Executive Conversations

Meet Sandeep John, Director of DemandGen at Outplay, as he chats about turning branding campaigns into successful lead generation machines. Sandeep discusses the importance of branding in building demand and shares insights on his background in sales and marketing.

Connect with Maeva on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maevaeverywhere

Previous guests include: Andrew Davis @Paddle, Casey Hill @Bonjoro, Camille Trent @PeerSignal, Erin Balsa @Haus of Bold, Emilia Korczynska @Userpilot, Brooklin Nash @Beam, Nick Warren @Alyce, Steffen Hedebrandt @Dreamdata, Vuk Vukosavljevic @lemlist

Farzad Rashidi @Respona, Andrea Skarica @Mixmax, Ashley Levesque @Banzai

Listen to our most popular episodes: 

• A Content System Beats Content Ideas, with Brad Smith @Wordable
• How to create a company culture that puts you ahead of the pack, with Adam Harris @Cloudbeds 
• How Typeform's Branding Experiments Guided its Content and Product Strategy, with Alex Antolino @Typeform 
  
  
  
  

Join the Flying Cats

Still feeling your stomach drop whenever you have to report organic growth to leadership? Things are about to change 👊

Follow Flying Cat Marketing for more SEO strategy and content advice from the agency that helped Hotjar, Mixmax, and ActiveCampaign drive more revenue from organic traffic in a sustainable and predictable way.

Website: https://www.flyingcatmarketing.com/ 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/flying-cat-marketing

Gomada co-founder Julian Schaaf explains how he gained 300 sign-ups in a year via content distribution, operations, and testing strategies. He discusses hiring, wrong SEO hypotheses, and prioritizing customer feedback.

Connect with Maeva on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maevaeverywhere

Previous guests include: Andrew Davis @Paddle, Casey Hill @Bonjoro, Camille Trent @PeerSignal, Erin Balsa @Haus of Bold, Emilia Korczynska @Userpilot, Brooklin Nash @Beam, Nick Warren @Alyce, Steffen Hedebrandt @Dreamdata, Vuk Vukosavljevic @lemlist, Farzad Rashidi @Respona, Andrea Skarica @Mixmax, Ashley Levesque @Banzai

Listen to our most popular episodes: 

• A Content System Beats Content Ideas, with Brad Smith @Wordable
• How to create a company culture that puts you ahead of the pack, with Adam Harris @Cloudbeds
• How Typeform's Branding Experiments Guided its Content and Product Strategy, with Alex Antolino @Typeform 
  
  
  

Join the Flying Cats

Still feeling your stomach drop whenever you have to report organic growth to leadership? Things are about to change 👊

Follow Flying Cat Marketing for more SEO strategy and content advice from the agency that helped Hotjar, Mixmax, and ActiveCampaign drive more revenue from organic traffic in a sustainable and predictable way.

Website: https://www.flyingcatmarketing.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/flying-cat-marketing

In this episode, we talk about:

• Video content production
• Video marketing
• Video marketing metrics

Connect with Rish on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rishabhb/

Connect with Maeva on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maevaeverywhere

Previous guests include: Andrew Davis @Paddle, Casey Hill @Bonjoro, Camille Trent @PeerSignal, Erin Balsa @Haus of Bold, Emilia Korczynska @Userpilot, Brooklin Nash @Beam, Nick Warren @Alyce, Steffen Hedebrandt @Dreamdata, Vuk Vukosavljevic @lemlist, Farzad Rashidi @Respona, Andrea Skarica @Mixmax, Ashley Levesque @Banzai

Listen to our most popular episodes: 

• A Content System Beats Content Ideas, with Brad Smith @Wordable
• How to create a company culture that puts you ahead of the pack, with Adam Harris @Cloudbeds 
• How Typeform's Branding Experiments Guided its Content and Product Strategy, with Alex Antolino @Typeform 
  
  

Join the Flying Cats

Still feeling your stomach drop whenever you have to report organic growth to leadership? Things are about to change 👊

Follow Flying Cat Marketing for more SEO strategy and content advice from the agency that helped Hotjar, Mixmax, and ActiveCampaign drive more revenue from organic traffic in a sustainable and predictable way.

Website: https://www.flyingcatmarketing.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/flying-cat-marketing

Timestamps:

00:00 - 00:40: Introducing Rishabh Bhandari

00:41 - 01:15: Content Beta

01:16 - 02:52: What kind of video content you should produce for every step of the funnel

02:53 - 04:16: There’s a lack of MOFU and BOFU videos in SaaS

04:17 - 05:20: Why you shouldn’t gate demo videos

05:21 - 07:53: Video marketing metrics per stage of the funnel

07: 54 - 14:56: Low-cost ways to produce video content

14:57 - 17:54: Roles and structure of a video content creation team

17:55 - 19:56: How to keep video content up to date

19: 57 - 20:35: Connect with Rishabh

Hello again listeners! Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Leader Interview Series.

This time, we’re joined by Tara Panu, VP of Marketing at VoiceFlow, the collaborative platform used to build chat and voice assistants, to talk about leveraging customer research like a product marketer. 

Every marketer knows the customer needs to be at the center of all their efforts, but how do you ensure that? Tara spent her first 30 days in her role interviewing customers and prospects, jumping into sales calls, and practicing social listening on LinkedIn. 

Her efforts revealed new opportunities that she took in to craft her strategy and, finally, her messaging and value proposition started to resonate with them. But that was not her ultimate goal.

As she’s a customer-centric marketer, she made sure that not only Sales and Marketing but the entire company was leveraging from her findings and keeping their ICP close to better execute their jobs. 

Tune in to see how she made that happen! 

In this episode we talk about:

• Customer research
• Customer-centric marketing
• Marketing strategy

Timestamps:

00:00 - 00:54: Introductions

00:54 - 03:42: How Tara’s background as a product marketer influences her role as VP of marketing

03:43 - 06:36: First challenges when joining VoiceFlow

06:37 - 10:22: The first 30 days knowing the customers

10:23 - 13:32: Why you should go to sales calls instead of listening to recordings

13:33 - 16:14: The emergence of the Conversation Designer role

16:15 - 19:48: Sourcing customer research interviews

19:49 - 24:00: Making sure that customer research findings are used effectively company-wide

24:01 - 28:22: Making the most out of customer research interviews

28:23 - 29:04: Connect with Tara

About Tara Panu

Tara has a passion and obsession for understanding customers deeply. She started her career in customer marketing, then turned to product marketing, and is now leading the marketing department at VoiceFlow. 

Connect with Tara on LinkedIn
Connect with Maeva on LinkedIn

Join the Flying Cats

Still feeling your stomach drop whenever you have to report organic growth to leadership? Things are about to change 👊

Follow Flying Cat Marketing for more SEO strategy and content advice from the agency that helped Hotjar, Mixmax, and ActiveCampaign drive more revenue from organic traffic in a sustainable and predictable way.

Website

LinkedIn

SEO Roundtable

The SEO Growth Podcast

Hello again listeners! Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Leader Interview Series!

This week, we’re talking to Andrew Davies about his first year heading up marketing at Paddle, a $2.4 billion valued company that helps SaaS businesses set up, run, and scale their payment infrastructure.

We discuss the challenges he’s faced and the changes he’s made to grow the marketing department in three distinct areas:

• Product marketing, including customer marketing and the website itself 
• Demand gen, which involves managing business development representative (BDR) teams
• Branding, which deals with the brand’s reputation, reach, and engagement with the wider market

Paddle has grown extremely rapidly, riding the pre-and post-covid wave of software and infrastructure investment. This year, it acquired ProfitWell, an analytics and retention tools business, along with its customer base and teams. 

Andrew tells us how he’s helped Paddle get to the next level by: 

• Merging the marketing departments of the two companies. 
• Broadening marketing efforts across distinct channels
• Expanding the tactics of the BDR team to include direct mail and outbound calling
• Improving branding recognition with an expanded PR strategy

Tune in to find out what it’s like to be CMO during the rapid growth stage of a $2.4 billion SaaS company.

In this episode we talk about:

• Marketing leadership
• Managing business and departmental growth
• SaaS marketing and SEO

Timestamps:

00:06 - 03:06: Paddle’s participation in SaaStock and SaaStr this year

03:06 - 07:22: The challenges Andrew has faced since joining Paddle

07:22  - 11:18: Changes Andrew has made to the marketing department

11:18  - 19:30: Where Andrew has doubled down or cut back on existing marketing efforts 

22:49  - 25:34: Wrap-up 

About Andrew Davies

Andrew Davies is currently Chief Marketing Office at Paddle. Previously, he was Head of Brand & Digital at Episerver after it acquired Idio, which he co-founded in November 2019. He also supports and invests in early-stage startups, helping them solve issues around proposition development, teams, and B2B/SaaS marketing.

Connect with Andrew Davies on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andjdavies/

Connect with Maeva on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maevaeverywhere

Join the Flying Cats

Still feeling your stomach drop whenever you have to report organic growth to leadership? Things are about to change 👊

Follow Flying Cat Marketing for more SEO strategy and content advice from the agency that helped Hotjar, Mixmax, and ActiveCampaign drive more revenue from organic traffic in a sustainable and predictable way.

Website: https://www.flyingcatmarketing.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/flying-cat-marketing

SEO Roundtable: https://flyingcatmarketing.com/seo-roundtable/

The SEO Growth Podcast: https://flyingcatmarketing.com/blog/podcast/

“It’s not SEO in-house vs. agency anymore. Having SEO in-house is a must, so the question for the SEO agency option is when”

Welcome to the 4th episode of The SEO Growth Podcast! This week we’re again with our founder and CEO, Maeva Cifuentes, jumping again on this popular and endless debate: should you build SEO in-house or delegate it to an SEO agency?

The short answer is… both! Teams are getting smaller, but not goals. Those just keep getting bigger and harder to achieve. And if you’re a B2B SaaS in growth or scaling mode, teaming up the deep product understanding from your in-house team with the technical and industry experts of an SEO agency is an unbeatable formula.

Having a dedicated in-house SEO professional early on is crucial. You’ll need data from them when you want to scale and use bigger impact strategies to generate extra revenue later on. However, SEO is such a vast space that finding someone with all the holistic skills (and capacity) necessary to execute it well is very rare. 

Having an agency as your full-stack SEO department to leverage all those in-house learnings can scale up your content operations really fast, and in the most strategic way. 

But for the Jack-of-all-trades CMOs that have very little SEO expertise, choosing the right high-quality agency to fit their needs can feel daunting and stressful. How do you separate the average from the exceptional? Hint: pay attention to the questions they ask.

Tune in to find out and choose with confidence!

In this episode we talk about:

• SEO agency
• SEO in-house
• Tips for hiring an SEO agency

Timestamps:

00:00 - 05:58: WebSummit Lisbon

05:58 - 10:49: Teams are getting smaller, goals aren’t

10:49 - 14:50: When in-house and agency SEOs complement each other

14:50 - 16:32: When to start looking for an SEO agency partner?

16:32 - 23:46: What good quality SEO agencies should be asking you

23:46 - 25:01: Connect with us on LinkedIn

Connect with us on LinkedIn:

Mila: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miladibella

Maeva: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maevaeverywhere

Join the Flying Cats

Still feeling your stomach drop whenever you have to report organic growth to leadership? Things are about to change 👊

Follow Flying Cat Marketing for more SEO strategy and content advice from the agency that helped Hotjar, Mixmax, and ActiveCampaign drive more revenue from organic traffic in a sustainable and predictable way.

Website: https://www.flyingcatmarketing.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/flying-cat-marketing

SEO Roundtable: https://flyingcatmarketing.com/seo-roundtable/

The SEO Growth Podcast: https://flyingcatmarketing.com/blog/podcast/

Hello dear listeners! Welcome to our third episode of The SEO Growth Podcast.

This week we’re joined by Usman Akram, Head of SEO at Flying Cat Marketing, as he talks us through how we can report our SEO efforts to leaders and stakeholders.

We discuss how it can take time to show the results of your SEO strategy. So it’s important to find a way of reporting to leaders that justifies the budget you’re investing—and demonstrates you’re on the right track.

Whether you’re part of a big company with a dedicated Head of SEO or a smaller company where the Head of Marketing does it all, it’s crucial to show the business impact of your SEO strategy.

To show how SEO impacts revenue, check the conversion rates on the top-performing pages of your website. Often, 50% of conversions come from just five pieces of content. Once you identify which pieces they are and how much organic traffic they generate, you can use this information to guide your content strategy.

You’ll also find out how attribution models can help you report SEO when you don’t have conversion data. By modeling customer touchpoints, you can understand and predict which steps in the customer journey lead to conversion. 

A common objection from leadership is how long it takes to see ROI from SEO.  We show you how to estimate ROI by setting SEO targets at the beginning of a project. So instead of having a strategy based on the number of pieces of content or backlinks you create, your end goal is an exact timeline for ROI. 

By using simple math, Usman demonstrates how you can develop a whole roadmap for your SEO strategy and estimate your results, outcome, ROI, and cost of acquisition. 

So tune in to find out how to report the value of your SEO efforts—by focusing on ROI over rankings and traffic. 

In this episode we talk about:

• SEO reporting
• SEO strategy
• Calculating ROI from SEO

Timestamps:

04:13 - 12:33: What indicators can you use to show your SEO strategy is on the right track? 

12:33 - 18:51: Structuring an SEO report for your leaders

18:51 - 20:59: Using an attribution model instead of direct conversions data

20:59 - 27:17: Attribution models: First touch, last touch, linear, W-form, and U-shaped 

27:17 - 32:20: How to calculate return on investment (ROI) from SEO

32:20 - 34:49: Wrap up

Connect with us on LinkedIn:

Mila: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miladibella
Maeva: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maevaeverywhere
Usman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/usman-akram5000 

Join the Flying Cats

Still feeling your stomach drop whenever you have to report organic growth to leadership? Things are about to change 👊

Follow Flying Cat Marketing for more SEO strategy and content advice from the agency that helped Hotjar, Mixmax, and ActiveCampaign drive more revenue from organic traffic in a sustainable and predictable way.

Website: https://www.flyingcatmarketing.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/flying-cat-marketing

SEO Roundtable: https://flyingcatmarketing.com/seo-roundtable/

The SEO Growth Podcast: https://flyingcatmarketing.com/blog/podcast/

“I don't think there's anything wrong with running an affiliate blog and going after high-volume keywords. It's just an understanding of what strategy you're after and how you're gonna justify going into content, then reverse engineering your strategy based on the action you want your customer to take”

Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Leader Interview Series! This time, we discuss with Ben Pages, Marketing Manager at Feature Upvote, the importance of considering search volume in context with your overall content strategy. 

Search volume is highly misunderstood by both clients and SEOs, who often wrongly correlate higher search volume with higher traffic. As Maeva and Ben reveal, that’s a total myth—and you should never choose keywords based blindly on this metric (SEO  tools are never 100% accurate anyway!). 

Instead, focus on what you want your readers to do according to your overall content strategy and LTV, and base your keyword selection on more relevant factors, like intent, or traffic potential. Also, don’t ever disregard finding opportunities through competitor analysis, variations and semantics, and ol’ good customer research to capture the voice of the customer.

Tune in to find out why you should start looking at search volume from a very different angle to get more qualified traffic!

In this episode we talk about:

• Search volume
• Traffic
• Keyword selection

Timestamps:

00:00 - 00:58: Introducing Ben Pages at Feature Upvote

00:58 - 02:01: When Search volume is irrelevant

02:01 - 03:19: Search volume doesn’t necessarily attract more traffic

03:19 - 05:19: Was it hard to break the search volume habit?

05:19 - 07:09: When traffic isn’t the metric you’re after

07:09 - 12:09: The connection between LTV and the impact of traffic

12:17 - 14:58: The risks of misunderstanding search volume

14:58 - 17:08: An experiment with projected traffic vs actual traffic

17:08 - 23:24: Choosing keywords without focusing on search volume

23:28 - 24:50: Wrap up

About Ben Pages

Ben is the marketing manager at Feature Upvote, a lightweight tool that helps product managers organize and prioritize user feedback. He specializes in producing high-quality content—from strategy and writing to search engine optimization.

Connect with Ben on his website, Benpages.com

If you’re a Product manager, Ben suggests you check out FeatureUpvote.com

“Rankings are obviously very important; people just get too blinded by rankings and forget all the most important things about business and sales.”

Welcome to the 2nd episode of The SEO Growth Podcast! This week we’re joined by the founder and CEO of Flying Cat Marketing Maeva Cifuentes as she walks us through measuring your SEO results.

We talked about how too many people consider SEO or rankings as the end goal, rather than a means to an end. The goal, she explains, is increased revenue—and SEO helps us get there.

A common misconception is that you can use trackers like Hubspot or Google Analytics to measure how SEO contributes to revenue and call it a day. Maeva explains that you need to use other tools, such as business intelligence apps, to get the full picture.

Another overlooked fact is that last-touch data doesn’t tell the whole story—nobody lands on a page and then immediately commits to a million-dollar piece of software. You also need to look at first-touch or assisted conversion data because it tells you how and when customers started interacting with your product.

A common question we get at FCM is: how do I know SEO is working for me? Or more crucially: what do I do if it isn’t working? We break down key metrics like relevance and search volume and things to keep an eye on like correct indexing and search intent.

So tune in now to find out how to correctly measure your SEO results and let us know your tips and tricks in the comments!

In this episode we talk about:

• SEO results
• Sales touchpoints
• SEO strategy

Timestamps:

00:00-04:00: The SEO Roundtable

04:01-06:07: The end goal of SEO 

06:08-12:14: How to track SEO results and the associated revenue

12:15-15:10: The critical touchpoints for measuring SEO success

15:11-19:21: How to know when your SEO strategy is working

19:22-24:59: What to do if your SEO strategy isn’t working

25:00-27:00: Wrap up

Connect with us on LinkedIn:

Mila: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miladibella

Maeva: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maevaeverywhere

Join the Flying Cats

Still feeling your stomach drop whenever you have to report organic growth to leadership? Things are about to change 👊

Follow Flying Cat Marketing for more SEO strategy and content advice from the agency that helped Hotjar, Mixmax, and ActiveCampaign drive more revenue from organic traffic in a sustainable and predictable way.

Website: https://www.flyingcatmarketing.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/flying-cat-marketing

SEO Roundtable: https://flyingcatmarketing.com/seo-roundtable/

The SEO Growth Podcast: https://flyingcatmarketing.com/blog/podcast/

Welcome to the first episode of our revamped podcast, now renamed The SEO Growth Podcast.

In this episode, we explore the Flying Cat’s philosophy: holistic SEO. Traditional SEO is based on running keyword research to produce content “for SEO” (aka to make Google happy).  But holistic SEO understands search engines as a distribution channel that works as a system that you need to maintain. 

Think of it this way: human beings need to take care of their physical health to stay alive. But they also care for their mental, spiritual, and social wellbeing to thrive. 

With SEO, using keyword research to produce content is just the basics. To make your website thrive, you need to take care of both the technical aspects of the site and the quality of your content. That means you need to make content that speaks not only with Google but with your audience.

So, how do we do it at FCM? We apply our trademark proprietary framework: Foundations, Growth, Scale (FGS). FGS is a combination of processes taking the mindset of holisitc SEO and transforming it into an actionable and measurable roadmap.

So sit back, relax and enjoy a mega dose of SEO philosophy to reframe this misunderstood revenue-driver that’s so much more than rankings and traffic.

In this episode we talk about:

• Holistic SEO
• SEO Strategy
• FGS framework

Timestamps:

06:02 - 12:25: What is holistic SEO? The difference between holistic SEO vs traditional SEO

12:26 - 15:21: Holistic SEO as a mindset

15:21 - 19:02: The Art of War analogy: The holistic SEO approach to strategy

19:02 - 23:43: FGS stages explained: Foundations 

23:43 - 25:36: FGS stages explained: Growth 

25:36 - 28:48: FGS stages explained: Scale (and programmatic SEO)

28:48 - 30:37: Wrap up

Connect with us on LinkedIn:

Mila: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miladibella

Maeva: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maevaeverywhere

Join the Flying Cats

Still feeling your stomach drop whenever you have to report organic growth to leadership? Things are about to change 👊

Follow Flying Cat Marketing  for more SEO strategy and content advice from the agency that helped Hotjar, Mixmax, and ActiveCampaign drive more revenue from organic traffic in a sustainable and predictable way.

Website: https://www.flyingcatmarketing.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/flying-cat-marketing

SEO Roundtable: https://flyingcatmarketing.com/seo-roundtable/

The SEO Growth Podcast: https://flyingcatmarketing.com/blog/podcast/