? Emily: Yeah. So really our goals ... I came in a year and a half ago being the first marketer that Very had ever had. They'd been in business for seven years and never had any marketing. And it all had just been the partners out there hustling and using their personal network, some things like that. And the first time that we had someone reach out to us through the website, it was like magic to them. They were just like, "What? This is so much easier." After that happened I was really able to kind of not only grow the marketing budget, but I think elevate marketing within the company as more than just fixing the website or making things look pretty, stuff like that. So really, our goal with marketing this year is to drive millions of dollars of revenue for the company. Last year marketing drove 2.2 million for the company, and that was our first year actually doing marketing. So I'm really excited about 2019, and the keywords that we were focused on. Well, we spent about a year focusing on the wrong target segment. So we now rank really highly for a lot of blockchain related keywords, which is not a segment that we're going after anymore. So it might be something that we go after in the future, but we just really found that ... You think Internet of things is hard to explain, try explaining blockchain. And also just there was a lot of immaturity in the market. People didn't really know what they were buying or what they wanted. There was this gold rush with initial coin offerings where people got money overnight and then they were spending it very recklessly and it was just not the type of client that we wanted to work with for now. But that was really what we were focused on, with kind of a secondary focus on IoT and machine learning, which are now the core tenants of our business. Kathleen: So if I'm hearing you correctly, it sounds like what you're saying is that you understood that they were the wrong keywords mostly because the type of client you were getting was a poor fit. Is that accurate? Emily: Yes. We understand now that they were the wrong keywords because we ... And SEO and AdWords were not the only things we were doing, we're also sponsoring conferences. And so we were doing huge push across the board for these types of clients. And we kept getting people raising their hands and saying, "I have a project." And then they would move through the sales cycle and then, "Oh, I don't actually have funding." Or they'd get to the end of the sale cycle and then we'd just never hear from them again. We should have pivoted faster away from it, we should have seen it faster, but we have a pretty long sales cycle so it took us awhile to identify. Yes, we're getting tons of interest from this, but it's not the right fit for our business. Kathleen: Yeah, that's really interesting. I think that's definitely a situation I see a lot. And I've seen it with a lot of clients we've had at IMPACT and when I had my own agency, we saw it too. Inbound marketing can work really well, and you can be getting lots of leads and still not feeling like it's right. And that's a familiar refrain to me. So you recognized that you were driving leads but they were not the right kinds of leads. And at the time you were working with Stacy, correct? Emily: Yep. Kathleen: So you guys sat down, and how did you approach the challenge of determining what is the best way to attract the right kind of lead? Emily: Go ahead, Stacy. Kathleen: I'll let you start. Or you want me? Okay. You want me to jump right in? Emily: Yeah. Go for it. Stacy: What we wanted to do when we were looking to put together a holistic keyword strategy was to not isolate ourselves so far down one path, but to make sure that we were building credibility on a number of topics that all fit within service offerings that would be the right fit for Very. So full disclosure, at the time that we created this, we still weren't 100% sure that blockchain was the wrong one. So it is one of the three topic areas we did cover. But what we did was we created a bit more breadth, and made sure that we had three major topic areas we were going after. And organize these into a topic cluster kind of keyword strategy. So I'm sure that most people hearing this will probably be familiar with what pillar content is. But if you're not, it's the organization around a high level topic area, and then you'll have subtopics that are highly related. So the example that we always use from our own website is website redesign. And separately, a subtopic from that might be how much does the website redesign cost? It's a really specific area of that main topic. And so we wanted to go ahead and create a wholistic strategy for Very. That worked to give us coverage over three topic areas instead of just a single one. Kathleen: And what were those three topic areas? Stacy: So at the time that we created it, it was blockchain, IoT, and machine learning, were the three. Kathleen: And how did you ... And knowing the situation you had previously with that wrong type of client, how did you approach this in a way that you felt would eliminate that same issue from happening? Emily: So just to clarify, we realized that maybe two months ago and we did this keyword strategy probably five or six months ago. So it was after we did this keyword strategy, we got a ton of volume in the door, and then we were able to see, okay, two hits, one miss. And we're able to kind of eliminate blockchain from the bunch. But at the time of developing this, we were still very focused on blockchain. And in fact, it was the one that we're most focused on. Kathleen: Wow. That is so interesting to me because that, what it says to me is that the new strategy worked really quickly if you were able to see that fast. Emily: Definitely. Kathleen: And it worked in the sense that it did deliver leads, but they were the wrong leads and you realized it. So that's so interesting. All right, so let's go back to before you knew that you didn't want to target those. Stacy: Naive little Emily. Kathleen: Yeah. And no, I mean I don't think if there's anything naive about it, I mean I think this is just the reality in marketing is you have to try things and you have to watch them, and recognize quickly when they're not working and pivot. And so kudos to you for doing that. Pillar Content and Topic Clusters Kathleen: So going back, you identified these three big topics that you wanted to build clusters around that Stacy described. Walk me through the process that the two of you used to determine what those subtopics would be. Stacy: So I was lucky. Emily just gave them to me. She knew what her team was really, really good at, which I think is really important. So I'll let her speak to that. Emily: Yeah, I basically went to the team because we are a services company, we are very dependent on what our team's capabilities are. And because we're technical services company, it's not just, okay, we do blockchain, which we no longer do, but it's, we do blockchain, we build smart contracts. We don't work on this framework or that framework, we do work on these. And so it got down in the very specific nitty gritty and the technical. And so I kind of gave Stacy a list of here's what I think, I have no idea what the search volume is. And then she curated that list, and said, "Okay, here are some of the keywords related to these that we should be going for." Kathleen: Okay. And Stacy, so Emily delivered this list to you. How did you go about evaluating that and coming back with those recommendations? Stacy: Well, I'm a giant nerd. So I enjoy diving into really, really specific data. So not everybody may get as super excited about this as I do, but- Emily: No, we must both be giant nerds then, 'cause this is what I like to talk about every week. So- Stacy: Oh, that's good, that's good. Emily: Yeah. Stacy: So then nobody's gonna hold it against me as I talk about it at length right now. Excuse me. Apologies, I'm fighting a little bit of a cold so I might cough throughout this. Kathleen: Oh, there is something going around. Stacy: Especially if I get more excited. Yeah. Kathleen: There's something going around and these were the times when I'm happy that I can podcast over zoom so that I don't get your cold. Stacy: Darn, I wanted to give it to you. But what we did internally is we went and dove into a tool called SEMrush, which is possibly one of my favorite tools of all time because it gives you access to the greatest level of data on keywords that's out there. What we did is took the areas in which we knew that the team was really good at delivering, so those three topic areas, and said, "What are the combination of the terms that have the highest search volume?" So that's the most number of people out there looking for those terms. And the lowest competition. Essentially not that many other websites are competing with you trying to rank for the same term. And what bubbled to the top throughout all this research of keywords that were related to these areas, keywords that were maybe variations of ways to say this. The example that I can put there is machine learning and artificial intelligence, kind of ended up being synonymous terms. But they're very different terms when you're thinking about search, right? They have no words in common, but they're highly related. So it really helps to know which way people are referring to it to find you, right? And so what we did is we looked at all of those kinds of related terms and bubbled up to the top those that had the best potential based on that search volume and competition crossover. And we organized them into a structure that looked like we talked about what these topic clusters were. There was a high level keyword which is our big very general topic area that had a very high search volume. And then we connected all of the smaller subtopics that we found that were the best crossover of that high search volume, low competition, that are more specific. And some of the tools that we use when we're trying to get a little more specific with our keywords or things like Answer the Public. Kathleen: I love that one. Stacy: That's one of my favorite. Yeah. It- Kathleen: They also have the best website home page experience with that grumpy- Stacy: Oh my gosh. I sometimes will sit there and watch his face for about 30 seconds because I'm like ... Kathleen: Same. Stacy: I just need someone to be mad at me for about 5 seconds. Kathleen: He's mesmerizing. So if you're listening and you've never gone to answer the public, check it out and there's this super grumpy older man on the home page, and it's awesome. Stacy: Yeah. It's great. He's judging you for how fast you're typing in your keyword. It's hilarious. Kathleen: Okay, so you used to answer the public. Stacy: Yeah. So we pulled the data out of SEMrush, we bubbled up the best opportunities, and then we go to answer the public to say, "What questions are people asking about these terms that we want to be answering?" And so what we did was we actually started building out all of our subtopic blogs before we even started on our pillars. So pillar content is typically 4,000 words and above. So we're talking pretty hefty material that takes a little while to get all of the content put together that get maybe the subject matter experts you need on board and get something out the door. So we didn't want to hold that up. So we put together the full editorial calendar of all the subtopic blogs and started diving into those first. And I can let Emily share how she worked with her team to get those moving and forward because I think that's probably her journalism career coming out. I've never had a client that's been so great at getting content out the door. Creating Content for a Highly Technical Industry Kathleen: Ooh, Emily, I need to hear about this because this is the universal challenge that all marketers face. So talk to us. Emily: Yeah. Well, first of all, I've never been at a company where I have had such a responsive team of experts. We're small company and we are completely remote, which means we all have to be really good communicators. And so everyone in the company is just great at getting back to me. And so that is one thing that really helps. Another secret weapon thing of mine too is I'll interview them for a blog post on a topic. I'll write it up and then I'll tell them, "Hey, here it is. You can preview it. It's going live on this date. Please get your feedback to me before then." And so it's not leaving it to them of a question like, do you have any edits? Is this approved? It's just saying, "This is happening." And I always give them their respectful amount of time. I'm always very respectful of the fact that they have a job to do. And there's been times where someone has been like, "Oh, I had edits, and it went live." And I'm like, "That's okay, it's the internet. You can go and you can make edits." So that's kind of my sneaking enjoy of getting things out the door. The other thing I'll say is just having a writing background. I write a lot of it myself. And then just get them to sign off. So for a lot of the topics I would just go and become a subject matter expert on whatever it was by doing research and things like that. And then running it by our internal subject matter expert. And they'd say, "Here, this wording isn't quite right. But other than that it's good to go." And that's- Kathleen: I am impressed because it's ... I , it's one thing ... I've had lots of clients from lots of different industries over the years, so it's very funny and random, but I mean I know a weird amount about commercial landscaping and insurance. It's one thing to become an expert on commercial landscaping, it is entirely another to do research and make yourself into a subject matter expert on IoT machine learning and natural language processing. So I mean how do you do that? How much time does that take? And- Emily: It's very time consuming. Yeah. So it is very time consuming, but again, the journalism background, really they taught me. I mean I had classes where they would say, "Go attend this event and deliver us an article about it within the hour." Because that's the type of thing you have to do if you're a journalist. And so it's really kind of like going in, understanding as much as you can, not writing past where you understand. Don't go beyond what your understanding is. But just doing a ton of research and not getting hung up on, is this perfect? And I think that's one thing that is really difficult for a lot of people. It's difficult for me. You want everything that goes out to be perfect and the best that it can be, but sometimes just getting something out, especially if it's a timely topic or something that is a new term that no one's ranking for, is getting something out is better than getting nothing out. And then you can go back and refine it in the future. But at that point I was doing a lot more of that. Now I've moved into ... So I was director of marketing then, I'm VP of marketing now. And since being promoted I've been doing a lot more strategic work. And so I've offloaded a lot of that copywriting to IMPACT. And they're working with our internal subject matter experts on blog posts. But yeah, at the time I was writing a lot myself. And in fact, this morning, I spent about an hour writing a blog post about something that the fun thing about being able to be a marketer and a writer is we can have a client who has a question, and I can just write something about it, and get it on the blog post that day, and have our sales team send it over to the client. And potentially win that deal because I'm just able to be very responsive and nimble. Kathleen: That's fantastic. We have one of the partners at IMPACT is Marcus Sheridan, who's fairly well known in the marketing world. And he is adamant when he works with companies that they have an in house content manager. And he specifically tells them to hire journalism students. And I think it's for the reasons that you outlined, which is that they tend to be well trained in how to get the story out. And I loved what you said about not writing past what you know, because I think that that definitely is a trap that marketers fall into. And sometimes it's because you want to sound smart. And there's lots of reasons for it, but I think understanding your limitations and sticking within the guard rails you have is a really good lesson. And I love that you give people those deadlines and say, "I'm putting it up. If I don't hear from you, it's going up regardless." Very smart. Emily: Yeah. We also have just a great working culture at Very. And a very much a fail fast culture, and an agile, nimble, get out the MVP type culture. And so there are other companies that I've been at where there was a lot more bureaucracy around what goes out the door and who sees it, and the checks and balances and all of that. And here it's really just me, and I love that. I really find that interesting and engaging. Kathleen: Yeah, the startup world is not for every marketer. Some absolutely love it and wouldn't have it any other way. And some don't need a ton of resources. So I'm curious. Alright, you identified all these subtopics, you built out the themes you wanted for the articles. It sounds like you started writing as the pillar was being developed. Can you talk me through, how much content was this? And in what amount of time? How many articles did you put up? Emily: That's a really good question. Stacy: You guys were on pace for at least three a week for an entire quarter, is what the cadence is that we'd look like in terms of blogs. Yeah. Kathleen: Okay. Go ahead. Emily: We're not still at that cadence. But that's what we were for a while. Kathleen: Okay. And this started when? Emily: This would be, we were looking at the launch of this strategy around June of 2018. Kathleen: Okay. So that's when the articles started going up, or that's when you finished the strategy? Emily: So that's when the articles started going up. So the really interesting thing about this is we built this strategy knowing that the capstone is the pillar, right? The pillar pages was gonna tie everything together. But what we found is because over the course of the quarter is when we were going to even get the first pillar out. So we were like, "We'll just tackle the subtopic blogs first, then they'll all be there ready for our pillar when the pillow goes live," right? The Results of Very's Pillar Content Strategy Emily: Well, before the pillar even went live, our traffic went through the roof. So it was really telling in terms of how we should overall be structuring keyword strategies going forward. Stacy: And the results of this which had originally been, let's just put together three pillar content strategies, was now let's change the way we do keyword strategies as a whole for our clients at IMPACT. So that was what came out of this. Kathleen: So when you say the traffic went through the roof, put some numbers behind that for me. What was it at and what did it go to? Emily: So we saw an 88% quarter over quarter increase in traffic. Kathleen: 88? Emily: 88%, yeah. It went from 8,800 range of organic businesses, just organic, to 16,600 for the quarter. Kathleen: In one quarter. Emily: Yeah. So that's quarter two compared to quarter three. Kathleen: Wow. Emily: And the crazy thing about that is that in May of 2017 this was a brand new domain with zero SEO juice. When I came in, it was a 100 percent brand new domain. Kathleen: Wow. Emily: So our year over year growth this past year, January nine to January nine, compared to the previous period was 1100 percent gross. Kathleen: Oh my gosh. And do you have any numbers around what happened to your lead generation? What was the growth there? And I know some of it is growth, but some of it is also just the quality of the leads. I'd be curious to know more about what you saw. Emily: Yeah. So the really interesting thing is, obviously we dabbled in and in blockchain for a while, but we were also working on building up the topics around machine learning in IoT, and we have started to get in really, really high caliber clients. I wish that I could mention their names because they're names that you would recognize, but they're still in our pipeline and I definitely shouldn't. But we have gotten through organic really high quality leads coming to us and saying, "You are obviously the experts in facial recognition." Or, "You're obviously the experts in building internet connected products." And the content speaking for itself, we're ranking number one for IoT application development and for IoT app development. Several of those key words that if you'd asked us a year ago, it would've just been, no, that's not a thing that's possible. Maybe in five years or something like that. So yeah, we're definitely seeing the results in terms of business as well. Kathleen: And how long is the typical article that you're producing? Are these 800 words, 1600 words? Do you have any kind of guideline around that? Emily: I don't have any guidelines. I like to say right until the topic tells you to stop. Because again, it's kind of like getting too far out in front of your skis or getting to a point where you feel like you're just saying things just to say them. So I don't have any guidelines. If I had to guess, I would guess it's between 800 and 1600 words for the ones we're producing. Stacy: And I'd say on average the ones that you've outsourced to IMPACT, probably run around the 1,200 range. Emily: Yeah, that makes sense. Kathleen: Now when did you wind up getting the actual pillar content up? Stacy: That's a good question because it wasn't even in the quarter. No, where we grabbed all these results from, which is why it was so exciting. And we're like, "okay, all keyword strategies have to be done differently from now on." The blockchain one, I believe, Emily, was the first one to go up? Emily: It was, and it was created in September. Kathleen: And when that went live, did you see, again, any sort of a boost? I know that you wind up kind of shifting the focus away from that, so I don't know if that's the best one to use as an example. But I'm curious to know if that had an impact on the traffic as well. Emily: Yeah. But not as much as I kind of thought. So we got about 300 views to that pillar page. But compared to the blog posts, it's nothing. And so I think really the thing that shines about this or thing that stands out about this strategy is the strategy itself. And I think the ... At least, I don't know what you've experienced with other clients, but for us the pillar page is kind of like an afterthought, and it's more of the strategy behind it. Yeah. Kathleen: Well, it makes sense because if you have the more niche topics covered in the blogs, I think that tends to be what people are searching. So that does seem logical. Emily: Yeah. And quite honestly with every pillar strategy, it's the combination of all of the pieces is what really drives the traffic. There's not really any one piece that you'd say, "Hey, this is the only thing that matters." It's really the fact that all of them are connected together. Stacy: And Kathleen, we've seen this on the IMPACT website with our website redesign pillar. The traffic boost that it's given all of the blogs that it's been connected to has been far greater than the traffic boost to the actual pillar itself. Kathleen: Yeah, that's absolutely right. Interesting. So now at this point, fast forward to today, do you have all three pillars and clusters completely up? Or are you still working on some of 'em? Emily: No, we're still working on the content for IoT and for machine learning. And really it's not because we've been slow on the marketing side, but our business has been figuring out exactly where we want to play. And within, we say we do IoT and machine learning, well both of those are huge umbrellas. That's like saying we're a marketing agency. Well for who? And what do you do? And what technologies do you use? And so I'm still in the process of a couple of things. So first is working really closely with our sales team to do customer interviews and prospect interviews to figure out service market theft. And then the other thing is just publishing a lot of blog posts that could be potential pillar content reference material and seeing how they perform before going too deep into one. A New Approach to Keyword Research Kathleen: Interesting. And what would you say ... Stacy, I'll throw this one out to you. You talked about how this experience kind of inspired you to say we really have to change the way we do keyword research now and content strategies. If you had to distill this down into what was the biggest change that you made, the before versus the after, how would you describe that? Stacy: Yeah. So the way that we use to deliver keyword strategies was, here's a list of keywords that are completely ... We're not even considering how they're related to each other. We're looking at each keyword on an individual basis and its own performance, which is still important. But what this has done is now involved a layer deeper where we're actually grouping our keywords that we're recommending clients target into groups of related clusters. So if we ever are presenting a keyword strategy to a client and there's a single keyword, they're saying, "Go after this keyword," and there's nothing else related to it, that's not gonna happen anymore, essentially. So that was kind of the old way, that you know, it's been the way since inbound became a thing. It's get your long tail keywords and write a blog. And you just think about that one keyword at one time for one page, as opposed to thinking of it more holistically across your website, of how many keywords do I have in this group that can all lead up to the same topic area? And so now we're making sure that if we are putting together a keyword strategy or an editorial calendar that we are grouping topics together into groups like that. Because when we saw that even before we had all of the pillar built up together, that was a signal to Google that we were a topic area expert. And they rewarded us greatly for it. Kathleen: That's interesting. Now have you seen that ... What is the pace of growth look like since that first big jump? Has it been fairly steady, or? Emily: Yeah. Yeah, it's been pretty steady. I would say that we have some months that it looks like, "Oh, it's not growing quite as fast" and part of that is just we have backed off on the content creation to focus really hard on the business strategy. So that then we can go back and go hard, and know that we're making the right bet so that we don't make the same mistake again that we made with focusing on blockchain. Kathleen: It is so interesting how literally as you scale up and scale back content publication, it's like turning the faucet on and off. You can really see a direct correlation to traffic and leads- Stacy: Definitely. Kathleen: And that's fascinating. Interesting. So if somebody wants to check out your site and see some of this content that you're talking about and get a sense for what you guys are doing, where can they find it online? Emily: Yeah. Our URL is verypossible.com. And you can go to our blog or you can go to /resources, which is the place where we have a lot of videos and white papers and things like that. And you can find the pillar page there as well. Kathleen: By the way, I love your domain name. Emily: Oh, thank you. Kathleen: Yeah. Emily: Yeah, talk about SEO Challenge when your brand name is Very, forget about branding traffic. Kathleen: Yeah, that's tough. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Well before we wind up, I do have two questions I always ask my audience. And I'll start with you, Emily. Company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Emily: So I'm going to be a terrible marketer and just let you know that I don't keep up with other marketers because I'm really occupied keeping up with technology so that I can be really good at my job where I'm at. And that's one reason I work with Impact is because I need people to help me who are keeping up with the latest trends and things like pillar content and stuff like that. Kathleen: So my question for you is - and I love that answer because I actually am more fascinated to hear about your experience as a consumer of content - so you just said you try to keep up with technology. Is there a technology website or blog that you think is doing a really great job? Emily: Yeah. Kathleen: Who do you like to read? Emily: I love Women Who Code. I love reading HBR, Harvard Business Review. Yeah, Women Who Code is really my favorite newsletter because they keep up with both women and tech stuff, but also just trends in the industry and things like that. And we're also ... Another thing that I'm just passionate about is women in tech, and we're really trying to recruit female developers. And so I'm looking at not just how are other tech marketing themselves, but how are they marketing themselves as an employer brand. And so figuring that out and kind of seeing what other people are doing. Kathleen: Ooh, I'll have to check that out because I'm kind of curating my own list of really good email newsletters. So that sounds like a good one to add to it. Emily: Yeah. Kathleen: And I love examples from outside of the marketing world. Emily: I also love the Reboot podcast, which is just a very grounded and thoughtful podcast about being in a startup and kind of keeping your head on straight while you're at a startup. So that's a really good one too. Kathleen: Ooh, that sounds like a good one. And it sounds like I already got my answer to my second question from you, which is, with digital marketing changing so quickly, how do you stay up to date? And it sounds like what you said is for you at least it's relying on an agency to kind of keep you up to date. Emily: Absolutely. Kathleen: Yeah. Emily: Yeah. I'm a one person marketing team, and I do events and the website content. I'm now an interim head of sales for a little bit and covering for someone while they're on leave. And so I have a thousand hats. And being able to stay up on marketing is something that is so important, but I just don't have the time to do. And so that's the biggest reason that I work with IMPACT. Kathleen: Great. And Stacy, I interviewed you recently and I got your answers. Any new tidbits to add to what we talked about last time? Stacy: Yeah. Um, I'll just throw out that I've also very recently been super impressed with Invision. Their content production engine is amazing. Not only to people who aren't users, but their community for designers and the way in which they engage people to use their tools successfully. So they have great examples of how you can use this part of their program or things like that I think probably go a whole heck of a long way in keeping their users satisfied and more engaged with their product over time, which is still a function of marketing, although we don't always think of it as such when we're really focused on bringing in new leads. But I've been really, really impressed with what they do. Kathleen: Oh, that's a good one. I'll definitely check that one out. Well, thank you both. This was so interesting. How to Reach Emily Emily: Emily, if somebody wants to find you personally online, what's the best way for them to connect with you? Emily: You can find me on Twitter @EmilyMaxie, M-A-X-I-E. Or on LinkedIn. The awesome thing about having a super weird last name is I'm the only Emily Maxie. So- Kathleen: Perfect. Emily: Just Google Emily Maxie and come find me. Yeah, I would love to connect and geek out about marketing or technology or whatever it may be. Kathleen: I love it, and Stacy, what's the best way for somebody to connect with you? Stacy: So directly through IMPACT's website is the easiest way to get to me, or on LinkedIn. And you can find my LinkedIn profile through the Impact website, which is probably easier 'cause Stacy willis is not a very unique name. Kathleen: Well and I'll include links in the show notes to all of your various profiles. Stacy: Awesome. Kathleen: Thank you both. It's been fascinating. I'm really excited to check out some of the content, Emily, and just get a sense for what you guys did to get these great results. But I appreciate you joining me. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: If you are listening and you learned something new or you enjoyed this episode, you know what to do. I would love it if you would give us a review on Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice. And if you know someone doing kick ass inbound marketing, tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. Thank you, Stacy, and thank you, Emily. Stacy: Thank you. Emily: Thanks. Stacy: Have a good one.

How do companies with successful channel marketing programs increase customer lifetime value by 150% while decreasing the cost of customer acquisition by up to 75%? This week onThe Inbound Success Podcast I'm joined by Bryn Jones, the CEO of PartnerStack - a SaaS platform that enables companies to build and manage partner channel marketing programs.  PartnerStack's clients range from startups to publicly traded companies like Intuit and Shopify. What they all have in common is channel marketing, and the insights that Bryn has gained by working with them have made him an authority on what it takes to build a successful partner channel. In this week's episode, he talks about the types of companies that are a good fit for channel marketing (TL;DR - it's just about everybody), when to start a channel, what it takes to build a successful channel, how much it costs, and what kinds of results you should expect. 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 keynote speakers 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 Bryn include: PartnerStack helps companies grow through partnerships by providing the technology layer that enables them to build a partner channel marketing program. Approximately 30% of the software sold every year is sold through channel programs. Partner channels are the best way to get in front of the late adopters and laggards in the market, which is the majority of the market. Bryn believes that partner channels can work for any type of business. The best way to start a partner channel is to identify four different potential types of partners, and the work with ten companies in each category (so 40 total). From that initial 40, you will be able to identify which category is the best fit for your business. Companies with partner channels, on average, have customer lifetime values that are 1.5 times higher than those without channel programs. When it comes to partner incentives, start with basic recognition (ex. thank you notes). When you're ready to scale up, cash rewards tend to work better than coupons or gift cards. HubSpot, Shopify and Intuit are all companies with best-in-class partner programs. Bryn says that companies that have partner programs aren't selling an opportunity to earn a commission. They're selling an opportunity to do business. The most successful partner channels aren't selling incentives, they are selling value that the company (that offers the partner program) can go through and then provide to the partner. When creating a new partner channel program, start by building out a portal and automating communication with partners. Make sure to create case studies about your partners' successes. Companies with $3 to $5 million in annual revenues are generally a good fit for starting a partner channel.  If you're serious about doing this, and doing it well, be prepared to hire a dedicated full-time person to work on your partner channel and give them at least six months to become successful. The typical partner channel program can increase customer lifetime value by 150% and decrease the cost of customer acquisition by up to 75%. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the PartnerStack website Email Bryn at bryn@partnerstack.com  Bryn Jones on Twitter Connect with Bryn on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to learn more about what types of companies are a good fit for channel marketing, when to start one, and what the specific characteristics are of the most successful partner channel marketing programs. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host):Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and today my guess is Bryn Jones who's the co-founder and CEO of PartnerStack. Welcome Bryn. Bryn Jones (Guest): Hey how are you? Kathleen, how are you? Bryn and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: I'm great, thanks. How are you doing? Bryn: Good, good. I'm in California today, so doing some last minute travel right before the year ends, getting in front of customers. Kathleen: Nice. The last minute hustle. Hopefully you get to wrap that up soon and have a little down time for the holidays. Bryn: Yeah, yeah. No, it's ... I mean, that's the great thing about enterprise software is it's pedal to the metal, but the holidays does leave a little bit of time for people to rest and recuperate, so looking forward to getting back into the office next week and putting a solid plan together for next year. Kathleen: Yeah, it sure beats being in retail this time of year. Bryn: Absolutely. About PartnerStack Kathleen: So before we jump into our conversation for today, tell our audience a little bit about yourself, and about PartnerStack, and what it does. Bryn: Yeah, perfect. Yeah so PartnerStack, we're a three year old company. Three years ago we got into a business incubator called Y Combinator. We went in as an idea, and we came out as a semi-functioning product. But what it is that we do is we let companies grow through partnerships. What that means is we're the technology layer that lets companies go and build partner or channel programs. So an example of this would be Intuit. They drive about 20% of their revenue through accountants, bookkeepers, and financial institutions. Except this whole process is incredibly challenging to 1) manage, and 2) actually ensure that it's in fact successful. We're the layer of technology that lets marketers get back to being marketers, and get away from being administrators. Kathleen: I definitely feel like it shows that you went through Y Combinator, because you have your value prop and pitch completely nailed down, which I know that gets drilled into you when you go through these incubators and accelerators, that being one of the, obviously the most famous ones. So what led you to wanting to create the solution? Was it something from your background or experience? Did you see that pain point? Bryn: Super interesting. So my other founders and I, we actually built another company while I was in graduate school. The company was like Slack, except it was pretty much worse in every other way in that the product wasn't as good, we certainly didn't have the revenue growth, and we definitely weren't able to go fundraise. But what we realized is we could instead innovate on business model. I don't think enough technology companies go through and do this, and so we started working with a network of agencies. These networks of agencies, they would send us business, and we'd simply send them a commission. This was incredibly interesting, because people started reaching out to us saying, "Hey, how are you managing your channel program? How are you managing your partner program?" Quite frankly, we just said, "What's that?" It took us down this big path where we realized, there's a ton of software sold each year, and 30% of the is coming through channel partners. This is kind of like the last fossil inside of a technology company, that technology hasn't had to go through it and understand distribution. But really it's the best way to get in front of the late adopters and laggards in the market, which is the majority of the market. Kathleen: Yeah, that's really interesting. I have been a participant in channel programs. I've been a value-added reseller, a partner, whatever you want to call it, for quite a few years, with several different technology companies. But I have never been in a company that had a partner or reseller program. So if somebody is listening and they're the in-house marketer, what would you say are the questions they should be asking themselves to understand better whether a channel program is right for their business? How To Know If A Channel Marketing Program Is Right For Your Business Bryn: Gotcha. We firmly believe that channel works for everyone's business. The reason why we believe that, is because we can see that is in fact true. Specifically in software, it works really well. What it really it comes down to is: Who are your channel partners? Is it more of an affiliate? Is it a larger partnership with a bank? Is it a partnership through accountants and bookkeepers? Everyone has a specific channel partner that will work for them, and you might not get it right the first time. So really it's a process about running experiments where you're first off, trying to determine the channel partner profile. You do this by finding 10 channel partners and making them successful, and then replicating it over, and over, and over. Now the best way that we recommend for companies to go on and do this, is to write down four different channel partners they believe will work, and go and try to backfill it. So it ends up resulting in you actually getting 40 channel partners onboard. The reality is, is one of those groups will work really well. One of those groups will work sort of well. The other two groups will in fact fail, so that's the starting point of a channel program. It does work for everyone. It depends on what your goals are. This isn't a marketing channel that you turn on overnight and it immediately starts pumping out lots of revenue. But the reason why people need to go through and invest in it early, is because the lifetime value, sorry, the cost to acquire customers through channel is actually less expense than through any other means. Then the lifetime value of those customers is significantly more. We're seeing in our customers it's up to 1.5 times more, and so it's an investment worth making early days, because it's the only thing that's going to let you go through it in scale. Kathleen: Now you said when you were talking about that this, that channel can work for everyone. Do you mean everyone in software, or everyone period? Bryn: Well, it's interesting. I think everyone period. Technology companies are the ones where we've gone through it and focused, but most other sectors are using channel in some way, shape, or form today. The best example would be the way Toyota sells their cars through a network of dealerships. They don't think of that as channel, but certainly it is channel. Those dealerships are owned by independent business people, and that relationship is always challenging. So nontraditional sectors have done a very good job at understanding channel. It just hasn't been formally called that, and so what we're seeing in the space is actually some of the most innovative stuff, is really coming out of agencies, in the way that they go through and manage their referrals, because it drives so much of their business. Kathleen: Yeah, it's funny when you say that these other industries are doing it without calling it channel, because what first came to my mind was specialist physicians. For example, I've worked for years with a client that does laser eye surgery. They get all of their business through referrals. I had a call the other day with a company that just does medical imaging, so MRIs, all of their business. Nobody goes in the phone book to pick out where they're going to get their MRI. It all comes through a referring physician. So in the medical field, it's incredibly common. I think we as consumers experience channels all the time. I think a lot of people just don't know that there's a name for that. Bryn: Yeah, it's the infrastructure underneath of the way that those referrals go through and work, and so our thesis is that this is actually much more scientific than it has been. There is a way to go through and do it. You can optimize that process, and when you optimize that process, you just get a better ROI. How To Start A Channel Marketing Program Kathleen: Yeah, so if somebody is listening and they think a channel could work for them, you mentioned that the first step is to figure out four, let's call it buckets, of types of channel partners, and to backfill those buckets, 10 partners in each bucket, so you've got 40 partners. Then it sounded like what you were saying is to do almost an A/B test, only I guess in this case it would be an A/B/C/D test, and figure out which of those is working the best. Is that accurate? Bryn: That's 100% accurate. You create the buckets, and you're trying to build a persona behind it. Where is this person located? What is their age demographic? What is their occupation? Maybe most importantly, what is the reason they are sending me business? You go through and you run those A/B tests, and you try to figure out who's going to most effectively send you the business. When you do, you have to figure out what's the incentive you will then go through and provide them. Is it a discount? Is it a coupon? Is it a reward? Is it cash? We've seen companies go through it and work through this. It could just be as simple as co-marketing material, writing a blog post, or featuring people. People like to be recognized for the work that they do. I mean, it could quite frankly be as simple as sending a thank you letter. But no one has enough process, we believe, behind the way that you go through it and recognize, and incentivize people to help you grow your business. Structuring The Right Incentives For Channel Partners Kathleen: Have you seen any evidence of what types of incentives tend to produce the best outcomes in channel programs? Bryn: It depends on what the goal of the channel program is. We find, as funny as it sounds, very basic things work, so just general recognition; thank you letters, acknowledging that you did in fact receive benefit, and that you appreciate that. Most people drop the ball there, and so that's a very basic step that can be done. "Hey, you know what, thank you for sending me Sally over. Got her all setup and it was really great. You really helped me out here." That's the most basic version of that. Then it can go all the way up to cash rewards. Though some people sometimes think, "Oh cash, that doesn't feel very good, maybe that's not what I want to go through it and do," the reality is, it works more often than gift cards. From the data that we've seen on our platform, cash works more in building a program that can infinitely scale, than just coupons, because what ends up happening, or gift cards, what ends up happening is you just bring in people to your program that just want to get gift cards. There's a very small segment of the population that only wants that, and so it's a very misleading idea. I mean, we always tell people, "If you were to go through and partner with Amazon, you couldn't pay them in Amazon gift cards, so why do you think that you can build a longterm scalable program where it's like this?" Kathleen: Yeah, I would tend to agree with that, having been on the partner side. I would think that gift cards could potentially work if your ideal partner is an individual, truly an individual person, because then their incentive is, "Sure this is money I can spend on myself." But if your partner is any kind of a company, gift cards have to be used by somebody. I think what's attractive about it ... I used to own my own marketing agency, and we were partners with a lot of different organizations, probably the most prominent of which was HubSpot, which has a very good partner program, 20% in perpetuity of any monthly recurring revenue that you sell. What was attractive about it for me was that I was in a business where there wasn't a lot of - what's the word I'm looking for? - residual income, if you will. You're selling your hours, your time, it's not super scalable. But a partner commission changes the game a little bit, if you can accumulate enough to make it meaningful, so I would agree with that. Bryn: Yeah. No, and that's what we're seeing. I mean ultimately if you go through and invest in the channel, what you want to do is you want to enable people to be able to earn a living, build a career, build a business off of the channel program that you go through and build. If you accomplish that, then you will have an incredibly successful channel program. That is an optimal end state that I think that everybody can go through it and work to, as long as people understand that it's doing the basics really well. But you have to be working towards, "How is this a longterm sustainable channel that runs and operates completely on its own?" There's many different touchpoints that get you there to that. Bryn: It's interesting that you mentioned HubSpot. I mean, we always point to them as the leader in understanding channel at a very early day. Peter Caputa, and the work that he did to really create a community around it, it's not just about money. It's teaching people how to build services around software, and that had never been done before. Yeah, it was incredibly impressive the way that that's happened. Kathleen: Yeah, Pete Caputa, he's an amazing guy. He's also who introduced us, so shout-out to Pete. I have to underscore what you just said, because it's kind of blown me away. I mean, becoming a part of that partner program was a major game changer for my business and therefore as a result, for my life. I've said that to him. In fact, I said that to him on his birthday this year. But the thing that amazed me about it was how almost religious people got as part of that partner program. I mean, I always saw a ton of value in it, but there were partners ... It was incredibly common to hear people say, "I bleed orange, or I drink the orange Kool-Aid," because HubSpot's logo is orange, which are pretty extreme statements if you really think about the meaning behind them. People who would paint their office walls orange, buy orange clothes, I mean it really was this incredibly evangelical approach to being a part of a partner program. You don't see that very often, so I think that that's to me the clearest manifestation of the value that Pete delivered to the partners that joined in the HubSpot partner program. Bryn: Yeah, and you know what, there are other programs that are like this that work well, specifically in SaaS I can point to Shopify. Shopify has built thousands of agencies in this point in time that help people go through and service Shopify stores. Excuse me. It all comes down to the fact that they know they aren't selling an opportunity to earn a commission. They're selling an opportunity to do business. "They aren't selling an opportunity to earn a commission. They're selling an opportunity to do business." ~Bryn Jones   Click to Tweet this Though it sounds very different, you're selling a partnership. What are you bringing to the table when you're setting that partnership up? It starts very low in the funnel, all the way from the thank you letter, to the coupon, to the recognition and the co-marketing stuff, and then all the way up to cash. So there is a step by step process in which you go through and built this. But it's just having a key, like, treat your partners the same way you would treat your employees. Bryn: If you come at it with that type of approach, and though it sounds very soft, you can unpack it, and they are very, very, very specific things that you can go through, to do to make that work. What Makes For a Successful Channel Program? Kathleen: Yeah. Now in my experience, as I mentioned, I've been a member of quite a few partner programs. What's really interesting to me anecdotally, is that, I think in every case the platform that I was a partner for, and I'm thinking of SAS software partnerships right now, in every case the platform was a great platform that delivered plenty of value. But the degree of value that I would say I derived and the platform did out of the partnership really varies. So there would be some companies like HubSpot, where my company, myself, the company I'm with now, we're very invested in that relationship. Then there's others where it's just like a failure to launch. It never really gets off the ground. At least in my experience, very little of that has to do with the actual incentives. You might have comparable incentives across five partnership programs, and have five very, very different results. So can you talk a little bit about ... For a company that wants to start a channel program, once they put that incentive in place, what are the other building blocks that are necessary to set partners up for success, and to have a longterm, really thriving partner relationship? Bryn: Yeah, so I mean the first and most important thing is that you aren't selling incentives, you are selling value that you can go through and then provide to the partner. That's not some abstract thing. You actually need to teach and train the partner how to go through and sell your product, or make the recommendation for you. You need to invest heavily, heavily in training and education materials that partners can through and access, so that they can understand how to sell your product. "You aren't selling incentives, you are selling value that you can go through and then provide to the partner." ~ Bryn Jones   Click to Tweet this Bryn: It's not like selling to a customer. It's again, selling a relationship. It's the same way as you would onboard an employee, so that's the first step that needs to occur. You need to understand that there needs to be an investment into understanding the value. For you as a company, you need to understand what the partner wants out of the relationship, because again, it's not just money, and so you need to spend some time to go through and do that investigation. They may not tell you. In fact, they probably won't, because they even know. But often what we find it is, is you as a company understand the value of your product, but I need to be trained the same way as an employee would be. That takes a lot of hand holding, beyond ... Specific things, you could put a learning management system in place, invest in technology. If you're going to invest in technology to employees that you bring on, whether that be through Slack, your CRM, many of the marketing automation tools that are in fact out there, you need to invest in technology to go through and then support your partner ecosystem. That technology starts with a learning management system. You should probably go through and create a basic portal. I'm not going to go through and hawk our platform, but then there are other things you need to go through and consider. You need to be building email campaigns to ensure that partners, once they come on board, they are in fact getting engaged. You need to think of it like a pipeline. Top of funnel is opening up and bringing new partners in, and then mid funnel is really how do you ensure that partners are moving through that pipeline. You need to determine when you should go through and reach out to them. If you can go through and do it, you're not going to make everyone successful all the time, but there's at least a lifeline. You're building a lifeline for them to reach out to you when they need help. That's why channel is a longterm investment. But those are some of the specific things we can think through. Then there's even more granular stuff. Build case studies, not where you talk about your product, but where you talk about your partner, and their company, and their clients, and the way that they're going through and selling, and the struggles that they're going through and facing. If you can build those case studies, and you can work alongside the partners to actually promote them inside of your blog, that's how you quickly build a community. Kathleen: Absolutely. That's been my experience, is that a lot of, especially if you're working with agencies for example, well, and I would think that this is true of most partner relationships, that that agency, that company, that is your partner is running their own business, they have a lot going on, their number one focus is not the partnership generally. So the easier you can make it for them to be successful, it's almost like, "Can you spoon feed success to them?" This is what HubSpot did really well. It had phenomenal partner onboarding. The partner success managers are great. They gave us a ton of content that we could white label and use in own marketing. I mean, that's making it easy. We needed to get leads as an agency, and HubSpot would just give us all this content, whether it was eBooks, or infographics, or what have you, that we could put our logo on and send out, and even change, customize copy. Making it that easy made it easy for us to invest in the partnership, so I would definitely agree with what you said there. Bryn: Yeah, just treat your partners like they're employees. For the people that are the marketers really driving these initiatives inside of organizations, I recognize one of the hardest challenges that everyone has is actually getting buy-in from executives. The best way to go through and communicate this to executives when this comes up, is to walk them through that. If these people are going to provide us a lower cost to acquire customers, a higher lifetime value, why aren't we willing to treat them the same way as we would any salesperson, or any other marketer that were to come on here? If you really push that and understand how aggressively you can go through and push it, it's very surprising how quickly finance comes in and says, "That makes sense." It's also important to understand that this isn't something that gets turned on and works overnight, but is the only way that you will truly continue to scale up longterm in the business. Then the other thing where we see people fail often is when they think there's one partnership that will work. "Oh, this one partnership is going to change the direction of our company." That's where you see a lot of scar tissue, you know? People have learned their lessons. Lots of scars have come from thinking through this one partnership with this one big company, that's going to change everything. Where reality is, those partnerships, to be frank, I have never seen them lead to anything, and so don't do that. That's certainly not the place that you want to go through and start with, because it costs so many resources, it takes so much time, and the likelihood of the payoff actually happening is actually very low. Kathleen: It's also incredibly risky. When I hear that, I think about a portfolio investment strategy. If you went to your financial advisor, they would never say to put all of your money into one stock. It could be an incredibly well performing stock, but they would never say put everything into that one stock, because you would have all your eggs in one basket. If that thing disappears, if that partner disappears, even if it is a successful relationship that does bear fruit, if all of the sudden in year two something happens and it goes away, what are you left with? Nothing, you have nothing. Bryn: I feel so bad. I'll tell you from our experience. One of the most challenging things for use when we first started PartnerStack in 2015 was customer development. The reason being is, we would go out and talk to partner, or channel, or community managers. No joke, we tracked it in our CRM, and 30% of the time, they would end up losing their job within six months of a conversation happening. We went back and looked at why they were losing their job, and very often, very high percentage of the time, it was because the pursuit of one single partnership. To this day, we've never seen that payoff. It's something that we always, always, always warn people about. You cannot under invest in this channel. It takes time, and there is no silver bullets, there's just a lot of lead. If you get that buy-in, and you communicate that across the company, it ultimately will be something that's successful. I mean, look at HubSpot. 40% of the revenue comes through channel. You can go through and look at companies like Shopify. When they IPO'd, 25% of their revenue was coming through channel, and so it's a huge, huge, huge opportunity. It's the only way you'll go through it and hit scale. It's just making sure you have buy-in. When Should You Start A Channel Program? Kathleen: So is there a certain point in a company's maturity when starting a channel program makes sense? It sounds like it's somewhat resource intensive to do it well, so is this something that you've seen companies do right out of the gate successfully? Or do they need to have a little time, and experience, and track record underneath them before they should move to starting a channel? Bryn: It's my belief that channel, when you make the investment, you can do it very early. The way you can do it is, it's very important to collect the data required to build those personas that we discussed, those four different buckets. The sooner you can start collecting that data, the better those personas become. We think that starting early is good. But when you start, you have to think of it as an experiment. All you're doing when you put a channel program in place, is you're putting a sign on the door that says, we're open for business. You should expect nothing to come through. You should just track it, and collect the data on it. Where we see it start to really work is when companies hit that three to five million inflection point, and it's because, simply put, companies have it figured out. They know where to collect payment information. We've seen people, and have had instances where people got really upset where channel programs didn't work. We've gone through, dug into their program and realized, they actually forgot to collect payment information. This doesn't fix a broken product or a broken process. But it will accelerate growth once you hit those inflection points, so I say three to five million is typically when you want to ... you know you ... If you're in a three to five million dollar revenue run rate, in order for you to hit 15 to 20, you're going to need to invest in channel in some way, shape, or form. The sooner you do it, the better. But that being said, we've worked with companies who have had less than 250,000 dollars in revenue, and have now grown revenues upwards and over three million dollars in revenue, because they really invested and understood channel. So there's no wrong time, but there's certainly an optimum time. What Does It Cost To Start And Run A Channel Marketing Program? Kathleen: Yeah. From a resource standpoint, walk me through what a company should be prepared to invest, in terms of staff to support this; level of effort, budget. I know you can't give me specifics, but give me a general sense of it they want to go in with their eyes wide open, what does it take to do this well? Bryn: You need a dedicated person on this program at the very least - one person where their job is to figure out channel partners. That is what their job is. You can't pull them off and having them do case studies. Or you can't pull them off and doing smaller tasks that go through and then pop up. You need to give one person a responsibility. You need to make one person responsible for channel. That one person can, within a six month period, should be able to generate significant revenue. I don't mean cover the cost of their salary by any means, but we've seen it go through and happen. But it will be a substantial amount of revenue, and you can see the path of growth going forward. If you interrupt that person, if you put them on different projects, if you say, "Okay, not only are you managing channel, but you're going to manage community too" very, very clear and concise in what their role was. Their goal needs to be, first to recruit partners, then to take those partners and turn them into people that actually engaged. Once they are in fact engaged -  engagement looks like training, day to day communication, opening and reading emails - once they are in fact engaged, they are actually starting to send you business or have ideas of how they will go through and send you business. But you need at least one person dedicated to it. I cannot stress that enough. Then after the fact, you hit a point where you decide, do you want to solve this with people, or do you want to solve this with technology? That's typically where PartnerStack comes in. We've seen companies, you would be very surprised at how big companies can become, just managing this with people. Though it's a really good thing, because they're figured this thing out, it's also very expensive. So there are companies where there are several hundred people working on channel alone, manually at the end of each month calling people and asking, "Hey, did you close this account? Did you close that account?" Oh, there's a channel conflict. That being where a partner sends business, and then a sales rep goes and closes it. Who are you paying the commission to? That's why it's important, once you hit that one to three mark, that you need to put technology in behind it. I mean, we've talked with companies where they've overpaid channel partners millions of dollars each year, because it wasn't gone through and tracked correctly. So there does need to be technology at some point in time. You do need to convince finance that it's worth an investment. But it's very easy to go through and point to. Kathleen: I can definitely speak from the user standpoint about why that is important, because I remember ... Again, we're part of several channel partner programs. I would say HubSpot is, again, is the most professional in terms of how it's run. But it's also evolved a lot over the years. When I first joined that partner program, we were still entering our leads into a dedicated Salesforce portal. Now they've got lead registration seamlessly a part of their CRM, which is genius. You don't have to leave the environment you're working in. To me, lead registration is one of the biggest pain points. I'm part of other partner programs where there is no good system. You have to email your partner rep. It's so imperfect. Then once you've done that, you don't know how to track it, because there isn't a portal that you can look in. So it's messy, and if that's messy, then I think that slows things down quite a bit for the use. I know for myself, if you don't have a clear sense of, "Alright, what am I working on? What is closed? What's in the pipeline?" it's hard to be effective. It's hard to get excited about it too. Bryn: Yeah, I think that this is all about optimizing for the partner's experience, and so everything that we do, every investment that we make is to try to enable that. So we try to automate programs as much as possible, as much as you possibly can, because that improves the partner experience. If you can improve, build the perfect partner experience, those partners will more likely than not be successful on your platform. But the reality is, is where partnerships and channel, today in 2018, is where sales operations was in 2000, where is didn't exist before things like Salesforce and HubSpot. Where marketing automation was in 2005 to 2008, that's the state of things today. So if you go back and compare to sales operation and marking automation, and you see the structure, the infrastructure, the requirements, and ultimately the returns that the investments in fact made, it's easy to go through and justify something further up front. Fortunately today, there are ... We're not certainly the only people in this space. We see other people do a really great job of stuff, and there's a lot of options for when that comes up. But at the end of the day, you have to optimize for partner experience. Your partners are going to tell you. Quite frankly, if they're not telling you, they're telling you. Silence is negative feedback, and I don't think people quite realize that too often. PartnerStack's Partner Channel Kathleen: Now, does PartnerStack have a partner channel? Bryn: Yes we do. We do have a partner channel. We've had a partner channel since day one. Since year one in our business, it's driven revenue for us. Certainly like everybody, you can through ... There are improvements for it to go through and be made. But for us, working with agencies has been, it's so much fun, because all the sudden, we're training people how to add another service line to their business. We're training them that they can go to their clients, and they can differentiate themselves on the market and say, "Hey, not only can we do email marketing, can we manage your website, can we do PR, but also we can know how to go through and manage the channel." When we walk agencies and our partners through that, the level of excitement that they have is unbelievable, because quite frankly, there are only so many new services that can be launched. This is something that's unique. We've seen agencies be very successful and generate a lot of new business of it. What Kinds of Results Can You Expect With A Partner Channel Marketing Program? Kathleen: Yeah. Walk me through the results. You have your own partner program. You work with companies. Obviously by definition, everyone that is a client of yours has a partner program. Can you tell me a little bit about the kinds of results you're seeing, either for yourselves, or for the companies that are using your platform? Bryn: Yeah, so I won't use specific customer names, but I will talk about some of the results that we've seen. We've seen early stage companies go from 250,000 dollars in revenue, to over a million five in revenue, in less than 16 months. This is completely bootstrapped, a team of four people moving upwards of a team of 10. We're driving upwards of 50% of their revenue, and it's awesome to see. We work with larger companies where people have hit annual milestones for their partner program within 24 hours of launching with our platform, because all of a sudden there was a way to go through and track stuff. Those people go through and get promotions because of it, which is incredibly exciting. I think that there are over 100,000 partners that are on our platform, that companies go through and work with today. What's unique about us is we believe very firmly, again, in partner experience. For us, that actually means enabling partners to join a broader network, where they can go through and pick other packages, and services that they can go through and promote. Companies go through a buy-in to this, so it's worked really well. It's been fun to watch. It's so fun to watch people go through it and be successful in their jobs, whether they be partners or companies that we've gone through and worked with. I mean for us, it accounts for 30% of our revenue, and drives 40% of our leads. We have a unique system in that there's a tiered version of it where you're dropped in. We give you an opportunity. We train you, and if you are in fact successful, we can move you to the next tier, and so I know that my customer success and sales teams love our partners. It's just fun to work with them. Kathleen: Now you started out talking about how prevalent channel programs are for software companies. I know for that particular vertical, two of the most important business metrics that they track are cost of customer acquisition, and lifetime value of a customer. In fact that ratio of LTV to CAC also is very important. You mentioned in the beginning that partner programs can really help optimize that. What have you seen, as far as how much does having a partner program enable you to bring that CAC, or cost of customer acquisition, down? How much does it extend the lifetime value? Bryn: Yeah, so we're seeing lifetime value for some of our customers to be over 200%. Median is about 150%, more than what they're currently used to. Anything over what they have now, everyone is happy with. But median returns, 150%. But we're seeing people as much as over 200%. The CAC is the thing that is incredibly interesting. We enable companies to go through and experiment with different incentives. Today you could go through and launch a bonus program where you pay an extra hundred dollars. Next month, maybe that that's not what you're going to go through and do, so we've been able to go through and test that. We've decreased CAC upwards of 75% in some companies. Kathleen: Wow. Bryn: Yeah. Some companies get really aggressive with their programs in the beginning and over invest, and actually try to not do that, because they're looking to improve engagement so much. But it's a result of not only are you unloading the cost of sales, I mean, this is the thing that people don't talk about enough, it's actually the cost of support after the fact. It's very hard to go through and quite frankly quantify that. But with our big customers that have those resources, those massive, massive finance teams, they've gone through and done it. That alone is enough for their finance teams to go through and invest in the tech to through it and support it. Kathleen: Wow, those are some impressive numbers. Well, so interesting, and this has really been the first time we've talked a lot of about channel programs on this podcast, so I'm really glad we had an opportunity to chat about it. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: I want to switch gears, because I want to make sure we have time for the two questions that I always ask all of my guests. My loyal listeners will have heard me say this time and time again, but I would love to know from your standpoint, we're all about inbound marketing on this podcast, so company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Bryn: That's really interesting. One of the companies that we see that has been doing a really great job of this, and that have been actually using their partner network to go through it and do it, is Intuit. Intuit has turned to their community to build content, and it's working really well. It's been very cool to see such a big company go through it and move so quickly, to go through it and take advantage of the opportunity. There's of course smaller companies that we've seen do a good job on this. But Intuit is the best example. Of course, I'm going to be biased with it. Intuit is the best example because they've leveraged their channel, their partners to actually create the content required to drive those advanced sales. Kathleen: Yeah, that's interesting, especially because they're such traditional industry, that a lot of people think of as very stodgy, so knowing that they're at the forefront of that is really fascinating. Now I'm going to have to take a look at Intuit's content, which I would normally not look at, now that I'm not a business owner anymore. But I did used to be in and out of QuickBooks every single day of my life for 11 years, so maybe I'll pay it a visit again. Kathleen: Second question, the world of digital marketing is changing at a lightning pace. How do you personally stay up to date and on top of all the new developments? Bryn: It's so tricky. One of the things that I've been doing lately is actually cutting the number of tools and technologies that I use way down. So instead of being spread out across all these social media platforms, I just focus on one. Kathleen: Which one? Bryn: Oddly enough, I go through and focus on LinkedIn. That's where I get most of my value from. I'm also following things on Twitter. That's certainly an area. But at the end of the day, with all this extra noise in the environment, I actually listen to people. I'm going through referrals more. I'm talking with my peers and asking them what works. I actually have a number of people through Y Combinator that I have biweekly calls with them still, that we've been continuing for three years now. We talk about it, what are the best things that we're seeing in the market. We also ask our customers when we're in the middle of doing any type of sale. We say, "Hey, just out of curiosity, do you have any new tools or technology that you're using?" As much as it's going through, researching and seeing what's out there, it still goes back to the basics. For me, it's limiting my consumption of technology, and going to the source, going to people, because I think with this influx of tools that are on the market, it's so hard to know which one is the best one to go through and pick. You have to go through and use referrals the way that you've always had to. So it's interesting, it's this weird thing that kind of through it and happened. Kathleen: Yeah, for me it's my podcast. I call or email people like you, because I'm interested in learning more. I interview you, and that's how I learn. If other people listen too, great, but I always say I would do it even if nobody listened, because it's- Bryn: Yeah, that's such a ... Maybe we'll have to start doing one, because that sounds like a really great idea to go through and learn how to, to go through it and talk with people. Talking with people is very underrated. Kathleen: Yeah, I would so agree. I've learned more doing this than I have doing anything else honestly. Well if you start a podcast, let me know how it goes. I'd love to hear about that. Bryn: I'll be calling you and we'll get you on there, first thing. Kathleen: There you go. How Reach Bryn Jones Kathleen: Well, so much fun talking with you. I've learned a lot about channel marketing, and I'm sure there are people listening that want to learn more, might have questions. What is the best way for them to learn more about PartnerStack, as well as connect with you as an individual online? Bryn: Yeah, so I mean, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I spend a lot of time on there. Connect with me, message me. I usually get back within 24 to 48 hours. People can reach out to me through email. It's first Bryn, B-R-Y-N @PartnerStack.com. You should check out PartnerStack or PartnerStack.com. Message one of our support or sales reps. We'll get you on the phone, and mostly walk you through what the potential is. One of the biggest things we push on people is like, "Hey, maybe now isn't the right time to go through it and invest in technology. Maybe you need to figure out your four buckets before you come through it and buy the platform." We love talking about this. We don't think enough people are talking about this, and so if you're interested, feel free to reach out any time, happy to always have a conversation about this. Kathleen: That is the mark of a great salesperson by the way - the salesperson who tells you, "You're not ready for us," and tells you what to do in order to get ready. Awesome, well thank you so much Bryn. If you are listening and you found value out of this or you learned something new, you know what to do. Please leave the podcast a review on Apple Podcasts, or on the platform of your choice. As always, if you know someone else that's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love for them to be my next interview. That's it for this week. Thanks Bryn. Bryn: Thank you so much.